Collaborative Fight

Paul R. Birch works in the Plans and Programs directorate at Headquarters U.S. Air Force, the Pentagon. Lina M. Svedin is professor of strategy and security studies, School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Air University, Montgomery, AL.

• List of TablesSeries Editor’s ForewordAcknowledgmentsList of Acronyms and Abbreviations1. The Collaborative Fight: US Armed Services’ Ambivalent Relationship to Jointness2. Factors in Organizational Collaboration and Success Cases3. The Army and Air Force Collaborate on AirLand Battle, 1973–19914. Cooperation in Peacetime: The Joint Primary Aviation Training System, 1988–Present5. Air Support in Counterinsurgency, 2001–20126. Joint All-Domain Command and Control7. An Empirically Informed Theory of JointnessConclusion: Jointness Is a Collaborative FightsAppendix. Research Method and Case-Study Selection CriteriaNotesReference ListIndex

"This unique study will be of great value to scholars and defense practitioners alike, particularly in staff and war colleges where there is always a need for rigorous, relevant, and informative case studies. Birch and Svedin offer penetrating insights why in the past the US military either failed to achieve jointness or to sustain if it was achieved for a time. This is a timely book that will challenge assumptions, fuel arguments, and do tremendous good for the joint force."—J. P. Clark, author of Preparing for War: The Emergence of the Modern U.S. Army, 1815––1917"The Collaborative Fight provides one of the only scholarly treatments of a word that dominates life in the million-person trillion-dollar defense industry: jointness. Since the Goldwater-Nichols reforms of 1986, jointness has been the coin of the realm for the US military, whether aspirationally or actually. Matters of budget, operations, doctrine, and education all esteem jointness as a predominant virtue—yet there is little robust understanding of what it is or why it is so difficult to achieve and sustain. Birch and Svedin offer a strong theoretical and empirical treatment of the subject, with novel case studies and appropriately eclectic theoretical antecedents. In short, far too little is known about a ubiquitous Pentagon buzzword—this book helps bridge the gap."—Jeffrey Donnithorne, Colonel (Ret.), USAF, and author of Four Guardians: A Principled-Agent View of American Civil-Military Relations