I first want to thank you for the opportunity to discuss the important issues facing us and to gain your perspectives and insights on the critical task of adapting our institution to more effectively support the nation’s national security interests. I view Small Wars Journal as an important gathering place for strategic thought, and I appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with some of the most thoughtful minds in our country.

The upcoming TRADOC Senior Leaders Conference (TSLC) in Gettysburg comes at an important time for Training and Doctrine Command and for our Army. We continue to transform TRADOC while simultaneously supporting transitions in both OIF and OEF. Let me offer some thoughts and considerations as we put our shoulders behind these challenges and opportunities over the next 2 years.

If our experience over the last eight years has taught us anything, it’s that war and conflict will continue to increase in complexity. We know that conflict will be waged among the population and for influence on the population, and we know our leaders and their soldiers will operate among a diverse set of actors along blurred military, political, economic, religious and ethnic lines with the potential for escalation and spillover in a variety of unpredictable ways.

Hybrid threats--combinations of regular military forces and irregular threats often in collaboration with criminal and terrorist elements--will migrate among operational themes to seek advantage. The operating environment will become more competitive as our adversaries decentralize, network, and gain technological capabilities formerly found only in the hands of nation states.

The challenge confronting us is building balance and versatility into the force by developing our leaders, by designing our organizations, and by adapting the institution. The outcomes we seek are flexibility and resilience to hedge against future uncertainty. Three imperatives are guiding our efforts to align the operational and institutional Army to meet demands and support the Army Force Generation (ARFORGEN) model:

• Develop our military and civilian leaders
• Provide trained and ready forces to support current operations
• Integrate current and emerging capabilities

These imperatives will remain in tension for the foreseeable future, but there are things we can do to bring them into better balance. The TRADOC Campaign Plan (TCP) describes how we’ll achieve balance across our priority lines of operation: Human Capital, Initial Military Training, Leader Development, and Capabilities Integration.

The focus of our discussions during the TSLC will be on the TRADOC Campaign Plan (TCP). We will also examine how TRADOC’s TCP aligns with and complements the Human Capital Enterprise. We'll demonstrate how the Central Training Database will become the “Training Brain” for TRADOC and provide us the opportunity to enhance training in the institutional schoolhouse.

As you may know, we've asked ourselves how we can replicate the complexity our leaders experience while they are deployed, and we will discuss some emerging opportunities to do just that. I'd like this to generate discussion about how TRADOC can lead innovation in training and education to account for the speed of change in the contemporary operating environment.

I look forward in the coming weeks to a lively, thoughtful discussion with the Small Wars Journal community.

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SWJ Editors' note - We will be live blogging from the TRADOC Senior Leaders Conference next week. A discussion forum has been set up at the Small Wars Council. Please feel free to post your questions, thoughts and opinions - engage!

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This week we published Army Field Manual 3-07.1: Security Force Assistance. In it, we seek to capture in doctrine our many years of experience in building partner security forces. Security Force Assistance is derivative of the broader mission of Stability Operations which we have documented in doctrine in FM 3-07.

It’s important to note that Security Force Assistance occurs under a variety of conditions, and it is the conditions that will determine how and with what organizations we use to accomplish the mission.

We have military cooperation agreements with more than 125 nations around the world and often provide security force assistance in response to host nation requests. This assistance is generally delivered by Offices of Security Cooperation, always under the control of the US Embassy Country Team, and is accomplished by a mixture of assigned military and civilian personnel, contractors, and mobile training teams. These mobile training teams come from either the General Purpose Forces -– perhaps more appropriately described as Multi-Purpose Forces -– or from the Special Forces depending on the type of training requested.

Under conditions of active conflict where we have direct responsibility for security -- as in Iraq and Afghanistan -- tactical commanders will have a security force assistance mission to train, advise, and assist tactical host nation forces. This mission is accomplished using the resources of the modular brigade augmented as necessary based, again, on conditions. The conditions include the “state” of security -- described in doctrine as Initial Stage, Transforming Stage, and Sustaining Phase -- as well as the capacity and capability of the host nation security forces. Security Force Assistance at the Institutional Level will be accomplished by a Security Transition Headquarters organized under the Joint Task Force. This Security Transition Headquarters partners with the US Embassy Country Team and evolves over time into an Office of Security Cooperation as described above.

Finally, we have security relationships with some nations facing significant internal security challenges but which, for many reasons, may not accept a large, visible US military presence within their borders. If they request Security Force Assistance under these conditions, the mission is generally assigned to US Special Operations Forces, potentially augmented by regionally-oriented General-Purpose Forces.

Clearly, the future operational environment will require us to demonstrate as much versatility in Stability Operations as we have in Offense and Defense Operations. Understanding the variety of conditions under which Security Force Assistance occurs is an important first step.

General Martin E. Dempsey is Commanding General of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command.

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Dissecting war and placing it into various “bins’ may seduce us into believing that we have somehow discovered a way to make it coherent. However, we’d be wrong. War is war. The threats we face are always hybrid threats. Military operations always require capabilities across the spectrum of conflict.

--SWJ comment posted 10 March 2009.

Future conflicts will introduce an array of threats that defy simple categorization. We have at times tried to categorize threats in discrete operational themes such as conventional or unconventional, regular or irregular, high intensity or low intensity, traditional, terrorist, or criminal. However, the world is just not that accommodating. The security challenges we face are complex, and we have every reason to believe—based on our own experiences and on other conflicts we have recently observed—that our enemies will seek to employ a variety of threats in confronting us. Our model of the spectrum of conflict in FM 3-0 can be somewhat misleading in that it implies gaps among the different operational themes. What our model does not portray is the affect that time has on conflict and the likelihood that our enemies will seek to migrate among these themes. We cannot expect that we will have the option of selecting a category of conflict and then implementing a strategy confined to that category—the enemy gets a “vote.”

Hybrid, networked threats further blur the space among operational themes adding even greater complexity to the current and future operating environment. In response, our units and leaders in theater adapt from one theme to another frequently, sometimes day by day, often mission by mission and location by location. This occurs at all levels from the tactical to the strategic.

The hybrid threats we face are also increasingly decentralized in execution. Their objective is to exploit us by decentralizing operations and employing information operations as a weapon. In the book The Starfish and the Spider by Rod Beckstrom and Ori Brafman, the authors examine business models that provide insights into how open and decentralized systems operate: “when attacked, a decentralized organization becomes even more open and decentralized….open systems can easily mutate.”

The point is that the threat doesn’t confine itself to a single operational theme. The enemy adapts to leverage their strengths and to exploit our vulnerabilities. I believe LTG Stan McChrystal—one of our truly innovative senior leaders—had it right when he said, “to defeat a network, you have to be a network.” So our challenge is to adapt our institutions and develop our leaders to confront the complexity and decentralization inherent in the future operational environment.

We must avoid either-or constructs about conflict and how we organize, train, and equip ourselves in anticipation of conflict. When we commit our “campaign-quality” Army to a sustained operation in the future operating environment, it will need to be versatile enough to respond to all forms of contact. Even more important, it will need to be led by leaders agile enough to deal with complexity and anticipate the changes inherent in an extended campaign.

General Martin E. Dempsey is Commanding General of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command.

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