The United States has a vital national security interest in addressing the current and potential security threats posed by extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Pakistan, al Qaeda and other groups of jihadist terrorists are planning new terror attacks. Their targets remain the U.S. homeland, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Europe, Australia, our allies in the Middle East, and other targets of opportunity. The growing size of the space in which they are operating is a direct result of the terrorist/insurgent activities of the Taliban and related organizations. At the same time, this group seeks to reestablish their old sanctuaries in Afghanistan.
Therefore, the core goal of the U.S. must be to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.
The ability of extremists in Pakistan to undermine Afghanistan is proven, while insurgency in Afghanistan feeds instability in Pakistan. The threat that al Qaeda poses to the United States and our allies in Pakistan - including the possibility of extremists obtaining fissile material - is all too real. Without more effective action against these groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan will face continuing instability...
President Barack Obama has announced his plan to send about 4,000 more US troops to Afghanistan and increase diplomacy with Pakistan. He said his strategy has a clear and focused goal.
"To disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. That is the goal that must be achieved. That is a cause that could not be more just. And to the terrorists who oppose us, my message is the same: We will defeat you," said the president.
Mr. Obama said, for Americans, the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan is "the most dangerous place in the world," where those who planned the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States are plotting further attacks.
The estimated 4,000 new troops would join 17,000 additional combat and support troops the president wants in Afghanistan in the coming months. By October, the overall force level should reach 59,000.
The new plan shifts the emphasis of the U.S. mission to training and increasing the size of the Afghan security forces, so they can eventually take responsibility for their country's security.
CBS News: Saying war in Iraq distracted from the effort in Afghanistan, President Obama announced his strategy to combat the Taliban and al Qaeda insurgents.
... The Army's leadership has rightly concluded that it needs a force capable of performing across the full spectrum of conflict at a high level of effectiveness. But in its attempts to become equally effective across a range of conflict types, it risks becoming marginally competent in many tasks, and highly effective at none. In attempting to increase the size of the Army to field forces large enough to deal with a range of contingencies, the Service risks becoming incapable of creating the needed scale by building up the capabilities of America's allies and partners, a key part of the defense strategy. It also risks a catastrophic leadership failure of a kind not seen since the late stages of the Vietnam War, a failure that took the Army over a decade to repair.
Dr. Peter Mansoor, Raymond E. Mason, Jr. Chair in Military History, The Ohio State University
... The transformation of American land power for the wars of the 21st century remains incomplete. In Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, Allan Millett lays out three prerequisites for effective military innovation: revised doctrine, changes in professional military education, and the creation of operational units that meet real strategic needs. The U.S. Army has met the first two fundamentals, but not yet the third. Although bulky divisions have given way to smaller, modular, more easily deployable brigade combat teams, these units remain largely configured for conventional combat -- and imperfectly at that. Brigades that are tailored for counterinsurgency operations would include more infantry; a full engineer battalion; a large intelligence section built mainly around human and signals intelligence, with significant analytical capability; military police, engineer, civil affairs, information operations, and psychological operations cells; a contracting section; adviser and liaison sections, with requisite
language capabilities; human terrain teams, with the capability to map tribal and social networks; explosive ordnance demolition teams; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets—particularly armed reconnaissance units that can engage the people and fight for information, along with armed unmanned aerial vehicles and ground sensors. The need for more infantry and engineers is especially critical, so much so that the Army should forgo the creation of additional brigade combat teams until existing units are reconfigured with the addition of a third maneuver battalion. The paucity of the current brigade combat team structure has forced brigade commanders to attach armor and infantry companies to the reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition squadron, which is otherwise too lightly armed to act as a combat force. A triangular organization would be more effective not just in counterinsurgency warfare, but would give our maneuver commanders the resources they need to fight more effectively in conventional conflicts as well.
... the U.S. Navy faces severe budgetary pressures on future construction of traditional capital ships and submarines. Those pressures will only grow as a result of the current global economic crisis (which--lest we forget--generates similar pressures on navies around the world) and America's continued military operations abroad as part of our ongoing struggle against violent extremism. Considering these trends as a whole, I would rather abuse the Navy--force structure-wise--before doing the same to either the Marine Corps or the Coast Guard. Why? It is my professional opinion that the United States defense community currently accepts far too much risk and casualties and instability on the low end of the conflict spectrum while continuing to spend far too much money on building up our combat capabilities for high-end scenarios. In effect, we over-feed our Leviathan force while starving our SysAdmin force, accepting far too many avoidable casualties in the latter while hedging excessively against theoretical future casualties in the former. Personally, I find this risk-management strategy to be both strategically unsound and morally reprehensible.
...Creating an adequate land force will not be cheap. But it's a price we're already paying now: when adding the Army's "baseline" budget to the constant and predictable cost of mobilizing reserve personnel and doing back-door procurements in the supplementals, the United States is paying about $200 billion per year for Army land forces. The costs of the Marines, which include weapons systems and other items included in the Navy budget is harder to estimate. And in fact, Marine costs can and should remain relatively constant; the difference is and should remain in Army expansion. But it would be far better to continue to grow and modernize the Army under a long-term plan rather than on an annual, ad hoc basis through supplemental appropriations and unending reserve call-ups. In very rough terms, I would estimate the cost of a large-enough Army to be about $240 billion per year. By 2016 -- the time it would take to expand, equip and configure the force we need, and if President Obama's economic projections are correct -- that would account for just 1.2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. A million-man land force would be a third of 1 percent of the U.S. population.
Without doubt, this is a force we can afford. Conversely, the strategic costs of not rebuilding America's land forces would be very great indeed. We cannot expect to exercise leadership in the international community if we are unable to guarantee the stability of the greater Middle East; in addition to the economic value of the region's resources, the political volatility of the Islamic world, and the prospects for jihadi terrorism, make it a cockpit for many conflicts -- not just regional, but potentially between global great powers. Nor can we expect, at this juncture, to stabilize the region by "offshore balancing." That moment has passed, both militarily and geostrategically; the clock cannot be turned back. Land power is not the answer to every problem, but it is an essential answer to this problem.
With just a week until President Barack Obama flies to Strasbourg, France, for his first NATO conference, his top advisers are still divided over what U.S. policy should be on the summit's No. 1 issue: how to fight the war in Afghanistan.
It's a debate that the Bush administration never seriously had in the seven years following the post-9/11 invasion. Now, by contrast, in the wake of three major strategic reviews, Obama is extending and deepening the discussion of Afghanistan, because the outcome of this debate may set the course of American foreign policy for the remainder of his presidency...
David Kilcullen, a former senior counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq, says the U.S. must change its policy in Afghanistan from chasing the enemy to protecting the people.
"We need to get into the business of making people feel safe and making them feel —to participate in a political process that doesn't involve violence," Kilcullen says...
"The review that the new administration has gone through has been a very detailed and sensible approach to what is an extremely difficult problem," Kilcullen says. "We need to make some fairly significant changes if we do want to win it."
A remarkably fresh perspective on the War on Terror. Kilcullen takes us "on the ground" to uncover the face of modern warfare, illuminating both the big global war (the "War on Terrorism") and its relation to the associated "small wars" across the globe: Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Chechnya, Pakistan and North Africa.
The new issue of the US Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center Colloquium has been released and can be found at the COIN Center Blog.
From the COIN Center - two articles of potential interest to academicians, policy makers, and practitioners alike:
In From Lebanon to Gaza: A New Kind of War, Ariel Siegelman draws on first-hand experience in Lebanon and Gaza to describe a new kind of war, in which "the enemy cannot hope to match Western technology, so he operates in a way to make the technology relatively meaningless." Siegelman, who served in the Israel Defense Force (IDF), Special Forces, as a counter terror operative, counter terror sniper and counter terror instructor, argues that the 2006 Lebanon War exemplifies "the wrong way to confront... this new kind of war," but that the recent IDF operations in Gaza demonstrate that Western militaries can appropriately prosecute such conflicts. This new kind of war, however, requires Western militaries to define success in a new way, one that recognizes that violence may ebb and flow, but that the conflict is never truly over.
In The Business of War: How Criminal Organizations Perpetuate Conflict and What To Do about It, Brock Dahl argues that "attacking criminal organizations is an essential element of the COIN fight." Without confronting organized criminal organizations, it is much more difficult to stabilize transitional societies. Mr. Dahl, who served for the US Department of the Treasury in Baghdad and on the Afghanistan Interagency Operations Group from 2006 to 2008, and who is now studying law at The George Washington University, investigates the legal and policy considerations of US military forces supporting law enforcement activities overseas.
Afghanistan is about to spike in the news this summer, as 17,000 more marines and soldiers arrive from the United States and pour into the southern Kandahar region. They will advance down roads and river valleys where American troops have never ventured in eight years of war here, and deliberately stir up a hornet's nest of Taliban strongholds in Mullah Omar's backyard. This incursion will lead to fighting and attendant casualties perhaps on a scale that Americans have not seen since the early days of the surge in Iraq. It will be part of an ambitious effort whose scope American commanders here dare not name or admit to, even to themselves: nation-building on a grand scale. To succeed, they must overcome the Afghan landscape itself: a sprawling expanse of high desert wrinkled with tortuous hills and wave upon wave of cathedral-like mountain ranges that segment the population into countless valleys and separate regions. Indeed, for the first time since the U.S. invaded here in late 2001, Americans are about to lead a great battle against culture and geography...
To get, not to do. Enough with the hysteria/doom-and-gloom mongering. War correspondent Robert Kaplan, who has been around the block a couple of times in Afghanistan and with the United States military, with a note of reason on the evolving campaign, what that campaign is fundamentally about, why we can win it, and why we have to...
U.S. Joint Forces Command has released an irregular warfare vision designed to help develop joint forces that are as effective in conducting irregular warfare as they are in conventional warfare.
U.S. Joint Forces Command Commander Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis has released the command's irregular warfare (IW) vision.
The vision provides guidance on how USJFCOM will respond to the threats posed by irregular adversaries. The vision prioritizes specific efforts necessary to achieve the objectives and guidance of the Department of Defense directive on irregular warfare.
Mattis said the command is determined to lead the way in achieving a balanced joint force where IW is a core competency and will lead DoD in the collaborative effort to deploy joint forces that are as effective in conducting irregular warfare as they are in conventional warfare. USJFCOM will partner with interagency, multinational, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Joint Staff, combatant commands, services and intelligence community partners in order to achieve this vision.
The vision outlines a timeline and expectations from directorates and subordinate commands. Over the next six to 12 months the command will focus its IW efforts in concept development and experimentation, capability development/joint integration and interoperability, training and education, joint provision/global force management and external engagement.
Several areas of effort include:
• Work closely with U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and the services to update the IW Joint Operating Concept to improve its relevance and utility to the general purpose force, interagency and our multinational partners.
• Standardize and optimize network enabled capabilities and services provided by DoD's Global Information Grid computer network in support of small units at the tactical edge conducting IW.
• Develop joint doctrine that guides and enables joint force commanders to plan and execute IW across the four categories of military activity: combat, security, engagement, relief and reconstruction.
• Identify tracking requirements for critical skills and experiences relevant to IW.
• Capture, analyze and disseminate IW lessons learned and best practices.
The vision states USJFCOM will work with its partners to identify the most important challenges the U.S. is facing in IW, develop concepts and evaluate capabilities solutions to address those challenges.
The Joint Irregular Warfare Center (JIWC) will prioritize efforts, proactively coordinate activities, provide subject matter expertise and collaborate closely with multinational and interagency partners in executing the IW vision.
The IW vision is available for download by clicking here.
The end of the Global War on Terror -- or at least the use of that phrase -- has been codified at the Pentagon. Reports that the phrase was being retired have been circulating for some time amongst senior administration officials, and this morning speechwriters and other staff were notified via this e-mail to use "Overseas Contingency Operation" instead...
