摘要: The current state of military understanding is in crisis, resulting from the application of a linear thought process to dynamic, complex problems. The crisis does not originate in a lack of creativity. To the contrary, the crisis ... 展开 The current state of military understanding is in crisis, resulting from the application of a linear thought process to dynamic, complex problems. The crisis does not originate in a lack of creativity. To the contrary, the crisis lies in an unfounded faith in the innate creative ability of the commander and his staff. This faith manifests in the joint doctrinal characterization of operational art as creative imagination, which in practice has become a vacuous panacea for complex problems. Lines of thought that do not fit the desired cognitive order are discarded as a product of chance and uncertainty in favor of a more palatable narrative. The current concept of joint operational art must change. Developing a nonlinear analytical method will eliminate the 'inshallah' approach to understanding complexity, defragment and restore a stable doctrinal foundation, and establish postulates for understanding the operational environment. A new principle of mass applicable in both the physical and metaphysical realms is the key linkage to a new fundamental theorem of operational art. With mass, force becomes a function of time that describes the motion of order and chaos spanning the tactical to the strategic levels. 收起