The U.S. military comprises more than 1.2 million active-duty soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. Hundreds of thousands more persons compose the reserves and the military’s civilian workforce, and more than 1.7 million military dependents receive various benefits. The military’s red-tape burdens are heavy as it administers a vast network of systems related to human resources, education, medical care, maintenance, logistics, contracting, and budgets. Nothing occurs in the military without regulatory guidance, from the procurement of a new weapons system and the steps an infantry battalion takes to seize an airfield, to the annual crafting of the military’s budget request and the provision of health care for military dependents with special needs. Hence, the military constitutes a very large bureaucracy. Yet the military is also responsible for the defense of U.S. citizens and territory and the promotion of U.S. interests amidst a range of potential threats, including state competitors, nonstate actors, terrorists, cyberattacks, natural disasters, and transnational organized crime. Whereas bureaucracies demand rule adherence to daily situations, posturing the military for tomorrow’s unknown security challenges requires foresight, creativity, and vision. As Don Snider argues, the U.S. Army is simultaneously a bureaucracy and a profession (see Don M. Snider and Lloyd J. Matthews, eds., The Future of the Army Profession, 2005).
Benjamin M. Jensen’s Forging the Sword explores whether the military’s bureaucratic habits suppress military officers’ need to think creatively and in a sustained mode about future wars’ demands. Put simply, the author explores “how professional military officers escape their iron cage” (p. 17) and fulfill their professional requirement by “scanning the horizon for future threats and seeking out changes necessary to confront them” (p. 16). Much of the literature on organizational change generally and military innovation specifically argues that bureaucracies require an external inducement to change (e.g., potential or actual military defeat or interservice rivalry). However, Jensen finds that the U.S. Army offers examples wherein military officers were able to create “theories of victory”—informed by the careful study of future war—and embed these theories in doctrine, which is a formal statement about how the military will posture its forces to achieve military victory in pursuit of political objectives. He argues that the professional desire to solve aborning problems in the security environment can outweigh the military officers’ instincts for turf protection, bureaucratic simplicity, and a cultural preference for attrition-based warfare. In these instances, civilian intervention is unnecessary.
Jensen shows how two causal mechanisms explain innovation during those instances when clear-sighted, problem-driven thinking (more so than other influences) shaped the U.S. Army’s doctrinal change. First, incubators, in the form of chartered study groups, simulations, exercises, and so on, provide military professionals with intellectual “safe spaces” within which to think about future war and generate concomitant reforms. Second, if the concepts that arise in incubators are to become doctrine, they must circulate in wide-ranging, multilevel advocacy networks wherein military leaders can champion, socialize, and protect new concepts amidst turf-protecting, bureaucratically comfortable actors. The author shows how incubators and advocacy networks operated, in varying ways and degrees, through a process tracing of four cases of doctrinal reform spanning the mid-1970s (with the army’s reorientation toward Europe via the Active Defense concept) to the resurgence of counterinsurgency in army thinking in the mid-2000s.
Forging the Sword will be valuable to scholars studying organizational change, military reform, and civil–military relations. By identifying cases in which problem-driven military officers engendered doctrinal innovation, the author complicates simple narratives about military officers’ close-minded rigidity. Yet Forging the Sword remains contestable. Each case ends with an assessment of Jensen’s argument vis-à-vis the “alternative pathways” of exogenous shock, bureaucratic competition, technology-driven change, and the cultural dominance of attrition-minded warfare. His weighing of evidence, while compelling, is not unproblematic. If the military professional engages during critical periods in a disinterested, problem-driven study of future war, is it not true that technological advancements and military defeat (whether actual or potential) should be central considerations? And if military concepts are to be fiscally and ideationally feasible, should not the best military thinking account for what senior executive and legislative leaders (who must ultimately pass budgets) and the profession of arms as a whole (which must translate concepts into action) find acceptable? An assessment of Jensen’s argument requires discerning the personal and professional motivations of not merely one or two officers but the aggregate motivations of those persons driving innovation.
Nevertheless, the book usefully invites study of organizational and military change through three careful delimitations. First, Jensen states that he is concerned less with whether doctrinal reform is effective than whether and how it occurs. However, if the purpose of major doctrinal reform is to imagine a potential future necessitating a dramatically revised military posture, at some point scholars will have to drop the author’s delimitation and assess whether the military professional is capable of effective military innovation or whether the profession requires the prompting and oversight of civilian intervention. A focus on the adequacy of the military professional’s intellectual work would inform assessments of an institution central to Jensen’s concern, that is, how well the military classroom prepares officers to participate in incubators and advocacy networks so as to generate insightful thinking about future warfare.
Second, Jensen’s work provides encouragement for scholars to study incubators and advocacy networks as dependent variables. It is clear that his causal mechanisms play important roles in those cases wherein major doctrinal change arises from within the profession of arms. But a related and critical concern is what explains the variation in the occurrence and influence of incubators and networks. Jensen’s four cases highlight the central role of four army generals, including William DePuy, Donn Starry, Gordon Sullivan, and David Petraeus, each of whom played key roles in the establishment of incubators and the advocacy of new ideas. The author does posit that senior leaders play a crucial role in protecting new ideas; however, Jensen’s text also gestures toward the role that senior military leaders play in either establishing incubators or allowing their bottom-up existence to flourish. It becomes clear that the leader’s role in advancing organizational complexity, which Jensen equates with the existence of untidy organizational diagrams wherein incubators are allowed to exist, might be capable of explaining the existence of incubators and the degree to which they flourish. Perhaps it is not merely the case that incubators and networks arise from the profession of arms as a matter of course, but that particular leaders’ personalities and ideas determine—at least partially—whether incubators exist, yield influence, and flourish.
Finally, Jensen limits his study to the military professional’s focus on the shape that future war might take. Two questions arise. First, is doctrine the best proxy for measuring change, or its absence, among military professionals? Second, what explains the balance between endogenous reform motivated by indifferent analysis, on the one hand, and civilian-generated reform, on the other, with respect to such contemporary, non-martial issues as the military’s handling of female integration into traditionally male-dominated specialties, the integration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender service members, and the mitigation of sexual harassment and assault? Ultimately, the practical effect of this important study may be to prompt military leaders toward the vigorous promotion of intellectual safe spaces as a way to improve performance not only on the battlefield but also in the protection and care of those who fight the wars.
