CRAN/RAFLC/4901/1
MISSION COMMAND IN THE RAF
1.
The aim of this paper is to provide the basis from which the education and training
of RAF personnel in the use of mission command can be derived.
“We must also make sure that we have the right people … and ensure that
they are just as agile and adaptable as our equipment” 1
2.
In order to be agile RAF personnel need to be able to make their own decisions to
exploit the opportunities that arise within ambiguity and leverage the technology they work
with. If they cannot make their own decisions, if everything is referred up to the
commander, bureaucracy and cumbersome process stifle any chance of agility. Mission
Command is the Service philosophy of empowerment necessary to allow agility.
3.
Mission Command was devised as an Army tactic to overcome the impossibility of a
commander being able to communicate with and direct the action of all of his subordinates
at all times and because friction, or the fog of war, did not allow him to see all that was
going on. The only way the army was able to act and react in less time than its opponent
was to empower decision making down to the lowest practical level. In the Air component,
and as we penetrate more into the NEC2 era, the limits to the commander being able to
communicate with their subordinates and visibility of the battlespace are largely being
removed. What cannot be changed is the time element; this is where NEC presents both
an opportunity and a threat. If subordinates are not to make decisions, there is a limit as
to how fast they can be made by the commander as they must move round the OODA3
loop and this takes a finite time. If NEC is subject to such strategic compression then
decision speeds will slow down contrary to the intent of NEC to make the pace of
operations beyond the capacity of an enemy to respond. If subordinates are to make
decisions, then they need freedom to exploit the situation, to be agile. This is the
philosophy of Mission Command. The extent to which Mission Command can be
successfully applied relies to a very large extent upon the level of mutual trust between the
commanders and their subordinates, together with a solid grasp of the tenets underpinning
the philosophy.
4.
The art of the commander is to know which decisions they need to make. They
need to be Politically Astute. NEC, however, allows a huge step forward in the clear and
unambiguous transmission of the commander’s intent to all levels of the organisation so
that decisions can be made within its guidance and framework while all levels share a
common situational awareness. With the commander’s intent in mind, subordinates can
weigh up the consequences of decisions and actions and must have the good
followership4 to know when they must seek the commander’s view. They must also be
able to use ‘constructive dissent’5 at the appropriate time and feed back to their
commanders and know when to move to ‘constructive consent’. If delegation in this way
works as it should, then speed is enhanced and the pure form of manoeuvre warfare
1
Royal Air Force Strategy 2006
Networked Enabled Capability.
3
Observe Orientate, Decide, Act.
4 For more information on followership see ‘Followership: The Anvil of Leadership’, Professor Keith Grint in
Air Force Leadership: Beyond Command?, RAF Leadership Centre 2005.
5 Ibid for more information on Constructive Dissent.
2
1
envisioned by the architects of NEC can become a reality. In short, mission command is
just as necessary in the information age as it was in the industrial age.
EMPOWERMENT
5.
It is useful to look at empowerment in its basic form before expounding on mission
command and its tenets. Empowerment has 2 aspects, first those things that each
individual has to do to feel empowered; the need to take responsibility. Second is the way
in which we work with others to nurture their autonomy, personal growth and sense of self
esteem, or what leaders do to make their team feel empowered 6. Working in both these
dimensions, there are 5 levels of empowerment described by Joan Pastor. To make the
most of Mission Command within the lean structures of today’s Forces, it is important that
teams work at the highest level of empowerment. At this level, the team makes the
decisions and decides what and when to inform the leader, ensuring the leader’s time is
not overburdened with unnecessary information7.
6.
Teams where key members have changed are unlikely to be able to work at the
highest level of empowerment without first building trust. That trust must be built quickly if
the full potential of the team is to be realised. Furthermore, just to anoint a team to work at
the highest level of empowerment is to court disaster. The team needs to know the
bounds of their empowerment, the context within which they are making decisions and the
desired endstate towards which they are working. Without this knowledge, how could they
possibly make decisions that would move the team forward? Leaders would have to
continually cut across and rescind decisions of the team which would totally break down
the trust necessary for empowerment to work. The team would become disillusioned,
probably angry and even fearful of making their own decisions. Certainly they would
increasingly refer all decisions to the commander. Mission Command is the method used
in the RAF to provide the understanding that will allow empowerment to work.
TENETS OF MISSION COMMAND
7.
The Mission Command philosophy has three enduring tenets: timely decision
making, the importance of understanding a superior commander’s intent and a clear
responsibility to fulfil that intent. It is a style that promotes decentralised leadership,
freedom, speed of action and initiative, yet is responsive to superior direction. It has these
key elements:





A commander ensures that his subordinates understand his intentions, their
missions, and the strategic, operational and tactical context.
Subordinates are told what effect they are to achieve and the reason why it is
necessary.
Subordinates are allocated sufficient resources to carry out their missions.
A commander uses a minimum of control so as not to limit unnecessarily his
subordinate’s freedom of action.
Subordinates decide for themselves how best to achieve their missions 8.
6
Joan Pastor Empowerment in Organizations Volume 4 * Number 2 * 1996 * pp. 5-7 Copyright MCB
University Press (available through the RAF Leadership Centre Website).
7 For an example of this working in practice on operations, see The Agile Airman, Annexes A and D.
(Available on the RAF Leadership Centre Website).
8 British Defence Doctrine (Second Edition) Oct 2001.
2
Mission command should not be seen as a one-off process but an iterative one, resources
may not be sufficient and more may be demanded, excess resources must be returned to
benefit others who are hard pressed. Missions will, and even intent may, change as the
whole remains responsive to superior direction and so forth. Understanding of intent and
context should prevent decisions being made that do not move towards desired endstates.
It may be useful to appreciate the original philosophy of General Helmut
von Moltke who introduced ‘Auftragstaktik’ or Mission Command to the
Prussian army in the 19th Century:







Tactical decisions should be left to junior leaders on the spot
who were trusted to make the right decisions. The Army had to
learn to live with and exploit chaos, not seek to control it.
Discipline did not mean following orders but acting in
accordance with intentions.
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.
The senior commander was not to tell his subordinate how he
was to accomplish his task, as he would if he 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.
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’.
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?’
Helmut von Moltke famously said ‘Obedience is a principle but the man
stands above the principle’1.
1. Dirk Oetting, Auftragstaktik – Geschichte und Gegenwart einer Fuhrungskonzeption, Report
Verlag 1993 as translated by Stephen Bungay in The Road to Mission Command: The Genesis of
a Command Philosophy, British Army Review Number 137.
8.
For Mission Command genuinely to work there has to be great trust both up and
down the command chain. Trust that subordinates will make good decisions to further the
intent. Trust that subordinates will take responsibility and risk. Trust that commanders will
deal appropriately with failure; for if genuine risk is taken, things will go wrong sooner or
later. Trust that one works in a learning organisation not a blame culture. Trust that both
subordinates and commanders are open and admit mistakes to all; that unacceptable poor
performance and negligence are also dealt with openly. If this trust is not there, then it
becomes more acceptable to delay and not to act quickly as a mistake has much more
serious consequences. Decisions are then referred up the chain; empowerment fails.
DECISION MAKING
3
9.
Decision making is both an art and a science and is vital to taking the responsibility
to fulfil the commander’s intent. The estimate is a process that aids decision making and
ensures that all factors are considered; supporting analytic or logic based decision
making9. But timely decision making may not allow all factors to be sufficiently understood
before a decision needs to be made. General Colin Powell said “Once the information is in
the 40 – 70% range, go with your gut”. Equally well, unnecessarily rushing a decision can
carry unbearable risk. The art is knowing when a decision needs to be made. Within this
art (as well as making many decisions themselves) intuition will play a great part. Intuition
is a subtle blend of intellect and experience10. We need both to understand its part in
making decisions and nurture it by gaining experience whether that is actual or vicarious
from reading and case studies.
10.
Every decision carries a degree of risk and there is clearly a place to take risk and a
place where risk should be minimised. These are defined by the consequences of the risk.
Nevertheless, a willingness to take risk is vital to agility and speed of manoeuvre. “To get
more successes, you have to be willing to risk more failures.”11 But to take a risk without
understanding the consequences of doing so is to take an unnecessary gamble 12.
Alternatively, if the situation is so desperate and unacceptable that failure will occur if you
continue down your current path then it may be acceptable to do something innovative and
different even if the consequences are unknown. There are many processes for dealing
with risk13 but all will need the risk to be identified and its impact, probability and
immediacy estimated. Appropriate responses need to be found and the effect of those
responses (including doing nothing) examined. When decisions have been made, the
situation must be monitored.
INTENT
9.
Formulation of intent is not an easy act. It requires time and deep thought. The
issues are invariably complex and often ambiguous yet intent must state purpose clearly
and simply. It is not impossible to cover complex and ambiguous situations with simple
tenets as Keith Park’s rules for fighting the Battle of Britain demonstrates14, yet the
difficulty of doing it should not be underestimated. The early steps in the estimate process
covering review of the situation, 2-up intent and commander’s direction offer a simple
framework to facilitate the expression of intent. It is not necessary that the commander
alone does the work to clarify his intent. It is very necessary that the commander alone
creates the final expression of that intent as it must come from the heart and inspire
subordinates. Along with intent, the strategic, operational and tactical context must be
clearly summarised. Together they help set the bounds of subordinates’ freedom.
However, the more detailed the intent is made, the less freedom subordinates get and the
less empowerment is genuinely available. Commanders should always strive to give
subordinates the maximum amount of freedom they can risk. The diagram below may be
helpful in considering bounds of freedom and detail of intent and context. As the level of
Brigadier G L Kerr, “Intuitive Decision-Making at the Operational Level of Command”, The British Army
Review Number 108.
10 Air Chief Marshal Sir Brian Burridge, Windsor Leadership Trust Annual Lecture 2003.
11 Rosabeth Moss Kanter “Innovation: the Classic Traps”, Harvard Business Review, Nov 2006.
12 See the Attributes for RAF Leaders on
http://www.cranwell.raf.r.mil.uk/live/RAF_Leadership_Centre/Index.htm
13 Eg programme approach to risk management – Tolerate, Treat, Transfer, Terminate or the project
approach – Prevention, Reduction, Acceptance, Transference, Contingency Planning, Residual Risk. More
information on risk management may be found through the RAF Leadership Centre Website.
14 See Stephen Bungay, Command or Control? Leadership in the Battle of Britain in Air Force Leadership:
Beyond Command? RAF Leadership Centre 2005.
9
4
understanding of the problem rises so the risks become clearer and freedom of
manoeuvre for subordinates can be extended.
Level of understanding of the problem
Context
HIGH
HIGH
LOW
LOW
Commanders
Control
RATIO OF CONTROL TO FREEDOM
Subordinates
freedom of
action
The position of the vertical bar will vary according to circumstance and may be close to the
left hand end if extreme time constraints or the enormity of the consequences dictate.
However, it should be set as far to the right as possible, allowing the subordinate the
maximum freedom of action. Above the solid diagonal (red) line, decisions can be made
with information flowing to the commander at the subordinate’s discretion. Below the red
line, the commander should be consulted for any decision but if time does not allow he or
she must be informed of any decision without delay.
10.
Looking a little deeper into intent, it is possible to discern 4 key ingredients that
must be present to frame intent effectively:




The context, including 2-up intent, should be summarised because this illustrates
the analysis and reasoning that led to a particular ‘what’ and ‘why’ being specified.
The ‘What’ that needs to be achieved and ‘Why’ must be stated with great clarity.
The commander must indicate any particular aspects that he wishes to be
consulted on; this sets the level of freedom for initiative.
Specific constraints such as time/deadlines and any particular boundaries must be
set out plainly; they should obviously flow and be discernible from the contextual
summary.
RESPONSIBILITY
11.
Mission Command not only demands much from the commander, it demands that
subordinates have good followership skills. They must be willing and ready to take
responsibility to fulfil the intent. They must search out intent and context ensuring their
own understanding just as much as commanders must ensure understanding. No matter
how clearly context, intent and bounds have been articulated, inevitably there will be
confusion and uncertainty, subordinates must learn the art of knowing when and which
decisions need to be informed up the chain just as much as commanders must learn the
art of knowing which decisions they need to become involved in and to stand back when
they don’t.
5
12.
Mission Command is not a cover for laissez-faire leadership. Commanders and
leaders do not absolve themselves from responsibility. They still need to know what is
going on. Subordinates should expect to have to justify their own actions; this is not
unnecessary interference. But commanders should not interfere or take up subordinates’
time unnecessarily. Equally, subordinates have a right to a fair hearing when things are
not going as the commanders expect or genuine mistakes rather than negligence are the
order of the day. This is part of the learning organisation that supports the trust necessary
for Mission Command to work. Risk means failure at some point and these failures must
be learnt from not blamed on those willing to take the risk.
CONCLUSION
12.
It is essential that all of the important principles outlined above are not forgotten but
Mission Command may be summed up as knowing your place in the commander’s plan
and being empowered to act. Further readings and presentations exploring the concepts
of mission command, leadership and followership are available on the RAF Leadership
Centre Website: http://www.cranwell.raf.r.mil.uk/live/RAF_Leadership_Centre/Index.htm
6