Military Review English Edition January-February 2015 | Page 38
of trust not only promotes a unit’s commitment to the
mission but also enables esprit de corps and personal commitment of soldiers and leaders to each other.
Dialogue is that important—it should be institutionalized to the greatest extent possible. The disengagement
effected by headphones and computer games should be
limited.
Clear Commander’s Intent
Commanders should tell subordinates what to do,
not how to do it. Harkening back to Field Manual (FM)
100-5, Operations, a unit commander should be sufficiently prepared to
conduct his operation confidently, anticipate
events, and act fully and boldly to accomplish his mission without further orders. If an
unanticipated situation arises, committed unit
commanders should understand the purpose
of the operation well enough to act decisively, confident that they are doing what their
superior commander would order were he
present.16
This idea is echoed in the Army Doctrine
Reference Publication (ADRP) 6-0, Mission
Command:
Commanders articulate the overall reason
for the operation so forces understand
why it is being conducted. They use the
commander’s intent to explain the broader
purpose of the operation beyond that of the
mission statement. Doing this allows subordinate commanders and soldiers to gain
insight into what is expected of them, what
constraints apply, and most importantly,
why the mission is being conducted.17
With operations now moving with such great
speed and complexity, partly due to leaps in technology and mechanization, they can be planned only
up to the point of execution. However, it is through
the mission command principles of shared understanding and trust that the commander’s intent can
be expressed so that it yields the greatest effect by
enabling initiative.
The commander develops a statement of the
commander’s intent through critical and creative
thinking. Dialogue between commanders and their
staffs and soldiers to create shared understanding
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supports this process. One approach the Army uses
to facilitate creative and critical thinking is the Army
design methodology, or ADM. As defined in ADP
5-0, The Operations Process, the ADM is
a methodology for applying critical and
creative thinking to understand, visualize, and describe unfamiliar problems and
approaches to solving them. Army design
methodology is an iterative process of understanding and problem framing that uses
elements of operational art to conceive and
construct an operational approach to solve
identified problems. Commanders and
their staffs use Army design methodology
to assist them with the conceptual aspects
of planning.18
A descriptive planning process, the ADM lends
itself to dialogue that helps flesh out emerging tasks
and objectives. Yet, creative and critical thinking are
January-February 2015 MILITARY REVIEW