By Dr. Steven Metz

I've just returned from a Department of Defense symposium which discussed the future strategic environment twenty years out. This was a useful window on official thinking and expectations, but it reinforced my feeling that American security strategy is careening forward on flawed assumptions. Specifically, we have not grasped the magnitude of the revolution underway in the strategic environment and the nature of security, and hence have not adjusted.

A few years ago symposia and documents dealing with the future strategic environment were dominated by discussions of "the long war," "GWOT," terrorism, proliferation, and Islamic extremism. For the past two years, the focus has been on "hybrid threats." In the event I just attended, those things were almost wholly absent from the discussion. Everything centered on technological change, economic turmoil, culture, demographics, and climate change.

Two things about this jumped out at me. First, there was very little discussion of exactly what the U.S. military is going to do about these trends and the threats that they generate. The unspoken assumption seems to be that the primary military mission over the next few decades will be stabilizing collapsed states. I don't buy this. I think it is a misreading of Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if things turn out well in those two places, I'm convinced that future political leaders and strategists will conclude that the costs (economic, political, and human) outweighed the benefits (in terms of greater security).

Second, I was convinced that the U.S. military and strategic community have not fully grasped the extent and depth of change underway in the strategic environment. At the symposium everyone nodded when a speaker said that the threats of the future will be dispersed, non-state entities, but few seemed to understand that this obviates the very essence of American strategy and the current focus of the military. Put simply, our strategy seeks to reverse history--to strengthen nation states so that they can "control ungoverned spaces" when trends are toward the devolution of economic, political, and economic power AWAY FROM national governments.

Because we are a big Dutch boy, we have been able to keep our finger in the dike of history for a few years but eventually must pull it out.

I was aghast when people talked about future missions like controlling the vast slums of Lagos or Karachi, both because I don't think those who made this point understood the magnitude of such a task, and because I don't think doing so would promote American security. None of the architects or implementers of 9/11 were motivated by the lack of jobs or emerged from a teeming slum. On 9/11 we were attacked by a dispersed, non-state entity but in a perfect illustration of the idea that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, we did what we knew how to do: we overthrew two national governments. But--and this is the important part—because there were no subsequent successful attacks on the United States, we assumed this was the right approach. I non-concur.

In the coming decades we're going to have to re-address the basic assumptions of the post-9/11 strategy. We've skated by with flawed assumptions for the past five years, but the day of reckoning is near. I think this revolutionary shift in the strategic environment will be particularly momentous for the Army. The Army's core function has always been to seize and control territory. That made sense during all of human history to this point since threats were geographic in essence. They arose from an identified place, and if we could control that place, we destroyed or minimized the threat. But if you buy the notion that future threats will not be linked to a particular piece of geography--enemies can mobilize resources and undertake operations from almost anywhere--then seizing and controlling terrain will no longer be the essence of security. This led me to predict at the symposium that 20 years hence, the U.S. Army's role in promoting American security will decline precipitously.

Via Milblogging Conference - 24-25 April 2009, Washington, D.C.

We're pleased to announce another panel, and moderator Greyhawk has tweaked the focus of the panel a bit.

New Media Agora: What is the impact of the "new media" on issues concerning national security, military doctrine and concept development, training, education, and lessons learned? A discussion of the issue by those at the frontlines of the debate.

Moderated by: Greyhawk - Mudville Gazette

Panel Members:

Dave Dilegge - Small Wars Journal

Andrew Exum - Abu Muqawama

Bill Roggio - Long War Journal

Update: This was a good one indeed. You can listen to a recording of this morning's broadcast here at WAMU.

After a slow start, the U.S. military has made remarkable strides in adapting to irregular warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is beginning to institutionalize those adaptations. Recent Department of Defense (DOD) directives and field manuals have elevated stability operations and counterinsurgency to the same level of importance as conventional military offensive and defensive operations. These changes are the outcome of deep reflection about the nature of current and likely future threats to U.S. national security and the military's role in addressing them. They represent important steps toward transforming a sclerotic organizational culture that long encouraged a ''we don't do windows'' posture on so-called ''military operations other than war,'' even as the nation's leaders called upon the armed forces to perform those types of missions with increasing frequency...

More at The Washington Quarterly.

FMI 3-24.2 is designed to be a user-manual for tactical level units and establishes doctrine for tactical counterinsurgency operations by combining the historic approaches to COIN, lessons learned from current operations, and the realities of today's operational environment.

Later this month, the Obama administration will unveil a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan. This comes as most important indicators in Afghanistan are pointing in the wrong direction. President Obama's decision last month to deploy an additional 17,000 U.S. troops was an important step in the right direction, but a comprehensive overhaul of our war plan is needed, and quickly.

As the administration finalizes its policy review, we are troubled by calls in some quarters for the president to adopt a "minimalist" approach toward Afghanistan. Supporters of this course caution that the American people are tired of war and that an ambitious, long-term commitment to Afghanistan may be politically unfeasible. They warn that Afghanistan has always been a "graveyard of empires" and has never been governable. Instead, they suggest, we can protect our vital national interests in Afghanistan even while lowering our objectives and accepting more "realistic" goals there -- for instance, by scaling back our long-term commitment to helping the Afghan people build a better future in favor of a short-term focus on fighting terrorists...

More at The Washington Post.

Last October, the Bush administration arranged a briefing for aides to Barack Obama and John McCain on the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. Among the expert advisers was David Kilcullen, an Australian counterinsurgency guru who had been one of the architects of the U.S. troop surge in Iraq.

"We said the situation was extremely difficult in Afghanistan, with a security crisis and a political crisis occurring at the same time," Kilcullen remembers. Obama had been talking on the campaign trail as if Afghanistan's problems could be fixed by adding more U.S. troops. The briefing was a wake-up call that the next president would face some agonizing policy decisions...

More at The Washington Post.

Fascinating article in the Straits Times from a couple of days ago 'North Korea Rethinks War-fighting Strategy'. The upshot of it is that North Korea is increasingly reliant on irregular measures. Personally, I see this as yet another reinforcement of Frank Hoffman's hybrid wars concept (the link goes to the KCL events page--scroll two thirds of the way down and you will find a podcast of Frank's lecture here from 21 January)...

The North Koreans are learning lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan. Chief among those would seem to be: when fighting Western armies you can tie them in knots with irregular techniques whereas confronting them in a conventional order of battle is a good way to get slaughtered. What lessons are we learning? According to some it's that we should stop messing around with this irregular warfare stuff because, hey, North Korea might want to do some high-intensity manoeuvre warfighting with all those heavy divisions it's got!

More at Kings of War.

Center for a New American Security (CNAS)

In providing additional military forces for the Afghanistan war, the Obama administration has demonstrated that Afghanistan is no longer an economy-of-force campaign. But a troop surge alone is not enough to win the war. In orthodox counterinsurgency theory, providing essential services and strengthening governance are as important as fighting the enemy with guns and bullets.

In a new policy brief published by CNAS, authors John Nagl, Andrew Exum, and Ahmed Humayun recommend that the United States increase its support for Afghanistan's National Solidarity Program (NSP) and similar development initiatives. Launched in 2002 by Afghanistan's Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD), the NSP is a rural development project that disburses modest grants to elected village councils. The NSP has not just simply provided tangible services to Afghans; it is "owned" by Afghans and run with an emphasis on transparency. The NSP is one of the few initiatives from Kabul to have generated significant goodwill among rural communities. Increasing U.S. funding for programs like the NSP can strategically leverage all instruments of American national power instead of relying on military force alone. Accordingly, this policy brief describes the structure of the NSP, its achievements, explains the underlying reasons for its success, and proposes a course by which the United States can help sustain and expand the program moving forward.

A Pathway to Success in Afghanistan: The National Solidarity Program

We'll auto-tweet the title and a link of all new entries on the SWJ Blog and most new threads in the Small Wars Council. At the moment, the following things do NOT feed: blog comments, discussion board posts on old threads, and new discussion board threads within the members-only area.

Thanks to many folks who encouraged and/or nudged us to get aboard. The list includes Jules Crittenden, Matt Armstrong, Julian Tolbert, and, indirectly, Ellyn Angelloti.

For those of you who prefer your RSS straight up, feeds are available for the SWJ Blog and the Small Wars Council.

We have also established a Facebook page, but aren't driving content feeds there yet. If you join us on Facebook, you still might be able to say you were there before it was cool. However, we already have 127 members in the group there, and some of them are raising the cool bar for us.