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...
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...
Gulf War images of oil soaked birds and burning oil wells continue to generate academic research on the environment as both a victim and a weapon of war. The resulting literature has sensitized policy makers and military leaders to 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...
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...
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...
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...
Combat operations in the urban area are not new to warfare. The United States' military conducted large-scale urban operations in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. During the last sixty years, the United States' Army approached the urban area by...
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...
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 current inter-agency doctrinal tools to integrate the decision-sharing elements of battle command at the operational level for defense support to civil authority operations are inadequate under conditions of extremely degraded communications....
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...
The purpose of this monograph is to analyze the U.S. Army battlefield distribution system from a “Systems Thinking” perspective. The method involves a holistic analysis of the distribution systems as it functions within its environment. Because...
The cognitive process of attribution of responsibility (AR) was empirically studied to establish baseline AR data within the U.S. Army. In the experiment, two sections of 41, middle-grade, U.S. Army officers (Captains, Majors, and Lieutenant...
The recognition of the failure at the strategic and operational levels of war during the Global War on Terror, specifically in Iraq, has resulted in a quest for intellectual solutions to complex operational and strategic problems. To date this has...
The information sphere is an integral part of the current environment. The center of gravity (CoG) theory currently is matched for conventional, linear, industrial age warfare in the physical domain. The CoG concept is thus not suited to work in...
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...
Communications technology has enabled the U.S. military to move data rapidly around the globe and provide commanders with the ability to monitor and maintain nearly constant communication with subordinates. However, this capability has the...
The strategic and operational environment in which the United States military will operate in for the foreseeable future is characterized by its complexity. Historically the United States military has taken a linear approach to understanding the...