Mission Command in Multinational Forces Overview

Hi, good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. How's everybody doing? Yeah, of course, good day to be here. So Great Penfield, Assistant Dean for Faculty and Strategic Initiatives, and this is the ongoing series we have for doctoral research presentations. Typically we do those for faculty who have completed their terminal degree and wish to share the research that they've done en route to that academic honor. But in this case we actually have a student here at CGSOC. who is pursuing his terminal degree, a PhD in Ireland. So this is a chance to not only hear where he is now, but perhaps provide some insights to further his research as he continues on. So first off, Gavin has been an infantry officer in the Irish Army for 21 years, currently in 9 Bravo, which I see some of his colleagues here. You're skipping out on the brew bedroom for that presentation? Yeah, yeah, I hear you. All right, so hey, he's got a master's degree in political communication from Dublin City University, and he's currently working on his Ph.D. at the University College in Cork. And it's on this particular topic, the application of mission command in multinational forces, which, given the curriculum here at CGSOC, is very apropos, and I think there's a lot that we can add to his research, along with his insights that he's gleaned to date. So I think this will be a great presentation. He has served on not just in a variety of infantry positions within the Irish Army. He's also supported the United Nations three different times. He's done that once in Chad, twice to Lebanon, and he's also done the European Union training mission in Mali. So he has certainly gone out and practiced what we learned theoretically here and gone out and shown that he can do it. All right, so without further ado, let's turn it over to Gavin Edgerton. Thanks, sir. Thanks very much. Can you hear me okay? Hear me at the back? So today, thanks to that introduction, you're well aware I'm going to talk about the application of Mission Command and Multinational Forces. It's a topic I'm very passionate about. It's something, obviously, as I've explained, I'm undertaking a PhD in, so I've committed a lot of time to it. But it's something I've always been interested in, and I'll explain a little bit about that background in a minute. I hope to provide some food for thought today to everyone that's taking the time to come. And I'm keen to discuss any points I raise either at the end where we have some questions and answers, offline afterwards or indeed online if you want to look me up and engage. I'm quite keen to reach out and meet people with a similar mindset to this. Before we start I just want to point out that anything I say is my own views, not necessarily representative of the Irish Defence Forces or indeed the US Army. So any conclusions or any leaps I make, just please take them with a pinch of salt. The agenda for today, very simply I'm going to just do a little introduction to the concept of Mission Command and my own background with it. I'll clear very early on, get some definitions out of the way just to get the stuffy stuff done early. I'll then do a brief history of Mission Command. I'll talk about some barriers to Mission Command in general. I'll talk about multinational command and how other barriers arise or some of them existing barriers are actually accentuated by that. And then I'll go into findings so far from the research that I've done. So by way of introduction, Mission Command is a concept we're all very well aware of. The US Army has doctrine on it that I'm going to talk about. But just to get a feel for the room, a little bit of audience participation, could I get a raise of hands, somebody who has had a boss that micromanaged them, someone that really stepped on them, gave you very, very specific tasks, gave you no freedom of action, now keep your hands up if you enjoyed that. Okay, I didn't think so. Put your hands up if you've had a boss that gave you very clear guidance and intent and then gave you the freedom of action to carry out that intent. Now keep your hands up if you like that. Okay, so we're all in good company and as we go forward just bear that in mind. Mission Command itself is decentralized decision-making, empowers subordinates operating within the sphere of their commander's intent to show disciplined initiative and to exploit opportunities in battle that arise at the heat of the moment. In other words trusting the views and opinions of the commander on the spot. In simple terms it's telling someone what to do but not how to do it. So I'll just talk about my own introduction to Mission Command because I think it's relevant to understand my motivation for studying this. So as a young cadet Learning platoon attack training, we were taught to emphasize intent, to give clear instructions but not too much detail, and to empower your section commanders to carry out your intent without getting too involved in their business. Again, what to do, not how to do it. However, it was after I got commissioned where I realized the importance of mission command. And a penny dropped for me when I was organizing a field training exercise, and I was telling my company commander where he was going to be accommodated. And he said, no, no, I'm not accompanying you on the exercise. I won't be there overnight at any phase. I was shocked. I expected him to be there to manage me. There was a lot of soldiers involved. I was very young. But he just said to me, Gavin, I trust you to make decisions in my absence and to do the right thing. And that was a lightbulb moment for me. The penny really dropped for me and I went, OK. This is mission command. This is the type of command they talked about in the cadet school. Obviously we weren't using the phrase mission command back then, but this was about being trusted to make decisions when your boss isn't around. Now I have experience, as was alluded to, at the start of four multinational peace support operations, and I witnessed mission command being employed in different ways to varying degrees across all those missions. But it was with EUTM Mali where I had a little bit of an epiphany and it provoked me to study in detail. So I had 82 trainers from 22 different countries. reporting to me and we encouraged and fostered a pretty strong mission command mindset where we'd empower a person to run a course, we would resource them with all the training resources and the instructors that they needed and then provide guidance as required, but not micromanage them. And my boss, who was a very big believer in mission command, treated me the same. Halfway through my deployment we changed bosses and the new boss came from a different country and he was a micromanager. It's just his style, but it completely changed the atmosphere in the camp, it changed what we were doing. And Dark Cloud... hungovers. So it asked me the question how come one commander from one country might have the exact same people from all these other countries working for him or her but can completely change the command climate and the dynamic. And that led me to ask the question how can mission command be successfully employed in a multinational force and that became my research question for my PhD. And my subordinate research questions fall out of that and they have shaped the research that I've conducted since I began this a number of years ago. So the PhD in pursuing In terms of the primary research that I'm conducting, I've done interviews with four generals, and I'll introduce those later when I talk about some of the findings. And those generals were selected because they have commanded multinational forces in the past, and they cover the spectrum of operations from crisis management or stability up to large-scale combat operations. I've picked three case studies similarly covering crisis management operations, so stability operation, counterinsurgency slash war fighting in Afghanistan, and desert storm. With the ISAF example, I'm looking at the British Army's deployment in 2006 to Helmand Province and how that British Army battle group integrated into a Canadian brigade, which was part of an American division as part of the overall force. And within that, we had Danish elements as part of that organisation. And in Desert Storm, because it's a large-scale combat operation, Mission Command was practised during it. I want to see how the British First Armoured Division interacted with 7 Corps. And thanks to being located in Levenworth right now, I have access to some retirees from that conflict. So I just want to talk a little bit about command because we talk a lot about command and leadership. The conversations tend to hover around leadership a little bit more. There's far more written on leadership and people are very good at articulating their leadership style or their philosophy, but maybe not as much as command. So just to set the scene a little bit, like military command, particularly when exercising a time of war, is a very unique form of authority and responsibility. It's not equaled in civilian life. There's no comparison to it. The decisions made by commanders result in subordinates killing or indeed being killed. So then the unique challenge of command is basically asking people to do something that they wouldn't normally do in a normal setting, something that's not natural to them. To do this, commanders are empowered with the authority and responsibility, and they leverage that power, both positional and personal, to get the effects from people. So if we take that as command, admission command is obviously leveraging the power that you've been given, and authority and responsibility are very, very key words in that. So a good definition from the U.S. doctrine is that command is the authority that a commander in the armed forces... lawfully exercises over subordinates by virtue of rank or assignment. So just focus on authority and subordinates in that definition. Anyone King, who wrote this fantastic book, Command, the 21st century general, simply says command is decision making. So therefore, if we're talking about mission command, we're talking about devolving command, we have to consider that we're devolving decision making authority. And then command and control, you'll often hear command mentioned with control, and indeed, it's a warfighting function. I understand in the past, mission command had briefly had a cameo as a a war fighting function and then was relegated back to being a concept. So the exercise of authority and direction by a properly designated commander over the assigned and attached forces in the accomplishment of the mission. Crucially, mission command is the US Army's approach to command and control. So that implies that there are other approaches to command and control and not all approaches to command and control are created equally. Some might be better than others. I would posit that mission command is a superior concept for command and control. So does that mean then that one version of command and control could be... Leverage an advantage over your enemy if you have a superior command and control system. Well, Mark van Creveld thinks so, and he says a superior command system may serve as a force multiplier and compensate for weaknesses in other areas, such as numerical inferiority. So we all understand Boyd's OODA loop and deciding and acting quicker than your enemy. If you've got a superior command system where the commander on the spot, the person at the coalface of the operation, can decide and act quicker than the enemy can, then you're going to have an advantage even if they are numerically superior. Mission Command. I'd just like to open up to the class. Anyone want to give me a definition of Mission Command in their own words? Anyone brave enough? I'm going to ask Alex Rupert in a second if no one gives me the definition. Okay, Alex, over to you. It's baseline the overall task with clear intent and constraint. So setting the left-right limits for what you can, cannot do, and ultimately what is to be accomplished and giving the... subordinate freedom to make decisions as long as they fit between the constraints you've established. Yeah, very well put. And I would say we'll see that the U.S. definition is probably not as nice as that in a second. But essentially, by pushing authority downwards, what formation commanders are hoping to achieve is that they devolve important decision-making authority to the subordinate commanders, reducing the time it takes to decide and act in critical situations. So that allows the commander on the spot to seize and retain the initiative and resulting in an agile and adaptable force. And as I said, hopefully quicker and more agile than your enemy. And in popular modern times, it makes mission command a very widely pursued command philosophy. So there's the US definition. Alex covered all that and what he said a moment ago. So mission command is the army's approach to command and control that empowers subordinates. decision-making and decentralized execution appropriate to the situation. Now I've always loved those words appropriate to the situation because that's a little get out of jail free card for whoever wrote this. It's like it might not always be appropriate. So just have a little think to yourself. Is there some types of operations you've been on where mission command definitely was not appropriate for that particular type of operation? So just think about maybe a breaching operation. Do you want to maneuver units passing through a breach to show a lot of freedom and initiative during that or do you want it to be tightly controlled? A passage of lines operation, very... tightly controlled by those conducting it. So mission command isn't always appropriate and actually it's not a binary choice okay command actually exists on a spectrum or a continuum. On one extreme or one side you have mission command to the extreme leadership style of that would be laissez-faire complete hands-off do what you want. On the other end of the spectrum you have detailed command characterized by detailed orders tight control a lot of checks a lot of communication merely people trying to eliminate risk and to ensure certainty but the extreme of that would be the micromanager which we we've all recognized at the start that we have we have met those um so just to use a sporting analogy and i wish i came up with this i stole this idea of rupert smith he's one of the generals i interviewed and he said he showed people a clip before 30 seconds of american football and 30 seconds of rugby to explain the difference between mission command and detailed command so one side you have a sport that has a lot of plays that have to be rehearsed thoroughly and people have to learn them off. It's very tightly controlled. There's even control measures marked on the pitch. On the other side, you have a sport that involves a lot of initiative at the lower levels and it takes players to spot a weakness and exploit it. However, the truth can be said about either of those sports that there is control measures in rugby, there's rules and there is players that are rehearsed and in American football, certain players are encouraged to use their initiative. So it's not a black and white binary choice. but instead a spectrum. And where you operate on that spectrum at any one time is a reflection of the situation, the troops under your command, external conditions of the operating environment. It's not always a case of, no, we will mission command today and that's it. So I'm aware there's a few historians in the room, so I'm very nervous about the next few slides. But I don't have the time to spend two hours talking about the history of Auschwitz Taktik and mission command. I'm also aware there's Germans in the room. I just pronounced something incorrectly. But I will discuss, because I think it's important to gain a little bit of context. context as to where mission command came from. And I think the context of this defeat that I'm going to talk about is very important to understand where it emerged. So in October 1806, Napoleon defeated the Prussian army at the twin battles of Jena and Arstad. Frederick William I's forces lost 40,000 casualties to the French 12,000. The devastating defeat left Prussia subservient to France and probably the most proud army up to that time, certainly German. and Frederick the Great's reign was defeated and left humiliated. So following this period, a deep reflection was undertook by Prussia. And instead of just sulking about it, they sat down and wrote down what went wrong. And I think that's an important lesson to learn. And what they noticed was that there was two different command styles at play. So on one side, Frederick William I had micromanaged. He had a very top-down approach. He centralised things like his use of cavalry and artillery was very centralised. And he centralised control as well with decisions being made by him. Napoleon was a very top-down approach. Aeolian, although a one-man show in planning battle, did exercise some decentralisation in terms of empowering corps commanders, in particular giving them the assets that they needed to use and trusting them. He was commanding by directive saying, this is what I want you to achieve for this particular part of the operation, and then they went to achieve it. So in the period following this... As it was a very severe shock defeat, it kick-started a period of reformation and transformation. And the man on the left was appointed to spearhead the reform and his name is Major General Gerhard von Scharnhorst. Under Scharnhorst the Prussian army saw significant reforms and rebirths. And these reforms occurred during a period of industrial and social revolution in Europe. And that's important because the raw material in terms of personnel coming into the army at that time improved. Increasingly better educated people were joining, so NCOs and officers. had a far better education behind them and the process of purchasing a commission was put to the wayside. So these better educated and better NCOs, better educated NCOs and officers, that facilitated more decentralised authority, increasing as the decades went on. The man on the right is Helmut von Malk. He's famous for defeating the Austrians and the French, but also more famous for being an early adopter, advocate and champion of Outstrike Taktik or Mission Command. He's regarded by many as the father of Mission Command. Probably more fair to call him the stepfather of mission command because Shamir Hurst initiated the whole thing but he came in his writings, in his daily life and in every memorandum he communicated he encouraged people to use Outstrike Tactic. He was an early adopter of technology such as Railroad and Telegraph and again realizing that the expanding increasing size of battlefields required a decentralized approach to command. During his more than 30 years he developed Outstrike Tactic, sorry 30 years as Chief of the General Staff, he developed Outstrike Tactic as a coherent theory adapted to the prevailing circumstances and enforced this doctrine. And he relentlessly championed the idea. He realised that commanders of armies and often divisions must judge the situation for themselves and decide how to act independently and constantly with the general intention. So he said because of the diversity and the rapid changes in situations of war, it is impossible to lay down binding rules. Only the principles and general points of view can furnish a guide. The advantage of the situation will never be fully utilised if subordinate commanders wait for orders. Only if leaders of all ranks are competent and accustomed to independent action will the possibility exist of moving large masses with ease. So, interesting, if they're competent and accustomed to, that means training for mission command, that means practicing mission command in garrison, at home, on exercises, not just when you're required to fight. If we just take a little bit of a leap to World War I, the effects of the reforms that I mentioned and of Auschwitz-Taktik becoming indoctrinated were seen initially at the start of World War I in the German army. However, due to attrition, due to increased conscription, those leadership skills may have decreased a little bit. But in 1918, some new doctrine emerged called the Attack in Position Warfare, which was the basic document for the German offences of 1918. And that ultimately affected the course of the 1918 German offences the most. So the new German assault that they practised was two-phased. First was the systematic artillery preparation and centrally controlled infantry assault at the enemy's forward units. followed by an aggressive exploitation to disrupt the enemy to the point where he could not reorganise and respond. The second phase required decentralised decision-making and the initiative of junior commanders to rapidly exploit the initial gains and seize opportunities as they presented themselves. But what's interesting about what I just said is that that shows two completely conflicting command styles, detailed command and mission command operating in the same time, in the same operation. So it's not, again, it's not a binary choice with command, it's a spectrum. The soldiers that perfected these infiltration tactics... tactics became to be known as Stoss Troops or Shock Troops, and more commonly referred to as the Shock Troops or Shock Troopers. And these elite units consisted of small sections of aid soldiers commanded by an NCO who were encouraged and empowered to exploit fleeting opportunities. So you can see Helmut von Malk mentioned core commanders, division commanders, now we're talking about NCOs being empowered, so it's becoming increasingly more democratised. And if we just look at this quote from Adolf von Schell, who wrote, The book Battle Leadership, it's a great reflection on his leadership in World War I. He said that in the German army we use what we term mission tactics. Orders are not written out in the minutest detail. A mission is merely given to the commander. How it should be carried out is his problem. Consequently, he will accomplish more because he's acting in accordance with his own psychological individuality. They're very modern words for something that was written in 1913 talking about World War I. What's interesting is you see we use the term mission tactics. So post-E, we had a conversation earlier about the translation of Outstrike, tactique is not a perfect translation and mission command isn't exactly the most intuitive phrase for what we're talking about today. So just don't worry too much about the direct translation, but we're talking about tactics and leadership and command specific to that operation that you're conducting at that point in time. So if we jump to World War II, again I'm making a large jump in history here, apologies to the history department. So on the 1st of September 1939, Germany invaded Poland in an operation characterised by rapid penetrating assaults by tanks. Armoured infantry in close cooperation with the German Luftwaffe. The swift and decisive engagements have since inspired military theorists from many nations wishing to analyse the German way of war in the hope of emulating their success. However, the marriage of armour, mechanised infantry... Close air support and artillery was one side of the coin, the other side was outstrike tactic. So that empowered commanders with this blitzkrieg concept to exploit initial gains and to be reinforced by their commanders with whatever reserve or force were available to rapidly exploit and attack in depth. So they sought to learn, they sought to rapidly exploit any gain that was made to the point where it became second nature and they weren't just It wasn't just an option, they were encouraged to do so. Interestingly, it would be many years before Western militaries adopted such tactics, and the US Army's military history programme studying and interviewing German leaders from World War II, so prisoners initially, began to look at the Blitzkrieg outstrike tactic as a way of war and a way of doing business. However, it wasn't until the adoption much later of Airline Battle in 1982 and revised in 1986 that... Mission Command entered into the US Army's lexicon and to be fair it still wasn't called Mission Command, it was referred to as Mission Oriented Command. The principles, initiative, agility, depth and synchronisation, they all speak to something akin to Blitzkrieg. So you can see the fruition of that study in the 1980s. Now it also coincided with the Big Five coming online and you can see some of those weapon systems here. So it was designed, a new doctrine for fighting in Europe that would rapidly exploit... opportunities and empower people to respond quickly to a Soviet invasion. However, that still didn't mean that Mission Command became doctrine. Okay, that was the first dip in the toe in the water. It was executed, as I mentioned, in Desert Storm. However, it was the influence, the reason I'm even talking about US doctrine today is influenced by Afghanistan and Iraq. So counter-surgency wars with decentralized enemy after 10 years of fighting, finally the US army realized in 2012 that they needed to start writing this down. Soldiers and commanders were practicing mission command on operations, but it wasn't actually written down as that was their doctrine. So isolated platoon and company level patrol bases and FOBs necessitated a level of decentralization. Actions operating from these FOBs necessitated a level of decentralization. And to meet a decentralized enemy, you needed to decide on that quickly. So the doctrine that came out in 2012, ADP-6, Mission Command, Command and Control of US Army Forces. Initially 2012 and then revised in 2019 so the current principles you see on the screen are from the 2019 version they're ever so slightly different to the original one and but you can see the the principles that are listed there are there are characteristics you would want in any command organization any command structure okay they're not they're ideal obviously they're not it's not that someone should go and try and pursue them like a checklist but it's interesting that competence was mentioned first and that's a very important factor without people being sufficiently competent in the role As leaders, as commanders, it's unlikely they're going to be trusted enough for decentralized authority to be bestowed upon them. Shared understanding and commander's intent go hand in glove, i.e. what's the bigger picture? Why am I doing this? What's my expanded purpose? Why are we conducting this operation? Commanders's intent, I will talk about it extensively in a minute with my findings. And then mission orders. So mission orders, as I mentioned at the very start of the presentation, is what we were encouraged to do as cadets. Just enough information to get the job done. Don't delay people with a huge amount of detail and then empower them to decide and act. And then disciplined initiative. So I love that the word disciplined is added there because initiative for its own sake isn't beneficial. Initiative aligned with the mission orders they've received, aligned with the commander's intent and based on the shared understanding is what's required. So that's a nice little bracket that we put on the initiative. And then risk acceptance. So who do we think that principle of mission command is aimed at? Commanderss. So if your commander is not willing to take risks, you're not going to be empowered by him or her. So risk acceptance is an important one. Previously this was take prudent risk. So if you think, I love the word prudent in that, it's that risk is important to take but gambles aren't. So the literature, I've read pretty much everything there is to read within reason and in English on mission command. There's a lot of really good German stuff on it, some of which has been translated, some hasn't. The Israelis have studied mission command in a lot of detail as well. But essentially these... barriers that have arisen in my readings ring true so the people i've interviewed and for my my case studies and for the generals they will they will echo what's been said here so insufficiently competent commanders is an interesting phrase so there are people who are just for every reason not sufficiently competent to the point where you trust them to empower them okay that's as a commander just not competent enough doesn't mean you write them off okay they can be developed and but there's also people can be differently competent okay so if you're a mechanized infantry battalion and you get a company of light infantry you might judge them as not competent compared to what you're trying to achieve as a mechanized organization however when you realize that they're competent at that skill and you judge them based on that you can integrate them into your plan quite well lack of trust so Newly formed heterogeneous organisations when they come together with disparate forces, there's not going to be an initial amount of trust there. That takes time to build. And that's something that in everything I've read, I obviously want to try to accelerate how that trust is built. It is something that's quite hard to build. It's not an instantaneous phenomenon. Reluctance to show initiative. So if a subordinate has a commander who has no risk acceptance and doesn't want to take risk, then they're not likely to show initiative. Because if they've showed initiative once, they might have got slapped down. They might have got punished, they might have been publicly admonished in front of their friends and colleagues and peers, and they say, I'm not taking risks for him or her anymore because last time it went really badly. And then that ties into senior commander ego. So there's two elements to senior commander ego, and we all have ego. Ego is both a good and a bad thing. But hubris, i.e. overconfidence, cockiness about one's abilities, that can result in a barrier in that the commander thinks he or she knows best. Sometimes the commander does know best. Sometimes the commander... It's often the most experienced person at the table, but that doesn't mean that they always know best. And then risk aversion for career reasons, for operational reasons. There's a load of reasons people would be afraid to take risk, for personality reasons. But if your commander is unwilling to take risks, he or she is unlikely to give you the freedom of action to show initiative and exploit initial gain. Technology is an interesting one because of some of the findings I have in the moment. But if you just think about Vietnam and the advent of the helicopter as a mobile command and control platform, And one of the works I read, there's literally a story of a division commander flying in a plane in Vietnam. A thousand feet below that, there's the brigade commander in a helicopter. A thousand feet below that, there's the battalion commander in a helicopter looking at one of his companies in action. And the brigade commander is asking to speak to the lead platoon. So that's the term helicopter parenting comes from that phenomenon. And so that's an abuse of technology. That's a fantastic technological advancement. People are abusing it. Think about C2 systems and think about situational awareness. It's very, very easy. for someone to be used to having the most up-to-date, accurate situational awareness and want that constantly. And how does that person then, as a commander, resist the temptation to reach down and start trying to affect subordinate units two, three levels below? But thankfully, I have two good stories of how people I interviewed did not abuse that technology. So Rupert Smith, it's a long quote, but I think it's very important just to think about multinational missions in general for a moment. Rupert Smith, in his excellent book, Utility of Force, said the commander of an international military force said, We must always be aware of the political factors and to make up the alliance or coalition. Indeed the nature of the relationship between allies is an important factor in the context of the operation. The basis of the collaboration must be absolutely clear at the highest level and transmit it down since it will ultimately define the limits of the shared activity. So what he's saying is that there's many, many different external factors affecting people who come together to form a multinational operation. Some of them are characterised as follows, so a fight for equity. So to give you an example, in Kosovo in 1999, the Irish contingent at that time was a heavy transport company. That's what they brought to it. I'm assuming it was a US division or at least not. So how can you have equal say at the table with those two organisations? But relative to that country's capacity and capability, that might be a really big deal for that country committing those forces. So everyone will fight for equity. So instead of actually apportioning a say in the operations to each contingent based on the size of that contingent, what I've read... says that you actually have to divide the cake into equal slices, and make people feel included in that organisation, because relative to the size of our country and our military, that might be an equal amount. Command cacophony, so that's a phrase I've coined to try and summarise the parallel command structures that can exist, one being legitimate and operational, one being informal. So the official chain of command from a force commander to division, to brigade, and all the way down to a platoon commander, that's the chain of command, the operational chain of command, we all understand that. But... If there's a company down there from an insert country here, then that country, that component's senior national representative may have to reach back to their home capital and ask a question, can we conduct this operation? I've witnessed that firsthand in Mali. I've loads of examples from my research of where we've done it as an organisation, because sometimes the risk involved might actually require a two-star at home in that country to make the decision. So command cacophony can slow things down. One example... There was a battalion deployed in one of my case studies where a one-star had to get into a plane and fly to speak to another one-star to approve their concept of operations of what they were asking that battalion to do. So think about how slow that makes the decision-making and responses to changing events. Then these two go hand-in-hand as well, so limited authority or command by persuasion, so just take into account what I just said. From a lot of what I've read about multinational forces, there'll be commanders who will cajole, will coerce, will convince, will... use their soft power skills to get people to contribute to the operation on certain things. Maybe leave them out of certain types of operations, maybe only use them during the daytime depending on what the operation is. So that leads to the point that maybe unity of effort is easier to achieve or more realistic to achieve I should say than unity of command. And then interoperability, so language, doctrine. radios, tactics, weapons, fuel, you name it. All those challenges that NATO worked very hard to standardise as you move away from NATO allies into partners and into more multinational organisations, they become exacerbated. All of those conspire to form barriers to mission command that collectively make multinational mission command quite difficult, but not impossible. I'll talk about my findings now. I mentioned the four generals that I interviewed. General Sir Rupert Smith commanded UN forces in Bosnia and Umpur 4. He also more famously commanded the 1st UK Armoured Division as part of VII Corps in Desert Storm. You know who David Peter is, he commanded multinational forces in Iraq and then ISAF. General Sir Peter Cosgrove, as a Major General he commanded International Force East Timor, which I'll talk about in a second. He then became Chief of Army, Chief of Defence Force and then the Governor General of Australia. And Major General Michael Beery commanded EUTM. Somalia and then later commanded UNIFIL for two and a half years, the United Nations interim force in Lebanon. So I was lucky to get to interview these four gentlemen. As I said, they cover a wide spectrum of operations from peacekeeping to crisis management operations to large-scale combat operations and counterinsurgency in between. So I've kind of aggregated their points here for this slide just to make it easier to digest. So not all of them said each point, so just bear that in mind. If there's a relevant example, I'll bring it up. Okay, so... All of them said Commanders's intent is important, that shouldn't be a surprise. I just think David Peter'one was interesting where he said he has his big ideas. So he might have three or four big ideas, things to him that are so important at the strategic level that everyone needs to know them. So he will constantly transmit them and when he visits troops he'll remind them. He might ask them to see has it been passed down and then remind them if it hasn't. Peter Cosgrove used to do a lot of battlefield circulation in East Timor. So he would go out and he'd touch base with units of every nationality in 22 different nations. and every level and every rank and he would repeat his intent over and over and over again to the point where people I interviewed for East Timor 20 years after it were able to recount his commander's intent to me with 90% accuracy and when I interviewed him again it was quite close to what he said and what has been written and then Major General Beery very interestingly he talked about the high turnover rates which I'll cover in a second in Lebanon being a factor but what he would do is because of the multiple nations contributing to his organisation he would write his commander's intent Then we have it very, very carefully translated to that nation's home language. Then he would meet them, read it out in English, ask them to read it in their own language, and then say, is there any confusion about what I've asked you and what my intent is? No, sir. Okay, now tell everyone in your unit what my intent is. And he spent most of his time just recirculating that intent over and over again. And he said it got to the point where he was tired from doing it, but he knew that was a good thing. Avoid a blame culture. So two of the respondents said that if you... Admonish people if you punish them because they make a show some initiative and make a mistake or the gains they're trying to exploit don't materialize into further success. They won't try again and if that becomes the status quo then it will create a culture of not trying and not trying to show any initiative. Trust, okay so trust is probably the most valuable commodity in the mission command market and they all talked about how to build trust. So trust as I said in an organization that comes together ad hoc for a specific operation it's difficult to build. but they said you just have to repeatedly, over and over again, get people together, get them training together, keep contextualising your intent, keep reinforcing them with positive encouragement and get them to interoperate and train together so that the trust builds. And he said simply just building personalities or building relationships with personalities below and above you. Competence, so they all spoke about competence. Again, some people are just not competent enough for mission command to be bestowed upon them. And how you trust them and how you empower them will change with that, obviously. So David Peter said... If you ask people to work for him, some would say they had enormous freedom and a very light hold on the reins. Other people then would say, no, he was a micromanager, simply because the trust and competence vary from person to person. But interestingly, none of them said, once a person is deemed not competent, forget about them. They all said you can work on building relationships, building trust and increasing their competence. And then standardisation, so getting an organisation like Unifil, for example, together and having SOPs. that can transcend those cultural and doctrinal barriers, that can transcend language barriers, so that everyone understands when they say defeat or disrupt, that people understand the definitions of those two very different words. So they identified some barriers to mission command and multinational forces. So I mentioned high turnover rates, so something like Desert Storm, where it was a build-up and then a war and then a withdrawal, that doesn't, it's not really as much of a factor here. But if you have an ongoing operation for years where multinational forces are rotating in, some for six months, some for 12, some for shorter, or specialists are coming and going, then you're going to have a lot of turnover of commanders as well. And that was a big problem, Michael Beery said, in Lebanon, where he had to constantly repeat his commander's intent. And he said it was sometimes where one of his MAs would say, OK, sir, we have a new Chinese contingent. And he said, but we just briefed him. And, oh, sir, that was six months ago. And he's like, OK, here we go again. So he had to just keep doing that and not to get frustrated or lose his patience. Micromanaging commanders, because of high turnover rates, because of a lack of trust, they all agree that these This is a huge factor. I mean, it's one of the most obvious ones, but a commander coming in and not recognising the skills or capabilities that a subordinate multinational force brings to their organisation, that can be a big factor. Technology, so obviously what I mentioned about helicopters and situational awareness equipment, I have two examples of where two of the people interviewed actually did not, they actually resisted the temptation to get involved. So Rupert Smith said when he was advancing or moving to contact in Iraq. that he listened two levels down. So he would listen to his battalion commanders on his radio, and he had two brigades forward, and he would just keep a bit of a listen to what the battalion commanders were doing, but he never keyed the handset. He just listened in. So that allowed him to see, okay, that brigade is using way more ammunition than I expected, or they're using much less ammunition. Let's shift the priority of sustainment to that other brigade, and vice versa. Or if they were making greater gains, he would just listen in for his own awareness, knowing that he had a G3 staff that were keeping up to date. But just, he resisted the temptation. to pick up the handset and abuse that. Peter Cosgrove said that when he was Chief of Defence, someone came in to brief him on an ongoing operation and opened up a laptop and then showed him a live feed of the operation. And he said, no, no, no, I don't need to see this. There's multiple commanders between me and this information. They need to analyse, they know what they're looking at, I don't. And who am I to look over the shoulder of this squadron commander or platoon commander and try and tell him that he's doing something wrong? So he was able to recognise the technology existed and it's a great asset, but not to... not to let it change his leadership or command style. Again, insufficiently competent commanders, so the language barrier came up for a couple of these generals where they said that in some armies below a certain rank, those people won't speak that good English, they won't have the same level of education in English. And if that's the case, you can't delegate to that level, you have to only delegate to one level above. So what he meant by that was if you were putting together a force of three multinational companies, Probably you should really maybe keep it at the company level because when you're at platoon level or start retask organizing those platoons the communication will break down and Rupert Smith said he'd always keep it one level above that to mitigate that and But people being differently competent was the point and that they're not incompetent at being a soldier But maybe compared to what you view is relevant for that that they might be seeing it But they all as I said, they wouldn't give up on someone like that. It's something that can be developed and an interoperability Okay, it's come up throughout this study interoperability as a factor However, as I said, Rupert Smith came up with the SOPs as an idea. UNIFIL is a good example of an organisation with very detailed SOPs that transcend language barriers. So I'll wrap up with this case study on InterFET. I have an article in Military Review next month, the May-June edition. We'll cover this in a lot more detail than I'm going to cover now, including the background to InterFET, which is very interesting. But I'll just talk about some of the key lessons I've learned from this, because it's a very interesting case study of where Mission Command went right. East Timor, 700 kilometres north-west of Australia. In 1999, they voted for independence from Indonesia, and when Indonesia withdrew, violence erupted with pro-Indonesian and anti-Indonesian forces clashing and a lot of attacks on civilians. So 700 kilometres from Australia, Australia couldn't ignore it, the world's media wasn't ignoring it, and an international response was called for to stop the violence and to stabilise East Timor. Australia being the nearest and most powerful and capable military. nation in the region, they took the lead. The call went out for other nations to participate. Unsurprisingly, New Zealand committed a battalion straight away. And when the call went out, Ireland, as you can see the photograph on the left, committed a platoon because our Army Ranger Wing, our Special Forces, had short notice, high readiness soldiers on standby anyway. So they agreed to deploy two platoons in succession to the New Zealand battalion. The New Zealand battalion was in an Australian brigade. The Australian Brigade was part of the wider Australian force, but there was 22 nations came together very quickly in 1999, and East Timor lasted for just less than a year before it handed over to a UN force. So interestingly, when I interviewed, I interviewed people from Force Commanders, the Battalion Commanders of the New Zealand Battalion, two of the Company Commanderss, two Irish Platoon Commanderss, and then a scatter of NCOs at what they would call team level or section or squad level. And what's quite interesting is the difference... perceptions about mission command. So Ireland at that time, 1999, we didn't have this in our doctrine yet. It was there in practice in some cases, but it wasn't a way of life. It was more good commanders practiced it, but we were just emerging from decades of internal security operations. We had Lebanon, we had a deployment of a large battalion in Lebanon, but typically people were more used to being tightly controlled because of the nature of internal security operations. New Zealand, as you can see, he's a lot happier about command. They had a they had imbued mission command into their soldiers, into all their training already by the state. So their doctrine backed up and reflected mission command at this point. And coincidentally, the two company commanders and the battalion commander of one Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment were all advocates of mission command and practitioners. So Ireland was entering... In some ways an unfamiliar command environment but something they were comfortable with doing when it existed. They just didn't know what it was called or what it was about. New Zealand, it was a way of doing business. It was how they were educated and practiced. So the presence of Mission Command, how it has emerged from the case study, what that looked like. So Commanders's intent was communicated constantly at all levels. You'll see a photograph in a moment showing the physical terrain of East Timor. It's difficult to do battlefield circulation so a lot of it was done what they call evening prayers or where the company commander would come up on the radio. and reissue or recontextualise his intent to reaffirm what was going on. Patrolling and observation posts and everything else was tasked by short, over-the-radio, intent-based orders because for the platoon commanders to come to the company headquarters for an orders brief would involve three modes of transport, one of which was walking. So it was difficult to bring the company commanders together or indeed the platoon commanders. So issuing the intents constantly right down, you saw the effect of it I mentioned a moment ago when veterans of this... 20 years later could recount the 4th Commanders's intent. Empowerment and freedom of action. Australia and New Zealand were big believers in mission command at this time and still are. So they empowered people automatically. It was the way they did business. They gave people freedom of action. That was quickly bestowed to the Irish platoon, although the Irish coming in, as one guy said, we didn't know what we were getting. We didn't know anything about the Irish Army, let alone these guys coming in. But how trust was fostered was during pre-deployment training. So the Irish platoon went to Townsville in Australia. And they trained with one New Zealand infantry regiment. And they met the company commander they'd be working with. They met the soldiers they'd be working with. And that trust started from there. It started with, believe it or not, a shooting competition that the Irish guys won. And they were like, OK, they're good shots. Then there was some patrolling. OK, they're good at patrolling. Right, where's your shortcomings? We need jungle training. OK, we'll do jungle training. Jeez, they're pretty good at this. So bit by bit, these little micro demonstrations of professionalism and, of course, sharing a coffee in the evening and chatting about the day's training. That built trust. So even an outside element coming into a force like that, you can build trust. But then once the mission started, trust was the name of the game. They empowered commanders, they empowered people to carry out operations as they saw fit. So why did it work in East Timor? So there's a few reasons. Some are actually environmental. So advocacy for mission command, doctrine and practice. So from the force commander down, including the Irish commanders that deployed who weren't as familiar with the concept, everyone became an advocate of mission command. And it was just encouraged, it was championed, and it was just the way people did business. You can see from that photograph the severe terrain. Patrolling those hills on foot would take a long time to cover, just a couple of kilometres. I think they were talking about between four and six kilometres a day in some cases, just trying to get into position for an OP. The impact of the environment was exacerbated by the distances that they were covered. So even trying to get to them, as I mentioned, required three modes of transport. Habitual association and pre-deployment training. So New Zealand and Australia had a very close relationship anyway. Anzac Day is coming up on the 25th, so going back to World War I, very, very close ties. So Australian and New Zealand officers and NCOs train in each other's schools. They cross-train and they spend a lot of time together. One, our NZIR, had actually deployed to Australia with Tree Brigade, who they deployed to East Timor with the year previous to do an exercise. So they had a combined exercise where although different commanders and leaders may have been in place, A lot of the staff, a lot of the other leaders would have been there, so at least they knew each other. And then the pre-deployment training that I mentioned. So the first thing that they did with the New Zealand battalion was to get as much of it as they could to Australia to conduct jungle training and pre-deployment training. And thankfully, the Irish platoon was able to be included in that. So they were able to build that trust that I mentioned. And then the influence of the force commander, I've mentioned it a couple of times, but since his time in Vietnam and Malaya, he was just a huge advocate of mission command. He said in Vietnam... he was more of a recipient of Mission Command than issuing it, but he felt very empowered by his company commander, and he remembered how that felt. So for the rest of his career, that's the way he did business. So catching people early on in their careers, during training, during NCO leadership training, and practicing Mission Command and letting people fail is probably the key to imbuing it in people at an early age. And thankfully, as he was the first commander, that was just the way he did business. If you want to read more about Mission Command, I can recommend any number of books, and so can... a lot of the instructors, but these are ones that have stood out for me. Stood out for me is Transforming Command, where Eitan Shamir looks at three organisations, the US, the British and the Israeli armies, and how Mission Command evolved and some of the cultural influences on those. Adopting Mission Command is a good summary by retired US Army officer Donald Vandegrift. I have a very short, very lowbrow article on the company leader about Mission Command and the Irish Army, how we train people with it, and an example of an exercise that we... pose the challenge to people and see how they respond. Very good Australian book, Trust and Leadership. There's the US Army one, 16 Cases of Mission Command, 16 Case Studies. And this book more recently came out, recommended to me by Manu, wherever he is. An excellent book on the history of outstrike tactic and that's written by a Canadian colonel. I'll leave you with this quote from Donald Vandegrift, I think it's excellent so you can outstrike tactic or mission command. It's a cultural philosophy, it's the highest form of military professionalism. The overall commander's intent is for the member to strive for professionalism. In return, the individual will be given latitude in the accomplishment of their given missions. So I'm willing to answer any questions if people need to cut away to go to class, that's obviously absolutely socially acceptable. If anyone wants to catch the end of the Exodus brief, you still have a chance. I'll answer questions here. If I don't know the answer... I won't answer it, but I will talk to you afterwards about it if you want, because I'm quite keen to talk to people about Mission Command anyway. So I'll open it up to questions if there are any. Let me start. In your case study review, did you ever find a case where you've got an overall commander that takes the detailed approach, but it's a board that takes a mission commander approach? And how did the two reconcile that? I have. I have the opposite, if that might answer the question. So an example where a platoon commander, and we're talking low level here obviously, but a platoon commander had complete mission command approach and one of his team leaders had a very, very detailed approach. I know he's only a team leader, but I think... it answers the question. He refused to empower anyone in his team and because of the nature of being a special forces unit, they're all about empowerment and collaborative planning. He planned everything himself, didn't want any inputs from the guys and that caused a lot of problems in the platoon. So they had to try and reconcile it and that person couldn't change. That person was at a point in his career where he wasn't going to make any change. But what I have seen and unfortunately I had the personal experience of this is where the person above me was a very detailed commander. I had to open up up my mission command umbrella and put it up and shelter my subordinates from the rain that was coming down. And that wasn't an easy thing to do. And actually, I found it very exhausting, just emotionally tiring, trying to constantly deal with that. But the good news was that in the most part, my subordinates didn't see that. And they just saw mission command continue to happen, albeit with some inserts and injects from the colonel. But yeah, I think strong leaders, the level below, need to... And I've just come from an emotional intelligence class. So... So I think there's probably a lot of the answers exist in that realm, is that people need to be aware of how they're communicating and how it makes others feel. So if you think back to the first slide I put up, I remember how Commander and Cowick made me feel in 2005, empowering me to do something when he wasn't there. And I told him I was going to mention him in this, and he laughed. And he said, you can if you want, but I don't think it was that impactful. So he didn't even realise. He just said it, but to me, it was a big deal. Okay. Oh, let's give him a round of applause. Thanks, sir. Hey, well, Gavin, what... So, hey, tremendous presentation. I think clearly it's shown the depth of his research to date and the emphasis and conclusions he's drawing from that research. Importantly, though, again, he is very receptive... and open to thoughts that can further his research and his conclusions. So even if you're not going to offer those thoughts out here in public, please reach out to Gavin personally and have a conversation. He clearly has reached out to some. key people from all levels from the four star down to glean these insights and I'm sure his colleagues and peers here would add just as much measure to his document as he goes along so don't pass up that opportunity you're on short final so make sure you do that and if nothing else make sure you have good comms with him and all your peers before you split to the winds okay good deal well next slide please if you would Brett so to continue on after that great presentation Malk Wilcox may or may not show show up. But this is the one we're doing in May. He is a Russian FAO who has an extensive background on the Russian political, really from a dot mil, or not dot mil, but a PCPT framework. So I will tell you, he's a recognized expert well beyond not just the Army, the United States, but also within Europe as well. So he has particular thoughts on the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe and the Russian security policy. I encourage you to attend that as well. Hope to see you then. And based on that, thanks for your participation today. Again, it shows that you are part of the profession that wants to know and learn more. So best of luck to you as you go. Have a great day.

Typically we do those for faculty who have completed their terminal degree and wish to share the research that they've done en route to that academic honor. But in this case we actually have a student here at CGSOC. who is pursuing his terminal degree, a PhD in Ireland.

So this is a chance to not only hear where he is now, but perhaps provide some insights to further his research as he continues on. So first off, Gavin has been an infantry officer in the Irish Army for 21 years, currently in 9 Bravo, which I see some of his colleagues here. You're skipping out on the brew bedroom for that presentation?

Yeah, yeah, I hear you. All right, so hey, he's got a master's degree in political communication from Dublin City University, and he's currently working on his Ph.D. at the University College in Cork. And it's on this particular topic, the application of mission command in multinational forces, which, given the curriculum here at CGSOC, is very apropos, and I think there's a lot that we can add to his research, along with his insights that he's gleaned to date. So I think this will be a great presentation. He has served on not just in a variety of infantry positions within the Irish Army.

He's also supported the United Nations three different times. He's done that once in Chad, twice to Lebanon, and he's also done the European Union training mission in Mali. So he has certainly gone out and practiced what we learned theoretically here and gone out and shown that he can do it. All right, so without further ado, let's turn it over to Gavin Edgerton. Thanks, sir.

Thanks very much. Can you hear me okay? Hear me at the back? So today, thanks to that introduction, you're well aware I'm going to talk about the application of Mission Command and Multinational Forces. It's a topic I'm very passionate about.

It's something, obviously, as I've explained, I'm undertaking a PhD in, so I've committed a lot of time to it. But it's something I've always been interested in, and I'll explain a little bit about that background in a minute. I hope to provide some food for thought today to everyone that's taking the time to come. And I'm keen to discuss any points I raise either at the end where we have some questions and answers, offline afterwards or indeed online if you want to look me up and engage. I'm quite keen to reach out and meet people with a similar mindset to this.

Before we start I just want to point out that anything I say is my own views, not necessarily representative of the Irish Defence Forces or indeed the US Army. So any conclusions or any leaps I make, just please take them with a pinch of salt. The agenda for today, very simply I'm going to just do a little introduction to the concept of Mission Command and my own background with it. I'll clear very early on, get some definitions out of the way just to get the stuffy stuff done early. I'll then do a brief history of Mission Command.

I'll talk about some barriers to Mission Command in general. I'll talk about multinational command and how other barriers arise or some of them existing barriers are actually accentuated by that. And then I'll go into findings so far from the research that I've done. So by way of introduction, Mission Command is a concept we're all very well aware of.

The US Army has doctrine on it that I'm going to talk about. But just to get a feel for the room, a little bit of audience participation, could I get a raise of hands, somebody who has had a boss that micromanaged them, someone that really stepped on them, gave you very, very specific tasks, gave you no freedom of action, now keep your hands up if you enjoyed that. Okay, I didn't think so.

Put your hands up if you've had a boss that gave you very clear guidance and intent and then gave you the freedom of action to carry out that intent. Now keep your hands up if you like that. Okay, so we're all in good company and as we go forward just bear that in mind.

Mission Command itself is decentralized decision-making, empowers subordinates operating within the sphere of their commander's intent to show disciplined initiative and to exploit opportunities in battle that arise at the heat of the moment. In other words trusting the views and opinions of the commander on the spot. In simple terms it's telling someone what to do but not how to do it.

So I'll just talk about my own introduction to Mission Command because I think it's relevant to understand my motivation for studying this. So as a young cadet Learning platoon attack training, we were taught to emphasize intent, to give clear instructions but not too much detail, and to empower your section commanders to carry out your intent without getting too involved in their business. Again, what to do, not how to do it. However, it was after I got commissioned where I realized the importance of mission command. And a penny dropped for me when I was organizing a field training exercise, and I was telling my company commander where he was going to be accommodated.

And he said, no, no, I'm not accompanying you on the exercise. I won't be there overnight at any phase. I was shocked. I expected him to be there to manage me.

There was a lot of soldiers involved. I was very young. But he just said to me, Gavin, I trust you to make decisions in my absence and to do the right thing. And that was a lightbulb moment for me. The penny really dropped for me and I went, OK.

This is mission command. This is the type of command they talked about in the cadet school. Obviously we weren't using the phrase mission command back then, but this was about being trusted to make decisions when your boss isn't around.

Now I have experience, as was alluded to, at the start of four multinational peace support operations, and I witnessed mission command being employed in different ways to varying degrees across all those missions. But it was with EUTM Mali where I had a little bit of an epiphany and it provoked me to study in detail. So I had 82 trainers from 22 different countries.

reporting to me and we encouraged and fostered a pretty strong mission command mindset where we'd empower a person to run a course, we would resource them with all the training resources and the instructors that they needed and then provide guidance as required, but not micromanage them. And my boss, who was a very big believer in mission command, treated me the same. Halfway through my deployment we changed bosses and the new boss came from a different country and he was a micromanager. It's just his style, but it completely changed the atmosphere in the camp, it changed what we were doing. And Dark Cloud...

hungovers. So it asked me the question how come one commander from one country might have the exact same people from all these other countries working for him or her but can completely change the command climate and the dynamic. And that led me to ask the question how can mission command be successfully employed in a multinational force and that became my research question for my PhD. And my subordinate research questions fall out of that and they have shaped the research that I've conducted since I began this a number of years ago. So the PhD in pursuing In terms of the primary research that I'm conducting, I've done interviews with four generals, and I'll introduce those later when I talk about some of the findings.

And those generals were selected because they have commanded multinational forces in the past, and they cover the spectrum of operations from crisis management or stability up to large-scale combat operations. I've picked three case studies similarly covering crisis management operations, so stability operation, counterinsurgency slash war fighting in Afghanistan, and desert storm. With the ISAF example, I'm looking at the British Army's deployment in 2006 to Helmand Province and how that British Army battle group integrated into a Canadian brigade, which was part of an American division as part of the overall force. And within that, we had Danish elements as part of that organisation.

And in Desert Storm, because it's a large-scale combat operation, Mission Command was practised during it. I want to see how the British First Armoured Division interacted with 7 Corps. And thanks to being located in Levenworth right now, I have access to some retirees from that conflict.

So I just want to talk a little bit about command because we talk a lot about command and leadership. The conversations tend to hover around leadership a little bit more. There's far more written on leadership and people are very good at articulating their leadership style or their philosophy, but maybe not as much as command.

So just to set the scene a little bit, like military command, particularly when exercising a time of war, is a very unique form of authority and responsibility. It's not equaled in civilian life. There's no comparison to it. The decisions made by commanders result in subordinates killing or indeed being killed. So then the unique challenge of command is basically asking people to do something that they wouldn't normally do in a normal setting, something that's not natural to them.

To do this, commanders are empowered with the authority and responsibility, and they leverage that power, both positional and personal, to get the effects from people. So if we take that as command, admission command is obviously leveraging the power that you've been given, and authority and responsibility are very, very key words in that. So a good definition from the U.S. doctrine is that command is the authority that a commander in the armed forces... lawfully exercises over subordinates by virtue of rank or assignment.

So just focus on authority and subordinates in that definition. Anyone King, who wrote this fantastic book, Command, the 21st century general, simply says command is decision making. So therefore, if we're talking about mission command, we're talking about devolving command, we have to consider that we're devolving decision making authority. And then command and control, you'll often hear command mentioned with control, and indeed, it's a warfighting function.

I understand in the past, mission command had briefly had a cameo as a a war fighting function and then was relegated back to being a concept. So the exercise of authority and direction by a properly designated commander over the assigned and attached forces in the accomplishment of the mission. Crucially, mission command is the US Army's approach to command and control. So that implies that there are other approaches to command and control and not all approaches to command and control are created equally. Some might be better than others.

I would posit that mission command is a superior concept for command and control. So does that mean then that one version of command and control could be... Leverage an advantage over your enemy if you have a superior command and control system.

Well, Mark van Creveld thinks so, and he says a superior command system may serve as a force multiplier and compensate for weaknesses in other areas, such as numerical inferiority. So we all understand Boyd's OODA loop and deciding and acting quicker than your enemy. If you've got a superior command system where the commander on the spot, the person at the coalface of the operation, can decide and act quicker than the enemy can, then you're going to have an advantage even if they are numerically superior. Mission Command. I'd just like to open up to the class.

Anyone want to give me a definition of Mission Command in their own words? Anyone brave enough? I'm going to ask Alex Rupert in a second if no one gives me the definition.

Okay, Alex, over to you. It's baseline the overall task with clear intent and constraint. So setting the left-right limits for what you can, cannot do, and ultimately what is to be accomplished and giving the... subordinate freedom to make decisions as long as they fit between the constraints you've established. Yeah, very well put.

And I would say we'll see that the U.S. definition is probably not as nice as that in a second. But essentially, by pushing authority downwards, what formation commanders are hoping to achieve is that they devolve important decision-making authority to the subordinate commanders, reducing the time it takes to decide and act in critical situations. So that allows the commander on the spot to seize and retain the initiative and resulting in an agile and adaptable force. And as I said, hopefully quicker and more agile than your enemy.

And in popular modern times, it makes mission command a very widely pursued command philosophy. So there's the US definition. Alex covered all that and what he said a moment ago.

So mission command is the army's approach to command and control that empowers subordinates. decision-making and decentralized execution appropriate to the situation. Now I've always loved those words appropriate to the situation because that's a little get out of jail free card for whoever wrote this. It's like it might not always be appropriate.

So just have a little think to yourself. Is there some types of operations you've been on where mission command definitely was not appropriate for that particular type of operation? So just think about maybe a breaching operation. Do you want to maneuver units passing through a breach to show a lot of freedom and initiative during that or do you want it to be tightly controlled?

A passage of lines operation, very... tightly controlled by those conducting it. So mission command isn't always appropriate and actually it's not a binary choice okay command actually exists on a spectrum or a continuum. On one extreme or one side you have mission command to the extreme leadership style of that would be laissez-faire complete hands-off do what you want. On the other end of the spectrum you have detailed command characterized by detailed orders tight control a lot of checks a lot of communication merely people trying to eliminate risk and to ensure certainty but the extreme of that would be the micromanager which we we've all recognized at the start that we have we have met those um so just to use a sporting analogy and i wish i came up with this i stole this idea of rupert smith he's one of the generals i interviewed and he said he showed people a clip before 30 seconds of american football and 30 seconds of rugby to explain the difference between mission command and detailed command so one side you have a sport that has a lot of plays that have to be rehearsed thoroughly and people have to learn them off.

It's very tightly controlled. There's even control measures marked on the pitch. On the other side, you have a sport that involves a lot of initiative at the lower levels and it takes players to spot a weakness and exploit it.

However, the truth can be said about either of those sports that there is control measures in rugby, there's rules and there is players that are rehearsed and in American football, certain players are encouraged to use their initiative. So it's not a black and white binary choice. but instead a spectrum. And where you operate on that spectrum at any one time is a reflection of the situation, the troops under your command, external conditions of the operating environment.

It's not always a case of, no, we will mission command today and that's it. So I'm aware there's a few historians in the room, so I'm very nervous about the next few slides. But I don't have the time to spend two hours talking about the history of Auschwitz Taktik and mission command. I'm also aware there's Germans in the room. I just pronounced something incorrectly.

But I will discuss, because I think it's important to gain a little bit of context. context as to where mission command came from. And I think the context of this defeat that I'm going to talk about is very important to understand where it emerged. So in October 1806, Napoleon defeated the Prussian army at the twin battles of Jena and Arstad. Frederick William I's forces lost 40,000 casualties to the French 12,000.

The devastating defeat left Prussia subservient to France and probably the most proud army up to that time, certainly German. and Frederick the Great's reign was defeated and left humiliated. So following this period, a deep reflection was undertook by Prussia.

And instead of just sulking about it, they sat down and wrote down what went wrong. And I think that's an important lesson to learn. And what they noticed was that there was two different command styles at play.

So on one side, Frederick William I had micromanaged. He had a very top-down approach. He centralised things like his use of cavalry and artillery was very centralised. And he centralised control as well with decisions being made by him.

Napoleon was a very top-down approach. Aeolian, although a one-man show in planning battle, did exercise some decentralisation in terms of empowering corps commanders, in particular giving them the assets that they needed to use and trusting them. He was commanding by directive saying, this is what I want you to achieve for this particular part of the operation, and then they went to achieve it.

So in the period following this... As it was a very severe shock defeat, it kick-started a period of reformation and transformation. And the man on the left was appointed to spearhead the reform and his name is Major General Gerhard von Scharnhorst.

Under Scharnhorst the Prussian army saw significant reforms and rebirths. And these reforms occurred during a period of industrial and social revolution in Europe. And that's important because the raw material in terms of personnel coming into the army at that time improved. Increasingly better educated people were joining, so NCOs and officers. had a far better education behind them and the process of purchasing a commission was put to the wayside.

So these better educated and better NCOs, better educated NCOs and officers, that facilitated more decentralised authority, increasing as the decades went on. The man on the right is Helmut von Malk. He's famous for defeating the Austrians and the French, but also more famous for being an early adopter, advocate and champion of Outstrike Taktik or Mission Command.

He's regarded by many as the father of Mission Command. Probably more fair to call him the stepfather of mission command because Shamir Hurst initiated the whole thing but he came in his writings, in his daily life and in every memorandum he communicated he encouraged people to use Outstrike Tactic. He was an early adopter of technology such as Railroad and Telegraph and again realizing that the expanding increasing size of battlefields required a decentralized approach to command. During his more than 30 years he developed Outstrike Tactic, sorry 30 years as Chief of the General Staff, he developed Outstrike Tactic as a coherent theory adapted to the prevailing circumstances and enforced this doctrine. And he relentlessly championed the idea.

He realised that commanders of armies and often divisions must judge the situation for themselves and decide how to act independently and constantly with the general intention. So he said because of the diversity and the rapid changes in situations of war, it is impossible to lay down binding rules. Only the principles and general points of view can furnish a guide.

The advantage of the situation will never be fully utilised if subordinate commanders wait for orders. Only if leaders of all ranks are competent and accustomed to independent action will the possibility exist of moving large masses with ease. So, interesting, if they're competent and accustomed to, that means training for mission command, that means practicing mission command in garrison, at home, on exercises, not just when you're required to fight. If we just take a little bit of a leap to World War I, the effects of the reforms that I mentioned and of Auschwitz-Taktik becoming indoctrinated were seen initially at the start of World War I in the German army.

However, due to attrition, due to increased conscription, those leadership skills may have decreased a little bit. But in 1918, some new doctrine emerged called the Attack in Position Warfare, which was the basic document for the German offences of 1918. And that ultimately affected the course of the 1918 German offences the most. So the new German assault that they practised was two-phased. First was the systematic artillery preparation and centrally controlled infantry assault at the enemy's forward units.

followed by an aggressive exploitation to disrupt the enemy to the point where he could not reorganise and respond. The second phase required decentralised decision-making and the initiative of junior commanders to rapidly exploit the initial gains and seize opportunities as they presented themselves. But what's interesting about what I just said is that that shows two completely conflicting command styles, detailed command and mission command operating in the same time, in the same operation. So it's not, again, it's not a binary choice with command, it's a spectrum.

The soldiers that perfected these infiltration tactics... tactics became to be known as Stoss Troops or Shock Troops, and more commonly referred to as the Shock Troops or Shock Troopers. And these elite units consisted of small sections of aid soldiers commanded by an NCO who were encouraged and empowered to exploit fleeting opportunities. So you can see Helmut von Malk mentioned core commanders, division commanders, now we're talking about NCOs being empowered, so it's becoming increasingly more democratised.

And if we just look at this quote from Adolf von Schell, who wrote, The book Battle Leadership, it's a great reflection on his leadership in World War I. He said that in the German army we use what we term mission tactics. Orders are not written out in the minutest detail. A mission is merely given to the commander. How it should be carried out is his problem. Consequently, he will accomplish more because he's acting in accordance with his own psychological individuality.

They're very modern words for something that was written in 1913 talking about World War I. What's interesting is you see we use the term mission tactics. So post-E, we had a conversation earlier about the translation of Outstrike, tactique is not a perfect translation and mission command isn't exactly the most intuitive phrase for what we're talking about today. So just don't worry too much about the direct translation, but we're talking about tactics and leadership and command specific to that operation that you're conducting at that point in time. So if we jump to World War II, again I'm making a large jump in history here, apologies to the history department.

So on the 1st of September 1939, Germany invaded Poland in an operation characterised by rapid penetrating assaults by tanks. Armoured infantry in close cooperation with the German Luftwaffe. The swift and decisive engagements have since inspired military theorists from many nations wishing to analyse the German way of war in the hope of emulating their success. However, the marriage of armour, mechanised infantry... Close air support and artillery was one side of the coin, the other side was outstrike tactic.

So that empowered commanders with this blitzkrieg concept to exploit initial gains and to be reinforced by their commanders with whatever reserve or force were available to rapidly exploit and attack in depth. So they sought to learn, they sought to rapidly exploit any gain that was made to the point where it became second nature and they weren't just It wasn't just an option, they were encouraged to do so. Interestingly, it would be many years before Western militaries adopted such tactics, and the US Army's military history programme studying and interviewing German leaders from World War II, so prisoners initially, began to look at the Blitzkrieg outstrike tactic as a way of war and a way of doing business.

However, it wasn't until the adoption much later of Airline Battle in 1982 and revised in 1986 that... Mission Command entered into the US Army's lexicon and to be fair it still wasn't called Mission Command, it was referred to as Mission Oriented Command. The principles, initiative, agility, depth and synchronisation, they all speak to something akin to Blitzkrieg. So you can see the fruition of that study in the 1980s. Now it also coincided with the Big Five coming online and you can see some of those weapon systems here.

So it was designed, a new doctrine for fighting in Europe that would rapidly exploit... opportunities and empower people to respond quickly to a Soviet invasion. However, that still didn't mean that Mission Command became doctrine. Okay, that was the first dip in the toe in the water.

It was executed, as I mentioned, in Desert Storm. However, it was the influence, the reason I'm even talking about US doctrine today is influenced by Afghanistan and Iraq. So counter-surgency wars with decentralized enemy after 10 years of fighting, finally the US army realized in 2012 that they needed to start writing this down.

Soldiers and commanders were practicing mission command on operations, but it wasn't actually written down as that was their doctrine. So isolated platoon and company level patrol bases and FOBs necessitated a level of decentralization. Actions operating from these FOBs necessitated a level of decentralization.

And to meet a decentralized enemy, you needed to decide on that quickly. So the doctrine that came out in 2012, ADP-6, Mission Command, Command and Control of US Army Forces. Initially 2012 and then revised in 2019 so the current principles you see on the screen are from the 2019 version they're ever so slightly different to the original one and but you can see the the principles that are listed there are there are characteristics you would want in any command organization any command structure okay they're not they're ideal obviously they're not it's not that someone should go and try and pursue them like a checklist but it's interesting that competence was mentioned first and that's a very important factor without people being sufficiently competent in the role As leaders, as commanders, it's unlikely they're going to be trusted enough for decentralized authority to be bestowed upon them. Shared understanding and commander's intent go hand in glove, i.e. what's the bigger picture?

Why am I doing this? What's my expanded purpose? Why are we conducting this operation? Commanders's intent, I will talk about it extensively in a minute with my findings. And then mission orders.

So mission orders, as I mentioned at the very start of the presentation, is what we were encouraged to do as cadets. Just enough information to get the job done. Don't delay people with a huge amount of detail and then empower them to decide and act. And then disciplined initiative.

So I love that the word disciplined is added there because initiative for its own sake isn't beneficial. Initiative aligned with the mission orders they've received, aligned with the commander's intent and based on the shared understanding is what's required. So that's a nice little bracket that we put on the initiative. And then risk acceptance.

So who do we think that principle of mission command is aimed at? Commanderss. So if your commander is not willing to take risks, you're not going to be empowered by him or her. So risk acceptance is an important one. Previously this was take prudent risk.

So if you think, I love the word prudent in that, it's that risk is important to take but gambles aren't. So the literature, I've read pretty much everything there is to read within reason and in English on mission command. There's a lot of really good German stuff on it, some of which has been translated, some hasn't. The Israelis have studied mission command in a lot of detail as well. But essentially these...

barriers that have arisen in my readings ring true so the people i've interviewed and for my my case studies and for the generals they will they will echo what's been said here so insufficiently competent commanders is an interesting phrase so there are people who are just for every reason not sufficiently competent to the point where you trust them to empower them okay that's as a commander just not competent enough doesn't mean you write them off okay they can be developed and but there's also people can be differently competent okay so if you're a mechanized infantry battalion and you get a company of light infantry you might judge them as not competent compared to what you're trying to achieve as a mechanized organization however when you realize that they're competent at that skill and you judge them based on that you can integrate them into your plan quite well lack of trust so Newly formed heterogeneous organisations when they come together with disparate forces, there's not going to be an initial amount of trust there. That takes time to build. And that's something that in everything I've read, I obviously want to try to accelerate how that trust is built.

It is something that's quite hard to build. It's not an instantaneous phenomenon. Reluctance to show initiative.

So if a subordinate has a commander who has no risk acceptance and doesn't want to take risk, then they're not likely to show initiative. Because if they've showed initiative once, they might have got slapped down. They might have got punished, they might have been publicly admonished in front of their friends and colleagues and peers, and they say, I'm not taking risks for him or her anymore because last time it went really badly. And then that ties into senior commander ego. So there's two elements to senior commander ego, and we all have ego.

Ego is both a good and a bad thing. But hubris, i.e. overconfidence, cockiness about one's abilities, that can result in a barrier in that the commander thinks he or she knows best. Sometimes the commander does know best.

Sometimes the commander... It's often the most experienced person at the table, but that doesn't mean that they always know best. And then risk aversion for career reasons, for operational reasons.

There's a load of reasons people would be afraid to take risk, for personality reasons. But if your commander is unwilling to take risks, he or she is unlikely to give you the freedom of action to show initiative and exploit initial gain. Technology is an interesting one because of some of the findings I have in the moment. But if you just think about Vietnam and the advent of the helicopter as a mobile command and control platform, And one of the works I read, there's literally a story of a division commander flying in a plane in Vietnam. A thousand feet below that, there's the brigade commander in a helicopter.

A thousand feet below that, there's the battalion commander in a helicopter looking at one of his companies in action. And the brigade commander is asking to speak to the lead platoon. So that's the term helicopter parenting comes from that phenomenon.

And so that's an abuse of technology. That's a fantastic technological advancement. People are abusing it. Think about C2 systems and think about situational awareness.

It's very, very easy. for someone to be used to having the most up-to-date, accurate situational awareness and want that constantly. And how does that person then, as a commander, resist the temptation to reach down and start trying to affect subordinate units two, three levels below?

But thankfully, I have two good stories of how people I interviewed did not abuse that technology. So Rupert Smith, it's a long quote, but I think it's very important just to think about multinational missions in general for a moment. Rupert Smith, in his excellent book, Utility of Force, said the commander of an international military force said, We must always be aware of the political factors and to make up the alliance or coalition.

Indeed the nature of the relationship between allies is an important factor in the context of the operation. The basis of the collaboration must be absolutely clear at the highest level and transmit it down since it will ultimately define the limits of the shared activity. So what he's saying is that there's many, many different external factors affecting people who come together to form a multinational operation. Some of them are characterised as follows, so a fight for equity. So to give you an example, in Kosovo in 1999, the Irish contingent at that time was a heavy transport company.

That's what they brought to it. I'm assuming it was a US division or at least not. So how can you have equal say at the table with those two organisations? But relative to that country's capacity and capability, that might be a really big deal for that country committing those forces.

So everyone will fight for equity. So instead of actually apportioning a say in the operations to each contingent based on the size of that contingent, what I've read... says that you actually have to divide the cake into equal slices, and make people feel included in that organisation, because relative to the size of our country and our military, that might be an equal amount. Command cacophony, so that's a phrase I've coined to try and summarise the parallel command structures that can exist, one being legitimate and operational, one being informal. So the official chain of command from a force commander to division, to brigade, and all the way down to a platoon commander, that's the chain of command, the operational chain of command, we all understand that.

But... If there's a company down there from an insert country here, then that country, that component's senior national representative may have to reach back to their home capital and ask a question, can we conduct this operation? I've witnessed that firsthand in Mali. I've loads of examples from my research of where we've done it as an organisation, because sometimes the risk involved might actually require a two-star at home in that country to make the decision. So command cacophony can slow things down.

One example... There was a battalion deployed in one of my case studies where a one-star had to get into a plane and fly to speak to another one-star to approve their concept of operations of what they were asking that battalion to do. So think about how slow that makes the decision-making and responses to changing events. Then these two go hand-in-hand as well, so limited authority or command by persuasion, so just take into account what I just said.

From a lot of what I've read about multinational forces, there'll be commanders who will cajole, will coerce, will convince, will... use their soft power skills to get people to contribute to the operation on certain things. Maybe leave them out of certain types of operations, maybe only use them during the daytime depending on what the operation is. So that leads to the point that maybe unity of effort is easier to achieve or more realistic to achieve I should say than unity of command.

And then interoperability, so language, doctrine. radios, tactics, weapons, fuel, you name it. All those challenges that NATO worked very hard to standardise as you move away from NATO allies into partners and into more multinational organisations, they become exacerbated.

All of those conspire to form barriers to mission command that collectively make multinational mission command quite difficult, but not impossible. I'll talk about my findings now. I mentioned the four generals that I interviewed. General Sir Rupert Smith commanded UN forces in Bosnia and Umpur 4. He also more famously commanded the 1st UK Armoured Division as part of VII Corps in Desert Storm.

You know who David Peter is, he commanded multinational forces in Iraq and then ISAF. General Sir Peter Cosgrove, as a Major General he commanded International Force East Timor, which I'll talk about in a second. He then became Chief of Army, Chief of Defence Force and then the Governor General of Australia.

And Major General Michael Beery commanded EUTM. Somalia and then later commanded UNIFIL for two and a half years, the United Nations interim force in Lebanon. So I was lucky to get to interview these four gentlemen. As I said, they cover a wide spectrum of operations from peacekeeping to crisis management operations to large-scale combat operations and counterinsurgency in between.

So I've kind of aggregated their points here for this slide just to make it easier to digest. So not all of them said each point, so just bear that in mind. If there's a relevant example, I'll bring it up.

Okay, so... All of them said Commanders's intent is important, that shouldn't be a surprise. I just think David Peter'one was interesting where he said he has his big ideas. So he might have three or four big ideas, things to him that are so important at the strategic level that everyone needs to know them. So he will constantly transmit them and when he visits troops he'll remind them.

He might ask them to see has it been passed down and then remind them if it hasn't. Peter Cosgrove used to do a lot of battlefield circulation in East Timor. So he would go out and he'd touch base with units of every nationality in 22 different nations. and every level and every rank and he would repeat his intent over and over and over again to the point where people I interviewed for East Timor 20 years after it were able to recount his commander's intent to me with 90% accuracy and when I interviewed him again it was quite close to what he said and what has been written and then Major General Beery very interestingly he talked about the high turnover rates which I'll cover in a second in Lebanon being a factor but what he would do is because of the multiple nations contributing to his organisation he would write his commander's intent Then we have it very, very carefully translated to that nation's home language. Then he would meet them, read it out in English, ask them to read it in their own language, and then say, is there any confusion about what I've asked you and what my intent is?

No, sir. Okay, now tell everyone in your unit what my intent is. And he spent most of his time just recirculating that intent over and over again. And he said it got to the point where he was tired from doing it, but he knew that was a good thing.

Avoid a blame culture. So two of the respondents said that if you... Admonish people if you punish them because they make a show some initiative and make a mistake or the gains they're trying to exploit don't materialize into further success.

They won't try again and if that becomes the status quo then it will create a culture of not trying and not trying to show any initiative. Trust, okay so trust is probably the most valuable commodity in the mission command market and they all talked about how to build trust. So trust as I said in an organization that comes together ad hoc for a specific operation it's difficult to build. but they said you just have to repeatedly, over and over again, get people together, get them training together, keep contextualising your intent, keep reinforcing them with positive encouragement and get them to interoperate and train together so that the trust builds. And he said simply just building personalities or building relationships with personalities below and above you.

Competence, so they all spoke about competence. Again, some people are just not competent enough for mission command to be bestowed upon them. And how you trust them and how you empower them will change with that, obviously. So David Peter said...

If you ask people to work for him, some would say they had enormous freedom and a very light hold on the reins. Other people then would say, no, he was a micromanager, simply because the trust and competence vary from person to person. But interestingly, none of them said, once a person is deemed not competent, forget about them.

They all said you can work on building relationships, building trust and increasing their competence. And then standardisation, so getting an organisation like Unifil, for example, together and having SOPs. that can transcend those cultural and doctrinal barriers, that can transcend language barriers, so that everyone understands when they say defeat or disrupt, that people understand the definitions of those two very different words. So they identified some barriers to mission command and multinational forces.

So I mentioned high turnover rates, so something like Desert Storm, where it was a build-up and then a war and then a withdrawal, that doesn't, it's not really as much of a factor here. But if you have an ongoing operation for years where multinational forces are rotating in, some for six months, some for 12, some for shorter, or specialists are coming and going, then you're going to have a lot of turnover of commanders as well. And that was a big problem, Michael Beery said, in Lebanon, where he had to constantly repeat his commander's intent. And he said it was sometimes where one of his MAs would say, OK, sir, we have a new Chinese contingent. And he said, but we just briefed him.

And, oh, sir, that was six months ago. And he's like, OK, here we go again. So he had to just keep doing that and not to get frustrated or lose his patience.

Micromanaging commanders, because of high turnover rates, because of a lack of trust, they all agree that these This is a huge factor. I mean, it's one of the most obvious ones, but a commander coming in and not recognising the skills or capabilities that a subordinate multinational force brings to their organisation, that can be a big factor. Technology, so obviously what I mentioned about helicopters and situational awareness equipment, I have two examples of where two of the people interviewed actually did not, they actually resisted the temptation to get involved.

So Rupert Smith said when he was advancing or moving to contact in Iraq. that he listened two levels down. So he would listen to his battalion commanders on his radio, and he had two brigades forward, and he would just keep a bit of a listen to what the battalion commanders were doing, but he never keyed the handset. He just listened in.

So that allowed him to see, okay, that brigade is using way more ammunition than I expected, or they're using much less ammunition. Let's shift the priority of sustainment to that other brigade, and vice versa. Or if they were making greater gains, he would just listen in for his own awareness, knowing that he had a G3 staff that were keeping up to date. But just, he resisted the temptation. to pick up the handset and abuse that.

Peter Cosgrove said that when he was Chief of Defence, someone came in to brief him on an ongoing operation and opened up a laptop and then showed him a live feed of the operation. And he said, no, no, no, I don't need to see this. There's multiple commanders between me and this information. They need to analyse, they know what they're looking at, I don't.

And who am I to look over the shoulder of this squadron commander or platoon commander and try and tell him that he's doing something wrong? So he was able to recognise the technology existed and it's a great asset, but not to... not to let it change his leadership or command style.

Again, insufficiently competent commanders, so the language barrier came up for a couple of these generals where they said that in some armies below a certain rank, those people won't speak that good English, they won't have the same level of education in English. And if that's the case, you can't delegate to that level, you have to only delegate to one level above. So what he meant by that was if you were putting together a force of three multinational companies, Probably you should really maybe keep it at the company level because when you're at platoon level or start retask organizing those platoons the communication will break down and Rupert Smith said he'd always keep it one level above that to mitigate that and But people being differently competent was the point and that they're not incompetent at being a soldier But maybe compared to what you view is relevant for that that they might be seeing it But they all as I said, they wouldn't give up on someone like that. It's something that can be developed and an interoperability Okay, it's come up throughout this study interoperability as a factor However, as I said, Rupert Smith came up with the SOPs as an idea. UNIFIL is a good example of an organisation with very detailed SOPs that transcend language barriers.

So I'll wrap up with this case study on InterFET. I have an article in Military Review next month, the May-June edition. We'll cover this in a lot more detail than I'm going to cover now, including the background to InterFET, which is very interesting. But I'll just talk about some of the key lessons I've learned from this, because it's a very interesting case study of where Mission Command went right. East Timor, 700 kilometres north-west of Australia.

In 1999, they voted for independence from Indonesia, and when Indonesia withdrew, violence erupted with pro-Indonesian and anti-Indonesian forces clashing and a lot of attacks on civilians. So 700 kilometres from Australia, Australia couldn't ignore it, the world's media wasn't ignoring it, and an international response was called for to stop the violence and to stabilise East Timor. Australia being the nearest and most powerful and capable military. nation in the region, they took the lead. The call went out for other nations to participate.

Unsurprisingly, New Zealand committed a battalion straight away. And when the call went out, Ireland, as you can see the photograph on the left, committed a platoon because our Army Ranger Wing, our Special Forces, had short notice, high readiness soldiers on standby anyway. So they agreed to deploy two platoons in succession to the New Zealand battalion. The New Zealand battalion was in an Australian brigade.

The Australian Brigade was part of the wider Australian force, but there was 22 nations came together very quickly in 1999, and East Timor lasted for just less than a year before it handed over to a UN force. So interestingly, when I interviewed, I interviewed people from Force Commanders, the Battalion Commanders of the New Zealand Battalion, two of the Company Commanderss, two Irish Platoon Commanderss, and then a scatter of NCOs at what they would call team level or section or squad level. And what's quite interesting is the difference... perceptions about mission command. So Ireland at that time, 1999, we didn't have this in our doctrine yet.

It was there in practice in some cases, but it wasn't a way of life. It was more good commanders practiced it, but we were just emerging from decades of internal security operations. We had Lebanon, we had a deployment of a large battalion in Lebanon, but typically people were more used to being tightly controlled because of the nature of internal security operations.

New Zealand, as you can see, he's a lot happier about command. They had a they had imbued mission command into their soldiers, into all their training already by the state. So their doctrine backed up and reflected mission command at this point.

And coincidentally, the two company commanders and the battalion commander of one Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment were all advocates of mission command and practitioners. So Ireland was entering... In some ways an unfamiliar command environment but something they were comfortable with doing when it existed. They just didn't know what it was called or what it was about.

New Zealand, it was a way of doing business. It was how they were educated and practiced. So the presence of Mission Command, how it has emerged from the case study, what that looked like. So Commanders's intent was communicated constantly at all levels.

You'll see a photograph in a moment showing the physical terrain of East Timor. It's difficult to do battlefield circulation so a lot of it was done what they call evening prayers or where the company commander would come up on the radio. and reissue or recontextualise his intent to reaffirm what was going on.

Patrolling and observation posts and everything else was tasked by short, over-the-radio, intent-based orders because for the platoon commanders to come to the company headquarters for an orders brief would involve three modes of transport, one of which was walking. So it was difficult to bring the company commanders together or indeed the platoon commanders. So issuing the intents constantly right down, you saw the effect of it I mentioned a moment ago when veterans of this... 20 years later could recount the 4th Commanders's intent. Empowerment and freedom of action.

Australia and New Zealand were big believers in mission command at this time and still are. So they empowered people automatically. It was the way they did business. They gave people freedom of action. That was quickly bestowed to the Irish platoon, although the Irish coming in, as one guy said, we didn't know what we were getting.

We didn't know anything about the Irish Army, let alone these guys coming in. But how trust was fostered was during pre-deployment training. So the Irish platoon went to Townsville in Australia.

And they trained with one New Zealand infantry regiment. And they met the company commander they'd be working with. They met the soldiers they'd be working with.

And that trust started from there. It started with, believe it or not, a shooting competition that the Irish guys won. And they were like, OK, they're good shots. Then there was some patrolling. OK, they're good at patrolling.

Right, where's your shortcomings? We need jungle training. OK, we'll do jungle training.

Jeez, they're pretty good at this. So bit by bit, these little micro demonstrations of professionalism and, of course, sharing a coffee in the evening and chatting about the day's training. That built trust. So even an outside element coming into a force like that, you can build trust.

But then once the mission started, trust was the name of the game. They empowered commanders, they empowered people to carry out operations as they saw fit. So why did it work in East Timor?

So there's a few reasons. Some are actually environmental. So advocacy for mission command, doctrine and practice.

So from the force commander down, including the Irish commanders that deployed who weren't as familiar with the concept, everyone became an advocate of mission command. And it was just encouraged, it was championed, and it was just the way people did business. You can see from that photograph the severe terrain.

Patrolling those hills on foot would take a long time to cover, just a couple of kilometres. I think they were talking about between four and six kilometres a day in some cases, just trying to get into position for an OP. The impact of the environment was exacerbated by the distances that they were covered. So even trying to get to them, as I mentioned, required three modes of transport.

Habitual association and pre-deployment training. So New Zealand and Australia had a very close relationship anyway. Anzac Day is coming up on the 25th, so going back to World War I, very, very close ties. So Australian and New Zealand officers and NCOs train in each other's schools. They cross-train and they spend a lot of time together.

One, our NZIR, had actually deployed to Australia with Tree Brigade, who they deployed to East Timor with the year previous to do an exercise. So they had a combined exercise where although different commanders and leaders may have been in place, A lot of the staff, a lot of the other leaders would have been there, so at least they knew each other. And then the pre-deployment training that I mentioned. So the first thing that they did with the New Zealand battalion was to get as much of it as they could to Australia to conduct jungle training and pre-deployment training.

And thankfully, the Irish platoon was able to be included in that. So they were able to build that trust that I mentioned. And then the influence of the force commander, I've mentioned it a couple of times, but since his time in Vietnam and Malaya, he was just a huge advocate of mission command. He said in Vietnam...

he was more of a recipient of Mission Command than issuing it, but he felt very empowered by his company commander, and he remembered how that felt. So for the rest of his career, that's the way he did business. So catching people early on in their careers, during training, during NCO leadership training, and practicing Mission Command and letting people fail is probably the key to imbuing it in people at an early age.

And thankfully, as he was the first commander, that was just the way he did business. If you want to read more about Mission Command, I can recommend any number of books, and so can... a lot of the instructors, but these are ones that have stood out for me.

Stood out for me is Transforming Command, where Eitan Shamir looks at three organisations, the US, the British and the Israeli armies, and how Mission Command evolved and some of the cultural influences on those. Adopting Mission Command is a good summary by retired US Army officer Donald Vandegrift. I have a very short, very lowbrow article on the company leader about Mission Command and the Irish Army, how we train people with it, and an example of an exercise that we... pose the challenge to people and see how they respond. Very good Australian book, Trust and Leadership.

There's the US Army one, 16 Cases of Mission Command, 16 Case Studies. And this book more recently came out, recommended to me by Manu, wherever he is. An excellent book on the history of outstrike tactic and that's written by a Canadian colonel.

I'll leave you with this quote from Donald Vandegrift, I think it's excellent so you can outstrike tactic or mission command. It's a cultural philosophy, it's the highest form of military professionalism. The overall commander's intent is for the member to strive for professionalism.

In return, the individual will be given latitude in the accomplishment of their given missions. So I'm willing to answer any questions if people need to cut away to go to class, that's obviously absolutely socially acceptable. If anyone wants to catch the end of the Exodus brief, you still have a chance. I'll answer questions here.

If I don't know the answer... I won't answer it, but I will talk to you afterwards about it if you want, because I'm quite keen to talk to people about Mission Command anyway. So I'll open it up to questions if there are any. Let me start. In your case study review, did you ever find a case where you've got an overall commander that takes the detailed approach, but it's a board that takes a mission commander approach?

And how did the two reconcile that? I have. I have the opposite, if that might answer the question. So an example where a platoon commander, and we're talking low level here obviously, but a platoon commander had complete mission command approach and one of his team leaders had a very, very detailed approach. I know he's only a team leader, but I think...

it answers the question. He refused to empower anyone in his team and because of the nature of being a special forces unit, they're all about empowerment and collaborative planning. He planned everything himself, didn't want any inputs from the guys and that caused a lot of problems in the platoon. So they had to try and reconcile it and that person couldn't change. That person was at a point in his career where he wasn't going to make any change.

But what I have seen and unfortunately I had the personal experience of this is where the person above me was a very detailed commander. I had to open up up my mission command umbrella and put it up and shelter my subordinates from the rain that was coming down. And that wasn't an easy thing to do.

And actually, I found it very exhausting, just emotionally tiring, trying to constantly deal with that. But the good news was that in the most part, my subordinates didn't see that. And they just saw mission command continue to happen, albeit with some inserts and injects from the colonel.

But yeah, I think strong leaders, the level below, need to... And I've just come from an emotional intelligence class. So... So I think there's probably a lot of the answers exist in that realm, is that people need to be aware of how they're communicating and how it makes others feel. So if you think back to the first slide I put up, I remember how Commander and Cowick made me feel in 2005, empowering me to do something when he wasn't there.

And I told him I was going to mention him in this, and he laughed. And he said, you can if you want, but I don't think it was that impactful. So he didn't even realise.

He just said it, but to me, it was a big deal. Okay. Oh, let's give him a round of applause.

Thanks, sir. Hey, well, Gavin, what... So, hey, tremendous presentation.

I think clearly it's shown the depth of his research to date and the emphasis and conclusions he's drawing from that research. Importantly, though, again, he is very receptive... and open to thoughts that can further his research and his conclusions.

So even if you're not going to offer those thoughts out here in public, please reach out to Gavin personally and have a conversation. He clearly has reached out to some. key people from all levels from the four star down to glean these insights and I'm sure his colleagues and peers here would add just as much measure to his document as he goes along so don't pass up that opportunity you're on short final so make sure you do that and if nothing else make sure you have good comms with him and all your peers before you split to the winds okay good deal well next slide please if you would Brett so to continue on after that great presentation Malk Wilcox may or may not show show up. But this is the one we're doing in May.

He is a Russian FAO who has an extensive background on the Russian political, really from a dot mil, or not dot mil, but a PCPT framework. So I will tell you, he's a recognized expert well beyond not just the Army, the United States, but also within Europe as well. So he has particular thoughts on the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe and the Russian security policy. I encourage you to attend that as well.

Hope to see you then. And based on that, thanks for your participation today. Again, it shows that you are part of the profession that wants to know and learn more.

So best of luck to you as you go. Have a great day.

Transcript for:Mission Command in Multinational Forces Overview

Transcript for:
Mission Command in Multinational Forces Overview