By Brig. Gen. John S. Brown, U.S. Army retired

A popular theory among prospective military reformers has been that we should flatten pyramids of command and control. Too many layers of command impede leadership processes, as the argument goes, so doing away with a few leaders in the chain should empower the rest. A dozen subordinate commanders lightly supervised by a single boss might show more initiative and daring than three to five constantly under his or her thumb. Broader spans of control in an era of modern communications should lead to greater flexibility and panache. Ironically, in our historical experience the opposite has been true. Broad spans of control have been associated with rigidity, drill and minimal maneuver, and narrow spans of control with flexibility, initiative and responsiveness.

The earliest battle we can reliably construct is Marathon (490 B.C.). The Greek commander that day, Militiades, led a dozen principal subordinates who came to tactical decisions by committee. Their product was a shoulder-to-shoulder charge of all constituent units on line without much effort to maneuver. By the reign of Alexander the Great (333-321 B.C.) commanders had refined the internal articulation of their armies. At his greatest and most decisive battle, Arbela (331 B.C.), Alexander divided direct control of his army with his general Parmenio, and controlled four major subcomponents himself while Parmenio controlled three. Each subcomponent commander in turn controlled between two and five major subordinate units. An example of such a subordinate unit was a phalanx of 16 syntagma (256 men each), all of which fought on line without internal maneuver. Thus the Macedonian organization for Arbela featured an important break point. Above the phalanx level, spans of control were small, and initiative, independent action and maneuver were expected. At the phalanx level and below, spans of control were large and maneuver was sacrificed for mass and drill.

This Alexandrian model of command and control held for more than 2,000 years. In our own Civil War a regiment consisted of 10 companies—a broad span of control—and did little in the way of internal maneuver. A brigade, on the other hand, had the narrower span of control of four or so regiments and was expected to maneuver them. The same was true of a division maneuvering its several brigades or a corps maneuvering several divisions. When fighting on a scale small enough to require maneuvering companies separately, commanders often improvised ad hoc intermediate levels of command. At the Little Big Horn, for example, Gen. George Custer retained direct control of five companies and dispatched three under Maj. Marcus Reno and three under Capt. Frederick Benteen.

World War I witnessed more formally narrowed spans of control in the pursuit of effective maneuver. Weapons had become so lethal, obstacles so formidable and frontages so extreme that maneuver had to be fluid at all levels to avoid excessive casualties. Armies that had begun the war in Napoleonic array went to ground, entrenched themselves and experimented with alternative techniques. German Hutier tactics provide a case in point. Soldiers worked their way forward in small bodies, penetrated without undue regard for their flanks and responded to intimately accessible supervisory chains. By the end of World War II, German principles of flexible maneuver and narrow spans of control had been generally accepted by all the major armies and adapted to mechanized warfare as well. Fire teams or crews of a few men each responded to squads or sections who in turn responded to platoons, companies, battalions, regiments and so on. At every level commanders were considered capable of effectively commanding and controlling from three to five subordinate maneuver units that themselves were executing complex internal maneuvers—recognizing commanders also had to monitor units to their flanks and coordinate combat support and combat service support.

The challenges posed by battlefield spans control do not seem to be particularly reducible by communications technology. In the recent advance on Baghdad, for example, Generals David McKiernan, William Wallace and Buford Blount each seem to have been fully, purposefully and uniquely engaged at their levels, as were the field grade commanders serving underneath them. There are human limits to how many internally complex subordinate battles can be understood and appreciated by a single person at the same time. Yet that understanding and appreciation is necessary if teamwork, coordination and deconfliction are to be achieved, and nonorganic combat support and combat service support appropriately distributed. Contemporary information management systems can hustle the commanders’ feel for the battlefield along somewhat, but they still must construct a coherent vision in their own heads if they are to be helpful to their subordinates and responsive to their superiors. Alexander’s response to this dilemma was to limit the complexity of his battlefield by prescribing mass and drill beneath a certain level. This is not an option for us. One might note, however, that although technology may not much increase a commander’s feasible span of control, it may well reduce the size of the staff he needs to effectively manage it.

Interestingly enough, the most popular advocates of flattening the pyramid want to do so at the top rather than at the bottom. No one I know of advocates doing away with platoons and having company commanders directly control a dozen squads, or doing away with companies and having a battalion commander control a dozen platoons. Rather, it seems, it is the division or corps that must go, since a corps/joint task force (JTF) should so easily be able to directly control a dozen brigades, or an army/JTF a dozen divisions. Such confidence may reflect a thinness of exposure to what corps and divisions actually do.

Happily, our Chief of Staff and his subordinates were aware of all the above dynamics when they redesigned the modular Army. What we will be calling corps and divisions will be radically reduced in size to become headquarters nodes alone. Staffs will be streamlined. Hierarchy will be designed for the occasion, not fixed—but with feasible spans of control expected of commanders at each level.


Recommended Reading:
Fontenot, Gregory, et al. On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom (Fort Leavenworth, Kan.: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2004)

Fuller, J. F. C. The Generalship of Alexander the Great (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1960)

Keegan, John. The Mask of Command (New York: Viking, 1987)