TRADOC Pam 525-3-7-01 - TRADOC - U.S. Army

TRADOC Pam 525-3-7-01to supply those services (economic growth.). There will be a large segment of our populationthat is undereducated, unemployed, and in poor health.Implications of the OESome suggest that to study human history is to study the nature of conflict. A never-endingstruggle for wealth, knowledge, and power, motivated by ideology, religion, ethnicity, andvirtually any other differences among peoples that can motivate a struggle characterizes the storyof civilization. The OE sets the conditions that may lead to conflict. An ever-shrinking pool ofvital resources, (food, water, energy), combines with the growing global population to stress thecapacity of the world to provide an acceptable quality of life for all. At the same time, theinformation age has dramatically expanded people’s access to knowledge and information.These phenomena—shrinking resources, growing populations, ubiquitous access to real timeinformation—interact and merge to create a collective sense of global relative depravation.Global relative depravation (resentment stemming from the realization that others in theworld enjoy a higher quality of life) is an all-too-human reaction to the growing gap betweenhaves and have-nots. In the not too distant past, people living in near poverty under miserableconditions assumed their experience was the norm. The elites, fearing class envy, did nothing todispel this perception. In some cases, the former Soviet Union for one, the ruling authoritiesmade a point of convincing its people that they were better off than the rest of the world bydelivering their messages while controlling access to external information sources. Today, andincreasingly so in the future, individuals, cultures, and societies recognize their plight and seek toimprove their situation.Time is in itself a constant, but its relation to the evolving OE and the impact it has on thehuman dimension in that environment is in constant flux. Globalization and informationtechnologies have enabled near-instantaneous flow of information and compressed the timeallowed for planning, decisionmaking, and the execution of operations. The Army must developprocesses and capabilities that enable military decisionmaking to meet the challenges of the realtime battlefield. If not managed properly, adversaries can manipulate this frenetic pace ofoperations forced upon the Army to support their operations and strategy. The compression oftime feeds stress and contributes to strategic exhaustion. This exposes the Soldier, the Army, andthe American people to a constant stream of near real time information detailing events in theOE. Over time, this begins to erode public support for the Army’s efforts. The adversary, whothinks in terms of decades or more, is less vulnerable to the pressure of time. His strategy maywell rely on protraction—that is, the deliberate avoidance of decisive events while prolonging theconflict. The U.S. must consider and adopt a strategy and implement human dimension programsand processes that support an Army committed to persistent conflict over an extended time.The physical environment encompasses a fixed amount of resources. The introduction of thehuman elements into that environment also introduces a competition for those resources. In aninverse relationship, available resources are shrinking as the demand for them is growing. Whenthose resources remain relatively plentiful, that competition can be resolved with cooperation.As those resources become more constrained cooperation will evolve into competition. Actual orperceived shortages increase the potential for open conflict.45