Publisher's Synopsis
Despite decades of research and experience in for-eign conflicts and fragile environments, institutions in the United States and beyond are often unable to position themselves for success when called upon to intervene. This monograph contributes to the growing recognition that today's conflicts are best understood as complex systems, characterized by greater levels of fragility, uncertainty, and intractability than conflicts of previous decades. However, it does something even more important along the way. It encourages us to acknowledge that policy processes and institutions designed to address foreign conflicts are themselves complex systems. As a consequence, it is not just volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments that are unpredictable; how our own policy decisions end up being implemented are also unpredictable. Decisions about policy and strategy are far from simple. They are inputs into a complex web of institutions, processes, incentives, and bureaucratic cultures that shape and reshape those decisions in ways that often end up quite different from their original intent. The Army is only one component of this complex system. The rest of the U.S. Government is likewise embedded in this complex system that includes other services, departments, agencies, and contractors. These, in turn, are part of a global system of alliances whose inner workings are complex as well. The authors describe this phenomenon as the "dual-system problem." A decision about how to inter-vene is fed into a complex policy system that turns the decision into a set of actions on the ground, which in turn are fed into a complex conflict system that turns those decisions into a set of outcomes. If the effects of a policy often seem disconnected from the motivations of the decision, it is because the recommended actions had to make their way through two complex systems-not exactly a recipe for success.No wonder lessons are not always institutionalized. Research on best practices and doctrine generally focus on the actions that took place on the ground, and many of the lessons discovered and recommended to decisionmakers end up getting rediscovered and recommended over and over, in some cases over decades. The authors encourage broadening the research and policy agenda to focus specifically on why our own institutions have so often failed to institutionalize lessons; in other words, to study our own systems as complex systems to find the sources of resistance. This is a bold, innovative, and important piece that needs to be taken seriously at all levels.
