Empowering Army Leadership for Future High-Intensity Conflicts: Assessing Army Leadership Doctrine

Large-scale combat and multi-domain operations in the Knowledge Era will require Army leaders to manage linear combat operations while maintaining an entirely separate operational approach in the complex consolidation areas. Within the Army's tactical formations, units' abilities to rapidly transition from counterinsurgency or stability operations to offensive or defensive decisive operations, and across multiple domains will pose a significant organizational challenge. No amount of materials, planning, or leader traits will ever mitigate these challenges. Complex challenges require leadership that enables emergent solutions, but the Army's current leader-centric, top-down approach perpetuates risk averse, zero-defect cultures. The Army must change its leadership doctrine. Transformational change to leadership doctrine will allow leaders at all levels to learn to embrace complexity and team-based approaches, fostering emergent solutions to complex problems. The trait-based leader-centric approach is archaic, inefficient, and promotes a risk-averse culture that will not prevail in large scale combat or multi-domain operations.