Mission command

But what we're really talking about here is extending, I think the Army would say, extending influence beyond the chain of command.

Well, speaking of doctoral terms, it sounds like what you're talking about is kind of textbook mission command stuff.

It is, 100%, Charlie.

And that's, you know, I'm glad you brought that up.

I was a 03 in the United States Army.

My battalion commander just acknowledged the sit-rep every night.

and just let me run it." And I was like, this place, Mission Command's like, I have more autonomy here than I've had my entire military career.

And that's what keeps leaders in the organization, is they have the autonomy to lead their formations.

And I reached out to him saying, I'd love to work with you.

Ex-Navy myself, and really liked the idea of intent-based leadership, which is similar but not quite the same as mission command.

And so for the past five years, I've been working with David, predominantly in Australia and New Zealand.

When he comes down here, I've shared a stage with him a few times and worked with clients in the fire service and police and tech startups, implementing how we change the dynamic of the culture so it moves from permission-based to intent-based.

I'm curious if we could talk about that,

the difference between your view between Mission Command and IBL.

I just want to hear the difference.

What do you

I think that the Australian professional education is right on track.

I mean, you're looking at maneuver warfare, actually mission command more than maneuver.

Because to be clear, a lot of people confuse mechanized warfare with maneuver warfare.

They're not the same thing.

Have I got the right things in place? Have I coordinated with the right people? Have I spoken to the right people? Have I made sure people below me know the plan? Do they know if I get taken out, they can do the plan? Simple stuff like that, that we can do.

But also then what is the wider plan? How do you fit into that? You know, and one of the things that certainly you'll be familiar with, but mission command is, Mission Command is a two-way conversation.

You can only give it to somebody if they have the situational awareness and the ability to hold it.

If they don't, you're just setting somebody up for failure.

Like if you're the breaking platoon commander in a battle group attack, that is new the time that you want to be starting to experiment and risk failure.

That is when you want to have...

And this is probably a good point, which is that the mission command, let somebody run versus pull them back a bit and restrict.

That doesn't mean completely cut off agency in what they're doing.

Yeah, this-- So there's an interesting connection here.

One of our guests and one of our friends of the show is Don Vandergriff, who wrote about mission command, and he's written, written several books about mission command.

And we do know those have been translated, and your war fighters are using that document, and you just brought it up that they're having an autonomous approach to fighting a war.

By the way, that is what John Boyd looked at.

Mm-hmm

...

he looked at, uh, a lot, a lot of German World War I, World War II tactics and, and, and lessons from their professional military education and saw that they were using mission command approaches, right? Which is small autonomous teams, uh, given intent and all that.

That is happening right now in Ukraine.

Yeah, I mean, it's really hard because we as an army, I mean, our line of work, it's pretty complex, right? And we often do some challenging and dangerous things that cause leaders at all levels to sort of feel like they've got to be in more control as opposed to less control for all the right reasons.

But I would say that mission command as an approach to how we want to lead is still largely aspirational in our army.

It's still... a stretch goal.

And I would say maybe a third of our army at any one time because our army is constantly changing because we rotate leaders every two years in commands most of the time.

We rotate soldiers every three years most of the time.

And so our teams and our leaders and our combinations of humans that are actually out there delivering the climate that mission command happens or not in, are constantly changing.

So it's not that the army says, this is the way we want to lead and then publishes doctrine and that it magically happens.

Mission command is a approach to how we lead and it doesn't happen by accident.

entry.Gil, so something you and August talked about earlier was this idea of operating in a decentralized manner, right? So the story features junior leaders exercising enormous initiative from afar, and you've got, you know, this commander who expects Rangers to step in for their fallen comrades and assume, you know, larger responsibilities kinda in real time.

How do you think about mission command? For the audience, mission command is just the idea of operating in a, in a decentralized manner.

But how do you think about mission command and risk tolerance in a contested environment where you may not be able to talk to your higher headquarters?

Yeah.

Yeah, we, we talked a lot-- This, I'm going back in the way back machine again, but we talked a lot in 10th Group just about, you know, communicating.