Junior Officers Demonstrate Troubling Command Failures
Maj. David Spangenberg
Chief Warrant Officer 3 Brendan Dawson
Thursday, August 20, 2020
In the early 1950s, the Army created Special Forces units, which were dedicated to conducting unconventional warfare. To stay prepared for this complex mission, Special Forces Operational Detachment A trains and plans for unconventional warfare using the Army’s Military Decision Making Process.
Embracing the task to conduct training events focused on validating units in fundamental skills, our battalion, which we are not naming here, held a Military Decision Making Process training exercise. This event required each Special Forces A-Team, as a detachment is known, to plan an unconventional warfare mission in a designated European country against a peer threat.
The intent was primarily to externally evaluate each detachment’s capability to isolate and plan an unconventional warfare mission. While the detachments demonstrated the ability to follow the step-by-step Military Decision Making Process, as given in the Special Forces Detachment Mission Planning Guide from March 2006, we, the evaluators, identified trends that revealed critical failures in leadership and planning.
https://www.ausa.org/articles/junior-officers-demonstrate-troubling-command-failures
