Community Defense - Part 4

In the first three parts of this series, we discussed several conditions and prerequisites for community defense - the WHERE, WHAT, WHEN, and WHO. The last topic encompassed recruiting, organization, and leadership in general terms, focusing mostly upon preparatory measures that ought to be undertaken before and in anticipation of a crisis. Now we're going to shift our perspective forward on the timeline and discuss concepts of tactical leadership during a crisis, when hostilities are imminent or underway. They are important and useful to leaders at all levels, and even to those who are only one or two bullets away from a leadership position.

Implied in the concept of community defense is that you probably won't have a multi-level, hierarchical command structure. No one with stars on their collar, no staffs, very little opportunity for specialization, and ad hoc units and pickup teams whose composition changes with the day, hour, and circumstances. Anyone in your organization may find themselves responsible for a 2-4 person team, or several of them, or the entire organization and the innocent lives depending on it for protection. They need to become familiar with concepts and methods that in a more structured military context are shared vertically in hierarchical structure of rank and mutual support.

What follows are definitions, principles, and discussion relevant to tactical leadership at any level. Later, we'll drop down into specific tactics, techniques, and procedures directly useful in a community defense concept – but here's the foundation.

COMMAND AND CONTROL

Command means to direct, order, or compel. In the tactical context, it is the hands-on, interactive art of exercising authority, directing what is to be done in a clear, timely, and unambiguous way. Command is a skill that requires significant thought, preparation, and application before you find yourself responsible for others in a fight.

Control is a counterpart of command. It has two functions. The first is assessment; this requires situational awareness, knowledge of the what is going on that requires observation, as well as intelligence gathering and communications to provide the information you cannot observe directly. You must monitor your own teams' actions and appreciate how they – in combination with unfolding circumstances and external forces beyond your control (like a thinking adversary) – are shaping the situation.

Control is difficult if we are "down in the weeds," in the thick of it, as a small team leader especially is going to be; and therein lies the rub for leadership at the tactical level. You're not watching maps and digital displays in a command post, or orbiting several thousand feet overhead; you're carrying a rifle in the fight. This leads us to the other function of Control, which is supervising the performance of subordinates - minimizing deviation from the commander's direction and intent.

Command and control are always more difficult than the definitions make it sound, because combat on any level is characterized by fog, friction, chaos, surprise, and uncertainty.

Fog of War: "All actions in war take place in an atmosphere of uncertainty. . . Uncertainty pervades battle in the form of unknowns about the enemy, about the environment, and even about the friendly situation." [U.S. Marine Corps, Warfighting, Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication [MCDP] 1

Friction: "Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war." (Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret)

Control, in the sense of one man carefully directing the actions of others, quickly breaks down under these conditions. The more a leader attempts to maintain top-down control under these conditions, the more he undermines initiative, conditioning subordinates not to act without orders. Or, in the context of a voluntary association of friends, family, neighbors or business associates, control may be unwelcome, and be met with resistance. The answer lies in cooperative attitudes, trust, and shared understanding, tempered by discipline. The discipline required is itself not the type imposed and regulated from above, but is self-discipline that motivates everyone to cooperate, harmonizing their actions in pursuit of the common goal. Remember Ben Franklin's advice: "If we do not hang together, we shall assuredly all hang separately."

Unity of Command means that everyone operates under a single responsible commander who is granted the authority to direct their actions in pursuit of a common purpose. This can be a challenge in the context of community defense. In that voluntary association of neighbors, friends or associates who are not wearing the same (or any) uniform and badges of rank, the willingness of team members to relinquish authority and follow orders is critical to success, however counter-intuitive or off-normal it may seem to them. In normal times, in the conduct of life and business, Americans in particular value independence, free thinking, and argument.

In a tactical environment, obedience to orders is sometimes a life-or-death issue. Your team leader may direct you to provide overwatch or suppressive fire to cover a team member's movement. If you do not obey his order, because you have a better idea, or feel the sector you're watching now is more important, or for any reason at all, your teammate's move can end quickly and badly. Obedience to orders can only be tempered by initiative when that initiative is informed, constrained, and guided by the commander's intent (which we will discuss in detail later); and it must be made to work with and not against the actions and initiative of your team mates.

How will you identify, select, and/or develop leaders that others will follow without question, when there is no time for discussion or debate? You must form a consensus that quick action "now" is usually better than a perfect plan enacted "too late" - so that intelligent, independent-minded adults will be willing to follow a team leader's direction even if they think there is a better way.

U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd's "OODA loop" ("Observe – Orient – Decide – Act") is a powerful concept that works especially well for a fighter pilot, where "action" means direct input to the throttle, rudder, or other flight controls. It works about as well for an independent operator with feet on the ground. The pilot's aircraft and the operator's body respond reliably to control inputs 99% of the time; they do not misunderstand, question, or hesitate to commit. However, when the parts receiving control inputs are living, thinking humans, all these things happen, even in established, hierarchical command structures. Subordinates have to understand the leader's intent, trust his judgment, and agree to follow his direction. Therein lies one of the greatest challenges of command.

Unity of Effort is a second-best alternative to Unity of Command at the tactical level. It will seldom come into play at the team level, but if more than one team must work together, and cannot reach agreement about who is in command or cannot communicate laterally, then cooperation and mutual support toward a commonly recognized objective may be the best that can be achieved.

Thinking Two Levels Higher. Every operator should learn to think two levels higher than his current position; he is after all only one or two bullets away from promotion in a fight. What that axiom means in the context of community defense is that an operator should be thinking about not just about his own immediate responsibilities, but also the decisions his team leader makes, the decisions of other team leaders or detached individuals, and of anyone in a position to make decisions affecting several teams or elements. A 'team' may be no more than two or three family members defending their home; but even in this scenario, one of them needs to be in charge (Unity of Command), and he should not limit himself to the immediate situation, but spare some thought for the situation outside the building, down the street, and in the larger community. Is the threat he faces an isolated criminal act, or part of a larger eruption of lawlessness? Is the power on? Are the telephones working? Are law enforcement officers available to respond, and will their response time be impacted by larger considerations such as rioting or a natural disaster? Are friends or neighbors responding, and is it according to prior plans or on the spur of the moment. The answers to these questions will influence his own decisions and his team's actions at every moment.

PROBLEM SOLVING AND DECISION MAKING

We strongly favor the concept of decentralized, intuitive decision making – decisions made at a high tempo at the lowest level, without dependence on communications and orders from higher echelons who lack the immediate situational awareness of the people on scene.

"Intuition" in this context is what allows you to observe what is going on around you, recognize its similarities to situations you have faced in the past, and quickly identify a course of action likely to succeed. This is called recognition-primed decision making (RPDM).

The alternative approach is a laborious, analytical process that begins with a systematic Mission Analysis, wherein you (with your staff, if you are lucky enough to have one) identify and develop several significantly different courses of action, assess each one independently and then by comparison to the others through some form of wargaming select the best alternative. Some will recognize this as the US military's traditional Military Decision Making Process (MDMP). Research and experience have shown that "best" can be the enemy of "good enough," and that there is never enough time or enough information in a crisis to conduct a complete and accurate analytical decision making process.

Competent, experienced decision makers in crisis situations very seldom actually use those formal analytical processes. They instead use intuition (the application of lessons learned through experience) to recognize key factors of the situation; and the first course of action they think of is usually the best, and almost always they one they act on. For more on this, see Gary Klein, Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making.

Recognition Primed Decision Making (RPDM) is a decision making model that reflects how expert decision makers most often act in the real world, especially under stress, with limited information, no staff resources, and no time for systematic analysis. The decision maker relies on his experience to recognize the key elements of the problem, and to rapidly formulate a solution that is likely to succeed. It is especially appropriate for leaders of small tactical teams in contact.

William Lind refers to Colonel Boyd's OODA Loop "... as a time-competitive observation-orientation-decision-action cycle ... To win any conflict, you need to get inside the adversary's OODA Loop (their decision making process). You can either go through the OODA Loop cycle faster than your opponent, or you can vary your tempos and rhythms so your opponent cannot keep up with you." This concept underpins our discussion of decision making models. It never pays to forget that your opponent is a living, creative, and antagonistic human attempting to short-circuit your decision making process and force you to react to his actions, just as you are doing the same to him. The tools presented in this section are designed to maintain a high tempo in your decision making – to orient, decide and act swiftly but not in haste; to seize and maintain the initiative as the leader of a small team or unit in a more complex environment than that of an individual gunfighter.

The decision maker makes a quick estimate of the situation (or revises his previous estimate to account for changing circumstances or new information). He recognizes patterns from his experience – an intuitive, not analytical process: "I've seen this before – not here, and not exactly like this – but I've seen it and I know what will work and what won't. "Recognition" (or "pattern matching") occurs when the decision maker sees patterns in the current situation similar to ones he remembers from experience. He then comes up with a course of action that he believes will work – usually the first one he thinks of. He does not create, compare, and choose from a list of alternative courses of action, the method used in the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) mentioned earlier.

Often, his estimate of the situation and the best solution emerge almost simultaneously. This is what Clausewitz called a coup d'oeil ("strike of the eye"), the ability to see the key factors of a situation at a glance.

The more experience the decision maker has, the more likely it is that his first option will work. What constitutes relevant experience?

• He has faced (and solved) a similar problem before.
• He has watched someone else solve a similar problem.
• He has done something similar, or seen it done, in training or wargaming environments.
• He recognizes the situation, and can identify likely solutions, from his study of history and the tactical/operational art.

Fortunately for us all, we can build the fund of relevant experience for tactical decision making in all these ways, most of which do not involve getting shot at. Training experiences are very useful, so long as you train realistically, train to failure, train under a variety of circumstances, and learn from your training experiences through honest and meaningful After-Action Reviews (AAR). Training experiences are also valuable because they and their lessons-learned are usually shared with others, contributing to shared understanding, implicit communications, and implicit command.

There are several pitfalls to beware, in applying the RPDM method:

• Mismatched experience – past experience does not match the current situation but you apply it anyway.
• Your past experiences were powerful and formative; you're proud of your achievements and the experience affected you profoundly, so you tend to see the current situation through that lens, no matter how poor the fit. This is a frequent trap for combat veterans, who sometimes assume that what worked for them one day "in the sandbox" will always be the answer.
• You develop comfortable habits, and fail to acknowledge that a new situation sometimes requires a new or adjusted solution: "This is how we've always done it."
• You are only confident or comfortable with one method: "To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."
• New or unfamiliar approaches feel like a loss of power or control; ego or pride prevent you from accepting new ideas, or an idea that is not your own: "I'm in charge here; we're doing it my way."
• As memory fades, and the story is retold, the experience is distorted, usually in favor of the storyteller. In Shakespeare's Henry V, King Henry's pep talk to the ragged English soldiers at Agincourt in 1415 includes a reminder of how veterans will tell the tale in years to come:

"Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say, 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day…"

• You apply experience that has become obsolete or irrelevant because of changes in organization, equipment, doctrine, tactics, and threats since your experience was earned. You must recognize obsolete experience and purge it, or at least recognize its limitations.

RPDM boils down to this: take the first idea that comes to mind; if you think it will work, adjust it as required, and commit to it despite any remaining uncertainties. Follow through and work out the details on the way. A term coined for this approach is "satisficing," a blend of "satisfy" and "suffice," because while you may not arrive at the theoretically optimum solution this way, it is likely to be good enough if applied quickly and forcefully.

• Command structure (including succession of command if a leader becomes a casualty or is absent or unavailable)
• Liaison procedures for establishing contact and coordinating with "friendly forces" such as law enforcement, EMS, or private associates
• Organization for routine as well as emergency operations
• Markings for recognition and IFF (Identification Friend or Foe)
• Signals and communications (such as hand and arm signals, radio procedures, and brevity codes)
• Routine weapons handling (including safety, assembly/disassembly, cleaning, function checks, storage and issue)
• Rules for the use of force
• Public affairs and media relations

• Reporting requirements, procedures, and forms

Well-written and properly used SOPs can reduce training time, reduce errors and the omission of essential steps or processes, address mundane but important questions (such as how vehicles or equipment are stored, prepared, and checked) and reduce the time required for completion of tasks. SOPs must change as necessary to avoid becoming outdated or irrelevant. They must be focused specifically upon the organization's mission and operational environment. Finally, they have little value unless all personnel know them and follow them. Operators - especially adult members of a community defense organization or a private security network - may bristle at a "showdown" inspection of gear and weapons, but team leaders almost always find and correct violations of SOP when they are conducted.

This is an IAD and not a contingency plan, for several reasons: it is performed in immediate response to an outside stimulus (the intrusion alarm) that alerts the family to an immediate threat; each individual has a simple, limited set of actions to perform, always in the same way; reaction time and speed of execution are paramount. Follow-on actions will require assessment and decision-making, but this drill will result in the family consolidated in one room with good security over the only approach an intruder can use.

In the tactical realm, procedures, drills, and contingency plans all have a very short half-life; they often reach the end of their usefulness when hostile action is imminent or has just begun. An aggressor starts with the initiative, and is probably targeting what he perceives (correctly or not) as a gap or weakness in your plans or procedures. Good prior planning, SOPs, and well-trained IADs can narrow those gaps, but they cannot eliminate them.

COMMANDER'S INTENT

Commander's Intent is a clear, concise, compelling, and personal expression of the result the leader wants to get from the battle and his general concept of how he will achieve it. It encourages the exercise of initiative by not tying subordinates to a plan or rigid orders which are likely to become quickly obsolete once the action starts.

Well-articulated commander's intent:

• Helps subordinates understand the larger context (the 'in order to') of their own actions.
• Guides them in the absence of orders, because the pace of the action or the lack of reliable communications may prevent the commander from issuing new orders.
• Allows subordinates to exercise judgment and initiative – to depart from the original plan when the unforeseen occurs – in a way consistent with the commander's aim.
• Communicates trust and confidence.
• Enables effective decentralized decision-making

• PURPOSE: This is often a restatement of the overall mission or a defined task which contributes to the mission. It tells "Why" and often starts with the key phrase "In order to" (sometimes abbreviated IOT). It should use clear action verbs, such as cause, allow, create, deny, enable, prevent, protect, or support.
• METHOD: Without getting into too much prescriptive detail, this should indicate the decisive or main effort, indicate shaping or supporting actions, and briefly address known or anticipated risk, and anticipated enemy actions.
• END STATE: This is a picture of the future, describing the conditions that will satisfy the Purpose.

Implicit Command, like Commander's Intent, is based in the realization that a leader cannot always be present or in communications, with complete and up to date situational awareness, able to modify his orders or issue new ones as the situation evolves. Implicit Command works when, in the absence of orders, subordinates act in accordance with the commander's intent. They do what the commander would likely direct, if he were able, and if he had the information they have.

Implicit Communications allow individuals or teams to act in a coordinated, mutually supporting manner without direct communication vertically (between commanders and subordinates) or laterally (between peers). Implicit communications occur between peers – neither of which has command authority over the other – based on group situation awareness (see below). Operators who have trained in the same "school" of tactical thinking, and have worked together in training and/or real-world operations, will develop confidence in how each other will react to a given situation. A team leader sees the situation facing another team and can confidently predict what its next action will be – or interpret it correctly when he sees it begin. He can then either support or exploit it, without needing to confer, coordinate directly, or wait for orders.

Communications are often thought of in terms of technology, and that begs the question of how off-normal will conditions be when the need for community defense arises. Under normal conditions, landline telephones, cellular phones, and the internet may provide adequate, efficient and redundant communications in many areas. But if the electric grid is compromised; telephone circuits overloaded or their cables severed or disabled; cable, satellite, and/or wireless internet service providers offline due to economic chaos, natural disaster, or hostile action; cellular networks are overloaded with emergency traffic (a common occurrence) or disabled by power loss, solar flares, or electromagnetic pulse, then other means will be required.

So long as the electric grid is functioning or you have another means of charging batteries, readily available handheld two-way radios in the FRS or GMRS bands, or more specialized and expensive VHF handhelds and compatible base stations can be very useful over the distances usually encountered in a community defense scenario. Their range, signal quality, and coverage will vary with the natural and manmade terrain and atmospheric conditions; all VHF radios require a clear line of sight between sender and receiver. Citizens' Band, amateur, and UHF radios offer additional options, as do satellite phones. Boosters and repeaters can extend the range of many systems, with of course greater power demands, complexity, and maintenance requirements.

Encryption is an option with some systems, but it generally increases power requirements, shortens battery life, and decreases range, and the risk of your communications being monitored and exploited by an adversary is sometimes overestimated. A good rule to remember is that the positive effects of plain English transmitted in the clear and fully understood by friendlies usually outweighs the potential negatives of an adversary successfully intercepting and interpreting your transmissions and putting them to use against you. This applies mostly to tactical operations; over the long run, adversaries with sufficient organization and forethought might monitor your communications to gather intelligence and identify your routines and response habits. COMSEC – Communications Security – should be a concern in your everyday operations. If encryption, frequency jumping, or other technical measures are not available, simple verbal brevity codes – well understood by all users – up to daily or one-time code pads provide a low-tech alternative to encrypted communications if you feel the need.

You cannot transmit on public safety frequencies without authorization (at least in normal times), but scanners will allow you to monitor traffic for purposes of situational awareness.

Redundancy is the key to effective communications in a crisis, as indicated by the acronym PACE, which stands for Primary, Alternate, Contingency, and Emergency means of communication, which are utilized (or resorted to) in that order. A communications plan at any level should identify each element of PACE and ensure it is available and understood by all parties. As an example, neighborhood watch patrols might use the following PACE plan for communications to their operations center and to each other: Primary = cellular phone; Alternate = GMRS radio (assuming that all parties will continuously monitor continuously a specified frequency and code setting); Contingency = land line or cellular phone from the nearest networked home or business; Emergency = audible siren, whistle, or alarm to alert the immediate neighborhood of trouble.