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home > February, 2007 issue > article
The next step in transformation
By Terry Pudas
Special to Defense Systems
To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of transformation’s demise are greatly exaggerated. Yes, the original Office of Force Transformation has been disbanded, but that does not reflect any diminution in the commitment to effect cultural change and adaptation across the Defense Department.
In recent testimony before the Senate, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates called transformation “a major charge from the President that must continue.” The newly established Forces Transformation and Resources Office under the undersecretary of Defense for policy mainstreams transformation and more closely aligns it with the department’s implementation processes. That is an important signal of support.
Although the new office’s exact responsibilities are still under discussion, it will bring a larger voice to joint experimentation, for example, establishing more robust and habitual relations with both Joint Forces Command and its NATO counterpart Allied Command Transformation. The next step will be establishing a closer link between transformation and the department’s major policy processes.
Transformation can be brought “in-house” today because of the progress achieved in changing the department’s culture. Changing an organization’s culture is hard work, but it is the bedrock on which transformation is built. Changing the culture of an institution as large, varied and complex as DOD is exponentially more difficult. But there is growing evidence that cultural change is spreading across the department.
One pillar of Defense transformation is changing the force and its culture from the bottom up through use of experimentation, transformational articles (i.e., operational prototyping) and creation and sharing of new knowledge and experiences. In one of his final briefings, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave the department a grade of eight on a scale of 10 for adapting attitudes and culture to transformation — but only a grade of five for progress in implementation. That assessment underscores the need for additional work.
So where is the hard evidence that a cultural change is indeed occurring across the department? The most compelling evidence that I have comes from an unparalleled survey of officer attitudes by Tom Mahnken and Jim Fitzsimmons at the Naval War College. In 2000, 2002 and again in 2006, they posed the same questions about transformation, change and innovation to thousands of officers attending military education institutions.
The collected responses reveal startling changes in officer attitudes. Most telling is the leap in the percentage of officers who believe that the military must radically change its approach to future warfare; that number rose to 62 percent in 2006 from 47 percent in 2000. This is a powerful indicator that the pace of change is quickening.
Compelling evidence of change can also be seen in the way that some parts of the department now refer to long-held concepts about the philosophy of command. One embryonic but interesting development is a shift from talking about coordination and de-confliction to talking about collaboration and sharing. Although seemingly innocuous, this phraseology is laden with cultural overtones.
Collaboration and sharing reflect Information Age metrics about how knowledge and learning are conveyed across cyberspace. The horizontal sharing of information, the “chat room” planners, the self-synchronizing of social networks — all are manifestations of new behaviors and alternative command models and all are based on the changing cultural elements of information sharing and collaboration.
This is good news for transformation and even better news for the department. The pace of cultural change today offers encouragement that past processes and actions are limiting neither innovation nor the search for new experimental pathways.
Terry Pudas is the acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for Forces Transformation and Resources.
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