Joint Chiefs Research Articles

Aligning and Assessing Core Attributes of Spiritual Fitness for Optimizing Human Performance

The United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM)'s Preservation of the Force and Family Program (POTFF) identifies spiritual performance (SP) as a key pillar for holistically caring for and optimizing the performance of all Special Operations Forces (SOF) and their families. Enhancing SP is key to sustaining core spiritual beliefs, values, awareness, relationships and experiences. The SOCOM Spiritual Fitness Scale (SSFS) enables religious support teams in SOF communities and beyond to reliably measure SP according to POTFF's definition of SP and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction (CJCSI) on Spiritual Fitness (SF). The three subscales of the SSFS relate to core attributes of SP/SF, which were identified through factor analysis during iterations of the tool's development. Directly aligning SP/SF programs with the core attributes of SSFS will allow chaplains to support both theists and nontheists and to retain certain traditional chaplain activities which no longer have universal connection to religious ministry in the public discourse. Chaplains are also empowered to immediately begin conducting relevant and spiritual assessments. We will illustrate how a chaplain can align SP initiatives with the three core attributes of SP/SF and leverage the SSFS to assess baseline unit needs, conceive and develop evidence-based initiatives, conduct rolling program assessments, and articulate program efficacy to key leaders and collaborators.

A Detailed Assessment of the Sexual Assault Prevalence Statistics at the Center of the Military Justice Reform Movement

“Twenty thousand service members experience sexual assault every year” while “only a tiny fraction of those end up with any kind of action at all in the military justice system.” Lynn Rosenthal, director of the DoD Independent Review Commission, recently offered this observation at a press conference while summarizing the findings reflected in the commission’s report. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand indicated in a recent blog post that “an estimated 20,500 service members are sexually assaulted every year” to make the case that there “is an epidemic of sexual assault in the military and the current military justice system has proven incapable of addressing it.” Likewise, General Mark Milley, currently the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently observed, “If we had 20,000 casualties in Afghanistan last year or 20,000 casualties in Iraq, we'd be taking some pretty radical actions to correct that.” The assertion that an estimated 20,000 U.S. military service members are sexually assaulted each year has become a common refrain in contemporary discourse. Indeed, the estimated prevalence data have long been at the center of the movement to divest commanders of the authority to initiate criminal charges and refer offenses to court-martial. Whence is this estimate of 20,000 annual sexual assaults drawn, and how effective is it as a measure of the performance of the commander-centric U.S. military justice system? This essay conducts a detailed assessment of the claim that an estimated 20,000 service members are sexually assaulted each year. The source of the assertion, a biennial survey that was last conducted by the DoD Office of People Analytics in 2018, is identified along with prior iterations of the survey. With the source identified, the essay examines several limitations that support the conclusions that the “estimate” is not an accurate approximation for actual sexual assault offenses and that these central prevalence data are not an effective measure of the performance of the U.S. military justice system. After examining these factors in detail, the essay concludes by considering the landscape of the debate regarding commander disposition authority when the prevalence data at the center of the reform movement are put into proper context.

U.S. plans to internationalize the containment of the USSR in the Balkans in the first half of the 1950s

The article examines the actions of the US diplomacy aimed at strengthening the US military and political presence in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean in the first half of the 1950s. The United States began creating mechanisms for mobilizing its allies to contain possible Soviet aggression in the event of a new local conflict on the Balkan Peninsula. This policy led to the need to develop plans for internationalization of alleged conflict. The author uses materials from the US National Archives, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the electronic archives of the Central Intelligence Agency, North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the US National Security Council, as well as published sources. Special attention is paid to the position of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff on military strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean. The outbreak of the Korean War became an important milestone in American politics not only for the Far East, but also for other regions of the world. In the Balkans, the Americans were mostly afraid of the aggression of Soviet “satellites” against Greece and Yugoslavia. In response, in the early 1950s the United States formed a new security model in the Balkans, which based on a differentiated approach: Greece became a member of NATO, while Yugoslavia entered the anti-Soviet Balkan Pact affiliated with NATO. Yugoslavia became a bridge between the NATO countries – Italy and Greece. Documents held in the US National Archives show that American military leaders spoke out in favor of Yugoslavia’s membership in NATO and insisted on coordinating the military plans of Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey. The author concludes that the rapprochement of Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey was situational. The improvement of the situation in the Balkans after the death of Joseph Stalin led to the collapse of the Balkan Pact. The analysis of American policy in the Balkans made it possible to contribute to the study of the means and methods used by the United States to internationalize military conflicts in various regions of the world in the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Captains of War

This article examines the role of history in professional military education (PME) in light of the recent US Joint Chiefs of Staff’s guidance on achieving ‘intellectual overmatch’. Louis Halewood and David Morgan-Owen argue that a narrow approach to the past, underpinned by preconceived notions of ‘relevance’, undermines what ability history has to serve the aims of military education. History need not be ‘applied’ to make it valuable, as its study can provide a broader understanding of warfare. Only by treating history more seriously, and by meaningfully engaging with the legacies of Britain’s own military past, can the discipline contribute to modern PME. ◼

Communications: Making Quantum Computing Real for JADC2 With Qiskit: Quantum Enabling Technologies for Applications to Support Communication and Networking: White Paper Submitted for the Global Competition: AFRL Innovare Million Dollar International Quantum U Tech Accelerator

Our research objective is making quantum computing real with Qiskit for USAF-Pentagon JADC2 (Joint All Domain Command & Control) thus contributing to USAF-DoD core missions. JADC2 is the US Air Force led and Joint Staff coordinated key effort central to Joint Services C4I-ISR and C2 (Command & Control) integration enabling the new Joint Warfighting Concept for All-Domain Operations. The resulting ‘New American Way of War’ is anticipated to yield “significant advantage over everybody in the world for a long time” according to the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General John Hyten.

Environmental Warfare against American Citizens: An Open Letter to the Joint Chiefs of Staff

While the public perception of the recent attempts to unseat duly-elected U.S. President Donald J. Trump is thought to be solely of national origin, there is strong evidence of a more pernicious, United Nations’ sanctioned environmental assault on America and on American citizens. The United States and other sovereign nations are in the midst of a highly organized, covert environmental warfare assault, underlain by deception and deceit, orchestrated by a foreign entity, and perpetrated in America by the U.S. Air Force and its contractors, and facilitated by intelligence-agency operatives. The intent, to slowly and insidiously sicken, weaken, and debilitate citizenry, cause weather and climate chaos, cripple agriculture, and devastate the environment, is so cleverly underwritten and camouflaged as to have gone unnoticed in the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America and, presumably, is unknown to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But it is described here. American military officers have the responsibility to protect their own citizens, especially as they possess the means to destroy human and environmental health. Systematically poisoning the air Americans breathe, harming human and environmental health, causing weather and climate chaos, damaging agriculture, and deceiving the public as to the adverse human and environmental health consequences – all under secret orders originating from a foreign entity – we allege, violates not only their Oath of Office, but is tantamount to treason. The United States Air Force co-optation, deceit, and unquestioning capitulation to a foreign entity should be of grave concern to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. With due humility we must emphasize that no military asset is worth damaging human and environmental health, especially on a national or planetary-scale, and especially due to a deceptively-worded, Trojan horse, United Nations international treaty whose signatories presumably were duped into signing in the false belief that they were preventing hostile environmental warfare.

У истоков американской гегемонии: планирование глобального военного развертывания США (1943–1945 гг.)

The article is devoted to the consideration of US strategic planning at the end of World War II. The subject of the research is the process of military strategic planning in the USA in 1943–1945. The author analyzes the activities of individual US agencies responsible for military planning in the second half of the 1940s. Particular attention is paid to the views of individual representatives of the US armed forces during this period on the deployment of national armed forces abroad. The author also examines in detail their participation in the decision-making process on this issue. The author carries out his analysis on the basе of a study of published documents of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States and the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee of the United States. The conclusion is made that the foundations of the US global military presence were laid today in the last years of World War II. The author identified the reasons and conditions under which the US command concluded about the necessity of large-scale deployment of their armed forces outside the United States.

Fostering collective action to reduce wildfire risk across property boundaries in the American West

Large-scale, high-severity wildfires are a major challenge to the future social-ecological sustainability of fire-adapted forest ecosystems in the American West. Managing forests to mitigate this risk is a collective action problem requiring landowners and stakeholders within multi-ownership landscapes to plan and implement coordinated restoration treatments. Our research question is: how can we promote collective action to reduce wildfire risk and restore fire-resilient forests in the American West? To address this question we draw on collective action theory to produce an environmental public good (fire-resilient forests), and empirical examples of collective action from six projects that are part of the US Forest Service–Natural Resources Conservation Service Joint Chiefs’ Landscape Restoration Partnership. Our findings are based on qualitative, semi-structured interviews conducted with 104 individuals who were purposively selected to represent the diverse stakeholders involved in these projects. Fostering collective action to restore fire-resilient forests entails getting as many landowners (especially large landowners) to participate in wildfire risk reduction as possible to increase its areal extent; and landowner coordination in planning and implementing strategically-designed restoration treatments to optimize their effectiveness. We identify factors that enabled and constrained landowner participation and coordination in the Joint Chiefs’ projects. Based on our findings and theory about when collective action will emerge, we specify a suite of practices to promote collective action for wildfire risk reduction across property boundaries, emphasizing incentives and enabling conditions. These include proactive education and outreach targeting landowners; multi-stakeholder processes with broad landowner representation to develop coordinated management approaches; financial and technical assistance to support fuels treatments on all ownerships within similar time frames; strong partnerships; and using common forestry professionals to plan and implement treatments on different ownerships (especially private lands). Our findings can inform cross-boundary management for landscape-scale conservation and restoration in other contexts.

A sustained tantrum: how the Joint Chiefs of Staff shaped the ANZUS treaty

ABSTRACT Unsurprisingly, most of the literature on the origins of the ANZUS alliance examines why the treaty came into existence in 1951, emphasising the role of John Foster Dulles, President Truman’s Special Representative, Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State, and Percy Spender, the Australian Foreign Minister. This paper takes a different approach. It focuses on the policy priorities of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and argues that the JCS played an important, underappreciated role shaping the text and therefore the nature of the ANZUS treaty. Their coordinated intransigence within the interagency process—described by Acheson as a ‘sustained tantrum’—limited the geographic scope of ANZUS to the Pacific area and prevented Australian policymakers from gaining access to non-Pacific bodies such as NATO. Most importantly, the JCS limited the institutionalised depth of the treaty by preventing the Australian government from gaining access to the Pentagon’s global strategic planning. The policy priorities of the JCS in 1951, and their success at influencing the ANZUS agreement to reflect these priorities, holds enduring significance for the US-Australia alliance, which is simultaneously dominated by the two countries’ militaries yet hampered by underdeveloped mechanisms for policy formulation and institutionalised military cooperation.

Applications of the SOCOM Spiritual Fitness Scale: Program Development and Tailored Coaching for Optimized Performance.

The SOCOM Spiritual Fitness Scale (SSFS) enables religious support teams and other spiritual fitness/performance (SF/SP) stakeholders in the Special Operations Forces community to reliably measure both "horizontal" and "vertical" dimensions of spirituality, as defined by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction on SF. The SSFS's three subscales relate to core attributes of SF/SP, which were identified through factor analysis during the iterations of the tool's development. The SSFS is capable of generating baseline assessments for research related to SF/SP. It is also capable of generating unique SF/SP profiles for individuals and groups, which can shape programs and inform tailored coaching for optimized performance.

Indigenous Environmental Interests and their Connection to Anthropogenic Climate Change

This research advocates a strategy to mitigate or prevent further anthropogenic climate change and preserve natural resources. The strategy takes into account mechanisms of social and moral norms, which are innate in humanity due to millions of years of evolution. Social norms themselves are not innate, but the mechanisms to acquire them and implement them are. To slow down anthropogenic climate change global forces, inclusive of governments, NGOs, and collective humanity, should help indigenous peoples to protect their territories and property. Important to the moral argument is highlighting the murder of Berta Caceres, a Honduran environmental activist, in 2015 by military members of Honduras at the instruction of the Honduran joint chiefs of staff as well as the likely involvement of an energy company. To conclude, if global forces were to enforce protection of indigenous communities affected by the negative effects of urbanization and globalization, then there would be a mitigating effect on anthropogenic climate change.

Polycentric systems for wildfire governance in the Western United States

In order to increase the pace and scale of managing forests to reduce wildfire risk in the western U.S., federal agencies have adopted policies that promote an all lands management (ALM) approach, which extends management actions across jurisdictional boundaries. To better implement such policies, ALM approaches require new governance systems that overcome barriers found in existing systems, which typically address jurisdictions separately. Polycentric governance systems, characterized by multiple and diverse actors at different scales operating in coordination with one another under an overarching set of rules, have emerged to address wildfire risk in multi-ownership landscapes. We describe these polycentric systems using three case studies of US Forest Service-Natural Resources Conservation Service Joint Chiefs’ Landscape Restoration Partnership projects in Oregon and California. While all three cases demonstrate polycentric systems, we found diversity in terms of partnering organizations and levels of success in implementing wildfire risk reduction projects. Lessons from our research can inform more effective implementation of ALM policies for managing natural resources and processes in multi-jurisdictional landscapes. Our research suggests these systems can be strengthened when: bottom-up and top-down processes and incentives for establishing them converge; actors within the system coordinate effectively; policies enable flexibility and adaptiveness for how systems function in different places; multiple actors at multiple scales are able to supplement one another’s capacity; and legal and policy mechanisms facilitate efficient transfer of funding and resources between actors in the system to accomplish work.

IMPORTÂNCIA DA REFORMA GOLDWATER-NICHOLS PARA A EVOLUÇÃO DA INTEROPERABILIDADE NAS FORÇAS ARMADAS DOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DA AMÉRICA

O presente artigo tem o propósito de analisar a importância da Reforma Goldwater-Nichols, aprovada em 1986, visando identificar elementos que se sobressaem na evolução da interoperabilidade das forças armadas dos Estados Unidos da América. O problema que nos norteou foi: em que medida a Reforma em lide proporcionou a evolução da interoperabilidade das Forças Armadas dos Estados Unidos da América? Esta é uma pesquisa teórica de cunho qualitativo, de caráter descritivo, bibliográfico e documental. O estudo aborda as razões históricas pelas quais os Estados Unidos realizaram tão profunda reorganização em seu Departamento de Defesa, com o advento da Reforma Goldwater-Nichols, uma vez que ela foi originada fora do âmbito castrense, especificamente no Congresso dos EUA. Espera-se que essa pesquisa seja relevante à Defesa Nacional, uma vez que são expostas características marcantes do processo de interoperabilidade dos EUA, nação amiga e que detém as forças armadas mais poderosas da atualidade. Devido ao seu caráter ímpar de ser uma iniciativa parlamentar, contrária aos interesses dos militares na ocasião, é demonstrada sua gênese e, posteriormente, seus quatro principais pontos de atuação: (i) o papel da Junta de Chefes de Estado-Maior; (ii) o reforço na autoridade dos Comandantes Combatentes Unificados; (iii) a criação de um sistema educacional próprio para o desenvolvimento dos oficiais e subalternos para atuação na arena conjunta; e (iv) a valorização dos militares que servem em comandos conjuntos.

Breaking Ranks: Robert McNamara, Adam Yarmolinsky, and the Montreal Speech*

On May 18, 1966, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara delivered a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Montreal entitled “Security in the Contemporary World.” Building on remarks that he had made in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), the title was deceptively bland and belied its significance. McNamara, heretofore loyal to Johnson, was publicly breaking ranks with official administration policy on Vietnam. In the weeks prior, back in the Pentagon, McNamara had considered and authorized the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s (JCS) proposals, which National Security Advisor Walt W. Rostow had endorsed, to expand Operation...

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the atom bomb, the American Military Mind and the end of the Second World War

ABSTRACTThe decision by the US government to drop the atomic bombs on Japan is one of the most heavily debated questions in history. This article examines one element of that debate, in many ways the most surprising. That was the different views of the top of the military hierarchy in the USA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The JCS was on the whole more sceptical about using atomic weaponry than the USA’s civilian leadership, for ethical and strategic reasons. As such they were willing to consider very different ways of ending the war.

An Approach for Integrating Uncertainty When Selecting an Anti-Torpedo Decoy in Brand New Warships

The Spanish Navy has planned that the F-80 frigates will be replaced by the brand new F-110 frigates in 2022. The F-110 program is in the conceptual design phase and one of the objectives is to provide the new F-110 frigate with a salient anti-submarine capability. Therefore, it is necessary to choose what anti-torpedo decoy should be installed in the warship. The Joint Chiefs of Navy Staff (EMA) established some guidelines and, considering the Navy guidance’s, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method was applied. After applying the AHP method, none of the decoys obtained a better score to the other one to make a decision. This paper addresses the problem of the selection of the best anti-torpedo decoy to be installed in the new frigates. This allowed implementing a new approach, the Graphic Method of Measurement of Uncertainty Beyond Objectivity (GMUBO). This approach considers different scenarios from the AHP, quantifies the uncertainty, and evaluates which is the best alternative. The method integrates the uncertainty in the AHP and allows measuring the robustness of the selected alternative, also providing a useful graphical tool. Furthermore, GMUBO has a great ease of use and it is helpful to make decisions under uncertainty conditions.

Omar Nelson Bradley: America's GI General, 1893–1981 by Steven L. Ossad

Reviewed by: Omar Nelson Bradley: America's GI General, 1893–1981 by Steven L. Ossad Adrian R. Lewis OMAR NELSON BRADLEY: America's GI General, 1893–1981. By Steven L. Ossad. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2017. The purpose of this book is to bring new light to the life of Five Star General Omar Bradley and to revise the traditional narrative of his life. Ossad observed that: "Omar Bradley has for too long been relegated to the shadows cast by his larger than life contemporaries or has been explained away as an example of a nice guy who made it to the top through hard work. That perception is not only wrong, it does a disservice to Bradley and those who can still learn from his example (16)." Ossad believes the story of Bradley's life has been dwarfed by that of Eisenhower and Patton. He seeks to provide a more complex, a more nuanced portrait of the man who commanded the largest operational command ever assembled by the United States, the 12th Army Group, and led in the biggest campaign ever fought by the U.S. Army, the Battle of the Bulge. This book is, in part, a study of command. Steven Ossad is a military historian and biographer. He coauthored, Major General Maurice Rose: World War II's Greatest Forgotten Commander. He has also published articles in military history journals. Ossad's book divides Bradley's life into three parts. Part I, "Becoming a Commander," chapter 1 through 5, covers Bradley's early life, life at West Point, assignments as an officer, learning the trade of soldier in the U.S. Army, Corps Command in North Africa, and the invasion of and campaign in Sicily. Part II, "The Liberation," chapters 6 through 10, covers the Normandy invasion, the breakout at St. Lo, the advance across France, the Battle of the Bulge, and the final victory in Europe. Part III, "Shaper of the Post War World," chapters 11 and 12, cover the post-war period, head of the Veterans Administration, the emergence of Cold War, service as the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Korean War, and retirement. Part I is the most original part of the book. In it Ossad developed a character analysis, which portrays Bradley as a man incapable of admitting his mistakes, incapable of admitting he was wrong. While identifying character flaws, Ossad's overall appraisal of Bradley is positive. He believes the General has been overlooked and under-appreciated for his many contributions and accomplishments. Part II, the war in Europe follows traditional assessments. Operation Cobra has been viewed as Bradley's most brilliant act of generalship, and the Battle of Bulge, where U.S. forces were surprised by the size and ferocity of the German counterattack, has not been considered Bradley's finest hour. Part III is the most problematic. There are errors in the book. For example, on page 368, Ossad wrote: "The new act [National Security Act of 1947] replaced the short lived National Military Establishment with new institutions, the most important being the Department of Defense." This is not accurate. The 1947 act created the National Military Establishment, and the 1949 amendment created the Department of Defense. (See: The Department of Defense: Documents on Establishment and Organization, 1944–1978, edited, Alice C. Cole, et al, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Historical Office, 1978, p. 63, 84). On page 382, Ossad wrote: "Secretary of Defense George Marshall agreed [End Page 117] not only that his old advisory had opposed administration policies but that his failure to clear his 24 March 1951 statement with the President and the intended violation of the December order were grounds for dismissal." In a "Memorandum for the Record," dated 25 April 1951, prepared by General Bradley, it states: "Secretary Acheson and Mr. Harriman thought he [General MacArthur] should be relieved at once. General Marshall and I recommended against such action." Both Marshall and Bradley ultimately supported the relief, but both had to be convinced. There are also problems of interpretation. On the desegregation of the Army, Ossad wrote: "By the end of 1953, when he left office, only 5...

The Establishment and the Role of the State–Joint Chiefs of Staff Meeting during the Korean War

The US government implemented the State–Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Meeting to look over its politico-military policies and strategies to implement NSC 68/4 during the Korean War. The meeting became a critical organization to conduct the war as a limited war by developing a limited goal and providing strategies for a decision-making apparatus after the removal of General MacArthur from the post of Commander of the United Nations in March 1951. The meeting later provided politico-military directives to the JCS to continue the war in limited terms, supported the armistice negotiation, and contributed to the success of the first year’s agreement.

Policy design to support cross-boundary land management: The example of the Joint Chiefs Landscape Restoration Partnership

There is a mismatch between large-scale, dynamic, ecological processes and the scales at which individual land management agency units have the capacity and authority to work. To improve environmental governance, scholars across disciplines emphasize the need to work across jurisdictional and organizational boundaries to support collective action and address scale mismatches. An important question now is how to design policies that support collaborative management across jurisdictional boundaries to produce improved outcomes. Our research evaluated the Joint Chiefs Landscape Restoration Partnership, a new policy tool in use by the US federal government to support forest restoration activities across the public-private divide, to investigate two research questions: 1) Did the policy design of the Joint Chiefs Partnership effectively support cross-boundary work? And, 2) What underlying conditions helped or hindered the ability of project participants to undertake cross-boundary work using this policy approach? To glean program-wide understanding of the Joint Chiefs Partnership, we conducted 62 semi-structured interviews with agency staff and external participants in the program. We found that the requirement to collaborate and infusion of committed, multi-year funding supported faster implementation of planned work and increased coordination across jurisdictions and partners. Previously established collaborative relationships were reported as the most critical factor underlying success, while limited agency capacity was reported as significantly impeding project success. Our findings suggest that this policy tool, which incorporates proposed policy design principles to support improved governance, was successful for supporting cross-boundary management and collective action. The results from this study also raise practical questions about tradeoffs under programs that prioritize funding investments and about navigating among the variables that affect policy implementation. Our study contributes to the broader literature on policy design for complex environmental governance challenges and provides an empirical evalution of a policy tool in a specific legal, administrative, and land management context.

Implementing Landscape Scale Conservation across Organizational Boundaries: Lessons from the Central Appalachian Region, United States.

Natural resources across the United States are increasingly managed at the landscape scale through cooperation among multiple organizations and landowners. United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service (USFS) agency leaders have widely promoted this approach since 2009 when Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack called for "all lands" management. Landscape scale projects have been undertaken to address multiple goals such as single species conservation, resilience to fire, invasive species eradication, and others. The West Virginia Restoration Venture (WVRV)-one of five landscape scale conservation projects funded 2014-2016 across the Northeast and Midwest and known as "Joint Chiefs'" projects-was evaluated by an interdisciplinary team of USFS employees to gain insight into how cross-boundary landscape scale conservation projects are implemented in the region. In this paper, the team used qualitative interview data from project participants to explore processes related to developing a shared vision for the landscape, implementation priorities, and methods to work across institutional and property ownership boundaries. Grounded in the landscape and collaborative resource management literatures, the report shows how established inter-organizational networks, flexible approaches to management, and a "shelf-stock" of ready-to-implement projects led to on-the-ground success. The authors provide insight about factors that constrain and facilitate the implementation of landscape scale conservation projects that have multiple goals, landowners, and organizational partners.