Normal is a Cycle on a Washing Machine: The U.S. Army Asymmetric Warfare Group

Abstract

This dissertation presents the U.S. Army Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG) as an example of that service implementing successful change in wartime. It argues that creating the AWG required senior leaders to adopt a vision differing from the Army’s self-conceptualization, change bureaucratic processes to permit that vision to produce an actual military unit, and then place the new unit in the hands of uniquely qualified leaders able to build and sustain it. In the process, the dissertation will consider forces that influence change within the Army, arguing that the two most significant are its self-conceptualization and institutional bureaucracy. Only determined senior leaders can overcome these barriers, and then only by deep personal engagement. Such engagement extends to manipulating the bureaucracy by placing like-minded subordinates in positions where they can sustain the tenets of change long after the visionaries retire. The dissertation also posits effective leadership as critical to building and sustaining organizations able to consistently meet their founders’ vision. To effectively tell the story, the dissertation explores three major subject areas that provide historical context. The first is the Army’s institutional history from the early 1950s through 2001. This period begins with the Army seeking to validate its place in America’s national security strategy and ends with the Army trying to chart a path into the post-Cold War future. That section includes the major bureaucratic changes brought about by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the early 1960s as these changes created processes the service still uses. It also addresses the Army’s post-Vietnam War focus on re-establishing itself as a technologically sophisticated force optimized to defeat similar opponents. This dissertation also looks at several episodes further in the past. Prior to World War I, the Army’s history is largely one of asymmetric warfare. The dissertation thus examines several campaigns that offered lessons for subsequent wars. Some lessons the Army took to heart, others it ignored. Finally, the dissertation chronicles the AWG’s creation in 2006. The AWG was a direct outgrowth of the failures and frustrations that the Army experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq. The dissertation examines these campaigns and identifies the specific problems that led senior Army leaders to create the AWG. It also chronicles the organizations growth and re-assignment from the Army staff to a fully-fledged organization subordinate to the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command in 2011. This reassignment placed a now mature AWG in the Army’s standard force structure, a place it held until its 2021 deactivation. This deactivation did not result not from the unit’s failure to adapt to a post-insurgency Army focusing on technical modernization. Rather, it resulted from the Army’s inability to realize that while the AWG originated as a response to counterinsurgency, it provided a capability to support the Army during a period of great strategic and institutional uncertainty.