The Collaborative Fight

Pursuing Jointness in the US Military

Paul R. Birch, Lina M. Svedin

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780700636211
• eBook ISBN: 9780700636228
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The beautiful picture of brothers in arms vanquishing a tyrant. The power of a well-orchestrated army and navy winning historic battles. Overwhelming military might and ability through teamwork. This is how the US military services portray themselves to the public and to their own service members through official doctrine. However, under the veneer of jointness, deeply fraught processes are at play. Frequently, the services think more about protecting organizational turf than about national security and maintaining an advantage against the United States’ external adversaries. Uniting US military services is a difficult endeavor that becomes even more so the farther from a battlefield and the higher up the command structure the unifying needs to happen.

In The Collaborative Fight, Paul R. Birch and Lina M. Svedin examine cases of institutional jointness among US military services from the late nineteenth century into the twenty-first century. They draw actionable conclusions for practitioners in the defense establishment while giving examples of successful joint cooperation that overcame the difficulties inherent in pursuing it. Even the successful cases that Birch and Svedin discuss show that the US military services face bureaucratic incentives and organizational leadership issues that make battlefield cooperation less than ideal.

Birch and Svedin adeptly translate theory and history into approaches useful to practitioners in the field while examining the theoretical framework outlining the drivers in joint military cooperation.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Chapter One. The Collaborative Fight: US Armed Services’ Ambivalent Relationship to Jointness
• Chapter Two. Factors in Organizational Collaboration and Success Cases
• Chapter Three. The Army and Air Force Collaborate on AirLand Battle, 1973–1991
• Chapter Four. Cooperation in Peacetime: The Joint Primary Aviation Training System, 1988–Present
• Chapter Five. Air Support in Counterinsurgency, 2001–2012
• Chapter Six. Joint All-Domain Command and Control
• Chapter Seven. An Empirically Informed Theory of Jointness
• Conclusion. Jointness Is a Collaborative Fight
• Appendix. Research Method and Case-Study Selection Criteria
• Notes
• Reference List
• Index
• Back Cover