Reflective Belts and General Officer Billets
In critiquing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, junior officers and enlisted personnel often cite the overuse of reflective belts and other restrictive bureaucratic personnel policies implemented on forward operating bases in country. While this can be construed as soldiers and marines complaining, it might be a valid measure to determine the correlation of top-down, bureaucratic and centralized operations in modern warfare.
For instance, instead of complaining about reflective belts, measure the amount of general officers billets in any given theatre. This number (along with associated higher headquarters, staff, and resources) will provide the analyst with a measure of the military means of the strategy. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we have spent a lot of money and resources to achieve our goals.
When we start look at ways, the approach to how to solve the problem, one must acknowledge that the ways are driven by the means.
In other conflicts, the military footprint was much smaller. In some cases, we had less military advisors than we currently have general officers and reflective belt policies in theatre.
Before we try to transcend COIN, FID, SFA, and IW and move towards strategy, we may want to confront our structure problems.
If we want to start moving towards a more indirect approach, then start by minimizing the higher level staff not telling platoons and companies to work with the locals and local security forces. The boys on the ground figured that out a long time before the think tanks in DC.
This post is another way to visualize the concept of Less is Often More.
double post
This is micro-management, not top down strategy, and the difference is important. The GO’s and their senior enlisted advisors who focus on this crap are generally incompetent and incapable of developing COIN or war fighting strategies and plans. The stupidity witnessed in OIF on the FOBs would have made a good comedy if it wasn’t a symptom of serious problems in the force and especially with its leaders. That is why only a handful of general officers stood out as being competent. There is something wrong with our system, if only a handful of our GOs are tactically to strategically competent. The symptoms included socks stuck in magazine wells (instead of magazines, because apparently the soldiers were not trained well enough to actually have bullets mated with their weapon), reflective belts for those on perimeter patrol (because hey, its just another day in garrison), 10 mph speed limits enforced by MPs who never left the FOB, to include giving tickets to guys rehearsing for a raid with their vehicles in a designated training/rehearsal area.
However the good news is Iraq and Afghanistan are abberrations, and it unlikely we could have removed Saddam with less force, to the contrary we had a dangerously small force for the mission due to Rumfield’s hubris. Sometimes mass is needed, but that mass needs to be organized and focused on the mission. Instead we had a huge mass pinned down by our bureaucracy on FOBs. We needed more men and women hitting the streets (saturation patrolling) and less C2 structure. Our revolution in military affairs (RMA) has led to the creation of large inefficient staffs and HQs to manage the large volume of digital data our force now generates. Maybe we need to relook the RMA entirely?
I had to laugh when I read the title of your post. It reminded me of my time in ROTC in the early 90s.
We used to PT at 0530 in an urban area. We had 4 or 5 students get hit by cars on indiviual runs. When the senior Marine Officer was asked why he didn’t make us wear reflective belts, he responded, “If they are not smart enough to avoid traffic; they are not smart enough to lead Marines.”
That probably wouldn’t go over too well today…
The new term and warfighting function “mission command” replaces C2 and theoretically relies on mission orders and greater subordinate initiative. That would indicate that generals (if not the Command Sergeant Major) do recognize that subordinates are adults that:
* should be given more responsibility
* won’t always be able to communicate for instructions
* must be able to react based on commander’s intent when mission execution inevitably does not go as planned.
On the other hand, if you look at Vietnam casualties in detail by year, you would find that accidents in some single years accounted for death rates equaling a decade of Afghanistan combat deaths. When troops return to the states, suicide and accidents can take more lives from individual units than a year of combat did. So not so sure we should completely discount measures taken to ensure Soldier safety.
What I find ironic is that the same leadership that would either micromanage safety on the FOB at one extreme, or decry safety as unnecessary from the opposite standpoint, would both then send subordinates out into known minefields riddled with IEDs.
Given the above and that IEDs are the biggest killer on the battlefield in these wars, and therefore won’t disappear from future wars, I might partially disagree with Bill M when he says:
“We needed more men and women hitting the streets (saturation patrolling) and less C2 structure. Our revolution in military affairs (RMA) has led to the creation of large inefficient staffs and HQs to manage the large volume of digital data our force now generates. Maybe we need to relook the RMA entirely?”
For instance, following OIF I, if we had used more heavy armor as mobile OPs dispersed throughout Baghdad and other areas, the dismounted patrols would have been fewer, or at least in sight of overwatching armor. With fewer FOBs, you have fewer reflector belts.
Second, local security sensors are not really RMA. But if, for instance, a GCV or M1A2 tank had a telescoping sensor on their turrets, the mobile OP could look out much farther than most dismounted patrols would venture in open terrain. Aerostats can see even farther as can the larger sensor towers located on FOBs and COPs.
Small UAS like Raven and Puma, tactical Shadow UAS, and larger Predator/Reaper/Gray Eagle UAS also ensure local security, and make open movement by insurgents, and monitoring the pattern of daily life a more persistent activity. Patrols pass through an area only briefly…and then purposely avoid the same area in subsequent patrols due to honesty traces. How is that logical or valuable, yet it is essential if you try to do it all with dismounted patrolling alone.
At least one structural “way” needs, badly, to be addressed and that’s the proliferation of civilian contractors. I get the argument that it’s supposed to be cheaper in the long run, but there’s a definite impact on the ability of troops to perform missions and I think the cost is probably worth it (if that argument is even actually true). Some contractors won’t leave the large camps to come to COPs and FOBs to work on systems–send ’em home. Some contractors get the relationship backward and think we’re there for them–send ’em home. All contractors have a vested interest in retaining their SME status and do not share expertise with Soldiers, who want to learn to handle their own problems–especially when those problems *will* occur in the field where there are no contractors around to help–send ’em home.
MikeF,
Do we need a decentralized strategy? How does that work exactly? We need a “strategy”, and how it is implemented is based on regional dynamics within each commander’s area of responsibility, but they better be striving towards accomplishing one over all strategy or we’re lost.
I think we need to stay away from the term indirect strategy, it leads us down the same rat hole the “through, by and with” mantra drags us into. We confuse “a” way (indirect) as the way, and sometimes confuse indirect as being a strategy. I’ll simplify this, because COIN often involves more than defeating an insurgency, but if the military objective is to defeat a particular guerrilla organization, then you don’t defeat it indirectly, you defeat it by creating certain effects against that group that destroy it or compel it to move towards a peace arrangement. The most important part of the strategy is determining what those effects are, and then determine the best means to accomplish them whether direct or indirect. We can already that many of our indirect approaches have failed, because they weren’t tied to a strategy.
It’s worth noting that this structural issue has particular relevance in Afghanistan due to the unique constraints on logistic support there. It seems fairly evident that in a landlocked theater where virtually all supply has to transit through problematic areas such as Pakistan and Uzbekistan there’s a huge incentive to reduce the footprint and do as much as possible with as little as possible. It does not seem that this incentive is being followed, though.
Having been a defense contractor in the intel world—bottomline—if we are asked to move forward to COPs and lower we go—armed and alot of times we are unarmed.
The problem with the experience side—yes if one is an SME then you have the experience due to years of working specific problems and having the deployments—but the real field experience depicts a large number of times Army personnel do not want to even listen to that experience when it offerred so one learns to refrain from offerring. If you are a SME with the Marines—a total out of body experience as they treat the SME with respect and include them at almost every turn and listen to them.
I always respond to the infighting about contractors in a combat environment–as my answer—IF the military had the manpower and manpower with a big M then you would not be seeing defense contractors in the combat zones—BUT the military does not have the manpower or if they do they do not want to extend the overseas tours to make up for the personnel shortages—have never seen a fully manned by MTOE deployed BCT/RCT.
Fully man the deployed units and you need less contractors–but then again alot of the defense contracting positions do not even exist any more in the military.
From Bill M.’s Dec 11, 8:28 PM comment below:
“At least after inital stumbles in World War II and Korea, the focus was on promoting warriors that could take the fight to the enemy. That is what was lost. The tangible change happened shortly after the Cold War, as we entered a series of deployments (to) Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Somalia, etc.; where the primary objective was to avioid casualties and incidents, not accomplish the mission.”
From Andrew Bacevich’s “Policing Utopia: The Military Imperatives of Globalization,” major section heading entitled “The Clinton Doctrine:” http://www.comw.org/pda/14dec/fulltext/99bacevich.html
“The Clinton Doctrine: “… avoid casualties, hold collateral damage to a minimum, use military action to compel or persuade … Secretary Albright: “We are talking about using military force but we are not talking about war, she snapped, “I think that is an important distinction.”
Should we, in considering the garrison mind-set, etc., take this into consideration, to wit: That, post-the Cold War, the military’s purpose came to be perceived as — not so much to fight and win our nations wars (see Sec. Albright above) — but to perform constabulary duties in support of globalization?
I have to second that sentiment. The senior leaders are the heart of the problem, through and through. In any organization this is true. When looking at an ate up battalion, for example, the first question should be “how bad are the officers?” If that still doesn’t explain everything, then ask how bad are the NCO’s. Then, and only then, do you ask if Joe is ate up.
Seeing the results of two different organizations operating in the same AO, one after the other, having dramatically different results one has to ask why. It wasn’t the equipment,neither was it Mission, Enemy, Time, Terrain, Troops, nor the Civilians that were the variable. It was the officers realizing that they could use the troops and equipment differently in the same METT-TC conditions. Key difference? The Officers. All the Joes and NCOs in both organizations passed pre-deployment training swimmingly and could shoot and move to standard. But how the leaders imagined their purpose and understood their environment was the key.
On the issue of reflective belts and relfective-belt-esque micromanagement I will say my opinion has shifted. At first I was that PL and jr staff officer moaning about the CSM not having a real job. Then, I came to believe that it was more about avoiding accountability and responsibility. The micromanagement wasn’t a symptom of a runaway bureaucracy trying to do too much and mucking things up, it was a symptom of a careerist bureaucracy controlling variables that impact NCOERs and OERs. Personally, I would sooner follow a leader that rewarded risk and proficiency than one who rewarded lack of deficiency. I won’t say I’m one that says garrison Army doesn’t belong in the field. Discipline is more applicable in the field than garrison in many ways. Discipline is not the issue.
I will leave this point with a real-world example. A single Soldier in a support company failed to catch a maintenance mistake when prepping his weapon, causing a misfire at the gate that injured him enough to go home. The injured Soldier happened to be on the same PB resupply convoy that the CSM was catching a ride on. Result: a land-owning maneuver unit was banned from taking .50 cals on patrol for 6 mo. after that. The 15-6 didn’t take 6 mo. Instead of doing corrective training based on the 15-6, the solution was to ban a weapon system from the maneuver Soldiers that had never had a problem. I am certain the leadership that made that call believed their call ensured that will never happen again. But at what cost? And what is the message to the junior NCOs and Officers that mind set sends?
Leaders. The Alpha and the Omega of American wars. Because god knows it’s not the bodies, steel, or rubber that we have a deficit of.