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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It’s called the “chain of command”. Every soldier knows who is in charge, and who is next in line if their leadership falls. The next person up assumes command in the moment, and the details are sorted out later. Officers, then non-commissioned officers, then by rank if it gets down to lower enlisted. It’s a part of training.
Military rank is very hierarchical and is built up from smaller units. 2-4 person teams combine to form squads of 5-10, 2-4 squads are organized under platoons, platoons are organized under companies, which are organized under battalions, etc. on up to entire armies. Each sub-unit has someone in charge and everybody knows who it is.
edit: my experience is with US Army. But it’s the same everywhere.
There’s a clearly defined Chain of Command
If an officer gets killed, the next highest in rank takes over, etc
Sometimes this falls to an enlisted man (sergeant) to run the show much like First Sargeant Lipton at Bastogne in Band of Brothers.
Individual units and soldiers will be briefed with their own objectives. They may not know the whole picture of the battle but they don’t need too. “Take that hill” or “Hold this position” might be enough.
Communication is next, with Radios and runners etc the unit can communicate back to HQ to receive orders.
Generally troops going into an operation or a mission will have a briefing beforehand. There they will go over relevant details and what specifically your unit is supposed to accomplish. For Saving Private Ryan their mission was get off the beach, secure the bunkers and areas up on the cliffsides to prevent them from hampering further landings.
Militaries have a “chain of command” through their ranks. Rank systems are different per branch of the US military, and different between militaries, so I won’t go into them here. But if you’re in a squad of 10 guys and your Sergeant gets killed, the next rank below him takes over until he’s given further orders from up the chain. Everyone knows where they stand in the hierarchy so it’s fairly easy to fill in the gaps as people are injured/killed. As another example: In “Band of Brothers”, Easy Company’s captain is killed during the landings into France. So Lieutenant Winters becomes “acting commander” of Easy Company until it’s formalized with his battlefield promotion to Captain later in the series.
Good example of a unit briefing, also in a good war movie, is the briefing scenes in Black Hawk Down, where each specific unit is told who is doing what and what to do in the event of a problem. That way everyone knows what they’re doing and to a certain extent what other guys are doing during the mission.
That depends on what kind of unit you’re talking about. In many less professional militaries, including European militaries really up to at least mid-way through the First World War, the answer is basically that they would continue up to the point where they ran out of commands, or commanding officers, or supplies, or some combination of all three of these, and then stop wherever they’d made it and wait for someone senior enough to arrive and fix things up.
In modern militaries, including in the scenario you’re talking about, people have been extensively briefed on what they, their superiors, and their subordinates are expected to do. They’ll have run through the plan multiple times in training exercises, both on maps and in real-life simulations. (One of these exercises in Britain, for the people on Utah Beach — whereas Saving Private Ryan was set on Omaha Beach — ran into disaster when a German patrol boat chanced on the landing craft in the middle of the exercise.) Everyone will be expected to know how to take charge of the men under them, or replace the men over them, in the event of casualties. They’ll be expected to know whatever the relevant objectives are for their unit, and the multiple contingency plans for achieving that objective, and how to signal up the chain that they’ve either succeeded or run into serious trouble and failed.
Real life is inevitably chaotic and doesn’t go according to plan, obviously, but unless order has totally broken down, the reality was almost always *less* chaotic than portrayed in many Hollywood movies. All those strictly regimented chains of command, protocols, etc., that you see army cadets and people in boot camp sweating through are there for a reason: so that when things start to fall apart, people have something they know and can fall back on.
In big complex operations like this *everyone* has been briefed on their mission. So if/when a unit loses their officers the unit still knows what their mission is and what the planned method to success is.
the related Band of Brothers (produced by HBO In a similar pairing as Apollo 13 and Earth to the Moon) covers some of the planning and rehearsal that occurred before the landings. In this case it was from the paratrooper point of view.
Also in the case of the D-Day landings, the Allies assumed a **significant** casualty rate and planned manpower and officers accordingly (if I remember double the normal number of officers *per unit* so enough would survive the landing). and a lot of the issue was addressed by “throwing more bodies at it”.
edit – planned casualty rate for D-day was about 25%.
edit – and in many cases it was *higher* once they hit the beach.
Rank and training.
By having a hierarchy of rank, rather than just “commander” and “soldier”, there’s always a man lower on the totem pole to take over. The chain of command is a tree; for a bunch of privates, you’ll have corporals leading a team of 2-4 or so, a sergeant in charge of a few such teams, and then a commissioned officer in charge of several sergeants and their teams (I’m simplifying here).
If the lieutenant is incapacitated, a sergeant can take over. If the sergeant is killed, a corporal can take over. Within ranks seniority or another method determines who takes charge; if a sergeant is take out, the corporals under him know which one will be in charge long before it happens.
Beyond that, good modern militaries train their soldiers to be *able* to function in that higher role when needed. So when it happens, they’re ready for it.
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.
This is something which have changed as the type of battles have changed and as different military doctrines are developed and adapted. But for most of the 20th century and even in most armies today every commander have a second in command. Sometimes you even have a third person in the unit with role of commander. Not only does this help if the commander is dead but also allow you to split the unit or allow for better flow of orders. If all the commanders of a unit is unavailable you go to the next lower set of commanders. As a rule the most senior of these gets promoted. So the most senior squad commander gets the role of troop commander if the troop commander and his second in command is both dead. So no matter who gets killed everyone knows who takes their place.
As for how the orders from above is distributed down this depends on doctrine. Of course you need secrecy so you may not be able to tell everyone the plan in detail. This does occasionally leave you with troops who do not know their role in the plan. But they know the general idea, if nothing else they will find targets of opportunity or link up with another unit to fall inn under their command. This is something which is better demonstrated in “Band of Brothers” which show the scattered state of the US airborne troops in the D day landings where most troops were unable to link up with their commanders and were often too far from their objectives. But in this case they had actually briefed each soldier on what their mission was, although not the mission of their neighboring units. So there were enough soldiers dropped in the right place to puzzle together the battle plans and execute them.
And this is a bigger part of the modern NATO military doctrine. Each soldier is briefed on their role in the bigger picture so that they can execute their mission and change it as needed without having to receive orders from the commanders. There is a lot more self-organizing in a modern army then there were even 20 years ago. To the degree where a lot of commanders do not even have a second in command any longer. When soldiers can make their own tactical decisions there is less need for a commander in the battle.
Chain of Command: The entire military is composed of ranks, from O-10 down to E-1. You would know each others exact ranking in the organization, down to the day if needed.
Contingency Plans: The military spends the majority of it’s time planning and training for every conceivable possibility in war. If it can happen, there’s a binder somewhere with orders on how to navigate through it probably.
One of the US strengths is the amount of independence our soldiers have. This, combined with every soldier knowing the mission parameters, allows for a bit of independent action when things get tough.
Also, there is a chain of command that is followed, so if a soldier hears his chain has been disrupted, he will fall back on the next in command. This does not just apply to the higher command levels, but each level, right down to the squad has a leadership chain as well, even if it is just assumed.
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