Leadership in History Pertaining to the Present

[Uboat509]

This all reminds me of a time at when I was at JRTC as a augmentee O/C. I was inside the TOC for one of the maneuver battalions. It was a monstrosity, a comandeered building, plus a frame tent, plus a generator, staff drones as far as the eye could see and all for one battalion. The BC and another officer were discussing some kind of new HMMWV mounted modular system to "streamline" the whole thing. The BC turned and asked the CSM what he thought about streamlining the TOC down to a half a dozen or so vehicles or whatever it was to which the CSM replied, "Sir, I can remember when the BN TOC was twelve rucksacks in a circle."

SFC W

[William F. Owen]

"Sir, I can remember when the BN TOC was twelve rucksacks in a circle."

All my research and experience leads be to believe that any competent army can run (C3I) a battle group out of 4 command vehicles (4 x M113). Beyond that you need 8 good officers, and 8 good NCOs.

Formation seems a little trickers because of all the attached arms, but I think merely doubling what a battle group has may be useful rule of thumb.

Technology bloat is insane.

The Mechanisation avant garde weenies (like Fuller and Liddel-Hart) said that mechanisation would reduce cost and manpower, but they were 100% wrong. The Digitisation weenies are exactly the same. - except digital command systems should can can reduce manpower and cost!

[Eden]

The first law of automation is this:

"There is no such thing as a labor saving device"

Now, technology has made some things easier. It is much, much easier to train a tank gunner than it was 25 years ago, for instance, because technology has reduced the complexity of and dexterity required for putting steel on target. Yet we still spend as much time or more training gunners. Why is that? Because we have raised the bar of acceptable performance. Gunners must be able to hit targets farther away in a shorter period of time. Why? Because improved technology allows us to.

Same thing for the staff, only worse. Imagine a system that allows the S4 in an armor battalion to track the number of rounds by type and the amount of fuel in each tank in real time. Because he has this, he can be held personally responsible whenever a tank runs out of fuel or bullets, and therefore must spend some time and energy tracking this. Now multiply this bit of info by the hundreds of other bits of info improved technology allows him to track, and suddenly your S-4 section needs to expand to handle all the extra work.

The 2nd Law of automation is:

"The number of people who need to plug into your system will always exceed the available bandwidth."

As connectivity increases, functions get pushed lower. The traditional field artillery and engineer attachments are still there, side by side your CI, HUMINT, CA, PA, MI, contractor, etc., etc. Because bandwidth can never quite keep up, it is still most convenient to have these guys plugged directly into the TOC. And more plug ins require more folks whose sole function is to keep the machine itself operational. And we are not emptying out the higher headquarters, either, because you need the same number of folks (or more) up there to coordinate activities across unit boundaries.

Thus, headquarters grow like topsy. The old style, ramp-to-ramp TOC still exists, but we call it a TAC now - and guess what, those are also growing.

This will continue so long as we insist that the staff retain its 19th century function as a 'funnel' of information to the commander; we need to turn it into a 'filter' before we can arrest or reverse the trend.

[wm]

All my research and experience leads be to believe that any competent army can run (C3I) a battle group out of 4 command vehicles (4 x M113). Beyond that you need 8 good officers, and 8 good NCOs.

Formation seems a little trickers because of all the attached arms, but I think merely doubling what a battle group has may be useful rule of thumb.

I watched/worked in a constrained environment where we ran a mech division out of a streamlined Bde TAC CP with a little augmentation--site consisted of 2 M577s, an M113, and an MSE vehicle for comms--of course that was mostly combat ops--we left most of the admin/log stuff up to the very bloated D-Rear CP. It does take very competent, multi-talented folks who are cross-trained to do each other's jobs though--no prima donna, "that ain't my job" specialization allowed.

The Mechanisation avant garde weenies (like Fuller and Liddel-Hart) said that mechanisation would reduce cost and manpower, but they were 100% wrong. The Digitisation weenies are exactly the same. - except digital command systems should can can reduce manpower and cost!

Digitization could reduce manpower if all users were technology competent--that is, able to do things beyond just typing inputs in a Powerpoint chart or Excel spreadsheet and reading what they see on the screen--just like leaders once needed to be "literate" (be able to read and write), nowadays, they need to be pretty darn tech savvy or else they will have to have a mini-army of technologists to keep them in the game.

[Fuchs]

It's a general phenomenon.
Technology can save the time necessary to finish a specific task, but we always use by adding more tasks ... alway more more more.
The human mind is difficult to satisfy. We could live just as happy as we are if we were more easily satisfied, ten hours of work every week and we could still live better than our grandparents did. Instead, we expand our desires endlessly.

But the military adds some aspects to this: Ever increasing tasks can be detrimental to success. The ability to improvise, to change intent and missions quickly and to focus on all that's not being covered by reports can be crucial.

Perfect logistics (if that was possible by staff work) are fine, but sometimes it's simply better to be critically low on supplies but several days earlier at the objective. Improvisation helps a lot.

Maybe we should have parallel concepts; some units employing the big staff concept and others using very small staffs. The lessons would be interesting.
The alliance offers the unique possibility to test that; smaller member's armed forces could adopt the lean model and test it. That would allow them a greater share of combat troops and significant combat troop power.
Exercises and experiments could show the benefits of both approaches.

I tend to prefer small staffs and low-echelon improvisation for airborne and armour brigades/battalions. Airborne needs to improvise in many of its typical missions anyway and armour benefits a lot by quick decision-making and high mobility staffs.

[Ken White]

on all that.......

[JHR]

Base on the various comments and observations above, sounds like we need to assign Brook's' The Mythical Man-Month an FM or put it on the reading list.