Executive Summary
Communication is a critical element to the human experience. As warfighting demands high-quality, immediately available, and secure communications, you would think that the Services and the forces who fight together have something as simple as radios sorted out. While I do not have any immediate field experience to draw on, I can offer a look at how the good intentions of the military Services, almost 20 years ago, failed to ensure that units fighting alongside each other were trained to rapidly communicate when conditions of life and death were at play.
In chapter 3 of Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s The Dichotomy of Leadership (St. Martin’s Press, 2018), Babin describes the direction given to a group of SEALs prior to moving into the Iraqi city of Ramadi in 2006. The simple request from the team commander was for all team members to learn how to reprogram their radios to change frequencies to communicate with other SEAL teams as well as with Army and Marine units. No one readily complied, and when asked to perform reprogramming before stepping off, none of the team members beyond the radioman were able to do so. The team perceived ownership of such a simple task as the responsibility of a single specialist on the team. But what if the team members were separated and had radios but could not reprogram them to communicate with another Service’s team?
Babin’s part of the story was to consider the responsibility of leaders within a team both to maintain standards for themselves and to enforce them—and to do so in a way that ensures success without generating disloyalty or mistrust. The simple task of radio reprogramming resulted in Babin’s being able to directly call off an Army tank’s fire on his team’s position, saving them to fight another day.
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