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By Major N. E. Reynolds, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve
The Marine Corps needs to follow the lead of history’s great military decision-makers. If a dark situation—here, in the Saudi Arabian desert—calls for turning on some lights, the decision could illuminate more than the night.
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t November 1991
31
The German colonel could feel the cool night air on his face, a pleasant contrast to the heat of the day in the Western Desert in late 1941. He was sitting in the commander’s hatch in the first tank in the column, the right place for him, because he was the battalion commander. The column was moving toward its objective when it encountered the concentration of parked vehicles. Peering ahead, the colonel could not identify the vehicles at first. They were now only about 20 meters away. His tank continued to roll. At 10 meters, he realized that he was looking at a British encampment. His tank continued to roll, now entering the British perimeter. The British were not reacting. The colonel quietly began giving orders over his radio.
Rommel’s World War II Panzers.
dered without a fight. In a matter of minutes, the Germans had captured the headquarters of a British brigade, including the brigadier, 17 officers, 150 enlisted men, 36 tanks, and other weapons and equipment.
Professor Russel Stolfi
U S NAVAL INSTITUTE COLLECTION
He ordered one company to turn left off the road, another to turn right, and both to encircle the enemy. Then he ordered the battalion to turn on its lights and, at gunpoint, to demand that the enemy surrender. His men deployed as if on parade, turned on their lights, and, except for one tank crew and one stubborn officer, the British surren-
There were many remarkable things about the encounter in the desert that World War II night, which is now part of the history of the 8th Panzer Regiment and of Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps: the failure of security on both sides; the Germans’ ability to execute the plan without any kind of rehearsal; the fact that the Germans were moving at night and the British were stationary; the German commander’s location in the lead tank of the lead company; and his unorthodox tactics (Turn on your lights and get them to surrender. What doctrine says that?).
But perhaps most remarkable was the commander’s decision itself. It was made literally on the move, without time to reflect or gather information about the enemy, let alone consult the staff. The decision was a product of refined intuition, and he communicated it orally and succinctly. Implemented immediately, it brought incredible success. All in all, the incident was a compelling demonstration of the commander’s confidence in his ability to decide and act.
This German commander was undoubtedly quite lucky. Nevertheless, the encounter was a prime example of the German Army’s routine ability to make and implement sound decisions under pressure in World War II. What kind of system fostered that ability? And what can we learn from it? A look at the way the German Army educated its General Staff officers in the first half of this century suggests some answers. The General Staff developed the model for military education in the German Army, and its officers imposed their values on the Army. In that sense, virtually all of its leaders were products of the General Staff system.
The threshold issue was selectivity, especially in its General Staff officers. By 1914, the selection process had taken the shape that it would keep, with few changes, until World War II. Every year approximately 800 officers, typically captains with roughly a decade of experience, took the entrance examination for the Kriegsakademie—the General Staff academy—and the first step on the fast track for leaders.
The examination was voluntary, and officers prepared for it on their own time, often studying published collections of tactical problems and solutions. Applied tactics were at the heart of the examination. It might include three or four regimental problems that had to be solved in six to ten hours. To solve a problem, the examinee had to produce and justify a commander’s decision.
About 20% of the 800 would pass. That group of roughly 150 officers entered the Kriegsakademie. Over the next three to five years of study and probation, most of the 150 would return to their parent commands, and only a handful, sometimes as few as five or ten officers, would earn the right to wear the General Staff Officer’s carmine trouser stripes. If, over time, one of them distinguished himself and demonstrated an aptitude for teaching, he would receive orders to join the staff of the Kriegs- akademie. If the General Staff was elite, with the attendant privileges of seniority and prestige, the staff of the Kriegsakademie was the elite of the elite.
What kind of work did students and instructors do at the Kriegsakademie? Every week student officers worked their way through a problem or set of problems, making decisions and issuing orders. It was the case-study method par excellence. Albert Wedemeyer, the future U.S. Army general who achieved fame in China in World War II, attended the Kriegsakademie in the mid-1950s, and described the procedure:
“Practically all of the instruction is imparted through troop leading. That is, a General Situation will be issued to the students, often a day in advance, so that they can plot it on the map and read themselves into the situation. The following morning additional information in the form of a Special Situation may be issued. The instructor assigns posts of command and staff to various students. . . . They will be given a few minutes in which to deliberate, perhaps at the most 10 or 15 minutes. . . . [Then, for example,] [t]he instructor may ask the Chief of Staff to state any recommendations he may wish to make to the Commander. . . . The instructor develops the situation naturally and permits enemy information to reach the Commander, injects difficulties [and so forth] . . . , all designed to bring about sound decisions quickly.”
The “troop leading” described by Wedemeyer went hand-in-hand with written work, which varied from preparing a regimental combat exercise to designing force- on-force maneuvers. Not unlike the entrance examination for its students, the written work at the academy was built around tactical problems and solutions.
The basic pattern of professional education did not change after an officer graduated from the Kriegs- akademie. At least once a year, the Chief of the General Staff would require every General Staff officer to submit to Berlin written solutions to one or more tactical or operational problems. Similarly, there was a yearly 10- to 14- hay tactical exercise without troops for senior General Staff officers. Most, if not all, local commanders followed the Chief of the General Staff’s example, and organized their own written problems and tactical exercises on a regular basis. General officers and commanding generals "'ere not exempt from the training. They participated in regularly scheduled tactical exercises designed exclusively h)r general officers, without troops. The literature contains examples of corps commanders gathering their divi- s'°n commanders for conferences, and then handing each a Written problem to solve and brief on his own within a short period of time, a practice that stands in stark contrast to gatherings of flag-rank officers in other nations.
Given the emphasis on independent work, it was diffi- Cuh for officers to evade responsibility. Every officer had to demonstrate his ability (or lack thereof) to decide and act- The Germans wanted to make sure that every officer VVas trained and evaluated, and they also stressed that the commander had to make his own decisions in combat. When the time came to make decisions, they were opposed to councils of war.
The German system generated and recorded meaningful information about all of its officers. At the Kriegsakademie in the 1930s, student officers were evaluated by their tactics instructors (roughly comparable to a conference group leader at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College). The tactics instructor, who was in daily contact with the students, prepared a written evaluation on every student at the end of each year. The evaluations indicated relative merit among students, but there were no numerical grades or percentages, and class standing did not determine a student’s future. Since there were no examinations, everything a student officer did “counted.” According to Wedemeyer, most instructors put a “premium on quick logical thinking and decisions, transmitted to the command in clear concise orders for aggressive, coordinated action.” In a statement that he believed ap-
plied to all evaluations at the school, Wedeyemer stressed that “mechanics,” such as military nomenclature or combat formation, were much less important than the decision itself.
The system for evaluating serving General Staff Officers and commanders was not much different. It accurately reflected professional abilities, especially tactical ability. This was always possible, because no matter where assigned, all General Staff Officers participated in the annual exercises. Again, the Germans avoided numerical grades or forced comparisons. Instead, the reporting senior had to describe, in a narrative, such things as strength of character, fairness and judgment, willingness to accept responsibility, and ability to work under pressure—all prerequisites for the “decisive” ability. The narratives formed the basis for dividing officers into three groups (above average, average, and below average) and for placing each officer in one of seven categories (suitable for General Staff duty, suitable for training, suitable for service at headquarters, and so forth). The result was a tool for making assignments and selecting commanders.
The Germans maintained a system of professional education for officers throughout their careers. It mattered to them personally and to the Army as an institution. Decisionmaking—and decisiveness—were at the heart of the process. It was a comprehensive system, one that was focused and institutionalized, with enforced standards.
That is what the Marine Corps needs today. The German model is once again useful to Marines, because the Corps, under General A. M. Gray, rededicated itself to meaningful professional education. The former Commandant outlined the system in general terms and established an institution for the professional education of Marines: the Marine Corps University. However, this university has yet to define the focus of Marine Corps education, and has only begun to apply General Gray’s standards. Career progression still fails to reflect consistently the individual’s level of professional education or—in many cases— ability.
The Commandant’s November 1988 message on Professional Military Education contains the remedy: . . . the systematic and comprehensive process of developing the skills, knowledge, and military judgment required to enhance the ability to deal with the increasingly complex responsibilities associated with the Marine Corps and the responsibilities of higher grades.” Implicit here is the ability to make sound decisions and carry them out. That ability needs to become the explicit goal of Marine professional military education.
For the Germans, it was the key to success. Warfare has changed since the Germans’ heyday, becoming increasingly complex. Today, it makes less sense to focus as exclusively on tactics or operations. But it still makes particular sense to focus on decisionmaking. Whatever an officer’s specialty, his worth to the service is largely a function of his “decisive” ability—both in wartime and in peacetime.
The first underlying assumption is that, no matter what the military occupational specialty, all Marine officers belong to a profession defined by concepts, rather than a craft defined by procedures. Judgment matters more than technique. The second is that judgment, by itself, is useless. To win, we need to think, decide, and act—not just think. The ability to combine the three is difficult to grasp, to teach, and to exercise, especially under pressure, when seconds count. Given the tempo of modem warfare, speed remains as crucial in 1991 as it was in 1941. This justifies the focus on decisions and decisiveness.
The goal can be achieved through decision exercises of graduated difficulty. The process has already begun. Building on the German experience, the Marine Corps Gazette has published a number of tactical decision games. The Basic School now teaches tactics by means of sandtable exercises which resemble decision games. The same is true, though to a lesser extent, of the school’s tactical exercises without troops (which tend to focus more on tactical techniques than tactical decisions). Across the street from The Basic School at Quantico, the Infantry Officer Course teaches a package on tactical decisionmaking, which begins on the second day of a ten-week course and provides a framework for tactical decisions during (and after) the course. At the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, a study group plays one tactical- decision game every week.
Decision exercises are more than vehicles for teaching a given subject, and they need not focus on tactics. They can be an end in themselves, a means of developing and measuring an officer’s ability to make decisions. It is not difficult to develop games in such diverse fields as logistics, artillery, communications, and engineering. Each of them can easily accommodate the basic requirements for a good decision problem: a palpably interesting and relevant scenario; a serious dilemma; an ambiguous set of facts; and the need for a quick decision. Information is imperfect, resources are scarce, and the dilemma has no perfect solution.
Decision exercises are more than vehicles for teaching a given subject. . . . They can be an end in themselves, a means of developing and measuring an officer's ability to make decisions.
U.S. MARINE CO**
A good solution to a decision problem will include, at11 minimum, the player’s assumptions about the ambiguous facts; a concept of operations; and a justification for that concept. More advanced players will express their concept of operations in the form of orders.
Knowledge can crowd out imagination and flexibility. It is far more important to know how to use mortars and machine guns to create a combined arms effect than to know how far they can fire.
The story of the German battalion commander in the desert makes a good decision problem. It engages the reader’s attention. His dilemma was clear: should he continue to advance or should he change course? Either way, the risks were tremendous, but time was too short to §ather information. At the same time, no doctrine could tell him exactly what to do. But his solution—clear, simple, and decisive—was as “correct” as any.
The German commander’s problem was not technical, was his decision. A student needs little technical knowledge to play in a decision game or exercise. This is important point. Teachers can use the encounter in the esert to teach officers who are not armor experts how to Jttske decisions, which is the goal. Officers need to learn 0vv to make decisions before they become experts. Skill, Specially conceptual skill, needs to precede knowledge.
. *n the Marine Corps, detailed knowledge (a.k.a. “tech- H'cal proficiency”) has often gone hand-in-hand with incision. One reason is that Marine Corps schools have aci a tendency to impart knowledge without skill. The ernPhasis on knowledge left little time for practical appliCation. Another reason is that knowledge can crowd out imagination and flexibility. For example, it is far more important to know how to use mortars and machine guns to create a combined arms effect than to know how far they can fire. What the student learns first will probably determine how he thinks throughout his career. Finally, there is the “zero defect” mentality, which demands perfect knowledge, and, therefore, waits until the moment to decide is long past.
Marine Corps schools could first teach students how to make decisions, then gradually integrate knowledge into the picture. Every day at a Marine Corps school could begin with a decision exercise, long or short, written or oral—not unlike the routine at many of the nation’s law and business schools, where students learn almost exclusively by studying cases, not principles or techniques, for two to three years. Over time, problems become increasingly complex—and impossible to solve, unless the student masters techniques. But the techniques themselves never become the focus. Units in the fleet could use the same approach to training. On a broader scale, the Marine Corps might use the case-study approach to design entrance examinations for its schools, to determine promot- ability, or to select and train instructors.
Whatever solutions the Corps adopts, it must create a climate that promotes a bias toward decisive action through professional military education. That bias must go beyond habit and become second nature. Continual practice must be the unwritten order of the day, every day. One or two repetitions will have little effect. Nor will mere statements of intent. It is individuals, not groups, who develop the bias in question. A decisive group is a contradiction in terms. The emphasis must be on individual effort.
Every individual cannot succeed, however. Some will fail, and others will excel. Marines who excel must be identified and selected for advancement. In order for that to happen, and for education in decisiveness to matter, fitness reports must accurately reflect every officer’s ability to make and implement decisions. The requirement is not for yet another block on the fitness report, but for a narrative description. It should describe the challenges put to him, and his response to them. It need not be very long, but it must specifically address decisiveness. The reporting senior must be unable to evade the issue, as he can on a computer.
The need for feedback brings the argument full circle. Simply stated, feedback means education with teeth— teeth the Marine Corps needs if it is to continue to produce great leaders into the next century.
Note on Sources: The author is indebted to a number of officers at the Marine Corps University who were kind enough to share their ideas and their sources.
Major Reynolds, a reserve company commander since 1989, is a real estate investor in northern Virginia. He is author of the book Treason Was No Crime (London, 1976), a version of his Oxford University doctoral dissertation on General Ludwig Beck, Chief of the German General Staff from 1933 to 1938. He has designed and conducted board games and conducted sandtable exercises to develop squad leaders. Major Reynolds joined the Marine Corps in 1975.