One of the most complex challenges facing the U.S. military today is the problem of imposing stability over the chaos that follows major combat operations. Despite the U.S. military's predilection to distill warfare into the linear, Newtonian paradigm, recent experience in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) suggests that the cause and effect correlation between high-velocity major combat operations and achieving a complex political endstate such as regime change is becoming less certain in the contemporary strategic environment. The transition to stability operations in a non-linear, dynamic environment is proving more difficult, and perhaps more decisive, than the major combat phase of a campaign. At some point in every war, the focus must shift from rupturing the existing system to stabilizing and legitimizing a new one; the center of gravity from the enemy's military forces to ending the chaos and violence that follow major combat operations. The aim of this study is to examine the difficulty in planning and executing these transitions from a historical perspective. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 sparked a guerilla resistance unparalleled in modern history in scale and ferocity. In the wake of the initial invasion, the German Army began its struggle to secure a territory encompassing one million square miles and sixty-five million people and to pacify a growing partisan resistance. The German endeavor to secure the occupied areas and suppress the partisan movement in the wake of Operation Barbarossa illustrates the nature of the problem of bridging the gap between rapid, decisive combat operations and "shaping" the post-major conflict environment - securing populations and infrastructure and persuading people to accept the transition from a defeated government to a new one. In this regard, the German experience on the Eastern Front following Operation Barbarossa seems to offer a number of similarities to the U.S. experience in Iraq in the aftermath of OIF. This study highlights what may be some of the enduring qualities about the nature of the transition between decisive battle and political endstate - particularly when that endstate is regime change. It elaborates on the notion of decisive battle, how the formulation of resistance movements can be explained as complex adaptive systems, the potential of indigenous security forces and the influence of doctrine, cultural appreciation and interagency cooperation on operational-level transition planning.

ADA436298 Approved for public release; Distribution is unlimited. The opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the student-authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College or any other governmental agency. (References to these studies should include the foregoing statement.)