”Those with a better understanding of war can and often do defeat those who are better-trained, better-prepared, but less-informed.” Oliviero, Charles S. Strategia, 2022
Strategic Context for Military Transformations
In 2024, my blog article viewed different approaches to contemporary military strategies. It defined the function of national security strategy as the art and science of developing and using the political, economic, and psychological powers of a nation, together with its armed forces, during peace and war, to secure national objectives, or in short, how to keep the peace. (Rovner, 2025)
Under national security is the national defence strategy, which defines how to coordinate military, diplomatic, economic, and civil defence instruments of national power, and how to build national robustness to produce durable national security. Liddle-Hart (Liddle-Hart, 1991) included some parts of this in the Grand Strategy, and the Nordic countries call it the Total Defence Strategy.
Military strategy is positioned under the national defence strategy to define the art and science of employing a nation's armed forces to secure the objectives of national policy through the application of force, or the threat of force, or, in short, how to win the next war. Military strategy is typically divided into means-oriented strategy (capability portfolio) and how the military will operate (operational strategy) with these forces during escalating confrontations (Schmitt, 2026).
This paper focuses on capability generation, or means-oriented strategy, within the national military strategy, as illustrated in Figure 1. The capability generation strategy observes the current state, seeks foresight into the adversary’s potential future capability development, and launches transformation and force-generation plans to meet future threats.
Figure 1: A Strategic framework for military transformation
Western militaries are currently reawakening to the possibility of an extended armed conflict rather than a quick deployment, or as Freeman puts it:
”Once military planners accept that any major contemporary war might not end quickly, they are required to adopt a different mindset. Short wars are fought with whatever resources are available at the time; long wars require the development of capabilities that are geared to changing operational imperatives, as demonstrated by the continual transformation of drone warfare in Ukraine.” (Freedman, 2025)
Therefore, sustaining capabilities and generating forces with continuously evolving tactics and techniques on the battlefield demand that militaries rethink their strategic agility. A more systems approach needs to include features of continuous transformation and the integration of force generation into the military enterprise's structure, while supported by logistics and development. (O'Brien, 2025)
Assuming that transformation is at the core of the military strategic framework and leaving out the entirety of environment and adversarial analysis, the following outlines a simple model for the governance of transformations within a military enterprise.
Changing the Mindset
Given the gravity of national defence, the governance of military transformation needs to consider both the short- and long-game of potential adversaries within the national security environment. Simon Sinek popularised this in the Infinite Game book. (Sinek, 2019) He applied James P. Carse’s original work on infinite and finite games. (Carse, 1986) Carse stated that a finite game is played according to rules, within recognised boundaries, between parties, and within an assumed timeline for the purpose of winning. On the contrary, an infinite game is played through any interaction, recognising evolving rules and involving participants for the purpose of continuing the play.
Sinek’s approach to applying an infinite mindset in business and politics emphasises the evolving nature of the rules, boundaries and parties in games that were previously defined as finite. The same can be applied in modern warfare, where the adversary is not necessarily playing the same game as you generated your troops for, parties are included and excluded from the value chain and campaign as the situation emerges, and despite the willingness of some parties, the war keeps going. (Freedman, 2025)
One way of modelling the more volatile game of future war is to use Porter’s five competitive forces. (Porter, 2008) The concept recognises: 1. competitive rivals, i.e., potential adversaries; 2. potential new entrants, i.e., partner or adversarial proxies; 3. Supplier power, i.e., supply chain and value stream changes, 4. Customer power, i.e., citizens of the defended nation, and 5. Threat of substitutes, i.e., new means and ways of power projection. My February 2026 article on the analysis of competitive forces in contemporary military affairs in Europe elaborates further on this.
A method of opening the thinking of rules and boundaries of finite games is scenario playing with intuitive logic (Metz & Sadler-Smith, 2026) that helps generate a variety of foresights into future possibilities for each of the above force vectors. These scenarios may introduce drivers, actors, relationships, characteristics, spaces and technology convergences sufficiently to fathom the nature of future wars (UK MoD, 2026). A shorter game may be waged using wartime stocks and serviceable platforms, but a longer game may require an adaptive approach to both supply chain arrangements and tactics/techniques/procedures in the theatre. (Freedman, 2025)
With a broader recognition of the foundational features of modern and future warfare, we may proceed to the details of the sub-strategy for generating military capabilities.
Adaptive Strategy for Transformation of Military Affairs
The August 2024 post introduced the realm of military strategy. This publication focuses on force-generation strategy, or the development of means, or military capabilities strategy. The foundation of the force generation strategy is the means and approach chosen in the national defence strategy. Gattorna defines a quadchart depending on the risk-appetite and a posture for activity: a low-risk Evolutionary or Proactive approach, or a higher-risk Operational or Pathfinder approach (Gattorna, 2010).
The new approach to the strategy includes two transformation engines: Linear or induced process and Agile or autonomous process, following Burgelman’s findings in the semiconductor industry (Burgelman, 2002).
- A linear or induced process creates a strategy from the top and implements it towards the bottom, typically with an Ends-Ways-Means (Lykke, 1998) structure, where Ends define the required capabilities in the future, Means define the required resources, and Ways define the actions needed for acquisition and generation of components of the capability. The Ends-Ways-Means linear process ”carries out the strategic intent of the organisation, seeks to reduce variation, produce stability, produce continuity, perpetuate the Forces' identity, and exploit.” (Burgelman, 2002) The implementation of a linear process usually follows the operational lines of the DOTMILPFII (Wikipedia, 2025)or TEPIDOIL (Berry, 2022) frameworks, and courses of action are selected from these lines of operation as applicable to each new or updated capability. When the security environment evolves steadily and is foreseeable, the linear process may take the major brunt of the transformation.
- Agile, autonomous or mutating process builds from bottom innovations up towards the strategic capability portfolio. The agile transformation process integrates continuous improvement to long-life system architecture and operational dominance to radical experimentation. The agile transformation process ”is a variation increasing, produces a degree of instability, changes the identity of the company, and explores new opportunities.” (Burgelman, 2002) Agility enables the development of trial-and-error, failure-fast cultures within military institutions and may also accelerate the integration of emerging technology and improve the internal dynamics of military organisations. (Schmitt, 2026) When the strategic landscape evolves swiftly, and all five forces are subject to change, an agile process may play a major role in the transformation. (Barno & Bensahel, 2020)
These two transformation engines are hosted within a military capability portfolio. The portfolio provides essential information on current, in-transit, and future capabilities that are required for the future security environment. The capability portfolio comprises, for example:
- capability taxonomy
- roadmap for CONOPSs to Doctrines to Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs)
- roadmap for Enterprise Architecture evolution: AS-IS and TO-BE
- capability phasing or life cycle
- capability dependencies
- capabilities mapping to operational activities
- capabilities mapping to Force Plans.
Figure 2: A model for governance of military transformation
The implementation of transformation needs to have a systems approach to military affairs, e.g., force utilisation, generation, and sustainment as illustrated in Figure 2. Linear command-and-control under centralised authority is slow and misses too many details to sense the dynamics between entities and to act when their relationship starts to fail during the transformation. The transformation of military affairs should be approached from the viewpoint of open socio-technical systems.
”Considering enterprises as ‘open socio‐technical systems’ helps to provide a more realistic picture of how they are both influenced by and able to act back on their environment.” (Jackson, 2019)
For options in transformation management, see the September 2024 article titled "Nine approaches to transformations."
