The Red-Tape Menace

I wish I had a commission

In J. Caesar's legions of old,

Where the mimeograph as we know it

Was a story that hadn't been told;

Their orders were then mostly verbal;

They were seldom called on to write,

For most of an officer's duties

Were training his men how to fight.

This anonymous doggerel is a cry of honest frustration to many an officer snarled in the modern army's endless red tape. One such officer is Lieut. Colonel Francis E. Gillette, instructor in the Army's Command & General Staff School (Fort Leavenworth). Writing in the current issue of the erudite C. & G. S. Military Review, Colonel Gillette quotes the verse and mourns: "General Marshall and General McNair, among others, have issued warnings that paper work should not be allowed to interfere with training. But . . . like the weather, everybody talks about it . . . no one does anything about it."

Colonel Gillette offers ample authority to support his anti-red-tape crusade. Said the Duke of Wellington about 1810: "If I attempt to answer the mass of futile correspondence that surrounds me, I should be debarred from all serious business of campaigning." Said a U.S. battalion commander in 1943: "We are actually swamped with typed and mimeographed literature. More than 90% of it is utterly useless." Says Colonel Gillette of a heavily burdened Air Force officer: "The command of which he was adjutant was scattered in three service commands. His headquarters received distribution direct from the Adjutant General's Office and from each of these three service command headquarters . . . each felt a duty to interpret . . . and expand [each] document before forwarding. As a result he frequently received several hundred copies of directives requiring him to do something four different ways."

What to Do. As a clincher for his argument that something must be done about paper work, the colonel offers the case of the first sergeant on Bataan who was seriously wounded while crawling across a fire-swept area to take the morning report for his company commander to initial. Can something be done about the surging flood of forms and orders? Colonel Gillette hopefully proposes that:

> "General staff officers must get out from behind their desks. . . . Their planning cannot be done efficiently unless they know the situation in the units to be affected by their plans."

> The number of administrative overhead personnel must be reduced to the point "where it becomes physically impossible for them to accomplish all the mass of detail formerly required of them."

> All types of paper used by every headquarters should be rationed.

> Except in action, personal or telephone interviews should be arranged. "As soon as they get into the army, many want to write letters to the man in the next office."

> Staff officers should study each document, reflect: "Is it necessary to pass this on to subordinate units?" If it is, cut it in half.

Two young officers arriving frustrated in Australia from the Battle of Java had the same idea in cruder form (fired by their first drinks in weeks). Hearing that a convoy was unloading at the Melbourne docks, they called for volunteers. Object: to throw the typewriters on the ships overboard before they could be landed. Luckily for them, but perhaps unluckily for fighting proficiency, they got no volunteers.

Other officers have struggled more systematically, but just as angrily, against the form and procedure that inevitably tend to strangle big organizations. Some high-rankers, like General "Hap" Arnold of the Air Forces, have often been in official hot water for cutting through red tape to get things done. General George Marshall has a maxim: "Red tape can be cut, but you've got to be deadly accurate."

Major General Levin Campbell, head of the Ordnance Department, recently wrote a classic general order to his officers: "Whenever a member of the Ordnance Department, regardless of rank, encounters 'red tape' in conducting our business: throw the 'red tape' to hell out the window! If an abundance of paper work is involved . . . deliver first and fill out the forms when there's time!"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.