The military has lots of acronyms, to put it mildly and politely. Arguably, there is no more prevalent or important acronym than C2 (Command and Control), at least in the opinion of the higher levels of military leadership. C2 has become not only a staple but almost a religion among leadership. Even the acronym has grown! It started out as just C2 but it grew into C2I (C2 + Intelligence) then C2ISR (C2 + Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance). Even that wasn’t enough. C2ISR led to C3ISR (C2 + Communications + ISR). Unbelievably, there’s now C4ISR (C2ISR + Computers). … … … Do I dare say it? Is there a C5ISR? Yes, there is! It’s the Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) Center which is an Army applied research and advanced technology development center under the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, or CCDC, which is a major subordinate command of the U.S. Army Futures Command. And before you ask, yes, there is a C6ISR C6ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber-Defense and Combat Systems, and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) being developed. There’s also JADC2 (Joint All Domain Command and Control). And the list goes on …
We can see, then, that C2 has expanded and grown to encompass … well … everything!
So, what’s wrong with C2? Isn’t that how we control battles and wars and fight efficiently? Isn’t that a good thing? We’ve previously discussed Command and Control (see, “Command and Control”) and the trend by today’s leadership towards ever greater levels of micro-managing under the guise of artificial intelligence battle management software. Now, though, let’s step back and look at the fundamental concept of Command and Control.
To state the obvious, C2 consists of two words: ‘Command’ plus ‘Control’. What do they mean?
Command is the formulation and conveyance of intent, in the form of orders, by the commander to his subordinates. As we discussed in the previous post, the ideal form of this command is ‘Commander’s Intent’ whereby the commander issues the broad scope and thrust of his desires for his local commanders to execute as they see fit.
Control is the step-by-step, item-by-item direction of a subordinate’s actions.
Let’s consider control ... We all recognize that some degree of control is necessary. Without it, units and individuals would act in an uncoordinated, almost random fashion which would negatively impact the desired outcome. Units would fail to support each other and would likely interfere with each other. However, the benefits of control are a function of distance from the controlled. When the controller is in close physical proximity to the controlled, this is a beneficial operation. An example would be a squad leader issuing commands to his squad. In this example, both the controller and controlled are in the same location and experiencing the same situation. As the controller becomes more and more removed from the controlled, the controller’s understanding of the local situation breaks down and the controller becomes both a burden to the controlled – due to incessant demands for information – and an impediment to swift and proper action - due to the controller’s lack of understanding of the local situation and the time delays involved in obtaining information, debating alternative courses of action, and the issuance of orders. An example is almost any operation today where the White House authority and Joint Chiefs sit around a war room monitoring and directing the moment by moment actions of an operation on the other side of the world. President Lyndon Johnson personally setting target lists in Vietnam or President Carter directing the failed hostage rescue are examples. There is an endless list of lesser examples of remote commanders directing moment-by-moment operations.
So, what do we immediately notice from the definitions of ‘Command’ and ‘Control’? The obvious point that jumps out is that the two are opposites! Command, properly executed, is the dispersal of authority to lower levels whereas ‘Control’ is the consolidation of authority to higher levels. Polar opposites and yet our military has, illogically, combined them into one phrase and one concept!
We have grown so used to the combined phrase that we don’t even consider the incongruity inherent in the phrase. Command and Control is an oxymoron and yet it is the foundation of our military leadership. That’s a problem!
Facing a future war where our communications, in all forms, will be under constant attack, we need to recognize that our ability to issue orders will be severely degraded and that Control will, therefore, devolve to the local unit level whether we want it to or not. That requires that we embrace the concept of Commander’s Intent and institutionalize the concept of local control. We need to relentlessly practice it so that when we lose communications in combat, we’ll be comfortable with the situation and able to function effectively.
Command and Control are opposites and we need to start splitting them apart and practicing them separately.
Command is the right to give orders - who has it and by implication who doesn't have it.
ReplyDeleteFrom Wikipedia
"A 1988 NATO definition is that command and control is the exercise of authority and direction by a properly designated individual over assigned resources in the accomplishment of a common goal.[5] An Australian Defence Force definition, similar to that of NATO, emphasises that C2 is the system empowering designated personnel to exercise lawful authority and direction over assigned forces for the accomplishment of missions and tasks.[6] (The Australian doctrine goes on to state: The use of agreed terminology and definitions is fundamental to any C2 system and the development of joint doctrine and procedures. The definitions in the following paragraphs have some agreement internationally, although not every potential ally will use the terms with exactly the same meaning.[6])"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_control]
The Squad Leader in the Sky that every senior officer longs to be.
ReplyDeleteThe best solution for that is large amounts of unscripted force on force exercises with both sides being able to screw with the other sides comm's and computers. No matter how hard you try to make OK to lose, no one likes it. You'll see commanders and units get creative on protecting and screwing with comm's as well as exploiting them when they do.
For years, I have read about how the Soviet pilots and soldiers would be confused and useless unless they were able to receive constant orders from their leaders.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that we are trying to replicate this using current technology.
@CNO
ReplyDeleteIf you want a good example of micro-management look at the First Gulf War; you will find that there was no true combined arms maneuver designed to take advantage of local situations. Instead the entire coalition force advanced from phase line, to phase line (i.e. the force stopped periodically at predetermined ‘lines’ on a map, irrespective of enemy action. At one point, elements of the 2nd ACR pushed beyond a phase line, and were ordered to return to the phase line even though there was no reason (enemy action) that required them to do so! After some ‘discussion’ they were allowed to hold position.
GAB
Good example!
Delete@CNO
DeleteI recommend: " The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West" by Karl-Heinz Frieser. Essentially the German high command tried to micro-manage Guderian ordering him to wait for supporting units, but he ignored them and crossed the Meuse river at Sedan, which unhinged the entire French position.
GAB
I tend to think of command as top-down guidance regarding strategic goals and objectives, whereas control is bottom-up detailed figuring out how to accomplish specific tasks enroute to those goals and objectives.
ReplyDeleteThe problem, as you note, is that top-down has gotten way to far down into the details. "My rudder is right 15 degrees,Mr. President, coming to new course 290." And that was from 1975, it's had 45 years to get worse. The better our technology gets, the worse the problem gets. Let's run an exercise and knock out the technology on day one, and let's see where that gets us.
"Let's run an exercise and knock out the technology on day one, and let's see where that gets us."
ReplyDeleteHalf the participating ships would collide with each other withing five hours.
Yep ! Good point, works in business too. BUT : it is easier to micromanage the guy at the bottom end of the the food chain and criticize him for any failure than to give him the strategic direction and try to remove the obstacles on the way that may stop him achieving the results.
ReplyDeleteSo the PLAN gets itself a login to JADC2, that should make it easy for them to come up with an air tasking order.
ReplyDeleteI have a longer post I was working on for this.
ReplyDeleteBut I thought this link deserved to be noticed not sure if came up already so sorry if so (this might have been better appended to the previous post).
https://blog.usni.org/posts/2020/09/02/one-navys-lost-quarter-century-the-others-great-leap-forward
from the link:
"One Navy’s Lost Quarter Century, the Other’s Great Leap Forward" [Guess which one had the great leap]
"So, what do we do from here? I think a good start is to stop with the habits, excuses, theories, and policies that got us here. In some ways, I think we need a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to explain how we went from the world’s greatest navy to the worlds second largest navy.
We need some hard questions and some uncomfortable answers – no we should demand them – from the senior leadership both civilian and uniformed of our Navy since 1995...
...Use this knowledge to start asking the hard questions about priorities, money, and programs. Accountability is still a thing, isn’t it?"
As far as I can remember from all the history books I've read: accountability usually happens AFTER you lose the war and got you ass kicked....
DeleteNot all the time the Athenians were hard core on fiscal responsibility and general responsibility. Sure you might win at Marathon but make your next campaign an embarrassing cluster F*** and you were going to rot in jail till you family manged to pay your fine. And gods help you if your accounts were not in order. The way the Pentagon looses money was a guarantee of a death sentence.
DeleteI don’t think the situation is as dire as that article portrays. But it’s getting worse, and we need it to get better.
ReplyDeleteFirst, China is not building a navy to confront the USN on the high seas. It’s building PLAN to invade Taiwan and to intimidate its neighbors, not to fight on the high seas. As a matter of global strategy, we need to decide how we intend to react to such actions. We should then define our future naval requirements in terms of what we need to execute that strategy. And while we still have the advantage globally, make sure China understands in no uncertain terms what we are willing to live with and what we aren’t.
Second, within the South China Sea, China enjoys a huge home court advantage, because of proximity and their A2/AD systems. We would be at a severe disadvantage engaging them in that area. If China is successful in taking over the first island chain, which is their stated goal, they can extend substantially the area in which we would be at a decided disadvantage taking them on. Therefore, it would seem to me that a viable strategic objective would be to prevent a Chinese takeover of the first island chain (Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Taiwan [?}, Japan).
Third, what China does not have is the ability to pose a credible across-the-board naval threat beyond the range of that A2/AD system and shore-based air. They don’t have the carriers to pose a credible air threat, and they don’t have the UNREP/RAS capability to support surface operations far from home. Like the USSR, they are basically a land power, and while China is a formidable land power, PLAN is not yet a viable seven seas blue-water navy. Again like the USSR, what they can pose in the way of a worldwide threat today comes in the form of submarines. That suggests very strongly to me (and I believe to ComNavOps, among others) that we need a huge effort in the area of ASW. When the Cold War ended, we decided that there would be no future submarine threat, so we let our capability atrophy. We got rid the Sprucans, Knoxes, and Perrys, most ahead of their time, took the S-3s off carriers, and pretty much stopped intensive training in the ASW area. It’s not too late to fix that mistake, but we need to get high behind fixing it. I’d say we need to build 80 or so ASW frigates, using ComNavOps’s ASW escort as a template, revive the 1950s/60s ASW hunter-killer groups, put the S-3s or something similar back on the carriers, and vastly intensify our ASW training.
Fourth, the good news is that China has some significant weaknesses. First, they are a group of people who don’t really like each other that much. The warlike north doesn’t get along well with the commercial Yangtze Valley and Shanghai, and neither group gets along well with the Cantonese south, not to mention Tibet and the Muslim Uighurs in the west. And thanks to 20 years of one-child policy, they are running out of 20-year-olds, so they can’t really have a consumption based economy. They have to export, or their economy crashes and their people starve. Their approach is to export cheap consumer goods in large volume, and use the cash to fund make-work projects (remember the empty cities?) that have no economic value but (they hope) keep the masses too busy to revolt. And their whole economy is based upon significant amounts of imported oil, much of which has to come from the Mideast (and until somebody figures out how to build a pipeline over the Himalayas, that has to come by sea. That whole structure obviously depends upon freedom of safe navigation, and right now PLAN can’t assure that. Currently, we could crater the Chinese economy by interfering with their export shipments and their oil supply, without having to do anything inside their A2/AD envelope.
To clarify, my post was referring to the article that Kath referenced. As Kath noted about her post, may have been better appended to the prior thread.
DeleteCaptain- "Knowing is half the battle."
ReplyDeleteXO- "What's the other half?"
Captain- "I don't know..."
Delete"The surprise is half the battle. Many things are half the battle, losing is half the battle. Let's think about what's the whole battle."
David Mamet
C2 is the yin-yang relationship of leadership-followership.
ReplyDeleteAll the additional acronyms are the support elements that make the original C2 relationship work(or fail).
Its like referring to a warship as "Destroyer!plus guns,missiles,engines radar and helipad, and a galley." DDGMERHG.
Something something forest...something something trees.
I think we have to be careful not to go too far the other way. In theory, people get higher ranks because they have been successful and have experience. Leaving aside that this is not always the case, junior leaders benefit from the experience of more senior leaders and not all of that can be taught prior to an engagement. Equally, a more senior leader has a better view of the overall battle and what makes sense at a local level does not always make sense at a more strategic level. The trick is to achieve the right balance. I think that more frequent and realistic exercises plus elimination of officers without sufficient combat ability from the command chain will have more effect than any number of computer systems.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget about the 'Peter Principle'.
DeleteIt states that within every hierarchical organisation, people who perform well keep getting promotions until they reach their level of incompetence.
Once at that level they fail at their jobs fairly consistently and stop getting promoted. That level (which is beyond their competency) is where they get stuck and where they are likely to spend MOST of their career.
This means that hierarchical organisations are filled to the brim with people who are incapable to adequately perform their assigned tasks. This is an endemic feature which cannot be realistically prevented and is very hard to remedy.
If you have ever wondered why big corporations go through a new reorganisation when the last one has only just been finished, this is the main reason. They need to constantly clean house to get rid of the dead-weights.
In public organisations, especially the military and politics, this rarely happens and worse, due to internal factionalism and coalition-building, the incompetent can still get promoted after they've already demonstrably reached their level of incompetence.
War used to be the great cleaner for the military, but they found something for that too, co-opting the media and declare everything a victory or (for non-combat matters) a great success.
I used to work for a big multinational and we had a saying there, 'all pilot-projects succeed, always'. I participated in executing many of those pilots and no matter how disastrous the outcome, a couple of months later we'd read the missive of how well the project performed (with manipulated data). There's always someone within the chain that reports back results who benefits from putting a new spin on it. The top never even gets the true data.
I hate to say this, but from an organisational perspective, the US military in general and the Navy probably more than the others, is not just rotten to the core, but to me it looks like it has already eaten away too much of the foundations. Reform is not longer a valid remedy, only rebuilding almost from the ground up will do.
R.
I agree, all good organisations need a periodic clean out and that includes Congress, the Senate, DOD etc.
DeleteStray thought: isn't the increasing obsession with micro-managing a side effect of simulation/sandbox games?
ReplyDeleteWhen you're on a computer, if you're bright, borderline autistic and really obsessed with micro-managing everything you can actually do very well.
Except of course for the fact that reality doesn't work that way.
The difference between reality and a game is that in the game you, at the very top of the chain, have perfect awareness of every knowable detail. In reality, the local commander has more local information than the top commander which is why top commanders should not be directing low level decisions. Conversely, the local commander does not have top level information and should not be dictating top level decisions such as overall strategy. Both should manage at their level. Instead, our top commanders are leaving their top level management and delving into the low level decision making.
DeleteI think you've hit at one of the problems. I think the people at the top of our chains believe (falsely) that they have perfect information. They have been lulled into that belief because of all the snazzy gadgets we have.
Delete