James Mingus and Christina Bembenek
Starting in 1997, every major at the Army’s Command and General Staff College received a multihour course on “How the Army Runs,” accompanied by a five-hundred- page tome. Within minutes of departing Ft. Leavenworth, nearly all officers had flushed that high-level, complicated staff knowledge from their brains, abandoned their copies of the book to a moving carton, and went back to leading troops—and then ten years later they arrived at the Pentagon and wished they had paid more attention.
But even if they had retained the book knowledge, the way the Army actually runs changes with constantly shifting policies and regulations. The basic framework for how the Army runs is over fifty years old, but the way we design, develop, and employ the force has changed—and the pace continues to accelerate. Continuous transformation requires streamlined, flexible, automated processes that allow the Army to design and build the force we need today, informed by experimentation in the field, as well as plan for the force required to stay ahead of rapidly advancing threats we cannot forecast. Getting this right is one of the most important tasks we can accomplish for our Army.
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