Linking humanity and military success.

Anyone who has discussed Auftragstaktik with me, and why it is the secret ingredient that can bring battlefield excellence to our military, knows I constantly say the foundation of Auftragstaktik is trust. Leaders must trust their subordinates to do what needs to be done, even in the absence of orders and supervision. Likewise, subordinates must trust their leaders and believe that they will never spend their lives wantonly or without a higher purpose. But this trust must be based on something more fundamental. It must be based on dignity.

Prussian development of what became Auftragstaktik stemmed from two things: First, a few influential thinkers like Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst (1755-1813) a Hanoverian-born officer in Prussian service, who’d studied the French reforms being instituted in France’s royal army before the Revolution. Second, in 1806, the Prussian Army suffered a complete collapse at Jena and had to be rebuilt from scratch. I won’t retell the whole story here (I did so in my book Auftragstaktik: The Birth of Enlightened Leadership).

The key for Scharnhorst was something he’d noticed in the French reforms. He noted that the French created special infantry battalions of skirmishers (tirailleurs), and he was convinced that such reforms would bring renewed excellence to the Prussian Army. The French and American Revolutions had introduced dramatic changes to the linear warfare of the eighteenth century. The rigid, disciplined professional armies, epitomized by Frederick the Great’s Guards, were being badly mauled by light infantry and tirailleurs. These battalions called for new tactics — and better training. More importantly, they called for a shift in how leaders at all levels perceived battle; how they led troops in battle. Slow, precise, highly drilled, and brutally disciplined geometric formations were coming up against the hit-and-run tactics of small groups; lessons brought home from fighting in North America. Light skirmishers were being trained to think for themselves, and to use ground cover to best effect.

These tactical changes forced a reconception of the nature of battle, and Scharnhorst’s most famous student captured it best. Carl von Clausewitz’s view of chaos, friction, and disorder was the best description of the new view. But this new understanding alone was not enough. Understanding that war was chaos was only half the solution. The other half was what this new awareness meant to soldiers in combat: They had to think for themselves.

Bubba

The Prussians combined this altered view of battle with the Napoleonic principal of freedom of action. The Napoleonic principle of freedom, as expressed later by Prussian field marshal August Neidhardt von Gneisenau (1760-1831) in his doctrine of control by directives, gave every Prussian soldier the understanding that he needed to act independently within the chaos of battle, even to the extent of creating more chaos (Freiheit des Handelns). Prussian thinking was transformed. Moreover, the imposition of order upon chaos by superior commanders — anathema to the Clausewitzian model —was henceforth to be avoided.

This change gave all soldiers the freedom of action necessary to make decisions based upon their local circumstances, guided only by their own judgement and their commander’s intent. Knowing that soldiers could, if necessary, disregard orders, lent great psychological impetus to the pursuit of tactical success. This Freiheit des Handelns strengthened the mutual trust between leader and subordinate and lent dignity to the ability of the individual soldier. As my old friend and Iron Cross winner Oberst Gerhard Muhm once explained to me, this doctrine exalted the intelligence and capabilities of the individual soldier; it gave him dignity. The marriage of the chaotic model of war with the dictum of acting independently in accordance with a commander’s intent formed an intellectual framework unlike any that existed in any other army. This framework breathed life into Auftragstaktik.

The process began with Scharnhorst’s belief that the intelligence of the common soldier enabled French tirailleurs to profit from all the advantages offered by the terrain and the confused situation, as opposed to forming up on open ground as if it were a parade and wait for their officers’ orders. But none of it was possible without recognizing that it was all based on dignity.