It’s finally happened.  After years of toil and growing pains as a company grade officer, you’ve made it to the next level: the key position of field grade.  Moving to your new unit, you are in your first year as the S3 Operations Officer, ready and energetic to make a difference and earn your title of “Iron Major.”  The first few weeks of transition and the honeymoon period sail by as you learn the organization, your team, and the new boss.  But as the dust settles and you begin to see the landscape from an informed position, you realize that something is wrong.  

There is frustration.  There is a lot of frustration.  The tension is palpable, with friction on multiple levels.  The staff doesn’t cooperate, fights with higher headquarters staff, and is constantly at odds with the company commanders.  The commanders are disjointed, with each unit pulling in different directions.  No one seems to know what to do next, so they do nothing.  You’re frustrated, they’re frustrated, and to make it worse, the boss is frustrated. However, as the newest addition to the team, you realize that you may be the only one with enough perspective to solve the problem.  

It’s clear to you that there is a failure in mission command and that something has to change.  However, what is less clear is what the actual problem is.  You’ve seen other organizations disintegrate amid mission command failures, with the unit unhappy and unproductive, where it seemed easy to blame the commander for not trusting or providing guidance, or – on the other side of the coin – blame the subordinates for being lazy and not taking initiative.  But no one wins in these situations when you’re blaming your own people.

One evening, after the office has cleared out and you have time to think, you reconsider some past observations.  You wonder what your unit’s problem is, and you realize that each of those previous situations was different and unique.  A line from Tolstoy drifts into your head, that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and that you need to figure out what your family’s problem is…  Deep… You must be getting this field grade thing already.  Ok, back on track.

You intuitively know that jumping to implement a new program or aggressively embarking on a campaign to improve OPORDs is a real rookie mistake.  You realize that the first thing you need to do is correctly diagnose the problem – a little mission analysis.  From your perspective as mid-level management, you look at both the staff and the commanders as different entities, which might have their own subpopulations and problems. The unit overall is failing and ineffective, and, while this manifests in different ways, it seems like the common theme is lack of confidence.

Examining each piece as if it were a puzzle, you think about what makes the different groups that way… Is it that they are unwilling to take responsibility and initiative?  This is the easy and first answer to come to.  But with a little more thought, maybe it is more complex than that.  Maybe it is about ability, that they are not able to carry out the tasks, based on access or resources, and cannot take the next steps on their own… Or maybe it is that they do not have the capability to do so, that the potential to move forward is there, but not the skill mastery.

In dissecting the complex problem from different perspectives of staff sections and companies, you realize that they each have different challenges, and that each of these challenges requires a different solution.  You come to the conclusion that the principles of mission command align with different approaches to these problems.  An incapable staff section with junior leadership might need more training and coaching to increase its competence.  A company commander who has recently stepped on it (more than once) does not have the battalion commander’s trust and isn’t allowed to do anything without express permission.  In another example, you realize that the whole unit was hamstrung by the ability to exercise a mission, because the staff’s directions and analysis of their order were not good quality, resulting in a less-than-stellar order to the companies.  

You recognize that different populations and diverse situations all had different symptoms of the disease of mission command failure.  Not escaping scrutiny, you also realize that there may be situations where the boss did not provide the clearest intent, or may have been unwilling to release the grip of control enough to let things happen.  That’s another knot to uncoil.  

With new understanding washing over you, you sketch out a few ideas and recommendations that can be broadly implemented, with a few more that require specific direction at a targeted audience.  You know that you need to discuss this with the other Major on staff, your battle buddy, whose different experience and perspective may illuminate other circumstances.  Any approach to treating this disease of dysfunction has to be a combined effort.  

While you are fairly confident with your assessments, you are even more convinced that to cure the mission command problem, you have to correctly diagnose it.  Failure to do so would waste precious time and staff calories on the wrong problem.  Or, worse yet, succumbing to an attribution error or placing a value judgment (“the staff is lazy” or “the commander doesn’t give guidance”) would create more harm and allow the disease to grow… Armed with this clarity, you’re ready for the next step.  You’ve got this.

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MAJ Williams has operational experience in Iraq and Afghanistan and completed KD time as a battalion and brigade S3.