Growing Imperative to Adopt Flexibility as an American Principle of War

With those six words, French author Jean de La Fontaine captures two compelling metaphors which should not be lost on any warfighter. Resistance to breaking-or, in essence, resistance to defeat-is so intuitively vital to success in war that little more needs to be said about the notion. The ability to bend, on the other hand, may not strike the American warrior's intuition with the same immediacy. It should. For, as this author will show, flexibility-the ability to "bend "-is a foundational warfighting attribute which should be embraced and adopted by the U.S. military community as a principle of war (or operation ). Further, due to both evolutionary and potentially revolutionary forces, the imperative to incorporate flexibility as a principle of war will only grow as the United States moves into the 21st century. Those points represent the thesis of this monograph. One can rightly ask whether capturing the elusive list of "true" principles of war-an effort dating to antiquity- really matters. Some question the 20th century development of an almost prescriptive, "checklist approach" to dealing with what many believe to be the essentially unquantifiable art of winning wars.3 The answers to those provocative questions have been debated for decades. More pragmatically for this monograph's purposes is this realization: Adopting and codifying principles of war in doctrine is a fully institutionalized U.S. military practice, yielding an attendant influence on American military Joint and Service cultures.Army War Coll Strategic Studies Inst Carlisle Barracks PA is the author of 'Growing Imperative to Adopt Flexibility as an American Principle of War', published 1999 under ISBN 9781423552819 and ISBN 1423552814.