What? I think you need to balance your list's narrative with the reality that delegation includes some abdication of understanding. It is necessarily an abstrac

What? I think you need to balance your list's narrative with the reality that delegation includes some abdication of understanding. It is necessarily an abstraction from the work itself. While responsibility may lie with a superior for the error itself and the process that gave rise to it, it is a responsibility of seniority - owning the outcomes of the organization you run - not responsibility for the act itself. Moreover, there is another dimension in that inertia in the org structure itself can't be pinned on any one person. Organizations by their very nature are supposed to be tolerant of changes and gaps in the knowledge of their members. This tolerance leads to inertia. the Inertia of the military is extreme and difficult to change. The more abstraction between the leader and the actual work, the more difficult it is to evaluate and enact the right change in the right way in the right timeframe. So, while your comment may in essence be right that there is a chain of command failure around this issue, it also strains credibility to claim that this failure belongs to Obama, one year into his successor's presidency, when the structure that this event took place in is much older than either of them.