Book Review: 'Command' by Lawrence Freedman

Lawrence Freedman's Command is a sweeping look at the politics of military operations since the end of World War II. Freedman's work is not limited to a central cast of characters, types of conflict, or even a central set of countries, but rather focuses on the challenges of command at large: across time, regime type, and strategic context. Perhaps due to its broad scope, the book lacks a single thesis besides the general observation that command is by nature political, but instead takes more of a kaleidoscopic look at command—exploring how the nature of command varies depending on the circumstances. If, however, there is a unifying theme of the book, it is an exploration of three central dichotomies: politicians versus the generals, delegation versus control, and obedience versus initiative. Together, these three dichotomies define the politics of command over the last three-quarters of a century and will likely continue to do so for many more years to come.

Politicians Versus Generals

The central dichotomy of Command is the classic divide between military leaders and their political masters. In an extension of Carl von Clausewitz's famous dictum that war is extension of politics by other means, Freedman notes, “The unavoidable political nature of operational decisions has provided this book's core theme.”1 Unsurprisingly, large swaths of Command are dedicated to the tension between heads of state and their senior military leaders.

Freedman argues that this civil-military tension is both inevitable and increasing. In the past, officers clung to the Huntingtonian conception that the political and military worlds could, at some level, exist independently from one another. He remarks, “As Eisenhower knew, commanders judged to be 'political' are often compared unfavorably with those [whose] focus is entirely on preparing for and engaging in combat.”2 According to Freedman, while officers at least in many Western militaries still often cling to this perception today, the operational and political dynamics of modern warfare are driving the political and military worlds closer together.3

Operationally, irregular warfare requires that officers understand local political dynamics. As Freedman remarks, “a political sensibility is an essential part of professional competence, enabling officers to understand the contexts in which they operate, and how the way they act affects these contexts.”4 Indeed, one could argue that American generals' ultimate success or failure was determined as much by their political sensibilities as it was by their grasp of military art. For example, Gen. David Petraeus' success during the 2007 surge of forces in Iraq was due in large part to his ability to leverage Iraqi political dynamics—specifically the Anbar Awakening movement against al Qaeda—while maintaining enough congressional support to achieve results. By contrast, despite being a gifted operator and tactician, Gen. Stanley McChrystal's ultimate downfall was his lack of political sensibility during the Afghanistan surge. In irregular warfare, politics matter, and generals must also be politicians.

Freedman, however, also notes that the political landscape has changed. Particularly as more countries have abandoned the draft, fewer politicians have served. At its peak in the early 1970s, roughly three-quarters of the members of the U.S. Congress had prior military experience. By contrast, today, that percentage hovers in the high teens. That trend, in turn, impacts the civil-military balance. As Freedman notes, “As presidents became less military, the military has become more political.”5 Perhaps the most visible example of this phenomenon is the number of generals serving as secretary of defense or national security advisor, which historically have been civilian roles. For senior American flag officers, navigating Washington has become an essential part of the job, but the breakdown in clear delineations exacerbates civil-military tension.

Despite this friction, Freedman argues that the alternative—combining civilian and military control into one—is far worse. For example, regarding Pakistani dictator Gen. Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan, Freedman writes that “in practice, few leaders can stay on top of both the political and military decisionmaking processes, and certainly Yahya was not one of them.”6 As messy as civil-military relations might be, fusing the two worlds to be overseen by one person is often far worse.

One of Freedman's major contributions here is to remind us that neither militaries nor politicians are monolithic. Some of the most intense fights occur within entities—between civilian policymakers debating amongst themselves, or military leaders jockeying for power among the ranks. As Freedman notes, “the problem [is often] not so much civil-military interaction as with that between headquarters and the field commanders.”7

This latter point is all the more important because a lot of the current debates about civil-military relations center less on generals versus the politicians, but instead on generals caught in between competing political factions. Perhaps the best example here is Gen. Mark Milley's tenure as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Democrats decried Milley's infamous walk across Lafayette Park with then-President Donald Trump during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests. Later, Republicans cried foul when Milley reached out to de-escalate tensions with China in the waning days of the Trump administration. Both incidents were civil-military crises, but in both cases Milley was, arguably, doing the bidding of at least a subset of his “political masters.”

In Command, Freedman never addresses the issue of how commanders should navigate an increasingly polarized political climate, but these events underscore yet another reason why modern generals must also be politicians apart from the operational and political dynamics he mentioned. Multiplayer sets of civil-military relations—filled with politicians with diametrically opposing views—are by definition more challenging than the classic military versus civilian dynamic. And such sets require that generals be more politically aware, becoming politicians of a fashion themselves.

Delegation Versus Control

The second defining dichotomy in Command is the tension between the competing demands to delegate more to subordinates, on one hand, and the need for commanders to retain more control, on the other. As Freedman recounts, commanders have always been torn between these two competing needs, but this tension has, of late, become more acute.

According to Freedman, a host of practical reasons push commanders to delegate. Subordinates often are closer to where the action is and, therefore, may “have a better grasp of the situation.”8 As such, they are better placed to make decisions, and certainly better placed than a senior commander sitting many miles behind the front. In other cases, commanders delegate out of necessity, either because networks are not robust enough, or because of other obstacles—like language barriers in multinational coalitions—that prevent continuous communications between the leaders and the led.9 Above all, commanders delegate to conserve one of their most precious resources: their time. As Freedman remarks, “delegation should provide the senior commander more time to worry about the bigger picture.”10

This need for delegation often comes into direct opposition with another operational necessity: control. As Freedman says at the beginning of his book, “Military organizations need strong chains of command because they are about disciplined and purposive violence.”11 If commanders cannot control how their subordinates apply violence, then militaries can devolve into mayhem, and wars no longer serve their strategic aims. While the need for control has long been a part of warfare, Freedman argues that nuclear weapons and the prospect of a local irregular war sparking a third world war have only heightened commanders' need to manage the risks of unintended escalation.12

Militaries have wrestled with how to balance these two competing imperatives. The U.S. Army has pushed the concept of mission command, or “the exercise of authority and direction by the commander using mission orders to enable disciplined initiative within the commander's intent to empower agile and adaptive leaders in the conduct of unified land operations.” In practice, the concept revolves around commanders trusting subordinates to employ their own initiative within certain bounds and against a defined objective. In theory, at least, mission command should allow commanders to have it both ways—gaining the benefit of delegation while still retaining the need to control violence.

Historically though, the balance between delegation versus control can be better thought of as a pendulum that has swung back and forth over the years, depending on the strategic context. During the Global War on Terror, the pendulum swung firmly back in favor of control. While militaries certainly paid lip-service to the concept of the “strategic corporal (PDF)”—and there were examples of relatively junior soldiers doing things that had an outsized strategic effect, usually for the worse (see the Abu Ghraib atrocities as a case in point)—by and large, commanders maintained a relatively high degree of control over their subordinates in combat.

There are at least two reasons for this trend. First, technology has favored control. With a plethora of overhead unmanned aerial systems and robust communication networks, commanders—at the strategic level—could observe and communicate with those at the tactical level. The iconic image of President Barack Obama and his senior national security team all huddled in the situation room watching the raid that killed al Qaeda head Osama Bin Laden epitomizes this overarching trend. This photo—where the most senior of all commanders, the president, is watching a handful commandos conduct a raid a half a world away in real time—documents just how far the pendulum of command has swung in favor of control.

Second, and simultaneously, the operational logic of war has allowed for this degree of control. After all, there are only so many commando raids on any given night, so senior leaders can afford to spend the time. Moreover, there have been few operational drawbacks to such an approach. More control has meant slower and more deliberate use of force. Given the strategic assumption behind both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that force—particularly haphazardly applied—only generated more insurgents in the long run, this may not be a downside.13 Unsurprisingly then, as Freedman notes, upper headquarters staff has grown astronomically to handle this new need for control.14

The better question, though, is to what extent this shift to control is sustainable going forward and if there are reasons to believe that the pendulum will swing back in the other direction. First, the ubiquity of jamming during the war in Ukraine demonstrates that, in future wars, commanders may not necessarily count on an unimpeded, secure communications line with their subordinates, so they will need to delegate more out of necessity. Moreover, the war in Ukraine also shows that the scale of conflict—both in terms of geographic expanse and the number of soldiers and platforms involved—can be immense, so commanders could not supervise every tactical action even if they wanted to. Even in future great-power wars, though, commanders will want to exercise some form of control, if only to avoid the potential for nuclear escalation. Nonetheless, it suggests that commanders may strike a different balance on the control versus delegation continuum than they have for the past several decades.

Obedience Versus Initiative

Finally, while Command is, understandably, mostly about what makes for successful commanders, it also deals—at least indirectly—with the inverse question: what it means to be a good subordinate. This arguably receives a lot less attention. After all, there are many more books on leadership than followership, in both the civilian and military arenas. Still, the underlying dilemma—when to obey versus employ individual initiative—is no less profound.

On the one hand, armies of unthinking automatons rarely do well in war. Throughout Command, Freedman describes the dangers of militaries that blindly insist on obedience to the chain of command. He notes how Saddam Hussein's top-down approach to the Iraqi army led to “wholly dysfunctional military organization,” where junior officers were “fearful of taking any action without specific authorization from a higher command or at least a political officer” and “every issue, however minor, was passed back up.”15 He notes how the Russian military—during its operations in Chechnya and later in Ukraine—has suffered from similar faults.16

And while these may be extreme examples, even democracies have had to wrestle with the obedience versus initiative conundrum. Up until 1966, the French Army's code was, “Orders are executed literally without hesitation or grumbling. Protest by the subordinate is not allowed except when he has obeyed.”17 Afterwards, it was changed to read, “A subordinate faced with an order he believes illegal has the duty to protest it.”18 And there are plenty of examples where subordinates were expected to and did follow their commanders into the breach, regardless of the wisdom or the consequences.

At the same time, while we may lionize the subordinate who disregards orders in the name of doing what he perceives is “right,” Freedman's book is filled with accounts of subordinates who exercise personal initiative with terrible consequences. There is the infamous case, during the Korean War, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur disobeyed orders and pushed forward to the Yalu River, ultimately sparking Chinese intervention and his own dismissal.19 Freedman also recounts the exploits of Israeli general, defense minister, and ultimately Prime Minister Ariel Sharon—the “very model of insubordination”—who routinely vexed his military and civilian superiors by disregarding orders across multiple wars. Sometimes, as in the case of his crossing the Suez Canal during the 1973 war, or later with Israel's operation in southern Lebanon in 1982, Sharon's disobedience had disastrous results.20

Whether history judges subordinates who do not obey as mavericks, or simply as reckless, often hinges on whether or not their bet paid off. While there may be times when it is more or less appropriate for subordinates to exercise initiative, Freedman argues that, from the subordinate's standpoint, the choice is always a gamble, because fundamentally they are operating on only partial information. Writing on the 1982 Falklands War, Freedman remarks how “the campaign highlights how much the perspectives of individual commanders are limited, not only by their experience and background but also by their most pressing concerns at any moment in the campaign.”21 And so, the Falklands campaign looked quite different from London than it did from the front. And while the Falklands may be an extreme example, given the distances involved, the same is likely true for all wars, to varying degrees.

Ultimately, despite the problems inherent within allowing room for initiative, Freedman still believes this is a risk worth taking. As he writes in the conclusion:

The advantage of democratic systems lies not in their ability to avoid bad decisions, either by governments or commanders. Many poor decisions have been recounted here. The advantage lies in their ability to recognize these mistakes, learn, and adapt. Closed systems, in which subordinates dare not ask awkward questions, and in which independent initiatives risk punishment, will suffer operationally.22

Ultimately, the only thing worse than initiative gone awry is not having any room for subordinate initiative at all.

Future of Command: A Series of Timeless Debates

Freedman concludes Command with a brief exploration of the future of command in light of new technologies in warfare (most notably the advent of artificial intelligence) and changes in geopolitical circumstances (including the rise of China). A priori, it is not clear how any of these changes will impact the three dynamics discussed previously, and Freedman does not offer any definitive answers. For example, artificial intelligence, on the one hand, could allow commanders to have better battlefield awareness and thereby exercise more control over the outcomes. Conversely, artificial intelligence could speed up the pace of warfare and force future commanders to delegate more to machines. Similarly, potential conflict with China could either force commanders to exercise more control (to avoid potential nuclear escalation) or more delegation (given that any war would likely occur over a vast geographical area).

One thing that can be concluded about the future of command, however, is that the three central dichotomies that Freedman highlights in his book—generals versus politicians, delegation versus control, and obedience versus initiative—will continue to define the politics of command, just as they have for the past 75 years. This is one of the central contributions of Freeman's work: that while command may look different across regimes, locations, and strategic contexts, many of the debates about how to exercise command remain timeless.

References

• 1Lawrence Freedman, Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2022), 513.
• 2 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 7.
• 3 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 7.
• 4 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 8.
• 5 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 510.
• 6 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 171.
• 7 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 104.
• 8 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 498.
• 9 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 498.
• 10 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 498.
• 11 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 1-2.
• 12 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 10, 491.
• 13 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 464-465.
• 14 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 496.
• 15 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 257, 279.
• 16 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 399.
• 17 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 72.
• 18 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 72.
• 19 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 18-27.
• 20 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 109-141.
• 21 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 245.
• 22 Lawrence Freedman, Command, 514-515.