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To introduce mission command, the present American approach to orders, manuals, and doctrine has to change. Mission command is the enemy of doctrine, of long-winded and complicated orders, and masses of paperwork. German generals did not practice the art of writing five-paragraph-orders, but the capability of rapidly composing and delivering precise oral orders in the chaos of war.
-Jörg Muth
Mission command is the Army's approach to command and control that empowers subordinates' decision-making and decentralized execution appropriate to the situation. Mission command supports unified land operations and its emphasis on seizing, retaining, and exploiting the initiative.1 The philosophy appeals to Western countries because it optimizes individual strengths and organization virtues, and it fits culturally with the people who make up its forces. Mission command, however, does not specify the conditions under which it needs to be more prescriptive, leaving commanders to decide the proper balance. Their knowledge of the individual unit, conditions that are present, and general situational awareness drives their decision-making. Under these conditions, are commanders still utilizing mission command, or are they applying a different philosophy entirely? The current mission command doctrine fails to address what these other styles are or how they could be useful within Army operations, or even the conditions under which they could be preferable. The authors propose a way to identify and fill this vacuum through a prospective model capable of evaluating what style of command a unit is currently employing or what style they should employ to operate in an optimal fashion.
Using the idea of "gaps" (defined by Stephen Bungay as the separation between what commanders want to happen and what occurs), the proposed model assigns a measurable proxy variable to each of the three gaps: the knowledge gap, the alignment gap, and the effects gap.2 These proxy variables are henceforth referred to as information density, assessment of unit capability, and order specificity. If we use a value of either "high" or "low" to describe each of these variables, we can categorize the environment that commanders find themselves in and, ultimately, what kind of orders they should give their soldiers. Commanders can lead in a variety of different ways, but understanding how their individual styles impact the execution of those orders is something a commander...