’10 Years Of Abject Failure’: Army, SOCOM, Marine Leaders Focus On ‘Strategic Landpower’
’10 Years Of Abject Failure’: Army, SOCOM, Marine Leaders Focus On ‘Strategic Landpower’ – Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr., Breaking Defense.
… Destroying a particular target is a complicated but solvable problem of physics. Defeating a formal unit is a more complex but well-studied question of military art. It’s massively more complex — a “wicked problem” — to anticipate the reactions of an entire society, or even understanding them swiftly enough to realize what’s happening, such as an insurgency, before it’s too late.
Strategically, that failure to understand the human factor is the root of the “abject failure” that the Army, Marines, and SOCOM are determined not to repeat. Politically, because humans live on land and are best understood through face-to-face interaction with other humans on the ground, emphasizing human factors is central to the argument that ground forces remain relevant. And institutionally for Special Operations, which is all about face-to-face interaction with foreigners, it would be a big boost in status to have formal, doctrinal recognition that there is a “human domain” of war…
“Strategically, the failure to understand the human factor is the root of the “abject failure” that the Army, Marines, and SOCOM are determined not to repeat.”
I submit that we must be much more direct, honest and specific than the amorphous term “the human factor” to identify the root cause of our problems. For example, consider this more specific description:
“Strategically, the failure to understand that:
a. While the goal of the United States is to transform different states and entire societies along modern western lines,
b. Different states and societies often do not wish to — nor often can they — readily trade (1) their ways of life for (2) modern western ways.
This is:
1. The essence of the “wicked problem,”
2. The root cause of “10 years of abject failure” and
3. The problem that landpower must learn to deal with and address in the 21st Century — should they wish to remain relevant.
Thus, if the Army, the Marines and SOCOM do not wish to repeat the mistakes made in the past 10 years, they must specifically address and come to terms with that portion of “the human factor” that relates to the head-on clash between:
a. The long-standing goals and objectives of the United States/the western world and
b. The often diametrically opposed and/or often very different goals and objectives of various other states and societies and individuals and groups.
Linda Robinson:
“Looking at everything that has happened over the last decade until now, we are not good enough at “shape and influence” — the military term for getting people, groups and governments to do what we want them to do without having to shoot at them first.”
Herein, and consistent with my argument above, should we say that the problem has less to do with our ability to “shape and influence” and more to do with the incompatible nature of the product which we are selling/pushing, to wit: modernization/westernization?
“War” being the common result of asking/demanding that states — and/or populations — do something that they simply cannot do?
How is it a “wicked problem” to anticipate that invading and occupying a foreign country is likely to produce insurgency? That possibility, or probability in the case of a place like Afghanistan, would naturally occur to anyone with a half dozen functioning synapses.
It makes sense that SOF is doing this- because they have to exist in the conventional world of DoD. But, it is sad too, because in adapting the systems and processes that DoD has, we become more like the rest. Above the ODA level I am wondering what, if anything, SOF has to offer that the rest of DoD doesn’t have- especially if our systems and processes force us to “see” warfare the same as everyone else does. I’d argue the strengths of SOF in the past have included the ability to see things in unconventional ways.
Specific comments:
“Defeating a formal unit is a more complex but well-studied question of military art. It’s massively more complex — a “wicked problem” — to anticipate the reactions of an entire society, or even understanding them swiftly enough to realize what’s happening, such as an insurgency, before it’s too late.”
It is possible that understanding an entire society- especially during an insurgency- one has to have the tools to do so and that our system does not prepare us to do so. Our system prepares us very well for situations wherein our objectives are clear, timelines are relatively short, and our national interests are self-apparent. Our entire system of systems with all its incumbent processes is very highly tuned to get the right person with the right training, equipment, education, command structure, plan, doctrine, etc. to a place to accomplish those clear objectives. Tweaking the margins of that system of systems and expecting it to also work in situations wherein we have no idea beforehand what DOTMLPF solution will work best is bordering on fantasy. Art implies creativity- and yet this effort is going in the exact opposite direction- SOF is becoming a more determinist organization- which will definitely get more $ and missions and attention, but I would argue will make us less effective in dealing with shaping ops- which to me implies reliance on less of a set plan and more of a nimble, decentralized, and less deterministic force.
“Strategically, that failure to understand the human factor is the root of the “abject failure” that the Army, Marines, and SOCOM are determined not to repeat.”
This is what I have the most problem with: the idea that we can institutionalize the understanding of humans and that will lead to strategic success. I didn’t see a huge problem at the tactical level with how our forces dealt with “the other”. Sure, there were some real blunders- but what the media ignored were the 75% good relations. It is in keeping with our cultural understanding and worldview that if we treat folks nice and understand them at the tactical level- that will help us win- and if we aren’t winning, we must not be acting nice enough. The problems I saw were more in the realm of the strategic and operational levels not understanding the paradigms they were operating under and how they were getting in the way of understanding. If we want to address that problem- then we have to look at our own systems first- instead of assuming they are good and synching them more.
“And institutionally for Special Operations, which is all about face-to-face interaction with foreigners, it would be a big boost in status to have formal, doctrinal recognition that there is a “human domain” of war…”
And thus we have the real reason for this effort: a big boost in status and formal doctrinal recognition. Yes, this is important- but only if one assumes that SOF adapting conventional systems and processes and growing closer to the conventional force will have more positives than negatives. The possibility that the system of systems that runs DoD http://www.afms1.belvoir.army.mil/files/primers/HTAR%28shortversion%297-10-10.pdf (it is relatively the same throughout the services) IS the problem- or at least gets in the way of being effective in “the human domain” more than anything else- should give us all pause. I think it is highly probable that everyone would improve if DoD adopted some of SOF’s processes and “anti-systems” approach to many things as opposed to the other way around…
It seemed that those who attended this meeting largely concluded that if we simply understood the human domain better we could win. What understanding the human domain better more accurately would enable is for planners and decision makers to determine what realistically can be accomplished and where so called human domain factors present significant risk to our desired ends. As most of us now realize the so called decisive combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan were far from decisive.
Lots of thinking on human domain lately that I’ll try to capture in an article since I have almost convinced myself contrary to my previous stance that we need to address human domain in our doctrine. I’m not backing off my position that this is simply common sense (that unfortunately isn’t common), but frankly since we’re too stupid to consider it if it isn’t in our doctrine telling us what to think. Why we to be reminded that war is ultimately about humans, not just opposing military or paramilitary forces is question worth pondering, because if we can identify the answer to that we may be able to come up with a relatively simple approach to create a collective paradigm shift within the military that enables our talented officers and NCOs to actually use their brains much like they did before they entered the Borg (or military). Doctrine was never intended to be so directive, but our military culture has devolved to the point where it embraces doctrine like a zealot embraces religion. We have a faith based belief if we follow it then we’ll accomplish our mission. We have encouraged our officers and NCOs to dismiss the value of curiosity and creativity when it comes to gaining understanding of the operational environment and developing feasible (to include non-traditional) approaches to achieving our desired goals. Of course there are many people who are exceptions to this rule, but exceptions to the rule don’t define our Army.
We approach planning in some respects with pre-set solutions consisting of six phases outlined in our Joint Planning Pub, although JP 5-0 states in the small print these are only suggested phases. Perhaps font needs to be enlarged, because those who entered the borg have embraced “the” prescribed six phases and thou shall not deviate.
Army doctrine and Joint Doctrine both perceive shaping operations as operations designed to gain a relative advantage to facilitate decisive operations. In my opinion we foolishly believe that a so-called decisive operation exists, and subsequently most, if not all, of our doctrine evolves around this notion. This doesn’t facilitate creative thinking in developing an approach to prevent conflict through a more subtle and holistic shaping effort that looks for opportunities beyond deterrence. It also hasn’t enabled a strategic success in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq. One can make an argument that the common interpretation of Clausewitz’s wisdom has had a very negative effective on our military’s thinking.
I think our desire to develop doctrinal based plans consisting of quantifiable objectives with associated effects and then tasks to achieve those effects are largely a waste of time that result from illusionary thinking. There are alternative approaches to addressing non-tradition (non major battle focused) security challenges that nest with the concept of mission command. Assuming we could evolve our force to once again (at least in SF) to be curious and creative, and provide them with a strategic context of the environment and what our nation desires the operational environment to look like they could then develop and adjust their own objectives based on their interaction with the environment where they will develop a much more nuanced understanding than the staff ever will. The commander and staff still owe them a very well thought out mission and intent, but they don’t need a laundry list of measurable objectives. They will need higher to truly embrace mission command and give them the freedom to be both proactive and responsive as they work towards the desired state as they interact with the environment. Commander and staffs will enable and provide guidance when necessary. All this will require a significant change in our culture, but it seems to align with the vision described in CCJO 2020.
I disagree with some of Grant’s comments below related to systems. We will ultimately have to adjust our system of systems (DOTMILPF) to facilitate the cultural change we need to implement mission command and free people to think. We’re largely a product of the system, so if you don’t change it I think it is asking a little bit much for the people at the end of the pipeline to change. The downsizing of the force is an opportunity to keep our best and focus on leading the revolutionary change we need to make.
True, we did not understand the “human domain” of Iraq and Afghanistan going in, and arguably we understand them little better coming out. But that is not why we produced so little of strategic value out of so much tactical energy applied across the range of miltiary, diplomacy and development.
We are looking for a fall guy to hang our current failures upon and a savior to prevent future ones. I doubt “Human Domain” is it, as human domain is a tactial construct to inform and improve tactical operations in populace-based conflicts. Tactics, however, are not how or why we fell short of our goals.
We fell short because we defined strategic goals and ends far beyond the capacity of any foreign invading force to achieve.
We fell short because we parked our Bradleys and MRAPs on the soveregnty and legitimacy of the nations we entered and did what we wanted, how we wanted to do it. And when that didn’t work we did even more of what we wanted how we wanted to do it. Doubling down on bad cards doesn’t work in Vegas, and it surely does not work in intervention efforts designed to make some place, some government, some people less of a concern to what we currently perceive our vital national interests to be.
We love tactics though, and we love the “rightness” of what we set out to achieve. Until we can step back and honestly discuss and assess what was wrong about what we set out to achieve we will never get to concepts that lead us to achieving more reasonable ends in ways that are far more respectful of the sovereignty and legitimacy of others – and that make interests that are truly vital (not just currently politically popular to call vital) as secure as they need to be.
Our failings in understanding of human nature in general dwarf our understanding of human culture in any particular time or place. Lets get the foundation right first, as that is what our strategic failures are built upon.
All the talk about understanding the human terrain is a bunch of malarky. If everyone of our soldiers and Marines had a degree in social science and anthropology and spoke Arabic, Pashto, and Dari, the outcome of the past 10 years would hardly have been different. As an institution we are fooling ourselves.
Our strength is in flexibility. No one knows what the next conflict will look like. On top of that, it is our civilian leaders who commit the nation to war. The military gets a vote, but not the final say. Creating a force with a broad range of capabilities is the key. The services should be distinct. Let the Marines focus on amphibious warfare, the Army on large scale maneuver, and SOF on niche capabilities which include regional expertise and language. The operational art is in employing a combination of these forces at the right place and time to achieve strategic objectives.
IMO the conflict in Pak/AF provides a critical opportunity to correct a fundamental flaw in the way the US aligns military strategy with its foreign policy. We often hear how a sizable proportion our well educated and dedicated senior military leadership in-explicitly become entangled in Machiavellian webs of vanity, careerism, deceit , avariciousness , sycophancy, messianic delusions, pork, Kafkaesque empire building, illicit sex blah, blah, blah and in doing so render our vastly superior Air, Sea and Land forces strategically impotent .
IMO the implausibility of such glaringly obvious shortcoming going unnoticed in so many stellar military careers (it appears other western armed forces are no less maligned) suggests to me something unique to military affairs is impacting leadership which cannot be explained away by normal human frailty and weakness.
Many folks go to great lengths to explain how the conflict in AF/Pak is not war and because we believe it is when it is not, strategy shaped on this mistake is stillborn from the get-go. The crux of the argument being not all violence is war – war has a distinct nature and the existence of certain war-like characteristics does not preordain a state of war exists. No doubt there is a great deal of truth in that but who’s viewpoint should we listen to? Whom is in a position to best understand whether the conflict is large scale civil unrest or war? I would suggest if the natives believe a state of war exists then it doesn’t matter what Johnny foreigner says or argues – war it is.
We could be forgiven for believing our military leadership should understand war and given a reasonable transition period our tactical and operational excellence should quickly align with the HN’s strategic goals as well as our own. But as we all know this has not happened for a very long time. In fact much has gone horribly wrong.
While the answers to these failures have stubbornly remained elusive to our own political and military masters such is not the case for our smiling Asian friends and our/their inscrutable Asian foes.
IMHO rather for want of personal integrity in our political and military leadership I believe our obsession with modernity and materialism has caused us to make the profound mistake that war and battle are the same thing. More precisely we believe war is a series of battles and if we shape our conventional GPFs to win any battle on land, sea and in the air we will win wars. To Afghans, Paks, Indians, Chinese, Iranians, Syrians, Iraqis and Vietnamese this is completely stupid. As far as they are concerned battle-proven mechanized excellence is of little consequence to a nation’s war fighting capability.
It is difficult to imagine a more abject example of the folly of Air, Sea, and Land Battle than Vietnam. The defeat in VN at the hands of tiny people, with tiny minds, a tiny army living in a tiny backward country should have stabbed a cold ideological bayonet into the very heart of our military leadership and compelled us to understand that victory in battle might be decided by machines but victory in war will always be decided by peoples. No matter if, as in VN, we are foolish enough to spend more money on mechanized battle systems than the rest of the world combined it will not alter the final outcome.
In VN we refused to go to war in the north and in doing so avoided war in the heartland of the NVA. More importantly we avoided the Red River Delta for the simple reason we refused to go to war with the PLA. Instead we chose to fight a meaningless series of battles in the south of the country.
Needless to say if our leadership had chosen war in the north the experience of VN would have been a much greater catastrophe than it ended up being. However the avoidance of a greater disaster rings hollow for want of our better appreciation of the gravity of war and the frivolity of battle. In other words we should have listened to many who understood this and kept out of VN in the first place.
In Afghanistan the gravitas of our failure to understand this difference has become such a crippling burden that we have convinced ourselves that for lack of a suitable foe (whom we deem worthy to engage our GPF in battle) we are taking our ‘bat and ball’ and leaving war to others. Once again we have scoped down onto battle for the simple reason we refuse or are unable to fight war.
Safely back in the homeland we will no doubt renew all our shiny machines and spend a fortune on new ones. There will no shortage of charging around proving grounds, surging across the ocean and launching no end of exotic weapon systems and platforms off numerous Battle Groups in toothless displays of battle-fixated ‘shock and awe’ firepower.
The strategic narrative justifying all of this is we await the Chinese to do battle with us somewhere on the 165 million square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately the chances of the Chinese rewriting Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of War’ to illuminate their simple minds as to the ‘Art of Battle’ seems as remote as a Clausewitz inspired rewrite titled ‘On Battle’ . I would suggest a collectivized frontal lobotomy of PLA leadership to be more likely.
As in VN, Iraq and AF we repeatedly insist our GPFs provide excellent tactical answers to the wrong operational questions in a vicious cycle of infinite regress that chokes the life out of any strategist attempting to align tactics and operations with a worthwhile strategic outcome.
So what?
It is not only Asian nations that understand that war is the graduate level of policy and battle is grade school. Non-state actors also understand the difference and none more so than ALQ and the MB. Unfortunately for us recent developments have provided an unexpected boost for both of these organizations to achieve their war aims.
The Navy has removed the deluded Messiah from the ALQs leadership and in the hands of AaZ ALQ has an patient, intelligent and astute leader whose deep hatred of Israel realigns ALQ strategy with that of the MB and the ‘Arab Spring’.
ALQ did not move to the AF/Pak region so as to better fly airliners into some US public buildings, blow up public transport across the Europe, cut people’s heads off on the internet and generally ‘piss off the entire world’. That would be a pointless battle-minded pursuit. They are in the region to acquire a nuclear weapon from which they hope to fabricate a nuclear IED (NIED)with which to attack Israel.
Up until the successful democratic election of the MB in Egypt ALQ’s underground organization would have found fabricating a NIED from scratch impossible. In recognition of that reality they have had to be in a position where stealing one (i.e. a Pakistani one) was the only realistic possibility. But now that is no longer their only option.
A MB government makes available the economic, political, industrial and military infrastructure of a large country and gives ALQ the second option to fabricate a nuclear weapon from scratch. All that this ALQ-MB alliance requires is a Pakistani sympathizer who has access to the technical drawing. So rather than the sole option of starting a civil war in AF/Pak and snatching a handful of nukes in the resulting chaos a file attached to an email from an ‘atom spy’ would open a second front from where ALQ can double down on the effort to achieve their strategic objectives.
The bloody events of the coup in Egypt have draped the cloak of martyrdom on the MB who prior to the coup was already the most democratically popular political party in Egypt. When the MB are returned to government the collective leadership of the Egyptian military will no doubt be given the same treatment as the hundreds of unarmed people they ordered to be shot down in the streets. The Face book/Twitter imagery showing civilians carrying wounded kids away from the confrontation and being shot in the back for their trouble are a MB recruiting sergeants’ godsend.
The ‘new’ Egypt will dispense with their current battle-centric Army and adopt the Persian model of a huge UW force shielded by a nuclear arsenal. In the fullness of time when they are duly ready the two Armies will begin to squeeze their neighbors and slowly encroach on Israel from opposite fronts.
The IDF (the ultimate disciples of ‘battle is best’) will sporadically lash out with battle and in doing so stoke the fuel of the coming fire-storm. Ironically this mind frame is the very opposite of the hard men of Shin Bet who despise this battle-rattle and like their Arab foes respect and fear the more resonant drumbeat of war.
Some folks will suggest that a Sunni –Shia Pact will never happen but that’s exactly what we told the Polish Jews when Molotov was having a not so secret meeting with Ribbentrop in August 1939.
Inevitability there will come a point when the Sunni wolf chooses to lay with the Shia sheep. When this happens we will be forced to bear witness to a second attempt by modern ‘civilization’ to exterminate the Jews.
From the splendid vantage points we have constructed to intercept the Chinese Armada we will have a birds-eye view of the effects of the only battle device that trumps everyone and everything. Once again we will experience what happens to human beings when they find themselves on the surface of the sun.
Unfortunately for all of us the last time we sunk this low the world was a more genteel place and the in the summer of August 1945 the Japanese were offered an opportunity to surrender. IMO this time round we will not be so blessed. This time no quarter will be asked for and none will be given.
“Here comes the sun……ditter ditter…….and it’s alright”,
RC
“… 10 years of abject failure …”
What is it then — specifically — that we abjectly failed to do in the past 10 years?
Was it: To cause Iraq and Afghanistan — ever so smoothly, quickly and efficiently — to become ordered, oriented, organized and configured more along modern western lines?
Can this abject failure be traced to a lack of understanding and appreciation of something that resides within “the human domain?”
If so, what is this specific aspect of the human domain — that we failed to adequately understand, address and appreciate — that relates most directly to our inability to smoothly, quickly and efficiently transform these states and societies more in our image?