Richard's Thoughts & Photos: Military Transformation and Forward-Looking Strategy

Yesterday I read the book review cited below (and accessible in full by clicking on the post title above) and found part of it particularly interesting, give my background as a proponent of developing robust strategies in business. The part of the review, at this stage focusing on Kagan's book can be summarized by the following paragraphs:

"Kagan points out that all of these improvements in ground and air capabilities have been useful mostly for taking on traditional armed forces in conventional combat -- not for war in its full political context, nor for the kinds of missions the United States finds itself engaged in today. Absent a compelling threat, defense thinkers and planners focused narrowly on the destructive power of emerging military capabilities and failed to remember what war really is: a political act aimed at producing a positive political outcome. Nowhere was this narrow focus more evident and tragic than in the Bush administration's failure to plan adequately for postcombat operations in Afghanistan or Iraq, or even to understand that the combat phase would inevitably affect the political circumstances after it.
This observation leads Kagan to a different kind of transformation: namely, the need for the U.S. military to change the way it plans for war. "Military operations of any scale must be planned from back to front," he writes. Planners should start with a vision of the political outcome they want to achieve and then work backward, being sure only to apply force in ways that encourage the desired outcome. Had this approach been applied to the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon would at the very least have called for substantially more ground forces than were used to bring down Saddam Hussein. And the very operation itself might have been called into question."

I have long argued that effective strategy development and deployment (call it transformation, if you like) depends, among other things) on envisioning one or more futures and reasoning backward to the present to see what would have to do to robustly anticipate the future(s). That can then be compared with the current situation to see what actions are required to prepare for uncertain futures. That may seem obvious, but most businesses extrapolate from the present, much as Kagan describes the military doing in the 1990s.

The Real Meaning of Military Transformation: Rethinking the Revolution
Thomas L. McNaugher
From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2007

War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today.. Max Boot. : Gotham Books, 2006, 640 pp. $35.00

Summary: Rumsfeld's mishandling of the Iraqi occupation has given the "revolution in military affairs" a bad name. But as Max Boot and Frederick Kagan point out in two new books, transformation is vital to any military's success -- and more important now than ever.

Thomas L. McNaugher is a Vice President of the RAND Corporation and Director of its Army Research Division.