Operationalizing the Comprehensive Approach: The Military as “Enabler…”
Janine’s Speaker’s Notes….
Combined Arms Center Senior Leader Conference
Fort Leavenworth, KS, 3 February 2009
Earlier this month, I was invited to address the senior leaders of the U.S. Army’s Training and Education community at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. This event, hosted by LTG William Caldwell, brought together the commandants of the Army’s training and education centers to discuss issues of importance to their community. LTG Caldwell asked me, along with Beth Cole of the U.S. Institute of Peace, UK LtCol. Mike Redmond, of the U.S. Army’s Stability Operations Office, and retired French LTG Raffenne to discuss how to operationalize the “Comprehensive Approach,” which is the guiding theme of the Army’s new Field Manual, FM 3-07 Stability Operations. Although I did not have formally prepared remarks, the following is an attempt to transcribe my messy handwritten speaker notes from my little brown book into something more concrete to share with the SWJ readership.
Thank you for the invitation to speak with you today. Thank you LTG Caldwell for your leadership and passion for this important topic — the Comprehensive Approach. CAC is doing some amazing and innovative things. From student blogging at CGSC to the latest doctrinal manuals, you have been leading the way in adaptation and learning. Operationalizing the comprehensive approach will be a great interagency challenge. Your efforts here, and with your latest civil-military center for security force assistance and stability operations will be a valuable resource for the Army — and the government as a whole — to continue to learn and adapt.
You might wonder how a former Air Force cargo pilot became interested in these topics — counterinsurgency, stability operations, and he comprehensive approach. Well, about six years ago, I came to DC on a Brookings pre-doctoral fellowship. On the very first day, at the welcome reception, I met the Army fellow, a Colonel with a PhD in military history, who asked me about my planned research. I told him that I had been frustrated as an AF pilot when I kept finding myself doing “non-traditional” missions like humanitarian operations, disaster relief and peace operations support in the Balkans. It wasn’t the missions, per se, but rather the resistance of my leadership to those missions. Instead of embracing them and organizing in ways to support them, we kept treating them like aberrations. This approach treated every contingency like an emergency and effectively kept us on alert 24/7. Given that experience, I wanted to write my doctoral dissertation on why the military can’t or won’t focus on peace operations, which from my perspective seem to be the main effort for the foreseeable future.
Dave nodded sagely and said, “I think I can help you with that…”
The next day when I got to my office, there was a 1994 copy of Military Review on my desk. On it was a little yellow sticky note that read: “Janine, take a look at the article tagged here and maybe you will see that the Army has not been flat on its ass when it comes to peace operations!”
Inside was an article by then-LTC Dave Gray and Colonel Charles Swannack relating their experience in training for peace operations at the new Joint Readiness Training Center, in Fort Polk Louisiana and how it related directly to their missions in Haiti. This was the beginning of my education about Army training — and Army organizational learning. I discovered that there was a large part of the institution that had begun to “get it.” Their institutional experience in the 1990’s, combined with the Army’s post-Vietnam organizational learning culture, would serve them well when the time came in 2004 to adapt the rest of the organization for counterinsurgency in Iraq.
The following year, in the fall of 2004, Dave invited me to Fort Campbell, KY to interview his soldiers for my research. Dave was the Brigade Commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 101st. They were preparing for their second tour to Iraq. Many of the soldiers had fought in the initial invasion and then with MG Petraeus in the post-conflict phase in Mosul. It was this stabilization and reconstruction, post-combat phase I was most interested in.
In one of my group interviews with junior officers and NCO’s, I asked the soldiers what it was like to try to work with civil affairs officers from other units. I was surprised to hear that many generally felt it was that it was more trouble than it was worth. CA officers rarely brought any ‘stuff;’ no money, no vehicles, etc. etc., making them a net “drain” on the unit. Plus, they hadn’t trained together so there was a lot of wasted time familiarizing them into the unit. As an outsider, it sounded to me like these fellow Army officers were viewed as an entirely separate organization — as far apart culturally as the military might be with someone joining their team from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) or an NGO. When I offered that comparison to the young officers I was shocked by their response… “What is USAID?”
Military vs. Civilian Capability and Capacity
We have come a long way in just a few short years. Today, the question from soldiers is not What is USAID, but Where is USAID? The military’s new doctrine for both stability operations and counterinsurgency makes it perfectly clear that the military cannot do this stuff alone. As Mike Redmond pointed out, the comprehensive approach requires complimentary efforts by a large variety of civilian and military experts. But as Beth Cole clearly related, the civilian side of our national security structure is vastly under-resourced and, despite calls from Secretary of Defense Gates, Chairman Mullen, and others, it is going to be a very long time before this imbalance is remedied.
Mike Redmond’s predecessor, Colonel Simon Wolsey, used to have a clever power point slide. It had two arrows — one coming from the left, depicting civilian capacity development; and the other from the right, depicting the Army’s stability operations capability development. When people asked him how far the Army was going to go on that vector, he would always say, “until these two arrow heads meet” — which everyone knew meant that the Army was going to be getting a lot better at this stuff before the civilians caught up.
So, if the nation is to succeed in the short and maybe the medium term, the military will continue to need to fill this gap. But in the medium to long term, the military will need prepare itself for the eventual arrival of more civilian partners. I think this will be much harder than we actually think it will be.
In my previous job in the Pentagon, I worked with Simon on stability operations capability development. We constantly ran into the same competing objections to change. The military experts would say they could not possibly estimate what type of new military capabilities were needed unless and until they knew exactly what the civilians were bringing to the game. That is a pretty fair question. From a taxpayer perspective, we do not need the military duplicating what already exists or is being developed elsewhere in the U.S. national security tool kit. Unfortunately, the civilians would claim that they could not possibly answer that question unless and until they knew what, exactly, the military meant when they said “military support to…” civilian partners.
Indeed, answering that question — really unpacking what we mean when we say the military is the “enabler” in such operations — is the key intellectual question for this community if we are to truly operationalize the comprehensive approach.
“Military Support To…”
If you are a civilian in Afghanistan or Iraq, you have skills and knowledge, but you have very little support. You don’t have the same life insurance, health care, logistics, or security training your military counterpart has. We cannot overestimate how much of a difference that makes. Civilians are not trained to carry weapons and in many cases are not issued body armor and helmets. Indeed, many civilians in Iraq’s green zone had to purchase their own body armor. Some of these problems are being solved in the field, but are they institutionalized for the next generation?
Does ‘military support to…” mean that civilians sleep on military fobs and military outposts, fly on military planes, ride in military vehicles? Or do all of these things belong to the USG anyway? When these civilians — including contractors — return from their long dangerous deployments, are they greeted with gratitude by the American people? Do they have health benefits and support structures to help with their PTSD? Do they have a lessons learned or after-action review system to capture their experience?
Many of these problems cannot be solved by the military, but need congressional intervention and budgeting realignment. DoD leaders can continue to advocate for their civilian counterparts, as Admiral Mullen and Secretary Gates have done, but developing more empowered expeditionary civilians means taking a different tack with respect to authorities and funding. For example, USAID officers on PRT’s have complained that they don’t even have the same spending authority that a soldier with CERP funds has. This quote by a FSO on a PRT is telling:
“The military has the control of fairly vast resources in the form of CERP [Commander’s Emergency Response Fund] monies, while the PRT has no money. If the military’s vision of how these funds might best be used fits in well with the PRT’s vision, it’s great. On the other hand, if the military thinks it can do something we believe won’t work or doesn’t think what we want to do is important, we’re up a tree.”
Who is supporting whom in this example? If, as our doctrine suggests, the critical “lines of operation” are those associated with governance and economic development, then “military support to…” might mean the expert USAID officer tells the soldier how, when, and where to spend that CERP money. Taking direction from a civilian is not in the cultural DNA of the military officer and will take more than just bumper stickers about “enabling” and new doctrine to internalize this idea. Of course, if we are truly trying to enable civilians, we might wonder why it is the soldier and not the civilian who has the checkbook in the first place.
Some people claim that the State Department needs its own couple combat brigades to provide them support. Others might rightly point out that State Department already has them — they are in their U.S. military. The trick is operationalizing the comprehensive approach; actually defining and internalizing a new understanding of the military’s role as an “enabling force.” Until we can do this, we will not be able to unlock the true power and potential of the rest of the U.S. government (and others).
In a recent article on his experience with the drug problem in Afghanistan, former Ambassador Tom Schweich describes his frustration in trying to work with the military. The military policy was to “have someone else clean up the drug business” in Afghanistan. The military agreed it would play a supporting role. In the end, however, the promised support (e.g. helicopters and ramp space in Kabul airfield) were not delivered.
In contrast to the many poor examples such as Ambassador Schweich’s Afghanistan story, there are plenty of other areas where mid-level civilians and military have worked it out. One example is the new Army Stability Operations Manual. FM 3-07 was a truly innovative, whole of government effort. LTC Leonard, the chief author, went beyond interagency vetting and reviewing of the manuscript. Instead, he developed the manual in an interagency forum from the start. Through workshops and roundtables with thought leaders and practitioners from myriad other agencies and non-governmental organizations, LTC Leonard was able to get to ground truth about what needed to be done in these operations and what we might actually expect from each other on the ground. The process of developing this manual reflects a sincere whole of government effort that, if emulated in other areas, will go a long way to operationalizing the comprehensive approach.
Reading the manual, one realizes, however, how much more intellectual work there is to do. The manual reflects the military’s preference to operate as an enabling or supporting entity; but stops short of the nitty-gritty detail of what that means for commanders on the ground. This is where the intellectual leadership of the Army, through its education, training, planning, and concepts efforts can provide a great service by intellectually, and even doctrinally, unpacking this role.
Next Steps:
If and when the civilian experts that the military is hoping for do show up, the military will need to be prepared. Specifically, they will need to have internalized what they mean when they say they will “support” the other elements of national power to accomplish the key lines of operation (e.g. governance, rule of law, economic development, etc). Supporting these efforts will not mean staying in the purely ‘kinetic’ or security lane. These civil-military lines are overlapping and intersecting. Coordinating all elements of power will require civilians and military actors to understand the complex environment and have agreed upon frameworks for action.
The following are a few suggestions on how the intellectual leadership of the Army might ensure that the next generation of soldiers is ready to fulfill their “supporting” roles.
Conops: Interagency concepts of operation that operationalize the latest doctrine (including FM 3-07 and the U.S. Institute of Peace’s forthcoming civilian counterpart) will more clearly articulate who will do what and how. It is important for the institutional learning process that these conops and any exercises associated with them, be developed through an interagency process by experienced soldiers and civilians currently in these agencies. From here, memorandums of agreement, if needed, can be crafted or otherwise replaced by interagency doctrine that describes how civilian efforts will be supported by military assets and expertise. This process will also help uncover legal or policy barriers to coordination that can be targeted for change.
Terminology: We can no longer pretend that words do not matter. “Diplomacy” and “development” for instance lose some of their meaning when re-crafted as “conflict prevention” or “shaping.” Thus we cannot expect diplomats and aid workers to be amenable to having their missions recast as such. But the most toxic and possibly counterproductive term in the current military lexicon is “irregular warfare.” While our allies frown at the intellectual confusion and ambiguity of the term, our own diplomats have more serious problems. Although the term has been useful in generating a paradigm shift among warriors who bristled at sissy terms like “peace operations” or even “stability ops,” diplomats and aid workers rightly resist having their missions cast as a type of “war.” This is not just a failure for these national security professionals to get with the program. For them, it is just bad business to try to develop and maintain peaceful relations with countries around the world if those countries (whose leaders do read our concepts and doctrine) think that the embassy is supporting or conducting war — however “irregular” — in their country. If we are serious about adopting a comprehensive approach for the challenges of the 21st century conflict environment, then we should seriously reconsider our current passion for this term.
Integrated training and education: Civil-military operations are like a symphony in which each musician has a unique skill and a different instrument. Each learns to play and practice alone; but then comes together to practice for the real performance. Unlike a symphony, however, in stability operations and counterinsurgency, we have had neither the same sheets of music nor a conductor in the field. Thus, it is critical that people from various agencies and organizations are able to practice together before deployment. This does not mean that military and civilian need to have completely shared educational institutions and professional development; but rather that they have the opportunity to come together to learn and train many times throughout their careers — and especially before and after deployment.
Information Sharing: As the stability operations manual makes clear, a comprehensive approach requires a “3C’s” approach to “coordinate, collaborate, and cooperate.” None of this can occur without a 4th C: “communicate.” Unfortunately, a competing imperative for cyber security has meant that our ability to communicate with each other within the government — much less with outside agencies — has been stymied. In the Pentagon, flash drives are outlawed and encrypted messages are sometimes blocked by the State Department. This can send frustrated government workers to their personal emails to get their jobs done, thus undermining the efforts of the IT professionals. Although the cyber threat may be real, if we cannot find ways to communicate in these civil-military environments, our efforts to operationalize the comprehensive approach will be for naught.
In sum, we rightly look to Congress and the other leaders in Washington to enhance capacity on the non-military sides of our government. Much work remains in order to field truly expeditionary civilians, including providing these professionals with the tools they need to succeed such as health care, life insurance, and security training equipment. Meanwhile, the military should not be sanguine about how much easier their job will be once more civilians show up. While more civilians with diverse expertise and skill sets on the ground will greatly enhance our ability succeed; this will not occur without the military doing its job in supporting and enabling these civilians. The military must prepare now for the steady increase in the numbers of non-military partners. The first step for the military to operationalize the comprehensive approach will be to do the hard intellectual work to define, teach, and internalize what “military support to…” actually means.
About Janine Davidson:
Assistant Professor, George Mason University
Non-Resident Fellow, Brookings Institution