On one foggy day, on 14 October 1806, two Prussian armies were shattered and scattered by a French army at the twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt. Built up by Frederick the Great during the 18th century, the Prussian army had been the most admired and successful in Europe. Its defeat was militarily decisive and psychologically devastating.
In the wake of the disaster, General David Scharnhorst, the Prussian army's chief of staff, led a group of reformers dedicated to understanding why and how it had happened, and to transforming the organisation that had suffered it. "We fought bravely enough," Scharnhorst pithily concluded, "but not cleverly enough." The reforms he championed were based on his analysis of the catastrophe of the twin battles.
The Prussian army had been run as a well-drilled machine. It was highly centralised and nobody took action without orders to do so. It assumed what management guru Douglas McGregor famously labelled the 'Theory X' of human motivation: it achieved compliance through compulsion.
The French army of 1806, which Napoleon had inherited from the Revolution, had been raised from highly motivated citizen conscripts. It had no time to practise drill, so it made extensive use of light infantry, who engaged the lines of Prussians in an unordered swarm in which each man acted as he saw fit. Promotion was based on performance. The French army was, in McGregor's terms, a 'Theory Y' organisation: it achieved commitment through conviction.
The transformation of the Prussian army began with people and culture, spearheaded by officer selection and training. Scharnhorst was looking for a particular type: intelligent, independent minded, strong willed and impatient. In 1810, a 'General War School' was set up in Berlin to provide these entrepreneurial characters with a common outlook, language and set of values. The right talent and the right behavioural biases were put in place as a first step.
In the long peace that followed Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the reforms lost urgency, but their spirit was kept alive by a few influential individuals. In 1857, a little-known figure was appointed chief of the general staff. When he assumed operational command of the Prussian army in the campaign against Austria in 1866, some of his subordinates were bemused. "This seems to be all in order," commented divisional commander General von Manstein on receiving an instruction from his commander-in-chief, "but who is General von Moltke?"
INDEPENDENT ACTION
Field Marshal Helmuth Carl Bernhard Graf von Moltke, born in the first year of the 19th century, was the main builder of the German army that emerged from it. He was both a practitioner and thinker in the fields of strategy, leadership, organisation and what we would today call management. He was the leader and teacher of a generation of German generals. In that role, he developed the army's basic operating model, which has become known as Auftragstaktik. It is perhaps his most lasting legacy.
Von Moltke espoused the cause of independent action by subordinates as a matter of principle. In his appraisal of his own victory over the Austrians at the culminating Battle of Königgrätz in 1866, von Moltke commented that the independent actions of two Austrian generals in pressing forwards, and so exposing their flanks, ultimately facilitated his victory. Remarkably, von Moltke exonerated them. It is easy enough to judge their actions now, he observed, but one should be extremely careful in condemning generals. Fear of retribution should not curb the willingness of subordinates to exercise their judgement. In the confusion and uncertainty of war, people who do so take risks. That must be accepted. Had they taken that aggressive action earlier in the day, or had they been supported by the rest of the Austrian army, they could have reversed the result of the battle. "Obedience is a principle," he asserted, "but the man stands above the principle."
It is therefore something of a surprise to find that in the self-critical Memoire on the 1866 campaign that von Moltke wrote for the King in 1868, two things he singled out for particular criticism were "the lack of direction from above and the independent actions of the lower levels of command". During the campaign, subordinates often acted independently without understanding how victory was to be achieved. He concluded that it was vital to ensure that every level understood enough of the intentions of the higher command to enable the organisation to fulfil its goal. Von Moltke did not want to put a brake on initiative, but to steer it in the right direction.
In 1869, von Moltke issued a document called Guidance for Large Unit Commanders. It was to become seminal. It opens by emphasising the importance of clear decisions in a context of uncertainty that renders perfect planning impossible: "With darkness all around you, you have to develop a feeling for what is right, often based on little more than guesswork, and issue orders in the knowledge that their execution will be hindered by all manner of random accidents and unpredictable obstacles. In this fog of uncertainty, the one thing that must be certain is your own decision... The surest way of achieving your goal is through the single-minded pursuit of simple actions."
To accomplish that single-mindedness, orders must be passed down "to the last man". The army must be organised so that it is made up of units capable of carrying out unified action down to the lowest level. The chain of command and the communications process should ensure that instructions can be passed on. But the chain of command can get disrupted so, at all levels, people must remain in charge.
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