Expanding on 'A One-Word Order'
■ Zhang Xicheng
During the War of Liberation, a certain battalion of our army was ordered to annihilate the enemy garrison at a river crossing, seize a key passage, and open a route for the main force. However, when the battalion arrived at the objective on time, the enemy had already fled in advance. Upon receiving this situation report, the higher command immediately issued a supplementary order—"Pursue." After the battalion commander received this single-character order, he immediately understood one thing: the fact that the order contained only one character indicated the situation was urgent and speed was essential. Acting on this understanding, the battalion commander led his troops into swift action, successfully completed the mission, and fulfilled the higher command's intent.
This single-character combat order is a special case, but it reveals a universal truth: combat documents must be written according to the principle of brevity and clarity, proceeding from actual conditions, and on the basis of making things clear, saying as little as possible that is repetitive, verbose, or consists of the stock phrases that have become habitual over many years. Especially on the battlefield of the "instant-kill" era, where the situation changes in an instant and opportunities vanish in a flash, if one mechanically begins with analysis of enemy and friendly situations and resorts to lengthy discourse at every turn, the battle may well be over before the order has even been transmitted.
If it is not necessary, do not add empty work. Comrade Mao Zedong once declared: "Tedious philosophy is always destined to perish." German military figure Hindenburg also said: "The simplest is also the most difficult; in war, only simplicity can achieve success." Between the complexity of war itself and the simplicity required to prosecute it, what is indispensable is the ability to reduce complexity to simplicity, strike at the vital point, and handle weighty matters with ease. If leading organs are cumbersome and dilatory, how can they command troops to take the field and win battles? It can be said that war making everything simple has never been a subjective choice—it is the objective compulsion of the battlefield environment.
During the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea, when Comrade Qin Jiwei was commanding the Battle of Triangle Hill (上甘岭) and speaking by telephone with troops pinned down in the tunnels, he had barely begun: "Please pass on to the comrades in the tunnels that the army Party committee and army commanders are all thinking of the comrades up front..." when he was unceremoniously interrupted by the telephone operator: "Commander, stop rambling! Say what matters, give the order first!" When Qin Jiwei recalled this incident, he said: "The soldiers were right! At that time many signal soldiers had been killed, and it was very difficult to keep the telephone line open for long—we could only grab one sentence at a time." This incident is worth our deep reflection.
A philosopher said that the rules of war, though simple, are rarely followed in peacetime. Why? Because many people have not truly thought from the perspective of the battlefield. If one prepares for war with the mindset of not fighting, then the "five excesses" problem (五多问题) can never be fundamentally resolved. If every officer and soldier could think through problems standing on "ground of life and death" and understand what "the way of survival or extinction" means, they would know what should be done on the battlefield and how to do it, and would not complicate simple problems.
For military personnel, the best teacher is the adversary, and the true classroom is the battlefield. Wherever warfighting thinking (战争思维) is established, red tape must retreat from that same ground. It must be fully recognized that, in the face of a grave and complex international situation and arduous and heavy mission tasks, officers and soldiers at all levels must update their warfighting thinking and operational concepts in step with the times, always anchor their thinking to the battlefield and focus their standards on winning, strengthen the awareness that cumbersome process is a calamity and delay is defeat, reduce complexity to simplicity and seek practical results, eliminate the false and retain the true, specialize and train to a high level of proficiency, and resolutely implement the principle of "cut what obstructs combat readiness, delete what deviates from actual combat, and stop what affects victory in battle"—leaving red tape no place to hide, and ensuring that the focus of combat power building does not drift, does not scatter, and advances in an orderly manner.