Strategy as a learning process

Islamic terrorism poses a novel challenge that disrupts the ability of western statesmen and military commanders to design a coherent and relevant grand strategy because of the complexity of the phenomenon; the military and the statesmen are required to conduct complex learning and diagnostic processes to properly interpret the operational environment, analyze the relevance of political goals and military courses of action and adjust them accordingly, to design a strategy. This article develops the concept of Discourse Space (open and closed), identifying the correlation between strategic learning and the Open Discourse Space and identifying the condition required to create it.