Learning and Adapting

We introduce two articles by Don Vandergriff (Raising the Bar: Creating and Nurturing Adaptability to Deal with the Changing Face of War) on the importance of adaptability in our military leaders with an excerpt from Chapter 5 (page 5-31) of the Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency (COIN) Manual.

Learning and Adapting

When an operation is executed, commanders may develop the situation to gain a more thorough situational understanding. This increased environmental understanding represents a form of operational learning and applies across all Logical Lines of Operations. Commanders and staffs adjust the operation’s design and plan based on what they learn. The result is an ongoing design-learn-redesign cycle.

COIN operations involve complex, changing relations among all the direct and peripheral participants. These participants adapt and respond to each other throughout an operation. A cycle of adaptation usually develops between insurgents and counterinsurgents; both sides continually adapt to neutralize existing adversary advantages and develop new (usually short-lived) advantages of their own. Victory is gained through a tempo or rhythm of adaptation that is beyond the other side’s ability to achieve or sustain. Therefore, counterinsurgents should seek to gain and sustain advantages over insurgents by emphasizing the learning and adaptation that this manual stresses throughout.

Learning and adapting in COIN is very difficult due to the complexity of the problems commanders must solve. Generally, there is not a single adversary that can be singularly classified as the enemy. Many insurgencies include multiple competing groups. Success requires the HN government and counterinsurgents to adapt based on understanding this very intricate environment. But the key to effective COIN design and execution remains the ability to adjust better and faster than the insurgents.

Both of the following linked articles by Major Don Vandergriff (USA, Ret.) address US Army training, education and culture and its relative importance in producing the adaptive leaders we require. Vandergriff retired August 30, 2005 following 24 years of active duty as a Marine enlisted and Army officer. He has served in numerous troop, staff and education assignments in the United States and overseas. Vandergriff is a recognized authority on the U.S. Army personnel system, Army culture, leadership development, soldier training and the emergence in the early 21st century of asymmetric warfare.

Adaptive Leaders Course (ALC): Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks (May 2006)

Abstract

The Secretary of the Army and the Army Chief of Staff explicitly state that the U.S. Army is going to adapt its culture to encourage develop and teach Adaptive Leadership.

The Army is learning and leaders admit it must reshape its leader educational and training programs as part of a new leader paradigm into what a recent Army magazine article identified as “Learning Organizations.”

U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) has identified a need to move from the current Industrial-Age leader development paradigm, and as a result has published a number of papers from TRADOC Areas of Interest (TAIs) to support its Campaign Plan objective “Reshape the fundamental Army Learning Process for a dynamic Operating Environment.” “TAI 2 Learning for Adaptation” provided the ingredients for the paper “Learning for Adaptation: U.S. Army Training and Leader Development in the Early 21st Century.” This paper lays the foundation to “discovering possible solutions as the Army continues to adapt to new settings and environments.”

One of the twelve study objectives of this paper is “Integration of recent leader development initiatives and a comprehensive leader education model with emphasis on human, cultural and cognitive understanding.” “Adaptive Leader’s Course (ALC) Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks” is an approach to evolving U.S. Army leader-centric institutions to ones that not only can teach and evaluate adaptability in leaders, but also become adaptive leader-centric institutions.

Cultural evolution within leader development is the optimal start point as Army leaders tackle the complex issues of addressing laws, regulations and beliefs that deal with today’s leader paradigm. The Adaptive Leader’s Course (ALC) offers examples of viable education and training solutions as sought and asked for in “Learning for adaptation: U.S. Army Training and Leader Development in the Early 21st Century.” Specifically the first recommendation in “Learning for Adaptation” is “Change the Professional Military Education (PME) model to adapt to the contemporary operational environment (COE) and the Army Forces Generation (ARFORGEN) model, and leverage Army Distributed Learning (ADL).” This paper supports the specific action of recommendation number 1’s “Direct the development of an overarching conceptual framework for adaptability that captures emerging research and will guide the implementation of related adaptability education and training concepts throughout TRADOC.”

Future Leader: The Journey of Developing (and Nurturing) Adaptability — The Future is Now (December 2005)

Abstract

“Adaptability” has become a buzzword throughout the Army. The system in place today evolved from one that worked to support the nation’s mobilization doctrine. Several factors have combined to force the Army to think about the way it develops and nurtures its leaders. Continual modifications to today’s paradigm may not be enough.

The U.S. Army still “thinks” and “acts” from an industrial-age, mobilization doctrine-based leader development paradigm more than 16 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The industrial age approach continues to shape the way the Army approaches its training and education, often confusing the two terms. The Army has to do more than post rhetoric about “adaptability” on briefing slides and in literature. The Army’s personnel system designed for an earlier era are so intimately tied to the maintenance of Army culture that they form a self-perpetuating cycle that will diminish and even prevent the Army from becoming an adaptive organization unless it accepts rapid evolutionary change as the norm of the new era.

One cannot divorce how the Army accesses, promotes and selects its leaders from its leader development paradigm. The Army cannot expect to create leaders that grasp and practice adaptability and then after graduation enter an Army that is not adaptive or nurtures innovation.

The Army culture must become adaptive and the personnel system evolves into one that nurtures adaptability in its policies, practices and beliefs.

Viable education and training solutions exist alongside an evolution into a new personnel management system centered on flexibility. This is what the paper and follow-on papers will recommend.