Military Review English Edition November-December 2015 | Page 94

Officer Candidate School. The NCOs with duty at these
education sites demonstrated to the prospective lieutenants what their future subordinate squad leaders and
other NCOs should be, know, and do.
In the U.S. Army today, officers and NCOs are
paired together at each level of command to form an
efficient and effective command team. As a captain,
an officer typically has the opportunity to command
a company—his or her first command. This occurs
at the seven- to ten-year mark of the officer’s career.
The officer is normally paired with a senior NCO—a
first sergeant—who typically has between seventeen
and twenty-two years’ professional experience. At
battalion level and higher, commanders are paired
with even more-experienced senior NCOs: command
sergeants major.
Over time, a unique and mutual trust has developed
between officers and NCOs. Army NCOs indeed follow
“the orders of the officers appointed over” them and, in
fact, affirm their commitment to do so frequently in
the oaths they take.5 Officers, on the other hand, learn
quickly to appreciate the experience and wisdom shared
with them by seasoned NCOs, and they quickly learn
to distinguish the poorly performing NCOs from the
exceptional ones. An officer’s responsibility includes
applying pressure where it needs to be applied to motivate and elevate the abilities of those poorly performing
NCOs; officers are assisted in doing so by other NCOs.
Conversely, oftentimes seasoned professional NCOs can
make up for the shortcomings of poorly performing or
inexperienced commissioned officers, tactfully assisting
in the professional development of those officers while
cushioning the potentially negative effects poor junior
officer leadership could have on their units.
In the end, what the Army has developed is a highly
educated, all-volunteer enlisted force, fully capable of executing a wide variety of missions in accordance with the
commander’s intent in a fully decentralized manner. Led
by career and midcareer professional NCOs, many with
post-high-school degrees and other higher-education credentials, this potent force has yielded tremendous benefits
for the U.S. Army.6 Officers, supported by their NCOs in a
team effort, have more time available to plan, coordinate,
and synchronize garrison, training, or combat events, as
compared to their counterparts in similar armies without
such a well-developed and self-aware NCO corps. Officers
in other armies often must personally manage numerous
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time-intensive tasks that would be regarded as NCO
duties in the U.S. Army, which interferes with focusing on
the next mission or critical leadership issues.

Mission Command Philosophy:
Decentralized Execution
Employing the U.S. Army’s mission command
philosophy—decentralized execution—means a commander economizes time by only having to move within
his or her command to where the commander’s presence
is most needed, where a conflict exists or a decision
requires command authority.7 Nevertheless, decentralizing exercise of power by delegating authority does not
relieve the commander of any responsibility, nor does it
drain the commander’s power away. Counterintuitively,
it actually increases the commander’s power and makes
him or her accountable for even more, as many more
macro- and micro-actions occur simultaneously in this
decentralized model, often without the direct supervision of the officer. Irrespective, it remains incumbent
upon the officer to follow up with his or her NCOs to
ensure command guidance is being met. A well-worn
adage in the Army is that “one can delegate authority,
but never responsibility.”
Though U.S. Army planning is largely centralized, with
ample input from senior NCOs, execution is nearly always
accomplished in a decentralized manner. This is especially
true in combat environments, where young officers often
rely on their squad leaders—who are, at many times, well
beyond the officers’ line of sight—to provide updates on
the rapidly changing situations on the battlefield. Skillful
officers use these extensions of their power to quickly
transition phases of tactical operations, synchronize operational areas with adjacent units, and execute complicated
tactical maneuvers at the small-unit level. The net effect is
a thoroughly efficient organization that maximizes the use
of all of its assets, especially its technically and tactically
proficient NCO corps, in a decentralized manner.
Today’s NCOs pride themselves on being able to
operate under duress with little or no supervision from
officers to accomplish their units’ missions. This gives
officers the freedom to concentrate their own leadership
skills and capabilities on more narrowly focused areas
of concern where they need to be applied the most.
Meanwhile, competent, dedicated, and trusted NCOs
operate efficiently in their commands without the officers’ direct supervision—but following the direction of a
November-December 2015  MILITARY REVIEW