America’s exit strategy in both Iraq and Afghanistan depends upon competent, confident Host Nation Security Forces responsive to the rule of law. In Iraq, years of effort to train and equip the Iraqi Army and Police are beginning to pay dividends, although they will continue to need our advice and assistance for a number of years to come. The Afghan National Army and Police are some years behind the IA and IP’s; recent decisions to increase the size of both forces are long overdue, but will demand additional American advisors in a theater that is already under-resourced.

Special Forces are the best US troops at conducting the Foreign Internal Defense mission, but there aren’t enough of them to train the IA, IP, ANA, and ANP, so most of the FID mission has fallen on conventional Army soldiers who are not organized, trained, or equipped to conduct the FID mission. Faced with a problem requiring organizational adaptation, the Army has adopted a series of ad hoc measures to select, organize, train, employ, and demobilize its advisors, despite numerous statements from senior Army leaders that testify to the essential nature of the advisory task in enabling our exit strategy in two wars.

I have previously advocated the creation of an Advisory Corps, in which combat troops would be assigned to standing advisory units ("A Team 1st Battalion 1st Advisory Brigade 1st Advisory Division") for a three-year tour of duty just as they now rotate through other line units. I believe that it is even more important to create standing advisory units now that we are increasing the size of the ANA and focusing more on the advisory effort to the IA while drawing down US units in Iraq. Standing units have history, lineage, and traditions; who wants to serve in Unit Rotating Force 1134 (as Transition Teams of Advisors are currently designated), especially if URF 1134 is disbanded four days after redeploying from combat?

If the Army can't or won't build standing units, at the very least it should designate someone below the level of the Chief of Staff of the Army who is responsible for all aspects of the advisory mission. Once named, the head of Advisor Command should establish a permanent advisory schoolhouse, get doctrine written, get the organization of the advisory teams right, be responsible for their training and employment, and ensure that advisors are given proper credit for their service. There are a number of Lieutenant Generals in the Army; I would submit that none has a more important mission than heading up such an Advisor Command with the possible exceptions of the MNC-I and MNSTC-I commanders.

Pete Dawkins wrote his doctoral dissertation at Princeton on the advisory effort in Vietnam; he called it "The Other War." I am confident that some bright and bitter Captain will do the same for the advisory effort in Iraq and/or Afghanistan.

Nothing follows.

Continue reading "On Advisors and Advising" »

Where would one find the U.S.’s greatest weapon? Try traveling to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the home of the Army’s War College.

You will enjoy the trip. The College’s stunningly beautiful campus hosts historic buildings that reflect the service’s proud warfighting history in a dignified yet refreshingly unapologetic manner. Just being there makes you stand straighter and – importantly – think clearer about serious subjects.

Clear thinking about serious subjects is what marked the Army’s XIX Strategy Conference convened there in early April. The premier convocation of its type, the meeting displayed an often misunderstood aspect of how the U.S. military improves itself: by welcoming critiques from the widest variety of sources, and encouraging opposing ideas to collide with great force.

The ability to think, learn, and adapt is what makes America’s military the finest in the world. Though it does not use these words, the Army exploits conferences like that at Carlisle to, in effect, tap into a concept from the Nation’s powerful engine of change, its free enterprise system.

Free enterprise triumphs as an economic system because it respects and empowers competition. Competition breeds efficiency and innovation. Unfortunately, the competitiveness outsiders may see in military debates can be misread as mere parochial squabbling. Sometimes that’s true, but more often the rivalry reflects honestly-held but differing beliefs as to how to use the military instrument most effectively in today’s very complex environments.

The good news is that those differences can make the U.S. military a devilishly difficult problem for our adversaries. Increasingly Iraqi insurgents are finding themselves watched and targeted by the Air Force’s unmanned drones linked to high-flying bombers. The satellite-guided weapon that lands precisely in their lair could come from aircraft they never saw or heard.

There is really no escape. Just when the insurgents think they’ve somehow outsmarted the Air Force’s high-tech surveillance capabilities, a young Army captain could show up on their doorstep with a platoon of no-nonsense U.S. and Iraqi troops. How? Today's captains carefully cultivate information sources among the locals as the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual teaches them to do. Schooled in the manual, such captains deliver offers the insurgents can’t refuse: be captured or be killed.

These are exactly the kinds of dilemmas the U.S. military loves to impose upon our enemies.

To get to the point where differing approaches are meshed to produce battlefield success requires passing through a crucible where white hot exchanges of ideas are forged into joint and interdependent “steel”. The process is not always “pretty”, and certainly not for the timid, but is one that – regardless – works.

The Army’s conference is central to this eminently “American” way of strategizing for war. Panels convened to wrestle with such questions as how can the interagency process work more effectively? What is the right balance of military forces? What is the role of civilian specialists? How can the armed forces optimize themselves for the future?

Moreover, the attendees, who represented a myriad of organizations in and out of government, showed no hesitation in challenging panelists with the toughest questions.

If you were hoping that at the end everyone stood and sang “Kumbaya” you will be disappointed. Disagreements still exist – and may (should?) always exist – but views do evolve. Military professionals know that being challenged intellectually forces them to re-examine their thinking. In some instances it will simply make views even firmer; in other instances, fresh information produces new insights. Both results are valued.

The finest military leaders want, indeed, demand, that differing ideas be ruthlessly explored. They expect and encourage vigorous debates. Can that process go awry? Sure. When it devolves into personal attacks and gets mired in finger-pointing, progress ceases. Accountability for the past may have its place, but it is vastly more important to look to the future. The stakes are too just too high.

Looking to the future is what took place at Carlisle. The American way of war is renewing itself. Our most powerful weapon - the competitive analysis of security issues by America’s military - is taking the field. Our enemies ought to beware. And update their wills.

Lt Col Nagl was one of the principal authors of FM 3-24, the Army/Marine Corps’ new counterinsurgency manual; Maj Gen Dunlap is the author of “Shortchanging the Joint Fight?” a critique of that same manual. These are their personal views.

Continue reading "America’s Greatest Weapon" »

In the current issue of “Counterpunch”, anthropologist Dr. David Price continues his assault on social scientists assisting national efforts to succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan. This time he impugns the work of anthropologists who helped write Field Manual 3-24, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual that was published by the Army and Marine Corps in December 2006 and republished by the University of Chicago Press in July 2007.

Price’s essay is extensive, but the argument and the tone of the whole can be extrapolated from this paragraph on the first page:

Most academics know that bad things can happen when marginally skilled writers must produce ambitious amounts of writing in short time periods; sometimes the only resulting calamities are grammatical abominations, but in other instances the pressures to perform lead to shoddy academic practices. Neither of these outcomes is especially surprising among desperate people with limited skills-- but Petraeus and others leading the charge apparently did not worry about such trivialities: they had to crank out a new strategy to calm growing domestic anger at military failures in Iraq.

I will attempt to explain the motivation for the project that led to the writing of the Field Manual as I observed it, provide a few words explaining the process of writing doctrine, and then discuss the effects of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual in the field and on the American military. This is not an official response to Price’s essay, and I do not speak on behalf of the Army, General Petraeus, or any of the other members of the team that produced the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, but only for myself...

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See also a response to the response -- David Price's reply in Counterpunch. Published 3 Nov.

Continue reading "“Desperate People with Limited Skills”" »

Although there were lonely voices arguing that the Army needed to focus on counterinsurgency in the wake of the Cold War—Dan Bolger, Eliot Cohen, and Steve Metz chief among them—the sad fact is that when an insurgency began in Iraq in the late summer of 2003, the Army was unprepared to fight it. The American Army of 2003 was organized, designed, trained, and equipped to defeat another conventional army; indeed, it had no peer in that arena. It was, however, unprepared for an enemy who understood that it could not hope to defeat the U.S. Army on a conventional battlefield, and who therefore chose to wage war against America from the shadows.

The story of how the Army found itself less than ready to fight an insurgency goes back to the Army’s unwillingness to internalize and build upon the lessons of Vietnam. Chief of Staff of the Army General Peter Schoomaker has written that in Vietnam, “The U.S. Army, predisposed to fight a conventional enemy that fought using conventional tactics, overpowered innovative ideas from within the Army and from outside it. As a result, the U.S. Army was not as effective at learning as it should have been, and its failures in Vietnam had grave implications for both the Army and the nation.” Former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army General Jack Keane concurs, recently noting that in Iraq, “We put an Army on the battlefield that I had been a part of for 37 years. It doesn’t have any doctrine, nor was it educated and trained, to deal with an insurgency . . . After the Vietnam War, we purged ourselves of everything that had to do with irregular warfare or insurgency, because it had to do with how we lost that war. In hindsight, that was a bad decision.”...

Continue reading "The Evolution and Importance of Army/Marine Corps Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency" »

In the linked paper I argue that, just as the new realities of warfare demanded the creation of the Special Forces in the 1960's, winning the Long War will require that the Army develop a standing Advisor Corps.  It has been informed by the experience of many advisors with service in Iraq and Afghanistan, and may prove of some interest to the Small Wars Journal / Small Wars Council community of interest.

"Institutionalizing Adaptation: It's Time for an Army Advisor Corps" was published by the Center for a New American Security.

The most important military component of the Long War will not be the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we enable and empower our allies to fight with us. After describing the many complicated, interrelated, and simultaneous tasks that must be conducted to defeat an insurgency, the new Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual notes “Key to all these tasks is developing an effective host-nation (HN) security force. Indeed, it has been argued that foreign forces cannot defeat an insurgency; the best they can hope for is to create the conditions that will enable local forces to win for them…

Continue reading "It's Time for an Army Advisor Corps" »

FM 3-24, the new Army/Marine Corps Field Manual, was released on December 15th. It was downloaded more than 1.5 million times in the first month after its posting to the Fort Leavenworth and Marine Corps websites and was widely reviewed, including by several Jihadi websites; copies have been found in Taliban training camps in Pakistan.

It is now for the first time available in hard copy from the University of Chicago Press....

Continue reading "FM 3-24 available in hard copy" »

I've gotten lots of feedback on this National Public Radio (Future Iraqi Advisers Face Hard Lessons) piece that ran this week in which Steve Inskeep and I discussed the moral dilemmas that often confront counterinsurgents. Situations like the one described below are why one of the paradoxes of counterinsurgency is that "Sometimes the best action is to do nothing" and why we put a chapter on ethics and leadership in counterinsurgency into Field Manual 3-24.

Continue reading "Moral Dilemmas in Counterinsurgency" »

I thought I understood something about counterinsurgency until I started doing it. In this interview conducted by the Army's Combat Studies Institute, I discuss what I learned the first time I practiced counterinsurgency, in Al Anbar province from 2003-2004. An excerpt follows:

The key to success in a counterinsurgency environment is not to create more insurgents than you capture or kill. A stray tank round that kills a family could create dozens of insurgents for a generation. Thus, it is essential to use force as carefully and with as much discrimination as is possible. This is especially important at situations like checkpoints when soldiers must be given the non-lethal tools to protect themselves from possible car bombers without relying upon deadly force. Always consider the long-term effects of operations in a counterinsurgency environment. Killing an insurgent today may be satisfying, but if in doing so you convince all the members of his clan to fight you to the death, you’ve actually taken three steps backwards.

Continue reading "Spilling Soup on Myself in Al Anbar" »