On 12 October 1999, the U.S. Army began a journey down a new path to innovation, when General Eric Shinseki presented his vision of Army Transformation at the 45th annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army. In this speech, General...
With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the grip of
superpower strictures loosened resulting in an increase in complexity and dynamism that marks today's security environment. The rapidly changing and uncertain...
The United States Army, along with its sister services, is struggling to create effective doctrinal concepts for warfighting in the Information Age. Man’s ability to manipulate and transport information at light speed is changing the conduct of...
Within the literature on Systemic Operational Design, discourse is generally treated as a mechanical communicative process. The monograph presents alternative ways to consider discourse, the implications of this for theory of Systemic Operational...
This monograph addresses how humans think and make sense of the world, and whether the current logic used by the U.S. military is still useful for understanding and influencing a world where complexity continues to increase. Drawing from elements...
This monograph posits that military practitioners have a theoretical and doctrinal gap in understanding operational art. This threatens to separate tactical action from strategic purpose resulting in battlefield success that is orphaned by...
From antiquity to the present there has been cultural tension over different views of what is right and what is wrong, and every culture desires to apply their values universally to the rest of the world. When a nation chooses to go to war and...
Operational design is an intellectual exercise that draws on the creative vision, experience, intuition, and judgment of commanders to provide a framework for development of detailed operation plans. Recently, a number of authors have questioned...
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...
In this paper I will discuss ethics when dealing with reports. The dilemma faced by many Non-Commissioned Officers and Officers in the United States Army today is rather to report the truth and risk a blemish in their career or to falsify reports...
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...
There is a common view within the United States Army that Information Operations is a military doctrine designed to win a "battle of ideas" within human populations. This monograph refutes this understanding of Information Operations by tracing the...
The Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) is the U.S. Army’s single analytical process used to assist the commander and staff in developing estimates and plans for military problem solving. A growing body of research and published works within...
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...
For military operations, the counterinsurgency environment is perhaps the most complicated and arduous environment in history. Often, government and military leaders are unsure how conventional forces should deal with an inferior enemy who stays...
If the United States is to provide viable options to its civilian leaders, it must change the way it organizes and employs its military power. Its current construct revolves around functional specialization where services provide self-contained...
The attached monograph, 'On the Foundations of National Military Strategy: Past and Present,' identifies the Hobbesian nation-state system, the Soviet threat, Containment, Deterrence, the Bi-polar balance of power, European focus, and a cumbersome...
Sorrells, William T., Downing, Glen R., Blakesley, Paul J., Pendall, David W., Walk, Jason K., Wallwork, Richard D.
Systemic Operational Design (SOD) is an application of systems theory to operational art. It is an attempt to rationalize complexity through systemic logic employing a holistic approach that translates strategic direction and policy into...
Since the beginning of the Republic, various forms of millennial religious doctrines, of which dispensational pre-millennialism is the most recent, have shaped U.S. national security strategy. As the dominant form of millennialism in the U.S....
Recent years have seen the US, UK and other ISAF and Coalition nations enmeshed in protracted, complex and intense campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Resilient and highly adaptable opponents have operated asymmetrically, and amongst the people, to...