Organisational Learning And The Modern Army

Drawing upon extensive original research, this book explores best practice in army lessons-learned processes. Without the correct learning mechanisms, military adaptation can be blocked, or the wider lessons from adaptation can easily be lost, leading to the need to relearn lessons in the field, often at great human and financial cost. This book analyses the organisational processes and activities which can help improve tactical- and operational-level learning through case studies of lessons learned in two key NATO armies: that of Britain and of Germany. Providing the first comparative analysis of the variables which facilitate or impede the emergence of best practice in military learning, it makes an important contribution to the growing scholarship on knowledge management and learning in public organisations. It will be of much interest to lessons-learned practitioners, and students of military and strategic studies, defence studies, organisation studies and security studies.

Your people are your most valuable asset, and if you want them to excel (and your profits to soar), you'll need to abandon your traditional command-and-control management style and adopt a collaborative, open leadership approach—one that engages and empowers your people. While this isn't a particularly new idea, many leaders, while they may pay lip service to it, don't really understand what it means. And most of those who do get it lack the skills for putting it into practice. In Flat Army you'll find powerful leadership models and tools that help you challenge yourself and overcome your personal obstacles to change, while pushing the boundaries of organizational change to create a culture of collaboration. • Develops an integrated framework incorporating collaboration, open leadership, technologies, and connected learning • Shows you how to flatten the organizational pyramid and engage with your peoples in more collaborative and productive ways—without undermining your authority • Explains how to deploy a Connected Leader mindset, a Participative Leader Framework, and a Collaborative Leader Action Model • Arms you with powerful tools for becoming a more visible leader who demonstrates the qualities and capabilities needed to become an agent of positive change

Case studies explore how to improve military adaptation and preparedness in peacetime by investigating foreign wars

This monograph, “ Systems Thinking and Design: Making Learning Organizations a Reality in the U.S. Army,” examines whether the addition of design to U.S. Army doctrine, along with other changes, can clarify the concept of the learning organization and make it more achievable by operational units at the battalion and brigade levels. While there have been prior studies of the U.S. Army as a learning organization, they have focused on the whole Army as a monolithic entity, rather than investigating organizational learning at the operational level. Systems thinking, a common component of design and of learning organizations, is explored in depth to determine methods best suited for military application within the current operations process. Our findings determine that current doctrine encourages and is broadly consistent with the requirements of the learning organization. However, the concept of the learning organization is not explained in any detail. The necessary components of a learning organization are distributed across multiple field manuals, and no integrating explanation of how commander and staff processes contribute to organizational learning is provided. If institutionalizing organizational learning at the operational level is a desirable goal for the U.S. Army, then minor changes in training and operations doctrine could help to realize this potential. We recommend several targeted improvements to current doctrine to better articulate the concept and explain the essential linkages with commander and staff processes. Finally, as theoretical research cannot improve Army practices on its own, a pilot study is recommended to test the recommendations on a sample of operational units.

The first institutional examination of the British army's learning and innovation process during the First World War.

This book examines the key dimensions of 21st century war, and shows that orthodox thinking about war, particularly what it is and how it is fought, needs to be updated. Accelerating societal, economic, political and technological change affects how we prepare, equip and organise for war, as well as how we conduct war – both in its low-tech and high-tech forms, and whether it is with high intensity or low intensity. The volume examines changes in warfare by investigating the key features of the conduct of war during the first decades of the 21st century. Conceptually centred around the terms ‘kinetic’, ‘connected’ and ‘synthetic’, the analysis delves into a wide range of topics. The contributions discuss hybrid warfare, cyber and influence activities, machine learning and artificial intelligence, the use of armed drones and air power, the implications of the counterinsurgency experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, as well as the consequences for law(fare) and decision making. This work will be of much interest to students of military and strategic studies, security studies and International Relations. Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 19 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This volume explores and develops new social-scientific tools for the analysis and understanding of contemporary military missions in theatre. Despite the advent of new types of armed conflict, the social-scientific study of militaries in action continues to focus on tools developed in the hey-day of conventional wars. These tools focus on such classic issues as cohesion and leadership, communication and unit dynamics, or discipline and motivation. While these issues continue to be important, most studies focus on organic units (up to and including brigades). By contrast, this volume suggests the utility of concepts related to mission formations – as opposed to ‘units’ or ‘components’ – to better capture the (ongoing) processual nature of the amalgamations and combinations that military involvement in conflicts necessitates. The study of these formations by the social sciences – sociology, social psychology, anthropology, political science and organization science – requires the introduction of new analytical tools to the study of militaries in theatre. As such, this volume utilizes new approaches to social life, organizational dynamics and to armed violence to understand the place of the armed forces in contemporary conflicts and the new tasks they are assigned. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, sociology, security studies and International Relations in general.

This book describes the evolution of French defence policy since the end of the Cold War. For the past thirty years there have been significant changes to French defence policy as a result of several contextual evolutions. Changes include shifts in the global balance of power, new understandings of the notion of international security, economic downturns, and developments in European integration. Yet despite these changes, the purpose of France’s grand strategy and its main principles have remained remarkably stable over time. This book identifies the incentives, representations and objectives of French defence policy The authors examine the general mechanisms that influence policy change and military transformation in democracies, the importance of status-seeking in international relations, the processes of strategy-making by a middle power, and the dilemmas and challenges of security cooperation. By doing so the book raises a number of questions related to the ways states adjust (or not) their security policies in a transformed international system. This book makes French-language sources available to non-French-speaking readers and contributes to a better understanding of a country that is at the forefront of Europe’s external action. This book will be of great interest to students of defence studies, French politics, military studies, security studies, and IR in general.