The military's effort to build a seasoned corps of expert officers for the Afghan war, one of the highest priorities of top commanders, is off to a slow start, with too few volunteers and a high-level warning to the armed services to steer better candidates into the program, according to some senior officers and participants. The groundbreaking program is meant to address concerns that the fight in Afghanistan has been hampered by a lack of continuity and expertise in the region among military personnel. But some officers have been reluctant to sign up for an unconventional career path because they fear it will hurt their advancement - a perception that top military leaders are trying to dispel as they tailor new policies for the complex task of taking on resilient insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Each military branch has established career paths, and the type of focus envisioned by the program would take people off those routes.

The difficulties with the program came to light when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, in an unusual rebuke within the Pentagon's uppermost circle, chided the chiefs of the four armed services three weeks ago for not always providing the best people. The program - which is expected to create a 912-member corps of mostly officers and enlisted service members who will work on Afghanistan and Pakistan issues for up to five years - was announced with much fanfare last fall. So far, 172 have signed up, and Admiral Mullen has questioned whether all of them are right for such a critical job...

More at The New York Times.

Overhauling Intelligence Ops in the Afghan War - Tom Ricks, Best Defense

Pentagon Slams Publication of General's Think-Tank Report - Blake Hounshell, FP Passport

The Most Important Thing You'll Read on Afghanistan This Month - Andrew Exum, Abu Muqawama

Coalition Urged to Revamp Intelligence Gathering, Distribution in Afghanistan - Walter Pincus, Washington Post

U.S. Retools Military Intelligence - Jay Solomon and Yochi Dreazen, Wall Street Journal

Military Intelligence Chief Orders Reorganization - Anna Mulrine, US News & World Report

Intelligence Overhaul Ordered for Afghanistan - Julian E. Barnes and Laura King, Los Angeles Times

Pentagon Calls Spy Critique "Irregular" - Reuters

CSM Michael Hall, the ISAF Command Sergeant

Major, has created a series of Intro to COIN videos that are being featured on

the ISAF Channel at You Tube and

are worth a look.  He is one of the point people for helping to educate

audiences from average folks on the street to political leaders to the force in

theater about the challenges of COIN in general and Afghanistan in particular.

The featured blurb here is the 6th and last in this series, "Nobody's an

Afghan Expert" and subtitled "Counterinsurgency Can't Be Looked At Through

Western Eyes."

The other five are:

1. ISAF Vision

   for Counterinsurgency

2. ISAF

   Message

3. What is

   "Hearts & Minds?"

4. Partnering
5. Protecting

   the People

This is a nice, simple, applied blocking and

tackling reiteration of the challenges well treated in works from

Galula to

Kilcullen.

See also CSM Hall's blog entry

How to Win in Afghanistan and How to Lose, where three other would-be bombers

create an interesting foil to the donkey-equipped bomber trio in the

first video of

the series.

As the counterinsurgency community continues to prepare leaders and units to confront and defeat irregular threats, it is clear that in spite of much progress, there is much yet to be done. All of our efforts should focus on enabling leaders, teams, and units to be better prepared for this challenge than our adversaries. Counterinsurgency at its core is a competitive and lethal environment in which those who learn faster and better win. Rapidly assessing, understanding, and adapting are essential to counter the nexus of criminality, corruption, instability, and narcotics that fuel ongoing insurgencies. Only in this manner can we generate and sustain the momentum -- physical, social, political, and psychological -- necessary to protect the population and prevail in enduring conflicts amongst the people.

The President's recent decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan helps bring into focus the complexity of the challenge to U.S. strategic objectives. A key initiative to address this challenge is the establishment of a 3-star NATO Training Mission for Afghanistan which will seek to improve Afghanistan security force training, leadership, and sustainability. Much of its expertise is derived from lessons and experience in Iraq where a key component of the U.S. efforts continues to be spear-headed by the work of Brigade Combat Teams operating as Advise and Assist Brigades. It is imperative that COIN, Stability Ops and SFA initiatives (to include policy, doctrine, training, and leader development) are coordinated fully with joint, interagency, and multinational partners. COIN Center has been providing COIN instruction to US civil-military training held at Camp Atterbury, Indiana to prepare PRT members for deployment to Afghanistan. We will continue to look for these kinds of opportunities to support the mission in Afghanistan and Iraq and are exploring additional areas where we can collaborate with our civilian interagency partners.

In accordance with our mandate to "help connect the dots" across multiple joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational partners, the COIN Center and SO & SFA proponent offices are redoubling efforts to increase presence and activity on the COIN webpage [link here], COIN blog [link here], COIN Center Facebook fan page [link here] and Battle Command Knowledge System (for CAC holders) [link here]. A summary of additional ongoing initiatives is in the December 2009 Army Magazine article entitled: "COIN Center: Preparing the Force for Counterinsurgency, Stability Operations, and Security Force Assistance" (see here, reprinted with permission of ARMY Magazine, December 2009).

Thanks for your efforts in support of our troops,

Colonel Dan Roper

Much more in the SITREP.

CNAS released today a report that critically examines the relevance of the U.S. intelligence community to the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan titled Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan. The authors - Major General Michael T. Flynn, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence in Afghanistan; his advisor Captain Matt Pottinger; and Paul Batchelor, Senior Advisor for Civilian/Military Integrations at ISAF - argue that because the United States has focused the overwhelming majority of collection efforts and analytical brainpower on insurgent groups, the intelligence apparatus still finds itself unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate in and the people they are trying to protect and persuade.

Quoting General Stanley McChrystal, the authors write: "Our senior leaders - the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, Congress, the President of the United States - are not getting the right information to make decisions with ... The media is driving the issues. We need to build a process from the sensor all the way to the political decision makers."

Fixing Intel is the blueprint for that process. It describes the problem, details the changes, and illuminates examples of units that are "getting it right." It is aimed at commanders as well as intelligence professionals in Afghanistan, the United States and Europe.

Among the initiatives Major General Flynn directs:

- Empower select teams of analysts to move between field elements, much like journalists, to visit collectors of information at the grassroots level and carry that information back to the regional command level.

- Integrate information collected by civil affairs officers, PRTs, atmospherics teams, Afghan liaison officers, female engagement teams, —non-governmental organizations and development organizations, United Nations officials, psychological operations teams, human terrain teams, and infantry battalions, to name a few.

- Divide work along geographic lines, instead of functional lines, and write comprehensive district assessments covering governance, development, and stability.

- Provide all data to teams of "information brokers" at the regional command level, who will organize and disseminate all reports and data gathered from the grassroots level.

- The analysts and information brokers will work in what the authors call "Stability Operations Information Centers," which will be placed under and in cooperation with the State Department's senior civilian representatives administering governance, development and stability efforts in Regional Command East and South.

- Invest time and energy into selecting the best, most extroverted, and hungriest analysts to serve in the Stability Operations Information Centers.

Read the entire report at CNAS.

On the night of December 1, shortly after Barack Obama announced plans to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, retired Lt. Colonel John Nagl appeared on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show." Maddow was dismayed by Obama's new plan, which she called "massive escalation," but, when she introduced Nagl, a counterinsurgency expert who has long called for a greater U.S. commitment to Afghanistan--even if it means raising taxes and expanding the military--she was surprisingly friendly. And, after Nagl spent the segment praising Obama's plan, which he said would throw back the Taliban and enable more civil and economic development, Maddow may have remained skeptical--but she was also admiring. "It's a real pleasure to have you on the show, John," she said.

Had someone like Bill Kristol given that same assessment of Obama's speech, Maddow might have tarred him as a bloodthirsty proponent of endless war. Which is why Nagl is one of the administration's most important allies as it tries to sell the United States on a renewed commitment to Afghanistan. A former tank commander in Iraq and co-author of the Army's landmark 2006 counterinsurgency manual, Nagl has become a fixture on television and in news articles about Afghanistan; he's even made an appearance on "The Daily Show." With the authority of a man who has worn a uniform in combat, and the intellectual heft of a Rhodes Scholar, he has helped to persuade many liberals that pursuing a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan is the only viable path to success...

Much more at The New Republic.

A few highlights from Kaplan's remarks:

1) Commerce on the sea lines of communication between the Middle East and East Asia, already massive, will greatly expand in the decades ahead.

2) Echoing the pre-World War I naval arms race between Germany and Great Britain, China will not trust the U.S. Navy to protect its shipping through this region.

3) Naval and air power will dominate military planning among the major powers with China, India, and Japan competing with the U.S. for military leadership in the region.

4) China is using its relationships with unsavory regimes in the Indian Ocean region to build an archipelago of naval bases around India. India is countering by expanding its own naval and air power and by expanding its military relationships with the U.S. and Japan.

Kaplan is writing a book on the future of the Indian Ocean region and this speech likely previews his conclusions. I recommend viewing his remarks.

As the new year begins, the Afghanistan surge is underway. Army brigades and Marine regiments have been alerted to deploy, and their lead elements are on the move. Even in these early stages, it is not too soon to begin to think about how this year will end in Afghanistan. Key military and civilian national security officials have said that this December, they will give President Obama an assessment of the surge and make recommendations about how it should proceed. Those of us who were in Iraq for the surge of 2007 and who have fought in Afghanistan can pretty much predict how the war in the latter nation will unfold. First, given the challenge of deploying and sustaining our troops in an incredibly difficult and underdeveloped region, the troop buildup probably will take most of the year to complete.

Initially, as new units fan out into areas where no coalition forces have operated before -- especially in the largely Pashtun provinces in the south and east -- the stark prediction of senior U.S. military commanders will no doubt be fulfilled: U.S. casualties will spike until soldiers and their leaders become accustomed to the new terrain and the enemy that has operated at will there. But as our forces adapt, they will fight with increasing effectiveness, and more and more the insurgents probably will choose not to accept battle, deciding instead to move to new havens as they are able to identify them, or simply to go to ground - that is, melt into the masses of their Pashtun countrymen. Contacts with the enemy are likely to decline, which means U.S. and coalition casualties will decrease...

More at The Los Angeles Times.

The U.S. military, if it is to measure up to its future responsibilities as an effective instrument of statecraft and a trusted institution of society, must embark on the path of thoroughgoing transformation. This means truly sweeping overhaul, not the marginal incremental change that has characterized the self-justifying, self-deluding rhetoric of "defense transformation" to date.

The international environment the U.S. faces and is destined to continue facing in the years ahead requires a military significantly different from the one we now have. What we have, arguably and at best, is a militarily effective military: an instrument of force, designed and able only to wage war — usually disproportionately, often indiscriminately — on its own preferred terms on behalf of those in power...

That there would be widespread strategic and civic illiteracy in the military should come as no surprise to anyone truly familiar with the institution and its deeply entrenched tradition of anti-intellectualism. In a society that is itself anti-intellectual, the military — a demonstrably action-oriented, physical culture — stands out as being especially so. Notwithstanding the fact that the military has an extensive professional schooling system and also underwrites civilian graduate schooling for many of its officers, it remains institutionally indifferent at best, hostile at worst, to intellectual pursuits. Education, with its focus on intellectual development, invariably takes a distant back seat in the military to training, with its focus on skill development, subject-matter familiarization and topical immediacy. The constant tension that exists in military schools between military and academic priorities consistently favors the former. Academic job assignments, for students and faculty alike, at military or civilian schools, are widely eschewed as a low-priority, unproductive, career-diverting cost (rather than a worthy investment) that comes at the expense of higher priority, more productive, more career-enhancing, institutionally more essential operational assignments. The handful of individuals in uniform who actually seek to write for publication must, even today, submit their work to internal clearance review — always, ostensibly, for security reasons — before public release. Doctrine, long a defining hallmark of military praxis, imposes a suffocatingly pervasive overlay of forced standardization and routinization on virtually every facet of military life. And political ideology (predominantly conservative) is an ever-present, if latent, intellectual crutch for the many in uniform who seek nothing more than reaffirmation and reinforcement of their pre-established core beliefs.

Collectively, these things severely retard free thought and free expression throughout the institution. Nothing so angers those in uniform and puts them on the defensive as the suggestion that they are representative — or captive — of the so-called military mind. Such defensiveness owes to the painfulness of truth. If the military is to extricate itself from the fact that its members are afflicted by a self-imposed common mindset that is unimaginative, reactive, ossified, even pedestrian, it must create a central space for intellectuals and intellectualization. Intellectual stagnation, in fact, threatens to be the military's undoing in a future where success will be determined far more by brains than by brawn...

On an e-mail discussion group David Gurney; Editor, Joint Force Quarterly; takes exception and granted SWJ permission to publish his response:

It seems to be a rite of passage for former military personnel pursuing a second career in academia to establish their bona fides by endorsing the threadbare stereotype of anti-intellectualism in the armed forces. That Greg Foster extends this malady to the general population generously confirms the heroism of academics from coast-to-coast. More now than ever before (thanks to technology), I see Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, & Marines engaged in distance learning and seminar studies in the minimal time available in the face of duties where incompetence can precipitate death and organizational failure. Our self-styled intellectuals exhibit a remarkable failure of imagination (and in Greg's case, amnesia) when they diagnose military hostility to intellectual development. It is laughable in general, yet occasional artifacts are eagerly marshaled to reinforce the charge, not least because of its rhetorical utility in university and think tank circles.

To my mind, Greg's greatest error--in an essay chock full of them--concerns doctrine. For Professor Foster to characterize doctrine as a "suffocatingly pervasive overlay of forced standardization and routinization on virtually every facet of military life" is as specious a flight of fancy as anything I have read of late. I reply with conviction that ignorance of doctrine (especially joint doctrine) is endemic in the armed forces and easily eclipses "anti-intellectualism" as a problem. Doctrine is not prescriptive; only dilettantes regard it so.

Allow me to conclude my objections (confined to a single one of Greg's "ten deeply rooted features of established military culture") with his misapprehension of writers in the armed forces. When Greg asserts that there are only a "handful of individuals in uniform who actually seek to write for publication" he reveals surprising ignorance of the facts. I receive more than a hundred manuscripts each month from military authors and my Book Review Editor has to beat military petitioners off with a stick! When one considers the plethora of military publications (many dozens!), whether technical, tactical, functional, or broadly military, the lie is given to such an uninformed claim. Similarly, Greg is out of his depth when he implies that security reviews are tailored to impede communication with the public. Security & classification problems are frequent and sometimes dangerous; these reviews are one of my greatest burdens as editor of JFQ, but they are essential and those who deny it lack either imagination or experience.

In 1990, I finished commanding the 5th Battalion, 14th Infantry, 25th Infantry Division, and set out to the Advanced Operational Studies Fellowship, School of Advanced Military Studies, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Four years later, I was promoted to colonel, and, three years after that, to brigadier general.

My battalion command sergeant major, Ron Semon, left our battalion and served both as a regimental command sergeant major and as the command sergeant major for the commandant of cadets at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, N.Y.

Colonels and their sergeants major run large parts of our Army. Generals and their sergeants major provide strategic guidance. Like CSM Semon and me, many of you now serving at battalion level (whether as battalion commanders, battalion command sergeants major, or in equivalent positions) will serve at the more senior ranks. What yet-to-be-envisioned future will you face in 2017? Simply put, no one knows.

For example, the Berlin Wall fell in the second year of my battalion command—a surprise to many. (At the time, many focused only upon reaping the supposed "peace dividend," which reduced the approximately 780,000-person volunteer Army to about 485,000.) Uncertain then, and still unfolding, are the strategic consequences of the Cold War's end.

Even with this uncertainty, however, there are approaches you can take now to prepare for your future, and accordingly, the future of our Army...

Much more at Army Magazine.