THE ROAD TO MISSION COMMAND
The Genesis of a Command Philosophy
By
Stephen Bungay
In the course of nine hours on 14th October 1806, two Prussian armies were first
shattered and then scattered by a French army at the twin battles of Jena and
Auerstedt. In the 18th Century the Prussian Army built up by Frederick the Great had
been the most admired and successful in Europe. Its defeat was militarily decisive and
psychologically devastating.
The Commander-in-Chief of the French forces that day has been described as ‘the most
competent human being who has ever lived’1. It is well known that Napoleon Bonaparte
changed the nature of warfare, the politics of Europe and the legal system of France. It
is less well known, but equally important for us today, that he changed for ever the
nature of organisations and how they are run, and specifically the nature of command.
The French attributed the military successes they enjoyed under Napoleon to his genius,
and hoped another genius would turn up to repeat them. In the wake of their defeat, the
Prussians began a period of soul-searching and decided to analyse Napoleon’s
methods to see what they could learn. They learned a lot. ‘We fought bravely enough,’
commented General Scharnhorst after Auerstedt, ‘but not cleverly enough.’ He
championed far-reaching reforms of the Prussian Army. He was joined by Gneisenau
and another colleague, Carl von Clausewitz, whose reflections on Napoleonic methods
and their consequences were posthumously published in 1832 under the title ‘On War’.
That work remains perhaps the most celebrated and influential military treatise ever
written.
The reforms of the Prussian Army were a direct consequence of the analysis carried out
by Scharnhorst and the Prussian General Staff of the catastrophe it suffered at the twin
battles.2 That analysis concluded that the Army had been run as a machine which
required iron discipline to function because the underlying motivation of its men was low.
Its training focussed on the wrong processes: it concentrated, for example, on perfecting
marching drill rather than firing drill. Officers sought to counter the chaos of battle by
handling troops according to mathematical principles. Nobody took any action without
orders to do so. It was a highly centralised, process-dominated organisation based on
Taylorian principles and assuming what Douglas McGregor has famously called the
‘Theory X’ of human motivation.3
The French Army had been raised from citizen conscripts. It had no time to practice drill
and perfect discipline, so it turned this vice into a virtue. It made extensive use of light
infantry or ‘tirailleurs’ who engaged the lines of Prussians in an unordered swarm in
which each man took advantage of the terrain and fired as he saw fit. The French were
highly motivated. Their Army was, in McGregor’s terms, a ‘Theory Y’ organisation. At
the top level, Napoleon introduced mini-armies called Corps, containing a balance of
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infantry, cavalry and artillery, and so able to operate independently of each other. Each
was commanded by a Marshal, a man picked on merit by Napoleon himself. In
conducting the campaign, Napoleon was able to communicate very rapidly with the
Marshals because they shared a basic operating doctrine, and he explained his
intentions as well as what he wanted them to do. He expected them to use their
initiative and act without orders in line with his intentions. They did. The result was an
operational tempo which left the incredulous Prussians bewildered.
The Prussian Army needed to get faster. It was clear that of the three classic variables
in warfare - force, space and time - in modern warfare, only lost time could never be
made good. It was essential to act quickly. The only way of doing so was to develop a
professional officer corps with the authority and willingness to take decisions in real time
at a low level. Meritocracy was a prerequisite. It was better to take a wrong decision
immediately than to take no decision at all. Sins of omission were more serious than
sins of commission. A Prussian officer was expected to share a set of core values,
defining his ‘honour’, which took precedence over an order. If he acted in accordance
with ‘honour’ (which constituted his integrity) disobedience was legitimate. It came to be
recognised, moreover, that orders from above could not possibly give an officer all the
direction he needed during a battle. The Commission set up in 1837 to revise the Field
Service Regulations of 1788 set out a paragraph saying that if the execution of an order
was rendered impossible, an officer should seek to act in line with the intention behind
it.4
However, in the long peace which followed 1815, the reforms stagnated. Their spirit
was kept alive by a few influential individuals. One was Prince Friedrich Karl of Prussia,
the nephew of the future Kaiser Wilhelm I, and a practising soldier. In a series of
essays published in the 1850’s and 60’s, he reinforced the growing idea that what made
the Prussian officer corps distinctive – and gave it an edge – was a willingness to show
independence of mind and challenge authority.5 When Friedrich Karl replaced the
octogenarian Field Marshal von Wrangel as commander of the Prussian Army in its
successful war against Denmark in 1864, he was joined by a shadowy figure who had
been Chief of the Prussian General Staff since 1857. Many operational commanders
were not at all sure what the Chief of the General Staff was supposed to do, apart from
handle administration and make sure the trains ran on time. When this Chief of Staff
actually assumed command of the Prussian Army in the campaign against Austria in
1866, some of his subordinates were bemused. ‘This seems to be all in order,’
commented divisional commander General von Manstein on receiving an order from his
Commander-in-Chief, ‘but who is General von Moltke?’6
Field Marshal Helmuth Carl Bernhard Graf von Moltke, a man born in the first year of his
century, was the main builder of the German Army which emerged from it, and the man
who established the General Staff as a body of professional soldiers pre-eminent in
Europe. He was both a practitioner and thinker in the fields of strategy, leadership,
organisation and what we would today call management. His thoughts are contained in
numerous essays and memoranda, but his influence at the time was more direct, for he
was the trainer and teacher of a generation of German generals. In that role, he could
also be named as the true father of Auftragstaktik. It is perhaps his most lasting legacy.
Von Moltke is known to have espoused subordinate autonomy almost to the point of
abandoning central control altogether, and to have conceived of strategy as
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improvisation. In his appraisal of his own victory over the Austrians at Königgrätz in
1866, von Moltke observed that the independent actions of two Austrian generals, acting
contrary to the orders of their commander Benedek, in fact facilitated his own victory
over them. Remarkably, he exonerated them. It is easy enough to judge their actions
now, he observed, but one should be extremely careful in condemning generals. In the
confusion and uncertainty of war, people who exercise their own judgement run the risk
of getting things wrong. That must be accepted. Fear of retribution should not curb
their willingness to make those judgements. ‘Obedience is a principle,’ he memorably
asserted, ‘but the man stands above the principle.’7
Von Moltke is clear about the value of independence of mind and initiative. The
Prussian Army had by this time created a leadership culture within the officer corps in
which this was becoming the norm, and he encouraged it. However, his ambition went
further. He wanted to build on that culture and use it to create an effective system of
command, one which also ensured cohesion and limited the impact of what might
subsequently appear to be mistakes on the part of subordinates. In his self-critical
Memoire on the 1866 campaign, written for the king in 1868, two things he singled out
for particular criticism are ‘the lack of direction from above and the independent actions
of the lower levels of command’.8 This may seem surprising at first, until we see where
he was heading. He concluded from this that it was vital to ensure that every level
understood enough of the intentions of the higher command to enable it to fulfil its goal.
Von Moltke did not want to put a brake on initiative, but to steer it in the right direction.
In 1869, the new Field Service Regulations, inspired and partially authored by von
Moltke, made it official. Senior commanders should ‘not order more than is absolutely
necessary’ but should ensure that the goal was clear. In case of doubt, subordinate
commanders should seize the initiative.
Meanwhile, while the French Army waited for another Napoleon it stagnated. Another
Napoleon did indeed appear in the form of his nephew Louis. He assumed the title of
Napoleon III, but unlike his uncle he was not a genius. When the French Army met the
Prussian Army on the field again in 1870, the results of Jena-Auerstedt were reversed.
A neutral observer of the campaign, the Russian General Woide, described the
Prussian command doctrine as having the effect of a ‘newly perfected weapon’.9 It was
indeed like a secret weapon, for it was invisible. The miracle was the way in which each
man acted on his own accord, but in such a way that the actions of the army as a whole
cohered. ‘Every German subordinate commander,’ wrote Woide, ‘felt himself to be part
of a unified whole; in taking action, each one of them therefore had the interests of the
whole at the forefront of his mind; none hesitated in deciding what to do, not a man
waited to be told or even reminded.’10 The Prussian Army seemed to a remarkable
degree to have mastered the fast-moving, ever-changing chaos which distinguished the
modern battlefield. It appeared to have reconciled autonomy and alignment.
That was not how things felt from the inside. It had won the war with France, but things
had not gone smoothly. It coped better with the mess and confusion of war than its
opponent had, but many of its own people were critical.
After 1871, the victorious Army got into a furious argument with itself.
Along with questions of tactics, the central issue under debate was how to retain control
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while encouraging independent action. Technology was making the issue more acute.
In 1870, the Prussian infantry faced accurate fire from the French Chassepot rifles when
still way beyond the range of their own needle guns, which had themselves, rendered
muzzle loaders obsolete just a few years before. It marked a step in the ‘transformation
of the infantry’ which meant that formations had to be loose. Control was rendered yet
more difficult. Battles were often won or lost by the actions of company commanders.
Sometimes they made up for mistakes committed by their superiors. Sometimes,
though, their headstrong decisions led to unnecessary losses. Cohesion was on a
knife-edge. Two ideas fomented the debate: the reinforcement of von Moltke’s
observation that a higher intent had to unify action; and the realisation that every unit
had to have a task or mission of its own to perform which made sense within that
context.11
One incident in particular became a cause célèbre. On 14th August 1870, the Prussian
First Army under Lieutenant General von Steinmetz approached the fortress of Metz.
Just in front of it, near the town of Colombey, in accordance with von Moltke’s orders, it
waited until the Second Army could reinforce it before investing the city. The
commander of 26th Infantry Brigade, Major General von der Goltz, observed the French
forces in front of him starting to withdraw. If the whole French army were to do so, Metz
would not have to be subjected to a costly and lengthy siege, but could be by-passed,
which is what von Moltke really wanted to do. There was no time for von der Goltz to
ask his division, division to ask Corps, Corps to ask von Steinmetz and maybe even von
Steinmetz to ask von Moltke what to do, and then relay the order back again. So von
der Goltz attacked. His men got into trouble, but his neighbouring brigadier saw what
was happening and joined in. So then did the two divisions of I Corps, against an
express order to remain on the defensive. Von Steinmetz was furious with the lot of
them, and ordered them to withdraw, so they sent back a few of their reserve troops to
placate him. In the morning the King arrived and forbade any retreat, for now the
French were retreating. Metz was indeed by-passed. Von der Goltz was accused of
recklessness. The debate over his case continued for decades in numerous
publications. The final judgement was passed in a tactical manual published in 1910:
‘His decision is one of the finest examples of spontaneous action taken within proper
bounds.’12
Passing final judgement on tactical methods took almost as long. The argument started
as a three-way contest. The first group were the conservatives who saw themselves as
the upholders of the true Prussian tradition. They wanted to abandon the curse of
loose-order tactics which allowed the battlefield to descend into chaos and re-establish
disciplined close-order formations. Their voices soon melted away.13 The main debate
was conducted by two schools, both demanding change. One, known as
Normaltaktiker, wanted to establish coherence by training infantry leaders in the use of
detailed tactical norms which specified methods of deployment and attack. The other
school, the Auftragstaktiker, argued that no such recipes were possible. Tactical
decisions should be left to junior leaders on the spot. Anything else would drive out the
spirit of initiative. Junior leaders had to be trusted to make the right decisions. The
Army had to learn to live with and exploit chaos, not seek to control it.14
The Auftragstaktiker of the Prussian Army, which after 1871 became the German Army,
were developing a new concept of discipline. Discipline did not mean following orders
but acting in accordance with intentions. The phrase ‘thinking obedience’ begins to
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appear. Distinctions were made between an ‘order’ (‘Befehl’) and a ‘task’ or ‘mission’
(‘Auftrag’). People started to talk about ‘directives’ (‘Weisungen’) as an alternative to
orders. In 1877, General Meckel wrote that a directive had two parts. The first was a
description of the general situation and the commander’s overall intention. The second
was the specific task. Meckel stressed the need for clarity: ‘Experience suggests,’ he
wrote, ‘that every order which can be misunderstood will be.’15 The intention should
convey absolute clarity of purpose by focussing on the essentials and leaving out
everything else. The task should not be specified in too much detail. Above all, the
senior commander was not to tell his subordinate how he was to accomplish his task, as
he would if were to issue an order. The first part of the directive was to give the
subordinate freedom to act within the boundaries set by the overall intention. The
intention was binding. The task was not. A German officer’s prime duty was to reason
why.
The debate peaked in the formulation of the new Field Service Regulations, the
Exerziersreglement of 1888. It recognised that battle quickly becomes chaotic. It
emphasised independence of thought and action, stating that ‘a failure to act or a delay
are a more serious fault than making a mistake in the choice of means’. Every unit was
to have its own clearly defined area of responsibility, and the freedom of unit
commanders extended to a choice form as well as means, which depended on specific
circumstances. The responsibility of every officer was to exploit their given situation to
the benefit of the whole. The guiding principle of action was to be the intent of the
higher commander. Officers were to ask themselves the question: ‘What would my
superior order me to do if he were in my position and knew what I know?’ An
understanding of intent was the sine qua non of independent action.16
It was clear that if individuals within the organisation were to tread along the narrow path
between the Scylla of rule-book passivity and the Charybdis of random adventurism,
and so unify autonomy and alignment, their selection and training were important. They
had to be ready to make decisions and to accept responsibility for them. They must
also have a shared understanding of how to behave and what they could expect of their
peers and their superiors. They needed a common operational doctrine and shared
values. The organisation had to have a high level of trust. Training was directed to
these ends. The Auftragstaktiker had won through.
But their opponents did not give up. The new regulations were subject to continual
criticism in journals, and it is there in fact that the term Auftragstaktik is first found in the
early 1890’s, coined by its opponents.17 The first attempt to define it in writing did not
come until 1906, when Major Otto von Moser published a widely read but unofficial book
about small unit tactics which devoted five pages to the concept. Von Moser
emphasised its value as a means of reconciling independence and control.18
The arguments continued into the first decade of the 20th Century, which saw two events
which finally drew the debate to a close. The first was the Boer War of 1899-1902, the
second the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. Both were taken to illustrate the superiority
of the new doctrine as mirrored in the tactics of the Boers in the one case and of the
Japanese in the other. The Japanese had indeed adopted the principles of the 1888
Regulations. The new German Regulations of 1906 confirmed them.19
In 1914, the methods which had overcome the French in 1870 served to overcome the
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Russians at Tannenberg, but narrowly failed in the west. As the front became static, the
principles of Auftragstaktik played a secondary role to principles of attrition, and so the
First World War took its dreadful course until 1918. Even so, Auftragstaktik played its
part in enabling the Germans to hold their lines against successive Allied offensives. In
an environment in which communications between higher commanders and junior
officers were uniquely fragile, the speed with which junior officers reacted to potential
breakthroughs was critical to maintaining an effective defence. The willingness of
German company commanders to change dispositions, commandeer reserves and
launch local counter-attacks without further orders was one factor among many why so
many Allied offensives stagnated.20
In March 1918, for the first time since late 1914, the German Army abandoned its
reliance on artillery, machine guns and trenches and flung a body of infantrymen called
‘Stormtroopers’ who were imbued with the principles of Auftragstaktik at the British lines.
They made the largest gains in territory ever achieved on the Western Front and were
only slowed and finally halted by the resilience and firepower of their opponents, ordered
by Haig to fight ‘with their backs to the wall’. On 18th July, the British counter-attacked,
and having themselves achieved a skill and flexibility in the use of artillery unique at the
time, joined their Allies to force them back until on 11th November, they signed an
armistice. The 100,000 men the Allies allowed the Germans to keep as an army reexamined their 100-year-old traditions.
The new German General Staff realised that in any future war of attrition they would
always be overwhelmed in the end. There were several schools of thought. One was to
defend Germany with a series of fortresses; another was to adopt guerrilla methods.
The one which prevailed was to achieve rapid decision on the battlefield and use
superior speed and manoeuvrability to compensate for lack of overall numbers.21 The
lessons of the failed offensive of March 1918 were examined in detail. There had been
no clear aim, the Army had out-run its logistical capability and its Stormtroopers had
been left without proper artillery support. The answer was to mechanise the part of the
Army tasked with achieving breakthrough, and provide it with mobile artillery. Thinking
which at first revolved around armoured cars eventually embraced the medium tank as
the best potential solution. Achieving breakthrough meant focussing energy at a
decisive point, and in thinking which went back to Clausewitz and Napoleon, the concept
of a Schwerpunkt, or ‘centre of gravity’ became central to a doctrine the world now
recognises as ‘Blitzkrieg’.
It would be impossible to realise this notion of manoeuvre warfare without a command
and control system which had Auftragstaktik as its core. Speed became a weapon in
itself, the psychology of the enemy commander as important a target as the forces he
commanded. The objective now was not just to master a rapidly changing situation but
to actually make the situation change as fast as possible so as to paralyse the enemy.
The command and control advantages of Auftragstaktik were therefore put to
operational use. Superiority in command capability had become part of the German
Army’s arsenal. It had truly become a secret weapon.
With an Army of 100,000 men, the Chief of the General Staff, Hans von Seeckt, a
veteran of the mobile war in the East, decided to turn it into an Army of 100,000 officers.
Training was centred on inculcating initiative and ‘thinking obedience’. To further this
and create greater levels of trust, all NCO’s were trained as officers and officers were
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expected to master the tasks of two ranks higher up the hierarchy and to take their
place if needs be. In 1933, the German Army produced a new guide to its leadership
philosophy called ‘Truppenführung’ (literally ‘Troop Leadership’). The British Army’s
equivalent was called ‘Field Service Regulations’. The titles alone point to a significant
difference in mind-set.
Like the German Army, the British Army had concluded that the battlefield was
inherently chaotic. Rather than thriving on the chaos, the British sought to control it
through a ‘masterplan’. The masterplan specified in great detail precisely what
everyone was to do and how they were to do it. British training stressed obedience, and
drill was used to inculcate its spirit. Initiative was effectively equated with
insubordination. Being of a liberal disposition, however, the British did not impose a
tactical doctrine. The result of that was that no-one at lower levels knew what anyone
else was likely to do under any given set of circumstances. The British also allowed
senior officers the freedom to interpret orders. The result of that was that high-level
orders became debating topics. The debates would go on as the battle raged, and
decision-making and action were very slow. Junior officers, on the other hand, were
only allowed to depart from orders if circumstances changed so as to render them
irrelevant. If they wished to do so, they had to seek permission from a higher authority
before doing so, as opposed to informing their superiors about what they were going to
do and getting on with it. So they were very slow as well.22 It was a low-trust doctrine.
The 1933 Truppenführung marks the next stage in the maturity of Auftragstaktik. In
accordance with Clausewitz, it accepts complexity, uncertainty, rapid change and stress
as the battlefield norm. It defines the qualities demanded of an officer. ‘Next to a
knowledge of men and a sense of justice’, it states, ‘he must be distinguished by a
superiority of knowledge and experience.’23 In other words, leaders had to demonstrate
social competence, integrity and task competence. British officers were expected to
manage battles. German officers were expected to lead their men. The German
command and control system had reached a new level of refinement.
‘The basis of leadership’, we read, ‘is to be found in the task (Auftrag) and the
situation. They must constantly be held in view. A task including many objectives
is always difficult to keep in mind. Uncertainty of the situation is the rule. Seldom
will more accurate information be available. To clear up the situation is an obvious
requirement. Waiting for information in strained situations is seldom an indication
of good leadership however, and usually a grievous shortcoming.’
‘From the task and the situation springs the plan. Where the plan no longer
corresponds to the situation, or if it is obviated by events, so must the plan take
these facts into consideration. Where anyone alters a task or does not carry it out
he must report it, and he alone must be responsible for the consequences. He
must always operate in the framework of the whole…The plan must be made
against a clear objective with all the means available…In the changing fortunes of
war, however, to hold stubbornly to a decision regardless of the situation may
amount to a fault…A commander must give his subordinates a free hand in
execution so far as it does not endanger his objective. He must not however pass
on the responsibility for decisions which rightly should rest with him.’24
At 6am on 1st September 1939, Hitler unleashed the organisation built around these
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principles on Poland, and on 5th October the last fragment of the Polish Army
surrendered. On 10th May 1940, he unleashed it on France and on 22nd June France
surrendered, the British Army having in the meantime been evacuated from Dunkirk.
On 22nd June 1941 he unleashed it on the Soviet Union, and it proceeded to gain the
largest and most spectacular victories in the history of land warfare.
In the end, of course, despite all the battles won by the German Army, Germany lost the
war. However, it took the combined forces of the two post-war superpowers, the British
Empire and the resistance of most of western Europe five years to defeat it. The war
became a war of attrition like the previous one, and Hitler’s hideous ideology gathered
against him an alliance wielding massive superiority of resources. Despite that, in its
last battle, the Battle of Berlin in April-May 1945, what remained of the German Army
inflicted 300,000 casualties on the three Soviet Army Groups which overcame it.25
In the historiography of the Second World War, attention has been increasingly been
devoted to the performance of the German Army and what can be learned from it. It
was remarkable, as any of those who fought against it will attest. As one American
veteran of Normandy and the Rhineland puts it: ‘until you’ve fought the German army,
you have never fought a real battle’.26 Scholars and researchers tried to analyse why
this was so. In 1977 US Army Colonel Trevor Dupuy concluded: ‘On a man for man
basis, the German ground soldier consistently inflicted casualties at about a 50% higher
rate than they incurred from the opposing British and American troops under all
circumstances. This was true when they were attacking and when they were defending,
when they had a local numerical superiority and when, as was usually the case, they
were outnumbered, when they had air superiority and when they did not, when they won
and when they lost.’27
The reasons for this are many and various, but there can be little doubt that one of the
major ones was Auftragstaktik.28 A contributing factor to the German defeat was Hitler’s
contempt for its principles and his attempts to reverse its practice, particularly on the
Eastern Front from 1942 onwards. Running through the whole conception is the
principle of trust. Hitler had never trusted his generals, and as his mistrust grew, so did
his interference and the level of detail he tried to manage.29 Despite this, the main body
of the Army continued to use Auftragstaktik. After a while some of those who defeated
the German Army began to realise that the Germans were on to something and began
to devote the subject some attention. As it crossed both the Channel and the Atlantic,
so Auftragstaktik slipped into English as ‘mission command’.30
If it is perilous to search for universal truths about leadership, then the hazards of
seeking universal principles behind what makes effective organisations are at least as
great. Yet the rewards of identifying some things which at the very least are very
important most of the time could also be great. Indeed, to positively deny that there
could be any such things seems to fly in the face of evidence. In the first book ever
devoted specifically to the nature of command, one of the world’s leading military
historians summarised his findings as follows:
‘The fact that, historically speaking, those armies have been most successful
which did not turn their troops into automatons, did not attempt to control
everything from the top, and allowed their subordinate commanders considerable
latitude has been abundantly demonstrated. The Roman centurions and military
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tribunes; Napoleon’s marshals; Moltke’s army commanders; Ludendorff’s storm
detachments; Gavish’s divisional commanders in 1967 – all these are examples,
each within its own stage of technological development, of the way things were
done in some of the most successful military forces ever.’
He goes on to cite the principles of sacrificing certainty for speed, specifying minimum
objectives, granting freedom of action to junior officers on the spot and hands-off
headquarters as ‘indispensable elements of what the Germans, following the tradition of
Scharnhorst and Moltke, call Auftragstaktik, or mission-oriented command system.’ He
concludes by showing how all these principles can be found in all the outstanding
examples he cites and that all successful command systems reconcile autonomy and
alignment.31
With great consistency, mission command allows an organisation to make rapid
decisions in an uncertain, fast-changing environment and to translate them, without
delay, into decisive action. Such an organisation can act faster than its opponents and
keep on doing so, because speed is built into it structurally. By the same token, it can
exploit unexpected opportunities and recover from setbacks. Mission command creates
an organisation which is not only more thrusting, but more resilient. If they have a clear
understanding of purpose, people understand what matters and can react fast to
whatever is unexpected, be it good or bad. In war, the unexpected is normal, and it is
often unpleasant. Beyond this, mission command unleashes human energy and acts a
motivator. It demands, creates and fosters large numbers of leaders and enables them
to stretch themselves whilst working within limits. None of this is theory or supposition.
It is a set of practices with a couple of centuries experience behind it. If van Creveld is
right, the experience base goes back a couple of millennia, though some parts of it are
more accessible than others.
The recent experience of the German Army is very accessible but for some time after
the war nobody bothered to examine it. After all, what did the winners have to learn
from the losers? With the formation of NATO, the losers became allies, but very junior
ones. It was in any case beginning to look as if technology would allow masterplanners
to control everything as perfect information became instantaneously available at the
centre. As the brightest and the best assembled in Washington to run the Vietnam War
under former Ford executive Robert McNamara, they revelled in vast amounts of data
and superb communications. They measured bodycounts and then told the Generals in
Vietnam what to do next. It created a ‘pathology of information’. 32 The business
paradigms and management theory of the 1960s invaded the Pentagon and it all went
horribly wrong.
The impact of Vietnam on the US military bears some comparison with the impact of
Jena on the Prussians. Digesting those lessons continued over a long period until, with
the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, the whole of NATO went through an identity
crisis. NATO had been designed to fight the Red Army as it swarmed over the North
German plain. There was a masterplan. Every NATO soldier knew exactly where he
had to go and what he had to do when that happened. When it became clear that it was
not going to happen, NATO had to prepare for something else, the nature of which no
one could specify. Traditional methods of command and control clearly had to be
replaced. The answer was mission command.
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In the British Army, the ground had already been prepared in the 1980’s by Field
Marshal Sir Nigel Bagnall. He first introduced manoeuvrist doctrine when commander of
1st Corps in Germany. As commander of Northern Army Group from 1983 he argued
that NATO’s ‘tripwire’ approach was an inadequate counter to current Soviet doctrine
and his influence spread beyond the British Army to other NATO forces. From 1985-88
he was Chief of the General Staff. As such, he was to ‘mission command’ what von
Moltke was to Auftragstaktik.
Today, the operational manuals of organisations like the US Marine Corps or the British
Army all contain passages which could have been lifted from Truppenführung. Mission
command is part of official NATO doctrine. Something like it, though not necessarily
with the same name, has long been practiced by élite forces. NATO has realised that
something like it was not just a burdensome necessity given the flexibility it suddenly
had to have, but actually turned regular army units into high performance organisations.
It was first applied on a large scale in the Gulf War of 1991. It has been used on
peacekeeping and security operations such as Operation ‘Palliser’ in Sierra Leone in
2000. It was last put to the test in Iraq in 2003.
The techniques of mission command, such as the estimate process, continue to be
refined. It affects recruiting, training, planning and control processes and how
operations are conducted. But its core is the culture and values of an organisation and
a specific philosophy of leadership. It crucially depends on factors which do not appear
on the balance sheet of an organisation: the willingness of officers to accept
responsibility; the readiness of their superiors to back up their decisions; the tolerance of
mistakes made in good faith. Designed for an external environment which is
unpredictable and hostile, it builds on an internal environment which predictable and
supportive. At its heart is a network of trust binding people together up, down and
across a hierarchy. Achieving and maintaining that requires constant work. It is under
test every hour of every day.
Mission command is a conception of command which unsentimentally places human
beings at its centre. It does so because the most sophisticatedly over-engineered
product of natural selection, the human mind, is still the best instrument for maintaining
rationality in chaotic conditions. The main threat to mission command is the belief that
technology will render it redundant by allowing command to be supplanted by control.
Centres are always data-hungry. They tend to aspire to omniscience. Their secret
desire is omnipotence, which is just a step behind. History suggests, circumstantially
but firmly, that these are dangerous illusions. Technology should be the servant of
doctrine. A Roman centurion of the 1st Century BC was animated by independence of
mind, a sense of responsibility and commitment to achieving a collective goal. A British
officer of the 21st Century AD faces greater unpredictability and needs even greater
creativity to deal with it. He will need just the same qualities in even greater measure.
Mission command grants him a framework within which he can develop them. The rest
is up to him. The man stands above the principle.
Dr Stephen Bungay is a writer, business teacher and management consultant. A Director of the
Ashridge Strategic Management Centre, and former Vice President of The Boston Consulting
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Group, he is the author of The Most Dangerous Enemy, Aurum Press 2000, which one reviewer
has called ‘the most exhaustive and detailed account of the Battle of Britain that has yet appeared’
and Alamein, Aurum Press 2002. He is currently working on a book on mission command and its
value to business.
1
Martin van Creveld, Command in War, Harvard University Press 1985, p. 64.
On what follows see Dirk Oetting’s superb Auftragstaktik – Geschichte und Gegenwart einer
Führungskonzeption, Report Verlag 1993. All translations are the author’s.
3 Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise, Penguin 1987 (first published by McGrawHill 1960). As an organisation, the Prussian Army which came to grief in 1806 was strikingly
similar to many large western business corporations 150 years later.
4 Oetting, pp. 86-8.
5
Oetting, pp. 97-103.
6 Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War, Rupert Hart-Davis 1961, pp. 27-29.
7 Oetting, p. 112.
8 Oetting, p. 105.
9 Oetting, p. 13.
10 Oetting, p. 116.
11 Stephan Leistenschneider, Auftragstaktik im preußisch-deutschen Heer 1871 bis 1914, Mittler
Verlag 2002, pp. 46-55.
12 Oetting p. 126. For an account of the incident see pp. 113-4 and more broadly the one in
Michael Howard’s classic work, op.cit., pp. 139-144. Though tactically a French victory, the
strategic consequences were to impose a vital delay on the French. Howard tellingly observes
that ‘no officer in the French Army had, or was supposed to have, any insight into the intentions of
the commander-in-chief’ (p. 145). It marched blindly to disaster.
13 Though they themselves and their followers presumably did not, as some German units
employed these methods, with predictable results, in 1914.
14
Leistenschneider, op. cit., pp. 65-67.
15 Oetting p. 125.
16
Leistenschneider, op. cit., pp. 72-92.
17 Leistenschneider, op. cit., pp. 100-106. It was not officially defined until 1977. See Oetting p.
14.
18 Oetting, pp. 16-19.
19
Leistenschneider, op. cit., pp.123-137.
20 For an example of this see Martin Samuels’ analysis of the German defence of Thiepval and
the Schwaben Redoubt on the Somme in Command or Control – Command, Training and Tactics
in the British and German Armies 1888-1918, Frank Cass 1995, pp. 149-157. The
communications problem faced by the attackers was more severe still than that of the defenders.
See Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory, Headline 2001, pp. 120-123. The inherent balance of
advantage was nevertheless compounded by each side’s approach to command and control, and
doctrine.
21
See James S. Corum, The Roots of Blitzkrieg – Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform,
University Press of Kansas, 1992, pp. 55-66.
22 See David French, Raising Churchill’s Army, OUP 2000, pp. 17-59.
23 Truppenführung, PRO WO 287/124, § 7. Its main author was Ludwig Beck, who became
Commander-in-Chief of the German Army and later organised the bomb plot against Hitler. It
may be worth observing that the German Army, the main instrument of his destructive will, was
the only institution in the Nazi state to offer organised resistance to Hitler. The legal system did
not, industry did not, the universities did not, nor did the Protestant or the Catholic Church. Hitler
mistrusted the Army from the first and sought gradually to replace it with the Waffen-SS. It may
be that whilst most German generals accepted their personal oath of loyalty to Hitler as absolute
and became his willing executioners in the East, the old concept of ‘honour’ implied by von
Moltke’s words ‘Obedience is a principle, but the man stands above the principle’ continued to
echo in the souls of a few men like Beck, von Stauffenberg and their co-conspirators in the
2
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General Staff. Their notion of honour would have sat easy with Enlightenment thinkers like
Lessing. The motto of the Waffen-SS was ‘Loyalty is my Honour’ (‘Meine Ehre heißt Treue’),
which would have been endorsed by the Nibelungen.
24 Truppenführung, §§ 36-7.
25 John Erickson, The Road to Berlin, Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1983, p. 622.
26
Belton E. Cooper, Death Traps, Presidio Press 1998, p. 242.
27 Colonel Trevor Dupuy, A Genius for War, Macdonald & Janes 1977, pp. 253-4. Dupuy bases
his claims on an analysis of data from actual engagements in North Africa, Italy and North West
Europe. This analysis has predictably been challenged, in particular its methodology, but the
broad conclusions are generally accepted. See David French, Raising Churchill’s Army, OUP
2000, pp. 8-10.
28 As argued by Martin van Creveld in his Fighting Power, Greenwood Press 1982.
29 Hitler’s perversion of the Army’s leadership philosophy is charted by Oberstleutnant Dr HansPeter Stein in ‘Führen durch Auftrag’, Truppenpraxis, Beiheft 1/85.
30 Some have followed Richard Simpkin in preferring the term ‘directive control’. Simpkin ably
argues his case for rejecting the rendering ‘mission command’ as ‘disastrous’ in Race to the Swift,
Brassey 1985, pp. 227-240. He seems nevertheless to have lost the battle over terminology.
31 Martin van Creveld, Command in War, Harvard University Press 1985, p. 270.
32 Van Creveld, pp. 258-60
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