Background Ops #8: Operational Consistency
NEGOTIATING IN BAD FAITH
Late Winter of 203 BC
The Outskirts of Utica
Carthaginian Empire, North Africa (modern-day Tunisia)
A strange scene is unfolding. The senior Roman officers are all intensely preoccupied in grooming themselves in… rather unusual ways.
Publius Cornelius Scipio — later, Scipio Africanus — is fussing over his appearance, getting himself clean-shaved and well-groomed. It was a strange thing among the time for Romans who normally went unshaven and rough.
Scipio had picked up the habit from a love of Greek culture and followed the custom of Alexander the Great of Macedon, who had died some 120 years before. Around half of Scipio’s high command followed suit for the diplomatic negotiations to come — grooming and dressing themselves perfectly to come across stately during the next round of negotiations.
Meanwhile, a number of the elite Roman scouts and centurions were grooming themselves in a decidedly different way.
“Hey, you don’t look dirty enough,” one scout jokes to a centurion.
The centurion was a large man, and even his worst clothing was of reasonably fine quality for the military campaign. The centurion frowns and sighs. “Okay, anyone got some larger servant’s clothing?”
Clothing is procured for him and he takes on a coarser tunic, but the scout says, “No, still not dirty enough. Here, come here.” He takes some mud and campfire ash, mixes it with water, and splashes the nasty paste on the centurion’s forearms, neck, and lightly on his face.
“There you go! You look dirty now!”
Mildly annoyed at this joke at his expense, the centurion takes up a blot of muddy paste and flings it and flings it at the scout, leading to a quick and mostly-friendly round of literal mud-fighting.
One of Scipio’s commanders comes by to inspect. “Hey, guys, roll around in the ground a little bit, your clothing is still too clean.”
There’s some laughs and some sighs, and the centurions and scouts beat dust and earth into their clothing and otherwise unpolish their appearances.
When Scipio’s embassy appearances to the Carthaginian and Numidian forces and sit down for negotiations, nobody pays too much attention to the ragged Roman servants who wander off into the Carthaginian camp.
After a round of negotiations that day, the Romans make their way back to camp. The centurion reports to Scipio —
“We’ve got ’em. The Numidian camp is all built out of reeds and dry wood. Their sentries are posted erratically. And they’ve got a large amount of huts and tents built outside their main walls.”
Scipio nods and lets the other scouts weigh in, along with his major allied commander, Massinissa. Everyone is in agreement — the Carthaginians have very flimsy defenses.
“So it’s decided then?”
Nods and assets all around.
“Then we’ll break off negotiations in the morning and feint that we’re taking Utica… and we’ll have our vengeance tomorrow night.”
***
2,200 YEARS LATER
“When you’re performing sentry duties, you’re in charge of your post. That means that no one except your training instructor, no matter what their rank, can change your orders. Even if a 4-star general approaches and demands that you let him pass, you can’t do so if his name isn’t on your access list. Only your training instructor can give someone who is not on the list permission to enter the barracks.
Warning: In basic training, other training instructors often try to bluff their way past recruits performing guard duties. If they succeed, that means they get to rub it in to your drill instructor. It also means that your drill instructor will probably have you for lunch.”
— Military.com, “Discovering How Sentries Act”
***
FULLY IMAGINING IT WAS AN ACCIDENTAL CONFLAGRATION
Late Winter of 203 BC
The Numidian and Carthagian Camps Outside Utica
Nighttime
It was two nights after the scouts had made their observations, and Numidians awoke to a started clamor of action, raised voices, and the smell of smoke —
“As had been foreseen, once the leading Romans had set the fire alight, it spread rapidly along the first row of huts, and in a brief while the whole camp was aflame, because of the closeness of the huts and the lack of proper intervals between rows.
Fully imagining that it was an accidental conflagration, Syphax’s men rushed out of their huts unarmed, and in a disorderly flight. Many perished in their huts while half asleep, many were trampled to death in the frenzied rush for the exits, while those who escaped were cut down unawares by the [Massina’s Roman-allied] Numidians posted at the gates of the camp.
Meanwhile in the Carthaginian camp the soldiers, aroused by the sentries’ report of the fire in the other camp, and seeing how vast was the volume of flame, rushed out of their own camp to assist in extinguishing the fire, they also imaging it was an accident and Scipio seven miles distant. This was as Scipio had hoped and anticipated, and he at once fell on the rabble, giving orders not to let a man escape to give warning to the troops still in the camp. Instantly he followed up this by launching his attack on the gates of the camp, were unguarded as a result of the confusion.”
— B.H. Liddel Hart, Scipio Africanus, 1927
***
TSR’S SERIES ON BACKGROUND OPS, ISSUE #8: OPERATIONAL CONSISTENCY
There are somewhere between dozens and thousands of “known best practices” in the world — if they are followed, good things tend to happen. If they are violated, the consequences range from a lack of good things happening… to outright disaster.
Much of the work of operations is ensuring that known best practices regularly and reliably happen.
This is both easy and difficult. Easy, because often individual best practices are not hard to understand once well-defined. Difficult, because there’s very many common human errors, biases, and the general weight of entropy and disorder bearing down on us all the time.
In this issue, we’ll look at how neglecting two simple best practices lead to the Carthaginians losing the decisive battle of the Second Punic War, and how the modern U.S. military codifies and trains to ensure that these errors do not repeat.
***
CARTHAGE’S FALL
You could make the argument that the Battle of Utica, in 203 BC, was one of the pivotal turning points in Western civilization.
In its aftermath, the undefeated Hannibal Barca had to be recalled from Roman territory to fight in North Africa and defend Carthage. Scipio defeated Hannibal at Zama, and Rome would go on to rule the world.
The tragic thing about Utica, from the Carthaginian perspective, is that it should not have been possible. Simply (1) constructing their camps using already-known best practices around defense, and (2) adequately posting sentries, would have been such that Scipio’s famed night attack would not be possible.
The Carthaginians had not been expecting the night attack, but they should have been more prepared — this was a war with very low chivalry. Both sides laid ambushes, made diplomatic overtures to induce treachery among the other side’s allies, broke agreements, and otherwise fought ruthlessly.
Hannibal had been the largest threat in Roman history, crossing the Alps and laying waste to Northern Italy, before laying the famous ambushes at the Trebia River and Lake Trasimene, and following those with the devastating Battle of Cannae wohich killed over 60,000 Romans — an unimaginably large amount in pre-modern warfare.
The Romans eventually gave command over to Quintus Fabius, who famously advocated the “delaying” strategy of refusing direct battle to the Carthaginians after Hannibal had repeatedly outmaneuvered and outstrategized them in the field.
One of the few effective Roman military commanders of the era, Scipio was eventually given a relatively small force to attack the Carthaginian allied bases in Spain. Winning stunning victories there, he was given a (still small) force to invade North Africa.
As Hannibal fought on Italy, the Carthaginians and their allies were still equipped to defend against Scipio’s relatively small invasion, but the night fire attack at the Battle of Utica changed everything — the two largest Carthaginian armies had been camped together, and both were nearly completed destroyed. Over 30,000 Carthaginians and Carthage-allied Numidians were killed or captured in one night, with minimal Roman losses.
Hannibal was recalled from Italy after the disaster and, fighting for the first time on African soil, was defeated by Scipio at the Battle of Zama. Carthage was defeated and disarmed, and 50 years later, was completely destroyed by Rome in the Third Punic War.
I think it’s very possible that if the Carthaginians had simply adhered to simple and known military best practices on defense, they would not have been destroyed.
***
SENTRY DUTY
The vast majority of people have a somewhat mistaken view of what it’s like to be in the military. The majority of war movies, for obvious reasons, focus on the intense action of combat scenes.
The fact is, the vast majority of being a soldier is extremely routine. A modern military has hundreds of individual jobs that need to be done — things like setting up supplies and logistics, securing gear and infrastructure, and keeping everything in good working order.
Even when deployed overseas in a combat zone, the majority of soldiers never see direct enemy fire. Even among the infantry and special forces who do face direct combat, it’s still vastly the minority of how their time is spent — the vast majority of the time is spent in training, cleaning, maintenance, checking and re-checking equipment, routine patrol, and a surprisingly large amount of paperwork.
This presents a unique challenge — the vast, vast majority of the time, nothing will ever happen during a sentry’s watch. Well over 99% of the time, nothing particularly relevant happens during sentry duty.
It’s a boring job, and especially boring in the middle of the night with no action anywhere to be found.
And yet, if sentries neglect their duties — like the Carthaginian sentries did in Utica in 203 BC — it can lead to everyone in their camp getting killed when the place is overrun in that rare instance that a surprise enemy attack is launched.
***
OPERATIONAL CONSISTENCY
Though it’s true that the stakes are higher in war, this problem isn’t unique to the military.
All throughout regular life, there’s dozens to hundreds of best practices that mitigate the chance of things going wrong. They make things run a little more smoothly. If followed, the result in everything going slightly better.
But there’s — usually — not grave consequences for neglecting any of these best practices. In fact, if best practices are followed, you often don’t even realize that disasters didn’t happen. Had the Carthaginian camp been better-constructed and better-defended outside Utica, Scipio simply wouldn’t have sent that risky night raid.
So here’s the problem —
1. There’s lots of best practices that things will go slightly better if they’re followed.
2. If they’re neglected, most of the time nothing bad will happen and it won’t be noticed.
3. If they’re neglected, everything will be slightly worse all the time.
4. If they’re neglected, occasionally something extremely bad will happen.
5. Following those best practices can be very boring and they don’t have a naturally good feedback loop on learning and following them.
That’s the challenge. Let’s learn from how the modern U.S. military deals with this in regards to sentry duty, a crucial role that’s incredibly routine and boring the majority of the time.
***
GENERAL ORDERS FOR SENTRIES
In the past, I’ve said that the U.S. Military’s “General Orders for Sentries” is perhaps the finest operations document of all time. It’s worth reading and thinking through why it was designed the way it was; many lessons are here to be learned.
Here’s the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps version of the General Orders —
“1. To take charge of this post and all government property in view.
2. To walk my post in a military manner, keeping always on the alert and observing everything that takes place within sight or hearing.
3. To report all violations of orders I am instructed to enforce.
4. To repeat all calls from posts more distant from the guardhouse (or the Quarterdeck) than my own.
5. To quit my post only when properly relieved.
6. To receive, obey, and pass on to the sentry who relieves me, all orders from the Commanding Officer, Command Duty Officer, Officer of the Day, Officer of the Deck, and all Officers and Petty Officers of the watch only.
7. To talk to no one except in the line of duty.
8. To give the alarm in case of fire or disorder.
9. To call the Corporal of the Guard or Officer of the Deck in any case not covered by instructions.
10. To salute all officers and all colors and standards not cased.
11. To be especially watchful at night and during the time for challenging, to challenge all persons on or near my post, and to allow no one to pass without proper authority.”
***
HUMAN NATURE AND EDGE CASES
On the surface, being a sentry is a fairly simple thing — “Watch this area. Tell us if anything odd happens.”
But when you dig deeper, there’s lots of little things that must be gotten right, and a lot of edge cases that need to be dealt with correctly.
The General Orders, I think, are particularly elegant in that the short form of them can be memorized with a few weeks of practice, but the expanded explanation of the Orders covers many relevant details.
Consider the expanded version of Order #8, “To give the alarm in case of fire or disorder” —
“While this is rather straightforward and obvious, keep in mind that a fire or disorder of some kind might be a deliberate distraction to keep you from observing some other disorderly or subversive activity. If you are certain that a fire is not meant to be a distraction, you should fight the fire if you have the means to do so. Remember, however, that your first responsibility is to report whatever is amiss.”
The reason I find the General Orders particularly elegant is that they successfully respect human nature.
Since time immemorial, fires have been started by enemy armies as a distraction in advance of an attack — it’s what the Romans did the Carthaginians at Utica.
Ordering someone to never fight the fire is unrealistic. It goes against human nature. If a fire breaks out in a military camp, it’s paramount to put the fire out.
But the General Orders make extremely clear that the fire needs to be reported first and then it must be clear it’s not a distraction before any sentry goes to help fight the fire.
Human nature is a difficult challenge in building any sort of operational consistency — particularly around edge cases, strange happenings, and emergencies. Any sort of operational documents must know, respect, and acknowledge human nature in order to ensure that the job gets done correctly instead of simply writing instructions down that don’t get followed.
***
OPERATIONAL CONSISTENCY IN THE BACKGROUND
Our investigation into Background Ops was prompted by Sir Alfred North Whitehead’s observation —
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
There’s a number of best practices out in the world that can’t ever be fully automated using technology, which are routine and somewhat boring to keep doing, but where things will go more smoothly if they’re followed and potentially go catastrophically bad if they’re not.
For these types of activities, you’ll want to ensure they become second nature to people through habit and practice. The steps to ensuring this type of operational consistency —
1. Codification
2. Accounting for human nature, biases, and errors
3. Stripping away inessentials
4. Training
5. Inspection and verification
The first step is codification. You want things written down in an objective, concrete fashion. Last issue, we discussed Universal Principles — in there, you can see some examples of items being codified at Bridgewater and Book In A Box.
Any high-value, routine, boring activity should be thoroughly codified — if you care about it happening regularly.
Secondly, you’ll want to account for human biases and human nature. I think the General Orders for Sentries offers some excellent material here — we’ve already looked at the special instructions for what to do if a fire breaks out. It’s also worth looking at the expanded instructions on General Order #5, “To quit my post only when properly relieved” —
“It should be fairly obvious that you should not leave your post until someone has come to take your place or until the petty officer of the guard has told you that the watch is no longer necessary. If the person relieving you is late, report it to the petty officer of the watch but do not quit your post. If you become ill and can no longer stand your watch, notify the petty officer of the watch and he or she will provide you a proper relief.”
In bootcamp and early phases of training, new recruits sometimes get into trouble when they turn in and sleep if whoever is supposed to relieve them comes late to do so.
In training, recruits are just practicing guard and sentry duty — they’re typically guarding something already well-secure without serious reprecussions. But if a recruit quits their post without being relieved in that instance, they get in trouble for it. The lesson to be learned is, never quit your sentry’s post without having whoever is next there to take over the watch.
Any initial codification of a routine activity will have lots of edge cases ranging from large disasters (fire) to occasional human problems (illness) to stupid things going wrong (the person supposed to relieve you is late). If you work on codifying any set of routine tasks, you need to pay attention and acknowledge all those edge cases and what to do in them.
The corresponding danger, though, is that whatever codified material you set down becomes unwieldy and bureaucratic — in Background Ops #4, Value-Producing Work, we talked about the necessity of simplifying and reducing all unnecessary waste from processes.
Over time, instructions tend to become more specific, address more edge cases, and keep growing. It’s critical to go back through things, from time to time, and pare back the inessentials to keep things simple and usable.
***
TRAINING AND INSPECTION
Finally, after you’ve got good guidelines for a process to be followed that account for human nature and edge cases, and which have been pared back down to their essential elements, it’s critical to work until they’re fully entrained.
We quoted Bruce Lee back in Background Ops #3 as saying,
“To become a champion requires a condition of readiness that causes the individual to approach with pleasure even the most tedious practice session. The more “ready” the person is to respond to a stimulus, the more satisfaction he finds in the response, and the more “unready” he is, the more annoying he finds it to be forced to act.”
This is essential.
If you want to dive into some interesting reading, simply Google “memorize general orders” and read some of the accounts of young sailors, soldiers, and marines.
There’s dozens of easily found threads online with questions like,
“Best method to memorizing my General Orders and Sailors Creed? I’ve always had difficulties remembering things verbatim. What are some tips to memorizing my GO’s and Sailors Creed?”
And replies like,
“There’s really no shortcut method. Just write one order at a time, until you can memorize them verbatim. Then memorize them according to their number. Same thing for the sailors creed, just write out one sentence, and add another until you can never get it wrong.
Also, youtube videos help to get some rhythem to memorizing them.
Whats the 7 order the sentry? To talk to no one except in the line of duty.
Sailors creed? I am a united states sailor, I will support and defend the constitution of the united states and obey all orders of those appointed over me. I represent the fighting spirit of the navy, to defend freedom and democracy around the world. I proudly serve my navy combat team with honor courage and commitment. I am committed to excellence and fair treatment of all.”
Again, I highly encourage to Google that term and read around it a little bit — there’s discussion threads on forums related to the Navy and Marine Corps, on Reddit, on Quora, really all over the internet. Some of them have useful practical techniques for memorization, some of them have recommendations for memorizing during boring time on a bus ride or otherwise in transit, but all of them come down to — you’ve just gotta do it.
To quote Lee again — I think it’s an important quote —
“To become a champion requires a condition of readiness that causes the individual to approach with pleasure even the most tedious practice session. The more “ready” the person is to respond to a stimulus, the more satisfaction he finds in the response, and the more “unready” he is, the more annoying he finds it to be forced to act.”
The willingness to embrace the hard, difficult, and time-consuming aspects of training is one of the fundamentals of excellent performance and mastery.
Finally, you can take a prompt for how the Navy and Marine Corps ensure that the Orders are learned — they regularly drill and instruct on the task.
A training instructor might ask, “What is General Order #10?” — and immediately expect back, “To salute all officers and all colors and standards not cased.”
Likewise, there will be training exercises where someone comes to a sentry’s post and blusters that they need to get past without adequate authority. If the sentry lets them past, they get in trouble later.
Training isn’t enough — you need to ensure and review that the training is actually working, that it’s sticking, that it works under stress and pressure.
***
GUIDANCE
The steps to build operational consistency of any high-value, routine, boring activity —
1. Codification
2. Accounting for human nature, biases, and errors
3. Stripping away inessentials
4. Training
5. Inspection and verification
This is an iterative process. Your first attempt at codification will almost certainly fail because of something unforeseen, and you’ll need to make adjustments. In the process of making adjustments, you’ll need to also set aside time to pare things back so that you don’t fail due to rigidity and bureaucracy.
The first steps at this, again, are almost always a work in process — and should be marked as such. It makes a lot of sense for executives or senior managers to do the steps written first, themselves, to make sure things are generally workable. And to make everyone know that it’ll be a work in progress for a while, so as not to compromise credibility when initial codified procedures are found to not work well — which is to be expected for the first versions.
After that comes training, inspection, and verification.
But okay — this is obvious on how it applies at scale on an organizational level, but does it also apply at the individual level?
I believe so. Most people make decisions somewhat intuitively without codifying them, which works fine in the areas where their intuitions are naturally in tune with reality, but works poorly in areas where their natural intuitions are out of touch with reality.
Take sentry duty again — the default inclination if a fire breaks out is to fight the fire. Is it correct to jump right into firefighting when you’re a sentry? No, it’s potentially disastrous.
Similarly, you need to codify how you want your own life to run during intense and stressful situations if you want to consistently make good decisions.
Some people are very fortunate that their natural intuitions and inclinations line up very well with the fields they’ve chosen to work in — but very few people are perfectly aligned with universal best practices.
Sitting and thinking through the correct way of doing things, writing those down, adjusting them, and training them thoroughly can be a very good practice for individuals. This could apply to getting your most important work done in the mornings, processing admin and chores like paperwork and taxes and recording expenses, managing a nutrition or fitness plan, setting aside time for learning and reflection and planning, and a whole lot of other activities.
Then, if it’s a truly a solo endeavor with no supervision, you’ll need to install your own inspection and verification. As mentioned in Background Ops #2, I think everyone with a complex life needs a Keystone of some sort in their lives. I use a Lights Spreadsheet, but there’s many workable versions of a Keystone.
If you have a keystone-type thing installed, you can simply put whatever you’re training on there for review every day and at the end of the week until it becomes truly automatic.
Most people won’t ever take these steps — even in areas they’re weak in that they’d very much like better performance from — because it’s time-consuming and challenging. But as Bruce Lee reflected, to become a champion is to approach with pleasure even the most tedious practice session.
Most of our lives, thankfully, will not be such high-stakes as a sentry’s duties in wartime, and certainly not as much as the Second Punic Wars — but for lack of simple best practices, the entire Carthaginian civilization was eventually destroyed.
Certainly, we can learn from this — for routine and important tasks, codify and adjust them, train them until they become automatic, and inspect and verify they’re working.
Until next time, yours,
Sebastian Marshall
Editor, TheStrategicReview.net
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This is the 8th issue in our series on Background Operations. TSR brings out one long-form actionable essay from history every Thursday, you can subscribe for free at thestrategicreview.net
Want to try out a Lights Spreadsheet? It’s a useful tool for building greater personal consistency. A template-generator and best practices guide is here: Ultraworking.com/lights
