The year 2001 began with the inauguration of a U.S. President deliberately aiming to shift the use of the military away from the numerous humanitarian and peacekeeping interventions of the 1990s toward responding to and defeating conventional threats from nation-states. The mood was optimistic, with the new U.S. National Security Strategy, recently put in place by the departing Clinton administration, citing widespread financial prosperity and conveying no sense of an imminent threat to the homeland. But this situation proved fragile: the events of a single day, September 11, 2001, altered the trajectory of the United States and the way it used its military over the next decade. A nation focused on countering conventional threats was now confronted by an enemy that attacked the homeland with low-tech means in asymmetric and unexpected ways—individuals armed with box-cutters using hijacked civilian aircraft

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE ), sometimes referred to as the Tamil Tigers, or simply the Tigers, was a separatist militant organization based in northern Sri Lanka. It was founded in May 1976 by Prabhakaran and waged a violent secessionist and nationalist campaign to create an independent state in the north and east of Sri Lanka for the Tamil people. This campaign evolved into the Sri Lankan Civil War. The Tigers were considered one of the most ruthless insurgent and terrorist organisations in the world. They were vanquished by the Sri Lankan armed forces in May 2009. In order to rehabilitate the 11,664 Tigers who had surrendered or been taken captive, Sri Lanka developed a multifaceted program to engage and transform the violent attitudes and behaviours of the Tiger leaders, members and collaborators. Since the end of the LTTE ’s three-decade campaign of insurgency and terrorism, there has not been a single act of terrorism in the country. Many attribute Sri Lanka’s post-conflict stability to the success of the insurgent and terrorist rehabilitation program.

Many discussions on design theory applications within military contexts often revolve around a small population of design practitioners using complex terms and exclusive language, contrasted by a larger population of design skeptics that routinely demand a universal, scripted, and complete examples for “doing design right.” Design, a form of conceptual planning and sense making, continues to gain traction in strategic political and military institutions, yet faces misunderstanding, disinterest, and outright rejection from military strategists and operational planners for a variety of reasons. This article aims at moving this discourse toward how several design theory concepts are valuable for strategists and decision makers, and how select design concepts might be introduced and applied in a simple language where military practitioners can traverse from strategic intent into operational applications with tangible results. As a lead planner for the Afghan Security Force reduction concept and the 2014 (NTM-A) Transition Plan, I applied design to strategic and operational level planning using these design concepts as well as others