During my early twenties, I had an episode of inspiration to join the British Royal Air Force. I was so enthusiastic that I set up a meeting with a seasoned officer.
After our initial discussion, he praised my enthusiasm but he politely advised me to continue studying and pursue other opportunities that life has to offer.
Of course, I was disappointed with what he was saying to me, but I took his advice.
A couple of years later, I had an opportunity to speak to a few individuals that served as army soldiers.
One person I talked at length about their military experience was an ex-prisoner who I shared accommodation with when I moved back to London after University. From what I can remember and understood from his simple Polish and my simple Russian while drinking Vodka, he punched someone in his youth causing the other person severe brain trauma and eventual death. He was deeply resentful and angry with his youthful stupidy.
You can certainly say that living in London has its perks as it brings people from all walks of life.
Stanislav, it is awful of me but I can’t remember his real name, served in Afghanistan with the Russian Army and told me of the terrors that one has to chew through to survive an assault of Talib fighters.
He told me that the Afghan fighters were relentless and no matter how many bullets or mortar shells the Russians fired at them, they kept coming back. He also mentioned that some of these people are wired in a completely different way. Few, like the Dementors in Harry Potter stories, sought nothing else than to drain the hope and the spirit of living from the Afghan community. He said that we should not make a mistake and label them as evil, they are just strictly convinced of their faith to purge others that pose a threat to their culture and existence; the same dormant trigger is ingrained at the cores of all of us, some of us just never had opportunity to be pushed enough to activate it.
He kept saying to me (not exact words but something along these lines):
"Whatever you do in life, keep studying and don't do any mistakes that will put you into a position where you have little choice but to fight all the time. Appreciate your youth and use your freedom to learn. I wasted my life but I am working hard now so my son has a better one."
Some people that are kind at heart want to change Afghanistan for the better. Tetsu Nakamura was one of them. In the western world, we are often told that good prevails, I believe, however, that people carrying too much good inside are killed too often. But I digress.
Some other time, I shared a cigarette with a homeless man who served with the British Army and had some history in Iraq and Afghanistan. He revealed that he was coming from a traveller family and joined the forces when he was sixteen. He felt that he was forgotten by the world, unappreciated for his efforts and was very bitter with his experience at the end because he was discriminated for his background, so he drowned his thoughts in drinking.
From both accounts, I learned more about the pessimistic dimension of the business of war machine. It may indeed involve dirty and ugly acts but these are often bundled with the soldier’s bag of duties. Unfortunately, some ex-servants end up struggling to recover after they exit the force.
Finally, I worked with Ben who was an ex-officer. He shed some light on the principles of war and mission command that sometimes guide the operations of the British Army. His presentation oh his experience and knowledge enhanced my understanding of the Army as a whole and I would like to take this opportunity to share these ideas with you.
I don’t like violence. I dream to see the world where we end up tackling disputes only with negotiation. Luckly, I realise that a lot more of us live in growing peace than ever before. However, the reality is we will always see conflicts that result in wars and to face them we need a set of rules. Every country has a variant set of principles, I am presenting the one that is often adopted by the United Kingdom.
1. Selection and maintenance of the aim
Setting unambiguous goals is key in the Army. Lives are at stake. Therefore sticking to the aims is vital for success.
How can we adapt this principle to daily lives? We can amplify this principle with a SMART method:
Let's imagine a simple example that I succeeded and failed in the past. I set myself to lose some weight. Is it an unambiguous goal? A bit yes, so let's rephrase with something more specific. I am going to lose 5 kg in 12 months. That is better as we can measure our goal.
What am I going to do to track and maintain reaching that goal target? I am going compile a weekly schedule that involves 30 minutes of medium intensity exercise three times a week. I will put this in a calendar so I don't lose track of my routine and be flexible to shit any training if necessary.
Do I have enough time for that and what can I drop from my weekly schedule? Be realistic, if you are doing too much you won't maintain your aim. Be prepared to push something out from your weekly schedule.
What else can I do to make it realistic? I will also abstain from low-quality food and caloric drinks.
What am I going to do if I reach that goal? Maintain my exercise regime and diet while regularly watching and measuring my weight.
When you break down your goals like that you might have a much better chance of success.
2. Maintenance of morale
Combat is a stressful enduring process and will leave some men dead. Keeping a positive mind can maintain everyone's focus and maintain the momentum towards the aim.
In daily life, when we wake up in the morning our first hour of being awake will dictate our mood for the rest of the day. When someone cuts our way when we drive to work, elbows us in the train or spams us with an unwanted sales calls, we should smile, accept responsibility to act calm and keep chopping through the day with a positive attitude and focus on our mission to deliver the tasks that we had been given rather than being irritated by something beyond our control.
If we fail to stop the propagation of toxic attitude through the society our collective morale will deplete and we will edge ourselves closer to the point where we are all against each other throats.
3. Offensive action
During a war, we don't win by letting our enemy deplete our forces. We seek to take advantage of when the opposing force makes mistakes.
During our daily encounters, we don't necessarily need to strike action in a literal sense or plan to take advantage of anyone around us. However, we can try to resist being defensive when we face situations where others will try to take exploit us. The mechanism of our social nature drives us to challenge each other all the time so we have to be ready to oppose as well as collaborate with various individuals. This way we will keep refining a better set of strategies and systems of interactions though experience.
An offensive action can also comprise the pursuit of a set of education goals or need to reach out to other similarly curious people that are willing to mentor us. It can make us involved in regular physical exercises or drive us to think of a plan with daily and weekly tasks that can help us in achieving a more advantageous position at home and work by being better informed, more organised and healthy.
Our offensive action can also be applied to the tasks we face. Rather than succumbing to the fixed mindset that makes us defensive, we can focus on the effort of action which through discomfort develops a growth mindset that will make us less likely to quit early. Of course, we need to take care to be balanced enough and not to walk a road of unpremeditated decision making.
4. Security
To achieve objectives the army requires that their base is safe for times of preparation and recuperation. The security of resources also means that everyone has more freedom of action.
When we plan our life we try to minimise our losses and risks, at least that's what I usually try to do with various level of success. We ought to live frugally and save money for the most disastrous eventualities such as losing our main source of income. When we prepare ourselves for pessimistic eventualities, this temporary security will help us to draw a better strategy. If our resources are not secure we will get punished by excessive stress and worry. That can wither our spirits and might emotionally compromise our decision actions.
Therefore we should strive to secure our resources.
5. Surprise
The strength in a surprising action might bring the enemy to its knees as a result of shock or invoked confusion.
I like to strategise to be ready for surprises in my life. This has never been easy but my approach results from a history of various interactions with other people in the past. I have never felt that I am particularly strong at reading people. Therefore, I have been trying very hard to listen to and observe everyone around me with full attention to get a sense of the shape of the surrounding emotional landscape.
I don't like gossip but when I let myself to listen to all stories I can build a clear picture of existing tensions in my environment that can serve as an early warning system. Keeping my ears open can help me with forming early decisions and make actions before any shocking news hits me directly.
6. Concentration of force
To realize intended effects, the army needs to concentrate its force indecisive and synchronised way in the right time and place.
The remarkable thing about life is that it can throw very demanding challenges at us such as unexpected projects, vocational exams, family or relationship issues, redundancies, accidents or viral outbreaks. We can have a nearly perfect daily or weekly routine that can easily be derailed through such testing events. In such cases, we might have to prioritise or reschedule our tasks and designate enough energy towards important or stressful issues that we can eliminate in the short term. We can then bounce back to our daily schedule that ensures our welfare and stability in the long term.
During difficult working days, I find it easier to start to concentrate on the most difficult or urgent tasks in the morning since my mind is still fresh and can focus. Later during the day, my mind will lose its ability to focus on detailed tasks so I try to concentrate more on administrative, creative or planning tasks for the next day.
What I often notice in myself is that I often forget that to train my mind for periods of sustained concentration on tasks I forget to allow myself to have plenty of time to recuperate.
7. Economy of effort
The economy of effort, in my mind, means how the army utilises their resources, that includes manpower, technology or time to achieve their objectives.
In our lives, we also utilise various resources such as external technology, personal time, mental or physical effort, or financial means to improve, sustain and change our livelihoods. The quantity and quality of resources that we can utilise, sustain or apply the change as we grow older, or change with the shift in our environment.
We have different characters, different drives and future goals, however, some generalisations can still apply to all of us when it comes to applying the principle of the economy of effort. Many times during our short lives we hear, "don't put all eggs in one basket", in the same way, we should always try to diversify our medium and long term efforts to develop ourselves to efficiently cope with challenging situations.
I failed several times to realise the essence of this principle. I often tried to focus on one skill or area in my life while putting other crucial departments in personal development on hold. For example, I invested obsessively in my educational pursuit and despite struggling with my pursuit I stubbornly pressed on. I missed many opportunities to socialise and grow, therefore I failed to nourish and develop stronger networks and relationships that would benefit me at later stages of my life. I realised that the knowledge is useless without a good underlying platform that it can move around, that is the people who you surround yourself with.
My other mistake was to invest too much time on a path in physical sciences subject that didn't inspire me and set me back financially to such an extent that I became homeless for a month. My choices in spending all my time on one thing became my punishment. Therefore, I concluded that I feel safer when I start to diversify my time and money efforts in several alternatives and learn to fail early rather than accumulate debt, for example, debt accrued in lack of socialising, to a point that it becomes unsustainable.
8. Flexibility
Being able to adapt to change is bread and butter for any army servant. Adaptability, acuity, responsiveness and agility are core attributes to embrace change, while resilience is required for frequent change and tense periods of patient wait.
I grew up in the countryside. During my childhood, I noticed quickly that manual labour is being rapidly replaced by technology. I vividly remember when we got our first TV. It opened a gateway of information that stretched beyond the boundary of our community and it was a fantastic feeling. Other things rolled in quickly, the way we learned relied more on being dependent on the internet. I saw certain jobs being obsolete as our usage of technology became more prevalent. So I quickly realised that if I want to survive in this changing landscape I need to be flexible. I never found it easy but I got the idea that it is inevitable.
Although we can persuade ourselves to be flexible, we will eventually hit a mental roadblock in the race of change. I am convinced that we will succumb to the emergence of intelligent technology that will gradually replace our "biological containers" that carry our intelligence with robotic composites. But that will take time so please don't panic, yet.
9. Co-operation
Cooperation is the glue binding warriors in teams. Individuals share oncoming dangers or iron out internal tensions, face risks or win opportunities.
For several years I misunderstood cooperation. My approach was mistakenly revolving around an idea of being friendly and putting pressure on myself to deliver tasks that were handed over to me was important to sustain healthy collaboration. I sometimes worked with very difficult characters that challenged me and my general strategies on dealing with other people. Eventually, I started to form an idea that it is better to tune down my personal feelings in response to emotional pressure emanating from the other side. I began eventually grew to challenge the other side on their ideas and focus on trying to establish a realistic set of common goals instead. This helped me to overcome the fear of being criticized and gave me the confidence to put my thoughts forward.
I am trying to decouple my emotions from work that I am doing, I am still spread my passion and I try spreading a convivial attitude to boost morale around me. However, when I start noticing a growing discomfort that someone tries to take advantage of my character I try to remind them of their position in hope to preserve healthy and professional boundaries that focus on the end goals rather than individual sentiments.
My personal experience has changed my understanding of cooperation and it helped me to work with people with a broad set of characters. Still, there are always a minority of people that we might never create a relationship with, so be prepared for that. For example, I have been trying to have a patient and tolerant personality but I still can't live in harmony with my disruptive neighbour who can't understand, probably due to habitual "smoking" or a certain level of arrogance, that playing loud music is making him happy during his highs but not necessary please others in his proximity. Luckily before my patience runs out my lease will expire first and I expect I will be able to move to a better neighbourhood.
10. Sustainability
To sustain the force of effort, the army must provide the means that the fighting power and freedom of action can be maintained.
When Ben shared his experience about the inner workings of his military experience, he revealed that servicemen and servicewomen are given the freedom to take responsibility for their actions while still adhering to a specific set of protocols. This means that soldiers can figure out their aims and roles depending on the circumstance of their unit. The assumed responsibility also implies that individuals are self-motivated to execute their functions.
As you probably can deduce at this point, all principles feed on each other, that is, they hierarchically cascade from the top to the bottom. For example, if you don't have a set aim, you can't maintain morale, therefore you can't take offensive action, maintain security and so on.
Mission command is a style of the instruction set that often is used by the military. I won’t go further into the details but from my notes on Ben’s talk, the mission command relies on several principles such as:
Purpose
Freedom of action
Trust
Mutual understanding
Timely decision-making
Acceptance of prudent risk
These philosophies favour and drive initiative and action that percolate up from individuals throughout the whole military division. We can often recognise them in the operations of some small to large scale businesses.
Perhaps my early military career ambition didn’t materialise, nonetheless, I still try to apply the principles during daily encounters. However, I don’t strictly adhere to them, rather I try to use them as guidelines.
So if you are like me and sometimes struggle to achieve your goals, you might find that the principles of war can help you to set up a tactical structure to move you closer to your aims. I hope you can find them useful as a framework. But remember not to beat yourself up if you fail somewhere on the way to realise your aims. That is common.
Thank you for reading.