Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 21

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE

The Army Warfighting Challenges

The Army Warfighting Challenges provide an analytical framework to integrate efforts across
warfighting functions while collaborating with key stakeholders in learning activities, modernization, and future force design.
TRADOC Publication 525-3-1, The U.S. Army Operating Concept: Winning in a Complex World

for learning around the 20 first-order capabilities
the Army must possess to win in a complex world.
Lessons from recent armed conflicts, such as the
need to put politics at the center of security force
assistance, the growing importance of counterthreat
finance, the increased overlaps between military
and law enforcement operations, or the criticality
of mobile protected firepower and combined arms
capabilities in urban operations, can now inform
interim solutions to warfighting challenges.37

Defining the Future Army: Force
2025 and Beyond
As historians Williamson Murray and
MacGregor Knox observed in a seminal book on
military innovation, militaries that prepared successfully for the demands of future war took professional military education seriously. They cultivated
in their leaders the ability to think clearly about
war, considering continuities and changes.
“The military institutions that successfully innovated between 1919 and 1940 without exception examined recent military events in careful, thorough,
and realistic fashion. Analysis of the past was the
basis of successful innovation. The key technique of
innovation was open-ended experiment and exercises that tested systems to breakdown rather than

aiming at the validation of hopes or theories. Simple
honesty and the free flow of ideas between superiors
and subordinates—key components of all successful
military cultures—were centrally important to the
ability to learn from experience. And the overriding
purpose of experiments and exercises was to improve the effectiveness of units and of the service as
a whole, rather than singling out commanders who
had allegedly failed.”38
Our Army is innovating under Force 2025
Maneuvers, “the physical (experimentation, evaluations, exercises, modeling, simulations, and war
games) and intellectual (studies, analysis, concept,
and capabilities development) activities that help
leaders integrate future capabilities and develop interim solutions to warfighting challenges.”39
Successful innovation will require focused and
sustained collaboration among Army professionals
committed to reading, thinking, and learning about
the problem of future armed conflict, and determining what capabilities our Army and joint force must
develop to win in a complex world.
The author wishes to express gratitude to those who
generously reviewed and provided helpful suggestions
for this essay—in particular, Dr. Nadia Schadlow of the
Smith Richardson Foundation and John Wiseman of the
Army Capabilities Integration