Luke Bellocchi, JD, LLM, MSSI, MBA and Ilaria De Santis, PhD
Introduction
Development of critical thinking is often touted as an important part of Joint Professional Military Education (JPME)-II education (1) and risk assessment an essential part of strategy development. Both are major components of most JPME-II senior staff college programs. However, experience demonstrates that risk assessment (including challenging assumptions) is often the tacked-on portion of strategy development, which means it is given short-shrift in the simplified ends-ways-means strategy construct that is core curriculum. In other words, after spending enormous amounts of time and effort building a strategy, planners naturally feel defensive about any process that attacks their hard work. As a result, the assessment becomes at most about what risks are inherent in the environment rather than a deep critique of whether the strategy itself contains flaws. SOF planners should take note of how best to counteract this potentially fatal flaw.
Moreover, military officers are not inclined to criticize work that has senior officer support and may be trained to be more doctrinal rather than critical in thinking. Consequently, methodologies for assessing risk and suitability such as red teaming can easily be given check-the-box treatment. Red teaming, a process that involves critical thinking and the ability to challenge authority, must involve vastly varied cognitive and cultural perspectives and is indispensable in challenging the underlying types of assumptions pervading every level of strategy (See Figure 1). Planners should take the process seriously to reduce risk to and from a strategy through expansion of formal planning guidance.
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