Adaptability: Time to Start Thinking about Thinking – Army Leadership to Foster a Culture of Strength of Mind, Problem Solving, Long and Short-Term Cognitive Agility, Complexity and Systems Thinking

The tendency to maintain familiar behaviors while evolving slowly and incrementally when faced with unfamiliar problems is the result of a gap in the US Army's understanding of adaptability and the conditions required to achieve it. Developing adaptive leaders is one of the Chief of Staff of the US Army's top priorities, yet few, if any, people seem to be talking about how to enable this critical capability. This monograph argues the US Army must foster "strength of the mind" at the individual level to enable the kind of adaptive behavior the Chief of Staff of the Army demands. Adaptability requires flexible, creative, unprejudiced, and reflective thinking; the thought patterns that enable cognitive agility. However, this kind of thinking is not something that merely happens in the mind. The interrelationship between mind, body and environment continuously and dynamically shapes the structure, functional organization, and connectivity of an individual's brain rendering them either more or less likely to sustain cognitive agility in both short-term and long-term contexts. Previous efforts to improve the Army's adaptability focused on institutional development. However, the US Army needs to do more than ask how it can inculcate adaptability through its doctrine and training programs. Rather, the question that requires further research is if the patterns in the Army's current culture and climate support the kind of thinking that enables adaptability at the individual level, or if its tendencies stifle flexible, creative, unprejudiced, and reflective thinking. The answer to this question will provide the impetus for the US Army to take steps toward actionable and enduring change. The United States (US) Army has a tendency to maintain familiar behaviors while evolving slowly and incrementally when faced with unfamiliar problems. Robert Komer's 1972 study on the Vietnam War concluded that conventional government institutions struggled to respond optimally to the atypical problems it faced in Vietnam, prolonging the conflict.1 Almost thirty years later, April 2003 news reports attributed military success in the war in Iraq to superior agility and adaptability. Newspapers quoted Dick Cheney as attributing the successful advance on Baghdad to "brilliant military planning;" but it was the military's ability to adapt quickly to changing circumstances that seemed to win the day. At the time, it appeared the military had become significantly more agile and adaptive since the Vietnam War, but this was not the case. Not long after the initial news reports recounted the military's success, a growing resistance to the US presence amongst the Iraqi population began to bog down US forces in Iraq. A blue-ribbon panel of bipartisan, independent experts, appointed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in August 2004, found the military was slow to "adapt accordingly after the insurgency started in the summer of 2003." In a mere matter of months, the military went from being an agile and adaptive force fighting a familiar threat, to one that was slow to evolve once the shape of that threat morphed into something unexpected, just as it had in Vietnam. Over the past decade, the US Army has attempted to improve its adaptability when faced with unfamiliar problems by developing and revising its doctrine and training, yet it continues to struggle.