I recently oversaw the response to an ambush that killed and wounded UN peacekeepers. It was my first time responding to a combat incident where lives were lost and survival of the wounded depended on my team's ability to manage the crisis. I've since reflected on the incident and, with the benefit of hindsight, how it was handled. I offer these reflections for others to consider as they occupy roles, either as staff or commanders, where they may be responsible for responding to a crisis.

Bring calm and control to chaos

When a crisis breaks out, the fog of war descends immediately. My crisis commenced with a private WhatsApp message:

LDP (long duration patrol) ambushed, 1x KIA more wounded

Shortly after I found out, knowledge of the incident spread in the operations room. When I stepped out to inform the commander, chaos ensued. Everyone was being brought up to speed separately, opinions on what had happened started flowing and ideas of what to do were being discussed.

The purpose of the operations room is to remove chaos, control the situation, maintain situational awareness, and coordinate the response. Nothing can be controlled when people's emotions override their objectivity, particularly when people have died or troops are in contact.

The first step in any crisis is to establish calm in the operations room. An effective method is raising your voice to gain everyone’s attention and asking them to be quiet and listen. Once the operations room is calm, you can begin to establish control. If you need to evict people who are contributing to chaos rather than calm, you must do so. Many people will want to be present and contribute. As the person in charge, you decide who is needed. Those who are not needed must leave, regardless of their rank or position.

Crisis is not the time to be establishing processes. Training and rehearsals create the foundation upon which people can impose control when everything else becomes chaotic. To establish control, you begin by enacting battle drills that should be familiar.

In a Unit setting, standard operating procedures (SOPs) for a conventional warfighting operations room will already exist. This is the foundation for any crisis management. Set up the space as you would per those SOPs. Put staff in their doctrinal watchkeeping positions. Set the tone of the operations room by conducting a battle drill designed to baseline situational awareness across the staff, such as the two-minute drill. This will buy time to establish facts and assumptions, create lines of communication, and develop responses. If you can achieve this, you will have established control.

Once you have established control, the currency of the operations room becomes information.

Facts, assumptions, and assessments

Information ensures accurate situational awareness for staff and commanders and enables the coordination of responses. My operations room was responsible for coordinating casualty evacuation and deploying reinforcements, which is typically all a headquarters can do in a combat situation. To do either of those things, you need reliable and timely information.

Even when you have control, the fog of war will not have lifted. There will be numerous vectors for information, numerous information channels into the operations room, and not all of them will be helpful. Misinformation can spread quickly as opinions and hearsay are reported as fact.

Understanding the difference between facts, assumptions, and assessments is critical. A reminder:

1. Fact: Something known to have occurred or to be true based on direct observation, reliable reporting, or objective evidence.
2. Assumption: Something not confirmed but which is being treated as potentially true because it is plausible. Assumptions require validation.
3. Assessment: A reasoned judgement based on the available facts and assumptions. An assessment is the assessor's professional judgement and should not be presented as established fact.

All information that comes into the operations room will fall into one of these three categories. It is critical that all information is categorised to avoid allowing assumptions or assessments to be treated as facts. This is particularly true when senior or influential people present their opinions as facts and are less likely to be challenged. Decisions to deploy reinforcements and casualty evacuation (CASEVAC) will be informed by risk, which in turn is informed by available facts, assumptions, assessments, and an understanding of the difference.

An operations team has to be ruthless in interrogating information, as there can be significant consequences for misinformation. If there are competing narratives, people will lose confidence in the operations room. For example, to conduct an aerial CASEVAC a risk assessment is needed to determine whether it is safe to put a helicopter into an incident site. If the aviation authority is not confident you are accurately representing the situation (such as whether the enemy remains in the area or not), then they will err on the side of caution and inflate the risk assessment.

This can cause delays to CASEVAC and put wounded lives at risk. This is an avoidable situation if the operations room is ensuring all information being reported is accurate, categorised, and disseminated in a timely manner.

Preserve objectivity without losing humanity

Humans are at the centre of all our actions and trauma affects humans differently, particularly if it is unfamiliar to them. Maintaining objectivity in a crisis is the most difficult component of gathering information, particularly where people have died, are wounded, or are being shot at. Leadership and emotional intelligence are required to influence people, allowing them to overcome trauma and provide accurate and timely information. Staff may hesitate to interrogate the accuracy of a CASEVAC 9 Liner or seek updates from troops in contact. This is compounded in a multinational setting where soldiers may not speak English or their commander is wounded.

Sometimes people will need to be reminded of the military necessity of the information you are seeking and that applying pressure on troops in contact to get it is wholly appropriate. Clarifying facts to build confidence in situational awareness is not criticism or second guessing – it is a necessity. These facts will ensure CASEVACs deploy on time and reinforcements are appropriately prepared.

This continues once troops are no longer in contact and the situation stabilises. While their experience is traumatic, there is a military necessity to continue to build awareness of the incident to understand what may happen next. Initial contact reports, and a necessary focus on casualty evacuation, will mean much of the context of how the incident occurred, what the actions of the enemy force were and the extent of the battle damage to friendly equipment will not be known. All are essential for informing follow-on actions. This will require staff to rise above the trauma, communicate with the traumatised, gather facts, validate assumptions, and form assessments that allow critical decisions to be made.

Through this fight for objectivity, the human element must be recognised. When the wounded arrived from the ambush site, I took a pause with some staff and we helped transfer them into the hospital, putting faces to serials in the CASEVAC 9 Liner. When the deceased were brought to the morgue the following day, I took the entire headquarters staff to support the interment of the bodies. I felt this was a critical component to balancing out the need to be ruthlessly objective in crisis, and ensuring the human sacrifice and tragedy was not lost in the chaos.

A crisis will rarely provide warning or unfold as expected. Leaders cannot determine how it begins, but they can determine how well their people are prepared to respond. Rehearsed battle drills, disciplined information management, and leaders capable of preserving objectivity while recognising the human consequences of crisis provide the foundations for restoring calm, establishing control, and making timely decisions when lives depend upon them. These reflections come from a combat incident in which peacekeepers were killed and others were left with life-changing injuries. These lessons extend beyond combat; every crisis brings chaos, fog, and human emotion in some measure. Use your time to build your approach. Leaders who can create calm and control at the outset are most likely to succeed.

Still Interested?

Why not also read Reflections on Command.

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