Blog Posts

[Note: While I have received official approval to offer personal comment at SWJBlog, the following post has not been vetted or screened in any way. It represents personal opinion only, and is strictly Unclassified and based solely on open source material.]

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.

I'll lead off with two short excerpts from the new Army Counterinsurgency (COIN) Field Manual, FM 3-24 and Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 3-33.5:

- Insurgencies are protracted by nature. Thus, COIN operations always demand considerable expenditures of time and resources.

- At the strategic level, gaining and maintaining U.S. public support for a protracted deployment is critical.

Which leads us to an excerpt from a 21 February NY Post article that appeared on the DoD Current News (Early Bird) and linked to from the Small Wars Council discussion board - America Says Let's Win War by Andy Soltis:

Here's a generous offer from Council member Tom Odom over on our discussion board...

An Offer to Potential Authors

To many, the idea of writing is harkens back to memories of dental work; it is painful and it leaves you numbly speechless. Over the past 6 years or so I have repeatedly asked hundreds of Soldiers the question: "How many of you liked your high school English teacher?" Soldiers being soldiers, the handful of positive responses to that question had nothing to do with the subject of English. That almost instinctual aversion to the idea of writing is therefore understandable. Writing like any other skill takes practice, patience, and not a little determination to develop. I would encourage all to set improvement of their written communication skills as a worthy goal. But I will also say that what counts most in writing are the ideas communicated; writing is the delivery means.

Posted to the Small Wars Council by Jedburgh...

Headquarters

Multi-National Force - Iraq

Baghdad, Iraq

APO AE 09342-1400

February 10, 2007

Office of the Commanding General

To the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Civilians of Multi-National Force-Iraq:

We serve in Iraq at a critical time. The war here will soon enter its fifth year. A decisive moment approaches. Shoulder-to-shoulder with our Iraqi comrades, we will conduct a pivotal campaign to improve security for the Iraqi people. The stakes could not be higher.

All organizations must be concerned with the growth, retention, and utilization of their best and brightest. Call them what you will -- the Iron Majors, the Strategic Corporals, the go-to desk officers and field operators -- they are the backbone and future of all of our organizations, and our aces-in-the-hole for the Long War.

Our bright and dedicated professionals have a passion to fight to win. Unfortunately, their enthusiasm, flexibility, and innovation often collides with the inertia of the status quo, which is frequently manifest in legacy attitudes, organizational rice bowls, and careerism and bureaucracy that linger amongst the establishment. Today's personnel systems at best fail to support employing all of our manpower in ways that our missions require, and at worst impair our up-and-comers who somehow find a way to contribute anyway in the arena where needed, rushing to the action while others stay comfortable.

Odom, Thomas P. Journey Into Darkness: Genocide in Rwanda. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. (Price - $18.96 Paperback on Amazon.com)

Review by Council member Major Adam Strickland, USMC.

Marine officers are taught that the two most important components of any operations order are the commander's intent and mission statement. Above all else, each statement should be clear and concise so as to leave the recipient with no doubt as to what must be accomplished. In 1994, at the height of a humanitarian crisis in Goma, Zaire, US Army LTC Thomas Odom, an Africa Foreign Area Officer, was told by his superiors -- "We must stop the dying," and thus tasked to "stop the dying." Though clear and concise, these provided little true guidance as he tried to assess the needs of over one million Rwandan refugees escaping violent retribution in front of the steadily advancing Rwandan Patriotic Front...

This is the second installment of "posts of note" from the Small Wars Journal's discussion board - the Small Wars Council. Poster JCustis, a long-time Council member, is a Marine infantry officer with two tours in Iraq under his belt. Where a military acronym is used I have inserted an explanation. For starters, the 'battle captains': the S-3 is the Operations Officer and the 'A' or Alpha is his assistant, the AirO is the Air Officer, the FSC is the Fire Support Coordination Officer, the FAC is the Forward Air Controller, the TF IO is the Task Force Information Operations Officer, and the SJA is the Staff Judge Advocate (legal).

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RTK has written on his experiences using the framework of Dave Kilcullen's Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency and I felt that same framework could be used to offer some lessons learned on the battle captain system that my unit applied during its 2004-2005 rotation.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Welcome to the SWJ Blog. The content will start to flow over the next several days from our illustrious Editor-in-Chief, and several contributing authors who we are very glad to have aboard. This is a short opening note on terrain appreciation, while we continue to clear the dust.

First, many thanks to Marvin Hutchens of ThreatsWatch and other sites, for making all of this technology insertion possible, and for putting up with us in the interest of national security and like-mindedness. S/F.