Ulysses S. Grant, Command and Control, and the Multi-Domain Battlespace of the Future
Jim Greer | November 30, 2018
The Art of War is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and then move on.
— General Ulysses S. Grant
With the perspective of more than one hundred years of history, U.S. Grant was much more than the commanding general of the US Army at the end of the Civil War and later president of the United States. Those who have read his memoirs know that he deeply understood the nature of war and the ability, as the quote above shows, to distill the essence of warfare into simple plans and orders. Through his use of distributed operations, theater-wide logistics, and what today we call “mission command,†he is considered to be the American military’s first operational artist. Importantly, throughout the Civil War, Grant also maximized the cooperation of the Army and the Navy at tactical, operational, and strategic levels, most notably during the Vicksburg campaign and the campaigns of 1864. Of the former, he noted, “the cooperation of the Navy was absolutely essential to the success (even to the contemplation) of such an exercise.†That cooperation between the land and sea domains was so important to him that as the theater-level commander at Vicksburg, he had himself rowed out to Rear Adm. David Dixon Porter’s flagship in the Mississippi for coordination.
https://mwi.usma.edu/ulysses-s-grant-command-control-multi-domain-battlespace-future/
