12/10/2023
Thank you Thomas A. Kruegler for the call out! U.S. Army Moves To Mobilize And Disperse Its Increasingly Vulnerable Command Posts by
Loren Thompson
I read the typical Loren article. As always, it focuses on technological solutions which will mean it will fail, but will enrich contractors ran by retired senior officers. He lost it on me with this paragraph,
"Command posts are the nerve centers of maneuver warfare, continually sending and receiving intelligence, issuing orders to field units, and assuring that the movements of friendly forces are synchronized."
As John Boyd and others have written, and I have seen for real in hundreds of field exercises, war games, and in actual combat, you cannot have true Maneuver Warfare and Synchronization. As Boyd stated, "you can only synchronize watches."
I have been pushing for over two decades to replace synchronization with harmonizon or harmony. The latter word befits the tenets of Maneuver Warfare that we just wrote about in the New Maneuver Warfare Handbook, available on Amazon in kindle and hard copy from Special Tactics (ran by former Tier-1 operator friends of mine).
Most Importantly, at the core of Maneuver Warfare is Mission Command, vastly misunderstood and ignored by the establishment. Adapting Mission Command to its true Auftragstaktik state requires massive reforms to the personnel management system, as well as force structure. Instead, it is just easier to plaster all over PPT slide briefings, and hope something happens.
In high-intensity combat, if you don't stay on the move you are likely to become a casualty.
