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