Anatomie de la bureaucratie de Moby Dick

Anatomie de la bureaucratie de Moby Dick

Commentant le même article de William Pfaff du 30 septembre sur l’“emprisonnement” de BHO par le Pentagone (voir dans cette rubrique le 2 octobre 2010), Franklin C. Spinney donne, le 3 octobre 2010 sur CounterPunch quelques-uns de ses propres avis, venus de sa propre expérience (Spinney, qui fit partie du groupe des “réformateurs du Pentagone” originel des années 1970 et 1980, dont deux autres survivants encore très actifs sont Winslow Wheeler et Pierre Sprey, a été officier de l’USAF et a travaillé au Pentagone).

Spinney estime que Pfaff ne donne que l’un des aspects de la situation de cet emprisonnement par la bureaucratie. Il décrit le processus plus en détails, pour montrer qu’en fait tout le monde est prisonnier de tout le monde dans la chaîne de l’information. Il rend ainsi mieux compte du caractère automatique du système, avec son absence d’orientation précise sinon les intérêts immédiats, hiérarchiques et corporatistes, des acteurs, et selon un processus bureaucratique allant de la base vers le sommet…

«Pfaff looks at the game playing from only President Obama's perspective. In Washington, the game is played at all levels, all the time. I have seen, over and over, how a Secretary of Defense gets set up by the bureaucracy just, like the Generals set up Obama. Also, when serving as low ranking officer on the Air Staff, I saw many cases where lower ranking generals using the same tactics to set up senior generals, especially the AF Chief of Staff – who was always considered the least informed guy in the room. If fact, I was once ordered by a two star general to lie to a three star general [Wheeler note: Spinney did not also say that he refused]. Colonels are always trying to maneuver generals into promoting their agendas. This is the way the real world operates, and the name of the game in this kind of staff work is always the same: remove all reasonable alternatives to your agenda to insure the decision goes your way. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

»The Pentagon is a rat's nest of military-industrial factions, factions inside factions, and ever shifting alliances – all competing with each other. The information game is easily played at all levels – which is one reason why this behaviour is so intractable. Mafias inside the AF are hosing each other as well as the AF Chief of Staff, ditto for the Army and the Navy, the different services are hosing the Secretary of Defense as well as each other; the Secretary of Defense is hosing the President. All are working the press and the Congress ... this is going on all the time at all levels, all the time. It is simply the human condition in large government bureaucracies where billions of dollars are at stake, and leaders ignore it at their peril.

»The key to playing this game successfully is to make a leader dependent on formal communications channels and the chain of command, then you can use the bureaucracy to filter what flows up to him/her. This is known as the mushroom treatment – keeping the boss in the dark and feeding him/her bullshit…»

Comment peut-on se sortir de cette situation, conjurer la malédiction de la bureaucratie et de ses automatismes ? Spinney expose une solution, dans tous les cas en théorie, qui est, pour le chef qui reçoit les informations, d’établir ses propres canaux d’information et, éventuellement de le faire savoir, de façon à ce que la bureaucratie qui se trouve face à lui sache qu’elle ne constitue pas la seule source d’information…

«The only way a leader, whatever his level in the bureaucratic hierarchy, can do this is to carefully cultivate alternative informal back channel communication loops to trusted people scattered throughout the lower echelons of his organization. By discretely accessing a multiplicity of views, as well than bureaucracy's preferred solution, a leader can determine when he is getting the mushroom treatment, and more importantly, gain the leverage needed to pry open the door to real alternatives… […]

»Back channel access to alternative views also gives a leader leverage over his subordinates. Once his subordinates appreciate that they can not control all the information flowing into their boss's brain, the game opens up and the leader can do some broken field running. Indeed, a subtle leader quickly learns that the best results often occur when he makes it clear he knows when subordinate is setting him up by tailoring the information, but chooses to give the subordinate a second chance (in bureaucratic jargon, this is known as appealing to his patriotism). That subordinate will never forget the experience, particularly if the leader has already established his cojones with a couple of ruthless well-timed career executions for similar behaviour.»

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