A general covers an Army war game

A good overview of the questions “modern” and “professional” militaries, which have the luxury of resources and intellect to think deep about the nature of their profession, should ask, or are asking, themselves.

A general covers an Army war game

Posted By Thomas E. Ricks

The annual “Unified Quest” futures war game held recently at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was pretty impressive — and also a refreshing change from my many previous forays.

Led by the human energizer Brigadier “HR” McMaster, this forum kicked off as a Very-Different-from-the-Big-Army event by enforcing a “NO POWERPOINT” rule. (OK, they showed about five slides over four-plus days.) Army insiders recognize how fundamentally heart-stopping this notion is among any audience of generals. A four-day conversation — scary for some, I know!

Although labeled a “war game” (and based on some scarily realistic scenarios), this week was more of a graduate seminar for a fistful of Army generals and senior civilians, as well as a smattering of U.S. allies and partners. 4-star TRADOC Commander Marty Dempsey chaired all four days 00 a huge commitment that I’ve never seen made by his predecessors in earlier years.

A “powerpoint-free” setting actually encouraged a free-wheeling conversation all around the room — light colonels and civilians challenging three-and four-star generals in surprisingly frank discussions. And on the couple of occasions they flipped up a slide, all conversation rapidly shut down — quite telling. The atmospherics were surprisingly relaxed and open — and everyone seemed feisty and ready to jump into any conversation — another good sign.

The conference “deliverable” was both to spin up an Army “Operating Concept” to round out its recent overarching “Capstone Concept” and to provide Army Chief of Staff George Casey some hard-hitting recommendations that could be used to influence the shape of the Army via the 2014-2019 budget years — decisions needed by next winter. I can’t share those recommendations, but for the flavor of the discussion, here are some highlights of the conversation, on a not-for-attribution basis:

• “We can’t see ourselves – all of us are positive illusion factories.”
• “We are approaching a strategic transition for the United States” [that is, an era of changed strategic context, when economic dominance is no longer assured, and budgetary realities will force choices]. “We are no longer going to be operating from a position of strategic superiority.”
• “Over-burdened terms” have proliferated and add confusion to our efforts — “what does C4ISR really mean? Does anyone really know?”
• “Beware Heroic Assumptions in the Next World” — not all wars will be like Iraq and Afghanistan. What’s the most demanding scenario the Army could face?
• “Tactical excellence alone does not win wars. Strategic coherence and operational excellence will be shaped by Army leaders.”
• “Mission Command — you are trying to balance a culture of competing virtues.” Can you build a commander-centric model founded upon decentralized operations as the norm?
• “How to use technology to enable decentralization while building trust and cohesion at the same time?” Can the science of command — technology and process — enable the art of command?
• “We’ve power-pointed over the problem” of the Army division and corps headquarters echelons of commands and what their roles should be. The Army is more than just a collection of brigades.
• “We need to think about blurring the distinctions between the Operating Force and the Generating Force” — it’s now gotten harmful. Gotta break down the cultural barriers between the deployed and deploying forces and the institutional Army that prepares and educates the force for the future
• “This is when we do our Interpretive Dance of Army organizational structures.” (Cue: Show Powerpoint Spaghetti Chart) How is the Army’s Force Management model — “ARFORGEN” — impacting Leader Development?
• “What has an overriding focus on Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) done to the Army’s operational and strategic leadership skills?” What are the second and third order effects of “modularity” — centering so much of the Army organization around the BCT?
• Allies: Lots of concern as well as admiration. “Is the U.S. Army of the future going to be designed and built to work with allies?” “Design us in!” “The U.S. Army goes down an amazing variety of multiple rabbit holes — we just want to see where you come up!”
• “How are we defining — and teaching — Risk?” How to inculcate a culture of initiative and risk-taking — not risk aversion? What is the message to young leaders of the recent investigations into tough combat actions?
• “Are we thinking enough about lethality? We’re four days into this and the term has not come up!” How does the Army look at its future role in delivering lethal effects?
• And finally — “What is the proper role of the Army in civil society? What’s the proper role of the Army officer in the republic?” Do we teach the meaning of a commission, explain the constitutional foundations of officership, and establish expectations for an apolitical officer corps? And do we reinforce this understanding throughout an officers’ career?

Most encouraging in the week’s efforts was the obvious commitment of this part of the Army — the TRADOC leadership — to thinking about the big issues facing the Army beyond today’s fights. First and foremost was an understanding of the critical importance of the human dimension in war. Dempsey and McMaster’s red-hot focus on leader development, decentralized mission command, and a clear recognition of the unpredictability of future conflict gave me confidence. Most importantly, they understood that Job One for Army leaders in the coming lean years is: “Don’t Lose this Generation!” Keeping the Army’s uniquely talented young leaders on board is the only reliable insurance policy against an unknown future.

This group — Dempsey and McMaster foremost — “gets it.” The challenge will be whether they can “sell it” to the rest of the Army in the midst of two grinding wars — and who may well not see it the same way quite yet.

Read Full Post »

On Hybrid Warfare and the Systems-versus-Classical approach to Warfare debate

Paul Mitchell (of Canadian Forces College fame, and until recently part of the RSIS crew) sent me these links to these two interesting articles from the NDU’s Joint Force Quarterly:

http://www.ndu.edu/inss/Press/jfq_pages/editions/i52/9.pdf

http://www.ndu.edu/inss/Press/jfq_pages/editions/i52/10.pdf

These two articles, ‘Hybrid Warfare and Challenges’ by Frank G. Hoffman and ‘Systems versus Classical Approaches to Warfare’ by Milan N. Vego, are excellent primers on the challenges of military transformation.  More than that, they sound a much-needed warning about the potential for ‘over-promise, and under-delivery’ of these new warfighting concepts.

Read Full Post »

Educating the 21st Century Soldier for The Unforgiving Minute

A while ago–must have been months back actually–I was on a book buying run with Evan at Amazon.com and had Craig M. Mullaney’s The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier’s Education suggested by the website’s recommendation engine. I’m interesting in military sociology, and more recently, military education as a function of that, so the the title grabbed my attention. I had  a quick look at the blurb, and decided to order it. Two things sealed the deal.  First, it was written by a young officer (Mullaney’s in his early 30s),  about his experience first at West Point, then in combat in Afghanistan. Second, the book is highly regarded by the who’s who in military intellectual circles, esp. among the intellectual generals like David Petraeus and Wesley Clark.

At some point I may post a full review of the book. It really is a good and more importantly, and easy read. My bedtime’s been pushed back by an hr or so several days now because it was just too difficult to put the book down. For those who would like to know more about the book, you can visit the author’ website. Rather interestingly, there’s a discussion guide there too for those who’d want to use the book in class. It’d certainly be a good exercise.

The point of my post today, however, is “a soldier’s education” in the SAF, thoughts inspired by the first few chapters of Mullaney’s book.

Read Full Post »

Studying how we study military studies

One of the more interesting things to develop in military studies has been the stark contrast between the language used to study the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), where terms such as network-centric warfare (NCW), cyber-warfare, non-linearity, simultaneity, battle space dominance and so forth are used to illustrate how radically different modern warfare is from all that has gone on before, and the language employed in the broader military studies that remains rooted in the mechanistic vocabulary of Newtonian physics and which reflects the Cartesian worldview of the rationality and certainty of scientific knowledge.  In a sense, studying the RMA has afforded us an opportunity to study not only how we study all things military, but how the ‘military’ itself is constructed and experienced.

Take the armed forces itself for instance.  The irony is that the very organization that is talking about open and adaptive systems, defence eco-systems, networks and so on is itself a highly structured, hierarchical, mechanistic, centralised organization (or should it be ‘organism’?)  The military organization, today as in the days of Frederick the Great, remains the pre-eminent example of Newtonian predictability.

Indeed, the metaphors we use reflect this: the soldier as a cog in the bigger machinery that is the military, where a critical turn of just the right gear will move the entire machine.  Which makes all this recent fixation with post-Newtonian science somewhat jarring, especially when juxtaposed against the still-dominant metaphor of the machine.  Quantum theory, relativity theory, Darwinian evolution, complexity theory – which following from the work of Fritjof Capra can be collectively termed post-Newtonian science – all suggest a world characterised by probabilities, arbitrary frames of reference, incremental yet unpredictable changes, and where slight variations in starting inputs can result in disproportionately large variations in final outputs.  Or, at the very least, suggest that Newton’s clockwork universe is only valid for a very small range of physical phenomena.

Such ideas have in turn spawned, in the military domain, concepts such as evolutionary approaches to organising, emergent strategy, networks/open systems, all of which preclude the possibility of prediction, much less control, that lies at the heart of the military organization.  And lest we forget, control is certainly something that is deeply embedded in military life.  In particular, the adoption of the ‘defence eco-system’ concept poses challenges to structure of, indeed the very rationale for, the military organization.  Evolutionary economists Kurt Dopfer and Jason Potts define eco-system, or complex open system, as follows:

Non-linear, quasi-entropic, partially stochastic, non-equilibrium, boundedly rational, self-organisational, path-dependent, complex adaptive ongoing process of variation, selection and replication.

All of which are concepts that are fundamentally opposed to the mechanistic determinism that defines military tasks and organisations.  More than that, the eco-system evolves in ways that defy any attempts to control it, even as it implicates any would-be controller.

The very rationale of the RMA itself comes under challenge if we concede the growing inadequacy, if not outright failure, of the Newtonian paradigm.  The Newtonian worldview holds that since all that happens has a definite cause and in turn gives rise to a definite effect, then the future can be predicted with absolute certainty if the present state is known accurately in all details.  The corollary to this is Sun Tzu’s dictum, ‘Know yourself, know your enemy, a hundred battles, a hundred victories.’  Translated into contemporary RMA parlance, dominant battlespace awareness through superior information and sensing technologies is a significant contributor to victory.

Yet, developments such as relativity theory, which argues against the privileging of any particular frame of reference, and quantum theory, which replaced mechanistic determinism with concepts such as probability waves and superposition, have invalidated Cartesian notions of certainty and rationality as well as Newtonian concepts of predictability and universality.  Sun Tzu’s dictum, which constitutes a major premise (and promise) of the RMA, fails simply because you cannot ever know yourself or your enemy with any certainty, only with degrees of likelihood.  Even the OODA (observe-orient-decide-act) loop becomes highly problematic, since an important consequence of quantum theory states that the process of observation alters that which is being observed, and that the Cartesian separation between observer and observed is untenable.  The OODA loop breaks down simply because the ‘observation’ fails as a stable basis for subsequent orientation, decision and action.

Clearly, the metaphors discussed above are powerful tools, not only for understanding the military domain, but for shaping how the military domain itself evolves (yes, the use of ‘evolve’ is deliberate).  The question arises, how then do you reconcile metaphors that are the antithesis of each other?  Something must surely give when the Newtonian ideals continue to dominate in a world marked by post-Newtonian ideas.

Read Full Post »