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Noted expert on adaptive leadership, military education, strategy and 4GW, Don Vandergriff, has become a contributor to the Fabius Maximus blog. A thought leader on the subject of military reform, Don is the author of Raising the Bar: Creating and Nurturing Adaptability to Deal with the Changing Face of War, Manning the Future Legions of the United States: Finding and Developing Tomorrow’s Centurions, The Path To Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs and Spirit, Blood and Treasure and his official site can be found here.  I know Vandergriff will make an excellent addition to FM’s well regarded blog.

FM declared last week to be “Don Vandergriff Week” and here are links to FM’s posts regarding some of Vandergriff’s ideas:

A new addition to the FM website team: Don Vandergriff

Donald Vandergriff has joined the team of writers on the FM website.  He’s one of the select few who are incomparably more influential after they retired (but still alive).  This week we’ll run excerpts from some of his works.

Background

In the world of military theory today there are many people on the cutting edge.  Historians like Martin van Creveld, analysts like John Robb and Chet Richards, visionaries like Thomas Barnett, even some crossing across these categories like William Lind.  But there are few developing solutions that can be implemented today.  By solutions, I mean large-scale programs (not incremental improvements) requiring no substantial political or institutional changes.

One of the best known on this short list is Donald E. Vandergriff.  He retired in 2005 at the rank of Major after 24 years of active duty as an enlisted Marine and Army officer.  He now works as a consultant to the Army and corporations.

Why is Vandergriff’s work an important contribution to preparing America for 21st century warfare?

Summary:  The second chapter in Donald Vandergriff week on the FM website, introducing his work to those readers not already familiar with it.  This chapter briefly sketches out why his work is critical.  People – not doctrine or technology – are the key to winning 4th generation wars (the many factors are always important, of course).  Recruiting, training, motivating, and retaining our men and women in uniform

Vandergriff: “Theirs Is to Reason Why”

Summary

Outcome-based training teaches the art in a manner that encourages retention while fostering independent and creative means of obtaining the end goal.

War is an art and as such is not susceptible of explanation by fixed formulae. Yet, from the earliest time there has been an unending effort to subject it’s complex and emotional structure to dissection, to enunciate rules for it’s waging, to make tangible it’s intangibility. One might as well strive to isolate the soul by the dissection of the cadaver as to seek the essence of war by the analysis of it’s records.
– “The Secret of Victory” by General George S. Patton Jr.  (1926)

Preface to Manning the Future Legions of the United States: Finding and Developing Tomorrow’s Centurions

Today’s we have a excerpt from the Preface to Don Vandergriff’s book Manning the Future Legions of the United States: Finding and Developing Tomorrow’s Centurions (2008).  Posted here with permission of the author.

“People, ideas and hardware, in that order!”
– John Boyd (Colonel, USAF, 1927-1997), “A Discourse on Winning and Losing”, unpublished briefing,  August 1987, p. 5-7.

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Like the United States today, Rome faced multiple challenges in 107 B.C., and was hard pressed to field adequate forces; the number of men who were qualified to serve, who could equip themselves was running out. The Jurgurthine War in North Africa had been going on far too long for the liking of the Roman Senate, a task that counsul (general) Gaius Marius took upon himself to resolve. German tribes had already defeated several Roman armies and threatened Gaul (southern France) as well as Italy.

Marius was a man of vision and acted upon the need to secure Roman provinces with the resources at hand. He did not have a technological revolution at his disposal to solve his strategic problem.  Marius turned to an intangible solution, the way the Roman Army was manned, structured and fought its legions as the solution. 

Training of officers, a key step for the forging of an effective military force

Chapter six:  Training (and Educating) Tomorrow’s Soldiers and Leaders

There is no standardized entry test for U.S. Army commissioning.

• 10%-15% of officer cadets come through the United States Military Academy at West Point. Here, academic excellence takes priority over military proficiency and many of the places are allocated on the basis of Congressional patronage.
• Most of the rest of cadets (future officers) join through the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) located at 270 schools throughout the US and its territories.
• A small, but growing, percentage comes through the 16-week Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, GA. This course has been frequented more by former noncommissioned officers (NCOs) than by those who have met the minimum entrance standard with a degree and only basic training prior to attending, which is good for the Army if those former NCOs are not tied to the old way of doing things.  (See “OCS expanding to turn out more officers“, Army Logistics News, Nov-Dec 2000)

For those interested in .mil theory…..

First, SWJ Blog reported today that the old, now defunct, DNI site of Dr. Chet Richards is being preserved as an online archive:

DNI alive again. Sort of…

Thanks, Mandy, for the info and for your role in bringing DNI back to a state of suspended animation.

DNI had a ten year run, closing its doors at http://d-n-i.net last November. There’s a site of loosely the same title there now, but it’s not the same site.

The Project on Government Oversight was involved with the start up of DNI, and is behind its Lazarus reincarnation. No new content is being posted, but the archives are alive again now for those who want to explore them. The new site is http://dnipogo.org/

In a recent email exchange, Dr. Richards indicated to me that he wanted everyone to be aware that he no longer owns or controls the old domain name for DNI which has been purchased by an unrelated company; those interested in the treasure trove of DNI articles on strategy, John Boyd, military affairs, 4GW or other concepts should go to the Project on Government Oversight page indicated above. Chet, by the way, can be found blogging at Fast Transients and his post follows:

DNI Relaunches

Defense and the National Interest, the real one, not the faux site now at d-n-i.net, has relaunched courtesy of our friends at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO).

For the time being, it’s an archive – new content isn’t being added – and we’re still in the process of tracking down some of the original files.  Please let POGO know when you find broken links.

When DNI launched in 1999 it was unique:  The only site devoted to furthering the concepts originated by the late USAF Col John Boyd, and its original mission was to house Chuck Spinney’s commentary that applied Boyd’s strategy, and his own insightful analysis, to issues concerning national security.  Today, there are any number of sites that provide cutting edge commentary, including zenpundit, John Robb, Tom Barnett, and Fabius Maximus.  Please visit them and contribute.

POGO’s press release announcing the reposting of DNI follows after the fold…..

Secondly, in a more esoteric vein, those interested in 5GW can reference this resource put together by Curtis Gale Weeks that contains about 95% of what has ever been written on the subject of “Fifth Generation Warfare” by a wide variety of authors including TX Hammes, John Robb, Thomas PM Barnett, William Lind and many others ( hat tip to Dr. Dan  Dr. tdaxp, who has edited the soon to be released by Nimble Books,  The Handbook of 5GW ):

5GW Theory Timeline

RESTREPO 

Will be going to this Sunday night with Lex and Charles Cameron, Madhu and some of the cast of Chicago Boyz. Also present will be some of the gents from the popular milblog, BLACKFIVE and veterans groups in the Chicago area. 

WAR by Sebastian Junger was the book that was written in conjunction with this documentary; Junger will be on hand to answer audience questions. I am sure there will be a number of blog reviews of this screening come Monday and I will attempt to link to them all here when I write my own.

Deserving accolades for organizing this screening, a sizable undertaking, are Kanani Fong and Laura Kim. They have reached out to many people in this endeavor and extended every courtesy to veterans support groups and bloggers in particular.

RESTREPO opens to the public on July 2nd.

An important upcoming blogging roundtable this summer at Chicago Boyz. Now a word from our moderator, Lexington Green:

Defeat in Afghanistan? The View from 2050

Voices from many quarters are saying dire things about the American-led campaign in Afghanistan. The prospect of defeat, whatever that may mean in practice, is real. But we are so close to the events, it is hard to know what is and is not critical. And the facts which trickle out allow people who are not insiders to only have a sketchy, pointillist impression of the state of play. There is a lot of noise around a weak signal.

ChicagoBoyz will be convening a group of contributors to look back on the American campaign in Afghanistan from a forty year distance, from 2050.

40 years is the period from Fort Sumter to the Death of Victoria, from the Death of Victoria to Pearl Harbor, from Pearl Harbor to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. It is a big chunk of history. It is enough time to gain perspective.

This exercise in informed and educated imagination is meant to help us gain intellectual distance from the drumbeat of day to day events, to understand the current situation in Afghanistan more clearly, to think-through the potential outcomes, and to consider the stakes which are in play in the longer run of history for America, for its military, for the region, and for the rest of the world.

The Roundtable contributors will publish their posts and responses during the third and fourth weeks of August, 2010.

The ChicagoBoyz blog is a place where we can think about the unthinkable.

Stand by for further details, including a list of our contributors.

Shameless Self-Promotion Department:

In an unusual turn of events, I was the subject of an interview by novelist and historian Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire and The War of Art.

Steve has an interview section on his newly redesigned site and I join a series of bloggers and authors like Instapundit  Glenn Reynolds, Tim O’Brien and Seth Godin who have sat down, in a virtual sense, with Steve for a discussion about writing and creativity. Having done such interviews of others in the past, it was a good experience to be on the receiving end of questions, for which I thank Steve:

The Creative Process: Mark Safranski

SP: Mark, what is the ZenPundit philosophy? Howdo you decide which stories or posts (or even guest bloggers) you want to include? What criteria do you use?

MS: Good question. My philosophy is something I also try to impart in my teaching.

Marcus Aurelius said “Look beneath the surface; let not the several qualities of a thing nor its worth escape you.” Most phenomena have many dimensions, multiple causes and second and third order effects. To deal with all of this complexity, we simplify matters by looking at life through an organizing frame, which we might call a worldview, a schema, a paradigm or a discipline. Whatever we call our mental model, we tend to become wedded to it because it “works.” It helps us understand some of what we are looking at-and in getting good at applying our model, advances us professionally and brings prestige or material rewards. So we will defend it to the death, from all challengers!

That’s getting carried away. Our mental model is just a tool or, more precisely, a cognitive lens. We need to be less attached to our habitual and lazy ways of looking at the world, put down our magnifying glass and pick up a telescope. Or, bifocals. Or, a microscope. Stepping back and applying different perspectives to a problem or an issue will give us new information, help us extrapolate, identify unintended consequences or spot connections and opportunities. When I do analytical pieces, I try to take that approach….

Read the rest here.