What the U.S. Army War College Taught Me About Strategy
- Jayne McQuillan
- 6 minutes ago
- 5 min read
I recently had the privilege of participating in the U.S. Army War College National Security Seminar in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
The experience brought together military leaders, academics, and business professionals to discuss the challenges facing our nation and the increasingly complex global environment.
As I listened to discussions about deterrence, force readiness, emerging technologies, geopolitical competition, and long-term national security priorities, I found myself continually drawing parallels to the work we do every day with business owners and leadership teams at Journey Consulting.
Business strategy and national security strategy are not the same.
One seeks to create value, growth, freedom, and sustainability for owners and stakeholders. The other seeks to protect national interests, preserve strategic advantages, and deter conflict.
Yet despite their different objectives, both disciplines require leaders to answer remarkably similar questions:
What future are we trying to create?
What challenges are likely to emerge?
What resources do we have available?
What risks are we willing to accept?
What capabilities must we build today to succeed tomorrow?
The seminar reinforced a lesson I have seen repeatedly throughout my career; strategy is ultimately the disciplined process of making choices under uncertainty.
Different Missions, Similar Challenges
Business leaders typically focus on growth, profitability, enterprise value, customer relationships, talent development, and achieving personal ownership goals. Their success is measured by performance, sustainability, and the ability to create options for the future.
National security leaders operate on a much broader scale. Their mission involves protecting national interests, maintaining stability, strengthening alliances, deterring adversaries, and preparing for threats that may not fully materialize for years or even decades.
The missions are very different. Businesses can choose their markets, customers, products, and services. Nations cannot choose their geography, competitors, or global responsibilities.
Yet both face a common reality: Leaders must make decisions today without complete information about tomorrow.
One of the themes emphasized throughout the seminar was the increasing complexity of the strategic environment. Military leaders are being asked to prepare for emerging technologies, evolving forms of warfare, shifting alliances, cyber threats, and economic competition all while maintaining readiness for today’s challenges.
Business leaders face similar uncertainty. Artificial intelligence, workforce shortages, supply chain disruptions, changing customer expectations, and economic volatility are forcing organizations to rethink how they prepare for the future.
Successfully navigating that uncertainty requires leaders to make thoughtful decisions about people, resources, and long-term priorities, which is exactly why strategic planning remains one of the most important responsibilities of leadership.
The Strategic Choices Framework
One concept from the Army War College particularly resonated with me. They teach leaders to think strategically by balancing three competing priorities: force structure, modernization, and readiness.
While the terminology is military, the Strategic Choices Framework applies surprisingly well to business.
Force Structure: The People and Capabilities You Have Today
In military terms, force structure refers to the personnel, units, and capabilities available to accomplish the mission.
In business, force structure is your leadership team, organizational design, workforce, culture, and operational capabilities.
Do you have the right people in the right roles? Is decision-making occurring at the appropriate levels? Can the organization execute without overreliance on one or two key individuals?
Many of the businesses we work with are not limited by opportunity. Instead, they are limited by organizational capacity. Growth often stalls because the structure that got the company to its current level is no longer sufficient to take it to the next level.
Modernization: Investing in Future Capability
Modernization focuses on building the capabilities the military needs to succeed in the future.
For businesses, modernization includes leadership development, technology investments, process improvement, innovation, succession planning, and building scalable systems.
These are the investments that may not deliver immediate results but often determine future success.
One of the most common strategic mistakes organizations make is becoming so focused on current performance that they fail to invest adequately in future capabilities.
The irony is that today’s success often creates tomorrow’s vulnerability.
Organizations that stop evolving because they are performing well frequently find themselves unprepared when conditions change.
Readiness: Performing Today
Readiness is the military’s ability to execute its mission today.
For business leaders, readiness includes cash flow, customer service, operational performance, sales execution, employee engagement, financial discipline, and management accountability.
Readiness matters because no amount of future planning compensates for poor execution in the present.
A company may have a brilliant strategic vision and ambitious growth plans, but if it cannot consistently deliver value to customers today, future success becomes increasingly difficult.
Readiness gives owners the confidence that the business can perform consistently, even while they are investing in change.
The Challenge of Balance
The real lesson from the Strategic Choices Framework is not that force structure, modernization, and readiness are important individually. Most leaders already know that.
The challenge is balancing all three simultaneously.
Focusing exclusively on current performance often sacrifices future growth.
Investing heavily in innovation while neglecting operational execution creates instability.
Continuously adding people without improving systems eventually makes organizations inefficient and difficult to scale.
The most successful leaders recognize that strategy is not choosing one priority over another. It is making thoughtful trade-offs among competing priorities while keeping the long-term mission in focus.
Strategy Creates Options
Perhaps the greatest insight I took away from the Army War College that reinforced the approach we take at Journey Consulting is that strategy is less about predicting the future and more about preparing for multiple futures.
At Journey Consulting, we often tell clients that one of the primary goals of strategic planning is to create options. Whether we are helping an owner prepare for growth, leadership transition, eventual succession or exit, the objective remains the same: build a business that can thrive under a variety of future scenarios.
National security leaders are trying to do the same thing on a much larger stage.
Different missions. Different stakeholders. Different consequences.
Yet the essence of strategy remains remarkably similar.
Whether in business or national security, the leaders who succeed are those who consistently make disciplined choices today that increase their ability to succeed tomorrow.
Strategy does not eliminate uncertainty. It ensures you have options when uncertainty arrives.
If you looked at your business through the lens of structure, modernization, and readiness, where would you be strongest, and where would you be most exposed?
Jayne McQuillan, CPA, MBA, Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA) is the owner of Journey Consulting, LLC and author of The Value Journey: How to Drive Profits, Build Wealth, and Exit Your Business on Your Own Terms.
Our firm is focused on providing business owners and their businesses with strategic planning, exit planning, financial expertise, and organizational improvement. We use a holistic approach within all of our services by aligning leadership with business strategy and outcomes.