Military Organizations, Complex Machines

Military Organizations, Complex Machines PDF Author: Chris C. Demchak
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501723685
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
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.

Military Organizations, Complex Machines

Military Organizations, Complex Machines PDF Author: Chris C. Demchak
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501723685
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
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.

The Sources of Military Change

The Sources of Military Change PDF Author: Theo Farrell
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
ISBN: 9781555879754
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
In varying circumstances, military organizations around the world are undergoing major restructuring. This book explores why, and how, militaries change.

The Yin-Yang Military

The Yin-Yang Military PDF Author: Jacqueline Heeren-Bogers
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030524337
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
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.

The Greening of the U.S. Military

The Greening of the U.S. Military PDF Author: Robert F. Durant
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
ISBN: 1589011538
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Through over 100 interviews and thousands of pages of documents, reports, and trade newsletter accounts, he offers a telling tale of political, bureaucratic, and intergovernmental combat over the pace, scope, and methods of applying environmental and natural resource laws while ensuring military readiness. He then discerns from these clashes over principle, competing values, and narrow self-interest a theoretical framework for studying and understanding organizational change in public organizations. - See more at: http://press.georgetown.edu/book/georgetown/greening-us-military#sthash.e4BZonoU.dpuf From Dick Cheney's days as Defense Secretary under President George H. W. Bush to William Cohen's Clinton-era-tenure and on to Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, the battle over "greening" the military has been one with high-stakes consequences for both national defense and public health, safety, and the environment.

Organization Development in the Largest Global Organization

Organization Development in the Largest Global Organization PDF Author: Robert L. Reinhard
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1648027296
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
The U.S. military, as the core constituent of the Department of Defense, collectively represents the largest and most complex organization on earth. As such, the U.S. military implemented the largest formal OD programs in the world. These programs, from inception to present day, utilized diverse and evolving OD intervention typologies to garner congruence with the environment. The research for this book, accomplished using an inductive, grounded theory approach, examined the initiatives that fostered the use of OD intervention typologies. The findings revealed three major epochs of OD interventions that span a 50-year timeline. The epochs include: (1) Traditional OD; (2) Total Quality Management (TQM); and (3) Continuous Process Improvement (CPI). The epoch of Traditional OD represents the use of human process interventions while TQM and CPI represent the use of technostructural interventions. In the end, the relationship between organization design and culture, and the selection of OD intervention typologies, were best explained using variables that explicate diverse environmental occurrences that influenced senior military leaders’ perceived need for specific OD interventions. These perceived needs were predicated on the requirement to exploit vital resources in an effort to bolster warfighting operational readiness in support of the American citizenry.

Flying Blind

Flying Blind PDF Author: Michael E. Brown
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501733567
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Flying Blind offers an astute analysis of the role of organizational forces in initiating and shaping weapons programs. Michael E. Brown concerns himself with how weapons programs begin and why they turn out as they do. In the process he redresses a large imbalance in our understanding of how nations arm themselves. In an unmatched account constructed from massive archival work and material declassified through the Freedom of Information Act, the author provides a detailed description of all fifteen postwar U.S. strategic bomber programs, from the B-35 to the B-2. Challenging the conventional wisdom about arms races and the weapons acquisition process, Brown marshals compelling evidence that Air Force reactions to strategic developments, not technological opportunism or industry initiative, brought about many major innovations in those programs. He also discusses competing explanations of the cost, schedule, and performance problems that plague U.S. acquisition efforts. He maintains that powerful strategic and bureaucratic forces lead American military organizations to set their performance requirements far beyond the state of the art and to push their programs as fast as possible. This, he argues, is a recipe for disaster. Developing a comprehensive explanation of the cost and performance problems that plague modern weapons programs, he presents policy recommendations designed to address these issues.

Military Intelligence

Military Intelligence PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Military intelligence
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description


Information Technology and Military Power

Information Technology and Military Power PDF Author: Jon R. Lindsay
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501749587
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Militaries with state-of-the-art information technology sometimes bog down in confusing conflicts. To understand why, it is important to understand the micro-foundations of military power in the information age, and this is exactly what Jon R. Lindsay's Information Technology and Military Power gives us. As Lindsay shows, digital systems now mediate almost every effort to gather, store, display, analyze, and communicate information in military organizations. He highlights how personnel now struggle with their own information systems as much as with the enemy. Throughout this foray into networked technology in military operations, we see how information practice—the ways in which practitioners use technology in actual operations—shapes the effectiveness of military performance. The quality of information practice depends on the interaction between strategic problems and organizational solutions. Information Technology and Military Power explores information practice through a series of detailed historical cases and ethnographic studies of military organizations at war. Lindsay explains why the US military, despite all its technological advantages, has struggled for so long in unconventional conflicts against weaker adversaries. This same perspective suggests that the US retains important advantages against advanced competitors like China that are less prepared to cope with the complexity of information systems in wartime. Lindsay argues convincingly that a better understanding of how personnel actually use technology can inform the design of command and control, improve the net assessment of military power, and promote reforms to improve military performance. Warfighting problems and technical solutions keep on changing, but information practice is always stuck in between.

The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas

The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas PDF Author: Emily O. Goldman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804745352
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Antologi. Sikkerhedspolitiske forskere giver deres vurdering af følgerne af informationsalderens opgør med hidtidig kendt våbenteknologi og doktriner i forbindelse med den globale spredning af know-how på området.

The Organizational Complex

The Organizational Complex PDF Author: Reinhold Martin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262633264
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
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.