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(More customer reviews)Command or Control?: Command, Training and Tactics in the British and German Armies, 1888-1918. Author: Dr Mart Samuels. 340 pages. 1996.
I stumbled across this book at a book give-away. It looked promising and so it sat in my "to read" stack for about two months. Ostensibly this book is about the development of military doctrine based on competing conceptions about how wars and battles are. These conceptions and doctrines are then allowed to play out in events during the First World War. The book also discusses the participants in these events and the evaluations made afterwards in regards to them.
At its core this book is really about the tension between art and science, between structure and chaos. What may surprise many readers given the common stereotypes is that the Germans were more inclined to view war fighting as an art and the British to view it as science. The Germans believed that war is chaos with variables and that what is needed is to teach creative thinking and problem solving. To manage events as they unfold and take advantages of opportunities which occur. To this end the Germans relied not on control but rather command. The British conversely operated from a belief that war was merely a matter of known inputs and verified outputs. In other words you can plan outcomes and events. Reading their views and practices is in many ways akin to reading Soviet military science and their great love for algorithms.
Both the Germans and the British based their concepts on their study of men in battles, battles, and results. The difference in approaches can best be understood as using data to buttress existing preconceptions. IN other words they went in to their studies with pre-conceived ideas and found data to support these. The persistence of these methodologies continued in praxis during the war. Following the war the data was again looked at. This time the bulk of the data was from praxis. The Germans perhaps benefited from this study by their culture of inquiry and their defeat in the First World War. The British on the other hand looked for answers in technology rather than organization or doctrine. They were handicapped by their own victory. After all if you win then what you did and how you did it must have been superior to that of your opponent. There were cracks in this official party line but the status quo strove to marginalize these cracks.
The essence of the doctrinal structure developed by the two competing systems is presented by the author in the way they understood functioning of the hierarchy in combat. The Germans in their acceptance of war as chaos focused on Command while the British and their understanding of war as structure focused their doctrine on Control. In many ways it reminded of the debate in Patristics between fighting (controlling) the passions and re-educating (commanding) the passions.
In the Chaos-Command model the emphasis is on telling the subordinates what you want and leaving the how to do it up to them. In modern military parlance this would be the Commanders Intent and mission orders. The key to this methodology is in training your subordinates in problem solving and having faith that they will do well.
In the Structure-Control model the emphasis is on detailed planning and telling your subordinates exactly what they are to do, when they are to do it and how they are to do it. Strict adherence to a detailed plan removes as many variables as possible from the equation and should guarantee a certain outcome. There is limited initiative and the focus is on rote repetition of immediate actions responses.
These lines of thought are viewed through pre-war training, writings, and maneuvers. Then they are analyzed head to head in battle or on their own as a process. This book is more than just a dry specialized book about the development of military theory and its application in operations. It is an excellent book for studying research, organizational dynamics and especially valuable in creating organizational training. Its applications are equally valid outside the military as they are within the military. A truly excellent book.
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This is a comparative study of the fighting systems of the British and German armies in The Great War. Taking issue with revisionist historians, Samuels argues that German success in battle can be explained by their superior tactical philosophy. The book provides a fascinating insight into the development of infantry tactics at a seminal point in the history of warfare.
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