Mission Command: Realizing Unified Action
Mission Command: Realizing Unified Action
by Richard N. Pedersen
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This paper proposes to describe mission command in a more accurate and practicable way. Effectively integrating the operations process within mission command activities in current and future environments is a complex problem. Enacting changes to time-honored and culturally inculcated institutional concepts is also a complex problem. Complex problems cannot be fully understood until possible solutions are proposed and developed through collaborative discussion and learned about through action. This paper provides a starting point for that process by offering three substantive proposals that may now be discussed and evaluated in order to stimulate further cultural change by transforming institutional concepts. Specifically, the paper proposes that we:
1) Describe Army mission command in a way more practicable to unified action. Mission command is a construct that integrates the functions and techniques of the art and science employed during the exercise of command authority over missions applying military and other instruments of national power.
2) Adapt how Army commanders conduct the operations process. New mission command ideas include: elevating framing as a major operations process activity; describing design as an operations process subcomponent alongside MDMP, rehearsals, and RDSP; describing the operations process subcomponents in the context of how the staff manages the operations process; adding learning through action as a key commander task; and integrating the framework by describing the operations process as an integral subset of mission command.
3) Develop practicable unified action functions. Mission command is the overarching unified action function (UAF) bond that integrates all unified action functions across all command echelons. The warfighting functions (WFFs) are retained and described as military mission power UAFs. Fifteen new UAFs collectively governing diplomatic, informational, and economic mission powers were developed.
These proposed concept refinements may enable the military to more effectively meet the challenges of unified actions in complex and uncertain environments. Although the discussion in this paper is from the perspective of Army commanders, the ideas put forth have great relevance to potential JIIM partners. These three broad conceptual refinements offer a framework within which both “soft” and “hard” power can be transformed into “smart” power. These ideas should now be collaboratively discussed, studied, experimented with, and further developed in order to better learn the true nature of the problem and ultimately to solve the complex problems that require unified action.
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COL Richard N. Pedersen (U.S. Army, Retired) is the lead mission command analyst at the U.S. Army Mission Command Center of Excellence Battle Laboratory at Fort Leavenworth, KS. He commanded a Combined Infantry Brigade Combat Team with duty in combat as Commander, Regional Command-South in Kandahar, Afghanistan. He also commanded the U.S. Army Battle Command Training Program and an airborne infantry battalion in the 82nd Airborne Division.
