Under Command, Out Of Control—the Emerging Paradigm For Army Operations

Command and Control

Armies implement a command hierarchy, in which orders cascade from the commander-in-chief via senior and junior commanders to the troops on the ground. The commander is supported by a staff, which at higher echelons is distributed among several headquarters, some of them dually redundant. The structure typical of NATO armies is fundamentally the same as that employed during the First and Second World Wars, while many of its essential features go back a considerable time before that. The British Army, for one, has experimented with alternative arrangements over the last few decades, but none has proved lasting.

It has commonly been argued that digitisation will reverse the historical trend for an increasing number of command layers and growing staff size. Automation of information gathering and processing should reduce the need for headquarters manpower, shorten lines of communications between the commander and his subordinates, and allow the commander to manage a greater number of entities. The same claims have been made in industry. Information technology is said to have produced flatter hierarchies, less bureaucracy, and a more decisive, high involvement style of management [1].

An important question is how this will affect the responsibilities of different levels of command. One argument suggests that delayering might be associated with a greater emphasis on team working and empowerment of junior ranks, to make up for the loss of traditional mechanisms of direction. An opposing argument is that digitisation might actually increase the control of senior ranks. Advanced battlefield sensors could give the headquarters a clearer view of the battle than the troops who are actually there, so that decision-making responsibility will migrate naturally upwards. Commanders who have a very detailed tactical picture alongside powerful, interactive command tools will be able to micromanage the formation.

In this discussion, it is helpful to distinguish between command and control as two functions of a military hierarchy. Command is associated with such concepts as decision making, motivation, direction, authority, leadership, accountability and responsibility. Control is not the equal of command but is said to be one component of it. Control refers to the process whereby a commander, assisted by a staff, organises, directs and co-ordinates the formation. It is a managerial function, involving the allocation and regulation of resources. Control is about administration, whereas command is a moral issue [2].

Information technology primarily affects the task of control, that is, the administrative/managerial element of command. Today, the ability to control a given formation is limited by the commander’s capacity to keep up with fast-flowing activity. Since digitisation will make it easier to handle information, it should improve the commander’s effectiveness in this area. However, the relative difficulty of control also depends on such issues as the complexity of the force structure, the challenges of the environment, and the formation’s own experience and continuity. Digitisation may affect these to a lesser extent or not at all, and so it should not be regarded as a panacea.

At present, the most prevalent theme within digitisation is about supporting the needs of headquarters at battlegroup level and above (although the issue of enhancing individual capabilities in the contact battle is not being neglected). In this respect, digitisation is primarily relevant to the operational level of command. This is the level intermediate between tactics (the prosecution of particular engagements) and strategy (the overall problem of winning the war) [3]. It is defined in British doctrine as the process of fulfilling a strategic objective [4]. It involves the setting of missions and objectives in order to achieve a desired end state in an entire theatre. Typically it looks ahead for a period of between two days and several months.

To explore how information technology will affect roles and activities at the operational level, this paper proposes a general model of command decision making. Digitisation can then be viewed in the light of broader themes in military affairs that extend back thousands of years. Its characteristic features and implications appear not as sui generis but as relating to issues that have always faced military commanders. Both digitisation and its associated organisational changes may be regarded as evolutionary not revolutionary. The requirements on future command structures then appear simply as the latest logical twist in a long-standing historical development.

Origins of Command Hierarchy [5]

Stratification develops naturally when large numbers of people apply themselves to a common task. The management scientist Joan Cox has identified a characteristic five-layer structure that often arises [6].

In Cox’s model, level 1 consists of those who deliver the output of the organisation while having no formal authority over anyone else. Level 2 comprises those who co-ordinate the activities of the level 1 personnel, without being involved in policy making. The level 2 supervisor plus level 1 subordinates constitute a ‘work unit’. Level 3 in the hierarchy consists of those who co-ordinate at least two work units. This level and above are the managerial levels. Level 4 delegates work and responsibility to the level 3 positions. Finally level 5 comprises the top management, responsible for long-term policy.

In a modern army, this hierarchy is implemented on two scales—the tactical/unit scale and the operational/formation scale. That is to say, the unit, as the fundamental element of all army formations, can be considered to be the output level (level 1) entity. Alternatively, the unit can be considered as an organisation in its own right, with the rifleman at level 1 and the unit commander at level 5 (assuming an infantry unit). See the following table.

Even in ancient times, armies were quite large and comparable to those of today. Around 1000 BC, the Assyrians fielded armies of some 100,000 soldiers. Clearly, such forces could only be controlled through some kind of hierarchy. Table 2 presents the structures of three ancient armies, and compares them with the modern equivalent. The comparison is based on numbers of combat troops. Modern formations include various support specialists (which would also have been present to a lesser extent in ancient armies). The table omits some internal details of the formations, such as the distinction between light and heavily armed troops or between archers and pikemen.

It may be appreciated that the ancient command structures bore a broad resemblance to each other and to the modern one. However, they varied considerably in detail and whole layers of command familiar from modern armies were often left out. The similarities could therefore be partially coincidental.

Ancient armies also had well developed staff systems. The consul who commanded a Roman consular army was supported by a number of quaestors whose duties consisted of administration and planning. Pages and aides-de-camp functioned as messengers. The staffs tended to serve as a training ground for future senior commanders. Many of the details of ancient staff systems are relatively unclear, and there is probably a danger of underestimating their sophistication. It seems fair to say, however, that they were much smaller than those of today.

Notwithstanding the existence of staffs and formation structures, from an operational perspective there was very little sense of a command hierarchy. Armies tended to fight in massed formations. The typical battle involved an encounter between opposing phalanxes, in which hundreds or thousands of troops might be arranged shoulder-to-shoulder and several lines deep.

Armies adopted highly conventional postures. For example, the ten cohorts of a Roman legion were arranged in a 4-3-3 formation on the battlefield. There was a fixed distance between the men, of one metre for manoeuvre and two metres for hand-to-hand combat. To allow the expansion from close to open order, there was one cohort width between the cohorts prior to actual engagement.

Armies also exhibited only a limited range of behaviours. Rear ranks might pass through forward ranks at a particular stage of the battle, or cavalry and light infantry might charge the enemy’s flanks in a pre-defined manner. These stereotyped manoeuvres required little initiative at lower levels. Although scouts and other specialist troops might operate independently, subordinate officers were for the most part not assigned distinct missions to execute at their own discretion. Their role was largely that of detailed tactical control. Operational decision making was concentrated in the commander-in-chief. There was not even a distinct commander at every layer. In the Roman army, the maniple was controlled by its two centurions and had no assigned officer as such. Since initiative was not required, unity of command was not an issue.

Communications in historical armies were naturally restricted and of short range. Drummers co-ordinated the recognised drills. For more complex messages, armies variously employed smoke signals, flags and the heliograph, or fire beacons for night operations. Genghis Khan invented a system using flaming arrows. The amount of information that could be passed by such means was limited. The overall trend, however, has been for the power of communications to increase, for example with the introduction of line telegraphy and telephony in the nineteenth century and radio in the twentieth century.

The emergence of modern formations can be traced to the sixteenth century, when the Spanish army adopted a structure based on 20 colunelas (columns), each comprising 1,000–1,250 men organised in five companies. The colunela is the origin of the modern battalion headed by a colonel. On campaign, three colunelas were grouped as a tercio. This was not a permanent formation and its command was not a permanent appointment. In the seventeenth century, Gustavus II Adolphus introduced the brigade proper, composed of three battalions. His battalions were 500-strong and comprised four companies. In the Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century, the British began with eight independent brigades of two to three battalions each. As the force grew, it was reorganised into divisions, each comprising 6000 men. Napoleon adopted a division of two to three infantry brigades, each with two to five battalions, plus an artillery brigade containing one or more batteries. Napoleon also introduced the corps as a permanent formation, containing cavalry alongside the infantry divisions.

These basic structures have remained down to the present but their employment has changed. In the Napoleonic wars, armies still fought in massed ranks, although their dispositions and behaviours were considerably more varied than those of the classical phalanx. As communications have improved, the main trend has been for formations to operate in an increasingly dispersed and disconnected manner, with subordinate components taking on distinct missions. The increasing sophistication has implied the growth of subordinate headquarters, independently determining the activity of each component formation in accordance with an overall intent. This has led to the current concept of mission command, whereby lower headquarters are given a fundamental mission but have considerable leeway over the details of how they fulfil it. It should be appreciated that mission command is not an abrupt innovation. Armies have been evolving conceptually in this direction for many centuries.

The army’s existing command hierarchy must therefore be regarded as the outcome of two interacting logics. The first logic involves the need for stratification to support work co-ordination, and is attested to by the theoretical comparative study of human organisations. The second logic consists of the long evolutionary process of command differentiation, which reflects the growing complexity and capabilities of military organisations.

The command hierarchy is not simply an unwieldy bureaucracy and overhead, but is a sensible and necessary response to the requirements of military operations. It would be reckless to dismantle it too hastily. Yet military hierarchies have changed with time, and this can be linked to the growing availability of information on the battlefield. Given that digitisation implies significant improvements in information management, it ought to entail further changes in command structures. These changes will represent continued evolution along the lines that are already well established.

Mathematical Treatment

It will be helpful to introduce a mathematical model representing the main features in the evolution of command hierarchies. For simplicity, the model will focus on a single command interface, that is a commander with a number of subordinate units. To some extent, the same issues affect each interface, and so the model’s conclusions can be generalised to a full hierarchy. More refined models could also be envisaged, involving further parameters and capturing detailed characteristics of real-life formations, but this is not really necessary for the broad points being made here. Nevertheless, the discussion should be recognised as being illustrative of the command and control process rather than a rigorous description of it.

Consider a given formation as being made up of a command element and n distinct operational elements. Here, n can be understood as a measure of the simultaneity in the formation’s operational activity. For example, a phalanx that manoeuvres and engages the enemy en masse has n = 1, even if it embodies a ramifying chain of command for the purposes of tactical control.

Let h be the amount of information contained in the output of each operational element. This should be understood in information theoretic terms. In effect, a high value for h means that, from an outsider’s perspective, there is considerable unpredictability in the behaviour of the subordinate formation. (The details of how h would be calculated are not important here. However, as a simple illustration, assume that all behaviours are equally likely. Then if the subordinate formation has just two possible behaviours—attack or flee—h would consist of just one bit of information. For four possible behaviours, h = 2, for eight possible behaviours, h = 3, and in general the number of possible behaviours is 2^h.) h can be thought of as a measure of the richness or possibility for surprise in the sub-formation’s behaviour.

The total amount of information in the sub-formation’s behaviour is made up of a locally decided, autonomous component and a commanded component decided by the formation’s command element.

$h=h_{commanded}+h_{autonomous}$ (1)

Define the formation’s ‘integration’, I, as:

$I=\frac{h_{commanded}}{h_{commanded}+h_{autonomous}}$ (2)

Integration is a measure of the degree of control of the command element over its sub-formations. If I = 1, the sub-formations have no initiative and only do as they are ordered. If I=0, the sub-formations operate completely independently, without higher orders. From Equations (1) and (2), it follows that:

$h_{commanded}=Ih$, while $h_{autonomous}=(1-I)h$ (3)

Suppose that the different elements of the formation are connected by communications channels capable of conveying information at a rate, 1/q. This means that as q ? ∞ communications become impossibly difficult, and as q ? 0 communications become totally transparent.

Consider the fraction of the operational picture that two sub-formations share in common. When communications are impossibly difficult (q ? ∞), this fraction will be zero; that is, the two sub-formations will know nothing about each other’s situation. When communications are totally transparent (q ? 0), this fraction will be one; that is, the two sub-formations will know everything about each other’s situation—they will have a (completely) common operational picture. In general, the fraction of the operational picture that is shared between sub-formations can be taken to be proportional to 1/(1+q). (Note. To obtain a more precise expression, one would need to take into account the rate at which the local operational picture changes and possibly other details. This would be important if one were to use the model for quantitative calculations but it does not materially alter the broad structural features being considered here.)

Consider now the fraction of the sub-formation’s behaviour that is consistent with or co-ordinated with the behaviour of other formations.

All of the commanded element of a sub-formation’s behaviour will be consistent or co-ordinated with the other sub-formations, that is, based on a common view. This simply states that the orders given out by the command element to its subordinate elements are self-consistent. (Deranged commanders who give out conflicting orders are discounted.)

The autonomous part of each sub-formation’s behaviour is based on an operational picture that is only a fraction 1/(1+q) consistent with the other sub-formations. Correspondingly, its decision making and resulting behaviour will also be a fraction 1/(1+q) consistent with the other sub-formations.

Overall, the amount of the sub-formation’s behaviour that is consistent with the rest of the formation will be given by:

Amount of ‘consistent’ behaviour $=Ih+\frac{(1-I)h}{(1+q)}$ (4)

The proportion of ‘consistent’ behaviour is given by dividing the above expression by the total amount of behaviour, h. Call this quantity u. It may be understood as a measure of the unity of purpose of the formation. It is given by

$u=I+\frac{(1-I)}{(1+q)}$ (5)

which can be simplified to:

$u=\frac{1+Iq}{1+q}$ (6)

When u=1, the formation functions in a completely consistent and co-ordinated manner. When u=0, it functions in a completely inconsistent and uncoordinated manner.

The fact that some decision making is performed in a higher headquarters imposes a delay in the decision cycle of each sub-formation. The delay comprises two elements: (a) the time to reach a decision in the higher headquarters and (b) the time to communicate this decision.

The time to reach a decision depends on the number of sub-formations, n, and the complexity of the decision to be made for each sub-formation. The complexity of the decision is given by Ih; that is, the amount of information generated by the command element (Equation (3)). We can write:

$t_{decide}=\lambda nIh$ (7)

where λ is a constant of proportionality reflecting decision speed.

The time to communicate the decision depends on the total amount of information to be communicated (= nIh) and the difficulty of communications (q). Hence:

$t_{communicate}=qnIh$ (8)

It is worth commenting on the presence of n in the above expression. It might be thought that once the decision has been made, it can be communicated in parallel to the different formations. For example, two horsemen could ride off with separate instructions to two different wings of the army and would take just as long to do so as one horseman riding to one wing. However, the point of the present model is to capture the fact that the command element is a bottleneck, which can only give out its decisions in a serial manner. Consider the simplest case of a commander briefing two subordinates face to face. Having made his decision, the commander must brief each one in turn. He cannot brief them simultaneously (unless he is giving them the same orders, in which case they are not distinct and we have n=1 not n=2). If two horsemen carry two messages, they still need to be briefed separately first, or the separate messages need to be written. It is this bottleneck that is represented by q.

The total overhead on the decision cycle of each sub-formation is given by

$t=(\lambda +q)nIh$ (9)

(t is a time, with $t=t_{decide}+t_{communicate}$)

The decision-making overhead for a given degree of unity of purpose is therefore given by:

$\frac{t}{u}=\frac{(\lambda +q)nIh}{(1+Iq)/(1+q)}$ (10

or:

$\frac{t}{u}=\frac{(\lambda +q)(1+q)nIh}{(1+Iq)}$ (11)

Now consider the values of u and t/u at the extreme values of q ? ∞ (for an ancient army) and q ? 0 (for a highly digitised force). We have:

For an effective army, it is desirable to maximise the unity of purpose, u, and minimise the relative decision making overhead, t/u. If possible, it is also desirable to have high values for simultaneity, n, and operational complexity, h. The above formulae show that when communications are difficult (q?∞), u increases with I, while t/u is independent of I and increases with nh. It is therefore desirable to maximise I and minimise nh. Conversely, when communications are easy (q?0), u is invariably high and independent of I, while t/u depends upon nIh. In this case, by minimising I it is possible to let n and h increase. These results may be summarised by Table 3.

These results accord with the observed historical trends. Until about 150 years ago, improvements in battlefield communications were modest. Simultaneity and operational complexity remained relatively low. In the twentieth century, communications improved but they were still far from transparent. Simultaneity and operational complexity increased, but integration also remained high in order to maintain unity of purpose.

In the twenty-first century, digitisation promises to reduce q to very low levels. The implication is that integration ought to decrease significantly, while simultaneity and operational complexity may rise. Indeed, a failure to reduce integration will result in a growing, unnecessary decision-making overhead.

As far as simultaneity is concerned, this is certainly valued and called for by current British doctrine. However, the doctrine also emphasises the importance of synchronisation, sequencing and tempo (which should be interpreted as the right rhythm for the operation and does not necessarily imply ‘as fast as possible’). These factors are not addressed in the above model. They are not incompatible with simultaneity, but they may require a higher level of integration than would be expected based on the consideration of simultaneity alone. Meanwhile, co-ordinated mass—the phalanx—has a certain shock value, which should be weighed against the desirability of simultaneity. During Operation Restore Hope, Somali agitators were more impressed and intimidated by the American forces when they formed up at platoon strength than when the same troops were distributed throughout a hostile crowd as individual sections and fire teams [3].

Innovation, implying a high value for h, is also commended by existing doctrine. In the Second World War, innovation tended to emerge in a relatively uncoordinated fashion low in the chain of command [7]. This illustrates how difficult innovation is for a centralised authority. A high level of integration can be directly bad for innovation and complex operational behaviour because of the problems of delusion among top-level decision makers. Their subordinates may tell them what they want to hear and previous successes can create an illusion of invulnerability. This engenders a tendency to settle on a limited range of responses that have worked well in the past. Operation Barbarossa is a classic example of this. Hitler imagined that his armies would easily reprise in Russia the blitzkrieg that had had such dramatic results in the west. Dissenting generals were overridden [8].

Although current doctrine advocates innovation, versatility and simultaneity, it should not be assumed that the vision is being fully achieved in practice. One US army officer has commented that the command hierarchy is still very effective at suppressing new ideas [9]. The fundamental philosophy remains a Taylorist one, with rigid demarcation of responsibility [10]. Modern militaries also continue to default to an attrition mode of operations [9], implying limited-option, low-h behaviour. In the Gulf War and the Kosovo conflict, heavy reliance was placed on the bombing campaign, which, for all the talk of precision weaponry, included a large proportion of free-fall munitions.

There is probably a considerable way to go before contemporary armies arrive at the kind of low-I, high-n, high-h implementation that digitisation should make possible. To get there they will need to allow subordinate formations to drive the operation forward rather than being driven from above. Higher headquarters should also be reduced drastically in size since they will have much less to do.

An analogy for the kind of army that might be created is possibly the ‘agent’ model that is being adopted for some computer applications. In this, complex functionality arises from the interaction of a large number of independent software agents or routines. Similarly, the overall behaviour of a military formation might arise from the independent activity of a large number of individual components. Suitable procedures would be needed to ensure that the emergent behaviour is as desired. Such an arrangement should not be equated with anarchy. However, the large number of entities and the high degree of autonomy would allow complex solutions to appear within given constraints, creating significant problems for the enemy.

Independence and simultaneity apply to combat support and combat service support functions as well as to the combat arms. Ammunition provisioners, say, would not be answerable to a division or corps headquarters but would respond directly to the needs of individual units and would decide their own priorities and stock levels. In the same way, a large number of independent companies are able to keep a city like New York supplied with food, never having more than a few days reserve and without running out [11]. By contrast, in the former Soviet Union, where such matters were scientifically and centrally planned, cities were always running out of toothpaste or other essentials. The benefits of decentralisation were observed in the Gulf War when units used the Air Staff Management Aid, an information system, to resolve supply problems directly with provisioners in the UK. This approach, bypassing the chain of command, proved rapid and effective [12].

The Commander’s Role

The reduction of hierarchy that has taken place in industry over the last few decades has implied a move towards less procedural, less rigid styles of working. Workers are subjected to a reduced amount of day-to-day control. Yet companies still have multi-layered lines of reporting. Even in today’s ‘flat’ organisations, it is not normally the case that one manager controls dozens of subordinates with absolutely no supplementary structure at all. On the contrary, one person typically controls no more than 5-10 others directly. Hierarchies have not disappeared but have simply become more fluid and situation-dependent. There is also a greater degree of informality between senior and junior staff.

If it were the case that dozens of employees reported to a single individual, some obvious pathologies would surely follow. For a start, there would inevitably be freewheeling among employees who were subject to insufficient oversight of their activities, or at least there would be the pursuit of personal agendas with no definite relevance to the organisation’s overall goals. It is also highly likely that the employees’ morale would suffer from the lack of contact with and visibility to their supervisor.

The same points apply to the military. Maintenance of morale requires the existence of commanders who can supply appreciation and reassurance to their troops. Commanders also mentor their immediate subordinates. This implies providing them with advice and overseeing their training and professional development. In addition, a given command layer serves as an interface between the layers above and below. The commander champions his troops in dealings with senior officers and translates the overall goals of the force into terms that are relevant to his subordinates [13].

For these roles, formal differences of rank are important. Individuals naturally place more value on commendations and instructions that emanate from a general, a managing director, or the queen than on those coming from an ordinary colleague. Senior commanders must therefore have status to function effectively. Status is acquired by having control over important resources, such as the soldier’s pay and promotion prospects [14]. Status also requires validation through visible status symbols, such as gorgets and personal drivers. Those with status should be remote but not too remote. The physical presence of the commander is itself a motivator. In the Battle of Hastings, rumours of William’s death led to a loss of spirit among the Norman troops. When William rode in front of his knights with an open visor to show that he was still alive, their morale returned and victory was achieved.

The commander is needed to provide the fundamental stimulus that gets the formation in motion. In any walk of life, not just the military, people will inevitably please themselves if no one puts any other pressures on them or monitors their effectiveness. All human behaviour originates with goals. Without goals there would be no behaviour. Goals are arranged hierarchically. Broad, high-level goals—such as satisfying hunger—recruit detailed, lower-level goals—such as purchasing groceries and combining them to form a meal [15]. Since goals are hierarchical it makes sense that there should exist a command hierarchy to generate those goals. Senior commanders generate the top-level goals. Subordinate commanders receive those goals as a given and generate subsidiary goals that will lead to their fulfilment. Senior commanders subsequently provide the feedback without which commitment to the goal rapidly disappears.

The most effective way to motivate humans is to create circumstances that release their deepest held goals, rather than simply to order them to act [16]. Incentives are better than threats. People then willingly exhibit the desired behaviour. If they reduce the tendency to control, future commanders will need to ensure that the goals they set appear as sensible and worthwhile within the value systems of their subordinates. This does not mean that soldiers will never fight—as might be thought if it were assumed that they will always value the avoidance of danger [17]. However, it does mean that soldiers will only take on reasonable risks. Insofar as this results in force-conserving tactics, it is surely to be welcomed. It might have been preferable if after the first hour on the Somme it had been appreciated that the plan were doomed. A re-think could have occurred before the army lost tens of thousands of fighting men for minute gains that were in many cases reversed soon afterwards. It is too easy to blame this classically misguided action on the deficiencies of a few generals. The fundamental problem was a rigid command hierarchy in which control was expressed in a downward direction only. Orders went unchallenged and unexamined, and this is how a failed concept of operations was able to persist for many weeks.

Digitisation will place an increased premium on charismatic and inspirational commanders. Yet this kind of leadership is not necessarily easy. When speed is of the essence and inaction could have disastrous consequences, a direct order is much more likely to succeed. In the future, traditional control may continue to be important in certain circumstances, especially where the commander has a fuller picture of the situation than his subordinates and there is insufficient time to communicate it downwards. Having said this, the control element of command has never been a great priority for effective leaders. Good commanders have always tended to leave administrative details to their chief of staff. This supporting role seems to be universal. In traditional African kingdoms, the king was almost always supported by a prime minister. The latter dealt with day-to-day governmental affairs in the manner of a chief of staff [18].

Overall, if the army continues to evolve in accordance with the logic of improving communications, the need for control may well be reduced, but there will be a continuing need for command. Command is the basis of the moral component of fighting power, which complements the doctrinal and physical components. Many existing features of command, such as the mystification of rank, are likely to remain valid in the digitised era. The allowable span of command will also continue to be no more than 5-10, as in industry [2]. Today’s armies, with ratios of 1:4 or 1:3 implement a hierarchy that is steeper than this theoretical maximum. However, in peacetime it makes sense to have an excess of chiefs, since the training and development of chiefs takes many years. If a macrowar breaks out, requiring mass mobilisation, indians can be drafted in very quickly to fill the lower ranks with privates and second lieutenants. The hierarchy will then flatten.

It may be said that future formations will be ‘under command’ but ‘out of control’. In fact, the British Army is already exploring ideas for a future operational architecture along these lines. The UK Directorate General of Development and Doctrine (DGD&D) is considering a ‘hierarchical command structure imposed on a flat information structure’ [19]. This is said to require a ‘light touch’, implying a significant reduction of detailed control, and is intended to enhance the philosophy of mission command, i.e. provide greater autonomy to subordinate commanders or, in the terms of this paper, reduce integration.

The DGD&D concept recommends ‘managing by exception’. It is a truism that military plans do not long survive contact with the enemy. One recent estimate is that 80% of staff officer effort turns out to be irrelevant to the prosecution of the operation [20]. Furthermore, large proportions of firepower are typically directed against an enemy that is not there. It therefore makes sense not to allocate enormous effort to developing detailed plans in advance but rather to allow the operational solution to emerge naturally from subordinate decision making. Drastically descoping the planning process, adopting a more responsive modus operandi, and intervening only when necessary will eliminate much wasteful activity. By itself this should deliver an immediate boost to combat effectiveness.

Exploiting Digitisation

The threats of the future are unknown. They may well involve wars of national survival—for example against China over the Taiwan issue or over control of oilfields in central Asia or over a Chinese desire for lebensraum in the Russian Far East. Such wars will not be simply the Second World War plus computers. Nor will they be a re-run of the Gulf War. As a general principle, one cannot fight the same enemy twice. Hostile and potentially hostile nations learn from past defeats and develop new strategies (albeit that these may prove equally unsuccessful in their turn). Future macrowars could very well be fought with nuclear weapons, requiring highly dispersed formations and presenting land forces with an environment that they have planned for but never previously experienced.

Alternatively, future conflicts may involve African irregular militias—who could one day be bringing their aggression directly to northern lands, of whose attractions they are certainly well informed. Western armies could even find themselves in contention with the Russian mafia, whose resources have grown fantastically over the last decade and which has been helping itself to the former Soviet Union’s cold war arsenal. Such small-scale, do-it-yourself aggressors will prove impervious to the Tomahawk missiles and other weaponry that served so well in Kuwait and Kosovo.

It is not clear that the application of information technology in these kinds of future conflict will be as imagined in the current digitisation programmes of western armies. ‘Many of the projections of the techies are likely to be more dream than reality’ [21]. It is not even clear that the western armies will be the chief beneficiaries of information technology in such conflicts. Perhaps these armies will not really digitise at all. Even the United States has allocated funding for only partial digitisation, and the timescales are still upwards of five years—an aeon in computer terms [21].

The true military digitisation of the coming years and decades may be based not on the cumbersome and troubled equipment programmes of most NATO armies but rather on off-the-shelf electronic organisers and satellite telephones. The latter can generate more reliable, less costly solutions with higher interoperability. Irregular militias like the drug barons, mafias and third world rebels have very high simultaneity and capacity for innovation in their procurement procedures as well as in their operations. Meanwhile, the monolithic (low-n) purchasing organisations of western defence ministries may succeed only in demonstrating that they are not suitable grounds for innovation, which is done best by mavericks operating at a junior level.

During the declining stages of the Roman Empire, the author of a tract, De Rebus Bellicis, recommended a thoroughgoing mechanisation of the army along with corresponding changes in its organisation and procedures. He also made some mordant criticisms of the Empire’s procurement system. These observations and suggestions were ignored [22]. The need for change was not sufficiently obvious, while tradition and vested interests perhaps made it too difficult to contemplate significant upheaval. Eventually, Rome found itself at the mercy of barbarian armies, who had more to gain and less to lose in embracing new styles of warfare, and who were certainly far from being the disorganised rabbles of popular imagination.

There is a real danger that current visions of the digitised formation with a lean staff system and flattened control hierarchy may similarly never be realised by the leading armies. Procurement failures and failures of imagination may inhibit the necessary evolution. It is possible to advocate new doctrine but not necessarily so easy to see through the required far-reaching changes in the entrenched culture of currently ascendant forces [20]. The model of a low-I, high-n, high-h army may turn out instead to be a blueprint for innovators among the less favoured nations. Armies that currently seem to be written off may thereby one day surpass those that now dominate them. This would present the world with another one of the reversals that are so common throughout history.

Conclusion

Digitised formations, whether in western or other armies, should logically adopt alternative procedures throughout the command hierarchy, reflecting the far greater communicability of information. The traditional operational model based upon cascading plans and orders should give way to an agent-like model of near-autonomous entities, motivated by higher authorities but subjected only to occasional direction. The moral element of leadership and authority will continue to require a command hierarchy essentially the same as that of today, but erosion of the control element will require some fundamental changes in attitudes and expectations. This implies a decision making approach that is neither autocratic as in the past nor anarchic but rather democratic. As one writer has put it, the real revolution to do with digitisation is not technological at all, but cultural [3]. It is a critical question whether the armies of the leading nations can actually achieve the implied changes.

References

Author

Marc Widdowson is a social anthropologist, who has been with VEGA Group PLC for over 12 years. He has performed a variety of studies for the UK MOD, in areas such as crew training and the impacts of digitisation. He has also been involved with training and organisational change in the space and civil aviation industries.