Basic Staff Duties and Written Orders

PME 210 · Professional Military Education · Level 200 (junior officers, senior soldiers, and cadets moving toward responsibility)

A Royal Army College course on the craft of staff work: how to write clearly in the service, issue sound orders, keep the picture current, and run a small headquarters that serves its commander.

Course length: approximately 10 hours of online self-study, studied asynchronously at the student's own pace, together with any in-person practical instruction and assessment the course requires.

Foreword

Behind every well-run operation stands work that is rarely seen and easily underrated: the clear order that everyone understood, the warning that let the command prepare in time, the report that kept the commander's picture current, the headquarters that held it all together. This is staff work, and it is the craft by which a commander's intent is turned into coordinated action and a command keeps its grip on a situation. It is not glamorous, and it is sometimes dismissed as paperwork, but a command whose staff work is poor will be slow, confused, and badly informed however good its soldiers, while a command whose staff work is sound moves faster, prepares better, and stays clearer than its difficulties would otherwise allow.

This course teaches the practical craft of that work to those moving toward responsibility. It is built for a small, lightly armed humanitarian home-defence force, where the staff is rarely a large dedicated body and is more often an officer and a few others doing the staff work alongside everything else, which makes the discipline of doing it simply and well all the more important. The course teaches service writing, the clear and correct military writing that carries orders and reports; the orders process and the issuing of written orders; the warning order and the planning sequence that let a command prepare in parallel; the reports, returns, and records that keep the picture current; briefing and presenting information by the spoken word; staff analysis and advice through the staff paper; the staff functions and how to cover and coordinate them in a small staff; liaison with higher, flanking, and partner headquarters; and the running of a small headquarters that serves the commander rather than burdening them. Throughout, the aim is the same: staff work that serves command, kept as simple as the task allows, and never an end in itself.

How this course works

This is an introductory-to-intermediate professional course, studied online lesson by lesson, with its written orders and report exercises marked against a standard and its headquarters practice conducted in person. It assumes Foundations of Military Leadership (LDR 201) and the Junior Leadership Course (LDR 301), and it draws on the orders and voice-procedure work of the Signals and Field Communication course. It pairs naturally with Command, Mission Command, and Decision-Making (LDR 410), which teaches the command thinking that the staff work in this course supports.

Structure

Where this sits

PME 210 is a Level-200 professional military education course, building on Foundations of Military Leadership (LDR 201) and the Junior Leadership Course (LDR 301), and drawing on the orders format and voice procedure of the Signals and Field Communication course. It supports and pairs with Command, Mission Command, and Decision-Making (LDR 410), supplying the staff craft that the command thinking of that course relies on, and it prepares officers for the higher staff and defence-administration courses of the professional military education series (PME).

A note on sources

This is the College's own course, written fresh in Kaharagian and Commonwealth terms on the British and Commonwealth tradition of service writing, the orders process, and staff duties, adapting its sources rather than reproducing them. It is written in formal British English and carries Crown Copyright. Its examples are illustrative and use generic settings, since the Principality holds no territory of its own.

Crown Copyright © 2026 | Published by Authority of H.R.H. The Prince of Kaharagia