The Army Capstone Concept: the Army wants your comments

[Bill Jakola]

If tactical units get orders/tasks that are so froggy that a young officer (see MikeF response) must use design to figure it out... shame on the issuing staff's CDR, CoS, G3 and staff... that is problem of professionalism and not a gap in doctrine

Hacksaw,

Well, like I said before, I’m no experts on FM 5.0 or design but here is a view as I see it.

Our doctrine is changing to meet the complexity and competitive nature of the environment in which we now must operate. For example, battle command, the art of maneuvering forces and managing violence shifts toward mission command, to reflect the reality that the instrument of military power is also largely a national tool for doing many things traditionally outside the military’s purview.

FM 3.0, describes full spectrum operations (FSO) as Offense, Defense, and Stability Operations, which means leaders must be grounded not only in the tactics, techniques and procedures of force on force, but also in integrating capabilities with others in a battlespace that’s increasingly crowded and transparent.

Therefore, if we decentralize capability and authority to lower tactical levels, to empower the edge, then leaders at these levels need mission command type orders that are broad and not so prescriptive that they can’t develop the situation on their own.

I see design as the means that empowers these junior leaders to do just that—develop the situation.

Bill Jakola

[William F. Owen]

Our doctrine is changing to meet the complexity and competitive nature of the environment in which we now must operate.

....but that is simply not true.
a.) It could be that the doctrine was always very poor and badly written. No one seems to want to ask that one.
b.) Warfare simply cannot get more complex and competitive than it was 600-1,000 years ago! - however the US Army can be less-skilled than it was in understanding the application of force for political purpose.

The vast majority of what is getting written is simply addressing imagined problems. I have yet to see a "So what" document that manages to get past that.

For example, battle command, the art of maneuvering forces and managing violence shifts toward mission command, to reflect the reality that the instrument of military power is also largely a national tool for doing many things traditionally outside the military’s purview.

So essentially you are saying people do not understand the application of military power? - Regular and Irregular Warfare are not mysteries. We know exactly what works and what does not. The only place confusion exists seems to be in Western Armies concepts and doctrine.

FM 3.0, describes full spectrum operations (FSO) as Offense, Defense, and Stability Operations, which means leaders must be grounded not only in the tactics, techniques and procedures of force on force, but also in integrating capabilities with others in a battlespace that’s increasingly crowded and transparent.

What capabilities and who is the crowd? How is the battlefield more transparent than it was in 1970?

Bill, not giving you a hard time for fun. I really struggle with this stuff as I see smart men telling me things that make no sense once I hear it, or see it written down.

[Infanteer]

Why does doctrine progressively get more complicated and misty - the estimate process is turning into a doctrinal thesis. I'm waiting for the Doctrine guy who chucks most of the manuals and is able to issue doctrinal pamphlets that can be carried by, issued to, read and understood by all leaders at all levels. When I show this stuff to my Sergeants, they laugh and say "whatever". Pretty bad when doctrine is spit out and not read by 95% of the target audience.

[Fuchs]

Armed services are bureaucracies. This explains a lot.
It explains prejudices, limited perception, the piling up of problems, red tape, slow reaction, rigidity - few problems really surprise you once you understand that armed services are bureaucracies.


There's a kind of solution.

Have an army. Observe how it turns into an inefficient bureacracy.
Take a selection of 100 high potential people, educate them and let them found a Marine Corps.
Let the Marine Corps take over the army's mission step by step.
Downsize the army to zero within 25 years. Don't transfer more than one selected per cent of army personnel to the MC.
Observe how it (the MC) turns into an inefficient bureacracy.
Take a selection of 100 high potential people, educate them and let them found an army.
(...)

[wm]

Why does doctrine progressively get more complicated and misty - the estimate process is turning into a doctrinal thesis. I'm waiting for the Doctrine guy who chucks most of the manuals and is able to issue doctrinal pamphlets that can be carried by, issued to, read and understood by all leaders at all levels. When I show this stuff to my Sergeants, they laugh and say "whatever". Pretty bad when doctrine is spit out and not read by 95% of the target audience.

Could it be that this advance on complexity is part of a self-fulfilling prophecy? We are being told that conducting COIN is the graduate level of military operations. If one accepts that premise, then the doctrine needed to execute "graduate-level" warfare must also be on the order of some Ph.D. dissertation in an area of arcane wisdom.

After slogging through the opening chapters of the FM, I concluded that its authors could have summed up design with the sentence, "Submit the environment to circumspection ere traveling some feet of space via muscular projection."
I also suspect that most folks on the ground who are performing successfully and not just reacting to what happens around them could express that one sentence summary much more succinctly: "Look before you leap."

[marct]

Still slogging through it, but I am getting increasingly frustrated by the way "uncertainty" is being used in such an uncritical, one might almost say "superstitious", manner.

[Infanteer]

Ahh...good ole uncertainty. I'm pretty sure Tuthmose III was uncertain as his chariots rumbled into Megiddo. Isn't uncertainty just a by-product of human (thus, not always rational or predictable) interaction. How is uncertainty new?

[wm]

Ahh...good ole uncertainty. I'm pretty sure Tuthmose III was uncertain as his chariots rumbled into Megiddo. Isn't uncertainty just a by-product of human (thus, not always rational or predictable) interaction. How is uncertainty new?

Uncertainty is most definitely not new. But the following may be worth pondering.

The more uncertainty one has, the more risk to which one is exposed. One way to reduce risk is to reduce uncertainty. I suspect that in an organizational milieu characterized by a low tolerance for risk (the organization is very risk averse), the reduction of uncertainty tends to assume a large role in the thinking of that organization's members.

On the move to Megiddo, Thutmose III may well have faced uncertainty about which road through the mountains was best to take, but the fact that he chose the narrow middle route seems to demonstrate that he was not risk averse.

[Bill Jakola]

....but that is simply not true.
a.) It could be that the doctrine was always very poor and badly written. No one seems to want to ask that one.

William,

Your suggestion that our doctrine was not well written may have merit; let’s explore this. Measuring how well or poorly we developed doctrine requires us to understand the context. Thus for example, the 1993 FM 100-5 Operations captures the essence of this context question:

“Never static, always dynamic, the Army’s doctrine is firmly rooted in the realities of current capabilities. At the same time, it reaches out with a measure of confidence to the future. Doctrine captures the lessons of past wars, reflects the nature of war and conflict in its own time, and anticipates the intellectual and technological developments that will bring victory now and in the future.”

Now, just because the writers here intended to base their thinking on the past, current and future realities, does not mean they succeeded; and in retrospect, the validity of their doctrine (any doctrine) depends more on assumptions than intentions. Thus, we need to evaluate the validity of their assumptions.

....b.) Warfare simply cannot get more complex and competitive than it was 600-1,000 years ago! - however the US Army can be less-skilled than it was in understanding the application of force for political purpose.

This is where earlier doctrine writers may have come up short; for example, assuming certainty as the ability of technology to deliver us knowledge dominance -- the quality of firsts (see first, understand first, act first, and win decisively) – is not valid. But even here complexity is not new to our doctrine, as the following quote shows.

Chapter 1, page 1-1 of the 1993 FM 100-5; “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.”

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.

Whereas, the increase may be in the competitive and transparent nature of the environment. Here we have some justification, as during the Cold War, we thought in terms of a bipolar world competition. Even though this was not completely accurate it did inform doctrine at least well enough to prevail in that conflict. 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.

....So essentially you are saying people do not understand the application of military power? - Regular and Irregular Warfare are not mysteries. We know exactly what works and what does not. The only place confusion exists seems to be in Western Armies concepts and doctrine.

Perhaps you can draw this conclusion; and I do not deny it. But your conclusion is further than I am willing to go; because like I said, doctrine development depends on the context of the times. So instead of looking back to how well we did doctrine in the past I am purely focused on the validity of this current doctrine.

Bill Jakola

P. S. The March/April 2010 edition of Military Review has been posted online.

This issue includes the article "Field Manual 5-0: Exercising Command and Control in an Era of Persistent Conflict" by Colonel Clinton J. Ancker, III, U.S. Army, Retired, and Lieutenant Colonel Michael Flynn, U.S. Army, Retired. This article highlights the debut of the new manual.

http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/Military...430_art005.pdf

[marct]

Hi Bill,

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.

That might have to been the intention of the authors, however that intention is not clearly expressed or presented by using a progressive tense in their verbs - e.g. "is becoming more complex", etc.

With the exception of Wilf who, as we all know is in deep and intimate contact with the Platonic aeon of Ideal Forms (), most of us are unable to make pronouncements about the "nature" of anything. we can talk about "our experience" (individual, institutional, national) of war, but when we start talking about the "nature of war", all we are able to do is map our boundaries characteristics (if we can even do that!). Even if we could a) access the Ideal Form of "war" and were b) able to communicate, then we would still have to say "This is where the current thing we call 'war' differs from the Ideal".

Far better, IMHO, to forget about trying to talk about an Ideal Type and, instead, use doctrine as a way of defining "our" perceptions of the important characteristics of what we a) are doing and b) think we will have to do in the future. Saying that war have become increasingly complex is, in this case, rather silly; far better to say that "we" have to handle more considerations (i.e X, Y and Z) than we did in the past.

Cheers,

Marc

ps. This is in light of a general caveat - I'm reading a piece right now that is so conceptually flawed and poorly written that I'm not even sure if it is written in English. By contrast, FM 5.0 is an absolutely brilliant work.

pps. No, Rob, it's not the piece you sent me

[Bill Jakola]

Hi Bill,



That might have to been the intention of the authors, however that intention is not clearly expressed or presented by using a progressive tense in their verbs - e.g. "is becoming more complex", etc.

Marc,

I did not find that quote in FM 5.0.

Bill Jakola

[marct]

Hi Bill,

The point being illustrated can also be made using the phrase "growing uncertainty", which is in the Foreward.

[Bill Jakola]

Hi Bill,

The point being illustrated can also be made using the phrase "growing uncertainty", which is in the Foreward.

Marc,

I don't mean to be pedantic but, uncertainty and complexity are different.

The use of growing uncertainty in the foreward seems to reflect the failure of our earlier assumptions like, if we build a force that can prevail in major combat operations then we will inherently have a force that can prevail in other types of operations; or that our technology will negate the fog of war.

Bill Jakola

[William F. Owen]

With the exception of Wilf who, as we all know is in deep and intimate contact with the Platonic aeon of Ideal Forms (), most of us are unable to make pronouncements about the "nature" of anything.

Mate, more Aeon Flux than Platonic Ideal Forms!

Let me be clear. My thesis on THE NATURE of war and warfare, is that cannot become more complex, because they always were the almost always MOST COMPLEX things that human beings ever did.

....additionally I would suggest that the belief in complexity has created an erroneous understanding of the problem which continues to compound itself.

So let's provide doctrine with achievable aims, using simple and clear language, based strongly in evidence and very little in belief.

[William F. Owen]

Bill, thanks for that, and while not wishing to nit-pick,

“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.

[Hacksaw]

Hacksaw,

Well, like I said before, I’m no experts on FM 5.0 or design but here is a view as I see it.

Our doctrine is changing to meet the complexity and competitive nature of the environment in which we now must operate. For example, battle command, the art of maneuvering forces and managing violence shifts toward mission command, to reflect the reality that the instrument of military power is also largely a national tool for doing many things traditionally outside the military’s purview.

FM 3.0, describes full spectrum operations (FSO) as Offense, Defense, and Stability Operations, which means leaders must be grounded not only in the tactics, techniques and procedures of force on force, but also in integrating capabilities with others in a battlespace that’s increasingly crowded and transparent.

Therefore, if we decentralize capability and authority to lower tactical levels, to empower the edge, then leaders at these levels need mission command type orders that are broad and not so prescriptive that they can’t develop the situation on their own.

I see design as the means that empowers these junior leaders to do just that—develop the situation.

Bill Jakola

Like Wilf... this isn't being an internet troll for the sake of being obtuse... and I know you aren't the author... and what you are doing is in fact an element of IO (that isn't a bad thing), but the problem is that the message has to be credible... Sorry, but the last two paragraphs don't cut the mustard... I am intimately aware of the trust and responsibility that we put in junior leaders... however, they have an MTOE and METL... we have a reasonable expectation that if given a tactical task, that they can develop the implied tasks necessary to achieve the desired endstate in their AO... If the Army's envisioned actions of a Junior Leader is that he parses the higher headquarters order... and says well I know what it says but I don't agree with the problem to be solved and moves ahead on that assessment... well we need to dispense with BN, DIV, Corps HQs...

If a BN can't give clear enough orders to a CO-Grade LDR so that he understands his environment, adjacent and high missions, and tasks... no amount of Design rub is going to solve that fundamental problem...

I would argue that if BCT & below are conducting Design as most recently described in Doctrine... it is a failure of senior leadership and the SAMS program. Must a tactical unit continually develop their understanding of the battlespace? Ah yea... Should a tactical unit, as a matter of routine, have to question what the hell they ought to do??? ah no....

Now I would characterize Gian (my friend) issues with the Army as the "COIN-ification" of the force... that FM 3-24 has become our operational doctrine and that this is bad.... I'm not sure I agree, I think he over-estimates the effect but I understand the concern....

This Design nonsense is I think far more worrisome... It essentially proposes that our doctrine didn't tell us that we had to think critically about our environment during the mission analysis/running estimate process... that of course is not the case - its just that (the corporate) we didn't do it... we didn't demand it of ourselves... we became great at inserting google earth screen captures and GPS, but lost the ability to look at contour lines and envision what the hell they really meant, see an overhead picture of urban sprawl and forgot who populated those structures that weren't on our maps... Strategic planners forgot what they learned as tactical and operational planners... namely that you have to understand the task org and its capabilities, you have to give a task that makes SENSE, and you have to give a piece of terrain to the subordinate leaders that, in terms of both geography and logical boundaries, allows the subordinate to achieve the mission... and you have to organize that activity in relation to the other military activities in the battlespace...

I really don't like to rant, and lack the patience to go back through this and take out the invective, but in the immortal words of Lewis Black... "well I can't help it, this sh!t pisses me off"

Live well and row