Army red tape and bureaucracy irritated Norris, as he consumed precious hours with paperwork, rather than addressing the real task at hand as a physician with an overwhelming number of wounded to treat. He asserted that the British had a more streamlined system, which enabled medical staff to spend more time in treating patients and less on navigating layers of bureaucracy.  "We were all exasperated by the enormous amount of medical and surgical talent that was utterly wasted in making out minutely itemized reposts in triplicate…when we were fighting a war!" And "Let civilizations perish, let nations fall, but God preserve us from a fixed idea.  All this red tape in the midst of World War."

This diagram, humorously called "Through Channels" was created by an unknown Army artist to lampoon Army custom, depicting the serpentine bureaucratic maze of Base Hospital 10 as a complicated urology system.