In essence, yes, "the AI" as one whole just shouts out what it is doing. What's sort of neat is that since all AI characters share one mind, they can have one character give orders to another, which then appears to comply – even though it was effectively the character that was going to do the thing that decided to do the thing in the first place. In other words, the "order" is just "the AI" telling itself what it's doing – but it looks to the player as though one AI character instructs another on what to do, and the other obeys.
Haha, yeah, I wonder if they at least designated a ‘squad leader’ that was the designated ‘order giver’, or whether it was always a random nearby soldier.
I guess it doesn’t matter from a game perspective since I never noticed, but from a technical perspective it seems more elegant to me.