The strategic and operational environment in which the United States military will operate in for the foreseeable future is characterized by its complexity. Historically the United States military has taken a linear approach to understanding the...
The military is increasingly using and relying on the term "narrative" in its lexicon. United States strategic guidance documents generally implore commanders to "shape the narrative," doctrinal publications recommend commanders to "exploit a...
First Place Winner of the MacArthur Military Leadership Writing Competition for the CGSC Class 2008-01. Unit cohesion is an important consideration in the best of times. In the worst of times — for a unit encircled, low on supplies, out of...
Field Marshall Viscount Slim holds a special place in modern military history. He soundly defeated the Imperial Japanese Army in Burma in 1945, retaking the strategically important Burma Road, and safeguarding the Chinese Theater from sure...
Creativity, the generation of new ideas that are both novel and appropriate is essential to understanding complex problems, and can be enhanced by both life experience diversity and cognitive diversity, as well as by delayed evaluation during...
Deconstructing army leadership. COL Christoper R. Paparone, U.S. Army; A deconstruction of the Army's theory of leadership, with its emphasis on hierarchy and management, reveals that the Army has based its theory on circular logic, improvable...
In the aftermath of the air campaign that began Operation Desert Storm, the US Air Force sought to measure US success in the military-technical and organizational innovation that occurred during the Gulf War and its impact on the future evolution...
Enable from overwatch: MNF-Iraq. General Raymond T. Odierno, U.S. Army; The MNF-Iraq commander's operating guidance emphasizes "how we think," "how we operate," and "who we are."
The strategy of protracted people's war: Uganda. Yoweri...
Analysts and analysts alone create intelligence. Although technological marvels assist analysts by cataloging and presenting data, information and evidence in new ways, they do not do analysis. To be most effective, analysts need an overarching,...
What causes a large group to operate in an efficient, effective, innovative manner? Is it the way it is organized, its executive structure, its mechanisms for gathering and disseminating information, its internal communications, its analytic...
Dependence on technological superiority should prompt many questions. What if the Army cannot use the Global Positioning System (GPS) data or it is degraded? Are the troops trained to operate when GPS systems are degraded? What about the precision...
The information sphere is an integral part of the current environment. The center of gravity (CoG) theory currently is matched for conventional, linear, industrial age warfare in the physical domain. The CoG concept is thus not suited to work in...
The Army conducts operations in complex environments with Joint, Interagency, Intergovernmental and Multinational (JIIM) partners. Doctrine provides several concepts designed to create and sustain effective partnerships. One of these concepts, the...
This work proposes a novel approach to military transformation, 'Adaptive Transformation,' that accounts for an inescapable reality in the current and future operational environment: uncertainty. Military planners and decision makers have to face...
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...
It is the enemy’s will to resist that is the true objective of war. Destruction of his armed forces is a means and not necessarily mandatory to achieve this objective. To save the precious resources of blood and treasure and to assure the...
The Department of Defense emphasis on stability operations caused the United States Army to change its operational concept to Full Spectrum Operations (FSO). The acknowledgment of the importance of stability operations however, does not translate...
Is there a better way to organize staffs in operational headquarters based on their roles? Following 9/11 in the ensuing Global War on Terror, the sizes of divisions and corps serving as operational headquarters have doubled and tripled,...
Sun Tzu asserts that success is not winning every battle fought, but subduing the enemy's will without fighting. Nevertheless, modern military thought fails to distinguish an enemy's will-to-fight from their means to do so, limiting the ways...
The defense and intelligence community initiatives to create persistent surveillance capabilities and enable access to the resultant continuous data streams will create significant change in the joint force and partners operating across the domains...