On an otherwise uneventful November morning in 1990, I watched from a distance as one of the most important lessons in failure unfolded before me. A pair of D-7 bulldozers were busy scraping out a makeshift trench in the lunar-like landscape of Saudi Arabia while another dragged a 40-foot container into the trench. Since our battalion was focused preparing for movement deeper into the desert to occupy battle positions, no one else seemed to take notice.
At least not until months later, as we consolidated our equipment for redeployment after the conclusion of the Gulf War. It was the battalion executive officer who first noticed that we were missing a container and asked the company commanders to “confirm their numbers.” In an almost matter-of-fact tone, one of them noted that the missing container was from his company.
“I think that MILVAN might be mine,” he said.
“Where is it?” asked the XO.
“I buried it.”
I don’t remember the exact words that followed, just the general nature of the back-and-forth. The battalion commander, who had a habit of chewing on his mustache when he was thinking, was gnawing away on it like a starving man. The XO continued to follow the line of inquiry, the whole time with his mouth hanging open in utter disbelief. Finally, the battalion commander asked the question that was on everyone’s mind: “Was there anything in it?”
“Just excess, sir. Nothing that was on my hand receipt.”
Several months later, as the company commander was preparing to change command, that statement proved false. To the tune of $287,000. As the battalion’s staff logistics officer, I had the pleasure of listening to both incoming and outgoing commanders explain the resulting disaster to the battalion and brigade-level leadership. In the process, I learned terms like “gross negligence”, “referred evaluation”, and “show cause.” It was a hard fall, a brutal failure that cost the outgoing company commander his career and a lot more than the standard single month’s base pay that typically followed in the wake of a bad change of command inventory.
Over the course of my 18-month tenure as a battalion S-4, I saw each of our five companies change command twice, every time learning invaluable lessons along the way. While none approached the level of abject failure involved in “the container incident” it was increasingly common to see outgoing commanders charged for lost or damaged property. The old adage, “stuff that’s not signed for will grow legs,” proved true time and again. Failure on a lesser scale can still be expensive; a twelfth of your annual salary is a lot of money no matter how you look at it.
As I learned, I took detailed notes. As those notes expanded, they became the foundation of a battalion change of command standard operating procedure and, eventually, what I thought was a fairly forgettable attempt at an article I submitted to Ordnance Magazine, entitled “The Change of Command Inventory.” During my own time as a company commander I was comfortable with the knowledge that, on a personal level, the lessons drawn from the failure of others would ensure that I didn’t repeat those same mistakes.
In the ensuing years, I continued to write and publish articles of that “genre” – the lessons drawn from vicarious learning. I wasn’t exactly sure how valuable those articles were, but the chance that my observations might help one person avoid similar mistakes was worth the effort, I believed. But, it was while attending the Command and General Staff Officer Course that I came to understand just how important such learning can be: my forgettable article on conducting change of command inventories was required reading in the elective for future executive officers. In conversation with my peers, it became increasingly clear that capturing and reflecting on failure was an integral part of our learning experience. It is far better to learn from the failures of others than to repeat those same failures yourself.
Thirteen years after a jaw-dropping learning experience in a threadbare festival tent within spitting distance of the Iraqi border in northern Saudi Arabia, I found myself encouraging a new generation of young leaders to do what I had done – record the lessons of failure for those who would one day follow in their footsteps. In a deployment that had featured countless ups and downs, there were lessons abound to draw upon; we had experienced our share of failure and communicating what we’d learned to others seemed to make perfect sense.
But not to everyone. Even as I made my case for writing about our experiences, one key leader felt otherwise – my own commander: “It’s a waste of time,” he said. “Nobody reads those articles, anyway.” And, just like that, an initiative to leverage our own mistakes to teach others died. Not everyone learns from failure. Not everyone embraces failure as a means to grow and develop. And that’s why we repeat those same failures again and again.
Steve Leonard joined the KU School of Business as the Director of the graduate program in Organizational Leadership following a 28-year career in the U.S. Army. A former senior military strategist and the creative force behind the defense microblog, Doctrine Man!!. He is a non-resident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point; the co-founder of the national security blog, Divergent Options, and its sister podcast, The Smell of Victory; co-founder and board member of the Military Writers Guild; and a member of the editorial review board of the Arthur D. Simons Center’s Interagency Journal. He is the author of five books, numerous professional articles, countless blog posts, and is a prolifically bad military cartoonist.