Change FM 3-24: Enemy Template in Small Wars
One of the key things missing in FM 3-24 is an enemy template. Remember those things? At NTC and JRTC, we’d count T-72s, BMPs, and BTRs to try and determine if we were facing the Russians forward security element, recon forces, or main effort. They provided a foundation for our thinking.
You won’t find such a section in FM 3-24. Magically, over the last ten years, we wished the enemy away believing that through our own sheer will-power we could separate the people from the enemy.
It’s time to be honest. We need to put the template in the manual.
Here’s a start. Nearly four years ago, I described in detail the enemy disposition and composition in the village of Zaganiyah in my article, The Break Point. It shows how AQI, just like many other social movements, mobilized, organized, recruited, trained, financed their operations, developed doctrine, planned, and executed the clearance of the village ultimately establishing a shadow government complete with judicial, military, arms economic arms.
It is one way to understand the enemy template.
Recently, Octavian Manea brought together a group of experts to ask them if counterinsurgency leads to a culture of entitlement?
Because we fail to recognize the enemy, what is missing in this conversation is the economic competition between the state and counter-state (or Shadow Government) which many continue to ignore or simply wish away. AQI has one (still does) and so does the Taliban. They provide competing "security forces, providing essential services to the population, promoting good governance, and encouraging economic development."
In Zaganiyah, we were in a bidding war with AQI. Everytime we would flood the market with state backed goods, they would drop their prices in order to show the citizens that they could outgovern the Iraqi government. At the same time, we had to shut down the AQI Walmart and try to rework property and land rights issues.
It's time to start listening to the guys who have actually done the work!
If we continue to only think in terms of what Americans are doing and ignore the other 99% of the people (not tell them what they should be thinking with information operations) then we're never going to get better.
We'll continue to waste time, money, and lives.
But, don't take my word for it. This is nothing new and was around long before FM 3-24. Some of the current modern thinkers who talk about it are Gordon McCormick and David Kilcullen and Steven Metz.
I learned from Bob Andrews and Leites and Wolfe. And so it must go. We must take our experience and teach it to the next generation refusing to brand ourselves knowing that war is much bigger than one person or one ideology.
Let’s make the change and put the enemy template into FM 3-24.
This is actually happening at the CTCs to a certain extent. The OPFOR now consists of general purpose forces, enemy special forces, insurgents, criminals, and civilians on the battlefield (with humanitarian needs, scripts, objectives, actors, etc).
CALL might have some interesting stuff on this, or get with me on AKO for more info after the new year.
Mike:
Nice post.
I would add that not only does a rebuilt 3-24 need some sense of an enemy but it must thoroughly jettison the naive depiction and portrayal of populations in insurgencies. On page 1-29 (University of Chicago Press version) there is a diagram which depicts a population as broken down into three parts: a small minority against the cause that cant be turned; another small minority for the cause; then in the middle a large maleable mass of people just waiting to be won over by the counterinsurgent force, this portion is often refered to as “fence sitters.” At the top of the diagram 3-24 has this caption “In any sitatuion, whatever the cause, there will be [a population as described in the chart].” I should also add that this statement was taken directly-verbatim-from David Galula’s book on Coin.
But when i came back from Baghdad in late 2006 and read FM 3-24 for the first time and closely and based on my experience in the middle of the Sunni-Shia civil war in Baghdad in 2006 I thought to myself what happens if that line dividing a population is drawn right across the middle?
The point here is that FM 3-24’s depiction of a population was taken directly from Galula and is pure, simplistic counter Mao. But in the real world populations are much more complex than that.
As mentioned above, many have already adopted some method of representing the enemy. With that in mind, I think doing so via a rigid template is overly restrictive. Even the IPB publication, FM 2-01.3 doesn’t really broach the topic in too much detail – and there is a reason. Templating out an insurgent force isn’t very easy and doesn’t really lend itself to templating. TTPs, sure, that’s easy…Event Templates, Situational Template…not so much.
In terms of FM 3-24 – it does offer guidance in terms of the enemy / insurgent (chapter 3, page 3-13 offers a comparison between conventional order of battle and insurgent order of battle). So I think it’s a bit unfair to criticize the manual for totally overlooking the enemy, it’s just not true. With that in mind, does it go far enough in looking at the enemy, no, FM 3-24.2 does a better job of that. However, there is nothing enemy-centric in FM 3-24 that an intelligent person couldn’t derive from the IPB pub alone. That is, the fundamentals remain the same, the considerations simply change.
Those of us coming out of Iraq in 2005 and 2006 ran smack into a wall with the idea of templating–some said it cannot be done because insurgents are an adaptive organization, we do not have enough data yet on the various groups, they are working with locals who are simply doing a second job, it is foreign fighters etc. You do not want to know just how many serious intel studies were started-finished-started again on just how many insurgents we were facing in 2005 and 2006.
Then up popped AQ with the Manchester Manual on a laptop in Iraq in 2005 which is in fact AQ’s own internal structure which has not really changed much—only changes occur when the state/counter insurgent applies pressure to some point on the system. We had in 2006 the hand written journal by the leader of the IAI and it was never fully translated-just a short gisting (it covered the period of two weeks after we arrived in Bagdah until mid 2006–absolutely ignored by the intel community).
If we had the buy-in from the intel community it might have happened far earlier as it was the intel community pushing back on the idea of templating–the concepts of CTCs reflecting templates only started occuring in mid 2008 when the COIC placed reach back capabilities in all CTCs. Yes the OPFOR had insurgent structure info and used it, but not in a structured way until 2008.
If we had evaluated insurgent video OSINT being put out by them even in 2003 up through 2008 we might have had a generic template far earlier—example ISI and IAI constantly released battle videos depicting the RKG-3 before we in the field knew what was hitting us as the actual RKG-3 strikes were initially being reported as EFPs. If we had used OSINT earlier we could have given the field approximate numbers of say how many are in an IED cell, IDF cell, attack cells, what are the swarm TTPs, how do they fight, etc.—but it did not happen as we the Army felt that the early videos were “proproganda” and “we should not be viewing them”.
The core problem is not templates, or order of battle but how we “see” what is occuring around us—we are now graduating intel analysts with 3- to 4 weeks less of the required training time with the motto “they will get further training at their units” and we all know how that works out.
AND now we have defense contractors flooding out to intel analysts at home station giving them classes on “critical thinking”—we are really on a treadmill and nothing is improving even ten years in.
RCS43—you have a couple of interesting comments.
Yes we should train our young MI officers and analysts to critically think and yes that is an art form that takes time to develop–but it can be done but it is though the clash between TRADOC and the required POI that has to be taught in order to declare someone an analyst or young MI officer-verus the reality taught us daily from theater–there is no room and motivation to build critical thinking/development courses into a rather tight and shrinking TRADOC POI–we always hear we cannot make the necessary changes to the current POI without TRADOC approval—that usually takes upwards of six months and then it is too late.
Example from the rubber meets the road of say a BN staff—the young graduate from the BOIC comes into the BN staff and is the CM working with the S2—he/she then has to build a ISM for a named operation—they sit in front of their computer and stare at the blank ISM for hours and are totally confused. WHY—in the BOIC they are shown the ISM and the course emphasis is on the ISM AS a briefing tool—not once are they taught that you cannot build an ISM without first building the Collection Plan—a clear result of the training course hitting the tactical reality of a BN. The schoolhouse hopefully knows about this particular problem, but you would be surprised how many former MI contractor types know it, but are unwilling to stand up and let the schoolhouse know –whoa I am not going to rock the system syndrome.
Second example from the analyst field–same issues on how much of the TRADOC POI is tied to producing a MOS qualified level 10 versus how much time is available to teaching critical thinking. There are a number of presentations around the concept of observerables, signatures, and indicators—you are right in the older days we knew what the indicators were for a motorized rifle regt even if we did not “see” them yet on the battlefield (we could sing them!)—where in the schoolhouse are insurgent/conflict ecosystem indicators being taught—believe me the ecosystem does not change that much and it does change when something teaches them it is time to change—how to “see” that change is not being taught. Take the example of say HME or narco organizations, production, and smuggling activities—when do young officers and analysts first learn about the actual indicators and understanding how to detect when those indicators change.
You will hear as a response—not enough time in the POI as a reason it does not occur
They come then into a BN which forces them immediately into indicators–deleveop them, build your NAIs on them, build the collection plan around them, get staff buy-in for them and then an execute–and by the way on a continious unending cycle—as an experiement stop the staff in the middle of that cycle and ask them WHY they are doing what they are doing.
Nesting what a concept—get a battle staff into a single room and ask them to define nesting as a doctrinal term per pub–ask them to define say “running esitmate” per pub or define say “battle rhythm” per pub. I do not know how many times I have seen top down bottom up refinement fail sometimes from the tactical level, but a majority of times as you point out from the operational side and you are right add multiple BNs on the ground and the complexity skyrockets—heck we even have now STBs as BSOs–not sure where that sits in doctrine. But the tactical level has other problems that impact the next higher elechon.
The current FM 3-24 is a multi-service publication. The Marine Corps began looking at a potential rewrite in 2010 (four year review process) but held off when the Army indicated it was interested in a rewrite as well. Both services are now in the beginning of the dance that accompanies all such work.
One of the interesting thoughts that has come up is, would everyone be better served with a new Small Wars manual vice a new COIN pub? In many ways I suppose this strikes at the very heart of the debates constantly raging across my computer screen. But the idea bears some thought for two reasons.
First, someone is actually going to write something. Yep – it’s going to happen. So some effort ought to be made sure that whatever is produced has some relevance to the second, and most important point.
Second, regardless of whether they should be there or shouldn’t be there, regardless of what doctrine does or not call the operation they are conducting, someone is going to end up doing something with a gun and perhaps with or without a smile and a soccer ball. It would be helpful if there was some decent guidance on how to go about executing that something.
A quick review of current doctrine reveals that insurgency is something that only exists if a government is being overthrown or changed (JP 1-02) unless it’s just a bit more than that (FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5). COIN may be its own thing FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5), unless it’s either a subset of stability operations, a type of crisis response or limited contingency operation, or a bit of everything.
Admittedly, there is a Marine Corps bias to the question. The service has a history of employment in all sorts of little, hard to pigeonhole, “small wars.” But regardless of what they might be called, they usually involved being placed in a foreign country due to either good or bad political calculations, facing an armed adversary of some descript who generally sought to avoid open fights, while hiding in, working in, working with the local populace, all occuring under some sort of scrutiny or limitation.
So, perhaps instead of an “a priori” approach, which is to take any given operation and try to cram it into some pre-determined doctrinal box, we ought to expand the toolbox. To take the analogy further, instead of being given a specific toolbox which may or may not work for the given task, the warfighter ought to be given the Craftsman rolling toolchest that allows him to select what he needs.
Is it a rebellion, an insurgency, a revolt? Those are probably the wrong doctrinal questions to be asking – yet those are the questions currently being asked. At the tactical level the questions are more likely to be – “well, here I am. like it or not. So, who is the bad guy, why is he upset, how well armed is he, do people like him, do I have any friends here, are they worth a crap, what can I and what can’t I do?”
I think that instead of seeking to place these questions into a pre-determined vocabulary, doctrine ought to just provide some answers. So perhaps the best way to get beyond COIN and to COIN Next, is to go back to basics…go back to Small Wars.
My one issue with Enemy Templates is when they replace common sense thinking. Ergo, by developing the Krasnovians, we really only prepared to fight one enemy, the Russians. I have seen templates stifle thinking as much as help it.
So here is what I mean. In Iraq, and insurgent would likely use IEDs, and the template should reflect that. In N. Korea, probably similar, an insurgent force designed to prevent our mechanized advantage, while using anti-air missiles. In America, if someone invaded us, I believe the insurgency that would develop would primarily use sniper weapons and attacks, because of our overwhelming number of firearms.
That said, the idea that you wouldn’t make one in an active war is madness. And the idea that you wouldn’t have them in training is madness (though Starbuck says they are around which is great).
So my recommendation is we keep making enemy templates, but don’t but them in doctrine. Before every training event, the intel shop should make this. We shouldn’t use a fake country, we should use a real world country and base the operation on their real world capabilities. Training is supposed to be realistic right?