Forging the Sword: Doctrinal Change in the U.S. Army - Hardcover

Jensen, Benjamin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804795606 ISBN 13: 9780804795609

Publisher: Stanford Security Studies, 2016

Synopsis

As entrenched bureaucracies, military organizations might reasonably be expected to be especially resistant to reform and favor only limited, incremental adjustments. Yet, since 1945, the U.S. Army has rewritten its capstone doctrine manual, Operations, fourteen times. While some modifications have been incremental, collectively they reflect a significant evolution in how the Army approaches warfare―making the U.S. Army a crucial and unique case of a modern land power that is capable of change. So what accounts for this anomaly? What institutional processes have professional officers developed over time to escape bureaucracies' iron cage?

Forging the Sword conducts a comparative historical process-tracing of doctrinal reform in the U.S. Army. The findings suggest that there are unaccounted-for institutional facilitators of change within military organizations. Thus, it argues that change in military organizations requires "incubators," designated subunits established outside the normal bureaucratic hierarchy, and "advocacy networks" championing new concepts. Incubators, ranging from special study groups to non-Title 10 war games and field exercises, provide a safe space for experimentation and the construction of new operational concepts. Advocacy networks then connect different constituents and inject them with concepts developed in incubators. This injection makes changes elites would have otherwise rejected a contagious narrative.

About this title

About the Author

Benjamin Jensen holds a dual appointment as a Donald L. Bren Chair of Creative Problem Solving at Marine Corps University and as a Scholar-in-Residence at the American University, School of International Service.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Forging the Sword

Doctrinal Change in the U.S. Army

By Benjamin M. Jensen

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9560-9

Contents

Foreword, 
Acknowledgments, 
1. To Change an Army, 
2. The First Battle of the Next War, 
3. The Central Battle, 
4. The New Warrior Class, 
5. Hearts and Minds Revisited, 
6. Incubators, Advocacy Networks, and Organizational Change, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

To Change an Army

DURING THE WINTER ENCAMPMENT AT VALLEY FORGE IN 1778, Baron von Steuben, a Prussian officer introduced to the American Revolutionary cause by Benjamin Franklin, formed a model company of one hundred hand-selected men. He set out to experiment with drill and tactics for the New World battlefield, documenting his search in a collection of notes that became Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States. On March 29, 1779, John Jay, president of the Continental Congress, signed an order approving the regulations. What started as a soldier's experiment at Valley Forge became the blue book of the U.S. Army, a doctrinal manual outlining how to train and fight an army. Baron von Steuben's work remained the Army's informal doctrinal treatise until 1812.

The process Baron von Steuben initiated at Valley Forge continues in the modern U.S. Army. Despite repeated assertions by pundits and academics alike that the military is a conservative, parochial organization resistant to internal reform, the U.S. Army has a long history of reinventing its war fighting doctrine. This book traces this dynamic process and reflects on the character of military change. Specifically, it analyzes the unique role played by knowledge networks that allowed new ideas to form and diffuse in an otherwise rigid and complex bureaucracy.

The historical cases in this book highlight two institutional processes associated with developing new ways of war in the U.S. Army. Doctrinal change requires incubators, informal subunits established outside the hierarchy, and advocacy networks championing new concepts that emerge from incubators. Ranging from special study groups to war games, test beds, and field exercises, incubators provide a safe space for experimentation and the construction of new operational concepts. Incubators form sites where officers engage in what scholar-practitioner Thomas Mahnken calls speculation, a search "to identify novel ways to solve existing operational problems." These concepts become the foundation of new doctrine articulating a theory of how to fight and win future conflicts.

Professional soldiers require these safe spaces to visualize new forms of warfare. Outside the formal hierarchy, officers are free from routines and bias that crowd out the space for innovation. Advocacy networks represent crosscutting institutional networks that spread the ideas throughout the broader defense community. These networks connect different constituents in the bureaucracy and infect them with new ideas that officers would otherwise reject. New doctrine requires forums where officers (re)imagine war and networks in which they can tell their story.

Efforts to reform military organizations occur in different sequences, settings, and circumstances as organizations adapt to the changing character of war. Reforms in China by Qin minister Shang Yang in 356 BC broke with the tradition of cohorts of aristocrats in chariots to form a new mode of land warfare dominated by large infantry formations suppor

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford Security Studies
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804795606
• ISBN 13: 9780804795609
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216