On Barno's concern of the Operating Force and the Generating Force, it should come as no surprise, the Army made the decesion about 6 years back to take risk in the Generating force when it had to figure out how to man all the new commands, and MiTT/PTTs operating in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Contractors are writing doctrine, TRADOC posts are undermanned (from Dril Sergeants to OBC and CCC instructors). Those jobs are now viewed as "take a knee" assignments after 12-15 month deployments. It is difficult to work long hours and put the same efforts into those jobs coming off of deployments, and knowing the next job will involve another deployment.
The generating force needs a lot of work.

Bright questions and observations. But no sense from the comments that the leadership knows where it is leading. This was not a confident discussion judged from the quotations. And underlying it seems the truth that these two wars, the rest of the commitments, and the strains of preserving the AVF have all led to a really tired Army. Finally, where is the top-down voice of command? These guys seem to be searching for issues rather than solving those given them.

My Favorite Army is in many ways the most fragile of the Services even though the biggest. And both the most connected to the American people and the most distant. Its future is something to worry about. These guys are and this seems a most positive session.

Loved the ban on .ppt, but why isn't it Army-wide?

Powerpoint is great, I love it. So why blame Microsoft?

In programming, there is an old term: Garbage In, Garage Out. Powerpoint just illustrates the garbage that stand for intelligence in the US military. Its not the computers, but the "minds" that create the BS.

This report sucks, it must be the fault of Microsoft Word. If we just went back to typewriters, this BS would not appear!

"Allies: Lots of concern as well as admiration. "Is the U.S. Army of the future going to be designed and built to work with allies?" "Design us in!" "The U.S. Army goes down an amazing variety of multiple rabbit holes -- we just want to see where you come up!""

I hope concerns like these from allies are taken seriously, especially with a future era of inevitable relative U.S. decline. It seems to me a lot of the interoperability problems of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan are mid-level bureaucratic rather than with the top military and civilian leadership (for example, failure to provide Brits and Aussies access to SIPRNET despite multiple Presidential directives).

I'm Encouraged by the focus on leadership development, I think that is an issue that has been left behind the last few years. Most Lieutenants today don’t know what it means to be an officer and because of deployments they very rarely get the mentorship that previous classes of new officers received. They are sent to units that are deploying and expected to not only know their job but a lot of times they end up having to fill the role of senior Captains.

And then there's Power Point, the program everyone loves to hate. I think Power Point has done some good and bad things for the Army. It is a good way to convey information to the visual learners of the world and for formal briefs. Where we go wrong is when we use Power Point slides during working groups. Nothing ever gets accomplished. A lot of times working groups end up being about fixing the “slideology” of what is being shown. Other times the working group will be nothing more than someone reading their slide, everyone staring the slide, the slide changing and the next person reading their slide with no collaboration at all. I say keep Power Point where it belongs, in Presentations, and turn working groups back into working groups.

As a newly minted field grade officer, this report gives a lot of hope for my next phase of Army life. Based my observations of countless meetings and briefs, I do think that the moritorium on powerpoint freed up the discussion. Good for GEN Dempsey! And I'm absolutely not surprised to find everyone's favorite bald Cavalryman in the middle of it.

One comment on the last bullet - it is very near and dear to my heart. When I was in command, I was shocked to find out that none of my four LT's had actually read the U.S. Constitution cover-to-cover. Needless to say, that is what we did at our next Officer Professional Development session. Emphasis from our senior leaders on our Constitutional role and responsiblities would be welcome and needed, IMO.

On that note, whenever I restated the oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, I always tended to think of the "and domestic" part as mainly perfunctory, certainly since Posse Comitatus went into law. And then MAJ Hasan hit. I hope the senior leadership, somewhere at some level, come to a candid assessment on how to prevent the next MAJ Hasan, precisely to defend the Constitution from internal enemies, without defaulting into a witchhunt on the one hand, or ineffective "sensativity" training on the other. I think that will be a huge challenge in the coming years, especially if another "lone wolf" from inside the goverment commits another terrorist attack.

The question that needs to be asked is "What if the suggestion to not use PowerPoint came from a major on a staff some where, and not from the TRADOC commander?" the answer is that the major would be vilified...the US Army needs to figure out a way to tap into the wide intellect of its force...

BG McMaster is famous in the Army for his antipathy to PowerPoint, among other little things like 73 Easting, Talafar, and lambasting a generation of general officers. I'm told GEN Dempsey has a similar disdain for cheese and "more cowbell". If the "no powerpoint" suggestion came from a major on either of their staffs, I'm sure it found receptive ears.

Without delving into the ppt subject again. This is the comment that raised my hackles:

""We've power-pointed over the problem" of the Army division and corps headquarters echelons of commands and what their roles should be. The Army is more than just a collection of brigades."

The Army is more than a collection of brigades, but it probably shouldn't be much more. A little while ago we had stupid names like unit of action and unit of employment. They were stupid names because a) not many people knew what they meant b) those who did know knew they were new names for old things (BDEs and DIVs) c) those who did know knew that those new names and distinctions were meaningless.

Corps and Divisions ought to be dead or dying - but they aren't because there are flag commands to be had there (with juicy giant meaningless staffs and kingdoms to lord over). Generals don't talk about such matters because that would be killing their gravy train.

Here's the comment that should have been offered. In the May 17th edition of the ArmyTimes SEN Webb asks why the fuck do we have so many goddamned generals? (i'll look for the linky in a sec). From 1 to 6000 at the end of WWII to 1 to 1400+ these days.

I appreciate that the big guys had an off-site and engaged in some fiesty (and hopefully meaningful) navel -gazing but if it doesn't come with some discernible change in course or policy...well I hope the hotel pool was nice. (yes I know it was at Carlisle). The rest of us will just be going back to work then, that fighting and dying stuff. Thanks.

Heres that link: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/05/airforce_military_officers_051710w/

I've enjoyed all the back and forth about Powerpoint. And like any other tool, its value is directly related to the person's abilities wielding that mouse! But this topic also relates to one of Barno's observations:

"Over-burdened terms" have proliferated and add confusion to our efforts -- "what does C4ISR really mean? Does anyone really know?"

It seems to me that "over burdened terms" reflects a laziness in language (or perhaps category definition) that is directly related to the many critiques of Powerpoint. I won't belabor all the arguments which critics level about simplification of complex concepts abetted by bullet points and associated cognitive truncation. But I will assert that this reflects a sloppiness of language that is haunting the Army in more ways than one. A few days ago, Ricks posted that extract from the Deresiewicz speech at West Point. It is the kind of deep thought which Deresiewicz proposes there that helps a person come to grips with clear, concise language in communication...a competency loudly and repeatedly asserted in multiple publications dealing with future leaders and soldiers (One example: TRADOC's Study of the Human Dimension in teh Future, 2015-2024). In a recent email circulated from an officer involved in the recent Haiti mission, there was an implicit critique of the "enterprise" approach to staff organization and operations. He reported that for clarity of mission and staff responsibilities, they reverted back to the "ancient" (my emphasis) staff designations such as J-5 and J-8 because people understood them and what they entailed. But as for an over-burdened term, what does "enterprise" mean these days? And exactly how does its nebulous nature improve things? I think we have a bad habit of latching onto terms then loading their rucks with a coke machine of connotations (and denotations, I suppose).

But I also choked back my morning coffee reading this one, almost laughing with a memory of the C4ISR world back in the early/mid-90s when I worked Army and Joint C4ISR doctrine in ODCSOPS. Those were the days when a vast networked military machine was being envisioned and really starting to hit its stride. And of course, contractors were anxious to hop on that train. Anyway, at a meeting on AFATDS (which was still in DT/OT), the contractor stated that its interface with other, envisioned systems (in this particular case, TBMCS) would be "seamless." This word/concept was becoming a real marker in discussions and presentations in the C4ISR world as these countless IT systems started multiplying. A good friend from PM-AFATDS leaned over to me and said, "God help any system these days that isn't seamless...and what is that supposed to mean, anyway?" Since that day, I have always tracked the use of seamless in the military context. Simply amazing, its multiple applications and recurrance! You might want to try it with the term of your choice. It clearly illustrates the point of "over burdened" language noted by Barno.

Because we are “positive illusion factories” our critical thinking curriculum should be closely examining the effect of bias and the utility of collaborative learning to overcome bias. I don't know that we have properly included considerations of bias in our rubrics were student products. It's not enough to just cover it in classes on critical thinking; we should be looking for it in everything we do systematically.

The observation that our doctrinal terms are “overburdened and lack meaning” reinforces the idea that language matters and that we should be looking to emphasize the writing curriculum.

“Beware of heroic assumptions in the next world” leads me back towards bias and the need to beware of what you know and the lessons that you think you are justified in learning. Case studies of Israeli lessons learned in the fighting against Hezbollah may or may not be good source material for us to project the future requirements of the U.S. Army. The two forces have a different set of assumptions and operating principles, and the analogy may not fit. Clearly there's a lot to learn from our allies, however we should not accept their insights uncritically and that's what leads me back towards a need to examine bias.

The need to examine the multiple levels of leadership and organization so that we don't simply focus on tactical excellence leads me to question whether or not we are truly learning to integrate combined arms.

The discussion of mission command and the need to balance cultures of competing virtues reinforces my belief that the commander must be the role model for the humble inquiring learner. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veTsjHu0F7I for a deeper look at this idea.

Note the assumption that technology is an inevitable part of our science and art of command and contrast that with the insight from Gen. Mathis recently that we should practice turning off our radios and looking at the cognitive processes independent of technology. Have we gone too far to roll the clock back. There've been some recent articles on the irreversability of evolution which suggests that complex organizations cannot roll the clock back and go back to simpler times. Are we experimenting in the classroom with different staff groups exploring different technologies and comparing products and insights in a roundtable or are we trying to standardize on a set of most complete digital command and control technology as a form of training? I think it's clear that were trying to treat command & control systems from a training perspective and not looking at the underlying C-2 processes and that we’re missing an opportunity to study.

The quote that we've “power pointed over the problem” of Army division and corps headquarters suggests to me that we should lock a group of general officers in a room for four days to solve the division and corps critical tasks and get on with business. We've pretty much figured out how brigades fights since that goes back to Washington's army and that leaders need to get their leadership in gear and fix the echelons of command issue. It's only been a problem since 1990.

FM 1- 01 is an excellent layout of the relationship, distinction and mutual support between the generating force and the operating force and needs to remain an essential part of our O200 block which is well out in front of the issues identified at the think tank. Similarly we need to continue to emphasize O200 and the end-to-end process of force generation across the services that have made their way into O200 at least through the next 3 to 5 years.

The Allied concerns can only be addressed by continuing to emphasize their attendance at CGSC and a reminder to "stay tuned"

the discussion of how we define and teach risk and inculcate a culture of initiative and risk taking is central to our educational mission for Field grade officers who are at the meeting point of strategy and tactics and who must make operationally significant risk manage decisions every day. See my separate discussion of the risk management challenge of the CEO of Goldman Sachs and decide if you think his degree of uncertainty is any greater than that of a battalion or brigade commander. I think not. We can learn an awful lot about the understanding of risk by taking a look outside of our professional domain. If the titans of global finance, informed by the biggest brains money can buy, can get risk management so dramatically wrong then we should be very careful on how we approach the subject from an educational perspective.

Concerning lethality: are we convinced that were doing an adequate job of integrating lethal combined arms in our operational campaign plan?
The proper role of the army incivil society is beginning to be addressed in the work being done on the Army professional ethic by Prof Nye,I but this needs to be in greater prominence in our curriculum as well.

In summary I think the biggest challenges going forward that the think tank were reportedly discussing, are: risk, uncertainty, collaborative learning and leadership, integrating lethal combined arms at the operational level in a way that includes all of the war fighting functions. Without their Powerpoints to review, naturally, I await the EXSUM and text-based info papers or word-of-mouth narrative to go further.