Too Many Requirements

Leonard Wong, research professor at the U.S. Army War College, finds that there are more requirements placed on U.S. Army officers than available hours to fulfill them. He argues that the proliferation of requirements has had a pernicious effect on honesty.

"When pressed for specifics on how they managed, officers tended to dode the issue with statements such as, 'You gotta make priorities, we met the intent, or we got creative.'"

"Eventually, words and phrases such as 'hand waving, fudging, massaging, or checking the box' would surface to sugarcoat the hard reality that, in order to satisfy compliance with the surfeit of directed requirements from above, officers resort to evasion and deception." 

The zero-defect mentality of the military strengthened the incentive to misreport. Luckily Wong is optimistic about leadership's ability to reform the requirements load in order to maintain a high ethical standard, and this says a lot about the professionalism of the U.S. military. 

What is most intriguing is that these institutional problems arose subtly where actors were largely honest and dedicated. 

Lying became rationalized in a process known as moral fading. Moral fading is the process by which a person doesn’t realize that the decision their making has ethical implications, and therefore doesn’t include ethical criteria in the decision. 

Where one person may see little value in a requirement's accuracy, another may view it as critical. Inconsistency in application makes the collective set of information systemically suspect.

These issues are probably not limited to traditional operations, but also those who manage the defense acquisitions. Many large contracts have more requirements placed on them than the contracting officers can possibly fulfill with 100% certainty. 

Requirements burden affects both government and contracting staff, both of who make tradeoffs on which requirements are met accurately, inaccurately (e.g. through ad hoc allocations), or not at all. Moral fading causes government agents to rationalize non-compliance on certain margins and contractors to slip through the cracks where they can. 

The resulting information is known throughout the system to be of overall suspect quality. When they can, analysts go directly to the contractor to receive what they believe to be their natural and uncorrupted data.

How would one go about researching this topic? There might need to be a survey of control account managers (CAMs) regarding adherence to planning requirements… a survey of contracting officers on which requirements they enforce strictly… Where might this show up in the data? The poor quality of most defense cost data (and the overruns they depict) might be an artifact of moral fading.