Military Review English Edition January-February 2014 | Page 45

Of Burning Platforms
and Champions
Cmdr. William Hines, U.S. Navy Reserve
“The prevailing style of management must undergo transformation.
A system cannot understand itself. The transformation requires a view
from outside.”
—W. Edwards Deming

O

N 1 FEBRUARY 2012, while speaking to reporters about Afghanistan, then Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta stated, “Hopefully by the mid-to-latter part of 2013, we’ll be
able to make a transition from a combat role to a train, advise, and assist role.”1 Secretary
Panetta later retracted some of his comments about this accelerated timeline under political
pressure. A Pentagon briefing two weeks later made clear that Operation Enduring Freedom was rapidly transitioning from combat operations to transferring responsibility of this
current conflict to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF).2 Subsequent events at the
NATO summit in Chicago in May 2012 confirmed this transition. This ongoing attempt at
“Afghanization” relies heavily on American military advisors, with five brigades slated to
provide hundreds of 18-man advisor teams. (Whether the U.S. military has the depth of
talent to meet this requirement for warrior-diplomats is in serious doubt, but that topic is
beyond the scope of this paper.)
Cmdr. William Hines, U.S. Navy Reserve, is assigned to Strike Force Training Atlantic in Norfolk, Va. He recently
returned from a tour as a military advisor with the 2nd Brigade Afghan National Civil Order Po