COMMAND AND CONTROL

The first principles of military art.

“Since war is a human endeavour, all of the weapons… are guided by human decisions. Whatever the force or the mission, human minds lie at the core of the combat power being built.”

Colonel (Ret’d) Charles Oliviero, Praxis Tacticum

If you abstract out far enough everything seems simple. This doesn't actually make things simple in real life, but abstraction to the point of simplicity can useful because it's easier to study a small scale map of the territory before working your way down to the details. This essay is an attempt at abstracting command and control to the point of simplicity, to create a start point for more detailed study.

We will begin with the situation.

In the tactician’s way of seeing, the situation is the status and relationships between the environment, enemy forces, and friendly forces. I’m using the word "environment" in a broad sense to include all the grounds of contention, including but not limited to: terrain, weather, the electromagnetic spectrum, civilians or non-combatants, societal institutions, and media. The environment is the milieu, the water that you swim in, the venue for the contest, the battlespace. Friendly and enemy are the contesting forces. The situation, taken as a whole, is the interaction between the environment, enemies, and friendlies.

The situation is what is happening, everywhere, now. Call it reality or Tao, it's what you have to work with. The situation has two planes: physical and psychological. The physical plane is stuff in space: bodies, materiel, and infrastructure are targeted in the physical plane. The psychological plane consists of perceptions, knowledge, and beliefs: situational awareness, understanding, and the will to fight are targeted in the psychological plane.¹

The physical and psychological planes are unified in bodies through the brain and the nervous system, which create feedback loops. A change in the body will change the mind (most people will only touch a hot stove once). This works the other way too, a change in the mind will move the body (the Thomas theorem). If a person believes that something is real then they will behave as if it is real and there will be real consequences.

The situation-in-itself exists independent of your mind. The situation is of the real, but the full extent of the real is too much for any human mind to apprehend. We lack perfect perception, perfect insight, and perfect communication. We cannot sense, make sense, and act on everything that happens in real time. Because our abilities are bounded in this way, we have to make the most of what we can do within our limitations.²

To overcome our limitations, we use tools. Our tools, whether mental or physical, are means to extend or expand our abilities. A rock is an extension of the wielder's arm and effectively multiplies their strength. A spear is a longer extension with a higher multiplier. A rifle extends your strike hundreds of meters beyond your natural reach. You can trace the lineage of a ballistic missile backwards to the first ancestor who hit a bird off its branch with a throwing stick.³

Writing is also a tool, an extension of the mind on a physical medium. Writing is a multiplier on cognitive processes. Having recorded our thoughts, we can direct attention elsewhere and return later to the thought preserved without expending cognitive effort to commit the whole thing to memory. We can also write down instructions and hand them off to other people who to carry out on our behalf, thereby extending our minds and bodies through them. In this perspective the staff is an extension of the commander’s mind while subordinate formations are extensions of the commander’s body.⁴

II

Through the theory of extended minds and bodies we arrive at first principles of command and control:

1. Command is extension of the will.

2. Control is extension of the body.

Command works on the psychological plane. In essence, command is the exercise of power. Power, in the sense of Arendt, is the cohesion and concerted action of people. In military theory we know that combat power is an emergent property of troops, materiel, morale, and the knowledge to effectively wield them against the adversary. The commander is empowered because of the combat power at their disposal.

Legal documents and badges are signifiers of empowerment, but when people do not recognize the signified,⁵ then all they are is paper and thread. Quoting Arendt:

“Where commands are no longer obeyed, the means of violence are of no use; and the question of this obedience is not decided by the command-obedience relationship but by opinion, and of course, the number of those who share it.”⁶

The commander can exercise power only so long as their subordinates believe in it. Command, therefore, is extension of the will by subordinates.

Control works on the physical plane through networks. Control is extension of the body through instruments, including people and machines. These instruments are the means of control. Orders are a means of control because they direct subordinates to take specific actions at specific times, in essence moving their bodies as extensions of the commander. Orders sent by verbally and by hand signals are the simplest means of control, the more sophisticated ones include radios, satellite communications, and networks of Battle Management Software.

There are also physical means of control. We construct obstacles to substitute for ranks of soldiers. We build fences to substitute for escorts. Walls, fences, ditches, and minefields are simply means of extending bodies to control access to people and space.

Markings on maps which outline unit boundaries, objectives, free fire areas, no fire areas, phase lines, etc., are called control measures. While means of control consist of physical networks, control measures belong to the category of things that exist because we believe in them (there’s the Thomas theorem again). They can (and should) be tied to obvious terrain features, but that's not strictly necessary e.g. a longitude or easting may be designated as a unit boundary. We act as if control measures are real and by our actions we make them real.

Control is not sufficient for command, since command requires belief. Control may compel compliance, but compliance is not belief. When armies comply but do not believe, they crumble against determined resistance. This is the way of mercenaries.⁷

Command is not sufficient for control. An army of true believers without adequate means of control cannot organized. Their actions will be inspired but undirected and uncoordinated. This is the way of mobs.

In the abstract, military art - which is to say organized violence - is the exercise of command and control. Everything else is detail.

Thumbnail: painting of Canadian soldiers in the First World War, artist is unknown to me, but if you recognize it please leave a comment with the source/artist and I will attribute it.

1. Deception plans, which aim to create false beliefs, also produce effects in the psychological plane.

2. Martin Van Creveld’s Command In War explores this dilemma in detail. Van Creveld models command as a “quest for certainty”, where commanders must either make uncertain decisions or seek certainty through info gathering. Systems of command and control which prioritize info gathering over action will succumb to a failure mode Van Creveld calls “information pathology”, where the means to gather data overwhelm the means to process that data into information and understanding, by which point the data which underlies the understanding is no longer relevant. C2 systems which suffer from info pathology have a clear understanding of things that have already happened but are unable to synthesize good-enough models what is happening now. The result is procrastination in decision making leading to system paralysis.

3. This is a point made by Hannah Arendt in On Violence. Here is a brief summary of her definitions:

Power: the ability to act in concert as a group, coordinated action.

Strength: a property of individual people or object. Even the strongest person can be brought down by a coordinated group, which is why such groups are powerful.

Force: the energy released by physical and social movements, not necessarily violent.

Authority: recognition of a person or position by those expected to obey.

4. Like everything else in this essay, the dichotomy of staff as extended mind and subordinate formations as extended body is an over-simplification. Commanders of surbordinate formations have their own minds - above the company level they also have their own staff - but the broad schema holds between those tasked primarily with cognitive tasks (moving bits) and those primarily tasked with physical tasks (moving atoms).

5. Siginifiers are symbols, signified are the things which are symbolized. A stop sign is a signifier and the command “STOP HERE!” is its signified.

6. Arendt, On Violence.

7. This is a point made emphasized by Machiavelli in the twelfth chapter of The Prince.