Comprehensive Operations; Future of Modern Militaries
COMPREHENSIVE OPERATIONS: THE FUTURE OF MODERN MILITARIES
Introduction (250)
Future of Warfare (200)
Yet conflict today has evolved dramatically from the conventional “big war” environment of the ALB world of the 1980s. Rather than a nation-state adversary armed with conventional military capabilities that very much mirrored our own, today we are dealing with a world of asymmetrical threats—fighting shadowy adversaries often operating at the murky nexus of terrorism, transnational crime, and illicit global money flows. Effective national security responses have become necessarily whole-of-government, involving departments from Treasury to Justice to Commerce to the
Intelligence Community. These responses are rightfully called complex operations, and only through integrated and coherent responses across all elements of national power can we hope to overcome adversaries operating in this new battlespace.
In the aftermath of the relative certainty of doctrine, training, tactics, adversary, and known terrain of the Cold War, our military today is in a sense operating without a concept of war and is searching desperately for the new
“unified field theory” of conflict that will serve to organize and drive military doctrine and tactics, acquisition and research, training and organization, leader development and education, materiel and weaponry, and personnel and promotion policies in ways that could replace the legacy impact that Cold War structures still exert on all facets of the military. Today, no agreed-upon theory of conflict drives all of these critical vectors toward a commonly understood paradigm; the result is a profusion of disparate outlooks leading toward the risk of professional incoherence. The confidence of civilian leaders and the population they serve that our military will continue to prevail in conflicts regardless of their complex nature may be in jeopardy.
Some characterize the nature of the
nontraditional
Introduction (250)
Future of Warfare (200)
Yet conflict today has evolved dramatically from the conventional “big war” environment of the ALB world of the 1980s. Rather than a nation-state adversary armed with conventional military capabilities that very much mirrored our own, today we are dealing with a world of asymmetrical threats—fighting shadowy adversaries often operating at the murky nexus of terrorism, transnational crime, and illicit global money flows. Effective national security responses have become necessarily whole-of-government, involving departments from Treasury to Justice to Commerce to the
Intelligence Community. These responses are rightfully called complex operations, and only through integrated and coherent responses across all elements of national power can we hope to overcome adversaries operating in this new battlespace.
In the aftermath of the relative certainty of doctrine, training, tactics, adversary, and known terrain of the Cold War, our military today is in a sense operating without a concept of war and is searching desperately for the new
“unified field theory” of conflict that will serve to organize and drive military doctrine and tactics, acquisition and research, training and organization, leader development and education, materiel and weaponry, and personnel and promotion policies in ways that could replace the legacy impact that Cold War structures still exert on all facets of the military. Today, no agreed-upon theory of conflict drives all of these critical vectors toward a commonly understood paradigm; the result is a profusion of disparate outlooks leading toward the risk of professional incoherence. The confidence of civilian leaders and the population they serve that our military will continue to prevail in conflicts regardless of their complex nature may be in jeopardy.
Some characterize the nature of the
nontraditional