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Crusader Mentality
A Response to Andrew Bacevich

by Matthew E. Valkovic and Brian M. Burton
Small Wars Journal Op-Ed

Numerous commentators in policy community, media, and academia have recently expounded upon the US Army’s unusually public debate over the appropriate lessons to draw from the Iraq war to shape the institution for the future. Andrew Bacevich is the latest to lend his distinguished voice to the fray. While we greatly admire and respect Prof. Bacevich and his work, his essay in the October 2008 issue of The Atlantic presented a flawed analysis of this important issue that warrants a response.

Bacevich argues that the Army’s perceived current focus on preparing for counterinsurgency has supplanted the Army’s traditional conventional war-fighting doctrine and set the military on course for future Iraq-style conflicts that are “protracted, ambiguous, and continuous.” On the first point, Bacevich presents Colonel Gian Gentile as a stand-in for his own views. Gentile’s concern is that the Army’s ability to perform conventional combat operations has seriously deteriorated because soldiers are not conducting training for the fundamentals of military conflict. Its soldiers have become “constabulary” forces charged with the protecting the local populations of failed states and re-building their communities, and in doing so have lost sight of their core mission of fighting and winning the nation’s wars.

But even today, with counterinsurgency doctrine supposedly taking over as the Army’s organizing principle, the organizational culture of the Army has not really changed. This is not to say that the Army has not learned counterinsurgency and, in addition, it is not to say certain functions of the Army (like the field artillery branch) have not suffered as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the Army today remains very much organized as a conventional force. Newly recruited soldiers, when they go through basic training and receive their advanced individual training are still taught their traditional military occupational specialty. The fire support specialists, formerly known as forward observers, still learn how to call for fire at Fort Sill. The Army school houses fundamentally teach the same things.

Bacevich and Gentile cite the National Training Center at Fort Irwin as a prime example in their lament about the degradation of the Army’s combat skills. There’s no doubt that conventional force-on-force training is no longer exclusively executed there, what has taken its place is not just counterinsurgency training, but a mix of both - termed “full spectrum operations.” Units that rotate through NTC today have provided security to the local population one day and sent a company of mechanized infantry to destroy a platoon of Soviet look-alike BMP infantry fighting vehicles the next. Tank gunnery training and maneuver combat exercises still occupy much of a battalion’s pre-deployment time.

The point is that Army, in the midst of waging two counterinsurgency campaigns, is still very much a force concerned with its conventional combat role. The balancing act is hard, but unavoidable. It has to prepare its soldiers to be effective in an irregular operating environment, while – at the same time - attempting to maintain a high level of proficiency in conventional military missions and tasks. Given this situation, it is unclear what Gentile would propose as a solution. Would he prefer that the Army ignore the wars it is currently involved in to prepare for conventional wars that may or may not happen in the future?

Bacevich’s second argument and his deeper fear is that, now that the Army is capable of conducting counterinsurgency and stability operations, the United States will continue to be bogged down in a costly and unnecessary path of interventionism with the pipe-dream purpose of saving the world. It is, Bacevich charges, an “affirmation” of the Long War launched recklessly in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 by President Bush and the “Vulcans” in his war cabinet.

In the course of this critique, Bacevich (like Gentile) seeks to tear down the importance of counterinsurgency, as well as those who have advocated its development within the Army. He uncritically repeats Gentile’s dubious assertion that General David Petraeus’s successes in Iraq had more to do with buying off the enemy than a change in approach, as if cooptation of foes were not a well-established component of any counterinsurgency. He further conflates Petraeus’s and John Nagl’s advocacy for adapting the force for irregular warfare with an unquestioning acceptance of the Bush Administration’s post 9/11 foreign policy goals. He tars them as “Crusaders” who are wedded to counterinsurgency as the solution to all foreign policy problems, rather than simply as part of a community of innovators who have helped devise more effective ways to prosecute the wars of today. When did striving to fight America’s current wars better become the wrong thing to do?

Like Gentile, Bacevich offers much criticism but no alternative solution for America’s current predicament. He says the United States must retain “strategic choice.” We agree: maintaining a variety of capabilities, both military and civilian, to operate across a range of strategic environments is essential to preserve US national security. But what of Iraq and Afghanistan today? Is America supposed to simply turn its back on those countries and act like the past seven years never happened? Is the Army supposed to go back to preparing only for the conventional wars it wants to fight rather than the irregular ones it actually is fighting? We humbly submit that the answer is no.

Matthew E. Valkovic is a first lieutenant in the US Army currently deploying to Iraq. Brian M. Burton is a research assistant at the Center for a New American Security and a graduate student in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the Department of Defense or Department of the Army.

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Speaking in Washington yesterday, McKiernan described Afghanistan as "a far more complex environment than I ever found in Iraq." The country's mountainous terrain, rural population, poverty, illiteracy, 400 major tribal networks and history of civil war all make for unique challenges, he said.

--Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post

AFGHANISTAN

Afghanistan Must Be Viewed Through Regional Prism, General Says - Gerry J. Gilmore, American Forces Press Service

NATO’s top military commander in Afghanistan said today he is “cautiously optimistic” regarding recent Pakistani military efforts to rein in insurgent activity in areas near the border with Afghanistan.

The Pakistani leadership now appears to be acting against terrorist sanctuaries located in the country’s remote federally administered tribal area, Army Gen. David D. McKiernan, commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, told Pentagon reporters.

Pakistani leaders may recognize that those militant bases pose “an existential threat” to Pakistan‘s future, McKiernan said. “I am encouraged by the military actions that the Pakistani army and frontier corps have undertaken in places like Bajaur,” he added.

Bajaur, the northernmost of Pakistan’s seven tribal agencies located along its border with Afghanistan, is known to contain Taliban and al-Qaida hideouts. Al-Qaida and Taliban militants conduct raids into Afghanistan from safe havens in Pakistan.

The Afghanistan-Pakistan border situation, McKiernan said, supports his contention that the conflict in Afghanistan must be viewed as a regional issue.

“I’ve consistently said that it’s very difficult for me to imagine the right outcome in Afghanistan without the right outcome in the militant sanctuaries on the Pakistani side of the border,” McKiernan said. “So, I think it’s a regional problem set that will require regional solutions.”

Having stability in that part of the world is vital to US national security interests, the general said.

McKiernan has recommended that thousands of additional US troops be deployed to Afghanistan in the months ahead to help tamp down mounting insurgent-generated violence, some of which is occurring along the border with Pakistan. Meanwhile, he said, there is potential “for increased military synchronization” between Afghan, US and Pakistani troops in the future.

McKiernan praised Afghan Defense Minister Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak’s proposal to establish a joint Afghan-Pakistani border patrol consisting of Pakistani military or frontier corpsmen, Afghan border police and ISAF troops, calling it “a very powerful idea.”

American Forces Press Service. More at Voice of America.

Commander in Afghanistan Wants More Troops - Ann Scott Tyson. Washington Post

The new top US commander in Afghanistan said yesterday that more American troops are urgently required to combat a worsening insurgency, but he stated emphatically that no Iraq-style "surge" of forces will end the conflict there.

"Afghanistan is not Iraq," said Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led ground forces during the 2003 Iraq invasion and took over four months ago as head of the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan.

Speaking in Washington yesterday, McKiernan described Afghanistan as "a far more complex environment than I ever found in Iraq." The country's mountainous terrain, rural population, poverty, illiteracy, 400 major tribal networks and history of civil war all make for unique challenges, he said.

"The word I don't use for Afghanistan is 'surge,' " McKiernan stressed, saying that what is required is a "sustained commitment" to a counterinsurgency effort that could last many years and would ultimately require a political, not military, solution.

More at the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

NATO Aims at Afghans Whose Drugs Aid Militants - Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, New York Times

NATO forces in Afghanistan will step up attacks on drug lords and narcotics traffickers who are supporting an insurgency that has rebounded in the past year and is responsible for rising violence, the top American commander in Afghanistan said Wednesday.

The comments by the commander, Gen. David D. McKiernan, made clear that international troops in Afghanistan were not going to eradicate opium poppy crops. Afghanistan is the world’s top supplier of opium poppies, which are processed into heroin.

But by drawing a clear link between the narcotics trade and its role in the insurgency, General McKiernan was outlining what could be an important and expanding role for American and NATO troops as they seek to eliminate a source of money and weapons for the insurgency.

More at The New York Times.

British Envoy Says Mission in Afghanistan is Doomed, According to Leaked Memo - Charles Bremner and Michael Evans, The Times

Britain’s Ambassador to Afghanistan has stoked opposition to the allied operation there by reportedly saying that the campaign against the Taleban insurgents would fail and that the best hope was to install an acceptable dictator in Kabul.

Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, a Foreign Office heavyweight with a reputation for blunt speaking, delivered his bleak assessment of the seven-year Nato campaign in Afghanistan in a briefing with a French diplomat, according to French leaks. However sources in Whitehall said the account was a parody of the British Ambassador’s remarks.

François Fitou, the deputy French Ambassador to Kabul, told President Sarkozy’s office and the Foreign Ministry in a coded cable that Sir Sherard believed that “the current situation is bad; the security situation is getting worse; so is corruption and the Government has lost all trust”.

According to Mr Fitou, Sir Sherard told him on September 2 that the NATO-led military operation was making things worse. “The foreign forces are ensuring the survival of a regime which would collapse without them . . . They are slowing down and complicating an eventual exit from the crisis, which will probably be dramatic,” the Ambassador was quoted as saying.

More at The Times.

Afghanistan / Pakistan Tribal Areas

Afghanistan’s Solution Primarily Political, Not Military, General Says - AFPS
Amid Taliban Violence, Key Players Differ on Strategy - CS Monitor
Consolidated Fielding Center Speeds Afghan Army’s Growth - AFPS
US Missile Strike Kills 6 - Associated Press
Militants Force Men to Fight - Associated Press
Pakistanis Rise Up - Washington Times editorial
Want War? The Afghans Will Oblige - Minneapolis Star Tribune opinion

Pakistan

US Pressure Deepens Divide Between Military and Civilian Leadership - VOA
Pakistan’s New Spy Chief - New York Times editorial

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Surging Statecraft to Save Afghanistan

by Vikram J. Singh and Nathaniel C. Fick

Small Wars Journal Op-Ed

We looked down into Pakistan in August from the Afghan border outpost of Torkham, high in the legendary Khyber Pass. Invaders have carved violent paths across this border in both directions since the time of Alexander the Great. Today, an invasion by proxy from Pakistan continues that bloody tradition.

Fighters flowing into Afghanistan from remote and rebellious western Pakistan have helped drive violence to its highest levels since U.S. forces ousted the Taliban in 2001, sparking concern in NATO capitals and anger from many Afghans who think Pakistan diverts U.S. aid dollars to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. “If you Americans are serious,” one tribal elder in Kandahar told us in frustration, “then take care of Pakistan.”

If only it were so simple. Stabilizing Afghanistan is going to require one of the most complicated exercises in statecraft undertaken by the United States in years. The next U.S. President must grasp both Pakistani and Indian motivations in Afghanistan, for these regional dynamics drive the "proxy invasion" that is undermining the coalition’s efforts there. A sound regional approach should lead the United States to re-evaluate blank-check security assistance to Pakistan; increase investment in non-military aspects of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship; and actively try to build confidence between New Delhi, Islamabad, and Kabul.

The heart of the regional dysfunction is Pakistan, a nation that has always feared two things: an Indian invasion and its own disintegration along ethnic lines. Pakistani leaders view Afghanistan not as part of the "war on terror," but as an Islamic rear echelon in which Pakistani forces would join long-nurtured proxies to repel any Indian invasion and occupation. Pakistan’s dominant Punjabis also fear that the British-imposed Afghan–Pakistan border, which splits ethnic-Pashtun lands and has never been accepted by Pashtun people or any modern Afghan government, will become a crack in Pakistan’s foundation. Bangladesh split from Pakistan with Indian support in 1971 and Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, has supported radical Islamists who could undermine traditional (and potentially separatist) ethnic-Pashtun power structures ever since.

To the east, India seeks to deter Pakistan from supporting extremists who set off bombs in Indian cities. India enjoys provoking uncertainty in Islamabad through diplomatic activity in Afghanistan, stoking Pakistani fears that India will use Afghan territory as a base of support not just for Pashtuns, but also for the Baluchi and Sindhi separatists who have long agitated for independence in western Pakistan.

This Indo-Pak competition in Afghanistan explains why hundreds of millions of dollars in monthly U.S. military assistance for Islamabad has produced only greater instability, growing sanctuary for extremists, and a haven for those plotting global terrorism. Both nations meddle actively in the border areas, and for Pakistan in particular, the incentives are perverse. As one U.S. official explained to us, “Pakistan gets over a billion dollars per year for poor cooperation and is quite certain that improved cooperation or any success against Al Qaeda would result in less, not more, U.S. support.”

Only a genuine U.S. offer of long-term cooperation can make fighting al Qaeda more worthwhile to Pakistan than the status quo. The first component of such an offer must be ending blank-check security assistance to Pakistan. The next U.S. president needs Congressional support to send a new message and offer a new bargain to Pakistan's military and fractious civilian leaders: “Pakistan’s progress as a modern state is at real risk either from Al Qaeda extremists or from any major international terrorist attack getting traced back to Pakistani territory, forcing western military action. We are ready to discuss a ten-year aid package, significant infrastructure investment, and security agreements in exchange for measurable progress along the border, concrete steps to address the grievances of minority populations, and investment in education, health, and basic infrastructure. The alternative is a drawing down of U.S. security assistance and additional unilateral military action inside your territory.”

Such a message would help the U.S. with the second facet of a truly regional strategy: moving beyond Pakistan's military to rebuild trust with the Pakistani people who now see us as friends of a dictator, rather than friends of average citizens. The U.S. should engage the academic elite on the possibility of opening an American University in Islamabad, and engage the business elite on the possibility of a bilateral investment treaty. America has initiatives underway to provide $750 million in assistance to local populations in Pakistan, and to build up the Pakistani Frontier Corps, irregular forces that we hope will counter extremists. These efforts should be continued. Pakistan's new democratic government needs to be pressured to focus beyond infighting and look to the well-being of its people. If it fails to support schools, clinics and political rights, then the U.S. should threaten to refuse to transfer items such as spare parts for the F-16s that really matter to Pakistani leaders.

Finally, a regional strategy requires the U.S. to begin confidence-building initiatives that encourage New Delhi and Islamabad to stop using Afghanistan as a weapon in their own bilateral struggle. Even if it is unsympathetic to Pakistan's concerns about India and separatists, the U.S. should offer Islamabad long-term strategic support. This could include commitments from New Delhi not to support its own proxy invasion from Afghanistan into Pakistan and from Islamabad to end terrorist infiltration of Kashmir and Afghanistan. The place to start is with regular shuttle diplomacy between New Delhi, Islamabad and Kabul to discuss the concerns playing out in each capital. Only increased regional confidence and a real U.S. commitment to stick with Pakistan even after defeating al Qaeda can enable Pakistan's leaders to tackle the extremist elements within the ISI who equate peace with a loss of power.

These are hard steps that offer no instant gratification. For now, the real leader in Pakistan remains the military. The recently revived civilian government has already brought political chaos and disunity. Without good partners in Pakistan, however, U.S. leaders will continue to be tempted by the two supposedly “simple solutions” we heard from many Afghans: sealing the border or expanding military operations into Pakistan without Pakistani consent. But neither credible border security nor unilateral western (or Afghan) military action against extremists in Pakistan has much hope of success.

The border, stretching 1,640 miles (equivalent to the distance from Washington D.C. to Albuquerque) through some of the most rugged territory on earth, will never be sealed. Locals pass back and forth without papers even at official crossings like Torkham. Many live on one side and work in fields on the other, and almost all have family on both sides of the line. Insurgents can easily cross through the open spaces between checkpoints, or blend into the scores of people we watched traverse the border on foot, in busses and atop the Technicolor “jingle trucks" carrying goods between countries.

Without Pakistani support, anything beyond limited covert military action to hunt militants in Pakistan is unworkable for two reasons. First, the U.S. does not and will not have enough forces to support a major counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, let alone in Pakistan. Second, coalition forces in Afghanistan depend on Pakistan for the delivery of virtually all their vital supplies. More than half of the goods passing through Torkham each day are destined for U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan, and the only alternate routes from the sea are through Iran or through the Caucasus via Russia and Georgia. If Pakistan were to shut down access to its territory and airspace in response to any unilateral invasion, then coalition forces in Afghanistan would face strangulation.

Frustrating though it is, the United States is far from all-powerful in Afghanistan. The proxy war being waged from terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan can only be stopped with cooperation from Islamabad to fight the militants on Pakistani soil, cultivate and support local tribal allies willing to fight Al Qaeda, and bring hope to the local populations with development and political rights. The extremist threat to Pakistan is seen by Islamabad as more bearable than Indian encirclement from Afghanistan. This is a foolish miscalculation given that the bigger threat to Pakistan is really from Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, who likely killed former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and have driven suicide bombings like that at the Marriot hotel last month to intolerable levels. But perception too often becomes reality, and despite their promises, Pakistani leaders will only really cooperate when their concerns about Indian meddling are addressed.

A failed Pakistan helps no one. This is the one theater on earth where terrorism, radical Islam, traditional nation-state conflict, and confirmed weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, really come together. Given the overriding imperative to keep dangerous weapons out of dangerous hands, it is up to Washington to find the strategic interests common to the U.S., India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and to craft the necessary bargains to protect those interests. This is the essence of statecraft. While they think about more troops for Afghanistan and keeping America's military relationship with Pakistan sound, U.S. leaders must start down the diplomatic road to stability in Afghanistan. It runs through New Delhi, Islamabad, and Kabul.

Mr. Singh is a former Pentagon official who worked on counterinsurgency and stability operations. Mr. Fick is a former Marine officer who served in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001-2002. They are Fellows at the Center for a New American Security.

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From Losing to Winning in Afghanistan - Michael O'Hanlon and Andrew Shearer, Washington Times opinion

... As Gen. Petraeus sets his sights now on the broader Central Command region, and US presidential candidates together with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates assert the need for more international forces in Afghanistan, it is becoming safe to assume that the international presence in Afghanistan will further strengthen over the coming months, perhaps from its current total of some 62,000 troops to 75,000 or more. There is talk, not surprisingly, of a "surge" for Afghanistan, and hope that we can soon accomplish there what has begun to take root in Iraq.

But we must avoid viewing the situation entirely in this light. Combined Iraqi and international forces numbered 600,000 or more personnel in the crucial months of the surge. In Afghanistan, the current figure is less than 200,000 and will grow only modestly in coming months - for a country even larger and more populous than Iraq. Afghanistan does not have the economic resources, or the historical track record of operating as a strong and cohesive polity, that Iraq enjoys. And for all the trouble Syria and Iran have caused in Iraq, by shipping in weaponry and tolerating the flow of al Qaeda fighters into the country, they have never represented the kind of sanctuary for main insurgent groups that Pakistan's tribal regions provide in regard to Afghanistan.

As such, it is difficult to spell out a convincing strategy for turning things around in Afghanistan. Almost surely, we will not find a silver bullet strategy as we did in Iraq; the first goal will be to arrest the deterioration of the situation, and only thereafter to turn the momentum in favor of the Afghan people and government as well as the international community. We need to do what is possible across four main fronts, and then hope that over time small positive developments within each strengthen and reinforce each...

More at The Washington Times.

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The Limits of American Power and Civil-Military Relations
A Framework for Discussion

by Thomas Donnelly

Small Wars Journal Op-Ed

It has been fascinating to follow the discussion sparked by Andy Bacevich’s short but incisive piece on “The Petraeus Doctrine” in the Atlantic. However, two elements of the essay have been overlooked. Bacevich’s core complaints are less about the structure of the U.S. Army (or the military more broadly) or its operational doctrine than they are about the underlying issues of the limits of American power and civil-military relations. The analysis of the John-Nagl-versus-Gian-Gentile debate is merely a framework for these larger questions.

Take the second question first. Bacevich concludes with what he rightly describes as “the biggest question of all.” That is, in the American democracy, do the essential choices about war rest with soldiers or civilians? The presumption he makes, however, that the decision to prosecute the Long War has been delegated to the military, isn’t correct: rather, it’s been the military (with top-cover from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) that’s been trying to dodge the decision. One may well argue that the Bush Administration has made unwise choices, but they are undeniably choices that have been validated by the American political process. Bacevich has elsewhere argued that the course of events since the 2006 election has disregarded the democratic process, but that’s not right, either. The Democrats victories in the 2006 elections gave them a congressional majority, but not a large enough majority to override the Constitution’s presumptions in favor of the commander-in-chief.

Bacevich similarly disparages at the quality of the war-policy debate, and it’s hard to disagree. But quality is no more the measure of democratic legitimacy than is any particular outcome. As a matter of the historical record, America’s domestic debates about war have generated more heat than light. And, when it came to Iraq, what is remarkable in retrospect is how long it took to translate civilian guidance – President’s Bush’s oft-stated goals of a stable and representative government in Baghdad – into military policy. The Decider decided; alas, the commander-in-chief did not sufficiently command, and the uniforms, too frequently, shirked.

So it is the new civilian leadership – in the form of a chastened, post-2006 President Bush and current Defense Secretary Robert Gates – that finally is dragging a still-reluctant military into embracing the irregular warfare mission. Just this Monday, Gates continued his jeremiad against “Next-War-It is” and “the defense bureaucracy’s priorities and lack of urgency opposed to a wartime footing and a wartime mentality.” This may be a strategic error, but it’s his civilian job to make the call. If anyone’s outside our norms of civil-military relations, it’s those in the Gentile-Bacevich camp.

And so to the second question. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the conventional-force advocates are looking for ways to constrain what they see as an unhealthy American, exceptionalist tendency to meddle in other peoples’ political affairs. Bacevich has long made this argument and makes it again in the Atlantic article, though by proxy. He approvingly quotes Gentile’s critique of Nagl’s “breathtaking” assertion about “the efficacy of American military power to shape events.”

Realism – that is, a cold-blooded assessment of costs and benefits – is no small virtue in the exercise of power. But this, along with realism about the limits of technology, was a central theme of Gates’ speech at National Defense University. And he allowed as how “we are unlikely to repeat another Iraq or Afghanistan anytime soon.” Yet he went on to say “that doesn’t mean we may not face similar challenges in a variety of locales.” This is not, as Bacevich portrays it, of “inescapable eventuality” of wars to come, or America’s predestined strategic fate, it’s an overdue recognition that we don’t just get to fight the wars that are congenial to generals.

Nor is Gates attempting to re-fight the last war. (This trope should be banished forever, but let it be noted that irregular warfare was America’s “first way of war;” Small Wars Journal readers would do well to read John Grenier’s – and he was an Air Force officer! – book by that title.) It’s the conventional-force school that is attempting to accomplish what Bacevich claims is Nagl’s goal: reducing and precluding U.S. strategic options.

It was a reasonable decision, as Bacevich points out, to refocus the Army on conventional combat after Vietnam; the Soviet 8th Guards Army had its engines idling in East Germany. It’s much harder to come up with a similar land-force threat today; Chinese military modernization is focused on the maritime, air, space and electromagnetic realms and the Russian army’s performance in Georgia was underwhelming. Invading Iran would call for lots of tanks, but if we’re precluding options, that would be high on my list.

By all means, let’s continue the debate on the purpose of America’s land forces, but let’s take the mission – as defined by the Constitutional civilian authority – as the point of departure. And yes, let’s not disguise a strategy and policy agenda in force-structure clothing. Let’s just also not claim all purity on one side.

Thomas Donnelly is a resident fellow in defense and security policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously, he served as policy group director and professional staff member for the House Armed Services Committee.

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Just a quick one - lots of good stuff over at the USA/USMC CON Center blog - to include - Director's September 2008 COIN SITREP, links to COIN related articles in Armor and Military Review, 3 new COIN articles in The Colloquium, COIN Workshop info - and more.

Same, same for the Combined Arms Center blog.

Both are great examples of what Frontier 6 (aka LTG William Caldwell) had in mind when he posted here at SWJ on changing the organizational culture.

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Follow the Money: Why the US is Losing the War in Afghanistan by Anthony Cordesman, Center for Strategic and International Studies

Synopsis:

Most of the literature on the cost of the Iraq War, Afghan War, and “war on terrorism” focuses on the burden these wars place on the federal budget and the US economy. These are very real issues, but they also have deflected attention from another key issue: whether the war in Afghanistan is being properly funded and being given the resources necessary to win.

Anthony H. Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at CSIS, has prepared a new report showing that the US has consistently failed to provide the financial and military resources necessary to win the war, and that these failures may well mean the US is losing it.

Follow the Money: Why the US is Losing the War in Afghanistan

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What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

--General Anthony Zinni- Naval Institute Forum, Sept. 2003

First item - Blast Kills 7 Russian Troops in S. Ossetia - Philip Pan, Washington Post

A car bomb exploded outside Russia's military headquarters in South Ossetia on Friday, killing seven soldiers and two others in what leaders of the Kremlin-backed separatist region immediately described as a terrorist attack launched by Georgia.

The blast in Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, came amid continuing tensions as a cease-fire deadline approached for Russian troops to withdraw from territory around the breakaway region, which has declared its independence from Georgia.

Russian troops had seized the car in a Georgian village outside South Ossetia and taken it to Tskhinvali to be searched after detaining four individuals who were carrying guns and grenades, Maj. Gen. Marat Kulakhmetov, the commander of the Russian forces, told the Interfax news agency.

More at the Washington Post, New York Times, Agence France-Presse and Associated Press.

And this broader item - in tomorrow's Post - Behind the Bluster, Russia Is Collapsing by Murray Feshbach

The bear is back. That's what all too many Russia-watchers have been saying since Russian troops steamrolled Georgia in August, warning that the country's strongman, Vladimir Putin, was clawing his way back toward superpower status. The new Russia's resurgence has been fueled -- quite literally -- by windfall profits from gas and oil, a big jump in defense spending and the cocky attitude on such display during the mauling of Georgia, its US-backed neighbor to the south. Many now believe that the powerful Russian bear of the Cold War years is coming out of hibernation.

Not so fast. Predictions that Russia will again become powerful, rich and influential ignore some simply devastating problems at home that block any march to power. Sure, Russia's army could take tiny Georgia. But Putin's military is still in tatters, armed with rusting weaponry and staffed with indifferent recruits. Meanwhile, a declining population is robbing the military of a new generation of soldiers. Russia's economy is almost totally dependent on the price of oil. And, worst of all, it's facing a public health crisis that verges on the catastrophic.

To be sure, the skylines of Russia's cities are chock-a-block with cranes. Industrial lofts are now the rage in Moscow, Russian tourists crowd far-flung locales from Thailand to the Caribbean, and Russian moguls are snapping up real estate and art in London almost as quickly as their oil-rich counterparts from the Persian Gulf. But behind the shiny surface, Russian society may actually be weaker than it was even during Soviet times. The Kremlin's recent military adventures and tough talk are the bluster of the frail, not the swagger of the strong.

While Russia has capitalized impressively on its oil industry, the volatility of the world oil market means that Putin cannot count on a long-term pipeline of cash flowing from high oil prices. A predicted drop of about one-third in the price of a barrel of oil will surely constrain Putin's ability to carry out his ambitious agendas, both foreign and domestic.

That makes Moscow's announced plan to boost defense spending by close to 26 percent in 2009 - in order to fully re-arm its military with state-of-the-art weaponry - a dicey proposition. What the world saw in Georgia was a badly outdated arsenal, one that would take many years to replace - even assuming the country could afford the $200 billion cost.

Something even larger is blocking Russia's march. Recent decades, most notably since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, have seen an appalling deterioration in the health of the Russian population, anchoring Russia not in the forefront of developed countries but among the most backward of nations.

Much more at The Washington Post.

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Standard Warfare May Be Eclipsed By Nation-Building - Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post

The Army on Monday will unveil an unprecedented doctrine that declares nation-building missions will probably become more important than conventional warfare and defines "fragile states" that breed crime, terrorism and religious and ethnic strife as the greatest threat to US national security.

The doctrine, which has generated intense debate in the US military establishment and government, holds that in coming years, American troops are not likely to engage in major ground combat against hostile states as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, but instead will frequently be called upon to operate in lawless areas to safeguard populations and rebuild countries.

Such "stability operations" will last longer and ultimately contribute more to the military's success than "traditional combat operations," according to the Army's new Stability Operations Field Manual, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post...

But as the Army struggles to define its long-term future beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, some critics within the military warn that the new emphasis on nation-building is a dangerous distraction from what they believe should be the Army's focus: strengthening its core war-fighting skills to prepare for large-scale ground combat.

The critics challenge the assumption that major wars are unlikely in the future, pointing to the risk of high-intensity conflict that could require sizable Army deployments to North Korea, Iran, Pakistan or elsewhere. "All we need to do is look at Russia and Georgia a few months ago. That suggests the description . . . of future war is too narrow," said Col. Gian P. Gentile, an Iraq war veteran with a doctorate in history who is a leading thinker in the Army camp opposed to the new doctrine...

Civilian officials and nongovernmental groups voice a different concern: that the military's push to expand its exercise of "soft power," while perhaps inevitable, given the dearth of civilian resources, marks a growing militarization of US foreign policy...

More at The Washington Post.

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A Manhunt or a Vital War? - Robert Kaplan, New York Times opinion

The rising violence in Afghanistan and fractious political situation in Pakistan have become leading issues in the American presidential campaign and the debates between the candidates. Indeed, after seven years of war in the region, it’s time to ask a very impolite set of questions: If we did, by chance, capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, would Afghanistan still matter? Would there be public support for sending more American troops to stabilize a country that has rarely in its history enjoyed strong central government and that abuts a tribal area in Pakistan that neither the British nor the Pakistanis have ever been able to control? Is the war in Afghanistan, deep down, anything more than a manhunt for a handful of individuals? And if it is, how do we define victory there?

After all, Afghanistan is not the only ungovernable space with an Islamic setting around the world that can provide a base for terrorists who want to attack the United States. The world is full of them: from Somalia to the southern Philippines to the Indonesian archipelago. Better, perhaps, not to be tied down with thousands of troops in one or two places, and instead use sophisticated, high-tech covert means to hunt down hostile groups wherever they crop up. The problem with Osama bin Laden, one could argue, was not that he had a haven in Afghanistan in the 1990s but that he was not pursued there with sufficient vigor.

So, here’s my answer: In fact, Afghanistan is more than a manhunt, and it does matter, for reasons that have not been fully fleshed out by policy makers or the military.

More at The New York Times.

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Winning the Battle, Losing the Faith - Nathaniel Fick and Vikram Singh, New York Times opinion

"The lion of the people will turn on you,” warned Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, a former Taliban foreign minister, as we sipped green tea at his home in Kabul a few weeks ago. He noted that while Americans had been shocked by a series of spectacular insurgent attacks over the summer, the United States-led coalition faced a far greater danger than the resurgent Taliban: growing despair among average Afghans that their government is fundamentally illegitimate.

Every aspect of sound counterinsurgency strategy revolves around bolstering the government’s legitimacy. When ordinary people lose their faith in their government, then they also lose faith in the foreigners who prop it up. The day that happens across Afghanistan is the day we lose the war.

With more than 230 military deaths since January, this year is on track to be the deadliest yet for the coalition in Afghanistan. July alone saw a brazen attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the deaths of nine Americans at a combat outpost in Nuristan and the killing of 10 French soldiers on the outskirts of Kabul. The response has been a growing consensus around sending two to four more combat brigades to Afghanistan - 8,000 to 16,000 troops.

Although larger and more populous than Iraq, Afghanistan has fewer than half the coalition forces, and critical programs to advise the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police operate at one-third to one-half of their authorized strength. As the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Michael Mullen, told Congress last year, “In Afghanistan we do what we can; in Iraq we do what we must.”

More at The New York Times.

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Provincial Reconstruction in Afghanistan
An Examination of the Problems of Integrating the Military, Political and Development Dimensions with Reference to the US Experience in Vietnam
by Colonel Ian Westerman, Small Wars Journal Exclusive

Provincial Reconstruction in Afghanistan (Full PDF Article)

The conflict in Afghanistan has been running now for more than six years but, after some early successes, the situation appears to have developed into a classic insurgency with the prospect of it becoming a long-term commitment for the coalition forces. Since taking the lead of the UN established International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in 2003, NATO has pinned a lot of its hopes on the ability of its multi-agency Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) to deliver stabilization to the country. The PRTs try to bring together the three strands of security, governance, and development through the contribution made by the military, political and economic elements of the teams. This paper considers how NATO is tackling the particular difficulties of managing the PRTs, and how it is attempting to harmonise the potentially disparate aims of their three separate dimensions.

In examining the problems faced by ISAF the dissertation looks back to the US experience in Vietnam where a similar situation existed in the late 1960s with their pacification programme. Robert Komer’s mandate from President Johnson was to determine where the problems lay, and to come up with proposals for solving them. Komer’s eventual recommendation was for a single civil-military command structure, which he later went on to help implement by establishing the Civil Operations Revolutionary Development Support programme, or CORDS, in Vietnam. The dissertation takes a close look at how Komer went about this, and consideration is made of whether there are any lessons from Komer’s work with CORDS that could be usefully employed by ISAF today.

In the conclusion some of the current problems that the coalition faces in Afghanistan are identified, and the specific areas where the lessons from CORDS might be helpful are discussed. Recognition is made of the additional problems that ISAF faces over those the US had to manage in Vietnam, and considers whether a military alliance such as NATO is actually capable of establishing the robust, unified command structure necessary to succeed in Afghanistan. It also poses the wider question of the suitability of broad-based coalitions for waging counterinsurgency campaigns at all.

Provincial Reconstruction in Afghanistan (Full PDF Article)

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The release of FM 3.07, Stability Operations, is an important step in the Army’s - and the nation’s - process of understanding the fundamental changes in the international system since the end of the Cold War. In conjunction with FM 3.0, Operations, and FM 3.24, Counterinsurgency, this document codifies a longtime but unacknowledged reality - that it is the Army’s task not just to win the war, but to create a lasting peace in the aftermath of conflict.

Important as these doctrinal manuals are in correctly understanding the nature of conflict in the 21st century - one in which weak states rather than strong ones are the greatest threat to our security and the smooth functioning of the international system - they are but a first step. Doctrine drives the way we organize and train our forces, educate our leaders, and select and promote our people. The Army now faces the difficult task of implementing significant changes in all of those areas to build the military we need for the 21st century.

Nearly three years ago, Department of Defense Directive 3000.05 stated that “Stability operations are a core U.S. military mission that the Department of Defense shall be prepared to conduct and support. They shall be given priority comparable to combat operations and be explicitly addressed and integrated across all DoD activities including doctrine, organizations, training, education, exercises, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities, and planning.” Since then, much progress has been made, but much more work remains to be done. Secretary of Defense Gates felt compelled to note just a week ago today that “Support for conventional modernization programs is deeply embedded in our budget, in our bureaucracy, in the defense industry, and in Congress. My fundamental concern is that there is not commensurate institutional support - including in the Pentagon - for the capabilities needed to win the wars we are in, and of the kinds of missions we are most likely to undertake in the future.”

The publication of FM 3.07 is an important step in the direction of preparing the Army for the wars we are in and the kinds of missions we are most likely to undertake in the future. Now comes the hard part of building the capabilities we need to win the wars of today and tomorrow.

-----

SWJ Editors Notes:

FM 3.07, Stability Operations was released / posted this morning by the US Army Combined Arms Center.

Also see It's Time for an Army Advisor Corps by Dr. John Nagl.

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Position: Arab Cultural/Political Subject Matter Expert

Location: Counterinsurgency Center For Excellence (COIN CFE), Camp Taji, Iraq

Qualifications: Instructor should have a PhD in Arab political / cultural studies. Candidates who have an MA and are currently working toward a PhD are acceptable. Instructor must be able to travel throughout Iraq when required as part of Mobile Training Teams (MTTs) and COIN Survey Teams (CSTs) augmenting information collection efforts for both the COIN CFE (Counterinsurgency Center For Excellence) and the ICS (Iraqi Counterinsurgency School). Wide ranging discovery and analysis of this kind should be presented to the Commander, Iraqi COIN School and his mission design team as part of the overall criteria that will ultimately shape the mature form and purpose of the Iraqi COIN School. Instructor must have a working knowledge of both historical and contemporary Iraqi government and the ability to instruct coalition forces about the nature of this system and its effects on day-to-day military operations; have an understanding of the structure of the Iraqi Army Division and its components and the processes and politics of the Iraqi Ground Forces Command, the Ministry of Defense and the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq. Instructor should be familiar with the current civil-military situation in Iraq as it relates to basic counterinsurgency doctrine as taught by the COIN CFE and the ICS.

Duties: Educates coalition military and inter-agency personnel on Arab political and cultural topics and their relationship with and significance to the Contemporary Operating Environment (COE) and ongoing counterinsurgency operations. Maintains situational awareness of day-to-day political / military events in the Iraqi theater of operations and incorporates this information into presentations as required. Infuses instruction with practical linkages between political/cultural issues and military operations. Assists in the collection, analysis and summation of COIN best practices for distribution to US and Iraqi training centers. Assists in curriculum development and course content design as it relates to political/cultural learning objectives in order to insure continuity, validity and currency of coalition and Iraqi COIN curricula.

Contact: William Rebarick, Raytheon Company, 321.235.1750 office, DSN 312.960.8647, wrebarick@raytheon.com

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Transitions While Conducting Counterinsurgency Operations
by Lieutenant Colonel Steven Alexander, Small Wars Journal

Transitions While Conducting Counterinsurgency Operations (Full PDF Article)

Transitioning is critical to the success of any operation. However within a counterinsurgency (COIN) operation where the interaction between military and inter-agency efforts intertwine with Host Nation dynamics managing transition takes on a degree of complexity that far out paces the conduct of conventional operations on a linear battlefield. Counterinsurgents do not manage transition in a linear fashion like their conventional partners during the conduct of offensive and defensive operations; there is a great deal of doctrine available describing phasing for these actions. Unfortunately we have very few resources or studies that go into any detail on the methodology a COIN force (the military and civil elements deployed to the HN) uses for determining what comprises the conditions that determine a transition under non-linear conditions. Those in the field are left to determine where they are conceptually and what conditions, if adequately accomplished, would allow them to transition responsibility and authority to the Host Nation (HN)-the endstate of most contemporary counterinsurgent efforts. Based on his experiences in Algeria and the Far East David Galula also indentified the challenge of transition in a COIN environment:

The army officer has learned in military academies that combat is divided into distinct phases...For each phase he is taught that there is a standard deployment and maneuver in accordance with the current doctrine. Therefore the intellectual problem of the field officer in conventional combat consists in identifying which phase in which he finds himself and then applying the standard answer to his situation. Such a process does not exist in counterinsurgency warfare. How much time and means to devote to tracking guerillas or, instead, to working the population, by what specific actions and in what order the population could be controlled and led to co-operate, these were questions that the sous-quatier commander had to answer by himself. One can imagine the variety of answers arrived at and the effects on the pacification effort as a whole. (Galula, Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958, 1963).

There are several external factors that impact on transition such as political will, coalition partner’s agenda, and world opinion. This article will not focus on those issues but rather on the COIN force’s action internal to the HN. There are three areas in which transitions must occur with a degree of predictability and control for counterinsurgents to be successful: security (to include Host Nation forces), legitimacy of the provincial/regional government (with respect to providing essential services), and the strength of the local economy. This article explores the inter-dynamics of non-linear transition within these three areas and their importance in successfully establishing the legitimacy of the HN government.

Transitions While Conducting Counterinsurgency Operations (Full PDF Article)

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Africom Stands Up
by Colonel Robert Killebrew, Small Wars Journal Op-Ed

Africom Stands Up (Full PDF Article)

On the first day of October, the new United States Africa Command (Africom) became fully operational. The last major action proposed by former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the new command is chartered to support U.S. military and diplomatic initiatives across a huge continent and among an enormously diverse population. It's no secret that the decision to establish the command was controversial in Africa, and that reception initially ranged from cool to frosty, though that is said to be warming slightly.

Certainly the new command is making every effort to appear helpful and collaborative. The four-star command has two deputy commanders, one three-star for military operations and one ambassador for civil-military relations; its mission statement and other supporting guidance focus on "soft" activities like conflict prevention, consultation and aid. Signally, the title "combatant command," another holdover from the Rumsfeld era, does not appear, replaced instead by "regional military command" and the more historic "unified command." Considering the state of affairs on the African continent, this is all to the good.

Africom Stands Up (Full PDF Article)

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The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) International Security Program (ISP) hosted Lt. General William B. Caldwell, USA, Commanding General, United States Army Combined Arms Center and Ft. Leavenworth; to introduce Field Manual 3-07: Stability Operations yesterday. SWJ was able to attend and found the panel discussion very informative as well as interesting. We hope to post some highlights from the discussion here in the near future. In the meantime CSIS has posted video and audio at their web page for this event.

The army's new stability operations doctrine calls for a comprehensive approach to stabilization efforts that envisions integration of a variety of stakeholders not traditionally combined as full partners in complex contingencies. The CSIS panel discussion included Ambassador John Herbst. Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, United States Department of State; Ambassador Dick Solomon, President, United States Institute for Peace; Ambassador Michael Hess, Assistant Administrator of the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance, United States Agency for International Development; Samuel A. Worthington, CEO and president of InterAction, Nathan Freier, a senior fellow at CSIS, and Rick Barton, codirector of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project.

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US Urgently Reviews Policy On Afghanistan - Karen DeYoung, Washington Post

The White House has launched an urgent review of Afghanistan policy, fast-tracked for completion in the next several weeks, amid growing concern that the administration lacks a comprehensive strategy for the foundering war there and as intelligence officials warn of a rapidly worsening situation on the ground.

Underlying the deliberations is a nearly completed National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan and the Pakistan-based extremists fighting there. Analysts have concluded that reconstituted elements of al-Qaeda and the resurgent Taliban are collaborating with an expanding network of militant groups, making the counterinsurgency war infinitely more complicated.

As the US presidential election approaches, senior officials have expressed worry that the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is so tenuous that it may fall apart while a new set of US policymakers settles in. Others believe a more comprehensive, airtight road map for the way ahead would limit the new president's options.

Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, President Bush's senior adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, has told Pentagon, intelligence and State Department officials to return to the basic questions: What are our objectives in Afghanistan? What can we hope to achieve? What are our resources? What is our allies' role? What do we know about the enemy? How likely is it that weak Afghan and Pakistani governments will rise to the occasion?

More at The Washington Post.

US Study Is Said to Warn of Crisis in Afghanistan - Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, New York Times

A draft report by American intelligence agencies concludes that Afghanistan is in a “downward spiral” and casts serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban’s influence there, according to American officials familiar with the document.

The classified report finds that the breakdown in central authority in Afghanistan has been accelerated by rampant corruption within the government of President Hamid Karzai and by an increase in violence by militants who have launched increasingly sophisticated attacks from havens in Pakistan.

The report, a nearly completed version of a National Intelligence Estimate, is set to be finished after the November elections and will be the most comprehensive American assessment in years on the situation in Afghanistan. Its conclusions represent a harsh verdict on decision-making in the Bush administration, which in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks made Afghanistan the central focus of a global campaign against terrorism.

Beyond the cross-border attacks launched by militants in neighboring Pakistan, the intelligence report asserts that many of Afghanistan’s most vexing problems are of the country’s own making, the officials said.

More at The New York Times.

Gates Seeks European Troops for Afghanistan - Peter Finn, Washington Post

US Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Wednesday asked defense ministers from southeastern Europe to send more troops to Afghanistan, a message that he is likely to forcefully echo at a meeting with other NATO defense officials this week.

"As the situation on the ground in Iraq continues to improve, I urge you to consider sending your military forces to Afghanistan, where there is an urgent need for trainers as they expand their army," Gates said at a meeting of the South-Eastern Europe Defense Ministerial, a 12-member organization composed of NATO members and countries such as Macedonia that want to join the military alliance.

More at the Washington Post and New York Times.

No Afghan-Taliban Peace Talks, For Now - Anand Gopal, Christian Science Monitor

The Taliban are not engaged in peace talks with the Afghan government, despite recent reports to the contrary, say sources close to the insurgents and the government.

Instead, meetings held last month in Saudi Arabia - which brought former Taliban officials together with members of the Afghan and Saudi governments - may be an attempt by Kabul to start negotiations with the current Taliban.

"The meetings signal that the Afghan government is weak and is desperate for a solution," says Waheed Muzhda, a political analyst in Kabul and former official in the Taliban government.

They've come at a time when the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan is reaching unprecedented heights, causing some analysts to doubt that the militants will be interested in making peace.

Moreover, the former Taliban members who participated in the Mecca meetings may not have much sway in persuading current militants to come to the table. "These people don't represent the Taliban," Mr. Muzhda says. "Most of the people have almost no standing with the current Taliban leadership."

More at The Christian Science Monitor.

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A View of Irregular Warfare
A Work in Progress (Draft)
by Colonel Daniel Kelly, Small Wars Journal

A View of Irregular Warfare (Full PDF Article)

SWJ Editors Note: We present this draft (work in progress) essay to encourage feedback by Small Wars Journal readership. The author welcomes comments and suggestions that add to our understanding of the complex operational environments of today – and – tomorrow.

In June 2007, I reported aboard Marine Corps Base Quantico to establish the USMC Center for Irregular Warfare. A Director with no staff, I jumped right into the maelstrom of the challenging environment called Irregular Warfare (IW). Armed with the new tools of my trade, the Multi-Service Concept for Irregular Warfare, a draft version of the Irregular Warfare Joint Operating Concept, the Small Wars Manual and several articles by Frank Hoffman I was ready to do my duty for the Marine Corps.

It did not take long to see that this thing called Irregular Warfare had taken on a life of its own as an untamable monster. My initial journey through Pentagon hallways to countless seminars, workshops and war games was marked by acquaintances with “duty experts” whose views on IW were as numerous as they were varied.

A View of Irregular Warfare (Full PDF Article)

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Matt Armstrong over at MountainRunner has more on the release of FM 3.07 Stability Operations.

While military operations may neutralize immediate “kinetic” threats, enduring change comes from stabilizing the unstable and building capacity to self-govern where there is none. Security, humanitarian relief, governance, economic stabilization, and development are critical for ultimate democratization, but more importantly, for peace and security locally and globally. Without competent and comprehensive engagement in these areas of “soft power,” tactical “hard power” operations are simply a waste of time, money, and life.

This week the US Army released a new field manual, FM 3-07 Stability Operations, to adapt the military to these requirements of the modern age. The manual “represents a milestone in Army doctrine,” writes LTG Bill Caldwell in the foreword.

FM 3-07 elevates capacity-building to be co-equal with traditional offensive and defensive military operations of Big Army. This doctrinal shift is not new, but also found in the updated Operations Manual for the Army, FM 3-0, Caldwell also oversaw earlier this year.

This field manual is more than a revision to Army thinking and training of future officers. It is a linchpin in effective global engagement by the United States.

Much more at MountainRunner.

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Understanding the al-Qaeda Enemy in Three Volumes
by Dr. Donald J. Hanle, Small Wars Journal Book Review

Understanding the al-Qaeda Enemy in Three Volumes (Full PDF Article)

Sun Tzu’s admonition to the general that in order to defeat his enemy, he must know his enemy as well as he knows himself was never more true than in the current struggle between the West and the Salafi jihadist organization known as al-Qaida and its allies – hereafter referred to as the al-Qaida Associated Movements (AQAM). Although the war had most certainly begun not later than Osama bin Laden’s 23 February 1998 declaration of war on the United States, and probably much sooner, it took the events of 9/11 to ensure the American population and their government were fully aware of their status as a co-belligerent in an armed struggle between the last remaining superpower and a small, fringe element of the Islamic faith. It has been seven years since that fateful attack and many – to include many who are in the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security – are still struggling to understand this enemy and devise a coherent strategy to defeat them.

Three works recently published by the Naval Institute Press provide an outstanding compendium examining AQAM ideology, strategy and doctrine. The first two works, The Canons of Jihad: Terrorists’ Strategy for Defeating America and A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad: Deciphering Abu Musab Al-Suri’s Islamic Jihad Manifesto, both edited by Jim Lacey, afford a superb view of not only who these Salafi jihadists are, but what makes them tick. What makes these works so important in the war against AQAM is that it affords the West a means to understand our enemy by examining the evolution of their own ideology and strategic thought through their own words. The third work, entitled The Terrorist Perspectives Project: Strategic and Operational Views of Al-Qaida and Associated Movements, edited by Mark E. Stout, Jessica M. Huckabey and John R. Schindler with assistance of Jim Lacey, is an assessment of AQAM ideology and strategic/ operational views with recommended countervailing strategies for the U.S. and the West to adopt to defeat AQAM in the cognitive domain of war.

Understanding the al-Qaeda Enemy in Three Volumes (Full PDF Article)

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Carried over from a June 2008 Small Wars Council post by Jedburgh - Another classic reprint from Rand: Counterinsurgency: A Symposium, April 16-20, 1962.

This April, 1962 symposium was held at a time when Kennedy Administration officials were focusing increasingly on the growing communist insurgency in Vietnam and on the verge of radically expanding the numbers, roles, and types of US military forces in that country. The purpose of the symposium was to distill lessons and insights from past insurgent conflicts that might help to inform and shape the US involvement in Vietnam and to foster the effective prosecution of other future counterinsurgency campaigns.

To gather these lessons and insights, Rand brought to the same conference table twelve US and allied officers and civilian officials who had expertise and a proven record of success in some aspects of guerrilla or counterinsurgency warfare. As their biographies will testify, the accomplishments and backgrounds of the symposium’s formal participants gave their views significant credibility. Each participant could claim firsthand experience with guerrilla or counterinsurgent operations in one or more of the following post-World War II conflicts: Algeria, China, Greece, Kenya, Laos, Malaya, Oman, South Vietnam, and the Philippines. Three of the participants had led or operated with anti-Japanese guerrilla or guerrilla-type units in Burma and the Philippines during World War II.

During five days of meetings, the participants exchanged views on a wide spectrum of topics relating to the political, military, economic, intelligence, and psychological measures required to defeat insurgencies. Convinced that the fundamental verities of effective counterinsurgency policy and practice that were elucidated by the participants remain as valid today as they were 44 years ago, Rand decided to republish the symposium proceedings.

Among the insights that emerged from the discussions, the reader will find a number of counterinsurgency best practices that seem especially germane to the insurgency challenges confronted today by the United States and its allies.

Formal Participants

Charles T.R. Bohannan, Lieutenant Colonel, AUS-Ret.
Wendell W. Fertig, Colonel, USA-Ret.
David Galula, Lieutenant Colonel (French Marine Corps)
Anthony S. Jeapes, Captain (British Army)
Frank E. Kitson, MBE, MC, Lieutenant Colonel (British Army)
Edward Geary Lansdale, Brigadier General, USAF
Rufus C. Phillips, III
David Leonard Powell-Jones, DSO, OBEY Brigadier General (British Army)
John R. Shirley, OBE, Colonel (British Army-Ret.)
Napoleon D. Valeriano, Colonel (formerly with the Armed Forces of the Philippines)
John F. White, Colonel (Royal Australian Army)
Samuel V. Wilson, Lieutenant Colonel, USA

Counterinsurgency: A Symposium, April 16-20, 1962 - Rand report.

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Meeting Lt. Col. David Galula - April 1962
by Rufus Phillips, Small Wars Journal Retrospective

Meeting Lt. Col. David Galula - April 1962 (Full PDF Article)

In April 1962, I participated in a RAND Symposium on Counterinsurgency held in Washington, D.C, along with my old boss from the 1954–56 days in South Vietnam, General Edward G. Lansdale, and a number of others. Lansdale had been the key advisor to Ramon Magsaysay in the successful campaign against the communist Huks in the Philippines and then in the successful birth of the Republic of South Vietnam in 1954–56. I had worked under him advising the Vietnamese Army in its occupation and pacification of large areas in South Vietnam previously controlled by the communist controlled Vietminh (predecessors to the Vietcong), and I had moved on to Laos to try to help that government counter Pathet Lao subversion in the villages through civic action.

I did not participate in the first few symposium sessions, but heard from Lansdale that there was a very unusual French officer named David Galula present, who had a lot of good ideas that sounded very much like our own. As I got involved in discussions with Col. Galula, I discovered he wasn’t anything like the vast majority of the French officers I had tried to work with as part of a joint American-French military advisory mission (called TRIM) in the 1954–55 days in Vietnam. Most had a colonial attitude toward the Vietnamese and saw them as lesser beings. Col. Galula, however, was different. He didn’t maintain an attitude of superiority. Rather, his mission involved trying to help the local Algerian population as their friend, and he imbued his troops with that attitude.

Meeting Lt. Col. David Galula - April 1962 (Full PDF Article)

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Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned - Rufus Phillips

Phillips details how the legendary Edward G. Lansdale helped the South Vietnamese gain and consolidate their independence between 1954 and 1956, and how this later changed to a reliance on American conventional warfare with its highly destructive firepower. He reasons that our failure to understand the Communists, our South Vietnamese allies, or even ourselves took us down the wrong road. In summing up US errors in Vietnam, Phillips draws parallels with the American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan and suggests changes in the US approach. Known for his intellectual integrity and firsthand, long-term knowledge of what went on in Vietnam, the author offers lessons for today in this trenchant account.

Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq - Peter Mansoor

This is a unique contribution to the burgeoning literature on the Iraq war, analyzing the day-to-day performance of a US brigade in Baghdad during 2004-2005. Mansoor uses a broad spectrum of sources to address the military, political and cultural aspects of an operation undertaken with almost no relevant preparation, which tested officers and men to their limits and generated mistakes and misjudgments on a daily basis. The critique is balanced, perceptive and merciless - and Mansoor was the brigade commander. Military history is replete with command memoirs. Most are more or less self-exculpatory. Even the honest ones rarely achieve this level of analysis. The effect is like watching a surgeon perform an operation on himself. Mansoor has been simultaneously a soldier and a scholar, able to synergize directly his military and academic experiences.

The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq - Bing West

From a universally respected combat journalist, a gripping history based on five years of front-line reporting about how the war was turned around - and the choice now facing America. We interpret reality through the clouded prism of our own experience, so it is unsurprising that Bing West sees Iraq through the lens of Vietnam. He served as a Marine officer there, and he thinks politicians and the media caused the American public to turn against a war that could have been won. Now a correspondent for the Atlantic, West has made 15 reporting trips to Iraq over the last six years and is almost as personally invested in the current conflict as he was in Vietnam; this book, his third on Iraq, is his attempt to ensure that the "endgame" in Iraq turns out better than in his last war.

Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq - Linda Robinson

After a series of disastrous missteps in its conduct of the war, the White House in 2006 appointed General David Petraeus as the Commanding General of the coalition forces. Tell Me How This Ends is an inside account of his attempt to turn around a failing war. Linda Robinson conducted extensive interviews with Petraeus and his subordinate commanders and spent weeks with key U.S. and Iraqi divisions. The result is the only book that ties together military operations in Iraq and the internecine political drama that is at the heart of the civil war. Replete with dramatic battles, behind-doors confrontations, and astute analysis, the book tells the full story of the Iraq War’s endgame, and lays out the options that will be facing the next president.

The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008 - Bob Woodward

Woodward interviewed key players, obtained dozens of never-before-published documents, and had nearly three hours of exclusive interviews with President Bush. The result is a stunning, firsthand history of the years from mid-2006, when the White House realizes the Iraq strategy is not working, through the decision to surge another 30,000 US troops in 2007, and into mid-2008, when the war becomes a fault line in the presidential election. As violence in Iraq reaches unnerving levels in 2006, a second front in the war rages at the highest levels of the Bush administration. In his fourth book on President George W. Bush, Bob Woodward takes readers deep inside the tensions, secret debates, unofficial backchannels, distrust and determination within the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, the intelligence agencies and the US military headquarters in Iraq. With unparalleled intimacy and detail, this gripping account of a president at war describes a period of distress and uncertainty within the US government from 2006 through mid-2008. The White House launches a secret strategy review that excludes the military. General George Casey, the commander in Iraq, believes that President Bush does not understand the war and eventually concludes he has lost the president's confidence. The Joint Chiefs of Staff also conduct a secret strategy review that goes nowhere. On the verge of revolt, they worry that the military will be blamed for a failure in Iraq.

We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam - Harold Moore and Joe Galloway

In their stunning follow-up to the classic bestseller We Were Soldiers Once... and Young, Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and Joe Galloway return to Vietnam and reflect on how the war changed them, their men, their enemies, and both countries - often with surprising results. It would be a monumental task for Moore and Galloway to top their classic 1992 memoir. But they come close in this sterling sequel, which tells the backstory of two of the Vietnam War's bloodiest battles (in which Moore participated as a lieutenant colonel), their first book and a 1993 ABC-TV documentary that brought them back to the battlefield. Moore's strong first-person voice reviews the basics of the November 1965 battles, part of the 34-day Battle of the Ia Drang Valley. Among other things, Moore and Galloway (who covered the battle for UPI) offer portraits of two former enemy commanders, generals Nguyen Huu An and Chu Huy Man, whom the authors met - and bonded with - nearly three decades after the battle. This book proves again that Moore is an exceptionally thoughtful, compassionate and courageous leader (he was one of a handful of army officers who studied the history of the Vietnam wars before he arrived) and a strong voice for reconciliation and for honoring the men with whom he served.

In a Time of War: The Proud and Perilous Journey of West Point' Class of 2002 - Bill Murphy

The West Point cadets Murphy follows through their baptism by fire are an admirable sample of young American men and women: intelligent, ambitious and intensely patriotic. Most come from career military families and hold conservative opinions. Murphy describes their four years at West Point with respect even when discussing their love lives and marriages. All yearn for battle, and most get their wish. The book's best passages describe the confusion of moving to Iraq or Afghanistan and fighting insurgents, for which they lack both training and equipment. All feel something is not right but concentrate on the job at hand; some inevitably die or are grievously wounded.

Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy - Steven Metz

Today the US military is more nimble, mobile, and focused on rapid responses against smaller powers than ever before. One could argue that the Gulf War and the postwar standoff with Saddam Hussein hastened needed military transformation and strategic reassessments in the post–Cold War era. But the preoccupation with Iraq also mired the United States in the Middle East and led to a bloody occupation. What will American strategy look like after US troops leave Iraq? Metz concludes that the United States has a long-standing, continuing problem “developing sound assumptions when the opponent operates within a different psychological and cultural framework.” He sees a pattern of misjudgments about Saddam and Iraq based on Western cultural and historical bias and a pervasive faith in the superiority of America’s worldview and institutions. This myopia contributed to America being caught off guard by Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, then underestimating his longevity, and finally miscalculating the likelihood of a stable and democratic Iraq after he was toppled. With lessons for all readers concerned about America’s role in the world, Dr. Metz’s important new work will especially appeal to scholars and students of strategy and international security studies, as well as to military professionals and DOD civilians. With a foreword by Colin S. Gray.

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The Case for Keeping Gates - Nancy Soderberg and Brian Katulis, Washington Post opinion

Here's a free piece of advice to President Barack Obama or President John McCain: There's no need to look for a new secretary of defense. You already have the best man in the job.

The Obama campaign in particular seems to have noticed the virtues of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. It's a little head-spinning to see senior Democrats lauding a Bush cabinet officer in the heat of the campaign, but earlier this month, Richard Danzig, the former Navy secretary who has become one of Obama's closest national security aides, said that many of Gates's pragmatic policies at the Pentagon "are things that Senator Obama agrees with and I agree with." Danzig added that Gates could do "even better" if he stayed on the job in an Obama administration.

The case for Gates goes beyond the obvious question of assisting the next president in handling Iraq, which Gates has helped haul back from the brink of total collapse. But he has also been instrumental in launching a sweeping revolution in US national security...

Much more at The Washington Post.

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How to Smooth the Transition in Iraq - John Nagl and Adam Scher, Christian Science Monitor opinion

Mahmoudiya, a town south of Baghdad, was part of the area long known as the "Triangle of Death" because of the extraordinary number of Sunni insurgent attacks against coalition forces and Iraqi civilians it suffered – often half a dozen daily in 2006. Today, with violence down to only a few ineffective attacks in any given week, it has earned the moniker "Triangle of Love."

The progress there is due in part to the new US strategy. It involved living among the local population to break the hold of the insurgents and now focuses more on partnering and empowering local Iraqi forces than depending on US troops to target and capture enemies.

This switch in Mahmoudiya has spurred economic growth in the area and sheds light on how to manage a drawdown of US forces without sacrificing the hard-won security gains of the past 18 months.

It's clear that the ultimate success of our counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq requires not just a reduction in all types of enemy activity, but also an increase in the capacity of the Iraqi Security Forces and the local governing councils...

More at The Christian Science Monitor.

3 BCT - 101st Airborne Division (AASLT) - Rakkasans - Transition Task Force Brief

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In a Time of War: The Proud and Perilous Journey of West Point' Class of 2002 - Bill Murphy, Henry Holt and Co., 2008, 384 pgs, $27.50

The West Point cadets Murphy follows through their baptism by fire are an admirable sample of young American men and women: intelligent, ambitious and intensely patriotic. Most come from career military families and hold conservative opinions. Murphy describes their four years at West Point with respect even when discussing their love lives and marriages. All yearn for battle, and most get their wish. The book's best passages describe the confusion of moving to Iraq or Afghanistan and fighting insurgents, for which they lack both training and equipment. All feel something is not right but concentrate on the job at hand; some inevitably die or are grievously wounded.

Today's Long Gray Line - Andrew Exum, Washington Post book review

... One constant through the years, however, has been the unique fraternity of officers produced by our nation's military academies. Each summer, some 1,200 cadets enter the US Military Academy at West Point; after four years of arduous training, about 1,000 graduate and are commissioned as junior officers in the army. Amid this perpetual rhythm, the graduating class of 2002 stood out in two ways: Its graduation coincided with the 200th anniversary of West Point's founding, ensuring extra attention for its members, nicknamed the "golden children." And the class of 2002 was the first since Vietnam to emerge, as President Bush noted in his commencement address, "in a time of war." Bill Murphy Jr. takes that phrase as the title for his group portrait, which he assembled from hundreds of interviews with members of the class and those with whom they served in combat.

The story Murphy has written is alternately inspiring and heartbreaking. It's inspiring because the US military continues to attract some of the nation's brightest talent, accomplished young men and women who yearn to serve their country in difficult circumstances. (If the class of 2002 was valorous for leaving West Point at a time of war, one wonders, what about the class of 2006, which entered at a time of war?)...

Much more at The Washington Post.

Hat tip to Charlie at Abu Muqawama.

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Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander’s War in Iraq - Peter R. Mansoor, Yale University Press, 2008, 376 pgs, $28.00.

Before the Surge, and After - Mark Moyar, Wall Street Journal book review

... When Gen. David Petraeus set out to rescue a seemingly hopeless Iraq in February 2007, he brought Col. Mansoor back to Iraq and into his inner circle. Like Gen. Petraeus, Col. Mansoor was a scholar as well as a soldier, having earned a doctorate in military history and written a book about World War II before leading the 1st Brigade Combat Team against Iraq's insurgency.

Thus in "Baghdad at Sunrise," Col. Mansoor displays the knowledge of a soldier alongside the narrative gifts of a true historian, weaving dramatic events together, capturing the thoughts and emotions of street-level fighters, and describing Iraqi society as it tries to emerge from the maelstrom of war.

The war was certainly grim during Col. Mansoor's first tour, in part because the Iraqis were only just learning to fight the insurgency themselves. In April 2004, Col. Mansoor's brigade received orders to escort 200 Iraqi soldiers from Baghdad to Fallujah, where the butchering of four Blackwater contractors had sparked the war's fiercest fighting...

Much more at The Wall Street Journal.

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Army Intelligence Views Kidnapping and Terrorism - Secrecy News (Federation of American Scientists) blog

Kidnapping and other forms of terrorist violence have developed into a significant form of asymmetric conflict, according to a new US Army manual (pdf) that describes the theory and practice of kidnapping with numerous case studies from recent years.

“This document promotes an improved understanding of terrorist objectives, motivation, and behaviors in the conduct of kidnapping,” the 168 page manual states...

Manual Has Terrorist Kidnapping Theories - United Press International

A US Army manual has incorporated evidence from case studies on terrorist organizations that use kidnapping as a threat tactic.

The Army counter-terrorism instructional series titled "A Military Guide to Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century" now features theories on kidnapping and other asymmetric warfare tactics deployed by terrorists and other militants, Secrecy News reported.

The section of the manual titled "Kidnapping and Terror in the Contemporary Operational Environment" is written for official use only. However, officials at Secrecy News, a Federation of American Scientists project on government secrecy, obtained a copy....

Nothing follows.

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Is US Fighting Force Big Enough? - Gordon Lubold, Christian Science Monitor

American's armed forces are growing bigger to reduce the strains from seven years of war, but if the US is confronting an era of "persistent conflict," as some experts believe, it will need an even bigger military.

A larger military could more easily conduct military and nation-building operations around the world. But whether the American public has the appetite to pursue and pay for such a foreign-policy agenda, especially after more than five years of an unpopular war in Iraq, is far from clear.

Last week, the Army released a new manual on "stability operations" that outlines for the Army a prominent global role as a nation-builder. The service will maintain its ability to fight conventional land wars, but the manual's release signals that it expects future conflicts to look more like Iraq or Afghanistan than World War II. While Defense Secretary Robert Gates has not publicly supported expanding the force beyond what is already planned, he has said the United States must prepare for more counterinsurgency wars like the ones it is fighting now - a hint that a larger military may be necessary.

Some analysts are certain of that need...

Much more at The Christian Science Monitor.

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Indirect Approach is Favored in the War on Terror - Peter Spiegel, Los Angeles Times

Weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, a small team of Green Berets was quietly sent to the Philippine island of Basilan. There, one of the world's most virulent Islamic extremist groups, Abu Sayyaf, had established a dangerous haven and was seeking to extend its reach into the Philippine capital.

But rather than unleashing Hollywood-style raids, as might befit their reputation, the Green Berets proposed a time-consuming plan to help the Philippine military take on the extremist group itself. Seven years later, Abu Sayyaf has been pushed out of Basilan and terrorist attacks have dropped dramatically.

"It's not flashy, it's not glamorous, but man, this is how we're going to win the long war," said Lt. Gen. David P. Fridovich, the Army officer who designed the Philippine program.

Fridovich is part of a quiet but significant transformation taking place within the most secret of the US military's armed forces, the Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, which encompasses the Green Berets, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, Delta Force and similar units from the Air Force and the Marines...

Much more at The Los Angeles Times.

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Two items posted today at World Politics Review (always a good read) that Small Wars Journal readers should find of interest.

Future Face of Conflict: The U.S. Army's Doctrinal Renaissance by Jack Kem

This month's release of Field Manual 3-07, "Stability Operations," marks a milestone for the United States Army. With it, the Army acknowledges and codifies a dramatic change in thinking: No longer does the mission of the military stop at winning wars; now it must also help "win the peace." ...

Stability operations have a precise doctrinal definition, and differ from traditional warfighting concepts of offensive and defensive operations, which emphasize the use of lethal combat power against an enemy force. Stability operations instead focus on providing a foundation for conflict transformation. The emphasis is on reestablishing security and control so as to enable other instruments of national power (diplomatic, information, and economic means) to facilitate transition to civilian control by the host nation. They involve a variety of military missions and tasks, and are conducted in coordination with civil instruments of national power to "maintain or reestablish a safe and secure environment, provide essential governmental services, emergency infrastructure reconstruction, and humanitarian relief."

For the Army, offensive and defensive operations rely on the destructive capabilities of military forces; stability operations rely on the constructive capabilities of the military. The reality of today's operational environment is that these actions take place simultaneously; what you break and destroy today, you may have to rebuild tomorrow...

Future Face of Conflict: Human Terrain Teams by Paul McLeary

... For a variety of reasons -- cultural, political, and economic -- the American armed forces have become all things to all people in the prosecution of American foreign policy. There is the obvious deterrent component that a globally-dispersed American force projects. But even when it comes to humanitarian missions, reconstruction projects, and low-level cultural outreach in the more dangerous corners of the world, you'll likely find a mix of soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen working on the problem before you'll find a member of the State Department.

And this is where the Human Terrain Teams come in. Or at least that's the long-term plan. Right now, the teams are wholly focused on extricating American forces from the tribal stews of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Montgomery McFate, one of the architects of the $130 million program and senior social science adviser to the Army Human Terrain System (HTS), says that in the early days of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, "nobody was looking" at cultural issues. When units rotated out, there would be a tremendous loss of knowledge concerning the complex tribal and cultural webs these societies represent. "People would come back with information in their head and shoe boxes full of CDs, Power Point slides, sticky note cards, and they really [had] nobody to give that information to," McFate explained. "And so much of it was tacit, it was in their head."

This loss of knowledge upon unit rotation meant that the unit rotating in "knew they needed to know something but they didn't know what they needed to know, so they'd get close to an answer but they couldn't find the answer."

The HTTs -- which were stood up in Afghanistan in February 2007 and in Iraq in August of the same year -- are tasked out at brigade level, meaning that they're out in the field with the grunts and the young lieutenants, captains and lieutenant colonels...

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Winning the War of Ideas
by Major Gabriel C. Lajeunesse, Small Wars Journal

Winning the War of Ideas (Full PDF Article)

Day after day the global airwaves are filled with entertainment and sports, humor and drama - each program telling its own subtle story. Our ever-ready media is also filled with more serious fare, documentaries and news, debate and commentary, often delivered with substantial spin or half-truths designed to convincingly sell the proponent’s themes and messages. In the mass of this media, those able to master the news cycle have an advantage. The same is true in the realm of new media, where the internet, blogs, instant messages, and streaming video provide a constant and on-demand barrage of messages from anywhere, to anywhere. In a world that is flat, ideologues of all kinds have increased capacity to communicate their messages at a very low cost through the use of these technologies. Al-Qa’ida, Wahhabists and Iran, along with their proxies, have made extensive use of these new tools, along with tried and tested techniques for distributing propaganda materials to individuals through person to person contact in Islamic Centers, radical madrasahs, and mosques. They are working hard to further propagate their message of enmity and compulsion. The US and its partners, the standard bearers of liberty and freedom, are struggling to compete with these themes and messages - with many calling for an increased emphasis on the battle for hearts and minds, the war of ideas.

The very idea of a war of ideas is contentious. What is this “war”? If it is a war, who are we fighting? Why a war; why not a competition - after all, in a marketplace of ideas shouldn’t the concept of an inalienable right to freedom of conscience win out every time over repression and compulsion? Further, if we are competing in a marketplace of ideas what are we selling?

Winning the War of Ideas (Full PDF Article)

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Between Clausewitz and Mao
Dynamic Evolutions of the Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq (2003-2008)

by Thomas Renard and Stéphane Taillat, Small Wars Journal

Between Clausewitz and Mao (Full PDF Article)

Insurgencies are dynamic, not static. The idea of dynamic insurgencies was previously developed by Mao Zadong. In his book, Mao described guerrilla warfare as a pyramidal process divided into three linear but not definitive phases - from propaganda to conventional warfare - which means that the guerrilla must follow the order of the different phases, but maintains the possibility to move back and forth between them.

Mao’s dynamic guerrilla, due to its linearity, explains only partly the tactical shifts adopted by insurgents. Therefore, in order to mirror the real dynamism of modern insurgencies, we propose a second model of dynamic insurgencies based on three operational poles: the terror pole, the guerrilla pole, and the conventional warfare pole. The three poles create a triangle of tactical possibilities, in which every insurgent action takes place.

Concretely, this means that a group closer to the terror pole will mainly rely on acts of terrorism, while maintaining a more or less pronounced aspect of guerrilla warfare, or even of conventional warfare, depending on its proximity to the other poles. This is to say - most groups do not rely on a single pole.

Between Clausewitz and Mao (Full PDF Article)

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Fight Club by Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Monthly book reviews

In the latest Washington Monthly - Washington Post military correspondent Tom Ricks (Fiasco) reviews two recent additions to the war in Iraq library - Warrior King: The Triumph and Betrayal of an American Commander in Iraq by Nathan Sassaman, with Joe Layden and Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story by Ricardo S. Sanchez, with Donald T. Phillips.

On Warrior King:

About eighteen months ago, the US Army produced an important new manual on counterinsurgency that, when implemented last year in Iraq, helped American troops greatly improve the security situation there. Retired lieutenant colonel Nathan Sassaman’s recent memoir, Warrior King, is the mirror opposite of that document - it is, effectively, the anti-manual. And it should be required reading for anyone who is deploying to the war in Iraq, or who wants to know how we dug so deep a hole there in 2003 and 2004.

Warrior King is a blueprint for how to lose in Iraq. Of course, that’s not how it is presented by Sassaman, who commanded a battalion of the 4th Infantry Division in the Sunni Triangle during the war’s first year. (Full disclosure: I am mentioned, neutrally, in the book.) In Sassaman’s mind, he’s a winner who understood that prevailing in Iraq meant breaking some furniture. A former West Point quarterback, he tended to see the civilian population not as the prize in the war, but as the playing field on which to pound the enemy...

On Wiser in Battle:

A companion volume to Sassaman’s is retired Army lieutenant general Ricardo Sanchez’s Wiser in Battle, a defense of his time as the US commander in Iraq in 2003–04. He is scathing in his criticism of the Bush administration, but about two years too late to be newsworthy, since it is now widely accepted that the handling of the war from 2003 through 2005 was a fiasco.

Sanchez’s volume is another report from the old, pre-"surge" US Army that never really understood what it was doing in Iraq and believed that whatever the problem, the answer probably was more firepower. (I’m also mentioned in Sanchez’s book - negatively, as supposedly emblematic of an incompetent and biased media in Iraq.) Sanchez is, however, more self-aware than Sassaman. He has a clearer understanding of what went wrong during his time in Iraq. Most notably, he doesn’t just blame civilian leaders, and sees that his army was part of the problem.

Even so, he doesn’t really get it either. Sassaman writes, "Force was the only thing that seemed to work … the only thing the Iraqis seemed to understand." Sanchez comes to a similarly wrongheaded conclusion: "Force seemed to be one of the few things that Iraqi insurgents clearly understood." But these are the voices of ignorance. Neither man seems to understand that when force is the only way American forces can communicate, it will be the only thing Iraqis will hear...

Much more on both books at Washington Monthly.

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Reviving OSS Methodology for 21st Century Military Operations
by Myrtle Vacirca-Quinn, M.D. Sternfeld and Luis Carlos Montalván
Small Wars Journal Op-Ed

Reviving OSS Methodology for 21st Century Military Operations (Full PDF Article)

The endemic problem of not having enough highly skilled and capable Civil Affairs personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan has negatively affected the Post 9/11 era of US military operations. The Civil Affairs (CA) problems of post-invasion Iraq should not have led our senior defense policy makers to move CA into the Regular Army as Secretary Rumsfeld directed. Rather, CA and Psychological Operations (colloquially known as PSYOP) should have been kept in the Special Operations Community.

In the first Gulf War, Civil Affairs (CA) worked well because it was part of US Special Operations Command. CA operators, specifically men and women of the Kuwait Task Force, planned post-combat reconstitution and reconstruction of Kuwait almost 6 months prior to the allied liberation. Indeed, post-combat planning began during the pre-combat phase called Operation Desert Shield.

This advanced detailed planning was very much in keeping with the tradition of the World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s first overseas intelligence and military special operations agency. In Italy during World War II, OSS operations began with detailed plans produced beforehand at Camp Lee, Virginia.

Reviving OSS Methodology for 21st Century Military Operations (Full PDF Article)

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Army to Activate First Company of Native Linguists-Turned-Soldiers

By John J. Kruzel
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Oct. 15, 2008 – The Army will activate its first company of native linguists-turned-soldiers next week to act as interpreters and translators, representing a new phase in the service's reinvigorated approach to foreign language.

This unit of "heritage speakers" -- known as the 51st Tico Company -- comprises members of the service's most recently added military occupational specialty, 09L, referred to as “09 Limas.” In addition to holding the Army's newest job, this cadre of native linguists trained at Fort Irwin, Calif., also reflects a change in Army recruiting strategy.

"We've found it's easier to train a linguist to be a soldier than to train a soldier to be a linguist," said Army Brig. Gen. Richard C. Longo, director of training in the Army’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Plans and Training.

Since cultivating a working knowledge of foreign language and culture is time- and labor-intensive, the Army is unable to "surge" a group of linguists in the same way it has in the past with combat troops. This is why when the Army was tasked by the Office of the Secretary of Defense in February 2003 to establish a pilot program that focused on recruiting native and heritage speakers of Arabic, Dari and Pashto to meet critical foreign language requirements, it launched 09L...

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Bing West reviews Bill Murphy’s In a Time of War: The Proud and Perilous Journey of West Point's Class of 2002 at Forbes in More Perilous Than Proud.

As with other professions, journalism favors its own. Bill Murphy benefited from working for Bob Woodward, the reporter famous for persuading top Washington officials to divulge their secret yearnings along with nasty gossip about their peers during the Nixon administration.

Promising it will move the reader to tears, Woodward and other luminary journalists conferred celebrity status upon In A Time of War. Indeed, the concluding paragraphs in several chapters do stir grief--along with anger and frustration at the apparent stupidity of the mission in Iraq.

Although the book lacks a preface that explains the author's purpose, its subtitle is The Proud and Perilous Journey of West Point's Class of 2002. The book, however, is not about the class of 192 women and 1,054 men. Nor is it about the legacy and values of West Point. Instead, it is a description of a handful of lieutenants, how they fell in love, where they served and how their spouses bore up.

One is left with the image of savage combat against untrustworthy Iraqis in a frustrating war that exacted sacrifices equivalent in scale and loss to the Greatest Generation of World War II. Yet this war is less intense by orders of magnitude than Vietnam, and Vietnam was far less intense than World War II. Although this does not mitigate the sorrow or sacrifice of each family that lost a loved one, it is helpful to the reader when a nonfiction writer lays out his frame of reference...

Bill Murphy responds (also at Forbes) in Bing West Was Wrong About My Book.

Bing West deserves respect for his military service in Vietnam and for the passion of his commitment to Iraq. But he got so many basic facts wrong in his review of my new book that I have to set the record straight. Readers inclined to decide for themselves might start at www.inatimeofwar.com, where the first chapter of In a Time of War: The Proud & Perilous Journey of West Point's Class of 2002 is available for free. You'll also a find a three-minute video that introduces some of the main characters.

I'll address the worst of West's factual errors in turn:

First, when West writes that two of the main characters in In a Time of War "were previously profiled in newspapers and books," he is almost certainly referring to a 2007 article in The Washington Post. Click the link, and you'll see a byline that reads: " By Bill Murphy Jr., Washington Post Foreign Service." (Yes, I'm that Bill Murphy Jr.) I wrote the profile about then-captain Drew Sloan after interviewing him many times over several years starting in the summer of 2005, and after I had shadowed him in Iraq for about four days. I did not, as West implies, simply pick up on somebody else's work.

A second main character, Todd Bryant, who gave the ultimate sacrifice for his country in Iraq, was not profiled in a major newspaper that I am aware of. However, he was one of several soldiers whose letters home were featured in a series of articles in The New York Times. I first learned about this from Todd's widow, Jen, in 2006, well into my reporting for this book. (For a transcript of part of the first long interview I did with Jen, click here, and go to the second page of the article.)...

Much more by West here and by Murphy here.

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Pushes for Stronger International, Interagency Relationships
By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Oct. 16, 2008 – Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said last night he’s struck by universal interest in bridging stronger ties with the United States in the roughly 50 countries he’s visited since taking office, and that allowing the evolving U.S.-China relationship to unravel would be a huge strategic mistake.

Gates also offered assurance that the military has no interest in dominating in operations best left to other departments and nongovernmental agencies.

Responding to questions at the U.S. Institute of Peace’s first Dean Acheson lecture, Gates called insights he’s gained during meetings with his international counterparts one of his biggest surprises during his 22 months at the Pentagon...

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Network Works to Help Interagency Crisis Response

By Fred W. Baker III
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Oct. 15, 2008 – As a reserve affairs soldier serving in Iraq in 2005, Andy Castro saw a problem.

Fresh drinking water systems took too long to set up, there was little standardization, they produced poor water quality and often failed quickly for a lack of maintenance, he said.

So, Castro returned to the United States, quit his full-time job, worked with the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter to raise money, teamed with a handful of guys who could help him design a solution, and started a business called Alrafidane, an Arabic word meaning “between two rivers.”

Today, in the Pentagon courtyard, Castro set up and demonstrated a system that he said can produce thousands of gallons of clean water every day, cheaply, quickly and reliably.

“It takes me 20 minutes to set up. I push the green button, and I walk away,” Castro said. “It’s designed to be simple. It’s designed to be user-friendly, so anyone can operate it.”

Castro is part of about a dozen companies gathered in the Pentagon courtyard for a STAR-TIDES research demonstration that runs through tomorrow.

STAR-TIDES stands for sustainable technologies, accelerated research - transportable infrastructures for development and emergency support. The program is headed by the National Defense University and serves as a worldwide network of defense leaders, educators, and technical experts and civic and industry executives who work to match experiences and technologies to aid relief efforts for people suffering in areas ravaged by war, disaster or poverty...

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Birtle ON PROVN
A Very Short Review of an Important New Essay on the Vietnam War

By Colonel Gian P. Gentile

Historian Andrew J. Birtle has written a very important new essay in the current issue of the Journal of Military History* that I recommend as a must-read to Small Wars Journal readers, Council members and the greater reading public who pay attention to matters of history and current defense policy and actions. Of note the Journal of Military History is considered the flagship journal for American historians of military history. Its standards of scholarship are impeccable and it is a “peer-reviewed” scholarly journal; which means that anytime an essay is published in it the essay is anonymously reviewed by usually 3-4 other historians who are experts in a given field. Often times, proposed essays for the Journal that go through this peer-review process are rejected for publication if they do not meet standards of scholarship, originality, quality of argument, etc.

Andrew Birtle is one of the leading historians in the country on the history of American Army counterinsurgency doctrine and operations. He has two books out on the subject and his scholarly work has received very strong reviews by such noted counterinsurgency experts as Dr Conrad Crane (primary author of FM 3-24) and Army Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cassidy.

Birtle’s essay, PROVN, Westmoreland, and the Historians: A Reappraisal is an in-depth historical analysis of the well known US report making recommendations for strategy and methods for the conduct of the Vietnam War written in 1966 titled A Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of South Vietnam. But Birtle’s essay is more than just a close historical analysis of the PROVN report. As Birtle’s title hints the essay directly and rightly refutes the abuse of the PROVN report by historians over the last thirty years.

Essentially Birtle’s essay demolishes a deeply flawed historical caricature of the Vietnam War that historians like Guenther Levy, Andrew Krepinevich, and Lewis Sorley (among others) have constructed over the years. The flawed historical caricature can be reduced to a simple set of sentences (remember, what follows is the flawed caricature and not truth):

1. The United States Army did not have a Coin doctrine prior to Vietnam and had no clue how to do Coin either.<br 2. In 1965 General William Westmoreland did not understand classic counterinsurgency theory and was a knuckle dragging artilleryman who only wanted to fight the Normandy campaign again in the Central Highlands using search and destroy missions.
3. THE PROVN report proposed a radically different way that focused on Galula-style coin, but Westmoreland didn’t “get it,” dismissed it, and even covered PROVN up.
4. But then, after almost three long years under Westmoreland not getting it, the Coin Cavalry comes to the rescue under General Abrams who does get it, understands the secrets within PROVN, unlocks those secrets and deploys them.
5. Abrams, therefore, immediately brings about a radical change in approach and method from his predecessor Westmoreland by applying PROVN
6. Abrams was winning the war with his new approach and if the American people had not lost their will the war could have been won.

This, in its essence, is the FLAWED historical caricature that Birtle’s essay finally and thankfully demolishes. What he convincingly shows in his essay is that Westmoreland’s strategy was for the most part in line with the recommendations by PROVN; that PROVN acknowledged that before pacification could go forward the United States military in Vietnam had to continue its large scale conventional operations to defeat a real-world and substantial VC and NVA regular threat in South Vietnam. Westmoreland, in fact, agreed with most of PROVN’s conclusions. The important point is that the in 65 Westmoreland and the US Army did understand classic counterinsurgency theory and practice and the strategy that Westmoreland came up with was a reasonable one.

Birtle also shows through meticulous historical research and documentation that when Abrams took over from Westmoreland in 68 he did not radically alter strategy at all; there was a shift in priority with Abrams toward pacification but that was primarily because Abrams could shift priorities after Tet in 68 when much of the South Vietnamese communist main force units were crushed. Arguably, if Westmoreland would have stayed in command through 1968 he would have done exactly what Abrams did.

Consider this quote from Birtle’s essay that sums up quite well the essentials of his argument:

By putting PROVN in its proper historical context, we can better understand not just the document itself but the [Vietnam] war more generally. As we have seen, the assertion that there was fundamental difference between Westmoreland’s strategy and that advocated by PROVN and implemented by Abrams is INCORRECT [caps mine]. Rather than representing antithetical concepts, Westmoreland’s and Abrams’s approaches to the conflict were cut of the same cloth, and we should not allow minor differences to mask this fundamental truth.

The truth about PROVN that Birtle brings out in his essay is especially important now as we try to understand the recent past of the Iraq War and where we are headed in the future. Since the flawed historical caricature of PROVN, Westmoreland, Abrams, and Vietnam is often deployed to argue as a juxtaposed historical case study of the purported extreme differences between the pre-Surge and Surge Army units in Iraq. The flawed caricature is deeply ingrained in the current Iraq War triumph-narrative. For example, Iraq War writer Tom Ricks has gone so far as to label a “pre-Surge” Army as a failure and a newly transformed “Surge” Army as successful in Iraq; just like the flawed caricature of Westmoreland being the “loser” and Abrams the savior in Vietnam.

So it is important now to decouple flawed understandings of the history of the Vietnam War from our current understanding of the Iraq War so that we can get at a more accurate assessment of what has happened in Iraq over the past 6 years to guide us into the future.

*The Journal of Military History does not offer open access to its articles on line; recommend those interested in reading it in is entirety go through a library source to get it.

Colonel Gian Gentile commanded 8-10 Cavalry armored reconnaissance squadron for three years until his posting to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He commanded his squadron during a deployment to western Baghdad in 2006.

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Dean Acheson Lecture - U.S. Institute of Peace (Washington D.C.)

As Delivered by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, Washington D.C., Wednesday, October 15, 2008...

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Just call me old fashioned – I have serious misgivings respecting and tolerating journalists who embed with an enemy (the Taliban in this instance) responsible for what some call the strictest interpretation and implementation of Sharia law “ever seen in the Muslim World.” The crimes against humanity that were a direct result of their rule in Afghanistan and continue in their desire to regain that rule cannot be forgiven or glossed over in hopes of some temporary respite from increased violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Yea, yea, okay – some people’s terrorists are other people’s freedom fighters – yada, yada – save it for the think tank- or university-circle sponsored seminars, studies and white papers. There is still black and white in today’s complex environment and our efforts in South Asia should most certainly fall within that category.

If there was ever a grouping of individuals and supporters that deserved complete annihilation (yea - I said the A word) – the Taliban and their support structure would and should be up front and center. It will take quite some time (that is why it is called The Long War) and there will most certainly be peaks and valleys along the way – but we must - and will - win this one and we will write the last chapter of the history book reserved for the victors.

But this is not about me and my particular passion for defeating a brutal enemy, it’s about Nir Rosen and his latest Rolling Stone piece entitled How We Lost the War We Won: A Journey Into Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan. Opinions via e-mail and several blogs and their comment sections are generally favorable to Rosen’s latest dance with the devil.

It’s Official: Nir Rosen, Who Embeds With the Taliban, Is More Impressive Than I Am

--Spencer Ackerman, Washington Independent

My colleague Nir Rosen, who is also a contributor to The Washington Note, is quickly becoming the preeminent Robert Kaplan-esque chronicler of Islamist insurgencies and conflict.

--Steve Clemons, The Washington Note

I read a draft of this story a few weeks ago and was, no kidding, glued to the page.

--Andrew Exum, Abu Muqawama

More blog traffic here – the vast majority strongly disagree with my humble opinion on Rosen and his reporting – so be it.

So, with a nod to Sun Tzu concerning knowing your enemy, I'd say read Rosen's article for any insight it may provide in defeating this gang of thugs.

-----

Update 1

Creative Dissent - Andrew Exum, Abu Muqawama
Our World - Richard Fernandez, The Belmont Club
Nir Rosen and the Taliban - Herschel Smith, The Captain's Journal
Why Nir Rosen Isn't To Be Trusted - Terry Glavin, Chronicles & Dissent
Nir Rosen: the Neo-Taliban’s Nancy DeWolf-Smith? - Joshua Foust, Registan

Update 2

I've received several e-mails indicating there might be some glaring errors or misrepresentations of fact in Rosen's Rolling Stone account of his most excellent adventure. For those so inclined, please send along such items to SWJ - documented / referenced of course. I'll post them here as an update.

Update 3

Embedded With The Taliban - Jules Crittenden, Forward Movement

In fact, How We lost The War We Won: A Journey Into Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan is misleading from the start. Contrary to his claim, Rosen never actually manages to embed with the Taliban. He just hangs out with some guys who say they are commanders … though other Taliban don’t seem to have much respect for their standing … and say they’ll get him in, but never quite manage to do more than link him up with some heavily armed layabouts. Lucky for him. Had he actually been with any fighting elements of the Taliban, he’d probably be dead now, which is what usually happens to the Taliban in large numbers when they directly engage the hated Crusaders. He probably would have been OK if he was just with a … you know … demolitions unit. Unless it was a suicide demolitions unit and they decided to give the American the full embedded experience.

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Mediating Between Crusaders and Conservatives
by Shawn Brimley, Small Wars Journal Op-Ed

Mediating Between Crusaders and Conservatives (Full PDF Article)

The long simmering debate over American defense strategy, re-ignited by Andrew Bacevich’s article in The Atlantic (and usefully stoked by Small Wars Journal), is perhaps the most important facing America’s defense community. Mere weeks from the election of a new President, the debate over whether Iraq and Afghanistan are harbingers of why, where, and how America will fight its next wars helps to frame the context within which the next administration will decide how to construct a defense budget during a deepening economic downturn. The debate is real and the stakes are high.

In his article, Bacevich framed the debate as one between the crusaders, those who believe that Iraq and Afghanistan are but opening salvos in a generational long war, and those he labels the conservatives, who believe that organizing America’s military to transform entire societies is a fool’s errand. An oversimplified summary of each view might read as follows:

Crusaders: If 9/11 and the subsequent operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us anything, it is that America’s 21st century enemies are likely to exploit weak and failing states to export terrorism, instability, and extremism. The era of episodic or periodic conflict is over, and America’s military had better get prepared for an era of persistent conflict, one in which instability anywhere can pose threats to America’s interests anywhere. In the conflicts of the 21st century, the U.S. military will not be able to kill its way to victory, but must instead focus on transforming societies in order to address the grievances that manifest into powerful threats against America’s interests. The types of capabilities most in demand for success in Iraq and Afghanistan – linguists, trainers, combat advisors, civil affairs and intelligence experts – are exactly the capabilities we will need in the future. Simply expanding so-called “white” special operations forces or marginal improvements in Army and Marine Corps capabilities will not prove sufficient. America’s ground forces need to transform for a future of small wars and insurgencies, and if that means taking risk in more conventional capabilities like field artillery or armor, so be it.

Conservatives: If 9/11 and subsequent operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have taught us anything, it is that American power has limits. We cannot transform entire societies, and the notion that America needs to be persistently deployed as part of a generational long war is exactly what our enemies most desire. The most important variables in Iraq and Afghanistan are the actions of the various political actors – we are not in control of the outcomes and never have been. Yes, weak and failing states can play host to those that may threaten us, but the answer is not to engage U.S. ground forces in a global Manichean counterinsurgency or pacification campaign in the quicksand of the Muslim world, because to do so would permanently mire America in a series of unwinnable wars. America’s Army and Marine Corps as currently organized are more than sufficient to wage the counterinsurgencies we find ourselves in today, and the attempt to dramatically retool our ground forces for a never-ending long war imposes great risks to America’s ability to defend against an uncertain future. With rising powers such as India, China and Russia poised to challenge American dominance, to embrace an era of persistent conflict is a recipe for a kind of permanent strategic distraction that will prove corrosive to America’s power and global prestige...

Mediating Between Crusaders and Conservatives (Full PDF Article)

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A review of:

Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander's Account of the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man

by Dalton Fury, St. Martin's Press, 2008.

Reviewed by:

Thomas (Tom) P. Odom

LTC US Army (ret)

Author, Journey Into Darkness: Genocide In Rwanda

Kill Bin Laden was written by another brave man, Major Dalton Fury, about other brave men in their efforts to hunt down and kill the most hunted man in the world.  For those of us who were raised in Fort Bragg circles in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Delta emerged as a rumor and soon became legendary as tales of selection and non-selection circulated.  After my RANGER student experience, I had no desire to try my hand; I have several comrades who did and some made it.  I respect them all for even trying.  Major Fury’s description of his final selection took me right back to 1977.  His low key, outward focused prose in describing his men reminds me of Dick Meadow’s radiated authority.

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Military Report Says Terms 'Jihad,' 'Islamist' Needed - Bill Gertz, Washington Times

A US military "Red Team" charged with challenging conventional thinking says that words like "jihad" and "Islamist" are needed in discussing 21st-century terrorism and that federal agencies that avoid the words soft-pedaled the link between religious extremism and violent acts.

"We must reject the notion that Islam and Arabic stand apart as bodies of knowledge that cannot be critiqued or discussed as elements of understanding our enemies in this conflict," said the internal report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.

The report, "Freedom of Speech in Jihad Analysis: Debunking the Myth of Offensive Words," was written by unnamed civilian analysts and contractors for the US Central Command, which is responsible for the Middle East and South Asia. It is thought to be the first official document to challenge those in the government who seek to downplay the role of Islam in inspiring some terrorist violence.

Much more at The Washington Times.

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Janine Davidson

The recent release of the Army’s latest Field Manual, FM 3-07 Stability Operations, has generated as much controversy as it has praise. On one side of the debate are those who see it as a great step forward in helping the military make sense of the complex, violent, and population-focused environments in which it increasingly finds itself. To the extent that our future conflicts are likely to look more like our current ones as Secretary Gates has asserted, it is high time we stopped muddling through and got serious about learning how to do this stuff. On the other end of the spectrum, however, are those who see the new doctrine as another dangerous step on the slippery slope toward U.S. imperialism. The better we become at nation building the critics claim, the more likely we are to try to do more of it. Moreover, teaching soldiers how to do stability operations not only erodes their war-fighting skills (i.e. their “real” mission), but it lets the civilian agencies who are supposed to do it off the hook in building their own capabilities and capacities. There are merits to both arguments, but on balance FM 3-07 should be seen as a great accomplishment.

Why FM 3-07?

It is perfectly understandable to hope that the military will conduct fewer stability operations in the future, but hoping does not make it so. The military still needs to prepare itself for the missions it will most likely be called on to perform. Given the thousands of troops over the last 200 years who have repeatedly been called to conduct these messy stability operations with little to no doctrine, education, or training, it seems high time someone put some rigorous effort into understanding how to conduct them better.

The concern over the U.S. as an imperialist power may be valid, but let’s not get carried away. Doctrine is not grand strategy. For those who worry that this new doctrine will make it more likely that we will try to invade and occupy more countries, consider that it might just have the opposite effect. If there is one thing this manual makes very clear, it is that stability operations are not rocket science – they are actually more complex and uncertain. Having a better understanding of the complexity and cost of these missions can only enhance the policy and strategy-making processes...

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One Crusader’s View
by Thomas Donnelly, Small Wars Journal Op-Ed

One Crusader’s View (Full PDF Article)

We have a great duty to perform and we shall show ourselves a weak and poor-spirited people if we fail to set about doing it, or if we fail to do it aright.

--Theodore Roosevelt
America’s Part of the World’s Work
Lincoln Club Dinner
February 1899

A century later and with the painful costs of Iraq and Afghanistan ever in our minds, TR’s call to American greatness can seem hubristic, jingoistic, anachronistic and its unguarded moments (and to a politically correct sensibility) outright racist. But Shawn Brimley’s recent “Mediating between Crusaders and Conservatives” called this quote to my mind. Brimley’s piece advances the original future-land-force-structure argument to its ultimate and proper point: what do we think about America’s employment of its military, and most particularly the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, over the next generation? At its indivisible core, this is a debate about American purposes in the world.

Brimley’s crusaders-or-conservatives taxonomy is likewise not a bad way to frame the landscape of debate; simplicity and clarity are indeed virtues and certainly ones that Roosevelt would have approved of. Yes, there many nuances among observers on all sides and indeed many points of analysis that those with profoundly divergent conclusions can agree upon. But let me offer an unreconstructed “crusader’s” view, meant to explain more fully several issues than Brimley glossed over. Most of what follows will focus on the purposes of U.S. land forces in the Middle East, but I will also end with a few observations about force structure and size.

One Crusader’s View (Full PDF Article)

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Learning from Contemporary Conflicts to Prepare for Future War - H.R. McMaster, Foreign Policy Research Institute E-Note

This essay is based on his full-length article in the Fall 2008 special issue of Orbis on “The Future of War.”

War is the final auditor of military institutions. Contemporary conflicts such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq create an urgent need for feedback based on actual experience. Analysis of the present combined with an understanding of history should help us improve dramatically the quality of our thinking about war. Understanding the continuities as well as changes in the character of armed conflict will help us make wise decisions about force structure, develop relevant joint force capabilities, and refine officer education and the organization, training, and the equipping of our forces.

But first we need to reject the unrealistic, abstract ideas concerning the nature of future conflict that gained wide acceptance in the 1990s. Flush with the ease of the military victory over Saddam’s forces in the 1991 Gulf War and aware of the rapid advance of communications, information, and precision munitions technologies, many observers argued then that U.S. competitive advantages in these technologies had brought about a Revolution in Military Affairs. It was assumed that there would be no “peer competitor” of U.S. military forces until at least 2020. Military concepts based on this assumption promised rapid, low-cost victory in future war. Ultimately, these ideas and their corollary of reduced reliance on military manpower became subsumed under “defense transformation.”

Defense transformation advocates never considered conflicts such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq—protracted counterinsurgency and state-building efforts that require population security, security-sector reform, reconstruction and economic development, building governmental capacity, and establishing the rule of law. Our experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the 2006 Lebanon war, provide strong warnings that we should abandon the orthodoxy of defense transformation and make appropriate adjustments to force structure and development...

Much more at FPRI.

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A Soldier’s View
by Colonel Gian Gentile, Small Wars Journal Op-Ed

A Soldier’s View (Full PDF Article)

Since Andrew Bacevich placed me in the “Conservative” camp in his Atlantic article and based on the two outstanding pieces just penned in SWJ by Shawn Brimley and Tom Donnelly I thought I would add a few comments of my own. As Joint Force Quarterly editor Colonel (retired) David Gurney has stated publicly on this blog, myself and John Nagl have a set of point-counterpoint articles due out in the next edition of JFQ that address the Bacevich Atlantic article and the issues involved.

First, I thought that Shawn Brimley’s SWJ oped, “Mediating Between Crusaders and Conservatives” drew out very well and accurately the points that Bacevich only touched on and did not develop in his Atlantic piece.

I also found much to agree with in Tom Donnelly’s “One Crusader’s View.” I especially liked his points at the end of the article where he articulated that the future of war is not just more Iraqs and Afghanistans but potentially conflicts that will require the American Army to have competencies at the higher end of the conflict spectrum. And Tom’s acknowledgment that there is still a need in the American army for armor platforms that he states are still (and implicitly in the future) “powerful formations” warmed the cockles of my cavalryman’s heart. I do, however, take issue in degree with what Tom said about current American Army doctrine. He said that “conventional force operational doctrine [did not] disappear with the publication of the counterinsurgency manual.” True, but not in sprit since the organizing principle of the current three American Army doctrinal manuals (FM 3-24, FM 3-0, and FM 3-24) has become nation building and not fighting has in a sense eclipsed the “conventional” side of the Army. I develop this argument much more in the upcoming JFQ piece.

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The Personnel System at War
A View from the Generation at the Tip of the Spear
by Robert Goldich, Small Wars Journal

The Personnel System at War (Full PDF Article)

Five junior officers, all veterans of combat, recently came together for a day-long dialogue with current and former senior manpower and personnel officials from the Department of Defense. Their major assessment was that an “industrial age” personnel system is being used to fight an “information age” war.

This frank assessment was sponsored by Anita K. Blair, the acting Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Manpower and Reserve Affairs). Ms. Blair’s purpose in bringing the two groups together was twofold. First, it provided an opportunity for senior manpower and personnel officials, both active duty and retired, from the military services and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, to hear, first-hand, the experiences of a group of five young officers who had served in Iraq, and their views of how personnel issues affected operations. Second, it also afforded the young officers, all of whom have published and commented on their wartime experiences in various electronic and print media, a chance to gain knowledge about current policies and practices from the perspectives of current senior defense leadership.

The five officers came from a variety of backgrounds. Four were Army, one Marine Corps; one was a woman; ages varied, approximately, from 27 to 39. One was an active Army major in the Aviation Branch, currently transitioning to a Strategist MOS; he commanded an aviation unit in Iraq as a captain. Another was an Army Reserve captain commissioned in Military Intelligence, who served as an operations planner and intelligence officer in an infantry brigade in Iraq. A third remains in the Army Reserve as a captain, also in Military Intelligence; she spent two tours in Iraq, one as a supply officer for an MI brigade and her second as commander of a tactical human intelligence team, and has also returned twice to Iraq for shorter tours as a contractor working on intelligence matters. A fourth has recently left the Army Reserve as a captain; a Military Police officer and a lawyer (although not a JAG officer), he spent a year in Iraq as an adviser to the Iraqi Police. The final officer, a Marine Corps Reserve infantry major, served in a Force Reconnaissance unit in the initial Iraq invasion in 2003 and as an adviser to the Iraqi Army in 2006-2007.

The Personnel System at War (Full PDF Article)

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Afghanistan: Is It Winnable? A British Perspective
Monday 27 October 2008
1430-1600: Reserve Officers' Association - Main Conference Room

The Foreign Policy Research Institute will kindly be hosting the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies from London for a panel discussion at the Reserve Officers' Association.

Afghanistan: Is It Winnable? A British Perspective

The operation in Afghanistan remains in the balance. It is winnable, but it is not being won and the future of the Transatlantic Relationship, and much else, depends upon its eventual success.

We now know the strategy and tactics that need to be adopted for success, but the fact is they are not being applied sufficiently or with enough political will.

New approaches will be needed on both sides of the Atlantic in the next four years and a different approach to expeditionary operations will have to be shared by all NATO members if the potential for success in Afghanistan is to be realised.

Panel Speakers

Professor Michael Clarke, Director of RUSI, will provide an analysis of current challenges in Afghanistan as well as a view of the new strategic thinking in the UK. Professor Clarke will discuss the progress of the conflict in Afghanistan so far as well as the issues surrounding UK policy in Afghanistan and its implications for the US.

Rear Admiral Chris Parry CBE MA FCMI will discuss the future of expeditionary warfare after Afghanistan. He will address such questions as: Are the operations in Afghanistan re-defining the character of future warfare? Or, are they a temporary aberration distracting the attention of strategic and military planners away from addressing the more complex challenges of the future? Admiral Parry's presentation will also discuss UK strategic thinking, procurement and training.

Chairman

Frank Hoffman, Senior Fellow, is a national security affairs analyst and consultant. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities at the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, Quantico, Virginia. Mr. Hoffman serves as the Center's strategic and global affairs analyst, develops advanced concepts and conducts research into the nature of future conflict. Prior to this position, Mr. Hoffman served on the staff of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century (Hart-Rudman Commission); was the National Security Analyst and Director, Marine Strategic Studies Group, at the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, Quantico; and served on the Professional Staff, Commission on Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces.

Location

The Reserve Officers' Association is located at:
One Constitution Avenue NE
Washington D.C. 20002-5618
Tel: 202.479.2200
ROA Point of Contact: Bob Feidler

For enquiries or to RSVP for this event, please contact Alan Luxenberg at lux@fpri.org

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Applying Ends, Ways, & Means to the Spectrum of Conflict
by Tom Clark and Bruce Stanley, Small Wars Journal Op-Ed

Applying Ends, Ways, & Means to the Spectrum of Conflict (Full PDF Article)

Can we have a meaningful discussion of full spectrum operations in one dimension? If we take the 2008 edition of FM 3-0, Operations, spectrum of conflict at face value the answer is yes. As depicted, full spectrum operations consist of a “ways” based framework. Such a framework stands in stark contrast to the remainder of FM 3-0 as well as other new doctrine manuals such as FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, and FM 3-07, Stability Operations.

All good models clarify complex topics. In using a simple model there is a danger of losing the clarity and completeness necessary to gain understanding. This is the problem with a one-dimension model to explain full spectrum operations – we traded clarity and completeness for simplicity.

FM 3-0, Operations, tells us that military operations occur within a complex framework of environmental factors. A contributing factor to complexity is the integration of activities of government and non-government entities with military operations to achieve unity of effort. Joint planning integrates military power with other instruments of national power to achieve a desired end state. Full spectrum operations involves more than simultaneous execution of offensive, defensive, and stability operations.

FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, tells us counterinsurgency is an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through subversion and armed conflict. Political power is the central issue as each side aims to get the people to accept its governance or authority as legitimate. Counterinsurgents use all instruments of national power to sustain the established or emerging government.

FM 3-07, Stability Operations, tells us that our military history is one of stability operations punctuated by episodes of major combat. Conflict transformation focuses on converting the dynamics of conflict into processes for constructive, positive change. Conflict transformation is the process of reducing the means and motivations for violent conflict while developing more viable, peaceful alternatives for the competitive pursuit of political and socioeconomic aspirations.

In the Fall 2006 Air and Space Power Journal, Dr Jack Kem wrote that transformation effects are difficult to assess under a one-dimension model. He proposes that effective transformation involves four specific considerations: the strategic context, the ends or purpose for transformation, ways or methods to achieve the ends, and means or resources to accomplish the ways.

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E-mail From Afghanistan - Roman Skaskiw, The Atlantic

... My Prediction: I’m fairly certain that so long as the illusionists in the Federal Reserve are able to forestall an implosion of the U.S. economy, American firepower and American wealth will prevail. The Deywagal Valley road will crest the ridge line and connect to the Korengal Valley road, to the great credit of whoever happens to be the PRT commander at the time. The sacrifice of the many good people who died will be invoked. The contractor will receive his last payment. The governor, escorted by the U.S. military, will give a speech. He will condemn the insurgents as agents of Pakistan. An approved Mullah will mention how even Mohammed worked with non-believers. Hopefully, the lives of Afghans along the roads will improve. A general will be in attendance. Then, the governor will return to his heavily guarded compound. He will meet with the PRT commander and ask for more projects. He will ask to be filled in on the PRT’s plan for the upcoming months. The handful of contractors with whom the PRT does business will wait patiently in the wings. Of course, there will still be violence, but our enterprise in Kunar Province is vast enough, and the people in the PRT smart enough, that statistics indicating progress will be produced and broadly advertised. The insurgents will still be referred to as “the bad guys,” Television will still resolutely confine itself to superficials, and young men will still like to fight.

My deal with the devil is finished. I've honored my commitment. I am back in my own country where the two main party candidates, despite all the cultural differences they represent, and despite the fervor with which red-team competes with blue-team, agree on Afghanistan, the bailout and everything else that matters to me...

Much more at The Atlantic.

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By John Collins

Alice in Wonderland asked the Cheshire Cat, "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

The answer was, "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."

The Honorable Les Aspin, as Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, asked much the same question on 9 October 1985 when he held hearings entitled "What Have We Got for a Trillion dollars?"

The world has changed a lot since then, when the US-Soviet military balance was still center stage, but structured ways of appraising national security problems and potential solutions have not. I'm therefore resurrecting my 23-year-old testimony for reconsideration, because it deals with a flock of fundamentals that the new Administration might usefully apply in its quest for ways to match military ends, ways, and means most successfully. Mismatches between forces and objectives, forces and threats, forces and strategies, forces and other forces remain prominent today.

Our superlative All-Volunteer Force, to cite just one of many examples, is hard pressed to cope with simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, much less Iran, North Korea, or anywhere else, because concentration on quality at the expense of quantity creates gaps between objectives and military power. A more prudent posture depends on increased capabilities, decreased ambitions, or both in some combination.

US policy-makers, planners, and programmers in the upcoming administration therefore would be well advised to review short-, mid-, and long-range requirements across the board, bearing in mind that the most dangerous enemy capabilities imaginable do not necessarily constitute dangerous threats, for reasons the attachment explores.

John M. Collins began to amass military experience when he enlisted in the Army as a private in 1942. Thirty years and three wars later, in 1972, he retired as a colonel. He spent the next quarter century as the leading analyst on military and defense issues at the Congressional Research Service. Many of us address him as Warlord.

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By Captain Crispin Burke

The US Embassy in Baghdad represents a massive engineering feat. Complete with its own power, food, shopping center, apartments, and formidable defenses, it is a marvel on the same scale as the finest World War Two-era battleships…and about as applicable to the current conflict as iron dreadnaughts were in the era of the aircraft carrier.

The building of massive redoubts has been an obsolete military strategy for centuries, and for good reason. A leader who retreats to a castle or fortress only controls the land on which that fortress stands, and can influence only the people who live within its walls. Within the walls of a fortress, leadership can grow increasingly out of touch with the local populace, with communications both to and from the fortress being increasingly difficult.

Attempts to control insurgencies and hold dominion over foreign countries through the building of massive isolated fortresses was attempted with disastrous results by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War. T.E. Lawrence, one of the intellectual fathers of modern insurgency, talks about a strategic situation in Hejaz in 1916 that was eerily similar to the strategic situation the United States faced from 2003-2007...

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Reviewed by:
Drew L. Schumann
LTC, US Army Reserve
Counter-IED Curriculum Developer, Combined Arms Center for Training
Fort Leavenworth, KS

Since 9/11, terrorism and Islam have been synonymous to many in the West, especially in America. Efforts by individuals and groups to disprove this concept have ranged from ineffective at best, to giving the impression of advocating terror and obfuscatory at worst. For the majority of Americans, according to a recent Gallup Poll, “There is nothing to admire about Islam”.

In 2001, the Gallup organization set off on a six-year, 35 country research project to determine what “Islam” thought about America, terror, as well as about their own society. The result is Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think. In this book, the authors assert that they can demonstrate conclusively, that most Americans’ opinions about Islam are misguided, and that the genesis of terrorism is not the actively religious in Islam.

For those who are reticent about reading a book about a series of polls, fear not, for the book is 204 pages, an introduction, five chapters and two tabs. Reading carefully, I would estimate a four hour read, uninterrupted. Plus, while the scope of the book is rather ambitious, and its execution is fairly sophisticated, it is written in understandable prose for all levels of readers with a minimum of jargon...

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PBS Press Release:

The next president of the United States will inherit a foreign policy nightmare: wars on two fronts, an overstretched military, a resurgent Taliban and a reconstituted Al Qaeda based far from America's reach.

In The War Briefing, airing Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), award-winning FRONTLINE producer Marcela Gaviria and correspondent Martin Smith offer harrowing on-the-ground reporting from the deadliest battlefield in the mountains of Afghanistan, and follow the trail to the militant safe havens deep inside the Pakistani tribal areas, probing some of the most urgent foreign policy challenges facing the next president.

“The situation is worse; there's no question about that,” says Ronald Neumann, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. “Provinces close to Kabul are now having incidents that didn't have incidents before. And to my mind, that is clearly a strengthening insurgency.”

The War Briefing begins in the mountains of northeastern Afghanistan, where FRONTLINE embedded with Bravo Company, a unit posted on one of Afghanistan's deadliest fronts. Bravo Company comes under fire almost daily. Attacks have reached an all-time high, now making Afghanistan a deadlier battlefield than Iraq. Often called the “forgotten war," top U.S. commanders concede that the next president will inherit a security situation that has deteriorated markedly over the last two years.

“The next president will face a situation where, in the next year or two, he will have to make the decision that faced the Soviets in 1988--either to massively reinforce and to wage a war very aggressively, or to get out,” says Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit. “That's the inheritance of the next president.”

In the short term, commanders agree that more troops are desperately needed. Lt. Col. John Nagl, a former counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, tells FRONTLINE: “In Afghanistan, we simply don't have enough boots on the ground to provide security on the ground, to convince the young men that we're there for the long haul; that if you work with us, we will not only keep you safe, but we'll work with you to build a better future for you and your family.”

But the next president's options in Afghanistan will be limited by a depleted military, with some units already on their fifth deployment. “The next president will be told: 'You need to spend more money on training troops. You need to recapitalize the military in equipment. And you might have to think about increasing the size of the military, especially ground forces,'” says Tom Ricks, author of Fiasco. “As one officer at the Pentagon put it to me: 'We're out of Schlitz. There are no extra troops left on the shelf. We're at our limit.'”

Even with more troops, any progress in Afghanistan will be hostage to developments just across the border. As long as the Taliban and Al Qaeda are able to launch attacks from their sanctuaries in the lawless tribal areas of neighboring Pakistan, any policy is likely to fail. But cracking down on the insurgent safe havens in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas presents enormous challenges of its own.

In recent months, special forces have mounted ground assaults on targets inside the tribal areas without the consent of the Pakistani government, prompting growing tensions with the Pakistani army and its new civilian leaders. “The United States does not have the right to go into a sovereign country that is its ally without permission and approval and consent of that ally,” Husain Haqqani, the Pakistani ambassador to the United States, tells FRONTLINE. Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations adds: “This was an early and decisive success we had [against the Taliban] after 9/11. If eight years later it collapses before the very force that we defeated and kicked out of Afghanistan, then the symbolism is tremendous. It would be a major morale booster for extremism across the Muslim world.”

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The Story

Afghanistan: The Night I Was 'Killed in Action' by a Taliban Ambush - Nick Meo, Daily Telegraph (21 October 2008)

The Reaction

The Most Self-serving and Incompetent Journalist in the World - Blackfive
A Cowardice Act By a Reporter - Bouhammer's Afghan Blog
Call To Arms - Bill & Bob's Excellent Afghan Adventure
Media's Finest - Mudville Gazette

The Rebuttal

Nick Meo Hits Back at Afghanistan Battle Report Slurs - Nick Meo, Daily Telegraph (26 October 2008)

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Military Prepares for Threats During Presidential Transition - Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post

The US military, bracing for the first wartime presidential transition in 40 years, is preparing for potential crises during the vulnerable handover period, including possible attacks by al-Qaeda and destabilizing developments in Iraq or Afghanistan, according to senior military officials.

"I think the enemy could well take advantage" of the transfer of power in Washington, said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, who launched preparations for the transition months ago, and who will brief the president-elect, the defense secretary nominee and other incoming officials on crisis management and how to run the military.

Officials are working "to make sure we are postured the right way around the world militarily, that our intelligence is focused on this issue, and in day-to-day operations the military is making sure it does not happen," Mullen said in an interview. "If it does happen, we need to be in a position to respond before and after the inauguration."

More at The Washington Post.

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US Resupplies Lebanon Military to Stabilize Ally - Robert Worth and Eric Lipton, New York Times

For years, the Lebanese military was ridiculed as the least effective armed group in a country that was full of them. After the army splintered during the 15-year civil war, its arsenal slowly rotted into a museum of obsolete tanks and grounded aircraft.

Now that is starting to change. At the gates of a military base just north of Beirut, groups of soldiers drive new American Humvees and trucks, and some tote gleaming new American rifles and grenade launchers.

The weapons are the leading edge of a new American commitment to resupply the military of this small but pivotal Middle Eastern country, which emerged three years ago from decades of Syrian domination.

The new wave of aid, the first major American military assistance to Lebanon since the 1980s, is meant to build an armed force that could help stabilize Lebanon’s fractured state, fight a rising terrorist threat and provide a legitimate alternative to the Shiite militant group Hezbollah. That organization, which controls southern Lebanon, has refused to disarm, arguing that it is the only force that can defend the country against Israel.

More at The New York Times.

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Tea With the Taliban? - David Ignatius, Washington Post opinion

As US and European officials ponder what to do about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, they are coming to a perhaps surprising conclusion: The simplest way to stabilize the country may be to negotiate a truce with the Taliban fundamentalists who were driven from power by the United States in 2001.

The question policymakers are pondering, in fact, isn't whether to negotiate with the Taliban but when. There's a widespread view among Bush administration officials and US military commanders that it's too soon for serious talks, because any negotiation now would be from a position of weakness. Some argue for a US troop buildup and an aggressive military campaign next year to secure Afghan population centers, followed by negotiations.

How the worm turns: A few years ago, it would have been unthinkable that the United States would consider any rapprochement with the Taliban militants who gave sanctuary to Osama bin Laden as he planned the devastating attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But the painful experience of Iraq and Afghanistan has convinced many US commanders that if you can take an enemy off the battlefield through negotiations, that's better than getting pinned down in protracted combat.

More at The Washington Post.

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US Considers Sending Special Ops to Afghanistan - Peter Spiegel, Los Angeles Times

In a sign that the US military is scaling back its goals in Afghanistan, senior Pentagon officials are weighing controversial proposals to send additional teams of highly trained special operations forces to narrowly target the most violent insurgent bands in the country.

The proposals are part of an acknowledgment among senior brass that a large-scale influx of conventional forces is unlikely in the near future because of troop commitments in Iraq. It also reflects the urgency to take some action to reverse recent setbacks in Afghanistan.

The idea of sending more special forces has intensified the debate over the best way to fight the war in Afghanistan. As security worsens in the country, many military leaders are increasingly arguing that an Iraq-style troop "surge" and counterinsurgency plan would not work because of the country's rugged geography and a history of resistance to rule from Kabul.

Unlike Iraq, where large portions of the population are urbanized in the wide, flat plains of the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys, much of Afghanistan is mountainous and dotted with remote villages that are hard to reach with large bodies of conventional forces, several Pentagon officials involved in the Afghanistan strategy review said.

More at The Los Angeles Times.

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Inside the Surge
1-5 Cavalry in Ameriyah
by Lieutenant Colonel Dale Kuehl, Small Wars Journal

Inside the Surge: 1-5 Cavalry in Ameriyah (Full PDF Article)

I had the privilege of commanding the 1st Battalion, 5th US Cavalry in Ameriyah from November 2006 until January of 2008. I have watched a debate on our actions unfold since last summer as we started having success in Ameriyah, but have refrained from jumping into the middle of it up to now. I acknowledge that I am not an unbiased observer, which is why I have avoided this debate. However, since the operations of 1-5 CAV under my command have become a part of the discussion I believe it is time that I jump in and try to clarify some of the facts about our operations and also offer some thoughts.

I start by emphasizing that I appreciate the efforts of 8-10 CAV and the other units in Baghdad that preceded us. My comments are in no way intended to question their dedication or valor, nor suggest that they did not conduct COIN operations. I fully appreciate the sacrifices made by Col. Gian Gentile and his battalion. However, I disagree with Gian’s position on the importance of the surge and the change in operational focus that accompanied it.

Inside the Surge: 1-5 Cavalry in Ameriyah (Full PDF Article)

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Manhunting…from the Sea
by Commander Chris Rawley, Small Wars Journal

Manhunting…from the Sea (Full PDF Article)

Although once considered little more than a nuisance and a force protection issue for overseas troops, terrorism will remain the top priority of our national security strategy for the foreseeable future. Regardless of the form in which a terrorist threat manifest itself, be it a state-sponsored global group, decentralized extremist cells, or just rogue individuals, Americans can no longer ignore stateless actors who have the ability to inflict serious harm on our citizens and economy. As the lethality and effectiveness of individual terrorist attacks grows, the ability to take down individual leaders or their networks becomes an increasingly urgent mission set for the military. Manhunting – finding and neutralizing high value individual targets – is now an integral part of irregular warfare operations supporting the Global War on Terrorism. These types of precision terrorist targeting operations, combined with sound counterinsurgency techniques, have proven effective in ongoing campaigns against the FARC in Colombia, Islamic insurgents in the Philippines, and Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Terrorists seek refuge in terrain that allows them to stay undercover from conventional targeting methods. These under-governed areas may include rugged mountainous, jungle, and coastal environments, or urban terrain where they can hide among the population. Over half of the terrorist safe havens listed in the 2008 State Department Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism Country Reports are in coastal countries or littoral areas. The Sinjar Records, a declassified database of Al-Qa’ida documents captured by coalition forces in October 2007 in Iraq provide another data set indicating terrorist proximity to the sea. All of the 328 individuals in those records who traveled to Iraq to fight against coalition forces or engage in suicide bombing missions originated from just seven different Middle East countries with coastlines of various lengths. Given the nomadic nature of terrorists and the proximity of many potential targets to the sea, distributed maritime forces are a natural player in manhunting efforts...

Manhunting…from the Sea (Full PDF Article)

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The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has recently posted the latest edition of the CTC Sentinel - lots of good stuff as usual to include the feature article Field Notes on Iraq’s Tribal Revolt Against Al-Qa`ida by Dr. David Kilcullen.
Here is the scoop on the remaining articles listed as reports by the Sentinel:

Islamic State of Iraq Commemorates its Two-Year Anniversary by Pascale Combelles Siegel, British Muslims Providing Foot Soldiers for the Global Jihad by James Brandon, Anatomy of Spain’s 28 Disrupted Jihadist Networks by Javier Jordan, The Impact of Global Youth Bulges on Islamist Radicalization and Violence by Colleen McCue and Kathryn Haahr, Jama`at al-Fuqara’: An Overblown Threat? by Farhana Ali and William Rosenau, The Threat of Terrorism to the 2010 Soccer World Cup in South Africa by Anneli Botha and Iraq as the Focus for Apocalyptic Scenarios by David Cook.

Check it out.

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The State Department, Not the Pentagon, Should Lead America's Public Diplomacy Efforts - Kristin Lord, Christian Science Monitor opinion

Today's public diplomats wear boots, not wingtips. Increasingly, the Defense Department is at the forefront of US efforts to engage public opinion overseas. While the State Department formally leads the effort, the Pentagon has more money and personnel to carry out the public diplomacy mission.

This trend is risky. The message foreign publics receive – not the message the US sends – changes when the Pentagon is the messenger. Putting our military, not civilians, at the forefront of US global communications undercuts the likelihood of success, distorts priorities, and undermines the effectiveness of US civilian agencies.

According to a Washington Post report, the Department of Defense will pay private contractors $300 million over three years to produce news and entertainment programs for the Iraqi public. These well-intentioned efforts aim to "engage and inspire" Iraqis to support the objectives of both the US and Iraqi governments.

Such outreach campaigns can be powerful if done well and as part of a broader strategy of engagement, political reconciliation, and economic development. Indeed, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has argued eloquently that the United States must call increasingly upon "soft power" to advance national interests. Soft power can take many forms, but it is primarily the use of culture, values, and ideas to attract, instead of military or economic threats to coerce.

More at The Christian Science Monitor.

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Support Sought In Afghan Mission - Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post

US commanders in Afghanistan now believe they need about 20,000 additional troops to battle a growing Taliban insurgency, as demands mount for support forces such as helicopter units, intelligence teams and engineers that are critical to operating in the country's harsh terrain.

The troop requests, made in recent weeks, reflect the broader struggles the US military faces in the Afghan war. Fighting has intensified, particularly in the country's eastern region, where attacks are up and cross-border infiltration of insurgents from Pakistan is on the rise. US troop deaths in 2008 are higher than in any other year since the conflict began in 2001.

The Pentagon has approved the deployment of one additional combat battalion and one Army brigade, or about 4,000 troops, set to arrive in Afghanistan by January. Commanders have already requested three more combat brigades -- 10,500 to 12,000 troops -- but those reinforcements depend on further reductions from Iraq and are unlikely to arrive until spring or summer, according to senior defense officials. Now, US commanders are asking the Pentagon for 5,000 to 10,000 additional support forces to help them tackle the country's unique geographic and logistical challenges.

Afghanistan's rugged mountains, bitter winters and primitive infrastructure pose a major hurdle as the US military seeks to build up its combat forces there. The conditions contrast with those in Iraq, where roads, runways and built-up urban areas helped absorb nearly 30,000 US forces during the troop "surge" last year...

Much more at The Washington Post.

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The Denial of Failure in Afghanistan
by Noureddine Jebnoun, Small Wars Journal

The Denial of Failure in Afghanistan (Full PDF Article)

The Afghan geopolitical terrain, which historically never had the reputation of being easy to negotiate, has made life particularly difficult for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its allies, which have