The Discipline to Fail: The DOGE Aftermath

 

I recently watched two very different war movies, Midway and K-19: The Widowmaker. Both take liberties with history, but both tell a compelling story about institutional hubris. They show what happens when leaders place too much faith in technology, discipline, and the appearance of success. They also show how quickly those strengths can become weaknesses when an institution loses its ability to adapt.

In Midway, Japan enters the battle with superior experience, disciplined forces, capable aircraft, and confidence built through a string of victories. Pearl Harbor appeared to validate that confidence and reinforce the belief that the Japanese military understood its adversary. Japanese commanders did not believe the Americans could anticipate their plans or respond effectively. More dangerously, they believed the Americans were incapable of understanding them.

They were wrong because American intelligence officers pieced together Japanese intentions by intercepting communications, analyzing patterns, and using indirect signals to confirm that “AF” referred to Midway. The Americans could not match every Japanese advantage, so they changed the terms of the fight. They used incomplete information, accepted uncertainty, and adapted their tactics. They recognized that understanding an adversary could be more important than matching its technology.

Japanese discipline eventually became a constraint. When commanders shifted from preparing another attack on Midway to confronting American carriers, aircraft had to be recovered, refueled, and rearmed. That transition created confusion and vulnerability at exactly the wrong moment. American dive bombers arrived while Japanese defenses were disrupted and destroyed three carriers within minutes, with a fourth lost later.

Technology did not save Japan, and neither did discipline or prior success. In fact, previous success may have made adaptation harder because it reinforced assumptions that were no longer true. Japanese commanders trusted their established methods and their judgment of the Americans. By the time they understood that the conditions had changed, they had lost the ability to recover.

That lesson should be familiar to anyone who has worked in government. We often believe that the next technology will save us, while elaborate processes promise that work will be performed consistently. We create governance boards, performance measures, dashboards, and reporting structures to demonstrate control. Eventually, we begin to confuse adherence to process with actual readiness.

The process works until something happens that the process did not anticipate. At that moment, the organization needs people who can recognize changing conditions, communicate uncomfortable information, and adjust. Bureaucracy often punishes those behaviors because deviation is treated as a failure to follow established procedure. Employees learn that following the process is safer than solving the problem, while leaders receive increasingly positive reports and operational risk accumulates below them.

K-19: The Widowmaker tells a similar story through a different kind of institution. In the film, Captain Mikhail Polenin raises concerns about the rushed construction and readiness of the Soviet Union’s first nuclear ballistic missile submarine. He is replaced by Captain Alexei Vostrikov, who inherits an unfinished vessel and a crew that already believes the submarine may be doomed. The real commander on whom Vostrikov was based was Captain Nikolai Zateyev, who later criticized the rushed construction of K-19.

The political system surrounding the submarine does not want uncertainty, caution, or delay. It wants victory, optimism, and visible success because the Soviet Union must demonstrate that it can compete with the United States. Failure is not treated as useful information that might protect the mission. It is treated as weakness, disloyalty, or an unwillingness to believe.

Vostrikov responds by imposing discipline through endless emergency drills. He wants to prepare the crew, establish order, and perhaps unite the men around a common purpose. Instead, the drills produce resentment, injury, and blame because the crew feels punished for the failures of the ship and the system that built it. Training intended to build confidence instead reinforces the men’s belief that they have been sent aboard a doomed vessel.

The captain then pushes K-19 toward its limits by taking the submarine near crush depth and forcing it through the Arctic ice. He believes shared danger followed by victory will give the crew confidence in themselves and in the ship. For a moment, the tactic works because the missile test succeeds and the crew celebrates. The Soviet state has its victory, the captain has his validation, and the submarine appears ready for duty.

The celebration is brief because the submarine receives new orders and proceeds into the North Atlantic. Soon afterward, its reactor cooling system fails and the ship that was too important to delay is in danger of becoming a nuclear catastrophe. The earlier test proved that K-19 could launch a missile, but it did not prove that the submarine was safe or sustainable. Political urgency had transformed a single successful event into evidence that the entire system worked.

When the reactor fails, the bureaucracy surrounding K-19 effectively disappears. There are no dashboards, talking points, ceremonies, or senior officials available to accept responsibility. There are only frightened men, a failing reactor, and a series of terrible choices. The people who did not create the problem are left to absorb its consequences.

The crew steps forward and enters the reactor compartment knowing that the radiation may kill them. They improvise a cooling system using the limited tools and materials available aboard the submarine. They work together to prevent a meltdown that could kill everyone aboard and perhaps trigger a much larger international crisis. Their courage saves the ship, but it cannot erase the institutional decisions that placed them in danger.

That part rings true because people often rise to meet a crisis when the stakes become real. They will work extraordinary hours, accept personal risk, and sacrifice themselves to protect their colleagues and their mission. Government employees do this more often than the public will ever know. Their commitment frequently becomes the final layer of protection between institutional failure and public catastrophe.

Government bureaucracies are not much different from the institutions portrayed in these films. “Yes” remains popular, bad news is softened as it moves upward, and coverups happen more frequently than leaders care to admit. Whistleblowers are punished, untested technology is deployed because the announcement has already been made, and systems break after everyone has declared success. Frontline employees are then expected to compensate through personal commitment and heroic effort.

Leaders often point to that heroism as proof that the organization ultimately worked. In reality, heroic employees are frequently evidence that the institution failed long before the crisis became visible. Their sacrifice may save the mission, but it does not excuse the decisions that made sacrifice necessary. An organization should not require people to continually rescue it from its own unwillingness to hear the truth.

It is the lesson of DOGE, as DOGE failed for many of the same reasons. It was built on hubris and protected by a political system that could not tolerate bad news. Its decision makers treated doubt as resistance and experience as an obstacle. When reality conflicted with the political narrative, the people delivering the warning became the problem.

DOGE also placed enormous faith in unproven technology without first reckoning with whether the underlying problems were technological, organizational, or human. Its perspective was simple: people make mistakes, so engineer people out of the equation. That may sound efficient, but it misunderstands how large institutions actually work. People do not merely operate government systems because they interpret exceptions, recognize consequences, exercise judgment, and intervene when technology gets something wrong.

Administration leaders treated federal employees as tools to be deployed or discarded as politics demanded. Their knowledge, relationships, and institutional memory were assigned little value because those qualities could not be easily measured on a dashboard. Employees became units of cost rather than individuals responsible for delivering a public mission. Once people are treated as disposable, the institution begins disposing of the very capacity it needs to recognize and correct failure.

Technological advancement is good, and government needs far more of it. Technology can reduce repetitive work, identify patterns, and help employees make better decisions. It cannot eliminate the need for human judgment, accountability, and compassion. The objective should be to give people better tools, not to pretend that people are the problem technology must remove.

DOGE mistook disruption for reform and speed for competence. Like the Japanese command at Midway, it believed technological advantage and aggressive action would overcome institutional complexity. Like the Soviet leadership behind K-19, it demanded visible success while discouraging the reporting of risk. It created the appearance of decisive action while leaving others to manage the damage.

The real measure of an organization is not whether its people will step forward when everything breaks because most people will. The measure is whether leaders will listen early enough that extraordinary sacrifice does not become routine. Strong institutions do not eliminate people or punish those who deliver bad news. They create an environment in which technology supports human judgment and bad news can travel faster than failure.