Building Leaders and Staffs

"Combat is about breaking things and killing people... war is about much more."1 Fred Kagan. The leadership development and professional education system since the end of the Cold War has been a key factor in many U.S. battlefield victories. Operation Just Cause, Desert Storm, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and the major combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom were all decisive victories. With that said, like many things related to warfare, the term decisive must be examined within the proper context. Were these operations decisive because the U.S. and coalition drove enemy forces from the battlefield and eliminated their ability to resist the U.S. imposing its will? Did these combat actions directly lead to attainment of national objectives? If they did, how quickly were the objectives met? How long were they expected to take? In answering these questions against a backdrop of these and many other operations two observations come to mind. The first is that the U.S. is extremely effective at major combat operations. The United States Military is capable of engaging and defeating any military foe. Joint doctrine, infrastructure, superior weapons and communications technology, and extensive training capabilities combine to make this happen. The second observation however is a bit more sobering. The ability to bring about decisive results in the non-major combat portions within the full Range of Military Operations (ROMO) has not been as successful. The ROMO is the continuum of Theater Security Cooperation operations at the low intensity end to Thermal Nuclear War (TNW) on the far end. Discounting TNW for the scope of this monograph, the U.S. has achieved a mixed record in operations commonly referred to as Military Operations Other Than War (MOOTW). The decisive actions are not always those involving major combat operations in terms of ultimately achieving national objectives. The current system is very adept at producing leaders and organizations capable of major combat but l