We advise the most senior military and civilian defense leaders on the hardest organizational challenges in national security — force structure redesign, command relationship reform, cultural transformation, and the institutional change required to fight and win in multi-domain contested environments.
The character of warfare is changing faster than institutional structures can adapt. Technological superiority has outrun organizational capacity — the DoD possesses capabilities that its command architectures cannot effectively employ, doctrine that its force structures cannot execute, and a talent system that produces the wrong leaders for the competition it now faces. The organizational design problem is the strategic problem.
Our Force Design practice is staffed by former flag officers, senior intelligence executives, and defense policy officials who have operated inside the organizational systems they now advise. We do not bring organizational design frameworks from the commercial sector and apply them to defense problems. We bring operational experience at the highest levels of the joint force — from the Joint Staff J3 to combatant command headquarters to service secretariats — and the analytical discipline to translate that experience into institutional change that survives contact with the bureaucratic realities of the Defense Department.
Force design is not organizational consulting applied to the military. Every engagement is staffed by professionals who have held the command and staff roles they now advise — at the O-7 level and above, or equivalent SES.
Force structure decisions — which units to create, retain, resize, or eliminate — are among the most consequential and politically fraught choices in defense management. They involve operational risk, institutional equity, congressional equities, and strategic posture simultaneously. Our force structure analysts bring experience from OSD PA&E, service staff G3/J3 organizations, and combatant command planning staffs to provide the analytical rigor these decisions demand.
We use a structured analytical methodology: capability gap mapping against the NDS threat framework, unit effectiveness modeling, readiness trend analysis, and cost-per-capability comparisons that give senior leaders the quantitative foundation for structural choices that will define the force for a decade.
Command relationships are the architecture of decision-making authority in the joint force. Who has OPCON, who has TACON, who has COCOM, and how authorities flow across component commands — these structures determine how fast the joint force can act and how effectively it can integrate capabilities across domains. As multi-domain operations have raised the premium on speed and integration, the command architectures designed for Cold War-era linear operations have become strategic liabilities.
We bring Joint Staff J3 and CCMD staff experience to command architecture redesign — working at the interface between Title 10 statutory authority, UCMJ command relationships, and the operational requirements of actual multi-domain campaigns.
Wargaming is the premier tool for stress-testing strategy and organizational design against adversarial action before real operations reveal the flaws. We conduct professional wargaming exercises ranging from tabletop campaign seminars for senior leadership to multi-day operational-level exercises with red and blue teams, structured adjudication, and analytical capture of findings that produce actionable design recommendations.
Our red team capability applies adversarial thinking systematically — not simply playing devil's advocate, but rigorously modeling the strategic logic, operational doctrine, and organizational decision-making of near-peer adversaries. We draw on former intelligence professionals and regional specialists who understand how adversaries actually think, not how we assume they think.
The military talent management system produces the leaders the organization says it values — which is often not the leaders the organization actually needs. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2019's Talent Management provisions created new authorities to reform military personnel management, but translating statutory authority into institutional change requires both technical expertise in DOPMA/ROPMA and the political fluency to navigate the deeply entrenched interests of a system that has worked exactly as designed for 50 years.
Doctrine is how the military institutionalizes learning — codifying operational concepts, command relationships, and tactical procedures in forms that can be taught, trained to, and replicated across the force. When doctrine fails to keep pace with operational realities, units improvise at the cost of integration and interoperability. We support the formal doctrine development process at TRADOC, TECOM, and ACSC, and design the institutional learning systems that feed doctrine development with operational feedback.
Net assessment — the systematic comparison of the military balance between the United States and peer competitors over time — is the analytical foundation for long-range defense planning and force investment decisions. In an era of great power competition, the ability to make rigorous, long-horizon assessments of competitive dynamics has become essential for every component of the defense enterprise. We bring former ONA, DIA, and service intelligence professionals to competitive assessments that go beyond order-of-battle accounting to analyze operational concepts, doctrinal trajectories, and organizational learning rates.
We run three distinct wargaming architectures — each calibrated to a different level of command and a different analytical objective. All classified exercises conducted in appropriate SCIFs with cleared facilitation staff.
Force design advisory at the most senior levels of defense requires trust that takes time to earn and cannot be manufactured. Our methodology is built around the reality that institutional change in the DoD is a political process as much as an analytical one — and that the most rigorous analysis will fail without the organizational navigation skills to move it through the system.
We begin by understanding the organizational problem at its actual source — not the presenting symptom that prompted the engagement. Senior leader interviews, stakeholder mapping, historical analysis of organizational evolution, and a frank assessment of what the institution is actually optimized for versus what it claims to prioritize.
Rigorous quantitative and qualitative analysis — force structure modeling, command architecture mapping, competitive assessments, wargaming. We develop multiple design options with explicit assumptions, risk profiles, and trade-off analyses. We do not arrive with a preferred solution. We arrive with a structured choice framework that gives senior leaders genuine options, not a rationalization for a predetermined answer.
Defense organizational change requires navigating the Joint Staff, OSD, service staffs, Congressional staff, and a labyrinth of informal power structures that no organizational chart captures. We provide the political and bureaucratic navigation support that transforms analysis into decisions — identifying champions, sequencing engagements, managing opposition, and building the coalition that change requires.
Organizational redesigns that are approved and never implemented are the most common failure mode in defense institutional change. We provide sustained implementation support — tracking decisions against intent, identifying deviation from design, and helping organizations build the internal capacity to sustain the change through leadership transitions, which are frequent and can be fatal to transformation programs.
A major geographic combatant command required a fundamental redesign of its command architecture to execute multi-domain operations against a near-peer adversary with a 2027 operational planning horizon. The existing architecture — built for Cold War deterrence and post-9/11 counterterrorism — could not integrate capabilities across the space, cyber, and electromagnetic domains at operationally relevant speed. Three internal redesign efforts had stalled due to service component resistance.
We assembled a team of former J3, J6, and service component CGs who had operated in this theater. We conducted a structured wargame exposing the command architecture's failure modes under stress, mapped the informal power structures blocking reform, and designed a phased redesign that achieved 80% of the operational objective while navigating institutional resistance. The new architecture was approved by SECDEF within 14 months.
An Army division headquarters required a fundamental force structure redesign to transition from the modular brigade model optimized for counterinsurgency to a force capable of large-scale combat operations against a peer adversary. The existing structure had been optimized over 20 years for a mission set that was strategically subordinate — the capabilities it needed were absent, atrophied, or allocated to lower echelons.
We conducted a capability gap analysis against the division's operational concept, designed three alternative MTOE structures with explicit trade-off profiles, and ran a five-day tabletop wargame with the division and corps commanders to stress-test each option against representative operational scenarios. The resulting structure incorporated capabilities from the analysis that had not been in the original scope.
Joint Staff J5 required an independent net assessment of the military balance between U.S. joint forces and the PLA in the Western Pacific that went beyond order-of-battle comparisons to examine operational concepts, doctrinal trajectories, logistics constraints, and institutional learning rates on both sides. Existing assessments were structured around platform inventories — failing to capture the operational implications of asymmetric advantages and vulnerabilities.
Our former ONA and DIA professionals conducted a structured net assessment using an ONA-derived methodology — examining not just the military balance but the dynamics that would determine how it would change over a 10–15 year horizon. The assessment identified three asymmetric U.S. advantages that existing investment plans were not exploiting, and two vulnerabilities that were structurally underweighted in the defense program.
AFSOC required a fundamental reform of its officer career development and talent management system to retain the high-aptitude, mission-focused personnel who were leaving at rates that threatened mission capability. The existing system rewarded staff time and operational breadth — systematically disadvantaging the deep operational specialists that special operations demands. NDAA 2019 provided the statutory authority; the question was implementation.
We analyzed career patterns of the highest-performing and highest-attrition cohorts to identify the specific institutional decision points where the system was driving out its best talent. We designed a parallel career track for designated operational specialists, redesigned the promotion board criteria for that track, and developed the implementation roadmap that moved the reform through Air Force personnel bureaucracy within 18 months.
Most consultants came in with a framework and proceeded to fit our problem into it. The Meridian team came in and learned the problem. It took longer, but the design they produced was one that my J3 staff actually built — because it reflected how this command actually works, not how an org chart says it should.
The wargame they designed broke three assumptions that had been embedded in our campaign plan for four years. One of them was a fundamental misread of how our adversary would sequence operations. If we had discovered that in an actual conflict rather than a wargame, the consequences would have been severe. That is what rigorous adversarial analysis does — and it requires people who understand the adversary, not just people who can facilitate a meeting.
We had tried twice to reform our talent management system under existing authority and failed both times — not because the analysis was wrong, but because we couldn't navigate the Air Staff. Meridian's team had the former service secretary staff experience to understand exactly whose equities needed to be addressed and in what sequence. The reform passed because they understood the politics as well as the policy.
Every member of the Force Design practice has held senior command or staff positions at the O-7 equivalent or above, or civilian equivalent. We do not field organizational consultants who have studied defense institutions. We field people who built them, commanded them, and know where they break.
The technology for joint all-domain command and control largely exists. The organizational structures required to employ it do not. Command relationship inertia, service component parochialism, and the absence of cross-domain authority frameworks are the real barriers — and they require organizational redesign, not better software.
Order-of-battle analysis misses the most important signal: organizational design reveals operational intent in ways that platform inventories never will.
Most senior leader wargames are choreographed confirmation events. Here is what rigorous adversarial analysis requires instead — and why the discomfort is the point.
Congress gave the services unprecedented authority to reform military personnel management. Three years on, implementation has been uneven — here is the honest scorecard.
ADP 3-0 codified MDO doctrine in 2022. Real-world training and exercises have surfaced gaps between the concept and the organizational capacity to execute it.
Our cleared, flag-level team is available for classified and unclassified discussions on force structure, command architecture, wargaming, and strategic competition analysis. We engage at the O-7 and SES level — and we bring the institutional credibility to be heard at that level.