Force-structure analysis is the method by which the United States adapts and prepares for war, a process based on a century of industrial and economic prowess that has become—for better and worse—its de facto strategy. Force structure takes time to develop and make operational. Once established, it is costly and arduous to change. It can dictate policy options and in so doing sets the conditions for the next war. Colonel Murphy has critically examined the process and finds it lacking in an age in which change is the norm and the gap between the quick and the dead...

Among the many tasks the US military services are charged with is the responsibility to “determine Military Service force requirements and make recommendations concerning force requirements to support national security objectives and strategy and meet the operational requirements of the Combatant Commands.”¹ In fulfilling this obligation, each of the services—as well as the Joint Staff and Office of the Secretary of Defense—employs a collection of scientists performing force-structure analysis to inform the process of planning, programming, and acquiring a material force structure. Thus, force-structure analysts are closely tied to the process of instantiating an ongoing development and implementation...

In his 1637 treatise A Discourse on Method, French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes characterized his view of the scientific method by a strict adherence to four principles. First, he committed himself to take no scientific assertion on faith.¹ Second, he dedicated himself to ensuring his investigations omitted no possibilities. To these he added the personal resolutions “to divide all the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as many as [are] required to solve them in the best way” and to begin his investigations “with the simplest and most easily understood objects, and gradually ascending, as...

The Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms defines force structure (one of the major components of military capability) as “numbers, size, and composition of the units that comprise US defense forces; e.g., divisions, ships, air wings.”¹ Generally included under this heading are such factors as personnel, equipment, organization and hierarchy, and command relationships. Consider, for example, the most recent Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a congressionally mandated “comprehensive examination of the national defense strategy, force structure, force modernization plans, infrastructure, budget plan, and other elements of the defense program and policies of the United States.”² The QDR describes...

The science of complex systems is not a new one, though it has not always appeared under the label of complexity as that term is understood today and used here. For example, an early description of emergent phenomena appears in Adam Smith’s description of an invisible hand operating to secure the public good from the sum of self-interested but interconnected and interdependent actors. According to Smith in his classic work The Wealth of Nations,

By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner...

Two hypotheses and evidence for the veracity of each have been offered in the preceding chapters. Based on the foundation of a definition for complex adaptive systems, it was first argued that the material force structure of the United States Air Force is a complex adaptive system and exhibits all of the characteristic behaviors of such systems (e.g., coevolution, path, dependence, etc.). This was followed by the proposition that the prevailing paradigm in the community of force-structure analysts providing support for Air Force decision makers does not recognize the true character of the force-structure system under examination. This is not...