This guy is coming at the U.S. military from such a different perspective that I am going to ask those who comment to read the twice piece before hitting send on their responses.

And you thought I was tough on U.S. military education!

By Jörg Muth
Best Defense department of Auftragstaktik affairs

Auftragstaktik. The word sounds cool even when mangled by an American tongue. What it means, however, has always been elusive to Americans. The problematic translation of that core German military word into "mission type orders" completely distorts its meaning. Auftragstaktik does not denote a certain style of giving orders or a certain way of phrasing them; it is a whole command philosophy.

The idea originates with Frederick the Great, who complained after more than one battle that his highly experienced regimental commanders would not dare take action on their own but too often ask back for orders and thus waste precious time.

Nearly one hundred years later the military genius Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke was the first to formulate the concept of Auftragstaktik. Moltke was a diligent student of Frederick's campaigns, of military history in general and philosophy. At a time when he was not yet famous and, not yet the victor of three wars, he observed the annual General Staff war games in 1858. The paperwork and the detailed orders appalled him because he knew that in war there was no time for such nonsense. During the war game critique he decreed that "as a rule an order should contain only what the subordinate for the achievement of his goals cannot determine on his own." Everything else was to be left to the commander on the spot.

In the following decades, when he rose to the highest rank of the Prussian and then the German Army, Moltke and his disciples promoted the concept in the military. However, the British military writer Basil H. Liddell Hart noted correctly, "that the only thing harder than getting a new idea into a military mind is to get an old one out." Thus Auftragstaktik, not yet known under a single name, was heavily embattled and discussed in German military journals who were then leading in the world. In 1888, the year Moltke retired, it finally manifested itself officially in the field manual of the Prussian Army.

Interestingly, the literally hundreds of American observers who were regularly send to the old continent during the course of the 19th century to study the constantly warring European armies completely missed out on the decade long discussion about the revolutionary command philosophy of Auftragstaktik. Instead they focused on saddle straps, belt buckles and drill manuals. This is one reason why the most democratic command concept never found a home in the greatest democracy. The U.S. officers simply missed the origins because of their own narrow-minded military education.

Read on

They must be learning from the Americans.

Yesterday I was reading the transcript of comments Gen. J. Lawton Collins made at Fort Leavenworth in 1983. "Lighning Joe" Collins was one of the few generals to fight in both the Pacific and the European theaters in World War II, and to my knowledge, the only one successful in both. (Generals Eugene Landrum and Charles Corlett, not so much.) So I was interested to see Collins conclude that the Germans were better fighters:

They were radically different. The German was far more skilled than the Japanese. Most of the Japanese that we fought were not skilled men. Not skilled leaders. The German had a professional army. . . . The Japanese army was very much like ours in a sense. They had a small corps of officers who were professionals. But the bulk of their people were not professionals in the sense of knowing their business and so on. They didn't have the equipment that we had. They didn't know how to handle combined arms-the artillery and the support of the infantry-to the same extent we did. They were gallant soldiers, though. They fought to the end and you had to knock them off-that was all there was to it. And we had to do that right on Guadalcanal. . . . The Japanese were very gallant men. They fought very, very hard, but they were not nearly as skillful as the Germans. But the German didn't have the tenacity of the Japanese."

Tom again: Still, I think the Pacific war, conducted on remote islands where the enemy would fight to the death, probably was the tougher fight, even if the foe wasn't as skillful or as well-equipped.

In this blog last Friday, we carried a photo of Petraeus sitting in one of his headquarters, I think with a French general at his side. Tom Nissley of Amazon, a prince among men, wondered aloud in his blog just what was the book Petraeus had on the table in front of him. It turns out to be Wildcat, a French tome about being an independent French journalist during the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq war. I wouldn't worry about this book -- being a French journalist is like being a German chef. 

UPDATE on Belgian authors and French generals: Fwiw, I am told that the author of Wildcat is Belgian, not French. But the foreign officer sitting next to Petraeus in the photo is  France's chairman of the joint chiefs, General Georgelin.  

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