Military practitioners are often asked to make plans that could have enormous strategic effects without having a good understanding of their operational environment. It is exactly this relationship between the plan, the environment, and the end...
The problem facing practitioners of emerging Army doctrine is how to expand the use of assessments beyond detailed planning to support conceptual planning during design. This raises the question, will the use of assessments enable the commander to...
How can the Interagency Conflict Assessment Framework (ICAF) be improved in order to better understand the operational environment? The application of the ICAF requires good intellectual habits that encompass an appreciation for abductive reasoning...
Throughout the past 15 years, both the Western allies and the Russians have entered into a series of military engagements that have in one way or another spectacularly failed to achieve the results intended, namely a decisive military victory which...
The Military-Media Relationship: A Dysfunctional Marriage? Thom Shanker and Major General Mark Hertling, U.S. Army: In the information age, the first casualty of war is often trust--between those who fight the wars and those who report them. A...
This monograph addresses the fact that most writing on strategy is descriptive rather than explanatory. Describing strategy in terms of categories such as "grand strategy," or "theater strategy," or by various analogies, does not illuminate what...
What caused the agricultural manpower shortage in World War II? Historians have proffered a variety of explanations that attribute linear causality to a handful of independent variables. No scholar, however, has attempted to study the manpower...
Since the end of the Cold War stability and support operations represent the majority of U. S. Army deployments. The writers of the Army’s capstone manual, FM 100-5, Operations, grapple with replacing the 1993 version with a comprehensive...
Causal claims are unavoidable in military affairs. However, causal claims are also insufficient when attempting to understand and intervene in complex environments. Hence, notions of conventional causality must be supplemented with an understanding...
How might military practitioners incorporate social science concepts within the intelligence analytical framework to better define and understand the human dimension of an area of operation? Current military intelligence doctrine vaguely prescribes...
Joint Doctrine, explicitly, and Army Doctrine, implicitly, recommend that military commanders and staffs exercise systems thinking in operational planning and execution. However, current Military Doctrine fails to fully explicate and apply a...
Presidential Study Directive-10 directed executive agencies to improve efforts in preventing human atrocities. Conflict analysis has identified that internal conflict has significant adverse impacts on civilian populations. Apart from increased...
The Joint Non-Kinetic Effects Model (JNEM) is a computer based simulation for training Division and Corps Commanders and Staffs in a manner that accurately replicates the complexities of interacting with civilian populations. The model replicates...
While the United States and Russia have many disagreements, very few of these affect nuclear weapon policy. One that has recently done so, however, is the argument over ballistic missile defense systems in Europe. The United States has signed...
Gulf War images of oil soaked birds and burning oil wells continue to generate academic research on the environment as both a victim and a weapon of war. The resulting literature has sensitized policy makers and military leaders to the...
The military needs an autonomous ground convoy capability because the speed and complexity of the environment in which it operates has begun to exceed the abilities of its members to operate within it. U.S. Army doctrine requires the logistics...
As western civilization evolved from a pre-industrial to an industrial society, social and technological changes transformed the structure and modus operandi of political, economic, and military institutions. With the dawning of the 21st century...
Bias caused by organizational culture is a constant companion of military planning. Cognitive models dominated by Newtonian, mechanistic, and reductionist thinking, have all but entrenched bias at the operational level of war where contextual, or...
American military doctrine and professional literature in the past decade have stressed maneuver warfare and the operational level of war. This monograph traces the evolution of maneuver theory and its conceptual opposite, firepower theory, and...
The recognition of the failure at the strategic and operational levels of war during the Global War on Terror, specifically in Iraq, has resulted in a quest for intellectual solutions to complex operational and strategic problems. To date this has...