Asymmetric Strategy
It's a little known fact that back in 2002, the US Military went through a major war game exercise to model what a war between the United States and Iraq might look like. The exercise, Millenium Challenge, took two years to plan and cost $250 million, involving some 130 000 troops and very sophisticated computer modeling. And the USA lost!
Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, formerly the Commanding General, Marine Corps Combat Development Command, Quantico, VA, played the role of the enemy commander; "a crazed but cunning megalomaniac ruling a militarily powerful Middle Eastern nation." In the opening stages of the exercise, using the element of surprise and highly unorthodox tactics, Van Riper's forces sank most of the US fleet in the Persian Gulf and brought the entire offensive to a halt. It was indeed fortunate that when the real war started, Saddam Hussein did not have a Van Riper commanding his forces.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Pentagon decided to ignore its defeat and continue with the exercise, ordering its troops "back to life" and its fleet "refloated."
How did Van Riper do it? The exercise is described in an article that appeared in The Guardian of 6 September 2002, extracted here from the website of GlobalSecurity.org:
He reckoned the US forces would try to launch a surprise strike, in line with the administration's new pre-emptive doctrine, "so I decided I would attack first."
Van Riper had at his disposal a computer-generated flotilla of small boats and planes, many of them civilian, which he kept buzzing around the virtual Persian Gulf in circles as the game was about to get under way. As the US fleet entered the Gulf, Van Riper gave a signal - not in a radio transmission that might have been intercepted, but in a coded message broadcast from the minarets of mosques at the call to prayer.
The seemingly harmless pleasure craft and propeller planes suddenly turned deadly, ramming into Blue boats and airfields along the Gulf in scores of al-Qaida-style suicide attacks. Meanwhile, Chinese Silkworm-type cruise missiles fired from some of the small boats sank the US fleet's only aircraft carrier and two marine helicopter carriers. The tactics were reminiscent of the al-Qaida attack on the USS Cole in Yemen two years ago, but the US fleet did not seem prepared. Sixteen ships were sunk altogether, along with thousands of marines. If it had really happened, it would have been the worst naval disaster since Pearl Harbor.
It was at this point that the generals and admirals monitoring the war game called time out.
"A phrase I heard over and over was: 'That would never have happened,'" Van Riper recalls. "And I said: nobody would have thought that anyone would fly an airliner into the World Trade Centre . . . but nobody seemed interested."
Van Riper's victory has a powerful teaching for professional service firm strategists. It is an unequivocal, real and highly dramatic example of where unconventional, unorthodox tactics defeated conventional thinking. We live in interesting times. Massive changes are looming for the legal profession in the United Kingdom. The accounting profession has been turned on its head by the new International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and other Sarbannes Oxley inspired changes that have transformed auditors from being trusted advisors to being policemen. Across the board, a sea change in the use of technology is providing opportunities for firms to drive efficiencies and collaboration to unheard of levels.
The saying that "nobody was ever fired for buying IBM" is now so old that it is senile. Today, clients are far more willing to try new firms and if they perform, to expand their use of them, than ever before. The level of client dissatisfaction with the law firms that serve them was the subject of one of my recent postings. The 'Big 4' accounting firms are coming under flak for the increased costs of audit. Clients expect their service providers to pay the same attention to customer care, innovation and even previously insignificant issues such as corporate social responsibility and diversity, as they do.
The time has never been better for hungry, emerging firms that are prepared to think and act in the same unorthodox way as Van Riper did, to develop models that closer meet their clients needs and to take business away from the mainstream players. In warfare, the term that has emerged to describe this is asymmetric warfare. In business strategy, the term asymmetric strategy would do just as well. The challenge for the currently dominant firms, of course, is to make sure that they learn and evolve fast enough to be able to ward off this threat.