The State Department's Foreign Services Institute (FSI) and U.S. Joint Forces Command's (USJFCOM) Joint Warfighting Center (JWFC) signed a letter of intent to commence the development of online courseware in support of integrated reconstruction and stabilization training and education.
The State Department hosted the ceremonial signing Thursday to recognize the significant collaboration achieved between FSI and the JWFC.
Dr. Jerry West, JKDDC strategic plans and implementation division chief, said the letter of intent is a formal agreement on how the two organizations will share information and collaborate in the development of online courses, mostly in support of a Presidential national security directive (NSPD 44).
"[NSPD44] requires interagency to coordinate and support reconstruction and stabilization in synch with U.S. military plans and operations," West said. "The State Department is the lead agency for structuring the coordination across all agencies."
Marty Vozzo, JKDDC deputy program manager, said the letter of intent outlines how the agencies will identify training requirements and collaboratively build Web based courses and then enhance learning portals.
"[The agreement will] close gaps and help us understand the cultural differences between interagency partners," West said.
Vozzo said each agency will provide introductory course information to better understand the needs of the training audience.
"The result is to better train participants in joint operations worldwide," he said.
"As we bring together different agencies representing diverse organizations, these Web-based training products will be available to help us work better together and be more proficient in the tasks we are tackling together." Vozzo added.
Marcus Griffin had never been to the Middle East before he arrived in Iraq last fall, as part of a project to help the U.S. military decipher the country's intricate social nuances. An anthropologist from Christopher Newport University in Virginia, Griffin knew much more about the Philippines, having accompanied his social-scientist father on a two-year research project there as a teen. In Virginia he'd been studying Freegans, those superenvironmentalists who forage for food in restaurant and supermarket Dumpsters. And so, during a recent outing with the unit he's attached to in Baghdad, Griffin rummaged through the trash of an Iraqi sheep rancher, looking for patterns that would tell him something worthwhile about the neighborhood—and by extension, about Iraqi society. "Well, they're drinking a great deal of Pepsi," he said dryly to a Newsweek correspondent. When a man in a checked kaffiyeh emerged from one of the homes, Griffin peppered him with questions. Where did he get his electricity? (A generator.) Did his children attend school? (No, they're too young.) How did he make a living? (From his sheep.)
Though he wears Army fatigues and carries a gun, Griffin is a civilian, part of a controversial program known as the Human Terrain System. According to a Pentagon blueprint from 2006, the idea is to recruit academics whose area expertise and language skills can help the military wage a smarter counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. These specialists, among other things, are meant to map the population of towns and villages, identify the clans that matter and the fault lines within them, then advise U.S. commanders on the right approach for leveraging local support...
General Petraeus gives his opening statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
General David Petraeus calls it battlefield geometry - determining the strength and positioning of U.S. forces across Iraq.
Charlie Rose Show - Senator Jack Reed, Jack Keane, Senator Jeff Sessions - A discussion about General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker's testimony on Iraq.
Charlie Rose Show - A discussion about day two of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker's testimony on Iraq with John Burns and Dexter Filkins, both of The New York Times.
In 9 April 2008 testimony, General David Petraeus discusses the reasons for war, al Qaeda, and the definition of success in Iraq.
Iranian officials on Sunday ruled out an attack as the cause of an explosion that killed 11 people inside a mosque in the southern city of Shiraz.
The explosion ripped through the mosque packed with hundreds of worshippers late Saturday as a cleric delivered his weekly speech against extremist Wahabi beliefs and the outlawed Baha'i faith, the semiofficial Fars news agency said.
Authorities said besides the 11 killed, 191 people were wounded, some of them critically, the state IRNA news agency reported...
The police chief of the southern Fars Province, Gen. Ali Moayyedi, said he "rejects" the possibility of an intentional bombing and "any sort of insurgency" in the blast.
Moayyedi, in comments carried by state IRNA news agency, said the initial investigation found remnants of ammunition from a military exhibition that was held recently at the mosque....
New Answers to Hard Questions: Properly structured adviser teams are key to winning the Long War by 1st Lieutenant Brian Drohan and Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl.
Today's strategic realities outline a world in which many states face internal and transnational threats from terrorist organizations and other violent groups. The past five years in Iraq and Afghanistan present a number of stark lessons, but perhaps chief among them is the need to help our friends and partners provide for their own security. In the words of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, success in the Long War "will be less a matter of imposing one's will and more a function of shaping behavior — of friends, adversaries, and most importantly, the people in between." The Defense Department must create specifically designed force structure optimized for adviser and assistance missions to successfully engage partner nations at all levels, from the institutional to the tactical, and help them build the capacity to win the Long War...
U.S. commanders with whom I spoke in Anbar province in August were worried — worried that their Marines would get bored in the absence of combat action. Enlisted Marines on return tours of duty expressed surprise verging on bewilderment that cities such as Fallujah, long wracked by insurgent violence, were calm and open for business. Foreign terrorists who once ruled the streets still launched minor attacks, but had been marginalized across the province. And last year's Sunni-Arab enemies were busily scheming how to profit from the American presence...
Polls show that most non-Kurdish Iraqis blame the U.S. for the condition of their country and believe that their situations will improve after we leave. If, some five years after the invasion, this describes the mood of those we came to help, it suggests that we and the Iraqi people will obtain — at best — an Iraq that is worse off than it was before our occupation and one that could provide a breeding ground of resentment against American interests for as long into the future as we can imagine.
At worst, our withdrawal from Iraq could result in hundreds and possibly thousands of additional American casualties, the abandoning of billions of dollars of equipment, and the emergence of powerful and determined entities allied with Iran in the case of the Shiites, or with the most regressive political and social forces in the Middle East in the case of Arab Sunnis...
Hope and Skepticism: Iraqis at home and displaced weigh changes in Baghdad by Christopher Griffen.
Last April, this column described initial responses by Iraqi bloggers to the "surge" of American troops in their country. Writing from shattered Baghdad and exile in Damascus, they recorded hopeful auguries as families returned to reclaim their lives in such one-time combat zones as Baghdad's Haifa Street. But such hope was tempered by long-sewn despair: One blogger noted in February 2007 that he didn't know whether to feel happy because the violence was dissipating, afraid that it may return or "sad because deep inside I think I know it will."
One year later, Iraq's growing community of milbloggers reports continued improvement, citing both the success of the surge and the growth of "awakening councils" that comprise former Sunni insurgents who have worked with coalition forces to expel tyrannical al-Qaida terrorists...
The Long Haul: Leaving Iraq will be a logistical nightmare by Captain Timothy Hsia.
The recent push by the White House to negotiate a pact with the government of Iraq concerning the long-term presence of U.S. service members in the country surprised many Americans but served as coda for Army logisticians. The fact is, the military continues to build and stockpile thousands of containers full of equipment in Iraq, despite the unresolved political infighting in Washington concerning whether U.S. troops will leave...
Hedging Strategies: UCAVs, budgets and improbable threats by Group Captain Peter Layton.
Unmanned air vehicle development has sharply accelerated in recent years principally because UAVs can overcome a major shortcoming of manned aircraft — limited persistence — while offering better range, payload and stealth performance.
Improved capabilities, though, are important only if they are strategically relevant and affordable. For the foreseeable future, the major strategic drivers appear to be winning the long struggle against global terrorism and hedging against the re-emergence of a major state-based threat. Although unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs) are relevant to both circumstances, this article discusses the strategic, budgetary and technological case when considering hedging against a future peer competitor...
Hoisted by its Own PR: Israel's gamble on high-risk ops hastened self-defeat in Lebanon by Barbara Opell-Rome.
Obscured amid the failures of Israel's 2006 Lebanon War was the extent to which Tel Aviv's wartime leaders were —to wager on speculative, strategically dubious, image-boosting operations.
Part of the Israeli military's quest for "narrative superiority," these so-called "consciousness operations" ranged from relatively simple public relations efforts to boost homeland morale to complex psychological, special forces missions designed to trigger strategic change in the Lebanese theater...
Most soldiers I know greeted yesterday's news about the reduction in combat-tour lengths with a great deal of cynicism. It's not that they don't appreciate the reduction -- they do, and their families most certainly do. It's just that even a 12-month tour is such a hardship, such a departure from the deployment models used before the Iraq war strained the Army to its breaking point...
Counterinsurgency requires detailed knowledge of the human, geographic, political and social terrain, and it takes time to acquire that knowledge. I'd say it became effective around the fifth or sixth month of my tour as a police adviser in Iraq. Arguably, advisers, commanders and troops operating outside the wire should serve longer tours in order to develop and cement their relationships, and capitalize on them.
But they can't -- there's a finite limit to the amount of combat that men and women can endure. So we must balance combat effectiveness, and the needs of an all-volunteer force (and its families), against the steep learning curve of counterinsurgency, which demands longer deployments...
Iraq has essentially three problems to "solve" to become a stable country. These are the Sunni problem, the Shia problem, and the Kurdish problem. By "problem" I mean not that the people are a problem, but that each of the main subsets of the population has a particular challenge that has to be resolved before it can integrate into a successful state. (This is, of course, at a high degree of abstraction -- at the ground level, Shiites and Sunnis may be intermarried, etc.)
The Sunni problem was rejectionism. The Surge has solved the Sunni problem.
That's a fundamental shift in the situation on the ground from a year ago. The gains are -- as Petraeus said -- reversable...
Now whatever one may think of Moqtada al-Sadr's participation in politics, the essential question is whether his participation will take place within the framework of an Iraqi Shi'te subpolity or within an Iranian dominated framework. The difference is essential. Sistani's declaration that the "law is the only authority" goes to this very point: whose law and whose authority. In this case Sistani seems to suggest that the Shi'ites can settle their "problem", but settle it within the framework of Iraq...
Three weeks after the Iraqi government initiated Operation Knights Assault in Basrah, US and Iraqi forces have squared off against the Mahdi Army daily in the Shia slums of Sadr City. Additional US and Iraqi forces have moved into northeastern Baghdad to prepare for a possible major engagement against the Mahdi Army...
There are tens of thousands of Iranian fighters inside Iraq. Five days of fighting in Basra and a few more in Sadr City are not enough to rid Iraq of Iranian influence. We are only at the very beginning stages of the fight in the South. Since Britain implemented the "we may as well go ahead and give all of the terrain to the enemy" approach to counterinsurgency, the developments in the South lag far behind the West and North...
While the Taliban's desire to explicitly adopt classic insurgency doctrine is interesting, it is questionable whether they are in a position to successfully emulate Giáp in Afghanistan. One of the main differences is that Giáp was able to benefit from a regular supply of heavy weaponry and munitions from Mao across the border in China, including the artillery and anti-aircraft guns that proved key to isolating and destroying the French at íiện Biíªn Phủ.
Although able to overrun isolated outposts manned by poorly equipped Afghan National Police (ANP) - in the same way as Baitullah Mehsud's Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) are able to temporarily seize isolated forts in the FATA in Pakistan - the Taliban are a long way away from achieving the kind of coordinated assault, backed by heavy weaponry, that would be required to seize a coalition Forward Operating Base. It is also questionable whether the Taliban have the extremely tight command and control structure required to conduct the coordinated multi-pronged offensives key to Giáp's success...
The most intense arguments over U.S. involvement in Iraq do not flare at this point on Capitol Hill or on the campaign trail. Those rhetorical battles pale in comparison to the high-stakes struggle being waged behind closed doors at the Pentagon.
On one side are the "fight-win guys," as some describe themselves. They are led by Gen. David Petraeus and other commanders who argue that the counterinsurgency struggle in Iraq must be pursued as the military's top priority and ultimately resolved on U.S. terms...
Arrayed against them are the uniformed chiefs of the military services who foresee a "broken army" emerging from an all-out commitment to Iraq that neglects other needs and potential conflicts. It is time to rebuild Army tank battalions, Marine amphibious forces and other traditional instruments of big-nation warfare -- while muddling through in Iraq.
I unavoidably compress what is a serious and respectful struggle about resources, military strategy and political ideology. The weapons in this discreet conflict include budget requests, deployment schedules and, increasingly, speeches and public presentations that veil the true nature of the internal struggle but reveal how the military's top commanders line up...
There is simply not enough booze in Abu Muqawama's apartment to get him through this interview on the Diane Rehm Show with Doug Feith.
I'd throw up my two-cents on the revisionists but it is much too nice a weekend to waste on the likes of Feith and company. If you really want more right now then curl up with this.
As many in the military publicly acknowledge here for the first time, the guerrilla insurgency that exploded several months after Saddam's fall was not foreordained. In fact, to a shocking degree, it was created by the folly of the war's architects. But the officers who did raise their voices against the miscalculations, shortsightedness, and general failure of the war effort were generally crushed, their careers often ended. A willful blindness gripped political and military leaders, and dissent was not tolerated...
I have some JUW items to blog about later, for now I'll leave you with a "wavetop" snapshot of the who and what and a slide from one of Dave's briefs to mull over. The slide depicts a framework for understanding (or more precisely "how to think about") the transition of responsibility and authority of security, essential services, humanitarian assistance, economic development, and political governance from a coalition to host nation - the snapshot and slide are at the end of this post.
Some aspects of the war in Iraq are hard to fit into "classical" models of insurgency. One of these is the growing tribal uprising against al Qa'ida, which could transform the war in ways not factored into neat "benchmarks" developed many months ago and thousands of miles away. I spent time out on the ground during May and June working with coalition units, tribal leaders and fighters engaged in the uprising, so I felt a few field observations might be of interest to the Small Wars community. I apologize in advance for the epic length of this post, but it's a complex issue, so I hope people will forgive my long-windedness. Like much else, it's too early to know how this new development will play out. But surprisingly (surprising to me, anyway), indications so far are relatively positive...
I've spent much of the last six weeks out on the ground, working with Iraqi and U.S. combat units, civilian reconstruction teams, Iraqi administrators and tribal and community leaders. I've been away from e-mail a lot, so unable to post here at SWJ: but I'd like to make up for that now by providing colleagues with a basic understanding of what's happening, right now, in Iraq.
This post is not about whether current ops are "working" — for us, here on the ground, time will tell, though some observers elsewhere seem to have already made up their minds (on the basis of what evidence, I'm not really sure). But for professional counterinsurgency operators such as our SWJ community, the thing to understand at this point is the intention and concept behind current ops in Iraq: if you grasp this, you can tell for yourself how the operations are going, without relying on armchair pundits. So in the interests of self-education (and cutting out the commentariat middlemen—sorry, guys) here is a field perspective on current operations...
I asked the SWJ to pass along that I've been continuously in the field of late and haven't posted to the blog as much as I would have liked to. I am still very much engaged in the Small Wars Journal community and will be posting here again soon. In the meantime I offer up this article published in the June 2007 issue of the Department of State's eJournal. I might add that there are some excellent articles in this issue of eJournal -- well worth following the link and taking a look around...
A few commentators have panned the new counterinsurgency manual for insufficient emphasis on religion. There is a grain of truth in this criticism but, as a practitioner, the evidence I see does not really support it. Rather, field data suggest, some critics may misunderstand both current conflicts and the purpose of doctrine. Worse, they may be swallowing propaganda from munafiquun who pose as defenders of the faith while simultaneously perverting it. (Did I sound like a politician there? Never mind. I will show factual evidence for this assertion, so the resemblance is fleeting...I hope)...
Gated communities in counterinsurgency are like tourniquets in surgery. They can stem a life-threatening hemorrhage, but they must be applied sparingly, released as often and as soon as possible, and they have side-effects that have to be taken into account. They are never a first choice. But, given the dire current situation in Baghdad, the "urban tourniquet" is the lesser of several evils, because it breaks the cycle of sectarian violence that has caused so much damage and human suffering in Iraq...
I spent a few hours recently, reading Edward N. Luttwak's article in Harper's Magazine, "Dead End: Counter-Insurgency as Military Malpractice", and carefully thinking over his argument. It was a pleasant holiday from the reality of war here in Baghdad, and a reassuring reminder that there are still havens of calm (like CSIS, where Dr Luttwak is a Senior Fellow) where one can consider issues thoroughly and arrive at firm conclusions. From my viewpoint, here in Iraq, things somehow never seem quite so black-and-white...
It has been an interesting few weeks here in Baghdad. Myself and the other advisors felt that a comment on recent developments might be in order. It is still early days for Fardh al-Qanoon (a.k.a the "Baghdad Security Plan") and thus too soon to tell for sure how things will play out. But, though the challenges remain extremely severe, early trends are quite positive. Counter-intuitively, the latest series of car bombings includes some encouraging signs...
Today's Guardian article ("Military Chiefs Give US Six Months to Win Iraq War") misrepresents the Baghdad advisers. So much so, it makes me doubt the reliability of the single, unidentified source responsible for much of the article's reporting.
I hope SWJ colleagues will forgive this more "personal" post than usual, but as Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser I have a duty to set the record straight on this.
There is a real country called Iraq, where a real war is going on, with real progress but very real challenges. We are not going to "win the war" in six months -- nor would anyone expect to. But the Guardian seems to be describing some completely different, (possibly mythical) country, and some imaginary group of harried and depressed advisers bearing no resemblance to reality...
It has been a busy few weeks. Operation Fadr al-Qanoon (which the media calls the "Baghdad security plan") is shaping up. Progress is measurable, but this is a marathon, not a sprint, and it's still too early to know how it will turn out.
The message for all of us, as professionals who do this for a living, is patience, patience, patience. The war has been going for nearly four years, the current strategy less than four weeks. We need to give it time...
Discussion of the new Iraq strategy, and General Petraeus's recent Congressional testimony have raised the somewhat obvious point that the word "counterinsurgency" means very different things to different people. So it may be worth sketching in brief outline the two basic philosophical approaches to counterinsurgency that developed over the 20th century (a period which I have written about elsewhere as "Classical Counterinsurgency"). These two contrasting schools of thought about counterinsurgency might be labeled as "enemy-centric" and "population-centric".
The enemy-centric approach basically understands counter-insurgency as a variant of conventional warfare. It sees counterinsurgency as a contest with an organized enemy, and believes that we must defeat that enemy as our primary task. There are many variants within this approach, including "soft line" and "hard line" approaches, kinetic and non-kinetic methods of defeating the enemy, decapitation versus marginalization strategies, and so on. Many of these strategic concepts are shared with the population-centric school of counterinsurgency, but the philosophy differs. In a nut-shell, it could be summarized as "first defeat the enemy, and all else will follow"...
Much discussion of the new Iraq strategy centers on the "surge" to increase forces in-theater by 21,500 troops. I offer no comment on administration policy here. But as counterinsurgency professionals, it should be clear to us that focusing on the "surge" misses what is actually new in the strategy -- its population-centric approach.
Here are the two core paragraphs from the President's speech, outlining the strategy (emphasis added):
"Now let me explain the main elements of this effort: The Iraqi government will appoint a military commander and two deputy commanders for their capital. The Iraqi government will deploy Iraqi Army and National Police brigades across Baghdad's nine districts. When these forces are fully deployed, there will be 18 Iraqi Army and National Police brigades committed to this effort, along with local police. These Iraqi forces will operate from local police stations -- conducting patrols and setting up checkpoints, and going door-to-door to gain the trust of Baghdad residents...
The President's new Iraq strategy has prompted much discussion, informed and otherwise. I'm not going to add to it here. Rather, I want to tentatively suggest a framework for thinking about Iraq, which (if you accept its underlying assumptions) might prove helpful in evaluating the new strategy and the enemy's likely response.
I developed this framework about two years ago, while writing the October 2004 version of Countering Global Insurgency, mainly the appendix on Iraq. I have since presented it in various forums, including during the Quadrennial Defense Review in 2004-5, the Eisenhower Series in early 2006, during a series of lectures at the Naval War College and at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, and during the Irregular Warfare conference in Summer 2006. I also briefed it to the Pentagon's "Plan B" team in November 2006...
Your company has just been warned for deployment on counterinsurgency operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. You have read David Galula, T.E. Lawrence and Robert Thompson. You have studied FM 3-24 and now understand the history, philosophy and theory of counterinsurgency. You watched Black Hawk Down and The Battle of Algiers, and you know this will be the most difficult challenge of your life.
But what does all the theory mean, at the company level? How do the principles translate into action - at night, with the GPS down, the media criticizing you, the locals complaining in a language you don't understand, and an unseen enemy killing your people by ones and twos? How does counterinsurgency actually happen?
There are no universal answers, and insurgents are among the most adaptive opponents you will ever face. Countering them will demand every ounce of your intellect. But be comforted: you are not the first to feel this way. There are tactical fundamentals you can apply, to link the theory with the techniques and procedures you already know...
Counterinsurgency is fashionable again: more has been written on it in the last four years than in the last four decades. As William Rosenau of RAND recently observed,
insurgency and counterinsurgency...have enjoyed a level of military, academic, and journalistic notice unseen since the mid-1960s. Scholars and practitioners have recently reexamined 19th- and 20th-century counterinsurgency campaigns waged by the United States and the European colonial powers, much as their predecessors during the Kennedy administration mined the past relentlessly in the hope of uncovering the secrets of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. The professional military literature is awash with articles on how the armed services should prepare for what the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) refers to as "irregular warfare," and scholars, after a long hiatus, have sought to deepen our understanding of the roles that insurgency, terrorism, and related forms of political violence play in the international security environment.
This is heartening for those who were in the wilderness during the years when Western governments regarded counterinsurgency as a distraction, of interest only to historians. So it is no surprise that some have triumphantly urged the re-discovery of classical, "proven" counterinsurgency methods. But, this paper suggests, some of this enthusiasm may be misplaced. In fact, today's insurgencies differ significantly — at the level of policy, strategy, operational art and tactical technique — from those of earlier eras. An enormous amount of classical counterinsurgency remains relevant. Indeed, counterinsurgency provides the "best fit" framework for strategic problems in the War on Terrorism. But much is new in counterinsurgency redux, possibly requiring fundamental re-appraisals of conventional wisdom.
Joint Urban Warrior 08 - "Wavetop"
Kilcullen's Tactical Jenga and the Strategic Stopwatch - Thoughts?
JUW 08 was marked by the exceptional quality of the guest speaker presentations - all spot on in providing the context and food for thought in meeting the program's objectives. Kudos to Major General John Allen (USMC), Brigadier General Itai Brun (IDF), Colonel J.B. Burton (USA), Lieutenant Colonel Joe L'Etoile (USMC), Dr. Dave Kilcullen, Mr. Greg Bates and Mr. Bill Smith.
Another highlight was the broad range of expertise, experience and professionalism brought to the event by participants to include senior mentors, "players", subject matter experts from numerous organizations and agencies, facilitators, team leads and the "iron majors" from the US Army Command and General Staff College and US Marine Corps Command and Staff College. Active attendance peaked at just over 180 participants to include 55 representing 18 countries and NATO ACT.
