Military Review English Edition January-February 2014 | Page 26

the costume, objectives, and equipment. In reality, the soldier and the suicide bomber are worlds apart; they think and behave based on entirely different processes and adapt in different ways. If we train our forces with the simulacra where opposing forces have identical motives to their own, how can we expect them to deploy to conflict environments and appreciate true rival adaptation? For decades, our training strategy created copies without originals for training our military. We inevitably fight ourselves without realizing it, interpreting all aspects of training through our preferred frame.45 Our frame uses the philosophies, methodologies, doctrine, and values that most of our rivals do not use. We subsequently deploy trained units into dynamic conflict environments with the expectation that their tra ining prepares them for complex, adaptive rivals. Yet when our organizations fail to accomplish objectives or the environment changes faster and in unexpected, novel directions, our own institutionalisms and adherence to our Western military paradigm sends those same military professionals back into training where once again, simulacra reigns. To shatter this paradigm, we require senior leadership discourse, critical reflection by military professionals, and subsequent creative transformation to a different training philosophy that avoids the perils of simulacra. MR NOTES 1. Larry and Andy Wachowski, The Matrix (the Internet Movie Script Database, (29 December 2012). This scene features Cypher and Agent Smith eating a meal inside the virtual world called “the Matrix” while discussing Cypher’s betrayal of his crew. The computer program represented by Agent Smith will return Cypher’s physical body to where he is permanently plugged into the virtual world and erase his memories of the harsher outside reality. 2. Department of the Army, The Army Training Strategy; Training in a Time Of Transition, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Austerity (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office [GPO], 3 October 2012), 7 (emphasis added by author). 3. Mats Alvesson, Jorgen Sandberg, “Generating Research Questions Through Problematization” (Academy of Management Review, vol. 36, no. 2, 2011): 255. “A key task is . . . to enter a dialectical interrogation between one’s own and other meta-theoretical stances so as to identify, articulate, and challenge central assumptions underlying existing literature in a way that opens up new areas of inquiry.” 4. By ontology, I seek in this article to apply a meta-question of how we understand the nature of “training”—and how all of our training endeavors might be categorized into what we validate as training, and what we might intend to do as training but misapply in practice. For more on meta-questions, see Gerald M. Weinberg, Rethinking Systems Analysis and Design (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982), 65. “A meta-question is a question that directly or indirectly produces a question for an answer.” Weinberg’s meta-question continues with “why” instead of “what” processes of query. 5. Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, The Starfish and the Spider (The Penguin Group, New York, 2006), 184-89. Brafman and Beckstrom discuss the differences between centralized and decentralized organizations. The U.S. Army clearly operates as a centralized or “spider” organization. Brafman and Beckstrom provide an example with General Motors in 1943. “GM’s response was: Why should we change? We have something that works. Look, we’re at the top of our industry—how dare you come in and make suggestions.” 6. Design introduces a challenging series of concepts to incorporate into military fields; this article cites a variety of post-modern philosophy and other sources that serve as a good starting point for those interested in how design differs from traditional military planning and decision-making doctrine. 7. This article uses “design theory” to avoid institutional pitfalls of serviceunique terms such as Army Design Methodology. See, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Field Manual (FM) 5-0, The Operations Process (Washington, DC: GPO, 2010), chap. 3, “Design.” For examples of U.S. Army design doctrinal approaches, see also, TRADOC FM-Interim 5-2; Design (Draft) (draft under development-Headquarters, Department of the Army, 2009). 8. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001). See also Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor Books, 1967). Berger and Luckmann make the case that all knowledge is socially constructed within groups and societies and over time are institutionalized into vast, complex, and expanding bureaucracies. 9. In the Matrix, the protagonist Neo is offered a symbolic choice between two pills on whether to remain trapped inside the Matrix or to leave and discover the real world. See also Michel Foucault, Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia (originally covered in six lectures given by Michel Foucault at the University of California, Berkeley, October-November 1983, online at (20 November 2012). 10. Baudrillard, 152-53. “We will live in this world, which for us has all the disquieting strangeness of the desert and of the simulacrum . . . only the vertiginous seduction of a dying system remains . . . ” 11. Ibid., 3. 12. Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), 125. 24 13. Foucault. A “problematizer” threatens his institution by critically questioning it, and may be eliminated (figuratively or literally) even if he presents truth—if the truth is too painful for the institution or threatens core tenets. 14. Decisive Action Training Environment (U.S. Army, 8 March 2012), Stand-To! (31 January 2013). This online article provides the official Army explanation of the Decisive Action Training Environment scenario. 15. I base my observations on my experience as an OPFOR Company Commander and subsequently a rotation scenario planner for the Joint Readiness Training Center from 2005 to 2009. As an OPFOR commander, I participated in over 12 brigade-sized training rotations, and as a rotational planner (Zulu Team), I was the lead planner for 5 brigade-sized rotations. 16. By symbols, I refer to the work of Mary Jo Hatch and Ann Cunliffe, Organization Theory, Second Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) 210-11. Hatch adapts her model from Pasquale Gagliardi and uses a cycle of assumptions, values, artifacts, and symbols where a society rotates through each of the processes and eventually changes them. 17. Joint Multi-National Readiness Center (JMRC) Mid-Point After-ActionReview presen tation for Rotation 13-01 provided to our unit as an example. These unclassified products on slides 14-20 lay out the 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry “OPFOR” unit’s mission, intent, and major operations. All of their material demonstrates absolute adherence to common military terms and structure; they use the same concepts on end-state, concept of operation, graphic control measures, and methodology as the friendly force. Author’s personal printed copies provided by JMRC as unclassified “take-away” products. This is no different from OPFOR plans I developed as an OPFOR company commander as well. 18. Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Anchor Books, New York, 1967). See also Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse; Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 6. “Rational or scientific knowledge was little more than the truth yielded by reflection in the prefigurative modes raised to the level of abstract concepts and submitted to criticism for logical consistency, coherency, and so on.” 19. Carl H. Builder, The Masks of War; American Military Styles in Strategy and Analysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 11, 17. Historian Carl H. Builder argues, in The Masks of War, that military institutions are generally motivated toward institutional survival, evoking “golden eras” of past wars, and the continued idolization of self-defining behaviors, traditions, and structures. Thus, the Army prefers to dine on the fake-steak of fighting conventional large-scale land battles rather than the less appealing gruel of decentralized counterinsurgency operations. 20. Benjamin S. Lambeth, How to Think About Soviet Military Doctrine (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, February 1978), 2. “Soviet military doctrine, in marked contrast to prevailing U.S. strategic orthodoxy, is highly systematic in formulation, unambiguously martial in tone . . .” Lambeth addresses strategic nuclear doctrine, however his observations relate to overarching strategies and philosophies. 21. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing: People’s Liberation Army Literature and Arts Publishing House, February 1999). See also Francois Jullien, trans., Janet Lloyd, A Treatise on Efficacy Between Western and Chinese Thinking (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996). See also David Lai, Learning From the Stones: A GO Approach to Mastering China’s Strategic Concept, SHI (Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, May 2004). 22. A Pakistani field grade officer, educated in the U.S. Army Intermediate Level Education programs, explained to me in personal correspondence that “we use stuff like Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield and that’s about it. Our planning process is called military appreciation, which again is extremely deterministic and unimaginative.” Another correspondence with an Indian Air Force field grade officer reaffirmed that they used checklists and some aspects of MiMDMP, but they diverged and injected their own interpretations. January-February 2014 MILITARY REVIEW