MISSION COMMANDER Swedish Experiences of Command in the Expeditonary Era preface • 1 2 • mission commander Mission Commander Swedish Experiences of Command in the Expeditionary Era Lotta Victor Tillberg & Peter Tillberg preface • 3 This book is a result of research on military professionalism conducted within the framework of the Swedish Armed Forces Research and Technical Development Programme. Mission Commander – Swedish Experiences of Command in the Expeditionary Era by Lotta Victor Tillberg & Peter Tillberg First published in Swedish 2011 by Centre for Studies of Armed Forces and Society (Centrum för Studier av Militär och Samhälle, CSMS ) Copyright © 2013 the authors Cover image: Peter Bihl Translation: Simon Moore, Academic Editing & Translation Services Design: Ola Norén, Luleå Grafiska AB Printer: Bookwell Oy, Finland, 2013 THE SWEDISH ASSOCIATION FOR ISBN: 978-91-86837-49-5 MILITARY HISTORY 4 • mission commander Mission Commander Preface .............................................................................................7 Things Never Turn Out as Expected Preface to the English Version Hans Ilis-Alm .......................................................................... 115 Allan Janik .................................................................................9 You Will Have to Take Full Responsibility How This Book Should Be Read ........................................ 12 Jan-Gunnar Isberg ................................................................ 139 When Your Judgement Is Tested........................................ 15 Difficult to Prepare Correctly Unpredictable Situations .................................................. 15 Olof Granander ...................................................................... 167 Uncertain Circumstances ................................................. 18 Gaining Experience from the Examples of Others ... 197 In Contradictory Contexts .............................................. 19 An Example from the First Gulf War ........................ 198 Phases in Developing Professional Skill ......................... 23 Knowledge of Familiarity ............................................... 202 The Different Forms of Knowledge .............................. 25 Problems with Follow-up Methods ............................ 203 The Path to Military Professionalism .......................... 26 Why We Need Examples ................................................ 205 How Previous Experience Plays a Role ....................... 28 Using an Example-Based Method ............................... 208 ‘It must be second nature’ ................................................. 30 Prowess, Courage and Disposable Shoe Covers Maciej Zaremba...................................................................... 213 Giving Up Was Never on the Cards Hans Håkansson ...................................................................... 37 Afterword: ’Perhaps it’s too early, but tomorrow it will be too late’ ....................................... 219 You Only Get One Bit of the Puzzle at a Time Anders Brännström ................................................................ 53 Literature ................................................................................... 221 You Solve the Task Notes on Authors, CSMS .................................................... 223 Ulf Henricsson .......................................................................... 75 Photographs and Pictures in the Book .......................... 224 It Must Be Second Nature Acknowledgements ............................................................... 224 Mats Ström ................................................................................. 89 preface • 5 6 • mission commander Preface In this book, seven Swedish military commanders have been interviewed about their experiences of challenging situations whilst serving overseas. They have been invited to describe ‘a situation in which you feel that your professional skills have been tested to the extreme’. This question is derived from one of the basic assumptions in the book, namely that real professional skills manifest themselves in action and can best be understood using concrete examples. (In contrast to hypothetical scenarios and theories that are not connected to mili- tary professional practice.) The aim is to examine how Swedish military com- manders ‘are tested’ whilst serving overseas. This is done by providing concrete examples of situations: How do military commanders at an operational and a military-strategic level describe the missions they have been commissioned to carry out? How do they choose to talk about problems they have been confron- ted with? And how do they describe what methods they have used and how they have arrived at the decisions they have taken? The purpose of this book is to describe how imponderable and tricky situa- tions might manifest themselves in international military missions and what kind of knowledge is required to execute them. My sincere thanks go here to those who have participated in the book and have shared their personal experiences: Hans Ilis-Alm, Anders Brännström, Olof Granander, Ulf Henricsson, Hans Håkansson, Jan-Gunnar Isberg and Mats Ström. I would also like to thank the soldiers and officers who have contri- buted to the book with pictures from the various missions. Lotta Victor Tillberg September 2013 preface • 7 8 • mission commander Preface to the English Version Allan Janik This volume continues a series of distinctively Swedish studies on the nature of military leadership in international operations initiated in 2007 with the pub- lication of Mission Abroad edited by Peter Tillberg, Joakim Svartheden, Danuta Janina Engstedt. The premises of these studies is that the challenge of keeping the peace internationally has become dramatically different since the end of World War II as the nature of armed conflict has radically changed. As long as war was a matter of massed armies confronting each other in pitched battle, peace-keeping was a matter of preventing direct confrontations by interposing neutral troops between the armies of the conflicting nations rather in the way that a referee separates two fighters in a boxing match. Since the end of World War II, almost everything in this picture has become passé. War has gone from being a extension of political conflict by other means, as Clausewitz described industrialized war between nations states, to an extension of cultural conflict on the basis of violence in war amongst the people, as General Sir Rupert Smith has described that difference. One particularly dramatic aspect of this transformation bears upon leader- ship. Previously military leadership was hierarchical as befits the structure of large-scale industrial enterprises. However, in situations in which humanitarian missions, peace-keeping and combat can merge imperceptibly before our very eyes the leadership function is shared (to be sure, in quite different ways) by co- lonels and corporals alike, as General Krulak has emphasized. Leadership has become increasingly a matter of discerning what the crucial elements of a tense situation are and responding to that situation fittingly, be it by assisting civilians in need, by mediating between conflicting parties or by engaging hostile irre- gulars. Distinguishing between these overtly similar but in fact drastically dif- ferent situations in a split-second under extreme duress is the order of the day. preface • 9 Thus the practical knowledge of soldiers has become increasingly recognized as the essential component in leadership. The challenge to military education is to map this knowledge in such a way that the split-second decision is recaptured in such that it can become useful for preparing young officers for efficient duty. This is where the distinctively Swedish element in this book enters into the picture. Swedish studies of working life have come increasingly to focus upon the epistemology as well as the sociology of professional experience. Over the past thirty five years Swedish researchers such as Ingela Josefson and Bo Gö- ranzon have pioneered research based upon the idea that qualified work has to be understood as based upon the application of formal knowledge in work situations. However, this turns out to be anything but a simple matter subject to a simply technocratic solution. Professional experience, be it in medicine or information technology, is not simply a matter of using pre-existing models or theories to solve clearly defined problems. Rather, it involves forming judg- ments about the meaning of models and formalisms in the myriad of activities involved in grasping the precise nature of an elusive problem at hand and the- refore forming a complex prelude to determining how we might go about sol- ving it. Thus a hermeneutic conception of the “application” of knowledge as the interpretation of complex, riddle-like situations has come to displace the wi- despread superficial idea that “applying” knowledge is something like putting a band aid on a cut. As Major General Anders Brännström makes the point with respect to the knowledge characteristic of military experience succinctly in this volume: “If we are talking about military professionalism and making decisions, then we can compare it to a puzzle with hundreds of different pieces. Only when all the hundreds of pieces have been put together will you be able to say that you know what it looks like. However, as commander you can never wait until you