Enabling the Future Force: The Use of Regional Alignment, Mission Command and Cultural Competence to Create an Operationally Adaptive Army

Abstract

Over the last decade, the Army has shifted its focus from fighting wars to capturing lessons learned, updating doctrine and creating concepts that will enable it to project power across the globe in support of national objectives. Among the new terms and concepts are regional alignment, mission command, and cultural competence. The difficulty in understanding the relationship between regional alignment, mission command, and cultural competence is that there has not been a great effort to explain how these efforts can serve each other as part of a single approach. The U.S. Army would benefit from fully incorporating the three concepts to enable future operations in an ever-changing environment. The paper demonstrates how the concepts are viewed as an interdependent system rather than as separate ideas and how the symbiotic relationship between regional alignment, cultural competence, and mission command could empower the U.S. Army to accomplish its strategic objectives in a resource constraint environment. Initially, the paper explores the regional alignment concept as a requirement to pursue national strategic objectives. Subsequently, the paper explains the U.S. Army's mission command concept and how cultural competence enables it. Next, the Army's cultural requirements are defined to explain the role of culture, cultural competence, and inter-cultural communications. Finally, the United States' Operation Blacklist and Strategic Hamlet Plans of the Japanese Occupation and the Vietnamese pacification efforts are examined to highlight the concepts and principles that enabled operations and influenced the regional alignment, mission command, and cultural competence initiatives.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 22, 2014
Accession Number
ADA612152

Entities

People

  • Jose R. Vasquez

Organizations

  • United States Army Command and General Staff College

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Congress
  • Department Of State
  • Doctrine
  • Economic Systems
  • Governments
  • Intergovernmental Organizations
  • International Organizations
  • Lessons Learned
  • Military Operations
  • Military Science
  • National Governments
  • National Politics
  • Organizational Structure
  • Political Systems
  • Public Administration
  • Second World War
  • Vietnam War

Readers

  • Military History / Militaries and War Studies
  • Organizational Process Management (OPM).
  • Strategic Security Studies