Fall 2006 - Air & Space Power Chronicle - Air Force Link

86 AIR & SPACE POWER JOURNAL FALL 2006IN MY OFFICE, I have a unique toy calleda “transformer.” It looks like a simple carwith working wheels and what appear tobe chrome headlights. But wait! When Itake it apart and transform it into a great warrior,the toy acquires a totally different purpose,appearance, and way of performing itsduties even though its material makeup doesnot change.In the military, one finds confusion aboutwhat transformation really means. The Departmentof Defense’s (DOD) Office of ForceTransformation (OFT) asserts that transformationin the department “addresses threemajor areas—how we do business inside theDepartment, how we work with interagencyand multinational partners, and how wefight.” 1 Many of the initiatives at the OFT involveequipment and technologies in supportof transformation, including the Navy’s LittoralCombat Ship, operationally responsive satellites,airships, and directed-energy weapons.The late Vice Adm Arthur Cebrowski suggestedthat “one of the great rules for transformationis if you want to transform go wherethe money is and on arrival, change the rules.” 2As a result, billions of dollars have been reprogrammedin military programs. According toSecretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, “a greatdeal of programmatic redirection has takenplace.” 3 The most visible transformational effortsby the OFT and the DOD focus on equipmentand technologies.Admittedly, the OFT’s efforts have movedbeyond toys—the resources needed for warfighting. Admiral Cebrowski was adamant thatthe military transform the way it fights as wellby strongly emphasizing such areas as networkcentricwarfare, effects-based operations, leadershipdevelopment, and cultural intelligence.The war in Iraq has helped shepherd these effortstowards a new mode of war “dependenton fast movement, interdependence amongforces, jointness down to the tactical level,persistent fires and persistent surveillance.” 4For these efforts, the OFT and DOD concentrateon methodologies—how the military doeswar fighting.Dr. Francis Harvey, secretary of the Army,recently referred to the transformation of theArmy asan approach that is best described as evolutionarychange leading to revolutionary outcomes.This priority . . . means we must make a smoothtransition from the current Army to a futureArmy—one that will be better able to meet thechallenges of the 21st Century security environment.It means we must prepare our forces, inmindset, training and equipment, to operate infuture ambiguous and austere environments.But to be truly successful, this transformationmust build on our enduring Army values andrich traditions—preserving the best of the past,while changing and improving for the future. 5However, in Breaking the Phalanx, a book widelyread by military professionals, Douglas A.Macgregor, an expert on transforming themilitary, finds great resistance by the militaryto the concept of transformation, which hedescribes as a revolutionary concept:Change in military affairs can be evolutionary orrevolutionary. For it to be implemented quickly,however, the direction of organizational changemust be more revolutionary than evolutionary.This is because most of the arguments againstchange are not based on disputes about warfighting;opposition is usually rooted in established,peacetime, bureaucratic interests. . . . In otherwords, changing the organizational structureand strategic focus of the U.S. Armed Forces willrequire not only pressure and influence fromabove and outside the services, but also anticipationof how the prior experiences and culturalnorms of the rank-and-file professional militaryresistant to change will lead them to slow otherwisemisdirected change. 6Macgregor’s later book, Transformation underFire, continues his quest to change the militaryto a more relevant force for today. Here, hewrites that his focus in the earlier book wasconsistent with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’srequirement for the Army—the capability of“moving rapidly from widely dispersed stagingareas overseas and in the continental UnitedStates, deploying into a crisis or regional conflictand initiating an attack, all without pausing.”His emphasis, however, has shifted to theorganizational structure of the military: “how