Commanders at all echelons must be experts at providing Indirect Leadership across their formations. They must visualize how they want to fight and instill their intent directly into their subordinate commanders and indirectly into their entire formation. ADP 6-22 states that indirect leadership and methods are essential for organizational leaders although it does not explicitly define the term Indirect Leadership. I propose that many leaders are unprepared for this reality despite untold resources spent on Professional Military Education (PME), Combat Training Centers (CTCs), Operational Deployments and self-development. We fail when we overestimate our personal ability to control our unit and inadvertently disempower our subordinate leaders.
Fortunately, we have the tools and the talent to effectively manage their organizations and keep our Army ready for war. Our Army expects Commanders to lead dozens, hundreds or thousands of soldiers distributed over extended distances in the face of very capable adversaries. The Commander and his representatives cannot be everywhere at once and may be unable to recognize the Decisive Point of an operation no matter how detailed the plan. The same is true of every echelon; even the tank company Commander with only 63 soldiers assigned to their organization cannot direct action inside every turret. Our organizational design and philosophy requires trust from the first day.
Throughout my 18 years of commissioned service I have come to learn that significant disparity exists, even amongst doctrinally astute leaders, regarding the terms and language commanders use to describe their visualization. Shared understanding underpins everything we do as a profession. We risk failure when we assume that following the approved checklist will guarantee success or that all of our subordinates, peers and superiors see the world in the same way.
The best leaders generate a mental picture of what is actually happening throughout their formation. They leverage usable fighting products to ensure sufficient, but not excessive control measures are in place. The following examples are a synthesis of observations throughout my career before and during my service as a Senior Task Force Observer Controller Trainer at the National Training Center. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Operations Group or the NTC.
We set the conditions for effective Indirect Organizational leadership by establishing common terms, defining how we fight at echelon and by instilling an expectation that our subordinate leaders are empowered to take action without specific direction from their higher headquarters. Our ability to conduct direct leadership is limited even with access to the Army’s most advanced Command and Control Systems. The Army cannot truly apply indirect leadership methods without confident leaders that display a bias for action.
Indirect Organizational Leadership Considerations
Leaders must have a common frame of reference and shared understanding before they can be proficient in any collective action. All leaders have some familiarity with the terms below but many have their own unique perspective on what they really mean for a particular organizations. Army forces conduct training individually and collectively to develop military expertise. How we think about terms like Expert, Standards and Perspectives is not uniform across our profession. It is a Commander’s responsibility to build shared understanding with their staff and other organizational leaders.
Expertise
Leaders are either Experts or Aspiring Experts. Expertise can be either a goal or a standard depending on the context. A soldier qualifies as “Expert” on their assigned weapon if they hit a certain number of targets on a range. Vehicle Crews can be “Distinguished” (here a synonym for expert) if they achieve certain requirements during crew gunnery. Units sometimes publish training guidance that explicitly states that the organizational standard is “Expert” for a given task and that all leaders should be “Experts” in their field. We lack a clear definition of expertise for areas that are not easily quantifiable.
Standards
Standards should be achievable and not merely an aspiration. We are lying to ourselves if we say something is a standard that we are not resourced to accomplish. We establish, learn, enforce and refine standards in support of our organizational mission in the Army. Some standards are very clear. Regulations, General Orders, Command Policy and sometimes unit Standard Operating Procedures may clearly define what we mean by a standard. Be clear about the difference between standards and goals; they are not always the same thing.
Doctrine and Definitions
Not everyone understands doctrinal terms. Those who do may differ in their understanding and application of terms. Just as we can easily define what constitutes an expert in rifle qualification, we can determine if a Company Commander complies with Army Regulation governing Command Supply Discipline without any great difficulty. However, how do define what constitutes an expert at leadership in LSCO while in command of a Company, Battalion, Brigade or higher echelon. Given the dynamic nature of combat, agreeing upon a set of common measures of success proves significantly more challenging recording an Army Combat Fitness Test score.
Perspective
Although we live in a resource constrained world, our military is among the most well funded in history. The equipment, training resources and personnel we have at our disposal far exceeds that of our closest adversary. Leaders at all levels hone their craft in a myriad of PME courses, our CTCs are the envy of the world, the education level of our soldiers is above the historical norm and we draw talent from most physically fit portion of the U.S. population. Our glass is more than half full when judged against any reasonable measure.
Leaders are rightly hesitant to tell their boss that they lack expertise or have not mastered their particular career field in some way. I propose that achieving anything like Malcolm Gladwell’s standard of 10,000 hours of experience in executing collective tasks proves impossible for most soldiers and leaders. Ask yourself if it is reasonable for the armor captain who served in a Stryker brigade as a lieutenant to truly be an expert in tank crew gunnery given how few opportunities they will receive in 12-18 months of command. We need to re-frame how we think of expertise.
The Army ultimately relies on the sum total of operational, institutional and self-development models to provide the leader with sufficient time. In our previous example, the armor captain closes the gap in his knowledge by the totality of these experiences across all three training domains. We should recognize his “expertise” not in terms of the number of gunneries he completed, but instead against what he may be called upon to execute as a combined arms leader in combat. They must be empowered to lead and train their formation; to command with the implicit assumption that their experiences give them the ability to lead in the most dynamic and high pressure scenarios available.
The following truisms underpin our thinking for the future and are worth highlighting before we continue.
- You cannot be everywhere at once and must rely on your subordinates to conduct their duties with minimal supervision.
- A commander’s presence at the decisive point depends on the commander correctly identifying what the decisive point will be and is not a foregone conclusion.
- The commander might place themselves at the correct decisive point and still be unable to prevent failure.
- The commander’s presence might inadvertently have a negative effect by causing subordinate leaders to focus on the higher commander rather than executing the task at hand.
The Army will fight the next war under uncertain conditions with an imperfect level of training. We must be mentally prepared to fight LSCO regardless of when our most recent CTC rotation occurred, how proficient our leaders might be at their assigned tasks or who attended the last collective training event. Opting out will not be an option.
Understanding The Human Reality – Risk And Failure
Years ago one of my Platoon Sergeants relayed to me his experience as a young NCO deployed to Bosnia. During his deployment, breaking a mirror on a HMMWV driving through a narrow village street was enough to merit a field grade article 15 from the battalion commander. Think of the message that this punishment sent to every leader in the formation. Minor mistakes can have career ending consequences. If this sounds like your unit, know that you are not building trust nor preparing junior leaders to lead with confidence in combat.
Imagine yourself as a junior leader executing a rotation at the National Training Center. Now imagine yourself doing the same thing without the benefit of the Operations Group and the standard CTC control measures present at every rotation. In both cases we make mistakes even when we have conducted a doctrinally sound training progression and implemented robust risk reduction measures. We cannot fully eliminate risk and we increase risk over time when we don’t trust our subordinates to act without direct supervision.
Now imagine yourself conducting operations in LSCO. You could do everything right, follow every step of the troop leading procedures, check every box in the applicable training and evaluation outline and still face catastrophic failure. After this failure, you must instantly recover and continue to make life or death decisions. Failure and recovery are an inherent part of our business. Human mistakes come with the territory at every echelon.
You Can Make More Time For Your Organization
The most effective division, brigade, battalion and company commanders create time for their subordinates and superiors alike. By defining how they want to fight from the outset, they don’t keep their subordinates [or superiors] guessing. I credit COL/R Tim Ryan for introducing me to the “Good Idea Cutoff Time”. In practice, you issue the minimal essential elements of your order with fighting products and give time back to your subordinates. Don’t waste time making the perfect plan, you are just preventing your subordinates from rehearsing, inspecting and preparing their formations.
I hear someone saying “The NTC fight isn’t multiple battalion fights, it’s a brigade fight…the brigade has to set the conditions”. Although this is true, a major caveat warrants discussion: a perfect product that is not issued in a timely manner or executable with the talent and resources at hand only hinders your subordinates. You cannot control as much as you think you can. Provide the minimum essential fighting products as quickly as possible and then move out. Don’t dither!
What are the minimum essential fighting products you ask? While opinions vary, I start with a formally published task organization. Orders, sync matrices, SITTEMPs, target list worksheets, digital and analog common operating pictures are all critical. But they are of limited utility if commanders don’t know who works for them and 1SGs don’t know who to feed. Units should be able to deliver the mail based on the task organization and yet we often fail this very basic requirement.
Why do we fail if task organization is an inherent part of the military decision making process and something we do all the time in almost every unit in the Army? One reason is that we are wedded to “our unit” and are unwilling to formally hand responsibility for our soldiers and equipment to someone else. We let our emotion cloud common sense and Army requirements. We have to trust that the leadership in the other brigade, battalion or company will do their duty. Our sister units are inherently members of our “Circle of Trust” based on their membership in the profession of arms.
Didn’t Ronald Reagan say “Trust but verify”? Yes, but the reality of our situation is that we have to trust that the sum total of operational, institutional and self-development experiences of our subordinates, peers and superiors make them trustworthy leaders that are competent to carry out their duties. You lack the authority and time to retrain everyone until you are satisfied with the level of competence of your colleagues. Commanders will be called to act with imperfect knowledge and without the benefit of an optimal solution.
Army doctrine suggests that the span of control is situation dependent but is generally recognized as 3-5 subordinate elements. A brilliant commander might be able to manage more but don’t assume that you are that genius. Every action that requires us to drill down multiple levels and directly intervene in our subordinate units comes at the cost of doing our job. Our doctrine says we train one level down and certify two levels down. Commanders who reach too far down on a routine basis disempower their subordinates and are likely not doing something inherent to their particular echelon.
Isn’t a commander responsible for everything his unit does or fails to do? Absolutely! I am not advocating a change to Army command policy. I am suggesting that senior leader interventions should be exceptional. The norm should involve ensuring that the right leader, at the right echelon, is formally designated with responsibility for their unit and is empowered to execute. Commanders must be empowered to command or they are nothing more than glorified hand receipt holders.
Leading Up
Help your higher headquarters by looking at the problem from their perspective. Units and leaders can solve problems for their higher headquarters. Anticipate what the higher level requirements are and then meet them without being asked. If time allows and you have a concept that will work then provide it to the higher unit staff and save them time. I am not proposing a new concept; watch the movie Patton and see how the 3rd Army’s Commanding General solved a problem for his higher headquarters and thus saved the day.
Your Division, Brigade or Battalion Headquarters will not deliver perfection. If you pay attention you will see that they are all likely doing their job for the first time and don’t have all the answers. Your complaints are more likely to build adversarial relationships, waste time and ultimately make the unit less effective.
Your higher headquarters is not incompetent nor ill of motive. That said, you should not try to fully assume the duties of your higher staff counterpart. You can help by sharing honest feedback, useful concepts or helpful products but if you step in and perform others’ duties on a routine basis you have set the conditions for a non-functioning organization. Be a good subordinate [and peer] and you will help every echelon of the organization.
Use precise and clear language so that everyone understands what you mean. I can give countless examples of organizations where leaders thought that they were in a contest to see who could speak the longest in an update or who could add the most slides to a briefing. You are stealing your commander’s time and hampering unit performance. Make your words count and keep your updates succinct.
Setting the Conditions
“Setting the Conditions” starts when you arrive at the unit and continues even now as you read this article. If you haven’t thought about how you will lead your particular type of unit and how you intend to fight then you are behind the power curve. You must also have a mental model of how you would command or lead the next higher organization. If you doubt this then ask yourself why we publish the succession of command in an operations order. Leaders must be instantly ready to assume command with confidence without hesitation.
Define How your Organization Fights
The best units provide not just a training focus but discuss how they will fight at the appropriate echelon well before they arrive at a CTC rotation. Publishing a Tactical Standard Operating Procedure (TACSOP) and conducting Leader Professional Development (LPD) sessions are insufficient. Commanders have to know how they are going to fight and need to reinforce this in a constant series of formal and informal touch points with their subordinates. Commander’s dialogue takes many forms but it is imperative to achieve both trust and shared understanding.
Build a Doctrinal Template for your Organization
All leaders, including those centrally selected, possess their own unique experiences. Although these experiences prepare them for their position, they are not universal and inevitably cannot cover every possible contingency. Start with your unit’s Modified Table of Organization and Equipment (MTOE). It is surprising how many leaders don’t know the assets that are organic to their unit.
Formally Issue your Standard Operating Procedures
Many units have well developed, highly detailed SOPs. Few units formally issue their SOPs in the form of an order to ensure dissemination occurs prior to execution. Almost every unit arrives at NTC with a solid SOP of some sort; however, few leaders are actually familiar with the document. Ask yourself how many actions we say are executed according to SOPs and then consider how your unit SOPs were issued. Have you read all parts of your unit SOPs, for maintenance, drivers training, command supply discipline, planning, main command post operations? Even if you have read them it’s likely that some of your subordinates haven’t.
Execution
You will execute in time and resource constrained environments without the benefit of battlefield systems and contracted support. Your subordinates won’t have time to ask permission. If they are trained to ask “Mother May-I?”, then you haven’t trained them and are playing not to lose. This is the leader development equivalent of deferring risk into the future. We will lose the first fight of the next war if we are afraid to act without Operations Group as a security blanket.
Command and Control
No commander is in total control of their unit. But every commander can clearly define roles and responsibilities associated with the organization of their. Assigning commanders to mission sets and giving them the required resources is how we “control” the fight. We set ourselves up for total failure when we cannot explain to our subordinates who and what they have to work with.
Although no magic bullet guarantees success in every environment, commanders and leaders who know their task organization and understand how their higher commander intends to fight have an immense leg up on their competition. They can act decisively with minimal orders in a way consistent with how their higher headquarters wants to fight. They are ready for war.
Conclusions
Commanders and other Leaders can be successful if they use their imagination and recognize what they can control and what they can merely influence. The commander who can visualize not only how his unit fights but also sees his own personal limitations is immensely powerful. The commander that doesn’t waste time trying to over-control his subordinates can focus on doing those things that only a commander can do at the appropriate echelon. I’ll briefly review key points here before we conclude.
Experts
We have an incredibly well-resourced system for education and training; one of the best ever devised for a military force. The time and money spent educating and training us are likely to decrease. If we cannot trust our current system to develop experts given our resource level then we should jettison both our leader development model and mission command as a philosophy.
Standards
We set the standards for our formation. Making perfection the “standard” is impossible and enables us to lie to ourselves. Set and enforce realistic standards, Army standards, and make allowances for the inevitable human failure that occurs in every organization.
Definitions
Use doctrinal terms and clear language everyone understands. Many of your subordinates don’t understand the analogy when you use a reference from sports, hunting or your favorite hobby. Some of your leaders will be afraid to ask for clarification and will blunder towards execution with an incomplete understanding of your intent.
Perspective
You will not get more resources. So do not ask unless it is something your higher headquarters can realistically provide. Instead consider articulating the risk associated with that shortfall so that your commander can make an informed decision. We are more capable, even in a degraded state, than we realize.
Limitations
Commanders cannot be everywhere and must rely on their subordinates; they must trust subordinate leaders no matter where the unit may be in the training cycle. A Unit Training Plan (UTP) that perfectly conforms to the Integrated Weapons Training Strategy (IWTS) and other applicable doctrine and regulations does not guarantee success and only partially mitigates the risk of failure. We must be mentally prepared to fight our organization without the benefit of a standard unit training progression that culminates in a CTC rotation.
The Way Forward
Leaders of all echelons must define how they want to fight and explain in detail to their subordinates well before they receive a particular mission. This holds true for whether in a CTC rotation, home station training or combat. The amount of time spent preparing orders at a higher headquarters has diminishing returns that can significantly impact subordinate units’ understanding and execution. Get the plan out quickly and rehearse early; you cannot have common understanding if you haven’t at least issued a verbal order.
Our profession demands that we be ready to operate in unfamiliar environments with imperfect knowledge of both friendly and enemy forces. Mission command is the philosophy that supports the command and control warfighting function for a reason. It is the only viable way we can operate against a peer level adversary and have any chance of success. Ask yourself how well your subordinates understand how the organization fights and what steps do you plan to take to improve your position.
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This is part of a series of posts focused on Leader Development in Contact. Click HERE for the rest of the series. Footnotes are annotated in the PDF version found on the Series homepage.
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