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Although researchers in the fields of mathematics, psychology, biology, and social systems theory have long used the concept of modularity, none of these fields offered an explicit causal model of how and why increasingly modular forms are adopted. The authors apply constructs and models developed in the study of organizational modularity to explain the adoption of increasingly modular organizational designs in the U.S. military and offer some implications of this work for force development, future concept development and experimentation, and acquisition.
There is a move underway to increase modularity in the design of our forces, as evidenced in our National Military Strategy and in the family of Joint Operations Concepts (see Figure 1). Many recent force-structuring efforts, especially by Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), appear to increase the disaggregation of forces into separable modular systems so they can be rapidly reconfigured to respond to a wide variety of mission needs. However, at the same time that many forces are being made more modular, other efforts appear to increase unit consolidation and joint integration (e.g., Pentagon efforts to create born joint systems).
So what drives some force developments toward increasing modularity and others toward increasing joint integration? When will forces benefit more from the flexibility of modular systems versus the tight coordination of less flexible configurations? Although researchers in the fields of mathematics,1 psychology,2 biology,3 and social systems4 have long used the concept of modularity, none of these fields offered an explicit causal model of how and why increasingly modular forms are adopted. Recent work on product and organizational modularity, however, has begun to tackle this question in an effort to understand when modular products or organizations will outperform their more tightly integrated counterparts.5 This article applies constructs and models developed in the study of organizational modularity to explain the adoption of increasingly modular organizational designs in the U.S. military, and offer some implications of this work for force development, future concept development and experimentation, and acquisition.
MODULARITY
Modularity can increase exponentially the number of possible task organization configurations achievable from a given set of requirements and capabilities, greatly increasing the flexibility of a military force. Modularity is a general systems concept: it is a continuum describing the degree to which a system...