Journal

With posters on Mission Command adorning virtually every classroom at the US Army’s Command and General Staff College, and with its prominence as one of the pillars of the Army’s Operational Concept, the term Mission Command has become a buzzword. One of the concept’s true benefits relies on quality personnel, and developing those leaders through the proper use of historical case studies can help to not only make military history engaging but also useful in everyday duties for even a young officer or a non-commissioned officer, and contribute to developing quality personnel.

In this essay I will argue that the threat of convergence to the Westphalian System has been exaggerated. Then, using the FARC and Colombia as a case study, I will argue that convergence is already being used to justify morally questionable interventions.

The Sinai conflict possesses all the traits of a robust insurgency, a human rights disaster, and the prerequisite conditions to escalate outside the peninsula. Strategies are based on resources, and resource limitations necessitate a focus on such issues as ISIS in Syria. However, external states cannot turn away from the situation. Europe and the United States should challenge human rights abuses and push the Egyptian authorities to reform their counterinsurgency tactics.

Recent and extensive developments in technology, media, communications, and culture – such as the advent of social media, 24-hour news coverage, and smart devices – allow populaces to closely monitor domestic and foreign affairs. This “ability to share information in near real time,” is an asset to the Nation and its military. However, these advances have also facilitated the convergence of new vulnerabilities to individual and international security, as seen with the rise of computer hacking over the past decade, as well as with Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

For the first time in human history, we live in an age where there are no means to predict the technology dictating life a mere few years from now. Innovations in several fields like medicine, communication and information happen at such a rapid pace that the lifestyle of an average human being today is likely to be unrecognizable from that of someone a decade down the line. The most concerning implication of this phenomenon is in warfare, where policymakers today are already having to confront themselves with emerging technologies that will shake the very roots of how we wage war.

This article is the latest addition to the U.S. Army TRADOC G2 Mad Scientist Initiative’s Future of Warfare 2030-2050 project at Small Wars Journal. Autonomous systems in a complex city environment would present both opportunities and challenges for U.S. Army units operating in such environments. Over the next decades, technologies will also transform these operating environments.

Erik Prince, the former CEO of Blackwater has been pushing the privatization of the Afghan war as an alternative to the present strategy of gradually completing the Afghanization of the war. This is obviously a very controversial proposal, but it is one that at least merits some consideration. There is one remote area of Afghanistan that might well serve as a laboratory for privatization - the provision of construction security for the Ring Road in the remote northwestern region. Completing of the road was the most wicked problem I faced in my time in country, and the situation has not improved since I left in 2012.

Recently, 1ST Lieutenant Virginia Brodie authored an article featured at Task and Purpose entitled: “Hey! You Shouldn’t Address A Bunch of Marines As ‘Gentlemen’ When the Group Includes Female Marines”. In this article, she reported feeling excluded as a female Marine when her commander addressed a formation using the term “gentlemen”. 1stLt Brodie suggested the inclusion of the language “Ladies and” to prevent this feeling of exclusion of female Marines. While her suggestion may seem straight forward, it presents issues with the complexity of the English language and historical usage of terms that may be valuable to maintain within the military.

The rise of terror attacks across the United Kingdom (UK) has been a harsh wake up call for the nation to re-evaluate its strategy for countering terrorism, known as CONTEST. Its first version was produced in 2003, with updated revisions in 2009 and 2011. Since 2011, the UK has suffered seven deadly terror attacks stemming from both far right wing and Islamic inspired extremism.

‘Terrorism’ and ‘insurgency’ describe inherently divergent methods of political violence. Although the label itself ought not to infer any analytical proscriptions, the misidentification of a threat can drastically undermine policy intended to counter it.

Instead of planning for the creation of another service, we should dedicate ourselves to the unfinished work that Eisenhower and Marshall began, by unifying our defense establishment and creating an organization that best serves American interests rather than our existing bureaucracies. With the threats we face and a President seemingly willing to challenge every calcified orthodoxy of ineffective government, there cannot have been a greater need or better time in modern U.S. history to think bigger for defense.

This work is the result of the authors’ numerous engagements with senior leaders explaining what Artificial Intelligence is, what it is not, and why there is such hype currently surrounding it for military applications. The lead author is currently leading the effort for the DoD CIO in standing up DoD’s Joint AI Center.

Even the U.S. Government's own investigation into and report on the lessons we've learned about stabilizing Afghanistan openly admits broad-cut failure: “Our analysis reveals the U.S. government greatly overestimated its ability to build and reform government institutions in Afghanistan as part of its stabilization strategy. We found the stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it were not properly tailored to the Afghan context, and successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical presence of coalition troops and civilians. As a result, by the time all prioritized districts had transitioned from coalition to Afghan control in 2014, the services and protection provided by Afghan forces and civil servants often could not compete with a resurgent Taliban as it filled the void in newly vacated territory.”

Insurgents have a symbiotic relationship with their popular support base. The people provide money, food/supplies, new recruits, and intelligence while the insurgents provide protection, advancement of social, economic, and political aims, and social services, e.g., education and health care. Oppressive regimes attempt to separate the insurgents from their popular support base, that is according to Mao Zedong, to dry up/divert the water (popular support base) in which the fish (insurgents) swim. The FBR organize-train-equip model design is worthy of study by the unconventional warfare community for its potential applicability to support insurgences through strengthening the bonds and rapport between insurgents and their popular support base.

Greater attention has been drawn in recent years to the atrocities committed in Balochistan. The decades-long insurgency has galvanized the nation and cannot be resolved until there is better investment in civil efforts. The Supreme Court and its affiliated judicial bodies must convince the military to respect the law and be an example of human rights. The armed groups in Balochistan have largely defeated themselves through infighting and a fractured leadership system. Pakistan should seize this opportunity to address the core grievances that Balochistan faces.

To date, there are dozens of scholarly articles speculating on the nature of Russian unconventional actions. This debate has only led to further inaction. Rather than debate over the appropriate response to a new generation of warfare, policymakers should recognize that the Russian government is conducting a form of warfare that has been firmly rooted in U.S. military doctrine for over 50 years.

In early July, the Saudi Arabian-led coalition halted its siege of the Yemeni port of Hodeidah to allow space for UN efforts to negotiate a political settlement. After three plus years of conflict, the United States, through its support of the coalition, has not achieved its strategic goals in the region, while also suffering harm to its international reputation. The Trump Administration should take this opportunity to press its allies, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to negotiate an end to the civil war in Yemen.

The U.S. military has re-orientated its efforts to countering and deterring Russia abroad. While American counterintelligence and law enforcement has focused on information warfare from Russian assets both abroad and in country, the military has re-shaped its training and deployment to reflect near-peer armed conflict in Europe. Commanders have lost sight of counterinsurgency theory and counterterrorism, replacing it with understanding the Russian way of war.

The Taliban fighter today does not seek honor. He seeks cleanliness. When contaminated, he uses blood, the blood of that which is non-Taliban, as soul bleach. Any act, no matter how far outside the realm of human decency or of traditional Afghan honor codes it may be, now becomes possible for a Taliban fighter as long as he cleanses himself in medias res or ex post facto, in blood. Without the modulating elaborations of honor-rooted, traditional, highly evolved, overlapping clan relationships, the resulting cultural product -- the Taliban's fighter -- is more primal, far less sophisticated, and far less stable and predictable than the traditional Afghan warrior.

The United States’ network of alliances and partnerships is an often heralded military advantage. Yet, this advantage is in many ways shaped, advanced, and maintained through military to military relations, especially those built through military training. Training foreign military personnel in American military institutions is an effective form by which to enhance defense familiarity with allies and partners—it’s a valuable program for our country. In addition to educating and training foreign military officers, these education programs build lasting relationships among officers of different countries contributing to a critical network of defense personnel around the world.

Read-ahead notes for a 19 July 2018 seminar with the “senior class” at The School of Advanced Military Studies, Command and General Staff College, Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.

Many of Africa's armed conflicts constitute wicked problems. Across parts of the continent, organized violence is fusing political, criminal and extremist motives, explicitly targeting civilians and involving multiple armed groups. In many cases, regional players are involved — profiting from disorder even as they sue for peace. Complicating matters, national and subnational governments suffer from chronic weaknesses, with limited control over their borders and territories. Due to the many security dilemmas arising from competing groups and the corrosive effects of predatory violence, these conflicts are exceedingly difficult to resolve.

Mexico’s powerful drug cartels could be using armed drones to attack those impeding their criminal operations, marking the potential expansion of the use of this technology from just transporting drugs or carrying out surveillance.

Ethnic/tribal identity is so sensitive an issue in Afghanistan today that neither the CIA nor any other entity monitoring demographics in Afghanistan (or its Diasporas) can provide even ball-park statistics about how many or which specific individuals belong to what ethnic, tribal, clan, or sectarian groups (genetic testing is, however, beginning to secure some reliable ethnic data). While Taliban and most other violent extremists proudly self-identify as Pashtun, the tribal, clan, and ethnic identity of the other Afghan today tends to change depending on which side of the street he's standing, which goat path he's using, or the immigration agent to whom he's relating his refugee narrative.

This is the latest addition to the U.S. Army TRADOC G2 Mad Scientist Initiative’s Future of Warfare 2030-2050 project at Small Wars Journal. This paper provides a framework on the future of war in 2050 and is also a call to action, providing examples of current and emerging nutritional research to help the Army take its first steps toward a nutrition revolution.

In counterterrorism, the interrogation of high-value targets (HVTs) can be difficult. Rapport building can be near impossible because HVTs may be determined not to talk regardless of the approach strategies used by the interrogator. If these unconventional HVTs were members of a conventional military, it would be said that they possessed a high degree of resistance training.

Instead of creating a sixth service, I recommend radically reorganizing the U.S. Air Force (USAF), using its manpower and existing resources as the foundation for establishing the Space Force. In doing so, I recommend not only consolidating the space personnel and assets of the other services but also stripping the USAF of its fighter platforms and turning those over to the U.S. Army (and re-establish the Army Air Corps) allowing it to control and defend the airspace of the areas they’re fighting in and on.

Today, the Army Rangers are a key component of the US Special Operations capability. Their participation in world-wide SOF operations, as portrayed in “Blackhawk Down”, highlights their employment in this role. It was not always so, and its transition to SOF was bitterly resisted by many within the Army structure. It was only due to force deficiencies in Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (SFOD-D) during the planning phase of the Iran rescue attempt, that forced their inclusion. From that, all else has flowed. Inclusion, now taken for granted, was a hard and bumpy road.

The Syrian regime’s application of “reconciliation agreements” in northwest Syria risks accelerating the humanitarian situation for internally displaced persons and destabilizing areas previously liberated from ISIS. There are no longer viable options for relocating individuals from Idlib Governorate given the presence of Turkish or U.S.-led Coalition elements in the other areas that remain outside of the regime’s control.

Selling military equipment in Kabul has become a cause for concern among both Afghans and their international partners. To maintain law and order, boost the morale of Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), and strengthen the trust between ANSF and ordinary Afghans, the Kabul police must ban selling military goods in open markets.

As outlined in this report, I chose a specific terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, and analyzed the role that they played in cyberterrorism. Throughout the paper, I discussed how the terrorist organization utilized the internet to indoctrinate as well as recruit likeminded extremist individuals, delved into how Al Qaeda used the internet to conduct cyberterrorism, included some insight into how this particular terrorist organization’s activities effect the larger topic of cybersecurity, and touched on what the future of Al Qaeda could be in the cyber realm. Hopefully, after reading this paper, people will not dismiss Al Qaeda’s cyberterrorist capabilities or underestimate them while they are probably in the process of refining their credibility in cyberspace.

When we met with South Sudanese civil society leaders in Juba last month and asked about the latest peace agreement after a series of unsuccessful accords, one common retort was “same paper, same pens.” We share their impatience for peace, which is why we’re joining our voices with theirs and calling on the U.S. government to adopt a new approach that puts civilians first in South Sudan.

The unit exists in an altered form today, but it is an example as to how the USG can effectively mix Title 10 and 50 rules to achieve a common end and how conventional bureaucracies can stifle needed imaginative resolutions. Part 1 of 3 - Rangers and TF160/SOAR to follow.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is the most rapidly advancing terrorist group of the past five years. The problem is that it is not a terrorist group at all. Just because a group commits grave atrocities and “terrorizes” citizen populations does not make it a terrorist group. That is not what terrorism means.

The most significant weakness of the counterinsurgency efforts is that the Myanmar government has not addressed any of the root causes driving the ARSA insurgency. The Rohingya Muslims continue to be classified as stateless people due their lack of citizenship within Myanmar and the limited and nearly impossible methods for seeking naturalization or repatriation.

The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) declared their insurgency in 1964 and did not sign a peace agreement with the Government of Colombia (GoC) until 2016. This qualifies the FARC insurgency as one of the longest running in history (Leech, 2011). Through fifty-two years of government attacks, terrible defeats, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and through the demobilization or defeat of many sister movements, the FARC persisted. In this paper, I will attempt to account for this persistence.

Special Operations Command Africa cannot go far alone, especially in Africa. While Special Operations Forces (SOF) are among the most expeditionary of all military forces, capable of providing their own SOF-specific sustainment, they still require common user logistics such as replenishment of supplies, reliable transportation, logistics services, and engineering support. It is this category of sustainment that is the most challenging in Africa and requires significant coordination within the logistics enterprise.

What was most extraordinary about the guerrilla leader William Wallace was the speed in which a virtual unknown rose up to national leadership and the short time between his first action, the killing of the English Sherriff of Lanark in May 1297 and his victory at the Battle of Stirling Bridge on 11 September 1297, a mere four months later. Even more compelling was that within a year he had ceased his position as Guardian of Scotland in favour of Robert the Bruce, the future King of Scotland, before disappearing until capture and vile execution on the orders of King Edward 1 of England in 1305, only eight years between rise and demise.

Robotic technologies seem set to disrupt warfare in at least two big ways: firstly, in improving productivity making armies equipment-centric; and secondly, in making defence dominant on the battlefield. In this revolution, the character of war will change and somewhat unexpectedly, possibly its nature.

SWJ discussion with retired Lieutenant General Frederick Benjamin (Ben) Hodges, the Pershing Chair in Strategic Studies at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a former commander of the United States Army Europe (2014-2017). He co-authored (together with Janusz Bugajski and Peter Doran) the report – “Securing The Suwałki Corridor: Strategy, Statecraft, Deterrence, and Defense.”

This article is the latest addition to the U.S. Army TRADOC G2 Mad Scientist Initiative’s Future of Warfare 2030-2050 project at Small Wars Journal. To predict learning in 2050, we must observe learning now in 2018; the technologies of learning, the culture of learning, and the audience of learning.

This incident should be considered an escalation of cartel/gang drone use and certainly won’t be the last use of armed drones in Mexico’s crime wars or by terrorists and/or insurgents elsewhere. Indeed, as we complete this assessment, a drone attack on 4 August 2018 in Caracas characterized as an attempted assassination on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro dominates the news. The effectiveness of these future drone attacks is expected to vary—indeed most can be expected to inflict limited damage—however over time the threat will likely mature, yielding enhanced lethality and operational effectiveness.

This paper explores how special operations forces have adapted to working with counterparts at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in addressing violent extremism at the country level and how these adaptations relate to broader policy discussions. Two case studies will be used as the basis of the study to examine how civil affairs teams have integrated with missions in Jordan and Tajikistan.

This essay challenges you to think differently about leadership, to see new meaning in familiar terms but specifically to draw an unfamiliar but hard distinction between leading and the functions of running an organization. It asks that you reject longstanding traditions about what is leadership or who is the leader and see it more as a collaborative effort, a state of being.

America’s Navy is badly in need of reform. After eight years under Obama’s abysmal Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, the Navy is under disciplined and largely lacking the basic skills needed to conduct seamanship - much less win a war at sea.

Perhaps most significant change in the 21st century has been the shift in focus from state security to ‘human security’, viewed as a sorely needed venue for highlighting the particular vulnerabilities of peoples who suffer violence from representatives of the stat, as well as other forms of violence and injustices. While addressing the challenges of human security is a worthy cause, the ambiguity presented by the concept of examining human security is undeniable.

Perhaps no army in history has ever juggled as wide and challenging an array of campaigns and conditions as the British Army did from 1897 to 1945. Battling enemies from Burma to Belgium, the British Army rapidly transformed itself from a small imperial constabulary to a war-winning conscript mass army, shrank back almost overnight, and then repeated the trick barely twenty years later. Through it all, from the height of empire to the Pyrrhic victory of the Second World War, one of the army’s few constants was ceaseless mountain warfare on the Northwest Frontier of India.

This article is the latest addition to the U.S. Army TRADOC G2 Mad Scientist Initiative’s Future of Warfare 2030-2050 project at Small Wars Journal. This paper examines the term technological fluency as it applies to future Special Operations Forces in the 2030 – 2050 timeframe. It begins with a proposed definition. It then shapes the discussion.

There are a record number of ongoing conflicts in Africa, pushing millions of people out of their homes. New conflicts are displacing new people while long-standing wars and refugee crises go unresolved. If responses to war and displacement do not improve, mounting problems will destabilize the region further.

Time and time again, counterterrorism experts both in cabinet policy and military capacities alike have contended that you cannot just kill your way to victory when it comes to countering terrorism or violent extremism. They have argued that kinetic acts, such as drone strikes or capturing battlefield combatants, do not so much as reduce terrorists or terrorist actions (albeit temporarily) as much as they fuel the fire to a new generation of extremists. Meanwhile, we have invested most of our counterterrorism resources to either killing or capturing terrorists despite these revelations.