Old Dogs and New Tricks: Setting the Tone For Adaptability

Army, Aug 2007 by Vandergriff, Donald E, Reed, George

One overarching best practice is the continuing importance of commander-centric operations in which the commander relies on his intuition and judgment, issuing mission-type orders to achieve desired effects. This remains essential, even in this age in which the improvements in technology tempt one to centrally control operations.

Former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker used the metaphor of a cattle drive to suggest that the Army needs to see our move to the Future Force as a journey rather than a destination. The cattle drive, the journey, is an evolutionary process. While the Army can more or less define "where we are" and "where we need to go/' the process of getting there will not be straightforward.

The cowboys of the 188Os knew that Kansas was the cattle drive's end and Wyoming its beginning, but they did not know with any certainty the best route to get there or what difficulties they might encounter on the way. It seems relatively clear that the system of professional military education should develop leaders to deal effectively with the ambiguities inherent in accelerating change, represented most urgently by the type of warfare we are now facing and will continue to face into the future. It is unclear exactly how this will be accomplished, thus demanding that the Army approach it as an evolutionary process in the same spirit that the cowboys used: a journey into the unknown, to blaze a viable trail from an Industrial Age into an Information Age Future Force mind-set. We believe that it is essential to emphasize human development on a par with the inevitable infusion of technological advancements.

The capacity to adapt is a chief contributor to military success at the tactical level. In his recent book, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, Lt. Col. John Nagl combines historical analysis with organizational theory to explain why the Army sometimes fails to be as adaptive as required. "Even under the pressures for change presented by ongoing military conflict," he writes, "a strong organizational culture can prohibit learning the lessons of the present and can even prevent the organization's acknowledging that its current policies are anything other than completely successful."

Equipped with a scientific management mind-set associated with the Industrial Age, the Army developed mobilization doctrine and a supporting leader development paradigm characterized by an aspiration to achieve quick results in a massive way. It was necessary in the last century to build a large force conscripted from the citizenry and proficient at the basics in a short amount of time. Laws and policies in support of the Army's mobilization doctrine drove various aspects of personnel management leading to cultural norms and institutionalized measures of success or failure. Some of the easily measurable short-term results valued in today's military culture can endanger the culture and climate needed to promote adaptability over time. Consider, for example, our tactical-art instruction in which simulated and training exercises are structured to teach doctrine producing one right answer. During the capstone divisionlevel simulation Prairie Warrior, the opposing forces are restricted in order to produce the prescribed training objectives for the students. Adaptability can be sacrificed when realism is subordinated to prescriptive training.

Another example occurred during Millennium Challenge 2002 when Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, as the opposing forces commander, defeated the blue forces using unconventional tactics. Joint Forces Command then placed restrictions on the opposing forces to restrain such innovative techniques. Gen. Van Riper protested that the enemy will not necessarily fight as doctrinal templates project. The conflict represented tension between the desire to verify existing doctrine and rigorous testing against a free-thinking and wily enemy.

The culture is affected when subordinates see superiors who consistently play it safe and conform to doctrine as the ones who are successful. These superiors build systems in order to produce predictable results. Adaptability and its handmaidens, critical thinking and innovation, are lost if too much emphasis is placed on staying on the assigned task.

Adaptability is defined as the capacity to change to meet different conditions. We can observe it in the process by which individuals and groups decide to change in the face of new circumstances. Adaptability, agility and resilience are closely related; they lead to changes in missions, plans, procedures and outcomes, but adaptability alone is independent of time constraints. Most individuals, groups and institutions can adapt slowly to changes. Agility, on the other hand, implies a rapid adaptation to environmental changes.

The consequences of resilience for ecological systems were first emphasized by Canadian ecologist C. S. Holling in order to draw attention to trade-offs between constancy and change, between predictability and unpredictability. Hollings defined resilience as "the capacity of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbance without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is controlled by a different set of processes. A resilient ecosystem can withstand shocks and rebuild itself when necessary. Resilience in social systems has the added capacity of humans to anticipate and plan for the future." It is this capacity for more rapid change that many believe will contribute to success in the contemporary and future operational environment.