The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) released today two important working papers as part of its ongoing work on the future of the U.S. military, which focuses on improving capabilities to confront future threats to our national security.
Contractors in Conflicts: Adapting to a New Reality, authored by CNAS President John Nagl and Senior Fellow Richard Fontaine, examines the problems exposed by the increasing reliance on private contractors in theater - including insufficient oversight, inadequate integration into operational planning, and ambiguous legal status - and its implications for successful military operations. In order for the United States to adapt to the key role that contractors will play in future hostilities -- the authors note -- the government must establish new policies and rules of the road.
This working paper is part of an ongoing CNAS project on Contracting in Conflicts and will culminate in a major capstone report released next year.
Time for Action: Redefining SOF Missions and Activities, authored by CNAS contributor Michele Malvesti, is derived from a larger study that will be published in spring 2010. In Time for Action, Malvesti - who served more than five years on the National Security Council staff, most recently as the Senior Director for Combating Terrorism Strategy - explores current organizational issues facing U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) and offers recommendations for how to optimize SOF for success.
"By integrating and synchronizing activities as a united whole, the Special Operations community will be better positioned to disrupt and defeat threats and shape and enable environments in a world where SOF are increasingly relevant and in high demand," writes Malvesti.
Comments
Gian,
To be fair, I think that's the model for <em>all</em> war. We demobilize, shift funds to social programs, the military focuses on safety and EO training, our training is geared towards CTCs rather than likely conflicts, and then "suddenly" an "unexpected" threat emerges and we jump through our butts to respond.
But Dave my good friend, you just dont "get it."
In the Coin learning and adapting paradigm every unit, organization, formation etc must, MUST start off screwed up so that they can learn and adapt toward better Coin or the new American Way of War. The rules of the paradigm do not allow for starting off correctly.
Re Dr. Malvesti's paper: I take exception to many of her points but I will address this one now and craft a formal response at a later time:
"How can the SOF community more appropriately account for the growing importance of indigenous populations in the conduct of special operations"
The indigenous population is not something of "growing importance" to SOF and Special Operations. At least not to SF, CA, and PSYOP the indigenous population has always been important. It was not just recently discovered. By definition, CA, PSYOP, UW, FID are all indigenous population centric missions or activities (as is COIN, SFA, IO, etc) I find it difficult to reconcile a question like that with a policy paper on Special Operations.
Sir-
I took her comment reference the "new" emphasis on indigenous populations to mean that those in SOF who traditionally took pride in being unilateral have started ("started" in my understanding means a few years ago) to develop capabilities that already reside in other forces. As the "Do we need SOCOM" article touched on- maybe SOCOM (and the TSOCs) should force SOF to train/work together more vice developing redundant capability?
Her basic arguments- that our missions should be better defined, that every SOF mission should use all of the activities available to us and that the missions should go hand in hand towards the overall endstate makes sense to me and simplifies the doctrinal mish-mash that I find few understand.
Too often, in my opinion, we use our doctrine to hamstring our activities and keep us from doing what we need to do seemingly to make it easier to explain what we are doing.
So, for example, when SOF were engaged in arguing what UW and FID meant and what we were doing in Afghanistan post-2002 and having a hard time explaining to the conventional folks what we were doing there- the doctrine was changed and we were doing only FID ("Combat FID" was something I heard a lot too).
I would argue, however, that restricting ourselves by saying everything we are doing is FID just because we are supporting a "legitimate" government ignores the reality that many districts and villages in Afghanistan are de facto ruled by a different entity than GIRoA.
Does our doctrine allow us to do UW in those areas? Shouldn't we subvert (a UW task) those de facto governments? Shouldn't we raise an irregular force in those areas- a la UW? That, to me, would be a better use of SF in Afghanistan. But, I've never heard anyone say we should do UW- because according to everyone I have heard we "had" to do FID according to doctrine.