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A Reminder on the COIN Leadership Seminar next Monday at Quantico:

8 December - Counterinsurgency Leadership Seminar (Seminar). Quantico, VA. On 8 December 2008 the US Marine Corps Center for Irregular Warfare (CIW) will host a Counterinsurgency Leadership Seminar at Little Hall (Base Theater), Marine Corps Base, Quantico, Virginia, featuring Colonel Stephen Davis (USMC), Colonel David Maxwell (USA) and Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling. This seminar is cosponsored by CIW, US Joint Forces Command Irregular Warfare Center (IWC), the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center (COIN Center) and Small Wars Journal (SWJ). Seminar Panel Members: Colonel Stephen Davis, USMC. Col Davis is currently the Deputy Commanding Officer of Marine Corps Special Operations Command. Previously, Col Davis commanded Regimental Combat Team 2 in Iraq. Colonel David Maxwell, USA. COL Maxwell is currently the G-3 (Operations Officer) of the US Army Special Operations Command. Previously he commanded the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines. Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, USA. LTC Yingling is the Commander of 1st Battalion, 21st Field Artillery and is currently deployed to Iraq performing detainee operations. He has served two previous tours in Iraq, and has also deployed to Bosnia and Operation Desert Storm. Colonel Daniel Kelly, USMC, will moderate. Col Kelly is the Director of the US Marine Corps Center for Irregular Warfare. He has held a wide variety of command and staff billets and participated in numerous operations to include Operations Restore Hope / Continue Hope (Somalia), Operations Allied Force / Joint Guardian, (Kosovo) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF I and II).

And an update from Matt Armstrong at MountainRunner:

13 January - The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948: A Discourse to Shape America’s Discourse (Symposium). Washington, D.C. – at the Reserve Officer’s Association at the intersection of First Street and Constitution Avenue, NE. The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 was passed as the U.S. was beginning a "war of ideology... a war unto death," as America's Ambassador to Russia described it at the time. But, beginning in the 1970's, instead of promoting international engagement through information, cultural and educational exchanges, the law was distorted into a barrier of engagement. From its propaganda and counter-propaganda intentions, it transformed into an anti-propaganda law for reasons that had little to nothing to do with concerns over domestic influence and far removed from the original intent of the law. Keynotes will be given by Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy James K. Glassman and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Support to Public Diplomacy Michael Doran. There will be four 90 minute panels – past, present, future, and Congress – that will emphasize Q&A, discourse, and debate and not presentations or monologues. Registration is free, open to the public, and required to attend. The event will be on the record with a transcript available after the event. A public report based on the proceedings will be produced. Registration and other information can be found at http://mountainrunner.us/symposium.

Continue reading "Events Reminder and Update" »

Statement by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates

"I am deeply honored that the President-Elect has asked me to continue as Secretary of Defense."

"Mindful that we are engaged in two wars and face other serious challenges at home and around the world, and with a profound sense of personal responsibility to and for our men and women in uniform and their families, I must do my duty - as they do theirs. How could I do otherwise?"

"Serving in this position for nearly two years - and especially the opportunity to lead our brave and dedicated Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Defense Civilians - has been the most gratifying experience of my life. I am honored to continue to serve them and our country, and I will be honored to serve President-Elect Obama."

Remarks of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton

“Mr. President-elect, thank you for this honor. If confirmed, I will give this assignment, your administration, and our country my all. I also want to thank my fellow New Yorkers, who have for eight years given me the joy of a job I love, with the opportunity to work on issues I care about deeply, in a State that I cherish. And you’ve also helped prepare me well for this new role. After all, New Yorkers aren’t afraid to speak their minds, and do so in every language."

“Leaving the Senate is very difficult for me. But during the last few weeks, I thought often of our troops, serving bravely under difficult circumstances in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. I thought of those other Americans, in our foreign and civil services, working hard to promote and protect our interests around the world. And I thought of the daunting tasks ahead for our country: an economy that is reeling, a climate that is warming, and as we saw with the horrible events in Mumbai – threats that are relentless. The fate of our nation and the future of our children will be forged in the crucible of these global challenges. America cannot solve these crises without the world, and the world cannot solve them without America."

“By electing Barrack Obama our next President, the American people have demanded not just a new direction at home, but a new effort to renew America’s standing in the world as a force for positive change. We know our security, our values, and our interests cannot be protected and advanced by force alone. Nor indeed by Americans alone. We must pursue vigorous diplomacy using all the tools we can muster, to build a future with more partners and fewer adversaries, more opportunities and fewer dangers, for all who seek freedom, peace, and prosperity."

“America is a place founded on the idea that everyone should have the right to live up to his or her God-given potential. And it is that same ideal that must guide America’s purpose in the world today. And while we are determined to defend our freedoms and liberties at all costs, we also reach out to the world again, seeking common cause and higher ground. And so I believe the best way to continue serving my country, is to join President-elect Obama, Vice President-elect Biden, the leaders here, and the dedicated public servants of the State Department on behalf of our nation at this defining moment.

“President Kennedy once said that, ‘engaging the world to meet the threats we face was the greatest adventure of our century.’ Well Mr. President-elect, I am proud to join you, on what will be a difficult and exciting adventure in this new century. And may God bless you, and all who serve with you, and our great country.”

Obama Names Key Members of Foreign Policy, National Security Team

By Jim Malone, Voice of America

President-elect Barack Obama announced the key members of his foreign policy and national security team Monday, including his choice of former political rival Hillary Clinton to be his secretary of state. In addition, Mr. Obama has decided to keep on the current defense secretary, Robert Gates. VOA National correspondent Jim Malone reports from Washington.

Mr. Obama announced his foreign policy and national security team at a news conference in Chicago.

The president-elect said it was time for a new beginning in what he called an uncertain world, and he described his team as ready to lead what he called a new dawn of American leadership around the world.

"We will strengthen our capacity to defeat our enemies and support our friends," Obama said. "We will renew old alliances and forge new and enduring partnerships. We will show the world once more that America is relentless in defense of our people, steady in advancing our interests, and committed to the ideals that shine as a beacon to the world--democracy and justice, opportunity and unyielding hope--because American values are America's great export to the world."

Mr. Obama's choice of Hillary Clinton to be his secretary of state has easily been the most surprising development so far in the presidential transition period.

Mr. Obama described his former political rival as someone who commands respect in world capitols and who can carry out his commitment to renew American diplomacy and restore alliances.

Mrs. Clinton said it would be difficult to leave the Senate, but added she was excited by the challenge of representing the U.S. abroad.

"We know our security, our values and our interests cannot be protected and advanced by force alone, nor indeed, by Americans alone," Clinton said. "We must pursue vigorous diplomacy using all the tools we can muster to build a future with more partners and fewer adversaries, more opportunities and fewer dangers for all who seek freedom, peace and prosperity."

In order to clear the way for Hillary Clinton's nomination as secretary of state, her husband, former President Bill Clinton, agreed to disclose the names of donors to his charitable foundation. Mr. Clinton will also clear his schedule and speeches with the State Department to avoid any potential conflicts of interest.

Mr. Obama's choice for defense secretary is Robert Gates, the man who currently holds the job under President Bush.

The president-elect said Gates has the respect of members of Congress from both political parties for his pragmatism and competence.

Gates also appeared at the news conference and said he was pleased to continue in his current job.

"I am deeply honored that the president-elect has asked me to continue as secretary of defense," Gates said. "Mindful that we are engaged in two wars and face other serious challenges at home and around the world, and with a profound sense of personal responsibility to and for our men and women in uniform and their families, I must do my duty as they do theirs. How could I do otherwise?"

Mr. Obama announced other appointments as well, including Eric Holder as his choice for attorney general and Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano as the next secretary of Homeland Security.

In addition, Mr. Obama has tapped retired Marine Corps General James Jones to be his national security advisor, and Susan Rice as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

At his news conference, Mr. Obama was also asked about the recent terror attacks in Mumbai, India.

Mr. Obama reiterated that the United States has only one president at a time. But he spoke out forcefully against the terror attacks and said his administration would support India's efforts to catch those responsible.

"Both myself and the team that stands beside me are absolutely committed to eliminating the threat of terrorism and that is true wherever it is found," the president-elect said. "We cannot have, we cannot tolerate, a world in which innocents are being killed by extremists based on twisted ideologies, and we are going to have to bring the full force of our power, not only military but also diplomatic, economic and political to deal with those threats."

Mr. Obama will be sworn in as the country's 44th president on January 20, and his cabinet members will have to be confirmed by the Senate before they can take up their new posts.

Continue on for more...

Continue reading "Obama Names Key Members of Foreign Policy, National Security Team" »

Just back from a quick tour of blogs I frequent - and some I will soon frequent - to see what they are saying - or have said recently - concerning the President-elect's national security and foreign policy nominations. Not all have commented – here’s what’s what from those that have:

David Ignatius at PostPartisan - This is Obama’s team; he’s clearly in charge. You could see that he wasn’t diminished by the proximity of strong personalities; quite the opposite.

Max Boot at Contentions - As someone who was skeptical of Obama’s moderate posturing during the campaign, I have to admit that I am gobsmacked by these appointments , most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain.

Steve Coll at Think Tank - The real challenge (and practical fix) for the next Secretary of State is simply to convince Congress to pay for more diplomats. Filling the shortfall of 2,400 or so positions would reduce waiting times for job applicants, but more importantly, it would give our diplomatic corps the time to get out from behind our desks to communicate with locals, the resources to plan for and respond to emergencies and major events, and the career flexibility to get the training we need to be ready for future challenges.

Blake Hounshell at Passport - What will they do in office? It's too early to tell, but all of these folks, David Sanger observes, "have embraced a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena."

Joshua Keating at Passport - Jones's thin paper trail may worry partisans, but with Clinton, Joe Biden, Robert Gates, and Susan Rice on his team, Obama probably has enough big egos with well-defined worldviews to advise him on foreign policy. He may be looking for a towering presence who can call BS on wrongheaded recommendations when necessary, a task the 6'4" Jones seems more than qualified to carry out.

Galrahn at Information Dissemination - The US Navy is a mess right now, and Obama's decision to retain Secretary Gates can't be seen as a good thing for US Navy leadership. Think about the gamble facing the Navy with the Obama administration, the argument to change plans just for the DDG-1000 with the current argument expects the Obama administration to come in, override the recommendation of Secretary Gates, hurt the shipbuilding industry (piss off or on the Unions, however you want to call it), spend more money on the alternative Navy plan, build a fleet for a strategic environment best represented by a nuclear war with China, and finally, take action counter to the majority Democratic Congressman and Senators who are supporting the DDG-1000 plan.

David Wood at Military Watch - The threat of nuclear weapons runs through almost every national security decision Obama and his team will make, from terrorism through negotiations with Moscow.

Noah Shachtman at Danger Room - As predicted, Robert Gates will be staying on as Defense Secretary in the new Obama administration. Count me as psyched. I've been of fan of Gates', for quite some time. I wrote this, for example, in June.

Mary Katharine Ham at The Blog - He fell back on his usual dissembling on Iraq, when asked about withdrawal: "Now, remember what I said consistently during the campaign, and you were there for most of it. I said we'd have all combat troops out of Iraq in 16 months, and that there would likely remain a residual force there." He's clearly squeaking the door open on staying in Iraq, both with rhetoric and appointments (Jim Jones as National Security Adviser instead of Susan Rice.)

Tom Barnett at Thomas P.M. Barnett - Gates is staying, very exciting to hear!

Dan Froomkin at White House Watch - Rather than simply hire a new brand of loyalists -- or replace one gut player with another -- Obama is making it clear that he wants his thinking challenged and wants to hear opposing views before he reaches his decisions.

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway - We’re about to see a great shift in resources from the military to other actors, David Sanger argues. In a New Atlanticist piece called “Obama’s Foreign Policy Shift,” I join Matt Yglesias in proclaiming this “a really good idea.”

Jennifer Rubin at Contentions - Certainly much depends on execution of policy, as specific decisions arise for the new administration. But conservatives have little reason to complain about the national security front.

Joe Klein at Swampland - Watching the Obama rollout of his national security team from overseas--I'm in Europe, on my way to Afghanistan--I was struck by the inanity of most of the questions from my colleagues. Granted, these are political reporters, not national security or foreign policy specialists, but what sort of journalist expects the President-elect to tell the "inside story" of how he selected Hillary Clinton?

Jennifer Rubin at Contentions - In responding to a query on his (Obama's) team’s strong viewpoints and personalities, he again emphasized his commitment to military strength. His emphasis was on strengthening our capabilities “in all dimensions.” (This would seem to mesh with my take that he’s not going to be abandoning “hard” power, but rather attempting to supplement it.)

Judah Grunstein at World Politics Review - I think the political optics of what signal this sends regarding Democrats ability to manage national security rightly take a back seat here to the fact that Gates has been very impressive in effecting the institutional changes necessary to support the operational needs of two ongoing wars. But the Pentagon's final internal armistice lines (COIN vs. conventional and hard vs. soft power in Iran, for instance) have not been ultimately settled, which means maintaining continuity at the top makes sense for the time being.

Spencer Ackerman at Attackerman - Instead, Obama presented a clear picture of what he intends to do. Withdraw from Iraq along his 16-month timetable, "but I will listen to the recommendations of [military] commanders." Renew efforts against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Confront the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Reduce the dependency on foreign oil. And, as my last post indicated, recalibrate the balance between civilian and military efforts in U.S. national security to use what Vice President-elect Biden called the "totality" of options.

Jules Crittenden at Forward Movement - Wake up and smell the foreign policy! Big day for the incoming Clinton-Bush administration as POTUS-elect Obama Rodham Bush 3 announces the national security team he campaigned against.

Herschel Smith at The Captain's Jounal - So there seems to be a fundamental difference between Gates and the balance of the team. Gates apparently doesn’t believe in fairy tales and myths, while the demands on the left are for Obama not only to defund the military and engage enemies with dialogue, but to succeed, and that, remarkably so. This administration and the American public are being set up for huge disappointment, but all is not lost.

Mark at The Torch - The shift would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states. However, it is unclear whether the financing would be shifted from the Pentagon.

Steve Field at The D-Ring - With the announcement that Sec. Gates will be staying on at the Pentagon for at least a year during what is described as a “rolling transition,” my attention has turned to the new communications apparatus at the Pentagon.

Editors at New Atlanticist - The incoming administration will face an enormous array of national security challenges. With General Jim Jones' vision, integrity, and wisdom having such a central role in guiding them, they have a solid foundation.

Westhawk at Westhawk - What about the Obama team’s regional strategy for the Afghan problem? One is likely to get better results from a negotiation when one is bargaining from a position of strength. That doesn’t describe the U.S. position right now, something the Pakistani and Iranian governments know very well.

Antonious Block at Strategy and National Security - I think the idea of keeping Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense until Obama's own secretary can assemble his team and hit the ground running is brilliant. I also think Clinton will be an excellent Secretary of State (even though I was vehemently opposed to her as a presidential candidate).

Erin Simpson at Abu Muqawama - Victory in our time. Victory for this blog, that is.

Continue reading "Blogging On and About Obama's Nominations" »

Today’s New York Times features a military analysis piece by Michael Gordon on the stiff challenge our strategy for Afghanistan poses for President-elect Obama.

One of the most difficult challenges President-elect Barack Obama’s national security team faces is Mr. Obama’s vow to send thousands of American troops to help defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Military experts agree that more troops are required to carry out an effective counterinsurgency campaign, but they also caution that the reinforcements are unlikely to lead to the sort of rapid turnaround that the so-called troop surge in Iraq produced after its start in 2007.

After seven years of war, Afghanistan presents a unique set of problems: a rural-based insurgency, an enemy sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan, the chronic weakness of the Afghan government, a thriving narcotics trade, poorly developed infrastructure, and forbidding terrain...

Quoted are many COIN practitioners familiar to SWJ readers: Dr. David Kilcullen - Afghanistan may be the ‘good war,’ but it is also the harder war, Ali A. Jalali - Afghanistan is not Iraq... It is the theme park of problems, General David McKiernan - ... trying to develop a “bottom up” approach in which tribal elders, religious figures and other community leaders would form local councils that would be given the authority and resources to help with security, Colonel John Agoglia and Lieutenant Colonel Trent Scott - ... more American and international troops are needed to protect the Afghan population and hold ground that can eventually be handed off to expanded and better trained Afghan forces... They must deploy prepared for a long fight... They must think long term and realize that victory is unlikely on their watch. They must build a solid foundation on which their successors build on gains made.

Much more at The New York Times.

Continue reading "Afghanistan's Challenge" »

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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.

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 when he or she takes office in January 2009.

The US Army / USMC Counterinsurgency Center is pleased to host Linda Robinson at the COIN Center Breakfast Brownbag from 0830 to 0900 (CST) 0930 to 1000 (EST) on Wednesday, December 3, 2008. She will discuss the Iraq Surge and Counterinsurgency. Off-Site personnel may participate virtually at https://connect.dco.dod.mil/coinbrownbag.

Ms. Robinson, the author of Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces and Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq, is a author in residence at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies' Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies and a contributing editor for U.S. News and World Report.

Ms. Robinson is also the author of a Small Wars Journal Trip Report published on 17 September 2007 entitled Where Do We Go From Here?

Continue reading "Short Notice - COIN Center Virtual Brownbag" »

Newsweek

The 8 December edition of Newsweek Magazine features leading foreign-policy experts offering their recommendations on dealing with some of the world's most difficult and pressing challenges. Here's the lineup:

Wanted: A New Grand Strategy - Fareed Zakaria

The next US president faces a unique opportunity to put in place an architecture of peace for the 21st century. Grand strategy sounds like an abstract concept - something academics discuss - and one that bears little relationship to urgent, jarring events on the ground. But in the absence of strategy, any administration will be driven by the news, reacting rather than leading. For a superpower that has global interests and is forced to respond to virtually every problem, it's all too easy for the urgent to drive out the important.

Afghanistan: What's Our Definition of Victory? - Andrew J. Bacevich

In Afghanistan today, the United States and its allies are using the wrong means to pursue the wrong mission. Sending more troops to the region, as incoming president Barack Obama and others have suggested we should, will only turn Operation Enduring Freedom into Operation Enduring Obligation. Afghanistan will be a sinkhole, consuming resources neither the US military nor the US government can afford to waste.

Iran: Talk Tough With Tehran - Dennis Ross

Russia: Ease Moscow’s Suspicions - Michael Mandelbaum

Russia has reason to feel betrayed by the process of NATO expansion, begun in 1997. Seven years earlier, the Russians believe, American and German officials working on German reunification pledged not to take advantage of Moscow's weakness by extending NATO into Russia's traditional backyard.

China: Don’t Isolate, Integrate - Richard N. Haass

Middle East: Know the Limits of US Power - John J. Mearsheimer

Charlie Rose

Continue reading "Newsweek and Charlie Rose Twofer" »

I’m sitting here pondering the latest e-mail circulating through various military and subject matter expert networks concerning Dr. Jason Brownlee’s Middle East Report hit-piece on the Army’s newest field manual – FM 3-07, Stability Operations. In Imagining the Next Occupation, Brownlee evokes all the politically biased bugaboos in his implied bottom line - the better we become at nation building the more likely we are to try to do more of it, thereby establishing military occupation as a Pentagon priority.

I’ll give my “knuckle-dragger” two-cents worth and then turn this discussion over to good friend and colleague Dr. Janine Davidson via her recent Small Wars Journal post - The New Army Stability Operations Manual: Fact, Fiction, and Perspective on FM 3-07 (reposted here in full and recommended reading for Dr. Brownlee should he be inquisitive enough to wander by SWJ).

My bottom line for those disposed to hurling stones at doctrinal publications such as FM 3-07 and FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency (USA and USMC doctrine) is they really do not understand why the Army and Marine Corps (MCWP 33.3.5) felt compelled to write both publications – because in the absence of such doctrine – they were reduced to “winging it” – conducting stability and counterinsurgency missions as directed by our civilian authorities without the whole of government package associated with such operations. Read – all those non-military lines of operation such as governance, essential services and rule of law. When a vacuum exists someone needs to fill it and this often falls to the default only guys in town – excepting the bad guys of course.

Doctrine is not national security strategy, defense strategy or a campaign plan and it is especially not the U.S. military’s version of Mao’s Little Red Book. Often unread by many until needed, military doctrine provides a common framework and lexicon to foster initiative and creative problem solving. In the case of the two FMs mentioned here, it provides a how to think - not what to think - about an unfamiliar operating environment. The military really does like to be "prepared for the unexpected" and the lack of such doctrine has caught us flat-footed one too many times. More importantly, the collaboration between the Army and non-DoD civilian departments and agencies on FM 3-07 paved the way for a common framework to someday truly contribute to a whole of government approach (read unity of effort here) to problems that beg for non-military solutions. Dr. Brownlee – it ain’t sinister – it's just good common sense.

Now on to the smart stuff – here is Dr. Davidson’s 20 October SWJ post on the facts, fiction, and perspectives concerning FM 3-07.

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.

Fact vs. Fiction

The real value of FM 3-07 is that it gets a dialogue going and sets a few things straight:

First, FM 3-07 rightly notes that, contrary to popular belief, the Army has been conducting these types of missions for 200 years. The opening chapter is an excellent overview of this rich history. Military troops have been tasked with stabilizing, building, and re-building societies since the first units were sent West to keep peace between the settlers and the Indians and to build – literally – the nation. Recall that West Point was established as an engineering school for a reason. President Thomas Jefferson insisted that if we were to have a standing military (which he originally opposed) it should be as useful in times of peace as it is in times of war. One might make a similar case today and ask if the American taxpayer should expect more for $500 billion than an institution organized, trained, and equipped to fight conventional battles and nothing else.

Second, the manual recognizes that the nature of conflict is more complex than the pure science of defeating enemy militaries. If we truly wish leave a lasting peace in the places in which we intervene or fight, we do not have a choice between preparing for pure scientific battles and preparing for stability operations. At a minimum, if we do not stabilize a place after we bring down an enemy, then we set a trajectory for more chaos not peace. In so many other cases where the military is called to intervene in on-going conflicts or insurgencies, where the need to provide human security is the decisive line of operation, we need a military with a “full spectrum” mindset to understand the myriad interconnected tasks required to get the job done. FM 3-07 is a first step in this education.

Third, the manual suggests that despite aspirations to the contrary, the desired capability and capacity in civilian agencies not only does not currently exist, but it is not likely to be built in the near future. More importantly, even if and when USAID, State and all the other agencies were to enhance their expeditionary capacity 10 fold, these civilians would still not be capable – nor should they be – of doing their thing while bullets are still flying. That is the definition of a combatant, not a civilian. This means that the military will, at a minimum, be required to set a trajectory for accomplishing the long term strategic objectives with or without civilian experts on the ground. Once the environment is safe enough for civilians to engage, the military needs to know how to support their work. This means having a fundamental understanding of the nature of the conflict environment, the intersecting lines of operation (e.g. governance, security, economic development, etc), and the appropriate coordination of efforts among myriad military and civilian actors. This is what FM 3-07 is designed to accomplish.

Finally, it is important to understand that although this is a military manual, paid for and sponsored by the U.S. Army, it is in every other way, shape, and form, a true interagency, whole-of-government product. The process of writing this manual was almost as important as the product itself – and this process was unique. Through a series of conferences, roundtables, and workshops with thought leaders and representatives from various agencies throughout the government, in the NGO community, and among allies, FM 3-07’s author, LTC Steve Leonard, was able to glean the latest thought, theory, lessons, and controversies from the widest possible group of experts. Detailed debates over language, connotations, social science theory, and recent lessons learned from the field took place over a 10-month period, with some of these non-military participants contributing actual text to the finished product. In the end, FM 3-07 was written for and by the civilian-military community of practice, which spans well beyond just the U.S. Army. LTG Caldwell, the manual’s chief sponsor at Fort Leavenworth, recognized the importance of generating this vibrant interagency dialogue and has thus set the bar for future whole of government efforts in doctrine and strategy. Indeed, the next QDR might follow a similar model.

In sum, FM 3-07 is a great accomplishment. It is about time we thought seriously about these missions – not only how to do them, but why we do them. That the publication has generated great debate means that it is functioning just as it should.

Update:

Andrew Exum has more at Abu Muqawama - On Critiques of COIN/StabOps:

Spencer Ackerman at Washington Indpendent chimes in too - The Counterinsurgency Debate in Two Quick Hyperlinks.

Update # 2:

Mark O'Neill at Lowy Institute's The Interpreter - It's Not a Strategy, it's Just a Very Useful Book:

The pertinent fact to take away from all of the noise is that FM 3.07 is not grand strategy. It is not even a strategy. It is essentially a ‘cook book’ that provides US Army personnel in simple, easy to understand format, concise information about what they should do when in a stability operation. And this is useful, since they actually have a few of these on their plates at the moment, and it is probably better (for all of us) if they can pull them off successfully.

The idea that the US is likely to embark upon countless crusades because the US Army now has some instructions in how to undertake stability operations is ridiculous. Consider this - the US Army has had doctrine for the tactical use of nuclear weapons for over half a century. I don’t recall seeing any blogging about the fact that because they have nuclear weapons doctrine that they will invariably use such weapons. It is simply an illogical argument.

Continue reading "Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? (Update # 2)" »

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Security Force Assistance Case Study: Mosul, Iraq
by Major Rob Thornton, Dr. John Fishel and Dr. Marc Tyrrell

SFA Case Study: Mosul, Iraq (Full PDF Article)

Major Rob Thornton of the Joint Center for International Security Force Assistance (JCISFA) in coordination with Dr. John Fishel of the University of Oklahoma, Dr. Marc Tyrrell of Carleton University, and Mr. Mark Lauber also of JCISFA sat down to write the Mosul Case study with the goals of considering the requirements generated in the pursuit of policy and military objectives in complex conditions, and making some observations and recommendations about how DoD might better address those requirements. To this end the Case Study is built around a specific place, Mosul, Iraq over a short period of time, 2006-2007. The Case Study is designed to give the reader both an understanding of content and context of the environment, and of the objective and the subjective nature of the participants.

Within the study we found there are areas across DOTMLPF (Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leader Development and Education, Personnel and Facilities) that might be adapted in such a way that reduces risk at the tactical, operational and strategic levels, as well as risk to the institutions which must consider the broad range of roles, missions and capabilities required of them. Principal to this is the understanding that you can not improve our capabilities to conduct these types of missions by simply addressing one aspect of DOTMLPF. In fact, to attempt to do so usually results in unintended consequences in other areas, some of which may not be known until they have manifested themselves as critical deficits.

The Mosul Case Study raises some questions about the nature of how we see ourselves as an institution, what we value, and how those values translate into enabling capabilities. One of the questions the study considers is the value of individual personalities and skills apart from context of collective leadership. The Case Study and the interviews show that one size does not fit all, cookie cutter solutions and approaches generally produce problems not solve them, and that personality may matter as much or more than other skills and attributes.

SFA Case Study: Mosul, Iraq (Full PDF Article)

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Carlo Muñozn at Inside Defense reports that the new DoD Directive for Irregular Warfare was signed and released on 1 December. The Directive establishes policy and assigns responsibilities for DoD conduct of IW and development of capabilities to address irregular challenges to national security and requires any conflicting issuances be identified to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (USD) and the OSD Director, Administration and Management. Here's an excerpt from Inside Defense:

A new Pentagon directive on irregular warfare drops the idea of making US Special Operations Command the joint proponent for IW and assigns a leading role for developing IW doctrine and capabilities to US Joint Forces Command. ...links IW to the "core US military mission" of stability operations, noting that improving the Defense Department's IW proficiency enhances DOD's conduct of stability operations...

JFCOM, rather than SOCOM, will assist the Office of the Secretary of Defense in "identifying tracking requirements for critical skills and experiences relevant to IW"... JFCOM will also handle another task previously envisioned for SOCOM: leading the identification of "joint IW-relevant capabilities" and recommending priorities for developing those capabilities.

The directive also says JFCOM chief Gen. James Mattis will lead the collaborative development of joint standards for general purpose forces' "IW-relevant training and readiness," along with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen and the service chiefs...

Further, in what could be an attempt to advance a more holistic approach to IW, the final directive omits language that would have required organizations to assign IW tasks to a specific official, as opposed to the institution at large. The final version of the directive notably lists stability operations on the roster of IW missions...

For those who subscribe to Inside Defense there is much more - or sign up for an account at the Inside Defense News Stand - the first three downloads are free.

For those who would like to read DoD Directive 3000.07 (Irregular Warfare) in full, Small Wars Journal has posted it here.

For additional background on IW see the Irregular Warfare Joint Operating Concept. The stated purpose of the IW JOC is to describe how future joint force commanders will accomplish strategic objectives through the conduct of protracted IW on a global or regional scale. It identifies capabilities and capacities required to successfully prosecute IW. Many of the ideas advocated in this JOC are drawn from best practices of current conflicts and history.

Update

US to Raise 'Irregular War' Capabilities - Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post

The Pentagon this week approved a major policy directive that elevates the military's mission of "irregular warfare" - the increasingly prevalent campaigns to battle insurgents and terrorists, often with foreign partners and sometimes clandestinely - to an equal footing with traditional combat.

The directive, signed by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England on Monday, requires the Pentagon to step up its capabilities across the board to fight unconventionally, such as by working with foreign security forces, surrogates and indigenous resistance movements to shore up fragile states, extend the reach of US forces into denied areas or battle hostile regimes.

The policy, a result of more than a year of debate in the defense establishment, is part of a broader overhaul of the US military's role as the threat of large-scale combat against other nations' armies has waned and new dangers have arisen from shadowy non-state actors, such as terrorists that target civilian populations.

More at The Washington Post.

Update # 2

Pentagon Steers Toward Irregular Warfare - Westhawk, Westhawk

... When (and if) implemented, this directive will be a sweeping change in the functioning of the entire Defense Department. Naturally, the extent to which the directive’s intent is carried out will depend on who leads the Department in the future, on Congressional input and appropriations, and on what actually happens in the world over the next decade (the enemies’ votes). As written, the directive establishes the basis for a dramatic change in the US military. An appropriate global context will ensure the completion of this transformation.

Mike Vickers’s directive assigns irregular warfare responsibilities and tasks to every corner of the US Defense establishment. All of the under-secretariats inside the Pentagon, the Services, the combatant commands, and the Joint Staff are assigned their homework.

The directive represents a crushing defeat for those who wished to keep irregular warfare doctrine and execution segregated inside a discrete box within the Department. Under this directive, everyone in the Department has a significant part to play. Thus Gian Gentile’s nightmare has come true...

More at Westhawk.

Continue reading "New Irregular Warfare Directive (Updated # 2)" »

HUMINT Nature and the Jim Thyne Theory
by Dalton Fury, Small Wars Journal Op-Ed

HUMINT Nature and the Jim Thyne Theory (Full PDF Article)

For the past several months I’ve had the great opportunity to insert my voice into the public debate about what in the world we should do about UBL. This question arose during a 6 hour interview taping for a 13 minute 60 Minutes episode, again during a short stint on Hannity’s America, some time with Brain Kilmeade and Geraldo Rivera on FOX’s The Strategy Room, during The Rachel Maddow Show, and again on CNN. Moreover, in between tapings, a half dozen print media interviews, and scores of radio stations that air across the nation, most recently The Laura Ingraham Show, asked the same question. All this because I was simply the guy who couldn’t get the job done back at the beginning of the GWOT. So, my opinion and analysis is as good or bad as the next guys as we are all painfully aware – UBL still thumbs his nose at us every day.

From my very far removed perspective of the battlefield where all assumptions are taken from open source developments, three key themes are at the top of my “to do list” to turn the tide on the war in Afghanistan. The first two are no-brainers and have been called for by numerous Think Tanks and dedicated analysts who are more talented and more “in the know” than I presently am. Negotiating with moderate Taliban and focusing US funding for Pakistan on the COIN fight even appears at the top of Secretary Gates’ personal way ahead.

HUMINT Nature and the Jim Thyne Theory (Full PDF Article)

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USJFCOM Press Release and Link to JOE 2008

US Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) released today their Joint Operating Environment 2008 (JOE 2008), a report that discusses the trends and contexts of the future operating environment and their implication for the future joint force. JOE 2008 is designed to spark discussions with the widest set of national security and multinational partners about the nature of the future security environment and its potential military requirements.

In the broadest sense, the Joint Operating Environment examines three questions:

1. What future trends and disruptions are likely to affect the joint force over the next quarter century?
2. How are these trends and disruptions likely to define the future contexts for joint operations?
3. What are the implications of these trends and contexts for the joint force?

By exploring these trends, contexts, and implications, the Joint Operating Environment provides a basis for thinking about the world a quarter of a century from now. Its purpose is not to predict, but to suggest ways leaders might think about the future.

JOE 2008 examines changes and trends in the geopolitical and military landscape, such as: demographics, globalization, economics, pandemics, cyber, space, energy, resource scarcity, climate change and national disasters. These trends then form the context for exploring the following types of scenarios:

1. Competition and Cooperation Among Conventional Powers
2. Potential Challenges and Threats
3. Weak and Failing States
4. The Threats of Unconventional Power
5. Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction
6. Technology
7. The Battle of Narratives
8. Urbanization.

JOE 2008 makes the case that, "The next quarter century will challenge US joint forces with threats and opportunities ranging from regular and irregular wars in remote lands, to relief and reconstruction in crisis zones, to sustained engagement in the global commons."

JOE 2008 contributes to USJFCOM's central mission to develop a vision for how our military forces will conduct future operations and test this vision in the most realistic and challenging ways possible.

Joint Operating Environment 2008 (JOE 2008 full document)

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An Irregular Focus on What Has Been
by Sam Brannen, Small Wars Journal Op-Ed

With the release of its new directive on irregular warfare (IW) the Pentagon has demonstrated seriousness of purpose to fight the last war. The directive (3000.07) comes more than 7 years after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and over 5 years after the invasion of Iraq, and it argues that the Department of Defense (DoD) should recognize that “IW is as strategically important as traditional warfare” and deserves similar preparedness and development of capabilities.

Beyond the statement of the obvious a day late and a dollar short, the directive incorrectly characterizes the future of warfare. Leading defense analysts—most notably Frank Hoffman and Steve Biddle—have argued in convincing fashion that the next wars the United States fight will be an undifferentiated blend of what the Pentagon has now formally parsed as irregular warfare and traditional warfare. In an analysis of the 2006 Lebanon campaign, Biddle and Jeffrey Friedman found that “Hezbollah’s methods were…somewhere between the popular conceptions of guerilla and conventional warfare—but so are most military actors’, whether state or nonstate.” Hezbollah blended tactics and even strategic end goals of conventional and irregular warfare. The 2008 National Defense Strategy (NDS) rightly recognizes that “These modes of warfare [traditional and irregular] may appear individually or in combination, spanning the spectrum of warfare and intertwining hard and soft power.” So why does the IW directive—which should be derived from the NDS—make no mention of this reality?

The IW directive is further contradictory to existing Department guidance in its categorization of stabilization operations as a subset of IW. For example, the Army’s new Field Manual 3-07 on Stabilization Operations places stability operations on an equal footing with traditional warfare. FM 3-07 is in turn derived from DoD directive 3000.05 on Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations, which declared that stability operations “shall be given priority comparable to combat operations.”

In his recent monograph on how to account for inevitable surprise in defense planning Nate Freier argues, “Senior defense and military leadership naturally err on the side of what is known and practiced at the expense of preparing for what is less well-known but perhaps more dangerous.” Institutional change already underway, Freier observes, is pursued by the defense establishment despite research and analysis of the future security environment that may make a compelling case to prepare for something else entirely.

There is also the institutional issue of where the IW directive places most of the impetus for change related to irregular warfare: at the newly-established U.S. Joint Forces Command Irregular Warfare Center (JFCOM IWC) and with the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM). These Combatant Commands have little actual influence over how the Services—and in particular, the Army—go about training and equipping their general purpose forces. Overall U.S. preparedness for this new strategic environment will hinge almost entirely on the commitment of regional Combatant Commanders and the Service Chiefs to the process.

Sam Brannen is a fellow with the CSIS International Security Program, where he works on projects related to defense strategy and policy, Middle East security (especially U.S.-Turkey and U.S.-Turkey-Iraq issues), and U.S. national security reform.

Continue reading "An Irregular Focus on What Has Been" »

First up - a tip of the hat to Herschel Smith at The Captain's Journal for brining this to our attention.

In the January / February 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates has a paper entitled A Balanced Strategy: Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age.

Summary: The Pentagon has to do more than modernize its conventional forces; it must also focus on today's unconventional conflicts -- and tomorrow's.

The defining principle of the Pentagon's new National Defense Strategy is balance. The United States cannot expect to eliminate national security risks through higher defense budgets, to do everything and buy everything. The Department of Defense must set priorities and consider inescapable tradeoffs and opportunity costs.

The strategy strives for balance in three areas: between trying to prevail in current conflicts and preparing for other contingencies, between institutionalizing capabilities such as counterinsurgency and foreign military assistance and maintaining the United States' existing conventional and strategic technological edge against other military forces, and between retaining those cultural traits that have made the US armed forces successful and shedding those that hamper their ability to do what needs to be done.

More at Foreign Affairs and The Captain's Journal.

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Reconstruction in South Baghdad
by Captain Steve McGregor, Small Wars Journal

Reconstruction in South Baghdad (Full PDF Article)

Humanitarian aid is increasingly becoming more important to US military operations—not only because the military works more closely with aid agencies than ever before but because the military now implements great amounts of aid. According to a recent study by the Washington Post in August of this year, the US military has spent over 2.8 billion dollars on aid projects through the Commanders Emergency Response Program (CERP) .

As military commanders deal with how to properly implement aid the aid community is struggling to redefine itself. Many strategists and writers believe aid needs reform. David Rieff, when speaking before the Carnegie Council in support of his book “A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis,” argues that in Sudan aid organizations were “logisticians to the war effort of the belligerents, that in effect what Operation Lifeline Sudan was doing, whilst doing a great deal of good by saving lives, the humanitarians were in effect allowing the war to continue.” In another article, anthropologist Alex de Waal charges the aid community with over-estimating damage, creating false need, and unnecessarily complex programs.

On the other hand, humanitarian aid implemented by the US military in Iraq is reinforcing stability and quickening the peace. One area of Iraq this is particularly noticeable is Yusufiya, where Task Force 3-187 was able to completely transfer their area of responsibility back to Iraqi control.

Reconstruction in South Baghdad (Full PDF Article)

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Adam Elkus at Rethinking Security - Ludic Spaces and National Security:

A while ago, Michael Tanji came up with the concept of Think Tank 2.0--a geographically dispersed and eclectic network that collaborate online in a series of salon-like discussions. Since then, I've been entertaining a similar idea--the ludic space...

If we consider operational doctrines and theories of national security as kinds of narratives battling for control, we may do well to construct ludic structures where we can construct meaning from the play, competition, and the continuous exchange and modification of narratives about the future. Small Wars Journal is a kind of ludic space existing in the boundaries between the military, academia, and the media. It drives discussion on military issues because it provides a freewheeling, multi-dimensional exchange from individuals of many different backgrounds...

More at Rethinking Security.

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Our favorite anti-COIN Colonel, Gian Gentile, and yet SWJ friend - go figure that one out, continues his personal crusade in this recent International Herald Tribune opinion piece - Mired in 'Surge' Dogma.

Here are some tidbits (regular SWJ and Abu Muqawama readers are well familiar with this drum beat):

The US Army and other parts of America's defense establishment have become transfixed by the promise of counterinsurgency...

The promise of counterinsurgency is to turn war into a program of social-scientific functions that will achieve victory...

The current US counterinsurgency program rests on the dubious assumption that the surge in Iraq was a successful feat of arms...

The recent uptick in bloodshed shows that the war is not over...

Yet influential American counterinsurgency experts have simply co-opted the counter-Maoist model. There is no originality - or at least a serious consideration for very different alternatives...

Many army officers and Department of Defense thinkers seem to be able to think only about how to apply the perceived counterinsurgency lessons from Iraq to Afghanistan...

Perhaps under the Obama administration, the army and the greater defense establishment will embrace creativity instead of dogma and at least consider other options. If not, our way ahead has already been decided for us...

Come on Gian, be part of the solution here - not the problem, and give General Petraeus and company credit where credit is due - no one - read - no one - is suggesting plopping down the Iraq model onto Afghanistan and even the most ardent counterinsurgency proponent freely admits we must maintain our military capabilities across a "full spectrum" of possible scenarios. I’d like you to at least acknowledge that we must maintain a reasonable capability to conduct COIN when all is said and done. I served through the post-Vietnam denial of all things “irregular” – and look at where that got us.

Continue reading "Gian, Yet Again, Energizes the Anti-Surge Story-Line" »

Thanks Herschel

Victory at Sea: Navy Routs Army in 109th Meeting - Associated Press

Continue reading "Army CAS Ain't S*** - Go Navy - Beat Army!" »

'Day of Infamy' Lives On In Memory - Timothy Warren, Washington Times

Sixty-seven years after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Edward K. Walker Jr. of Alexandria still "vividly" remembers watching the bombs fall, with little understanding then of the infamous role the event would play in history.

"I just climbed up on the roof to see what was happening, much to my mother's consternation," said Mr. Walker, who was 9 at the time. "I didn't really know what was happening. I just thought it was interesting to watch."

Mr. Walker, the son of a naval officer stationed at Pearl Harbor, later spent 38 years in the Navy, retiring in 1988 as a rear admiral.

He is one of a dwindling number of people who witnessed the forces of Imperial Japan nearly deliver their intended knockout blow to the US Pacific Fleet at its Hawaiian base on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941. Some of them will be present for the annual wreath-laying at the Navy Memorial on Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest in remembrance of those who died.

More at The Washington Times.

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December's Armed Forces Journal is online and here's the lineup:

Terror at the Border by Robert Killebrew

With American attention diverted to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic crisis and a hard-fought national election, national security experts have largely overlooked the bitter countercartel war in Mexico. But that war, which is beginning to overlap the US border, is only the forerunner of an even more serious threat. Sometime in the near future a lethal combination of transnational terrorism and criminal gangs is going to cross the US border in force. According to some, it already has, and we haven’t even noticed.

Learning from Lawrence: Lawrence the Insurgent by Robert Batement

Of late, there are quite a few people who have taken to quoting T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. The quotation presented above is seen almost every day now, on military briefings and in State Department papers, in news articles and in public statements from people involved in all aspects of our effort. In the eyes of many, Lawrence, it seems, holds the answer to our dilemmas - in our efforts to suppress an insurgency and helping develop a democracy.

Transition Strategy: If Iran Goes Nuclear by Joseph Collins

Iran and its nuclear program will be a top issue for the Obama administration. Both US political parties have declared an Iranian nuclear weapons capability to be “unacceptable.” We all believe that we would better off if we lived in a world of fewer nuclear powers, and if erratic and ambitious states such as Iran did not develop nuclear weapons.

Flashpoint: Buccaneers are Back by Peter Brookes

The thought of pirates usually evokes Hollywood blockbusters involving swashbuckling buccaneers, tropical isles and buried treasure marked on a tattered map with an “X.” To those mindful of history, piracy might conjure up notions of the Barbary pirates, who sailed the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, raiding coastal towns, capturing merchant ships (some American), and ransoming or enslaving their crews in North African ports. Strikingly, some two centuries later, piracy at sea is back - with a vengeance.

Talk, Without Preconception by Thomas Momiyama

The US stands as an uncontested superpower, albeit serendipitously with the demise of the USSR and despite being incessantly denounced and challenged by rogue states and insurgency factions. America’s stature is questioned domestically and abroad for its “unilateral” invasions and tactically vexing deployment and engagement of military assets in the Near and Middle East under debatable political judgments. Nonetheless, America’s de facto superpower status destines it to the role of leading the world into peace and freedom. President-elect Barack Obama must reckon that role in his long-range vision of the nation.

Fighting Words by Ralph Peters

If our troops shot as wildly as our politicians and bureaucrats fire off words, we’d never win a single firefight. The inaccurate terminology tossed about by presidents and pundits alike obscures the nature of the threats we face, the character of our enemies and the inadequacies of our response. If we cannot, or will not, label our opponents, their cause and their motivations correctly, how can we forge an efficient and effective national strategy?

More at Armed Forces Journal.

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Bob Andrews is the Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army. As a Special Forces officer, he conducted intelligence, long-range reconnaissance and covert operations during two tours in Vietnam. He later served in senior positions at the Central Intelligence Agency and on the staff of Senator John Glenn. A former defense industry leader and author of three books and numerous articles, he returned to government in 2001 as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. In 2006, he became Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Counterintelligence and Security. until his appointment as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army in 2007.

Along with John Paul Vann, Bob co-authored two insightful studies on counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam in 1965. Motivational Training in Counterinsurgency: A Proposal offers practical advice to tactical units in developing host-nation security forces. These observations included "protect the villages upon completion of securing operations conducted by regular forces" and "promote the idea of participation in civic affairs."

What the motivational study is to tactics, Harnessing the Revolution in South Vietnam is to strategy. The authors begin with an analysis of the political situation in Vietnam, including the assessment that "a popular political base for the Government of South Vietnam does not now exist" and recommend "establishment of a country team advisory unit."

In reading these works, I recalled Phillip Larkin's Annus Mirabilis.

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Counterinsurgency is surely among the world's oldest professions. The knowledge we need to win lies in the memories of our veterans, old and new. Our task in building the capabilities to fight the wars of the 21st century is a much a task of remembering as it is of innovating.

Paul Yingling
Commander, 1-21 FA
J5, Task Force 134

Continue reading "Remembering Old and New" »

Joint, Interagency, and International Organization Economic Planning Integration
by Dr. David Anderson and Major Lawrence Walton, Small Wars Journal

Economic Planning Integration (Full PDF Article)

Objective, mass, and unity of effort have long been used as Principles of War. An objective is a clear obtainable goal, and mass refers to merging the efforts of different organizations to achieve decisive effects. However, it is only possible to gain the necessary mass towards achieving an objective through unity of effort (JP 3-0, 2006).

The President and the National Security Council are responsible for insuring that the whole of government is unified toward achieving national strategic objectives. However, unity of effort at the national strategic level does not always translate into unity of effort at the operational and tactical levels.

The economic instrument of national power requires unity of effort between the military, Other Government Agencies (OGAs), and International Organizations (IOs) to achieve contingency operational objectives. There is a growing volume of evidence from current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that suggests that these organizations have not been effectively integrated towards achieving economic contingency operational objectives creating operational risk. Unity of effort and decisively massing the institutional capabilities of the military, OGAs, and IOs are essential to achieving contingency operational planning objectives.

This paper examines how well integrated the Military, Other Government Agencies (OGA), and International Organizations (IO) economic functions are in contingency planning, and how well this integration reduces the operational risks in achieving contingency operational objectives. It will do so by first assessing current U.S. policy/directives and military doctrine addressing economics-related activities, and then by comparing/analyzing the military operational planning process with OGA/IO economic-related functions and widely accepted economic factors that influence economic development.

Economic Planning Integration (Full PDF Article)

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Via the Center for a New American Security:

On December 5, as part of our ongoing discussion with veterans returning from the front line, the Center for a New American Security was pleased to feature Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling for the latest installment in our Voices from the Field Project. The discussion focused on the need to internalize valuable insight from our experienced junior officers and the importance of decentralized decision making throughout the ranks. LTC Yingling described the need for ‘adaptive leadership’ specifically from returning veterans and further outlined institutional changes to re-incentivize the military’s internal promotion structure. However, Yingling stressed junior officers should not wait for institutional adaptation. Instead veterans should better integrate first-hand combat experience into the central dialogue regarding the future of American forces. In his often cited article A Failure in Generalship published in the Armed Forces Journal, LTC Yingling describes the role of the general in preparing and executing effective and adaptive warfare for the 21st century:

To prepare forces for war, the general must visualize the conditions of future combat. To raise military forces properly, the general must visualize the quality and quantity of forces needed in the next war. To arm and equip military forces properly, the general must visualize the materiel requirements of future engagements. To train military forces properly, the general must visualize the human demands on future battlefields, and replicate those conditions in peacetime exercises.

To listen to LTC Paul Yingling's opening remarks, please click here.

And for those in the DC Metro area on Monday:

Counterinsurgency (COIN) Leadership Seminar. On 8 December 2008 the US Marine Corps Center for Irregular Warfare (CIW) will host a Counterinsurgency Leadership Seminar at Little Hall (Base Theater), Marine Corps Base, Quantico, Virginia, featuring Colonel Stephen Davis (USMC), Colonel David Maxwell (USA) and Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling. This seminar is cosponsored by CIW, US Joint Forces Command Irregular Warfare Center (IWC), the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center (COIN Center) and Small Wars Journal (SWJ).

Seminar Panel Members. Colonel Stephen Davis, USMC. Col Davis is currently the Deputy Commander of Marine Corps Special Operations Command. Previously, Col Davis commanded Regimental Combat Team 2 in Iraq. Colonel David Maxwell, USA. COL Maxwell is currently the G-3 (Operations Officer) of the US Army Special Operations Command. Previously he commanded the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines. Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, USA. LTC Yingling is the Commander of 1st Battalion, 21st Field Artillery and is currently deployed to Iraq performing detainee operations. He has served two previous tours in Iraq and has also deployed to Bosnia and Operation Desert Storm.

Moderator. Colonel Daniel Kelly, USMC. Col Kelly is the Director of the US Marine Corps Center for Irregular Warfare. He has held a wide variety of command and staff billets and participated in numerous operations to include Operations Restore Hope / Continue Hope (Somalia), Operations Allied Force / Joint Guardian, (Kosovo) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF I and II).

COIN Leadership Seminar - Information Paper and Map

Continue reading "Officership and Adaptive Leadership" »

A Combat Vet’s Reading List - Jules Crittenden at Forward Movement has the list, and a damn good one it is.

Larry Gwin, former US Army captain, Silver Star, Purple Heart, XO of Alpha Co., 2/7 Cav, 1st Cav Division, veteran of the Ia Drang battles of 1965 and author of Baptism: A Vietnam Memoir, spent many years trying to understand war and find some context for his own horrific combat experience by exploring war literature. It is useful exercise, because in this manner the combat veteran may learn from other people, find commonality in what they write, ease the alienation and find his or her place in history. It is an important part of the post-combat normalization process. Make that post-combat normality transcendence process. There is the risk of obsession, but if that is an issue, take it up with your shrink.

In any case, Larry got bored the other morning, drafted his quick combat reading list, and emailed it. A couple of his buddies, on an email list that runs from Guadalcanal through Korea and Vietnam to Petraeus’ Baghdad staff and the Afghan Counterinsurgency Academy, added to it...

A Combat Vet’s Reading List at Forward Movement.

Continue reading "A Combat Vet’s Reading List" »

Council member Cavguy (Major Niel Smith at the USA / USMC COIN Center) recommends Understanding Airpower: Bonfire of the Fallacies by Colin Gray.

A great balanced paper on the capabilities and limitations of airpower... Read it all, some sacred cows get slain, both for groundpounders and airpower advocates...

This study rests upon two vital assumptions, both of them anathema to post-modern minds. First, it believes that historical truth can be found, or at least approached. Second, it believes in the utility of ambitious theory. The discussion here flatly rejects the proposition that “history” simply comprises competing “fables” told by historians with interests and attitudes.

Similarly, it dismisses almost out-of-hand the belief that one theory is worth about as much as any other, which is not very much. This analysis seeks to find plausibly verifiable truth and, as a consequence, to identify error, the “fallacies” in the secondary title. To understand airpower, most especially American airpower, is a task imbued with high significance for national and international security. But, this task is harassed and frequently frustrated by both unsound history and incompetent theorizing. The problem is that those who debate airpower typically seek the history that they can use to advantage, not the history that strives honestly to be true. As for the theory of airpower, it never did take off safely; it continues to fly in contested skies or to taxi indecisively on the runway. No single short study can aspire to correct for 90 years of poor history and shoddy theory, but it can at least make a start.

The hunter who seeks to find and slay fallacies about airpower finds himself in a target-rich environment. Paradoxically and ironically, airpower’s most forceful advocates, from the time of Billy Mitchell (1920s) to the present, also have served as its worst enemies. The prime loser has been US national security.

Understanding Airpower: Bonfire of the Fallacies by Colin Gray

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Delegate Beyond Point of Comfort

by Ken White

The tendency in the United State Armed Forces to micromanage is inimical to competency in combat and has adverse implications for doctrinal development. We should train to eliminate it yet instead we tacitly – some would say overtly – encourage it.

Colonel Daniel S. Roper, Director, USA/USMC COIN Center, 10 Dec 07 Iraq visit briefing (extract):

Delegation. OODA loop so tight, if capabilities, lethal or non-lethal, (e.g., AH, $, Intel, PSYOPs) not pushed to executor, may miss window of opportunity. Delegate beyond point of comfort. (emphasis added)

Why should such an obvious thing have to be said?

Because our egos are so large that we discard the lessons of history and sometimes even our training for our own determination of what is required and we know we cannot trust our subordinates to do it our way? Since we have been successful, obviously our way is correct…

That may be unfair and it certainly does not apply to all but it does apply to many; more importantly, we often forget it does not have to be our way to be correct and when we do remember that, we recall that our subordinates are not as capable as we’d like. Thus we eschew delegation and micromanage. We do this in the face of historical precedent in all our wars that this is practiced on entry and is discarded as dangerous as we gain experience in that war. See First Manassas or Kasserine Pass and compare those with later unit and soldier actions at Yellow Tavern and penetrating the Siegfried Line in the same wars.

I applauded when I was told that had been stated by Colonel Roper. Seemed like a long overdue observation to me. I have watched the progress of micromanagement in the Armed Forces of the United States since World War II. Watched it with considerable fear and trepidation. Even got to operate under it for many years…

While my comments apply to all four services and to the Department of Defense as an entity, I am more familiar with the US Army and will address just it in detail...

Continue reading "Delegate Beyond Point of Comfort" »

Just spent an absolutely great 24 hours plus – a 2 1/2 hour dinner last night with COIN Leadership Seminar panelists Colonel Steve Davis, Colonel Dave Maxwell and Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling; moderator Colonel Dan Kelly, MCTAG Director Colonel Scott Cottrell and SWJ partner in crime Bill Nagle.

Great conversation on complex issues led into today’s seminar – adding into the mix an informed and experienced audience made for quite a day. We will have more on this later as we sort through the notes for an AAR and format the video of today’s panel discussion as well as the Q&A for CD and web posting.

With that, I’ll leave you with a couple of pics and the opening remarks of LTC Paul Yingling...

Continue reading "COIN Leadership Seminar - Quick-note" »

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US Army Training and Doctrine Command Change-of-Command Ceremony

As Delivered by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, Fort Monroe, VA, Monday, December 08, 2008.

Today, we pay tribute to the career and achievements of one Army leader, welcome another, and reflect on the ways that this command has transformed itself and the Army.

General Scott Wallace’s retirement and relinquishment of this command brings to a close nearly four decades of training, mentoring, and leading soldiers at every level. The arc and trajectory of that career – culminating in the changes General Wallace has led here in TRADOC – in many ways tracks the story of the U.S. Army over the past two generations...

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Sons of Iraq: A Vote of Confidence for Reconciliation
by Adam Weinstein, MNC-I Public Affairs

Sons of Iraq: A Vote of Confidence for Reconciliation (Full PDF Article)

In early November, as U.S. Soldiers looked on, Baghdad-based members of the Sons of Iraq got their monthly paychecks from a new boss: the Iraqi government.

“It was a critical step in the turnover of the mostly Sunni volunteers from Coalition to Iraqi control. And the Baghdad transfer has become a model for similar moves in four other key provinces,” according to Lt. Col. Jeffrey Kulmayer, the chief of reconciliation and engagement for Multi-National Corps - Iraq. “The government is doing the right thing. Baghdad has gone quite well, and we expect that the rest of the provinces will do the same.”

The Sons of Iraq, one of the war’s good-news stories, occupy what Maj. Gen. Michael Ferriter, the deputy commanding General of MNC – I, calls “the leading edge of reconciliation.” A few years ago, many of the group’s members considered Coalition forces their enemies; some fought against U.S. troops and their allies. But in June 2007, armed militiamen in Anbar province found they shared a goal with the Coalition: taking back their neighborhoods from al Qaeda in Iraq. “We helped organize them and eventually began to fund them to provide critical infrastructure and security throughout Anbar,” said Ferriter, “and it quickly spread to many of the other provinces.”

Sons of Iraq: A Vote of Confidence for Reconciliation (Full PDF Article)

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Via Galrahn at Information Dissemination - The US Naval Institute is now blogging. So far, so good. Glad to see USNI in the blogosphere.

Also - check out Information Dissemination's main page for a lively discussion of piracy issues and Secretary Gates' recent Foreign Affairs article entitled A Balanced Strategy.

And while I'm at it - check out Seven Questions: Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper on How to Kick Pirate Booty at Foreign Policy.

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Africa Command Welcomes Army Component

Southern European Task Force cased its old colors, ending the airborne chapter of its history, and uncased its new colors signifying acceptance of its new mission as the Army component in support of US Africa Command in a ceremony here today. The ceremony followed an official announcement by the US and Italian governments Dec. 3 in Rome that SETAF would become US Army Africa.

“We are honored and privileged to be the first members of US Army Africa,” Army Major General William B. Garrett III, SETAF commanding general, said. “This is a huge responsibility, as our decisions and actions will establish the foundation that others will build upon in the years ahead.”

Army General William E. “Kip” Ward, commander of US Africa Command, and Army General Carter Ham, commander of US Army Europe and 7th Army, attended the ceremony, which highlighted SETAF’s long, proud history.

“I welcome all of you to the US Africa Command team,” Ward said. “I am confident that this great command is up to the challenge.”

Garrett, who was promoted from brigadier general to major general earlier today, said that while SETAF’s mission has changed, its relationship with the command’s Italian partners will not.

“The enduring relationship between the United States and Italy will only get stronger; new opportunities will spring from common objectives and a shared vision for a prosperous Africa,” he said.

SETAF, stationed in Italy since 1955, has a long history of operating on the African continent and working with African nations. During the past 15 years, SETAF has provided crisis response, disaster relief and humanitarian assistance on the continent.

During the next year, SETAF soldiers will learn and grow to lay the foundation for future success as US Army Africa, Garrett said. This foundation includes building and strengthening relationships with African army organizations, along with national and international partners, to promote peace, security and stability in Africa, he said.

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Southern European Task Force Transformation Ceremony
by Major General William B. Garrett III

Southern European Task Force Transformation Ceremony (Full PDF Article)

On behalf of the entire SETAF team, I would like to thank the leadership at U.S. Africa Command and U.S. Army Europe, who have been instrumental in helping us transform to assume our new role.

We are honored and privileged to be the first members of U.S. Army Africa. This is a huge responsibility, as our decisions and actions will establish the foundation that others will build upon in the years ahead.

In Africa, we face a set of security challenges that may be unprecedented in complexity and scope – presenting dilemmas that do not lend themselves to a simple choice between use of force or diplomacy.

Members of the international community have long asked for increased global attention to African issues – particularly since genocide, ethnic cleansing, rape, acts of terror, and crimes against humanity have come to symbolize modern conflict in Africa.

The creation of Africa Command, and now U.S. Army Africa, reflects our Nation’s determination to commit to a lasting security relationship with Africa – a long neglected continent whose impoverished people remain vulnerable to the ideology of violent extremism.

Southern European Task Force Transformation Ceremony (Full PDF Article)

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Building a Military for the 21st Century
New Realities, New Priorities
by Lawrence J. Korb, Peter Juul, Laura Conley, Major Myles B. Caggins III and Sean Duggan; Center for American Progress

The next administration will have to contend with two wars, a military readiness crisis, recruitment and retention problems, mounting equipment shortages, and an out-of-control defense acquisition process.

In a little over one month, a new administration will have the opportunity to manage a significant realignment of U.S. defense and national security priorities. To be sure, this process will not occur in a vacuum. Today’s security imperatives and budgetary realities will require the next administration to make hard decisions and difficult trade-offs on competing visions of the military and its role in implementing national security strategy. These trade-offs will have wide-ranging consequences for the size and structure of the force, and what procurement and modernization options are feasible in order to advance overall U.S. national security interests.

Pentagon planners have already begun to warn the incoming administration about the choices it will have to make. A Pentagon advisory group recently notified the president-elect’s office that the Department of Defense, “cannot reset the current force, modernize and transform in all portfolios at the same time. Choices must be made across capabilities and within systems to deliver capability at known prices within a specific period of time.”

Full Report.

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Distinguishing Between Security Force Assistance & Foreign Internal Defense
Determining A Doctrine Road-Ahead
by Major Derek C. Jenkins, Small Wars Journal

Distinguishing Between SFA and FID (Full PDF Article)

There is confusion and a disconnect between Security Force Assistance (SFA) and Foreign Internal Defense (FID). It is unclear how or if they support an overarching theme. For years the US Armed Forces have used the FID construct to describe how the military element of US foreign policy supports internal security assistance to friendly nations. Recently, the Secretary of Defense (SecDEF) promulgated a newer, larger construct called SFA. Many in the military view SFA as when U.S. and partner forces rebuild security infrastructure during stability, security, transition, and reconstruction operations.

The new paradigm comes from a realization as spelled out in the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), that the U.S. must train partner forces rather than just provide security for them. This grew out of a void in our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. No secret here, the QDR states that we need “multipurpose forces to train, equip, and advise” and “deploy and engage with partner nations” . As a result the SecDEF created the Joint Center for International Security Force Assistance (JCISFA) in 2006. This center is the U.S. Armed Forces focal point for SFA.

This paper will frame the basics for comparison between the current paradigm (FID) and the new one (SFA). Then it will describe why both of these elements fit under a Building Partnership (BP) framework. This framework should be clearly and appropriately described in one doctrinal theme.

Distinguishing Between SFA and FID (Full PDF Article)

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Building Adaptive Leaders
The Army Can Adapt Its Institution (Pt. 1)
by Major Donald E. Vandergriff, Small Wars Journal

Building Adaptive Leaders (Full PDF Article)

Warfare has evolved to the point that the central idea is that small unit leaders in direct contact with the enemy can see and react to situational changes much faster than could the more senior leaders in the rear. This occurs despite the advent of information technology. This technology laid over an Industrial age hierarchal force structure confined with leaders developed through an industrial age personnel system can make it tempting for leaders to micromanage. Thus, the decision cycle slows down. But, warfare now demands something different. Small unit leaders who were once only concerned with choosing which battle drill now make decisions which have strategic implications. The question arises, how can we evolve the current way of developing leaders and Soldiers (Marines as well) that prepares them earlier to be complex problem solvers?

The Army acknowledges the need for change. The Army has begun an evolution in the way we develop—train, educate, access, promote and select—leaders, specifically how do we evolve adaptability. It is now implementing two training and leadership development models. In part I, I will discuss the Adaptive Leader Methodology (ALM) as an approach to develop adaptability and decision making skills. In part II, I will discuss Outcomes Based Training & Education (OBT&E).

Building Adaptive Leaders (Full PDF Article)

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As a follow-on to this August entry on the SWJ Blog and Small Wars Council discussion thread on the Minerva Project, we received the following nice note from Corrie at the Stanford Humanities Center. A skeptical viewpoint based on historical analysis? Hmmm, might resonate with some of our crowd.

I saw the SWJ Minerva Project entry and thought you might be interested in an essay written by a Stanford history Prof. who has some reservations about the project. History Professor Priya Satia wrote the essay for the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) which has set up an on-line platform where invited scholars post their concerns and arguments relating to the Minerva Project. In her essay, Satia explains that the DoD’s appeal to scholars is a misguided attempt to involve academics without fully considering the consequences of the act. Satia uses her history expertise to illustrate her point and explains that the British military was involved in a similar situation in the Middle East following WWI.

Read the entire SSRC essay, The Forgotten History of Knowledge and Power in British Iraq, or Why Minerva’s Owl Cannot Fly, or this short story about Prof. Satia’s involvement with the SSRC.

BTW, our friends at the American Anthropological Association aren’t big fans of Minerva either. They seem pretty well dead-set against anything to do with DoD. But it is still wise to grasp the well-reasoned reservations that academia has about the project. It is, after all, engagement, which must be done on mutually acceptable terms.

Continue reading "Minerva Project revisited" »

U.S. Special Operations
Personal Opinions
by Colonel John M. Collins, Small Wars Journal

U.S. Special Operations: Personal Opinions (Full PDF Article)

Many true believers throughout USSOCOM have memorized SOF Truths, here are the first four of five bullets that I conceived and Congressman Earl Hutto signed in the Foreword to U.S. and Soviet Special Operations on 28 April 1987:

- Humans are more important than hardware
- Their quality is more important than quantities

- Special Operations Forces cannot be mass-produced

- Competent SOF cannot be created after emergencies occur

When General Stiner sent me on a Cook’s tour of his subordinate commands in 1993 the first stop was Fort Bragg, where USASOC commander Lieutenant General Wayne Downing proudly concluded his formal presentation with a slide that displayed SOF Truths. He did a double take when I told him “they’re wonderful,” then said, “I wrote ‘em.”

If asked to start over from scratch, I would add one word to the fourth bullet so it would read “Competent SOF cannot be created RAPIDLY after emergencies occur.” Otherwise, I believe they are still solid as bricks, but wish that whoever enshrined the first four had retained Number 5, which says “Most Special Operations require non-SOF assistance.” That oversight was a serious mistake in my opinion, because its omission encourages unrealistic expectations by poorly tutored employers and perpetuates a counterproductive “us versus everybody else” attitude by excessively gung ho members of the SOF community.

U.S. Special Operations: Personal Opinions (Full PDF Article)

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Secretary Gates Urges Greater Balance in Military Capabilities
by Donna Miles, American Forces Press Service

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, in a Foreign Affairs magazine article, calls on the defense establishment to recognize the importance of low-intensity, irregular capabilities and unconventional thinking to succeed in the war on violent extremism.

The outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan will set the stage for the United States’ ability to deal with future threats, Gates wrote in an article called “A Balanced Strategy: Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age,” published in the magazine's January/February issue.

“To be blunt, to fail -- or to be seen to fail -- in either Iraq or Afghanistan would be a disastrous blow to U.S. credibility, both among friends and allies and among potential adversaries,” he wrote.

While calling it “irresponsible” not to look ahead to future conventional and strategic threats, Gates said the defense establishment can’t lose sight of today’s pressing requirements in the process.

The secretary expressed frustration over the Defense Department’s budget and bureaucracy, calling them overly committed to conventional modernization programs. He urged balance, as spelled out in the new National Defense Strategy, which gives equal focus to nonconventional capabilities and know-how.

“My fundamental concern is that there is not commensurate institutional support … for the capabilities needed to win today’s wars and some of their likely successors,” he wrote. Gates extended blame to the Pentagon bureaucracy, Congress and the defense industry.

Direct military force will continue to play a role in the prolonged, worldwide, irregular campaign against terrorists and other extremists, Gates acknowledged.

“But over the long term, the United States cannot kill or capture its way to victory,” he said. “Where possible, what the military calls kinetic operations should be subordinated to measures aimed at promoting better governance, economic programs that spur development, and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented, from whom the terrorists recruit.”

Those goals won’t happen overnight, he conceded. Instead, they’ll require “the patient accumulation of quiet successes over a long time to discredit and defeat extremist movements and their ideologies,” he wrote.

While the United States isn’t likely to face the exact circumstances taking place in Iraq or Afghanistan any time soon, Gates said, it should expect to encounter challenges elsewhere in the world. When facing these, Gates advised taking the indirect approach whenever possible. Building the capacity of partner governments and their security forces can prevent problems from turning into crises that require direct U.S. military intervention, he wrote.

The secretary, a staunch advocate of the “soft” as well as the “hard” elements of national power, lauded renewed emphasis on State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development capabilities. But even with more funding and manpower channeled to those organizations, Gates said, he doesn’t envision a day when military commanders won’t be tied in some way to security and stability missions.

He cited “impressive strides” the military has made in recent years to support those missions. These include steep increases in special operations funding and personnel, advances in the Air Force unmanned aerial operations programs, and a new Navy expeditionary combat command and restoration of its units capable of operating on rivers.

Meanwhile, he added, new counterinsurgency and Army operations manuals and a new maritime strategy incorporate lessons learned in recent operations.

Gates pointed to vivid reminders of the dangers insurgencies and failing states continue to present if not adequately addressed. These threats and others the United States is likely to face in the future are too big and too potentially catastrophic to be overlooked today, Gates wrote.

“The kinds of capabilities needed to deal with these scenarios cannot be considered exotic distractions or temporary diversions,” he said. “The United States does not have the luxury of opting out because these scenarios do not conform to preferred notions of the American way of war.”

This is first article in a series based on Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates’ article, A Balanced Strategy: Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age, published in the January/February 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

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Recently on an e-mail based discussion group in which I participate, there was some extended debate about how much language training was enough and which was more important, language training or history/culture education, for deploying soldiers. It was an informed and interesting squabble, with practitioners from every American war since Korea piping in with opinions and points of evidence. Then one fellow, a former-soldier-turned-photojournalist named Jim, plopped down the Truth. His simple formulation? "It's a people thing."

Now I am not a big one for the whole "emotional" thingeemabob. In most debates I want footnotes, documentation, and fracking proof for everything. People who know my history know this about me. But there are limits, and Jim's simple statement hit the mark. Sometimes, some very rare times, you don't need proof. You don't need evidence. You need only know how to feel, and be human. Jim, I knew instantly, was right.

So here I suspend. Watch this video.

No, wait. STOP. Backstory first. Because, as you all know, I'm Mr. Context.

OK, so a few years ago this doofus Seattle kid, a 20 something named Matt, decided he wanted to see the world. He took off, and it being the internet age and all, he updated his friends with short snippet videos from all over. The hook was that all of his friends firmly believed that this fellow, Matt, was quite possibly the worst dancer in all of human history.

They were probably right.

But because young Matt had a sense of humor, the snippet videos he sent to his friends from around (that time) South and SE Asia, were all of him dancing his somewhat, ahhhh, unique "dance" in various locals.

Then somebody tied all the videos together. It went "viral"...meaning that people across the planet watched it. Millions upon millions of them. Including some very saavy marketers at an Australian gum company called "Stride." They wrote to Matt and said, "Hey mate, like to do it again on our dime?" So Matt went around the world again, doing his doofy dance. That video was even bigger. Matt was inundated with mail, and Stride saw a global marketing boost, so they (being Aussies) said, "Double down mate." And Matt fused the two...all of the e-mail he had from around the planet...people who loved his video, and a travel expense account that his unemployed butt could have never supported.

This video was the upshot:

And THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is what we fight for. Or at least it is one part of what I fight for. Your mileage may vary, but for me, the vision of the world that this dumb-ass, 20-something, no-talent Muldoon gave us through his genius is enough. Our world is farked up, or at least large parts of the world...the parts that we Soldiers (and our brothers, the Marines) see, are often farked up. But young Matt, with this effing magnificent, transcendent, unifying-the-whole-goddamned-planet vision, which he demonstrated to the world all by his lonesome far better (judging by the 26 million hits on this video) than DoD, or State, or than any part of our government ever has, is a vision of the planet that represents what I want for our collective future.

My friend Jim is right. "It's a People Thing."

I hope this is what you fight for as well. Regardless of your nationality.

Continue reading "What I Fight For" »

Smarter, Not Harsher
by Matthew Alexander, Small Wars Journal Op-Ed

Smarter, Not Harsher (Full PDF Article)

TV shows like 24 incorporate interrogations and the use of torture under the "ticking bomb" scenario because it is dramatic and entertaining. The myriad of cop shows on TV (including NYPD Blue, CSI, Law & Order, and The Shield) consistently use harsh and forceful interrogation scenes to build excitement, it is a favorite topic of talking head political shows, and was a major topic in the recent presidential debates.

What's interesting to me is that the debate over torture in interrogations is morally important, but pragmatically irrelevant. Politicians and bureaucrats supporting the current administration have put in Herculean efforts to legalize harsh techniques, labeled "enhanced interrogation techniques," and to keep them classified. These methods are in complete contradiction to the standards that we expect our own troops, when captured, to be afforded and they are incompatible with American principles. Enhanced interrogation techniques are torture by the standards of the Geneva Conventions which we proclaim to uphold. What's most important, they are neither the most efficient nor reliable methods of achieving cooperation.

Smarter, Not Harsher (Full PDF Article)

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We're back after ~18 hours of darkness. Sunspots, pesky old Al Qaeda, that annoying wing beating Amazonian butterfly, and maybe a little of our technical incompetence were to blame for our big server corruption. But it appears we have fully restored and haven't lost any existing content, just the opportunity cost of not getting that revelation that someone was going to provide in a blog comment or Council post while pondering deep thoughts on a Saturday night. Oh well. Now that it's Sunday morning, no need to hold that thought any longer. Have a cup of coffee and let it fly. We are mission capable once again.

And while you are at it, do your last minute shopping through those little Amazon links on the top right. Free money for us, no cost to you. Clearly, we are in need of some technical help.

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Report Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders - James Glanz and Christian Miller, New York Times

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag - particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army - the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces - the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ”

More at The New York Times and read ‘Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience’ in full via the NY Times.

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Plucked from the Small Wars Council's Non-Virtual Community forum -- in the spirit of the 3Bs of deep thinking -- basements, bars, and backyards; this forum is to facilitate local get-togethers. Council members have met in DC, Arlington, Quantico, Ft. Leavenworth, Ft. Hood, Ottawa and even Estonia. The skinny has it that additional non-virtuals are planned in even more exotic locations - can you believe that? Any-hoot, if you are near Leavenworth this Wednesday, the 17th of December, take a break and join in the fun and great conversation. H-hour is 1800. Be there or be square and check this thread (Council members only) for updates.

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From Preponderance to Partnership: American Maritime Power in the 21st Century - Frank Hoffman, Center for a New American Security

One of the most important national security challenges facing the next president of the United States will be preserving America’s maritime power. The U.S. Navy has been cut in half since the 1980s, shrinking steadily from 594 to today’s 280 ships. The fleet size has been cut by 60 ships during the Bush administration alone, despite significantly increased Pentagon budgets.

Several naval analysts and commentators, including the observant Robert Kaplan, have argued that America’s present naval fleet constitutes an “elegant decline” or outright neglect. A former Reagan administration naval official contends that our current maritime policy and investment levels are “verging towards unilateral naval disarmament.”

This is something of an overstatement. The American naval fleet is still substantially larger than any other, and has unmatched global reach and endurance. The U.S. Navy’s aggregate tonnage is the equivalent of the next 17 international navies, of which 14 are U.S. allies, and our power projection capabilities retain a 4:1 advantage in missiles. Looking simply at overall naval ship totals may not be the most accurate measure of naval power, but it is an historical standard of measurement. By that criterion, the U.S. Navy has not been this size since World War I, when Britain’s Royal Navy was the guarantor of the global commons.

While one can debate whether today’s Navy is sized properly, there is little doubt that U.S. maritime capabilities are critical to the execution of any national security strategy. The so-called American Century has largely been coterminous with the U.S. Navy’s mastery of seapower. In a global economy that is increasingly interdependent and dependent on the security of the global highways of international trade, maritime security will remain a vital national interest...

From Preponderance to Partnership: American Maritime Power in the 21st Century

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US Accuses Britain Over Military Failings in Afghanistan - Tom Baldwin and Michael Evans, The Times

The performance of Britain’s overstretched military in Afghanistan is coming under sustained criticism from the Pentagon and US analysts even as Gordon Brown ponders whether to send in further reinforcements.

Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary who has been asked to remain in his job under Barack Obama, is understood to have expressed strong reservations about counterinsurgency operations in British-controlled Helmand province.

He has already announced plans for a surge of 20,000 US troops into Afghanistan but Mr Brown, who was given a bleak progress report when he visited Afghanistan at the weekend, is said to be reluctant about committing another 2,000 British troops on top of the 8,400 already there.

More at The Times.

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Ain't this just dandy and a pisser to boot - those who have strived - and died - to ensure Iraq's freedom and future place as a responsible partner on the world scene are brushed aside for the latest bash Bush melodrama and a 'real hero' is on the scene - Iraqi who threw shoes at George Bush hailed as hero via The Times. Plenty on this elsewhere, on the dailies and wires - most likely more tomorrow - meanwhile back in the real word... People care, they die or suffer serious wounds, and their contributions are tossed aside for this. A damn shame it is, indeed.

Nothing follows.

Continue reading "It Takes a Hero" »

Dear Mr. Baldwin

I was sent an email by Dr. Carter Malkasian stating that you wished to speak to me. I then quickly was informed that an article was published with a quote from this summer's CNA/Press Club book launch.

I wished you had waited to speak to me, since I would have put the quote in context. There are many positive developments within the British Army at the moment.

British officers and soldiers were embarrassed since they felt they could not complete their COIN mission in Iraq, due to issues outside their remit.

There is recognition that the Americans have reformed beyond all expectations. The British Army has recognised the need to reform as well.

The British Army and HMG had many issues in MND SE due to a variety of decisions, one being the US approach to the campaign from 2003-06, which was not appropriate. However, the British Army recognised that the war had changed dramatically in 2007 and many commanders, officers, NCOs and soldiers wished there had been a shift of strategy from Whitehall for MND SE.

The shift finally occurred with the Charge of the Knights and the British were able to support the Iraqi 14 DIV in its efforts to clear and now hold the city of BASRA, through proper embedding into MITTs. The British Army in their time honoured tradition of learning and adapting, was able to restore honour to their mission in MND SE. Many lessons are being learned from the campaign in Iraq that have had a positive impact on British operations in Helmand and RC South.

The British campaign in RC South and Helmand has been difficult but not due to the efforts of the officers, NCOs and soldiers of the British Army. Their preparation for Helmand has been stronger with each HERRICK due to lessons from the past as well as Iraq. There are issues for the Army that are outside their control but rest with Whitehall that need to be addressed.

All armies need to learn and adapt. The Americans have done so and now the British are doing it as well.

I feel that I should write a letter to the editor or an op-ed to put these 'quotes' in their proper context. Do you have any ideas how best to do this?

Best
Daniel Marston

-----

SWJ Editors Note: This letter is in response to an article in today's Times entitled US Accuses Britain Over Military Failings in Afghanistan by Tom Baldwin and Michael Evans.

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Jules Crittenden has a great post at Forward Movement concerning The Battle of Bulge.

It began at dawn on Dec. 16, 1944, 64 years ago today, with rapid assaults through the Ardennes forest, as the Germans blitzed one last time, hoping to split the Allied armies and take Antwerp. As Guderian reportedly liked to say, “Man schlägt jemanden mit der Faust und nicht mit gespreizten Fingern.” You punch with the fist and not with the fingers spread.

Jules has an overview and plenty of photographs marking the anniversary of this "bloodiest of battles".

Continue reading "64 Years Ago Today..." »

The Army has released FM 7-0: Training for Full Spectrum Operations:

The operational concept requires the Army to be ready to conduct simultaneous offense, defense, and stability or civil support operations anywhere along the spectrum of conflict, from General War to Stable Peace.

FM 7-0 is designed to help develop an expeditionary Army, comprised of Soldiers and Civilians experienced and knowledgeable enough to be comfortable with operating anywhere along the spectrum of conflict in any type of operation, under any conditions.

Its principles and concepts are intended to produce agile leaders, who can rapidly and easily adapt to changing, ambiguous situations.

The manual’s four chapters address the breadth and depth of Army training concepts – “the what" of Army training. The web-based Army Training Network will address – “the how” of Army training. It will provide examples of concepts in FM 7-0; training lessons, examples, and best practices for implementing the 7-0 concepts; and solutions to training challenges. The 2008 version of Field Manual 7-0 is the 3rd edition of the Army’s training management doctrine. Previous editions were published in 1988 as FM 25-100, Training the Force, and in 2002 as FM 7-0, Training the Force. However, this is the first version to be completely synchronized with our capstone operations manual.

FM 7-0 Download

FM 7-0 Information Paper

FM 7-0 Media Package

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U.S. Military to Launch Pilot Program to Recruit New Local Afghan Militias - Anna Mulrine, U.S. News and World Report

The U.S. military will soon launch a pilot program to raise local militias, paid by the Pentagon, in an effort to improve security throughout the country.

The plan is modeled in part on a similar program in Iraq to build up Sunni neighborhood militias. But officials warn that the forces must be carefully vetted to avoid repeating the mistakes of Afghanistan's past, notably bolstering local warlords.

For months, Congress has been asking how soon the military could roll out "some sort of Awakening movement"—a reference to the Iraq program—in Afghanistan, according to U.S. officials. After initially being rejected by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the plan was developed this fall and approved just over two weeks ago.

But some senior U.S. officials worry privately about launching a program modeled on the U.S.-financed militias of Iraq, given the considerable differences in the wars...

Much more at U.S. News and World Report.

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Irregular Warfare: Everything yet Nothing
by Lieutenant Colonel (P) William Stevenson, Major Marshall Ecklund, Major Hun Soo Kim and Major Robert Billings, Small Wars Journal

Irregular Warfare: Everything yet Nothing (Full PDF Article)

September 11, 2001 the Global War on Terror began. This global war has brought to life a timeless tactic called irregular warfare (IW). IW is difficult to define, explain, and employ. Yet, with no firm understanding or consensus on what IW actually means, the Department of Defense (DoD) developed the Irregular Warfare (IW) Joint Operating Concept (JOC) on 11 September 2007. Version 1.0 of the IW JOC proposes that IW is a protracted form of warfare, on a global or regional scale, that will require new capability development. Fortunately, for the Joint Warfighter, the intent of the IW JOC was only to further IW discussion, debate, and experimentation intended to influence future IW concepts and capability development. As presented, the definitions and concepts in the IW JOC have unnecessarily created confusion within the DoD by ignoring more than fifty years of experience and doctrine related to the challenges faced by the post-Cold War world and after the events of September 11, 2001.

The history of IW needs closer examination to capture those lessons learned to advance the IW discussion beyond the IW JOC. Given the significance and long-term DoD investments in the concepts presented in the IW JOC, this paper will analyze whether DoD has presented an appropriate definition of IW based on a doctrinal review of IW’s roots. The paper will also look at the doctrinal relationship between Low Intensity Conflict (LIC) and IW. If necessary, the authors will propose a more fitting definition for IW that is aligned with its doctrinal characterization.

Irregular Warfare: Everything yet Nothing (Full PDF Article)

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The Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS) at the Department of State would like to announce the opening of recruiting for the Civilian Response Corps. Positions in the Civilian Response Corps' Active Component (CRC-A) -- America's fulltime expeditionary interagency civilian reconstruction and stabilization capability -- are currently being advertised via USAjobs.gov. Positions will be available within the Departments of State, Justice, Agriculture, Commerce, HHS, DHS, Treasury and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Active component officers train for, prepare, and staff reconstruction and stabilization (R&S) operations and conflict prevention and mitigation efforts all over the world. They focus on critical initial interagency functions such as assessment, planning, and management in order to stand-up or increase the capabilities of USG systems/structures for response and implementation of R&S activities for a specific crisis operation in countries in or emerging from conflict. CRC-A will work with military or peacekeeping forces and with international organizations and NGOs on the ground.

CRC-A officers are full-time employees who must be available for overseas deployment within 48 hours of notification. Officers may spend up to 60% of their year in conflict areas on deployments averaging 3 months. CRC-A members will attend up to eight weeks of formal training and exercises per year. Deployments may be to the most isolated and restricted overseas locations, including combat zones, and may involve embedding with U.S. or international military or peacekeeping units. Deployed personnel will receive benefits (per diem, hardship, danger pay) as applicable. Please visit www.civilianresponsecorps.gov for more information.

Please Note: Some positions are open to current employees only; other are advertised for all sources. More Active Component positions will be posted shortly, please check our website for updates. In addition, Washington-based positions supporting these overseas operations are also available.

Copies of the announcements are available here. Bookmark and check back as more vacancies become available.

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Putting together the SWJ news and commentary roundup each morning, combined with the commentary on several e-mail discussion lists I belong to, have exposed me to much speculation on our actual spending in regards to Afghanistan vs. Iraq. A savvy and knowledgeable e-mailer on one particular list service - points to the most likely source to put us “in the ballpark” on this issue.

With that I give you The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11 by Amy Belasco of the Congressional Research Service. This report was last updated on 15 October 2008. The bottom line numbers cited in this report are as follows:

Total War Funding as of the FY2009 Bridge Fund

In the FY2008 Supplemental (H.R. 2642/P.L.110-252), Congress funded DOD’s war costs not only for the rest of FY2008 but also for the first part of FY2009 in order to give a new Administration breathing room to set its war policies. As of enactment of H.R. 2642, the FY2008 Supplemental, the cumulative total for funds appropriated since the 9/11 attacks to DOD, State/USAID and VA for medical costs for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and enhanced security total $864 billion. This total includes:

$657 billion for Iraq;
$173 billion for Afghanistan;
$28 billion for enhanced security; and
$5 billion unallocated

Of this total, 76% is for Iraq, 20% for Afghanistan, 3% for enhanced security and 1% unallocated. Almost all of the funding for Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) is for Afghanistan.

Some 94% of this funding goes to the Department of Defense to cover incremental war-related costs, that is, costs that are in addition to normal peacetime activities. These costs include funds to deploy troops and their equipment to Iraq and Afghanistan, to conduct military operations, to provide in-country support at bases, to provide special pay for deployed personnel, and to repair, replace, and upgrade war-worn equipment. DOD’s baseline or regular budget covers the costs of normal pay for all military personnel, training activities, running and building facilities on U.S. installations, buying new military equipment, and conducting research to enhance future military capabilities.

Continue reading "What We Spend on the “Wars”" »

Four article series by Donna Miles of American Forces Press Service based on Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates’ article, A Balanced Strategy: Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age, published in the January/February 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

Gates Urges Greater Balance in Military Capabilities - Part 1

Procurement System Must Be More Responsive to Current Requirements - Part 2

US Must Maintain Conventional Dominance - Part 3

Appreciation of Limits, Humility Important in Facing Challenges - Part 4

Continue reading "AFPS Roundup of A Balanced Strategy" »

Let's get something straight.  There's a strong streak of unapologetic curmudgeon in both Dave and me.  But it's not nearly as strong as the raging case of validation of preconceived notions that runs in so many commentators these days.  Latest case in point, some of the reactions to Dave's recent micro-rant, It Takes a Hero. 

For example, Armchair Generalist says "Small Wars Journal Blog departs from the sane and analytical evaluation of military issues and sounds off with a primal scream of disgust on what they perceive as unjust things....Fortunately we have articulate people on the left, like Matt Yglesias, who can counter this short-sighted, myopic view."  Both go on to suggest SWJ has basically drunk the Kool-Aid, buys "completely into the CheneyBush argument for the Iraqi invasion and justification for continued US force presence", and "reflects some dangerous trends in American culture."  Yeah, right.

Take another look at Dave's post.  Intermittent display of personal frustration / disappointment?  Sure.  Revisionist history or glorifying, fact-distorting, self-justifying neo-con rant?  Hell no.  That's only there if you want to see it that way.  Primal scream of disgust?  Not hardly.  Unless you count the one that rightfully follows from how so many people can spool so endlessly on such random things.

So we'll continue to toil away here, focusing on the serious work at hand.  For the most part, we have no Small Wars Journal house opinion, other than that the opinions of all serious participants should be heard and considered.  We're trying to facilitate that, and will continue to be equal opportunity based on substance, credibility, and weight of reason, not ideology.  We'd like to be better at it, and we'd dearly like greater participation from non-military practitioners of Small Wars.  It will come.

From time to time, we'll flip out a personal opinion.  You don't do this for as much time as we do without forming a few that you just want to put out there, pretty clearly standing alone as such and only for what they're worth (typically not much).  But that happens on SWJ Blog a lot less than most blogs, and it never interferes with our desire to publish substantive analysis and personal insights on all sides of unpopular issues, whenever we can find them presented thoughtfully.  Those are worth a lot more.  We are, after all, pretty much boring small wars wonks.  And as such, one thing we really don't like is opinion disguised as analysis, particularly when it's cantilevered out from extrapolated perceptions.  We'll leave that to the legions of armchair pundits.

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Outside View: Mexico's Criminal Insurgency - John P. Sullivan, United Press International (Middle East Times)

Behind the headlines about kidnappings, assassinations and shootouts, the escalating conflict in Mexico between drug cartels, gangs and the police is evolving into a kind of criminal insurgency.

Vying for domination of the lucrative drug trade, the cartels are seeking both market control and freedom from government interference. Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and other border towns are racked with violence. Mexico City itself is not immune. Corruption joins the extreme violence and helps fuel Mexico's downward spiral.

Drug murders in Mexico have more than doubled this year to nearly 5,400, with 943 occurring in November alone. On Nov. 30 nine decapitated victims of the drug wars were discovered in Tijuana. Within the past few weeks, Mexican "drug czar" Noe Ramirez Mandujano was accused of taking $450,000 in bribes from Sinaloa's Pacific cartel. Five hundred municipal police in Tijuana were replaced because of fears that they were corrupt. Mexico's liaison to Interpol, Ricardo Gutierrez Vargas, was arrested under suspicion of leaking information from criminal intelligence databases to the cartels. A newspaper office in Culiacan, Sinaloa's capital, was also attacked with grenades...

More at The Middle East Times.

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Survival Guide for Veterans - New York Times editorial

Far too often, military veterans find themselves desperately short of the information they need as they make the torturous quest for benefits within one of this country’s most daunting bureaucracies, the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Officials say help is on the way, but administrators are forever promising to streamline procedures for an era of conquered paperwork that never seems to come. That is why it is heartening to see that one promising form of help has indeed arrived: a 599-page guide to veterans’ issues...

It’s called “The American Veterans’ and Servicemembers’ Survival Guide,” and it comes, unsurprisingly, from outside the system. It is a publication of the nonprofit advocacy group Veterans for America, available as a free download at veteransforamerica.org...

More at The New York Times.

From the Veterans for America web page:

VFA has brought together three co-authors of the bestselling “The Viet Vet Survival Guide,” as well as former VA analysts and military and legal experts, to create a 21st-century survival guide that includes vital information for servicemembers and veterans from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The book presents in three parts - ”Veterans and Their Families”; “Special Non-VA Programs, Opportunities and Problems”; and “Issues Related to Active Duty Servicemembers and their Families” - information every returning servicemember and family member needs to know to best serve as their own post-combat advocate. The guide is available, without charge, through the VFA website.

More at VFA.

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Persuasive Politics - Matt Armstrong (MountainRunner), Washington Times opinion

"Repairing America's image" is a popular mantra these days, but discussions on revamping America's public diplomacy are futile if the legislative foundation of what we are attempting to fix is ignored. A sixty year old law affects virtually all US engagement with foreign audiences by putting constraints on what we say and how we say it. Perhaps more importantly, it limits the oversight by the American public, Congress, and the whole of government into what is said and done in America's name abroad. The impact of this law, the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, must not be ignored if policymakers hope to improve how the United States communicates overseas.

In the early years of the Cold War, the threat to the United States was not military invasion but subversion capitalizing on economic and social unrest in Europe and elsewhere. In 1947, America's ambassador to Russia said the most important "fact in the field of foreign policy today … is the fact the Russians have declared psychological war on the United States, all over the world." It was, he continued, "a war of ideology and a fight unto the death." Bullets and bombs were secondary to the power of information and persuasion in the global struggle for the minds and wills of people...

More at The Washington Times.

Also:

13 January 2009 - The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948: A Discourse to Shape America’s Discourse (Symposium). Washington, D.C. – at the Reserve Officer’s Association at the intersection of First Street and Constitution Avenue, NE. The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 was passed as the U.S. was beginning a "war of ideology... a war unto death," as America's Ambassador to Russia described it at the time. But, beginning in the 1970's, instead of promoting international engagement through information, cultural and educational exchanges, the law was distorted into a barrier of engagement. From its propaganda and counter-propaganda intentions, it transformed into an anti-propaganda law for reasons that had little to nothing to do with concerns over domestic influence and far removed from the original intent of the law. Keynotes will be given by Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy James K. Glassman and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Support to Public Diplomacy Michael Doran. There will be four 90 minute panels – past, present, future, and Congress – that will emphasize Q&A, discourse, and debate and not presentations or monologues. Registration is free, open to the public, and required to attend. The event will be on the record with a transcript available after the event. A public report based on the proceedings will be produced. Registration and other information can be found at http://mountainrunner.us/symposium.

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Military Police Operations and Counterinsurgency
by Major Matthew R. Modarelli, Small Wars Journal

Military Police Operations and Counterinsurgency (Full PDF Article)

Within the Department of Defense (DoD), each service is assigned military police officers, special investigators, and special agents charged with countering every kind of criminal activity. These personnel are highly skilled in obtaining evidence (i.e. actionable intelligence) to disrupt and neutralize criminals and their illicit networks. It is precisely this skill set that when applied to an insurgency simplifies the process of targeting and neutralizing insurgent leaders, subsequently leading to overall more effective security operations. Using current cultural training and linguist support, this DoD capability could be organized immediately and assigned to jurisdictions (i.e. battle space, province, or theater level) in a given occupied country. By adopting a military government and law enforcement (LE) command and control (C2) structure, military forces would be able to focus on restoring security and justice to occupied areas using police techniques. Organized within a proper military government C2 structure, security operations could be kept in lock-step with local, provincial and theater-level counterinsurgency (COIN) campaigns. With no interagency support available for the foreseeable future, the DoD must turn to its own organic capabilities immediately and organize appropriately to support the functions needed to maintain security while properly identifying and neutralizing insurgent leaders and groups.

Military Police Operations and Counterinsurgency (Full PDF Article)

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I loved the paper by a team of guys trying to tackle a thorny issue - Irregular Warfare: Everything yet Nothing by Lieutenant Colonel (P) William Stevenson, Major Marshall Ecklund, Major Hun Soo Kim and Major Robert Billings.

In over a year of effort, and two separate meetings of OSD's most senior officers; we failed to come up with a good solid definition for Irregular Warfare (IW). It’s like porn, we know IW when we see it. I do take exception to the unfounded statement made about historical research. The IW JOC (Irregular Warfare Joint Operating Concept) may not show it, but there is a lot of good history referenced by both the IW team and counterinsurgency guys, with lots of cross fertilization and common members. We may not have gotten it right, but it wasn’t due to a lack of intellectualism. I'll be a bit blunter, people who live in glass houses, need to be careful where they throw their rocks. That said, I agree with the conclusion that we could use a better definition.

To continue, let me decompose the proffered new definition and raise some points:

Combat operations conducted by the overt element of an insurgency in enemy-held territory,

Not clear why IW is limited to combat ops, nor limited to only the overt element rather than the insurgency at large. No explanation is offered. Nor is it clear or useful to make "insurgency" synonymous with IW rather than the subset it should be. I agree that the IW JOC is overtly insurgency oriented and limiting. But equally limiting is constraining our grasp to only the physical dimension of IW – this is very limiting and historically erroneous. I am also unclear why only the overt element is addressed rather than whole of insurgency. It is completely ambiguous to discuss "enemy held" territory. Is this needed? Meaningful? Extraneous words are killing this definition.

…by predominantly indigenous and irregular forces organized on a military or paramilitary basis,

It is not evident why only "a predominantly indigenous" nature is useful. The global jihad is a movable feast. Irregular forces in IW? No kidding, but organized on a military or paramilitary basis means not terrorist or networked or transnational? How is this relevant today? Taking a backward look at my limited glance – I have to ask - are we saying that they have to look like us, organize like us, and fight irregularly but conduct combat operations and be overt? This part of the definition is most important and gets us past just COIN, as it could be relevant to Fedeyeen and future jihadist opponents who will target us in future interventions.

…characterized by the extensive use of unorthodox tactics to reduce the combat effectiveness, industrial capacity, and morale of an enemy, usually an established civil and military authority.

Unorthodox is vague but acceptable - but culturally dependent. "Reduce" is okay, but the goals are limited by two physical - conditions and morale - not overthrow of state - or one of Bard O’Neill’s or Steve Metz's categories. The ending is a bit odd, "an enemy" helps me figure out the meaning of the "enemy held territory" in opening phrase, but its utility in both places is not clear and it seems to only muddy things.

All in all - the beginnings of a good debate. Yes, we need a definition better than what we have. Yes, concur with the point about populations (very COIN centric). But out of a dozen or so definitions that exist in the foreign literature, and the six or so developed by OSD, Army, Booze Allen etc, this is not an improvement. Sorry about that – so it’s back to the white board. I will put up a bottle of scotch to the best definition.

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The SWORD Model of Counterinsurgency
A Summary and Update
by John T. Fishel and Max G. Manwaring, Small Wars Journal

The SWORD Model of Counterinsurgency (Full PDF Article)

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the United States military turned its back on counterinsurgency (COIN). Except for a few Special Forces officers and soldiers, and a handful of others, there was no interest or effort devoted to COIN. America was never again going to fight a war like that. All of the Army’s attention was devoted to stopping the Soviet armored hordes on the North German Plain and in the Fulda Gap by means of the Active Defense promulgated in the 1976 edition of FM 100-5, Operations. By that time, the curriculum at the Army’s mid-level school for officers, the Command & General Staff College (CGSC) at Fort Leavenworth, had almost completely eliminated any reference to COIN. In the late 1970s there was even a concerted effort to purge the CGSC files of any curriculum references to COIN! Only through the heroic efforts of LTC Don Vought, who hid the offending material in files on terrorism (which was the new topic du jour), were the lessons of the past saved for future generations of doctrine writers and officer students.

By 1981 there had been some minor changes. Communist insurgents (the FSLN) had seized power in Nicaragua in 1979. Other communist insurgents were attempting the same in neighboring El Salvador and the Carter Administration was beginning to support the government, however, unsavory. There was also a worrisome insurgency sputtering along in the Philippines and the U.S. was beginning to provide limited assistance to the anti-Soviet insurgents in Afghanistan. These developments resulted in a new manual, FM 100-20, Low Intensity Conflict (1981), which was primarily a rehash of the COIN manuals of the Vietnam era. In 1981, the United States Southern Command sent a team of officers to El Salvador, headed by Brigadier General Fred F. Woerner, to assess the situation and recommend a strategy for American support to the Armed Forces of El Salvador (ESAF). The result was the famous Woerner Report, produced in draft but never finalized or published. Nevertheless, it provided the U.S. COIN support strategy until the war ended 11 years later. One of its recommendations was an expanded security assistance effort which resulted in the “birth” of the 55 man U.S. Mil Group. Its first commander was Colonel John Waghelstein who went to El Salvador with the promise that he would command the 7th Special Forces Group on his return.

The war in El Salvador, which appeared to be going badly even into 1984, sparked some interest at the highest levels of the Army. That year, the Vice Chief of Staff, General Maxwell R. Thurman, asked the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) at the Army War College if it could conduct research to determine the “correlates of success” in COIN. The question, posed in that form, implied a quantitative study with a fairly large number of cases. Coincidentally, SSI had just hired Manwaring – then a Reserve Lieutenant Colonel, who had recently come off several years of active duty in the U.S. Southern Command (Southcom) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). In his civilian life, Manwaring had been an academic political scientist and was trained to design and conduct that type of research. Manwaring became the lead researcher on the project which resulted in the SWORD Model.

The intent of this article is threefold. First, it addresses the methodology and development of the SWORD Model in context. Second, it reports the findings of the research using the model. And, third, it addresses the utility of the model both in light of the two major strategic approaches to counterinsurgency and, especially, at the operational and tactical levels of war.

The SWORD Model of Counterinsurgency (Full PDF Article)

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Special Ops ‘Surge’ Sparks Debate - Sean Naylor, Army Times

Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ plan to deploy three additional combat brigades to Afghanistan by the summer has superseded a contentious debate that pitted the Bush administration’s “war czar” against the special operations hierarchy over a proposed near-term “surge” of spec ops forces to Afghanistan, a Pentagon military official said.

The National Security Council’s surge proposal, which grew out of its Afghan strategy review, recommended an increase of “about another battalion’s worth” of troops to the Combined and Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan, or CJSOTF-A, said a field-grade Special Forces officer, who added that this would enlarge the task force by about a third.

Several sources said that the “SOF surge” proposal originated with Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, the so-called “war czar”...

...the proposal sparked a fierce high-level debate, with special operations officers charging that Lute and his colleagues were trying to micromanage the movement of individual Special Forces A-teams from inside the Beltway, and countercharges that Special Forces has strayed from its traditional mission of raising and training indigenous forces and become too focused on direct-action missions to kill or capture enemies.

Much more at The Army Times.

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The UN recently decided to do something about Somali piracy this month. They have not said exactly what that something is. Shipping companies are losing hundreds of millions. Navies don’t know how to legally deal with the pirates even if they capture them. Liberals point out that that the Somali pirates are fishermen, merely defending their fishing grounds by asymmetrical means against first and second world fishing fleets that are denuding their offshore harvesting areas. Conservatives claim that the Somali pirates are nothing more than seagoing gangsters who are after quick cash and who find honor and a neat way to get hot chicks by being brigands. Both views have elements of truth. The question is whether this is a national security crisis? It is not. No great American interests are at stake other than international law of the sea and preventing piracy from becoming a trendy thing to do in other places such as the Straits of Malacca which already have a pirate problem. During the recent election, much noise was made about encouraging multilateralism. Eliminating piracy is a problem custom made for a multilateral solution.

We need to avoid becoming entrapped in a “let Uncle Sam do it” situation just because we have the world’s largest and most powerful navy which has excess capacity because Iraq and Afghanistan are mostly land wars. This is why we need to avoid those who call for a blockade of Somalia. Blockades are expensive things. The coast of Somalia rivals the size of the American southeastern seaboard, and it took hundreds of Union ships to blockade the Confederacy during our Civil War. We have the only navy in the world that could do such a thing and not one U.S. merchant ship has so far been lost to the Pirates. The Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Turks, Chinese, and other seagoing nations have much more at stake than we do; this problem is ripe for a coalition solution, and it can be solved; they need to create an effective coalition in order to solve the problem.

The best way to stop the Somali pirates is not at sea through convoys and blockades; we are not dealing with the German High Seas Fleet or even the Confederate Navy here. The best way to do it is to seize and occupy their fishing village bases along the northern coast of Somalia, which the UN resolution authorizes, and then give the locals something productive to do with themselves besides brigandage. This does not need to be done by U.S. Marines, but it will take good troops. The Somalis like to fight and they are entrepreneurial; if they are not given something productive to do once a coalition stops piracy, they will make armed resistance to an occupation force pay as they did from 1993 to 1995...

Continue reading "A Multilateral Solution to Somali Piracy" »

US Opens Fire on Brown’s ‘War Fatigue’ - Sarah Baxter and Nicola Smith, The Sunday Times

As the United States prepares for a troop “surge” in Afghanistan in the new year, Robert Gates, the defence secretary, and senior commanders are concerned that the British government lacks the “political will” for the fight.

General John Craddock, the Nato commander, said last week that Britain must put more troops into Helmand province to defeat the Taliban insurgency.

In an interview with The Sunday Times at Nato’s supreme headquarters in Mons, Belgium, he said Gordon Brown’s announcement last Monday that more troops would bolster Britain’s 8,100-strong force in Afghanistan by March was not enough. Although planning is under way to send up to 3,000 extra troops to Afghanistan next summer if required, Brown committed only 300 in his Commons statement.

“I don’t think 300 more, if you are talking about Helmand province, will do the trick. We’ve got to hold down there until we’ve got some Afghan street forces who can take over,” Craddock said.

More at The Sunday Times.

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Britain Has Lost the Stomach For a Fight - Michael Portillo, The Sunday Times opinion

Last week Gordon Brown announced a date for Britain’s withdrawal from Iraq. Most troops will be back in time for a spring general election. The prime minister posed with soldiers and expressed his sorrow over yet more fatal casualties in Afghanistan. He did not dwell on Britain’s humiliation in Basra, nor mention that this is the most inglorious withdrawal since Sir Anthony Eden ordered the boys back from Suez.

The fundamental cause of the British failure was political. Tony Blair wanted to join the United States in its toppling of Saddam Hussein because if Britain does not back America it is hard to know what our role in the world is: certainly not a seat at the top table. But, for all his persuasiveness, Blair could not hold public opinion over the medium term and so he cut troop numbers fast and sought to avoid casualties. As a result, British forces lost control of Basra and left the population at the mercy of fundamentalist thugs and warring militias, in particular Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army...

More at The Sunday Times.

SWJ Editor’s Note: From the small corner of the world of counterinsurgency I occupy my observation is that our (the US) adjustment to face COIN realities, produce a new doctrine for the same and execute that doctrine were well informed by the British Army, Royal Marines and Air Force participants in a program I was associated with (and am) from 2003 to the present. That program – Joint Urban Warrior – cosponsored by the USMC and USJFCOM – specifically looked at insurgent threats and counterinsurgency strategies as well as tactics, techniques and procedures - in five annual wargames and dozens of seminars, workshops and planning events. The UK delegation; along with the Australians, Canadians and others; contributed first-class lessons learned, theory and practice - we owe them quite a bit for that. - Dave Dilegge

Discuss at Small Wars Council

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The anti-COIN beat goes on with Gian Gentile's latest - this time at War and Game.

Writing "current history" is not an easy task for historians because it involves delving into topics that are often loaded with domestic political implications. It also involves writing about people who are still active in the topic of the current history. Yet, it is very important for professional historians to bring their expertise to the field of current history, if for no other reason than to provide an important corrective to other accounts of the recent past by pundits, so-called experts, journalists, and bloggers of various shapes and sizes.

The war in Iraq is a perfect case in point. Already, a very misleading narrative has been created by memoirists, journalists, and others. That narrative goes like this: because of the U.S. Army's lack of counterinsurgency doctrine and preparation prior to the start of the war it fumbled at counterinsurgency after the fall of Baghdad in spring 2003 until the end of 2006. But then, as a result of newly written counterinsurgency doctrine and inspired leadership, plus an additional five U.S. combat brigades that all entered into the mix in early 2007, Iraq and the American army were rescued. This flawed narrative puts the U.S. Army and U.S. foreign policy on a trajectory toward more Iraqs and Afghanistans.

The interlocutors of this flawed narrative are legion. But a few examples of the texts, articles, and blog entries that have built the matrix-cum-metanarrative include Tom Ricks's Fiasco, published in 2006 (and one can only assume Ricks will add more force to the matrix in his forthcoming The Gamble); Steve Coll's recent lengthy and gushing article in the New Yorker on General David H. Petraeus ("The General's Dilemma," September 8, 2008); and Pete Mansoor's, John Nagl's, and Fred Kagan's numerous writings arguing that prior to the surge the U.S. Army just didn't "get it."

More at War and Game.

Links:

On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign - US Army
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq - Tom Ricks
The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 - Tom Ricks
The General’s Dilemma - Steve Coll, The New Yorker
Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq - Pete Mansoor
Ground Truth: The Future of U.S. Land Power - Fred Kagan and Tom Donnelly
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam - John Nagl

Continue reading "A Starting Point?" »

Hat tip to Starbuck at Wings Over Iraq for pointing to this valuable travel advice by Rob Crilly at From the Frontline - how to plan a trip to Somalia:

1) Have you been to Somalia before? If yes proceed to 2. If no proceed to 3
2) Were you kidnapped on that occasion? If yes proceed to 4. If no proceed to 5
3) Have you been to Iraq or Afghanistan? If yes proceed to 7. If no proceed to 6
4) Then you should know better. Don’t go
5) Then your luck is probably about to run out. Don’t go
6) Then what are you thinking of? Don’t go
7) Then you are probably under the impression that you can hide in the green zone and wait for an embed to go somewhere interesting. In Somalia there’s no green zone, and the only embeds are with Ethiopian or African Union soldiers who are being blown to smithereens on a daily basis. There’s no-one you can trust. And no-one who can guarantee your safety. Don’t go

Check out Wings Over Iraq and From the Frontline - great stuff and both added to our blogroll.

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The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 by Thomas Ricks

The Gamble will be released on 10 February 2009.

Thomas E. Ricks uses hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with top officers in Iraq and extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to document the inside story of the Iraq War since late 2005 as only he can, examining the events that took place as the military was forced to reckon with itself, the surge was launched, and a very different war began.

Since early 2007 a new military order has directed American strategy. Some top U.S. officials now in Iraq actually opposed the 2003 invasion, and almost all are severely critical of how the war was fought from then through 2006. At the core of the story is General David Petraeus, a military intellectual who has gathered around him an unprecedented number of officers with both combat experience and Ph.D.s. Underscoring his new and unorthodox approach, three of his key advisers are quirky foreigners—an Australian infantryman-turned- anthropologist, an antimilitary British woman who is an expert in the Middle East, and a Mennonite-educated Palestinian pacifist.

The Gamble offers news breaking information, revealing behind-the-scenes disagreements between top commanders. We learn that almost every single officer in the chain of command fought the surge. Many of Petraeus’s closest advisers went to Iraq extremely pessimistic, doubting that the surge would have any effect, and his own boss was so skeptical that he dispatched an admiral to Baghdad in the summer of 2007 to come up with a strategy to replace Petraeus’s. That same boss later flew to Iraq to try to talk Petraeus out of his planned congressional testimony. The Gamble examines the congressional hearings through the eyes of Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, and their views of the questions posed by the 2008 presidential candidates.

For Petraeus, prevailing in Iraq means extending the war. Thomas E. Ricks concludes that the war is likely to last another five to ten years—and that that outcome is a best case scenario. His stunning conclusion, stated in the last line of the book, is that “the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered by us and by the world have not yet happened.”

Thomas E. Ricks is The Washington Post’s senior Pentagon correspondent, where he has covered the U.S. military since 2000. Until the end of 1999 he held the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for seventeen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize- winning teams for national reporting, he has reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of Fiasco, Making the Corps, and A Soldier’s Duty.

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Questioning a Deity
A Contemplation of Maneuver Motivated by the 2008 Israeli Armor Corps Association “Land Maneuver in the 21st Century” Conference
by Dr. Russell W. Glenn, Small Wars Journal

Questioning a Deity (Full PDF Article)

On September 16-17, 2008, the Israeli Armor Corps Association hosted its second annual conference, this entitled “Land Maneuver in the 21st Century. The centerpiece for speaker presentations and related discussions was “maneuver:” what it is, what it should be, and its relevance to security operations in light of the 2006 Second Lebanon War, ongoing operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and other recent or continuing conflicts. An international speaker slate proposed a broad spectrum of thinking in that regard, a spectrum ranging from general acceptance of the current definition of maneuver to considerably expanding what the concept encompasses.

This document considers maneuver in light of these speaker presentations and the discussion stimulated by them. First sampling maneuver historically, it follows with an analysis of how theorists, doctrine writers, and military personnel conceive of maneuver in the first decade of the 21st century. These dual foundation stones of history and current thinking serve to underpin presentation of the treatment given the topic during the conference. The closing analysis considers the implications of thinking of maneuver in terms different than is currently the case…or, contrarily, the impact if it instead remains unchanged.

The document will be of interest to individuals in the armed forces, academics, and others desiring to investigate alternative conceptualizations of maneuver in the 21st century.

Questioning a Deity (Full PDF Article)

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On the Future and Options
by Jason Fritz, Small Wars Journal Op-Ed

On the Future and Options (Full PDF Article)

Andrew Bacevich’s defense of COL Gian Gentile in October’s Atlantic, while well intentioned, was both flawed and misguided. Concerns about the U.S. military’s focus on counterinsurgency and stability operations at the expense of conventional war-fighting abilities are real and warrant a significant discussion on how to strike a balance between the two ends of the spectrum of conflict. However, Gentile’s arguments that he defends drive that discussion to the extreme end of the spectrum and would leave the U.S. military few options to defend against the plethora of security challenges that face the nation today and in the future.

Gentile’s main arguments are that too much credit has been given GEN David Petraeus for the change in strategy in Iraq, that the decline in violence in Iraq is primarily attributable to the United States buying the allegiance of the Sons of Iraq, and that the U.S. military focuses too much on counterinsurgency doctrine to the detriment of its high intensity warfare skills. A corollary to this last critique is that U.S. forces will likely not – and really should not – fight irregular-war conflicts in the future. Bacevich’s article not only supported Gentile’s ideas but also stated that those who disagreed with him, like LTC (Ret.) John Nagl, were trying to mold the nation’s fighting forces in order to continue to fight “one, two, many Iraqs to come.”

On the Future and Options (Full PDF Article)

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President George Bush

President George W. Bush sent his best wishes for the holiday season and those of first lady Laura Bush to servicemembers around the world in a message broadcast on the Pentagon Channel.

Here is the text of the President’s holiday message:

“Laura and I send greetings to all the men and women of the U.S. military this holiday season.

“This time of year, our thoughts turn to rejoicing and reflection, gratitude and cheer, love and peace.

“Throughout our history, love of country and the hope of peace on earth have inspired America’s armed forces, from the frozen fields of France to the jungles of Southeast Asia. Around the globe, today’s men and women in uniform are carrying on that noble tradition. You are helping bring freedom, security and peace to millions in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, and you are helping to protect the American people here at home.

“Many of you are spending this holiday season far from home, but you are close in our thoughts and prayers.

“I am sometimes asked what I will miss most about being president. Above all, I am going to miss being your commander in chief. Every one of you volunteered to serve the United States, and in this dangerous time, I thank you for making the world freer, our country safer and all Americans proud.

“Happy holidays and may God bless you.”

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates

In this season of hope, I want to say how uplifting it has been to get to know so many soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines during the last 24 months.

Many of you are far from home, and I’m sure there’s no place you would rather be than with your loved ones. But know that they, and all Americans, are free and secure because of what the men and women of the U.S. military are doing all over the world – from Fort Lewis to Fort Drum, from Korea to Kosovo, from Bagram to Baghdad.

The holidays are a time to reflect on the kind of nation we are: a nation whose character and decency are embodied in our armed forces. Those who risk life and limb every time they set foot “outside the wire.” The medical personnel, engineers, and civil affairs teams who improve the lives of thousands. And all are volunteers.

To the families of our forces: thank you for sharing your loved ones to defend us all. To our troops: we admire your selflessness and pray for your success and safe return home. And to all: happy holidays.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff evoked the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Trenton in the annual holiday message he issued to U.S. servicemembers and their families today.

Here is the text of Navy Adm. Mike Mullen’s message:

“Throughout our history, when faced with war at this special time of the year, American Servicemen and women have risen with crisis and fought with valor – while providing their fellow citizens precious moments to enjoy the season’s joyous spirit with loved ones at home.

“This tradition harkens to our first holiday season as an independent Nation, 232 years ago. The bleak winter of 1776 found this Republic and its leader, General Washington, with a difficult and uncertain future. At twilight on the twenty-fifth of December, faced with one of the darkest moments of the American Revolution, Washington’s Army crossed the icy Delaware River to defeat enemy forces at the Battle of Trenton. Their bravery on that cold winter’s night altered the course of the war, and, ultimately, our road to victory.

“Among Washington’s troops that December was Thomas Paine, who appealed to the honor and patriotic duty of his fellow soldiers with these famous words: ‘These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.’

“This holiday season, more than 280,000 modern-day patriots are deployed around the globe, ensuring their families and friends – and ours – can celebrate in peace and comfort. Let us take pause to honor their sacrifice.

“We also offer our thoughts and prayers to the wounded, their families, and the families of the fallen. Theirs is an emptiness we cannot know – made only deeper during the holidays. Although their sacred void can never be filled, let us look deep into our hearts and honor them all – for they richly deserve the love and thanks of a grateful Nation.

“On behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and our families, I thank you for all that you do for our country. We wish you and your loved ones a festive holiday season, and tidings of peace in the coming New Year.”

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Defining Terrorism It Shouldn’t be Confused with Insurgency

By Haviland Smith at American Diplomacy

During the presidency of George W. Bush, everything possible has been done to obfuscate and conflate the true meanings of the terms terrorism and insurgency. Preferring the former, largely because of its emotional post-9/11 impact on the American psyche, Bush spokespeople and the president himself consistently have used the terms insurrection and terrorism interchangeably, indiscriminately, and inaccurately…

Much more at American Diplomacy.

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We received this "Who's Who" current history recap out of the blue from Hamid Hussain.  He was born and raised in Peshawar, is an allergist by profession, but has been unable to cure his affliction with military history.  That condition has been observed before on these premises.  Hamid is now freelancing and doing analysis on security issues in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Middle East.

As for this piece, many of the players and muscle movements will be familiar to regulars around here.  For folks that haven't been following the story for long, it's a handy recap and there are plenty of links to many of the milestone articles.  Here it is basically as received, with some minimal tweaks to the links.  Thanks, Hamid, and good luck with your new venture.

Courageous Colonels

by Hamid Hussain

‘It takes one madman to throw a stone down the well.  It takes ten wise persons to get it out’.

- A Persian proverb

In the last three years there has been a subtle shift in U.S. military thinking where colonel level officers have come to the forefront of a debate about ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.   Most of this debate is going on the sidelines away from the media limelight but influence of some colonels is being felt well beyond their rank.  This article will summarize the background of some of these mid-level officers and the important role they played in the shift in Iraq policy as far as military operations are concerned.  It will also look at current ongoing contribution of these officers and point to some of the potential pitfalls of solutions offered by these officers for a diverse and very complex strategic environment. 

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The COIN Graduate Seminar
by John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus, Small Wars Journal

The COIN Graduate Seminar (Full PDF Article)

Military analysts and pundits have often dubbed counterinsurgency the “graduate level of war.” Dissenters protest that full spectrum operations—with their mixture of conventional and irregular warfare—are truly the graduate level of conflict. We do not take a position on this debate, as we honor the contributions of both conventional and unconventional soldiers. However, it is indisputable that irregular warfare--like any form of human conflict--is immensely complex. Approaching it requires a holistic—if not eccentric—approach that defies the simplistic political debates and strategic orthodoxies commonly found in popular discussions of issues such Iraq and Afghanistan. But this begs the question of how we would ideally advance the discussion to something more nuanced. If counterinsurgency is truly the “graduate level” of war, it needs its very own Graduate Seminar.

What readings and films would we assign to students in the Seminar? We’ve outlined everything bellow under the “Syllabus” heading. The material here, though exhaustive, is by no means comprehensive. We have opted to emphasize the diversity of intellectual approaches involved in conceptualizing war and power as well as more recent military irregular warfare research. Our aim is to engage the entire spectrum of irregular conflict, from counter-terrorism to speculations about the future of war.

Some of our readings and films—drawn from the humanities and popular culture--may strike the reader as odd choices, but our eclecticism is intentional. “Out of the box” thinking is often praised but rarely honored due to institutional, political, and intellectual cultures that police discourses and close minds. Likewise, we have also included military theorists whose ideas have sparked controversy. Even if one violently disagrees with certain theories of war and peace, it is important to engage with their arguments.

Given the sheer amount of material, readings and passages from each book would be selected to provide a comprehensive approach. The first unit, counterterrorism, covers operational, political, legal, and cultural issues associated with CT. The second unit, counterinsurgency, examines both classical and modern counterinsurgency theory. It also examines case studies of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, looking at contemporary successes and failures. The third unit, criminal insurgency, examines insurgencies waged by gangs, cartels, and other criminal actors. Lastly, the fourth unit, future warfare, engages speculation about the future of conflict through study of past and present predictive literature. We offer this list for discussion and debate.

The COIN Graduate Seminar (Full PDF Article)

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Our best wishes to you and yours this Christmas and for the new year. While not US Marines, these guys are our distant rogue cousins - much like Abu Muqawama - and we extend them a hearty Semper Fidelis this Christmas. Hat tip and Merry Christmas to Jules Crittenden at Forward Movement.

The rest of the story via The Daily Telegraph

Royal Marines fired mortar rounds at the Taliban while wearing Santa hats after their Christmas Carol service was interrupted by an attack.

Attempts at bringing temporary normality to the festive season in Helmand by holding the service were shattered when the men came under fire from the Taliban.

Throwing aside their hymn sheets, the men took their positions.

But such was the urgency of the situation the men kept the santa hats on and did not change into helmets as they were pictured firing round after round of mortar fire to see off the enemy.

Once the skirmish was over – with no injury to the British soldiers – the men resumed the carol service before tucking into turkey for Christmas lunch.

Well done men.

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The first issue of Operational Culture, the newsletter of the Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning (CAOCL) is on the streets. Go to the link for the full newsletter, what follows is the scuttlebutt from the Director - George Dallas. Good stuff - and best wishes to this USMC initiative that is paying off in ways not fully anticipated at its inception.

From the Director

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Operational Culture, the newsletter of the Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning (CAOCL)—an easy-to-read synopsis of the latest trends in Marine Corps cultural learning and language familiarization. This is also a forum for discussion and debate about these important issues.

As you may know, Training and Education Command (TECOM) stood up CAOCL in the spring of 2005. We were created to help Marines plan and operate successfully in a joint expeditionary environment.

Equipping Marines with the essential regional, cultural, and language skills that enable them to effectively operate in any region of the world has been re-validated by the just-released “Marine Corps Vision and Strategy 2025.”

The Commandant’s new vision statement calls upon all Marines to acquire all the necessary cultural and communications skills to enable them to effectively navigate the “cultural terrain.” This means giving Marines the skills they need to operate in any current and potential operating conditions in order to effectively target persistent and emerging irregular, traditional, catastrophic, and disruptive threats.

Complementary to the Commandant’s vision and strategy is the Long War operational employment concept that makes the awareness of regional and cultural issues into the foundation of future Marine Corps operations. In particular, cultural awareness and language skills are now key tasks associated with building partnership capacity.

To that end, CAOCL’s three primary lines of operations – education, pre-deployment training, and regional studies – are connected by a language familiarization program that blends instructor- facilitated classes with self-paced, computer-based training.

To date, CAOCL has supported OIF and OEF. This focused effort will not waver. We are broadening our culture and language capacity to include the development of other regional and country specific packages that support security force activities and unit deployments to Africa, South America, and other global locations.

Your access to Rosetta Stone, CL-150, and other language training programs are part of our effort to develop and sustain individual language skills within the Corps. These courses can be taken via MarineNet or at any of our newly-opened Language Learning Resource Centers.

Additionally, we are expanding our education programs to include a more dynamic
Enlisted and Officer PME. We are also creating a Culture and Strategic Studies program: a confederation of organizations that will provide research, seminars, and symposia. And, lastly, in the spring of 2009, we will release the Career Marine Regional Studies (CMRS) program.

Good things are happening here at CAOCL. However, we believe that our goal of constantly striving to improve service to the Marine Corps is enhanced by active communications with the people we train and educate. So let’s hear from you and start a dialogue!

Col George M. Dallas, USMC (Ret.)

Much more in the first issue of Operational Culture.

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U.S. Prepares to Fight 'Irregular' Wars for Years to Come - Al Pessin, Voice of America

The U.S. Defense Department has taken several steps in recent weeks to ensure that hard won lessons in counterinsurgency are not lost when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are over. The military has been ordered to establish organizations to preserve counterinsurgency capabilities, the Army has published a new training manual focusing on such skills and one military command has published a report indicating that the United States is most likely to face insurgencies and other small scale threats during the next 25 years.

For years, a debate has been raging along the many kilometers of hallways in the Pentagon - should the U.S. military focus on fighting insurgencies or should it return to its traditional strength in conventional, large-scale warfare.

In May, Defense Secretary Robert Gates weighed in.

"I've noticed too much of a tendency toward what might be called 'next-war-itis,' the propensity of much of the defense establishment to be in favor of what might be needed in a future conflict," he said.

By labeling those who favor a focus on large-scale warfare as having 'next-war-itis' Secretary Gates came down firmly on the side of those advocating a deeper commitment to counterinsurgency. Indeed, the secretary asked rhetorically who the United States might reasonably expect to fight in a major traditional war, indicating he sees no such adversary on the horizon...

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Hat tip to Scared Monkeys - to these guys and gals we say this:

... and this:

... and coal in your stockings CSIRO.

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Merry Christmas from SWJ - We wish you and yours all the best through this holiday season and beyond... and a thank you for what many of you do best - the dirty work to obtain that elusive dream - but a dream we might one day obtain - Peace on Earth. God bless you, fair winds and following seas, one and all… Dave and Bill

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The Army We Need
by Dr. John Nagl, Small Wars Journal

The Army We Need (Full PDF Article)

It is a huge pleasure for me to be back at Fort Benning. My last visit here was more than 20 years ago, during the hot summer of 1986, when Sergeant Airborne pinned silver wings to my bony chest with a vigor that would today result in a court martial. Something has been lost and something gained since the demise of that particular custom, which was perhaps more important in a peacetime army than it is in one that is at war, as ours is today.

You know that better than do I. Most of you have two tours in Operations Iraqi Freedom and/or Operation Enduring Freedom, as do your instructors. Your story is the story of the United States Army over the past seven years. You have had to adapt units that were designed for a different kind of war to conduct counterinsurgency operations. You succeeded—but, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates noted in a speech at NDU three months ago that I was privileged to attend, your job was harder than it had to be.

The Army We Need (Full PDF Article)

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Theory to Strategy
How to Defeat al Qaeda in Iraq and around the Globe
by Dr. Paul R. Chabot, Small Wars Journal

Theory to Strategy (Full PDF Article)

The U.S., Coalition and Iraqi forces have made great progress in combating al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Today, AQI is severely damaged and limited in its operational potential. However, despite all best efforts, AQI has adjusted to internal and external pressures and remains a threat to the region and national security.

AQI fits the academic definition of a resilient organization. It's aware of challenges, continues to make sense of its environment, learns from failure, adjusts to difficulties and creates or uses resiliency characteristics to sustain itself in what I describe as a resiliency cycle. If U.S., Coalition and Iraqi pressure where to be released on AQI, it would reconstitute itself with a vengeance and wreak havoc throughout the region, yet again.

What this strategy proposes is to simultaneously attack each of AQI's resiliency characteristics by the asset best suited for that mission. As such, AQI will shrink further, much like applying pressure to all sides of a balloon. Results are measured, evaluated, reassessed and refocused. The process of attacking the resiliency charactertics begins again, thereby further shrinking the organization. This process repeats itself over and over, much like peeling back layers of an onion. Eventually, AQI will be so severely shrunk and damaged, that it is but remnants compared to its previous strength. It is at this stage, in its weakest form, that it most susceptible to organizational failure.

This strategy can be a blue-print for fighting not only al Qaeda, but all terrorist organization including criminal/drug trafficking organizations and sophisticated street and prison gangs, worldwide. Simply, such horrific organizations must either adapt to pressures or collapse upon itself like a dying star. Those organizations able to sustain despite such pressure and survive, exhibit resiliency and therefore contain resiliency characteristics. It is these resiliency characteristics that we must focus our efforts upon to bring about the destruction of such evil organizations. It is a precise, focused strategy requiring leadership, resources and patience.

Theory to Strategy (Full PDF Article)

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