NDU 6002: INNOVATION IN A RAPIDLY CHANGING NATIONAL SECURITY ENVIRONMENT

This course is to help you:

• Understand the elements of transformation in today’s national security environment
• Compare top-down transformation initiatives with bottom-up innovations
• Understand why past transformations succeeded or failed
• Evaluate the transformational approaches being taken now by different Services and organizations
• Examine what kinds of challenges and opportunities need transformational change to address them
• Consider how transformation can be executed in a constrained fiscal environment while at war
  

Course Description
Transformation has been a critical objective of the Department of Defense and elements of the U.S. military for nearly a decade. It is defined as a wide-ranging process of major changes in which the military is restructuring and acquiring new capabilities to be able to adapt rapidly to emerging threats. Transformation responds to several dynamics: new U.S. defense goals to meet a changing security environment, new forms of warfare and combat, and rapidly advancing technology (especially information technology). Initiated in the late 1990s, it has accelerated in response to the strategic direction set by the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) Reports of 2001 and 2006, which call for highly flexible, responsive, and adaptive forces for the future. Similar to transformations of the past, today’s effort is a fluid process that responds to diverse imperatives, follows the course of experiment and discovery as new technologies emerge, and is animated by vigorous debate and dialogue.

Within that debate, some challenge the concept of transformation itself arguing that a military cannot be “directed” to transform, and that true innovation is more likely to stem from responses to specific military problems than from “top-down,” overarching approaches. Still others note that leaders need to be developed and mechanisms put in place to sustain the innovations and transformations that occur. Others ask if in fact, there should be multiple transformations, to address threats from major peer competitors while meeting the future needs of stabilization and reconstruction, and asymmetric or irregular challenges in homeland defense.

This course will address each of these approaches, with comparisons and contrasts. We will take stock of transformational progress that has been made to date, review the precursors for scientific and military change, and examine past transforma-tions, both successful and unsuccessful. The focus then will shift to the changing nature of warfare and how it applies to the variety of national security challenges the U.S. may face in the future. Service plans for transformation will be examined in these contexts, along with the need to transform defense processes, inter-agency activities, alliances and coalition relationships and to grow leaders who can both initiate disruptive innovation and sustain it. The course will conclude with a look at the future of transformation in an era of non-linear change and potentially constrained resources.

Key decision-makers from OSD, the Joint Staff, and military Services will join the class to share insights into national security transformation from diverse perspectives.

Course Objectives

• Understand the nature of transformation and its role in U.S. defense strategy; its origins and achievements; competing approaches, and a history of past transformations, both successful and unsuccessful.
• Develop an understanding of how changes in science, demographics and other factors impact society and the nature of warfare and how they affect transformation.
• Analyze individual Service transformation plans and their relationships to joint and complex operations, as well as to inter-agency and multi-national engagements.
• Understand how both disruptive and sustaining innovation needs to be paralleled by developments across the full range of doctrine, organization, training, leadership, material, personnel and facilities, and what alternative paths may be possible in a resource constrained future.

Course Methodology
The course will combine readings, presentations from the instructors and from decision- makers responsible for directing the process of force transformation, and strong participation by the students to promote a vigorous dialogue on transformation. Students will need to come prepared to each session. They should be willing to express their own views and to add their experiences and insights to the classroom discussions. Students are also encouraged to look at a variety of outside resources.

Student Evaluation
Students will be evaluated by the instructors based on ICAF and NWC standards. Class participation will compose 60 percent of the final grade, while the paper and presentation will compose 40 percent.

This is a critical time to be examining security transformation. Decisions are being made that will affect the direction our military will take for years to come. We look forward to an interesting and spirited exploration of these important questions.

Faculty
Dr.Linton Wells, III
Dr. Hans Binnendijk
Mr. Terry Pudas

Research Associate
Mr. Walker Hardy