Mission Command doctrine empowers subordinate leaders and facilitates mission success. The Irish Defence Forces employs Mission Command doctrine and senior leadership encourage its practice, but not all leaders in the Irish Army embrace the concept. To fully operationalise Mission Command at the tactical-level, commanders need to engage and empower junior Irish Army leaders, particularly NCOs. The successful implementation of Mission Command requires those with the most to lose to do the unthinkable: abandon perfection.
What is Mission Command?
Mission Command (MC) is a command and leadership philosophy that favours pushing decision-making downwards, allowing junior leaders to rapidly exploit changes in the situation. Effective implementation requires “encouraging commanders to tell their subordinates what needs to be achieved and why, and then let subordinate officers [and NCOs] get on with determining how to best achieve their commanders’ intent.”
For the U.S. Army, MC practice began with the adoption of Air-Land Battle in the early 1980s. With Air-Land Battle, “subordinate commanders were liberated to act on their own initiative in line with their Commander’s Intent but without direct supervision.” Other militaries followed suit, including the Irish Defence Forces, whose Leadership Doctrine defines MC as “a philosophy of command that promotes decentralised command, freedom and speed of action and initiative, but is responsive to superior direction.” In simple terms, MC is about commanders telling their subordinates what to do, but not how to do it.
Communicating Clarity
MC is a two-way street. Every soldier, down to individual riflemen, must understand their role in achieving the mission. They need to appreciate the operational (and often strategic) context or bigger picture. The civilian corporate world recognises the importance of this: “Leaders must know the purpose of their organization…if managers lack true understanding of the strategy, then comprehension among employees is bound to be minimal.” If military leaders at all levels don’t understand the ends, then their actions may not align with higher commanders’ intent. The formal orders process facilitates this. With mission orders, superior commanders’ intents are transmitted two and three levels below in what is referred to as nesting, or what the civilian corporate world call organisational clarity.
MC “is not ‘fire and forget’”[1]; commanders must engage with subordinates in order to provide guidance. Similarly, junior leaders must engage with their commanders, ask questions, confirm his/her intent and check-in throughout the execution of their mission and tasks. Two –way communication such as this ensures clarity is maintained.
Building Trust
Each section (squad) commander in a rifle platoon must actively seek opportunities to execute disciplined initiative in order to rapidly exploit changes in the situation. Furthermore, each individual rifleman must know his/her job intimately, mastering each tactic, technique and procedure to the point of professional excellence. With this approach, leaders build trust. Mission Command is a marketplace where leaders and followers openly trade freedom and control. In this market, trust is the most important commodity. The amount of freedom given and control exercised by commanders will “vary to a degree commensurate with the trust developed in subordinates and their experience level and competence”.
Mission Orders
Using mission orders avoids devising over-prescriptive schemes of maneourvre, micro-managing ever single subordinate action and decision. Instead commanders should empower (and trust) their subordinates to make decisions and take action in line with their commander’s intent. This implies a level of comfort with results that might not be the exact course of action the commander would have devised personally, but are nonetheless aligned with higher level objectives. For some commanders this means letting go of the reins and abandoning the pursuit of absolute perfection.
Discomfort
During recruit and cadet (officer) training there is (quite correctly) a traditional emphasis on attention to detail, following detailed orders precisely, and the relentless pursuit of perfection. In this environment, junior leaders’ opinion count and their experience is valued. For some leaders, this is a new and uncomfortable position. Likewise, commanders can struggle to release control and devolve decision making downwards. If a commander lacks experience in decentralising and empowering, he/she may feel uncomfortable or reluctant to experiment with MC.
Mission Command in Practice
Whilst employed as the officer-in-charge and chief instructor of the NCO Training Wing (NCOTW) at the Irish Army’s Infantry School, I was afforded the opportunity to command multiple infantry company attacks. These occurred across a series of career courses for corporals from all branches, but mostly infantry, striving to become sergeants.
To examine and assess command and leadership ability, we rotate students through different command appointments as platoon sergeant, and platoon commander. To facilitate the high volume of command appointments, the NCOTW deploy on week-long field training exercises to execute multiple iterations of platoon attacks by day and night. These exercises typically culminate with deliberate infantry company attacks in order to provide important sub-unit context to the platoon level actions. As it would be unreasonable to ask students pursuing the rank of sergeant to fill appointments at company level, the instructors themselves constitute the company headquarters. This provided an excellent opportunity to expose the students to MC in practice.
Prior to each deliberate company attack, role-playing instructors outlined the situation, mission, execution, CSS, and command and signal paragraphs with which most readers will be very familiar. In addition, we issued the students a printed copy of the operation order (OPORD) with various aerial photographs, and gave them access to a detailed terrain model. We marked control measures carefully to clearly define each platoon’s manoeuvre space. The correct explanation of commander’s intent and platoon tasks was vital. As was emphasis on what effects (clear, capture, seize, destroy etc.) on terrain and enemy each platoon was to achieve; but not how they were to achieve them.
No Plan is Perfect
The teaching model adopted by NCOTW is one of mentoring and coaching, with instructors close by to provide students with advice and guidance. However, if later engaged in a real life conflict, or deployed on peace support operations overseas, the students won’t have this luxury. Therefore, we afforded students the space to design and execute their own plans using the military decision making process appropriate to their level. In doing so we discovered the absolute imperative to abandon perfection. That is not to say the NCOTW instructor staff accepted poor quality planning or incomplete plans. What it meant was deliberately giving the students the freedom of action to analyse, experiment, innovate, and flourish, all within a well-defined manoeuvre space as free from instructor interference as possible.
Through this experimentation we found that the students developed more rapidly. They produced superior results than if the instructors had provided them perfect textbook solutions at every decision point. Although we provided some less-than-textbook details, the outcomes were far more realistic and organic. This ultimately meant that students developed the mental agility to quickly re-orientate and rapidly devise a plan to exploit a change in the situation.
Seizing the Initiative
One particular company attack we conducted during an Infantry Platoon Sergeants’ Course, proves the efficacy of MC. In this example, the lead platoon – whose role was to secure the company forming up point (FUP) – met unexpected enemy before the company reached its objectives. The training staff positioned enemy in the FUP. As the platoon began their recce of the company line of departure, the enemy engaged. The quick-thinking NCO acting as platoon commander seized the initiative. He suppressed the enemy and conducted a rapid estimate of the situation. Then he executed an aggressive platoon attack. He did all this without seeking (or requiring) detailed orders from company headquarters.
Why?
Because his leadership make it clear that his platoon was to secure the FUP; feeling empowered to do so, he showed disciplined initiative in conducting a hasty platoon attack. He also showed sound judgement and decision making, acting in support of my commander’s intent. I adjusted my fire plan. I moved H-Hr forward and assaulted our two objectives with the other two platoons, as we had rehearsed.
–
The relentless pursuit of perfect textbook solutions to tactical problems is both inefficient and unrealistic. Paradoxically, abandoning perfection, empowering subordinates and letting them surprise you will bring greater results. However, it is not just the superior ranks who must abandon perfection. In the NCOTW, some students want to impress the instructors by devising a perfect plan. Consequently there is a slight reluctance to embrace the freedom offered by this more participatory style of command. We overcame this by providing students with a careful explanation of MC and the requirements to pass their assessment.
Operating within a defined manoeuvre space, junior leaders should have significant latitude to exercise freedom of action and initiative. Early in the commander-junior leader relationship, this manoeuvre space will be tight and detailed-orders with little room for interpretation. As trust builds, the commander increases freedoms and the junior leader begins to grow exponentially. As we become more familiar with Mission Command, we become more comfortable and we enhance our outcomes. Our end-state was a highly competent and empowered sergeant with the confidence to exercise disciplined initiative.
Subscribe to The Company Leader!
Complete archive of The Company Leader Posts
[1] Glenn, R.W. 2017, “Mission Command in the Australian Army: A Contrast in Detail”, Parameters, vol. 47, no. 1, p 28.