Military Organizations, Complex Machines

Military Organizations, Complex Machines PDF

Author: Chris C. Demchak

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-10-18

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1501723685

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Chris Demchak explores the reasons why military machines surprise their users and how they can change both the complexity and effectiveness of tactical organizations. She uses the Army's experiences with its M1 Abrams tank, as well as other examples, to explain the interaction of complex technology and militaries that seek to control uncertainty. Under some conditions, Demchak demonstrates, complexity in critical machines induces increased complexity in the organizations that use them, and can produce an army different from the one that was intended. Drawing on organization theory and her data, she argues that understanding this interaction will heavily influence whether armed forces reductions, savings, and modernization produce rapid, successful military organizations or lethally unpredictable ones.

Managing Military Organisations

Managing Military Organisations PDF

Author: Joseph Soeters

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-02-02

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1135154821

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This book deals with the processes and theories involved in managing military organisations in both peacetime and crisis conditions. Examining the challenges faced by policymakers and military commanders in conducting military operations, this book considers the benefits of conventional management and organisation theory for the military. At the same time, these essays recognise that the military should be considered as a highly individual organisation, operating in exceptional circumstances. This awareness of the differences between the military and other organisations generates important lessons not only for the military but also for general organisations as it teaches them how to cope in exceptional, ‘hyper’ conditions. These theoretical lessons are illustrated by case studies and experiences from recent military operations, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. This book will be of great interest to students of military studies, security studies and organizational studies. Joseph Soeters chairs the department of management and organization studies and defence economy at the Netherlands Defense Academy and he is a professor in organizational sociology at Tilburg University. Paul. C. van Fenema is an associate professor of organization studies at the Netherlands Defence Academy and Tilburg University. Robert Beeres is an associate professor in the field of defence accounting and control (business administration) at the Netherlands Defence Academy and at Nyenrode Business School.

The Yin-Yang Military

The Yin-Yang Military PDF

Author: Jacqueline Heeren-Bogers

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-09-07

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 3030524337

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This book examines change processes and the challenge of ambidexterity in military organizations. It discusses how military organizations can better adapt to the complex, and at times chaotic, environments they operate in by developing organizational ambidexterity. The authors identify various multiple tasks and functions of military organizations that require multi-dimensional and often contradictory operational, technological, cultural, and social skills. In analogy to the often-opposed functions performed by the right and left hand of the body, modern military organizations are no longer one-dimensional fighting machines, but characterized by a duality of tasks, such as fighting and peacekeeping which often make part and parcel of one and the same mission. The military is both a “hot” and a “cold” organization (a crisis management organization and a bureaucracy). As such, the book argues that these dualities are not necessarily opposed but can serve as complementary forces, like the yin and yang, to better the overall performance of these organizations. As a consequence, ambidextrous organizations excel at complex tasking and are adaptable to new challenges. Divided into four parts: 1) structures and networks; 2) cultural issues; 3) tasks and roles; 4) nations and allies, it appeals to scholars of military studies and organization studies as well as professionals working for governmental or military organizations.

Operations Research for Military Organizations

Operations Research for Military Organizations PDF

Author: Tozan, Hakan

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2018-07-27

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 1522555145

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The study of operations research arose during World War II to enhance the effectiveness of weapons and equipment used on the battlefield. Since then, operations research techniques have also been used to solve several sophisticated and complex defense-related problems. Operations Research for Military Organizations is a critical scholarly resource that examines the issues that have an impact on aspects of contemporary quantitative applications of operations research methods in the military. It also addresses innovative applications, techniques, and methodologies to assist in solving defense and military-related problems. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as combat planning, tactical decision aids, and weapon system simulations, this book is geared towards defense contractors, military consultants, military personnel, policy makers, and government departments seeking current research on defense methodologies.

Military Organizations for Homeland Defense and Smaller-Scale Contingencies

Military Organizations for Homeland Defense and Smaller-Scale Contingencies PDF

Author: Kevin D. Stringer

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2006-10-30

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0313087237

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History has often confirmed that it is not superior weapons but superior organizations that are the most effective factor in achieving military success. In light of this consideration, Kevin D. Stringer's new work proposes how the U.S. military can best be restructured to conduct military operations other than war (as they are known in doctrinal terms).. Such reform is central to meeting the demands of homeland defense and smaller-scale contingencies, including nation-building and stability operations. Foreign military formations present models for peace operations, irregular warfare, and other missions, as well as counterterrorism, law enforcement, and border control. The models considered — drawn from tactical units in Britain, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Norway, Rhodesia, Russia, and Switzerland — are selected as best practice examples for transforming the U.S. Armed Forces for future missions both at home and abroad. The author describes the categories of military operations other than war in the context of force structure requirements for homeland defense and irregular warfare. Each chapter aligns foreign tactical organizations with these military operations to identify appropriate formations to enhance the U.S. Army. This issue of future organizational structure is crucial to the debate over the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon report to Congress on emerging threats, and the future role of the National Guard. Changes in existing force structure will have significant implications for the conduct of stabilization operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as responses by the active and Reserve components to domestic emergencies.

Military Organization and Administration

Military Organization and Administration PDF

Author: G. Collins

Publisher: Hardpress Publishing

Published: 2012-08

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 9781290530170

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Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

The Future of War

The Future of War PDF

Author: Mark Mandeles

Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.

Published: 2014-05-27

Total Pages: 631

ISBN-13: 1597974722

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Many analysts have heralded the U.S. military's Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), a qualitative improvement in operational concepts and weapons that transforms the nature and character of warfare. Focusing on military technology, most argue that the new sensor, surveillance, communications, and computational technologies will usher in a period in which U.S. military capabilities will far exceed those of potential competitors. Developments in such fields as nanotechnology, robotics, and genetic engineering will greatly influence new weapons designs of the twenty-first century. These discussions about military revolutions, however, too often ignore or only pay lip service to the role of military organization in improving combat capability. They downplay the relationship between organizational structure and outcomes, the difficulties of coordinating large organizations composed of many people and offices having specialized roles, and the challenges of calculation, attention, and memory that face individuals making decisions with inadequate or ambiguous information under short deadlines or stressful situations. Mark D. Mandeles argues that the key to future combat effectiveness is not in acquiring new technologies but rather in the Defense Department's institutional and organizational structure and its effect upon incentives to invent, to innovate, and to conduct operations effectively. Doing so requires the military establishment to resist incentives to substitute short-term technological gains for long-term operational advantages and to maintain incentives for effective long-term innovation.

The Organizational Complex

The Organizational Complex PDF

Author: Reinhold Martin

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2005-09-23

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0262633264

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A historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. The Organizational Complex is a historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. Its title refers to the aesthetic and technological extension of the military-industrial complex, in which architecture, computers, and corporations formed a network of objects, images, and discourses that realigned social relations and transformed the postwar landscape. In-depth case studies of architect Eero Saarinen's work for General Motors, IBM, and Bell Laboratories and analyses of office buildings designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill trace the emergence of a systems-based model of organization in architecture, in which the modular curtain wall acts as both an organizational device and a carrier of the corporate image. Such an image—of the corporation as a flexible, integrated system—is seen to correspond with a "humanization" of corporate life, as corporations decentralize both spatially and administratively. Parallel analyses follow the assimilation of cybernetics into aesthetics in the writings of artist and visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes, as art merges with techno-science in the service of a dynamic new "pattern-seeing." Image and system thus converge in the organizational complex, while top-down power dissolves into networked, pattern-based control. Architecture, as one among many media technologies, supplies the patterns—images of organic integration designed to regulate new and unstable human-machine assemblages.

The World Wide Military Command and Control System evolution and effectiveness

The World Wide Military Command and Control System evolution and effectiveness PDF

Author: David Eric Pearson

Publisher: DIANE Publishing

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 1428990860

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Perhaps the best single way to summarize it is to view the book as a bureaucratic or organizational history. What the author does is to take three distinct historical themes-organization, technology, and ideology and examine how each contributed to the development of WWMCCS and its ability (and frequent inability) to satisfy the demands of national leadership. Whereas earlier works were primarily descriptive, cataloguing the command and control assets then in place or under development, The book offers more analysis by focusing on the issue of how and why WWMCCS developed the way it did. While at first glance less provocative, this approach is potentially more useful for defense decision makers dealing with complex human and technological systems in the post-cold-war era. It also makes for a better story and, I trust, a more interesting read. By necessity, this work is selective. The elements of WWMCCS are so numerous, and the parameters of the system potentially so expansive, that a full treatment is impossible within the compass of a single volume. Indeed, a full treatment of even a single WWMCCS asset or subsystem-the Defense Satellite Communications System, Extremely Low Frequency Communications, the National Military Command System, to name but a few-could itself constitute a substantial work. In its broadest conceptualization, WWMCCS is the world, and my approach has been to deal with the head of the octopus rather than its myriad tentacles.