Mark D. Mandeles's Books

Military Transformation Past and Present

Historic Lessons for the 21st Century

By: Mark D. Mandeles

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Military Transformation Past and Present

Historic Lessons for the 21st Century

By: Mark D. Mandeles

Transformation has become a buzz word in today's military, but what are its historical precursors—those large scale changes that were once called Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMA)? Who has gotten it right, and who has not? The Department of Defense must learn from history. Most studies of innovation focus on the actions, choices, and problems faced by individuals in a particular organization. Few place these individuals and organizations within the complex context where they operate. Yet, it is this very context that is a powerful determinant of how actions are conceived, examined, and implemented, and of how errors are identified and corrected. The historical cases that Mandeles examines reveal how different military services organized to learn, accumulate, and retrieve knowledge; and how their particular organization affected everything from the equipment they acquired to the quality of doctrine and concepts used in combat. In cases where more than one community of experts was responsible for weighing in on decisionmaking, the service benefited from enhanced application of evidence, sound inference, and logic. These cases demonstrate that, for senior leadership, participating in such a system should be a strategic and deliberate choice. In each of the cases featured in this book, no such deliberate choice was made. The interwar U.S. Navy (USN) aviation community and the U.S. Marine Corps amphibious operation community were lucky that, in a time of rapid technological advance and strategic risk, their decisions in framing and solving technological and operational problems were made within a functioning multi-organizational system. The Army Air Corps and the Royal Marines were unfortunate, with corresponding results. It is characteristic of 20th-century military history that no senior civilian or military leader suggested a policy to handle overlapping responsibilities by multiple departments. Today's policymakers have not learned this lesson. In the present time, while a great deal of thought is devoted to proper organizational design and the numbers of persons required to perform necessary functions, there is still no overarching framework guiding these designs.

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Page Count

172

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0313083665

ISBN 13

9780313083662

The Future of War

Organizations as Weapons

By: Mark Mandeles

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The Future of War

Organizations as Weapons

By: Mark Mandeles

Many analysts have heralded the U.S. military's Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), a qualitative improvement in operational concepts and weapons that transforms the nature and character of warfare. Focusing on military technology, most argue that the new sensor, surveillance, communications, and computational technologies will usher in a period in which U.S. military capabilities will far exceed those of potential competitors. Developments in such fields as nanotechnology, robotics, and genetic engineering will greatly influence new weapons designs of the twenty-first century. These discussions about military revolutions, however, too often ignore or only pay lip service to the role of military organization in improving combat capability. They downplay the relationship between organizational structure and outcomes, the difficulties of coordinating large organizations composed of many people and offices having specialized roles, and the challenges of calculation, attention, and memory that face individuals making decisions with inadequate or ambiguous information under short deadlines or stressful situations. Mark D. Mandeles argues that the key to future combat effectiveness is not in acquiring new technologies but rather in the Defense Department's institutional and organizational structure and its effect upon incentives to invent, to innovate, and to conduct operations effectively. Doing so requires the military establishment to resist incentives to substitute short-term technological gains for long-term operational advantages and to maintain incentives for effective long-term innovation.

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631

Publisher

Potomac Books, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1597974722

ISBN 13

9781597974721

Managing Command and Control in the Persian Gulf War

By: Thomas C. Hone,Mark D. Mandeles,Sanford S. Terry

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Managing Command and Control in the Persian Gulf War

By: Thomas C. Hone,Mark D. Mandeles,Sanford S. Terry

During Desert Shield, the Air Force built a very complicated organizational architecture to control large numbers of air sorties. During the air campaign itself, officers at each level of the Central Command Air Forces believed they were managing the chaos of war. Yet, when the activities of the many significant participants are pieced together, it appears that neither the planners nor Lt. Gen. Charles A. Horner, the Joint Force Air Component Commander, knew the details of what was happening in the air campaign or how well the campaign was going. There was little appreciation of the implications of complex organizational architectures for military command and control. Against a smarter and more aggressive foe, the system may well have failed.

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Page Count

188

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0313023352

ISBN 13

9780313023354

Sunburst

The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941

By: Mark Peattie

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Sunburst

The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941

By: Mark Peattie

This acclaimed sequel to the Peattie/Evans prizewinning work, Kaigun, illuminates the rise of Japanese naval aviation from its genesis in 1909 to its thunderbolt capability on the eve of the Pacific war. In the process of explaining the navy's essential strengths and weaknesses, the book provides the most detailed account available in English of Japan's naval air campaign over China from 1937 to 1941. A final chapter analyzes the utter destruction of Japanese naval air power by 1944.

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294

Publisher

Naval Institute Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1612514367

ISBN 13

9781612514369

Innovation in Carrier Aviation

Naval War College Newport Papers 37

By: Thomas Hone,Norman Friedman,Mark D. Mandeles,Naval War College Press

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Innovation in Carrier Aviation

Naval War College Newport Papers 37

By: Thomas Hone,Norman Friedman,Mark D. Mandeles,Naval War College Press

In a widely noted speech to the Navy League Sea-Air-Space Expo in May 2010, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates warned that “the Navy and Marine Corps must be willing to reexamine and question basic assumptions in light of evolving technologies, new threats, and budget realities.We simply cannot afford to perpetuate a status quo that heaps more and more expensive technologies onto fewer and fewer platforms—thereby risking a situation where some of our greatest capital expenditures go toward weapons and ships that could potentially become wasting assets.” Secretary Gates specifically questioned whether the Navy's commitment to a force of eleven carrier strike groups through 2040 makes sense, given the extent of the anticipated superiority of the United States over potential adversaries at sea as well as the growing threat of antiship missiles. Though later disclaiming any immediate intention to seek a reduction in the current carrier force, Gates nevertheless laid down a clear marker that all who are concerned over the future of the U.S. Navy would be well advised to take with the utmost seriousness. We may stand, then, at an important watershed in the evolution of carrier aviation, one reflecting not only the nation's current financial crisis but the changing nature of the threats to, or constraints on, American sea power, as well as—something the secretary did not mention—the advent of a new era of unmanned air and sea platforms of all types. Taken together, these developments argue for resolutely innovative thinking about the future of the nation's carrier fleet and our surface navy more generally. In Innovation in Carrier Aviation, number thirty-seven in our Newport Papers monograph series, Thomas C. Hone, Norman Friedman, and Mark D.Mandeles examine the watershed period in carrier development that occurred immediately following World War II, when design advances were made that would be crucial to the centrality in national-security policy making that carriers and naval aviation have today. In those years several major technological breakthroughs—notably the jet engine and nuclear weapons—raised large questions about the future and led to an array of innovations in the design and operational utilization of aircraft carriers. Central to this story is the collaboration between the aviation communities in the navies of the United States and Great Britain during these years, building on the intimate relationship they had developed during the war itself. Strikingly, the most important of these innovations, notably the angled flight deck and steam catapult, originated with the British, not the Americans. This study thereby also provides interesting lessons for the U.S. Navy today with respect to its commitment to maritime security cooperation in the context of its new “maritime strategy.” It is a welcome and important addition to the historiography of the Navy in the seminal years of the Cold War.

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Page Count

236

Publisher

Createspace Independent Pub

Published Date

ISBN 10

1478386371

ISBN 13

9781478386377

The Future of War

Organizations as Weapons

By: Mark Mandeles

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The Future of War

Organizations as Weapons

By: Mark Mandeles

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

631

Publisher

Potomac Books, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1597974722

ISBN 13

9781597974721

Book's by Mark D. Mandeles

Military Transformation Past and Present

Military Transformation Past and Present

The Future of War

The Future of War

Managing Command and Control in the Persian Gulf War

Managing Command and Control in the Persian Gulf War

Sunburst

Sunburst

Innovation in Carrier Aviation

Innovation in Carrier Aviation

The Future of War

The Future of War

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