Before reading Warfighting (Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1) I thought business was uncertain and risky and difficult. After reading Warfighting, I now think business is relatively certain, positively safe, and relatively easy.
My god.
Conversation
(This isn’t to say that business are not also those things, but the picture Warfighting paints of war — “expect plans to go wrong, communications to fail, and men to make critical errors during execution” is just so much worse.)
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Some choice excerpts:
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More context around the book:
“After Vietnam, all the major services came out with problems, and suffered from dysfunction. So all the services went through introspection. (…) The Marine Corp went through the same process but it was more like a food fight.”
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I think the main value I’m getting out of this is “here is one way to operate and embrace extreme uncertainty” — where the one way is “create a structure+culture that trains & enables local leaders to go after objectives with huge amounts of autonomy.”
Replying to
There is an interesting sub-point here, which is “how do you train lower level commanders to improvise?”
Schmitt talks about how the adoption of Warfighting led him to develop Tactical Decision Games as a training methodology:
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Continued from previous clip: “(and this military attaché) pulled out a map (…) and I thought this is exactly what we need — we need scenarios like this to make these theoretical concepts (around improvisation, commanders intent) concrete for people.”
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“Publishing a TDG every month in the gazette really changed the approach to decision making training in the Marine Corps, and it also helped to institutionalise manoeuvre warfare concepts”
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If you want to experience a TDG for yourself, you may find one here: shadowboxtraining.com/news/2021/06/0
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