This is not an article about what the British Army consider the concept of ‘mission command’ to be; nor is it about how they approach its practice. Those who wish to explore that can simply read their doctrine. It is well written, well thought through, very readable and readily available.[1] I am, however, a great believer in the maxim that if you want to know where you are it’s a very good idea to understand how you got there and where you came from. In that respect, this article will make the (perhaps bold) assumption that the reader is familiar with what British military doctrine has to say about the philosophy behind, and the conduct of, mission command.[2] It will instead seek to explore how the British Army got to that doctrinal place. Working upon that and upon the aforementioned assumption that the reader has a clear idea of what the doctrine now has to say on the subject, we might also get an insight not just into where the British Army may be in this respect but also into where they may be going.
The related concepts of ‘manoeuvre warfare’ and ‘mission command’ have come, over a period of some 30 years or so, to represent the underpinning philosophies of the British Army’s approach, indeed British Defence’s approach, to warfare and warfighting. If you are a British Army non-commissioned officer (NCO) or officer and you don’t understand these two concepts and demonstrably hold them dear, then you simply are not professionally credible. After all, why would anyone not want to be, as Sun Tzu would have it, like water flowing around the difficult rocky obstacles and rushing on through the weak spots on the path to success? And why would anyone not want to empower their thinking, competent, motivated, professional subordinates to use their initiative, understand the intent that guides their path to a greater ‘end game’, and seize opportunities as soon as they recognise them? How could anyone not see that this is the surest method of retaining that acme of the tactical, operational and strategic arts—that is to say, the initiative? Surely this sort of doctrine provides the capability that is exactly the asymmetric edge that highly professional armies, like the British Army, hold over their more hidebound and less professional rivals and potential opponents. Mission command is all about the ‘in order to’: so long as those executing their military business understand the greater ‘why’ of their remit, then they are more likely to achieve it, both individually and collectively. Under these conditions, leaving the ‘how’ and the ‘with what’ to those professional and capable subordinates who are closest to the problem and most familiar with their own ways and means makes complete sense. And if those professionals have also learnt that those who seize, hold and retain the initiative are likely to prevail on the battlefield, and therefore strive to achieve this in their planning and execution, then the methods that they apply on the path to that overarching ‘in order to’ are likely to lead not just to limited individual successes but to greater collective success. Obvious, isn’t it?
Or is it? If it is so obvious then why did the British Army of the 1950s to 1980s harbour such a different philosophy? This was an army that had forged its thinking as a result of warfighting experience on the World War II battlefields of Europe, Africa and Indochina—an experience that contained as much in the way of failures from which to learn as it did successes. Its doctrine and concept writers were the grizzled veterans of global war. This was an army whose job was to help to win the Cold War. That army, along with just about all of its NATO allies, held a very different central philosophy to one of ‘mission command’. In a nutshell, the thinking in that time preached with great certainty that the defence was a stronger form of warfare than the attack (although an ‘offensive spirit was to be maintained’) and that in the stately-dance layer cake of the Central Front in Germany there was little room for initiative. On the contrary, it was thought that there was much sense in directive command, in meticulous attention to pre-analysed detail and the disciplined following of orders. And this was a time when, like now, the NATO allies were focused not on counterinsurgency and so-called small wars and wars of choice but on warfighting against a Russian-led enemy on a continental scale. In 1(BR) Corps in the 1970s and 1980s, the last thing that the corps commanders thought they needed (after literally years of preparation and detailed planning, contingency planning, training and exercising) was a bunch of battalion commanders or, worse, brigade commanders who suddenly started ‘showing initiative’, deviating from the plan and rushing around the battle space trying to show that they knew better than those who had the full picture, more experience and loftier rank!
Against that background, mission command had a difficult birth in the British Army of the 1990s. It was not universally seen as a no-brainer and it experienced considerable pushback. General (later Field Marshal) Sir Nigel Bagnall is rightly due much credit for getting a new idea into the reluctant military minds of the late- and post-Cold War British Army.[3] Of course, he had to begin by forcing the old ones out first.[4] At the seat of Bagnall’s thinking was that defence might well be the strongest form of warfare, in many ways, but that defence alone would never bring about operational (probably) and strategic (certainly) resolution. He believed profoundly that attrition of an aggressive enemy, even at its most successful, could only ever bring about a stalemate that required resolution by other means. Cold War thinking argued that, as long as successfully conducted defence brought about the required operational stalemate, strategic resolution could be found in the threat of, or actual graduated use of, nuclear weapons and, thereafter, political resolution. The army’s job, it was therefore posited, was simply to bring about that operational stalemate. Bagnall argued, from a soldier’s point of view, that such an approach was neither practically nor morally defendable and nor was it, indeed, professionally satisfactory or satisfying. His extensive and detailed study of military history, from the Peloponnesian War to the First World War and through into the late 20th century,[5] had taught him that favourable strategic resolution was likely to come only to those whose armies searched for the so-called tipping points that allowed them to seize the opportunities to harry their opponents through a drumbeat of offensive actions that broke through battlefield stalemates and delivered operational successes at scale. It was, he argued, commanders who could not just recognise and seize upon such moments but exploit them through initiative-enabled offensive action who would deliver the campaign successes that were needed for strategic leverage.
Over an extended period of discussion and doctrinal debate in the British Army, roughly covering 1985 to 1995, the old orthodoxy of the primacy of defence, underpinned by the importance of meticulous planning and adherence to detailed and well-practised orders, was forced out, kicking and screaming as it went. Inevitably it was the next generation, taught the new orthodoxy from Sandhurst onwards, who embraced mission command as an obvious and professionally rewarding ethos. As the grumbling naysayers reached retirement, so the memory of ‘another way of doing it’ retired too. With the confidence and certainty of youth, the next generation of officers, joining the Army from the early 1990s onwards, unburdened by ‘old ideas to get out’, embraced the new orthodoxy with confidence and assurance. From then on ‘if you didn’t get mission command, then you simply didn’t get it.’ You were professionally questionable.
And then came 9/11 and 20 years of counterinsurgency conducted not just by the British Army but by all of their closest friends and allies too. So both the external and internal doctrinal debates focused or refocused on such operations. Krulak’s three-block war and strategic corporal made sense.[6] Britain’s centuries of empire building and then the subsequent management of the retreat from empire, along with the Northern Ireland experience, seemed to the British Army to provide them with a wealth of doctrinal evidence, alongside an in-the-bones inherited experience, that suggested the Brits were going to be good at this approach. For centuries the British Army had practised an extreme form of mission command where junior officers found themselves in the remotest of places with the grandest of responsibilities on behalf of the Crown. It was perfectly normal for captains and majors, remote from higher authority and provided with limited resources reinforced only with a clear sense of a greater ‘in order to’, to use their own initiative and make decisions with strategic impact and consequence. This contrasted with Britain’s NATO allies, both Continental European and North American, whose armies (standfast to a degree, perhaps, the French) had a history of concentrating on warfighting at scale as their core purpose, rather than operating at reach and in isolated dispersion. As some NATO armies struggled with embracing the notion of subordinates practising mission command in its purest sense, the British, armed with long experience, and (as usual) untroubled by self-doubt, found that the new set of clothes suited them very well indeed. Thus mission command was embraced with enthusiasm by the British, who felt that they were better at it than most others and that thus, with friends and enemies alike, it gave them an edge.
Regardless of the strategic outcomes generated by the pursuit of the at-reach, counterinsurgency wars-of-choice operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the British Army, in its extended moments of self-examination over more than 20 years, repeatedly came to the conclusion that the central ethos and philosophy of mission command had delivered repeated tactical successes. It was a good way of doing business. It continued to give a thinking, professional army an edge over less-thinking, less-professional opponents. Despite the self-doubt generated by the troubling campaign outcomes, the British Army (and, indeed, most of their NATO allies, including the US) came to the reinforced conclusion that the approach was sound. Seizing, holding and maintaining the initiative remained the thinking soldier’s best path to tactical and operational success. Delegated empowerment, underpinned by a clear understanding of higher commanders’ intent, remained a force multiplier over more hidebound opponents. It had also proved to be the only sensible way of doing business in the remotely dispersed sub-unit bases of Iraq and Afghanistan. The ethos was validated in combat—confirmed as fit for purpose.
Then, in February 2022, the next strategic shock struck as Russia rolled into Ukraine. Here is not the place to examine the multiple wake-up calls that the conflict in the Donbas and across wider Ukraine has offered to military thinkers. The war in Ukraine has reminded NATO armies, and the British Army in particular, that their core purpose is, and always will be, simply to be ready to fight and win the nation’s wars on and from the land. It has reminded NATO and Europe, and Britain in particular, that to fight such wars long-neglected ‘conventional’ capabilities (such as combat bridging, mines and other counter-mobility capabilities, integral air defence, massed and delegated tube artillery, electronic warfare competences and equipment—the long list goes on) need to be rediscovered, relearned and reprovisioned. It has shown the same armies that new capabilities (such as the full panoply of drones, from long range to micro-tactical; electronic countermeasures; information management in a universally accessible digital world; operations in the ‘transparent battlespace’; cyberwar; robotics and unmanned vehicles—the equally long list goes on) need to be understood, learned and provisioned.
Interestingly, however, in the context of this article, new thinking (or, to old-timers like me, new old thinking) is beginning to be conducted concerning the accepted orthodoxies, especially those that have made ‘manoeuvre warfare’ feel synonymous with the primacy of initiative-enabled offensive action conducted with flair and imagination. And if manoeuvre warfare is under scrutiny then so too, by association, is its sister concept of mission command. The latest drafts of British Army doctrine[7] are starting to use language like ‘the relearned primacy of defence’ and the value of ‘deterrence by denial’. The British Army is one in which almost all of those who have more than 15 years of service behind them (the senior NCOs, warrant officers, battalion and regimental commanding officers and above), and are thus the decision-makers on directions of doctrinal travel, are all men and women with huge and visceral combat experience. But their experience, valid and valued though it may be, is in warfare other than more conventional warfighting. At the same time, the generation below them have no such experience but have accepted the primacy of the mission command orthodoxy because it is what they have been taught and no alternative has yet been offered.
Against that background, the British Army understands where it is and where it has come from, and it is thinking hard and deeply. And, as this intelligent, professional army examines the lessons from the last 30 years of its own experience and the experience of those close at hand who are now fighting a modern existential war at scale, there is a new urgency. Everything is up for debate. In the British doctrinal discussion, the accepted orthodoxies are all fair game, and, therefore, so is the orthodoxy of mission command.
So, do I think that the likely outcome of that discourse will be that the current understanding of the value of mission command, as articulated in the references that I urged you to peruse in endnote 1, are under threat? If one continues to believe that the soldiers who are likely to prevail are those who understand the primacy, at all levels of their art, of the need to drive events, rather than be the victim of events, then the concept continues to have great merit. I am convinced that seizing, holding and maintaining the initiative is likely to remain the acme of the soldier’s art. That being so, the practice of offering leaders at all levels a clear understanding of the endgames beyond their own limited goals, and empowering capable people with the delegated authority to use their own wits and initiative, is likely to remain an asymmetric edge over less enlightened practitioners of the military art. There will be exceptions to the rule. The ethos will need to be a philosophy, not an orthodoxy. The learning and practising of delegated authority within an understanding of higher purpose will need to be more nuanced.
To my mind, however—and, if my instincts are right, to the minds of the British Army’s current crop of doctrinal thinkers—the concept will endure with great strength. The relative merits of attack and defence will sway back and forth in the debate. The influences of technology and context will ebb and flow as the ever-rapidly changing character of war evolves. On the other hand, the need to do what you are told, to obey orders and not deviate from higher direction, will continue to have its place, as much as it did when Marius reformed the legions and Xenophon marched to the sea. As long as one understands that balance, then the underpinning idea of mission command—of decision-making by people who are good at their art, professionally competent, well-trained and practised, rightly self-confident, equipped with the right capabilities and empowered by a philosophy and practice that encourages them to seek ownership of the initiative through the use of objective-informed action —remains valid. Those so empowered will continue to hold a vital edge over opponents who are not.
So, do I believe that the British Army’s answer to their question ‘Whither mission command?’ is likely to be ‘Wither mission command!’? No, I don’t.
Endnotes
[1] See, for example, Linda Risso (ed.), Mission Command and Leadership on Operations since 1991 (Camberly: The Centre for Army Leadership, 2024), at: https://www.army.mod.uk/media/25267/cal-mission-command-and-leadership-on-operations-2024-final-v2.pdf; House of Commons Defence Committee, Defence—Fifth Report (UK Parliament, 2004), at: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmdfence/465/46508.htm; and Luke Turrell, Mission Command in the British Army, In-Depth Briefing No. 67 (Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research, 2023), at: https://chacr.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/IDB-67-Mission-Command.pdf.
[2] If you are not, then I refer you to endnote 1 above and offer that you might like to take a few moments to, at least, scan the references, in order to get the best value out of the next few pages!
[3] See the Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research publication Ares & Athena 21 (2022), especially the leading two articles, at: https://chacr.org.uk/2022/07/15/ares-athena-issue-21/; and Turrell, Mission Command.
[4] Sir Basil Liddell Hart repeatedly observed that ‘the only thing harder than to get a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out’.
[5] Bagnall’s book on the Peloponnesian War is instructive on its own merits but is equally instructive in understanding the merits, as an informed thinker and as a soldier, of the individual who wrote it. Nigel Bagnall, The Peloponnesian War: Athens, Sparta and the Struggle for Greece (Pimlico, 2004).
[6] See the widely discussed article on this topic by General Charles Krulak of the USMC. Charles C Krulak, ‘The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three Block War’, Marines Magazine, January 1999, at: https://www.mca-marines.org/wp-content/uploads/1999-Jan-The-strategic-corporal-Leadership-in-the-three-block-war.pdf.
[7] See, for example, the shortly to be published (at the time of writing: March 2025) British Army Tactical Doctrine Note Battlegroup Recce Strike.