ISBN 9781032481784, Routledge Studies in Conflict, Security and Technology, June 2023, 342 pages, $136.00
Reviewed by: John Dill, United States Space Command, Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA
In Understanding the Military Design Movement, Dr. Ben Zweibelson examines the history and methodology of the design movement’s attempts to penetrate and be adopted by the militaries of Israel, the United States, and, more briefly, Canada and Australia. Dr. Zweibelson offers a unique perspective, grounded in his immersion in military design. He was the lead design facilitator at the Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) and was awarded a Doctorate in Philosophy (focused on design) from Lancaster University (UK). His book is also informed by his multiple combat deployments as an U.S. Army Infantryman where he was awarded four Bronze Star Medals. Despite his muddy boots origins, Dr. Zweibelson currently serves as the Director for U.S. Space Command’s Strategic Innovation Group.
This is a densely written book that chronicles the ideological conflict between Brigadier General Shimon Naveh and, later, Dr. Ofra Gracier, and their acolytes versus the military establishments in those respective countries over changing the Western methodology of envisioning and planning for war. Naveh et al. advocate for integrating design methodology, post modernism, and accepting complexity in the preparation for and execution of conflict. The respective military establishments resist, and in Zweibelson’s telling, cling to an outmoded, less effective, rigid, reductionist method rooted in a frequently flawed understanding of Clausewitz and modern, hierarchical, and reductionist practice.
This book begins with a brief history of design itself, exploring its roots in the commercial world. Readers and even planners previously unexposed to design theory may find this a bit of a slog. The narrative then segues into design’s adaptation by Naveh to a military praxis. For military design 1.0, termed Systemic Operational Design (SOD), the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is the first battleground between the advocates for a free flowing, difficult to understand, uncodified, evolving method of thinking about campaigns, and adherents of traditional, rigid by comparison, practices. Design proponents freely avow that their method requires exceptional talent and Naveh focuses version 1.0 at the General Officer level. SOD 1.0 is believed to require that level of understanding of war and command authority for its proper execution. In what will be a recurring theme, the forces of tradition win out just before the controversial 2006 Hezbollah War and Naveh becomes a prophet scorned in his own land. The errors and failures of the 2006 campaign are laid, fairly or unfairly, at SOD’s feet.
The setting then shifts to Fort Leavenworth in 2004 as Naveh’s efforts receive a second wind. The United States Army, mired in Afghanistan and Iraq, is searching for a better mousetrap for its planning efforts. Naveh’s revamped military design, SOD 2.0, was adopted by the Army’s premier planning school where Majors go to learn campaign planning, the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS). Naveh focuses his efforts from 2004-2009 on training staff members who will graduate to write the orders for Corps and Division Headquarters on his intuitive, ever-changing and constantly revised method. The effort was fraught with difficulty as students had a mixed record of achieving the required insights. Although this was supported by SAMS leadership and demonstrated some success in the 2004 Unified Quest war game, SOD 2.0 foundered as Corps and Division Commanders found their planners speaking in a different tongue. The small number of SAMS planners were on a different sheet of music from the rest of the Army. Attempts to work design into broader doctrine similarly foundered as it proved impossible to pack thousands of pages and hours of required education into the short chapters allocated for general understanding. The U.S. Army SOD experiment, focused on young field grade officers, ebbed away, as Zweibelson describes advocates eventually reduced to holding clandestine meetings hidden away from official oversight.
Concurrently with the SAMS experiment, the United States Marine Corps (USMC) also expressed interest in military design as a replacement for traditional planning methods. No less a personage than then Lieutenant General James Mattis, head of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, advocated for design and its inclusion in USMC doctrine. He was also the proponent for partnering with the Army on the development of counter insurgency Field Manual 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5. The author describes a similar fate for design as USMC disciples ran into bureaucratic opposition who reduce design to a formula and awkwardly insert it upstream from traditional planning. The USMC’s results were similar to the Army’s as military design had a short, turbulent life that came to an end shortly after its champion, Lt. Gen Mattis, was reassigned to lead I Marine Expeditionary Force.
Zweibelson also delves into military design’s rise and fall in the Canadian and Australian military establishments. Both those nations had officers exposed to design in American military schools with subsequent development of small communities of advocates. These proselytes also attempted to inculcate design into their professional military education schools with mixed results. Similarly, SOD’s sojourn at JSOU was short lived as the contract to teach the concept was terminated in 2014. As for Naveh and his teammate, Dr. Ofra Graicer, they have returned to Israel where the IDF is experimenting with SOD 3.0. In the author’s narrative, the best and brightest IDF General and Flag Officers are invited to attend seminars and workshops. Their small groups experiment with using design to solve Israel’s security issues under the tutelage of Naveh and Gracier. Whether military design 3.0 is the answer has yet to be determined but the question may be answered shortly by the progress of the current difficult campaigning in the Gaza Strip.
The story painted in Understanding the Military Design Movement is one of military establishments searching for, experimenting with, and then rejecting military design as a complement to traditional planning. Zweibelson documents the challenge of embedding a difficult concept and ever-changing methodology based largely on postmodern philosophy and commercial practice into institutions looking for widely understandable, fixed, and concrete methods for doctrine. The inability to do so when focused on Israeli Brigadiers, American Majors, and O-8-supported Marine doctrine developers makes one wonder if the implementation of military design is an achievable goal. However, the author takes heart from the small communities who, despite occasionally fractious relationships, keep the concept of military design alive, continually working on and refining it. He also sees that change is a long game, comparing it to science where progress is measured, in physicist Max Planck’s s quote about scientific advancement, “one funeral at a time.” Zweibelson advocates for the inevitability of this change as Western high-tech forces continue to be challenged by much less equipped, but ultimately successful, movements.
This challenge—the poor track record that the vaunted security establishments of the West have of late—is the heart of the why to read this book. While the description of design is useful and perhaps eventual SOD version X.X may be the key to reversing trends since at least Vietnam, the description of how tradition and bureaucracy strangle innovation is a lesson to dwell upon. Failure should be a catalyst for change and improvement. The long running, quickly collapsed, debacle in Kabul should provide appetite and energy for improvement. As we face the challenge of potentially confronting the People’s Republic of China’s economic peer while saddled with 34 trillion dollars in debt, we will need to do things differently lest we demonstrate Einstein’s famous definition of insanity. Design may very well not be the answer to that equation, however, examining and overcoming the difficulty of creating change will help us solve our challenges as the answers are developed.
