Why Army Operational Design Methodology is Required in the MDMP

Unified Land Operations defines the army operational design methodology (ADM) as “a methodology for applying critical and creative thinking to understand, visualize, and describe unfamiliar problems and approaches to solving them. The operational design methodology incorporated into army doctrine serves as a method to compliment the military decision making process (MDMP). Although the ADM it is often confused with replacing MDMP, its purpose is to address complex problems from a nonlinear approach. ADM helps the commander to answer questions to problems. However, only a collaborative effort of an operation planning team (OPT) will achieve the approach to answering complex problems. Doctrine alone does not provide the answer to complex problems, but rather offers a guide to solve them. To conceptualize the MDMP, planners must incorporate ADM to provide a better understanding, visualization, and description of the problem. The purpose of this paper is to provide the framework to support why ADM is required in the MDMP.

The Army incorporated the concept of design into doctrine to emphasize the importance of developing an appreciation of complex problems and ways to solve them before conducting detailed planning. Design’s holistic understanding of unique situations is reached through critical and creative thinking, mediated by discourse and drawings. ADM addresses a different approach to provide the ends, ways, and means to answer the commander’s question. The first part of this paper will explain how understanding the problem provides the initial approach framework. The second part will demonstrate how visualizing the problem allows the commander to conceptualize. The third and final part explores how understand...

... middle of paper ...

... Do to Make Them Right. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996.

HQs, Department of the Army. Army Doctrine Reference Publication 3-0, Unified Land

Operations. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2011.

HQs, Department of the Army. Field Manual 3-07, Stability Operations. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2008.

HQs, Department of the Army. Field Manual 5-0, The Operations Process. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010.

Lawson, Bryan. How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified. 4th ed. Oxford: Architectural Press, 2006.

SAMS Design Student Text, v. 2.0.

Senge, Peter M. The Fifth Discipline: The Art. New York: Doubleday, 2006.

Slim, Viscount. Defeat Into Victory. Hong Kong: Papermac, 1987.

U.S. Joint Chief of Staff. Joint Publication 3-0 Joint Operations. Washington, D.C.: Headquarters Joint Chief of Staff, 2011.