Operation Dragon Spear Demonstrates Army Strong

Bill M:

I'm pretty much with you here. But let me expound:

Our enemies today -- those that seek to halt and roll back our efforts at expansion in their neck of the woods/their sphere of influence/their backyards -- these such enemies would seem to be:

a. Using UW today

b. Much as we did in during the Cold War and

c. For the exact same purposes, to wit: to address the expansionist efforts of one's enemy.

Thus, during the Cold War, and in our neck of the woods/our sphere of influence/our backyard (Latin America), the United States used UW to "spoil" and otherwise undermine various attempts by the former USSR, and its affiliates, to transform the states and societies of our region more along communist political, economic and social lines.

Likewise today, and using this exact same playbook (and for the exact same reason), such nations as Russia and Iran use UW today to try to "spoil," and otherwise undermine, our various attempts to transform states and societies, in their region of the world, more along modern western political, economic and social lines.

In this regard, and as to confirm your thoughts on how these such efforts harm the lesser states and societies where such conflicts occur, consider this from a recent "War On The Rocks" article entitled "America Did Hybrid Warfare Too:"

"In the early 1980s, Central America had gone from backyard backwater to flash point in the Cold War. Walter Cronkite’s first question for President Ronald Reagan shortly after his inauguration was about El Salvador. Reagan reassured the American public that — less than a decade after the American tragedy in Vietnam — he had no intention of sending U.S. combat forces into a Central American quagmire. His administration then built on Jimmy Carter’s reactive stance to contain the spread of Cuban-inspired, Soviet-aligned revolutions from Nicaragua to El Salvador and beyond through a combination of measures. Some of them were prosaic, others unorthodox and controversial in the extreme. In El Salvador, light footprint counterinsurgency held off Latin America’s fiercest guerilla army while a democratic political strategy took hold. Covert action supported insurgents, the Nicaraguan Contras, who kept the Sandinista government off balance and mired in war. U.S. military forces on permanent exercise menaced from across the border in Honduras. Aid programs pumped U.S. dollars into the underdeveloped region. Desultory diplomatic negotiations mollified regional actors, allies, and the U.S. Congress. Information operations aimed at the homeland audience featured images of Soviet tanks headed toward Harlingen, the first American city at the southern tip of Texas.

The purpose of all this? Defending America from hostile foreign interference — the Monroe Doctrine. But it was also a “forward strategy for freedom,” as Secretary of State George Shultz called it, which above all served to demonstrate that America had revitalized its will to oppose the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Whether or not hybrid war as employed in Central America was a good thing or bad is a matter of political judgement. It associated the United States with unsavory allies and terrible human rights violations, while the misguided evasion of Congressional restrictions on covert action led to the Iran-Contra scandal that nearly wrecked the Reagan administration. Certainly the consequences of protracted war were very costly to the people of the region, even if they could be said to have benefited from the advent of democracy. Objectively, the United States did achieve its stated aims, specifically containing the spread of leftist revolution elsewhere in Central America and reversing it in Nicaragua; lasting peace coincided with the end of the Cold War itself, but it cannot be said that the wars in Central America made any contribution to that outcome."

http://warontherocks.com/2015/04/america-did-hybrid-warfare-too/

All-in-all -- and based on the evidence provided above -- what we appear to be having is a reverse Cold War (the implications of which, for the United States, and re: such things as legitimacy, political warfare, UW, use of force, etc., are astounding!).

So, and continuing with my analogy to (1) similar US efforts, (2) made during the Cold War, to (3) spoil/undermine Soviet attempts at expansion in our backyard:

a. What would have been the message that the United States was supposed to received from, for example, a "Dragon Spear-like" exercise, conducted by the Soviets, back then? And

b. What would likely have been our reaction, back then, to such a (provocative) exercise/message???

Bill C.,

The two types of UW you described are certainly possible policy options, but not the only policy options that UW can serve. The U.S. has conducted UW for many decades with mixed results, and arguably over the long term the results in many cases have been undesirable. Protracted conflicts in hindsight seem to damage a society's psychic core and can destroy its social norms, which leads to long term instability (Afghanistan, El Salvador, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and so forth). Of course that is a personal view after reading many case studies and witnessing in some cases the post conflict period, so at best it is correlation and not necessarily causation, but it worth further study. Regardless, it isn't always the case. UW can be a viable tool at times, but we need to avoid falling into the rut of pursuing UW like Billy Mitchell pursued strategic bombing as the answer to our strategic problems. It works in certain conditions, and not others.

UW is war, so can it prevent war? In theory, and in practice, UW can prevent larger and much more dangerous wars. The U.S. and USSR fought each other using UW to pursue a favorable balance of power for decades, which arguably prevented a larger scale war that could have been devastating. If we just get rid of the term UW temporarily to free our minds of the possible, I think it will become apparent that the collateral skills associated with UW can be applied in a number of collateral ways to shape the security environment that don't fall under the classic definition of UW. The UW zealots kept UW alive in Special Forces, but the same zealots can kill it when they try to make problems conform to UW instead of our unconventional operational approach conform to the problem.

The case study that wasn't is Syria.

Syria is a hotly debated, and now neither side can prove its case regarding the claim we should have going in earlier and supported the resistance (as though it was collective whole). I differ with that opinion, there were over a 100 different resistance groups, done strong enough to overthrow Assad, not even with our help. If we provided conventional support via airpower in support of the resistance elements we supported, that may have tipped the scales enough to oust Assad, but then what? The only groups organized enough to have any chance of maintaining power were the extremists. More than likely we would have simply got bogged down in another quagmire.

You get the point, UW may have accomplished something in the short term, but would it have been in our interests in the long term? Hard to tell, but plenty of reason to suspect that it wouldn't have. Perhaps the lesson, which many of us in Special Forces tend to believe, is that if we had connections in these countries of concern prior to conflict we would have a better understanding of the human domain. That would then present "informed" and feasible options on the ability to conduct UW feasible as a main or supporting effort. That would be proactive, yet defensive. We wouldn't execute unless their was a crisis.

The so called UW we're doing in Syria now is a sad joke for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with potential of UW or the people running it, and everything to do with the astrategic policy wonks. However, we have the recognize our own weaknesses and develop feasible strategies based on who we actually are versus who we want to be. Seems like some true patriots developed a plan based on a Reagan era political environment. That isn't the era we live into today.

Bill - the definition of proactive is below. While you can interpret preventing potential problems to be preventing war (which of course is he acme of skill according to Sun Tzu and certainly the ideal) I think a read of the white paper and the USASOC concepts falls under the first part of the definition below "creating or controlling a situation by causing something to happen rather than responding to it after it has happened: Yes the ideal would be to prevent war but as we all know the enemy has a vote in that. But it is better to be pro-active when appropriate than to always be reactive. And we should recall the wise words of Eliot Cohen and John Gooch in Military Misfortunes: all military failure are a result of three failure: failure to learn, failure to adapt, and failure to anticipate. Being proactive is part of anticipating.

This exercise illustrated the concept of being proactive by engaging with the indigenous forces over time before conventional military operations became a necessity. It may be absurd to you but I hope people can grasp the simple reason behind combing unconventional warfare and proactive.

And MG Bowra's article can be accessed at the link below. "Regional Engagement: An ARSOF
Approach to Future Theater Operations" by Major General Kenneth R. Bowra and Colonel William H. Harris Jr

https://www.dvidshub.net/publication/issues/8272

And a lot of ground has been plowed over the years on all these "new concepts" of special warfare and political warfare. You can review all the Special Warfare Magazine editions at this link: http://www.soc.mil/swcs/swmag/archive.html

proactive |prōˈaktiv|
adjective
(of a person, policy, or action) creating or controlling a situation by causing something to happen rather than responding to it after it has happened: be proactive in identifying and preventing potential problems.
DERIVATIVES
proaction |prōˈakSHən| noun.
proactively adverb.
proactivity |ˌprōˌakˈtivətē| noun
ORIGIN 1930s: from pro-2 (denoting earlier occurrence), on the pattern of reactive.

While I understand the concept, it seems a bit absurd to call warfare (whether UW or another form of warfare) a proactive means to engage and prevent war. MG Bowra's 1998 article on Peacetime Engagement seems to more effectively capture the shaping aspects of what we're attempting to accomplish in the Phase 0 and Phase 0+ space. His concept was also very much proactive and focused largely on leveraging what we in SOF now call the human domain. His article is well worth a re-read. Since there has been a lot of water that has passed under the bridge since it was published it needs to be updated. Nonetheless, it seems there is potential to nest his concept with modifications and the special warfare doctrine to more fully address how DOD, with SOF playing a large role, can be employed in conjunction with the interagency and other partners to defend or advance U.S. interests.