That reminded me of this report on the functioning of British Army staffs and formation HQs during Operation Telic, which were massively overmanned and apparently spent most of their time coming up with endless and hugely detailed plans for every contingency, to the detriment of their ability to control operations. A discussion about this on the ARRSE forums led to the conclusion that at least one factor in this is the availability of word processors and powerpoint - the belief they had was that if there was a capability to turn out long, detailed sets of orders reasonably quickly, they would do so, regardless of how necessary it was.
http://www.dodccrp.org/events/9th_IC...papers/068.pdf