Bill, thanks for that, and while not wishing to nit-pick,
Quote Originally Posted by Bill Jakola View Post
“Unlike the Cold War era when threats were measurable and, to some degree, predictable Army forces today are likely to encounter conditions of greater ambiguity and uncertainty. Doctrine must be able to accommodate this wider variety of threats.”
But Vietnam had clearly shown this to be a faulty assumption at the height of the Cold-War.
FM 5.0 seems to have assumptions of complexity, uncertainty, and continuous change. But let’s be clear; this appears as an acknowledgement of the nature of war and not a new aspect of war. War is war. Thus to say the operational environment is complex is not to say that war is more complex, it is just using the inherent complexity as an assumption to build doctrine.
Warfare is about the complex thing humans can do. That is my point. It always has been. It cannot become more complex. It always was.
But today our competition includes a number of near peers and other organizations below the nation-state like al Qaeda or a drug cartel. The transparency comes in the form of the 24 hour news cycle and the explosion of information available to almost anyone on the internet.
When was this not the case - as concerns non-nation threats?
24 hour news cycles merely effect the rate and frequency of reporting. NOT IT's NATURE!!
The sheer proliferation of differing messages makes them less relevant. The power of the information age is the faith based belief in it, by some and not something grounded in evidence.