The Secret of Future Defeat: The Evolution of US Joint and Army Doctrine 1993-2006 and the Flawed Conception of Stability Operations

Throughout the past 15 years, both the Western allies and the Russians have entered into a series of military engagements that have in one way or another spectacularly failed to achieve the results intended, namely a decisive military victory which would in turn deliver a solution to the original political problem. The nature of US military operations in the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has achieved dramatic military victories but has failed to deliver the political aims of the conflicts. Many analysts attempt to explain the phenomenon by describing changes in the strategic environment that have rendered conventional interstate warfare ineffective or even irrelevant or obsolete. Many even claim that the age of conventional warfare is over, and that the world has transitioned to a new irregular paradigm of conflict. Other analysts point to organizational and cultural preferences for conventional warfare or for material-based or technological solutions that are inappropriate to the situation. However, these concepts are merely symptoms, or at best precipitating causes and not the proximate cause of this seeming lack of military effectiveness in securing national policy objectives. Instead, the principal cause of the lack of efficacy in the modern military art is a flawed conceptual approach and design to current joint and Army doctrine. This monograph will explore the development of doctrinal concepts and models since 1993, focusing on Joint and Army doctrine's treatment of combat and stability operations. It will then analyze these models in relation to history and theory of stability operations, isolating flaws in conceptual models such as the Range of Military Operations, the Deliberate Phasing Model, Full Spectrum Operations, and the Army tenet of versatility. These flaws will be linked to conceptual errors endemic to the Joint and Army organizatio