I offer this in response to Dr John Nagl’s recent article on Advisory Operations.

As we consider requirements for advisors in the future I think it is important to look at the doctrinal missions of the US military both past and present and see if there is anything that is relevant to the future of advisory operations.

While most are agreement that the advisor mission is critically important in Iraq and Afghanistan I think it is important to consider the current missions there as well as those both currently outside of OIF and OEF and what we forecast might happen in the future.

I think the most important assumption we have to consider is whether we are likely to be faced with future situations such as Iraq and Afghanistan where we completely depose totalitarian governments, destroy or disband all indigenous security forces as well as the government bureaucracies and are forced to rebuild a nation virtually from scratch. If you see this in our future then I recommend that you pay attention to Dr Nagl’s writings and how he believes the Army should organize for the future.

If you do not believe that is a likely scenario then there are two others that must be considered. First is how we will organize for continued operations in Iraq after US combat forces begin to draw down as well as how to organize to deal with the challenges in Afghanistan. Second is how the US will engage throughout the world after OEF and OIF transition to supporting operations that require a minimal presence of US combat and general purpose forces. For the second and third scenarios I believe there is historical doctrine that would be a useful starting point to develop organizations to support our friends, partners and allies in their quest to bring stability and security to their countries and in particular ungoverned and under governed spaces within their sovereign territories. In addition these sovereign nations may need and request assistance in dealing with trans-national threats as well.

Many will say that Special Forces is the force of choice to conduct advisory operations and provide support to counter-insurgencies because of its Foreign Internal Defense (FID) mission. Many will also argue that because FID is a SOF/SF mission that the General Purpose Forces need a new mission to define what it is they are now doing. These have taken various names recently such as Security Force Assistance (SFA), Train, Advise, and Assist (TAA), and Stability Operations, just to name a few. And of course many will say (and I strongly concur) that there is not enough SF/SOF to conduct all the advisory and training requirements in OIF and OEF. But I think it is important to debunk a couple of myths about Special Forces...

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Is Counterinsurgency the Graduate Level of War?

Some Random Thoughts on COIN Today

I have to respectfully disagree with the assertion that “counterinsurgency is the graduate level of war.”

Despite being an avid believer in and advocate of COIN (and FID and UW) for most of my nearly 30 year career I still believe that that the graduate level of war has to be full spectrum and those that are practicing the graduate level of war are those that can shift between major combat operations and stability operations and when necessary assist a friend, partner, and ally in the conduct of COIN. Now that everyone is chasing the shiny (but not really) “new” thing (COIN) and calling it the graduate level of war I it think is disparaging to our great general purpose forces out there who are still going to be required to conduct major combat operations in some form or fashion and will have to be able to combine those operations with stability operations once the battle is won.

The graduate level of war is any form of war because war is as complex in major combat operations as it is in stability operations. The real “PhDs of war” are those that are able to recognize that the actions they take in the beginning of conflict (e.g., March-May 2003) are going to have effects on the outcome and the post conflict phases (e.g., May 2003 to the present). All war has to be people oriented – it is always war among the people (Clausewitz still holds true, war is a duel, it is to impose one’s will on another: that is just as true in major combat operations as it is in COIN – and in the end it is always about influencing human behavior whether it be the behavior of the enemy leadership (political and/or military), soldiers, and the people (whether enemy, friendly, or neutral)). Yes, I have always quoted T.E. Lawrence that “irregular warfare is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge” but I will always believe it is necessary for the US military to operate across the spectrum of conflict. We have always recognized the need to be able to conduct post-conflict operations (stability operations, Phase IV or V or VI operations or whatever we have to decided to call it as we are always sticking new names on old doctrine, e.g. Security Force Assistance for FID, etc) but in the past we have paid lip service to it and have always focused on the “maneuver phases”. Instead of letting the pendulum swing too far to one side (as we did post-Vietnam when we discarded everything we learned for the most part) we have to be able to strike the right balance...

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Just to play a little devil’s advocate here as people debate proponency. Why do we need a proponent for Counterinsurgency (COIN)? Why does it have to “compete” with Infantry, Armor, etc? Is there a proponent for Major Combat Operations (MCO)? Is there a proponent for offense or defense? Obviously, the answer to my rhetorical questions is no. Why is that?

Because every service and every component, and every branch contributes to those operations. COIN is the same way. I think this is counter-intuitive but if we want COIN to be equal to Major Combat Operations then we should NOT have a single proponent because once we do that we allow abdication of responsibility for it to studied and practiced by all the organizations that are not the proponent...

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Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence: The U.S. Military and Counterinsurgency Doctrine, 1960–1970 and 2003–2006 by Austin Long, Rand.

The linked Rand paper is worth the read. Great doctrinal historical run down.

I have to take slight exception to the wording of this paragraph (page 28) below. It is not that we (in Army Special Forces) consider Foreign Internal Defense (FID) to be a core mission, it is by law a core Special Operations Force (SOF) mission but by doctrine all services are required to provide forces trained and ready to conduct FID. It is not an exclusive mission to any one service or force.

Note that the variation in observed COIN practice in Iraq likely stems from differences in military organizations. Army Special Forces have always considered FID to be part of their core mission and have developed patterns of thinking appropriate to that mission. These patterns are often highly at odds with the larger Army. The Marine Corps falls somewhere between the Special Forces and the larger Army in terms of patterns of thinking. Of course, the Special Forces are not expected to win a high-intensity conflict alone and, despite the occasional exuberant Marine rhetoric, neither is the Marine Corps.

And I would also a caveat to the above. Just as Special Forces and the Marine Corps are not expected to win high-intensity conflicts alone, Special Forces an/ or the Marine Corps, and General Purpose Forces in general do not “win” FID or COIN alone. It takes an integrated whole of government effort not to win the FID/COIN fight but to support friends, partners, and allies in their fight against an insurgency (or lawlessness, or terrorism or ungoverned spaces and sanctuaries, whatever internal or transnational threat exists the country or region). But again, I hate to beat a dead horse, one of the fundamental problems I think we have with FID/COIN is that we approach it from the perspective of the US winning the FID/COIN fight. While our past doctrine has alluded to it and you can read it in the attached paper when it discusses the paramount requirement for the local government to win (or win back) the support of the population, we tend to pay lip service to that fact and a consistent theme in all our operations in post WWII has been about the US winning in FID/COIN. For example we place great emphasis about “living with the people.” While I absolutely believe that is critically important (see CIDG, CAP, and CORDS discussions in the paper on pages 14-15) , it is not so much about us (as in big US) living with the indigenous people - it should be us living with the indigenous security forces - but with us in the background advising those indigenous security forces to live among their people. We have to get out of the mindset that we have to be the victors in Iraq and Afghanistan. We can only be the external support to help the Iraqi and Afghan people be the victors by helping those governments and their security forces to be successful. In the long run, it is counterproductive to try to win these fights ourselves, because we cannot. The only COIN fight we can win is one directed against the United States.

And one last editorial comment. We have to get over the “we-they” in our own military and our own government. What we have learned in the era of jointness is that no one service or one capability (e.g., SOF vs GPF) can be successful in any campaign. It takes the proper application of the right joint capabilities and resources to be successful. And the we-they problem is not just within the military – we have a “we-they” problem within our whole of government particularly as evidenced when we say “the military and the interagency.” We seem to forget that DOD is part of the interagency when we tend to talk like it is something separate. We need to get over our parochialism and get on with accomplishing the mission and getting the job done as a joint and interagency team.

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