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Comment by 33W | Hacker News Reader

I believe in Dan Carlin's recent Hardcore History, The Destroyer of Worlds* he talks about the changes in military commands and micromanagement that have occurred with advances in telecommunications.

He compared the discretion given to commanders in the American West vs. Civil War battlefields. The more realtime the communications, the more that higher commands interjected in lower level decisions.

With advances in telecommunications, we shift decision-making up the chain of command, leaving subordinates to manage inspections and admin-weenieness.

*I can't find a transcript to verify, and as much as I'd like to re-listen to the 6 hour episode, I just can't at the moment.

It also could have a Harvard Business Review episode, after reading this: http://www.leadingageoregon.org/assets/docs/Other-resources/...

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In the Battle of France in WW2 some German commanders (pretty sure it was either Rommel or Guderian) would regularly have radio "problems" isolating them from their HQs when they found tactical opportunities they wanted to exploit.

Supposedly the British Commandos were in part formed so that the generals could get Churchill off their back.

This while over at the German side Hitler would increasingly micromanage as the war dragged on.

You could make the argument that WW2 would have turned out very differently if Hitler hadn't been allowed to meddle with operations on the eastern front (e.g. calling a position "fortified" and forbidding retreat, which led to horrific casualties and usually ended up with the generals disobeying orders and retreating anyway, so the result was often the worst of both outcomes). Germany was broken by Stalin and Hitler before the Allies even hit the beaches.

This is a problem which is commen in the US-Military. As I know a dozen Soldiers - mainly Army - of the Bundeswehr, they all recall their trainings against US-Army units stationed in Germany. They all said: "Take out the higher ranking officers, then they are done." Even though the German Units were completely inferior in the main strength of the US, their superior quality material-based approach, they mostly managed to rip them to shreds with a high degree of flexibility. Practice in the Bundeswehr is to tell Officers, Nomcoms and Enlisted only "What to Achieve" and "Why to Achieve it", not "How to achieve it", allowing for higher initiative, less micromanagement and greater flexibility. What every US-Officer most feared were the Hit-and-Run tactics of German "Wiesel"-Vehicles, something the armored platoons were completely unable to counter. Or, as one US-Officer at a beer-fueled post-post-debriefing said: "We may have the better Material, but you have the better Soldiers"

I don't remember this from the "Destroyer of worlds", but hey, 6 hours, it might have been there somewhere and I just missed it.

BTW - it's not the recent one anymore, there's a new one. Yay!

The new one ("Celtic Holocaust") is about the Roman conquest of the Celtic people. Definitely worth a listen if you're into history/Carlin podcasts.

Personally I'm hoping for a "Common Sense" podcast by him sometime soon !

I saw that when I looked for a transcript (a recent, not the recent I guess). I'm two months behind in my podcast feed, so I'll catch up to the next one eventually!

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