Practicing Mission Command in the Institutional Setting

This is an ongoing series to support Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's reforms of DoD. Here, we start with examples of how Mission Command was practiced on a daily basis in "Garrison" or peacetime!

As Dr. Bruce I. Gudmundsson has written, “the German Army was, since the days of Frederick the Great, one of “the most decentralized ones in Europe.” Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army 1914-1918, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995, p. 18

The best way to implement Mission Command is to examine how others have done it through case studies. Until recently, most historical studies focused on the Prussian and German practice of Mission Command on the battlefield. But emerging today are studies that examine the “peacetime practices” that enabled the Germans to put Mission Command to practice once they went to war. Even the U.S. Army has recently stated in its Field Manual 7-0, Training, “If mission command is not practiced in training [and garrison], leaders will not use it in operations.” This applies to any organization regardless of his purpose.

Recent examination of how the Germans prepared their leaders and soldiers to execute Mission Command was tied to their personal and professional education systems and how their institutional side practiced it. All of these institutions had evolved since the reforms of Gerhard von Scharnhorst, which began in 1809. Over a century they evolved together with the emphasis being developing and nurturing leaders of strength of character, of independence, who took and sought responsibility, even took joy in making and standing by decisions.

The German personnel system was decentralized. Other than winning on the battlefield, leader development was held as the premier mission of commanders in the German army. Officers were strenuously developed and selected through one of the finest professional education programs in the world. Intensive professional education came first in an officer’s career, beginning when he was a new cadet and continuing through the last course he would take as a captain at the Kriegsacademie.

After that, professional education, though on the shoulders of the individual, was highly encouraged. There was not centralized control of training and education except through guidance from the General Staff and commanders. If leaders needed updating on the latest tactics, techniques and technology, it was left to corps and divisions to set up their own courses to provide notifications to their subordinates about these advances.

Commanders used staff rides and after-action reviews of free-play force-on-force exercises to further develop their subordinates. Additionally, from the time they were cadets at the military academies throughout their time as junior officers attending army schools, German officers were given time off and then evaluated on their character and conduct during this unsupervised time. Conduct off duty was as important as performance on duty. One cannot determine a leader’s potential to innovate, problem solve or make decisions if he is completely controlled in his professional educational environment, be it on or off duty.

Another way to practice Mission Command on the institutional side was to keep written correspondence as concise and short as possible. This began in the education of officer cadets. Examinations were used to screen candidates as they advanced from different levels of cadet through lieutenant and then to captain. Examinations centered around tactical problems that put the cadet and junior officers in roles of responsibility two to three levels above their current position. For example, the German cadet or lieutenant would be given a regimental problem to solve, but the solution had to be expressed in the form of written orders as concise as possible, one page being preferred, with no school solutions on which to base their prior knowledge. Their problem-solving ability had been developed through numerous map and staff exercises and an exhaustive study of military history.

Another example is how the Germans approached and evaluated training. In 1888, records indicate that German army guidance on training was based on principles and outcomes. A German cavalry squadron was expected to do certain tasks, expressed in German army training guidance: attack, defend, screen and conduct reconnaissance. The guidance expressed how the desired outcome of success was defined, but determining how best to train to this was left to the squadron and regimental commanders within the parameters of their resources, also given to them by the German army. Each commander could deviate from the other squadrons as long as he adhered to the principles (or outcomes) of the General Staff and his commanders.

When members of the General Staff later inspected the performance of the seven different squadrons in free-play force-on-force maneuvers, six succeeded and one failed. The German army took actions by relieving the failed officers and promoting the most successful commanders from the exercise. This example is just one of thousands of how the Germans applied Auftragstaktik to their training institution.

British officers after World War I and U.S. Army officers in World War II were amazed by this decentralization of training based sometimes on “little more than a page of yearly guidance.” German officers replied again and again that their army valued the independence and innovation of their subordinate commanders over standardization so that all units could reach a minimal standard for war.

In Command Culture, Jörg Muth describes the outcome that the culture of Auftragstaktik had on German military effectiveness: The strength of the Wehrmacht officer corps lay in the creativity, leadership capabilities and tactical finesse of officers who commanded anything from platoons to corps. They had been taught to be innovative and inventive, to disregard doctrine when desirable, to surprise the enemy whenever possible, and to live and survive in the chaos of war. They were taught to welcome that chaos and use it against the enemy instead of making sense of it with a “school solution” or a preconceived doctrine.

German officers were able to give oral orders an instant after a short tactical deliberation, employing Auftragstaktik, trusting their subordinate commanders to carry out those orders with minimum interference. They would go forward with their troops into battle to observe the fighting and go into combat themselves if necessary—from lieutenant to major generals. Those abilities were the power of the German officer corps that enabled them to hold out for so long, inflict catastrophic casualties on their enemies, and made them the terror of Europe.58 Already mentioned is the need to reform the U.S. Army personnel system, and there are multiple efforts beyond the scope of this paper that promise effective reform if put to practice.

What can take place today to enable Mission Command is the revolution in training that is already occurred briefly in the U.S. Army (2007-2012) by the application of Outcomes-Based Training and Education (OBT&E) now Outcomes Based Learning (OBL). OBL also occurred recently in the US Marine Corps from 2020-2021. There was also a memorandum from the Joint Staff advocating the use of OBL in May 2020. It happened in the best spirit of Auftragstaktik in that leaders and service members were taking the spirit of Auftragstaktik and implementing methodologies and doctrines that, after 20 years of war, they believed best prepared Soldiers, Marines and leaders for the future.

Where is it at today?

No where, it has been cancelled from programs of instruction (PoIs) and curriculum across the services as it conflicted with the negative impacts of Cultural Marxism introduced into the military as early as Obama’s presidency, and required under President Joe Biden’s four years.

Next article: “The Future is Now: The First Thing I Would Reform if Asked by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth would be Professional Military Education or PME”

Notes:

1. I must credit the impact of my friend and mentor, Dr. Charles E. White, former chief of military history for Training and Doctrine Command.

2. Martin van Creveld, “On Learning From the Wehrmacht and Other Things,” Military Review vol. 68, no. 1 (January, 1988): p. 62–71.

3. Kessel, Moltke, pp. 100–103. 50 Otto Friedrich, Blood and Iron: From Bismarck to Hitler the Von Moltke Family’s Impact on Germany (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 64.

4. Department of the Army, Field Manual 7-0, Training for Full-Spectrum Operations, Draft, June 2007.

5. Dr. Charles E. White, The Enlightened Soldier: Scharnhorst and the Militarische Gesellschaft in Berlin 1801–1805 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1989), pp. 45–54.

6. Bruce I. Gudmundsson, “The Evolution of Mission Command,” Tactical Notebook, Summer 1995, pp. 52–57.

7. William S. Lind, Maneuver Warfare Handbook (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985), p. 87.

8. Muth, Command Culture, pp. 85–112. 56 Lumley, “On the Training of Prussian Officers,” p. 747.

9. The author is indebted to the insights of Dr. Bruce I. Gudmundsson, Dr. Charles E. White and William S. Lind in reference to examples of German application of Mission Command in peacetime. See also, Robert T. Foley, “Institutionalized Innovation: The German and the Changing Nature of War, 1871–1914,” Royal United Services Institute, vol. 147, no. 2 (April 2002), pp. 84–90. 58 Muth, Command Culture, p. 205.