Organizational Forms in Military Command

Military command does not take organizational form as a single chain of command descending from one person. In practice it relies on recurring organizational forms such as the headquarters staff, the command post, functional and integrating cells, and time-structured coordination such as battle rhythm [@reeves2018; @adaptordie2020].

Headquarters staff

The first form is the staff. Staffs are not only aides to a commander. They are the apparatus that turns reports into options, orders, and assessments.

Command posts

The second form is the command post. Army writing on command-post survivability and modernization is useful because it treats the command post as an operational form that has to be made smaller, more mobile, and harder to target [@adaptordie2020; @cpmodernize2021].

Functional and integrating cells

The third form is the use of functional and integrating cells. Reeves’s discussion is useful because it shows how a headquarters divides work by specialty while still forcing collaboration across specialties [reeves2018].

Time-structured coordination

The fourth form is time-structured coordination. Headquarters do not only organize people; they organize time. Battle rhythm, running estimates, boards, and working groups are forms through which a headquarters turns continuous change into recurrent moments of review and decision.

Military Review’s discussion of Warfighter 23-04 is useful here because it shows the pressure to move from a static battle rhythm to a faster “rhythm of the battle” [datacentricity2023].

Sources

• Functional and Integrating Cells within Sustainment Brigade Staffs
• Adapt or Die: Command Posts - Surviving the Future Fight
• U.S. Army aims to modernize traditional command post structure
• Data Centricity and the 1st Cavalry Division’s Speed of Relevance during Warfighter 23-04