This monograph examines the state of the Army's operational terms as seen through its written doctrine. Operational terms play an important role in the command process and a common vocabulary is one of the defining features of a profession. The...
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 investigates the possible use of initiative by the operational commander when conducting a defense. AirLand Battle doctrine is based on securing or retaining the initiative and exercising it aggressively to accomplish the mission,...
This monograph examines the role of initiative in AirLand Battle doctrine as contained in the 1986 edition of Field Manual 100-5 Operations. It concludes that although the tenet of initiative is clearly defined as setting the terms of battle by...
The Coalition's success in Iraq will be defined by how well it balances the strategy of Rapid Decisive Operations (RDO) against the realistic requirements for post-conflict reconstruction operations. There are many questions posed about how the...
Over the past ten years, addressing what Strategic Communications is has been a challenge for the military community. It is at times referred to as a process, referred to in the context of the strategic level of war, and referred to in the context...
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...
Operational art, subject to a transformation of meaning over time, is today more a vaguely defined phenomenon than a clearly defined term. On the whole, the concept of operational art is the result of the hierarchical organization of warfare...
This monograph offers a definition of "military art," discusses military art's relationship to the commander's management of battlefield uncertainty, and uncertainty's relationship to nonlinearity. Using the terms of art, uncertainty, and...
In response to current world security environment challenges at the regional level, several initiatives emerged establishing regional political or military organization. Today, with fourteen (14) member nations and two (2) observers, Multinational...
This monograph examines the limited success achieved by the U.S. Army in implementing mission oriented command and control. Evidence from the National Training Center (NTC) suggests that there is a problem with intent communication and effective...
People in modern societies are generally becoming more risk aversive. Whether risk is perceived to include uncertainty or not, form two differing schools of thought within literature and doctrine. Risk aversion is viewed as a challenge in most...
The purpose of this monograph is to recommend the retention, modification, or abandonment of certain concepts of the current elements of operational design based on their continued validity within the contemporary operational environment. Military...
Recent assertions have been made that the nature of warfare in our current operating environment has changed in such a way that phasing in military operations has outlasted its utility and become problematic, requiring it to be eliminated or...
This monograph seeks to develop a model for the employment of a civil military operations center based on available doctrine and the experience of the military in recent operations. The frequency of the U.S. military being employed in military...
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...
This study examines the relationship between tactical instruction in officer advance courses and the Army's current command and control doctrine. Using content analysis techniques, the study analyzes and compares USAIS and USAARMS tactical...
The debate on the development of NATO expeditionary capabilities started in the late Nineties, but only after the 9/11 attacks -- following a proposal of the then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- was finalized. The NATO Rapid Response...
This monograph analyzes whether major combat operations or stability operations should be more of a priority for United States Army general purpose forces given the likely future threat, future operating environment, requirements and resources....
Joint military doctrine has yet to bridge the gap between lessons learned from U.S. domestic disaster relief and application for international disaster relief. The National Response Framework stresses the need for a response architecture...