THE Fighting Illini

“Why is the military so bad at retaining these people? It’s convenient to believe that top officers simply have more- lucrative opportunities in the private sector, and that their departures are inevitable. But the reason overwhelmingly cited by veterans and active-duty officers alike is that the military personnel system—every aspect of it—is nearly blind to merit. Performance evaluations emphasize a zero-defect mentality, meaning that risk-avoidance trickles down the chain of command. Promotions can be anticipated almost to the day— regardless of an officer’s competence—so that there is essentially no difference in rank among officers the same age, even after 15 years of service. Job assignments are managed by a faceless, centralized bureaucracy that keeps everyone guessing where they might be shipped next.

The Pentagon’s response to such complaints has traditionally been to throw money at the problem, in the form of millions of dollars in talent-blind retention bonuses. More often than not, such bonuses go to any officer in the “critical” career fields of the moment, regardless of performance evaluations. This only ensures that the services retain the most risk-averse, and leads to long-term mediocrity”

More from “Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving” at The Atlantic

In honor of Veterans Day, an obit from the Washington Post for MoH recipient, COL Lewis Millett

Daring soldier was awarded Medal of Honor

By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Lewis L. Millett, 88, a career Army officer who was briefly and somewhat misleadingly court-martialed for desertion during World War II and went on to receive the Medal of Honor for leading a bayonet charge during the Korean War, died Nov. 14 at a veterans hospital in Loma Linda, Calif. He had congestive heart failure.

Col. Millett, who sported a red handlebar mustache, cut an audacious and unconventional path during his 35 years of military service. He led daring attacks in two wars and was instrumental in starting a reconnaissance commando school to train small units for covert operations in Vietnam.

He also was an Army deserter. He later said he had been so eager to “help fight fascism and Hitler” that he left an Air Corps gunnery school in mid-1941 — months before the U.S. entry into World War II — to enlist with the Canadian army and go overseas. He manned an antiaircraft gun during the London blitz before rejoining the U.S. Army, which had by that time declared war and apparently was not being overly meticulous in its background checks.

As an antitank gunner in Tunisia, he earned the Silver Star after he jumped into a burning ammunition-filled halftrack, drove it away from allied soldiers and leapt to safety just before the vehicle exploded. Not long after, he shot down a German Messerschmitt Me-109 fighter that was strafing Allied troops. Col. Millett, who was firing from machine guns mounted on a halftrack, hit the pilot through the windshield.

He had fought his way through Italy, participating in the campaigns at Salerno and Anzio, when his paperwork caught up with him. A superior officer told him that he was being court-martialed for his desertion to Canada and that his punishment was $52. He also received a battlefield promotion for fearlessness in combat.

His letters back home were unfiltered epithets aimed at the chain of command. “Letters were censored in World War II, and the next thing I knew I was standing before the battery commander,” he told the journal Military History. “He told me that the War Department had ordered three times that I be court-martialed. They finally did it to prevent someone from really throwing the book at me later. Then a few weeks later they made me a second lieutenant! I must be the only Regular Army colonel who has ever been court-martialed and convicted of desertion.”

During the Korean War, he received the military’s highest awards for valor, including the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross, for two bayonet charges he led as a company commander in February 1951.

“We had acquired some Chinese documents stating that Americans were afraid of hand-to-hand fighting and cold steel,” he told Military History. “When I read that, I thought, ‘I’ll show you, you sons of bitches!’ ”

He was awarded the Medal of Honor for leading a charge up Hill 180 near Soam-Ni on Feb. 7. When one of his platoons was pinned down by heavy fire, he placed himself at the head of two other platoons and ordered the men to charge up the hill.

According to his Medal of Honor citation, he bayoneted several enemy soldiers and lobbed grenades in their direction while rallying his men to fight. Grenade fragments pierced Col. Millett’s shin, but he refused medical evacuation.

“Despite vicious opposing fire, the whirlwind hand-to-hand assault carried to the crest of the hill,” the Medal of Honor citation read. “His dauntless leadership and personal courage so inspired his men that they stormed into the hostile position and used their bayonets with such lethal effect that the enemy fled in wild disorder.”

Charles H. Cureton, director of Army museums at the U.S. Army Center of Military History, said that Col. Millett’s intimidating, close-combat bayonet charge was “very unusual. By the time you get to the Second World War, the range of lethality of weapons is such that a bayonet charge is very hazardous.”

Lewis Lee Millett was born Dec. 15, 1920, in Mechanic Falls, Maine, and grew up with his mother in South Dartmouth, Mass., after his parents divorced. After his Korean War service, he went through Ranger training at Fort Benning, Ga., and was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division as an intelligence officer. He later was sent to Vietnam as a military adviser to a controversial intelligence program called Phoenix, which killed thousands of suspected Viet Cong and their sympathizers in an effort to destroy the Viet Cong infrastructure in towns and villages.

He said he retired in 1973 because he was convinced that the United States had “quit” in Vietnam. He championed the return of U.S. prisoners of war from Vietnam and then worked as a deputy sheriff in Trenton, Tenn., before settling in the San Jacinto Mountains resort village of Idyllwild, Calif., across the street from an American Legion post.

His first marriage, to the former Virginia Young, ended in divorce. His second wife, Winona Williams Millett, died in 1993. Survivors include three children from his second marriage, L. Lee Millett Jr. and Timothy Millett, both of Idyllwild, and Elizabeth Millett of Nevada; three sisters; a brother; and four grandchildren.

A son from his second marriage, Army Staff Sgt. John Millett, died in the 1985 airplane crash in Gander, Newfoundland, that killed more than 240 U.S. service members returning from a peacekeeping mission in the Middle East.

Reflecting on his career, Col. Millett once told an interviewer: “I believe in freedom, I believe deeply in it. I’ve fought in three wars, and volunteered for all of them, because I believed as a free man, that it was my duty to help those under the attack of tyranny. Just as simple as that.

By Army Lt. Matt Spartz

Editor’s note: Army Lt. Matt Spartz, a lifelong Lombard resident, was deployed to Afghanistan in May with the 101st Airborne Division. A 2008 journalism graduate of University of Illinois, he is submitting occasional reports for the Daily Herald.

Walking out the gate of an outpost for the first time is what I imagine an inmate feels like during his first steps outside of prison; a more literal translation may paint the American outpost more like freedom and the war zone I walked into as more like the prison. But my first time stepping “outside the wire was like waking up to the sunny dawn after a rainstorm.

Finally I was leaving the shadow of dirt-filled, wire Hesco barriers that surround and protect combat outposts. Although I’ve been in Afghanistan for five months, it felt like this was my first day actually in the country. I found myself walking down a regular street next to a field being harvested in the distance. Kids were playing on a blue and white-striped swing set hidden beneath a shady grove. Without the M4 rifle in my hands and the body armor soaking up the warm autumn, I could have been strolling through the Illinois countryside.

I’ve gone from being an artillery platoon leader to being the fire support officer for an infantry company. Instead of overseeing my platoon firing howitzer cannons to support the infantry, I’m now the infantry commander’s expert on planning artillery and air assets for his missions. The lieutenant I’m shadowing who will go on to lead the beloved platoon I trained and fought with for 18 months.

While I shadow his job, our first big task is to meet with the local Afghan official who runs the civil projects I’ll soon be managing.

This official’s reputation is for being one of the few honest Afghans who can set deadlines, stay on budget and keep people accountable. He served us Mountain Dew – his favorite drink – and packaged banana cakes. As the midmorning meeting went on we were brought the usual fare: dishes of chickpeas, raisins (stems included), a portion of an unknown, aquamarine seed with a flowery taste and a spicy mix of crunchy chips. The chai tea was the same tint as Mountain Dew, with heaping spoons of large-grain sugar.

Unlike the reputation of the usual Middle Eastern business meeting, ours consisted of nearly all business talk with what seemed like tangible results. We followed up on the election of the local development shura, and laid out plans for multiple projects. Our interpreter is so fluent in American slang he regularly drops the “F-bomb in perfect context when referring to the Taliban, and can convey our jokes in Pashto to get the entire group laughing.

This meeting will take place weekly in my new job and probably will seem very trivial to some. But that day I left the typical American comfort zone. I connected with regular Afghans working to better their homeland, putting into place the actionable arm of American diplomacy. Here, hope exists to make an impact on the lives of real, poor and war-torn people. Here, and in thousands of these shuras across Afghanistan, over sugary chai with handwritten contracts stamped with purple finger prints, is where the war against extremism will be won.

Times like these makes me feel bad about any time thinking down on this country and these people. If one official like this exists, there must be thousands more. If one exists, there’s a chance this mission will succeed.

Copyright © 2010 Paddock Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

"Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strength. When you go through hardship and decide not to surrender, that is strength."

-Arnold Schwarzenegger

Today in the AP is a good point/counter point on the dichotomy of our contemporary generals. Now, I am a fan of Big Stan. He was a soldier’s officer who was one of the most capable ass kickers and name takers out there today.

But Dave has been my hero since the day I pinned my air assault wings back in ’07 and first heard the tall tales of his leadership.

By KIMBERLY DOZIER, Associated Press Writer Kimberly Dozier, Associated Press Writer – Wed Sep 29, 12:34 am ET

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan – Gen. David Petraeus trudges across a gravel helicopter landing area with his aides, looking purposeful but a bit grim, as he reaches a village outpost in the violent Afghan province of Helmand. He’s here to chart progress, or lack thereof, in a war that’s running at the pace of a horse cart, in a world that runs at the speed of a text message.

The only time the 57-year-old commander’s smile reaches his eyes are a couple of brief moments when he stops and chats with troops. He poses for snapshots that memorialize his first months in command here, fighting a long war that he knows the American public, not to mention the White House, wants done yesterday.

Petraeus does not snap when a reporter asks him a question he has answered 50 times before, and will at least another 50 this year: Do you see progress?

When he replies, the pressure weighing on him shows in his voice — quieter than when he was in charge at U.S. Central Command in Florida, or earlier in Baghdad and Mosul — and it shows as well in the slightly hunched set of his shoulders, leaning on one arm of the chair.

There is none of the showmanship described in magazine profiles that sketched a megawatt four-star commander who outmaneuvers his adversaries with political and media savvy.

Instead, there is a solemn professor, patiently getting through the next order of business in a day scheduled down to the minute. To answer that “progress” question, he asks his aide for a stack of charts, leafs through to the chosen page, and then walks the reporter through his vision of the war, like a tough calculus problem he keeps having to explain over and over.

Calm, calculating professor. That’s how this war-of-waiting is going to be won. He is the professional officer’s officer. He has kept Stan’s name on the plans he implemented, and that are successful. GEN Petraeus has that sixth political sense to navigate these murky waters.

His leadership is something to be modeled and aspired to. The next time we feel down in our daily grind, just think of the last 10 years of 15-hour days this guy has gone through. GEN Petraeus’ fight is emblematic of the war itself. In his own words:

“I think we’ve pushed it right to the limit,” the general says, “and we stay there.”

He calls the pace “sustainable,” but says quietly, as he shakes hands, “there’s not much of a reserve.”

"Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strength. When you go through hardship and decide not to surrender, that is strength."

-Arnold Schwarzenegger

Just when we thought we could leave…they pull us back in.

TEHRAN, Iran, (AP) — Iranian forces crossed into neighboring Iraq and killed 30 fighters from a group it says was involved in last week’s bombing of a military parade, state TV reported Sunday.Gen. Abdolrasoul Mahmoudabadi of the elite Revolutionary Guards said the “terrorists” were killed on Saturday in a clash “beyond the border” and that his forces were still in pursuit of two men who escaped the ambush.

While Iran has said in the past it would target armed groups on Iraqi soil this is a rare case of it actually admitting to an attack.

Iraqi officials have complained in the past about Iranian artillery shelling its northern mountainous region where armed Kurdish opposition groups have taken refuge.

An explosion during a military parade in the town of Mahabad, in Iran’s northwestern Kurdish region, killed 12 women and children on Wednesday.

Iran has already blamed the attack on Kurdish separatists who have fought Iranian forces in the area for years, but most Kurdish groups condemned the attack and no one has so far claimed responsibility for it.

Iran has also blamed Israel, the U.S. and supporters of Iraq’s previous regime for supporting the Kurdish groups.

The parade was one of several held around the country to mark the 30th anniversary of the start of the Iran-Iraq war.

The city of Mahabad is home to 190,000 people — most of them Kurds and Sunni Muslims. Iran is predominantly Shiite.

Government forces in Iraq, Iran and Turkey have all periodically battled with the Kurdish minorities straddling their borders. They fear the groups are seeking to unite territory in all three nations to form an independent Kurdish homeland.

The most active rebellion is in southeastern Turkey, where the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, has fought for greater autonomy and civil rights since 1984 in a battle that has killed tens of thousands of people. They have sometimes operated from bases across the border in northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, sparking a large-scale cross-border Turkish military campaign in February 2008 that involved airstrikes and ground troops.

The group in Iran is a wing of the PKK and also sometimes operates inside friendly territory in Iraqi Kurdistan. Like Turkey, Iran’s military has attacked their bases on the other side of the border with occasional artillery strikes.

Inside Iran, their fight has mostly involved occasional roadside bombs and other attacks targeting security forces. Iranian authorities also linked the rebels to a terrorist cell whose members were arrested last month on suspicion of plotting to assassinate officials.

I’m seeing visions of a future mission: screenline. Now that’s a core competency I can get excited about.

h/t to Starbuck. Must-see internet TV. What sayeth you, Screaming Eagle?

60 minutes

Danger Room reports:

“More troops than ever are flipping tractor tires, lobbing 50-pound kettle bells and conquering the Three Bars of Death in an effort to become “tougher, faster, hard-bodied freedom fighter[s].” But some of them are also working out until they puke, faint or suffer permanent organ damage. Now, a team of medical researchers have a message for recruits: You’re probably not fit enough for CrossFit.”

“Our number one concern is growing anecdotal evidence of injuries,” CHAMP medical director Col. Francis O’Connor tells Danger Room. “Military leaders are interested in knowing how to handle these programs, and want more information, and we just don’t have adequate solid data.”

I’ll admit it: I drink the CrossFit kool-aid. I gain more in a month of CrossFit than in a year of Army PT. Soldiers, Marines, Airmen, and Sailors do CrossFit because it works.

Before I got on active duty, I worked out at a CrossFit Affiliate Gym in Oswego. My class included people over the age of fifty, people who had more than 20 pounds to lose, and people with no knowledge or experience in performing the fundamental movements of CrossFit. On Christmas leave, I worked out with CrossFit Will County again, and saw how the same flabby, middle-aged people I had known in the summertime quickly transformed into some hardcore civilians.

My point here is not that there is anecdotal evidence to support CrossFit, but rather that when CrossFit is properly programmed, taught, and executed, it works very well. It is universally scalable to all strength, flexibility, and conditioning levels.

The problems I’ve faced in my unit stem from leaders being unable to tell their soldiers what crossfit actually is. As a result, people print out workouts they find online with little to no guidance as to how a workout schedule should be programmed, or how to do the prescribed movements. Without proper instruction on technique, programming, and recovery, it’s no surprise that soldiers occasionally break themselves doing the workouts. The solution, as I see it, starts with sending at least one leader per platoon to get CrossFit certified (not the Squadron S3, as has happened in my mighty squadron).

The Army has a different plan in mind. Rather than certifying people in CrossFit, there is doctrinal push back evidenced in TC 3-22.20 Physical Readiness Training. I encourage the readership to peruse through this training circular. There are some decent movements, but here’s what there isn’t:

• Moving heavy weight overhead
• Bodyweight exercises with more than 10 repetitions
• Soft tissue work
• Rope climbs

A sample workout – Conditioning Drill 3 (p. 9-20):

1o repetitions each

1.“Y” SQUAT

2. SINGLE-LEG DEAD LIFT

3. SIDE-TO-SIDE KNEE LIFTS

4. FRONT KICK ALTERNATE TOE TOUCH

5. TUCK JUMP

6. STRADDLE-RUN FORWARD AND BACKWARD

7. HALF-SQUAT LATERALS

8. FROG JUMPS FORWARD AND BACKWARD

9. 1/4-TURN JUMP

10. SQUAT JUMP

You’ve.Got.To.Be.Kidding. But wait, there’s more.

From page 5-5:

Corrective Action

5-15. When exercise is used for corrective action, it is often performed incorrectly, promoting overtraining

syndrome, and overuse injuries. Often corrective action mimics “smoke sessions,” punishing Soldiers with little

or no corrective value. Consideration must be given to the number of times per day exercises are used for

corrective action for individual Soldiers and groups of Soldiers to avoid the cumulative effect and limit the

potential for overtraining syndrome. The following guidelines should be followed when employing exercise as

corrective action.

 Only the following exercises should be selected for performance of corrective action.

 Rower.

 Squat bender.

 Windmill.

 Prone row.

 Push-up.

 V-up.

 Leg tuck and twist.

 Supine bicycle.

 Swimmer.

 8-count push-up.

 Only one of the above exercises may be selected for each corrective action.

 The number of repetitions should not exceed FIVE for any one of the exercises listed above.

You read that right. FIVE repetitions.

I can’t link to the manual because it’s restricted to AKO users, but high school football teams have more intense conditioning programs than the United States Army. PRT is pathetic. There’s a reason the most elite warriors use CrossFit and its derivatives, to include Military Athlete. The reason is that the workouts increase strength and work capacity while building the warrior spirit. They’re challenging, they’ll make you puke, and they’ll mess you up if you’re not careful.

Whoever wrote this circular was more concerned with injuries than he or she needed to be. Physical training is supposed to be intense. It should challenge both the body and the mind. The Army is mitigating risk at the wrong level, and seriously needs to HTFU on the matter of Physical Training. What’s more is the disconnect between the Army’s PME program and doctrine on this issue. CGSC has Iron Major CrossFit, and West Point has Black and Gold CrossFit. It’s time that senior leaders had a pow-wow with CrossFit HQ, the NSCA, and Rob Shaul to give the Army the physical training regimen it so desperately needs.

By Army Lt. Matt Spartz | Guest Columnist
Published: 9/15/2010 12:00 AM

Editor’s note: Army Lt. Matt Spartz, a lifelong Lombard resident, was deployed to Afghanistan in May with the 101st Airborne Division. A 2008 journalism graduate of University of Illinois, he is submitting occasional reports for the Daily Herald.

It is not my place in this war to tell you about blazing fire fights. It is not my place to illustrate the successes and failures of civil reconstruction projects. It is not for me to recount the lore of secret operations or the capture of terrorist cell leaders that make blockbuster screen plays.

My stories are harder to tell in certain ways, and probably harder to read. I can say not much more than that about the daily lives of our average soldiers. The plight of the hard-working fighting man is not all bombs and bullets.

There are soldiers in this war who have it much, much harder than I do. There are soldiers in this war who have it much easier, too. But the most uncommon trait in the most common soldier is to get up every day and do his job, at every hour of every day, of every day of every week, of every month until you’re relieved of your duty, with the expectation of iron resolve and a scientific attention to detail in every task.

The enemy doesn’t care if you’re in the shower. He’ll still drop mortars on your outpost. Then soldiers go out and look for him, getting dirtier still.

It doesn’t matter if it’s nine o’clock at night. Sometimes that is when your work day begins – again – and you don’t finish until seven the next morning. But four hours of sleep later duty calls, and the soldier will be back in a guard tower or at a radio monitoring air craft movements.

The enemy doesn’t care that it’s the Fourth of July or Sept. 11 or Eid. The Army can’t afford to care that it’s the weekend. Every single day someone will be on patrol; every single day reports have to be briefed.

I imagine it’s like permanently living “at the office,” and working for each of the 10 different companies that rent the building.

This isn’t the war I learned about in grade school. American history books atone for 7,000 Civil War soldiers lost in 20 minutes of one battle. Theaters pack with summer movies about storming the beaches of Europe, some units suffering 100 percent casualties.

Today one can see soldiers reading “Band of Brothers” in their spare time, ever wondering whether thier daily goings on will have some legacy for those of future armies.

Our legacy won’t be of epic battles, but of the individual soldier’s ability to accomplish any mission he is asked to do. An infantryman runs and rucks hundreds of miles of hardened terrain, shoots thousands of bullets, and develops orders to close in and destroy the enemy. Here, he is told to build a well for a village, so he does it.

It doesn’t matter that he hasn’t been trained in construction or legal contracts.

A field artillery officer learns the ballistics of shooting unguided missiles, and calculates the effects of weather and the curvature of the earth. Here he is told to develop plans for the building of permanent living quarters, so he does it.

It doesn’t matter that he has no engineering or construction background.

Robert E. Lee took personal responsibility for the loss at Gettysburg revealing “All this has been my fault. I asked more of men than should have been asked of them.”

I believe the modern American soldier takes pride in being asked more of him than should be asked, because in this war the modern American soldier has to.

"Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strength. When you go through hardship and decide not to surrender, that is strength."

-Arnold Schwarzenegger

Worthwhile essay in SWJ on Decentralized Leadership. Starbuck wonders how we get there:

“I’m enthusiastic, yet somewhat skeptical of calls for more decentralized leadership within the Army, such as those examined in the book “The Starfish and the Spider“. For starters, modern technology has given us the ability to micromanage on an unprecedented scale. For example, the Army’s new Digital Training Management System could theoretically allow senior leaders to examine the training records of platoons or even individual soldiers. There’s also the issue of the Army’s organizational culture. Leaders can often think “in their intellectual comfort zone”, usually based on their experience at more junior grades. This can unintentionally result in micromanagement as well.

Finally, As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, and the Army moves to a more stable garrison environment—filled with well-structured problems—it will be even more difficult to foster a culture of innovation and decentralization. We will have lost the ill-structured environment which allows “leadership”, as defined by Col. Parapone, to flourish.

How do we make true leadership—as opposed to command and management—a reality?”

Let’s consult Don Vandergriff, military historian, and leader developer philosopher extraordinaire:

“We must understand what causes us to comply, even today to the Anglo-American method of central, hierarchical planning and tight control cycles (“red tape”) that causes mistrust, while maintaining a centralized personnel system that causes undue competition between officers and NCOs, when trust is needed. This of course also influenced the manner in which strategic planning developed in our corporations and the Allied armies over a hundred years ago in the Industrial Age, but still lays the foundation for our culture today. This kind of planning can be applied in a stable environment. But war is turbulent and this form of bureaucratic strategic long term planning is inadequate to counter the often fast and unpredictable changes in the environment.”

“The Prussians, then Germans began their cultural reform toward Auftragstaktik after the October 1806 battle of Jena when Napoleon achieved an incredible victory over the Prussians-he destroyed their Army and overran their country in six weeks. By 1809, the great Prussian reformer Gerhard Scharnhorst came to the conclusion that the commanders behind the battlefield, due to the “fog of war”, were unable to obtain an accurate view of what was really happening at the front and in the chaos of combat. Those who knew what was actually happening were actually the subordinate commanders and officers in the field (Please read the book The Enlightened Soldier: Scharnhorst and the Militarische Gesellschaft in Berlin 1801-1805 by Dr. Chuck White, Military Historian for U.S. Army Forces Command)”

“As a battle is always plagued by uncertainties and is characterized by unforeseen situations, the Prussians tried to find a concept of planning – and a system of command – that would ensure flexibility. This system should ensure that commanders in the field would react quickly to the situation at hand and take the initiative independently and without first consulting higher command to exploit an unexpected favorable situation or respond immediately to an unfavorable development. The result of this requirement was the Auftragstaktik or what we call Mission Command. The Prussians institutionalized it in 1870, on the verge of the Franco-Prussian War, after years of experimentation.

The Auftragstaktik is not only about delegating decisions to subordinate commanders; it implies a whole set of measures that had to be developed during the implementation of this concept. In fact it required the whole German Army to be reorganized, a process comparable to re-engineering the Army today if we are to truly practice Mission Command.  Applying Auftragstaktik meant that the overall commander would formulate the broad goals that had to be achieved by the officers in the field and that he gave a relatively large amount of latitude in the manner the desired goals were to be achieved. In other words: the goals were known, what had to be achieved was known (the outcome), but how they should be achieved was left to the subordinate commanders [emphasis added]”

“To implement this concept the Germans understood that first officers and men should be trained before they could carry it out successfully. This took years to implement because the idea has to cascade down to the lowest subaltern, the sergeant. The form of the learning model they used was called the Applicatory Method. The highest attainment of conducting Mission Command and taught through the applicatory method was what Frederick the Great called the coup d’oiel  – the ability to size up a tactical situation at a glance and, within seconds, begin to give the necessary orders.

Coup d’oiel  is, in the blinking of an eye, being able to determine the general tactical situation.  Warfare against Hybrid opponents is creating circumstances never seen before.  As a result, innovation cannot be a step or series of steps that leader to a static outcome, but rather as a continuous ceaseless process of change and adaptation impelled not merely by technology, but also by the nature of the battlefield and of the enemy. Today’s combat offers fleeting opportunities that disappear quickly if leaders—from general to rifleman—fail to grasp them.

Generally associated with the late 19th century Prussian general Julius von Verdy du Vernois, the applicatory method sought to teach tactics by means of problems.  Some of the problems were simple – the tactical decision game (Planspiel or Planübung) was based on a  sketch map and a one or two page scenario .  Others were more complicated – the rigid wargame contained enough charts and tables to gladden the heart of any present day board wargamer and the staff ride could last for days.  Whatever particular techniques were used – in most cases there was a mixture of many – the applicatory method was based on a solid consensus about the teaching of tactics.  Tactics was not a science to be taught be means of theory, or a simple task to be explained by lists of rule or acronyms.  Rather, it was an art to be learned by doing.

The characteristic of the Auftragstaktik, therefore, was the great amount of attention given, during the training of officers and men, to quickly assess and judge developments during the battle and how to grasp the initiative.  Mission Command demands that when necessary, all arms — combat or maneuver support — as well as civilians, should coordinate and act together even without direction from above.  The result will be an evolving command style that forces leaders and commanders to focus their attention downward and outward onto the battlefield.  The limited information flow of information up the chain of command will compel them to see for themselves, to lead from the front.

Today’s learning approach, as well as our culture follows an entirely highly centralized model—control from the top downward, from Army to battalion, company/team and platoon levels, even at the Soldier level, are touched by the technological ability to see all through information technology laid over an Industrial age force structure both in the operating and generating forces.  This “schematism” forces commanders at every level in our centralized system to inevitably focus not on what is happening on the battlefield but rather on providing information to those above them in the chain of command. It is a culture that is focused inward, vice outward.”

“A result of this system of overall or mission oriented planning was that tactical decisions for the greater part could be left to the operational level and so the desired flexibility was achieved. Furthermore, battle orders could be short with a remorseless concentration on essentials because the more detailed planning of actions could be left to the commanders in the field.

Mission Command is a policy concept that assumes the willingness to delegate. This concept, however, places high demands on the organization. It can only be successfully implemented when the Army can meet the following conditions:

1. Be able to formulate its goals clearly and keep to the essentials;
2. Have well-trained officers and subordinates (officer and NCO), able to understand the intention of the high command;
3. Have well-trained officers and subordinates (officer and NCO), able to judge the situation quickly and opt to take the initiative;
4. A willingness to cooperate;
5. Have a transparent and flattened organizational structure-less overhead;
6. Have a good parallel communication structure;
7. Possess a shared standardized system by which “frontline” situations are evaluated;
8. Strenuous accessions system;
9. Flexible, decentralized personal system;
10. Principle-based doctrine.

In present the development of junior and mid-level officers and NCOs in these ideas, and giving them the freedom to act accordingly, is quite often neglected. The common practice is that taking the initiative is permitted as long as it is successful. If it’s not successful, then, at the very least, demotion can be expected. By contrast, in the German Army taking the initiative – whatever the result – was appreciated but not taking the initiative was punished!”

Spartz, I’m interested to hear how your ‘stan experience matches up with the grand capstone vision.

What I’m dealing with right now in training hardly encourages initiative. In fact, it makes initiative irrelevant. I have exactly 2 weeks between now and February to train my platoon as I see fit. Why so little time? BDE has its training priorities. My question is this: if BDE has tasks that it wants its Companies and Troops to complete, does it not trust the commanders to complete these tasks? Deployment drives the BDE, which then drives the training. Everything is backdated from the ready point, then chopped into mandated training iterations to ensure the unit is up on all of its essential tasks. The problem is that the small unit leaders don’t have a say in the training priorities, and in the situation I find myself in, we also have little say in how the training is conducted.

Starbuck has his doubts, but if the right people are in charge of the post-Iraq reset, we can finally shift away from BDE specified training, and give company commanders enough latitude to train their soldiers in a manner consistent with their organizations’ mission statements. Devolution of planning power (creating an “ill-structured” environment) is an experiment worth considering.

By now, everyone at the CO/TRP level and maybe a few rebels on BN staff have read the now infamous Powerpoint Kinda Sucks article that got a reserve Colonel fired. For those of you keeping score at home, the following will get you fired from your position in the Army:

• Speaking to the press without permission
• Speaking to the press with permission, and without discretion.

The following are still safe:

• Brief your Phase IV plan using a few bullet points, and something reminiscent of a “Road to War” slide.
• Place a combat outpost in an isolated valley among hostile villages

Andrew Tilghman, for the Army Times:

“Army Reserve Col. Lawrence Sellin has no regrets about publishing a rant about the military’s overreliance on PowerPoint presentations — despite the fact it got him fired from his job at joint command headquarters in Afghanistan.

“I’m not sorry at all. I think there are a lot of people who feel this way, even on [General David] Petraeus’ own staff,” Sellin said in a telephone interview with Army Times. “There were colonels who came up to me and shook hands and said, ‘You were right.’”

Sellin, 61, who deployed previously to both Iraq and Afghanistan, lost his job with the staff supporting Petraeus, the commander of the International Security and Assistance Force, on Aug. 26, two days after his 680-word op-ed piece was published by the United Press International wire service.

In it, Sellin skewered the joint command as a bloated and bumbling bureaucracy.

“For headquarters staff, war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information,” Sellin wrote.

Officially, the Army said he violated rules requiring coordination with public affairs officials before making statements to the media.”

So who is this Col. Sellin anyway?

“When not on active duty, Sellin lives in Finland and does defense contracting work involving C4ISR technology – command, control, communications, computing, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. He has a doctoral degree in biophysics and Army branch qualifications in Infantry, Special Forces and medical services.”

I’m just a dumb LT, but it seems to me that this COL might know a thing or two about communication, information, and warfighting. This also isn’t the first time a high ranking officer has criticized the Army’s reliance on PowerPoint.

“Long before I wrote my controversial article, I wrote a private e-mail to my supervisor,” Sellin wrote in an e-mail to Army Times. “I explained that for six weeks I had added no value to the war effort. I was having difficulty justifying to myself being at ISAF Joint Command (IJC) and being away from my employer and family.”

This, Sellin said, “was a not so subtle plea for something meaningful to do.” He got no response, he says, and “followed up that e-mail by sending him a high-level description of how business management methodologies could be applied to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of IJC.”