They sent 150 aircraft to collect one man.
The US raid on Caracas in January 2026 was said to be flawless. A small Delta team were on the ground for less than an hour before they took President Maduro prisoner and flew him to New York.
It worked because the system was built to absorb failure. Redundancy was the point. Not waste, but insurance for work you can't afford to get wrong.
The US military learned this the hard way. ‘Black Hawk Down’ tells a very different story. Thirty years earlier in Mogadishu, requests for tanks and armoured vehicles were refused to keep the footprint light. When the helicopters went down, the reserves weren't there. Eighteen Americans, and many more Somalis, were killed.
Marketing never carries those stakes. But every team has its can't-fail moments. Campaign launches. Board presentations. Rebrands. Pitches. The times when a mistake doesn't just cost money, it costs credibility.
And yet most marketing runs with the leanest possible crew. Single points of failure are not uncommon - we’ve all seen it. The campaign that lives in one person's head. The reporting only one analyst understands. The freelancer who goes quiet the week before launch. None of it registers as a problem until the moment it does.
But budgets are constrained and backup is a hard line-item to justify. On a spreadsheet it looks like waste. A second person who knows the system, a documented process, a deputy who could step in - all of it reads as cost right up until the day it becomes the only thing standing between you and a public failure.
This is where lean quietly turns fragile. Building redundancy into a marketing team isn't a bigger headcount. It's removing the dependencies you didn't know you had.
Knowing who else can run the launch if the lead is ill. Knowing the campaign logic isn't trapped in one inbox. Knowing the work survives contact with the real world - holidays, illness, resignations, the freelancer who simply doesn't reply.
Lean is a modern marketing virtue, and a good one. It works beautifully when you can afford breakage. The trouble is that most teams operate lean by default, then discover the cost in the moments they could least afford it.
The discipline isn't choosing between lean and resilient. It's knowing which moments are which.
Operate lean. Just not when it matters most.
If you suspect you're running too much like a skeleton crew in the moments that matter most, the Drag Diagnostic is a free, 60-minute look at where friction is costing you and what to tackle first.