Month 5 Day 9

Notebook Entry
Eleven reports to the Afghan National Army. One from the Afghan National Army, encryption put on radios, grounding radio, spoke to General.

Journal Entry
Tried to work with Samir all day on the personnel issue. He just will not do anything without me being right there and forcing him to do it, even if it is something that will benefit him. He is simply lazy and doesn’t like his job. I find that I do get more success when I go over there without a linguist. They impart a sense of urgency and he/they quickly try to get me to leave. If I go over there by myself I can spend a couple of hours with him, and the only limit is my patience. After some time on Parris Island no can outlast me. The issue of the CoC [Combat Operations Center] came up last night and a couple of the problems that the staff brought up (e.g. will the primaries be involved, and just what does the RCT [Regimental Combat Team] expect this to look like) were vindicated. The bizarre “message to Garcia” culture here is finally catching up with itself. The [embedded training team and Afghan] staff went over there and when the[y] went into the new combined CoC the Marines from the CoC closed the door on them because there was a bunch of secret stuff on the screens. What a warm welcome for this half-baked plan. This is the metis, the how do you actually do things that you can’t see from on high. This is why central planning never worked. At this level the RCT CO [Commanding Officer] should say “I want this” the HQ Co[mpany] Commander or the OpsO [Operations Officer] should come up with a few courses of action and then he should pick. Saying I want this there now is micromanaging, doesn’t allow the staff to plan anything and leads to these half baked results. But I guess the time we spend learning the Marine Corps Planning Process has been compartmentalized into maneuvering your units. Oh well.

Edited to Add:
The book Message to Garcia was on the commandants reading list when I was a private.  It is about acting on little to no information.  That can be find in some circumstances, but in this instance it was not needed.  It ended up with half-baked results.