Decapitation & Distributed Leadership Part 1
I was once told by my late friend and mentor, Chris von der Heyde, who was closely familiar with the Korean War, that the only prisoners who escaped from North Korean prison camps were Turkish soldiers. He claimed that this was due to the fact that they were not dependent on orders from a superior when they were in trouble. A Turkish soldier WAS the Turkish army. As such, they could improvise any actions necessary to escape a situation or solve a crisis.
It turns out that this story rings quite true, and it’s well-documented. It seems that the Turkish Brigade’s reputation in Korea was extraordinary. They arrived in late 1950 and quickly earned a fierce reputation among both allies and enemies. Their performance at the Battle of Kunuri in particular became legendary — when Chinese forces encircled UN troops during the massive November 1950 offensive, the Turkish Brigade formed a rear guard that fought in brutal close combat, often with bayonets, buying time for other units to escape.
Chris’ recall aligns with stories that circulated widely among Korean War veterans. Turkish POWs were considered exceptionally difficult to hold and manage. There are accounts of Turkish soldiers resisting, escaping, and refusing to be broken by the psychological pressure campaigns the North Koreans and Chinese applied to Western prisoners. The Chinese in particular ran sophisticated “re-education” programs that exploited the hierarchical dependency many Western soldiers had on their chain of command — when that chain was severed, some soldiers became psychologically rudderless. The Turks, by many accounts, did not suffer this in the same way.
Chris’ cultural explanation also seems credible. The Turkish military tradition, rooted partly in Ottoman military culture and the particular experience of Atatürk’s War of Independence (1919–1923), placed enormous value on individual martial competence and initiative. The War of Independence was fought by irregular forces improvising constantly against better-equipped enemies — it forged a culture where the soldier himself was the fundamental unit of resilience, not the formation or the order.
There’s a contrast worth noting. American military doctrine of that era was heavily dependent on material superiority and coordinated command structures. When those were disrupted — as they catastrophically were in late 1950 — some units collapsed. Turkish soldiers apparently drew on something more internal.
The claim that they were the only prisoners to escape is probably an exaggeration born of admiration. But the core observation — that Turkish POWs were dramatically more resistant and escape-prone than most — is consistent with what veterans and historians have recorded. It’s one of the lesser-known remarkable stories of that war.
The Korean War is often called the Forgotten War, which is a shame — it produced some remarkable human stories, and the Turkish Brigade’s performance is one of the most striking of them.
“Decapitation” resistance is a feature of distributed forms
The Turkish Armed Forces today are a large, NATO-integrated, heavily institutionalised military. That inevitably smooths out some of the fierce individual warrior ethos of old. More significantly, the failed 2016 coup attempt caused enormous disruption — Turkey’s president Erdoğan purged roughly 40% of the officer corps, including much of the senior leadership. Thousands of experienced officers were imprisoned or dismissed. Whatever institutional culture existed in that officer class was severely fractured. The army that exists today is in many ways still rebuilding its institutional identity. Operations in Syria have shown Turkish forces remain capable and willing fighters, but critics note uneven performance that suggests the purges did real damage to unit cohesion and leadership quality.
This leads us to the idea of “decapitation”. As noted above, American and British prisoners of war deprived of their hierarchically-oriented leadership became rudderless, vulnerable to indoctrination and psychological pressure. In a single stroke, decapitation led to disorientation, insecurity, susceptibility and distress.
Most likely, President Erdoğan was well aware that a single stroke of decapitation would not work within the culture of his own army. He consequently carried out multiple decapitations over both leaders and potential leaders. The sheer breadth of his efforts showed how difficult it is to unravel a well-functioning distributed leadership network.
The theory of distributed leadership explicitly addresses the resilience of distributed systems against “decapitation” through metaphors of collective organisms and the conceptualisation of leadership as a persistent, decentred pattern rather than an individual property. Distributed leadership models emphasise that multiple sources of leadership operate within any organisation, ensuring that the “leader-plus” aspect maintains systemic stability even if a formal leader is removed.
One of the most direct references to a system being proof against the loss of individual leaders comes from the study of professional service firms, where leadership is described using the “Borg” metaphor from Star Trek. In this model, the collective is viewed as a “mass of things that go forward” where the individual is considered “absolutely irrelevant”. If “bits drop off, like limbs and heads,” the system simply replaces them immediately, ensuring the collective entity remains intact. The resilience of such systems often stems from the fact that leadership is tied to a persistent concept rather than a mortal person. For example, in Apple, Steve Jobs, the founder, lives on not as a person but as “Jobs the concept,” which continues to guide the collective long after his departure.
Persistence of “Collective Mind” and Patterns
The literature on high-reliability systems (like aircraft carriers) and complex adaptive systems provides a theoretical basis for why these structures persist despite changes in top leadership or personnel. Leadership is seen as a “higher-order pattern of interrelated activities” that persists despite changes in personnel.
Because the “collective mind” is constructed through the actions of contributing, representing, and subordinating across the whole group, the system’s “intelligence” and “comprehension” are not located in “one brain at a time”.
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Further, in complex adaptive systems, control is highly dispersed and decentralised, meaning there is no single “head” whose removal would cause the system to collapse; instead, coherent behaviour arises from the interaction of many autonomous agents. I’ve described this previously in considering citizen behaviour in urban renewal projects, and the comings and goings of the members of activist groups in protecting the natural environment. Movements like the youth-led Standing Rock protests refused to produce a single visible face for the media, instead using a model of “epistemologically distinct diffusion of authority” that made the movement difficult to disrupt through traditional leadership-targeting strategies
Some of the literature on distributed leadership argues for a “decentred” view of leadership where the focus is on the “spirit” or “purpose” of the group rather than positions. And in some professional or Indigenous contexts, the narrative may even be that “no one is a leader” or that “nobody is led,” which prevents an external force from identifying a “head” to target for disruption.
Do some of the Korean War lessons persist?
I wondered whether this culture and tradition persist today? Or put another way, is this lesson of the efficacy of a military form of distributed leadership taught to soldiers and officers in today’s armies? I subsequently did some research, which pointed to it being a complicated issue.
The evolution of lessons learned from the Korean War is genuinely interesting. The concept Chris described has a formal name in modern military theory: mission command (the Germans called it Auftragstaktik). The core idea is that commanders communicate intent and objective rather than detailed orders, trusting subordinates to use initiative when circumstances change. It is the direct opposite of rigid top-down command.
It appears that the German Wehrmacht practised it with devastating effectiveness in World War II, which is largely why a smaller German force repeatedly outmanoeuvred larger Allied formations in the early war years. Western armies studied this after the war with, one would hope, considerable humility.
The US military formally adopted mission command doctrine after painful lessons in Vietnam and the institutional reforms of the 1980s. It is now written into American Army doctrine explicitly. The British Army is said to have embraced it deeply. Most serious modern Western militaries at least pay lip service to it.
But were the lessons of these forms of distributed leadership really learned?
The gap between doctrine and reality is significant. Teaching mission command is far easier than actually producing soldiers and junior officers who can execute it. It requires:
- Deep trust between ranks, built over years
- Junior leaders genuinely comfortable making consequential decisions without permission
- A command culture that doesn’t punish initiative that fails
That last point is the contentious one. Bureaucratic military institutions tend to punish failure harshly and reward caution. You can write mission command into a doctrine manual and still have a culture where a lieutenant is terrified to act without calling his captain first.
Back in the 1980s, Chris used to cite the Israeli Defence Forces as probably the closest example to what he described about the Turks — junior officers and even NCOs routinely exercised dramatic initiative, and the culture actively rewarded it. This was partly necessity (small country, fast-moving warfare) and partly deeply intentional cultivation.
So the lesson is known, widely taught in theory, and genuinely practised by some armies. But the Turkish Korean War example remains striking, precisely because it wasn’t doctrine — it appeared to be something cultural and almost instinctive, which is much harder to manufacture.
In Part 2 of this article, I will turn to some contemporary questions of distributed leadership in the context of conflicts of which today we are too keenly aware. What happened to the Israeli Defence Force and its erstwhile aegis? Were the lessons of the Korean War evident in the behaviour of the protagonists? Were elements of distributed leadership on display and what form did they take? What new lessons might have emerged regarding leadership in times of conflict and talk of “decapitation”?
