Book Review: Trust and Leadership: The Australian Army Approach to Mission Command

Trust and Leadership: The Australian Army Approach to Mission Command

Edited by: Russell Glenn

University of North Georgia Press, Dahlonega, 2020,

ISBN 1940771692, 408pp

Reviewed by: Dr Albert Palazzo

Nations may wage wars, but soldiers conduct missions. There was a time when such a distinction did not exist. Warriors slashed and thrust at each other with swords and spears, and when one side broke and ran the battle, and often the war, was over. Today, however, the waging of war is far more complex and prolonged and occurs over far greater distances with a vast array of weapons and systems and with forces of much larger number. Battles are rarely decisive, as Cathal Nolan argues in The Allure of Battle. Instead, war is made up of innumerable tasks, each a small step towards the objective and conducted by commanders who cede authority to their subordinates up to the limits of trust. This is the essence of ‘mission command’.

Trust and Leadership, the title of Russell Glenn’s excellent collection of essays, captures the role of mission command in the Australian Army experience. Trust and leadership is the key to imbuing a force with the ability to employ mission command to manage the scale and complexity of modern war. Commanders must have the skill to convey in clear and understandable language what he or she wants a subordinate to achieve and then stand aside, allowing the subordinate to get on with the job. In return, the subordinate must demonstrate that they have the competency to warrant this trust. Without either, mission command cannot succeed. Although this point is made by each author, from Peter Pederson on the First AIF to Chris Field on the Queensland floods, such is the range of examples that each chapter adds novel insights that strengthen the experience of how the Australian Army employs mission command.

As the authors illustrate, mission command is a transactional form of leadership that is heavily dependent on the interaction between the personalities of the commander and the subordinate. The degree of liberty given to a subordinate is in direct proportion to the faith a leader has in the junior’s ability, and in a long war, as Antony Rawlins illustrates in his chapter on Iraq, the personalities can change, resulting in a re-evaluation of trust. But this does not mean that in shorter commitments mission command relationships are more stable. John Caligari outlines the learning that took place during Operation SOLACE in Somalia: as junior leaders improved, their liberty to make independent decisions increased. It is on operations where a leader’s true measure is revealed and those who excel gain in trust whereas those who do not find themselves more tightly controlled. The authors pound home the observation that mission command, like most things in war, is an art based on shifting relationships between soldiers aimed at the attainment of the objective, a point that goes to an essential requirement for success—unit cohesion.

Since mission command is a key technique of the soldier’s craft, the reader would not be surprised that most of the chapters were written by military professionals. However, Glenn balances the analysis with contributions by several academics, including Meghan Fitzpatrick on Korea and Peter Dean on the South-West Pacific theatre during the Second World War. Both discuss the challenges of applying mission command as the junior partner in a coalition, an analysis of considerable relevance for those serving today.

For the military professional Trust and Leadership is mandatory reading. Soldiers at all grades need to understand how mission command can be optimised so that they can manage the complexities of current and future wars. Soldiers of other nationalities will also benefit from a different perspective on a common command technique. The 12 interpretations presented here are either by historians of the first rank or by senior officers of the scholarly bent. They are uniformly of a high standard and Glenn has done a superb job of harmonising different authors into a powerful and consistent message. This book will also find a welcome place on the shelf of the serious student of Australia’s military past, because to understand the method commanders used to achieve their objectives helps to explain how the Army wages wars. It is rare for a book to offer relevance for two different audiences. It is testimony to the importance of Trust and Leadership, and to the knowledge of its contributors, that it does so.