What is it?

During the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) semi-annual Senior Leaders Conference (TSLC) TRADOC leaders discuss emerging issues and chart the way ahead. Now for the first time, TRADOC will make the conference transparent and seek public interaction by allowing anyone to follow the conversation, contribute comments and ask questions via a Small Wars Journal (SWJ) discussion board. At the August 18 to 20 conference, two editors and a moderator from SWJ will blog live, providing readers observations and ongoing commentary about the proceedings.

What has the Army done?

TRADOC conducts these conferences to facilitate seminal discussion among senior Army leaders, but now you don't have to be general officer to get a front-row seat. The inclusion of social media in this year's TSLC provides a near real-time interactive public dialogue that offers an opportunity for the outside community to understand and even participate in the conversation by reading and writing on the SWJ discussion board. Also, TRADOC Public Affairs will guide followers through the many planned conference events using Twitter, Facebook, blog posts via TRADOC Live, and web updates.

The "Next Battles" conference theme emphasizes the future as our Army returns to a 1:2 BOG/DWELL (Boots on the Ground dwell time in unit rotations out of theater to home-station). This TSLC will address institutional adaptation; synchronizing and aligning the TRADOC Campaign Plan (TCP), merging the TCP with the Army Enterprise effort, and replicating the complexities of combat in Army training.

What continued efforts does the Army have planned for the future?

TRADOC envisions far more interaction between everyday people and senior Army leaders; and social networking tools make this possible. Public feedback from this TSLC will help drive the discussion forward and shape future TSLC events that will include more military bloggers, an expansion of TRADOC Live active-duty contributors, and a Facebook fan page devoted to TSLC issues. Soon, the Army will implement a new social networking policy, formally opening the door to even greater transparency and interaction between the Army and the public.

Why is this important to the Army?

The participation and interaction with the social media community allows the Army and TRADOC the opportunity to tell its story in a transparent, thoughtful manner, while offering the public community a stake in the future of their Army.

Resources:

Training and Doctrine Command Web site

Small Wars Journal discussion board

TRADOC Live

... Yet how can the US military, so overstretched in strategically crucial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, spare any troops for this type of primarily humanitarian venture? The dilemma is similar to that faced in recent years in Darfur, where we wanted to do something but did not have the forces.

Admittedly, there may not be a solution tomorrow. But by tapping into President Obama's call for a new spirit of volunteerism and national service, there may be a way to make a difference sometime in 2010. The idea involves a new type of military unit that the Pentagon should propose during its ongoing Quadrennial Defense Review.

For crises like those in Congo and Darfur, the United States should consider a radical innovation in recruiting policy. We should create a peace operations division in the Army with individuals enlisting specifically for this purpose. There would be risks in such a venture, to be sure. But they are manageable and tolerable risks, especially since most such deployments would be legitimated by the United Nations, carried out with partners such as key allies, and backstopped by the US armed forces in worst-case scenarios...

More at The Washington Post.

Here's Loren's "beach-side" e-mail press release:

Greetings from New England. Yes, I too am at the beach. But I'm still working, and the purpose of this brief is to tell you about a new project that the Lexington Institute has launched while you were away. It is a defense blog. Yes, yes, I know -- there are already hundreds of defense blogs, and many of them are pretty awful. But that's why we launched our own blog on the Lexington homepage, called Early Warning. It isn't awful. In fact, I'm betting that if you read a few entries, at some point you'll say -- "Gee, I didn't know that."

We all recognize what the main problem is with blogs. The barriers to entry are so low that almost anyone with a laptop can start one, and it's hard to sort out the good ones from tendentious nonsense. For every interesting, competent effort like DoD Buzz, there are dozens of ill-mannered rants masquerading as insight. To say that blogs have lowered the standards of public discourse on policy matters is an under-statement -- there are no standards. Anybody can say anything, with extra points for verbosity.

We are trying a different approach. First, we intend to keep our postings brief. It will be a rare day indeed that a posting on Early Warning runs as long as this brief, and the typical posting will run to two or three paragraphs. Second, we plan to be long on facts -- especially little known, useful facts -- and short on opinions. I mean really, why should you care what I think about the Bradley infantry fighting vehicle or V-22 tiltrotor unless I have inside information to impart? And third, we intend to write about national security in a somewhat more expansive manner than most military analysts. We will frequently look beyond the realm of strategy and tactics, to dissect economic trends, political developments and technology breakthroughs that have a material bearing on national security.

Obviously, we do not expect this vision of a world-class web-log to spring spontaneously from the collective consciousness of the Lexington braintrust onto the Internet. It will take some time to get the blog right, including all the material that surrounds it at www.lexingtoninstitute.org. The blog has actually been up and running for over two weeks, and we are still tweaking features such as how the postings display and are written. But we think we're off to a good start, and are already getting indications that people in the defense community have noticed.

We want Early Warning to be an island of sanity in the chaos of the Worldwide Web. With so many traditional news outlets declining and no new hierarchy of credible sources yet emerged, we'd like to offer a site that is both sensible and engaging. We will never match the resources of the New York Times or the reach of the Associated Press. But we hope that when you read something on the Lexington blog and say, "Gee, I didn't know that," it will be because the information is new and not because it is wrong.

Update:

Defense Industry Consultant Launches Blog, Insults Bloggers - War is Boring

Phib, why did you start blogg'n? - CDR Salamander

Who died and made you king? - USNI Blog

Early Warning—The Pretend Blog - ELP Defense Blog

The upcoming TRADOC Senior Leaders Conference (TSLC) in Gettysburg comes at an important time for Training and Doctrine Command and for our Army. We continue to transform TRADOC while simultaneously supporting transitions in both OIF and OEF. Let me offer some thoughts and considerations as we put our shoulders behind these challenges and opportunities over the next 2 years.

If our experience over the last eight years has taught us anything, it's that war and conflict will continue to increase in complexity. We know that conflict will be waged among the population and for influence on the population, and we know our leaders and their soldiers will operate among a diverse set of actors along blurred military, political, economic, religious and ethnic lines with the potential for escalation and spillover in a variety of unpredictable ways.

Hybrid threats--combinations of regular military forces and irregular threats often in collaboration with criminal and terrorist elements--will migrate among operational themes to seek advantage. The operating environment will become more competitive as our adversaries decentralize, network, and gain technological capabilities formerly found only in the hands of nation states.

The challenge confronting us is building balance and versatility into the force by developing our leaders, by designing our organizations, and by adapting the institution. The outcomes we seek are flexibility and resilience to hedge against future uncertainty. Three imperatives are guiding our efforts to align the operational and institutional Army to meet demands and support the Army Force Generation (ARFORGEN) model:

• Develop our military and civilian leaders

• Provide trained and ready forces to support current operations

• Integrate current and emerging capabilities

These imperatives will remain in tension for the foreseeable future, but there are things we can do to bring them into better balance. The TRADOC Campaign Plan (TCP) describes how we'll achieve balance across our priority lines of operation: Human Capital, Initial Military Training, Leader Development, and Capabilities Integration.

The focus of our discussions during the TSLC will be on the TRADOC Campaign Plan (TCP). We will also examine how TRADOC's TCP aligns with and complements the Human Capital Enterprise. We'll demonstrate how the Central Training Database will become the "Training Brain" for TRADOC and provide us the opportunity to enhance training in the institutional schoolhouse.

As you may know, we've asked ourselves how we can replicate the complexity our leaders experience while they are deployed, and we will discuss some emerging opportunities to do just that. I'd like this to generate discussion about how TRADOC can lead innovation in training and education to account for the speed of change in the contemporary operating environment.

I look forward in the coming weeks to a lively, thoughtful discussion with the Small Wars Journal community.

-----

SWJ Editors' note - We will be live blogging from the TRADOC Senior Leaders Conference next week. A discussion forum has been set up at the Small Wars Council. Please feel free to post your questions, thoughts and opinions - engage!

More than a year has passed since an Afghan police commander turned on coalition forces and helped insurgents carry out a surprise attack that killed nine Americans, wounded more than 30 United States and Afghan troops and nearly resulted in the loss of an allied outpost in one of the deadliest engagements of the war. Within days of the attack, Army historians and tactical analysts arrived in eastern Afghanistan to review the debacle near Wanat, interviewing soldiers who survived the intense battle, in which outnumbered Americans exchanged gunfire for more than four hours with insurgents, often at distances closer than 50 feet.

Now, that effort to harvest lessons from the firefight of July 13, 2008, has contributed to a new battlefield manual that will be delivered over coming days to Army units joining the fight in Afghanistan with the troop increase ordered by President Obama. The handbook, "Small-Unit Operations in Afghanistan," strikes a tone of respect for the Taliban and other insurgent groups, which are acknowledged to be extremely experienced fighters; even more, American soldiers are warned that the insurgents rapidly adapt to shifts in tactics...

More at The New York Times.

James Joiner and Dave Schuler were joined by special guest Dave Dilegge of Small Wars Journal to talk about the renewed debate on Afghanistan. See "Afghanistan Debate Intensifies," "Back Off Jack Keane Wannabees," and "What Are Our Strategic Objectives in Afghanistan?" for background.

By Morris Davis

Lynndie England will discuss her biography Tortured: Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib and the Photographs That Shocked the World at the Library of Congress Veterans Forum on Friday August 14 at noon in room 139 on the first floor of the James Madison building.

She is a convicted criminal who was dishonorably discharged, but she's out of prison and on stage at the Library of Congress. You may recall many of the memorable pictures of the glowing Private England during her tour in Iraq, including the one of her standing next to an Iraqi prisoner, a cigarette dangling from her lip, as she points at the Iraqi prisoner's genitals as he stands there naked with a sack over his head as he's forced to masturbate in the presence of GI England and several other nude men. It sure looked like she was enjoying some good times in the picture, so maybe she'll give more behind the scenes details during her lecture on Friday as she expounds on how she's a victim who is deprived of veteran's benefits because of her dishonorable discharge. As she said in an interview published in the West Virginia Metro News on Monday: "Yeah, I was in some pictures, but that's all it was ... I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time." That has to be comforting to those who died because of the wave of anger her snapshots ignited in the Middle East, like the family of Nick Berg who was slaughtered in front of a video camera in retaliation for Abu Ghraib, according to his murderers. America as a whole still pays the price for Private England's "wrong place -- wrong time" misadventure, but that won't stop the Library of Congress from opening its doors and handing her the mike.

The event is sponsored by the Library of Congress Professional Association's Veterans Forum and its leader LOC employee and Vietnam Veteran Bob Moore. Veteran Moore has weathered a wave of criticism in recent days, but he remains steadfast in his hatred for Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and his admiration for Lynndie England's "guts."

I am a Library of Congress employee and a veteran.* I retired with an honorable discharge after serving for 25 years in the Air Force. I was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay for more than two years and I resigned in 2007 in large part because I believe waterboarding is torture and my superiors, Tom Hartmann and Jim Haynes, did not. I believe my views on torture have been clearly expressed, so it should come as no surprised that I am more than a little disappointed that the library that belongs to the United States Congress is hosting one of the most infamous torturers in modern time so she can promote her book. I'm even more disappointed that the event is sponsored by a veterans group. Perhaps I should start a rival group within the LOC called Veterans with Values and our motto will be "we don't honor the dishonorable." It doesn't appear that we'd overlap in any way with Mr. Moore's group.

Thousands and thousands of honorable men and women have and are serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places. They don't get book deals and invited to lecture at the Library of Congress. Most of them would be happy with a thank you and a chance at an education or a decent job when the mission is over. It's a disgrace that the dishonorable profit and that we use government property and resources to glorify the gutless. If you attend the lecture on Friday, don't save me a seat.

-- Moe Davis

*The views expressed herein are my personal views published in my personal capacity.

In June, New York Times reporter David Sanger captured the White House staff's Hamlet-like mood of self-doubt and auto-generated second-guessing as it pondered what to do about North Korea's Kang Nam, then shadowed by USS John S. McCain:

"The whole thing just doesn't add up," said one senior administration official who has been tracking the cargo ship's lazy summer journey. "My worry is that we make a big demand about seeing the cargo, and then there's a tense standoff, and when it's all over we discover that old man Kim set us up to look like George Bush searching for nonexistent W.M.D."

No such worries for the Indian government which seized, boarded, brought into port, and inspected MV San. India's inspection revealed 16,000 tons of sugar but no missile parts, nuclear reactor components, or any other prohibited materials. Indian officials seem neither apologetic nor red-faced about this result.

Naturally there are some differences between the Kang Nam and MV San episodes. For reasons unknown, MV San dropped anchor in the middle of the night near Hut Bay Island, Indian territory. The Indian coast guard then gave chase and seized the ship. Perhaps if Kang Nam had anchored off Guam, the U.S. Navy would have subsequently seized it after it had chased it back out to sea. Or perhaps not. The June 2009 UN Security Council resolution required that North Korean crews first give their permission to high-seas boardings. U.S. officials deemed this a reason for not ordering USS John S. McCain to board Kang Nam. But it is not clear from the news reports that India received permission to board MV San. To the contrary, that crew was described as "uncooperative."

If the Proliferation Security Initiative and UNSCR 1874 are to ever have any meaning, some day there will have to be forced boardings of North Korean cargo ships. With a duplicate of North Korea's Yongbyon plutonium reactor having appeared in a Syrian desert, North Korea hardly merits the benefit of the doubt. If it is too shy to carry out this sort of work, perhaps the U.S. government should subcontract these duties to the Indian Coast Guard.