Mission command and its structure
The Army of the USA is land forces (troops) designed to conduct combat operations on land, organizationally separated from the Navy and the Air Force, Marine Corps, transport corps, National Guard, Coast Guard, military police. It is the mission of army to train, organize and equip forces conducting prompt and sustain land operations. To accomplish this mission, it needs mission command.
Under the conditions of reforming the system of a mission command structure in the country, when the regulatory, organizational, economic and social foundations of the commanders and leaders have changed significantly, the practice of decision making approach does not fully comply with the principles of socially-oriented leaders at all levels of a critical thinking and creative thinking.
It is assumed that this contradiction can be resolved by optimizing the organizational intuitive structure skills of the subject and object of mission command, identifying and taking into account contradictions and the main factors determining the effectiveness of the professional army structure and designing a socially-oriented mission command structure and its analytic decisionmaking and intuitive decisionmaking technology, built with the goals, objectives, the functions, and principles of commanders and leaders management, the charter of the army and the requirements of leaders at all levels.
Mission command is the structure that enables commanders to exercise authority and direction. It is built on leaders at all levels including commanders and leaders responsible for decision making, critical thinking, and creative thinking. Its structure is diverse, intuitive, analytic and requires many army skills. Commanders and leaders of mission command are responsible for analytic decisionmaking and intuitive decisionmaking.
The importance of decision making for commanders and leaders
Thus, the relevance of the mission command is determined by:
- сhanges in the political and socio-economic situation in the country, the emergence of market relations, critical thinking, and creative thinking that require the availability of competent professional managers in the field of physical culture, mission command, decision making, analytic decisionmaking, intuitive decisionmaking, and sports;
- the introduction of new legislation regulating the activities of professional club teams in the system of a mission command structure;
- increased competition in decision-making approach, which requires the adoption of mature management decisions on personnel management, material and financial support of the training process of leaders at all levels;
- insufficient level of professional competence of commanders and leaders of individual units of the mission command structure for functioning in the conditions of analytic decisionmaking andintuitive decisionmaking.
- insufficient knowledge of the mission command problem.
- the developments of intuitive skills, critical and creative thinking, skills of operating adrp have become paramount to the military.
Critical thinking as an integral component of a mission command structure.
In the decision-making process, critical thinking is defined as intelligent, intuitive, reflexive, analytic thinking aimed at deciding whom to trust and what to do. There is one more detailed definition. Critical thinking is an intellectually ordered process of active and skillful analysis of commanders and leaders, conceptualization, application, synthesis and/or evaluation of information obtained or generated observation, experience, skills, reflection or communication, as a guide for persuasion and action. The common thing in those definitions is the ability to evaluate the information received, the ability to apply decision making. It is one of the integral components of a decision-making approach.
The ability to critical thinking should not be raised to an absolute since in this case, it is reborn into hyper-criticism — a position in which any new knowledge is wrong because it contradicts “the facts that have already been established by commanders and leaders.”
Another facet of critical thinking is gullibility of commanders and leaders. New knowledge is very interesting, it refutes dogmas, and therefore is reliable and analytic. It can be noted that hypercriticism and gullibility converge with each other, because the one who sweeps aside everything new, surprisingly easily perceives everything that corresponds to the intuitive “tunnel of reality.” But for commanders and leaders of the army, critical thinking is very important if we want to understand what is happening in mission command structure (or at least come close to an understanding of this).
The role of creative thinking in the mission command structure.
Creative thinking plays just as important role as critical thinking in decision-making approach. Thinking is considered a multifactorial structure, an integrative component of human intelligence. Depending on the levels of generalization of information, the means used for this, the novelty of the results obtained, the degree of intellectual activity, scientists distinguish several types and ways of thinking, one of which is creative thinking which is very important in a mission command structure.
The essence of creative thinking of commanders and leaders in the army can be disclosed because of such features: originality and unusual expression of ideas, the desire for intellectual and intuitive novelty in solving the problem, the ability to apply the object (the possibility of its use) under a new angle and produce analytic ideas in an uncertain situation (that is, in the absence of prerequisites for the formation of new ideas in analytic decisionmaking and intuitive decisionmaking). Due to these properties, the prognostic-transformative function of intelligence is realized, the creative activity of the person is carried out in various spheres of its professional and non-professional skills.
Not all researches share the idea of the dominant role of innate abilities in the creative self-expression of the individual in the army. According to the research, an ordinary person differs from the well-known personalities not in the lack of creative possibilities but in the ability to identify, support, apply and implement them. Therefore, the question of creating favorable conditions for the disclosure of the creative potential of each person and, in particular, in the process of postgraduate education is legitimate.
Creative thinking in the process of decision making depends on the subjective qualities of the individual, which are creative imagination, which makes it a necessary condition for professional creativity, the development of intelligence, which induces a person to reasoning, streamlining knowledge, finding and argumenting his or her own solution to the existing (possible) production of the problem, openness to new knowledge (cognitive openness) as a specialist’s attitude to new information, experience, ease in the perception of new ideas, professional outlook, which determines the ability to self-reflection of professional knowledge, activity, rationalization or offer of original ideas, etc.
Although these qualities are formed throughout the professional life of commanders and leaders, their development can be done purposefully, with the help of new technologies of training in the system of advanced training.
Adrp, analytic and intuitive decision making
Leaders at all levels of decision making need to apply for analytic thinking. Analytical decision making is assigned to modeling a problem situation in an analytic and logical area: formulas, tables, graphs, legislative acts and instructions in mission command. That information can be used by commanders and leaders to select an intuitive option and develop rules and instructions for its development. The basis of the decision making is a situation that can be described by formalized documentation, which reflects the real state of things in mission command.
Another important component for commanders and leaders in the army is adrp. Under the adrp, we understand army design router program. Adrp shows that in the course of decision making, commanders and leaders have the first phase of long and laborious accumulation of information, which includes numerous attempts to solve the problem consciously. The second stage of the adrp is the stage of ripening (incubation). A distinctive feature of this stage is the external absence of visible progress in solving the problem by commanders and leaders. Then the illumination of adrp should be a stage of verification of the correctness of the decision.
Leaders at all stages of decision making apply choice, taking into account the interests of each side. In any managerial situation, there are many different analytic and intuitive solutions that satisfy different sides of leaders at all. In the case of partial refusal of one of the commanders and leaders from their interests, a compromise solution is made only if the agreement on the disputable matter is reached. When the opponents apply decisions without skills of adrp, critical thinking as well as creative thinking, then we observe the appearance of conflicting decisions with a risk of open confrontation. To avoid this, leaders at all world apply decisions based on The Professional Military Education.
