Commander’s Intent
One surprising consequence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the rate at which their generals are dying in combat. The United States lost no general officers in combat during the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Tragically, one American general fell in a so-called “green-on-blue” attack. Major General Harold J. Greene died “when a gunman believed to be an Afghan soldier opened fire at a military academy near Kabul.” By contrast, Russian flag officer casualties in the field are staggering. That’s not to mention the other senior officers including colonels and majors who have died.
According to this piece March 2022 in Foreign Policy, the “tally of Russian generals killed in the nearly monthslong conflict – most of them one- and two-star commanders, including at least one lieutenant-general – is likely the highest death rate among general officers in the Russian military since World War II” accounting for “up to a fifth of the number of commanders deployed in Ukraine …”
There are multiple different explanations. The Ukrainians have been able to decapitate Russian leadership thanks to poor Russians communications, for example. The United States has provided Ukraine with intelligence.
“The United States has focused on providing the location and other details about the Russian military’s mobile headquarters, which relocate frequently. Ukrainian officials have combined that geographic information with their own intelligence – including intercepted communications that alert the Ukrainian military to the presence of senior Russian officers – to conduct artillery strikes and other attacks that have killed Russian officers.”
None of this would have been possible without the design of the command-and-control mechanism in the Russian army.
Bureaucracy killed the generals.
Here is Reuters.
“A senior foreign official in Moscow told Reuters: ‘For me what is important is the reported heavy casualties at colonel and above, the backbone of the Russian army, not just generals.’
“The diplomat said the Russian army was heavily centralized and hierarchical, and lacking in empowered Western-style junior officers. ‘There are too many colonels, too few corporals. So what happens is tasks requiring resolution, which in the West would be resolved at much lower levels, get passed up the chain for decision,’ the source said.
“The diplomat said that the hierarchical structure drew senior officers to the front to sort out problems or revitalize the effort, leaving them vulnerable to attack.
“Centralisation of command and control, lack of dispersal, and paucity of secure communication also puts them in locations where they can be identified and picked off by Ukrainian UAVs,’ the diplomat said, referring to unmanned drones.”
It’s not just junior officers, such as lieutenants and captains. There’s a paucity of non-commissioned officers, too. Think sergeants. Here’s the WSJ.
“’Their level of small-unit leadership, as they themselves recognize, is not great which is why you see general officers much more forward in the field’ in the Russian army, said Col. John ‘Buss’ Barranco, a U.S. Marine Corps fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank.
“’They are overly dependent on senior people micromanaging from the Front because they don’t have the same noncommissioned officer corps to exercise initiative,’ he said.”
Contrast this with the Ukrainian armed forces who succeeded in repelling the multi-pronged impulse of the Russian Army at the start of the war.
“Training is responsible for Ukraine’s greatest advantage over the Russian invaders. The Ukraine military ditched the old Soviet style of tactics and began emulating the West, and this included building a competent and empowered non-commissioned officer corps. ‘Working with the Ukrainians in terms of NCO leadership is something that we have done,’ Ryder said. ‘This is a strategic advantage in a lot of ways of the U.S. military and many Western militaries.’
“Small Ukrainian units led by sergeants are making a difference on the battlefield. These units move faster and do more than the Russian enemies.
“The Ukrainian military – even in the exigencies of war – continue to stress NCO training, U.S. officials said.”
This flexibility was especially advantageous in the initial defense. However, in the wake of the failed 2023 offensive in which the Ukrainians failed to dislodge a dug-in Russian defense-in-depth, the Ukrainians appear to have reverted to their prior Soviet doctrine of intensive use of artillery to wear down the enemy. This may not be sustainable, given Russia’s greater industrial capacity and the feckless support of the West. Part of this shift in approach is because of the lack of trained troops. Part of it may stem from frustration after failing to meet elevated expectations.
Western organizational structure worked wonders for Ukraine in surprising the world with its ability to defend against Russian military might. Some may argue that the Ukrainians lost the initiative and were doomed to fail in dislodging the Russians after giving the invaders the time to prepare their defenses. That’s more of a political question than a military one, given the fact that the Ukrainians were doing the best with the kit that they could muster.
Organizations exist to collect and to act upon information. A bureaucracy is a form of organization that is well-suited for some kinds of information flow, say where it is consistent, continuous, and predictable. There is also the question of trust. Bureaucracy is not optimized for making decisions if the information is incomplete, inconsistent, or uncertain. You can apply a bureaucracy to this latter kind of problem. It just won’t work out as well as some other approaches.
The U.S. Marines know this.
“Mission command and control tends to be decentralized, informal, and flexible. Orders and plans are as brief and simple as possible, relying on subordinates to effect the necessary coordination and on the human capacity for implicit communication—mutual understanding with minimal information exchange. By decentralizing decision making authority, mission command and control seeks to increase tempo and improve the ability to deal with fluid and disorderly situations. Moreover, with its reliance on implicit communications, mission command and control is less vulnerable to disruption of the information flow than is detailed command and control.”
The American military focuses on the communication of commander’s intent, here described by General Stanley McChrystal.
“What the commander’s intent was designed to do was tell everyone in the organization, ‘This is what I actually mean. If everything goes to hell, as long as we get this done, accomplish this outcome, that’s success’” So while I’ve got a plan that says, ‘We are going to do it this way,’” if the plan falls apart, whatever we can do to accomplish this outcome is good. It’s letting all of the force into the commander’s head, understanding what to do.
“So when the plan goes badly, as they invariably do, and you’re picking the pieces up and adapting, everybody can pick up the piece and adapt by themselves. They don’t need you to tell them exactly what to do.”
How do we choose the best form of organization at the outset? How can we be rational in designing our process for making decisions? Rationality means that our entity makes optimal decisions given the nature of the information at hand and does so as efficiently as possible. Decentralizing decision making requires trust. Even if we want to push down responsibility in the organization, we may not feel comfortable doing so.
It is too easy to default to bureaucracy as a choice of organizational form. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We also need to be wary of the collective organizational entropy in which organizations drift into greater bureaucracy, destroying the energy that would be used otherwise to do the work to make rational decisions under conditions of varying informational quality.
Bureaucracy takes away the ability of the line worker to achieve the commander’s intent, replacing it with rules and procedures. Perhaps the range of outcomes one might obtain from a flexible approach implies costs that outweigh the benefits, justifying a prescriptive top-down, centralized management. Bureaucracy may lend itself to situations in which we want to reduce the variability of results and the conditions are in place for us to do so. It all comes down to the nature of the information flow and to the level of trust.
We have said since the beginning of this series that our aim in writing about bureaucracy is to learn how to predict its behavior. We have talked about ways in which we can measure the amount of bureaucratic thinking in an organization and we have fleshed this metric out with an additional metric. Perhaps we can add a third dimension: the degree to which an organization has a strong understanding of the Commander’s Intent. Or not.