Military Review English Edition January-February 2015 | Page 31

PREPARING FOR UNCERTAINTY

21st Century Offensive Tactics,” Australians Justin
Kelly and Mike Brennan posit that war can be
viewed as a dialectic struggle between the offense
and defense.18 They describe how as soon as one
force gains an advantage, the other quickly counters
it. They believe that since detection technology has
greatly enhanced the effectiveness of the offense,
the defense has countered with traditional countermeasures such as dispersion and decentralized
operations to operate below the detection threshold. To regain the upper hand against this type of
defense, the offense needs to decentralize operations as well.
For the U.S. Army, training lethal units that
can effectively shoot, move, and communicate in
varied environments is critical to our ability to
meet this latest evolution in the offense versus
defense fight. The Army certainly has spent years
perfecting an approach to lethality and effectiveness but in the process has lost sight of fundamentals. Units should train on much more than the
standard gunnery tables. These are scientific and
formulaic but fail to account for uncertainty on
the battlefield. Training should require smaller
elements to react to unfolding events in multiple
environments and quickly gain operational or

firepower dominance while limiting civilian casualties in the operational area. The current decisive
action rotations slotted for Army training centers
certainly are moving in this direction.

Leader Development Goals
None of these approaches to increasing soldiers’
knowledge and preparedness for uncertainty will
work without a way to evaluate their effectiveness.
Each element should be evaluated as a part of normal leader development and training activities. As
part of counseling noncommissioned and commissioned officers, the study of warfare should play
a part in educational goals. When a rater writes
leader evaluations, those goals should be addressed,
and the rater should determine if they were met.
Similarly, as smaller units improve their ability
to conduct decentralized operations, unit leaders
must ascertain the failures, successes, and lessons
of training. Following training events at all levels,
leaders should drive home the lessons of fighting
and adapting in an uncertain environment.

Conclusion

The Army frequently gives lip service to the
complexity of environments in which it has battled
during the last decade,
while predicting environments that are more
complex in the future.
However, to ensure
soldiers are prepared for
such a future, more than
lip service is needed.
The Army must leverage
the lessons of the past.
As Huba Wass de Czege
writes, “The business of
war has never been simple and those that tried
in the past to reduce its
practice to mere formulas were defeated.”19
The Army needs to
find a balance with the
(Photo by Ruediger Hess , Visual Information Specialist)
training of tasks and the
U.S. Army soldiers with 6th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division,
conduct virtual convoy training 8 February 2008 in Baumholder, Germany.
education of warfare. It
MILITARY REVIEW  January-February 2015

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