The Army Capstone Concept: the Army wants your comments

[Rob Thornton]

Such an environment demands that we develop leaders who understand the context of the factors influencing the military situation, act within that understanding, continually assess and adapt those actions based on the interactions and circumstances of the enemy and environment, consolidate tactical and operational opportunities into strategic aims, and be able to effectively transition from one form of operations to another. We seek to develop leaders who will thrive in this environment.

It has been my observation that when the next echelon of leaders understand the mission in terms of the task and purpose, and by understand I mean they really understand all the supporting collective, leader and individual tasks that go into it, it is then that they feel free to allow greater subordinate decision making and initiative. That is how they weigh and assume risk, and develop their own risk mitigation measures (bigger reserve, alternative COAs, etc.)

To support this shift in the next higher leader echelon during training and operations which supports our leader development goals, the defining of the tasks (and their supporting tasks) in conditions where the standard tactical tasks are inadequate is needed. At the experiments, AARs (of all types), and theater collection efforts I’ve participated in, reviewed or seen, I’ve not seen more than a skin deep attempt to document or create the list of tasks individuals and units have done (or would be required to do in the case of experimentation).

Part of this may be where we catch people in theater or upon their return, part of it also may be the way we collect – I’m not completely sure. Those interviewed may not have deemed it critical for one reason or another, they may have assumed it was something that someone else should have done but could not, or it could just be that because we caught them at the end of their tour, the tasks that stood out were those that were strongly rooted in emotion.

With respect to experimentation it may just be due to resources, and the way seminar war games, and other forms of experimentation are structured. It would take a great deal more time, and detailed information about the environment that really replicates the frictions that impose the types of unanticipated tasks on us that actual operations do. It would also require an increase in analytic capacity I think to be present in the experiment so more than just the big rocks are captured.

I think until we can identify the range of tasks that we expect individuals and units may have to do (either because it is part of the identified mission, or because the other folks we’d prefer to be doing those tasks are not present or able) in the COE, then we won’t be able to really look at what individual or unit capabilities are required, and we will not be able to look at how training, education, assignments and other leader development opportunities, etc. need to be tweaked to support it. We will not be able to tell ourselves what we want leaders at each level to be capable of doing, and we won’t be able to allow them to stretch their authorities and initiatives to develop them. After all, just because the right, or identified person, unit or agency is unavailable to do a task does not mean the requirement goes away. However, I do think not understanding the tasks, and not knowing which capabilities are required to do those tasks conflicts with our leader development goals as stated in the paper.

While some work has been done in task analysis, from what I have seen it has largely been limited to work groups which convene for a 2-3 day period somewhere, and because of self imposed constraints have been somewhat limited to looking at how existing identified tasks might fit somewhere else vs. looking at the a problem or objective and describing the over arching task(s), and then doing the difficult and time consuming work of task decomposition that produces the type of supporting collective, leader and individual tasks that we have in our list of “tactical tasks” and which we have spent years developing training strategies and resources around.


Ken's recent comments (ref. Niel's article) raised another related question: what artificial constraints do we impose into the environment that either facilitate this, or hinder it?


Best Rob

[marct]

Ken's recent comments (ref. Niel's article) raised another related question: what artificial constraints do we impose into the environment that either facilitate this, or hinder it?

Some great comments, Rob. Since I'm tied up with other stuff, I just want to address your last question which, IMHO, is really a crucial one.

As far as "artificial constraints" are concerned, for the purposes of this answer, I want to define "artificial" as "systems constructed by humans", just to avoid the possible understanding of it as that+ an emotional connotation of wasted resources .

Okay, probably the most important and easily observable system is the HR / personelle system. This is intimately tied in with leader development and pretty much every aspect of training and operations. This system controls both the day-to-day lived reality of most people in terms of extra paperwork, boxes that have to checked for promotion, etc., etc., ad nauseum. It is also crucial in defining the status system the Army is operating under or, to be more accurate, the formal status system. It does absolutely no good, and quite a bit of long term harm, to develop, say, an excel;lent junior leader program and then not have that impact their career paths positively both formally (e.g maybe a merit pay raise for excellent performance) or phenomenologically (i.e. they still see useless twits commanding them).

A second system is really cultural at the policy level. Leadership, as with most things, is a composite of a skill set that can be taught and a talent that is inborn. If you've got a really good talent, the training should bring that out and enhance it. having said that, the model I assume exists (and there is a lot to support it), says that any one-size-fits-all policy model will encourage the pursuit of mediocrity. This basically means that recognized and supported career paths have to include what might be called "excellence in place"; this avoids the Peter Principle. It also means that you have to have parallel career paths defined by talent groups.

At any rate, that's where my thinking is running at the moment.

Cheers,

Marc

[Bill Jakola]

Okay, the Combined Arms Center will post the ALDS on their website, on 10 December. Here is a link to the CAC website.

http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/

Also, the TRADOC website should have a story out soon.

http://www.army.mil/info/organizatio...ucture/tradoc/

[Rob Thornton]

Hey Marc,

Good comment, and you are right, I did mean artificial as man made - more specifically - not necessarily required for the system to operate, and possibly contrary to the system to operate at its best (more/most effective).

Constraints could be to the benefit (looking for a specific tolerance) or the detriment of the desired outcome (wrong tolerance and/or out of tolerance relative to the needs). The ability to affect these constraints (policies, biases, etc.) could be within a service's or organization's ability while others (in this case particularly those that are legislated and politically sensitive) may be beyond its ability to affect. They could also be hard to root out, but I think begins with developing an understanding of how the system really operates relative to how we desire it to operate, and what the effects are of our constraints. Then leadership can take better steps in modifying the system - hopefully adding some kind of measure to see if its now producing within the desired tolerances, and if in fact the new tolerance fits the actual requirement.

I'm sure that sounds mechanistic, but it is a "production system", and the bigger the system (be it PME, recruiting and assessment, universities, training programs,etc.), the more the output is going to look like a "product". The smaller the system (e.g. down at a company or BN level), the more control you have over the output, and the more it can be tailored to specific conditions - even to do as a mentor of mine recommends "putting round pegs in round holes".

The question is how good do you want that product to be relative to the requirement? - again, in this case I think that means defining the tasks you want your people to be capable of executing to reasonable standard at a specific time (position and/or grade) - the product in this case is individual leader capability. If you cannot name and define the tasks then the output (capability) probably does not vary much from where you were - and you are probably limited on your ability to affect the constraints and provide rationale for change.

I also needed to make a clarification on what I meant by identify and mitigate risk - I was referring to the ability to see the broader range of implications or outcomes associated with an action and then consider if it is the right or best possible action, and if it is, then to prepare to deal with the outcome. I bring this up because I have seen "mitigation" used to mean "avoid" which is not what I had in mind, and often results in greater risk to mission and those conducting it.

Best, Rob

[marct]

Hi Rob,

Constraints could be to the benefit (looking for a specific tolerance) or the detriment of the desired outcome (wrong tolerance and/or out of tolerance relative to the needs). The ability to affect these constraints (policies, biases, etc.) could be within a service's or organization's ability while others (in this case particularly those that are legislated and politically sensitive) may be beyond its ability to affect. They could also be hard to root out, but I think begins with developing an understanding of how the system really operates relative to how we desire it to operate, and what the effects are of our constraints. Then leadership can take better steps in modifying the system - hopefully adding some kind of measure to see if its now producing within the desired tolerances, and if in fact the new tolerance fits the actual requirement.

I'm sure that sounds mechanistic, but it is a "production system", and the bigger the system (be it PME, recruiting and assessment, universities, training programs,etc.), the more the output is going to look like a "product".

For a while now, I've been fascinated by how we, as a species, reify (aka "turn into as 'thing'") our interpersonal interactions and ascribe characteristics to that reification. What truly fascinates me is not that we do this but, rather, that as part of the process of doing it, we have to forget that we have done it. I would really love to see an MRI-based study on the neurological effects of becoming part of an organizational culture, since I suspect that there are actually reflections of that process in brain re-wiring.

That, BTW, is not a tangent - it is directly related to your comment about this sounding 'mechanistic". What I am getting at with it, is that whatever socio-technical systems (STSs) we create, they will have physical (and neurological) effects on the people who are part of them that will condition the probabilities of those systems being able to "produce" people capable of performing certain types of tasks. In effect, these STSs act as additional boundary criteria for natural selection.

The smaller the system (e.g. down at a company or BN level), the more control you have over the output, and the more it can be tailored to specific conditions - even to do as a mentor of mine recommends "putting round pegs in round holes".

Yup, and one of the reasons is actually tied in to the "span of control" problem, which is a sub-set of communications restrictions. Think about it this way: if I know the men under my command from having lived and worked with them, I have a much more nuanced understanding of them that if I only have their service records.

But, in any organization over a certain size (~1-2k), I have to use an exceedingly sparse and formalized system (service records) in order top "know" them. This "knowledge storage/transmission system", in turn, is designed to highlight minimum factors that, earlier in its life cycle, were deemed to be "important" (there's always a time lag, sometimes decades or even centuries long in this). Now this type of system is designed to abstract perceived "core information" about a person and use a standardized form to do so; it is a "mechanistic" system in the sense of interchangeable parts, and it really cannot guarantee "production" of anything more than satisficing behaviour (i.e. minimal standards; they haven't failed - yet).

But if we are talking about producing highly adaptive perceptions in people and rapid problem solving in messy problem space, that is not amenable to a system designed to produce satisficing behaviour in a "clean" problem space. If we want to do this, then we have to use a system that is differently designed, and that is where I was tagging into the strategies discussion of using "mentors". Now, a mentorship model is based on an apprenticeship system that derives out of para-kinship systems. It is much more flexible, generally has much higher minimal standards and, at the same time, tends to be much more labour intensive simply because a lot of time has to be spent working with an individual rather than an amorphous group. BTW, this ties back in to that span of control and communications problem thingy.

The question is how good do you want that product to be relative to the requirement? - again, in this case I think that means defining the tasks you want your people to be capable of executing to reasonable standard at a specific time (position and/or grade) - the product in this case is individual leader capability. If you cannot name and define the tasks then the output (capability) probably does not vary much from where you were - and you are probably limited on your ability to affect the constraints and provide rationale for change.

I'd have to say yes and no. Defining tasks and desired standards is a crucial capability, but that defines what is considered to be satisficing behaviour. In that sense, yes it is crucial, since it is defining the minimum acceptable level of accomplishment in a standardized form. Okay, that works well enough, but it can only capture the predictable, and about half of what the strategy implies it wants to develop is reactions to the unpredictable. See the problem ?

Now there certainly are ways of defining tasks, broadly construed, to capture the, hmmm, let's call it the "predictable unexpected"; that, after all, is one of the reasons for having wargames. But how do we "train" people for this? Standardized training only works with standardized problem spaces so, ideally, we use a melding of standardized training and highly individual education / experience. From some of the stuff I have done, I would estimate that about 80% of the required changes lie in the individual student's head; their perceptions and knowledge of themselves - sort of a "know thyself" on steroids.

In the strategy document, "mentoring" is used as a rhetorical silver bullet to get around this problem, which is why i can only comment in general terms on the document until I start to see some operational details.

Cheers,

Marc

[William F. Owen]

So many things are wrong with this it's hard to know where to begin

....and on our assessment that the future operational environment will be even more uncertain, complex, and competitive as hybrid threats challenge us across the full spectrum of operations.

More uncertain? More complex? Where's the evidence and so what? This is drivel and it gets worse:

Our enemies – regular and irregular – will be well armed, well trained, well equipped, and often ideologically inspired. We must overmatch their training with our training and with the development of our leaders. We must counter their ideologies with our history and with a sustained commitment to our values.

When was not being well trained an option, and ideology IS POLITICS!!! History is not one the problems.

All this paper had to do was say why good leadership HAS ALWAYS BEEN CRITICAL in ALL WARFARE and how the US was going to fix the problem. Instead it decided to invent a set of reasons as to why the problem didn't need fixing before, but now... SUDDENLY... it does!

Basically it starts bad and gets worse. I could go on, but I see little point.

[Steve the Planner]

Wilf:

Sure does set the bar low on the intel and expectations side.

Assume we go into each future complex problem set without a clue or goal, and that our opponent (who sometimes didn't graduate an equivalent of high school and controls no satellites or PhD farms) knows everything.

Where is the challenge to get ahead of background understandings, to develop responses, including non-military ones, before the problem, whether military or not, is dumped in DoD's lap as the agency of last resort for actions beyond US borders?

If I agreed with the above, I would, as an organization, start thinking about defining my enemy as internal, and beginning to understand how to out-game them before they game me.

At that point, none of it is about anything within a reasonable scope of a Department of Defense.

Steve