The big questions: What's it all about, why is it important, and why now?
Release Date: 05/24/2023
Not the Heroic Model of Decision-Making
Command and Control
What makes a good and a great military leader? The myth of a divine, born leader is very popular but today we actually know better than this fiction. Science has given us the evidence to understand what traits and characteristics imbue a person with the skills and experience become a great leader. And we actually know how to select them based on the very different requirements in wartime and peacetime. It is also popular to talk about leadership and followership as two distinct functions; the term servant leader has become fashionable amongst military professionals as an attempt to delineate...
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Delegation to the point of discomfort
Command and Control
Many medium powers have been struggling to keep pace with the US military as it reimagines how it will undertake command and control over the coming decade. For those in Canada the challenge is extremely pertinent: shared coastlines, integrated C2 at NORAD, conjoined airspace and territorial seas, a long and unfenced land border, and the block between the US homeland and Russian forces in the Arctic. Canada also faces pressing concerns in trying to balance resources between the challenges being faced to their West as well as to their East and North. Deputy Commander of the Canadian Joint...
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You Cannot Beat Winter
Command and Control
A discussion with Major General Karl Engelbrekston, former chief of the Swedish Army who retired in Jun 2023. Command and control is clearly different when operating in environmental and geographic extremes; the High North (well inside the Arctic Circle) exemplifies those conditions. How to command and how to exercise control over military forces in those extremes leads to an interesting conversation about the realities of delegation and empowerment. Given Karl's experiences with multi-national forces too, there are some interesting take aways from this discussion that get to heart of modern...
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The Devolution of Command
Command and Control
Having an intelligent conversation about command and control requires a discussion with the USMC, the same institution that gave us the current C2 taxonomy back in the 1980s. While USMC force design 2030 leans towards a decentralised command structure and an aggregated control hierarchy, the pragmatism of the Corps has nested capabilities at lower levels that would allow a much more flexible approach to C2. In contrast to other forces which retain very structured C2 architectures, the USMC seems to be comfortable with a degree of ambiguity that would make others tremble. Peter talks to Colonel...
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Air C2
Command and Control
Command and control in the air domain has always been very different to that of other domains. Much more control, command execute in differnt ways, at different levels, and all captured in the phrase "Best picture has....". How much has been forgotten from former expereinces of air C2 in major contests and competiton? How much are we willing to relearn? How much of the differences in domain specific C2 will be lost as we amalgamate and integrate structures towards a beautifully informed single commander or system, a la Enders Game? Peter talks to former senior RAF officer, Paul Kendall about...
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NATO C2: How to improve
Command and Control
Having spent the week at the NATO C2 Centre of Excellence in The Hague, talking C2 with some impressive people, this episode captures a ‘hot wash’ between Peter and Colonel Mietta Groeneveld, Director and Commander of the C2COE. Given this was recorded only 90mins after a fairly intense 3 days, we don’t cover all the take aways, but it gives a flavour about some of the themes we talked about and some of Mietta's thoughts too.
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JADC2: A primer
Command and Control
In 2019, the Chiefs of Staff of the US military determined that C2 really had to adapt. The decision came after the publication of a report on Russian C2 and counter C2 capabilities: on that basis, the programme on Joint All Domain C2 was initiated. Currently, the US is spending between $1-2BN per year on it, having scoped it and pushed it forward with remarkable speed. It is progressing rapidly through the experimentation phase but has shifted shape over 5 years – moving from a plan to enable the Joint Force Commander with a long screwdriver to something that enables a more dynamic and...
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Question time
Command and Control
In this final episode of series one, Vice Admiral Andy Burns, Major General Zac Stenning and Andrew Graham answered questions from the audience on command and control live at the DSEi event in London. The panel couldn’t get through all the challenges thrown their way so we focused on the big themes: What will C2 look like in the future? How will ML and AI impact decision-making? Will C2 survive in its current form? What does the role of the commander look like in the future? And do we train and educate our future commanders well enough? Lots to digest before we start recording series two…
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Confidence and The Initiative
Command and Control
People lie at the heart of any C2 complex – both those in command and their HQ staff, as well as those at the gritty end of an orders process. Beyond the dry doctrinal definitions of command and control sit the facets of mental capacity, resilience, adaptability, leadership, standards, behaviours, and trust. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach either because the shock of combat and the context (and battlefield geometry of the fight) differ between battles, let alone campaigns or wars. One combat experience might feel similar to previous experiences, another utterly alien. Peter talks...
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AI in C2
Command and Control
Everyone seems to be talking about how Artificial Intelligence inside HQs will revolutionise command and control. The issue is that we don't even seem to have an agreed definition of AI, and the pol and mil leaders providing this rhetoric don't seem to have an answer to that either (or really understand what it is). Sitting down with two AI specialists, people who work with AI engineers on a daily basis, was enlightening in terms of definitions, clarity and perspective. The reality - from people who make this happen - is that AI (as described by many people) is some way away from widespread...
info_outlineThe show is about military command and control - sometimes considered the panacea of battles and campaigns - and what it might look like for the fight tonight and the fight tomorrow, whether for irregular warfare or for high end warfighting.
The hypothesis is that command is human and control has become increasingly technical/technological. In that, much has been written about command but little enough about control. Blending human decision-making with cutting edge technology in military headquarters has been an evolutionary process over the past 20 years, but the advent of data science, big data, machine learning and AI have given rise to a sereis of promises about machine control at the speed of data exchange: it sounds like an end to human command. How much truth sits within these statements by political masters and AI evangelists? Can AI substitute for the creativity, wit and guile of human commanders? How will dynamic control measures shape military command in the future?
Join us as we talk through C2 for an era of high-end war fighting at a moment when the increasing availability of dynamic control measures is centralising control away from local command. It has been a noticeable trend in Western C2 since the late 1980s. Given the growth of C2 systems in HQs, I think we need to consider how we effectively synchronise between the key functions of command and control. We aim is to open the conversation up – since we haven’t had a serious debate about what the ‘control’ element of C2 since the 1980s.