Military Review English Edition March-April 2016 | Page 55

MYTH OF COMPLEXITY

Notes
1. Nomination of John F. Kerry for Secretary of State: Hearing before
the Committee on Foreign Relations Committee, 113th Cong. 163 (24
January 2013 statement of John Kerry), accessed 25 November 2015,
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-113shrg86451/html/CHRG113shrg86451.htm.
2. Everett S.P. Spain, J.D. Mohundro, and Bernard B. Banks,
“Intellectual Capital: A Case for Cultural Change,” Parameters 45(2)
(Summer 2015): 77.
3. Tony Zinni and Tony Koltz, Before the First Shots are Fired: How
America can Win or Lose off the Battlefield (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 169, 171–72.
4. Army Doctrine Publication (ADP) 1, The Army (Washington,
DC: U.S. Government Printing Office [GPO], 2012), 4; Training and
Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Pamphlet 525-8-2, The U.S. Army
Learning Concept for 2015 (Fort Eustis, VA: TRADOC, 2011), i.
5. John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1999), 23.
6. Ibid., 10.
7. Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, Military Innovation in the
Interwar Period (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1, 5.
8. Richard A. Preston, Alex Roland, and Sydney F. Wise, Men in
Arms: A History of Warfare and its Interrelationships with Western Society, 5th ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1999), 245.
9. Brian M. Linn, The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 153.
10. Zinni and Koltz, Before the First Shots, 201.
11. United States Army Center of Military History, A Brief History
of the U.S. Army in World War II (Washington, DC: 1992), passim;
“WWII by the Numbers,” National World War II Museum website,
accessed 25 November 2015, http://www.nationalww2museum.org/
learn/education/for-students/ww2-history/ww2-by-the-numbers.
12. Kent R. Greenfield, American Strategy in World War II: A
Reconsideration (Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing, 1982), 22–23.

Greenfield describes the various military and political elements at
work that made decision making difficult for the Allied nations.
13. Robert Golan-Viella, “The Cold War Wasn’t Simple,” The National Interest, 4 February 2013, accessed 25
November 2015, http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/
the-cold-war-world-wasnt-simple-8049.
14. Paul Kennedy, “The Good Old Days of the Cold War,” Los
Angeles Times, 18 February 2007.
15. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin
Group, 1984), 11.
16. Bruce Palmer Jr., The 25 Year War: America’s Military in Vietnam (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), vii.
17. A.M. Fufaev and V.A. Runov, The Soviet Afghan War: How a
Superpower Fought and Lost, eds. and trans. Lester Grau and Michael
Gress (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 72.
18. Ibid., 91.
19. Wesley K. Clark, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo and the
Future of Combat (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books Group, 2000), 18.
20. Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency (Washington, DC: U.S.
GPO, 2006).
21. Bing West, The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way out of
Afghanistan (New York: Random House, 2011), 249.
22. Robert Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 571.
23. Linn, The Echo of Battle, 243.
24. Christopher A. Lawrence, America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam (Havertown, PA: Casemate,
2015), 299–300. The order of the citations was arranged for clarity.
25. General David G. Perkins, “Army Operating Concept: Delivering the Future,” Army Magazine 64(10) (October 2014): 66.
26. ADP 1, The Army.
27. Charles E. Heller and William A. Stoft, eds., America’s First
Battles, 1776–1965 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986), 352.

MR We Recommend

I

f you found the article above intriguing, you may also enjoy reading “The
Complexity Trap,” by Michael J. Gallagher, Joshua A. Geltzer, and Sebastian
L.V. Gorka. Their article also critiques the concept of complexity. Find it in
the Spring 2012 edition of Parameters, Vol. 42 Issue 1,
http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/Articles/2012spring/Gallagher_Geltzer_Gorka.pdf.

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