Bridging A Gap: QMN076
Martial Mental Models: The Quartermaster Newsletter, Monday, 13 January
(This week’s report is an 8 minute read)
BLUF: We’ve covered a lot on The Quartermaster Newsletter and a few patterns have emerged in the content regarding reader interest and value. Most of our information consists of what we call "martial mental models" and the rest includes assessments and explainers on current events regarding shifts in global conflict patterns and the lessons that come from them. This week’s edition is a summary of these, with links. Use this as your reference post!
Brady here. The Quartermaster Newsletter's gained a few more readers in the past week following the reprise of the Iran conflict review first published here - and we can't thank Noah Brier and Colin Nagy enough for the opportunity.
Just about any of today's American veterans is going to come to the civilian world with a unique point of view and a set of ingrained cognitive processes that guide the way they consider situations and approach problems. Rarely has anyone explained these concepts in a way that your average civilian American of the same generation can use in their day-to-day lives (Exceptions include Chad Storlie's books and articles, and Stephen Bungay's Art of Action). KS Anthony and I work each week to provide our readers with the military concepts we've found useful for cognition, communication, memory, mental models, and planning - handy tools that have proven themselves in military contexts, but that can be applied to areas outside combat as well. I have a background as a US Army infantry and Special Forces (Green Berets) officer and KS is an Ivy League trained and life-experienced man of many talents and stories. Between the two of us and a loyal base of readers, we're able to expose and explain many of the practices that elite organizations use to guide performance.
A U.S. Army Green Beret, assigned to 19th Special Forces Group (Airborne), searches for weapons as part of a night assault during Exercise Trojan Footprint 19, Ujdorogd, Hungary on June 15, 2019. Photo by Sgt. Alexis Washburn-Jasinski
What we like to do when we get a whole new set of readers is review what we've covered here. Our coverage is about 80% what we call "martial mental models" and the rest includes assessments and explainers on current events regarding shifts in global conflict patterns, "way of war" and other topics that American veterans of our era can help with. As many have noticed, there's a huge and growing culture gap between the American population and the military that protects its interests. We seek to bridge the gap in terms of ways of working, communicating, and running an organization. Across 75 posts we've covered quite a bit and a few patterns have emerged. Here they are:
Military Culture Concepts
A Culture of Accountability: The US military has a culture that puts the group before the individual - and this ethic is part of what makes many of its processes function appropriately. Echelon Front’s Jocko Willink and Leif Babin have been very successful in communicating how to impress a Navy SEAL culture of accountability on the workplace, but an examination of Rob Shaul’s ideas and the operating system communicated below will take that culture and turn it into a series of personal and group actions that can be measured and improved over time.
The Quiet Professional: Mountain Tactical Institute founder and president Rob Shaul has explained this term - originally used to characterize the ideal Green Beret - with eight different aspects of behavior and attitude. Shaul’s brief blog treatise is the most well-considered piece of writing on how to be or become an ideal leader or follower that I’ve ever seen on the internet. I imagine there’s a lot more to be written about QP in the future, but for now this is a great read.
The Ideal Operations Cycle (or "Operating System"): The most high-performing and experienced teams in the US military have a set of practices that form a cycle of continuous improvement. For Green Berets, this cycle is designed also to use the skills of every member of the team to come up with extremely resilient plans that lead to effective execution. Broadly speaking, the steps follow this pattern:
Planning - Green Berets use a modified form of the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) to analyze their missions and come up with multiple creative ways to accomplish objectives. It requires everyone on the team to explain their ideas and an objective judging approach by team leadership. The result is the best possible approach to the mission, and has a secondary effect of giving each team member a deep knowledge of all the factors - so that when the plan fails as so many do, every team member can quickly pivot to the next best set of actions.
Orders - Loads of veterans will tell you how often they use the 5-Paragraph Operations Order to organize, plan and communicate complex actions for a group - and that’s because it’s a great, time tested model. The Colin Nagy and I explained this at 4As Stratfest this past fall and got some great feedback, which we used for the published After-Action Review (AAR).
Briefbacks - There’s a practice that makes sure that the order is fully understood. In briefbacks, team members let the leader know their understanding of expectations for the upcoming mission. This practice provides leaders with assurances that their plan is fully understood, but it also allows the team to explain where there’s a lack of clarity, or where conflicts with past directions might exist.
Rehearsals - Often overlooked but almost always the key to great execution, rehearsals not only provide teams with the ability to work through kinks, but let leaders know where there might be gaps in the plan well before they become a problem. The most effective rehearsals are of the full-dress variety, but even a verbal rehearsal is better than none at all.
Execution - Instinctive application of best practices (like Battle Drills) and ordering quick changes on the fly (like Fragmentary Orders) make sure that when the bullets are flying, time isn’t wasted in trying to figure out what to do next.
After-Action Review: By having each member of the team assess the team’s performance after an operation, often in great detail, the best teams get a survey of where they’re succeeding and failing. This ensures every perspective is heard and the entire team has a stake in getting better over time. It’s not always easy to do, but teams who take it seriously become realistic about their performance and see it gradually improve.
Standard Operating Procedures: Truly great teams take the results of their AARs and ensure they’re reflected in the way they execute going forward. It’s difficult to modify habits, especially for a group, but there are ways to make it happen. Keeping simple and making one individual responsible for enacting the changes are a couple great practices to make yours a real learning organization.
Lessons from 20 Years of Counterinsurgency Conflict
Targeting - At around 2007, US military intelligence leaders came up with an impressive process to find and kill or capture terrorist leaders. Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, Disseminate (F3EAD) deserves some examination as a solution to a very hard problem.
Insurgency vs. Counterinsurgency: We've examined "civil wars", counterinsurgency media and lessons, and even the value of getting outside your bubble to get a more accurate perspective of the world.
Emergency Trauma Medical ideas: Green Berets get a fair amount of crosstraining on all possible team specialities, but the advances in trauma medicine over the past couple decades have provided some pretty interesting concepts on how to save lives and train for that eventuality.
Future War
Information Warfare - Social media and the internet in general are shaping the way many nations approach conflict, and it’s all playing out right now before our eyes.
Multi-Domain Battle - The US came up with a strategy in the 1970s that melded air and ground combat for expected Cold War confrontations that’s proved pretty successful in past conflicts - and is now outdated. Managing combat in terms of air, ground, sea, cyber and space is the new approach, and making it work isn’t going to be easy.
Urban Warfare - There’s a growing belief that over the next few decades we’ll see a conflict play out in city with more than 10 million inhabitants. There’s a lot to consider here.
We’ve covered all this and more - and we’re always looking for suggestions on what to cover next. If you’ve got a need or idea, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly at https://bradyjmoore.com/contact/. Thanks for reading! (BJM)
*****
CIVILIAN-MILITARY GAP AND THE FAMILY BUSINESS: Who Signs Up to Fight? Makeup of U.S. Recruits Shows Glaring Disparity (8 min) “A widening military-civilian divide increasingly impacts our ability to effectively recruit and sustain the force,” Anthony M. Kurta, acting under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, told the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service last year. “This disconnect is characterized by misperceptions, a lack of knowledge and an inability to identify with those who serve. It threatens our ability to recruit the number of quality youth with the needed skill sets to maintain our advantage.” (BJM)
MORE GOOD ANALYSIS: Mohammed bin Zayed’s Dark Vision of the Middle East’s Future (35 min) “Yet M.B.Z. remains a rare figure in the Middle East: a shrewd, secular-leaning leader with a blueprint of sorts for the region’s future and the resources to implement it. For all his flaws, the alternatives look increasingly grim. The American drone strike that killed Suleimani and his top Iraqi ally, coming on the heels of a tense standoff at the United States Embassy in Baghdad, has pushed the region closer to war, with Iran's supreme leader issuing dire-sounding threats of retaliation. It is too soon to know how Tehran will react, but M.B.Z. is likely to be a key player in whatever unfolds next. Despite his reputation as an Iran hawk, he has made several quiet diplomatic gestures in recent months and reportedly has a back channel to communicate with Iran’s leadership.” (BJM)
HIDDEN CATASTROPHE: Education and Men without Work (20 min) “Unlike the Great Depression, however, today's work crisis is not an unemployment crisis. Only a tiny fraction of workless American men nowadays are actually looking for employment. Instead we have witnessed a mass exodus of men from the workforce altogether. At this writing, nearly 7 million civilian non-institutionalized men between the ages of 25 and 54 are neither working nor looking for work — over four times as many as are formally unemployed. Between 1965 and 2015, the percentage of prime-age U.S. men not in the labor force shot up from 3.3% to 11.7%. (The overall situation has slightly improved in the last four years, but this group still accounted for 10.8% of the prime-age male population in October 2019.) Over that half century, labor-force participation rates fell for prime-age men in all education groups, but the decline was much worse for men with lower levels of educational attainment than for those with higher levels. Labor-force participation dropped by about four percentage points for college graduates and by two points for men with graduate training; it fell by 14 points for those with no more than a high-school diploma, and by 16 points for those who didn't finish high school. By 2015, nearly one in six prime-age men with just a high-school degree was neither working nor looking for work, and for those without a high-school diploma, the ratio was worse than one in five.” (BJM)
Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.
KS Anthony (KSA) & Brady Moore (BJM)