Auftrag-static (VII): UK official tells Donnelly he has another think coming

It is interesting to see where this
discussion has led. Here is a response from a British government official to
yesterday's column by Tom Donnelly.

By "A. Gentleman Ranker"

Best Defense guest responder

I'm afraid
Tom
Donnelly's comments yesterday about the undeniable British failures of the
past have finally prompted me to send you this, which has been in my mind ever
since this discussion started. It's from Field Marshal Slim's Defeat
into Victory (chapter
on "Afterthoughts", pps 619-620 of the 2009 U.K. Pan edition). Slim was of course
himself a product of the "British Empire's military system" which, according to
the Brian Farrell quote cited by Donnelly "insist[ed that] the situation must
fit the plan at all levels":

My corps
and divisions were called upon to act with at least as much freedom as armies
and corps in other theatres. Commanders at all levels had to act more on their
own; they were given greater latitude to work out their own plans to achieve
what they knew was the Army Commander's intention. In time they developed to a
marked degree a flexibility of mind and firmness of decision that enabled them
to act swiftly to take advantage of sudden information or changing
circumstances without reference to their superiors. They were encouraged, as
Stopford put it when congratulating Rees's 19th Division which had
seized a chance to slip across the Irrawaddy and at the same time make a dart
at Shwebo, to "shoot a goal when the referee wasn't looking". This acting
without orders, in anticipation of orders, or without waiting for approval, yet
always within the overall intention, must become second nature in any form of
warfare where formations do not fight closely en cadre, and must go down to the smallest units. It requires in
the higher command a corresponding flexibility of mind, confidence in its
subordinates, and the power to make its intentions clear right through the
force...

Seems
a pretty good definition of (at least some parts) of Auftragstaktik to
me. It prompts three thoughts: 

1. You don't need to be Prussian to develop Auftragstaktik.
There's no sign in Slim's writing that he's drawing on Prussian thinking, and
in fact this part of the chapter is entitled "New Techniques". Of course, all
things German were profoundly unpopular after the War, but given Slim's
reputation for intellectual honesty, I would expect him to have at least nodded
to the German experience if it had been a major influence on him. This
counterbalances what I often worry is a modern attitude verging on idolatry
towards Imperial and Nazi German military performance. I wonder how much this
positive view of the Wehrmacht in particular is still based on the post-war
Allied need to justify their poor initial performance against the Germans, on
the self-serving post-war accounts of German generals, and on an artificial
separation of German military actions from their political and moral context. I
also wonder how much this debate is fuelled by national stereotypes and
self-images, e.g. efficient and cerebral Germans, stolid and unimaginative
British, informal and unstructured Americans etc. [[BREAK]]

2. Slim does not say this
is the right approach for all forms of warfare, e.g. it's not
necessarily right for the European theatre, where formations may indeed fight en cadre (which I assume means aligned along a continuous front with
friendly units on either flank). He
links this approach (to which he doesn't give a distinct theoretical name) to
his experience of fighting in the broken terrain of South East Asia, and to
what he sees (in 1956) as the likely dispersed pattern of future
nuclear-conventional warfare. This makes me wonder whether mission command is
in fact the right approach for (e.g.) a campaign like Afghanistan, where
formations and commanders serve tours of 6 months - 2 years and then are
replaced by fresh ones (albeit often these days with their own experience of previous
tours). There has been criticism in Britain that many of the brigades in Helmand
have used their mission command freedom to take approaches very different from
their predecessors and successors, meaning perhaps, as with Vann's comments on
Vietnam, that we don't have five years' experience of Helmand, but six month's
experience ten times over. But maybe this is just a result of "higher command"
not having been able "to make its intentions clear right through the force..."?

3. Slim's book is of
course all about transformation (though he would doubtless have used a more
elegant word) - the title "Defeat into Victory" says it all. The British (and
imperial) military had of course a great deal of experience with this even
before it learnt to eat soup with a knife: Singapore was followed by Slim's
victories, Dunkirk led to D-Day, the Royal Navy pioneered convoys, carriers and
intelligence fusion as well as dreadnoughts, the army in the American colonies
developed greenjackets as well as redcoats etc. Throughout Slim's book he
emphasises the traditional, established nature of the skills and principles
needed for adaptation to changed and demanding circumstances, e.g. he
singles out discipline, which to him seems the essential basic military
quality. He implies that failure was as much a result of neglecting these
established virtues, as of neglecting to invent new ones (qv his scepticism
about the then newly-fashionable special forces). This implies that Eitan
Shamir is only partly right to argue that established armies (in Schilling's
words) "tend, when confronted with new cultures, to look to their past in an
attempt to proof that the 'new' is actually a well-known tradition of their
respective force": in fact, armies may genuinely need to return to the old in
order to deal with the new.

I am
something of an amateur in all these issues, but if Bill Slim thinks along
these lines, then I'm inclined to take his word for it. He was, after all, the
most successful British general of the Second World War, as well as the one
with the clearest writing style.

"A.
Gentleman Ranker," when he is not out on a spree, is a British official who has
worked on Iraq and Afghanistan issues and is now attached to a think tank.