Infrastructure and the Operational Art: A Handbook for Understanding, Visualizing, and Describing Infrastructure Systems

Abstract : The Army s understanding of infrastructure as an operational variable has been evolving over the past 30 years in response to significant events ranging from international conflicts to domestic weather-related disasters. These experiences have combined to drive a significant shift in infrastructure doctrine, which now demands that commanders and staffs understand, visualize, and describe the infrastructure variable to accomplish the Army s assigned infrastructure missions of protecting, restoring, and developing infrastructure all missions essential to restoring stability after conflict or disaster. Current Army doctrine, however, does not say how commanders and staffs are to approach these challenging tasks. This report presents a cognitive framework for understanding, visualizing, and describing infrastructure by using five conceptual models created to allow commanders and staffs to think critically, creatively, and completely about infrastructure problems. The report also includes the scholarship behind the models including verification, validation, and certification as well as example applications of the models to actual situations. Infrastructure is a concern for both civil society and the military, and the models work equally well in both. The authors actively solicit feedback from any reader on the use, application, and improvement of these models.