Some Managerial Aspects of Command

Abstract

Abstract : A farseeing Army needs to digress now and then in assessing its performances to make certain that it is recording the lessons which have great impact for the future. In time of war, analysis of the critical battlefield understandably dominates military writing, but it cannot be permitted to hide other great lessons. In the past half-decade, the Vietnamese battle has done just that. The feedback, critique, and assimilation of other important if less spectacular teachings have been dwarfed. A prime current example is the lack of professional discussion of unit commanders' management roles in what possibly has been a major accomplishment of the US Army, especially in the past five years: the ways and means of manipulating military resources--expanding, contracting, and trading off-in responding to US national security requirements. While the subject has been amply covered at the Department of Defense and budget level, not nearly enough attention has been given to documenting, analyzing, and assimilating the management experiences subordinate to centralized decisions of the defense establishment as a whole. Valuable lessons are waiting to be rediscovered in the next expanding crisis of military consequence. Two precedents related to the Vietnam buildup illustrate this point: (a) The expansion of forces without any significant call-up of the reserve training base, and (b) the costing of manpower along with other resources in determining battlefield means. Both reordered past planning exercises and are procedures now established as possible ways of instituting future force level changes. Consequently, in order to be certain that the end results did in fact justify the means there is a great need to trace the effects of these techniques and associated trade-offs from top to bottom.