The relative rise of China is likely to lead a major shift in the world's strategic architecture, which the United States will need to accommodate. For the outcome to be generally beneficial, China needs to be dissuaded from hegemonic aspirations and retained as a cooperative partner in the world system. This will require a range of potentially conflicting thrusts in U.S. policy. Since the Asia-Pacific Region is primarily a maritime theater, the U.S. Navy, Marines, and Air Force will need to play a leading role. The U.S. Army, nonetheless, will have a substantial supporting and facilitating...

The U.S. Army has made significant investments in its future, especially in its leadership. In particular, the Army has devoted billions of dollars to officer undergraduate-level education, world class training, and developmental experiences. Since the late 1980s, however, prospects for the Officer Corps' future have been darkened by an ever-diminishing return on this investment, as evidenced by plummeting company grade officer retention rates. Significantly, this leakage includes a large share of high-performing officers, many of them developed via a fully-funded undergraduate education. In...

The U.S. Army has always touted itself as a capstone developmental experience and still does so today- You made them strong-we'll make them Army Strong. The Army is almost universally acknowledged as an organization that powerfully develops talent in areas such as leadership, teamwork behavior, work ethics, adaptability, fitness, and many others. Yet despite this well-earned reputation, the Army must remain vigilant. Authorized strength and inventory mismatches, an inverse relationship between responsibility and formal developmental time, and sparse non-operational development opportunities...

Towards a U.S. Army Officer Corps Strategy for Success: Employing Talent is the last of six monographs focused upon officer talent management in the U.S. Army. Here, Colonel Casey Wardynski, Major David Lyle, and Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Michael J. Colarusso argue that the Army's current officer employment paradigm is unequal to the needs of a professional, volunteer Army facing the twin challenges of a competitive labor market and an increasingly complex global operating environment. The authors then explain the ways in which optimal employment theories, information age tools, and...

The Strategic Studies Institute has published a 6-part Officer Corps Strategy Series analyzing the development of an officer corps strategy. This book, the first in the series, highlights the importance of accessing, developing, retaining, and employing talented leaders. Creating and maintaining a highly competent U.S. Army Officer Corps has always been the cornerstone of the nation's defense. Colonel Casey Wardynski, Major David S. Lyle, and Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Michael J. Colarusso consider America's continuing commitment to an all-volunteer military, its global engagement in an era of...

Accessing Talent: The Foundation of a U.S. Army Officer Corps Strategy, is the fourth of six books focused upon officer talent management in the U.S. Army. In it, Colonel Casey Wardynski, Major David S. Lyle, and Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Michael J. Colarusso continue their examination of how the U.S. Army accesses, develops, retains, and employs officer talent. In particular, they focus upon the ways in which dynamic labor market conditions and generational preferences have shaped service propensity among potential officer prospects. As in the previous volumes of this series, the authors...

This book is the second in a series of six that analyze the development of an Of cer Corps Strategy. Of course, talent management is a means to an end, not an end in itself. An officer strategy focused upon talent has but one purpose: to help the Army achieve its overall objectives. It does this by mitigating the greatest risks: the cost of a mismatch between numbers of officers and requirements; and the cost of losing talented officers to the civilian labor market. Whether it likes it or not, the Army is competing with the private sector for the best talent America has to offer. The domestic...

U.S. military leaders, planners, and decision makers face a new security environment in the 21st century, characterized by its complex networked nature, which has emerged as a result of globalization accompanied by the ever increasing speed of technological advancements. This in turn has created a new set of security dynamics that is increasingly spawning a variety of asymmetric threats, changing the very nature of conflict. The result is a complex and untidy security environment, where even attempting to define the nature of the threat has become difficult. Historically, adversaries were...

The East Mediterranean has been witnessing an unparalleled natural resource boom since the late-2000s, when Israel, followed by Cyprus, made its first significant offshore hydrocarbon discoveries in many years. These discoveries have since proven to be substantially larger than any other resources previously explored in the East Mediterranean Sea. A 2010 U.S. Geological Survey suggests the Levant basin-the area including Cyprus and Israel's offshore zones, and the offshore and some onshore territories of Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territories-could hold as many as 1.7 billion barrels...

There is a vast literature on the potential for new technologies to create a Revolution in Military Affairs or "networked warfare," but that is a discussion of the impact of military technology on the way the force itself can be used. Today there is a question regarding the impact of new communication and information technologies in the hands of civilians-some of whom are combatants-on the environment in which the force will be used. This book argues that the impact of these technologies has been, and will be, great enough that the way they are shaping the battlefield needs to be understood....