Toward a Common Cultural Bias: The Operational Art and CFLCC Planning for OIF

The overall intent of this monograph is to examine an operational warfighting headquarters (CFLCC) to show the degree to which its contemporary commanders and core planners exhibited a common cultural bias' or operational mindedness in their operational design for execution. In doing so, it suggests that not only does this common cultural bias' exist, but that future success in the U.S. Army's ability to design and execute operational warfare will continue to be a function of its ability to further develop this operational mindedness within the future officer corps. This paper should therefore provide the reader with an increased understanding and appreciation for the U.S. Army's ability to conduct operational art as a function of an operational consciousness, which manifests itself through commanders and planners who create operational designs in adherence to theoretically and historically informed doctrinal principles that are descriptive and not prescriptive. Such principles are inculcated through the service by means of education, training, and practice in preparation for execution. The author's hypothesis is that the U.S. Army's overwhelming success in the execution of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) Phase III, Decisive Operations, was not a function of haphazard coincidence. Instead, it was largely due to the existence of a developed common cultural bias' or operational mindedness, which was envisioned in the early 1980s and is now being manifested in real world operations like OIF.