Recently I watched “Saving Private Ryan” again, and it made me have some questions. For example, in the opening scene of soldiers rushing to the beach, most of the soldiers were almost dead before they even got out of the landing craft. If the commander was also killed, what about the remaining soldiers? Who should direct the people? How should each unit perform the tasks assigned before departure?
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Training and organization.
First off, I’m coming at this from an American military perspective. Different country’s militaries do things differently.
We manage chaos by training in chaos. We purposely make training scenarios VERY difficult. We throw proverbial curveballs into training specifically to make leaders react. We degrade systems to make them use alternate methods. And we do it over and over and over again.
When I was a young lieutenant in Afghanistan, my convoy was attacked. The training kicked in and it was just business. I had trained many multiple times for this exact scenario. 30 minutes later when we arrived “home”, that’s when the nerves kicked in.
The other is how the unit is organized. There are leaders up and down the chain of command in the American military. CO gets taken out? Next man up. Sometimes that’s the XO (executive officer) but it could be a platoon sergeant or even a fire team leader. Americans are empowered to lead at every echelon. The plan for whatever we’re doing is communicated to everyone so no matter where you fall on the chain of command, you know what the mission is and what needs to be done to accomplish it. If a leader is taken out, we don’t sit around waiting for someone to tell us what to do.
One of the reasons the US was so successful in rolling up the Iraqi army in Desert Storm was that the Iraqi’s used the old Soviet style of leadership where no one does anything unless an officer tells them to. Take out their ability to communicate and the units sat and died in place because they were scared to take any initiative.
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