Søren Sjøgren

With the 2022 update to NATO’s AJP-01 Allied Joint Doctrine, mission command was elevated from an important component of a joint command philosophy to the alliance’s overarching command philosophy – a shift in written doctrine raising concerns about its practical application across the multinational force. This study explores the gap between written doctrine and operational practice, highlighting the complexities of implementing mission command within NATO’s diverse military landscape. Through 33 interviews with NATO senior leaders, the analysis highlights challenges in achieving human interoperability in a multinational environment. We show that NATO commanders lack some of the mechanisms held in the literature to be efficient means to ensure its implementation in national settings. Ultimately, while the doctrinal emphasis on mission command is a positive step, its successful implementation requires operational commanders across the NATO command structure ensure that doctrine is read and discussed, and that training activities designed to facilitate prudent risk-taking are arranged. Finally, we call for a focus on the use of simple language to promote mutual understanding. These steps might aid the transition from paper to practice, and enhance human interoperability.

This article concerns organisational decision-making in a multinational military NATO headquarters. Despite widespread criticism of its mechanistic and bureaucratic tendencies, empirical research on the daily practices of military planning remains surprisingly scarce. Drawing on fieldwork in an operational NATO headquarters and interviews with commanders and staff officers, this article utilises an assemblage framework to unravel the construction of order. Within the military headquarters, war is generally imagined as a managerial problem – a rational, procedural endeavour of aligning means and ways to achieve military ends. The article shows how standardisation efforts designed to increase interoperability can paradoxically relegate staff officers to the status of cogs in the war machine focused on processing (“feeding the beast”) rather than inspiring creative or innovative thinking. This approach risks alienating segments of the multinational staff when imposed standards diverge from contemporary NATO doctrine. Since professional military education is the domestic responsibility of member nations, NATO commanders cannot assume a uniform understanding of doctrine and planning; individual headquarters must therefore bridge this gap if staff officers are not to be left with the inescapable obligation to adhere to procedures.

Evnen til at studere militære operationer på en systematisk og kritisk måde er en central kompetence for enhver officer. Alligevel har det på Forsvarsakademiet (FAK) vist sig svært at overbevise vores studerende på både diplom- og masterniveau om at skrive deres afsluttende projekter om netop dette. 

Under overskriften the science of military operations søsatte vi i 2022 et projekt for systematisk at undersøge, hvordan vores studerende på FAK har grebet sådanne analyser an. Vi anmodede officersskolerne og studiekontoret om samtlige projekter og censorrapporter siden akkrediteringen i 2014 for at undersøge de gode eksempler og lære. På baggrund af disse 659 afgangsprojekter spørger vi: Hvad kendetegner en god analyse af militære operationer?

Artiklen ligger åbent her: https://krigsvidenskab.dk/emne/den-nodvendige-taenkning-hvad-kendetegner-en-god-analyse-af-militaere-operationer-i-afgangsprojekter-pa-forsvarsakademiets-uddan

Collecting data and working with classified information in restricted military settings can present significant research challenges. Academic ideals of transparency and openness clash with the military’s need for secrecy and closedness. This article engages with existing literature on security requirements and research ethics in discussing practical challenges researchers face in military research. Even though military security requirements and principles of research ethics are often perceived as opposites, they also share characteristics: both realms are context-driven, nonobjective, and require professional judgment to assess. Through a four-part analysis corresponding to different steps in a research process, the authors develop a practice-oriented guide for researchers accessing and working with classified information in discussing mundane examples of how “insiders” with “privileged access” navigate between ethical research principles and security issues. The article also incites a broader debate on research governance, (self-)imposed restraints and the conditions for critical inquiry in the military domain.

What is a healthy aff-commander relationship, and how do commanders understand the command function? This article is an abridged and adapted version of the research article "What Military Commanders Do and How They Do It" (available via the QR code). It is based on my interviews with 33 former and current NATO commanders and senior staff officers.

We can sum up their key perspectives as follows:

• Commanders support a conservative or doctrinal definition of command as well as clear divisions of labour, authority and responsibility.
• Commanders make key decisions in the planning process based on professional judgement, discretion and intuition.
• Commanders find value in structured decision-making processes but recognize that these tend to produce predictable solutions.

This article discusses concepts to explore decision-making processes in a military headquarters. Military planning is commonly perceived as a systematic and structured approach to organising ways and means to achieve military ends. While standardised procedures and decision-making tools are crucial for large military organisations to function efficiently, these devices are not neutral. Routines within the staff organisation carry implicit beliefs shaping the perception of war as a managerial problem with an optimal solution that can be elicited through a process and presented in a bulleted list. By examining organisational outcomes as socio-material assemblages, this article sheds light on how daily routines influence potential solutions and shape what can and cannot be thought. Conventional approaches in organisational studies have either overlooked the role of organisational tools or studied them as a matter of technology adoption. The entanglement of the social and material in organisational life should be observed and described empirically to understand how order is reconstructed after it has broken down. 

Conventional wisdom holds that war has an enduring nature; its character change. This chapter offers a different way to conceptualise war by introducing the war assemblage. This will allow one to grasp how phenomena exist on a continuum between stability and change, which, we argue, aligns with Clausewitz. The aim is to bridge an ontological gap between new war and empirically minded scholars and military practitioners and classic approaches to civil-military relations. The military profession and its political masters need stable categories and boundaries. However, classifications are not reflections of an enduring nature. They are arrangements open for change.