As I wrote The Moral Imperative of Our Time—Purposeful Intellectual Growth, my hope was to influence America’s readiness for the wars of the information age. This book aims to shape minds and provide ideas essential for protecting America’s future. Early on, I realized that military doctrine must evolve, incorporating two new domains: information and cognition. Additionally, leaders must expand the traditional levels of war—tactical, operational, strategic (military), and strategic (policy/political).

My vision targets America’s military, encouraging a shift in preparedness for modern warfare. This encompasses mental combat, wars of wits, massing, maneuvering, swarming, hybrid war, unconditional war, asymmetric war, multi-domain war, conventional war, and unconventional threats like drug infiltration weakening our society.

Through my writing, I aspire to entice readers to delve into the book and its forthcoming summary on the website. Success lies in equipping those responsible for our national security with improved thinking skills. The book’s core message is that leaders must excel in ‘how to think,’ alongside ‘what to think’ and ‘why think.’ This development should be nurtured by savvy mentors, military schools, and within military units.

Delving deeper, ‘how to think’ involves synthesis and holistic thinking. Our current standard in this area is lacking. Understanding “will” requires holistic thinking, and synthesizing similar and diverse war aspects into an operable whole. This mental preparation necessitates thought mentors proficient in all three aspects of the triad. While training (‘what to think’) is vital, our future battles demand exceptional skills in perceiving, thinking, planning, decision-making, and adapting, ensuring we win wars of wits as well as kinetic conflicts. The third triad component, ‘why think,’ tackles the philosophy of thinking, planning, deciding, acting, assessing outcomes, and adapting to stay ahead of adaptive foes.

Military curricula must evolve for all ranks, emphasizing the integration of national power elements, timing, synchronization, and maintaining military subordination to policy and political direction. To reach this goal, teaching human beings ‘how to think’ allows a profound understanding of “will,” its complexities, and its complicated intricacies. Despite its centrality in conflict, “will” is undefined in current Joint or Service doctrine. Similarly, doctrine must address the multitude of battles people will have to engage in and win. This book addresses such gaps, proposing conceptual and practical enhancements to equip our forces for future battles—I suggest thirty-four types of battles in the book.

Doctrine must also acknowledge nonlinear events inherent in operational contexts and unpredictable enemies. Clausewitz’s concepts of friction, randomness, chance, and the inappropriateness of people rigidly following mathematical maxims in war and Sun Tzu’s intimation of chaos, normal and extraordinary forces, turbulence, and change, highlight the need for mental agility. The book’s table of eighteen characteristics adds more and often subtler characteristics, e.g., aggregation, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, difficulty in determining causes linking to effects, presence and influence of tendencies, and so on. Recognizing and preparing for the sudden appearance and influence of such events suggest the need for resilient highly agile and adaptive minds, processes, and technologies. The book’s advocacy of these nonlinear characteristics belong in doctrinal discussions of operational environments (operational contexts in my world) that planners, intelligence analysts, strategists, and decision-makers must learn to anticipate and once occur, even if via surprise, means people must be sufficiently nimble in mind, organizational design, and technologies to adapt rapidly and continue on with attaining and holding the advantages of initiative, tempo, momentum, decision, knowledge, position, and freedom of movement

Ignoring The Imperative To Read And Think Critically, Holistically, And Mastering Synthesis Is Perilous. Synthesis, A Key Aspect Of Holistic Thinking, Can Never Be Examined In Detail Without Understanding It Close Relationship With Analysis. The Two Ways Of Thinking Are Entangled. Releasing Human Intellectual Potential Is Crucial; Otherwise, Artificial Intelligence Will Dominate, Reducing Humans To Mere Machine Maintainers And Data Inputters.

Bureaucratic tendencies pose a significant challenge. Bureaucracies, as they grow, tend to resist new ideas and changes, hindering nimbleness of thought, organization, and meaningful technologies.

This book is my effort to rectify our national defense strategy. I hope to see positive changes in the remaining years of my life.