Thanks, Genius

In the early years of the war in Afghanistan, the airfields used by the US Air Force to supply combat operations were austere and dangerous. Asphalt vestiges of the country's modest modernization as a Soviet satellite, they were given scarce investment or maintenance in the intervening decades.

They were also magnets for enemy missiles and mortars, with pot shots consistently hurled in the hope of a high-profile shootdown to boost recruitment of terrorists and insurgents into the rapidly expanding conflict.

During this time, airlifters flew into places like Bagram, Kandahar, and Mazar-I-Sharif under the cover of night, lights extinguished, and spent as little time on the ground as necessary, offloading their supplies and skedaddling post haste. Engines were kept running to make a rapid egress possible and to reduce the risk of a motor not starting up again, marooning a plump target on dangerous tarmac. Airlifters are the herbivores of the combat aviation jungle. Equipped with humble self-defenses, their first and best tactic is to avoid threats altogether.

I piloted many C-17 missions into Bagram Air Base, a mile-high dusty and desolate hellhole punctuating a crackle-dry desert basin in the foothills of the Western Himalayas. About 60 miles north of Kabul, Bagram would grow to become the main hub of US aviation activity in Afghanistan. But long before that point, it was a place I visited frequently but never stayed more than a few minutes.

Except this one time.

We had started our day in Germany and been delayed, first by a maintenance issue with our aircraft and second by a delay uploading our cargo, a helicopter with folding propellor blades which had proven a challenge for the ground crew.

Our enroute aerial refuel and arrival into Bagram were uneventful, but there was again difficulty handling our cargo. There is a tempting digression here about the ill-preparedness of our military enterprise to tackle sustainment of a scaled and protracted land war waged on a landlocked and inhospitable Central Asian battlefield. But we shall leave that tangent for another time.

The unloading delay created a new problem. In the time it had taken to disgorge our cargo, a hellacious storm had parked itself over the airfield. Dogs and cats rained down in relentless diagonal waves. Thunder rumbled with a deafening boom which Thor himself would've envied. Hailstones so big each had its own ozone layer. We could not fly until this was over.

The weather team at Bagram, which to my knowledge consisted of a Lieutenant named Greg with a Walgreen's thermometer and a meteorology textbook from the Fort Sill post library, had no idea how long the tempest would last.

"It wasn't forecasted sir, so it should clear out sometime," the reply stated, equal measures sardonic and stupid.

Our main enemy was not weather or delays. As usual, it was time. The cumulative delays we'd absorbed meant that if the storm didn't lift presently, we wouldn't have enough crew duty day left to make it back to Germany. (For safety, crews are limited to a maximum number of consecutive operational hours).

We'd be stuck in Afghanistan for the night, and more important so would our jet. This meant a target on the ramp our Army colleagues would need to posture and resource themselves to defend, and it meant a C-17 idle for half a day with no one to fly it. The cardinal rule of aerial logistics dating to the Berlin Airlift is you keep the planes moving. Someone somewhere would have combat-critical cargo delayed unless we got out of Bagram as scheduled.

With all this in mind, I got on the radio to our command and control element and requested a 2-hour extension to our crew duty day, which would give us the time to wait out the storm and get ourselves out of there. Such waivers would later become dime-store cheap, pre-emptively issued via blanket edict. But early in the war, they came from 2-star generals and were seldom fast nor easy.

On this particular night, the mothership managed to stun me with a fusillade of stupidity so profound I still get a migraine just recalling it.

My waiver request was denied. Not because it was risky to let us operate for two more hours. But because, and I quote "it's not raining in Bagram."

A cubicle-dwelling mid-level technocrat in a dimly-lit cave in Illinois, paid by the US government to support me and my crew, had taken 10 minutes to chat with his weather team, who had no direct knowledge or data, and had been informed by them that we, the crew on the ground at Bagram, must be imagining the thunderstorm. It must be that we wanted to trap ourselves in a combat zone. We must be malingering.

This was before the smartphone era. We couldn't simply snap a quick pic and email it to Major Bonehead to end the debate. I held my mic up to the windscreen to let him hear the maelstrom for himself. I described for him the colours and patterns appearing on my radar scope. I confirmed for him our geocoordinates, swearing on a stack of holy books we were not mistakenly somewhere else nor was it a tranquil evening where we were. None of this worked. His brain was encased in an impermeable hermetic shield of unreason.

The next 30 minutes were more like calling in a claim to an insurance company than something out of military lore. I was on hold eight times as much as actually interacting with a human. The call dropped repeatedly, causing me to growl at my hapless copilot to get us back in touch. The hold music sounded like a band comprised of Lionel Richie with laryngitis and Kenny G on quaaludes, with a backing track of a cat trying to escape a bathtub. The process was designed to compel surrender.

Eventually, as my crew cackled in the background with bellies sore from laughter, I managed to pierce the ramparts of illogic. Someone climbed the circular staircase to the top of the headquarters ivory tower and disturbed the grand poobah's sip-smithing long enough for him to grunt unintelligibly and issue a kingly hand-flick of disinterested approval.

The controller gave us the good news, but then delivered his coup de grace. "Looks like the rain there should stop soon, so you'll be good to go."

He was actually remarking on the rain he insisted didn't exist, the non-existence of which had eaten a half hour of my life and shaved years off the end of it. Whatever source of knowledge he was quoting from was indirect, uninformed, and could only be correct by accident.

"Thanks, genius." My unprofessional reply was then spared any retort by the call dropping for the umpteenth time. The Gods of satellite telephony finally countenanced a whim in my favour.

30 minutes later, the stubborn storm abated and we were able to get airborne and point ourselves westward. Fuel was a little tight, but we had an hour to spare on our waiver and made it home safely, living to fight our various enemies, foreign and domestic, another day.

As fun as it has been simply re-living this episode, it's the organizational lessons that have really stuck with me over the years.

1. Never require permission for common sense. As a captain entrusted to command missions in combat, I was nonetheless required to seek approval to do what was in the organization's best interests and should not have required any approval at all. In other circumstances, the need for senior approval could have dissuaded a crew from doing the right thing, creating an absurd result for the organization.
2. Trust your experts. During my time with Amazon, I learned and championed the practice of going directly to the problem, so I could observe it first-hand and hear about it from the frontline employees dealing with it. There is cultural virtue and value in this. By taking my support leaders to an issue, I was demonstrating we cared and removing communication barriers so the problem could be understood and addressed with clarity. But this can be overdone. Sometimes, it's not necessary for the senior leader to see the problem themselves, and insisting on doing so when the issue is clear and simple and well-articulated ... feels like distrust. Putting stock in the assessments of your people gives them important validation as the in situ experts, and it also saves time and churn so solutions can start flowing even faster.
3. Avoid excessive process. Organizations, as they grow, get attached to and immersed in bigger and broader things. They seek order and efficiency to keep all that scale from inducing chaos. They achieve this drive for stability with process, in particular cumbersome approval and coordination. Unless organizations remain intentionially customer focused, they risk process taking over and creating absurdities which actually defy their customer commitments. More on this in future installments of this newsletter.

So many war stories are time-bound. Had this occurred a decade later, the entire anecdote would have been slain by a two-second smartphone exchange.

But hey ... without a broken US health care system, Walter White would never have become a meth cook. I'm awkwardly grateful for my experiences in dysfunctional bureaucracies for gifting me with so many stories and lessons to share.

Until next time.