Rapid Decisive Operations: The Emperor's New Clothes of Modern Warfare.

摘要

Joint Forces Command has proposed 'Rapid Decisive Operations' as an operational concept for future warfare. The paper examines Rapid Decisive Operations from theoretical and the strategic perspectives within the context of conventional, state-to-state warfare. The Joint Forces Command's concept 'Whitepaper' includes ambiguous conflicting statements concerning the employment of Rapid Decisive Operations within in a coercive strategy focused on influencing adversary leadership decision-making. However, such decision-making is unpredictable due to psychological factors and the actions of chance, friction, human nature, passion, uncertainty, and politics; especially within the interactive nature of warfare. General systems and chaos theory support the unpredictability of war. Although Rapid Decisive Operations embraces these modern systems concepts, this is a self-contradictory position since these theories establish the impossibility of predictability within such systems. The paper concludes that Rapid Decisive Operations is a fundamentally flawed operational concept. The White paper's description of the concept fails to present a balanced, intellectually honest, critical assessment. Rapid Decisive Operations does not appear to be adequately grounded in operational realities and the critical enabler of the Operational Net Assessment adopts a self contradictory position regarding systems theory versus predictability which invalidates its promise to provide the foreknowledge necessary to support the concept. Rapid Decisive Operations is divorced from strategic context, which ignores political factors that could reduce its speed and operational advantages. Despite these flaws, Rapid Decisive Operations is still a worthy candidate operational concept, provided it is redesigned to reconcile its internal contradictions and establish solid theoretical underpinnings.