Strategy and Command

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Horner

In Strategy and Command, David Horner provides an important insight into the strategic decisions and military commanders who shaped Australia's army history from the Boer War to the evolution of the command structure for the Australian Defence Force in the 2000s. He examines strategic decisions such as whether to go to war, the nature of the forces to be committed to the war, where the forces should be deployed and when to reduce the Australian commitment. The book also recounts decisions made by commanders at the highest level, which are passed on to those at the operational level, who are then required to produce their own plans to achieve the government's aims through military operations. Strategy and Command is a compilation of research and writing on military history by one of Australia's pre-eminent military historians. It is a crucial read for anyone interested in Australia's involvement in 20th-century wars.

2005 ◽  
Vol 04 (02) ◽  
pp. 71-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Janev ◽  
Sanja Vraneš

Knowledge technologies are a subject of permanent interest for software engineers at research organisations, as well as for market analysts in commercial organisations. In this paper, which aims to clarify the role of knowledge management solutions in an enterprise business, we survey the market of commercial knowledge management solutions and analyse their functionalities in domains such as document management, information retrieval, collaboration, decision support, e-learning, business automation and enterprise integration. The survey is based on a thorough study of web resources of knowledge management solution providers. Regarding the role of knowledge solutions in the business process, the present study will show that on an operational level they serve for better utilisation of the enterprise knowledge resources and, on a strategic level, they synthesise new knowledge needed for better management of customers, suppliers and partners. This paper gives an insight into the knowledge management market that can help strategic planners to easily begin a knowledge management initiative.


Author(s):  
Harald Høiback

AbstractMilitary operations can be a complex and cumbersome undertaking, involving millions of soldiers and tonnes of equipment. Even though war has been part of human experience for time immemorial, systematic thinking about how to prepare, conduct, and use military operations is nonetheless a rather new undertaking. This chapter explores the history of thinking about military operations, broadly defined, and narrows down on operations as the concept is used today.After the historical exploration, the chapter investigates how military operations can be studied. In principle, there are four different ways to approach operations as a field of study. The most common methods are the historical method and operations research, i.e., making heuristic models of reality. Game theory and axiomatic foundationalism are the other two but are far less used than the former two.The development of modern military thinking notwithstanding, it is still difficult to convert military power to strategic gains, and the latter part of the chapter explains why. Military commanders and planning groups do not always get the what and why from the political level, making it difficult to find the how. Military operations are also intrinsically difficult because your opponent will try to make it difficult for you. The concept of an operational level of command is also problematic, since it tends to do the opposite of what is intended. Instead of pulling tactics and strategy closer together, it tends to push them apart. And finally, the word “art” in “operational art” is perhaps also an unfortunate misnomer?


Author(s):  
Marco Bertoni

Manufacturing organizations shall recognize sustainability as a business occasion to capitalize on, rather than an undesirable pressing situation. Still, empirical evidence shows that this opportunity is hard to capture and communicate in global strategic decisions, through planning by tactical management, to daily operational activities. This paper systematically reviews the modelling challenges at the cross-road of value and sustainability decisions making, spotlighting methods and tools proposed in literature to link sustainability to customer value creation at strategic, tactical and operational level. While statistical results show that the topic of sustainability and value modeling is trending in literature, findings from content analysis reveal that recent attempts to promote a value-based view in the sustainability discussion remain at a strategic level, with most of the proposed indicators being suited for managerial decision-making. The lack of support at operational level points to the opportunity of cross-pollinating sustainability research with value-centered methodologies originating from the aerospace sector. The Value Driven Design framework is proposed as main hub from which to derive models supporting engineers and technology developers in the identification of win-win-win situations, where sustainable improvements are aligned with business advantages.


10.34690/03 ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 166-175
Author(s):  
А.И. Демченко

Будучи одним из самых самобытных музыкантов начала ХХ века, Комитас претворил в своем искусстве ряд характерных для этого времени художественных идей, наиболее примечательные из которых связаны с музыкальным фольклоризмом и с понятием хронотопа. Блистательное композиторское мастерство Комитаса выводило его очень далеко за пределы привычных представлений о жанре фольклорной обработки. Глубокое проникновение в дух и законы родной музыкальной речи позволяло ему широко применять методы полифонической обработки народных мелодий, активно развивать фактуру сопровождения, которая в ряде случае приобретала самостоятельную художественную ценность. Самобытность песен и хоров Комитаса в ряде случаев определяется связью с восточным миросозерцанием, для которого в сравнении с европейским менталитетом характерно особое восприятие времени и пространства. При этом наибольший интерес представляют те образцы, где раскрывается сопричастность к категориям всеобщей материи и вечности. Особенно широко представлено в творчестве Комитаса погружение в природную сферу с растворением в ней человеческого начала. Восхождение к надвременным категориям композитор чаще всего совершает, когда делает основой сочинений фольклорные мелодии, пришедшие из толщи времен и запечатлевшие в себе устойчивые, коренные черты народного характера. Особым достижением Комитаса является то, что он не ограничивается претворением пантеистического и надвременного как отдельных сущностей. В ряде сочинений композитор дает их в соединении, чему опять-таки способствовали особенности восточного понимания хронотопа. Being one of the most original musicians of the early 20th century, Komitas has put into his art a number of typical for this time of artistic ideas, the most notable of which are associated with the musical folklorism and with the concept of the chronotope. His brilliant compositional skills took him far beyond the usual ideas about the genre of folklore processing. A deep insight into the spirit and laws of his native musical speech allowed him to widely apply the methods of polyphonic processing of folk melodies, actively develop the texture of accompaniment, which in some cases acquired an independent artistic value. The identity of Komitass songs and choirs is in some cases determined by the connection with the Eastern worldview, which is characterized by a special perception of time and space in comparison with the European mentality. At the same time, the most interesting are the samples, which reveal participation in the categories of universal matter and eternity. Especially widely represented in the works of Komitas deep immersion in the natural sphere with the dissolution of the human principle in it. The ascent to supra-temporal categories the composer often does, when making the basis of the works of folk tunes, came from strata of the times and depicting in a sustainable, indigenous features of the national character. A special achievement of Komitas is that it is not limited to the implementation of the pantheistic and supra-temporal as separate entities. In a number of works the composer gives them in conjunction, which again contributed to the features of the Eastern understanding of the chronotope.


2020 ◽  
pp. 13-31
Author(s):  
Roy K. Gibson

Modern biographies of ancient individuals focus on emperors and generals, as a form of political or military history. A biography of a ‘private’ individual like Pliny raises more urgently the question of the distorting effects of our biographical norms. Modern biography encourages the recreation of a ‘unique individual’, insight into the effects of childhood, or the reconstruction of a rich inner life. Approaches of this sort are not suited to Pliny: he was not interested in the ‘interiority’ found in Catullus or Augustine. Pliny’s individuality can be captured by working along the grain of the Letters: by focusing on the range of locales in which he lived, worked, and owned properties. No Roman writer, not even Vergil, ties his identity to the regions of Italy more successfully than Pliny. This approach is suited to the episodic nature both of Pliny’s own life and of the evidence available.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-287
Author(s):  
Elias Auberger ◽  
Christian Ramsauer

Nowadays, production companies are facing an increasingly volatile environment. Due to increasing globalization, but also de-globalization, taking into consideration an internal production network is becoming more and more important for companies, all in order to be able to counteract in an agile way the uncertainties such as swings in the demand. Current production network planning procedures focus on (re-)locating decisions without delving into what happens inside the plants, neglecting the dynamics of production networks, following a rigid top-down approach during the configuration phase, and they do not integrate the effects of planning tasks at the factory level (tactical and operational planning). In order to be able to make strategic decisions with a well-founded database regarding the production network, the effects on the tactical and operational level must be considered in an iterative way during the strategic decision-making process. The aim of this research is to define the requirements for an approach to strategic production network planning, which considers the effects at the tactical and operational level in an iterative way, and to develop a process model, derived from the requirements, that in its five phases considers the deficiencies of the existing approaches.


Author(s):  
Wilfred S.J. Geerlings ◽  
Alexander Verbraeck ◽  
Jon van Beusekom ◽  
Ron P.T. de Groot ◽  
Gino Damen

Every organization needs a staff appropriate for its tasks in order to accomplish its business objectives, both now and in the future. To gain insight into the quality and number of staff needed in the future, human resource forecasting models are being used. This chapter addresses the design of a simulation model for human resources forecasting, which is being developed for the Chief of Naval Personnel, Royal Netherlands Navy. The aim is to provide the Director of Naval Manpower Planning with tools that give insight into the effects of strategic decisions on personnel buildup, and the effects of changes in personnel on reaching the organization’s business objectives.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 264-267
Author(s):  
Eduardo González Calleja

The bibliography on the Spanish Civil War is almost unattainable, but the matter continues to elicit such interest that it remains open to new historiographic trends. For example, the ‘classic’ military history of the conflict, cultivated prominently in recent years by Gabriel Cardona, Jorge Martínez Reverte and Anthony Beevor, does not renounce the microhistory or cultural perspective. These constitute the theoretical framework of the New Military History and its corollary the New Combat History, which combine philological, anthropological, psychological and historiographical perspectives to various degrees. In the specific field of the war experiences pioneered by George L. Mosse, the concepts of brutalisation, barbarisation and demodernisation of military operations, coined by Omer Bartov to describe the particularities of the Eastern campaign during the Second World War, are being used by Spanish historians dedicated to the study of the violence and atrocities of the civil war and post-war. Focusing on the field of political history, government management or diplomacy has been studied almost exhaustively, but this is not the case for the principal phenomenon of political violence in the 1930s in Europe, namely paramilitarisation. It is surprising that the latest studies on the issue at the European level (Robert Gerwarth, John Horne, Chris Millington and Kevin Passmore) do not include any essays on the enormous incidence of paramilitary violence in Spain before, during and after the civil war.


Author(s):  
Robin Moore

Fernando Ortiz is recognized today as one of the most influential Latin American authors of the 20th century. Amazingly prolific, his publications written between the 1890s and the mid-1950s engage with a vast array of subjects and disciplines. Perhaps Ortiz’s most significant accomplishments were the creation of the field of Afro-Cuban studies and major early contributions to the emergent field of Afro-diasporic studies. Almost everyone else associated with similar research began their investigations decades after Ortiz and in dialogue with his work. Ortiz was one of the first to seriously examine slave and post-abolition black cultures in Cuba. His studies became central to new and more positive discourses surrounding African-derived expression in the mid-20th century that embraced it as national expression for the first time in Latin America. This essay considers Ortiz’s academic career and legacy as regards Afro-Cuban musical study beginning in the early 20th century (when his views were quite dated, even racist) and gradual, progressive changes in his attitudes. Ortiz’s work on music and dance have been underrepresented in existing academic literature, despite the fact that most of his late publications focus on such topics and are considered among his most valuable works. His writings on black heritage provide insight into the struggles within New World societies to overcome the racial/evolutionist ideologies that justified colonial subjugation. His scholarship resonates with broader debates throughout the Americas over the meanings of racial pluralism and the legacy of slavery. And his changing views over the years outline the trajectory of modern Western thought as regards Africa and race, specifically the contributions of Afro-diasporic peoples, histories, and cultures to New World societies.


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