Quote Originally Posted by Distiller View Post
By giving the individual teams more freedom and responsibility, use technology to get away from micro-management (not the other way round, as it looks like now).
By turning unit leaders more into managers. (You might be familiar with the German "messen - steuern - regeln", inadequatly translated into English as "instrumentation, control, and automation", so more "regeln" than "steuern").
Then I think the question could be not about controlling the teams, but the action vectors (attack/defense/movement/...). And how many action vectors could you have in a company?
Expanded Auftragstaktik.
I appreciate the innovation Distiller, but I must say that I very much doubt that what you propose is practical. One of the problems with it is that if, say the Company leadership is killed or incapacitated or communications is seriously disprupted (and it happens even with the Company Commander and the Company 2i/c in two separate locations), Command and Control breaks down almost completely. With the Platoon Level still there, one of the Platoon Commanders takes over the Company and the Coy carries on.

And Management does not work even at Higher Echelons - Leadership is necessary even there. In the Field, Management does not work at all, even in peacetime - there is just too much pressure and too much adversity and too many things going wrong, even on Ex - for Management to do anything but exert a dead-weight at best, or become a positive hindrance at worst. All the Echelons are necessary, and prior attempts to change that have all failed, because the basic needs of Command and Control revolve around Leadership; Management Theory and the like are hopelessly detached from its practical realities. Put no stock in them.