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 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...
Does following the rule of law assist security forces in defeating an armed insurgency? If so, what factors assist or prevent security forces from conducting operations in accordance with rule of law principles? Counterinsurgency literature and...
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...
What kind of policy can the United States and the international community pursue that increases the likelihood that stability emerges in failed and failing states? I develop a theory of state-building to guide decision makers. The theory states...
The Arab Spring has demonstrated the power and potential of social mobilization and collective action as a form of political warfare in support of unconventional warfare strategies. This power and potential is not isolated to the Arab Spring or to...
The Army faces both significant external and some internal changes. These external changes in its operational environment, precipitated by the end of the Cold War, have created new threats and conflicts for the Army to contend with. This monograph...
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...
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...
On 7 December 1941, the US Navy had 343 warships in commission; however, a “second” fleet, consisting of 344 warships, was in various stages of construction in shipyards across the country. Given that building a warship could take anywhere from...
This study investigates the contributing factors of rail congestion at Kansas City Southern Railway's (KCSR) switching yard - Knoche Yard - located in Kansas City, Missouri. This thesis asserts that lack of locomotives, known as power, is the most...
This monograph focuses on the possibility of defeating any and all enemies with an information-intensive force. Clearly, no one currently possesses this capability. However, in the intermediate and long-term, such a force may be within the reach of...
The information revolution seems to hold a lot of promise to the U.S. economy and the U.S. military, but rigid bureaucratic hierarchies make it extremely difficult for effective integration of operational fires and information operations (IO). As...
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...
Soldiers returning from service in the Global War on Terror may experience a high incidence of varying degrees of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). As such, the military leadership and society in general must, therefore, develop an in-depth...
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...
This monograph asserts that phasing as a tenet of operational art has outlived its usefulness. Phasing as a component of campaign design worked effectively in the industrial age of symmetrical opponents, but has lost its usefulness in the...
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...
Article from Military Review with the author's stated purpose: "It is the purpose of this article to demonstrate the relevancy of new analytical criteria that will better enable a government to “fingerprint” an insurgency—and, in so doing, to...
During home station training operations, United States Air Force bomb wings use a five-year historical loss rate, also known as attrition, to predict future losses in the monthly flying schedules. The purpose of the attrition is to ensure that...