Empathy as a Strategic Virtue: The Case of Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the Most Decorated German officer of WWII

Close-air-support (CAS) is defined as “air action by fixed -and rotary-wing aircraft against hostile targets that are in close proximity to friendly forces and require detailed integration of each air mission with the fire and movement of those forces.”  [1]

*** Note to reader: This article was inspired by a question asked by the Boyd associate Chet Richards. Readers who have a basic understanding of the strategic philosophy of USAF Colonel John Boyd will have an easier time proceeding. ***

________________

Stuka Pilot

Hans-Ulrich Rudel is a CAS legend. A Stuka pilot, he was Nazi Germany’s most highly decorated officer, the only man to have been awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds. Rudel survived the war and amassed a stunning combat record of over 2,530 combat sorties in which he destroyed over 2,000 targets including 800 vehicles, 519 tanks, 150 artillery pieces, 70 landing craft, nine aircraft, four armored trains, several bridges, a destroyer, two cruisers, and the Soviet battleship Marat. [2]

Rudel was an anomaly. His disproportionate success in such an extreme system (WWII) begs the question: how did he do it? As well as the question: what can we learn from his success? Let’s start by taking a closer look at the system, and how Rudel applied his effort therein. 

A key point: Rudel understood how the system worked, and what his role in it was.

________________

The System

All of his victories were earned during the execution of missions in support of the German troops on the ground. The troops on the ground were the main effort - their mission was to close with and destroy the enemy, and occupy the terrain on which he had been standing. This is always the mission for the infantryman, and every other martial action exists in support of that main effort mission. This particular field of battle - the Eastern Front during WWII - was and remains the largest and most bloody struggle in human history. It was the most extreme system imaginable - and thus an ideal laboratory to study dynamic forces and anomalies. 

Rudel was born to fly planes; but after joining the wehrmacht, Rudel, like every other German officer of his time, went through six months of infantry training before he was allowed to touch an aircraft. This gave him an understanding of the German fighting man on the ground; he could thereafter empathize with infantrymen based on previous experiences, shared experiences, and intimate exposure to infantry culture. This six month period of infantry training greatly increased Rudel’s Orientation in terms of the German ground element. 

Rudel’s empathy muscle was strong, and it paired nicely with his innate cognitive agility. Rudel demonstrated a remarkable ability to comprehend and react to unexpected information, changing conditions, and unfolding circumstances. He developed the empathic agility necessary to see the battlefield through the eyes of his comrades on the ground, his comrades in the sky, and his enemies - and cycle back and forth through those perspectives quickly in chaotic situations. 

________________

Not Just Close - DAMN Close!

Rudel also understood something fundamental to the infantryman’s understanding of close-air-support: close means damn close. Rudel couldn’t properly empathize with the troops on the ground without getting close enough to see what was really going on down there. 

The U.S. Air Force’s most reliable CAS platform, the A-10 Warthog, is beloved by American infantrymen everywhere and has an impressive service record of its own. The Warthog was designed primarily by the Boyd disciple Pierre Sprey, who required everyone on his team to read Rudel’s excellent wartime autobiography Stuka Pilot. The A-10 borrows heavily from the German Junkers Ju-87 Stuka dive-bomber and other similar battle-tested war-planes, as the design team approached the project in the same way that Rudel approached CAS: from a position of empathy for the ground element. 

From Sprey:

“Technology is enormously important. I come from a technology background but, you’ve got to start with what really happens in combat and that’s what we did. When you distill it all down – what has to happen to do close air support – to really help the guys on the ground – is you got to be able to get in close enough to see them and what they’re opposing and what their dangers are. How they’re about to be ambushed. What tanks they’re facing. What machine gun nest they’re facing. What fortifications they’re facing, and that takes an airplane that’s got to be able to get in real close, and slow. You come flashing by there at 500 miles an hour – you are hopeless and useless.” [3]

Before Rudel had a medal pinned on his chest, he became famous throughout the wehrmacht for his daring exploits close to the troops and the enemy on the ground. He routinely dove lower, flew slower, and risked his life diving dangerously close to the objective that he was attacking. In Stuka Pilot, he writes about how he often could have struck the bodies of the Russian soldiers themselves with the wings of his aircraft if he had been so inclined. 

________________

From Hans Rudel to Sun Tzu

Pierre Sprey worked closely with John Boyd on the A-10 project, and they both studied and consulted with Hans Rudel and other CAS legends during the A-10’s design phases. Discussions with Sprey and Rudel inspired Boyd to dive into German armor tactics and blitzkrieg philosophy, which led to deep dives into the minds of Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin, Erwin Rommel, and Erich von Manstein. From there he moved to B. H. Liddell-Hart, Heinz Guderian, and Charles de Gaulle to discern the origins of the blitzkrieg and infiltration tactics. This then lead to Genghis Khan and Mongolian tactics, and eventually all the way back to Sun Tzu. Rudel was a critical first stepping stone in the construction of what would become Boyd’s comprehensive strategic philosophy. 

So let’s look at Rudel and see in him what Boyd saw. Our starting point: Boyd’s famous OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) Loop.

Rudel’s OODA Loop functioned at an elite level and was optimized for his supporting role. Because of his willingness to get closer to the troops on the ground than anyone else, his Observation was superior to other CAS pilots. His high emotional intelligence was a result of his genetic heritage and his upbringing (according to his mother, he was almost overly emotional in his youth) combined with his previous experiences immersed in infantry training and combined-arms combat. From this position of deeply empathetic Orientation, he executed optimal Decisions and Actions in support of the infantry.

________________

Hans Rudel: A Type of... Interaction?

There is more evidence to demonstrate how prominent Rudel was in John Boyd’s thinking. In The Essence of Winning and Losing, Boyd’s OODA Loop sketch has an Insight recorded beneath it that states “the entire ‘loop’ (not just orientation) is an ongoing many-sided implicit cross-referencing process of projection, empathy, correlation, and rejection.” 

This “process” is seen again with Boyd’s notion of orientation in Organic Design as “an interactive process of many-sided implicit cross-referencing projections, empathies, correlations, and rejections that is shaped by and shapes the interplay of genetic heritage, cultural tradition, previous experiences, and unfolding circumstances.” 

The slide right after the chart above proclaims an Insight that “interactions, as shown, represent a many-sided implicit cross-referencing process of projection, empathy, correlation, and rejection.” 

Rudel even earns a spot on this chart, where he is confusingly listed as an “activity” that is a type of “positive” “interaction”. This brings us to a question that another Boyd disciple, Chet Richards, recently asked: How is “Rudel” a type of “interaction”? This seems to make no sense. All of the other “activities” in the chart are actual activities, not human beings! 

All of the activities on the chart have “linkages” attached to them. The “linkage” attached to Rudel is “image of activities and changes thereto”. So that’s our biggest clue. But after that, the trail runs cold - even Colonel Osinga is silent on the subject of Rudel. 

So here’s what I think: This case study has demonstrates how empathy allowed for a cybernetic collective unconscious between Rudel, the CAS pilots that he commanded, and the ground elements that his Flight supported. By creating a cohesive, integrated mental system which allowed for a network effect as new information became available, Rudel set the conditions for harmonized effort that interacted with unfolding reality as a rapid and accurate engine of iterative mental modeling. 

I can see that being considered a type of interaction. It certainly contributes to the “ongoing many-sided implicit cross-referencing process of projection, empathy, correlation, and rejection” that keeps popping up in various Boyd insights. But it’s a complex interaction that is difficult to sum up in a simple, elegant way. What else would you call it? Empathetic agility? Optimal CAS? Empathy-centric observation / orientation? I don’t know, and perhaps Boyd couldn’t quite find the perfect way to express it either… except for to name it after the man that inspired the thought - Hans Rudel. 

________________

Final Thoughts

Like the German wehrmacht during the Second World War, The United States Marine Corps requires its close-air-support pilots (along with all other officers, regardless of mission occupation specialty) to undergo six months of infantry training before ever touching an aircraft. “Every Marine a rifleman!” we are told. During this six month course, Marine leaders build the psychological repertoire necessary to empathize with the infantrymen. The Marine Corps has identified strategic empathy as a requisite for the conduct of combined arms warfare.

Through this and other similar practices, the Marine Corps has built its own blitzkrieg war machine. Its method of warfighting, comprehensively referred to as maneuver warfare, traces its lineage directly back to Sun Tzu through everyone that I’ve mentioned in this article, including the German wehrmacht and the Mongol hordes. Maneuver warfare was developed during a post-Vietnam period of intellectual enlightenment in the Marine Corps led by its 29th Commandant, General Alfred M Gray, who himself was heavily influenced by - you guessed it - Boyd. 

***

Since so much of Boyd’s work is concerned with the optimization of systems, I’ll conclude this essay by circling back to a quick point that I made earlier:

Rudel was so successful because he understood how the comprehensive system worked, and what his role in it was. None of his success would have been possible had he not understood this. Close-air-support is, after all, support.

My next article will look closely at this article’s implications on the comprehensive system. I’ll take a deep dive into support and the various supporting relationships, including practical application for non-military organizational optimization. 

Readers: I’d appreciate any thoughtful feedback, especially feedback that examines empathy as a strategic asset. 

PART 2