On command, continued.
By Jeff Emanuel Posted in Featured Stories | War — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Piggybacking on streiff's post on the Price of Command, and on Winter Pop's comment on command innefectiveness, I have an example of commander who which exemplified the phenomena to a "T."
At a certain location, we had a commanding officer who first came into our unit as a Stan/Eval inspector. After excoriating our commander at the time for failing to comply with a littany of relatively obscure and arcane guidelines and regulations -- something pretty regularly done, generally out of expediency, by SOF units -- he set himself up to come in as our next commander, even though he had never served one day in SOF, on the promise that he would "clean up" our three-straight-year award-winning unit and ensure compliance with every reg he could get his hands on, while also attempting to eliminate any "possibly risky" training practices or events -- a fairly ridiculous goal at a unit whose day-to-day operations often consist of freefall parachuting, open-water and subsurface operations, and other "possibly risky" events.
Needless to say, this man was not only unloved, but was ineffective -- his policy-stickler attitude reduced the effectiveness of our teams, as, in order to operate effectively, SOF teams can't be held to the same "three-bags-full" standard of dotting i's, crossing t's, and making perfect hospital corners at all times -- in that atmosphere, not only morale but operational readiness and effectiveness are significantly degraded.
This commander committed the cardinal sins of (a)worrying more about his next promotion than the effectiveness of his unit, and (b) ignoring the primary mission of the men he was tasked with commanding. Instead, he focused on trying to remake the unit (SOF) into the type (conventional) with which he was most comfortable, and which he felt was superior in the sense that it was more willing and able to follow regulations, and was much more manageable by a career desk-sitter who found himself hopelessly out of his element when tasked with leading free-thinking, unconventional fighting men.
...on the first, and the second may very well be true, as well; I haven't the interest in the man to find out. Once he was out of "our" world and back in the conventional one, we toasted to his exit and never asked about him again. ;-)
De Opresso Liber
Once, as an XO of an A-Team deployed to SEAsia I had a commander much like the one you describe.
"Lieutenant, I don't want to be here. I'm too senior. I don't know why they sent me here. You make all the decisions in this camp, leave me out of it."
So, I did. He meddled in them all. People got hurt.
I confronted him, alone, in a dark place on site.
Four days later, he was gone and I had my first A-Team command.
What you call SOF today, we called simply SF, then.
Then, as now, it required a different way of viewing the world, a different way of getting things done, a different way of operating and a different way of relating to people - especially your own team.
'Their' world and 'our' world are simply not the same - nowhere near. Not then. Not now.
now a civilian and this one is a General?
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If "pro" is the opposite of "con", what is the opposite of "progress"?