Michael Furlong, the long-time Defense Department official who set up and ran network of private intelligence collectors for the military, is being hung out to dry by the very forces that precipitated the network's formation in the first place. Here's the skinny: form follows function in the military, and the U.S. Strategic Command, or STRATCOM, has been aggressively moving into territory traditionally occupied by other military elements and the Central Intelligence Agency. They're doing it under the cover of something called IO -- Information Operations -- which they've adapted as one of their core missions. (The others: cybersecurity, which overlaps with IO, nuclear weapons, and space defense.)
Around 2004 or 2005, STRATCOM set up what it calls the Joint Information Operations Warfare Center in San Antonio, Texas. IO ops are run from here. Most everyone involved in this controversy, from Furlong to his superiors to the contractor intelligence gatherers, went through the JIOWC at some point in their careers. The CIA doesn't think STRATCOM should play in this lane. But neither does Robert Gates, the Defense Secretary, or the State Department, or the National Security Staff. Information Operations involves five fields: deception, psychological operations, computer network operations, electronic warfare and operations security...
More at The Atlantic.
What If COIN Just Doesn't Work? - Ann Marlowe, World Affairs.
I don't mean, What if counterinsurgency is too trendy? or What if we shouldn't neglect preparing for conventional wars in our enthusiasm for COIN? I mean, what if counterinsurgency has never, ever, anywhere actually worked? What if our military has been chasing a chimera for almost four years — or more? These thoughts are prompted by my last couple of trips to Afghanistan where, truth to tell, there doesn't seem to be any increase in security when our troops do the right stuff (getting out among the people, lots of presence, lots of talking). We've got it down to a science now: the shuras, the projects, the provincial development plans, the embedded partners (is it my imagination or does the current military jargon for police mentors sound like a euphemism for a gay relationship?).
COIN makes sense intellectually, especially in the pellucid prose of David Galula, who wrote better in English than Roger Trinquier in French. Part of the reason it makes sense is that COIN is congruent with our culture's bias toward a perspectival view of reality. As General McChrystal keeps saying, counterinsurgency is a matter of perception. If you feel that the government provides security, that's reality. If you feel insecure, that's reality. We think lots of stuff is a matter of perspective, from modern art and music to ethics. But when COIN succeeded, it may well have had nothing to do with the living among the people bit — or the talking bit...
More at World Affairs.
Comments
Ann, I'm the last one to mention this because I'm something of a brawler, but I don't think that you really meant to write that the way you did.
Just because Foust was rude doesn't mean that you should your exceptional skills as a writer to pare him to whittles.
Your arguments were strong enough without resorting to listing credentials, which I suspect you don't much blandish or I would've heard of them years ago.
You're a gracious person. Don't sacrifice a trait I much envy for a rash moment I too often reveal.
Joshua Foust ought to read more closely if he is going to "run his mouth". The province I wrote about, Khost, is one of Afghanistan's smallest, the size of the Bay Area. Not a "vast swath". What happened in Khost between 2007-8 was an experiment, flawed, but suggestive. Many elements were copied elsewhere, mainly with less success. But since it is hard to disentangle the COIN strategy in Khost from the larger national and international factors impacting security there and in other parts of Afghanistan, we can't conclusively say it failed or not. I am starting to wonder how culturally relative COIN may be, and said so, quite speculatively, in the freeflowing environment of a blog. Not exactly written in stone.
As to my credentials compared with Mr. Foust's, well, he's what, 4 years out of a third tier college and has one trip to Afghanistan under his belt and doesn't speak or read Farsi or Pastu, as far as I am informed. I've had a bit more experience of the world and of Afghanistan (14 trips, 6 embeds),have studied Farsi (reading, speaking, writing) as well as 8 other foreign languages, graduated magna from Harvard,spent a year in the Ph.D. program in philosophy at Harvard, got an MBA in finance from Columbia. I have a monograph on David Galula coming out with the Army War College this summer, reflecting archival research, interviews and reading in French.
It's rather touching after all this time that Joshua Foust still finds fulfillment in attacking me and my supposed "friend" Scott Custer, who retired a couple of years back as a LTC and is now running Fort Bragg. I wrote about Custer as a journalist and had and have no social relationship with him, haven't seen him since he left Afghanistan in spring 2008 and have had no contact with him other than a couple of one or sentence emails. I'm not sure how that makes us "friends". But Foust seems to be unable to separate approving of someone's tactics or strategy as a commander from being their "friend". Chalk one up to the Facebook generation, perhaps?
You're charitable. I strongly doubt the article is even reasonably accurate. There are numerous errors of fact as revealed in other open sources, not least the origin, purpose and current manning of the HTTs.
I have long wondered at the presumed and often stated credibility of the magazine that carries him. This article and others like it are the reason for my cynicism. One could almost divine the author is essentially ignorant on the topic and was fed some information to purposely drop a few random Dimes in a national forum in a flawed attempt to sow hate and discontent...
RE: Ann Marlowe, big words from a woman Mr. Dilegge <a href="http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/11/on-anthropology-goes-to-war-1/… called out</a> for ignorantly running her mouth off at a topic she had clearly never studied seriously. She also, in that same essay Mr. Dilegge rightly highlighted for getting everything wrong save the conclusion, declared vast swaths of Afghanistan perfectly safe and successful because of her friend's COIN efforts. Only now, now that there's data and her friends aren't involved, now she sees that a few months of good doesn't really equal success.
World Affairs Journal remains a prestigious journal, but honestly, the crowd here can do themselves more favors than reading Ann Marlowe. Like most amateurs at this game, she is comfortable making grand pronouncements in the severest of terms - this is totally successful, wait now it's totally a failure - with no acknowledgment or even possibility that words and ideas matter, and when you advocate one thing that fails you should not blithely advocate your next bright idea without a modicum of reflection on why you were wrong.