The following excerpt is from a draft 'think piece' -- work in progress -- on an issue that is a recurring theme in much of the work I've been involved in over the last several years. I am not the author -- but did participate in many of the discussions concerning Strategic Compression and its implications for coalition forces that fed the content of the paper. It is presented to provoke thought, help frame a debate, and be a catalyst for further discussion.

What is Strategic Compression?

Strategic Compression is the forming of unexpected causal relationships and breaking of expected causal relationships among the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of conflict. Furthermore, Strategic Compression occurs due to the rapidity of information transmission and Blue actors' lack of understanding of pre-existing and emergent trends and social appetites both within the local area of operations and within the world-wide audience. As such, the levels of war seem to compress in time and in causal linkages.

The chain of command system is an example of a pre-existing organizational scheme that is intended to aid in command and the distribution of information and allow for purposeful and coordinated operations in attaining strategic objectives. Mechanisms such as lines of operations formed in the campaign planning phase are tailored to accomplish strategic and operational objectives through a collection of tactical and operational actions. Strategic level guidance requires crafting a suitable response that is tempered by the forces available. While contingency planning can aid in advance preparations each event demands a fresh look at situations and objectives as every crisis or event has its own unique characteristics that need to be acknowledged and accounted for. In both cases, military planners rely on assumptions of pre-existing and developed causal relationships in dealing with new situations.

In Strategic Compression, there are two major types of changes to causal relationships. The first is where an entirely new, unexpected causal relationship forms at any level of war that causes a change in another level of war. The second is one that breaks or negates an otherwise existing and expected causal relationship. Both result in changes in the operational approaches in the levels of conflict. The formation of a new causal relationship or the destruction of an existing causal relationship can be either top-down (strategic ---> operational ---> tactical) or bottom up (tactical ---> operational ---> strategic).

How Does Strategic Compression Work in the Current Security Environment?

In dealing with conflict in the current world system, the number of actors and factors one has to account for is overwhelming. The dense overlay and dynamic interweaving of social, political, and economic interactions produce the situation on the ground. Pulling the layers apart in order to find critical nodes or mechanisms that can be leveraged to accomplish strategic and operational objectives is a daunting task. The complexity of the environment is such that all actors are continuously interacting, reacting, and adapting to each other in a fluid and evolving setting. If one group of insurgents is dismantled, another takes its place. If one social problem is alleviated, such as food distribution, another can appear, such as sanitation. Obvious solutions to problems do not always work. Even if a problem has been largely solved, other problems or difficult situations appear which diminish or negate positive effects already created. Furthermore, the uniqueness of each problem due to the complex interaction of social factors is such that lessons learned are not transferable to the next problem. Each attempt to solve the problem changes the underlying nature of the problem. In such complex interactive systems, it is impossible to predict -- and also to repeat -- effects and results.

One of the great paradoxes of Small Wars is that terrorists are regularly able to leverage Strategic Compression -- use tactical actions to create strategic effects -- yet great powers seem unable to. Terrorists and insurgents regularly fight through using asymmetric engagement: using tactics, equipment, and resources that generate disproportionate effects. While asymmetric engagement is the method in which asymmetric actors wage war against the U.S., it is a term distinct from Strategic Compression. Strategic Compression is specifically leveraged by insurgents and terrorists when actions are undertaken with the intent to influence public opinion through the media (traditional and non-traditional) towards specific aims. The tactical actions of killing a few U.S. soldiers or destroying U.S. vehicles are just a means of achieving the greater goal of eroding support or enraging the domestic and local AO populations, respectively.

In Iraq, this has happened in instances where insurgents have taken positions in hospitals and mosques. By drawing the U.S. into fights in these areas, the insurgents are specifically trying to leverage Strategic Compression against the U.S. Any battle with insurgent forces in a sensitive area would cast the U.S. in a bad light as uncaring or worse, disrespectful of Islam. The goal of the insurgents is not so much to kill soldiers or destroy vehicles but rather to affect the perceptions of the local and global public audience. Media, if involved would likely capture brutal images of death and destruction of Iraqis and religious buildings respectively. If media was not present to capture images, other images would likely appear through non-traditional sources showing the effects or for example the collapsed roof of a mosque. The underlying message would presumably be that the U.S. was responsible. Furthermore, regardless of traditional or non-traditional media action, the local population would have a visible reminder and it would possibly be portrayed as an example of how the U.S. does not care about the people of Iraq, is an occupier, etc.

The wide-spread presence of photo and video cameras, the proliferation of communications devices and technology, and the availability of new web services (blogs, Youtube, etc.) has opened the doors to the global instantaneous "rumor mill." True or not -- pictures, video footage, and reports of incidents can be rapidly transmitted around the world. Even if this data is 'true' in the loosest sense, it is not necessarily grounded in its proper context. Images of soldiers firing on a crowd might not show insurgent perpetrators in the crowd. In the current environment, news is as likely to be carried by mainstream media as it is to be propagated by new and non-traditional means (i.e. camera phones and the aforementioned Youtube). In leveraging public opinion through Strategic Compression, America's enemies will make use of both new and old modes of communication. However, it is important to point out that technology is an enabler and an accelerator of Strategic Compression, but it is not the cause. Strategic Compression is rooted in the unpredictable interaction of complex systems and is not dependent on technology per se.

The proliferation of images, videos, and reports filtered through traditional and non-traditional media allows terrorists, insurgents, and unsympathetic members of the public to convey a story is either false or selective with the truth. An alarming characteristic of current information technology is that images, pictures, and quotes can be sent to the worldwide audience without any contextual information. This allows actions or results of actions -- real or perceived to be --used in information warfare by insurgents against the United States. Images of soldiers firing into a crowd could in reality be coordinated shots at insurgent snipers. Regardless of reality these images could give the impression that American forces kill indiscriminately. Al-Sadr's staging of rallies next to the hotels in which foreign journalist stay can give the impression that the entire city of Baghdad is falling rapidly into anarchy.

While they give the viewer an impression of understanding the reality on the ground, these previously mentioned images are in fact just raw data. This raw data can be easily spun in a certain way to espouse a certain view point. Even worse, in an age where images are easily manipulated they could be also be completely false and have no basis in any real event. Furthermore, in the absence of context, those watching the images tend to superimpose their own opinions and beliefs on them. If there is a natural predisposition towards one view point or another, the raw data can become further 'fuel for the fire'.

Some Thoughts on the Future of Strategic Compression

The unexpected linkages created amongst the levels of war are unlikely to diminish. Inexpensive, readily available cameras and the ability to post images and video on the internet by amateur reporters will increasingly contribute to this phenomenon. Sources of news will likely proliferate and instances of media responding to tactical mistakes are likely to grow. Other causal linkages are likely to become more apparent or emerge. All of these factors will result in placing greater emphasis on General Krulak's strategic corporal idea as tactical actions should be expected to receive hyper-scrutiny in the future. The CNN effect will play an increasingly important role in Small Wars relative to major combat operations (MCO), because unlike the enemy in MCO, the two major centers of gravity in small wars -- the occupied population and the American public -- depend upon news media to gain information and formulate opinions about military actions. Ensuring that tactical actions are well understood by both audiences is essential. Small wars are also likely to be increasingly fought in urban environments. The likelihood that collateral damage will occur during operations and be documented by international and non-traditional media is dramatically increased. As such, Strategic Compression is exacerbated when American forces are operating amongst urban civilian population centers.

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".

The population-centric approach understands counter-insurgency as fundamentally a control problem, or even an armed variant of government administration. It believes that establishing control over the population, and the environment (physical, human and informational) in which that population lives, is the essential task. Again, there are many variants within this approach, including some very hard-line methods and some softer approaches, but the underlying philosophy is "first control the population, and all else will follow".

(Note that we're talking about classical counter-insurgency theory here, not modern counter-insurgency practice, so much. Also, I'm not suggesting one school is always right and the other always wrong -- both can be well-done, and both can be hopelessly counterproductive if done badly. The key to "good counterinsurgency practice" is the agile integration of civil and military measures across security, economic, political and information tracks -- and this is something that has to be done regardless of which approach you adopt, and is just as necessary in both).

Now, some people are quite committed to one or the other school of thought (Galula, for example, flatly states that the population-centric approach is always correct, and the new FM 3-24 takes a similar but less absolute stance). But my experience has been that both are applicable in varying degrees in most insurgencies, and at different times in the life of any one insurgency - since, over time, the nature of insurgencies shifts.

The real art is to "read the battle" and understand how it is developing, fast enough to adapt. Neither the enemy-centric nor the population-centric approaches are always or universally appropriate -- there is no cookie-cutter, and no substitute for situation-specific analysis informed by extremely deep local area and cultural knowledge.

As an example of the need to read the battle and adapt, I hope you will forgive a brief personal anecdote. In Timor in 1999 I worked closely with village elders in the border districts. I sat down with several of them one afternoon to discuss their perception of how the campaign was progressing, and they complained that the Australians weren't securing them in the fields and villages, that they felt unsafe because of the militia (the local term for cross-border guerrillas) and that we needed to do more to protect them. In actual fact, we were out in large numbers, securing the border against infiltration, patrolling by night, conducting 14 to 21-day patrols in the jungle to deny the militias a chance to build sanctuaries, and working in close in the villages to maintain popular support. There had not been a single successful attack by the insurgents on the population for more than two months. So, "objectively", they were secure. But -- and this is the critical point -- because our troops were sneaking around in the jungle and at night, staying out of the villagers' way and focusing on defeating enemy attempts to target the population, they did not see us about, and hence did not feel "subjectively" secure. This was exacerbated by the fact that they had just experienced a major psychological trauma (occupation, insurgency, mass destruction and international intervention) and as a society they needed time and support for a degree of "mental reconstruction". Based on their feedback (and that of lots of other meetings and observations) we changed our operational approach, became a bit more visible to the population and focused on giving them the feeling, as well as the reality, of safety. Once we did that, it was fine.

In other words, we had to shift from a more enemy-centric approach to a more population-centric approach to adjust to the developing situation. My personal lesson from this experience was that the correct approach is situation-dependent, and the situation changes over time. Therefore the key is to develop mechanisms that allow you to read the environment, to be agile and to adapt, as John Nagl showed so brilliantly in Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife.

So, in summary, two broad philosophical approaches in classical counterinsurgency (and remember it's classical 20th century counterinsurgency we're discussing here) -- population-centric, and enemy-centric. Both have merit, but the key is to first diagnose the environment, then design a tailor-made approach to counter the insurgency, and - most critically - have a system for generating continuous, real-time feedback from the environment that allows you to know what effect you are having, and adapt as needed.

If I were a snooty European intellectual, I would blame the inability of many Americans to recognize the multi-sided nature of the current war in Iraq on American culture. "Americans," I would write, "can only think in terms of black and white, of absolute good and absolute evil. If you doubt this, just look at the films they watch, the games they play and the politicians they elect."

Fortunately, I'm a snooty American intellectual. As such, I realise that three-sided conflicts have been a staple plot device in American films for more than thirty years, that games like Monopoly, Risk and poker provide America with lots of people who are familiar with the dynamics of multi-sided competition, and that nobody gets very far in American politics without being able to handle more shades of grey than a high-end laser printer. Moreover, as a snooty American intellectual who has spent a lot of time studying the military history of Europe, I also realize that the chief cause of our strategic myopia is an idea that we borrowed from European intellectuals, and that is the notion that war is necessarily a two-sided affair.

The great irony here is that the writers who gave us the idea that war had to be two-sided - Carl von Clausewitz, Antoine Jomini and a host of lesser lights who popularized their ideas - were products of an age when international conflict was anything but two-sided. Both Clausewitz and Jomini, for example, were veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, a series of struggles in which each participant switched partners with a frequency that would put a present-day movie star to shame. Both, moreover, based their theories on the wars and campaigns of a century (1680-1780) in which each of the five or six "great powers" that dominated the Continent saw itself as competing with every other "great power". Indeed, the struggle among the "great powers" in eighteenth century Europe is probably the best documented case study of sustained multi-sided conflict that we can find.

Why, then, did Clausewitz, Jomini and their second-rate immitators base their theories of war on the axiom that war was necessarily a two-sided affair? The reason, quite simply, was that they were soldiers rather than statesmen and, as such, looked at war from a bottom-up perspective. As befits a man who first went to war at the tender age of twelve, Clausewitz devoted most of his energies to matters that we would now categorize as "operational". This was even more true of the other theorists of the day. When mentioned at all, politics was treated as something my old economics teacher called an "exogenous variable", a phenomenon that, while might intrude into military calculations in a powerful way, was nonetheless alien to the subject at hand.

The relationship between multi-sided politics and two-sided war thought is nicely illustrated by an episode from the First Balkan War (1912-1913). Crown Prince Constantine, who commanded the Greek army in the field, wanted to use his forces to help the much-larger Bulgarian army defeat the main Turkish army. Bulgaria and Greece, after all, were allies, and shared the common goal of expelling the Turks from the Balkan peninsula. King George of Greece, however, had a different idea. While just as eager as anyone else to gain territory at the expense of the Turks, he was also worried about the territorial ambitions of his allies. The king therefore ordered his son to let the Bulgarians worry about the main Turkish army while the Greek field army took the shortest possible route to the choicest bit of real estate at issue, the city of Salonika.

Constantine made all sorts of noise about the necessity of keeping faith with allies and how the main Turkish army was the center of gravity of the campaign. In the end, however, he obeyed his orders. As a result, the relatively small detachments that the field armies of Bulgaria and Serbia (which was also taking part in the war against Turkey) sent to Salonika found themselves marching into in a city that was already occupied by a much larger Greek force.

As might be imagined, the Bulgarians, who were fighting alone against the main Turkish army, were not happy about this turn of events. They were even less happy when they discovered that the Serbian army had done something similar in central Macedonia, using forces that would have been very welcome in the bloody battles against the main Turkish army to occupy territory that Bulgaria had claimed as its own. Indeed, the Bulgarians, who had done the lion's share of the work of driving the Turks out of the Balkans, and who had consequently taken the lion's share of the casualties, were greatly annoyed. Thus, when it became clear that neither the Greeks nor the Serbs were —to give up the territory they had snatched while Bulgaria had been distracted, Bulgaria declared war on its former allies. (This was the start of the Second Balkan War, but that is a different story ...)

While the relationships among the countries that took part in the First Balkan War were extremely complex, the moral of the tale of Bulgaria's great blunder is painfully simple. A power that gets involved in a multi-sided conflict needs to follow the logic of multi-sided "political" conflict. If it doesn't, and persists in acting as if it is in a two-sided "military" conflict, then it will end up being the patsy of actors who, while far less powerful, understand the dynamics of the situation at hand.

I thought I understood something about counterinsurgency until I started doing it. In this interview conducted by the Army's Combat Studies Institute, I discuss what I learned the first time I practiced counterinsurgency, in Al Anbar province from 2003-2004. An excerpt follows:

The key to success in a counterinsurgency environment is not to create more

insurgents than you capture or kill. A stray tank round that kills a family could create dozens of insurgents for a generation. Thus, it is essential to use force as carefully and with as much discrimination as is possible. This is especially important at situations like checkpoints when soldiers must be given the non-lethal tools to protect themselves from possible car bombers without relying upon deadly force. Always consider the long-term effects of operations in a counterinsurgency environment. Killing an insurgent today may be satisfying, but if in doing so you convince all the members of his clan to fight you to the death, you've actually taken three steps backwards.

I'd be happy to discuss the interview, the new Army/Marine Corps "Counterinsurgency" Field Manual, or other topics of interest via this blog when my day job commanding the 1st Battalion 34th Armor allows. Duty First!

Two items to pass along from my day job working Joint Urban Warrior (USMC / USJFCOM wargaming program) and Emerald Express (operational insights and observations seminars). Good products if I say so myself...

The New Challenges for Military Operations in the 21st Century: Emerald Express Insights and Observations from Operation Iraqi Freedom:

This documentary video was produced as part of the annual Joint Urban Warrior (JUW) program and provides insights and observations from Emerald Express seminars in support of JUW 04, 05, and 06.

The video is divided into seven sections - Introduction, Winning the People, Strategic Compression, Filling the Gap, Becoming an Agile Force, Improving Civil-Military Unity of Effort, and Enhancing Coalition Operations. It runs 55 minutes, combines video, still images and interviews, and is professionally narrated and produced.

Distribution of this project is authorized to U.S. Government agencies and their contractors; lead representatives of multinational participants in the Joint Urban Warrior and Emerald Express programs; and for administrative and operational use. To request a copy, please send an email to wargaming@usmc.mil. Please include organization name, organization mailing address, phone number, and point of contact in your request.

Joint Urban Warrior 2006 Small Wars Battlebook:

This multimedia product, consisting of 3 interactive DVDs, was produced as part of the Joint Urban Warrior 06 Program. It synthesizes and integrates a multifaceted range of products developed throughout the entire nine-month pathway into a user-friendly format, and addresses a broad spectrum of key issues central to the conduct of complex urban operations.

The Battlebook contains white papers addressing critical urban operations and small wars issues, video interviews and background reference material to include doctrinal publications and an extensive collection of insurgency and counterinsurgency articles.

The JUW 2006 Small Wars Battlebook is a FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY product. It is authorized for distribution to US Department of Defense organizations and other organizations participating in JUW 06 Small Wars to include US Government Agencies, and representatives of: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Israel, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, NATO, Poland, Singapore, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

To request a copy, send an email to wargaming@usmc.mil. Include rank / title, name, organization / agency name and mailing address, official e-mail address and phone number.

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.

This is a strong commitment. But for it to succeed, our commanders say the Iraqis will need our help. So America will change our strategy to help the Iraqis carry out their campaign to put down sectarian violence and bring security to the people of Baghdad. This will require increasing American force levels. So I've committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq. The vast majority of them -- five brigades -- will be deployed to Baghdad. These troops will work alongside Iraqi units and be embedded in their formations. Our troops will have a well-defined mission: to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs."

What matters here is not the size of forces (though the strategy will not work without a certain minimum force size), but rather their tasks. The key element of the plan, as outlined in the President's speech, is to concentrate security forces within Baghdad, to secure the local people where they live. Troops will operate in small, local groups closely partnered with Iraqi military and police units, with each unit permanently assigned to an area and working its "beat".

This is different from early strategies which were enemy-centric (focusing on killing insurgents), or more recent approaches that relied on training and supporting Iraqi forces and expected them to secure the population.

The new strategy reflects counterinsurgency best practice as demonstrated over dozens of campaigns in the last several decades: enemy-centric approaches that focus on the enemy, assuming that killing insurgents is the key task, rarely succeed. Population-centric approaches, that center on protecting local people and gaining their support, succeed more often.

The extra forces are needed because a residential, population-centric strategy demands enough troops per city block to provide real and immediate security. It demands the ability to "flood" areas, and so deter enemy interference with the population. This is less like conventional warfare, and more like a cop patrolling a beat to prevent violent crime.

This does not mean there will be less fighting -- indeed, there will probably be more in the short-term, as security forces get in at the grass-roots level and compete for influence with insurgents, sectarian militias and terrorist gangs. But the aim is different: in the new strategy what matters is providing security and order for the population, rather than directly targeting the enemy -- though this strategy will effectively marginalize them.

Why the focus on Baghdad? Because about 50% of the war in Iraq happens inside Baghdad city limits. Improving security in the capital therefore makes a major difference. (Not that the enemy will meekly roll over and accept this -- hence the need for more troops and a reserve to deal with the inevitable enemy response, which will probably see spikes of activity outside Baghdad even as security in the city improves.)

There are no guarantees in war, and there is no guarantee that the new strategy will work, or that success will happen overnight if it does work. Iraq is an extremely complex and difficult problem, as all of us know -- if there was a "silver bullet" solution we would have found it by now. All that the new strategy can do is give us a fighting chance of success, and it certainly does give us that.

All of this represents a true departure from previous strategy, but the "surge" is not the strategy -- the switch to population security and a residential, high-force-density, long-term approach is what matters here.

From time to time I will make a blog entry here based on a "post of note" from the Small Wars Journal's discussion board - the Small Wars Council.

A recent and energetic discussion at the Council elicited a wide range of responses from military theorists, experienced operators and casual observers. The genesis of this discussion centered on Dave Kilcullen's Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency.

One particular reply that caught my eye was posted by RTK -- a two-tour Iraqi Freedom veteran who served as a platoon and troop commander with the 3rd Armored Regiment. In that post RTK broke down each of the 28 articles of company-level COIN (counterinsurgency) and provided a short example of its utilization and / or utility based on his personal experiences and observations. Where a military acronym is used I have inserted an explanation.

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Article 1: Know your turf - Very little difference from saying "conduct IPB" (Intelligence Preparation of the Battlespace).

Article 2: Diagnose the problem - Looks like mission analysis.

Article 3: Organize for intelligence - Companies don't have intelligence sections. Smart and innovative companies have developed in-house intelligence sections that collect and analyze intelligence from the platoons. These ad-hoc sections were more often than not better suited and outperformed battalion-level intelligence sections with actual intelligence trained soldiers.

Article 4: Organize for interagency operations - In your typical mission rehearsal exercise, a company doesn't even touch interagency operations. In-theater, maximizing the effectiveness of interagency operations, particularly in the realm of civil-military projects, can make or break your combat tour.

Article 5: Travel light and harden CSS (Combat Service Support) - It doesn't take a Rhodes Scholar to see that CSS convoys were getting hammered right off the bat (remember PVT Lynch). We didn't do a good job in training our logisticians to fight on the roads. Conversely, for every tank or Bradley with a good load plan in theater I saw 8 gypsy wagons for tanks with all kinds of crap hanging off them that their crew would never use. Utilization of the conex-box for junk not used is an important PCI (Pre-Combat Inspection).

Article 6: Find a political / cultural advisor - Why did SF (Special Forces) traditionally conduct UW (Unconventional Warfare) and FID (Foreign Internal Defense) missions? Because being culturally astute are SF imperatives in their doctrine. We, in the conventional force, were never trained that way. Good units pulled in people who knew what they were talking about. I remember learning a great deal from Dr. Hashim. Once in theater, I got hooked into a sheiks family who brought me up to speed on the specific cultural dos and don'ts in my area. It helped place my soldiers in my troop on a higher plain of understanding than other units in theater. Our performance and results spoke to that.

Article 7: Train the squad leaders, then trust them - On the high intensity battlefield, I, as a troop commander, can maneuver individual sections much easier than in a COIN environment. The abilities of my junior leaders are of vital importance to everything I do. They conduct independent operations. Most of my patrols in my troop were led by an E5 or E6. I had 3 officers in my troop and they couldn't be everywhere. I, as did my PLs (Platoon Leaders), had to trust my NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers) to do the right thing consistent with the commander's intent I wrote.

Article 8: Rank is nothing, talent is everything - Goes back to the rule of thirds that Tom Ricks talks about in Fiasco (one third get it, one third are trying to get it, and one third just want to use the hammer as the only tool in their box). Some are really good at COIN, some suck. Some of our best COIN operators are E5s and E4s who are out there every day. They understand how 2nd and 3rd order effects work. They see them up close and personal.

Article 9: Have a game plan - It may be surprising to you that many units go into an area without one. Ties back to Articles 1-4.

Article 10: Be there - Near and dear to my heart. As a reconnaissance tactics instructor, it's my job to communicate to the force that R&S planning and operations work in COIN just like they do in HIC environments. If you're unable to place effective fires at the critical point and time (which in OCIN is 3-7 seconds) you'll lose the engagement. Developing NAI (Named Areas of Interest) on areas that have a high IED (Improvised Explosive Device) threat and over-watching them will eliminate IEDs in given area. Again, goes back to IPB and planning

Article 11: Avoid knee jerk responses to first impressions - First reports are wrong 95% of the time. Insurgents know when RIP/TOA (Relief in Place / Transfer of Authority) is happening. Depending on where you are - some lay low and some hammer the new unit. Those laying low can paralyze a new unit into inaction. Going into the game with a plan and sticking to it is better than initial improvisation.

Article 12: Prepare for handover from day 1 - We reinvent the wheel on each rotation. It has been said we fought the Vietnam War for one year 11 times, rather than for 11 years. Many units get the RIP/TOA files and paperwork and never look at them again. That's a travesty. Additionally, some units are preparing to RIP/TOA with indigenous forces. That needs to be planned from Day 1.

Article 13: Build trusted networks - May seem like common sense but many units think they can do it on their own. There are people in the community who want to help, despite great risk to themselves and their family. Taking them in and getting them to help your unit will make the unit successful. This goes back to the cultural advisor piece. If the tree branches are overt operations, the tree's roots are relationships with and in the local populace.

Articles 14 and 15: Start easy and seek early victories - Some go in and try to take down the entire AQIZ network in Iraq in their first 48 hours. The easiest victories have very little to do with kinetic operations; SWEAT-MS (Security, Water, Electricity, Transportation Network, Medical and Sanitation) victories, tribal engagements, and equipping of security forces are the easiest 3 things to focus on. The populace sees this and will warm to your unit quickly.

Article 16: Practice deterrent patrolling - Firebase concepts, which conventional units were completely against initially, lend well to this. Dominating the environment through sheer presence to deter attacks goes back to R&S (Reconnaissance and Surveillance) planning.

Article 17: Be prepared for setbacks - Things don't go perfectly, despite even the best of plans. Western logic doesn't always translate well. Despite your best effort to explain a specific COA (Course of Action) to a sheik, he may not roll with it. If you've hinged your entire plan on the COA he's refuted, you probably needed to plan a bit better. Stuff happens. Deal with it.

Article 18: Engage the women; beware the children - Iraq, despite the men's perspective, is a matriarchal society. Getting into the women's networks influences the family network and gets 14 year old Joe Jiahist grounded and beaten with a wooden stick by his mom. Aside from the pure comedic value of these types of events, the women's circles are often the untapped venues of success in this type of society. Conversely, the insurgents are more ruthless than we are. They use kids because they're impressionable and, to them, expendable. It's much easier, seemingly, to deal with the kids, but they're distracters and oftentimes scout for insurgents.

Article 19: Take stock regularly - It may seem like common sense, but after continuous operations for prolonged periods, it's tougher to do than you'd think. Determining the metrics of progress can change from week to week. But it lets us know where we are and where we need to go.

Article 20: Remember the global audience - Perception is reality, even if it's wrong. The way this war is covered, a private flashing a group of kids with the muzzle of his weapon on routine patrol can be cut and spliced into a nasty IO (Information Operations) message for the insurgents. We are always on stage and they have the benefit of the doubt globally right now.

Article 21: Exploit single narrative - This goes right into the IO plan. It must be tailored to fit your specific area. Again, this is something we don't train regularly and we learn by doing.

Article 22: Local forces should mirror enemy, not ourselves - Further, they should mirror local operational requirements. What's the use in providing the village doctor with an endocrinology lab that he doesn't know how to use? I don't know either, but some division surgeon thought it was a good idea. Additionally, just because we have bells and whistles for equipment doesn't mean our partnering Iraqi unit does too. We need to remember that. Often we don't.

Article 23: Practice armed civil affairs - CMO (Civil-Military Operations) can be a decisive operation depending on where you are. You must be able to transition from CA to combat operations quickly. Additionally, the CA (Civil Affairs) bubba isn't the only one doing CA work; your 19D1O is probably doing more CA in a day than the Civil Affairs officer will do in 3 days.

Article 24: Small is beautiful -- The Iraqis want to see results. The proliferation of small programs that work does wonders. Also, small is recoverable and cheap. They don't need to know that.

Article 25: Fight the enemy's strategy, not his forces - The strategy is the iceberg, his forces are the tip. Ask Capt Smith from the Titanic what was more important. We often look for the 10 meter target and forget what's downrange.

Article 26: Build your own solution, attack only when he gets in the way - Combat operations do not win COIN. For a company, since combat operations are what we've trained for, they're our comfort zone. CMO, IO, economic development, and the sustainment of security forces are all bigger moneymakers in COIN than combat operations. It's tough to get to work, but more productive once you do.

Article 27: Keep extraction plan secret - Everyone has a farewell tour with the sheiks, tribal leaders, political leaders, and others in the AO (Area of Operations) they've worked with over the year. That gets back to the insurgents. We need to watch it, but I was guilty of this too. It's where human instinct and developed relationships interfere with what is doctrinally right.

Article 28: Keep the initiative - Insurgents are used to the initiative. Hell, our battle drills are all named "react to ____." By good planning and intelligence development, you can kick an insurgent in the teeth by making him react. Insurgents can handle the "initiate ambush" piece but aren't too good at the react to contact game and usually die in place.

One of my favorite public speaking techniques, which I probably borrowed from Paul Harvey's "The Rest of the Story", is to tell an obscure story as if it were a familiar one. Thus, when I want to introduce an audience to the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, I start by talking about the "great civil war of the mid-nineteenth century, where the Northerners wore blue and the Southerners wore grey ..."

A couple of years ago, while giving an after-dinner talk to a group of dentists in Manhattan, I used this technique to introduce the subject of terrorism. I told the story of a man who had a career that was remarkably similar to that of Osama bin Ladin. The subject of the story, however, was not a present-day Saudi terrorist, but an English contemporary of William Shakespeare by the name of Guy Fawkes.

Though separated by more than three centuries, the careers of the two men were remarkably similar. Each had been born into a family that, by dint of hard work and royal favor, had risen from obscurity to prominence in a short period of time. Each had spent several years as a volunteer with the forces that were fighting campaigns of attrition against one of the leading "infidel" states of the day. (In the case of Guy Fawkes, the "infidel" state was the Protestant Dutch Republic, which was fighting a century-long war against Roman Catholic Spain.) After returning home, each used the connections he made while at war as the foundation for a terrorist organization that specialized in blowing up large public buildings.

The parallel between Fawkes and bin Ladin is, of course, less than perfect. Fawkes was a hands-on type of guy who led from the front and operated on a scale that would strike bin Ladin as painfully modest. Where bin Ladin is the purveyor of a perverse sort of globalism, Fawkes was primarily concerned with regime change in his own back yard. In particular, he thought that if he could only succeed in exploding an improvised explosive device under the reigning king of England - the same James I who lent his name to the Jamestown colony, the James River and the King James Bible - he would be able to replace him with a Catholic monarch.

As it turned out, the bomb that Fawkes and his co-conspirators were building under the Houses of Parliament was discovered well before it could be set off. (The idea was to blow up James I, as well as his most powerful supporters and immediate heirs, while he was giving the seventeenth-century version of the "state of the union" address.) Thus, rather than being the anniversary of an act of terrorism, Guy Fawkes Day, which is still celebrated in England on the 5th of November, is the anniversary of the uncovering of the plot.

My first point in telling this story was to separate the phenomenon of blowing things up for political purposes from its connection to radical Islam. That is, I wanted to remind people that while radical Islam and terrorism have, at late, been closely intertwined, one does not have to be a follower of that particular ideology in order to plant a bomb. My second point was to commend James I - a king who, if remembered at all, has come down in history as smelly, pedantic egomaniac with an excessive fondness for handsome young men - for his response to the discovery of the plot to blow him up. Rather than condemning all English Catholics for the actions of a few, James took every opportunity to distinguish between the conspirators and the vast majority of his Roman Catholic subjects who, notwithstanding their disobedience in matters of religion, were entirely innocent of treason.

After having had two years to reflect upon the Guy Fawkes story, I would like to add a third point. One of the prerequisites to terrorism is the existance of an explicit ideology - a well-developed set of opinions, grievances, explanations and goals that allows terrorists to believe that their actions serve a higher purpose. Not all who embrace this ideology, however, are terrorists. Indeed, in every case that I am familiar with, the terrorists are invariably outnumbered by those who simultaneously share their point of view and decline to adopt their methods.

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.

So if you were in any of those discussions, read no further since you've heard it all before.

This is a model, not a strategy. That is, it is a systematic oversimplification, designed to clarify an extremely complex, rapidly-changing reality. It does not tell us what to do in Iraq, but is a basis for evaluating options. It is wrong -- all models are -- but applied tentatively, with skepticism, and with constant and rigorous "ground truth" from first-hand observation in theater, I have sometimes found it useful. Here is the model, expressed graphically.

The "Four Problems" concept

In essence, the model suggests that Iraq comprises four strategic problems:

• an underlying nation-building problem, resulting from the fact that Iraq is a weak and fragile state, and
• three overlapping security problems that sit "above" that underlying problem, and make it harder to get at it. The three problems are:

  • Terrorism -- that is, the presence of terrorist entities including (but not limited to) AQI who seek to exploit the situation in Iraq to further extremist or trans-national aims
  • Insurgency -- the (primarily Sunni) rebellion against the new post-Saddam order in Iraq, including rebellion against both the coalition presence and the new Iraqi government, and
  • Communal Conflict -- including sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shi'a elements, and ethnic conflict between Kurds, Arabs and other ethnic groups.

These three security problems overlap: incidents may involve elements of more than one dimension -- for example, some terrorism is "pure" AQI activity, while other terrorist acts are insurgent-motivated, and yet others incorporate a sectarian dimension. Most incidents in fact include elements of two dynamics, or all three. You might think of the three problems as a Venn diagram of overlapping circles, each constantly changing in size, with any incident able to be plotted somewhere within the interaction of the three dynamics -- terrorism, insurgency and communal conflict.

They prevent us getting at the underlying problems (crime, weak infrastructure, economic and social alienation, weak governance, an so on) that we need to address in order to deal with the nation-building requirement. The inability to get at this underlying problem perpetuates and exacerbates the security problems.

The three security problems are also mutually reinforcing -- each makes the others worse. Terrorism provokes communal conflict, which in turn makes the insurgency more intractable, which in turn gives rise to terrorism, and so on.

The solution sets to each problem also tend to be countervailing -- the solution to one tends to make the others worse. For example, defeating the insurgency requires building indigenous security forces. But in a society with weak national institutions, divided along sectarian lines, this can tend to make the communal conflict worse. Resolving the communal conflict requires outreach out to all community groups including those (such as some Sunni groups in Anbar) who support the terrorists. But this can create safe havens for terrorists. Countering terrorist cells implies disrupting these safe havens, but that can make the insurgency worse -- and so on, in an endless Iraq do-loop.

Another conundrum is that our presence in Iraq is both essential for a solution, and a source of irritation which tends to exacerbate the situation.

The Regional Dynamic

This whole "four-problem set" sits within a region that straddles a Sunni Arab world (Arabia and the Sunni parts of the Levant) and a Persian Shi'a world (primarily Iran, but also Iranian proxies and allies) with a long history of internal and intra-regional conflict and tension. As General Zinni remarked recently, in toppling Saddam we have created the first Shi'a Arab state in modern history, with profound implications for the long-standing regional dynamic, and the global relationship between Sunni and Shi'a Islam, that we are only just starting to appreciate.

This implies two things. First, conflict within Iraq that threatens to spill into the broader region or drag Sunni states into increased confrontation with Iran, is by definition more strategically ominous than forms of conflict that remain within Iraq. By this measure, the model was already predicting in 2004 that communal conflict would turn out to have broader strategic significance than the insurgency itself (though this tends to change over time).

Second, it is critical that we conduct the campaign in Iraq within a broader regional campaign (diplomatic, economic and informational), rather than conducting it as if Iraq was an island somewhere in the Indian Ocean rather than a central puzzle-piece in a complex regional chessboard. We have to approach the region as a region. This seems like a statement of the obvious, but not everyone seems to have seen the issues this way so far.

Iraq, then, is not a "pure" Insurgency problem

In this sense, Secretary Rumsfeld was perfectly correct when he denied that Iraq was an insurgency and rejected the comparison with Vietnam. This is quite true -- Iraq is not just an insurgency, it is an insurgency plus a terrorist campaign plus a sectarian civil war, sitting on top of a fragile state within a divided region.

And Vietnam is indeed not an apt comparison. The insurgency part of the problem resembles Vietnam to some extent, but insurgency is only one small part of a much bigger problem in Iraq. If we were to draw historical analogies, we might say that the problem in Iraq is like trying to defeat the Viet Cong (insurgency) while simultaneously rebuilding Germany (nation-building), keeping peace in the Balkans (communal conflict) and defeating the IRA (terrorism). And, oh by the way, these all have to be done at the same time, in the same place, and changes in one part of the problem significantly affect the others.

Thus, Iraq is a fiendishly difficult, complex and constantly-changing problem. Look no further for the reason why we have found it so difficult -- put simply, because it is. It's an incredibly complex, tough problem, which requires constant adaptation and agility of response.

(Without getting all theoretical on you, this is what we might call a "wicked" problem, according to the very specific meaning that planners and systems theorists give to that term, in describing a class of problems that has no single solution, no "stopping rule" that tells you when the problem is solved, and where the very act of attempting to solve the problem changes the nature of the problem to be solved. Incidentally, there is a solid and very useful body of research into how to deal with this type of problem, which I have found very helpful in thinking about approaches to Iraq, as have others).

From a practitioner's standpoint, this means that improvements in counterinsurgency technique and capability, while important in addressing the insurgency part of the problem, are not enough to deal with the broader strategic problem in Iraq. Instead, we need solutions that deal with all four problems simultaneously in an integrated fashion, and try to control and impose order on an overall complex environment.

The term I and some of my Australian colleagues developed to describe this form of operation, during work in 2003, was "Control Operations" -- operations that are neither enemy-centric (as in traditional counterterrorism) nor population-centric (as in traditional counterinsurgency) but rather environment-centric, seeking to control and reduce the chaos and violence within a highly complex, multi-sided overall environment. (More about this idea, which I and others have been working on for several years now, in subsequent posts).

So much for theory. In practice, for commanders on the ground, does this help? Not much, I would suggest. The basic techniques of peace operations, counterinsurgency (if executed properly), information operations, counterterrorism, and institution-building are all well-known and at the tactical level our people are well skilled in applying most of them.

Hence the requirement for things like the "Twenty-Eight Articles" -- they don't tell you anything new, nor help address the overall strategic problem (which is well above tactical commanders' pay-grade, thank God), but they help deal with the tactical issues that are already well-understood, and provide memory joggers for guys in the field who have to deal with one discrete part of a larger problem.

Where the model makes a difference is at the strategic level, in prioritizing actions between the various problems, deciding whether and where to expend resources, and -- most important -- developing metrics and "reading the environment" to understand how it changes over time. In a sense, this a prototypical "operational design" for the Iraq theater.

In terms of evaluating options, it allows you to develop checklists or metrics to understand how a plan might function. Does it help us get at the underlying problem? Does it exacerbate the other security problems? Does it address more than one security problem simultaneously? Does it help prevent spill-over of conflict to the regional level? Does it cement state authority? -- and so on. The questions are different each time, but the model helps frame them and work out which factors matter most in a given situation.

Hardly rocket science, of course, just an effort to simplify complex reality and identify macro-trends, which then allow you to work out which bits of detail matter, so that you can drill back down into the detail to think about issues.

Bottom line

I have found this useful as a way of thinking about Iraq and evaluating strategic options. In considering strategic initiatives like those just announced, you need some kind of framework, and this is mine.

If it works for you, use it. If you think of refinements, suggest them (a very senior USN officer whose views I greatly respect did just that in a recent meeting). If it doesn't help you, discard it and think up your own. Either way, you need some kind of model for thinking about Iraq, lest the sheer complexity of events and the difficulty of knowing just exactly what is actually happening overwhelm you.

For what it's worth.....

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