It happens when an operator — or an entire element — locks onto a single course of action with such certainty that they stop processing contradicting information. The mission plan becomes the reality, even when the situation on the ground is telling a different story. Actions become automatic. Dissenting information gets filtered out. The commitment to the original plan overrides the evidence that the plan isn’t working.
Over decades in Special Operations, this failure mode played out more than once. Not because the operators were incompetent. Because they were experienced, confident, and deeply committed to a plan they had put significant effort into developing. Commitment to a plan is an asset until the moment it becomes a liability. The transition happens faster than most people expect.
The Same Failure Mode in Procurement
The same operationally identical failure mode appears in government UAS procurement, and the cost is measured in warehouses full of expensive equipment that nobody is flying.
Here’s how it typically unfolds: A program office identifies a requirement. Someone sees a vendor demo early in the process — often before requirements are formally written. The platform looks capable. The vendor relationship develops. Requirements get written, and they happen to align closely with the platform’s demonstrated strengths. The evaluation process confirms what the team already believed. Alternative platforms get evaluated against criteria that were shaped by the first demo.
The platform is procured. It underperforms in the operational environment. The specification looked good in the conference room and failed in the field. Nobody wants to be the person who says the decision was wrong, so the platform sits. The procurement officer wasn’t incompetent. They were committed to a plan they’d invested significant professional capital in developing.
The Red Team Solution
In operational planning, we addressed target fixation through deliberate red-teaming. Before any significant operation, someone was assigned to argue against the plan. Not to be obstructive, but to surface the assumptions the planning team had stopped questioning because they’d lived with the plan long enough that the assumptions felt like facts.
The best commanders actively sought out the red team’s analysis. They understood that a plan stress-tested by an honest adversarial review is stronger than a plan everyone agrees with because nobody wanted to be the one who pushed back. The discipline required isn’t intellectual — it’s cultural. Organizations that red-team effectively have leaders who’ve demonstrated that raising concerns is rewarded rather than punished.
Building the Structural Fix Into Acquisition
The structural equivalent in acquisition is straightforward: evaluation criteria established before vendor engagement, not after. Set your operational requirements. Define your evaluation criteria. Then engage the market. When you’ve seen a compelling demo before the requirements are written, require an explicit review asking what the demonstration didn’t show you — and weight that review.
The agencies that have internalized this operate differently. Requirements are written by operators, not by procurement officers who’ve attended vendor briefings. Evaluation panels include people whose job is to identify failure modes, not confirm capability claims. The question “what could go wrong in our operational environment that didn’t appear in the demo” gets asked before contract award, not after.
This isn’t a complex structural change. It’s a cultural one. It requires leadership that actively rewards the people who identify problems before they become procurements — rather than the people who successfully advance a program through the acquisition process regardless of whether the program serves the operational need.
Target fixation in procurement is preventable. The fix is the same one that works in the field: build the red team in before you execute, not after you’re committed.