March 29, 2016

Defense Entrepreneurship: How to Build Institutions for Innovation Inside the Military

Fears of slipping dominance are driving an American push for military innovation. But while the accomplishments of American industry are enviable, not all innovation is grounded in technology or flows from the private sector. The U.S. Armed Forces have a considerable history with internally driven innovation, and today a new class of innovators is emerging within the Services. These public entrepreneurs watch for opportunities, make decisions under uncertainty, and then meld the factors of change in sticky (that is, locally commercialized) ways. Their entrepreneurship sometimes falters, as the controlling tendencies and vested interests of the bureaucratic apparatus resist. Defense entrepreneurs must overcome greater barriers than those faced by private entrepreneurs, but policymakers could speed their progress by building the right organizational models in staffing, structures, and incentives.

March 29, 2016

If We Fight Joint, Shouldn't Our History Reflect That?

American forces are fighting joint as never before in conjunction with the armed forces of allied nations. Joint and combined operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and current operations over Iraq and Syria have demonstrated conclusively that the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 came at the right time and has subsequently produced impressive results.

March 29, 2016

Thoughts on Force Protection

One of the prime objectives of an adversary is to inflict damage on the joint force. With thinking enemies, vulnerability is an inescapable characteristic of conflict, and every joint force will have vulnerabilities. Contemporary threats transcend space far easier than in the past, and operational protection is not confined to lethal threats to formations located in hostile environments overseas. With modern technology, even individual Servicemembers can be targeted directly or indirectly through families or communities and by both lethal and nonlethal means. For example, in August 2015 the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant published the names, photographs, and addresses of 100 U.S. military personnel and encouraged sympathetic individuals to attack them.

March 29, 2016

Joint Doctrine Update

Joint Publications (JPs) Under Revision (to be signed within 6 months)

March 29, 2016

Book Review: Counterinsurgency in Crisis

Writing in his seminal The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, David French concluded that the United Kingdom had created a “chequered history of gathering, analyzing, and disseminating the lessons” from its irregular campaigns. This conclusion contrasts with Dr. John Nagl’s case study of Britain’s superior organizational learning in Malaya in his Eating Soup with a Knife. Both books focused on Britain’s imperial past. More recently, veterans from the United Kingdom’s campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have sided with French, stating that “despite our institutional [counterinsurgency] heritage,” the study of small wars “[has been] relegated to a position of almost complete institutional irrelevance.” This is now reinforced by a new assessment of British operations, Counterinsurgency in Crisis, which argues that Her Majesty’s armed forces overestimated the relevance of their past imperial policing to contemporary challenges.

March 29, 2016

Book Review: Clausewitz

Donald Stoker, a professor of strategy and policy at the Naval Postgraduate School, has written what could be labeled a military biography of Carl von Clausewitz. One might reasonably ask why a biography of the Prussian general and military theorist is necessary, given Peter Paret’s towering intellectual biography Clausewitz and the State (Princeton University Press, 1985).

March 29, 2016

Book Review: Superforecasting

Philip Tetlock has worked for decades on the problem of judgment in national security affairs. He became justly renowned for his book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton University Press, 2006), which demonstrated, among other things, that foreign policy experts were no more accurate in their forecasts than “monkeys throwing darts.” Tetlock’s somewhat alarming finding led to a series of intriguing questions: Just how good can judgment become? Can we do better than the “experts”?

March 29, 2016

Interorganizational Cooperation III of III: The Joint Force Perspective

This article completes a trilogy on interorganizational cooperation—with a focus on the joint force perspective. The first article discussed civilian perspectives from across the U.S. Government and their challenges in working with the military and highlighted the potential benefits of enhancing unity of effort throughout the government. The second article presented humanitarian organization perspectives on interfacing with the military and served to illuminate the potential value of increased candor and cooperation as a means to develop mutually beneficial relationships. In this final installment, the discussion focuses on how the joint force might assess and mitigate the issues raised by the first two articles through application of the joint doctrine development process. This article also explores how joint doctrine can assist in developing and sustaining the relationships that are essential for building effective and cooperative processes in the operational environment. Although the authors accept that cultures and missions vary widely among different types of organizations, we suggest there is a mutual benefit to be achieved from deep understanding of not only one’s own organization but also each other’s perspectives, methods, and structures.

March 15, 2016

Violating Reality: The Lavelle Affair, Nixon, and the Parsing of the Truth

On December 20, 2010, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) denied the Pentagon’s request, endorsed by President Barack Obama, to advance posthumously Air Force Maj Gen John D. Lavelle to the retired list in the rank of general.1 Thirty-eight years earlier, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen John D. Ryan had fired the four-star Lavelle as the Seventh Air Force commander in Saigon for allegedly conducting unauthorized airstrikes against North Vietnam and ordering the falsification of mission reports. Senate hearings in September 1972 deemed Lavelle guilty of both offenses, resulting in his demotion to major general following retirement. Yet a careful reading of documentary and taped evidence, much of it recently discovered and not available at the time of the original Senate hearings, reveals that General Lavelle neither violated the rules of engagement (ROE) that prescribed America’s air war at the time of his dismissal nor falsified mission reports. Accordingly, Lavelle should have his rank restored, and the so-called Lavelle affair should serve as a cautionary tale for political and military leaders alike who question the proper conduct of “civil-military relations” in the complex and often confounding era of modern limited war.

Feb. 1, 2016

Posing Problems without an Alliance: China-Iran Relations after the Nuclear Deal

China is poised to increase economic and diplomatic cooperation with Iran as a result of sanctions relief under the recent Iran nuclear deal, though a close geopolitical alignment between the two states is unlikely.