Mission Command
Why is everyone suddenly talking about it?
One essay on nearly every commander’s reading list is Message to Garcia. The long and short of the essay is that President McKinley wants a letter delivered to General Garcia, the leader of the Spanish insurgency. He gives the task of delivering the letter to a young lieutenant, Andrew Rowan, who, at great risk, delivers the letter to General Garcia. After the opening paragraphs, the essay goes on to lament the weakness inherent in society at the end of the 19th century (it is the same tropes today, no one wants to work, no one wants to try, people are too soft.) The essay ridicules the lazy and inept and extols the virtues of men that just take vague instructions and set off. Doers, that do not quit and won’t take no for an answer. The pre-gilded age axioms are a distraction from the real lesson. Leaders who trust can inspire follows to achieve greatness. This is not a lesson young lieutenants need. Young lieutenants are like children, they instinctively trust their senior officers to take care of them because, why would they not. After all, they are working towards the same goals. They are disabused of this belief by the constant lack of trust by constant exposure to micromanagement. Micromanagement is antithetical to trust. The key lesson from Letter to Garcia is not “we need more men of action.” Rather it’s, we need more leaders willing to trust. At some point, the U.S. Military recognized this and develop a philosophy of mission command.
Mission command is the art of not micromanaging. Each of the services give definitions of mission command that confuse the heart of the issue. They focus on the chaotic nature of war, the inability for a plan to account for every variable, and a belief that the person closest to the problem is best positioned to solve it. They invoke “human factors” in war. The Army went so far as to make seven principles of mission command. The concept is simpler than that. It requires commanders to give a clear goal, trust and support their people, and supervise to make sure they reach their objective. Like most things in life, it is the simple things that are hardest.
Recently,
posted an article by Lieutenant Colonel Torrence attempting to design a better Situation Report (SITREP) for the Army. The SITREP competes with the CONOP for best sign of bureaucracy in the military. They are both punchlines and nightmares for junior leaders. The SITREP started as a simple update that included anodyne information like, the unit’s location and the status of your supplies has ballooned into a sprawling writing assignment. LTC Torrence’s opening paragraph imagines a battalion commander sitting down to read twenty pages of reports on a weekly basis. This sounds interminable. It is not even the reality. During my career, I deployed multiple times with daily SITREP requirements. This often resulted in seven to ten page reports, for every unit, daily. This meant a Special Forces battalion commander read 98 pages of reports. Every day. At a minimum. If a commander spending two hours to read his units’ daily status updates seems excessive, image the time spent writing those reports. SITREPs are, for better or worse, graded. Officers that write bad reports are not going to ascend as quickly as those that write better.What does this system produce? An environment that compels junior officers to report everything their unit does (flatteringly of course but that is a different topic.) It also serves to pull the commander into the unit’s daily life more intrusively. Commanders begin asking questions and offering suggestions on how to do things. Most of these are innocuous. But, it is the slow slide into micromanaging. It’s not just the commander that offers their thoughts, so does every Tom, Dick, and Harry that reads the reports and has a thought. Losing trust is like going bankrupt; it happens gradually, then suddenly. This slow expansion of the SITREP erodes trust because too many people have too much access and control over the unit’s daily operations.
Technology is in part to blame for this. But, it is important to understand why the military uses mission command before ascribing blame. The reason is initiative. Many important moments in U.S. military history come from people seizing the initiative during the heat of battle, sometimes directly against orders and instructions from their commanders. The airborne invasion of Normandy, in real life and as depicted in Band of Brothers, was only successful because soldiers operated with wide autonomy. They landed, formed groups, and moved to their rally points and objectives without the need to constantly update their commands. Because of this, they were able to defeat Nazi defenses and help secure the beach landings for D-Day. This was not because commanders were more sanguine by nature in the 1940s. They would have filled the airwaves with radio transmissions if they had the ability. The military performance during World War I highlight this fact. During the British offensive of the Battle of the Somme and the German Spring offensive in 1918, the Kaiserschlacht, the British and German militaries broke through enemy lines pushing towards decisive victories. Units moved forward until they reached the edge of their strategic depth. Eventually, they would outrun their lines of communication and stop to await instructions. It was always as if success startled them. These pauses allowed defenders to reform lines, counterattack, and drive back the attackers. To fix these issues militaries adopted mission command and focused on maneuver warfare as they prepared for the next war. This is the key lesson. Militaries can train people to act on initiative.
Through the Cold War, the inability of commanders to have perfect knowledge (or the perception of perfect knowledge) forced them to rely on their subordinates’ initiative to achieve their missions. The weakness of technology—radios were not incredibly capable, and relatively scarce—meant commanders could not expect constant updates. All the while the defense department invested in technology and research and development. Then Iraq invaded Kuwait. Operation Desert Storm showcased a new form of American warfare where high technology, from precision guided weapons to increased communications, allowed General Schwarzkopf to believe he could control the entire battle from his command center. The coalition quickly dismantled the 5th largest army in the world. Clearly, the technology was potent. Another lesson was also learned. When the General can demand a lower commander tell him exactly what a unit is doing at any given time the lower commanders learn to become insatiable data consumers.
Technology allowed commanders to give to their worse instincts. Their desire to control. Every commander sees themselves as a Patton, leading the attack. They now had an alternative to subordinate initiative, they could use technology to build a hive-mind they controlled. Commanders can access increasingly detailed data on their units. They can demand communication at any moment, every soldier can be tracked, and every round can be accounted for. That system is stifling. It has even given rise to the worst acronym in the military C5ISRT, a chimerical abomination equal to the Greek myth.
C5ISRT is the Army’s latest permeation of C2 (command and control.) While command and control makes sense intuitively, C5ISRT does not. It stands for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. In other words, everything. Since almost everything has a computer in it now C5ISRT is everything. The idea that the commander controls and has access to information and data from everything runs exactly counter to the ideas of mission command. This one of the reasons I am not scared of the U.S. building autonomous weapons. We have them now, each soldier and unit could be autonomous from the whole but we continue to restrict them in ways that strip autonomy away. This is control is pervasive and in everything. Units are not free to organize as they see fit, they have a standard formation they must use. They are not able to adjust the formations they deploy as they have to meet requirements dictated by combatant commands and their deploying order. This is the inverse of the Letter to Garcia. In a modern telling of that essay the president would not only pick the messenger but assign his horse, chart the route, and demand hourly updates on this status, and want to see detailed expense reports within five days of his return. Why would a military that built that system ever build autonomous weapons that decide for themselves? It would run against their idea of control.
The illusion of control in warfare is the greatest risk the military runs. As early as 2022, one of the clearest lessons from Ukraine was that highly connected headquarters are targets. Russian headquarters disappeared as fast as crab legs at a buffet. (For some evidence look here, here, and here.) What is the Army’s answer to this? More connectivity.
As part of that updated network architecture and approach, service leaders are envisioning the elimination of single- and two-channel radios for troops on the ground. In their place will be what the Army calls end user devices, which are Android devices that are strapped to soldiers’ chests and have typically been reserved for team leaders.
These end user devices feature position and location information. They can now also enable communication using emerging voice-over-IP technology.
This is exactly the wrong direction. The idea that you can “hide in the spectrum,” which seems to underpin this decision, denies the reality of what computer and artificial intelligence actually excel at, identifying patterns. Those IP enabled devices are vulnerable today, in a peer conflict they will be enemy missile homing beacons.
How then should the U.S. military think about mission command and equip its force going forward? There had to be a two-pronged approach. Forces need to be able to plug in and access the wealth of data modern militaries can access. They also need to be able to, and to be expected to, “go dark” when they are in periods of vulnerability. This is not something that the military currently preaches or practices. For 20+ years, the military has enjoyed dominance of every possible technology. They could communicate readily and relied on technology overmatch to face any challenge.
Today’s military needs technology. Some of that technology, in the dungeons of the combatant commands where planning occurs at the corps headquarters, and with the nation’s leaders needs to be highly connected. But, the warfighters, the soldiers fighting at the bleeding edge need technology that is resistant to jamming, does not emit, and works without connectivity. We see this in Ukraine where Ukrainians and Russians are using field phones and fiber optic drones to reduce their dependence on signals that can be jammed or targeted.
The technology soldiers use needs to provide insights into the battlefield. The military should enable tactical units to collect and analyze signals in real time. This will allow units to target enemy forces more effectively and target adversarial C5ISRT (or whatever they will call it tomorrow.) Much of this technology exists today. Some advances can be made by simply changing tactics. These changes, such as only allowing soldiers to turn on radios during communication windows or requiring them to move immediately after transmitting would naturally decrease the reliance on constant communication during training. But, the military is replete with old technologies, like the military’s GPS (the DAGR), which are unwieldy and not resistant to jamming. Moving rapidly to wearable devices that are jam resistant and do not emit are steps in the right direction.
Lastly, the ability to continue mission in the absence of technology is important. I saw a commander berate an artillery officer for using a howitzers that was not “connected to the fire direction center.” There was nothing wrong with manually inputting the data into the weapon. The commander didn’t like it because it opened up the possibility of human error. He also was unhappy that the young officer “didn’t tell me.” He didn’t tell him because there was not issue. The solution they had was perfectly. This over-cautious approach is not rare. Commanders have to stop thinking that the technological solution is automatically preferable.
SITREP bloat is a symptom and not the disease. The disease is a lack of trust expressed as a demand for constant, real-time data. In the next conflict, commanders and political leaders are going to have to be more comfortable with less of everything. Less data, less communications, less comfort, if they want to see their units perform at their best and achieve their goals. The technology we invest in today cannot lock the force into reliance on networks and connectivity. It needs to be able to operate when networks fail, when power is scarce, and when the enemy controls the spectrum. That is a tall order, it means investing in robust technologies that are multi-trick. It seems expensive, but it is less costly than losing a war.
This brings to mind the Chinese military’s ongoing efforts to reconcile its traditionally centralized command structure with the principles of mission command.  
In recent years, the PLA has emphasized the need for subordinate initiative and flexibility, but its hierarchical structure and the dual-command system involving political commissars present challenges. To address this, the PLA is increasingly integrating AI into its C2 systems. AI-driven decision support tools are being developed to assist commanders in making more informed decisions, potentially compensating for gaps in officer experience and promoting more agile battlefield responses.  
These developments suggest a hybrid approach, blending traditional C2 structures with modern technologies to enhance decision-making and operational flexibility. Not sure if it’ll work, though. I’m guessing the theater JOCCs and even more so the CMC JOCC with Xi Jinping sitting in his CINC chair will micromanage any war from above. I write about PLA C4ISR on my Substack, if interested. https://ordersandobservations.substack.com
Really good article. I found myself pondering this thought. Don’t you dare tell me I’m wrong.
Seizing the initiative. Its significance has routinely been referenced by senior leaders every at echelon. It’s a lesson in every book, on every commanders reading list, and it’s consistently referenced in every update to the Army’s Operating Concept. History is full of examples of commanders seizing the initiative, and subsequently capitalizing on the momentum (Huns, Alexander the Great, Allied attack at Amiens, Patton’s Information Warfare in France, and Blitzkrieg) it created. However, contemporary examples of seizing the initiative lack the same results they once did (at scale). In recent conflicts, you can only find micro examples at the tactical and maybe the operational level, but nothing nearly as extraordinary (insert Ukrainian scenario). There are lots of reasons for it.
So, I wonder if we are overvaluing concepts like “initiative” simply because we can look at historical events and recognize the importance they once played, and assume they hold the same value in conflict today. It’s like other appealing factors in history like “audacity,” that was once extremely important. It’s certainly hard for me to connect the dots over the last twenty-five years. Conversely, if I wave the “I believe in our LSCO concept,” wand, it’s a bit easier to conceptualize (although perhaps counter-indicated in many LSCO scenarios).