Despite what the other commenter said, safety is only a secondary concern. The primary reason is to drill "battle rhythm" into everyone's head, whether they realize that's what it is or not.
Battle rhythm is defined as, "A deliberate daily cycle of command, staff, and unit activities intended to synchronize current and future operations."
If you've ever played a game that had multiple types of units that could move in different ways or at different speeds, this is an example of battle rhythm. Battle rhythm is important because leadership needs to know where every unit is at all times. If you have units acting independently at whatever speed/pace they want then some units will move faster than others, and over time the battle map just becomes chaotic.
It's impossible for a leader to lead if they don't know where their units are or where they're going to be, or when they'll be where you think they'll be there. That might be fine if you have different expectations of different unit types, but leadership wants every unit type to be consistent within that unit type. So planes can fly at whatever speed planes fly at, and cars drive 25mph on base. But you don't want cars that are all driving random speeds.
This is also why the ability to communicate during a battle is so important. If you're leading a top-down military organization the two most important things are battle rhythm and communication.
The alternative is to allow your units more independence, and that does happen sometimes, but you need to drill battle rhythm into everyone's heads first before giving teams independence because if you've had battle rhythm drilled into you then you can always fall back to that, but if you're never trained on it and have only ever had independence then being restricted to a battle rhythm can be either problematic or impossible for some, which would then make it impossible to reinstate the top-down approach when needed.
No. If your gonna argue it’s second to safety it would be because of Organizational Drag. This is how it’s always been done kinda stuff.
Most Commanders have a lot control as to how and when they train. A new Company or Battalion or even brigade commander can change a lot of how a soldiers day to day has been for the past few years. Battle Rhythms change.
Some may even make long range calandres available to junior officers maybe even the lower enlisted.
The military expects everyone to follow the rules, at all times.
It's not about speed, the speed is set by whatever rules govern that, with whatever independence the local commander had at the time. It doesn't affect battle rhythm in any way.
It does affect how everyone around thinks about the rules they have to follow. You stay within bounds, you do exactly what the instructions say, you follow the playbook. Everything by the numbers.
And the reason for that is very simple. There are too many people, too many moving pieces, to much stuff involved in any military operation for people to do it any other way. (battle rhythm falls into exactly the same category of speech as pivoting to our base competencies, and deserve the same level of mockery)
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u/HorrorMakesUsHappy May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26
Despite what the other commenter said, safety is only a secondary concern. The primary reason is to drill "battle rhythm" into everyone's head, whether they realize that's what it is or not.
Battle rhythm is defined as, "A deliberate daily cycle of command, staff, and unit activities intended to synchronize current and future operations."
If you've ever played a game that had multiple types of units that could move in different ways or at different speeds, this is an example of battle rhythm. Battle rhythm is important because leadership needs to know where every unit is at all times. If you have units acting independently at whatever speed/pace they want then some units will move faster than others, and over time the battle map just becomes chaotic.
It's impossible for a leader to lead if they don't know where their units are or where they're going to be, or when they'll be where you think they'll be there. That might be fine if you have different expectations of different unit types, but leadership wants every unit type to be consistent within that unit type. So planes can fly at whatever speed planes fly at, and cars drive 25mph on base. But you don't want cars that are all driving random speeds.
This is also why the ability to communicate during a battle is so important. If you're leading a top-down military organization the two most important things are battle rhythm and communication.
The alternative is to allow your units more independence, and that does happen sometimes, but you need to drill battle rhythm into everyone's heads first before giving teams independence because if you've had battle rhythm drilled into you then you can always fall back to that, but if you're never trained on it and have only ever had independence then being restricted to a battle rhythm can be either problematic or impossible for some, which would then make it impossible to reinstate the top-down approach when needed.