Achieving Operational Adaptability: Capacity Building Needs to Become a Warfighting Function

摘要

Eight years of persistent conflict and increasing engagement requirements across the globe have followed the end of the Cold War. Appropriately, leaders and theorists recognize the professional military obligation and importance of adapting military power and capabilities to achieve strategic objectives. America's security depends on developing a flexible and adaptive military that can integrate the threat or use of force with stability and partnership activities in complex operating environments. As a learning organization, the U.S. Army must examine its current doctrine and conceptual frameworks to determine if they sufficiently represent the logic behind the application of land power and the vision outlined in the recently updated Quadrennial Defense Review and Army Capstone Concept. This monograph contributes to organizational learning by proposing an additional warfighting function, capacity building, to the current list. The current six warfighting functions include movement and maneuver, fires, command and control, intelligence, sustainment, and protection. The warfighting functions originated in the 1980s and represent a functional analysis of conventional maneuver operations when current and future operational requirements necessitate a more comprehensive doctrinal mental model for the balanced application of land power. Aspects of military theory, learning theory, doctrine, operational design, and military history support this recommendation by highlighting the importance of comprehensive doctrinal mental models when thinking critically and developing concepts. Making capacity building a warfighting function ensures that future U.S. Army leaders and planners visualize and balance the full spectrum of their responsibilities and capabilities during the operations process.