Von Moltke the Elder once said, "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." As a veteran of an honest-to-god named battle (just like in the old days!), I can vouch for this statement. You have your plans, the enemy has his plans, and when you and he meet, both plans fall apart. Whoever's plan falls apart the least wins.
The best way to win is to have the most adaptable force, to be formless, as Sun Tzu wrote. With a rigid force working under a strict top-down hierarchy, you will win all the drill competitions and lose all the battles. With this in mind, I was dismayed to learn from Wired that the Army has developed an app store and will be putting in on smart phones they'll be issuing to soldiers. Why? Increasingly centralized command and control is sapping the initiative from junior leaders, leaving decisions to higher commanders, who do not understand the situation as well.
When we fought World War II, the corporal, sergeant or lieutenant on the spot made the tactical decisions. General strategic direction ("Take Cherbourg" or "take that house") came from on high, along with a basic plan that would be "adapted," (that is, discarded and replaced) as the situation warranted. We fought that war with field telephones and unreliable backpack radios, and we won it, decisively. Remember the scene in Band of Brothers when 1LT Winters led his men against a German gun emplacement? He surveyed the scene himself, made his plan, altered it as necessary and led the attack personally. The emplacement was destroyed with minimal American casualties and the attack became a textbook example of assault on a fixed position.
Fast forward sixty-three years. Your humble author is a platoon medic on a route clearance mission in scenic downtown Baghdad. Driving along, we come upon a row of boxes, set across our route in a straight, evenly spaced line. From the way the wind is shifting them, they appear empty, but they were definitely put there on purpose. There was no attempt at concealment, and the area is surrounded by multi-story structures, all of which offer ideal vantage points for enfilading fire or simple observation. It's night and the area is a known hotspot for enemy activity. Every instinct in every soldier in the platoon is screaming that this is an ambush or, at best, an attempt by the enemy to stop us and record how we react, to better attack us in the future. But even after we're sure the boxes are empty, we still sit there. Why?
Because our platoon leader, a West Point graduate recently promoted to captain, is waiting for instructions from higher. He cannot make the decision himself. The platoon sergeant and I mutter to each other about how we are all going to get rocketed to kingdom come any second as we listen to the back and forth on the radio- "How many boxes?" "How far apart are they?" "How big are they?" "Are there any markings on them?" Eventually battalion command decides that we should move to a 'safe' distance (whatever that means) and let EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) clear the boxes. We back off, EOD arrives twenty minutes later, and the EOD tech then laughs at us as he throws the boxes off the road and tells us all is clear.
Why couldn't our platoon leader just make the call himself? The boxes themselves were no threat; sitting there was. The reason this decision was made two echelons above the platoon leader's head is all the modern technology that gives senior officers unprecedented tactical awareness. Thanks to all our on-board tech, battalion command knew we were stopped as soon as we stopped, and instantly injected itself into the decision-making process. No junior officer with any sense is going to tell his colonel to butt out, so we sat there and waited to die while the decisions were made miles away in a fortified, air-conditioned command post.
Our platoon leader was a fine man and an excellent leader, and in another age might have been another Dick Winters. But in today's Army, senior commanders are essentially playing a giant game of Command and Conquer with shittier graphics and deadly consequences. Currently the technology that makes this possible is all vehicle-mounted, and I think that this, and not the "elite" status of light infantry forces, accounts for most of the superior efficacy of dismounted units in Iraq and Afghanistan. When I tell the above story and others like it to friends who served with Airborne (and hence dismounted) units, they laugh in astonishment. Such things never happened to them; their junior leaders made those sorts of decisions on the ground and on the fly.
With the new Army smartphones and all the other tech the Army wants to mount on individual soldiers, I fear that will change. Instead of just seeing Humvees, tanks and APCs, senior officers in ten years will be able to track individual troops, and possibly even issue individual orders to them. The French Army once mutinied out of exasperation with generals sending them to their deaths by telephone. Hopefully our senior officers won't have to learn their lesson the same way in some future war.
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