From Smoke Pits to Strategy
From Smoke Pits to Strategy
The Professional Discourse Ecosystem
Sitting around complaining to your friends about the Army’s problems while at the smoke pit, the ammo point, a bar, or the DFAC will only go so far. To make an impact, you have to engage with others who have varying experiences and thoughts, find solutions to problems, and act on them. This is what the Army’s professional discourse ecosystem is designed to do—link learning leaders to win wars.
This ecosystem consists of three interdependent parts: journals, institutions, and units. The Army has sixteen professional bulletins or “journals,” roughly one per branch, plus a few others. The institutions range from the Army University enterprise to the branch-specific centers of excellence and their occupation-enhancing schools. Lastly, there are the units—the muddy-boot-wearing and battle-hardened warfighters.
The healthy system
Military thought flourishes when ideas and insights are discussed, refined, clearly written, disseminated, challenged, adjusted, institutionalized, taught, contested, and discussed—rinse, wash, repeat.
By the nature of its design, this ecosystem facilitates Army-wide adaptation when:
Units capture hard-fought lessons, then share them in the journals and while attending the institutions.
The journals collect insights, ideas, and experiences and disseminate them back to the units and institutions.
The institutions synthesize the journal’s aggregate knowledge, refine it (often into doctrine), turn it into a lesson plan, teach it to the force at scale, and then feed their unique observational data to the journals.
Types of Professional Discourse
Professional discourse |prəˈfeSH(ə)nəl ˈdiˌskôrs|:
Exchanging military thought or knowledge to refine or create professional expertise.
While many types of discourse exist, professional writing is the clearest and most well-thought-out version—therefore, the most actionable. Other forms of discourse, such as podcasts or debates, provide unique and additional content to an idea that other forms cannot. For example, the written word is a one-way conversation from the author to the reader, whereas a podcast can take a well-thought-out piece of literature or experience and add depth. Similarly, a formal debate adds several dimensions to an otherwise two-dimensional form of discourse. Below are six different types of professional discourse that Army leaders should normalize in practice and actively engage in to promote healthy adaptation.
Discussion
From command lunches to office talks—gain perspective about your ideas from other angles by actively seeking out those with similar and dissimilar thoughts.White papers
Put your thoughts or ideas on paper and share them internally. Raise awareness about a problem, solicit feedback, or give it to your boss to say, “Here is how I think we can do this better.”Article
Give yourself a voice by sharing your insights with the Army’s journals.Podcast
Share discussions to add depth and perspective to your work or experiences.Present
Host your own TED Talk presentation of an idea to facilitate further discussion.Debate
Find others to challenge your ideas and debate them in an open and judged forum. Conduct relevant reading, research, and oppositional understanding to strengthen ideas.
Turning the flywheel
Normalizing the Army’s professional discourse ecosystem requires the effort of every soldier—rank and branch are immaterial. We have an obligation to serve the next generation by recording our experiences and ideas. As leaders, we must actively promote professional discourse within our formations and encourage sharing outwardly.
I recommend this simple and progressive introduction to professional discourse. Encourage small group discussion—in person or online. If you have a weapons squad leader or a shop officer in charge who has an idea, connect them with other passionate soldiers who can provide more insight. Next, have them capture the proposal or lesson learned in an info paper. Share this clear-cut outline internally to drive more interest and garner more insight. From here, there are multiple options:
Convert the white paper into an article and publish it in a journal.
Present the paper to others during a Leader Professional Development session or Sergeant’s Time Training to engage, inform, or discuss it further—then publish it in a journal.
Host a formal debate between soldiers with opposing thoughts—then publish the findings in a journal.
This path is often fluid and less linear than the one I have laid out. No matter the starting point, every professional discourse road should lead to contributing lessons or ideas to the Army’s journals. Whether it’s a summary of an internal TED Talk, an excerpt from a podcast in the form of a callout, or the findings from a formal debate, it must be put on a published and searchable record so the Army can adapt and learn quicker. No one person has every answer, and preparing for the next conflict must be a collaborative effort.
Turn the flywheel—join the pursuit of professional excellence.
Thank you, Leyton, for publishing a great think piece to help us think about aligning our discourse and our purposes for it with the venues that are or should be available.
I would like to add a couple streams because "Published" can be broken down into several categories -- as in, Published for What?
The Published stream as described aligns with publishing in the traditional sense, which is to say a permanent entry into the domain of expert knowledge -- enduring and timeless works, perhaps.
I would also recommend the following two additional lines to the Published stream. The first is published for the academic environment -- with "students" and "practitioners" as the audience. We have not had enough discussion about the kinds of materials that our PME institutions need to distill many resources into practice knowledge for training and education purposes. The sequence would look like this from left to right.
"Seminar dialogue" -- This is a facilitated type of dialogue whereby students engage and learn from each other and the faculty learn from students (as well as students learn from faculty). This is more structured than a podcast or ordinary discussion because there is a learning outcome to meet.
"Faculty papers" -- This is a meta-analysis of practice knowledge put together generally not to promote a school solution but as a tool to facilitate dialogue and have students and practitioners (these should not be confined to the schoolhouse) wrestle with the questions raised. At the Army War College, we produce a number of these types of products for public consumption -- see https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/reference-materials/
"Poster Sessions" & "Conference Presentations" -- These are opportunities for students and faculty to engage with each other informally in an academic-style setting to present and debate important topics of research and innovative solutions
"Keynotes" -- These are opportunities for soldiers to engage with high-level experts on matters inside and outside the military, an important channel of outreach, to fuel dialogue.
The second thread I would propose is publishing for archival purposes. Militaries face brain drain problems and old pubs have an annoying habit of disappearing, especially online. We need to sustain archival records of our corporate knowledge and make it easy to use, otherwise we risk finding ourselves unknowingly restating old knowledge or forgetting past lessons. Again, from left to right on the spectrum Leyton provided:
"Oral Histories" -- The Army Heritage and Education Center and the Center for Military History has done these and they are an extraordinary resource. I have used them for my own research, but I fear this is becoming a lost art.
"Journals" -- Journaling is definitely a lost art. No one has time for it. But where would we be as an Army if not for all the journals that general officers past used to keep that allows all of us to gain and sustain historical mindedness?
"Unit Histories" -- In my view, these devolved over time into public affairs puff pieces. They should be centers for debate and lessons learned. What did the unit or command do over the year or operation, what went well and what didn't, and what lessons should be learned. Debates over questions of military science, warfighting, and responsible command should be fueled by practical problems, and unit histories are a vehicle that permits the sharing of knowledge to promote those debates.
"Repositories" -- Ok, so this one does not align with "TED Talk" or "Presentations" but we need to figure out how, in an environment with severely constrained time and limited resources, to ensure our corporate knowledge is organized, searchable, and available. Even DTIC is not sufficient because it is a difficult thing to query and it is far from complete (it is also too restricted for the purpose I am talking about). A pilot attempt at this is the Defense Management Library which aims to collect and store past and present resources related to defense management for senior leader use -- https://dml.armywarcollege.edu.
Hope this is helpful -- but great piece, Leyton, much appreciated!