... things go as they go. I refer you (again) to Herrera's superb piece. And to delusions (across the board) and how they embed themselves into the national psyche. And why the West cannot do strategy. With "strategists" like Sarah Paine the US is doomed, not as a super-duper power, that title has been lost long time ago, but as a nation.
... doctrine writers would better serve the Army by acknowledging that while there are some similarities between Auftragstaktik (Fűhren mit Auftrag) and mission command, that is where the relationship begins and ends. The U.S. Army was practicing what it today calls mission command long before it discovered German practices, and ADP 6-0 acknowledges this, even as it returns to its imaginary German origins. It is long past time to shed the infatuation with the German military experience and fatuous lineage of mission command. Historians have more than amply demonstrated for over two decades that similarities aside, there is no exclusive or even specific PrussoGerman foundation in what is today termed mission command. Confusion about complex historical concepts such as the origins of mission command and Auftragstaktik reveals why doctrine writers and military professionals should consult professional historians and their works, those whose analyses and conclusions are grounded in primary sources, archival research, and historiography when they seek to understand and draw from the past and to understand the past as it exists in the present and informs it. There is much to be studied, learned, and even adopted in some fashion from the practices of other armies, just as there is much to realize that mission command is far more American, and far less German than doctrine pretends. This is not to say that there is nothing of value in German, or other armies’ practices. Rather, deeper understanding, greater historical literacy, and more precision in thought and language are needed, and a recognition that longstanding American practices do not require other armies’ validation. A conjured past is worse than no past at all.
I wonder what Herrera would write today against the background of utter failure of the American strategic and operational approach WITH or WITHOUT ever-present infatuation with a conjured past.
