Blaming the wrong people
David Pugliese of CanWest is upset with the answers - or, more accurately, non-answers - he's getting to the questions he's been posing to DND. He seems to be blaming DND Public Affairs and ADM-Mat Dan Ross:
A lot of what comes officially out of DND PA right now is crap. It's evasive, bland, and just about useless in many cases. And it takes days or weeks to get responses on even the simplest of questions. So, as far as that's concerned, I agree with Pugliese.
But he's beating on the wrong people. The fault is not with DND PA, per se, but rather with the bureaucrats and political mandarins at "The Centre" - which is what many in Ottawa call the PMO/PCO axis and its attendant power players behind the scenes. Believe me, many of the PA officers I know want to be more open. But they're constrained by directives - unwritten directives, but carrying the full weight of the bureaucracy just the same - that limit what can be released, by whom, and in what time frame. It's micro-management gone mad.
I know Pugliese already knows this. So why he's beating on Ross and the PA branch, I can only guess.
I'm not saying the PA branch are a bunch of white knights in all this. They work in an undervalued branch, which has serious repercussions on morale and performance. Their talent pool is largely made up of people who didn't fit in another military classification (another job), and were shuffled off to PA as a consequence. And because of a confluence of factors - including having their wings clipped severely these past couple of years - the PA branch is bleeding experience badly. One individual I've spoken with suggested to me that in a couple of years, more than 80% of the captains in the branch will have less than three years of PA experience. That's not a recipe for success.
But Pugliese's still blaming the wrong people for this fiasco. The problem isn't the dog, it's the guy in behind holding the leash and muzzle.
A Defence Department public affairs branch appears to have a new tactic for dealing with questions from journalists. It is recycling the same answers they provided to reporters more than 20 months ago as new answers for different questions asked this year.
...
Well of course, there was absolutely no response (as is par for the course these days) from the public affairs branch handing queries to the office of Dan Ross, the Assistant Deputy Minister for Materiel. So I went ahead and published my article in the Citizen.
Then about a week after my deadline a DND PR person did phone me and told me that she had emailed me the response.
I informed her two things. The main thing was that the emailed answer didn’t answer my question. The second was that the emailed answer looked mighty familiar….at which point she informed me that was definitely not the case and it was her understanding that I didn’t even know what OTSP stood for (actually I do….having written several articles on the project).
So I did some checking in my emails from long ago, and sure enough, the bulk of this latest response from Dan Ross’s office was exactly the same as the one his PR branch had emailed me in March 2007 when I asked about the project .....but at that time with a different set of questions.
A lot of what comes officially out of DND PA right now is crap. It's evasive, bland, and just about useless in many cases. And it takes days or weeks to get responses on even the simplest of questions. So, as far as that's concerned, I agree with Pugliese.
But he's beating on the wrong people. The fault is not with DND PA, per se, but rather with the bureaucrats and political mandarins at "The Centre" - which is what many in Ottawa call the PMO/PCO axis and its attendant power players behind the scenes. Believe me, many of the PA officers I know want to be more open. But they're constrained by directives - unwritten directives, but carrying the full weight of the bureaucracy just the same - that limit what can be released, by whom, and in what time frame. It's micro-management gone mad.
I know Pugliese already knows this. So why he's beating on Ross and the PA branch, I can only guess.
I'm not saying the PA branch are a bunch of white knights in all this. They work in an undervalued branch, which has serious repercussions on morale and performance. Their talent pool is largely made up of people who didn't fit in another military classification (another job), and were shuffled off to PA as a consequence. And because of a confluence of factors - including having their wings clipped severely these past couple of years - the PA branch is bleeding experience badly. One individual I've spoken with suggested to me that in a couple of years, more than 80% of the captains in the branch will have less than three years of PA experience. That's not a recipe for success.
But Pugliese's still blaming the wrong people for this fiasco. The problem isn't the dog, it's the guy in behind holding the leash and muzzle.
posted by Babbling Brooks at 10:42 a.m.
4 Comments:
It's the casual acceptance of the Public Affairs Branch that bothers me.
Don't get me wrong, their job is a valid one, but DND hires lots of civilians to perform specialized tasks, why does this task require someone in uniform?
Would the uniforms not be better utilized, on the backs of soldiers, or sailors or airman?
It is a bureaucrat position that could be filled with a professional, but a civilian professional. Cheaper too.
A PAffO who wishes to remain anonymous e-mailed this to me:
I would point out that all modern militaries, and certainly all the best ones have Public Affairs officers in uniform, and use civilians in appropriate positions as well. But, nobody uses civilians completely. PAOs have an operational role to play, good Commanders and operators know this, and good PAOs know this; but not all Commanders and PAOs know this! The recent phenomenon of a FEW PAOs being deemed unsuitable to deploy, or remain deployed to Kandahar is an indicator that senior operational Commanders are demanding a higher standard of PA; why? Because they now see the importance and value of PA when you fight a war in the digital age. Civilians cannot forward deploy to all the places PAOs need to go, nor can they fully connect with the people they support.
British PAOs are officers from other trades who agree to do PA for a few years, one Gurkha officer described himseld to me as an "enthusiastic amateur", while I was a "professional". Canadian uniformed PAOs are held in high esteem by all NATO countries, which is often why NATO asks Canadian PAOs to fulfill training roles. The British model is not without some merit; where they lack in professional PA accumen, they want not for credibility with the operators they support because they are soldiers, sailors, and airmen first and PAOs second. But British PA in Afghanistan is no shining example, although they are ahead in one area: soldier video diaries.
But we both know as you point out that there is room for improvement. The civilianization of the PA branch is a legitimate concern. It seems to come from:
A. Having a civilian at the head of your organization, ADM (PA).
B. Working alongside civilians for extended periods of time.
C. Toiling at 101 in a bureaucratic environment for the majority of your career (more than 50% of PA positions are in the NCR.)
The real and only solution in this area is for operational Commanders to fullly understand what PAOs should and must do, and then rigorously hold their feet to the fire...as long as the centre agrees!
So....we can send civilians to Afstan to serve Tim Horton's coffee, or run the R&R program, serve as part of the Reconstruction Team from DFAIT or CIDA or CSC, or embed journalists with the troops, etc.. but it would not be suitable for DND civilian PAFFOs to deploy there and do their jobs?
Don't see how you can justify that.
Civilian Public Affairs Officers cannot go outside the wire with a battle group to accompany journalists. Even one person in a vehicle without a gun is too many. They can't waste anymore valuable space on a PAO who is not equipped to return fire.
It's also very hard for a civilian to fully understand the complexities of an organization like the CF without experiencing the life first hand.
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