This field manual establishes doctrine (fundamental principles) for tactical counterinsurgency (COIN) operations at the company, battalion, and brigade level. It is based on lessons learned from historic counterinsurgencies and current operations. This manual continues the efforts of FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, in combining the historic approaches to COIN with the realities of today's operational environment (OE)—an environment modified by a population explosion, urbanization, globalization, technology, the spread of religious fundamentalism, resource demand, climate change and natural disasters, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. This manual is generic in its geographic focus and should be used with other doctrinal sources.

It's important to note that Security Force Assistance occurs under a variety of conditions, and it is the conditions that will determine how and with what organizations we use to accomplish the mission.

We have military cooperation agreements with more than 125 nations around the world and often provide security force assistance in response to host nation requests. This assistance is generally delivered by Offices of Security Cooperation, always under the control of the US Embassy Country Team, and is accomplished by a mixture of assigned military and civilian personnel, contractors, and mobile training teams. These mobile training teams come from either the General Purpose Forces --- perhaps more appropriately described as Multi-Purpose Forces --- or from the Special Forces depending on the type of training requested.

Under conditions of active conflict where we have direct responsibility for security -- as in Iraq and Afghanistan -- tactical commanders will have a security force assistance mission to train, advise, and assist tactical host nation forces. This mission is accomplished using the resources of the modular brigade augmented as necessary based, again, on conditions. The conditions include the state" of security -- described in doctrine as Initial Stage, Transforming Stage, and Sustaining Phase -- as well as the capacity and capability of the host nation security forces. Security Force Assistance at the Institutional Level will be accomplished by a Security Transition Headquarters organized under the Joint Task Force. This Security Transition Headquarters partners with the US Embassy Country Team and evolves over time into an Office of Security Cooperation as described above.

Finally, we have security relationships with some nations facing significant internal security challenges but which, for many reasons, may not accept a large, visible US military presence within their borders. If they request Security Force Assistance under these conditions, the mission is generally assigned to US Special Operations Forces, potentially augmented by regionally-oriented General-Purpose Forces.

Clearly, the future operational environment will require us to demonstrate as much versatility in Stability Operations as we have in Offense and Defense Operations. Understanding the variety of conditions under which Security Force Assistance occurs is an important first step.

General Martin E. Dempsey is Commanding General of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command.

By John J. Kruzel

American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, May 4, 2009 -- The type of hybrid warfare" that defense experts predict the United States is increasingly likely to face will pull the military in two directions, the Defense Department's top policy official said today.

Michele Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy, said America's conventional dominance gives incentive to its enemies to use asymmetric means to undermine U.S. strengths and exploit its weaknesses.

Preparing for this operating environment will pull the Army, and the military writ large, in two very different directions," she told the roughly 200-person audience at the Army Leader Forum at the Pentagon.

On the one hand, the United States must be ready for irregular warfare, in which combatants blend in with civilian populations and conduct roadside-bomb attacks, suicide bombings and similar tactics, she said.

Those of you who served in Iraq and Afghanistan know firsthand how challenging it is to operate effectively in such an environment," she said.

Meanwhile, she said, the United States must remain prepared to deal with high-end threats, though these are much more likely to be asymmetric in character. Illustrating this concept, Flournoy described a scenario in which rising regional powers and rogue states use highly sophisticated technologies to deny U.S. access to critical regions and to thwart its operations.

These tactics range from anti-satellite capabilities, anti-air capabilities and anti-ship weapons to weapons of mass destruction and cyber attacks.

Further complicating the battle landscape is the prospect of sophisticated nonstate actors using high-end capabilities such as weapons of mass destruction or guided rockets or munitions, as in the case of Hezbollah in Lebanon during its 2006 war with Israel.

We can expect to see more hybrid conflicts in which the enemy combines regular warfare tactics with irregular and asymmetric forms of warfare," she said.

The concept of hybrid warfare garnered attention last month when Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced his budget recommendations at a Pentagon news conference.

Gates proposed distributing allocated funds in accordance with what he characterized as the type of complex hybrid" warfare he expects will be increasingly common. He placed roughly half of his proposed budget for traditional, strategic and conventional conflict, about 40 percent in dual-purpose capabilities and the remaining 10 percent in irregular warfare.

Gates also said recently that the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review -- a congressionally mandated Defense Department strategy review completed every four years -- would be unique in its consideration of this blended type of warfare.

This will be the first QDR able to fully incorporate the numerous lessons learned on the battlefield these last few years; lessons about what mix of hybrid tactics future adversaries, both state and nonstate actors, are likely to pursue," he said at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.

Flournoy provided a glimpse of the 2010 QDR, which the department will submit to Congress early next year.

In addition to the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, key security challenges include violent extremist movements, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, rising powers with sophisticated weapons and increasing encroachment across the so-called global commons, which include air, sea, space and cyberspace, she said.

Kabul is smaller than I thought it would be. It seems like more of a frontier town feel than a big crowded third world city. The streets reminded me initially of the National Urban Warfare Training Center out at Ft. Irwin... the dusty brown mud buildings... the crooked little shops with old men dressed in the classic Pashtun clothing.. goods piled in windows and on tables....... the hanging meats. That Kabul reminds me of NTC is a credit to former NTC CGs Dana Pittard and Bob Cone and their restless dedication to the training mission. The only thing NTC needs to really capture Kabul is about 5,000 Toyota Corollas... seemingly the only vehicle on the road. Kabul's streets also illustrate that this is a town used to conquest and war. Every street is lined with walls topped with razor wire, every building a miniature fortress.

We had hoped to move straight to RC East on our first day but milair availability being somewhat sketchy and weather dependent, we were delayed and forced to overnight in Kabul. This was not a hardship. We stayed at the beautiful and luxurious Kabul Serena Hotel and dined with journalists and NGO workers at a classic Kabul hang out, the Gandamack Lodge. For the interagency crowd discussion starts at social hour, with civilians sharing perspectives and hassles over beers while the military remains tightly behind the wire. We need a whole-of-government drinking hole.

The Serena also happened to be hosting a conference with twelve Provincial Governors. In our discussions with several of the Governors, two topics were on their mind:

1) giving the Provinces more governing authority by moving away from the Kabul-centric strategy adopted in 2002

2) the fall elections and, in particular, the implications should President Karzai lose

These two questions will drive many of our discussions over the next two weeks.

Nick Dowling is a small wars policy wonk with experience in OSD, the NSC Staff, NDU, and the contracting sector. He has worked on stability operations for 16 years, most prominently on Bosnia and Kosovo as a Clinton Administration appointee and Iraq and Afghanistan as a DoD contractor. He is currently President of IDS International, a leader in interagency and soft power" types of support to the US military. He is a graduate of Harvard, got his masters at Georgetown, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Although a veteran of print and television media interviews and publications, this is his first foray into SWJ.

--SWJ comment posted 10 March 2009.

Future conflicts will introduce an array of threats that defy simple categorization. We have at times tried to categorize threats in discrete operational themes such as conventional or unconventional, regular or irregular, high intensity or low intensity, traditional, terrorist, or criminal. However, the world is just not that accommodating. The security challenges we face are complex, and we have every reason to believe—based on our own experiences and on other conflicts we have recently observed—that our enemies will seek to employ a variety of threats in confronting us. Our model of the spectrum of conflict in FM 3-0 can be somewhat misleading in that it implies gaps among the different operational themes. What our model does not portray is the affect that time has on conflict and the likelihood that our enemies will seek to migrate among these themes. We cannot expect that we will have the option of selecting a category of conflict and then implementing a strategy confined to that category—the enemy gets a vote."

Hybrid, networked threats further blur the space among operational themes adding even greater complexity to the current and future operating environment. In response, our units and leaders in theater adapt from one theme to another frequently, sometimes day by day, often mission by mission and location by location. This occurs at all levels from the tactical to the strategic.

The hybrid threats we face are also increasingly decentralized in execution. Their objective is to exploit us by decentralizing operations and employing information operations as a weapon. In the book The Starfish and the Spider by Rod Beckstrom and Ori Brafman, the authors examine business models that provide insights into how open and decentralized systems operate: when attacked, a decentralized organization becomes even more open and decentralized....open systems can easily mutate."

The point is that the threat doesn't confine itself to a single operational theme. The enemy adapts to leverage their strengths and to exploit our vulnerabilities. I believe LTG Stan McChrystal—one of our truly innovative senior leaders—had it right when he said, to defeat a network, you have to be a network." So our challenge is to adapt our institutions and develop our leaders to confront the complexity and decentralization inherent in the future operational environment.

We must avoid either-or constructs about conflict and how we organize, train, and equip ourselves in anticipation of conflict. When we commit our campaign-quality" Army to a sustained operation in the future operating environment, it will need to be versatile enough to respond to all forms of contact. Even more important, it will need to be led by leaders agile enough to deal with complexity and anticipate the changes inherent in an extended campaign.

General Martin E. Dempsey is Commanding General of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command.

The Al Muntaha restaurant and bar sits majestically atop the legendary Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, mirroring the mast-top spars of the sailboat shape of the iconic hotel. Originally touted as the world's only seven-star hotel (now since more realistically categorized by Jumeirah Group as five-star premier), and uber luxe hotel bar is an ironic place to contemplate my upcoming two-week expedition into the southern slopes of the Hindu Kush and to try to better understand Coalition efforts to stabilize Eastern Afghanistan.

What brings us to Afghanistan? My company trains and supports DoD and State in the non-lethal and interagency dimensions of war. In both training programs and our handbooks, we help military and civilian staffs to better understand the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of their mission and we teach them how to form an effective team with other parts of the interagency and NGO space. You will be relieved to know I don't do this training. Rather we have a team of about sixty veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan PRTs and similar reconstruction or advisory roles in these wars. My role is to manage this extraordinary collection of interagency talent and lend my perspective of working stability operations at the policy level for more than 16 years. Quite simply, we are the experts in small war soft power."

As I sip my $32 blueberry martini (delicious but, crikey, not THAT delicious), I ponder several questions :

(1) What are the political, economic, and human dimensions of conflict and instability in Eastern Afghanistan (and Western Pakistan for that matter)? Do our military units, PRTs, and NGOS understand and agree on the local sources of conflict and is there an integrated strategy to promote stability at the provincial and local level?

(2) Is the capacity building mission of extending legitimate governance from Kabul still the right development strategy? Or should we put greater emphasis on addressing needs and capacity at the local and tribal level as a means to build political support among the people?

(3) Is the military-PRT structure in Afghanistan working effectively? How can we enable more effective civil-military teams focused and capable of provincial and local level engagement and assistance?

(4) Perhaps a shorter summary of these questions: what the hell is going on with governance, economics and reconstruction in Afghanistan and what needs to be fixed?

I hope to report back to SWJ on what we (myself and two of my Afghanistan trainers) find on our travels. We will be meeting and traveling with a wide range of folks at many levels, including the military, PRTs, journalists, and the Afghans themselves. But first, can someone wire me some cash to cover my Al Muntaha bar bill?

Nick Dowling is a small wars policy wonk with experience in OSD, the NSC Staff, NDU, and the contracting sector. He has worked on stability operations for 16 years, most prominently on Bosnia and Kosovo as a Clinton Administration appointee and Iraq and Afghanistan as a DoD contractor. He is currently President of IDS International, a leader in interagency and soft power" types of support to the US military. He is a graduate of Harvard, got his masters at Georgetown, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Although a veteran of print and television media interviews and publications, this is his first foray into SWJ.

David Kilcullen is no soft-headed peacenik.

He's a beefy, 41-year-old former Australian army officer who served in Iraq as a top advisor to US Army Gen. David H. Petraeus. He's one of the counter-insurgency warrior/theorists who designed Petraeus' successful "surge" of troops into the streets of Baghdad.

But a few days ago, when a congressman asked Kilcullen what the US government should do in Pakistan, the Australian guerrilla fighter sounded like an antiwar protester.

"We need to call off the drones," Kilcullen said.

In the arid valleys of western Pakistan, the United States is fighting a strange, long-distance war against Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their Pakistani allies. Unmanned "drone" airplanes take off from secret runways, seek out suspected terrorists and, with CIA employees at the remote controls, fire missiles to blow them up.

Officially, this is a covert program, and the CIA won't acknowledge that it's going on at all. Unofficially, intelligence officials say the Predator strikes are the most effective weapon they have against Al Qaeda...

More at The Los Angeles Times.

President Obama convened a crisis meeting at the White House last Monday to hear a report from Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had just returned from Pakistan. Mullen described the worrying situation there, with Taliban insurgents moving closer to the capital, Islamabad.

"It had gotten significantly worse than I expected as the Swat deal unraveled," Mullen explained in an interview. He was referring to a truce brokered in February in the Swat Valley, about 100 miles north of Islamabad. The Pakistani military had expected that the cease-fire would subdue Taliban fighters in Swat. Instead, the Muslim militants surged south into the district of Buner, on the doorstep of the capital.

Listening to Mullen's report at the White House were two senior officials - Defense Secretary Bob Gates and special envoy Richard Holbrooke - who were serving in government back in 1979, when a Muslim insurgency toppled the Iranian government, with harmful consequences that persist to this day. The two policy veterans "made the argument that it's worth studying the Iran model," recalls a senior official who took part in the White House meeting...

More at The Washington Post.

There may be just two weeks left to prevent the Taliban from overthrowing Pakistan's government, Gen David Petraeus, the commander of American forces in the region, has told officials.

American officials have watched with growing anxiety as Taliban fighters have strengthened their grip on north-western Pakistan.

Militants advanced to within 60 miles of Islamabad, the capital, last month and were pushed back only when the US put pressure on Pakistan to launch a counter-offensive.

Gen Petraeus, the head of Central Command, which covers all US forces in the Middle East and south Asia, is reported to have said that the Pakistanis have run out of excuses" and now accept that tough action has to be taken to guarantee the government's survival...

More at The Daily Telegraph.