Headquarter organisation

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This blog post will make some observations and proposals about military staff work. There's (AFAIK) but a pitiful choice of published books on the subject. So far only two of them have impressed me favourably:

The very new book "Something Rotten: Land Command in the 21st Century" by Jim Storr (2022) (mostly about staffs on brigade to theatre level) and the by now ancient Austrian (thus German language) book Truppendienst Band 28: "Stabsdienst im kleinen Verband" (1979), which is centred on battalion HQs. Both are focused on combat command.

Decisionmaking doesn't get better by involving many people, and preparation for decisionmaking doesn't get better by exceeding a few people. Experiences in from software development to military staffs show that the time spent on communication grows to excessive amounts when you go beyond 40 members in an organisational cell, but really agile command requires much smaller elements.

So my simple idea is that a headquarter from brigade to theatre level should consist of three components:

(1) Administrative component led by a manager with enough authority to make decisions in absence of the commanding officer. This administrative component would be in a 'rear' location, left behind in a safe and calm place even when the combat formations are manoeuvring rapidly. Historical divisional staffs simply allowed the 'management' tasks to pile up during periods of much activity and focused on combat operations instead. The piled-up management tasks were then done in calmer times. This seems suboptimal to me. We should have a truly proficient head manager in this component who gets to work with officers and seniors NCOs who aren't exactly overachievers.

(2) Operations staff component, led by the Chief of Staff. This would include S2 (intelligence), S3 (operations), S4 (logistics), S6 (signals) officers and S9 (Civ-Mil cooperation, preferably an attached allied officer). All these positions would have a 2nd officer who's newer to the job. A naval-like watch system of each four watches per day (each 6 hrs) would be enforced to its practical limits in wartime.* This leads to four transition briefings time windows per day, with the Chief of Staff or 2nd Chief of Staff attending the S2, S3, S4 and S6 transition briefings in sequence, all in less than one hour. Further staff personnel would be senior NCOs and maybe attached allied officers.

This sounds like much, but in the end the preparation for the commanding officer's decision would rest on only five officers. The Commanding officer (CO) would give a brief order, which the staff officers understand by their training (20...40 command post exercises as a team per year) and the orders would be limited in quantity per day and in their size per standing order. All violations would lead to disciplinary measures for military disobedience (for every officer involved).

I did not propose a S5 (plans) officer. Planning is a small part of the job of the S2, S3, S4, S6 and S9, and any plan overarching the specialisations should be very concise and not require a dedicated officer.

(3) The CO crew. This would be a military policeman/driver, a signaller-qualified officer and an officer qualified for instantly taking over command of any subordinate unit. They would fit into a protected 4x4 car or a light liaison helicopter. The high mobility of the CO with his tiny CO crew would permit frequent leading from 'the front'. The CO would sometimes be briefed about new developments or about proposals prepared by the Operations Staff Component through basically one screen-sized graphic and up to one page worth of text, all digestible within five minutes.

The CO crew should be assembled very carefully, and at least one of them must not be selected by the CO himself, for this crew should have a counterweight officer who complements the CO to alleviate his weaknesses.

I did not propose a 2nd in command for the CO. The Chief of Staff would fill that role when communications contact with the CO is lost or the CO is incapacitated. The superior HQ would assign (and possibly send) a new CO if necessary.

This was about 'combined arms' combat command headquarters. A support headquarter could look different, and particularly replace the S? officer specialisations with specialisations that fit to the logistics headquarter's tasks. A supply HQ could have one officer for organising inflow (including Civ-Mil), one for outflow (including security concerns), one for the depots (esp. choosing sites and decision to move depots) and one for determining the needed quantities of supplies, for example.

This offers a path towards much more agile (smaller and better-trained) staffs for operations while at the same time offering improved administrative performance and a path for dumping mediocrity out of the command staffs without the mass deletion of officer slots that the armed bureaucracy resists with maximum determination.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

 

*: I understand that the four watches system may attract criticism and may be found impractical. I suspect it would work worse in the first four days, but afterwards prove superior because it permits enforcing sleep discipline and thus helps to avoid exhaustion. There's usually a collapse of officer performance after four days of intense action due to loss of recovery (sleep), a frequent wartime problem that rarely  shows up in peacetime.

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