Introduction
In peacetime, Defence often defaults to process. Procedures tighten, oversight expands, and risk tolerance drops. While this approach provides structure and accountability, it can also undermine the very traits that win wars – adaptability, initiative, and timely action.
The Royal Navy’s experience, as described in Andrew Gordon’s book Rules of the Game, offers a useful lens: 'Rat Catchers and Regulators'. Rat Catchers recognise when systems are failing and act decisively. Regulators maintain the system, often prioritising compliance over outcome. Neither is inherently wrong – but an imbalance can be dangerous.
History shows us where this leads. Monash challenged outdated doctrine and won. The Royal Navy clung to tradition at Jutland and paid the price. As junior leaders, we must learn from both.
This paper examines how over-regulation affects flexibility, innovation, morale, collaboration, and operational effectiveness. The goal is not to reject rules, but to strike the right balance – one that ensures we’re ready for the next war, not just compliant with the last one.
The Merchant Navy
Before we explore the Rat Catcher vs Regulator dynamic in Defence, it’s worth considering the Merchant Navy. As a cornerstone of global trade, it has long operated in a space where efficiency and regulation collide. Ship owners focus on keeping cargo moving; regulators focus on safety, environmental standards, and legal compliance.
During wartime, the stakes increase. In World War II, merchant convoys, protected by naval escorts, kept vital supply lines open despite the threat of submarines. Adaptation was essential. Bureaucracy alone could not keep pace with enemy action.
The Merchant Navy reminds us that effective systems require both structure and initiative. Regulation ensures safety and consistency. However, excessive regulation slows response, blocks innovation, and increases risk – especially when time is critical.
This trade-off mirrors our own. Defence is not immune to the same friction. Rat Catchers keep things moving. Regulators keep things in line. Both roles exist in balance, but if regulation dominates, we risk readiness.
Rat Catcher vs Regulator
The Rat Catcher vs Regulator concept captures a persistent tension inside any large organisation: those who adapt to get things done and those who enforce the rules to keep things in check.
Rat Catchers aren’t rebels. They’re not rule-breakers for the sake of it. They take calculated risks, guided by a clear sense of purpose and responsibility. They understand the system but aren’t bound by it when it fails to serve the mission. Their decisions weigh risk against effect – always with the team and the task in mind.
Regulators, on the other hand, value order, compliance, and consistency. They ensure accountability and uphold standards, which is critical. But when regulators dominate, the system becomes rigid. Process overshadows purpose, and initiative is penalised instead of encouraged.
Andrew Gordon’s Rules of the Game highlights this divide in the Royal Navy. Rat Catchers saw the Navy’s decline and tried to adapt. Regulators maintained outdated procedures, even as technology and tactics changed. The result: the Navy struggled to innovate and lost its strategic edge by the time of the Battle of Jutland (Gordon, A. 2003).
The problem wasn’t a lack of competence – it was a system over-weighted toward regulation. The same risk exists today. If we favour regulatory comfort over tactical utility, we’ll produce leaders who hesitate when they need to act.
We must create space for Rat Catchers to operate – not to ignore rules, but to challenge them when they no longer work. That’s leadership, not defiance.
Peacetime vs Wartime Command Dynamics
In peacetime, Defence runs like a regulated machine. We focus on training, maintenance, policy, and compliance. Commanders and staff work within detailed frameworks to ensure readiness, accountability, and adherence to law.
This changes in war. Commanders shift from managing systems to fighting through uncertainty. Risk tolerance increases. Decision-making decentralises. Initiative becomes critical. Structures built for assurance in peace often prove too slow or rigid for combat.
The relationship between commanders and regulatory bodies mirrors that of ship owners and maritime authorities. In peace, both sides are focused on structure and control. In war, commanders face pressure to act, often without time to seek approval or wait for policy updates. When regulatory systems can’t keep pace, they become friction points – or worse, liabilities.
The challenge is finding balance. Over-regulation in war leads to hesitation and missed opportunities. But unregulated action risks ethical lapses, legal consequences, and strategic failure. Both sides must adapt. Regulators must support warfighters, not constrain them. Commanders must act decisively but remain accountable.
Political pressure, technological change, and coalition dynamics make this even more complex. The best way through is clear communication, mutual trust, and leadership that embraces mission command – not just in doctrine, but in practice.
The Rat Catcher
Sir John Monash is a textbook example of a wartime Rat Catcher. An engineer by trade, Monash rose to command the Australian Corps in World War I, earning a reputation for planning, precision, and effectiveness. His leadership style broke from convention – and delivered results.
Monash didn’t succeed by ignoring orders. He succeeded by challenging outdated thinking. He built combined arms operations before they were doctrine. He synchronised infantry, tanks, artillery, and aircraft into deliberate, timed operations – something the British command resisted at the time.
He promoted officers based on merit, not seniority. He delegated decision-making to subordinates who understood the situation on the ground. He insisted on intelligence-led planning. All of this ran against the established norms of the day.
What Monash did wasn’t reckless. It was calculated, informed, and focused on mission success. His actions at Hamel and Amiens proved that innovation, coordination, and adaptability win battles.
Monash shows us that being a Rat Catcher isn’t about breaking rules. It’s about knowing when the rules no longer serve the mission – and having the courage, skill, and leadership to do things better.
The Regulator – Consequences of Over-regulation
Impaired Flexibility
Excessive regulation limits responsiveness. Before a unit even reaches the battlefield, red tape can delay movement, decision-making, or procurement. A good example is capability acquisition. Complex procurement processes – designed for transparency and accountability – often slow down access to urgently needed equipment.
Delays, outdated technology, rigid contracts, and missed opportunities become routine. By the time a system is approved and fielded, it may already be obsolete. Worse, over-regulation deters innovative suppliers and small businesses from contributing, shrinking the pool of ideas and reducing competition.
If flexibility is essential in combat, it must be protected in preparation. Systems that punish speed and reward compliance will fail when urgency matters most.
Reduced Innovation
When innovation requires navigating endless approval chains, it stops. This is especially clear with emerging technologies like UAVs. While concerns about safety, privacy, and airspace are valid, excessive regulation often halts testing, delays adoption, and discourages experimentation.
The result: Defence lags behind civilian industry and even non-state actors. Meanwhile, innovators inside Defence lose interest or leave, knowing that new ideas are more likely to get blocked than backed.
Innovation can’t thrive in a permission-only culture. If we want competitive advantage, we need to allow calculated risk and back those willing to test the limits for the right reasons.
Bureaucratic Burden
Red tape consumes time, energy, and focus. It shifts attention away from mission and toward compliance. This is especially damaging during high-tempo operations where decisions must be made quickly, and friction must be low.
Consider the logistics of moving sensitive equipment. Layers of authorisations, transport policies, and customs regulations delay deployment and increase risk. Personnel qualifications, host nation compliance, and asset availability all add further drag.
The result? Slower reactions, less agility, and increased risk of mission failure. Bureaucracy has a place – but not when it overrides operational need.
Morale and Retention
Over-regulation doesn’t just affect operations – it wears down people. Excessive admin, rigid grooming policies, micromanagement, and outdated procedures reduce autonomy and kill initiative. The message received is clear: we don’t trust you to think.
This is especially clear in small but symbolic areas – like grooming standards. While beards may seem trivial, they matter to soldiers who see them allowed in other services. The perception is that rules exist for their own sake, not for mission relevance.
Combine this with slow promotions, inflexible career paths, and excessive oversight, and it’s no surprise people leave. We’re not just losing capability – we’re pushing it out the door.
Increased Risk
Ironically, over-regulation can increase risk. Systems that focus on compliance over outcomes create a false sense of security. One of the clearest examples is France’s reliance on the Maginot Line before World War II.
The defences were impressive on paper, but inflexible in practice. They didn’t adapt to mobile warfare or new tactics. The Germans bypassed them entirely. The system worked exactly as designed – but the design was flawed, and no one challenged it.
If no one is empowered to challenge assumptions or revise plans, we risk failing in exactly the way we planned to succeed.
Missed Collaboration
Complex regulation also limits cooperation. In multinational or inter-agency operations, overly strict rules block shared planning, communication, and resourcing. The Anzio landings in 1944 show how differing procedures, incompatible equipment, and restrictive information-sharing delayed operations and increased casualties.
We face similar risks today. If every partner has to navigate a different approval system, coordination slows down and effectiveness drops. Mission command cannot work across teams if compliance overrides trust.
Strategic Disadvantage
The final risk is strategic. When enemies move faster, adapt quicker, and operate without the same constraints, over-regulation becomes a liability. The Japanese military in World War II imposed strict communication and coordination restrictions to protect operational security. But those same restrictions reduced flexibility and created gaps in awareness. The result was rigid operations, poor coordination, and missed opportunities.
Today’s adversaries operate in complex, fast-moving environments. If our systems slow down our decision cycles, we give away the initiative – before the first shot is fired.
Conclusion
Defence depends on structure, but structure alone won’t win the next war. If we value compliance more than outcomes, we’ll build a force that’s well-regulated but ineffective. Over time, we risk creating a culture where initiative is punished, innovation is stalled, and our best people leave out of frustration.
Rat Catchers aren’t threats to the system – they’re essential to its survival. They don’t reject standards; they challenge stagnation. They see where doctrine fails and adapt early. They act when others wait. And in war, those actions often make the difference.
We need to stop treating Rat Catchers as outliers or problems to be managed. We need to identify them, support them, and ensure they operate within clear intent and strong values. That takes trust, leadership, and the courage to allow room for judgement.
As leaders, we influence this culture every day. In how we write directives, run training, assess risk, and back our subordinates, we send a message: either we value initiative, or we don’t.
Regulation matters. But it must enable – not replace – warfighting competence. The next war will reward adaptability. Our people need to be ready to act, not just comply.
Let them.
well done on capturing the Rat Catchers vs Regulators concept.
This has often been a talking point of mine, and now I have an easy to read follow-up reference to send out.
Thank you!
... ready to act and seize the initiative, not just comply.
When you can strip process away, and you’re heading into unknown territory, the scientific process (hypothesis->measurement->understanding) is your friend, regardless if your innovation is ‘high tech’ or not.
Thank you for your great article. I have only in the last few years read Gordon’s excellent book and I too found it fascinating. As a team leader within the Landworthiness project, I have often pondered the right balance between regulation and over-regulation. We think we have the balance right, and hopefully at unit level and below the Landworthiness systems should be largely a mystery to most, unless they get involved in one of our Independent Landworthiness Boards. We seek to assess problems with ‘the system’ by measuring at the coal-face. We seek to give our fighters the best chance of winning by getting the Fundamental Inputs to Capability right, and getting risk and integration right.
This year the Chief of Army has directed that we do accident investigation better across the Land Force, as part of the evolution of Landworthiness. This is a fascinating area and one where Rat Catchers, not Regulators can find a happy home. A human error is treated as an opportunity to start thinking, not the end of thinking. One of the smarter accident investigator theorists talks about Efficiently/Thoroughness Trade Offs (ETTO) that we all make each day. Rat Catchers will have a different view of these trade-offs than a Regulator. As we roll out training for unit level accident investigators this year we will incorporate some of the things you mention into the training packages.
I once cost-modelled a unit's compliance burden—a battalion needed the equivalent of a full-time compliance company (80 FTE). I doubt most COs truly understand their obligations; it’s simply too complex and onerous. The ACT is likely our costliest formation. We’re breeding HQs. Army doesn’t need reform; it needs a rebuild. Better use of existing personnel alone would improve retention.
In my company, we aim for 90%+ of people’s time to be spent on their primary role. We use tools, time-tracking, and metrics to understand workforce utilisation and drive improvements. Non-value-adding work is eliminated, automation is routine, and tasks are shifted to the most efficient layer. In contrast, I doubt Army personnel spend even 50% of their time on what they’re trained to do. Too much effort goes into executive posterior protection. The tail is well and truly wagging the dog.