Feral Jundi

Monday, September 24, 2012

Leadership: General Mattis On ‘Command And Feedback’, And The Use Of ‘Eyes Officers’

From his lead position, Mattis stayed close to the regiments involved in the fiercest fighting and got a good sense for events on the battlefield. The general refused to believe that images on a computer screen in the quiet hum of a command post could tell him what he needed to know about how the battle was progressing and what his subordinates required. Mattis could be ruthless; he would relieve the commander of one of his regiments in the middle of a campaign. In the marines, only performance counts. Mattis picked several officers to act as what he called his “eyes only” representatives. They had no authority but, he said, like “Frederick the Great’s focused telescope or Wellington’s lieutenants in the Peninsula Campaign,” they had the duty of wandering the battlefield to keep him informed of things they thought he needed to know: troops or officers who were exhausted by combat, supplies that were not reaching the front line, and the other human factors that can be crucial in combat. -page 116 and 117 of The Iraq War: A Military History, By Williamson Murray, Robert Scales

The Slate put this out last year, but I just recently stumbled upon it and wanted to share. General Mattis is a Marine’s Marine and he is very much respected. With that said, when I found out that he was implementing some concepts that are familiar here in Jundism and some of my leadership posts, I perked up.

Specifically, the mystery shopper concept or having folks on the inside of your organization to give you some honest feedback about the true health of your company or military unit. With this data, you can actually make adjustments to policy that will better serve the mission or contract.

I also liked the focus on innovation and gaining feedback. Or, command and feedback, which is a play on the phrase command and control. This also led to the best quote in the article below about where that feedback or innovation could come from.

If you are always on the hunt for complacency, argues Mattis, you will reward risk-takers, and people who thrive in uncertainty. “Take the mavericks in your service,” he tells new officers, “the ones that wear rumpled uniforms and look like a bag of mud but whose ideas are so offsetting that they actually upset the people in the bureaucracy. One of your primary jobs is to take the risk and protect these people, because if they are not nurtured in your service, the enemy will bring their contrary ideas to you.”

That is awesome and all companies and military units should learn from this. Leaders should dare to listen and seek feedback from all quarters of their organization, and soldiers/contractors should dare to come forward and disagree, or present the better idea. Any policies and actions within an organization that supports this command and feedback process should be looked at and attempted.

We should constantly be supporting and pushing innovation within the ranks, and constantly seeking feedback and using these innovations in order to continuously improve the organization/mission/contract/war fighting/strategy. Awesome stuff. –Matt

 

 

Gen. James Mattis, USMC The general who is fighting a constant battle to keep the military innovating.
By John Dickerson
Aug. 9, 2011
When speaking to rising officers, Marine Gen. James Mattis likes to tell the story of the British Navy. At the turn of the 19th century, it had no rival in the world, but 100 years later it had grown complacent in dominance. Officers amassed rules, ribbons, and rituals that had little to do with the changing nature of war. “They no longer had captains of wars,” he tells them, “but captains of ships.”
As commander of the U.S. Central Command, Mattis oversees the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but his career mission has been against complacency. In modern warfare the reliance on better technology and superior firepower deadens the talent for innovation, he argues. This blinds some officers to emerging threats and slows their ability to react to them. The U.S. military, he argues “must avoid becoming dominant and irrelevant.”

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Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Publications: Innovation In War–COIN Operations In Anbar And Ninewa Provinces, Iraq, 2005-2007

 The standing operating procedure (SOP) for the unit typically focused on: (1) Planning and establishing the COP; (2) Ensuring route security so each outpost could be kept resupplied; (3) Clearing operations after the COP had been stood up to clear IEDs and find weapons caches; and (4) Census patrols to follow after the clearing operations to consolidate the position and gradually work its way into the human terrain of the area – the real target of MacFarland’s campaign. 

*****

     This is an excellent paper that discusses some of the key innovations of the war.  The main theme that I am getting from all of this, is intelligence, intelligence, and intelligence.(jundism hint)

     If you notice in the publication, there are some themes that keep getting repeated.  The importance of networks or fusion is one of them.  To bring together different groups of experts, and have them contribute to actionable intelligence. And feeding these fusion groups requires interaction with the terrain, population and the enemy.

    Hence why COPS or combat outposts are so important.  It allows a unit to insert itself into the heart of a population/insurgency center and get as much information as they can via census patrols, sensors, raids, attacks against and by the enemy, etc. All of this is fed into a searchable database that can be cross referenced and searched by other units and organizations, and future deploying units and organizations. In other words, all actions and collected information is fed into the machine.

    I also liked the reference to ‘continuous improvement’. Too bad the author didn’t use the term Kaizen in the paper though. I also saw hints of ‘learning organization’, which is also an incredibly important concept for developing winning TTPs and strategies. Because once you have all of this great information and experience, you have to build a snowmobile out of it so you can win the fight. A rigid organization that doesn’t seek feedback internally and externally, work together and with others, or doesn’t innovate, will not succeed.

    Now here are my ideas to further the concepts into our industry.  Right now we are witnessing the African Union stumbling along in Somalia and trying to gain a foothold.  My thoughts on the whole thing is that you could take a PMC that was composed of former military leaders familiar with these concepts, and help the AU to organize accordingly. Or AFRICOM could send a leadership team in there to help organize the effort.  Either way, I see no reason why the AU forces could not replicate this strategy in Mogadishu right now.

    I also think that PMC’s could learn a lot from these types of strategies. PMC’s have had to set up remote sites that are very similar to ‘COPS in a box’. The CMC projects are a prime example. But what was missing with those operations was deliberate census patrols or the other means of intelligence collection that the Marines and Army could use.

    The way human intelligence was collected for these projects was often through the process of hiring and working around locals for guard positions and general labor projects. You learn all sorts of things about the locals when you work around them all day, day in and day out.

    Imagine though that if PMC’s actually did census patrols as part of the contract? Or planted sensors in abandoned buildings in their area? That data could not only be useful to that PMC, or future replacement PMC’s, but could also be added to a much larger database that the military could use? A PMC remote site and the routes they travel daily could be an excellent source of intelligence for the military units of that area, but unless that PMC is brought into that fusion process, it will simply be another lost chance at crucial data collection.

     It would also be nice if PMC’s could take advantage of that fusion process as well, and access the COPLINK or whatever database that is established locally. It could save lives and win wars, but it also requires both the military and civilian equivalents to talk and work with each other. Stuff to think about as we continue the fight and learn new ways of doing our thing in this war. –Matt

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Innovation in War: Counterinsurgency Operations in Anbar and Ninewa Provinces, Iraq, 2005-2007

James A. Russella

August 2010

To cite this Article: Russell, James A. ‘Innovation in War: Counterinsurgency Operations in Anbar and Ninewa Provinces, Iraq, 2005–2007’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 33:4, 595 – 624

Abstract

This article analyzes operations by three battalions conducting counterinsurgency, or COIN, operations in Iraq over the period from July 2005 through March 2007: the 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment (1-7) along the Iraq-Syrian border in the first half of 2006; the 1st Battalion, 37th Armored Regiment (1-37) battalion operating in south-central Ramadi in the fall of 2006; and the 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment, or 2-1, operating in eastern Mosul in 2005-06. The empirical evidence presented in these cases suggest that, contrary to popular perceptions, the units successfully innovated in war – a process largely executed organically within the units themselves. Innovation is defined here as the development of new organizational capacities not initially present when the units deployed into the theater. The evidence presented in these cases suggests that the innovation process enabled these units to successfully transition from organizations structured and trained for conventional military operations to organizations that developed an array of new organizational capacities for full-spectrum combat operations. The units in this study developed these new capacitites largely on their own initiative.

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Friday, July 3, 2009

Building Snowmobiles: In Search of Innovation

Filed under: Building Snowmobiles — Tags: , , — Matt @ 7:50 AM

   I read this article and instantly thought that this belonged in the building snowmobiles category.  Innovation is such an important aspect of a company’s future and welfare, and that includes our industry.  So for those in the companies looking for some inspiration on how to get there, here you go.  Enjoy. –Matt

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In Search of Innovation

JUNE 22, 2009

When companies try to come up with new ideas, they too often look only where they always look. That won’t get them anywhere.

By JOHN BESSANT, KATHRIN MöSLEIN And BETTINA VON STAMM

If you want to understand why some companies lack innovative ideas, think about the man who can’t find his car keys.

His friend asks him why he’s looking for the keys under the lamppost when he dropped them over on the lawn. “Because there’s more light over here,” the man explains.

For too many companies, that describes their search for new ideas, and it pretty much guarantees they won’t go anywhere fast. While such a company can marginally improve what it’s already good at, it misses out on the breakthroughs—those eureka moments when a new concept pops up, as if from nowhere, and changes a company’s fortunes forever.

Those ideas, however, don’t really come from nowhere. Instead, they are typically at the edge of a company’s radar screen, and sometimes a bit beyond: trends in peripheral industries, unserved needs in foreign markets, activities that aren’t part of the company’s core business. To be truly innovative, companies sometimes have to change their frames of reference, extend their search space. New ways of thinking and organization can be required as well.

In other words, they have to look away from the lamppost.

None of this is easy to do. But companies that succeed may just recognize the next great opportunity, or looming threat, before their competitors do. And that’s important in tumultuous economic times with rapidly changing technologies. Indeed, every once in a while, that blip on the horizon turns out to be a tsunami.

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