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I have previously argued that, while the central problem of international relations in the 20th century was states that were too strong (Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union), the primary problems of international relations in the 21st century are states that are too weak (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mexico). Thomas Friedman agrees in the linked New York Times column, which has vast implications not just for the State Department, but also for the Department of Defense.

Super (Sub) Secretaries - Thomas Friedman, New York Times

It is way too soon to say what policy breakthroughs Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be known for at the State Department. But she has already left her mark bureaucratically. She has invented new diplomatic positions that say a great deal about the state of foreign policy in these messy times. I would call them “The Super Sub-Secretaries of State.”

Mrs. Clinton has appointed three Super Sub-Secretaries - George Mitchell to handle Arab-Israel negotiations, Richard Holbrooke to manage Afghanistan-Pakistan affairs and Dennis Ross to coordinate Iran policy. The Obama team seems to have concluded that these three problems are so intractable that they require almost full-time secretary of state-quality attention. So you need officials who have more weight and more time - more weight than the normal assistant secretary of state so they will be taken seriously in their respective regions and will have a chance to move the bureaucracy, and more time to work on each of these discrete, Gordian problems than a secretary of state can devote in a week...

More at The New York Times.

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Since 1922, Military Review has provided a forum for the open exchange of ideas on military affairs. Subsequently, publications have proliferated throughout the Army education system that specialize either in tactical issues associated with particular Branches or on strategic issues at the Senior Service School level. Bridging these two levels of intellectual inquiry, Military Review focuses on research and analysis of the concepts, doctrine and principles of warfighting between the tactical and operational levels of war.

Military Review is a refereed journal that provides a forum for original thought and debate on the art and science of land warfare and other issues of current interest to the US Army and the Department of Defense. Military Review also supports the education, training, doctrine development and integration missions of the Combined Arms Center (CAC), Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Military Review is printed bimonthly in English, Spanish and Portuguese and is distributed to readers in more than 100 countries. It is also printed in Arabic on a quarterly basis. Widely quoted and reprinted throughout the world, it is a readily available reference at most military and civilian university libraries and research agencies.

Here is the March - April 2009 Issue lineup:

Counterinsurgency Lessons from Iraq by Bing West

A noted author summarizes the lessons from Iraq and draws some surprising conclusions.

Unifying Physical and Psychological Impact During Operations by Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege, U.S. Army Retired

America’s love affair with technology and raw power eroded appreciation for the psychological dimension of war.

Narrowing the Gap: DOD and Stability Operations by Colonel David W. Shin, U.S. Army

Performing all stability lines of operations as a “core mission” is impossible for the U.S. military; it does not have the resources. DOD must prioritize its strengths—providing civil security and control.

Tal Afar and Ar Ramadi: Grass Roots Reconstruction by Captain Chad M. Pillai, U.S. Army

Because no clear linkage exists between Army units’ short-term goals and broader interagency goals, tactics meant to foster local governance and economic development have produced mixed long-term results.

Not My Job: Contracting and Professionalism in the U.S. Army by Lieutenant Colonel William C. Latham, U.S. Army Retired

Imagined efficiencies of contracting may cause the U.S. military to lose its jurisdiction over traditional roles.

From Peddlers to Sheiks: A Contracting Case Study in Southern Baghdad by Lisa A. Verdon

Coalition contracting for public projects in Iraq suggests that reconciliation in Iraq comes at the discretion of the sheik.

All Our Eggs in a Broken Basket: How the Human Terrain System is Undermining Sustainable Military Cultural Competence by Major Ben Connable, U.S. Marine Corps

The military should expand its organic, sustainable cultural expertise rather than waste resources on external academics and the appendage called the “Human Terrain System.”

Complex Operations in Africa: Operational Culture Training in the French Military by Colonel Henri Boré, French Army Retired

An expert from the French Army relates how cultural expertise was a critical combat skill that led to success for French counterinsurgents of the recent past.

Testing Galula in Ameriyah: the People are the Key by Lieutenant Colonel Dale Kuehl, U.S. Army

David Galula claims that popular support for the counterinsurgent requires an active minority working on its behalf. Ameriyah showed him to be correct.

A View from Inside the Surge by Lieutenant Colonel James Crider, U.S. Army

The “surge” worked, and David Galula’s 40-year old treatise proved its worth in the process. His works should be required reading for American military professionals.

Amnesty, Reintegration, and Reconciliation in South Africa by Major Timothy M. Bairstow, U.S. Marine Corps

South Africa successfully employed the principles of amnesty, reintegration, and reconciliation (AR2).

Educating by Design: Preparing Leaders for a Complex World by Colonel Stefan J. Banach, U.S. Army

The School for Advanced Military Studies is meeting a recognized need for new conceptual tools to assist commanders in the operational planning process.

The Art of Design: A Design Methodology by Colonel Stefan J. Banach, U.S. Army, and Alex Ryan Ph.D.

Two experts provide a brief overview of adaptive learning to develop comprehensive plans for complex missions.

Learning from Moderate Governments’ Approaches to Islamist Extremism by Major Eric A. Claessen Jr., Belgium Army

One can learn much from states that controlled extremists for decades.

The Future Combat System Program by Major Luis Alvarado, U.S. Army

The Future Combat System will be the Army's best connection to America's future war machine.

Book Reviews

Letters

2009 General William E. DePuy Combined Arms Center Writing Competition

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Thoughts on “Hybrid” Conflict
by Dr. Russell W. Glenn, Small Wars Journal

Thoughts on “Hybrid” Conflict (Full PDF Article)

The last several years have seen the rise of “hybrid warfare” as a term in international and U.S. armed forces literature. Others similarly write of “hybrid conflict,” “hybrid war,” or “hybrid threat,” ...

We can credit Hezbollah for the recent and rapid spike in such interest. That group’s success in defending against the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) over 34 days spanning July 12 - August 14, 2006 gained worldwide attention. The notice is unsurprising given the success experienced by a non-state actor’s military against a national armed forces with an established reputation for excellence. But do “hybrid warfare,” “conflict,” “war,” or “threat” merit this newfound notoriety in light of both the Second Lebanon War and broader analysis? The question is a nontrivial one at a time when challenges in Iraq, Afghanistan, southern Philippines, and elsewhere continue to challenge Western defense thinkers while foes of developed nations demonstrate an ability to share proven techniques. Comments made by Israelis in the aftermath of the July-August 2006 Second Lebanon War add further impetus to questioning the value of adding yet another concept to defense thinking. Among the problems recognized as undermining IDF performance during that conflict was penetration of the country’s military doctrine by an “intellectual virus,” i.e., the introduction of new and opaque thinking that clouded rather than clarified the guidance provided those committed to Israel’s security. U.S. doctrine and thinking are similarly vulnerable to adverse influences. The confusion wreaked by effects-based operations (EBO) ended only after the commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command recently declared it would not become a part of joint doctrine. (Interestingly, EBO was cited by Israelis as one of the imported concepts found unhelpful in 2006.)

The deliberately brief discussion to follow considers the value of a hybrid construct in two contexts. First, we consider none-too-consistent usage of the term in light of its applicability to the security challenges of today and tomorrow. Second, we confront the issue of whether the hybrid concept is sufficiently original to merit addition to military intellectual discourse and – ultimately – armed forces doctrine as a separate form of warfare. Another possibility, of course, is that the term may serve to educate even if the concept represents nothing new, much as did Basil Liddell-Hart’s “indirect approach” in the aftermath of World War I.

Thoughts on “Hybrid” Conflict (Full PDF Article)

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Further Thoughts on Hybrid Threats
by Frank G. Hoffman, Small Wars Journal

Further Thoughts on Hybrid Threats (Full PDF Article)

I commend everyone's attention to Dr. Russ Glenn's belated entry (Small Wars Journal, 2 March 2009) into the hybrid conflict debate. I share with him some concerns about new terminology but such changes in lexicon help distinguish changes or nuances. It’s important to professional discourse, and sometimes new thinking requires new terms. The utility of the hybrid construct is not as a new entry into the long and pathetic list of US Joint Forces Command’s (JFCOM) Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs). Rather it is critical to current critical debates we have presently having. Taking Dr. Glenn's argument to an extreme, there would be little utility to anyone in our community reading Rupert Smith's The Utility of Force, or T.X. Hammes The Sling and the Stone, or John Robb's Global Guerrillas. All of these scholar/ practitioners have offered useful constructs on top of those like Van Creveld non-trinitarian wars, Arguilla's Netwars and Bunker's Epochal Wars. To ignore them because they posed a new construct, or one not invented at JFCOM where Russ now sits is simply bunk.

Each of these books and essays have tried to help capture new elements (if not entirely new, then different) in the ever evolving character of conflict. I have shamelessly stolen from them. Each of these constructs has had to overcome the narrow if not dead hand of the traditional school in military affairs. Dr. Glenn is not part of that rigid community, having committed a number of years to enhancing our understanding of urban operations. But his stated position suggests he might be willing to climb into bed with some traditionalist thinking that too often oversimplifies and underestimates our enemies. That approach has very little to show for it the last decade and is principally responsible for the ghastly cost we’ve paid since 9/11. Let’s not repeat that mistake as we peer into the 21st century and tried to pierce the fog.

Further Thoughts on Hybrid Threats (Full PDF Article)

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Thoughts on the “New Media” - compiled by Small Wars Journal

Last weekend I sent out the following “RFI” to a number of bloggers I know:

Andrew Exum’s post / review of Tom Ricks’ The Gamble several weeks ago at Abu Muqawama got me thinking (once again) about the impact of the “new media” on issues concerning national security, military doctrine and concept development, as well as lessons learned. As one part of this new media I’m not sure I fully grasp our influence – though I am often told we are, quote – “making a difference”. Here is the excerpt from the AM post that got me thinking about this.

“The New Media: Ricks cited a discussion on Small Wars Journal once and also cited some things on PlatoonLeader.org but never considered the way in which the new media has revolutionized the lessons learned process in the U.S. military. (Forget Abu Muqawama, though, because this lowly blog started around the same time as the surge.) Instead of just feeding information to the Center for Army Lessons Learned and waiting for lessons to be disseminated, junior officers are now debating what works and what doesn't on closed internet fora -- such as PlatoonLeader and CompanyCommand -- and open fora, such as the discussion threads on Small Wars Journal. The effect of the new media on the junior officers fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was left curiously unexplored by Ricks, now a famous blogger himself.”

I’d like to get your thoughts on this - nothing elaborate – maybe a paragraph or two on the core issues concerning the new media and it impact on the military. I’d then like to post the responses I get as one post on SWJ.

Appreciate the consideration.

What follows are the replies I received through yesterday. Some stuck to the one-two requested paragraphs, some sent more. Rather than attempt to “over edit” and get some uniformity I opted to go with this initial batch of thoughts on this issue.

All good stuff that hopefully energizes a discourse on the impact of new media and its influence on military doctrine, concept development, training, education, and lessons learned. Without further ado (and in alphabetical order) here is Spencer Ackerman, Tom Barnett, Janine Davidson, Andrew Exum, Grim, Judah Grunstein, Dave Kilcullen, Raymond Pritchett, Mark Safranski, Herschel Smith, Starbuck, Michael Tanji, and Michael Yon...

Thoughts on the “New Media” - compiled by Small Wars Journal

Update:

Counterinsurgency and the New Media - Andrew Exum, Abu Muqawama

New Media Poised to Change the Future National Security Debate - Raymond Pritchett, Information Dissemination

SWJ, New Media and COIN - Judah Grunstein, World Politics Review

Thoughts on the New Media and Military Blogging - Herschel Smith, The Captain's Journal

New Media + Old Military = New Military - Jules Crittenden, Forward Movement

The "New Media," the Surge, and the Writing of History - Mark Grimsley, Cliopatria

Media Blitz - Spencer Ackerman, Attackerman

New Media and Modern War - Joshua Foust, Registan

Legacy Futures in Cyberspace - Adam Elkus, ThreatsWatch

Small Wars Invitational on The Surge and New Media - Grim, Blackfive

The Difference - Greyhawk, Mudville Gazette

Recommended Reading - Mark Safranski, Zenpundit

Counterinsurgency and the New Media - Starbuck, Wings Over Iraq

Continue reading "Thoughts on the “New Media” (Updated)" »

Lot's of good stuff in the current issue of Foreign Policy. Here are the lead articles:

The Axis of Upheaval by Niall Ferguson

Forget Iran, Iraq, and North Korea—Bush’s “Axis of Evil.” As economic calamity meets political and social turmoil, the world’s worst problems may come from countries like Somalia, Russia, and Mexico. And they’re just the beginning.

The Most Dangerous Place in the World by Jeffrey Gettleman

Somalia is a state governed only by anarchy. A graveyard of foreign-policy failures, it has known just six months of peace in the past two decades. Now, as the country’s endless chaos threatens to engulf an entire region, the world again simply watches it burn.

Reversal of Fortune by Arkady Ostrovsky

Vladimir Putin’s social contract has been premised on an authoritarian state delivering rising incomes and resurgent power. But the economic crisis is unraveling all that. And what comes next in Russia might be even worse.

State of War by Sam Quinones

Mexico’s hillbilly drug smugglers have morphed into a raging insurgency. Violence claimed more lives there last year alone than all the Americans killed in Iraq. And there’s no end in sight.

Much more at Foreign Policy.

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Greg Grant over at DoD Buzz (added to our blogroll) comments on SWJ posts Thoughts on “Hybrid” Conflict by Russ Glenn and Further Thoughts on Hybrid Threats by Frank Hoffman with “Hybrid War” Throwdown. Greg's bottom line:

I’m convinced this “New Model Army” is going to be encountered with more frequency on the world’s battlefields. The U.S. military would do well to study this new and adaptive threat and prepare accordingly.

More at DoD Buzz.

Continue reading "Even More Thoughts on “Hybrid” Conflict" »

Last April, over 200 people gathered in Washington D.C. for the State Department-sponsored kickoff of an innovative, web-enabled, interagency community of practice, the Consortium for Complex Operations. This project, sponsored by the leadership among the “3D’s,” (diplomacy, development, and defense), was designed to link civilian and military educators, trainers, thought leaders and practitioners to focus on theoretical and practical problems associated with stability operations, counterinsurgency, and irregular warfare.

As the CCO approaches its first anniversary, the CCO Support Office will be moving to the Center for Technology and National Security Policy (CTNSP) at the National Defense University (NDU) under the oversight of Hans Binenndijk and Bernie Carreau. This move introduces clear advantages as well as some manageable challenges to the CCO's charter and has thus generated some moderate debate. Based on my experience in leading the development and launch of the CCO, I thought I would offer the following insight for the SWJ readership and the CCO community of interest...

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Dan Troy of the Consortium for Complex Operations (CCO) was kind enough to share with SWJ a CCO interview with Bing West, author of The Village, The March Up and No True Glory. Bing's latest book, The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq has been widely acclaimed since its release last August.

Ten Questions with Bing West

Bing West served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Reagan administration. A graduate of Georgetown and Princeton Universities, he served in Marine infantry in Vietnam. His books have won the Marine Corps Heritage Prize, the Colby Award for Military History and appeared on the Commandant's Reading List. West appears regularly on The News Hour and Fox News. He is a member of St. Crispin's Order of the Infantry and the Council on Foreign Relations. He lives in Newport, RI.

He recently released The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics and the Endgame in Iraq, the result of fourteen trips to Iraq embedded with front-line units over the entire course of the war, and agreed to be interviewed by the CCO on the lessons he learned from writing the book.

1. Your assessment of the national Iraqi security forces, including the Army and the Police, is pretty bleak. An important aspect of counterinsurgency is working with indigenous partners, but given that their inability to take control of the counterinsurgency effort was a major part of our change in strategy in early 2007, do we need to rethink our basic assumptions as to how best to work with the host nation? Would it have been better to adopt a grass-roots approach from the beginning, putting all our effort into working with groups from each town, city and region to secure their own areas before looking to create national forces?

President Obama has declared a total pull out by Aug of 2011. So US advisers have about two years to improve the Iraqi security forces. But the leverage of advisers has been tremendously weakened – discounted – because the date certain for their departure has been agreed by the US and GOI. It’s too late for significantly more strengthening by US mentoring. We will provide technical training, staff procedures and logistical support. The greatest defect in our approach is the lack of police techniques appropriate to an insurgency.

The grass-roots approach makes all the sense in the world; but it cannot be applied until a majority of the locals in the affected area support the approach and are willing to inform on the insurgents in their midst. In Iraq, that willingness on the Sunni side did not appear until late 2006; then it spread rapidly. On the Shiite side, the power of the Sadr extremists was not broken until the battles in Basra and Baghdad in April of 2007.

Continue on for more Q&A with Bing West...

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By Ben Fitzgerald and Scott Brady

Recent operational experience has identified the need for the United States Government to make better use of law enforcement concepts, skills and organizations to improve outcomes in population centric operations. However, within this broad consensus, there is a lack of common understanding beyond ‘we need more police’. Deeper analysis of this problem space quickly identifies not just a lack of common understanding but three varying and overlapping perspectives on the role of law enforcement in this context.

From a military perspective, the value of law enforcement may be seen as enhancing the military’s conduct of population centric operations through improved patrolling techniques, investigation, community engagement, graduated use of force etc. Separate to the military perspective is the potential to deploy civilian law enforcement personnel to essentially perform domestic law enforcement tasks, such as community policing, in support of broader operational goals. Finally, there is the perspective focused on long term capacity building and institutional reform of host nation law enforcement agencies, which is a prerequisite for the successful drawing down of international resources and the establishment of ongoing diplomatic relations. It should be noted that all three of these perspectives are valid and, in fact, mutually reinforcing.

The reasons for these different perspectives and associated gaps in USG capability become apparent when one considers that elements of the responsibility for law enforcement capability in international operations reside across the Departments of State, Justice and Defense in addition to USAID’s role in capacity building. Additionally there is no single point of Congressional oversight and funding for these various organizations.

To help address this situation, the Emerging Capabilities Division within the Office of the Secretary of Defense sponsored an interagency project on Transitional Law Enforcement aimed at stimulating, informing and providing a framework for discussion on the application of law enforcement in international operations. This was achieved by first documenting the various interagency perspectives and contributions as well as the specific functions of TLE in international operations. This was supported by an analysis of the USG authorities (legislation, policies, directives, etc) that govern various aspects of TLE. The project also covered international models for deploying law enforcement expertise including a detailed analysis of the capabilities of the Australian Federal Police’s International Deployment Group as well as issues associated with international supply and demand for law enforcement and an overview of the law enforcement communities and international contributions of sixteen major donor nations.

The Peacekeeping and Stabilization Operations Institute has uploaded these documents for use by any interested organization. These documents are the first set of deliverables in an ongoing body of work which investigates the role of law enforcement on international operations.

Ben Fitzgerald is the Principal for Noetic Corporation, a strategy firm focused on national and homeland security issues. Scott Brady, a former Australian Army officer, is a senior analyst with Noetic.

Continue reading "Transitional Law Enforcement" »

Via e-mail from Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, USMC (Ret.) on the recent SWJ discussion concerning Hybrid War and Threats:

Contrary to what my good friend and fellow Marine, Frank Hoffman, argues, I believe that this continual adding of adjectives in front of "war" is counterproductive. As Clausewitz wrote, "In war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole, for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together." Every modification of the word "war" serves mainly as fodder for un-needed conferences, workshops, and meetings where the new definitions as well as the merits of these terms are debated with, in my estimation, little value added. These new terms also help confuse our officer corps and undermine a solid professional lexicon. I remain in Professor Colin Gray's corner who maintains that "warfare is warfare"---plain and simple. At most we need only think of it in two forms, wars of fire and maneuver and wars of insurgency.

Clausewitz allowed for this with two observations:

(1) “War is more than a chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case.”

(2) "We can thus only say that the aims a belligerent adopts, and the resources he employs . . . will also conform to the spirit of the age and to its general character.”

Our current enemies have adopted wars of insurgency as the form they use to challenge us.

Paul Van Riper

Updates:

Frank Hoffman responds:

I have always been informed by the tremendous scholarship of Dr. Gray and of course have benefited over the years from my interaction with General Van Riper. But they are both wrong here (I think Dr. Gray is being misquoted out of context and not wrong). We've been arguing this particular point for some time since the Army 2003 Arm War College strategy conference where I was critical of The American Way of War, and at NDU in 2008 where General Van Riper first articulated his views.

I agree with Dr. Gray's true point that War is War. War defined as a state of violent interaction between two groups, a clash of wills AND cultures, between groups (not necessarily just States) to obtain political ends is War. As he states in his great book, my Loop choice Fighting Talk, war is a relationship. Furthermore, the nature of war is immutable (violence, chance, human dimension, etc) But Warfare, Dr Gray makes pains to distinguish as a subset of War and I agree, warfare describes the military component of War, the warmaking. I recommend his chapter "There is More to War than Warfare" for those seeking more distinction.

Warfare is not immutable, quite the opposite. Dr. Gray points out that some cultures (he means ours) have a dominant military culture that precludes understanding the distinction between war and warfare (p. 32), which often leads to tactical success but strategic failure. I think Dr. Gray is right about us, for we conflate our preferences about warfare and then mirror image our enemies with our culturally induced idea about what warfare is and isnt. We focus on the warfare, and ignore the strategic context. Regrettably, General Van Riper's comments continue that misunderstanding--undoubtedly unintentionally.

I think the bromide that Warfare is Warfare is a dangerous over-simplification and residue from the poor professional conceptualization of warfare that has marked U.S. military since Vietnam. I recall the late Harry Summer's as the first in the "War is War is War" school, in his essay by that title in the post-Vietnam era. This was central to his argument that Vietnam was a conventional fight, which remains a dubious argument that has fallen aside. This has led us to the problems in our doctrine and profession reflected in operations and the poor transition to a better peace in Panama, Desert Storm and OIF. It has truncated our thinking to a narrow professional sphere in the conflict spectrum, the most irrelevant today and for the mid-range future.

There ARE forms of warfare, and different societies and cultures have they own forms or modes of warfare. There is fighting and dying in each of them, but the rule sets or principles or what Clausewitz suggested by Grammar are different. One doesn’t succeed in COIN by applying conventional warfighting capabilities and one doesn’t succeed in major combat operations with t he six Logical Lines of Operation of FM 3-24. Moreover, ignoring the distinction simply continues the tragedy.

Moreover, as General Van Riper points out, and as Dr. Tony Echevarria has discussed in some length in his book on Clausewitz and Contemporary Conflict, our Prussian friend was very much aware that war (more accurately warfare) has an ever evolving character. Each age he said has its own conception and preconceptions, and that war is MORE than a chameleon, that is it changes more than just color, it changes its character and characteristics. I think General Van Riper, given his profound historical founding and study, appreciates this more than most of us and actually means this in his statement, but by trying to bin everything into Warfare is Warfare, he perpetuates our misunderstanding of what has changed and what has not. This will continue to leave us poorly prepared for tomorrow's fights.

I think its patently illogical to ignore language and its influence on our professional thinking. We already have numerous adjectives about warfare: Unconventional, Irregular and "Conventional" or Traditional. I think all of these are flawed or outdated in our thinking right now. UW is related to the SOF community and needs serious updating. Irregular has become synonymous with COIN, which is a very clear case of what Colin calls "presentism." I don’t agree that our enemies have picked something called Wars of Insurgency, t hat is OUR term and its a label or adjective after the noun instead of in front of it. There are many forms of Irregular Warfare for which the Joint concept leave us utterly unprepared for. What I think most folks think of as Regular or Conventional or Traditional warfare is vague but is very Western or ethno-centric. I think we need a serious professional discourse about warfare and what assumptions and illusions we hide behind when we use the terms we have.

This is a valuable debate because we are entering an era in which our conceptualization of future conflict will influence our strategy, and the allocation of scarce resources is upon us. I trust that the debate will continue.

Frank

LtGen Van Riper responds:

Ah, it is a sad task to debate a good friend in a public forum, but in this case a necessary task. Let me say at the outset, however, that for several reasons I am surprised by Frank Hoffman’s focus on a term many view as simply trendy, for in the past we have both lamented the steady degrading of the military’s professional lexicon in numerous conversations over dinner. (Pity our poor wives who have to listen to such professional talks for hours on end.) Moreover, from 1995 to 1997 Frank was the very best writer at the Marine Corps Combat Development Command and many of his words appeared in my formal congressional testimony and speeches. Those words were simple and elegant, unburdened by use of stylish terms.

Also, let me second Frank’s words that Dr. Gray's, Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare and Dr. Antulio (Tony) Echevarria's Clausewitz: Contemporary War are exceptional books that serious scholars of war, strategy, and operational art need to read and study! I might also tout Dr. Gray's latest book, National Security Dilemmas: Challenges & Opportunities, one for which I was honored to write a forward.

I took the words “warfare is warfare” from the Conclusion (page 370) of Another Bloody Century. The lead sentence to that chapter reads, “Warfare is warfare, period.” Later in that chapter Dr. Gray notes that “War, and warfare, has an enduring, unchanging nature, but a highly variable character.” He also observes that “The American defense community is especially prone to capture by the latest catchphrase, the new-sounding spin on an ancient idea which as jargon separates those who are truly expert from the lesser breeds without the jargon.” Though Dr. Gray’s words, I believe, support my case, please read the entire chapter—better the entire book—to judge for yourself. Again, I am surprised by Frank’s insistence that the word “hybrid” adds to our understanding of war, for he is “truly expert” in things military, and certainly not “from the lesser breeds.”

I am fairly certain that I understand Dr. Gray’s distinction between war and warfare. In fact, I would have preferred to use words I believe he spoke in 2005 at the opening of an address at the Army War College, “War is war,” but not having a transcript of that address I hesitated. As a nation we are too single-minded and center our attention on warfare rather than war. Dr. Echevarria has pointed this out in numerous places, noting that it is the reason we have an "American way of battle," not war. I agree! Too few Americans understand the full impact of Clausewitz’s admonition: “. . . war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means. We deliberately use the phrase ‘with the addition of other means’ because we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs.” As a Marine I am deeply interested in the “grammar” of war, but I know that it is the “logic” that is most important.

The one thing Frank and I certainly agree on is that “we already have numerous adjectives about warfare.” He is also correct that my “wars of fire and maneuver” and “wars of insurgency” place the adjectives after the noun. However, my words have the distinct advantage in that they spell out a meaning; the reader does not have to guess as he or she might with words like “irregular,” “unconventional,” “nontraditional,” forth generation,” and yes, “hybrid.”
Let the debate continue.

May the winner enjoy a Sam Adams and a steak at the expense of the other!

PKVR

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I was a little nonplussed by Andrew Bacevich’s review of my recent book, The Accidental Guerrilla (Oxford University Press, 2009). Mr Bacevich is a highly intelligent and knowledgeable man whose work I have admired over many years (in fact, I quote him at length in two places in the book). He also has an incandescent wit, which he applies like a blowtorch to my book and to my personal character. While I beg to differ on the assertion that I have been guilty of moral cowardice or benefited personally from the war, I actually agree with almost all the points he makes in his review – indeed his argument, though framed as a critique of my book, is actually precisely the same argument I make in the book. I wonder, in fact, whether he has actually read the book, or whether some evil fairy or publishing-industry gremlin slipped another, completely different, book, like a changeling, into my book’s dust-jacket before he read it.

To be fair, as normally happens, he probably reviewed a galley (or perhaps an early incomplete draft) of the book, and he therefore may not have had a chance to read it in full, read the later chapters or look at the theory chapter. Mr Bacevich’s review focuses on the Iraq and Afghanistan chapters, but of course the book also analyses five other conflicts at some length (West Java, East Timor, Pakistan, Southern Thailand and radicalization in Europe), and there are three theory chapters also. I understand Mr Bacevich may have been pressed for time or short of space, and so I can completely understand a desire to focus on Iraq and Afghanistan. But whatever the reason, the fact is that the book Mr Bacevich criticizes so harshly is simply not the book I wrote...

Continue reading "Accidental Guerrilla: Read Before Burning" »

By Judah Grunstein, World Politics Review (SWJ cross-post)

If you've been following the "COIN will breed COIN" debate, check out these posts by Andrew Exum, Matthew Yglesias and Spencer Ackerman. If you haven't, check them out anyway. It's an interesting discussion of whether in making COIN a doctrinal focus of operations, the U.S. military will be tempted to intervene in counterinsurgencies of choice. It's a subject I've written about often over the past 18 months. If anything has reassured me that my worries weren't warranted, it's been Secretary of Defense Bob Gates' emphasis on "strategic balance." Exum's insistence that COIN practitioners are not necessarily COIN enthusiasts rings true, too.

Still, the COIN-dinistas' scholar-warrior approach to war has made it more intelligent and less destructive, and thereby more intellectually satifying and morally palatable. Afer all, "Counterinsurgency is armed social work," as David Kilcullen has said, makes for a better marketing slogan than "War is Hell." Having experience in social work, I can say that at one point or another, we all found ourselves wishing we did have a gun, even while knowing that forced progress is no progress at all.

But I think Spencer's point about the theorist-practitioners moving into policy positions offers a better potential payoff as a line of investigation. The question, though, isn't whether or not the shift will necessarily result in more wars, but what kind of impact will it have on strategic policy? I'd identify three areas where it will have an impact:

1) An emphasis on stability as the strategic objective of American foreign policy. This is largely consistent with America's historical emphasis, primarily due to the benefits of stability to trade and commerce. But with failed states now being perceived as a national security threat vector, that will probably increase. The downside is that promoting stability, if pushed to an extreme, can translate into stifling change and progress. There's also an internal tension, since trade and liberalization often have very destabilizing effects.

2) An emphasis on understanding over knowing. This seems like a clear net plus. One of the cornerstones of the new COIN doctrine is the need to understand the culture within which the operation is unfolding. Translated into a broad policy directive, that can only have a positive effect on strategic decision-making. If there's one risk, it's that in emphasizing the socio-cultural aspect of intelligence, COIN hones the ability to shape opinion through narrative, both within the theater of operations, but also domestically. The potential for abuse should be obvious.

3) An emphasis on a whole of government approach. The advantage here is that the wholistic synthesis of interagency strengths offers better strategic guidance for identifying objectives. It's also the institutional incarnation of "smart power." The disadvantage is that it also often results in policy paralysis and turf wars. The risk, too, is that it might eventually lower the barriers to "policy entrepeneurs" that the systemic firewalls have erected between agencies. There's also the problem that, notwithstanding all of Bob Gates' protests about the militarization of American foreign policy, the military will still be the biggest-funded agency within any interagency approach for the foreseeable future. And we know what talks and what walks, especially in Washington. While that doesn't necessarily mean more wars, it does mean that strategic policy will most likely be driven by the Pentagon and informed by the military's perception of America's national interests.

That's a start. Feel free to shout back with any others I've missed.

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This paper comes to SWJ highly recommended by Dr. Erin Simpson of the Marine Corps University (aka Charlie at Abu Muqawama) - Counterinsurgency, the War on Terror, and the Laws of War - by Ganesh Sitaraman of the Harvard Law School. Here is the abstract:

Since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military strategists, historians, soldiers, and policymakers have made counterinsurgency's principles and paradoxes second nature, and they now expect that counterinsurgency operations will be the likely wars of the future. Yet despite counterinsurgency's ubiquity in military and policy circles, legal scholars have almost completely ignored it. This Article evaluates the laws of war in light of modern counterinsurgency strategy. It shows that the laws of war are premised on a kill-capture strategic foundation that does not apply in counterinsurgency, which follows a win-the-population strategy. The result is that the laws of war are disconnected from military realities in multiple areas - from the use of non-lethal weapons to occupation law. It also argues that the war on terror legal debate has been myopic and misplaced. The shift from a kill-capture to win-the-population strategy not only expands the set of topics legal scholars interested in contemporary conflict must address but also requires incorporating the strategic foundations of counterinsurgency when considering familiar topics in the war on terror legal debates.

Counterinsurgency, the War on Terror, and the Laws of War - by Ganesh Sitaraman (with a tip of the hat to Erin)

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A short note, via e-mail, from Major General Geoffrey Lambert, USA (Ret.), concerning the future threat posed by explosive devices:

As we fight the current IED fight, we need to look to the future. Next-Gen IEDs will lose the I. North Korea and others with fears of US invasion and occupation will manufacture state of the art platter-charge type devices with all sorts of unique designs to blend in any environment, counter-US electronic warfare technology, and increase lethality. With vehicle killing "panzerfausts" in unlimited numbers for urban and other terrain, adversaries may be able to create formidable web defenses when coupled with other attriting technology.

Manufactured or Military Explosive Devices might be a nice term. Irregular no longer, MEDs will be a permanent part of the defensive landscape. We need to start investigating MEDs now, as they develop, and determine doctrinal and technological responses.

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To Whom Should our Generals Listen?
Or Who Should Control the Debate on the Nature of Future Conflicts
by Colonel David S. Maxwell, Small Wars Journal

To Whom Should our Generals Listen? (Full PDF Article)

Today there is much being written, discussed and even passionately argued over the nature of future conflicts that the US will face. This debate is critically important as the military enters a new QDR period and develops the future operating concepts for the military and (as US leadership has now fortunately come to realize) the whole of government approach to US National Security challenges. One might ask why this important or perhaps more pointedly, is it really that important?

Experts and pundits will say that understanding the nature of future conflict is important because it must be understood so the proper organizations can be designed, manned, trained, and equipped to operate and if necessary fight in these future environments. Multi-billion dollar budgets will be determined by the requests for future force structure. The US Joint Forces Command recently published the Joint Operating Environment (JOE) which provides useful insights into the nature of future conflicts and conditions the US could see; however, that document has by no means put an end to debates and arguments on the nature of war. In addition, the Capstone Concept for Joint Operations should also put to rest the debates for the time being and form the basis for future operating concepts and resourcing the future force. One could rightly ask that is these are the views of the Joint Forces then the Combatant Commands and the Services should take these documents as the foundation for our future joint force and get on with resourcing the force to operate in this environment and support the concepts called for in the documents.

To Whom Should our Generals Listen? (Full PDF Article)

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Defense Showstoppers: National Security Challenges for the Obama Administration

Conference summary report by Michael P. Noonan at Foreign Policy Research Institute.

On February 12, 2009, FPRI’s Program on National Security held a conference on potential “defense showstoppers” for the Obama administration—critical issues that, if not fixed, could lead to a serious deterioration of American military capabilities. The event was hosted and co-sponsored by the Reserve Officers Association in Washington, D.C. Program-affiliated scholars Michael Horowitz, Michael P. Noonan, Mackubin T. Owens, and Frank G. Hoffman served as panel moderators. More than 100 individuals from academia, government, NGOs, the media, the military, and the public participated in person, and another 300-plus individuals from around the world participated by webcast. Audio and video files of the proceedings are posted at FPRI’s website; the papers presented at the conference will be published in Orbis and other outlets.

A summary of the major panel presentations and discussions can be found here and include commentary by T.X. Hammes, Stephen Biddle, Roger Carstens, Frank G. Hoffman, Mackenzie Eaglen, Christopher Preble, James N. Mattis, Michael O’Hanlon, Thomas McNaugher, Frederick W. Kagan, Janine Davidson, Thomas Schweich, Ralph Peters and a conference summation by Harvey Sicherman.

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SWJ's 9th weekly contribution to Foreign Policy - This Week at War by Robert Haddick - is now posted. Topics include - Who's in charge of cleaning up after a war?
- Are weak states a bigger problem than strong states?

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On the Aesthetics of Doctrine
by Jason Fritz, Small Wars Journal Op-Ed

On the Aesthetics of Doctrine (Full PDF Article)

It will come as no surprise to the readers of the Small Wars Journal that there is a heated and vigorous debate ongoing over the future of the U.S. military – both in its structure and in the missions it will execute. Much like the counterinsurgency conflict it debates, this discussion has highly-opinionated small minorities at each pole with a large population in the center whose loyalty is yet to be won. This paper focuses on those poles, those groups who have been named many things: Crusaders, Conservatives, COINdinistas, and anti-COIN, as a few examples. Instead of yet another treatise on the merits and detractors for each argument, this paper will attempt to frame the rationale behind these disparate positions by considering the world view of these actors. Put another way, this is a discussion of aesthetics with regard to counterinsurgency doctrine.

Aesthetics might seem an odd concept when contemplating any type of doctrine, but it should come as no surprise. Basic-level military science classes often discuss the balance of science and art in military operations, indicating that the intangibles are often as important as the measurable knowns. Doctrine, in and of itself, provides the science, but it is the master who exercises that doctrine in a maestro-like way who defeats his enemy and earns immortality in historic tomes. By defining military matters in terms of art, then the use of aesthetic ideals should not be entirely foreign as a descriptor for such matters. What student of military history does not see the beauty and sublime (as well was the horror) in the battles of yore?

On the Aesthetics of Doctrine (Full PDF Article)

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The Emerging Obama Doctrine - Gordon Lubold, Christian Science Monitor

As President Obama carves out his own foreign policy, there are signs that his use of military force overseas will be tempered by his views on the limits of American power.

Mr. Obama is leaning toward a pragmatic approach that limits military deployment of the kind used by former President Bush in the “war on terror,” while remaining open to humanitarian aid and security training, especially in places such as Darfur. This approach departs from Mr. Bush but also synthesizes policy elements from Bush’s later years.

“It is a very balanced, pragmatic understanding that America’s interests and her ideals don’t always coincide and so you have to make some trade-offs,” says John Nagl, a former Army officer who now heads the Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington...

More at The Christian Science Monitor.

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Secretary Gates On Afghanistan Mission, Iraq Exit - National Public Radio (All Things Considered) - Listen Now.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says that the administration is currently reviewing the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.

"I would say that, at a minimum, the mission is to prevent the Taliban from retaking power against a democratically elected government in Afghanistan and thus turning Afghanistan, potentially, again, into a haven for al-Qaida and other extremist groups," Gates told NPR's Robert Siegel in an interview at the Pentagon.

Gates says he believes NATO plans to commit more troops to the country, especially to provide security for elections in August.

More at NPR.

Gates: U.S. Won’t Allow Taliban Resurgence in Afghanistan - Donna Miles, American Forces Press Service

As the United States reviews its strategy in Afghanistan, one thing is certain: The United States won’t let the Taliban threaten the Afghan government and re-establish safe havens there, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said on National Public Radio yesterday.

“I would say that at a minimum, the mission is to prevent the Taliban from retaking power against the democratically elected government in Afghanistan and thus turning Afghanistan potentially again into a haven for alQaida and other extremist groups,” Gates said.

The secretary conceded that the situation in Afghanistan “began to go downhill again” in 2005 and 2006. That’s when the Taliban started taking advantage of safe havens on the Pakistani side of the Pakistan-Afghan border and began “to re-infiltrate into Afghanistan and create security problems.”

The decision to send an additional 17,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan and reassess the strategy there focuses on this challenge. “We’ve really just been responding to that,” Gates said. “Clearly, we all still have our work cut out for us.”

More at American Forces Press Service.

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How is Afghanistan Different from Al Anbar? By Carter Malkasian and Gerald Meyerle of the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA's Stability and Development Program)

Al Anbar was a tough fight. Yet after four hard years of war, US Marines and Soldiers, together with the Sunni tribes, defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq and established security. Now, battalions of Marines may be headed to Afghanistan for a fight that promises to look different from the one in Al Anbar. Factors that loom large in any counterinsurgency campaign—politics, society, economics, and outside support—bear only passing resemblance to Al Anbar. This paper highlights 9 major differences between Al Anbar and Afghanistan (particularly southern Afghanistan) and considers their implications for the Marine Corps.

Executive Summary
Full Report

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Okay, you remember back a few years when those trying to figure out counterinsurgency were snapping up all available copies of Galula’s 1964 Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice and breaking out the popcorn to watch the 1967 movie The Battle of Algiers. Well, now circulating amongst those tasked for figuring out “Irregular Warfare” comes the 1962 US Army "booklet" entitled Special Warfare – with an introduction by President John F. Kennedy. So here, SWJ brings you another blast from the past.

The Introduction begins with a letter to the US Army from President John F. Kennedy that interestingly enough, notes the “several terms” that the Army used to describe guerrilla warfare and goes on to say “by whatever name, this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics, communications and logistics to meet this threat. The introduction also includes a foreword by Secretary of the Army Elvis Stahr, the Table of Contents and (something we could use today) a section called “Use the Right Word!” – a handy guide to official terminology.

Part I - New Emphasis on Special Warfare includes articles The Third Challenge by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Special Warfare: A Progress Report by General George Decker, Chief of Staff of the US Army.

Part II – Why You Should Know About Special Warfare includes articles Countering Guerilla Attack by Walt Rostow, Guerrillas: A Formable Force by Captain Thomas Collier, and Soldier of the Future by Major Boyd Bashore.

Part III – Is Special Warfare Something New? Includes articles The US Army and Guerrilla Warfare by Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Gardner and Counterguerrilla Operations: A Case Study by Lieutenant Colonel Donald Rattan.

Part IV – What the Army is Doing includes articles Special Forces by Charles Dodson, US Army Special Warfare Center by Brigadier General William Yarbrough, The World’s Top Jungle Fighters by Nelson Axlerod, The Jungle Tigers of Viet Nam by Simon Poore, Our Secret Weapon in The Far East by Dickey Chapelle and Special Forces: Europe by Captain Robert Asprey.

Part V – Some Thoughts on Guerrilla Philosophy and Tactics includes articles Mao’s Primer on Guerilla War by Mao Tse-tung, La Guerra De Guerillas by Che Guevara, Encirclement Methods in Counterguerrilla Warfare by Major Thoung Htaik and Both Sides of The Guerrilla Hill by Brigadier R.C.H. Miers.

Part VI – A Look at The Future includes articles Twilight War by Colonel Robert Rigg and Unconventional Warfare by Franklin Lindsay.

Part VII – Additional contains reference listings for further reading.

With that we give a SWJ Tip O’ Hat to Paul Tompkins and Dave Maxwell.

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America’s Broken Interagency - Hon. Thomas A. Schweich, Foreign Policy Research Institute

The last job I had with the Bush administration was coordinator for police training, judicial reform, and counternarcotics in Afghanistan. When I got the job, the National Security Council said, “It’s got three parts. First, you have to go to Afghanistan and try to coordinate among their agencies for police reform, judicial reform, and counternarcotics. Then you fly to Europe to coordinate with the EU on the same issue. Finally, you come back to Washington and coordinate U.S. interagency.” The last of these jobs was the most difficult one.

Afghanistan’s interagency process could best be described as “uncoordinated lack of action.” For example, in the areas of police training or counternarcotics, the ministry of the interior and the ministry of counternarcotics were supposed to coordinate their activities. The ministry of the interior would train police, the counternarcotics office was then supposed to execute the policies. Well, the ministry of the interior was run by former Mujahideen Tajiks while the ministry of counternarcotics was run by Hazaras who used to work for the Soviets. They didn’t like each other very much, they didn’t coordinate, and they didn’t talk to each other. Then, the two of them were supposed to get together and go down to Helmand and Kandahar and tell the Pashtuns how to get rid of drugs...

More at Foreign Policy Research Institute.

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Joint Warfare in the 21st Century - General James Mattis, Foreign Policy Research Institute

In Joint Forces Command, we have about 1.2 million troops under us, and aircraft carriers, aircraft squadrons, Army brigades, and Marine air-ground task forces. When General Petraeus or Admiral Keating needs forces, we assign those forces out. That aspect of Joint Forces Command is very straightforward. We also train the Joint Forces Headquarters that go into Baghdad, to Bakhtaran, to Djibouti. But I spend most of my time on forward-looking concepts. That’s the intellectually demanding part. That’s where the two jobs, NATO and Joint Forces Command, come together. Think of the Roman God Janus, who looks both forward and backward. That’s because history—especially very recent history—provides us some of our best signposts for the future.

I got the phone call that I was going to be the Allied Commander Transformation and Commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Command when I was in Kabul, Afghanistan, so I called for a map of NATO. They didn’t have one there, so they got me a map of the world. At that point I was a Marine from California who answered to John Abizaid and Admiral Fallon as the Marine Force’s Central Command. There I was in Kabul, closer to Brussels than Brussels is to my current headquarters in Norfolk. And therein lies part of the problem. Right now, we are superior to our enemies in terms of nuclear warfare and conventional warfare (we’ve lost a little bit of that edge, but we’ll get it back very quickly), but we are not superior in irregular warfare, and that is what we’ve got to do...

More at Foreign Policy Research Institute.

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Can We Defeat the Taliban? - David Kilcullen, National Review (Accidental Guerrilla book excerpt)

On the basis of my field experience in 2005–08 in Iraq, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, I assess the current generation of Taliban fighters, within the broader Taliban confederation (which loosely combines old Taliban cadres with Pashtun nationalists, tribal fighters, and religious extremists), as the most tactically competent enemy we currently face in any theater. This judgment draws on four factors: organizational structure, motivation, combat skills, and equipment.

Taliban organizational structure varies between districts, but most show some variation of the generic pattern of a local clandestine network structure, a main force of full-time guerrillas who travel from valley to valley, and a part-time network of villagers who cooperate with the main force when it is in their area. In districts close to the Pakistan border, young men graduating from Pakistani madrassas also swarm across the frontier to join the main force when it engages in major combat - as happened during the September 2006 fighting in Kandahar Province, and again in the 2007 and 2008 fighting seasons...

More at National Review.

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The U.S. Army General Staff
Where Is It in the Twenty-first Century?
by Lieutenant Colonel Louis A. DiMarco, Small Wars Journal

The U.S. Army General Staff in the 21st Century (Full PDF Article)

A Myriad of problems plagued the U.S. army in the first few years of operations in Iraq. At the eleventh hour General Petraeus led a new counterinsurgency doctrine inspired “surge” campaign that may have saved the entire war effort. However, the question must be asked –why did the war effort of the most sophisticated army in the world come down to a final moment “Hail Mary” pass that was reliant on the genius of an individual commander for victory? The answer is that the U.S. army experienced a crisis of command. Pundits gradually came to the conclusion that the performance of U.S. generalship and senior leadership had been mediocre at best and at worst largely responsible for the problems associated with prosecuting the war in its initial years. Army Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling wrote: “These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America's general officer corps.” Yingling’s analysis was echoed by military affairs analysts such as Ralph Peters and Douglas McGregor. Even Chief of Staff of the Army, General George Casey allowed that “we don’t do as good a job as we need to training our senior leaders to operate at the national level.” However, mediocre generalship alone does not account for the initial uninspired reactive prosecution of the war. Also contributing to the inconsistent and ineffectual prosecution of the war was the absence of a professional corps of general staff officers operating in support of the senior leadership.

The U.S. Army General Staff in the 21st Century (Full PDF Article)

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SWJ's 10th weekly contribution to Foreign Policy - This Week at War by Robert Haddick - is now posted. Topics include - The generals declare war on "war adjectives" - Special operations forces - the talent-poaching elite?

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Pentagon Rethinking Old Doctrine on 2 Wars - Thom Shanker, New York Times

The protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are forcing the Obama administration to rethink what for more than two decades has been a central premise of American strategy: that the nation need only prepare to fight two major wars at a time.

For more than six years now, the United States has in fact been fighting two wars, with more than 170,000 troops now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The military has openly acknowledged that the wars have left troops and equipment severely strained, and has said that it would be difficult to carry out any kind of significant operation elsewhere.

To some extent, fears have faded that the United States may actually have to fight, say, Russia and North Korea, or China and Iran, at the same time. But if Iraq and Afghanistan were never formidable foes in conventional terms, they have already tied up the American military for a period longer than World War II.

More at The New York Times.

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US Army Africa: Smart Power in Action
by Colonel Stephen Mariano and Major Charles O’Brien, Small Wars Journal

US Army Africa: Smart Power in Action (Full PDF Article)

Secretary of State Clinton’s use of the term “Smart Power” has stirred the proverbial pundit pot. A surge of talk show commentaries, opinion-editorials, and blog spots have questioned the wisdom of smart power, some going so far as to calling the idea “just plain dumb.” Secretary Clinton’s evocation of the “full range” of power tools was likely informed by a Center for Strategic and International Studies commission study headed by Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye.

Professors may define and debate smart power but the Nation’s civilian and military leaders must develop security policies and employment concepts. The Obama administration, for example, has an objective to “Rebuild the Military for 21st Century Tasks.”

Charting a course that implements the administration’s notion of smart power will not be easy. The military must conceptualize its role in a smart power policy. Hard power is commonly associated with the military instrument but even hard power can be applied in softer ways to generate smart power. Strengthening a weak foreign military’s capability or conducting foreign humanitarian assistance are examples of soft application of hard military power. The Department of Defense must further develop other smart power concepts.

US Army Africa: Smart Power in Action (Full PDF Article)

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Why Washington Worries - Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek

... The problem with American foreign policy goes beyond George Bush. It includes a Washington establishment that has gotten comfortable with the exercise of American hegemony and treats compromise as treason and negotiations as appeasement. Other countries can have no legitimate interests of their own—Russian demands are by definition unacceptable. The only way to deal with countries is by issuing a series of maximalist demands. This is not foreign policy; it's imperial policy. And it isn't likely to work in today's world.

More at Newsweek.

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A Counterinsurgency Primer - Max Boot, Wall Street Journal book review of The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One by David Kilcullen.

Almost everyone, even if otherwise ignorant of military affairs, has heard of Karl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. Very few people, though, have heard of C.E. Callwell, David Galula or Robert Thompson. Yet they, too, wrote immortal works on military strategy -- but on unconventional, or guerrilla, conflicts.

For all their timeless wisdom, their books were also a product of their times -- Callwell of the imperial wars of the late 19th century, Galula and Thompson of the wars of "national liberation" in the mid-20th century. Because of the global jihadist insurgency, the early 21st century has produced a new epoch in the annals of low-intensity struggle. It is fitting, then, that to help us understand the current conflict another soldier-scholar has emerged in the tradition of Callwell, Galula and Thompson.

In "The Accidental Guerrilla," a combination of memoir and military analysis, David Kilcullen looks at the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, East Timor, Indonesia and southern Thailand, all of which, excepting the last, he has seen first-hand. He then draws lessons from his experiences and those of other soldiers...

More at The Wall Street Journal.

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Mexico’s Struggle with ‘Drugs and Thugs’
SWJ Book Review
by John P. Sullivan

Mexico’s Struggle with ‘Drugs and Thugs’ (Full PDF Article)

Mexico is in the thralls of bloody drug wars. Last year these battles for profit and power cost an estimated 6,290 lives. So far this year, over 1,000 people have died as the cartels and their criminal soldiers seek dominance in the lucrative global narco-markets. These narco-conflicts are waged by cartels, gangs, paramilitary militias. The cartels fight at three levels: within their own enterprise for dominance; against other cartel alliances for market control; and against the security forces of the state (police and military) to fend off interference. Collectively this amounts to a virtual civil war fought by criminal netwarriors.

These netwars challenge Mexico and the cross-border region that embraces the frontier between Mexico and the United States with a series of interlocking, networked criminal insurgencies. Communities cower with fear against cartel reprisals and public debate is hampered by a lack of detailed understanding of the conflict and its players. This monograph, Mexico’s Struggle with ‘Drugs and Thugs’, helps fill the knowledge void.

George W. Grayson is the Class of 1938 Professor of Government at the College of William and Mary, is a respected area specialist on Mexico. In addition to his long-standing academic focus, he is a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Grayson brings over a quarter century of experience to bear in this lean, yet rich account of the social and political dynamics underlying the current cartel conflict.

Mexico’s Struggle with ‘Drugs and Thugs’ (Full PDF Article)

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West Point's Combating Terrorism Center has released the March 2009 issue of the CTC Sentinel.

The March issue contains the following articles:

Somalia’s New Government and the Challenge of Al-Shabab by David H. Shinn
Inside Look at the Fighting Between Al-Shabab and Ahlu-Sunna wal-Jama by Abdulahi Hassan
Pakistan’s Continued Failure to Adopt a Counterinsurgency Strategy by Ahmed Rashid
Al-Qa`ida’s Involvement in Britain’s 'Homegrown' Terrorist Plots by James Brandon
Lashkar-i-Tayyiba Remains Committed to Jihad by Farhana Ali and Mohammad Shehzad
Deconstructing Ibn Taymiyya’s Views on Suicidal Missions by Rebecca Molloy
Muslim Brotherhood Faces Growing Challenges in Egypt by Steven Brooke
The Current State of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group by Carlos Echeverría Jesús
Recent Highlights in Terrorist Activity

March 2009 issue of the CTC Sentinel.

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US Army / US Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center announces the next COIN Leadership Workshop.

From 27 April - 1 May 2009, the United States Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center will present its next Counterinsurgency Leader Workshop at the Lewis and Clark Center in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. This event is a five-day program focused on understanding the fundamentals of insurgency and counterinsurgency. This is a version of the same extremely popular workshop offered to hundreds of military and civilian attendees over the past two years.

This workshop will feature presentations from prominent general officers and guest speakers from the interagency community on the COIN environment in addition to the instructional material.

We have expanded the number of slots available to compensate for the high demand of previous sessions. The proceedings are UNCLASSIFED and registration is open to all interested US government and allied personnel.

The COIN Leader Workshop Site is open for registration. Please head to the COIN Center website, click on "Events" and then click on the "27 April - 1 May 2009 COIN Leader Workshop" to view more detailed information and register.

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Yes, we are up on Twitter under the userid smallwars.

We'll auto-tweet the title and a link of all new entries on the SWJ Blog and most new threads in the Small Wars Council. At the moment, the following things do NOT feed: blog comments, discussion board posts on old threads, and new discussion board threads within the members-only area.

Thanks to many folks who encouraged and/or nudged us to get aboard. The list includes Jules Crittenden, Matt Armstrong, Julian Tolbert, and, indirectly, Ellyn Angelloti.

For those of you who prefer your RSS straight up, feeds are available for the SWJ Blog and the Small Wars Council.

We have also established a Facebook page, but aren't driving content feeds there yet. If you join us on Facebook, you still might be able to say you were there before it was cool. However, we already have 127 members in the group there, and some of them are raising the cool bar for us.

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A Pathway to Success in Afghanistan: The National Solidarity Program

Center for a New American Security (CNAS)

In providing additional military forces for the Afghanistan war, the Obama administration has demonstrated that Afghanistan is no longer an economy-of-force campaign. But a troop surge alone is not enough to win the war. In orthodox counterinsurgency theory, providing essential services and strengthening governance are as important as fighting the enemy with guns and bullets.

In a new policy brief published by CNAS, authors John Nagl, Andrew Exum, and Ahmed Humayun recommend that the United States increase its support for Afghanistan's National Solidarity Program (NSP) and similar development initiatives. Launched in 2002 by Afghanistan's Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD), the NSP is a rural development project that disburses modest grants to elected village councils. The NSP has not just simply provided tangible services to Afghans; it is "owned" by Afghans and run with an emphasis on transparency. The NSP is one of the few initiatives from Kabul to have generated significant goodwill among rural communities. Increasing U.S. funding for programs like the NSP can strategically leverage all instruments of American national power instead of relying on military force alone. Accordingly, this policy brief describes the structure of the NSP, its achievements, explains the underlying reasons for its success, and proposes a course by which the United States can help sustain and expand the program moving forward.

A Pathway to Success in Afghanistan: The National Solidarity Program

Continue reading "CNAS Releases New Policy Brief on Afghanistan" »

From our good friends at Kings of War - Regular Warfare is Increasingly Irregular by Dr. David Betz (Note to self - you have not been visiting Kings of War of late as much as you should).

Fascinating article in the Straits Times from a couple of days ago ‘North Korea Rethinks War-fighting Strategy‘. The upshot of it is that North Korea is increasingly reliant on irregular measures. Personally, I see this as yet another reinforcement of Frank Hoffman’s hybrid wars concept (the link goes to the KCL events page–scroll two thirds of the way down and you will find a podcast of Frank’s lecture here from 21 January)...

The North Koreans are learning lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan. Chief among those would seem to be: when fighting Western armies you can tie them in knots with irregular techniques whereas confronting them in a conventional order of battle is a good way to get slaughtered. What lessons are we learning? According to some it’s that we should stop messing around with this irregular warfare stuff because, hey, North Korea might want to do some high-intensity manoeuvre warfighting with all those heavy divisions it’s got!

More at Kings of War.

Continue reading "Regular Warfare is Increasingly Irregular" »

Road Map for Afghanistan - David Ignatius, Washington Post opinion

Last October, the Bush administration arranged a briefing for aides to Barack Obama and John McCain on the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. Among the expert advisers was David Kilcullen, an Australian counterinsurgency guru who had been one of the architects of the U.S. troop surge in Iraq.

"We said the situation was extremely difficult in Afghanistan, with a security crisis and a political crisis occurring at the same time," Kilcullen remembers. Obama had been talking on the campaign trail as if Afghanistan's problems could be fixed by adding more U.S. troops. The briefing was a wake-up call that the next president would face some agonizing policy decisions...

More at The Washington Post.

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Our Must-Win War - John McCain and Joseph Lieberman, Washington Post opinion

Later this month, the Obama administration will unveil a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan. This comes as most important indicators in Afghanistan are pointing in the wrong direction. President Obama's decision last month to deploy an additional 17,000 U.S. troops was an important step in the right direction, but a comprehensive overhaul of our war plan is needed, and quickly.

As the administration finalizes its policy review, we are troubled by calls in some quarters for the president to adopt a "minimalist" approach toward Afghanistan. Supporters of this course caution that the American people are tired of war and that an ambitious, long-term commitment to Afghanistan may be politically unfeasible. They warn that Afghanistan has always been a "graveyard of empires" and has never been governable. Instead, they suggest, we can protect our vital national interests in Afghanistan even while lowering our objectives and accepting more "realistic" goals there -- for instance, by scaling back our long-term commitment to helping the Afghan people build a better future in favor of a short-term focus on fighting terrorists...

More at The Washington Post.

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Via the USA and USMC Counterinsurgency Center Blog - The US Army’s comprehensive approach to COIN for brigades, battalions, and companies is now available as an Approved Final Draft - FMI 3-24.2, Tactics in COIN.

FMI 3-24.2 is designed to be a user-manual for tactical level units and establishes doctrine for tactical counterinsurgency operations by combining the historic approaches to COIN, lessons learned from current operations, and the realities of today’s operational environment.

Continue reading "FMI 3-24.2, Tactics in COIN Now Available. " »

Dirty Windows and Burning Houses: Setting the Record Straight on Irregular Warfare - John Nagl and Brian Burton, The Washington Quarterly

After a slow start, the U.S. military has made remarkable strides in adapting to irregular warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is beginning to institutionalize those adaptations. Recent Department of Defense (DOD) directives and field manuals have elevated stability operations and counterinsurgency to the same level of importance as conventional military offensive and defensive operations. These changes are the outcome of deep reflection about the nature of current and likely future threats to U.S. national security and the military’s role in addressing them. They represent important steps toward transforming a sclerotic organizational culture that long encouraged a ‘‘we don’t do windows’’ posture on so-called ‘‘military operations other than war,’’ even as the nation’s leaders called upon the armed forces to perform those types of missions with increasing frequency...

More at The Washington Quarterly.

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We just got word that SWJ's own Robert Haddick (This Week at War) will be a guest on WAMU's The Diane Rehm Show. Show-time is 1000 EST. Robert will participate as a panel member with Tom Shanker, Robert Work, and Andrew Exum discussing the state of the US military, the stop-loss policy, the DoD budget, QDR, and of course etc... Should be a good one.

Update: This was a good one indeed. You can listen to a recording of this morning's broadcast here at WAMU.

Continue reading "Diane Rehm Show - Tomorrow! (Updated)" »

Game Theory
Can a Round of Poker Solve Afghanistan's Problems?
by Major Richard J.H. Gash, Small Wars Journal

Can a Round of Poker Solve Afghanistan's Problems? (Full PDF Article)

Analyzing the ill-structured problem that is southern Afghanistan noticeably tests the bounds of traditional military planning doctrine. Identifying and framing the problem, isolating centers of gravity, and even articulating an attainable end-state given the tangle of tribal violence, narco-trafficing, and religious fanaticism can drive otherwise mild mannered planners to the verge of physical violence. Training and Doctrine Command's Pamphlet 525-5-500 goes as far as predicting an expected "lack of professional consensus" when tackling such a "wicked problem"1. Fortunately (or unfortunately), ill-structured problems do not exist solely in the realm of military conflict. Social scientists, political theorists, and economists routinely grapple with their likes. Over the past century they have devoted much scholarly effort toward their mitigation, if not solution. One theory that may particularly apply to southern Afghanistan is that of games. Although one can quickly become bogged down with the mathematics of game theory, a rudimentary understanding of its basic principles can prove quite beneficial to military planners. What follows is a brief primer and simple demonstration of how game theory can be applied to help military planners frame the problem of developing a viable counterinsurgency strategy in southern Afghanistan.

Can a Round of Poker Solve Afghanistan's Problems? (Full PDF Article)

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A Comprehensive Approach to Improving US Security Force Assistance Efforts

by Lieutenant Colonel Theresa Baginski, Colonel Brian Clark, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Donovan, Ms Karma Job, Lieutenant Colonel John Kolasheski, Colonel Richard Lacquement, Colonel Michael McMahon. Colonel Don Roach. Colonel Sean Swindell and Lieutenant Colonel Curt Van De Walle, Small Wars Journal

A Comprehensive Approach to Improving US SFA Efforts (Full PDF Article)

Current operations, the demands of persistent conflict, and the enduring national security interests of the United States underscore the immediate and continuing need to improve US Security Force Assistance (SFA) efforts. The frequency and importance of such activities throughout US history demonstrate that the current requirements are not anomalies. Since 9/11, the United States has been challenged to accomplish key national security goals due to a lack of capability and capacity to effectively advise, utilize and partner with foreign security forces. To meet this challenge, this paper recommends the creation of a new organization as a means of overcoming current bureaucratic impediments and providing a coherent focus on SFA challenges.

Previous US advisory experience with similar requirements did not result in institutionalized capabilities that would have forestalled major problems. Instead, US SFA efforts have been largely ad hoc ventures. The United States should have had expertise, plans, authorities, and organizational solutions readily at hand to address the full range of partnership activities when the inevitable crises arose. The Department of Defense (DoD) must act now to avoid future SFA difficulties and to ensure that it does not squander the hard-won lessons of recent experience. DoD is long overdue for a comprehensive approach to SFA that supports Geographic Combatant Commander’s (GCC) Theater Campaign Plans (TCP) and contingency operations in a manner that integrates US military assistance activities from ministerial through tactical levels, while providing strong links to complementary interagency and multinational activities.

This paper offers recommendations that build upon recent initiatives within DoD to create a comprehensive approach to improve US Security Force Assistance. At the heart of our recommendations is a DoD-level organizational approach to effectively institutionalize SFA activities and facilitate interagency and multinational unity of effort. We intend to adapt current DoD processes that encourage the ad hoc approach and implement a single DoD-level integrating organization. Expertise in key SFA activities, massed and integrated within a DoD-level organization, offers the best opportunity to improve hitherto disjointed efforts. This single integrator can be successful only with simultaneous change to DoD’s authorities and policies.

A Comprehensive Approach to Improving US SFA Efforts (Full PDF Article)

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Panel Announcement: New Media Agora

Via Milblogging Conference - 24-25 April 2009, Washington, D.C.

We're pleased to announce another panel, and moderator Greyhawk has tweaked the focus of the panel a bit.

New Media Agora: What is the impact of the “new media” on issues concerning national security, military doctrine and concept development, training, education, and lessons learned? A discussion of the issue by those at the frontlines of the debate.

Moderated by: Greyhawk - Mudville Gazette

Panel Members:

Dave Dilegge - Small Wars Journal
Andrew Exum - Abu Muqawama
Bill Roggio - Long War Journal

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Trends, Threats, and Expectations

By Dr. Steven Metz

I've just returned from a Department of Defense symposium which discussed the future strategic environment twenty years out. This was a useful window on official thinking and expectations, but it reinforced my feeling that American security strategy is careening forward on flawed assumptions. Specifically, we have not grasped the magnitude of the revolution underway in the strategic environment and the nature of security, and hence have not adjusted.

A few years ago symposia and documents dealing with the future strategic environment were dominated by discussions of "the long war," "GWOT," terrorism, proliferation, and Islamic extremism. For the past two years, the focus has been on "hybrid threats." In the event I just attended, those things were almost wholly absent from the discussion. Everything centered on technological change, economic turmoil, culture, demographics, and climate change.

Two things about this jumped out at me. First, there was very little discussion of exactly what the U.S. military is going to do about these trends and the threats that they generate. The unspoken assumption seems to be that the primary military mission over the next few decades will be stabilizing collapsed states. I don't buy this. I think it is a misreading of Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if things turn out well in those two places, I'm convinced that future political leaders and strategists will conclude that the costs (economic, political, and human) outweighed the benefits (in terms of greater security).

Second, I was convinced that the U.S. military and strategic community have not fully grasped the extent and depth of change underway in the strategic environment. At the symposium everyone nodded when a speaker said that the threats of the future will be dispersed, non-state entities, but few seemed to understand that this obviates the very essence of American strategy and the current focus of the military. Put simply, our strategy seeks to reverse history--to strengthen nation states so that they can "control ungoverned spaces" when trends are toward the devolution of economic, political, and economic power AWAY FROM national governments...

Continue reading "Trends, Threats, and Expectations" »

Our Role in Iraq’s Year of Decision

By Gary Anderson

2009 is being called a Year of Decision in Iraq. The counterinsurgency campaign will be largely turned over to Iraqi control. We have not successfully turned over a counterinsurgency effort from the American military to a host nation since the middle of the last century in the Philippines. The turnover of the Vietnamese counterinsurgency effort was interrupted by the North Vietnamese conventional invasion in 1975; consequently, we will never know how successful that effort might have been. We are in unfamiliar, but not unknown, territory. In many ways, we will have to use common sense and lessons learned from what has gone right or wrong to date.

Perhaps the first thing we need to realize that the days of brick and mortar projects are largely over in the COIN fight. Future building projects should be largely left to long term development agencies such as USAID and the NGOs. If we do find the need to build new facilities, we need to ensure that we have hard Memorandums of Agreement with the Iraqi agency that will be taking over to include salaries for employees and operations and maintenance. We have a depressing history of building facilities and training staff only to see the Iraqis bring in their own people, often untrained, when they take over. Even though it may well involve some graft and nepotism, it is much more cost effective to have them identify the long term operators up front and train them whether or not we think they are the best people to do the job.

Likewise, we need to try to ensure that the Iraqis have identified the long term operations and maintenance (O&M) funding. It does us no good to build a clinic that will not have a staff or supplies. Otherwise it becomes an instant relic...

Continue reading "Our Role in Iraq’s Year of Decision" »

A Conversation With David Kilcullen - Carlos Lozada, Washington Post interview

Why is an Aussie anthropologist coaching American generals on how to win wars? David Kilcullen, an Australian army reservist and top adviser to Gen. David H. Petraeus during the troop surge in Iraq, has spent years studying insurgencies in countries from Indonesia to Afghanistan, distinguishing hard-core terrorists from "accidental guerrillas" -- and his theories are revolutionizing military thinking throughout the West. Kilcullen spoke with Outlook's Carlos Lozada on why Pakistan is poised for collapse, whether catching Osama bin Laden is really a good idea and how the Enlightenment and Lawrence of Arabia helped Washington shift course in Iraq.

More at The Washington Post.

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Via e-mail from CCO:

Dear CCO Members,

Greetings from the CCO Support Center. Attached is the latest issue of the CCO Newsletter. We hope you will continue to find it an informative and useful vehicle for keeping apprised of recent CCO activities. The biggest news is that the CCO recently moved to the National Defense University, and is now located within the Center for Technology and National Security Policy. In conjunction with the move, the CCO is now the Center for Complex Operations. Our new location and name will enhance the CCO’s role by positioning it in an academic setting, while maintaining close links to policymakers in our partner organizations at Departments of Defense and State, and USAID.

This edition of the newsletter also includes a number of interesting features, including a contribution from Colonel Daniel Rubini (Ret.) on developing rule of law in Iraq, information on the Case Study series sponsored by the CCO together with the Cebrowski Institute at Naval Postgraduate School, an interview with Bing West on his most recent book The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics and the Endgame in Iraq, upcoming events in the complex operations community and more.

Please feel free to forward this newsletter to your colleagues who may not have heard of the CCO and who might be interested in our activities.

Best regards,
David A. Sobyra
Acting Director, Center for Complex Operations

Continue reading "CCO Newsletter March 2009" »

An Address at the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation Museum on 5 March 2009

General Christmas, General Gardner, Fellow Marines. It is an honor to be asked to speak about war-fighting in this magnificent museum. General Christmas, a legend for his fight at Hue City, has accomplished the impossible as president of the Heritage Foundation. This museum soars skyward in testimony to generations of fighting Marines. General Gardner, former Vietnam recon leader par excellence and now President of the Marine Corps University, has built a curriculum that focuses upon war fighting, not upon academic theories. The epitaphs on the walls around us bear witness that every Marine is a rifleman.

Permit me to make six points. Then we’ll spend the rest of the evening in Q & A. My first point is that the mistakes – and corrections – in Iraq were jointly made by military and civilian officials. To scapegoat the prior administration and excuse the military ignores the record and leads us along a divisive path. In my book, The Strongest Tribe, I quote at length from the semi-annual military assessments. The record shows systemic, excessive optimism on the part to the senior military staffs. One looks in vain for requests for more troops. At every level - including the battalion command chronologies -progress was routinely reported until mid-2006.

That leads to my second point. The greatest defect in the Iraq war was the lack of objective risk assessment. The CentCom commander, General Abizaid, philosophically agreed with his Iraq commander, General Casey, that American soldiers on the streets were an antibody in an Arab culture, as much the cause as the cure of the insurgency. In the fall of 2005, Casey ordered a study by a general officer that confirmed the antibody thesis. This underlay the gradual pull back in the east to the Forward Operating Bases, or FOBs.

In wars, especially irregular conflicts with so many variables, the president requires a military expert who assesses risk independently from the operational commander. In Iraq, the NSC Adviser, Stephen Hadley, emerged as that assessor in 2006 and manipulated a change in strategy while the Pentagon dawdled.

Watch Afghanistan. The assessor can be the Chairman – (General Pace did not perform that role in 2006) – or it can be the theater commander. The appointment of General Jim Jones as the NSC Adviser may signal that the assessor is residing inside the White House. It’s too soon to tell. But the president would be well advised to make it explicit to one senior general that he is so designated. If risk is assessed by committee, it gets watered down...

Continue reading "War Fighting Factors in Iraq and Afghanistan" »

Conflict Resolution in Small Wars
A Counterinsurgent’s Guide to Controlling the Hearts
by Major Michael Few, Small Wars Journal

Conflict Resolution in Small Wars (Full PDF Article)

Nobel Laureate John Nash’s arbitration for non-cooperative games explains how to negotiate a fair settlement of utility in the midst of irreconcilable differences. This compensation helps to balance the minds of the populace, but it does not account for the emotional or hearts aspect. Utility is merely the value placed on a good or service. To achieve ashura, the constant absence of sorrow, a negotiator must arbitrate the emotional grievances. Nash shows us how to control the minds, but the economic models is exhausted in this limitation.

The current rationale is that these types of conflicts cannot be resolved simply by military or rational, economic action. Paradoxically, the truth may be more subtle yet more complex. Is not one’s heart collectively intertwined with one’s mind? Certainly it is so we must extend past economic theory to offer some resolve. To heal, one must mend both the heart and mind. In the realm of hearts or emotions, sometimes one plus one equals three. Sometimes everything is a paradox.

The purpose of this paper is to explore non-kinetic, non-military indirect methods of conflict resolution for the Iraqi people. To explore these methods, we must turn to the field of psychology. This paper will examine how theories for conflict resolution and substance abuse treatment and recovery methodologies. Collectively, I will merge economic and psychological theory to model the hearts and the minds. In the end, and somewhere in between, this method may allow the United States to transition from the role of occupier to the role of arbitrator, negotiator, and peace-maker. This method allows us to begin redeploying home. Furthermore, this method may serve as instrument of acceptance and healing from our own psychosis derived after the attacks of 9/11.

Conflict Resolution in Small Wars (Full PDF Article)

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I'll defer to Bill, Robert and our Council moderators to post their CPs...

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We are at no risk of being on the cutting edge of technology, but we have made some updates to our site to blow some of the dust off it.

Let me ask all our curmudgeons and luddites to just ignore this post. But for the more progressive of you that might actually know what we think we're talking about, here are some of the things to look for:

• Throughout most of the site, the new "share" button in the left bar menu gives easy access to the universe of stuff like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc., plus some print and email features.
• In the Small Wars Council, there have been some social bookmarking buttons there for a while, all the way down at the bottom of the page.
• RSS feed buttons are now more prominent, in the right bar menu of the SWJ Blog and near the top left in the Small Wars Council.
• For those who prefer just the feed URL, the options are:
• SWJ Blog
• Small Wars Council posts (recommended):
• Small Wars Council threads only:
• Note that the SWC feeds contain only the unregistered / guest-viewable content. You have to go to the board to get the members-only material.
• We are alive on Facebook.
• We are alive on Twitter, as mentioned earlier.
• At risk of overkill, we are inelegantly shoving updates by RSS to both of those sites. The risk of an SWJ FB Tweet overdose is real. Please drink responsibly.

We have a long way to go, but we actually have some resources now and can break ground. Implementing a full CMS and adding web 2.0 features to our Reference Library, Reading List, and Research Links is on the plate, as is a freshening of the site design and finally un-@$$ing the interim Journal format. We are in the market for technical expertise in that regard, and are particularly interested in Drupal as a platform. Your advice and solicitations are welcome.

In the interm, please make use of the new features, and continue to advance our profession and interest.

(Nothing more follows)

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Civil Affairs: Gathering the Reins
by Colonel Gregory Grimes, Small Wars Journal

Civil Affairs: Gathering the Reins (Full PDF Article)

As the extremists are squeezed out of the Middle East the emerging sanctuary for their cadres is Africa, especially the Trans-Sahel across northern Africa. As a result the U.S. government has an increasing interest in preventing their exploitation of the region’s poor socio-economic climate to recruit to their cause. For the U.S. to succeed an increase in diplomatic, economic and military resources will have to occur. For the military this means yet more demand for Civil Affairs units. Added to the looming demand certain to result from renewed efforts in Afghanistan, the value of Civil Affairs to the conflict response is undeniable. Yet even as their value is demonstrated by high demand for their low-density skills, Civil Affairs units remain constrained by inefficient mission taskings, competitive encroachment and a few self-inflicted problems. The Civil Affairs community needs to reassert its mission or risk losing its relevance as a prime DoD battlespace multiplier.

Specializing in civil-military operations, Civil Affairs (CA) represent one endpoint on the range of military options, marking the non-kinetic end of the military spectrum. In recent testimony to Congress the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, stated "We can't kill our way to victory… It requires teamwork and cooperation." Mullen further stated that the U.S. urgently needs to improve its nation-building initiatives. Derided in the past by senior military officers as ‘work for the Peace Corps,’ nation building and associated activities are receiving renewed attention as preferred solutions in the war against terrorism. Note the recognition of stability operations as a core mission in the 2005 Department of Defense Directive 3000.05. President Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton have both stated a preference for renewed efforts at humanitarian assistance, nation building, stabilization and reconstruction, reviving efforts that were previously a priority in American foreign engagement. The question becomes one of how, exactly, to implement such a policy of pre-emptive engagement.

Civil Affairs: Gathering the Reins (Full PDF Article)

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We hope that our single-issue voters will at least attempt to look at this issue from all sides.

In The Know: New Iraqi Law Requires Waiting Period For Suicide Vest Purchases

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The Future of Public Diplomacy

By Matt Armstrong - Cross Posted at MountainRunner

The world increasingly operates on perceptions created by the “Now Media” environment. Governments must fully take into account these perceptions in the forming and conducting of foreign policy. From the perspective of the United States, the simple and essential fact is that everything we say and do both at home and abroad, as well as everything we fail to say and do, has an impact in other lands. This isn’t a new idea but an observation originally made by a certain general running for president in 1952.

Just a few short months ago, the election of Barack Obama generated a lot of enthusiasm at the promise of the return of smart foreign policies based on understanding global publics. Call it public diplomacy, strategic communication, or simply global engagement, the President has already shown an innate appreciation and aptitude for connecting directly with people around the world. From his television interview with Al-Arabiya to his “YouTube Diplomacy” with Iran, he clearly “gets it.”

The same can be said for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Between her recent trips to Asia and Europe and her expansion of so-called “e-diplomacy” initiatives using Web 2.0 technologies and practice, Clinton shows that she too could be a force for mobilizing individuals and groups.

However, public diplomacy does not have an auto-pilot. Leaving the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs unoccupied creates a government-wide leadership vacuum at a critical time. As we approach the 100-day mark since the President’s inauguration, there has been little, if any, substantial progress by the Government in the areas of public diplomacy and strategic communication, even as many have touted its resurgence. This is troubling considering the broad and global struggle the United States is engaged in against terrorism, insurgency, poverty, deprivation, and disease.

The combined personal diplomacy of the President and the Secretary of State will only go so far in a global information environment where ideas and news are subjected to accidental misinformation as well as intentional lies and distortions by our adversaries. If it were as simple as having a President or a Secretary of State who is effective at public engagement in the global struggle for minds and wills, then there would never have been a need for cultural and educational exchange programs, government broadcast facilities, or the United States Information Agency.

Where is public diplomacy today? Although Judith McHale, the former CEO of Discovery, was Clinton’s #1 pick for Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (one of four Under Secretary openings that remain unfilled) since about Clinton’s nomination hearings before inauguration, the Secretary of State has yet to nominate her.

Three conclusions can be drawn from the lengthy delay in moving forward with public diplomacy. The first is that the State Department’s role in public diplomacy is being questioned. Arguments abound that the Department is irreparably broken and some responsibilities, including public diplomacy, should be removed. This “let it bleed to death” scenario is dangerous and wastes talented human and technical resources. This scenario usually includes empowering the National Security Council to do some of what had been previously done by the United States Information Agency.

The second conclusion is Ms. McHale is not viewed as the optimal candidate. But this is unlikely because after two months of vetting, the word on the street is that her nomination is “imminent.”

The third conclusion is public diplomacy is not a priority. Sadly, this is the most likely case because if the President and the Secretary of State fully appreciated the value of global engagement as a means to support foreign policy, there would have been substantial action in this area to leverage and expand upon their personal outreach. Without invigorating and empowering America’s public diplomacy, the leadership and the charisma of the President and the Secretary of State will be wasted.

The first and third conclusions lead to severe consequences. If the Secretary of State fails to acknowledge her Department’s leadership responsibility in engaging global populations, she will continue the trend of ceding power and authority to the Defense Department, the only vertically integrated element of the Government that can provide the services necessary in a world of state and non-state actors. The Defense Department will, by default, become the hub of government engagement with the world. We have already seen the Secretary of Defense make policy statements that arguably should come from the Secretary of State. America’s public diplomacy must not continue to wear combat boots.

To be relevant in the modern struggle of minds and wills, the Secretary of State must have an empowered Under Secretary coordinating America’s public diplomacy and global engagement. Failure to act risks not only the future of the State Department but America’s national security in general.

Continue reading "The Future of Public Diplomacy" »

Statement of General James N. Mattis, USMC
Commander, United States Joint Forces Command
Before the House Armed Services Committee
March 18, 2009

Thank you for the opportunity to report on United States Joint Forces Command. As one of 10 combatant commands in the Department of Defense, U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) oversees a force of 1.16 million Active Duty, National Guard, and Reserve Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines. The command is uniquely structured to provide agile forces to geographic combatant commanders as directed by the Secretary of Defense to prevail in current operations and to ensure we are not caught flat-footed in future battles. The command works closely with other government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and allied and coalition partners. We are as focused on coalition issues as we are on joint issues, and we provide a critical link to NATO through our co-location in Norfolk, Virginia with NATO's Allied Command Transformation, the only NATO Headquarters on U.S. soil.

My testimony will focus primarily on the future following a short update on accomplishments over this past year. I will do so with a dose of realism and a sense of urgency. I will present the way forward for Joint Forces Command as it supports the current fight and prepares the nation's military for future operations. The forward-looking emphasis of my remarks reflects the command's mission statement: To provide mission-ready, joint-capable forces and support the development and integration of joint, interagency and multinational capabilities to meet the present and future operational needs of the joint force.

Today, our nation is involved in major conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it faces a number of threats and opportunities around the globe. For Joint Forces Command, we are focused on the current threat environment for two reasons. First, we are the Joint Force Provider for the Department of Defense. We must do as much as possible to support current military operations. The second reason addresses the focus of this statement: “the future of the joint force.” Simply put, much of what we see in the cities of Iraq, the mountains of Afghanistan, and the foothills of southern Lebanon, I believe we will see again in the future. I say this knowing there is much we do not know about the future, and there is much more that will surprise us no matter how well we prepare .. How many people expected a conflict in Georgia would keep cartographers busy in 2008? That said, the conflict in Afghanistan, and other conflicts will sharpen USJFCOM's activities as we give traction to Secretary Gates' principle of balancing our force to fight conventional, irregular, and hybrid threats of the future.

We know the nature of future wars will not differ from current wars. History teaches us that the character of each individual war is always different and most certainly will change, but the enduring nature of war as a human endeavor will remain largely unchanged. Just like today, future enemies will force us to adapt as they adapt-and they will attack our vulnerabilities when and where they can. Just like today, they will attack our values and misrepresent our intentions in the “battle of competing narratives,” theirs versus ours. Thus, in many respects, today's warfare is the future of warfare as demonstrated over the past 25 years since militant extremists first attacked our embassy and Marine barracks in Lebanon. The “irregular” methods our enemies use today will be employed against us tomorrow. We are already facing many of the threats prognosticators once labeled as “future” threats - cyber war and economic terrorism being just two examples....

Continue on for the entire transcript to include General Mattis' statements concerning making irregular warfare a core competency, enhancing joint command and control, improving as a joint force provider, accelerating efforts toward a whole of government approach, and training and education.

Continue reading "General James Mattis - Before the HASC - 18 March 2009" »

Pentagon to Show Softer Side to the World - Gordon Lubold, Christian Science Monitor

After seven years of war, American foreign policy has become nearly synonymous with the brawny side of its military. But the US armed forces may now be moving to show a different face to the world.

Last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates recommended an admiral better known for humanitarian and diplomatic initiatives than for muscle-flexing to assume a critical command post in Europe.

Adm. James Stavridis is an unusual choice to fill a job usually held by the Army. In his two years overseeing US military operations in South and Latin America, he has built a reputation for running a different kind of command – deploying hospital ships and soccer teams while contending with drug trafficking and corruption. Stavridis may be able to bring that balance to Europe, where deliberations over Afghanistan over the next few years will be critical to that mission's success.

More at The Christian Science Monitor.

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Army’s New Breed of Officers in Iraq Earn Their Spurs in Line of Fire - Michael Evans, The Times

Operation Telic in Iraq was supposed to be about liberating a repressed people and rebuilding a nation, but it turned into a war of attrition that put the Northern Ireland experience in the shade. The impact on the British Army has been profound. Every assumption made by senior military commanders based on the prevailing intelligence and political judgment at the time was turned on its head.

As a consequence, the doctrine of warfare taught at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and at the staff colleges had to be rewritten, and the Ministry of Defence was forced to beg for funds from the Treasury to provide equipment off the shelf to cope with the unexpected and unprepared-for surge of violence in southern Iraq.

Sandhurst went from being a renowned academy that prepared young officer cadets for regimental life, big-picture wars and peacekeeping operations to a production line for almost instant deployment to Iraq once the Sovereign’s Parade was over.

More at The Times.

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The End of the Global War on Terror - Al Kamen, Washington Post's In The Loop

The end of the Global War on Terror -- or at least the use of that phrase -- has been codified at the Pentagon. Reports that the phrase was being retired have been circulating for some time amongst senior administration officials, and this morning speechwriters and other staff were notified via this e-mail to use "Overseas Contingency Operation" instead...

More at The Washington Post.

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Command Releases New Irregular Warfare Vision

U.S. Joint Forces Command has released an irregular warfare vision designed to help develop joint forces that are as effective in conducting irregular warfare as they are in conventional warfare.

U.S. Joint Forces Command Commander Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis has released the command’s irregular warfare (IW) vision.

The vision provides guidance on how USJFCOM will respond to the threats posed by irregular adversaries. The vision prioritizes specific efforts necessary to achieve the objectives and guidance of the Department of Defense directive on irregular warfare.

Mattis said the command is determined to lead the way in achieving a balanced joint force where IW is a core competency and will lead DoD in the collaborative effort to deploy joint forces that are as effective in conducting irregular warfare as they are in conventional warfare. USJFCOM will partner with interagency, multinational, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Joint Staff, combatant commands, services and intelligence community partners in order to achieve this vision.

The vision outlines a timeline and expectations from directorates and subordinate commands. Over the next six to 12 months the command will focus its IW efforts in concept development and experimentation, capability development/joint integration and interoperability, training and education, joint provision/global force management and external engagement.

Several areas of effort include:

• Work closely with U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and the services to update the IW Joint Operating Concept to improve its relevance and utility to the general purpose force, interagency and our multinational partners.

• Standardize and optimize network enabled capabilities and services provided by DoD’s Global Information Grid computer network in support of small units at the tactical edge conducting IW.

• Develop joint doctrine that guides and enables joint force commanders to plan and execute IW across the four categories of military activity: combat, security, engagement, relief and reconstruction.

• Identify tracking requirements for critical skills and experiences relevant to IW.

• Capture, analyze and disseminate IW lessons learned and best practices.

The vision states USJFCOM will work with its partners to identify the most important challenges the U.S. is facing in IW, develop concepts and evaluate capabilities solutions to address those challenges.

The Joint Irregular Warfare Center (JIWC) will prioritize efforts, proactively coordinate activities, provide subject matter expertise and collaborate closely with multinational and interagency partners in executing the IW vision.

The IW vision is available for download by clicking here.

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Saving Afghanistan - Robert Kaplan, The Atlantic

Afghanistan is about to spike in the news this summer, as 17,000 more marines and soldiers arrive from the United States and pour into the southern Kandahar region. They will advance down roads and river valleys where American troops have never ventured in eight years of war here, and deliberately stir up a hornet’s nest of Taliban strongholds in Mullah Omar’s backyard. This incursion will lead to fighting and attendant casualties perhaps on a scale that Americans have not seen since the early days of the surge in Iraq. It will be part of an ambitious effort whose scope American commanders here dare not name or admit to, even to themselves: nation-building on a grand scale. To succeed, they must overcome the Afghan landscape itself: a sprawling expanse of high desert wrinkled with tortuous hills and wave upon wave of cathedral-like mountain ranges that segment the population into countless valleys and separate regions. Indeed, for the first time since the U.S. invaded here in late 2001, Americans are about to lead a great battle against culture and geography...

More at The Atlantic.

Afghanistan Made Easy - Jules Crittenden, Forward Movement

To get, not to do. Enough with the hysteria/doom-and-gloom mongering. War correspondent Robert Kaplan, who has been around the block a couple of times in Afghanistan and with the United States military, with a note of reason on the evolving campaign, what that campaign is fundamentally about, why we can win it, and why we have to...

More at Forward Movement.

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The new issue of the US Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center Colloquium has been released and can be found at the COIN Center Blog.

From the COIN Center - two articles of potential interest to academicians, policy makers, and practitioners alike:

In From Lebanon to Gaza: A New Kind of War, Ariel Siegelman draws on first-hand experience in Lebanon and Gaza to describe a new kind of war, in which "the enemy cannot hope to match Western technology, so he operates in a way to make the technology relatively meaningless." Siegelman, who served in the Israel Defense Force (IDF), Special Forces, as a counter terror operative, counter terror sniper and counter terror instructor, argues that the 2006 Lebanon War exemplifies "the wrong way to confront... this new kind of war," but that the recent IDF operations in Gaza demonstrate that Western militaries can appropriately prosecute such conflicts. This new kind of war, however, requires Western militaries to define success in a new way, one that recognizes that violence may ebb and flow, but that the conflict is never truly over.

In The Business of War: How Criminal Organizations Perpetuate Conflict and What To Do about It, Brock Dahl argues that "attacking criminal organizations is an essential element of the COIN fight." Without confronting organized criminal organizations, it is much more difficult to stabilize transitional societies. Mr. Dahl, who served for the US Department of the Treasury in Baghdad and on the Afghanistan Interagency Operations Group from 2006 to 2008, and who is now studying law at The George Washington University, investigates the legal and policy considerations of US military forces supporting law enforcement activities overseas.

Continue reading "New Issue of COIN Center Colloquium Released " »

Expert Lauds Obama's Afghanistan Approach - National Public Radio's All Things Considered - 25 March 2009.

David Kilcullen, a former senior counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq, says the U.S. must change its policy in Afghanistan from chasing the enemy to protecting the people.

"We need to get into the business of making people feel safe and making them feel willing to participate in a political process that doesn't involve violence," Kilcullen says...

"The review that the new administration has gone through has been a very detailed and sensible approach to what is an extremely difficult problem," Kilcullen says. "We need to make some fairly significant changes if we do want to win it."

Listen to the entire broadcast at All Things Considered.

The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One - David Kilcullen

A remarkably fresh perspective on the War on Terror. Kilcullen takes us "on the ground" to uncover the face of modern warfare, illuminating both the big global war (the "War on Terrorism") and its relation to the associated "small wars" across the globe: Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Chechnya, Pakistan and North Africa.

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CT or COIN? - Fred Kaplan, Slate

With just a week until President Barack Obama flies to Strasbourg, France, for his first NATO conference, his top advisers are still divided over what U.S. policy should be on the summit's No. 1 issue: how to fight the war in Afghanistan.

It's a debate that the Bush administration never seriously had in the seven years following the post-9/11 invasion. Now, by contrast, in the wake of three major strategic reviews, Obama is extending and deepening the discussion of Afghanistan, because the outcome of this debate may set the course of American foreign policy for the remainder of his presidency...

More at Slate and a H/T to Fred for the shoutout:

"For the best summaries of COIN doctrine and strategy, spelled out by officers, consultants, and private scholars, see the Web site Abu Muqawama, the Small Wars Journal, Gen. David Petraeus' Army and Marine Corps field manual on counterinsurgency (or my summary of it), David Kilcullen's The Accidental Guerrilla, and John Nagl's Learning To Eat Soup With a Knife."

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Thomas Donnelly, a Resident Fellow in Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, appeared today before the Senate Armed Services AirLand Subcommittee. SWJ has posted a transcript of his prepared remarks and an excerpt of his bottom line follows:

...Creating an adequate land force will not be cheap. But it’s a price we’re already paying now: when adding the Army’s “baseline” budget to the constant and predictable cost of mobilizing reserve personnel and doing back-door procurements in the supplementals, the United States is paying about $200 billion per year for Army land forces. The costs of the Marines, which include weapons systems and other items included in the Navy budget is harder to estimate. And in fact, Marine costs can and should remain relatively constant; the difference is and should remain in Army expansion. But it would be far better to continue to grow and modernize the Army under a long-term plan rather than on an annual, ad hoc basis through supplemental appropriations and unending reserve call-ups. In very rough terms, I would estimate the cost of a large-enough Army to be about $240 billion per year. By 2016 – the time it would take to expand, equip and configure the force we need, and if President Obama’s economic projections are correct – that would account for just 1.2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. A million-man land force would be a third of 1 percent of the U.S. population.

Without doubt, this is a force we can afford. Conversely, the strategic costs of not rebuilding America’s land forces would be very great indeed. We cannot expect to exercise leadership in the international community if we are unable to guarantee the stability of the greater Middle East; in addition to the economic value of the region’s resources, the political volatility of the Islamic world, and the prospects for jihadi terrorism, make it a cockpit for many conflicts – not just regional, but potentially between global great powers. Nor can we expect, at this juncture, to stabilize the region by “offshore balancing.” That moment has passed, both militarily and geostrategically; the clock cannot be turned back. Land power is not the answer to every problem, but it is an essential answer to this problem.

Tom Donnelly is the author of The Military We Need and coauthored Ground Truth and Of Men and Materiel with Frederick Kagan and Gary Schmitt respectively.

Continue reading "The Force We Can Afford" »

On CT vs. COIN
by Andrew Exum, Small Wars Journal Op-Ed

On CT vs. COIN (Full PDF Article)

In advance of the Obama Administration’s forthcoming review of policies toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, much of the commentary has focused on whether or not the Obama Administration will adopt a long-term, hugely expensive population-centric counter-insurgency (COIN) campaign or whether the administration will instead opt for a lower-cost counter-terror (CT) strategy. Fred Kaplan, in a typically well-informed piece for Slate, framed the debate as an either/or dichotomy in which the Obama Administration had to choose one or the other vis a vis Afghanistan.

The distinction between COIN and CT, however, is poorly understood. For one, there is no hard and fast dichotomy between the two – a fact that Kaplan and other longtime defense correspondents largely understand but which policy-makers must understand as well. If what Kaplan writes is true, and policy-makers are stuck thinking of their policy options as either/or propositions, we are in more trouble in Afghanistan than I thought.

On CT vs. COIN (Full PDF Article)

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... on 26 March before the Senate Armed Services AirLand Subcommittee.

Dr. Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., President, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments

... The Army’s leadership has rightly concluded that it needs a force capable of performing across the full spectrum of conflict at a high level of effectiveness. But in its attempts to become equally effective across a range of conflict types, it risks becoming marginally competent in many tasks, and highly effective at none. In attempting to increase the size of the Army to field forces large enough to deal with a range of contingencies, the Service risks becoming incapable of creating the needed scale by building up the capabilities of America’s allies and partners, a key part of the defense strategy. It also risks a catastrophic leadership failure of a kind not seen since the late stages of the Vietnam War, a failure that took the Army over a decade to repair.

Dr. Peter Mansoor, Raymond E. Mason, Jr. Chair in Military History, The Ohio State University

... The transformation of American land power for the wars of the 21st century remains incomplete. In Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, Allan Millett lays out three prerequisites for effective military innovation: revised doctrine, changes in professional military education, and the creation of operational units that meet real strategic needs. The U.S. Army has met the first two fundamentals, but not yet the third. Although bulky divisions have given way to smaller, modular, more easily deployable brigade combat teams, these units remain largely configured for conventional combat – and imperfectly at that. Brigades that are tailored for counterinsurgency operations would include more infantry; a full engineer battalion; a large intelligence section built mainly around human and signals intelligence, with significant analytical capability; military police, engineer, civil affairs, information operations, and psychological operations cells; a contracting section; adviser and liaison sections, with requisite language capabilities; human terrain teams, with the capability to map tribal and social networks; explosive ordnance demolition teams; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets—particularly armed reconnaissance units that can engage the people and fight for information, along with armed unmanned aerial vehicles and ground sensors. The need for more infantry and engineers is especially critical, so much so that the Army should forgo the creation of additional brigade combat teams until existing units are reconfigured with the addition of a third maneuver battalion. The paucity of the current brigade combat team structure has forced brigade commanders to attach armor and infantry companies to the reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition squadron, which is otherwise too lightly armed to act as a combat force. A triangular organization would be more effective not just in counterinsurgency warfare, but would give our maneuver commanders the resources they need to fight more effectively in conventional conflicts as well.

And at the House Armed Services Committee, Seapower and Expeditionary Forces Subcommittee:

Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett, Senior Managing Director, Enterra Solutions LLC

... the U.S. Navy faces severe budgetary pressures on future construction of traditional capital ships and submarines. Those pressures will only grow as a result of the current global economic crisis (which--lest we forget--generates similar pressures on navies around the world) and America's continued military operations abroad as part of our ongoing struggle against violent extremism. Considering these trends as a whole, I would rather abuse the Navy--force structure-wise--before doing the same to either the Marine Corps or the Coast Guard. Why? It is my professional opinion that the United States defense community currently accepts far too much risk and casualties and instability on the low end of the conflict spectrum while continuing to spend far too much money on building up our combat capabilities for high-end scenarios. In effect, we over-feed our Leviathan force while starving our SysAdmin force, accepting far too many avoidable casualties in the latter while hedging excessively against theoretical future casualties in the former. Personally, I find this risk-management strategy to be both strategically unsound and morally reprehensible.

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Winning Today’s Hybrid Warfare (SWJ Book Review)
by Frank J. Hoffman

Winning Today’s Hybrid Warfare (Full PDF Article)

David Kilcullen’s new book is a travelogue of his lengthy intellectual and foreign treks into the bowels of human conflict. These travels have taken him to the jungles of the Solomons to the slums and palaces of Baghdad and Kabul. While this Australian soldier-scholar has already firmly established his status as the age’s top strategist and advisor in modern conflict in the field, he owed our community a summative product. The Accidental Guerrilla meets this obligation with first honors. Based upon a lifetime of study, coupled with his advisory work in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past few years, it is a jewel. While David modestly presents many innovative ideas as merely proposals, his composition is in reality ground breaking and comprehensive at all three levels of war...

Winning Today’s Hybrid Warfare (Full PDF Article)

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Obama Unveils Strategy for Afghanistan, Pakistan - Voice of America

President Barack Obama has announced his plan to send about 4,000 more US troops to Afghanistan and increase diplomacy with Pakistan. He said his strategy has a clear and focused goal.

"To disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. That is the goal that must be achieved. That is a cause that could not be more just. And to the terrorists who oppose us, my message is the same: We will defeat you," said the president.

Mr. Obama said, for Americans, the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan is "the most dangerous place in the world," where those who planned the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States are plotting further attacks.

The estimated 4,000 new troops would join 17,000 additional combat and support troops the president wants in Afghanistan in the coming months. By October, the overall force level should reach 59,000.

The new plan shifts the emphasis of the U.S. mission to training and increasing the size of the Afghan security forces, so they can eventually take responsibility for their country's security.

More:

Obama Announces New Afghanistan, Pakistan Strategies - Transcript
President Unveils Afghan-Pakistan Strategy Review - AFPS
US Defines New Afghan Strategy - Wall Street Journal
Obama Announces Plans for More Funding for Afghan War - Washington Post
Obama Sounds Cautious Note as He Sets Out Afghan Plan - New York Times
Obama: Taliban and al Qaeda Must Be Stopped - Washington Times
Obama Pledges More Troops for Afghanistan - Los Angeles Times
Afghan Plan Adds 4,000 US Troops - Boston Globe
Obama's Strategy for Afghanistan - Christian Science Monitor
Obama Zeros in on Afghanistan - Washington Times
Obama Pumps $5bn Into Pakistan - The Times
Obama Vows to 'Dismantle and Defeat' al-Qaeda - Daily Telegraph
Afghanistan 'On Brink of Disaster' - The Australian
Barack Obama Pushes for Afghanistan Result - The Australian
Obama Takes Aim at Taliban and Al Qaeda - Associated Press
Obama sets Qaeda Defeat as Top Goal in Afghanistan - Reuters
US Rethinks Afghanistan Strategy - BBC News
Barack Obama Offers New Strategy to Tame Pakistan - The Times
White House Debate Led to Plan to Widen Afghan Effort - New York Times
Pakistani, Afghan Leaders Welcome Obama War Strategy - Voice of America
Afghan-Pakistan Strategy Emphasizes Need for Counterinsurgency Fight - AFPS
New Afghan Program Supports Community-based Approach to Security - AFPS
New Afghan Approach More Likely to Succeed, Gates Says - AFPS
Mullen Praises Regional Approach of Afghan-Pakistan Strategy Review - AFPS
Trainers ‘Critical’ to Obama’s New Afghan-Pakistan Plan, Mullen Says - AFPS
New Strategy ‘Refocuses’ Mission in Afghanistan, Flournoy Says - AFPS
Holbrooke, Petraeus Weigh In on New Afghan-Pakistan Plan - PBS
The Price of Realism - Washington Post editorial
The Remembered War - New York Times editorial
Mr. Obama's Surge - Wall Street Journal editorial
Obama vs. Al Qaeda - Boston Globe editorial
Obama's Afghan Plan - Christian Science Monitor editorial
A New Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan - Commentary opinion
Defusing Afghanistan - Washington Post opinion
The Right Strategy? - Washington Post opinion
Why Pakistan is a Stumbling Block - The Times opinion
'Lower Your Sights' is the Wrong Vision - Los Angeles Times opinion

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Frakin’ Cool and Winning Wars (SWJ Book Review)
by Robert L. Goldich

Frakin’ Cool and Winning Wars (Full PDF Article)

After Operation Desert Storm in 1991, there was a fusillade of remarks about how American technological superiority was the decisive factor in how we won the war. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf would have none of this. He stated that although our weapons and equipment were indeed technologically superior to those of the Iraqis, we would have won the war if we had had their equipment, and they had had ours. P.W. Singer would have done well to ponder this remark at some point in the researching and writing of Wired for War.

Frakin’ Cool and Winning Wars (Full PDF Article)

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White Paper of the Interagency Policy Group's Report on U.S. Policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan

The United States has a vital national security interest in addressing the current and potential security threats posed by extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Pakistan, al Qaeda and other groups of jihadist terrorists are planning new terror attacks. Their targets remain the U.S. homeland, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Europe, Australia, our allies in the Middle East, and other targets of opportunity. The growing size of the space in which they are operating is a direct result of the terrorist/insurgent activities of the Taliban and related organizations. At the same time, this group seeks to reestablish their old sanctuaries in Afghanistan.

Therefore, the core goal of the U.S. must be to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.

The ability of extremists in Pakistan to undermine Afghanistan is proven, while insurgency in Afghanistan feeds instability in Pakistan. The threat that al Qaeda poses to the United States and our allies in Pakistan - including the possibility of extremists obtaining fissile material - is all too real. Without more effective action against these groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan will face continuing instability…

White Paper of the Interagency Policy Group's Report on U.S. Policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan

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Intelligence and Third-Party Intervention in Unconventional Civil/Sectarian Conflicts:
The British in Malaya and American Military in Lebanon
by Augustine Marinelli, Small Wars Journal

Intelligence and Third-Party Intervention (Full PDF Article)

As the Cold War fades into memory, the United States’ likelihood of fighting a conventional war fades with it. The United States and other countries must now contend with unconventional warfare in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where third-party intervention in unconventional civil/sectarian conflict is the order of the day. In such conflicts, an effective intelligence apparatus is of paramount importance. The current U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual notes that good intelligence information provides the basis for successful operations against the enemy, which, in turn, provide more solid intelligence, creating a cyclical effect. The Field Manual’s assessment will form the theoretical basis upon which this study will examine England’s successful 1948-1960 intervention in Malaya and the United States’ failed 1982-1984 mission in Lebanon.

In both cases, intervention occurred to support existing governments beset by civil war. In Malaya, the British military sought to defeat an insurgency waged by Communists. In Lebanon, the Americans sought to establish an environment that would permit the Lebanese military to secure to the Beirut area—what President Ronald Reagan called the essential precondition for the Lebanese government to stabilize the country. The British accomplished their objective, due in part to the effectiveness of military operations supported by an excellent intelligence-gathering system in the cities and jungle villages of Malaya. The Americans, hampered by poor intelligence support, were unable to foster a better environment for the Lebanese military to function and were driven from Lebanon by a devastating terrorist attack in 1983.

Intelligence and Third-Party Intervention (Full PDF Article)

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... by Mark Safranski at ZenPundit.

Thursday, in a statement that was issued in part for public diplomacy purposes, DNI Adm. Dennis Blair, dismissed any strategic implications regarding the strength of Mexico’s drug cartels that the Mexican government is struggling to suppress...

While it might be tempting to ask what the good Admiral is smoking, Blair is neither a naif nor a fool but a very experienced and saavy intelligence manager who is engaged in pushing a political line of the Obama administration, in deference to the wishes of the government of Mexico. The line is being peddled on many fronts; Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has just declined offers for increased appropriations for improving border security in favor of “surging” Federal agents on a temporary basis (i.e. a political show that will accomplish nothing)...

Much more at ZenPundit.

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19th Century Strategy and its Applicability to Insurgent Warfare
by Dr. Geoffrey Demarest, Small Wars Journal

19th Century Strategy and its Applicability to Insurgent Warfare (Full PDF Article)

Irregular warfare (insurgency, low intensity conflict, etc.) is said to have a generally different character than conventional, maneuver warfare. So be it, but it does not necessarily follow that classic military strategic principles are inapplicable. One of the best statements of classic strategy comes from a British barrister writing before the advent of airpower. His expression reminds us that the important lines in linear warfare are not the fronts, but the lines of communication. This considered, the notion of ‘non-linear warfare’ can mislead. The line of retreat is especially highlighted, helping us place Mao’s teaching more closely to Jomini’s.

19th Century Strategy and its Applicability to Insurgent Warfare (Full PDF Article)

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No Place to Hide - Andrew Exum, The New Republic

When the Obama administration announced the results of its review of Afghanistan and Pakistan policies on Friday, reporters quizzing the review's authors seemed confused. They wondered whether the recommendations announced by the president amounted to an abandonment or endorsement of the kind of population-centric counter-insurgency strategy employed in Iraq in 2007. Were we embracing a more limited counter-terror mission? Or were we committing ourselves more fully to nation-building?

The aims of the strategy are quite modest: to deny transnational terror groups the ability to use physical space to plan and prepare for attacks on the United States in the way that al-Qaeda used Afghanistan in the years before the 9/11 attacks. And the central problem of the post-Cold War era is that these staging grounds are often in ungoverned spaces like the Pashtun belt straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border...

More at The New Republic.

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Nature Redux
Wicked Problems, Creative Thinking, and the Transcendentalist
by Major Michael Few, Small Wars Journal

Wicked Problems, Creative Thinking, and the Transcendentalist (Full PDF Article)

Eighteen months ago, I embarked on a journey to pursue an academic solution for Iraq. After redeploying from the Surge, I wanted to merge the gap between counter-insurgency and stabilization and reconstruction. I wanted to figure out how WE could fix Iraq’s problems. I wanted to find a way to win. In truth, it was never simply about Iraq. I was trying to reconcile the world I knew as a boy with the world that I know as a man.

Initially, I began my research investigating the different perspectives of various compilations of social sciences. I examined Zaganiyah from the objective lens of the anthropologist, the economist, the historian, and the sociologist. Each lens provided a unique insight but no solution. At the end of every path, I felt like I was running into a brick wall. I searched past social sciences and attempted to merge economics with psychology. In this realm, I was able to devise a new way of thinking that I could understand.

Wicked Problems, Creative Thinking, and the Transcendentalist (Full PDF Article)

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