Military Review English Edition January-February 2017 | Page 54

Successful Innovation
and Mission Command

about fighting. Based on Murray’s factors of successful military innovation, it is time for the Army’s
approach to mission command to evolve.
Further exacerbating the command and control confusion is that mission command does not
provide specificity to the Army in relation to the

Historian Williamson Murray defined four critical factors of successful military innovation: specificity; a reflective, honest military culture; proper
use of history; and cognitive openness.10 Murray’s

Our current paradigm
Command
and control

or

Mission
command

to
a paradigm for the future
Detailed
control

Directive
control
(Graphic by author)

Figure 1. Continuum of Command and Control to Mission Command
thoughts on innovation are important to mission
command because they suggest that philosophies
and operational methods must be derived from the
culture they are intended to support. In attempting
to shoehorn mission command into Army doctrine,
some could argue that the Army is improperly using
history and ignoring specificity to justify the incorporation of the concept based solely on theoretical
preference, or that the Army is cutting its feet to
fit the shoes. Joint doctrine’s retention of command
and control instead of wholesale adoption of mission
command could be seen as an acknowledgement of
this idea. The Army’s mission command doctrine
lacks specificity of the environments in which the
U.S. Army finds itself, the nature in which technology has influenced how the Army operates, and how
the information age has shaped the Army’s thinking
52

contemporary American way of war. The Germans’
Auftragstaktik was an evolutionary innovation specific to the tactical, doctrinal, and cultural needs of
the German army.11 The conditions that allowed the
concept of Auftragstaktik to develop organically over
time and flourish in the German military are not
found in today’s U.S. Army operations.
The theoretical underpinnings of Auftragstaktik
were products of vast battlefields in which large field
armies were dispersed across great distances, generally operating against opponents similar in style and
organization. However, in twenty-first century Army
operations, conditions have changed.
The United States traditionally fought according
to what many have called the “Western way of war.”
Historian Geoffrey Parker suggests that it is characterized by a focus on seeking a quick, decisive victory
January-February 2017  MILITARY REVIEW