U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Nathan Reyes
The Command and Staff College (CSC) is designed to create full-spectrum Joint, Interagency, and Multinational operations commanders and staff officers who are able to leverage their understanding of warfare, operational art, and critical thinking capabilities to ensure mission accomplishment. The successful staff and commander know they need an effective and focused team to enable their objectives. Despite this understanding, they may lack the contextual view to know how to best employ their teams in terms of this new level of commandership and staff planning leadership.
One of the ways a commander or staff officer can become more effective is through the proper use of their Staff Non-Commissioned Officers (SNCOs). As the vast preponderance of officers can attest, the ability to use SNCOs’ abilities, experiences, and knowledge will ensure a more effective organization. However, this is not to say the experience between a field grade officer and a SNCO is the same as that between a company grade officer and their SNCO. In a decentralized decision-making command or staff, the SNCO functions as a specialist while the officer tends to operate as the operational artist, creating the tapestry from which the command can successfully accomplish its mission. In other words, the officer should focus “up and out” while the SNCO should focus “down and in.”
Up and Out
The CSC is very big on the idea of seeing the art within war. In your basic and Captains’ level courses, the science of war was the predominant lens through which to view the operational landscape. In CSC, that aperture is widened to include operational art in terms of larger operations and feeding the small tactical measures into a larger picture. As a field grade officer, the tactical realm needs to be noted but not be the focus of your attention. You need to focus on the larger picture.
The commander controls the execution of the planning cycle and directs where to place priorities of effort. He directs the stages by making sure they are conducted with attention to time, future actions, ability to be understood succinctly by subordinate units, and ensuring they have a sufficient level of detail. In a sense, while they need to be cognizant of the plan, staff officers must look up and out for other factors that impact the overall success of not only the current operation but the ones to follow.
The pull of the tactical realm will probably still excite you. Wanting to give young lieutenants and captains the benefit of your experience in solving their tactical problems is part of who you are and marks you as someone who cares about your people and their successes. However, you have succeeded because leaders allowed you to fail and succeed. You are a field grade officer and have been sent to CSC due to the potential for higher levels of operational thought. The Peter Principle should not apply to you; ensure it does not.
Down and In
Your SNCOs are specialists in their field with typically three or four advanced schools under their belt and typically have approximately a decade of experience. The staff officer takes planning direction from the commander and helps him by reframing it during the planning process due to changes that cause a COA being developed to become irrelevant or impossible to achieve. None of these staff officer functions should supplant the ability of your SNCOs in their specialist roles to aid in aligning your operational designs with reality and should not be overlooked. The SNCO’s job is to make a reality of the operational picture and plan you have created. They may even be able to do things you haven’t even considered, once again causing you to change your operational plans.
You, the operational designer, are not expected to know every part of every system or the absolute best way to address a technical issue. However, you should be able to plan the larger parts and trust the smaller details of actual mission accomplishment to the specialists in their field. For example, the best type of radio you used in one operation might be completely wrong for another type of operation. Understanding this and trusting in your SNCOs is the best way to engender trust up and down the chain of command and enable a smoother planning process.
The competent SNCO should be able to understand the commander’s intent, implicit orders, and how to ensure appropriate information flow throughout the staff. He should also ensure his subordinates understand this and execute it. Creating a sense of decentralized leadership throughout the command and at the staff level further enables junior Marines operational freedom to conduct their missions in accordance with the commander’s intent and not simply the letter of the order. This creates the ability to exploit successes as they appear without working through a highly centralized command structure. In other words, the SNCO should be focused inward on the small, tactical objectives they can control.
Through the use of staff officers looking “up and out” to the overall design of an operational plan and SNCOs looking “down and in” to ensure the design of the plan can meet reality and is executed appropriately, a synergy forms between the two. Of course, at the end of the day, mission success or rests on the commander’s shoulders. Nothing offered here should derail that when the planning process is failing to meet expectations. The commander must interject himself into the planning process at critical points to redirect the staff to meet his expectations. This should be done as a last resort to prevent loss of initiative in the planning cell. The commander and staff’s ability to understand the line between mission success and failure is probably the most important aspect of their lessons and Command and Staff College and should always be present in their mind while performing their duties.
Gunnery Sergeant Jeremy Kofsky is a 15-year veteran of the Marine Corps with Masters Degrees in International Relations and Public Policy and Administration (Terrorism, Peace, and Mediation). He has deployed nine times in his career with five combat tours. He is a graduate of the Marine Corps Advanced Course, Naval War College Senior Enlisted Online Course, and is currently enrolled in the Marine Corps Expeditionary Warfare School. His previous assignments include Iraq, Afghanistan, Armenia, Southeast Asia, the Republic of Korea, and Western Africa. He is currently assigned as an Operations Team Chief at II MEF Information Group at Camp Lejeune, NC.