Quote Originally Posted by Red Rat View Post

'Execute' is time from receipt of orders through battle procedure to executing the plan. That is quite slow but:

a) We never claimed to be good at manoeuvre warfare (unlike COIN )
Wow... seriously? Where do those times come from? The SOHB? or LWC?
To quote Lt Col Jim Storr, in his work on UK Command.
Patton was absolutely clear. In his ‘Letter of Instruction to Third U.S. Army’ , he said that a division should have twelve, or preferably eighteen, hours from the physical receipt of the order from corps headquarters. We will assume that the ‘one thirds, two thirds’ rule applies. That means that at each echelon of command a headquarters should take no more than one third of the total time available to both plan and give its orders. If we have twelve hours for a division, then we have eight hours for a brigade, and about five to six hours for a battle group.
Now actually I think BG's should aim, in training, to complete in 4 hours, so this pretty generous.

Rather then rely on a finely honed HQ of men (and women) tried, trained and few, we have dumbed down our officer corps and added layers of process and bureacracy instead - all of which adds time and diminshes tempo. We call it progress
.... that is a huge problem and one that folks keep pointing out, so I wonder why we do nothing about it?