Adopting a Warfighting Culture With a Business Discipline

Army, Oct 2008 by Dunwoody, Ann E

Transforming to Sustain an Army Enterprise

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. "

-Albert Einstein

Since 9/11, the Army has been on a fast track to transform its legacy formations to more expeditionary, lethal, agile and déployable capabilities for Joint force commanders. It was clear we needed to increase capacity and capability if we were going to be able to sustain the Army in an era of protracted conflict and rapid change. Now the votes on modularity are in. Although we continue to refine our combat service support (CSS) force structure above the brigade combat team (BCT) level, we can say without a doubt that we have built an expeditionary, campaign-quality Army that is significantly more capable than our legacy force.

As we continue to satisfy the demands of growing, transforming and deploying our Army, we have created an army in which equipment and people are in constant motion. Global requirements have created a situation in which current and future demands consume readiness as fast as we generate it. Our Chief of Staff and secretary of the Army have laid the foundation to regain balance in our Army by focusing on four strategic imperatives: sustain, prepare, reset and transform. These imperatives now serve as the beacons for our efforts to rebalance our Army.

Transforming our operational force alone is not sufficient. We need to change the way we think about resolving challenges. As Albert Einstein said, "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." This is not a matter of turning the Army into a business but one of understanding the business of the Army, which will ultimately improve the effectiveness of our ability to support the warfighter.

Through the logistics lens, an enterprise way of thinking is fundamentally about being able to see the entire organization and the relationships between its people, processes, capabilities and organizational parts. An enterprise view recognizes that no single organization or command, no matter how large, is capable of autonomously providing the full breadth of logistics services required to support our military objectives. We must enable processes at the corporate level so that staffing, equipping, training and sustaining our Army enterprise can be accomplished with fiscal responsibility.

Enterprise opportunities in logistics are everywhere. Logistics is a major part of the business of the Army that drives us to think and operate as an enterprise. Changing to an enterprise way of thinking requires us, as leaders, to collaborate, coordinate and integrate with all who can contribute to the solution. Considering the billions of dollars we spend on logistics every year, it is clear that an enterprise approach could garner efficiencies and increase effectiveness.

The Army exists to provide trained and ready forces and capabilities to Joint force or combatant commanders, our Title X responsibility. Army Force Generation (ARFORGEN) is the process with which we build and generate combat power. We synchronize the manning, training, equipping, organizing, deploying, mobilizing and sustaining of forces. The current demands (global requirements) exceed supply (forces and capabilities). Our institutional processes were last transformed under Gen. Creighton Abrams, Army Chief of Staff from 1972 to 1974. Now more than ever, the demand on Army capability requires the transformation of the institution to keep pace with the transformation of the operational force.

The Army is moving out on all fronts-reviewing how forces train for full spectrum conflict, changing the way we prepare our forces for deployment and changing the way we reset our people and equipment. We know the new strategy must drive resources (and not vice versa). We know we need to change the way we sustain, reset, train, equip and modernize our force to support our new ARFORGEN model.

To meet this reality, the Army recently published its new capstone doctrine. FM 3-0 Operations recognizes the complexity of the new global environment by elevating stability or civil-support operations to equal importance with offensive and defensive operations. Further, FM 3-0 recognizes that full spectrum operations require continuous and simultaneous combinations of all three kinds of operations. This capstone doctrine outlines the fundamental principles and concepts that will guide the Army through this new era, emphasizing how to think rather than what to think in our approach to operations. With new doctrine and ARFORGEN, our institutional processes (reset, equipping, modernizing) require transformation.

At the Army level, a logistics enterprise approach is the holistic application of strategic leadership and business practices to run the Army in the same way we employ the Army. The U.S. Army is a $240 billion enterprise of roughly one million volunteer soldiers, spanning the globe with boots on the ground in more than 80 countries conducting operations. Requirements to support sailors, airmen, marines, other government agencies, civilians, contractors, Coalition and multinational partners 24/7 under harsh and austere combat conditions are unyielding. We can no longer afford to operate Cold War organizational structures and processes within the Army that fail to promote or optimize enterprise decision making.