This Week at War, No. 25

Adaptation means learning how to learn

In the latest edition of Armed Forces Journal, Frank Hoffman, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, discusses four schools of thought for organizing U.S. military ground forces. Pentagon planners will have to make decisions about weapons purchases, basing, training programs, and doctrine based on the kind of world they anticipate. Implied is the assumption that it would require a long time and much expense for ground forces to adapt to a situation planners did not anticipate. But is this assumption correct?

Hoffman describes the four schools of thought:

• Counterinsurgents, who emphasize the high likelihood and rising salience of irregular adversaries

• Traditionalists, who place their focus on states presenting conventional threats.

• Utility Infielders, who balance risk by striving to create forces agile enough to cover the full spectrum of conflict.

• Division of Labor, who balance risk differently by specializing forces to cover different missions to enhance readiness.

Pentagon planners will likely focus on the third and fourth options as the two alternatives that most minimize risk. But the two options attempt to cover the full range of threats in two different ways. The Utility Infielder option takes a "jack of all trades, master of none" approach, the risk being that partially-prepared U.S. ground forces might fare badly against a competent adversary. The Division of Labor option creates a few military units specialized for each point on the spectrum of conflict, but risks having those few specialists overwhelmed and abandoned by colleagues thoroughly trained for unneeded tasks.

Is there a way out of this dilemma? Gen. Peter Chiarelli, vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army, discussed the solution at Small Wars Journal. In his essay, "Training Full Spectrum -- Less is More," Chiarelli affirms that there is not enough time for a ground combat unit to fully prepare for every possible contingency. Since forecasts about the future operating environment will almost surely be wrong, U.S. ground forces will have to adapt.

Chiarelli observed during his career that adaptation is rapid for soldiers and units that have learned how to learn. The best way to do that, Chiarelli discovered, is to learn to do a few things to a very high standard, rather than many things to a mediocre standard. Chiarelli concludes that in the process of learning to do a few things very well, people and organizations acquire processes and habits that allow them to acquire new skills at a rapid rate.

Chiarelli's conclusion would point to the Division of Labor option. Yet the Army and Marine Corps have been reluctant to create truly specialized units within their general-purpose forces; this has been deemed operationally risky and bad for institutional culture. The default option remains the Utility Infielder approach.

Few question the need for rapidly adaptable forces. But what if the method for achieving adaptability overturns the services' long-standing cultures and traditions? That will be a test of the leadership's adaptability.

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