Chancellorsville -- “You get judged for two things as a commanding officer: how you prepare your people to fight and how you fight,” said Col. Steven Grass, director of Marine Corps Command and Staff College, on a recent tour of the Chancellorsville Battlefield area. “We need to be able to transfer what happened here to modern warfare.”
On September 28 and 29, the faculty and students of CSC conducted a “staff ride” of key sites of the Battle of Chancellorsville to “study the art of command at the operational level, decision making, and the human element of war,” according to a mission statement by Lt. Col. Edward Debish, CSC faculty member. A staff ride is a common military training tactic in which leaders are taken to historic battle sites to learn about the strategic and operational actions and decisions involved in the battle. The locations for the Chancellorsville staff ride included the Chancellor House, the bivouac site of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and the hilltop artillery site of Hazel Grove, among others.
At each stop throughout the day, a different student briefed his or her classmates on the status of the Union and Confederate armies at a given point in time. The students then participated in discussions and operational decision games, where they evaluated the goals of the commanders and determined what they personally would have done, based on the status of the armies. They had the benefit of highly detailed maps showing the troop positions at specific times on each day of the battle, a tool that may have changed the course of the war had it been available to the Union and Confederate generals 152 years ago.
“The trip was a great opportunity to look at how, while times change, the human element of warfare hasn’t,” said Army Capt. Jason Lopez, CSC student. “The operational decision games gave us a chance to take a counterfactual approach and see how the fight could have been so much different. You can look at everything from an objective perspective, without the stress of battle, and perhaps apply the lessons in your own career.”
At the final stop of the afternoon, Salem Church, Grass spoke of the importance of the staff ride for the students’ educational experience, telling them that the decision-making criteria from the Civil War “are still the same for a commander today.”
After the event, Maj. Asbjorn Lysgaard, a Norwegian student at CSC, reflected that “From a Norwegian perspective, no one studies Chancellorsville in Norway; we study battles with a Norwegian contribution. I think getting out in the field here gives us a better understanding of the challenges, issues, and moral dilemmas the Confederate and Union sides faced.” He added, “I think we have a lot to learn about leadership from both Lee and [Union General] Hooker.”
— Writer: ebaker@quanticosentryonline.com