By James Ashworth, with Rebecca Segal
The U.S. Army has been charged to transform in contact, using deployments and exercises to stimulate innovation. To do so successfully, while still training your tactical mission, requires a conscious approach to leadership, risk, and learning to make the most of the opportunity – something my former battalion had to fulfill with two big changes to our mission in the same year: to innovate and then to deploy. As a British Army Officer on exchange to the United States, working for the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, I wanted to share the lessons we learned from that experience.
Innovation
As I boarded a plane heading to Cyprus in late 2020 with the battalionI assumed command of only a few weeks before, I reflected on our extraordinary circumstances. We were in the grip of a global pandemic and had endured multiple phases of isolation and testing to move nearly a thousand soldiers and families overseas – the first such move by the British Army since COVID. The battalion had returned from a deployment to Afghanistan just before I arrived and was now heading out on a two-year mission to Cyprus. Significantly, the battalion was also tasked to lead a two-year, $160 million program of experimentation designed to improve light force lethality.
I had never been a battalion commander before. But between Army doctrine, mentors, brilliant subordinates, and my own experience, I had a clear framework for how to prepare and lead the unit for a combat deployment. Yet leading a major transformation program in tandem to our core mission was entirely new ground. Along with considering how best to deliver this task, I also wondered whether the additional innovation demand would detract from the unit’s combat readiness.
Once in Cyprus, we started to appreciate the scale and ambition of the innovation task. I was amazed, and frankly distracted, by the sheer array of new technology the unit was expected to field. New weapons, sensors and sights, communication devices, drones, autonomous vehicles – I wanted to get my hands on it all. I had a range of ideas about how to integrate and employ the capabilities downrange. Fortunately, I had several invaluable mentors to help channel my tactical enthusiasm. Rather than getting into the weeds, I needed to examine how to command a unit tasked with innovating, in parallel to delivering an operational mission. It quickly became apparent we needed to re-evaluate our culture with three elements at heart: Leadership; Risk; and Learning.
Key to embodying an innovative culture was understanding our respective leadership roles – and then empowering everybody to fulfill theirs. Defining that started with the senior commanders realizing that we were not the key innovators and demonstrators of the new equipment, but instead needed to design the conceptual frameworks to drive our collective approach. Our junior leaders and Soldiers were the right people to be doing that hands-on testing and innovation. They were the technology natives, and more importantly, they were the end users. To enable the juniors to be imaginative, we ensured that senior commanders protected the juniors’ “license to operate” by removing policy and/or psychological obstacles. This cleared the way for Soldiers to embrace their roles and motivated them to own the problem, while knowing they had the trust and support of their commanders.
We saw an incredible, and perhaps unexpected, professionalization in our junior leaders in response. When scientists and industry technicians came to the unit, the junior leaders briefed proudly, took ownership, and created new, innovative solutions. They became the authority. Some of our junior commanders were invited to return to the UK as guest instructors on tactical and promotional courses to introduce new tactics and technologies. I was amazed how much the culture had shifted to be the most lethal light role Unit in the Army. Ultimately the junior commanders had shifted it—the senior commanders had simply encouraged and given them permission to do so under a unifying and inspiring purpose.
As our experimentation matured, and the combination of capabilities became more technical and complex, we started running into a recurring problem. We had to manage a growing, but poorly understood, span of risk: risk of testing new equipment that had not undergone the normal safety testing; risk inherent to deliberately pushing new capabilities to breaking point; and risk in creating new combinations of capabilities which had not been designed or tested together. On a few occasions we avoided serious accidents more so by luck than design. We realized we had an inherent tension: the quickest way to lose our freedoms to innovate and experiment was to have a serious accident or fatality, but effective innovation required a bold and more nuanced risk appetite than for routine training. We realized we needed to have more frequent and honest conversations between all commanders about risk to mission, force, and personnel. Furthermore, we needed to better understand, educate, and manage risk at all echelons. Then let those echelons own their risk.
Nothing better exemplified this than having a junior team brief a general officer on an ambitious experimentation exercise that would span all echelons of the battalion. The junior commanders led an in-depth analysis on what could go wrong and how they would mitigate risk. Letting them not only plan, but also brief that plan to a general conveyed to them our trust in them. Subsequently it also invited confidence from the higher command for the entire unit because it demonstrated that understanding and management of risk was incumbent on all – not just me as the commanding officer.
Managing risk also accelerated our learning. We often learned more from failure than from success. Effective risk management allowed us to fail safely – physically and psychologically – and to use failure as our route to learning. Senior leaders in the organization were charged with ensuring failure was not only safe, but also framed positively, which required a culture shift away from one founded on performance. Then we challenged our Soldiers to ensure they failed because they pushed boundaries and the equipment, and not because of incompetence. Then they had to turn lessons “observed” into lessons “learned”, and share those lessons with the formation. This held our juniors accountable for being brilliant at the basics and everybody accountable for promulgating tactical observations. We set up ways to share lessons spanning written, mixed media, verbal, formal and informal, based on the setting and the audience.
This was arguably the hardest part of the culture shift – junior Soldiers who wanted to prove themselves had to be comfortable falling short publicly and then sharing the reasons why. Seniors had to give those juniors the chance to get things wrong. So long as the action was safe, letting things play out proved to be the best way to nurture a culture of learning. Multiple times I found myself wanting to interject, but I knew that an intervention at my level would jeopardize the nascent culture we were building. It became easier over time but took a conscious effort to remain hands off.
Deployment
A year into command, I got a call that rapidly changed our mission. Our Unit was held at high readiness for potential crises in the Middle East. We were given 12 hours’ notice to deploy in support of the evacuation from Afghanistan. That news brought an immediate focus and excitement. After all, soldiers join to go on operations, to make a difference and test themselves under the most demanding circumstances.
As I briefed the battalion, our focus shifted quickly to the difficult situation in Kabul and equipping our Soldiers to deploy into it. Despite my initial concerns that our experimentation may have distracted or even eroded our operational readiness, I watched junior leaders harnessing the innovative culture they had developed to work through a myriad of issues under intense time pressure.
Although our experimental technologies and equipment were never intended to be operationalized so soon, I pushed to incorporate as much of our new capabilities into the mission as possible. We advanced our understanding of these capabilities significantly as a result. Whether it was getting a piece of equipment the loadmasters hadn’t seen before onto an aircraft safely, or scale new equipment to a new and novel mission set, our soldiers and young commanders were all over it. 12 hours later, the unit was spread across multiple countries and time zones across the Middle East, operationalizing their new equipment. Rather than detracting from their core warfighting purpose, their innovative mindset had enhanced it.
Forward deployed with my headquarters near Afghanistan, I was itching to be with the Soldiers in the melee at Kabul airport. I will admit, counter to initial guidance I tried hard in the first 24 hours to fly into Kabul personally. But the lessons of the last year came back to me – know your role. My soldiers and commanders needed me to connect the whole unit spread across the Middle East, and not just at the tactical edge. It allowed me time and space to shape the external network right up to the strategic level to protect their “license to operate” in Kabul; they would, and did, handle the tactical fight.
It was at this moment, in the crucible of Kabul, my previous concerns about an innovation mission detracting from combat readiness was fundamentally proved wrong. Junior commanders made bold, live-saving decisions on their own initiative without waiting for direction. Indeed, a 19-year-old Soldier was singled out and cited by our partnered U.S. forces for his initiative and actions subsequently receiving a commendation. Soldiers and junior commanders knew their roles, how to take and mitigate risks, and were undaunted by fear of failure.
The innovative concepts practiced over the last year translated far more easily to operations than I had anticipated. Although the evacuation from Afghanistan was not a warfighting mission, it was unquestionably demanding and complex. Not only did the Soldiers evacuate many more people than anticipated, but all our Soldiers returned safely after 14 grueling days in Kabul. Embracing a culture of innovation – guided by leaders knowing and playing their role, robustly managing risk at all levels, and a willingness to embrace failure as a facet of learning – enhanced our warfighting and combat readiness.
James Ashworth commissioned into the British Army in 2004 specializing in light and mechanized infantry with operational deployments to Kosovo, Afghanistan, Cyprus and Ukraine. He formerly commanded the 2nd Battalion The Royal Yorkshire Regiment before becoming Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army.
This article was written with Rebecca Segal as a part of the FTGN Partnered Writing Program, which connects leaders with writers who help them tell their story. If you are interested in sharing your story with assistance from a writing partner, please reach out with your pitch to Jack Hadley, jack@fromthegreennotebook.com.
