In 1980, a helicopter collided with a transport plane in the Iranian desert, killing eight American servicemen. Operation Eagle Claw, a hostage rescue mission, had drawn together four separate military branches that had never trained as one unit, running incompatible communication systems, pulled together as a coalition only days before the operation itself.
The fix wasn’t more flexibility. It was JSOC — a standing joint command, forcing every branch of special operations to train together, report through one structure, stop being stitched together ad hoc right before it mattered.
Twenty-four years later, a different task force was losing to an enemy that had no fixed structure at all. General Stanley McChrystal’s elite counter-terrorism force in Iraq had the best technology, the best training, and the most rigid, siloed hierarchy imaginable — and it was losing to a scattered insurgency that could adapt faster than any approval chain could move.
The fix wasn’t more hierarchy. It was tearing the silos down and building what McChrystal called “shared consciousness” — radical transparency across units, decision-making pushed down to whoever was actually looking at the problem.
Same institution. Similar stakes. Two real disasters, decades apart. Two completely opposite prescriptions.
I don’t think there’s a way to predict, in advance, which one a given situation needs. Anyone claiming they can is fooling themselves and everyone listening.
What actually holds up is something narrower and less satisfying to say out loud: keep the structure clear enough that everyone knows their role and their reporting line, let people decentralize and use their own judgment as the default, and reserve the authority to tighten control the moment things visibly start falling apart.
That’s not indecision dressed up as nuance. It’s the same principle showing up in three unrelated places — a 19th-century Prussian general trusting his officers with intent instead of orders, Netflix trusting employees with context instead of rules while still running a continuous performance filter underneath, and a special operations command deciding when to centralize and when to let a task force self-organize. The specific mechanism changes. The underlying shape doesn’t.
Structure isn’t the opposite of flexibility. It’s usually what makes flexibility survivable.