Colin L. Powell Joint Warfighting Essay Contest 2nd Honorable Mention
“Sometimes two heads are better than one.”
As a child, I read a book which described a dinosaur so large and long that it needed two brains, one in its head and one in its tail. I have no idea whether there really was such a creature, but in any event this beast serves as a powerful metaphor. I used to make fun of this dinosaur, but over the years, I have come to think that such a reflexive dismissal was a mistake. An understanding of the occasional advantages of such a nervous system can tell us something useful about both the promise and the perils of military command and control with respect to our modem military aspirations to inter-service “jointness.”
Joint military organizations can help us do more with our shrinking share of the country’s fiscal pie, and also can make our armed forces far more effective at warfighting. Jointness represents a modern outgrowth of the age-old aspiration of combined arms: to bring about warwinning synergies by employing different types of military force in complementary ways. As Alexander triumphed with his adroit use of infantry and cavalry against the Persian armies of Darius III, so we aim to win in the future by integrating the diverse elements of modern high-technology warfare. This dream of a “purple” war effort is compelling, and when it works—as it seemed to under during Desert Storm—it can be almost irresistible.
But remember that dinosaur. Evolutionary biology didn’t necessarily make a mistake in giving it a second brain. There is a limit to how fast neurochemical pathways can transmit information, and for particularly large creatures, it might well be advantageous to devolve a bit of physiological command and control to the extremities. Attacked by a smaller, more agile predator—one whose linkage was much more streamlined—our dinosaur’s posterior ganglions could begin defensive measures even before the primary brain registered the assault. Were it to lack that second brain, the hesitation between stimulus and response could be devastating. This admittedly offbeat metaphor suggests to me that we may need to approach joint warfighting with some caution—not because the purple ideal is unworthy or unworkable, but because it makes a great deal of operational difference how one goes about building a joint-service organizational scheme. Some plans may be a great deal more useful than others.
The U.S. military has, for many years, prided itself on the independence of its commanders and their ability to depart from doctrine, improvise, and take the initiative. In contrast to the top-heavy don’t- move-a-muscle-without-clearing-it- with-me command schemes of the former Warsaw Pact—characterized by the sort of “spiritual mechanization” that Frederick the Great called Korpsgeist'—a Western commander is expected to innovate and to exercise independent judgment, taking advantage of opportunities as they present themselves. When we faced larger Soviet ground forces across the inter-German frontier, our security relied upon maneuver warfare. As its exponents have long argued, maneuver warfare aims to “generate] a faster operational tempo than the enemy” so that “events happen ... faster than [he] can keep up with them.”2 Analytically, this is an application of Colonel John Boyd’s a “observe-orient-decide-and-act” command cycle, in which “success in battle often depends on which commander can complete the loop faster.”3
This can be viewed as an application to warfare of some of the insights of cybernetic theory, which is built around the idea that “a state of [being] ‘in control’ depends upon a flow of information.”4 It is, in some ways, quite a postmodern conception of warfighting, recognizing each opponent’s role in constructing the tactical reality that confronts his adversary, and aiming to make the enemy’s world unintelligible and unlivable by supplying environmental stimuli faster than coherent responses can be formulated.
Modem analytic trappings aside, however, this is an ancient insight. For Sun Tzu, for example, it was “[t]he highest realization of warfare ... to attack the enemy’s plans,”5 while the Japanese duelist Miyamoto Musashi emphasized the importance of “finding a rhythm that will fluster adversaries” and thereby lead them to min.6 As Clausewitz observed, “[e]very action needs a certain time to be completed”: The good commander aims “to deny the enemy the time he needs for getting ready.”7 Maneuver warriors aim to be agile predators attacking a slow, single-brained behemoth before the lumbering victim can bring its weight to bear in its own defense.
The strength of this idea suggests the need to reconceptualize the metaphors with which we speak about command in modern warfare. The “decision-loop” approach to warfighting suggests that the most appropriate metaphor for the challenges of C3] may come less from Clausewitz than from Newton. Rather than “friction,” we should focus upon the idea of inertia: the tendency of objects in motion to remain in motion, and objects at rest to remain at rest. In Clausewitz’s famous description, a “fog of greater or lesser uncertainty”8 envelops the battlefield, causing “great chasms between planning and execution.”9 While true enough in its own right—and to strategists who attempt to reduce warfare to invariant rules—the concept of friction does not quite reach the cybernetic theory of warfare we have been discussing.
Friction, the degradation of command intent from planning to execution, is a linear concept; inertia is a dynamic one that contemplates taking advantage of the enemy’s tendency to remain on his present path while we ourselves quickly change course. Friction is present here too, since we must cope with the difficulty of making our own actions track our intent. But the concept of inertia—or more precisely, that of compounded inertias, incorporates the element of reciprocal causation that is added by the fact that wars take place between opponents, each trying to construct an unpleasant reality for the other. In warfare, as Clausewitz himself recognized, “the will is directed at an animate object that reacts.”10
More important for present purposes, the idea of inertia highlights the dilemma of jointness: How are we to construct a joint command architecture that allows us the strengths of coordinated, multi-service, combined arms warfighting without adding so many steps in the decision loop that we find ourselves slowing our ability to respond to the battlefield environment? Unless we understand that large bureaucratic dinosaurs may sometimes want more than one brain, we will confuse jointness with mere centralization—and thereby miss the crucial insight that real jointness is sometimes to be found less in tying separate chains of command together than in coming up with novel ways to subdivide missions and responsibilities across community and service lines.
The most effective purple war machine is one which knows when—and to what degree—to centralize, and is not afraid not to do so when circumstances demand. In Napoleon’s early campaigns, unity of command was a distinct advantage in turning inside the decision loop of his opponents. “One bad general,” he wrote to Carnot during the Italian campaign, “would be better than two good ones.”11 This centralism, however, ultimately became a liability, since the Emperor’s staff never developed “an institutional capacity for independent decision making within the context of his strategic and operational intentions.”12 As the size of the French armies grew and found themselves engaged in widely separated theaters, unity of command inhibited and slowed more than it empowered and quickened. The Napoleonic dinosaur grew so large that two heads really might have been better than one.
The lesson for our emerging world of joint warfighting is clear. Even in Napoleon’s era, land combat still consisted of largely linear tactics in open territory, as armies maneuvered against each other in relatively rigid and exposed columns or squares. Moreover, it was still possible for a commander personally to see most of his troops on the field of battle. Today, of course, the battlefield is incalculably more complex, geometrically formless, and rapidly changeable—even before we allow for the complexities of a purple joint-service environment in which the full range of modern military force is coordinated and employed simultaneously toward a common end. At the same time, however, modern technology presents leaders with very real temptations to try to command as Napoleon did. In this era of hand-held GPS and satellite communications, it is possible for officials in the White House to direct squad-size units in the field, thousands of miles away. Although this opens great new possibilities for precise command and control, such micromanagement is often easier than it is wise. If undertaken incautiously, jointness could end up merely giving us more opportunities to show such a lack of wisdom.
Nor is the lesson merely one about the devolution of command responsibility. It isn't just a matter of finding the optimum point along a continuum between absolute unity of command and absolute autonomy: the degree of autonomy best given subordinate commanders depends not just upon relative position in the chain of command, but upon the type of activity in question. This is where the idea of jointness in the cross-service context may prove most problematic. Since organizational reforms aimed at joint command across service frontiers will cross important functional lines as well, we must be careful to remember that the same system of control does not always work equally well for every type of military activity. Frederick the Great, for instance, proved himself a superlative commander of rigidly-disciplined and “scientifically” employed regular line infantry. His gifts for centralized command, however, did not extend to the skillful employment of light infantry for skirmishing or patrolling, or to the use of cavalry for scouting—or indeed, for any purpose beyond shock action in tightly coordinated units. Frederick had no place in his scheme for units “which, dispersed and individualistic, could not be extensions of his own mind.”13
In failing to understand the need to treat such forces differently, however, he kept his otherwise remarkably capable Prussian military machine from living up to its full potential. The point here is simply that some types of military force may be much more usefully made part of a centrally directed whole than may others. We should not, in other words, too quickly assume that a single command architecture can work across all such functional lines—especially those between the land, sea, and air services.
Joint strategy should mean different things to different services. Ironically, the pitfalls of unitary command today may run quite contrary to our services’ traditional attitudes to organizational autonomy. The Navy—built around the paradigm of a captain’s absolute and independent authority at sea—has most enthusiastically advocated autonomy of command. The Army, by contrast, has historically aspired to its own variety of jointness,14 having always had to coordinate employment of infantry, cavalry, and artillery. It is this openness to command integration, for instance, that helped lead the Army to experiment in 1903 with an integrated General Staff system loosely modeled on that of 19th century Prussia.15
Before the era of electronic communications, this was functionally appropriate: A general could survey the battlefield and relay commands to outlying units with relative dispatch, but once over the horizon a naval commander was cut off from immediate command and control and simply had to be entrusted with independent authority. The rootedness of modern service culture in these traditions may well explain, as Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Allard has suggested, much of the contemporary politics of joint planning.16
In an era of globe-spanning, real-time voice- and data-link communications, however, a centralized approach to jointness may be more effective for the Navy and the Air Force than for the traditionally joint-minded Army. Air Force and Navy operations take place in comparatively homogeneous media and involve comparatively few independently controllable operational units; such operational environments may be well suited to a highly centralized command architecture. As the Navy’s Aegis air-defense scheme and the Air Force’s AWACS system suggest, the relatively transparent media of atmosphere and sea often lend themselves to highly automated battle management over vast distances.17
The contrast to ground combat is striking. Air and naval commanders do not face the bewildering complications of topography, vegetation, watercourses, urban development, and indigenous populations that confront a general on the ground. Moreover, the number of individually command- able units is much greater in land combat. Naval and air combat requires the coordination of, at most, no more than a few hundred units at a time, but a corps-level army intelligence system might have to track tens of thousands of “movers, shooters, and emitters” at a time.18
This complexity helps make ground warfare the operational environment in which the challenges of friction and inertia are the most acute. There is no substitute, of course, for unity of strategic purpose even in the most complex of land battle environments. However, it is in jungles, woodlands, mountains, and urban battle zones that the disadvantages of Korpsgeist are greatest—and the benefits to be gained from subordinates’ autonomy and innovation most dramatic. Perhaps in land combat, our metaphorical service dinosaur gains the most by having more than one brain, and where it has the most to lose by complicating its decision loop with collaborative decision-making.
As far as jointness is concerned, one size doesn’t fit all. The feud between Army and Air Force strategists over the merits of allowing ground commanders to “call their own shots” with air interdiction in the “Air-Land Battle,”19 for example, reflects precisely this dilemma of modern jointness. The optimum level of command integration may be different for different types of combat—and different missions may require different approaches to joint command, even where the forces employed do not cross service-functional lines.
We should neither await nor expect the development of a clear joint strategy analogous to the coherent service-specific strategic visions20 advanced by the likes of Mahan or Douhet. Ultimately, the best metaphor for understanding the demands of joint warfighting is less that of the master plan than that of the Chinese menu. We need to be able to provide an array of command-architectural options that will enable us to employ whatever level of, or approach to, jointness deemed most appropriate, to any mission assigned by the National Command Authority.
This will not be easy. If joint strategy really is no more than what Moltke called “a series of expedients,”21 it will demand of us not a single doctrinal answer but our cultivation, over time, of the flexibility to enable individual units and command subsystems to thrive in many different positions and roles. It will not be something that can be put into a field manual. Rather, it will be a habit of the mind—one that may challenge our military in the coming years as few other things we have ever undertaken. “The art of war is simple,” said Napoleon: “everything is a matter of execution.”22
1 See R.R. Palmer, Frederick the Great, Guihert, Balow: From Dynastic to National War, in Makers of Modern Strategy, supra, at 99.
2 Gen. A.M. Gray, USMC, Warfighting, 1994.
3 Lt.Col. C. Kenneth Allard, USA, Command, Control, and the Common Defense 150, 1990.
4 Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought 177, Alan Bullock et al., eds., rev. ed., 1988.
5 Sun Tzu, The Art of War 177, Ralph Sawyer trans. 1994 (emphasis added).
6 Miyamato Musashi, The Book of Five Rings 103, Thomas Cleary trans. 1994.
7 Carl von Clausewitz, On War 91-93, Michael Howard & Peter Paret trans. 1993.
8 Ibid, at 117
9 Ibid, at 137 (emphasis deleted).
10 Ibid, at 174.
11 Peter Paret, Napoleon and the Revolution in War, in Makers of Modern Strategy, supra, at 129-30.
12 Ibid. at 137.
13 Palmer, supra, at 99-100.
14 See, e.g., Allard, supra, at 45. ,
15 Ibid, at 76-79.
16 See, e.g., id. at 95-96.
17 An exception to this may be the employment of submarines, where difficulties in subsurface communications leave commanders in a position more akin to that of ship captains of old.
18 Id. at 145 (quoting A.N. Stubblebine III, 07 for Automated Focus on the Battlefield, 20 Army 33-34 March 1979.
19 See, e.g., Maj. James A. Machos, USAF, TACAIR Support for the Air-Land Battle, 35 Air University Review, 21, May-June 1984.
20 See generally. Rear Adm. Joseph C. Wylie, USN, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power control 35-56 (1966) (outlining principal service-specific strategic theories).
21 Helmuth von Motlke, quoted in Gunther E. Rothenberg, Moltke, Schlieffen, and the Doctrine of Strategic Envelopment, in Makers of Modern Strategy, supra, at 209.
22 Paret, supra, at 127.
An ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserve, Dr. Ford is Assistant Counsel to the White House Intelligence Oversight Board.