Command Crisis

Wellington and Clausewitz speak from a now-distant and foreign era. Much of what they wrote has become obsolete in all but historical terms. Clausewitz’s comments on ‘attacks on swamps, flooded areas and forests’, for instance, are of little contemporary relevance. Yet, despite all the prodigious advances in military technology and the transformation of warfare itself, the observations of Clausewitz and Wellington about command remain as valid as ever. Even in the twenty-first century, military command remains of paramount importance. Battlefield success still relies upon generalship. Indeed, many of the fundamental skills of command remain the same as they were in the Napoleonic era. Above all, penetrating the fog of battle, commanders still need to be able to identify clear and achievable objectives and to calculate the probability of success. Command remains critical to military operations and combat effectiveness today.

Indeed, the recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated only the enduring importance of command to military operations. In response to the disappointments of those campaigns and proving the continuing validity of Wellington’s and Clausewitz’s interventions, command has been the object of intense scrutiny over the last fifteen years, in both America and Europe. Concern, even calumny, about the failures of command has been frequent and strident. Of course, much of the debate has focused exclusively on civilian leadership. The Bush and Obama administrations have been roundly criticized for their strategic incompetence in their respective ‘Wars on Terror’; Bush foolishly invaded Iraq, fomenting a sectarian civil war which has de-stabilized the Middle East,Footnote ⁶ while Obama precipitately withdrew from the theatre, facilitating the rise of ISIS and the collapse of Syria.Footnote ⁷ Yet, military command and individual generals have themselves been the object of widespread and deep public concern. For many commentators, military command has demonstrably and specifically failed in the last decade. Generals stand accused. In an increasingly multi-polar and mediatized world, they have been unable to identify or to execute coherent strategies. They have failed to display precisely the qualities which Wellington and Clausewitz most prized in a general. Rather than illuminating the darkness, they seem to have been as confused by recent conflicts as their political masters.

These criticisms have predictably been most pronounced in the United States, where an entire genre has developed criticizing generalship.Footnote ⁸ This literature is far too voluminous to consider at any length. However, the work of Tom Ricks exemplifies many of the criticisms. As a leading war correspondent and military journalist, Ricks has been particularly excised by the problem of military command itself – and its failings. His monograph on command, The Generals, begins with a pointed dedication, ‘For those who died following poor leaders’, and an epigraph, ‘There are no bad soldiers, only bad generals’. The implication is very clear. The ‘fiasco’ in Iraq could not be blamed on Bush and Washington alone; America’s generals were culpable too. Consequently, Ricks examines American generalship from the Second World War to identify individual failings and recurrent structural problems. Thus, Tommy Franks, Ricardo Sanchez and George Casey are subjected to very severe personal admonition.Footnote ⁹ Yet, the malady is deeper. For Ricks, America’s command problems have constituted a profound corruption of the system which General George Marshall had implemented in the Second World War. Crucially, although a number of US officers have been relieved from duty in the course of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in most cases, according to Ricks, these reliefs have been primarily political, initiated and enacted not from within the military but by civilian leaders and the White House itself. There has been only one exception. During 1st Marine Division’s advance on Baghdad, James Mattis, the divisional commander, relieved one of his Regimental Combat Team commanders. Precisely because it was so unusual, the sacking ‘made page-one news’.Footnote ¹⁰ However, Ricks claims that for the most part commanders have not been relieved because the armed forces have been too weak, self-interested or cowardly to remove their own officers. The Service Chiefs have devolved themselves from their professional responsibilities with disastrous results.

The command crisis in America may be the most internationally prominent because of the country’s superpower status. Yet, it is far from unique. On the contrary, equivalent discussions are evident in Europe and no more so than in the United Kingdom. Indeed, British concerns about military command have reached a level of intensity in the last decade which may even have exceeded American interventions. There are some evident reasons for this. Britain’s armed forces have not only been committed to complex expeditionary counter-insurgencies, with all their attendant ambiguities and contradictions, but they have been deployed in support of an American-led mission. As a medium-sized military power and America’s closest ally, the United Kingdom felt impelled to contribute to costly foreign missions in Iraq and Afghanistan which were not in the immediate national interest. Caught between alliance obligations and public scepticism, the United Kingdom’s campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have been fraught with controversy from the very start. Public concerns about the quality of military leadership have been radically compounded. Over the last decade numerous publications have appeared published by leading scholars, journalists and officers criticizing British commanders.Footnote ¹¹

The public disquiet about political and military leadership, of course, reached its apogee in Britain on 6 July 2016 with the long-awaited publication of the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War. The inquiry had sat for seven years, longer than the military intervention itself, to produce a 2.6-million-word report. It is the most comprehensive statement of command failure yet to be produced. The report admonished Tony Blair for rashly committing the United Kingdom to follow the US into Iraq before properly assessing the necessity for military action and its likely outcome. Yet, military commanders were also reprimanded for their failure to respond to the changing situation in Basra, to communicate the dangers to their political leaders and for committing themselves to a simultaneous campaign in Helmand in breach of defence planning guidelines. For instance, Air Chief Marshall Jock Stirrup, the Chief of the Defense Staff, in the crucial period between 2006 and 2010,Footnote ¹² was singled out for special censure by the Chilcot Inquiry.Footnote ¹³ He recommended an option of drawdown in Basra in 2006, unaware that a British withdrawal would have disastrous consequences for the city and severe reputational consequences with American allies: ‘ACM Stirrup’s proposed remedy of continued drawdown and managing public opinion did not mitigate the risk of strategic failure he described’.Footnote ¹⁴ The public criticism of a senior British officer was almost unprecedented.

Although its predicament may have been more accentuated than most, the United Kingdom is by no means alone in Europe in having suffered a command crisis in the last decade. Similar disquiet has been evident in the Netherlands,Footnote ¹⁵ Denmark,Footnote ¹⁶ FranceFootnote ¹⁷ and Germany.Footnote ¹⁸

Western command is suffering a legitimation crisis, then; indeed, for some, generalship has palpably failed. However, despite all the often bitter complaints about generals over the last fifteen years, not one commentator, whether civilian, academic or military, has questioned the enduring relevance of military command. On the contrary, the central presumption underlying all these interventions is not that military command has become irrelevant in the twenty-first century but, on the contrary, that command remains as indispensable to military effectiveness as it ever was. The condemnation of a legion of failures does not in any way suggest that generalship is obsolete today. On the contrary, command is regarded as vital to military success in the twenty-first century as it was in the Napoleonic wars. Generals have been calumniated not because their utility is now questioned but, on the contrary, because they have failed to fulfil their duty. Generals have been criticized precisely because they have lacked the acuity advocated by Wellington and Clausewitz. Even today, command retains the primacy with which Wellington and Clausewitz invested it in the early nineteenth century.

The Transformation of Command

There is little doubt that military commanders have made very considerable mistakes in the last decade. There have been many cases of poor decision-making; a coherent strategy has often been lacking and campaigns have been periodically mismanaged. Yet, while in no way excusing these individual errors, generals have found themselves in an unenviable predicament. Since the turn of the century, generals have confronted distinctively challenging operational and organizational conditions. Indeed, command itself has been undergoing a significant transformation. In many cases, generals, attuned to twentieth-century expectations, have struggled to adapt to the new conditions in which they have been ordered to operate.

Generals may have struggled to command campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan but senior officers have become increasingly aware of the new challenges they face. Indeed, some generals have suggested that the very practice of command is in transition; in the face of increased operational and organizational complexity, decision-making has begun to evolve. Consequently, alongside the vivid discourses on command failure, a second sub-literature has begun to appear in the last decade on the transformation of military command itself. Tony Zinni’s book, Leading the Charge, published in 2009, is a highly pertinent example of this emergent genre. Tony Zinni served for forty years in the US Marine Corps, including tours in Vietnam in the late 1960s.Footnote ¹⁹ He retired as a four-star general, having served as the Commander of US Central Command. As a result of his long military experience, he has been exercised by command failures in the last decade. Significantly, Zinni does not criticize or blame particular civilian or military leaders in his book, nor does he deconstruct the contradictions in Western strategy or in civil–military relations. Rather, he attributes much of the current crisis to more fundamental organizational problems in leadership itself.

Specifically, Zinni claims that leadership is currently in transition. The practice of generalship has changed and, in many cases, the problems of the last decade have been the result of a failure to respond to these new challenges: ‘Virtually all organizations are becoming too complex and involved for single, directive approaches to leading’.Footnote ²⁰ Existing command models, derived from the twentieth century, have become increasingly obsolete in the face of new global problems. Precisely because organizations and operations have become more complex and dispersed, traditional, heroic models of leadership, designed for vertically integrated organizations, have become obsolete.

Zinni argues that, if there is to be any improvement in the quality of military command, a new model of ‘participatory leadership’ is required which actively seeks to engage with and maximize a network of peers and subordinates: ‘We no longer build a leadership hierarchy in a cutting edge modern organization. Instead, we build leadership networks that make the business of leading institutionalized and multi-directional. Leadership is no longer only vertical, working from the top down. It is distributed, pervasive, invited from all members, and instilled in the culture of successful enterprises’.Footnote ²¹ For Zinni, because of the increasing complexity of operations and the expanding span of command, the armed forces must embrace participatory leadership: ‘Leaders who are organizing combat commands, like leaders of organizations everywhere, have realized that our fast-changing world requires new approaches and new thinking’.Footnote ²² Team-building is now essential. Zinni maintains that certain leadership characteristics are requisite in the current era. However, ‘good character alone is no longer enough to define a good leader’; he defines eleven new characteristics which will allow the new leader to understand the situation and to collaborate with others so that problems can be resolved collectively. For Zinni, command has become a collaborative, joint enterprise.

Zinni’s work is certainly significant and it has attracted a wide readership. However, in the English language, General Stanley McChrystal has surely made the most important contemporary statement about the changing character of command in the twenty-first century. McChrystal commanded the US Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq from 2003 to 2008 and subsequently commanded NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan in 2009–10, before being relieved by Barack Obama in controversial circumstances. McChrystal is widely admired as one of the finest military commanders of the current era. His two recent publications, My Share of the Task and Team of Teams, document this reformation of command.

Team of Teams is particularly relevant here. It situates McChrystal’s personal experience of Joint Special Operations Command in Baghdad in a wider historic context to show that the evolution of this command was consistent with general patterns of organizational transformation in the twenty-first century. In particular, McChrystal claims that the hierarchies which were developed in the twentieth century for industrial warfare have become archaic in the face of hybrid opponents. According to McChrystal, twentieth-century warfare was complicated; it involved the coordination of massive, homogeneous forces. This was administratively demanding – and a mistake could be catastrophic. By contrast, in the twenty-first century, military problems have become ‘complex’: ‘Being complex is different from being complicated. Things that are complicated have many parts but those parts are joined, one to the next in relatively simple ways … Complexity, on the other hand, occurs when the number of interactions between components increases dramatically – the interdependences that allow viruses and bank runs to spread; this is where things quickly become unpredictable’.Footnote ²³ The elements of a complex system are heterogeneous, interconnected with each other in multiple ways.

While commanding in Baghdad, McChrystal discovered that the armed forces, which he had known throughout his career, were ill-adapted for complex, multi-dimensional operations. They were configured for mass two-dimensional fights: ‘In the course of this fight, we had to unlearn a great deal of what we thought we knew about how war – and the world – worked. We had to tear down familiar organizational structures and rebuild them along completely different lines, swapping our sturdy architecture for organic fluidity, because it was the only way to confront a rising tide of complex threats’.Footnote ²⁴ McChrystal had to construct a network to fight one. It was no longer enough simply to be better at mass industrial warfare; a paradigm shift was required in the execution of military operations. The development of this new organizational form required a revision of old hierarchies and allegiances. In particular, McChrystal had to break down the local tribal loyalties in the armed forces and, especially, within the Special Operations Forces community.

The reform of command itself was central to McChrystal’s reconfiguration. In place of an imperious individual commander directing operations from above, decision-making had to be devolved outwards and downwards. Echoing Zinni’s argument about leadership, McChrystal became not so much the pinnacle of an organizational hierarchy but rather a node at the centre of a network. Consequently, McChrystal recognized that, even as a commander, he could not know everything. On the contrary, he emphasized the importance of ‘shared consciousness’, which ‘helped us understand and react to the interdependence of the battlefield’.Footnote ²⁵

Indeed, traditional models of leadership had become obsolete and obstructive: ‘The heroic “hands-on” leader whose personal competence and force of will dominated battlefields and boardrooms for generations had been overwhelmed by accelerating speed, swelling complexity, and interdependence’.Footnote ²⁷ McChrystal empowered commanders at the local level to prosecute missions on the basis of shared understanding and collective initiative.

Substantially because of McChrystal’s writings, the question of command reform is perhaps most advanced in the United States. Yet, similar discussions are observable elsewhere. There have been a number of publications in the United Kingdom by retired generals which echo the remarks of Zinni and McChrystal. General Lord David Richards has become a prominent figure here. Richards was, perhaps, the foremost officer of his generation, commanding forces in East Timor, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, before going on to be appointed both Chief of the General Staff and Chief of the Defence Staff. On the basis of these wide experiences, like Zinni and McChrystal, Richards has suggested that command today has become ‘more complicated’ because the commander ‘has to deal with a range of actors’; commanders have to manage complex inter-service and inter-agency operations.Footnote ²⁸ Consequently, traditional dirigist systems of leadership have become outmoded and Richards did not practice them. Rather, the commander ‘has to be an entrepreneurial networker and communicator rather than a dictator’.Footnote ²⁹

Richards is not alone among British generals in believing that the practice of command has changed. General Sir Richard Shirreff, who commanded the Multinational Division South East (Basra) in the scarring period of 2006–7, has affirmed some enduring features of command. He insists that high command is still about setting a personal example and that ‘it is up to the commander to decide how he wants to do things, not the staff’.Footnote ³⁰ However, he also acknowledges evident differences: ‘What has changed is that generalship now requires more than the ability to command and control purely military capabilities’.Footnote ³¹ Since success in war depends on the achievement of unity of purpose with other non-military players, command, according to Sherriff, involves new skills, characteristics and techniques. British discussions of the evolution of command may be somewhat underdeveloped in comparison with America; concepts of teamwork, shared consciousness and interdependence are absent. Yet, the broad parallels are evident.

It might be argued that, as retired generals, Zinni, McChrystal or Richards have a distorted perspective. Their texts might be read as not entirely reliable self-vindications. Yet, their analysis of the evolution of command has been recently supported by Gary Klein, a more junior officer. He concurs with Zinni and McChrystal that in the face of radical organizational transformation, traditional models of command are becoming obsolete: ‘Complex environments require different leadership and decision-making techniques than succeeding in simple or complicated environments’. Crucially, Klein proposes that, ‘decision-making researchers in a number of different fields believe that experimentation and collaboration are keys to success in the complex domain’. Instead of prescribing one course of action for their subordinates, effective commanders today have to identify a clear but broad direction of travel to guide followers.

However, Klein is concerned that despite the requirement for a new system of command, military atavism has impeded change:

Klein recommends thoroughgoing reform: ‘To enable collaboration, leaders and staffs must be capable of forming more flat, distributed organizations in addition to traditional hierarchical models’. Closely echoing Zinni, Klein emphasizes the creation of newly empowered followers: ‘In the near term, leaders can encourage networked leadership and collaboration by increasing their emphasis on followership. They must educate their subordinates about and demonstrate qualities of good followers’.Footnote ³³ Effective commanders will train, develop and empower their subordinates to make decisions. His recommendations for a more collaborative, devolved system of leadership and decision-making are compatible with the observations of Zinni and McChrystal.Footnote ³⁴

The work of Zinni, McChrystal and Klein suggests that military command is moving rapidly away from ‘heroic’ individualism, typical of the twentieth century, to a more professionalized, collective practice. It is very noticeable that the emergent lexicon of command today contrasts markedly with traditional definitions of leadership. New concepts like ‘shared consciousness’, ‘collaboration’, ‘team-work’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘interdependence’ all suggest a very significant reform of command. Command may, indeed, be in crisis, as many commentators have argued. However, if Zinni, McChrystal and Klein are right, command may, more significantly, be in transition. The very institution of command seems to have evolved in the last decade so that the fundamentals of decision-making, management and leadership have changed. Generals should certainly be subject to public scrutiny and their poor decisions criticized. Yet, perhaps many of the commentators have themselves failed to appreciate sufficiently the extent of this transformation. Like the generals they reprimand, they too may still presume an obsolescent definition of command.

Command Regimes

Zinni, McChrystal and Klein document the transformation of command in the twenty-first century. They outline the reconfiguration of command hierarchies, as collaboration, collectivism and professionalism have displaced more traditionally directive and centralized practices. Nowhere do these authors employ the term, but it might be argued that their work operates around the concept of two command regimes. A command regime refers to a broadly stable paradigm of leadership when a characteristic practice of decision-making is widely institutionalized by the armed forces. In particular, each of these writers identifies an important transition between command in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to whose understanding they want to contribute. Effectively, they are trying to make sense of the shift from one command regime to another.

Their attempt to map this transition is important. However, in positing the historical existence and evolution of command regimes, Zinni, McChrystal and Klein are, in fact, drawing on a much wider literature. A number of scholars have addressed precisely this question of the historical development and transformation of command regimes. Martin van Creveld and John Keegan are particularly pertinent here. They, for instance, seek to explore how the institution of command has changed over a very long historical period from antiquity to the present. They attempt to periodize command, showing how particular regimes of command, involving a demonstrable repertoire of practices, emerge in different eras, primarily in response to operational and organizational problems.

John Keegan, for instance, claims that while command displays some common features, generalship necessarily reflects the cultures in which it arises:

Reflecting immediate historical conditions, Keegan identifies five types of command: heroic (Alexander), anti-heroic (Wellington), un-heroic (Grant), false-heroic (Hitler) and post-heroic (the nuclear age). However, although hugely suggestive, in the end, Keegan’s analysis of these command types collapses, for the most part, into a descriptive biography of each individual commander. It fails to deliver the genuine sociology of command which it promises.

Van Creveld is more successful in delineating command regimes. He organizes his analysis into two periods: Stone Age command and modern command. Quickly dismissing Stone Age command, van Creveld is primarily interested in showing how modern command has evolved. He plots how the emergence of headquarters and staff systems in the eighteenth century facilitated command on increasingly complex and expansive campaigns. This is an important work but it also has some shortcomings as an investigation of command. It lacks the ethnographic and empirical detail of individual, historical studies. Decisively, it is compromised by van Creveld’s approbation of one specific form of command over all others: namely, mission command, the de-centralization of decision-making initiative to subordinates. He sees the Roman legions, Napoleon’s marshals, Moltke’s army commanders, Ludendorff’s storm troops and Ganesh’s divisional commanders in 1967 as the ideals here. In each case, they embodied the self-evidently superior principle of mission command.Footnote ³⁶ The ahistorical advocacy of mission command, putatively unchanging across the ages, eventually vitiates van Creveld’s work. Nevertheless, his basic concept that command can be understood only in organizational – not personal – terms and that stable and identifiable command regimes exist is instructive. It has, of course, been followed by Zinni, McChrystal and Klein.

Other scholars have also argued for the existence of recognizable regimes of authority. Yves Cohen’s recent work on leadership represents a seminal contribution to this literature and it is immediately relevant to the study of command regimes. He claims that the period, from the late nineteenth century up to 1940, constituted the age of the ‘leader’ and he tries to document this regime in detail.Footnote ³⁷ As a result of the increased scale of industrial production and growing international competition in this era, a new class of managers or leaders emerged to plan, direct and coordinate production. These managers developed new bureaucratic systems to control workers in pursuit of efficiency. The rise of the industrial manager was, according to Cohen, paralleled by developments in two other sectors: the military and politics. Cohen appositely notes that the rise of the leader was substantially a moral phenomenon aimed at motivating workers, soldiers and citizens, even as elaborate administrative systems were developed to organize them; ‘The industrial revolution as much as mass politics and mass war made actors feel impelled to recompose and develop hierarchies which were known to have nothing in common with those of the aristocratic Ancien Regime’.Footnote ³⁸ Cohen claims that underlying socio-political forces demanded a new kind of leadership in these three sectors. Consequently, a broadly stable regime of leadership across civilian, political and military spheres is identifiable in the first half of the twentieth century.

Significantly, at the end of his work, Cohen considers contemporary leadership in the twenty-first century. In the light of rapidly changing social conditions, he considers whether a new regime of leadership might not be emerging in the global era. Cohen considers the role of leaderless movements, like the Arab Spring in Tunisia in 2011, as a way of contemplating these changing patterns of leadership: ‘Social movements are equally the sites of a search for alternatives to the traditional hierarchies of the rational and organizational epoch of the twentieth century’.Footnote ³⁹ Cohen suggests that, in the face of globalization, the heroic, hierarchical and, indeed, often authoritarian leadership of the twentieth century is being superseded by flatter networks in which collaboration and partnership are more adaptive. Cohen’s remarks are deliberately suggestive; his work focuses on the twentieth century. However, at this point, he begins to address the transformation of leadership and consider the emergence of an alternative regime of command today. Like Keegan and van Creveld, he identifies two distinct command regimes: one in the twentieth century and another in the current era.

When Zinni, McChrystal and Klein discuss command regimes, they are then contributing to a much wider literature which also recognizes the existence of historic paradigms of authority. Their work is an important starting point. Crucially, they highlight the distinctiveness of contemporary command; they demonstrate that, in fact, a major rupture has taken place in the practice of command itself. As serving offices, they have actually experienced this transition. However, their work invites further, more detailed and systematic research. It could be strengthened empirically and conceptually by the application of academic rigour. Zinni’s prose is a journalistic and rhetorical plea for a new form of leadership rather than a detailed and evidenced investigation of command practice itself; it is a manifesto rather than a sustained inquiry into command. While McChrystal’s work is deeply informative and draws on some relevant literature, it is based ultimately on only one empirical example: Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Baghdad. Precisely because the conventional forces typically imitate the Special Operations Forces, the analysis of JSOC is likely to anticipate wider changes. Nevertheless, the distinctiveness of Special Operations and the unique mission of JSOC in Baghdad would recommend some caution about the immediate replicability of McChrystal’s findings, especially since the author is likely to put himself in the best possible light. Similarly, Klein’s analysis is based primarily on the interpretation of contemporary US military doctrine. As such, it cannot be dismissed but in order to understand the contemporary command regime and its origins with precision, a deeper investigation is required.

This book builds upon the work of Zinni, McChrystal, van Creveld, Keegan and Cohen to develop a theory of contemporary command; it analyzes the displacement of twentieth-century command by a twenty-first-century regime. It tries to dissect the distinctive practice of contemporary command. In this way, in line with the pleas of Zinni and McChrystal, it attempts to explore the potential rise of participatory, network leadership in the armed forces of the Western powers today. It broadly confirms the central arguments of Zinni and McChrystal that increased operational and organizational complexity has propelled the emergence of professionalized command teams in place of individual commanders, personally blessed with coup d’oeil. However, it introduces an alternative lexicon to Zinni, McChrystal or Klein, knowingly derived from sociology. Specifically, this book argues that in the twenty-first century, in the face of increased complexity, ‘collective command’ has emerged to replace a more individualist practice of twentieth-century command. Today, command collectives, consisting of commanders, their deputies, subordinates and staff bound together in dense, professionalized decision-making communities, has displaced previously more individualized, intuitive systems. The book is organized around these fundamental concepts, which will be defined in greater detail below and then exemplified and illustrated throughout the text.

Of course, this investigation of command regimes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries makes no attempt to analyze command at every level; it does not claim to be comprehensive. Such an endeavour would be impossible. Command is exercised at the very highest strategic level down to the small unit. It would be quite impractical to attempt to examine command in all its manifestations from supreme commanders down to combat leaders. While commanders might be united in their responsibilities, the practice of command at each level is clearly quite different. Coherence demands a narrower focus. Consequently, this study concentrates purely on the command of army and marine divisions, combined arms formations of approximately 20,000 troops. This study examines the ‘two-star’ major-general. It examines how major-generals have commanded divisions in the twentieth century and how they command them today.

The Scope

Although the rationale will be discussed at greater length in the following chapter, the divisional level of command is identified as the object of study because the division has both been the basic formation for warfare since the First World War and is currently being regenerated once again. In the light of Iraq and Afghanistan, the major Western powers – the US, UK, France and Germany – have begun to implement changes at this command level. Specifically, the US Army, followed by the British, French and, finally, German armies, have sought to restore the divisional level of command.Footnote ⁴⁰ The division is at the centre of contemporary army transformation, therefore. Indeed, this renovation of the division is substantially a response to the perceived command failings in Iraq and Afghanistan that have been excoriated in public debates. The division is currently being reformed so that commanders will be able to conduct future operations more successfully. This study of divisional command addresses, therefore, a critical military reform. It concentrates exclusively on the divisional level. However, precisely because the division is the site of significant adaptation, it may provide a particularly advantageous vantage point for the study of command more widely.

Focusing on the division, this book examines two command regimes: one in the twentieth century, the second in the twenty-first. The first regime emerged in response to industrial warfare in the First World War and persisted until just after the end of the Cold War: from 1914 to 1991. This regime was itself displaced after the Cold War, as new operational and organizational conditions arose, initially in the 1990s. Its contours became particularly apparent in the first and second decades of the twenty-first century, especially in the course of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the subsequent reorganization of the division. These twin regimes are the poles around which the book revolves. Specifically, the book contrasts the way in which divisions are commanded and coordinated in combat today in contrast with the previous century. While acknowledging continuities, this work tries to show the radical – but often unacknowledged – differences between command practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It argues that command today is historically distinctive.

As Zinni and McChrystal acknowledge, in the twentieth century military operations were large but mechanically simple operations. Consequently, individual commanders, supported by a very small staff, were invested with sole decision-making authority to define and manage missions; command was broadly individualist. Conditions are radically different now. The scope of command has expanded. Divisions and divisional operations have become increasingly heterogeneous, involving the deep integration of diverse joint and multinational elements; the geographic, temporal and functional span of command has also increased in complexity. Military missions have become deeply politicized and, even at a low level, military force has to be applied with precision and proportion. Consequently, in order to address increased coordination problems, generals have been forced to distribute their decision-making authority to empowered subordinates, forming executive teams, closely united around a common understanding of the mission. While generalship has always necessarily involved a cooperative element, in the twenty-first century, military command has become collective to a degree which has rarely, if ever, been seen before; decision-making has now become a professionalized, ensemble activity. As command points have proliferated, it has been necessary to increase the capacity for decision-making in the division and integrate it across echelons. Highly professionalized command collectives have emerged, displacing a formerly more individualist, instinctual system of command. Command collectives, involving dense confederations of commanders, partners, deputies and subordinates, have begun to manage complex, heterogeneous contemporary operations.

Clearly, to argue that military command has been transformed since the end of the Cold War, and in the last two decades in particular, is to propose a controversial thesis. A theory of collective command is potentially radical – even unwelcome. At the same time, military traditions and even the self-perception of officers and generals, who often like to project a heroic self-image, resist the concept of change. To argue for command as a historic practice, against the inherent individual qualities of a general, is challenging for many. It replaces a celebration of revered personal martial qualities, like intelligence, bravery, courage and nobility, with an emphasis on the more mundane mechanics of command itself. Indeed, even in the course of the research, the concept of a command collective met with considerable resistance, not least from some generals themselves. Some saw the argument for collective command as undermining their autonomy and responsibility – even their duty. In interviews during the research, both James Mattis and David Petraeus, among the most famous and successful generals of the modern era, both questioned the idea that command could be shared. They rejected a concept of collective command and asserted a traditional concept of individual command responsibility:

Their subordinates often concurred. One Marine officer, who had served with Mattis in the 1st Marine Division in Iraq, decried any idea of sharing command: ‘If the commander is not invested in ownership of the mission, there is no vision. If he is just a board member, the mission does not get actualized’.Footnote ⁴³ In the United Kingdom, officers often took a similar view. Rupert Smith, for instance, one of the foremost British generals of his generation, commanding a division in the Gulf War in 1991 to become Deputy SACEUR during the Kosovo War, also rebuffed the idea of collective command as an aberration: ‘I accept that the processes you are describing may be happening. But they shouldn’t be’.Footnote ⁴⁴

All these officers have a point. Since generals are still the primary decision-makers and divisional tactics have remained recognizably similar, there are undeniable constants. So there are evident empirical objections to a theory of collective command. There are also ethical objections that the concept seems to divest commanders of their inalienable legal and moral responsibility for the actions they order. However, notwithstanding evident historical continuities and the controversy of its central thesis, this book aims to demonstrate that a new regime of command has appeared in the early twenty-first century. The presumptions of continuity prevent the armed forces and civil society itself from understanding the character of military command and, therefore, its capabilities, requirements and, crucially, limitations. The aim of this book is analyze military command – not to criticize generalship or individual commanders.

Of course, the parameters of this book are limited. It focuses only on the divisions of the major Western powers: America, Britain, France and Germany. Writing in the twenty-first century, this is potentially problematic. Jeremy Black, for instance, has consistently warned military historians about Western ethnocentricism. He has properly advocated the requirement for a global perspective.Footnote ⁴⁵ This study potentially falls short of Black’s injunction; it avowedly looks only at Western forces. However, some defence might be made here. It is impossible to study everything; some boundaries must be put in place. Moreover, necessary empirical boundaries do not always imply inevitable, still less catastrophic, conceptual limitations. In his seminal work on leadership, Yves Cohen examines leadership only in France, America, Germany and Russia. Yet, no one could claim that his work was invalidated by this limited comparative focus. On the contrary, although he focuses only on four states, Cohen’s work has much deeper resonance. The regime of leadership, which he identifies in the first half of the twentieth century, is not only deeply significant in itself but it has evident relevance for the other parts of the globe, although Asian, African and South American hierarchies assumed their own differentiated forms. This study is fully aware of the dangers of Occidentalism but adopts a similar position to Cohen. In order to attain a sufficient level of depth, it concentrates on four major powers with a view to providing some insight into command globally. Indeed, at the end of the book, the cases of China and Russia are briefly assessed in order to determine whether the transformation of command evident in the West is also observable elsewhere.

The book has a second necessary limitation; it focuses only on land warfare. The division is an army and marine formation and, consequently, the fascinating question of the transformation of maritime and air command is excluded from most of this study. It is simply impossible to provide an evidentially adequate account of the transformation of command in all three services. However, although it cannot pretend to be a genuine solution, at the very end of the book, the evolution of naval and air command is considered briefly. At this point, it is suggested that while the strategic mission of each service remains quite different, informing singular organizational cultures and structures, command of maritime and air forces has indeed undergone very significant reforms since the end of the Cold War. These developments are not the exact equivalent of the emergence of collective command at the divisional level in land warfare but there seem to be evident parallels. This analysis is cursory but it suggests that complementary changes may be taking place. If this is the case, then the exclusive attention to land warfare may have a wider pertinence.

This book is an analysis of military command – specifically at the divisional level. However, since the armed forces are an important part of the state, this book plainly has a much wider purpose. It necessarily speaks to the wider questions of social organization, leadership and, ultimately, to power. Over the past decade, social scientists from the across the disciplines have become increasingly interested in the transformation of public and private organizations. In place of homogeneous, vertically integrated hierarchies, heterogeneous networks – often global in scope – have begun to appear. Of immediate relevance to this study, organizational studies scholars have plotted the transformation of corporate hierarchies. Michael Hammer and James Champy have analyzed – and indeed advocated – the evolution of the American company in the face of changing markets, increased competition and technological change. They have demanded that companies reorganize existing divisions of labour into flatter, more flexible and responsive networks: ‘The reality that organizations have to confront, however, is that the old ways of doing business – the division of labour around which companies have been organized since Adam Smith first articulated the principle – simply don’t work any more’.Footnote ⁴⁶ They are not alone: Rosabeth Moss Kanter has also recommended radical corporate restructuring.Footnote ⁴⁷ More recently, Keith Grint has promoted the ‘arts of leadership’ over obsolete, dirigist twentieth-century models of management.Footnote ⁴⁸

Meanwhile, social and political scientists from across the disciplines have attempted to analyze and describe the many complex changes which have occurred to social, political and economic structures. They have traced the transformation of states and public sector organizations, business and industry in the commercial sector or the restructuring of class, ethnic and gender orders. Indeed, it might be argued that ultimately all recent social scientific scholarship is but an attempt to understand the dynamics of globalization. Modes of solidarity, social and political hierarchies, methods of organizing and, even, power itself are all changing. No consensus has emerged about its implications and is unlikely to. Yet, a new lexicon is emerging which has tried to capture these reconfigurations. Major academic figures have proposed concepts such as ‘the interaction ritual chain’,Footnote ⁴⁹ ‘the civil sphere’,Footnote ⁵⁰ the ‘workshop’,Footnote ⁵¹ the ‘sphere’Footnote ⁵² or the ‘Actor-Network’ to define emergent social forms.Footnote ⁵³ This book has avoided the beguiling metaphors of scholars like Peter Sloterdijk and Bruno Latour and has adopted a more empirical approach. In order understand changing power structures, it seeks to plot the precise reform of practice through the close observation of one lifeworld. Nevertheless, it is self-consciously trying to address these wider debates about globalization and the transformation of power.

This book is, then, an attempt to contribute to these debates about contemporary social transformation through the detailed study of one specialist area: military command. It explores the changing application of military force, evolving in parallel to social and civil power. It traces the emergence of highly tuned command teams to prosecute contemporary operations and the professionalization of their decision-making. It dissects the rise of concentrated, condensed nodes of executive military authority. Since command is intimately associated with the distribution and application of power, this book can also be read obliquely as an analysis of the transformation of power much more generally. Through the sociological analysis of divisional command, this work aims to contribute much more widely to the comprehension of the exercise of power in the twenty-first century. In particular, this work addresses the transformation of one aspect of state-military power. The armed forces are a unique organization which alone, even with the declining power of the state, retain the monopoly of legitimate violence. Nevertheless, the way the armed forces exercise military power may usefully illustrate the dynamics of power in Western society today more widely.

This book is an anatomy of military command. It describes the emergence of new regime of military command in the twenty-first century. Especially towards the end, when the intricate staff methods of the new divisional headquarters are discussed, the book traverses terrain which seems to be a very long distance from Wellington or Clausewitz, writing after the Napoleonic Wars. The differences between these eras are, indeed, profound. Yet, all the dramatic innovations which have been instituted at the divisional level are still designed for one purpose, which both Wellington and Clausewitz would immediately recognize; they are but attempts to allow commanders to see the battlefield more clearly and, therefore, to make better decisions. Although the point is often obscured by the complex apparatus of management, command still fundamentally involves seeing over the over side of the hill. It is simply that the geography of hill, what is over it and the way of seeing it has changed. This book documents that transformation.