Department of Defense, January, 11 2006
The Army Futures Center at Fort Monroe, Va., is running the exercise and leaders there say they are bringing back an old proven way of doing business to prepare the Army of tomorrow for today: a bottom-up approach. "The reason for the bottom-up approach is to look at the nature of irregular warfare in a complex environment," said Col. Robert C. Johnson, chief of Future Warfare Studies, deputy game director of Unified Quest 06. "The Army Chief of Staff tasked us to take a look at how we can refine our capabilities in irregular warfare. We are doing that through the study of future warfare and war gaming is the primary tool."
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For the past 10 years, the Army has looked at the top down version to solving problems. With a new force structure and new systems, the Army is looking at getting information at all levels with its bottom up approach to Unified Quest 06. Adapting the way we do things to changing technology is another way that at TRADOC Victory starts here. (more)
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Interesting story that highlights a number of dominant themes in military rhetoric these days. One is an emphasis on the future: studying it, gaming it, forecasting it, and using it to reinterpret the past, as well as make decisions in the present. Another dominant theme is gaming. While war games have always been important to the military, they have become increasing IT-driven. Additionally, another dominant theme, the bottom-up/top-down (non-hierarchical/hierarchical) dichotomy, joins with the gaming theme to emphasize a new kind of war game, one which is bottom-up.