Tag Archive: Command and Control

Submarine Command and Control Imagine sitting on a battlefield blindfolded and trying to figure out what is happening with only your ears to guide you; your guidance is based on orders written weeks or months...

Synchronisation and Mission Command There is an unresolved tension between the ethos of mission command (delegation of command to the lowest appropriate level), and the demands of synchronisation (that requires the...

Better Political Decision-Making Takes Time A recent discussion with former NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer made it clear that effective civil-military relationships – especially where command and control is...

The commander and the BS detector It seems likely that AI will provide the military commander with more options, advice, and courses of action (COAs) in the near future. That should be good news. Smarter AI...

NATO C2 – Enough of the Mediocrity Placing 140 diverse experts, commanders, scientists, technologists, psychologists, scholars and operators in a room for three days to talk about command and control should derive...

C2 and Trust Trust has always been a central concept in military command and control: it can be based on a ‘Band of Brothers’ construct or something a bit more complex with allies and...

Orders, Planning, and Resources Planning processes change rapidly during combat operations: if they don’t alter to reflect the context, the needs, and the pace of the campaign – rather than the abstract...

Talking softly and carrying a big stick On stepping down as 38th Commandant of the United States Marine Corps, General David Berger leaves a USMC ready for the fight tonight and the fight tomorrow. With a clear vision...

Fighting as an organism (not an organisation) “The Task Force failed to respond sufficiently to the complex environment and began to sub-divide into two C2 structures: official and informal. An informal networked structure...

The Quest for Certainty Until the 1980s, it was just command. Neither Clausewitz, Jomini, Sun Tzu, nor Basil Liddel Hart talked about Command and Control. Indeed, until the 1980s, no one outside the...