ARE THE MARINES INVENTING THE EDSEL OR THE MUSTANG?

 via War On The Rocks

The Marine Corps is in a far more precarious position. It could have used incremental dollars to test its promising fusion of targeting technologies and distributed maritime operations with a minimum viable product. Instead, the commandant, Gen. David Berger, divested current crisis response and land battle capabilities in order to fund a large-scale, hyper-optimized capability that will take eight years to build. Before the new force was designed or prototyped, Berger wrote, “We will not seek to hedge or balance our investments to account for [other] contingencies.”

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 Marine leaders neglected key principles of change management, repeating four organizational mistakes surrounding Ford’s Edsel and Coca Cola’s New Coke: choosing secrecy over stakeholders, testing in a closed loop, leapfrogging instead of iterating, and losing control of the narrative.

Note.  I called for an Enhanced or Reinforced MEU instead of this transformationalist garbage that so many in the Marine Corps seem to be worshipping.

Read the entire thing here.

If its too long then let me sum it up...

Berger is a horrible change agent and from all appearances a poor leader, is wedded to his "idea" with the strength of a religious zealot and will accept no criticism of his idea. 

This plan will not make it across the finish line.  Bits and pieces will remain but the Ground Combat Element will have to be rebuilt and the Aviation side of the house will have to be rationalized.

He has less than a year left and he will leave the Marine Corps wrecked by chaos and unnecessary friction.  A divide between old and new (that I doubt will be fixed...I see no leader in the Marine Corps on the horizon that will be able to patch up the rift), with precious little time to get it right.

Berger did what I thought was impossible.  He's making Amos look like a decent Commandant.