Tactics for Dummies: Moving People Around on A Battlefield is Hard, Part III: Tactical Articulation

The previous posts in this series (parts one and two) have mostly been discussing how to handle single groups of fighting personnel. But sometimes the task at hand requires us to split the force into two or more smaller elements, and now we’re going to take a look (heavily simplified, as usual) into how it can be done.

Now imagine you’re the leader of this small group of combat personnel. Let’s mark you off from the rest of the people in this group as the gold/yellow pip.

Yes, yes, some of you might argue that you’re not stupid enough to volunteer for such an assignment, but bear with me for the moment.

Now assume there’s a hill in the distance that you’d like to occupy, but you don’t think you’d need the whole force to do it. So you grab a few people and lead them to that hill.

So far so good, right? But then you go back to the place where you left the rest of the group . . . .

. . . and find that while you were away leading the breakaway sub-goup, you couldn’t exercise control over the rest of the original group and thus they wandered off on their own account, whether to look for food or to relieve themselves or to do any of an endless list of other very human activities.

Fortunately, for the sake of the argument, we can give you a reset button. Knowing that you’ll need some way to maintain control over the people left behind while you’re away, you appoint the most reliable person among them to undertake the responsibilities of a subordinate leader. Then you can go off on your merry way to occupy the hill. Here we’ll represent the subordinate leader as the blue pip.

Then you take a merry jog back to the start point.

Lo and behold, when you arrive, the rest of the original group is still there! And of course, not being an idiot, you’ve learned that the lesson works both ways, so you’ve also picked out the most reliable person among the sub-group you took to the hill and appointed them to be a subordinate leader there. Along the way you’ve created two subordinate units. Such a simple concept, but an incredibly useful one.

Of course, to paraphrase Clausewitz, even something this simple isn’t as easy as it seems, and plenty of things can still go wrong. For one thing, the delegation of power always carries a measure of risk. That subordinate leader you appointed to lead the part of the original group you left behind? They might not be as reliable as they seemed at first, and might actually lead that left-behind group in deserting their post, basically becoming the ringleader of a mutiny. Or what if they were unwilling to restore the command of the left-behind group to you when you get back, and challenged your authority to lead instead? The same thing applies to the other subordinate leader you appointed on the hill.

So, then, how do we make sure that the people we split off into units — and especially the ones we appointed to lead those subordinate units — would carry out our orders? This is really a subset of the bigger question of how a military command system works in general. If you’d like to read up on this issue in greater detail, I’d probably recommend John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (1976) and S.L.A. Marshall’s Men Against Fire (1947) as decent starting points. Both books are getting rather dated now, and people have raised some pretty reasonable concerns about Marshall’s research methods (I’d recommend Anthony King’s The Combat Soldier: Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in the Twenty-First Century (2013) for a fairly thorough and accessible review of Marshall’s evidence), but in any case their treatment remains largely valid for the one issue we’re going to discuss here. And the key point of that issue is that — to put it in (again) heavily simplified terms — cohesion depends on personal bonds within the unit. The main thing that helps people overcome the fear of death or grievous injury is the fear of shame — of being seen by our peers as a coward or a shirker who doesn’t pull one’s weight within the unit. And for this to matter, those peers who witness our deeds of bravery or cowardice must be people who matter to us. In turn, this means those peers must be more than just random strangers brought together for the duration of the mission or engagement at hand. They must be capable of spreading news that affect our reputation in the long term. And this basically means those peers must live in the same society that we live in, because that’s where they can spread those news to our friends, family, neighbours, and other people whose opinions we care about in everyday life.

In the simplest outcome of this principle, it explains why the military structures of so many cultures in history reflect those of their civilian societies. The armies of ancient Greek city-states were originally built on the same distinctions of age and wealth that regulated civilian life, with younger and poorer men becoming skirmishers, property-owning adults becoming the hoplite core of the army, and a tiny wealthy elite forming a small cavalry force (though this last category often operated more in the fashion of mounted infantry or an officer corps, leaving actual cavalry duties to allies or mercenaries better at the job). Similarly, the command structures used by the peoples of the Eurasian Steppes when they went to war closely mirrored the family and clan affiliations they relied upon in everyday life, or in other words military leaders were usually chosen from among people who already had the respect of the kinsfolk and friends they were going to lead into war (at least when there were no factors operating to deliberately break up these structures, such as Chinggis Khan’s attempt at decimal reorganisation in the 13th-century Mongol Empire; this was fairly successful for a while but faded out after a few generations). The eight- to thirty-men conrois that formed the basis for Anglo-Norman knights’ wartime organisation in the 12th century or so were usually based on the circles of friends, relatives, and neighbours who would hang out and ride together in peactime, whether to hunt in the game forests or to patrol their lands looking for vagrants, outlaws, recalcitrant peasants, and other undesirables; the members of these small circles already knew each other’s measure and who were the natural leaders among them, and mostly preferred organise along these existing lines of trust and leadership when they were called up for military service. (On this last subject, Chapter Two of J.F. Verbruggen’s The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages (1998 — the new translation, not the old and abridged 1977 one) provides one of the best overviews available to date, especially pp. 27-43 and 63-77.) If you’re looking for a fictional example instead, I’d recommend Bret Devereaux’s treatment of the military organisation of Rohan in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series and Peter Jackson’s cinematic adaptation of it.

On the other hand, modern people may be more familiar with professional military forces segregated from their civilian society. But in reality the same forces are in motion in this case; it’s just that the professional servicepeople’s military peers assume the role of the civilian friends, family, and neighbours, because that‘s the society the servicepeople live in on an everyday basis and whose opinions they care about. It’s particularly obvious for modern military personnel who live in military barracks or housing complexes and are regularly redeployed between stations to the extent that it’s hard to put down civilian roots during the term of one’s service outside the circles of fellow servicepeople in similar circumstances. (This is probably where I’d plug Anthony King’s The Combat Soldier (2013) once more for those who’d like a deeper look into the subject). But we see similar patterns in earlier professional military societies too, such as Imperial Roman auxilliary cohorts deliberately stationed far away from their home regions (say, the Syrian Hamian archers in Britain and so on) or Muslim garrisons planted across the breadth of the Middle East and North Africa in the wake of the Arab Conquest. The difference here is that the years of socialisation into military life could mould professional soldiers into the habit of following institutional lines of authority. This habit gives the military institution some power to make the servicemembers obey commanders they’ve never met or known personally in “civilian”/off-duty life. But of course this power is never absolute; instead, it tends to exist in some degree of tension with personal relationships, sometimes working to reinforce each other and sometimes contradicting each other. This balance between institutional and personal factors is where different military forces (or even different units within the same force) vary with regards to these factors’ relative influence on the issue of whether subordinates would be inclined to listen to and follow their superiors — and whether junior or intermediate leaders would be inclined to remain loyal to even higher authorities.

We’re probably starting to digress too far beyond the post’s original small-unit tactical focus, so let’s end the current discussion here while things still make some sense. I hope it makes sense to you too and would be of some help in understanding some of the things going on behind the scenes of your fictional military institutions.