Bureaucracy

While watching the movie Tora, Tora, Tora earlier this evening, I was struck by one of the many examples of bureaucratic paralysis. The movie depicts the events leading up to and including the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. There were numerous instances but the one that stood out involved the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold "Betty" Stark. When informed that the decrypted intercepts indicate war, Stark is advised to put the Navy on alert. He pauses, and then decides he has to ask the President first. His Army counterpart, General George C. Marshall, needs no such confirmation, he goes and orders the Army to be ready (the tragedy being the message doesn't get to Hawaii in time.
But Stark's hesitation is a far cry from a similar situation some forty three years earlier. In 1898, Congress was debating declaring war on Spain. The Assistant Secretary of the Navy, on his own initiative, ordered the US fleet to prepare to attack the Spanish fleet at Manila, thus paving the way to Admiral Dewey's smashing victory. The Assistant Secretary's name?
Theodore Roosevelt.
In another irony, Roosevelt was entertaining a guest from England, a journalist, who sixteen years later, as Second Lord of the Admiralty (British for Assistant Secretary of the Navy) would keep the British fleet at sea after maneuvers while Europe waited for war. His name was Winston Churchill.