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Critical thinking alone just doesn’t buy what it used to buy, Lesk concluded. “Critical thinking has become the basic price of admission. If I had to choose who else I would elect to help assure the continued success of this law firm, one of the most important qualities I would be looking for is proven ability to innovate, because with change coming this fast, that is the only thing that will save us.”

Green-Collar American

General Martin Dempsey is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—America’s top military officer—but earlier in his career he commanded the First Armored Division in the Iraq war that took Baghdad from Saddam Hussein in 2003; served as acting CENTCOM commander, in charge of all American forces throughout the Middle East; and from 2008 to 2011 was commanding general of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, where he oversaw boot camp—the training and education of American soldiers for twenty-first-century warfare. He remembers the exact moment when the light started flashing in his head, saying, “We need to train and educate our soldiers and leaders differently.”

“When I was acting commander at CENTCOM,” said Dempsey, “I went to visit a young U.S. Army captain stationed on the border with Pakistan, inside Afghanistan. It was the summer of 2008. Out at his base he described to me his task and purpose there and the recent engagements he had had with Taliban trying to infiltrate. I think he was twenty-five kilometers from any other base. Yet from his little forward base he had access to intelligence and information from the lowest tactical level right up to the national level and he had the authority to order joint fire from air and artillery. I am guessing he was probably twenty-six years old. At one point I said to him, ‘You have more capability at your fingertips than I had as division commander in Baghdad in 2003.’ The technology had improved that much … The type of threats we face today are decentralized, networked, and syndicated. They are not massed threats but threats at the edge. To confront a network you have to be a network, and to confront a decentralized foe your power needs to be decentralized.”

Dempsey returned from Afghanistan to Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, saying to himself, “We have empowered our soldiers to be effective in this new kind of battle. We have given them the capability and authority and responsibility to function in distributed operations, semiautonomously. But we have not changed the way we trained them to accept this responsibility.”

As soon as he took over the army’s training and education systems, that became his primary focus. “We say that a leader’s responsibility is to visualize, understand, decide, and direct,” said Dempsey. “And yet we used to spend the vast majority of our time providing the knowledge skills and attributes to allow a commander to decide and direct and almost no time on how to visualize and understand.”

The changes the U.S. military is undertaking now start with recruitment. Thirty years ago, said Dempsey, “we would have said we want men who are physically fit, educated, and disciplined. Now, what we say is that we want someone who wants to belong to a values-based group, who can communicate, who is inquisitive, and who has an instinct to collaborate—and we will take care of the rest.”

Dempsey began reforming army training by asking that all-important question: What world are we living in? The military, he concluded, was living in what he called “a competitive learning environment.” By that he meant a world in which military capability is diffusing into the hands of non-state actors, terrorists, and criminals. Nation-states no longer have a monopoly on competitive military capabilities.

“It is a fool’s errand,” Dempsey said, to chase every new capability emerging from your adversary—whether it is new roadside bombs or devices that confuse GPS signals. “We cannot be oblivious to these things, but