Initiative and Obedience

The Art of Command (Part I)

Richard Knötel Gneisenau at Ligny

Recently, while looking for something else, I ran across a translation, made by the British War Office, of an article that appeared, in 1907, in the pages of a German military magazine. Called ‘The Art of Command’, the piece dealt with two subjects dear to my heart - the tradition of mission command and the applicatory method of studying tactics. I therefore decided to make a fresh translation for the readers of The Tactical Notebook.

The author of ‘The Art of Command’ came into this world in1853. Seventeen years later, Clemens Spohn found himself fighting on the battlefields of France. In the years that followed, he followed the customary path of a Prussian infantry officer of the late nineteenth century, dividing his time between the training of recruits and the exploration of the (already enormous) German-language literature on military matters.

Soon after the start of the twentieth century, Spohn began to add to that literature, reviewing books for military magazines, revising guides to military examinations, updating handbooks for the conduct of honor courts, and writing articles on the place of military institutions in German society.

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Is the giving of orders an art? Many will doubt it. They feel that nothing could be easier than to command. Yet anyone who thinks that way ignores some stubborn truths. Only the man who has learned to obey is fit to give orders. An order is justified only when the situation makes it absolutely necessary. It is tolerable only when neither its manner or its form make things worse.

Every order places limits on the subordinate. He accepts those limits willingly when he sees the necessity for them. In such a case, obedience does not degrade him. Rather, it becomes the free gift of a free man. But he submits only grudgingly when the order springs merely from a fondness for being in charge or a desire to display one’s own power.

The desire to dominate leads straight toward tyranny and provokes disobedience. Rather than promoting discipline, it undermines it. We can see that in the army a thousand times over. Some superiors can make reluctant men obey them willingly. Others, by contrast, provoke defiance in otherwise obedient men.