The Strategic Corporal

OPINION: “Leadership, Petraeus Style,” by Paula D. Broadwell, Boston Globe, 21 April 2009

In Petraeus’s words, ”we must continually think about the relatively junior officer who has to make a huge decision, often with life or death consequences, in the blink of an eye. There is no substitute for flexible, adaptive leaders. The key to all that we did in Iraq was leaders – especially young leaders – who repeatedly rose to the occasion and took on tasks for which they’d had little or no training.”

For folks in the military, junior officers or junior enlisted men making decisions is not a new idea. The principle of pushing responsibility down to the lowest level for decision is a staple of military training -- empower subordinates to make decisions in the absence of direct supervision.

To exercise this principle effectively the military uses a couple of concepts, which when taken together, allow for timely decisions.

The first concept is mission-type tactics. Mission-type tactics is nothing more than a commander giving a subordinate a goal (mission), the resources and time to accomplish the goal, and letting the subordinate figure out how to make it happen.

The second concept is commander’s intent. In a nutshell, commander’s intent is how the commander envisions his battlespace at the completion of his mission -- his end state. The commander communicates this to subordinates so, in the absence of any guidance, they have the ability to continue to make timely decisions with a broad understanding of what the “boss” would have them do given particular circumstances.

Mission-type tactics and commander's intent allow for quick and timely decisions. A good decision executed in a timely manner is better than a perfect decision executed too late. This philosophy has proven correct time and again, with no better examples than the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In both conflicts, U.S. servicemembers, usually aged between 18 and 24, are making the split-second life and death decisions referred to above by General David Patraeus. Compound this with the twenty-four hour news cycle and instant global communications, and the decisions are truly strategic in nature.

Because of the strategic nature of the decisions these young American patriots are forced to make, they are often referred to as "strategic corporals."