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5 May 2015

STOP JUST ADAPTING OR DIE

May 2, 2015

The belief that the Future Combat System was a disaster. It wasn’t. The Army, as Flounder, lent its car to Otter, played by Industry. It’s past time to get over it. The FCS had some fatal flaws, but the Objective Force work that formed its intellectual foundation was not one of them.

Stop Just Adapting or Die

Organizing an Army for war is inherently adaptive and Armies that can react and respond the fastest generally win. The US Army’s ability or inability to adapt since 1898 has been directly related to how it has innovated between wars. Innovation begins with thinking about the future. Failure to think deeply about the future results in a reduced ability to adapt to the present when you arrive there.

Preface – Ten years ago the Nation was in the early phases of what was even then called “the Long War.” A major Army imperative at that time was to reset the institutional Army from a future focus based on “what could be?”, to a warfighting focus of “what must be now?” Opinions differ as to how rapidly or how well the Army made that transition, but it is undeniable that the institutional Army today is organized and operates differently than it did in 2001. Unfortunately, after spending the last 10 years optimizing itself to fight two theater wars the institutional Army now faces a very different problem set; that of maintaining combat power during a period of declining budget and end strength even as potential adversaries invest in disruptive technologies that threaten to overmatch US Military dominance in every domain (see Russia’s newest family of combat vehicles for example). Once again the Army must change to accommodate a new domestic and operational environment. After spending the last 10 years very much focused on adapting its forces for two wars in the here and now, the institutional Army must go back to the future.

Adapt Evolve or Innovate? – The Army Operating Concept (AOC) describes three imperatives – Adapt Evolve and Innovate. The distinction in Army capability development between those words adapt, evolve and innovate is important. How might those three ideas be understood other than through the timelines described in the AOC? The words are related, but while adaptation exists in the present, true innovation focuses on the future. One can adapt with or without innovation (see MRAP and/or the Battlefield Surveillance Brigade). To paraphrase GEN Schoomaker on a different subject (training vs. education); you adapt for the mission you have now; you innovate for the range of missions you might get in the future. In the middle is evolution, the more or less permanent change of force structure to accept successful adaptations. Adaptation occurs within the near term through Army’s budget and force structure processes and procedures. Adaptation is “off the shelf.” Innovation begins between the ears. Adaption asks, “Why?” Innovation asks “Why not?”

When he became CSA in 2003, GEN Schoomaker chartered 17 different General Officer-led Task Forces to adapt the Army for the Global War on Terror. The lead Task Force was Joint and Expeditionary Capability, the most well-known was TF Modularity. The knowledge baseline for almost all the work of those Task Forces was the innovative futures work of Training and Doctrine Command in the 90’s. Many of the resulting adaptations were enabled because of innovative work the Army had been doing since the early 90’s. None of that work predicted 9/11 or the exact requirements the Army faced as a result of two theaters of war. But the 90’s innovations enabled adaptations in 2004 by providing the Army a knowledge baseline from which it could get right-enough answers at a double time.

The choice is not to either adapt or innovate. The Army 2020 force design updates that are currently being fielded in the operating force are an example of adaptation led by the institution. But properly preparing the Army for an uncertain future requires innovation fueled by exploration and wargaming of a deeper future than the one in which the Army has operated since 2001, or is adapting to by 2019. Designing the future Army requires a different institutional approach than adaption, one for which the current institutional Army must organize itself. If we don’t do future force design right, we will not have the knowledge baseline from which to adapt when the next fight comes. Ensuring we don’t get the future “too wrong” requires imagining what “too wrong” looks like. That requires a robust future’s franchise that looks beyond the horizon of current national policy, existing defense guidance and today’s budgets.

The Army through its rhetoric appears to recognize the new imperative to innovate. Even so, it continues to wrestle with the demands of the current fight, and the cultural impact of the longest shooting war in its history which has made adaptation a survival imperative that has all but eliminated deep future innovation. The question is do we have the correct balance of effort between iterative corrections to existing force design to meet current needs and innovative force designs that better posture us to adapt in an uncertain future. We don’t. Here is why.

Current thinking that impedes innovation; many of the impediments listed in Adapt or Die, an article about Army innovation written 11 years ago, have proven to be intractable and many of them are often salutary. In addition to those impediments, there are some impediment to the new imperative for innovation that we must overcome.

1. The belief that the Future Combat System was a disaster. It wasn’t. The Army, as Flounder, lent its car to Otter, played by Industry. It’s past time to get over it. The FCS had some fatal flaws, but the Objective Force work that formed its intellectual foundation was not one of them. The Army’s future concept work was not blind to the uncertainties of combat. As long as we wrongly think it was, the less able we will be to look deeply enough to develop the knowledge needed when the future becomes the present. Moreover, even accusations of Industry’s perfidy are overwrought. The fact is that dozens of systems were fielded out of FCS, which program should have been dramatically re-scoped with the start of the global war on terror. Not only was it not re-scoped, but in order to rationalize suboptimal BCT design to meet theater requirements in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2004, the Army took what was highly conceptual work envisioned for 16+ years in the future and used it to explain how it could take risk it had been forced to take. Rather than simply acknowledging that the modular 2 Battalion BCT design was suboptimal, but within acceptable risk parameters, it used the Objective Force work and FCS to rationalize a tough risk decision that weakened the brigade in order to meet Theater Commander requirements in a war. OSD and Army leadership’s public conflation of the requirements of 2001 with the conceptual potential of 2020 did more to kill the Objective Force and create a false FCS mythology within the Army itself than any other single factor. One can understand why the operating force was skeptical given that many in the leadership were rationalizing force compromises by promises of technology and capability that did not yet exist.

2. Misunderstanding the nature of risk as focus shifts to a better temporal balance. It is easier to fight the devil you see than the one you don’t YET see. Predicting the future is much like forecasting hurricanes. The safest place to be is often where forecasters predict a hurricane to land five days hence. When a storm gathers we may know that it will make landfall, but not where or how strongly. In the same way, we know the general shape of the world according to the global trends, but history teaches us that we can be certain of one thing – the trends will not hold constant for even 15 years. Something will happen to change the storm track, and we must have the imagination to envision it, and the courage to challenge the status quo to design a force that can weather the storm. To do that will require a level of disruption that will make some uncomfortable. That is innovation. We will have to leave Iraq and Afghanistan behind intellectually and return to first principles. We will have to stop just adapting and return to innovating. Mitigating the risk of the uncertain future is a function of investment and the Army should reexamine its balance of investment in current readiness and force structure vice basic research and experimentation.

3. A potential reticence to apply materiel solutions to the human dimension. One can hardly attend a capability development meeting these days without hearing caveat after caveat about the limits of materiel solutions and especially their inapplicability to the human dimension which has become the anti-materiel solution. But are we taking our anti-materiel concerns too far? One of the greatest improvements to the human dimension in the 1980’s was the creation and fielding of MILES. Although SCOPES had begun to bring individual Soldiers into every fight, until the Army fielded technology that credibly simulated every individual and crew served weapons most actions at the individual Soldier level ended with “I shot you!”, “No you didn’t!” and an engineer-tape wearing OC making a call as to what happened. The advances enabled in training and leader development by fielding a technology that enabled every Soldier to be not just physically, but intellectually and psychologically, in the fight are incalculable. The CTC’s would have been nothing without MILES. The real advances in the human dimension will occur in hard science and materiel, not in curriculum changes and POI updates at Army schools. Since the 1980’s, science’s understanding of brain science and decision making has made major strides that the Army should leverage. The Human Dimension must be part of the S&T and Materiel effort, not just the D, T and L effort.

4. An incomplete appreciation of the information age policy environment. With the exception of OPERATION Just Cause, not since WWII has the policy end state established at the beginning of a major conflict survived to its end, and in many cases like Iraq it wasn’t even close. See Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Even Desert Storm ended with a US policy of encouraging the indigenous overthrow of Saddam Hussein that was not militarily supportable and came back to haunt later US efforts. The information age is changing the policy environment in ways the US military does not yet fully grasp. Seizing the capitol doesn’t end wars any more. Rather than assuming the same national policies in Phase IV as they were in Phase I, as many military plans appear to do, every war plan written henceforth should have this standard assumption; “The policy objective that precipitated the employment of military power will change once that power is employed.” In other words, no policy survives first contact. We have no overarching theory of conflict to help us make our way in this new policy world. We are still endeavoring to understand warfare in the information age. Among its many challenges, understanding future warfare requires a thorough understanding of the nexus between policy and warfighting in the information age within historical, contemporary and future contexts. Outside of the Army, this realization is being explored through the term “gray zone” warfare. There is an increased momentum of human interaction that drives policy into cycles that the military is not keeping up with. A critically needed innovation is the development of a new theory of the application of military power in the information age .

Thinking that will assist in innovation – A few adjusts in our framing will better enable the innovative thinking we need.

1. Recognize that adaption and innovation are different. In 2004, the Army had to redirect its future franchise to the problems of two theaters. It was appropriate to climb down from our crow’s nest, collapse our telescope, and man a gun. In 2004, innovation was about adaptation. The requirement has changed. Focusing exclusively on adaptation is no longer necessary nor sustainable as the Army faces significant cuts, and must transition from an Army of execution to an Army of preparation. Distinguishing our innovation objectives from our adaptation objectives in design, time, and resources will ensure that we are ready to meet an uncertain future as rapidly as we did 13 years ago, when that uncertain future arrived.

2. Intellectual must now more often lead the physical – Adaptation leads to suboptimal solutions across the potential mission set in aggregate to achieve an optimal solution for the fight you are in. The MRAP is no one’s idea of a tremendous intellectual innovation, but it is what we needed at the time. So too the two battalion BCT, the BfSB, and Human Terrain Teams were no one’s idea of long term organizational designs for the future – but they satisfied immediate needs. All were adaptations driven from physical examination of what was required downrange and could be fielded fastest. The first initiatives of General Odierno when he became Chief were Army 2020, the fixing of the suboptimal organizational solutions imposed on the Army by the demands of adaptation in a war zone.

3. Imagine the unimaginable. The Army’s intellectual reach must exceed the operating force’s grasp. It was often remarked after 9/11 that the security America had enjoyed for two centuries as a result of geographical isolation was shattered by the attacks that day. What will shatter next? Since World War II, the US has possessed unchallenged supremacy of the global commons. Our national security strategies have been predicated on that supremacy. What if we lose it? If diplomatic and economic shifts make large segments of the commons unavailable to us are we prepared to regain them by force? Is the cyber-attack on Sony a harbinger of worse to come? This question is especially important when considering cyberspace – the newest, most uncontrolled, and arguably the most vital common. For the Army, the role of landpower when the US has lost dominance of the commons is a situation it has not faced for over 50 years. Can Army leaders today visualize an Army Brigade lying in smoking ruins? If not, we are not thinking thoroughly enough about the future..

4. Rethink modularity and echelons. The Maneuver BCT was the right choice as the coin of realm for force generation in 2005 when it was developed, but it is not the right choice for future force design now. The Division has been the basis for every major re-envisioning of the Army in the modern era, save the last one. From the first Louisiana Maneuvers, through the 11th Airborne Division Air Assault, Pentomic, the 9th division, the Light division, Div 86 and the Digital division. Even the Stryker Brigade was a derivative of a future Division concept – the Mobile Strike Force. Brigades will never deploy without an overseeing joint task force, responsible for achieving an ambiguous policy outcome. The Army should return to thinking about the grand tactical level of war and postulate a future Division Commander’s problem as the focal point for examining every echelon of the fight in 2025-2040.

Closing – Our near term future force development must be grounded in the lessons of our most recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but cannot merely solve those operational problems in hindsight. In the end, we must field a future Army in 2025 that can achieve a wide range of political objectives across the full spectrum of operations to include major combat. To do that, we must not only continue to adapt the current force, but we must simultaneously and with focused effort imagine a different future and innovate to design the Army that will win in it. If we don’t innovate in future force design we will not develop the knowledge baseline from which to adapt when the next fight comes.

So the Army must continue to adapt, at which it has become more effective than it credits itself. But the Army must also innovate by doing that which separates humans from every other species on earth – look to the future and prepare for the range of possibilities it presents. 

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