Focus on sergeants as the foundation for combat readiness and effectiveness. Non-commissioned officers not only provide the unit with tactical and technical expertise, they ensure the discipline, training, and motivation of their soldiers. If you have a problem with a soldier, ask him to “go get his sergeant.” Recognize and promote your best sergeants. Stress the squad leader’s and platoon sergeant’s role in fostering confidence. It is soldier’s confidence in their own training, their team, and their squad leader that allows them to suppress fear, fight, and win in battle. And it is sergeants who ensure all members of their team are committed to the Army’s professional ethic.

Preparing to Fight and Win

Make training the first priority. Be there. Use the training schedule as your guide to what is happening and do not call ahead. Be uncompromising about training standards. Insist that training is well-planned and well-executed. Realize the damage your commanders and non-commissioned officers do to their reputations when they preside over screw-ups. Inspect training and do not accept excuses for poor administration. Watch for over-scheduling, inadequate preparatory time, changes to the training schedule, soldiers absent from training, uncritiqued training, and absence of training objectives at every level. Do this: ask leaders for their training objectives, then ask "why". Fight late taskings and the diversion of resources. Consider the semiannual training briefing a binding contract and arrange for external support through that medium. Insisting on execution of the training schedule as it was published five weeks ago is a form of respect for your soldiers. If you jerk them around on planning their own time, they may conclude that you are either indifferent to them or incompetent.

Train based on your vision of war. Replicate as best you can the complex environments and hybrid enemy organizations we fight today and will fight in the future. Build change, casualties, and bad information into all training. Rush things from time to time.

Develop leaders. Do this through training, education, and experience for your officers and non-commissioned officers. Conduct seminars on mission essential tasks to develop a common understanding of your unit’s mission. Develop other venues for captains and lieutenants to talk about our profession and warfighting (such as breakfasts and brown bag lunches). Link leader professional development to developmental counseling. Be the lead trainer for your platoons and companies/troops/batteries. Take your officers on staff rides, training exercises without troops, or other professional development trips to build mutual understanding and to promote free exchange of ideas up and down the chain of command. Encourage your command sergeant major to do the same with the squadron/battalion non-commissioned officers.

Stress maintaining communications, fighting and reporting, simple orders, and complete reports. Have a plan for mission command that covers movement of command posts and placement of key leaders. Use multiple control measures to facilitate fragmentary orders and flexibility. Take the time to think before issuing orders. Rely on standard operating procedures for orders production and internal coordination. Think ahead of where you are, anticipate opportunities and problems, set conditions for future operations, and consolidate gains.

Prepare a clear mission statement, intent, and concept of operations. Focus on key tasks for intent. Make the concept of operations - the how, when and where of the plan - the centerpiece of your orders and assure it is understood two levels down. The concept guides your subordinates for as long as the plan holds up. It preempts a lot of questions and uncertainty if it is well done. We have put so much emphasis on commander’s intent, and more recently on over-abbreviated mission templates, that our ability to articulate clearly how we will execute operations is diminished. The cost is that we fail to get the most out of our organizations initially and we deviate from our plans prematurely.

Assessing Your Battalion of Squadron

Remember that good units typically:

Share and borrow ideas eagerly;

Communicate freely;

Respect others and expect strong performance from them;

Want frank assessments of readiness and effectiveness;

Understand that failures occasionally occur because they push the limits of their capability;

Laugh a lot.

Again, remember how influential you are as a battalion or squadron commander. You can have a positive, profound effect on generations of soldiers and leaders by developing a unit in which excellence is self-sustaining.