Services Have Learned Irregular Warfare, Leaders Say
Services Have Learned Irregular Warfare, Leaders Say
By Lisa Daniel
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Nov. 3, 2011 – The military has institutionalized lessons learned from the past decade of nonconventional warfare and will work to maintain doctrine and skills that allow the services to balance readiness for traditional defenses as well as irregular fighting, service leaders told a congressional committee today.
“In 2002, the nation effectively went to war with two armies,” Maj. Gen. Peter Bayer, the Army’s director of strategy, plans and policy, told the House Armed Services Committee. “One, comprised of general-purpose forces, was prepared to excel against traditional adversaries in direct combat. The second, comprised largely of special operations forces, was prepared to prevail in an irregular environment.
“The Army quickly learned that success on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq required adaptation in both general-purpose and special operations forces,” Bayer said. The Army has adapted since then by institutionalizing irregular warfare capabilities and capacity across the force, he said.
Bayer was joined by Rear Adm. Sinclair M. Harris, director of the Navy irregular warfare office; Brig. Gen. Daniel O’Donohue, director of the Marine Corps’ capabilities development directorate; and Brig. Gen. Jerry P. Martinez, director for joint integration in the Air Force’s directorate of operational capability requirements. All four said readiness for irregular warfare is critical to future operations, and they described how each of the services has blended conventional and irregular warfighting doctrine and skills.
The Navy has leveraged its Navy Expeditionary Combat Command and established maritime partnership stations and maritime headquarters with maritime operations centers to meet demands, Harris said. “The evolution of intelligence and strike capabilities has enabled the Navy to meet urgent combatant commander requirements for counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations,” he said.
The Navy Irregular Warfare Office, created in 2008, has led the institutionalization of irregular capabilities, Harris said.
The Marine Corps has designed a readiness force for post-Afghanistan operations – beyond 2014 – “that mitigates this hybrid threat, creates options and provides decision space for senior leadership” that considers joint, interagency and allied responses, O’Donohue said.
That force will be fundamentally different from the current or pre-9/11 force, O’Donohue said. “It draws on a rich history of innovations in irregular warfare, but is recast as a scalable crisis response force ready to counter complex irregular, conventional and hybrid threats – and the gray areas in between,” he said.
“Above all,” O’Donohue added, “we prepare to operate in and adapt to unpredictable, uncertain, complex environments at a moment’s notice.” He noted that irregular warfare is not new, and had the same definition in the Marines’ Small Wars Manual of 1940 as it does today.
As for the Air Force, Martinez said, the service is part of a larger, joint, coalition effort, and that works to supplement or improve host-nation and regional capabilities. “Air power directly contributes by establishing a secure environment in which the partner nation can flourish, ultimately without direct assistance,” he said.
By assessing, training, advising and equipping a troubled partner air force, airmen can contribute to that nation’s sovereignty and legitimacy while creating opportunities for economic growth, political development and stability, he added.
Like his counterparts at the hearing, Martinez said the Air Force’s challenge going forward will be how to balance the requirements for irregular warfare with those of traditional fighting, although he added that an increase in capabilities in one area usually helps the other.
The most important thing the Army can do to advance the institutionalization of irregular warfare is to continue educating its leaders, Bayer said.
“By developing adaptive and creative leaders, the Army ensures its ability to respond to a wide range of future tasks,” he said. “Maintaining a highly professional education system is crucial to institutionalizing the lessons of the past decade and ensuring that we do not repeat the mistakes of post-Vietnam by thinking that these kinds of operations are behind us.”
Future battlefields will be populated with hybrid threats, Bayer said, with combinations of regular and irregular tactics against enemies that include terrorists and criminal groups. The Army must remain flexible to operate against “whatever the threat” and in all types of settings, he said.
“As pressures for cuts in defense spending and force structures increase, the Army must assess which capabilities to emphasize, how many of each, and at what level,” he said. “Finding the right mix will be a challenge.”
The key to advancing the Army’s ability to respond to irregular threats will be to ensure the necessary force structure to support a versatile mix of capabilities in an uncertain future, he said.
The Army demonstrated flexibility in Iraq and Afghanistan with modular brigades that included a host of irregular warfare specialties, including information operations, public affairs and civil affairs, Bayer said.
All of the officers said foreign language and cultural training will grow as a requirement for service members.
With all due respect to the generals and admiral testifying, every time I read something like this I do have to wonder what we are thinking. Sure, throw a little Civil Affairs around and make people learn a language and know a little culture and now you know “Irregular Warfare.”
Example: are information operations, public affairs, and civil affairs part of a host of irregular warfare “specialties?” Or are they military specialties that apply to regular and irregular warfare?
Brig Gen O’Donohue does recognize that IW is not new though if IW is defined the same as in the 1940 USMC Small Wars Manual why did we spend so much time in the last 10 years arguing about a definition of IW? Why did we not just use the Small Wars definition. As I have shared before but I think worth repeating, a friend and colleague said this about the new (re-)discovery of Irregular Warfare: “It is like Columbus landing in the “New World” and the indigenous people scratching their heads wondering what is so new about it.” It is not new and has always been there. We just have to recognize and deal with it.
But instead of trying to solely focus on Irregular or Regular Warfare (it is not an either or construct) I think Brig Gen O’Donohue has it right with this quote:
“Above all,” O’Donohue added, “we prepare to operate in and adapt to unpredictable, uncertain, complex environments at a moment’s notice.” He noted that irregular warfare is not new, and had the same definition in the Marines’ Small Wars Manual of 1940 as it does today.
Not a chance! The very fact that IW is “irregular” should be an indication to the brass that IW is a “moving, time-sensitive target”. If the services really “get” IW, we would not have the sound of the old major conventional warfare priorities screaming out from the impending cuts in personnel and resources.
It is clear that the services want to be better at IW. The services have made some gains. However, their insistence on protecting the top dollar new mega machines as budget priorities does not reflect an understanding of the nature of, and preparation for, IW. IW preparation and execution is a constant priority for any nation’s defense forces, this century and beyond.
Many successful IW interdictions are carried out by small highly agile and innovative groups. These groups are in and out of uniform. They are capable of self-synchronizing with updated intelligence and objectives, adapting to changing circumstances in real-time. They do not need to abort a mission or program to restart from the beginning. Their primary critical requirement is a constant flow of reliable and actionable intelligence that is adequately analyzed to meet their intended objectives. These may be short duration activities or long duration shaping and influencing activities both kinetic and non-kinetic in nature. The analysis of that information is derived from contemporary collection and historical analysis of similar threats or practices with a good dose of creative and critical thinking to apply the analysis to novel challenges. In short, they need modern tradecraft and permission to use it (obviously with the legal confines applicable to their mission). Their tools of the trade may be the traditional weapons of war or the information, influence and human systems technologies of today and tomorrow.
We are not preparing leaders for the IW world we live in today. We did not prepare leaders to lead in the IW world of the past. Service academies create only marginal preparation for IW if any. We are certainly not preparing the agile and innovative leaders of tomorrow’s forces for the future of conflict at all levels. If we need managers for IW well, were are good at turning out the petty bureaucrats to foul things up. There is a huge difference in leading and managing; I give you the early Iraq experience when leaders were ignored and managers prolonged the conflict by five years.
If ready for IW means the services are ready to continue to slap tactical bandages on strategic problems after they have occurred then OK, the services are ready (no, sorry, not the AF, they can’t wait until the annoying IW emphasis goes away with the current Chief of Staff, the only AF CoS to ever have considered IW). IW like all warfare evolves based on both intra-national and inter-national developments in all spheres of life, economic, political, educational and social. Until we, the US defense establishment accept the fact we will always be looked on to do the State department’s job…because congress won’t fund them to do it themselves…we will eternally play catch up on the next evolution of IW be it in the flesh on ground, or bytes in cyberspace.
The article isn’t that bad, the services to varying degrees have adapted at the tactical level, but strategically we’re not doing well, which I suspect is due as much to policy issues as military competence or incompetence.
To claim that the Navy and Air Force have adapted is a bit of a stretch. A few very small scale programs don’t equate to the capacity needed. The fact is many senior leaders in the Navy and Air Force haven’t adapted, nor see the need to adapt. As it stated in the article, we’ll continue to be challenged by hybrid threats, and the greatest threats to our national security continue to be conventional in nature, so maintaining conventional capabilities is critical. The CIA, Department of Justice, and State Department can wield a lot of capability to deal with most IW threats (we created the large scale IW threats in Afghanistan and Iraq due to our approach), but no other agency can conduct large scale conventional war outside of DOD, so obviously senior leaders are obligated to maintain that core competency. Emerging non-traditional threats such as cyber are probably a greater threat to our interests than irregulars, so I would be more concerned about shortfalls there.
I suspect that we exaggerate both the need for “IW” as a construct and our ability to conduct “IW.”
The fact that we have landed on a definition of colonial warfare, laced with the lessons learned of centuries of European colonial experience, and 40 years of American colonial experiences as the final answer should cause an alarm bell to start ringing in the back of one’s mind…
Wars are not best defined by their SIZE or the degree of VIOLENCE employed. Similarly the mixture of “regular” vs. “irregular” forces or tactics are poor distinctions as well. The best definitions are rooted in the political nature and purpose of the conflict, and no single type is any more regular or irregular than the next.
If the generals are asserting that the US military is now well prepared to establish and defend illegitimate governments over the populaces of those who have the misfortune of living where we have determined US intersts to be at risk, then I would offer in return that they are 100 years too late and out of date with their answer.
We’re still asking the wrong questions, so we will continue to provide the wrong answers.
Related, and I think important, is my view that there is not really that much of a problem with our concepts and doctrine – with some caveats. First up is to actually read and accept the short blurb that is usually contained in the introduction or preface – that this doctrine / concept is merely a guide (a framework for thinking about a particular problem set – “how to think, not what to think”) and not a checklist for success. Every COIN publication, for example, goes to a decent length to lay out that no two insurgencies and no two counterinsurgency campaigns are the same and this (fill in the blank) pub is a starting point for reference and consideration to be ADAPTED. Go figure.
Moreover, two things need to be present when conducting such operations – capability and desirability. We most certainly have the capability – more so if we recognize the type of fight we are in early on (we normally start playing the real game in the third or fourth quarter). Desirability is another matter and always trumps capability and when present almost always is a day late and a dollar short. We, as a nation, do not really desire such fights and seem to be genuinely surprised as we find ourselves armpit deep in such “dirty little wars”. So the bottom line is yes, we should not be doing these things because as a matter of national policy we intervene fairly conventionally and resist the unconventional until it’s pretty much too late to matter. But that does not mean the future holds “no more Vietnams, Iraqs, Afghanistans, or Somalias”; we have short memories and have taken lessons unlearned to a new form of art not seen previously.
Dave D.
From the article above by Lisa Daniel:
“In 2002, the nation effectively went to war with two armies … One, comprised of the general purpose force, was prepared to excel against traditional adversaries in direct combat. The second, comprised largely of the special forces, was prepared to prevail in an irregular warfare environment.”
IMPORTANT NOTE HERE: It would appear that neither the general purpose force nor the special forces, prior to 2002, were required — and therefore were prepared — to “nation-build,” “modernize” or, more accurately, “Westernize” the opposing state and society as part of their overall duties and responsibilities; nor were they required to subordinate their primary job function (war fighting/war winning) to this new purpose [nation-building, modernization, Westernization.)
“The Army quickly learned that success on the battlefield of Afghanistan and Iraq required the adaptation of both the general purpose force and the special forces … The Army has adapted since then to institutionalize irregular warfare capabilities and capacity across the force.”
ANOTHER IMPORTANT DISTINCTION: Once the powers-that-be changed the definition of “success on the battlefield” to a nation-built, modernized and Westernized, THIS, I would suggest — rather than the uniqueness of Afghanistan or Iraq — is what caused (1) the general purpose force and the special forces to have be adapted and (2) these new requirements to need to become institutionalized.
THUS THE QUESTION: Minus this new requirement to “modernize”/Westernize” the opposing state and society as part of our primary duties and responsibilities — and the new definition of “success on the battlefield” as the modernization/Westernization of outlier states and societies — then would the general purpose force, the special forces and/or Army doctrine have needed modification?
Thus, it may not be that the conflicts that we are in today are so different from those we have been involved with in the past. Rather what may be different today is how we intend to use our military forces to achieve our national security and foreign policy goals (outlier state and societal transformation). This, it would seem, is what has mandated the changes noted above.