9 October 1996 Lessons in military history for rural leaders says Kellogg course director

Planning and communication are key factors related to success or failure in war and they are also essential ingredients for success in other arenas demanding incisive leadership such as politics and business, says the Director of New Zealand's Kellogg Rural Leadership Course, Dr Alastair McArthur of Lincoln University.

Dr McArthur, who has been involved with the Kellogg Rural Leadership Programme since its foundation nearly 20 years ago, believes there are useful lessons to be learnt from military history which can be applied to rural leadership. He structures the Kellogg courses on planning and communication and is currently preparing the 14th course which starts in February.

Here Dr McArthur looks at some historical examples of good and bad military leadership...

The Duke of Wellington believed that thoughtless heroism was no substitute for careful planning. In the Peninsular War, he was much criticised for not exhibiting the dash of General Moore who nearly lost his army at Corunna. Wellington was prepared to retreat back into Portugal to extend France's lines of communication and shorten his own. The French Army rotted in front of Wellington's defensive positions based on Lisbon.

Likewise Wellington fell back on the village of Waterloo because he had surveyed that battlefield earlier and decided the slope of the ground there favoured the formation of 'squares'.

The Duke wrote out his instructions clearly to his commanders so that there was no doubt as to their objectives. He rode around the Waterloo battlefield on his large horse 'Copenhagen' giving encouragement to his men to stand and fight.

Thirty years later, in the Crimean War, the British Army had forgotten the planning and communication lessons of the Grand Duke. The charge of the Light Brigade in the Battle of Balaclava lacked both planning and communication. Six hundred horsemen charged Russian guns. Only 150 returned!

Lord Raglan's order to 'capture the guns' was a classic case of poor communication. There were two lots of guns: a line of guns at the head of the valley that was a no-no for even the most sanguine cavalry commander, and a few British guns that had been captured by the Russians who were taking them away. The captured British guns were the ones Lord Raglan had in mind. The Light Brigade could not see these guns but headed instead for the Russian ones at the head of 'the valley of death' up which they rode 'into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell'.

This is a classic example of poor communication leading to leadership failure.

Hitler was a great communicator but his planning was faulty. He was able to spell-bind the German people with his mass performances stage managed by the artful Dr Goebbels, Reich Minister of Information and Propaganda.

The Fuehrer promoted himself to the position of overall military commander – a position for which he was not trained. He had a corporal's view of the average German general's ability, but he won the battle for France in 1940 with an attack which his generals thought unwise.

Initial success went to his head. Hitler ordered his soldiers at Stalingrad to fight to the last man. Like Napoleon before him, he lost an army to 'General Winter' and a heroic Russian attack.

The Third Reich's Jewish policy was devoid of rationality being based on redneck gutter politics. In the First World War the Jews had not sabotaged the German war effort leading to defeat in 1918. They had been loyal citizens and in WW2 many went to their deaths in the gas chambers waving iron crosses won for bravery in the trenches two decades earlier.

Hitler needed Jews to help him win his war. For example they had the know­ how for making an atomic bomb. But he gassed them instead.

Although he excelled at mass communications, Hitler committed stupendous tactical blunders as well as monstrous crimes. His plans and policies failed.

Temporarily advantaging the Germans, the Russians, Americans, and British also had leaders lacking the skills of planning and communication. Churchill was a brilliant wordsmith with skills honed by his experience as a journalist. He played a vital role in 1940 by giving the British the self-confidence to stand up to Hitler and by bringing the US into the European war.

But Churchill's track record as a military strategist left much to be desired. Greece and Crete were Churchillian SNAFUs that cost New Zealand lives. These disasters and Gallipoli were based on his simplistic theory about the soft underbelly of Europe.

British generals of merit were few and far between at the beginning of WW2. There was one exception – General O'Connor. He masterminded the defeat of the Italians in 1940, and drove them out of Egypt and Libya. Unfortunately he was taken prisoner in the subsequent Axis counter-attack after his army had been weakened for reinforcing the Greek fiasco. O'Connor was both a planner and communicator. These two skills support one another, and in the Kellogg Rural Leadership Course we instruct and encourage participants in the development of them in relation to rural interests and concerns.

We set out unashamedly to groom positive, thoughtful and enthusiastic lobbyists and spokespeople for the rural sector. After all, urban interests receive such constant attention it is often easy to overlook the fact that the New Zealand economy is still based essentially on rurally-sourced earnings.

The views of the rural sector must be communicated to all, otherwise national and local planning could easily tip towards solely urban considerations and condemn us to failure as inevitably as military disaster occurs when leaders fail to practise the principles of planning and communication.

Application forms for the 1997 Kellogg Rural Leadership Course are available from Dr Alastair McArthur, Agri-business and Economics Research Unit, PO Box 94, Lincoln University, Canterbury.

Ian Collins, Journalist, Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand.