Military Transformation Past and Present [Chapter 1]

P1: 000 GGBD140C01 C9190/Mandeles June 29, 2007 1 Transformation and Learning in Military Organizations Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. —James Madison1 THE CHALLENGE Visionaries of new modes of combat are often far ahead of the technological state of the art. Their visions, therefore, look better on paper than in real life. When reviewing pre-Civil War naval technological advances in steam propulsion and ordnance (these eventually combined to form the propeller-driven ironside with rotating armored gun turrets firing shell ordnance), the late military historian Walter Millis observed that the plans of gun and ship designers were ahead of the state of the art in metallurgy and ballistics.2 A military historian writing in the year 2100 might make three analogous observations when looking back at presentday American architects of a military revolution based on precision munitions, robotics, nanotechnology, bio-engineering, information and decision tool, computer, communications, and sensor technologies. First, weapon systems designers are embedding myriad new technological capabilities into organization structures conceived by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century military theorists.3 Second, operations based on these military technologies require complementary organizational procedures, processes, and structures that currently are not mature—and in some cases may not yet exist. And third, the organizational processes commonly employed to guide the interaction among people, technologies, and military 22:58 P1: 000 GGBD140C01 C9190/Mandeles 2 June 29, 2007 military transformations past and present organizations are flawed, so there has been little coherent thought about the organizational and operational implications of new weapons technologies.4 This book is written for two very different audiences. First, the officers and civilians who make important decisions now or who may make them soon. Second, the members of the military policy analysis community who try to define and solve problems for the civilians and officers. The latter group is often wrong, because they search for infallible solutions amid unavailable, hidden, ambiguous, and imperfect information, and competing goals and preferences. Physicist John R. Pierce warned against this search for infallibility—a constant in the national security community—when he noted, “Novices in mathematics, science, or engineering are forever demanding infallible, universal, mechanical methods for solving problems.” My intent in this book is to show these two audiences that while there is no infallible method to achieve innovation, the prospects for successfully implementing innovation in the Department of Defense (DoD) may be enhanced. I shall do so by examining, comparing, and analyzing how previous large-scale changes in military capability—what we now call “transformations”—took place and then drawing inferences from that analysis to current and future questions of military transformation. Public servants charged with the responsibility of designing, managing, and overseeing national security programs are rightly concerned about the prospects for innovation and learning within the DoD. There are real national security threats to the United States, and the costs of failure are high if public servants improperly prepare for and conduct military operations and postwar reconstruction. U.S. military organizations have learned and innovated, and they can do it again. To understand how military organizations can learn and innovate, the reader will have to follow, at times, a complex argument. The unique value of this study is its use of multilevel analysis. Most historians and social scientists studying military innovation examine historical case material at a single level of analysis, that is, by looking at the actions of significant individuals or at the interactions of people within an innovating organization. Indeed, examining innovation from the perspective of an individual or a single organization has generated useful insights. Yet, this perspective has been unable to generate effective broad policy guidelines for future innovation. In the real-life world of people in organizations considering military problems, nothing is simple. People have to deal with “solutions” to previous problems that are proposed for new or poorly understood issues. Risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity are constant companions. Individuals and organizations interact in varied and complex ways. Hence, the real key to unlocking the process of innovation is attention to multiple sets of relationships among individuals, organizations, and multiorganizational systems. This book will show that many opportunities exist for strategic leadership—even within an organization as large and complex as the DoD. When properly arranged, interaction among groups of organizations enables effective innovation by enhancing the application of evidence, inference, and logic. 22:58 P1: 000 GGBD140C01 C9190/Mandeles June 29, 2007 transformation and learning in military organizations 3 MILITARY TRANSFORMATION: PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS The fascination of DoD and military officials with the concept of military transformation began in the early 1990s.5 During that period, documents prepared by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) called for “fundamental change” through implementation of the Revolution in Military Affairs. The Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force proposed transformation road maps, created battle laboratories, designed experiments, and conducted wargames.6 Congress supported these efforts. Congressional Research Service analyst Ronald O’Rourke asserted that as early as 1986, Congress instituted changes that can be seen as examples of defense transformation, including activities that were opposed by DoD leaders.7 In 1998, Congress required the secretary of defense to establish a Defense Science Board task force to examine DoD’s preparations for military transformation.8 Completing its work in 1999, the board defined transformation in terms of pursuing “bold new ways of conducting military operations to meet new security challenges of the 21st century.” It found that DoD leadership called for “fundamental transformation in both military and business affairs” in strong terms, the Services were developing new concepts, sharing themes, and beginning to address new security challenges. In addition, the Defense Science Board observed that the Services and the joint community were beginning to experiment with new concepts of war. However, the board noted that DoD leadership were possibly underestimating the “focus and effort needed to affect fundamental transformation,” and that there seemed to be no “pervasive sense of urgency” to transform military and associated business capabilities.9 In a September 1999 speech at the Citadel entitled “A Period of Consequences,” George W. Bush argued the time was ripe to transform the U.S. military. Bush observed that the six-month planning period used to conduct Operation Desert Storm against Iraq was too long. He pledged to develop lighter, more mobile, and more lethal forces, and promised to appoint a strong secretary of defense who would be given a mandate to transform the military.10 With his election in 2000, President George W. Bush kept his promises and appointed Donald H. Rumsfeld as secretary of defense with the directive to “transform the military for the twenty-first century.” High among Secretary Rumsfeld’s initial two concerns were the development of a viable missile defense system and the reduction of the size of the Army—thus freeing funds devoted to personnel for new materiel programs central to his view of military transformation. In a speech delivered on September 10, 2001 at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld observed that the primary obstacle to achieving change, innovation, and transformation was the Pentagon bureaucracy and its processes. He proposed to transform the way the DoD works and what it works on.11 Less than two months later, Secretary Rumsfeld established an office to develop and implement transformational ideas—the Office of Force Transformation—and appointed retired Navy Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski to lead it. Previously, Admiral Cebrowski was president of the Naval War College, 22:58 P1: 000 GGBD140C01 C9190/Mandeles 4 June 29, 2007 military transformations past and present where he was a leading theoretician and proponent of network-centric warfare, an operational concept he believed was central to transformation.12 Crystal Balls and the Impact of New Technology Military leaders agree that technology, in the words of then-Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Charles C. Krulak, “will change tomorrow’s battlefield in a way that none of us really understand.” This situation is not unique to the present, but it provides the context for the current concern about military “transformation.” There can be no crystal ball with which the national security community13 can accurately predict the future even though DoD civilian and military leaders constantly search for one. No operations research method can determine the single most effective apportionment of roles and missions, or identify unequivocally the technologies, operational concepts, and associated organizational structures that will improve military capability qualitatively. The best the national security community can do is to organize to learn by collecting and cataloging relevant information, developing the means to access and critically test the information, and posing and considering alternatives in a systematic matter.14 Thus, the U.S. ability to anticipate and respond to national security challenges—and to minimize the effect of unpleasant surprises—will depend on the quality of analysis of policy tradeoffs and the way OSD, the Joint Staff, Combatant Commands, and the Services interact to provide that analysis. In the larger context of the U.S. national security community’s response to global terrorism, this type of analysis could improve efforts to prevent the type of intelligence failures that occurred prior to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.15 The Services and Combatant Commands have conducted many good tactical studies, simulations, exercises, and experiments. However, these studies fail to address the linkages among tactical, operational, and strategic levels of warfare, or the relationships between individual-level and organizational decision making essential to implementing the intent of combat leaders. Consequently, the national security community does not have a robust and coherent analytical framework to (1) transform the twentieth-century U.S. military into a twenty-first century force, (2) figure out how tomorrow’s battlefield will be different, or (3) allow officers and enlisted personnel to codify their experiences and to think clearly and systematically about operational concepts, technologies, or organizations. Nor has the analytical community developed a perspective—or credible models—to relate military technologies and operational concepts at individual, organizational, and multiorganizational levels of analysis, or consider operational complications flowing from the use of new operational concepts carried out with multiple generations of equipment. Indeed, as the then-assistant director of the Office of Force Transformation Thomas C. Hone observed, the Army in 2003 was being challenged by Secretary Rumsfeld to explain and justify its current organizational structure. To meet Secretary Rumsfeld’s challenges, the Army could respond to his criticisms 22:58 P1: 000 GGBD140C01 C9190/Mandeles June 29, 2007 transformation and learning in military organizations 5 and try to give him what he wanted, or the Army could employ wargames and simulations to determine which weapons, tactics, and military formations may work best in particular situations. Yet, if the wargames and simulations are poorly designed, the conclusions drawn from them will be flawed—a likely outcome because the analytic community lacks the means to relate operational concepts, technology, and organizations at individual, organizational, and multiorganizational levels. Therefore, the argument between the Army and its critics cannot be resolved—or even illuminated—by simulations, trials, and tests.16 Since military leaders do not have models that relate technological and organizational changes with individual-level cognitive and knowledge requirements, they can’t predict the effects of information asymmetries on combat operations. Discussions about operational concepts and organizational architectures are conducted with little appreciation for (1) the necessity of examining levels of analysis, (2) the problems of evidence and of inference, and (3) how to accumulate, catalogue, and retrieve knowledge about military operations. A related situation has existed in the analytic support to national policies of nuclear deterrence since the invention of nuclear weapons. There has been a great deal of competent analysis on narrow problems (e.g., of basing and dispersal), but precious little work on broader issues of the sort conducted by Bernard Brodie: he examined the kind of analysis that should be done, and asked questions that were hidden behind the numbers on a briefing chart. Indeed, the use of briefing slides to transmit information, array options, and structure decisions is a significant source of analytic failure.17 Current official doctrine assumes it is possible to achieve a seamless forward and backward distribution of information, instructions, feedback, and evaluations—for example, close coordination of tactical and command units or greater interdependence between theater and organizations located in the continental United States. Such assumptions are equivalent to postulating a functioning frictionless organization—an organization without error—conducting flawless operations under the most dangerous, stressful, rapidly changing, and uncertain conditions.18 The potential sources of organizational error and the cognitive effects of sleep deprivation, fear, stress, uncertainty, ambiguity, and information overload on decisions in combat have been inadequately analyzed, and strategies to deal with them are not in place.19 What little official writing exists (e.g., in Joint Vision 2010 or Joint Vision 2020) on information storage and processing, division of labor, command arrangements, span of control, coordination of information and analysis, and personnel skills offers inadequate guidance for practical decision making. Military Transformation and Military Revolution The concepts of military revolution—that is, a significant qualitative improvement in operational capability—and transformation address a common theme.20 22:58 P1: 000 GGBD140C01 C9190/Mandeles 6 June 29, 2007 military transformations past and present Both highlight the important role of well-designed experimentation to prevent accepting faulty assumptions and inferences. And both involve linking new organizations and processes, new technologies, and new operational concepts to achieve greatly improved operational capability—or, in Admiral Cebrowski’s words, a “sustained American competitive advantage in warfare.”21 However, the symbolic and bureaucratic uses to which the concept of military transformation has been put—particularly, justifying advanced technology weapons programs—only reiterate the language of military revolutions, and have robbed the concept of its substantive meaning.22 The assumption underlying many of the military Services’ proposals for new transformational technologies is the same as that for components of military revolutions: higher technical performance equates to higher operational capability. Unfortunately, this assumption is wrong. There is no identity relationship between technical performance and operational capability.23 The blind faith that paper acquisition and budgeting plans and elaborately expressed goals for new military capabilities translate directly into improved operational capability transcends political party and particular administrations, imperiling the goal of planned and directed military transformation. Military transformation is more likely to occur when the DoD develops more effective means to (1) apply knowledge and analysis to decision making and action, (2) aggregate and integrate available knowledge, and (3) catalogue, retrieve, and analyze propositions derived from current operations’ “lessons learned” and historical analyses. Stephen A. Cambone, when director of Program Evaluation and Analysis, misunderstood these critical factors in creating the conditions for military transformation.24 Cambone was silent about the problem of organizing to produce knowledge about military operations and the relationship between acquisition plans and future operational capability. For Cambone, transformation would eventually be reduced to “nuts-and-bolts decisions about which ‘platforms and programs’ to buy.”25 Just as there are no simple recipes to achieve a military revolution, there is no simple expedient to military transformation. Successful development of weapons, doctrine, and operational concepts requires a great deal of planned, coordinated, and cooperative action among countless offices, agencies, laboratories, and contractors over a long period of time. Planning to achieve a military revolution or transformation necessarily entails predictions, many of which will not be realized. A military transformation, like a military revolution, is most easily identified with hindsight, because it is impossible to predict secondary (and higher order) effects of self-generating technological and operational change.26 Furthermore, a transformation of operational capability may be hindered, retarded, or delayed by organizational processes and actions that reduce the ability of individuals to apply knowledge and analysis to their tasks. Richard McKenna, naval historian and author of the novel The Sand Pebbles, noted that the interwar Navy’s cutback of the machinist’s mate school (set up by President Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels) significantly delayed the acquisition of engineering knowledge for thousands of sailors. Instead, sailors learned engineering through 22:58 P1: 000 GGBD140C01 C9190/Mandeles June 29, 2007 transformation and learning in military organizations 7 “long years of apprenticeship,” and the Navy deprived itself of a higher operational capability achievable by the deployment of large numbers of personnel able to act at higher levels of skills and competence.27 The Navy did not make the same error in regard to aviation. As Navy historian Rear Adm. Julius A. Furer observed, “Perhaps the greatest contribution made by the Navy Department to the program of aviation during its early years was in the education and training of aeronautical engineers; a contribution which made it possible for the Bureau of Aeronautics, when it was established in 1921, to take on all of the functions of a technical bureau without a lengthy interregnum for training its personnel.”28 In other words, the Navy Department, by increasing the number of people having technical knowledge and enhancing their ability to apply that knowledge, raised the prospects for “transformative” success. Today, Marine Corps leaders have embraced this perspective in official documents, such as the 2005 “A Concept for Distributed Operations,” which was signed by then Marine Commandant General Michael W. Hagee. The Concept urges the Marines to “continue to elevate the already high competence of our most junior leaders, educating them to think and act at the tactical level of war, with an understanding of the application of commander’s intent to achieve operational level effects.” Junior leaders will be trained to perform additional technical tasks to enable them “to perform combat tasks accomplished at higher levels of command.”29 These facts have profound implications for planning transformations and devising an organizational strategy to enhance competitive advantage. Knowledge is not free. Resources must be devoted to creating, developing, cataloguing and storing it; retrieving and transmitting it throughout the national security community; and analyzing and correcting it. Planning Transformations Some transformations have required more than twenty to thirty years to become recognized by observers, which means that most, if not all, of the senior civilian and military officials developing initial plans for transformational weapons systems will not be in office to see the fulfillment of their plans and the myriad ways in which they will change.30 For example, in 1973, no one in the U.S. Army anticipated how the technologies of precision guidance would play out in the force structure. Nor did anyone predict that reliance on precision-guided munitions (PGMs) would stimulate a wide range of other effects, including the need to develop new sensor, communication, and computer technologies, new platforms for these technologies, new occupational specialties and associated training curricula, new operational concepts, and new organizations and doctrine for command and control. Yet, military historian Russell F. Weigley observed that the Army, spurred by analyses of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, “initiated the weaponsdevelopment and replacement campaign that by the 1980’s had become the most complete rearming in the Army’s history. Further refinement and distribution of 22:58 P1: 000 GGBD140C01 C9190/Mandeles 8 June 29, 2007 military transformations past and present PGMs [precision-guided munitions] was conspicuously involved, but the rearming extended into almost every area of weaponry.” Likewise, the Air Force in the early 1970s began to place greater emphasis on PGMs and the organizational prerequisites for using such weapons, for example, intelligence analyses of target sets.31 This rearming of the Air Force also has extended into almost every area of weaponry, 32 and continues to have rippling effects for each of the Services in acquisition, force structure, doctrine, recruitment, training, and organization. In October 2001, U.S. forces began fighting al-Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) using a new operational concept. In an example cited by Air Force Maj. Gen. Daniel “Fig” Leaf about the early days of combat, a Northern Alliance commander turned to an Air Force air control specialist and said he wanted to attack Taliban forces on the next ridge. The Afghan commander thought U.S. forces would go through a long approval process, and that the strike would come in after a day or two had passed. Instead, nineteen minutes after the airman’s call, the Afghan commander was surprised to see a bomb flying directly to the Taliban positions he had just identified.33 This operational concept appears to be very similar to the Hunter Warrior concept conceived and first tested by the Marine Corps during the Hunter Warrior Advanced Warfighting Experiment at the Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California, in March 1997. Hunter Warrior was designed to examine a new operational concept: “small teams in a non-contiguous battlespace, advanced and integrated C3 I [command, control, communications and intelligence] to provide shared situational awareness, and enhanced fires and targeting.”34 Initial thought about this operational concept began in 1992, and over the next five years, it was clarified in wargames, debate, argument, and analysis.35 The experiment, situated in a simulated littoral environment, pitted an experimental (Blue) force of about 2,000 (of which an average of about 100 marines were ashore at any one time), against a (Red) conventionally armed force of almost 4,000. During the experiment, Blue small mobile units, dispersed across a wide area, used a loosely coupled (or “flattened”) command and control structure, and were linked through squad-level battlefield computers to a communications network managed by an experimental Command and Control Center located more than 150 miles away.36 Maj. Lawrence Roberts, a marine aviator who participated in the Hunter Warrior experiment, also noted that Blue air and ground forces communicated effectively using the “Newton Ericsson, a combination of the Apple Newton hand-held digital computer modified with a Global Positioning System (GPS) card and the Ericsson free-text burst-transmission radio.”37 Planning was accomplished through face-to-face exchanges between ground and air personnel. The Hunter Warrior planning process was faster than the conventional air tasking order process, and “greatly enhanced the capability of the maneuver force to function as a single entity within the commander’s intent.”38 Blue teams called in air strikes and long-range fire support from simulated naval units and covert remote-operated mortars. The experimental Blue Force used a simulated network of satellites, surveillance aircraft, micro ground sensors, and 22:58 P1: 000 GGBD140C01 C9190/Mandeles June 29, 2007 transformation and learning in military organizations 9 unmanned aerial vehicles to collect information about the Red Force. As designed, the Hunter Warrior experiment relied upon free play, which allowed unanticipated interactions and tactical innovations to be conducted by offensive and defensive forces.39 Although descriptions of Hunter Warrior appeared in defense trade magazines and newsletters, the similarity between the Hunter Warrior and the Enduring Freedom operational concepts may be coincidental, and a result of the availability of advances in communications and targeting gear.40 However, the melding in combat of ground spotters with aircraft carrying PGMs represents a remarkable example of organizational learning at tactical and headquarters levels.41 The introduction of PGMs into the Army and Air Force, and the creation of a new operational concept melding ground spotters with aircraft suggest that the size and accumulated resources available to the U.S. military allow multiple military transformations to proceed in parallel, at different tempos and with different degrees of maturity. This situation has characteristics of a positive feedback loop, wherein portions of transformation programs may interact and reinforce the others.42 It is conceivable, however, that central pieces of transformation programs may be negated by (1) weakness of multiorganizational coordination and interaction, (2) insufficient attention and support for military thinkers through deliberate identification, protection, and mentoring of innovative personnel, (3) inadequate procurement of enabling technologies (e.g., reliable communications transmission bandwidth for expeditionary forces), and (4) the opportunity costs imposed by continuation of service programs that conflict with the transformation program.43 The Challenge of “Legacy” Constraints, capital stocks, and structure are all part of the “legacy” of past actions, acquisition decisions, and habits. It is difficult to update habits, standard operating procedures, and tradition in changing from one organization and mixture of forces, technologies, and operational concepts to another. Historian Elting E. Morison captured the essence of this problem in describing the use of older artillery pieces, first used in the Boer War some forty years earlier, shortly after the defeat of France by the Nazis and the subsequent British retreat. It seems that the British employed this old and light artillery in mobile units for coastal defense. Unfortunately, these mobile units did not fire their guns quickly enough, and a time-motion expert was hired to suggest improvements. As Morison describes the situation, the time-motion expert Watched one of the gun crews of five men at practice in the field for some time. Puzzled by certain aspects of the procedures, he took some slow-motion pictures of the soldiers performing the loading, aiming, and firing routines. 22:58 P1: 000 GGBD140C01 C9190/Mandeles 10 June 29, 2007 military transformations past and present When he ran these pictures over once or twice, he noticed something that appeared odd to him. A moment before the firing, two members of the gun crew ceased all activity and came to attention for a three-second interval extending throughout the discharge of the gun. He summoned an old colonel of artillery, showed him the pictures, and pointed out this strange behavior. What, he asked the colonel, did it mean? The colonel, too, was puzzled. He asked to see the pictures again. “Ah,” he said when the performance was over, “I have it. They are holding the horses.”44 On the verge of fighting a mechanized war in World War II, some behaviors associated with using animal power remained in operational practice. Morison was right to wonder what would remain after the militaries of the mid-twentieth century mechanized. Today, we might ask what residues of mid-twentieth-century practice will persist after the widespread introduction of precision munitions, stealth platforms, and sensor, computer, and communications technologies, and will these residues of twentieth-century practice enhance organizational and operational reliability? Transformation and Organizational Strategies It is commonly asserted that concrete mission objectives, priorities, and clear metrics to measure progress are essential elements of programs to achieve transformation.45 However, examination of real cases of transformation, such as the introduction of carrier-based aviation into the U.S. Navy (see Chapter 3), and the start of the PGMs transformation in the Army and Air Force, shows that concrete objectives and clear metrics are not necessary components of successful transformation. Indeed, given the accelerating rate of technological advance and the enormous personnel and financial resources devoted to national security, it is likely that, regardless of our plans, roadmaps, and metrics, we will see one or more “military transformations” every fifteen to twenty years. However, there remains the understandable desire of political and military leaders not to leave such matters to chance. A central argument of this book is that military transformation will result more effectively from enhancing the interaction among DoD components to confront risk, coordinate, experiment, discuss, and set priorities. This organizational strategy alters the incentives for how the military creates and uses evidence and inference to judge the implementation of plans and programs. It focuses seniorlevel attention on the role of knowledge and analysis in decision making at three levels of analysis: individuals who think, decide, and respond to problems; interactions among individuals in organizations; and interactions among groups of organizations. The historical cases explored in the following chapters illustrate these three levels, the relationships among them, and potential practical guidelines to promote organizational effectiveness across the DoD. In particular, we shall see that establishing “rules” of evidence may not be an appropriate first step. 22:58 P1: 000 GGBD140C01 C9190/Mandeles June 29, 2007 transformation and learning in military organizations 11 The rules of evidence used to judge new operational concepts, new organizations, and the operational capability of new weapons technologies will emerge through partisan argument and mutual adjustment among individuals in organizations and between organizations, as they learn. Similarly, regardless of what the April 2003 DoD’s Transformation Planning Guidance document calls for, an effort to create a “culture of innovation”46 by promulgating policies to reward innovative thinkers and doers will amount only to verbal and written exhortations. The exhortations to be innovative will be ignored in practice, unless organizational arrangements inherently encourage them. Innovative thinkers and doers are more likely to be rewarded and promoted when organizational leaders see their skills as an advantage in competition and interaction with other organizations. Even so, there will be lags and uneven application of rewards to innovative thinkers. Attention to the role of knowledge and analysis in decision making is consistent with the post-World War II observations of mathematician John von Neumann, a participant in and astute observer of official high-level strategic discussions. Writing as U.S. forces were undergoing a major transformation due to their adoption of nuclear weapons, von Neumann noted “the enormous importance of the most powerful weapon of all; namely, the flexible type of human intelligence.”47 Indeed, von Neumann asserted that human intelligence—the ability to pose analogies, to infer, to marshal evidence, and to test and evaluate assertions and arguments—has a greater impact on the conduct of war than atomic weapons. Von Neumann’s argument is relevant to today’s discussion within the DoD and in national security journals about transforming the military to exploit new technologies and operational concepts, and thereby, to achieve qualitative improvements in military capability.48 As an anonymous officer serving in Iraq noted, “the most high-tech weapons in the U.S. military reside in the ‘brain housing group’ of soldiers and Marines.”49 This chapter’s opening quotation from James Madison represented his belief in the importance of the structural arrangement of organizations in controlling significant sources of error in government. The logic of Madison’s argument to reduce error in government has never been applied to any of the post-World War II DoD reorganizations. In fact, as the U.S. defense establishment has grown, become ever more differentiated, and been reorganized repeatedly, interaction within and among the department’s components has not improved—the interaction is certainly not of a higher quality than that displayed by the interwar naval aviation community or the interwar marine amphibious operations community. It remains for the current generation to improve interaction and analysis among these organizations.50 OUTLINE OF THE BOOK The book is organized into a series of case studies that illuminate some key practical and historical questions of organizational learning: 22:58 P1: 000 GGBD140C01 C9190/Mandeles 12 June 29, 2007 military transformations past and present r r r r r Toward what concepts of operation should we evolve? How should the United States compete in specific missions? What organizational forms and arrangements may exploit U.S. technological and personnel advantages? How should the national security community organize itself to develop new operational concepts and new organizations appropriate to new technologies? Is the use of knowledge and analysis in creating new operational concepts and organizations more or less effective today than it was in the period between World War I and World War II? To what extent do today’s analytical tools and computer and information technologies provide symbolic cover for a reduced application of knowledge and analysis to military problems? Chapter 2 introduces the problem of organizing to learn by examining the post-Civil War Army and Navy. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the interwar period. Chapter 3 compares how the Navy and the Army Air Corps aviation communities approached technological and operational uncertainty. Chapter 4 examines the problem of the development of amphibious operations in the United States Marine Corps (USMC) and the Royal Marines. Chapter 5 moves to the present time period and explores how the Navy is developing new operational concepts to exploit the set of technologies comprising cooperative engagement capability. Finally, Chapter 6 applies the insights derived from the case studies to current efforts to guide military transformation. SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS 1. Weapon systems designers are embedding many new technological capabilities into military organizational structures conceived by eighteenthand nineteenth-century military theorists. 2. Operations based on new military technologies (including precision munitions, robotics, nanotechnology, bio-engineering, information technology, computer, communications, and sensors) require complementary organizational procedures, processes, and structures that currently are not mature or may not yet exist. 3. Current organizational processes do not stimulate coherent thought about the organizational and operational implications of new weapons technologies. 4. There is no crystal ball that can predict the future accurately, determine the single most effective apportionment of roles and missions, or identify the technologies, operational concepts, and associated organizational structures that will improve military capability qualitatively. 22:58 P1: 000 GGBD140C01 C9190/Mandeles June 29, 2007 transformation and learning in military organizations 13 5. A military transformation, like a military revolution, is most easily identified with hindsight, because it is impossible to predict secondary (and higher order) effects of self-generating technological and operational change. 6. A military transformation may be hindered, retarded, or delayed by organizational processes that reduce the ability of individuals to apply knowledge and analysis to their tasks. 7. The methodological key to unlocking the process of innovation is attention to multiple sets of relationships among individuals, organizations, and interactions among groups of organizations. 8. Military transformation will result more effectively from enhancing the interaction among DoD components to experiment, to discuss, and to set priorities. When properly arranged, interaction among DoD components creates effective innovation by enhancing the application of evidence, inference, and logic. View publication stats 22:58