Military Review English Edition July-August 2014 | Page 54
These are not the types of questions any military
organization encourages commanders and staffs to ask
(publically, at least). Instead, most military organizations proceed on the assumption that civilian policymakers already will have connected the dots between
strategic intent and military capability. History shows
repeatedly how wrong such assumptions can be. Still,
such questions are fundamental to planning because
they probe strategic aim: What change in the military
and political context would a series of military operations ultimately achieve? Put another way, strategic
questions look for answers to similar metaquestions:
What is the qualitative change in conditions (e.g.,
destruction of the war-making capability of Region
X) that war plans should achieve, and how well would
those changed conditions support national strategic
goals? This is especially important for military leaders
to ask when national goals seem unclear or clearly in
excess of what military force can do at acceptable cost
in time, blood, and money.
What is a Qualitative Approach?
Qualitative approaches can be understood by
their function and their form. First, the function
of qualitative research is to interpret context—the
interrelated conditions in which something exists or
occurs.3 To interpret context means to understand
conditions within a cohesive whole. Any categorization of conditions—including any statistical analysis,
if appropriate—would be based on their relationship
to the whole. Second, the basic form of all qualitative
research is the gathering or developing of what could
be called “texts”—referring to spoken and written
language—because reading and conducting interviews are the primary means of obtaining data and
information. Qualitative researchers gather existing
texts from archives, memoirs, and other sources, or
they generate texts through interviews and interrogations or derivative methods such as focus groups or
surveys.4 To interpret a subject’s utterances during an
interview or understand an archived memorandum,
the researcher would need sufficient training in the
appropriate language and culture.
During a 2012 lecture at Duke University,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin E.
Dempsey, discussing his experience in strategic decision
making, emphasized the significance of context:
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When I go into a meeting to discuss policy,
discuss strategy, discuss operations, plans,
whatever it happens to be, he who has the
best context generally prevails in the argument, not necessarily who’s got the best
facts. There’s a difference. It’s who has the
best context in which those facts exist.5
Context differentiates a qualitative from quantitative way of seeing the world. By thinking in context—
using qualitative approaches—commanders will be
better able to set the on-the-ground conditions they
are asked to establish. Not being an adept partner in
strategic discussions that include context is a guarantee
of military misfortune.
Why is a Qualitative Approach
Needed Now?
The modern American military tradition is techno-scientific to the extreme. In practice, this means the
American tradition is defined chiefly by what Antoine
Bousquet calls “systemic application of science and
technology,” as a way to gain “complete predictability and centralized control over armed conflict…”6 In
the Army, this pattern became exaggerated after the
Vietnam War. Gen. William DePuy, founder of the
Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC),
sought to refocus the new all-volunteer force toward
what he saw as a future war dominated by technologically skilled teams operating advanced weapons
systems as efficiently as they would a lawn mower.7 In
the 1990s, the debate over what was known as the “revolution in military affairs” trod similar ground.8
DePuy sought tactical superiority through systematized training and the development of generalized,
quasi-scientific rules and methods for battle. These
rules and methods would maximize the chance of
success in any engagement by minimizing the risk of
not maintaining control of the situation. This approach
would reduce tactical engagements to predictable
events in which basic variables (on-fire rates, weapons
performance, mobility, and so on) could be controlled
reasonably well. Crucially, the guiding tactical principles were regarded as valid in a predictive, hard-scientific sense. Mission accomplishment surely would
follow their application. This was only possible, though,
because the nature of the imagined war against the
July-August 2014 MILITARY REVIEW