Surveying the Responsibility of Command
Maj. Gen. William F. Mullen III
May 9, 2019
Anthony King, Command: The Twenty-First-Century General (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Upon receiving this book, I was very interested in reading it, having never come across a book that addressed this specific subject before. The emphasis, or lack thereof, on the divisional level of command in particular has been hit or miss over the years. In my own service, the division level is often subsumed under the Marine expeditionary force because of the way we organize, train, and fight. For any contingency, we tailor the forces that we send forward to the size required by the nature of the operation, but always try to ensure that it is a Marine air ground task force which consists of a command element, a ground combat element, an aviation combat element, and a logistics combat element. When a Marine expeditionary force is deployed, the ground combat element is a division. It is generally only when the personality of the person commanding that division is larger than life that it gets the amount of attention that it likely deserves. This was certainly the case for the 1st Marine Division under then-Maj. Gen. James Mattis for the attack into Iraq in the spring of 2003. This is also likely why it is included as one of the cases studied in Command.
https://warontherocks.com/2019/05/surveying-the-responsibility-of-command/
