What Richard A. Gabriel’s book Military Incompetence: Why the American Military Doesn’t Win Can Teach You About Christian Internet Evangelism and Business

Gabriel's Military Lesson	Christian Internet Evangelism	Business
Avoidable mistakes matter	Fix recurring communication and publishing errors	Eliminate recurring operational and customer-service errors
Personnel turbulence reduces expertise	Let people develop sustained expertise in important ministry functions	Give employees enough continuity to master their responsibilities
Institutional memory matters	Document what works, what fails, and what has been learned	Preserve operational knowledge and lessons from previous projects
Beware careerism	Reward useful ministry contributions rather than visibility alone	Reward value creation rather than bureaucratic maneuvering
Training should match the real mission	Combine theological knowledge with writing and online communication skills	Combine management theory with practical knowledge of the actual work
Coordination is essential	Coordinate researchers, writers, editors, developers, and outreach	Coordinate sales, marketing, operations, finance, and product teams
More resources do not guarantee effectiveness	Improve the system before simply adding projects or volunteers	Fix organizational problems before assuming more money or employees will solve them
Learn from failures	Conduct after-action reviews of articles, projects, and campaigns	Review projects systematically and turn failures into improved procedures

What Richard A. Gabriel's Military Incompetence: Why the American Military Doesn't Win Can Teach You About Christian Internet Evangelism and Business

Richard A. Gabriel's Military Incompetence: Why the American Military Doesn't Win is about the failures of a military institution, but many of its organizational lessons extend far beyond warfare.

Gabriel's central concern is not simply that American soldiers lacked ability or that the United States lacked resources. His argument is that an organization can possess enormous resources and talented individuals while still performing poorly because its structure, incentives, personnel practices, culture, and leadership processes systematically produce avoidable mistakes.

That is an important lesson for anyone trying to build a successful Christian internet evangelism ministry or an effective business.

The key question is not simply:

"Do I have good people and good intentions?"

It is:

"Have I built a system that allows good people and good intentions to produce good results?"

1. Good intentions do not compensate for organizational incompetence

One of Gabriel's important lessons is that noble purposes do not automatically produce competent execution.

An organization may sincerely believe in its mission while repeatedly making avoidable mistakes.

That distinction is particularly important for Christian evangelism.

A Christian ministry may have:

• a sincere desire to spread the Gospel,
• doctrinally sound material,
• dedicated volunteers,
• considerable biblical knowledge,
• excellent intentions,

and still be ineffective online.

Likewise, a business can have:

• an excellent product,
• hard-working employees,
• substantial capital,
• a compelling vision,

and still perform poorly.

The practical lesson is uncomfortable but valuable:

Evaluate the effectiveness of the system separately from the goodness of the mission.

For a Christian ministry, this does not mean measuring spiritual fruit as though it were merely a business metric. It means recognizing that poor communication, poor organization, inadequate preparation, and wasted effort can hinder the ministry's human effectiveness.

Good intentions are not a substitute for competence.

2. Avoidable mistakes matter enormously

Gabriel defines incompetence in terms of failing to avoid mistakes that reasonably could have been avoided.

This principle transfers remarkably well to ordinary organizations.

Nobody can eliminate mistakes. Internet evangelism involves unpredictable audiences. Businesses face competitors, recessions, technological changes, supply problems, and bad luck.

The goal therefore should not be:

"Never make a mistake."

It should be:

"Do not repeatedly make mistakes that the organization should have learned to prevent."

For an evangelism ministry, this might mean discovering that:

• certain kinds of articles consistently confuse readers,
• certain website designs make information difficult to find,
• certain arguments generate unnecessary misunderstandings,
• important questions repeatedly go unanswered,
• volunteers duplicate each other's work,
• promising projects are abandoned because nobody owns them.

For a business, the equivalents might include:

• recurring production errors,
• repeated customer complaints,
• preventable inventory problems,
• unclear responsibilities,
• ineffective meetings,
• poor documentation,
• repeated mistakes by new employees.

A mature organization develops mechanisms for converting mistakes into institutional learning.

3. Personnel turbulence can destroy expertise

The additional discussion of Gabriel's work highlights one of his distinctive ideas: personnel turbulence.

If people are constantly rotated through positions, they may never remain in one role long enough to develop genuine mastery.

This produces an organization filled with people who know something about many things but have insufficient depth in the particular things they are responsible for doing.

That has a direct application to both ministry and business.

Imagine an evangelism website where:

• one person writes for two months,
• another takes over,
• another redesigns the site,
• another changes the article strategy,
• another starts a completely different project,

with nobody staying long enough to determine what actually works.

The ministry may be constantly active while simultaneously accumulating little expertise.

The same thing happens in business when employees are constantly moved between responsibilities.

The lesson: Do not confuse activity with accumulated expertise.

Someone who has spent years developing expertise in one important function may be substantially more useful in that function than someone who has briefly sampled many different functions.

For internet ministry, this could mean deliberately developing specialists in areas such as:

• apologetics,
• biblical scholarship,
• writing,
• search-engine optimization,
• web design,
• video production,
• social media,
• audience research,
• data analysis,
• community management.

For a small organization, one person may perform several roles. But even then, recognizing which roles require accumulated expertise is important.

4. Build institutional memory

Gabriel argues that turbulence can cause organizations to repeatedly relearn old lessons.

That is extraordinarily expensive.

Suppose a ministry discovers through years of experience that a particular approach to an apologetics article consistently produces misunderstandings.

If nobody records that lesson, the next person may unknowingly repeat the experiment.

The organization has effectively paid for the same lesson twice.

Or ten times.

The same principle applies to business.

A company should not depend entirely on employees remembering everything in their heads.

Important knowledge should be captured through:

• documentation,
• procedures,
• postmortems,
• research notes,
• performance data,
• editorial guidelines,
• customer feedback,
• decision records,
• training materials.

The same applies to a ministry.

A useful ministry archive might record:

What did we try?

Why did we try it?

What happened?

What did we learn?

What should we do differently next time?

This creates organizational memory.

The organization becomes smarter over time rather than merely older.

5. Beware the entrepreneurial officer problem

Gabriel's concept of the entrepreneurial officer is especially relevant to organizations where advancement depends on navigating internal systems.

When people become more concerned with managing their careers than mastering their professions, incentives become distorted.

The same phenomenon can appear in business and ministry.

People can start optimizing for:

• visibility,
• prestige,
• titles,
• influence,
• being associated with important projects,
• pleasing organizational leaders,
• avoiding blame,

rather than optimizing for actual mission effectiveness.

In a ministry, this can produce a subtle temptation:

"What project will make me look important?"

rather than:

"What project is most useful to the people we're trying to reach?"

In business:

"What project will get me promoted?"

can replace:

"What actually creates value for customers?"

This is an incentive problem.

Good organizations therefore try to make advancement and recognition depend substantially on real contribution, not merely on organizational maneuvering.

6. Don't promote people merely because they are good at bureaucracy

Gabriel's criticism of the officer corps raises a broader organizational question:

Are the people rising to the top actually good at the organization's central mission?

This is particularly important because administrative competence and mission competence are not necessarily the same thing.

Someone can be excellent at:

• meetings,
• reports,
• networking,
• presentations,
• politics,
• scheduling,
• managing bureaucracy,

without being excellent at the organization's core activity.

A Christian ministry therefore needs to distinguish between:

being good at running a ministry

and

being good at communicating Christianity.

A business needs to distinguish between:

being good at corporate administration

and

being good at creating value for customers.

Administrative skills matter. But organizations get into trouble when administrative ability becomes a substitute for mission competence.

7. Long assignments can produce mastery

Gabriel's critique of constant turnover implies an important principle:

Some responsibilities require enough time for a person to become genuinely good at them.

This sounds obvious, but organizations frequently underestimate it.

Imagine giving someone responsibility for a website's SEO strategy and replacing them every few months.

They may never discover the long-term consequences of their decisions.

The same applies to content strategy.

An article might perform poorly initially but become successful after six months of search traffic. A person constantly rotated out of the position might never discover that.

Business projects can have similar time horizons.

Therefore, organizations should distinguish between positions that benefit from rotation and positions where continuity and accumulated expertise are especially valuable.

8. Training should resemble the actual job

Gabriel criticizes military education that, in his view, moved away from the practical realities of warfare.

The broader lesson is:

Train people for the problems they will actually have to solve.

For Christian internet evangelism, someone who knows theology but has never learned how online audiences actually read may need additional training.

Likewise, someone who understands marketing but does not understand Christianity may be poorly equipped to handle theological questions.

The strongest combination may be:

substantive knowledge + communication skill + practical experience.

For business, theoretical management knowledge is valuable, but employees also need practical competence in the organization's actual work.

A salesperson should understand customers.

A product manager should understand the product.

A marketer should understand the market.

A leader should understand the organization's core operation sufficiently to recognize good and bad work.

9. Develop specialists without creating silos

Gabriel's critique of generalist officers suggests a useful distinction.

There is nothing inherently wrong with being a generalist. In fact, leaders often need broad understanding.

The problem arises when an organization expects people to perform highly specialized functions without giving them enough opportunity to develop specialized competence.

A healthy organization therefore needs both specialists and integrators.

Specialists develop deep expertise.

Integrators understand enough different areas to coordinate specialists effectively.

A Christian ministry might need someone who understands theology deeply, someone who understands online communication deeply, and someone capable of integrating those capabilities into an effective publishing strategy.

A business may similarly need engineers, marketers, accountants, salespeople, and managers.

The leader does not necessarily need to be the world's greatest expert in every discipline.

But the leader should know which expertise is needed and who possesses it.

10. Coordination problems can destroy good work

Gabriel repeatedly emphasizes organizational and interservice coordination problems.

The lesson extends beyond military organizations.

Suppose a ministry has:

• excellent writers,
• excellent web developers,
• excellent researchers,

but they do not communicate.

The result can be inferior to what a smaller team could accomplish.

For example:

The researcher produces material the writer does not understand.

The writer produces material the web team cannot easily present.

The web team builds something the audience cannot navigate.

Nobody realizes the problems until after publication.

The solution is not necessarily more people.

It may be better coordination.

The same is true in business.

Adding employees does not automatically solve organizational problems.

Sometimes it increases them.

11. More resources can magnify incompetence

This may be one of Gabriel's most valuable general lessons.

An organization does not automatically become effective by acquiring more:

• money,
• employees,
• technology,
• equipment,
• websites,
• advertising,
• software.

If the underlying system is dysfunctional, additional resources can simply produce more complicated dysfunction.

A poorly organized ministry with ten volunteers may waste more resources than a disciplined ministry with three.

A poorly managed business with 100 employees may accomplish less than a well-managed business with 30.

Therefore, before asking:

"What additional resources do we need?"

ask:

"Are we using our existing resources effectively?"

12. Learn to distinguish friction from incompetence

Gabriel's critics raise an important counterpoint: war contains enormous amounts of uncertainty and friction.

The same distinction matters outside warfare.

Not every failure is evidence of incompetence.

A ministry article can fail because:

• the audience was unpredictable,
• a cultural event changed attention patterns,
• another website unexpectedly dominated search results,
• a technological platform changed its algorithm.

A business can lose money because of:

• recession,
• a new competitor,
• a natural disaster,
• a supplier failure,
• changing consumer preferences.

A competent organization can still fail.

Consequently, postmortems should ask:

What was controllable?

and:

What was genuinely outside our control?

Blaming employees for every bad outcome creates fear and eventually encourages people to conceal problems.

But blaming everything on circumstances prevents learning.

The objective is accurate diagnosis.

13. Don't punish honest mistakes so severely that people hide information

Gabriel's emphasis on accountability raises another important organizational issue.

Accountability is necessary.

But an organization that treats every mistake as a career-ending event can create an environment where people hide mistakes.

That is disastrous for learning.

Consider two organizations.

Organization A: Someone discovers an error and immediately reports it. The organization fixes it and changes the procedure that allowed it to happen.

Organization B: Someone discovers an error and hides it because admitting it could damage his reputation. The problem grows until it becomes impossible to hide.

Organization A has created a learning system.

Organization B has created an information-suppression system.

Christian ministries should be especially careful here because a culture of humility and truthfulness is compatible with acknowledging mistakes.

Businesses face the same principle.

Accountability should exist alongside honest reporting.

14. Measure the mission rather than vanity metrics

Gabriel's critique of careerism suggests another useful lesson:

Do not confuse impressive-looking activity with genuine accomplishment.

A ministry can boast:

• thousands of articles,
• millions of page views,
• hundreds of social-media posts,
• enormous email lists,

while having little evidence that its material is actually helping people understand Christianity.

Similarly, a business can boast:

• number of employees,
• number of meetings,
• number of projects,
• number of products,

without those numbers demonstrating genuine customer value.

The organization should identify measurements that correspond reasonably closely to its actual objectives.

For an internet ministry, relevant evidence might include:

• whether people actually read the material,
• whether visitors return,
• which questions people ask,
• which explanations resolve recurring misunderstandings,
• whether content reaches the intended audiences,
• whether readers engage in substantive follow-up.

Those measurements do not measure spiritual transformation itself. That is an important theological distinction.

But they can measure aspects of human communication effectiveness.

15. Conduct after-action reviews

One of Gabriel's recurring concerns is an organization's failure to learn adequately from previous experience.

A powerful remedy is the after-action review.

After an important project, ask:

1. What were we trying to accomplish?
2. What actually happened?
3. What went well?
4. What went badly?
5. Which assumptions were wrong?
6. Which mistakes were avoidable?
7. What unexpected factors affected the result?
8. What should we repeat?
9. What should we stop doing?
10. What should we change before the next attempt?

Most importantly:

Record the answers.

Otherwise, the exercise can become an interesting conversation rather than institutional learning.

16. Don't let organizational politics become the mission

Gabriel's concern about interservice rivalry has an obvious general equivalent.

Different departments can begin competing with one another.

A ministry might have:

• an apologetics group,
• a social-media group,
• a website group,
• a video group,

with each group becoming concerned about its own importance.

A business can experience the same problem between:

• sales,
• marketing,
• engineering,
• finance,
• operations.

The organization gradually becomes a collection of competing fiefdoms.

The cure is a shared mission.

The question should repeatedly return to:

"What outcome are we collectively trying to achieve?"

17. Liberal education can matter more than technical training

Gabriel advocates greater attention to liberal arts and the human dimensions of warfare.

The transferable lesson is that technical competence alone is insufficient for complicated human problems.

Christian evangelism is fundamentally concerned with human beings.

Therefore, an evangelist benefits from understanding:

• history,
• philosophy,
• psychology,
• literature,
• rhetoric,
• culture,
• competing worldviews,
• human motivations,
• common reasoning errors.

A business leader benefits from many of the same disciplines.

Markets are composed of human beings.

Customers do not behave like mathematical variables.

Understanding people requires more than technical knowledge.

18. Build a culture of professional excellence

Perhaps Gabriel's deepest lesson is cultural.

An organization can write procedures forever without becoming excellent.

Excellence eventually becomes a norm.

People should expect themselves and one another to:

• prepare carefully,
• know their subject,
• tell the truth,
• admit mistakes,
• learn continuously,
• take responsibility,
• preserve institutional knowledge,
• help colleagues succeed,
• prioritize the mission,
• avoid wasting resources.

For a Christian ministry, this can fit naturally with Christian virtues such as:

• diligence,
• humility,
• honesty,
• stewardship,
• responsibility,
• service,
• perseverance.

The goal is not merely to create a technically efficient organization.

It is to create an organization in which character and competence reinforce one another.

19. The "fewest avoidable mistakes" principle

Gabriel's argument can ultimately be condensed into a powerful principle:

You do not always need extraordinary brilliance. You need a system that consistently prevents ordinary mistakes.

This has profound implications.

Suppose two ministries possess equally good theological material.

Ministry A:

• publishes inconsistently,
• loses research,
• repeats mistakes,
• changes personnel constantly,
• has unclear responsibilities,
• ignores audience feedback.

Ministry B:

• preserves institutional knowledge,
• develops expertise,
• reviews failures,
• trains people,
• coordinates projects,
• documents procedures,
• learns from audience responses.

The difference may have little to do with sincerity or intelligence.

It may be organizational design.

The same principle applies to businesses.

An organization does not necessarily need genius.

It needs a system that makes competent behavior easier and preventable mistakes harder.

20. A Gabriel-Inspired Checklist for a Christian Internet Ministry or Business

Personnel

• Are people staying in positions long enough to develop expertise?
• Are we constantly rotating people for reasons that do not improve performance?
• Are we developing specialists where specialization matters?
• Are promotions based substantially on actual contribution?

Training

• Does training resemble the real work people perform?
• Do people understand both theory and practice?
• Are leaders sufficiently familiar with the organization's core activity?

Institutional Memory

• Do we document important lessons?
• Can a new person discover why previous decisions were made?
• Are we repeatedly rediscovering lessons we already paid to learn?

Accountability

• Are responsibilities clearly assigned?
• Do people know who owns each decision?
• Can people report mistakes without creating incentives to conceal them?

Coordination

• Do different teams communicate effectively?
• Are departments competing with one another?
• Does everyone understand the larger mission?

Learning

• Do we conduct after-action reviews?
• Do we change procedures when recurring problems appear?
• Do we distinguish bad luck from preventable mistakes?

Incentives

• Are we rewarding genuine mission contribution?
• Are people optimizing for results or for personal visibility?
• Does the organizational culture encourage truth-telling?

Strategy

• Are we pursuing too many projects?
• Are we measuring meaningful outcomes?
• Are we mistaking activity for accomplishment?

Conclusion: Competence Is a Form of Stewardship

The most interesting lesson from Gabriel's Military Incompetence is not really about the American military.

It is about organizations.

An organization can have a worthy mission, talented people, abundant resources, and sincere dedication while still underperforming because its systems generate unnecessary mistakes.

For a Christian internet evangelism ministry, this suggests an important principle:

Stewardship includes organizational competence.

If time, money, talent, knowledge, and human effort are resources entrusted to the ministry, wasting them through preventable organizational failures is not something to take lightly.

For a business, the principle is similar:

Effectiveness requires designing the organization so that knowledge accumulates, expertise develops, mistakes become lessons, incentives encourage contribution, and people remain focused on the actual mission.

Gabriel's concept of personnel turbulence provides an especially useful warning. Constant movement can look dynamic while actually preventing mastery. Careerism can look ambitious while diverting attention from the mission. Bureaucracy can look productive while consuming resources. More resources can look like progress while merely magnifying an inefficient system.

The alternative is a culture in which people master their responsibilities, preserve what they learn, coordinate with others, tell the truth about failures, and continually improve the system.

That is useful whether the objective is selling a product, publishing an article, building a company, or communicating the Christian faith on the internet.

The fundamental question is remarkably simple:

Are we merely working hard, or have we built an organization that makes our hard work effective?