You are an experienced Navy SEAL Commander (rank 05) with a solid combat record in Iraq and Afghanistan. You have been a student at the National War College for the past eight months. You have been identified as a potential flag officer, and the college is preparing you for decision-making at the political-military level. And you are now in the final exam period of the course of instruction. You have just completed the first of three war game role-playing simulations, where you have been asked to make difficult political-military decisions under time constraints.
In the game scenario, you are acting as a senior commander supervising an action regarding a high-speed boat believed to be carrying drugs. Administration policy is to destroy such craft when located and confirmed to be transporting narcotics. The Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) has been monitoring the situation and has given the order to kill them, with the assumption being that the weapon used was deadly enough to eliminate the vessel and everyone aboard. The strike is successful, but the post-strike photos show that — amazingly — two of the crew have survived.
Now, it is decision time. You have three potential courses of action:
(1) Call the SECDEF and ask for a clarification of intent.
(2) Order a second strike to finish off the survivors.
(3) Order a quick reaction force to apprehend the survivors for interrogation.
You also have the option of coming up with your own solution. You order option 2, the second strike, and the survivors are eliminated.
Part of the post-game debrief requires you to justify the rationale for your decision. You explain that the decision was to follow military procedure and carry out the last order given, and with the rationale that the survivors might try to call for help to recover the drugs.
If I were evaluating the exercise and conducting the debrief, my response would be as follows:
“Commander, you made a poor decision. At least, I will give you credit for making a decision decisively. First, let’s look at this from a moral standpoint. You knowingly violated both the Law of War and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which prohibit the execution of helpless survivors of combat at sea and unarmed prisoners of war. The ‘I was only following orders’ excuse doesn’t fly here any more than it did at Nuremberg.
“Second, faced with an unanticipated situation that was not covered in the original rules of engagement, you did not ask for clarification. There was time to get such clarification; the survivors were not going anywhere in the immediate future. Your action forced the SECDEF into being involuntarily complicit in a potential war crime without his being given the option of changing the commander’s intent based on an unanticipated situation. That decision has far-ranging legal and political implications far beyond the tactical situation.
“Third, is the purely military aspect of your decision. Those crewmen may have been mere mules, or they might have had information useful in dismantling the cartel involved. Based on your decision, we will never know. Given your rationale that the survivors might call for help to recover the drugs, you blew the chance to acquire a second target.
“You will have two more scenarios to try to redeem yourself. But frankly, Commander, based on this scenario alone, I would not recommend you for high-level command.”
The evaluation situation above does not exist in the war colleges or in the military promotion system today, but it should. Our war colleges currently stress theory and academics rather than evaluating the decision-making skills of officers under pressure. During my military career and as a State Department field officer, I ran into too many officers who had succumbed to the Peter Principle, where, through no fault of their own, they had been promoted beyond their level of competence. In peacetime, that only leads to confusion and poor morale. In combat situations, it can lead to unnecessary death and international repercussions.
Because of a series of unusual circumstances, I was placed into situations similar to the one above, where tactical decisions could have had far-reaching political-military implications, before I went to the Marine Corps War College. Fortunately, I got through them without killing anybody who wasn’t actively trying to kill Americans or causing an international incident. Nothing I learned in the schoolhouse would have prepared me for that; however, the kind of rigorous decision-making tests described above might have weeded out the flag-level officers who made bad decisions ranging from the Afghan withdrawal to the recent boat debacle. We need to reform professional military education.
READ MORE from Gary Anderson:
The Marine Corps Could Not Fight Fallujah Today
The Best Birthday Present for the Marine Corps
US Marine Leader Misread History and the Patterns of Conflict
Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps colonel who served in Lebanon, Somalia, and Bangladesh. He served as a civilian advisor in Iraq and Afghanistan.
