Organizational failures and communication breakdown in the Falklands War

Organizational Design

Management Issues

Communication Strategies

Culture

Lessons for the Contemporary Leader

A sequence of national political and economic reorganizations and institutional realignments that culminated in systemic leadership failures during the Falklands Island conflict ultimately persuaded the Galtieri Junta to relinquish power in 1983. This paper examines the historical background to this war focusing on the organizational and communication mistakes that led the government to assess the invasion as likely to benefit them. These miscalculations arose from the internal structure of the military junta, the psychology of Galtieri and the other leaders (on both the Argentinian and British sides), and broad cultural factors that played a potent although often unconscious role. The defeat of the Argentinian military by Great Britain during the 1982 Falklands War and the Junta's resignation the following year can only be understood by taking into account all these levels of organization and human interaction.

Historical Background

Where one begins the story of the conflict over the Falkland Islands depends in no small part on which side one is privileging, for the scattering of two larger and numerous smaller islands has been claimed by a number of different nations. Thus French accounts of the history of the islands tend to start with French occupation, Spanish accounts with the Spanish occupation, and British accounts with the British occupation (Gustafson, 1988, p. 26). As this paper focuses on the Falklands War between Argentina and Great Britain, the historical background also focuses on British claims to the territory -- without meaning to deny the importance of the other European colonial powers on the history of the islands and the region in general.

As Gustafson (1988) notes, the Falkland Islands have been subject to competing claims of sovereignty since the 18th century. The 4,700-square-mile islands -- called the Islas Malvinas by the Argentinians and located about 300 miles east of the Argentinian coast are home to about 2000 people -- were uninhabited when Europeans began exploring them. Although indigenous people living on the mainland may have made excursions to the islands, they never settled them, and so the first permanent settlements were made by a series of European powers. The islands' early inhabited history includes a series of disputes between the United Kingdom and France, Spain, and the United Provinces of the River Plata and its political successor, Argentina.

In a move that foreshadowed in key psychological, political, and cultural ways the invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentina in 1982, Luis Vernet established a colony on the islands in 1828. Vernet claimed authority to become the island's governor for this move both from the Government of the Central Provinces and the British Consulate (Beck, 1988, p. 136). This dual diplomatic permission was an acknowledgement of the already well-developed political tensions about control of the islands. However, even as he acknowledged his vassalage status and asked for promises of military protection from the British, Vernet also acted in autocratic ways, as if the islands were his own fiefdom. (His inclination to do so may well have arisen from the fact that his was given the governorship of the islands in part as a repayment of a debt owed to him from the government of the United Provinces.)

Vernet quickly moved to establish his own laws for the islands, a political acknowledgement that there is an element of exceptionalism about the islands. After he began to limit sealing on the islands, both Great Britain and the United States lodged protests. Vernet then seized American ships, the U.S. responded by sending in the Navy, the United Provinces called their people home, then sent them back. Great Britain then sent its warships to the islands in 1833 and once there were able to re-impose British rule. With this bloodless re-occupation by the British, the islands remained in British control until 1982 (Beck, 1988).

From the perspective of establishing an historical explanation for the Falklands War, what is most important about these early conflicts over the islands is that the mainland authority (first the United Provinces and later the nation of Argentina) used occupation of the islands as a sign of national authority and power. Part of the story that Argentinians told themselves about the islands between 1833 and 1982 was that the British had unfairly seized land that was rightfully theirs. It was this story of entitlement that made the Falklands so appealing as a political diversion to the ruling junta in 1982 as it sought a way to distract the citizens of Argentina from a range of domestic problems.

This is to some extent a simplification of the process and the thinking of the Argentine leadership as its members decided to invade the islands. But the historical animus between the islands' British control and the mainland government -- I argue -- made the junta inclined to make mistakes in strategy that they would not have been as likely to make vis-a-vis other issues. Low-standing anger and long-simmering hatred are both heavy burdens when trying to make rational decisions -- something that would have been hard enough to do in the domestic turmoil. With the history of the conflict pressing against him, Galtieri was effectively robbed of the possibility of making sound decisions (Makin, 1983b).

We all, as humans, have areas of weakness in which we are likely to let unexamined emotions have undue influence, reducing our ability to think and act rationally and to be as attentive to long-term goals and consequences as we might otherwise be. This is one of the important dynamics of what happened in the internal debates of the Argentine junta. Failures in leadership are likely to occur when leaders act on motivations that are not well examined, and that is in part what brought about first the Falklands War defeat and then the resignation of the Galtieri Junta. Galtieri was sure that the people would follow him in rallying around the invasion of the islands as a national priority (although he was also simply trying to throw sand in their eyes) and so was unable to recover afterward when he realized that his version of events was not as widely held to be true as he had thought (Makin, 1983b).

An analogy could be made between Galtieri's invasion of the Falkland Islands and the George W. Bush invasion of Iraq. Bush too believed that his nation's people would set the same priority on military adventuring. (Obviously the wars are on a very different scale and there are other differences, but there are also key similarities in terms of leadership beliefs.) Bush was able to remain in power after the war was rejected by the American people because of the political structure and stability of the United States. Galtieri, faced with clear military defeat and economic misery at home and without the feeble but still important veneer of having to come to power through an honest election, had to cede power.

Overview of the Conflict

The Falklands War lasted about two and a half months, killing 907 people, and restoring the status quo in which Great Britain controlled the islands and Argentina remains resentful of this fact. The near-term roots of the war -- as opposed to the longer-term historical causes described above -- began in 1976, when the National Reorganization Process -- a military dictatorship -- took control over the country. The junta had engaged in violent oppression of its political opponents -- killing and "disappearing" thousands. Even as the leadership of the junta changed, the repression continued.

At least as devastating as the political violence of the junta to the people of the country was the economic chaos of the time. The military dictatorship was unable to provide any economic stability for its people. History has shown us repeatedly that people are willing to put up with terrible conditions in other areas of their lives if they can have some confidence in the monetary system. Previous Argentine regimes had been able to provide some security: In the late 1960s rigid federal controls over monetary policy had put a break on inflation.

Beginning in 1973, the government began to lose control of inflation again and the nation's currency rapidly began to lose power over the peso as its value was undermined by increasing political instability and violence; pressure by the labor unions to increase wages devalued by inflation (thereby setting up a highly problematic feedback loop); run-away budget deficits; and inflation itself. In 1982, the inflation rate was over 200% officially; some scholars argue that it was in fact closer to 600% in terms of what ordinary people had to pay to buy basic goods. Wages and gross national product were in free fall and general strikes hit the country nearly every day. Before the invasion, the government had announced that in 1983 it would devalue the currency by the ratio of 10,000 to one. This would have had a devastating effect on the nation's people.

To understand the effect of such economic pressures on the people and the government of Argentina in 1982 it may be useful to think of the ways in which people have reacted over the past couple of years during the current recession, when the economy has actually been subject to deflation. The relatively small degree of economic displacement during this recession has prompted the rise of the Tea Party and (to those who are not a member of this movement) incomprehensible fury against the federal government. (By noting that the economic pain now is "relatively small" I do not in any way to mean to suggest that many people have been not been devastated by the recession, merely to make the factual statement that the economic conditions in Argentina in the early 1980s were much worse.)

The junta in Argentina in 1982, led for the previous year and a half by General Leopoldo Galtieri, had no possible tools to use to make real changes in the country: They did not have the economic resources to distract the nation's people with domestic "bread and circuses" (Makin, 1983b). So they tried another, historically proven strategy: Tamp down a domestic crisis (in fact, a dual domestic crisis of political and economic failure) by rallying people with calls to patriotism in times of war. The decision on the part of Galtieri was cynical in the extreme, but not misguided per se. Such decisions have worked a number of times historically.

The following provides a precise summary of these dynamics:

Galtieri aimed to counterbalance public concern over economic and human rights issues with a speedy nationalist 'win' over the Falklands. Pressure was exerted in the UN with a subtle hint of invasion raised: the British missed this threat and continued to waste time (it is worth noting, British positions are not expressed centrally and monolithically but rather emerge from the operations of special interests and departments without always being uniform and consistent; this has often misled outside observers). The Argentinians interpreted the British position as disengagement, being willing to step away if the islands were invaded - a viewpoint encouraged by the withdrawal of the last Royal Navy presence in 1981 (together with a general down-sizing of the fleet) and the British Nationality Bill of 1981 which withdrew full citizenship rights from the Kelpers. The British also helped by being unwilling to believe that the Argentinians would invade.

Moreover, Galtieri had no other hole cards to play. This was true for him on a number of levels. As a military leader and the head of a military government, he would naturally have been inclined to think in military terms. And as an Argentinian, he would naturally have been inclined to think of the Falkland Islands as being held in a sort of exile from their homeland. (History gives us too many examples to count of the number of times when people have gone to war to reclaim some portion of the earth's surface that the invading group had proclaimed was a lost part of their homeland. Among the most pernicious of these claims were Mussolini's call for the return of Trieste -- as "unredeemed national territory" to Italy and Hitler's near-hysterical claims for the return of French-held Saar and the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia.)

Surely some Argentinians at the time recognized the cynicism of Galtieri's invasion of the Falklands as the bald attempt that it was to shift public attention away from the economic chaos and political carnage in the streets. But they, along with their compatriots, were nonetheless attracted to the idea that at least their nation could do something to reclaim its stolen territory. The fact that the invasion was cloaked in an historical myth that was important to many Argentinians blinded them to the foolhardiness of the invasion itself and helped to ensure that a very high level of organizational sloppiness was permitted to exist (Sanders, Ward, & Marsh, 1987).

Of course, an invasion organized under such conditions would almost necessarily fail. Despite the fact that Great Britain had ignored hints that the invasion was coming, British officials and military officers responded quickly and rationally and the small-scale (in military terms) war ended (Ministry of Defence, 1982). The British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, saw a substantial rise in her popularity and political power. The junta saw a different message written on the wall: Its leaders voluntarily left power the following year, replaced by leaders who came to power on anti-military platforms.

It should be noted that Argentina maintains its claim to the Falklands: This claim is in fact written into the nation's constitution. The battle was lost, the military leaders replaced, democracy was strengthened. But the historical myth of Argentina's legitimate sovereignty over the islands remains. Lest we take this as an opportunity to dismiss the Argentinians as somehow more jingoistic or even superstitious than other peoples, it is necessary to remember that all people have similar stories about their nations. Such stories that connect people to the land where they live seem simply to be a part of human nature.

Management Issues

This paper divides the analysis of the leadership of the Galtieri Junta during the Falklands War into organizational, management, and communication strata because these are in fact three different perspectives, and differentiating them proves to be useful to the analysis. However, before moving on to this section it is important to note that all of these aspects of analysis are fundamentally linked to each other and that to some extent separating them for the purpose of analysis is to create artificial distinctions within an integral whole.

The managerial problems of the junta and the ways in which they initiated and then oversaw the war were numerous and systematic (Ministry of Defence, 1982). Among the most serious of these management problems was the fact that there was no mechanism in the Galtieri government to prevent such a precipitous decision as the invasion from being made. Well-run governments have clear procedures for the process of deciding to pursue military actions: The Galtieri Junta had no such mechanism both because such a strategy requires clear lines of distinct divisions between military and civilian power and authority. This lack of a political mechanism to rein in military over-enthusiasm ran parallel to the psychological profile of a leader like Galtieri (Freedman, 1988, p. 63)

At least as serious in terms of management problems was the fact that there were frequent conflicts among the different military branches. These conflicts -- abetted by poor communication among the different branches -- were another result of the lack of a civilian government imposing order on the military:

All military services participated in the Junta government, however the Army provides the President and exercises leverage from its traditional ranking as the senior service. In order to avoid a true dictatorship they adopted the Brazilian pattern of limiting the Presidential term. This is not to say that personality does not have an inordinate amount of force and a desultory effect upon the level of maturity of decision making.

Since 22 December 1981, Argentina was governed by a three-men Junta controlled by Army General Leopoldo Galtieri, Admiral Isaac Anaya and Air Force Brigadier General Arturo Domo. These officers were highly individualistic, lacked professional military depth, and as time proved, diplomatically and militarily inept.

An exacerbating factor is that the military are very much divided. Sometimes the conflicts are among Army, Navy, Air Force or between different ranks of officers. On other questions, military opinion may cut across all services. (Korkin & Sanders, 1985, pp. 13-14)

These divisions, Korkin & Sanders write, were the result of the fact that Argentine soldiers had served primarily as a sort of domestic police force for the junta, used by the military leaders to suppress dissent at home.

Argentina's main enemy up to the Falklands invasions was Chile, and even then, it was more "saber rattling" than actual military confrontation. Their limited combat experience was a result of protracted, fierce fighting against rural end urban guerrillas within their assigned military region and thus simply a continental Army responsible for internal stability.

The obsession with internal dissidents resulted in armed forces that were highly compartmented, with each service judiciously guarding its rights and privileges, and "their compulsory participation in the to and fro of national politics merely aggravated the situation. (p. 25)

These breakdowns in communication and overall lack of rational management combined with the what Korkin & Sanders referred to as by 'Argentine sophomoric world diplomacy.' They describe the decision to invade as having no more managerial (or organizational) complexity than a "spur of the moment outburst of Latino macho."

Even given the short time table that Galtieri gave his troops, they would have been able to perform better with even minimal practice and familiarity with the conditions that they would be facing. Such preparation does not seem even to have crossed the mind of Galtieri, Anaya, or the other junta leaders:

While joint operations would have generated enough synergistic value to overcome glaring performance shortcomings, not even a professional field exercise was mounted prior to the Invasion. The lack of strategic planning and paucity of General Staff direction fragmented the priority of defense, leaving the nation's fate to the vagaries of military personalities. (p. 25).

Personality is a part of leadership: It can never, however, substitute for it.

An invasion that arose without any sophisticated planning (which can serve as a synonym for what good management should be) will have predictable problems. One of the things that made Galtieri such a poor leader was his inability to control his own impulses: To put it in stark terms, he failed to act like the grown-up in the room. He made a number of mistakes during the month and a half of active fighting, but these pale in contrast to his decision to invade the islands at all.

He seems to have adopted Donald Rumsfeld's dictum that one goes to war with the army that one has (bearing in mind, of course, that such an adoption would in fact require time travel) and upped it. His armed forces were woefully unprepared. No good military leader -- and no humane or wise civilian leader -- would stage an invasion with such an army if he had any sense of strategy or proportion. Korkin & Sanders (1985) list a number of these management or macro-organizational problems:

1) Many of the troops were in poor physical condition, sick and undernourished.

2) The Argentine soldiers were so ill-prepared and so demoralized that they would break ranks and run away at times.

3) Argentine soldiers at times killed their own officers

4) The Argentine conscripts had been very poorly trained and were not given the information that they needed about the goals of the war to perform in ways that would maximize the chances for success.

5) Many of the small-arms weapons were inoperable due to rust because soldiers either had been not taught how to clean them or because officers had not instilled sufficient discipline in their men to ensure that they cleaned their weapons as needed.

6) In a rather grim attempt to inspire their soldiers, the Argentine officers made up stories about how the British would torture any soldiers that they captured. This propaganda tactic must have lost the officers the loyalty of the men who realized that they were being lied to.

7) Major weapons systems had not been tested beforehand in field conditions.

8) Argentine garrisons often lit fires at night, making them as easy to shoot as fish in a barrel. (Korkin & Sanders, 1985)

The above are some of the specific problems that arose from what might be called Galtieri's leadership based on magical thinking: He acted from the invasion through the aftermath of the war as if the military venture should go the way he wanted it to simply because it was the way that he wanted it to go (Makin, 1983a). One has the distinct sensation of a little boy saying to the British: "I'm going to hold my breath until you surrender." This is not, as any parent (and indeed any child who has tried this strategy out once or twice) can tell you, a winning strategy. But it does encompass precisely the mindset that Galtieri (along with the other Junta leaders) embodied during the Falklands War (Kinney, 1985, p. 106). Instead of offering their soldiers and their citizens the key attributes of leadership -- vision, wisdom, humility, due caution, courage, generosity, and the willingness to put the needs of others before one's own -- they acted in ways that were designed primarily to benefit and aggrandize themselves (Hastings & Jenkins, 1983, p. 218). The inability -- or refusal -- of the different leaders to see beyond what possible benefit the war could bring to themselves led them to set up a command structure that was designed to protect their personal power and popularity. This managerial/organizational choice created unsurmountable problems:

Faced with war, the junta set up a complicated command arrangement to direct combat operations. A theater command, the South Atlantic Theater of Operations (TOAS), was created under Vice Adm Juan Lombardo to command Argentine naval units and the Falklands garrison. Subordinate to Admiral Lombardo, Brig Gen Mario Benjamin Menendez was to command all the army, air force, and navy units deployed to the Falklands (which amounted to over 10,000 men by the end of April). On 5 April the air force operational headquarters (Strategic Air Command-TOAS) set up a special force called the Southern Air Force (Fuerza Aerea Sur [FAS]) under the command of the air force's Brig Gen Ernesto Horacio Crespo. General Crespo, commander of the 4th Air Brigade, was a highly experienced pilot and commander and was given the pick of Argentina's aerial strike forces with the primary mission of attacking the British fleet. The air force was outside the authority of the theater commander and reported directly to the junta, although it was supposed to coordinate its efforts with the other commands. It was not an effective command arrangement for developing strategy or conducting operations. (Corum, 2002)

Communication Problems

A number of problems arose during the course of the war from the fact that there were no clear communication lines amongst the different junta leaders. Most of these communication issues have been touched upon before and consisted of what one might call "

anti-communication errors since they consisted of the failure of the top leaders to communicate either with each other or with those under them. As Corum (2002) notes, "The junta made strategic and operational decisions throughout the campaign without consulting its senior service commanders or doing any serious study of the situation." What initially began as a failure of will to communicate -- as leaders of the different military branches and units tried to safeguard their own spheres of influences and power -- quickly became complicated by the inability of the forces and leaders to communicate with each other because of a British naval blockade that made it difficult for leaders to communicate with soldiers in the field.

Within days of the invasion it was clear that the British were going to fight, and the junta started reinforcing the Falklands garrison. On 9 April 1982, the president and army commander Lt Gen Leopoldo Galtieri, without consulting the service staff or the officers responsible for the defense of the Falklands, ordered the entire 10th Mechanized Brigade to the islands. ...Resupply and reinforcement of their forces on the islands were complicated by a British naval blockade of the Falklands -- enforced by three Royal Navy nuclear attack submarines. Argentina dared not use the sea to send any reinforcements or supplies. Thus, from the start, Argentinian forces in the Falklands were dependent upon FAA airlift. (Corum, 2003)

The above covers the essential problems of the communication situation during the war from the Argentine side as well as summarizing the general failure of leadership during the process: Arrogance and lack of appropriate knowledge of military tactics led Galtieri to assume that he knew what to do and then led him to act without consulting or communicating with others in the Junta. This failure of personal leadership qualities was exacerbated by better military skills on the side of the British (Udemi, 1989, p. 54).

Galtieri and the Argentine army and navy were also stymied by forces not under their control, such as weather conditions that tended to favor the British. However, a good leader knows that something unexpected always occurs and allows for this. Galtieri, focused as he was on trying to distract people from domestic problems, gave little foresight to planning the war (Freedman, 1988, p. 119).

Culture

The effects of culture on the Falklands War, in terms of mistakes made by the Argentine leadership, were complex, for culture itself is the entire way in which we look at the whole world. But it is possible to isolate two particular features of Argentine culture that in key ways limited the effectiveness of Galtieri and the other military leaders to act in ways that would have allowed them to lead their side to victory during the war -- or at least to survive the defeat during the war and to remain in power for more than an additional year. The first of these cultural influences has been touched upon a number of times in this paper: Galtieri was mislead by the embedded Argentine cultural model that military leaders were competent to run the civilian aspects of government simply by virtue of past military experience and not because of any particular leadership skills (Reginald & Elliot, 1983, p. 211).This dovetailed with an overall cultural push toward macho-ism that lead Galtieri and his fellow members of the Junta to believe that men had a privileged position so long as they acted in stereotypically masculine ways. Bullying and posturing were modes of behavior that tended to pass in lieu of leadership within the power structure of Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s.

At least as important in terms of what might be called cultural interference -- in terms of general aspects of culture that exacerbated the personal leadership problems of Galtieri and his allies -- has also been touched upon. Argentinians believed in a cultural/nationalist myth that the Falkland Islands belonged to them. It was their version of the American Manifest Destiny. This sense of ownership blinded Galtieri to the tactical and strategic mistakes that he was so blithely making, and it also dampened the ability of the Argentine people in general to assess how thoroughly they were being led astray by the men who were supposed to have their bests interests uppermost.

Conclusion: Lessons for Future Leaders

Looking back over nearly three decades to the failures of the Argentine leadership during the Falklands War, we can draw certain conclusions that will allow future leaders in similar situations not to make the same mistakes. (Bearing in mind how difficult it is for each new generation to learn from the past.) The first lesson is the most fundamental: Mixing military and civilian power and authority structures is always problematic and cannot be sustained in the long run. Military culture (and thus the goals of military leaders) are different from those of civilian leaders and by definition tend to focus on the short-term. A people are never served by leaders who focus on the short-term. Nor is any nation served by choices that are primarily belligerent in origin or goals. A phrase borrowed from Alcoholics Anonymous (of all odd places) actually serves to illustrate this point: If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. For military leaders whose only tools are ones of war, then the solution to every problem looks like an invasion.

The next major level of problems and mistakes made by the leadership was their failure to put into place an organizational system that allowed for clear lines of communication (Udemi, 1989, p. 54). Had they done so, they could have avoided a series of problems. These ranged from failures to communicate before the war when Galtieri failed to determine to what extent he could on other nations to the continuing failures during the war when the main bodies of troops were cut off time and again from leaders on the mainland. Lines of communication (like lines of supply) are essential for military victories, something that was almost inexplicably forgotten by the military leaders of the junta. One might have thought that while they might fail as military leaders they would at least have gotten the military choices right. But their arrogance (among other factors) led them to believe that they were insulated from the consequences of poor decisions.

The junta leaders also failed to understand how quickly the Argentine people wold be to understand the fact that their leaders were simply trying to distract them from the terrible economic conditions and from the leaders' past actions of political violence (Hastings & Jenkins, 1983, p. 217). One of the inevitable speculative paths that one thinks about when reviewing the aftermath of this war is whether or not the junta would have been able to stay in power if Argentina had been successful during the war. Taking all of the conditions and factors into account, probably not (Kinney, 1985). There were simply too many problems with the junta's domestic policy, to the extent that it could even by called a "policy" at all given its ad hoc and desperate nature.

Galtieri and his fellow members of the junta had one slim chance to stay in power after their defeat in the Falklands War: They could have admitted the mistakes that they have made and sincerely tried to make changes. However, the same lack of leadership skills that allowed them (or even forced them) to make the many mistakes discussed in this paper also robbed them of the insight needed to be able to make the kinds of changes in domestic policy that would have made a genuinely beneficial difference in the lives of the Argentine people. Although, perhaps, this is to judge them too harshly. The junta did have sufficient insight -- or humility, or grace -- to give up power the following year. They could have tried harder to stay in power and caused even greater harm. To paraphrase a line from Macbeth: Nothing in their rule became them like the leaving. In the end, in the very act of giving up their positions of leadership, they acted most like leaders.