Military Review English Edition November-December 2013 | Page 13

E D U C AT I N G S T R AT E G I C P L A N N E R S
ent planning process. It acknowledged that both can
play an important role in developing operational and
tactical plans, depending on the situation.3 Design
is now a standard part of the curriculum for majors
in the Command and General Staff Officers Course
and for battalion and brigade command-selects in
the School for Command Preparation Tactical Commander’s Development Program.

The Yingling Argument

However, the introduction of the Army Design
Methodology and the inclusion of Design into professional military education and other leader development forums did not address a more fundamental
problem: the need for leaders who could think and
operate in the realm of strategy. Thus, concurrent
with the debate on the need for a better planning
process, another debate emerged on the need for
further education of our officer corps to develop
better collaboration, communication, and influence
skills at the strategic level and critical and creative
thinking skills in general. The public face of this
debate was provided by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling who

(U.S. Army)

Afghanistan we found that the traditional planning
processes were inadequate for the complexity of
the operational environment.”1
To address this inadequacy, the Army turned
to Design as a companion piece to MDMP to
help planners address the issues associated with
complex and unfamiliar problems. Design, originally adopted from the Israeli theory of Systemic
Operational Design, required practitioners spend
considerable time defining the environment and
framing the problem before beginning to identify a solution.2 Design emphasized the need for
critical and creative thinking and iterative solution
processes to understand clearly the depth of the
problem that operational planners encountered on
the ground. The vehicle for introducing Design
and similar critical thinking skills to the Army was
the school most identified with planning processes
and operational planners: The School of Advanced
Military Studies (SAMS) at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
The school embraced this change wholeheartedly
and revamped its curriculum to include the use of
Design and MDMP as companion parts of a coher-

War Plans Division, March 1942. Left to right: Col. St. Clair Streett; Gen. Eisenhower, chief; Col. A.
S. Nevins; Brig. Gen. R.W. Crawford; Col. C.A. Russell; and Col. H. A. Barber, Jr.

MILITARY REVIEW

• November-December 2013

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