Brigade Combat Teams

Should the US Army allocate an Advanced Military Studies Program (AMSP) graduate to the Brigade Combat Team's plans cell in light of a decade of doctrinal changes and modularity? This monograph analyzes a decade's worth of change in the US Army, post September 11, 2001. Ten years of combat operations and Army modularity has not only changed the way the Army fights, but how it must think. Modularity changed the Army's structure from division centric army to a brigade combat team centric army. This shift coupled with the lessons learned over past ten years of combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq has had a profound impact on US Army doctrine, specifically, the Army's operational construct, the operations process and command and control. These changes recognizes the complexity of operations at the BCT level, and therefore has created a need for a school trained and educated operational planner in the BCT's plans cell in order to provide the required operational problem solving capability at the BCT headquarters level. Findings, shift from the legacy Army to a modular Army has fundamentally changed the army structure from a division centric army to a BCT centric Army. Capabilities and responsibilities that once resided at the division level now fall on the BCT. This additional capability and responsibility make today's BCT more like a "mini division" then like their legacy Army brigade predecessor. Modularity and a decade of doctrinal changes resulting from combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan identify a potential gap in the BCT's ability to conduct operational planning. Current doctrine emphasizes the commanders need to understand the operational environment and the problem in order to visualize a solution and or endstate. Doctrine further states that the Army's design methodology is the conceptual planning that enables the Mission Command conceptual commander's tasks facilitating the simultaneous employment of full spectrum operations. Although a BCT is auth