p.113 Of course, as the bridge between strategy and tactics it makes sense that the appropriate operational approach depends on an equally appropriate overarching strategy. As a retired US Special Forces veteran of Vietnam suggests:

When you’re facing a counterinsurgency war, if you get the strategy right, you can get the tactics wrong, and eventually you’ll get the tactics right. If you get the strategy wrong and the tactics right at the start, you can refine the tactics forever but you still lose the war. That’s basically what we did in Vietnam.

p.115 [Complex systems’] most marked feature is a departure from the idea that our world can be reduced to simple models, that the real dynamics of the world make prediction nearly impossible and demand a different way of thinking.  – Joshua Cooper Ramo

p.116 A system is complex in the sense that there are a great many independent agents interacting with each other in a great many ways... non-linear systems can not be broken into smaller pieces, analysed, and then put back together with the expectation that the sum of the analyses will satisfactorily explain the whole. This requires a holistic view of the system, not a reductionist view.

p.117 complex adaptive systems are continually adapting to improve their fit to the environment based on their ‘perceptions’ of the environment.

p.119 Effective action in an environment where problems tend to be ill-structured and are the result of multiple complex adaptive systems competing with each other requires significant insight into the relationships defining the wider system.

p.119-120 In an influential article in 2004, then Brigadier General David Fastabend and Robert Simpson passionately argue that ‘if we were to choose one advantage over our adversaries it would certainly be this: to be superior in the art of learning and adaptation’.  Specifically, the US Army must become a true learning organisation.

p.123 In the environmental space designers focus on generating a systemic understanding of the environment, the existing conditions relative to desired conditions, and accounting for all of the actors (including, importantly, ourselves), their relationships and their tendencies, the patterns of conflict and cooperation, and the potential for change.  The environmental frame sets a boundary for inquiry and aims to identify what is new or different in the emerging context that implies the current level of understanding is no longer sufficient to comprehend and explain the problem.

p.124 By being explicitly iterative, operational design promotes continual learning.

p.127 Solving complex operational problems requires a different approach to traditional, linear, reductive problem solving approaches, and our soldiers and their leaders need to become even more comfortable with operating in an ambiguous, uncertain and unpredictable environment.