Organizing for War: Overcoming Barriers to Whole-of-Government Strategy in the ISIL Campaign

Organizing for War: Overcoming Barriers to Whole-of-Government Strategy in the ISIL Campaign

Nathan White

Introduction

With much needed emergency operations well underway in Iraq and Syria, many are calling for a more comprehensive strategy to combat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in the long-term.  If these calls are heeded, the result will be yet another attempt at an interagency, coalition effort by the United States Government that seeks to integrate a wide array of capabilities to achieve policy objectives, albeit with limited numbers of American boots on the ground.    Yet, in recent overseas missions, the U.S. regularly struggled to coordinate the various tools of state power to achieve desired strategic end-states.  Post-9/11, civilian and military personnel achieved many tactical and operational gains in several places, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia.  But many pitfalls prevented these impressive, often heroic, efforts from leading to strategic success.

Today’s national security leaders must understand that these unsatisfactory outcomes were caused less by the shortcomings of U.S. civilian and military personnel, government agencies, or Presidential administrations as is often claimed.  Instead, they are more the result of deeply rooted systemic barriers to good strategy within the U.S. national security system that will likely prevent a favorable outcome in the ISIL campaign if left unresolved. Referencing lessons from the past thirteen years of war, this paper argues that in order to prevail against ISIL, leaders, planners, and operators need to overcome three mutually reinforcing institutional deficiencies that plagued the United States in past missions: First, a failure to properly conceptualize the nature of strategy in war; Second, a national security system that is poorly structured for whole-of-government campaign strategy management;[1] and finally, a resulting inability of U.S. Government agencies to coordinate in the field for strategic impact.[2]

Properly Conceptualize the Nature of Strategy in War

Success in the ISIL campaign requires the U.S. Government to conceptualize strategy in a way that it has not in recent missions.   Much has been written about how the U.S. regularly struggles to address the political aspects of war, despite centuries of statements to this effect from top military strategists (e.g. Clausewitz).[3]  The specific challenge is that the U.S. does not properly address the centrality of human decision making and behavior in its formulation and execution of strategy.[4]

The Nature of Strategy

Effective strategy aligns ends, ways, and means while also nesting the tactical and operational levels of war with the strategic level.[5]  Within this broader context, good strategy for a campaign synchronizes lethal and non-lethal actions over time and space to create conditions that drive the decision making and behavior of relevant actors (e.g. militants, host-nation governments, sections of the local populace, regional governments, and any other individuals, groups, and populations that impact mission success) in accordance with U.S. objectives.  Thus, strategy is inherently political, which means that it is ultimately about influencing human behavior. More specifically, whether applying lethal force to remove adversaries from the battlefield, conducting negotiations with host-nation and regional governments, freezing an actor’s finances, training indigenous military forces, supporting host-nation governance, or conducting economic development, these actions must all be subordinate to a whole-of-government campaign strategy designed to shape relevant actor decision making and behavior in a manner that is in line with (passively or actively) U.S. objectives.

U.S. Approach to Strategy

Over the past decade-plus of war, the U.S. did not always approach strategy in this way.  Senior National Defense University Researcher Frank Hoffman explains that “Whether called political warfare or the political dimension of war, accepting this broader definition of war would then require a theory of victory to adequately account for that dimension. Political outcomes would be embraced as a principle and articulated specifically in each case. Winning battles does not ensure victory, and the elegant formulations of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz are often quoted. But the translation of this exhortation into the operative principle in U.S. strategy does not routinely occur.”[6] Certainly strategies did exist which focused on politically significant components such as security, governance, economics, and development.  In the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan, these strategies eventually became fairly robust and detailed, with both clearly articulated campaign end-states and links to national objectives, though political ends and the ways of achieving them were not always well defined.[7]  In those conflicts, the U.S. actually did most of what it set out to do with regard to establishing governance structures, improving essential services, and eliminating a large number of adversaries from the battlefield.

Nevertheless, these strategies generally focused on defeating the military capabilities of ill-defined and nebulous adversaries and creating and strengthening institutions of government.  It goes without saying that this is not the same thing as ensuring that all such activities were carried out in a politically astute manner that appropriately shaped relevant actor behavior.[8]  David Kilcullen identifies this phenomenon in his research of past counterinsurgencies. Kilcullen observes that counterinsurgent forces have a, “tendency to judge success based on progress in creating top-down, state-based institutions, while reposing less value and significance in bottom-up societal indicators.”[9]  He goes on to note that analysts tend to, “give greater weight to events at the national level, or to elite-level political maneuvering, than to events at the grassroots, civil society level.”[10]

The failure to properly address politics has more recently been framed as a neglect of the human domain of war or the human aspects of military operations.[11]  For instance, Hoffman and T.X. Hammes note that the U.S. tends to, “overlook human factors,” in war and warfare observing that the tendency, “has a long history, and reflects a tension in American strategic culture which values science, technology, and logistics over other strategic dimensions.” [12]  They observe that the U.S. often emphasizes, “technologically-produced solutions to what are inherently political challenges that can only be resolved in the minds and will of the social community that is challenged.”[13] This institutional shortcoming produced many cases where highly successful U.S. military operations did not lead to preferred strategic end-states. Vietnam and Somalia are two leading examples.

The Joint Force and others within the U.S. Department of Defense have recognized these past shortcomings and are working to address them through several new initiatives.[14] U.S. officials have also noted that the issue extends beyond the military to the performance of U.S. civilian agencies in their diplomacy, governance, and development efforts.[15] Yet, attempts to adapt within both the services and civilian agencies are only in their early stages.

Thus, in the meantime, it is important to recognize what commonly occurs in the absence of sound U.S. strategy.   Typically, a President’s national security team articulates overarching policy goals for a campaign.[16]  These may include things like a free and democratic state that does not serve as a safe haven for terrorists who seek to attack the West.  In other cases, as in the case of the ISIL campaign, stated goals may focus more narrowly on degrading and/or destroying an insurgent or terrorist group.[17]  Policy goals for war are usually accompanied by a perceived requirement for a combination of military, diplomatic, development, humanitarian assistance, economic, and/or other lines of effort.[18]  Contrary to the beliefs of many however, these policy-level focal points do not represent well defined campaign goals and a corresponding whole-of-government campaign strategy.  At best, they are components or pillars of a strategy.

Lines of Effort and Strategy

A misuse of the lines of effort concept was particularly debilitating to good whole-of-government strategy in past campaigns because it muddied the waters as to what the strategy was attempting to achieve.  True strategy requires the coordination of relevant activities within the lines of effort to achieve agreed upon intermediate goals and end-states, also known as strategic coherence.  However, the U.S. and its partners often pushed forward without a clear understanding of how the force would integrate aspects of various lines for strategic impact.[19]  Views on what specifically was required to be successful within each line of effort and how actions should be integrated marked the point of departure from a shared theory of change that informed how the force would coordinate efforts in a strategically significant way.[20]

U.S. agencies were regularly assigned to lead particular lines of effort, which further challenged strategy because agencies tended to design stove-piped plans according to line-of-effort specific objectives (e.g. Military plans were routinely developed separately from U.S. Department of State governance strategies, often with minimal integration toward strategic goals).  For Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, the lack of integration came to a head in 2009, which prompted the drafting of the United States Government Integrated Civilian Military Campaign Plan for Support to Afghanistan.[21] However, despite many similar efforts which generated some improvements, all too often, lines of effort continued to be treated as ends within themselves, as opposed to components of a coherent strategy.  In these cases, the force was vulnerable to what LTG H.R. McMaster describes as a tendency to, “confuse activity with progress,” meaning that the force was mistakenly seen as successful because of its progress within multiple lines of effort, despite achieving limited progress with regard to the strategy.[22]

Recommendations for Improved Strategy in the ISIL Campaign

Properly Conceptualize the Nature of Strategy: For the U.S. to succeed in the ISIL campaign, it must properly conceptualize the nature of strategy in war.  A good strategy requires strategically significant end-states that specifically articulate the conditions in the operational environment that are required to achieve desired behavior of the relevant actors (Note: Relevant actors in the ISIL campaign include at a minimum: all elements of ISIL; al Qaeda linked militants in the region; Shia militias; the Iraqi and Syrian Governments and their security forces; vulnerable Sunni populations; influential Sunni leaders; elements of the Kurdish population and their military forces; and regional governments such as those in Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Syria).   Defeating or degrading ISIL, although important, is not a strategically significant end-state because ISIL is a symptom of conditions in the operational environment, which drive or enable many different actors to behave in unfavorable ways.  For instance, in areas of Northern and Western Iraq, as well as parts of Syria, it is seen as a rational pragmatic political act that many Sunni’s choose to actively assist, or at least passively acquiesce to, ISIL.  This view is rational and pragmatic because most who side with ISIL feel that disenfranchisement by their government and inadequate security has left them no other option but to side with the force that offers them the most physical security and a chance at an improved quality of life.  In the absence of a credible alternative, it is perceived by many Sunnis that their only practical choice is to side with ISIL.[23]  Therefore, ISIL’s (and likely other ambitious groups such as Al Qaeda’s affiliates in the region) ability to take territory and gain footholds can only be permanently eroded if conditions are created that offer a credible and enduring alternative.   Those conditions are a vital component of the strategic end-states of the campaign and they need to be defined upfront in great detail.

Once viable end-states are established, a strategy for shaping relevant actor behavior to achieve them must be developed.   Support to degrading ISIL forces militarily and assistance with security will be the most politically important aspect of the strategy in the near-term. However, a true credible alternative requires a more comprehensive approach to compel (through incentives and/or lethal and non-lethal pressure) all relevant actors to behave in a manner consistent with campaign goals.

Place Lines of Effort in Proper Context: The White House outlined nine lines of effort for a more robust strategy to combat ISIL: Supporting Effective Governance in Iraq; Denying ISIL Safe-Haven; Building Partner Capacity; Enhancing Intelligence Collection on ISIL; Disrupting ISIL’s Finances; Exposing ISIL’s True Nature; Disrupting the Flow of Foreign Fighters; Protecting the Homeland; and Humanitarian Support.[24]   The focus of the lines reveal a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of the conflict than was the case in other instances over the last thirteen years, but they are not a strategy.[25]  Lines of effort must be treated as capabilities and tools, components of which may be applied (or not) at different points in time and space, as they are specifically required by the strategy.  In the words of Major General Hix of U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, “No physical action should be pursued if it is not tied to a human objective, an outcome where people make a decision.”[26]  A coherent strategy that aligns aspects of the nine lines to achieve desired behavior among relevant actors is still required as the campaign progresses.[27]

Whole-of-Government Campaign Strategy Management

Management structures that were absent in past missions must be created to ensure proper strategy formulation and implementation for the ISIL campaign.  Over the past thirteen years of war, it was certainly recognized at times that the various components of strategy could not exist in isolation and that a fair amount of integration would be required.[28]  However, a true management function rarely existed to ensure that whole-of-government participation was coordinated around a unified approach to the mission.

Absence of Whole-of-Government Strategy Management Structures

A common perspective is that the National Security Council (NSC) and its staff should ensure coordinated strategy is formulated and implemented.  However, as former NSC director for Afghanistan and Pakistan Paul D. Miller explains, the NSC and broader U.S. Government are not structured to manage whole-of-government strategy:

“The United States’ national security establishment lacks an integrated strategic planning capability. Disparate organizations—such as the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, the Joint Staff’s J5, United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) Bureau for Policy, Planning, and Learning, and the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy—carry out strategic planning for their respective organizations with minimal coordination between them.”[29]

Administrations have sought to address the issue in the past.  For instance, General Doug Lute’s role as Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan was meant to help resolve the problem.  But even General Lute could not overcome the barriers to whole-of-government strategy management because as Miller explains, “the most crucial piece of the national security establishment, the one designed to knit it together and coordinate all its parts, has gone completely untouched by the reforms of the past decade: the National Security Council (NSC) and the interagency system it oversees.”[30]  Furthermore, Miller notes that, “The NSC and its subordinate committees and supporting staff are supposed to integrate and coordinate interagency efforts—but no regular mechanism for integrating strategic planning has existed in the NSC system since 1961.”[31]

Some suggest that it may be beyond the purview of the NSC to reach below higher-level national security strategy and manage coordinated strategy for a specific whole-of-government campaign.  Instead, the job would fall to the Country Team, the Combatant Commands, or whatever interagency office or taskforce is designated as the lead.  However, managing strategic coordination at lower levels is severely challenged from the start if at the highest levels of government, individual agencies are already given the leeway to create their own separate plans and strategies.  Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke learned this the hard way during his 2009-2010 where he eventually became a lightning rod for the bureaucratic infighting that occurred in developing coordinated strategy for those two countries.[32]  A 2008 Government Accountability Office report on the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership (TSCTP) provides another useful example of a typical whole-of-government strategy management breakdown from a counterterrorism perspective:

“Several factors have hampered the key agencies’ implementation of TSCTP activities, in some cases limiting their ability to collaborate in working to combat terrorism. First, the agencies lack a comprehensive, integrated strategy for their TSCTP activities, and the documents used in planning the activities do not prioritize proposed activities or identify milestones needed to measure progress or make improvements. Second, disagreements about whether State should have authority over DOD personnel temporarily assigned to conduct TSCTP activities in partner countries have led to DOD’s suspending some activities, for example, in Niger. Third, fluctuation in State’s and USAID’s distribution of funds for TSCTP resulted in suspension of a peace-building program in Mali. Fourth, although the agencies measure activities’ outputs, such as the number of foreign military personnel trained, they do not measure their activities’ outcomes in combating terrorism—for instance, any decrease in extremism in the targeted countries.”[33]

To the extent coordinated whole-of-government management did occur over the past thirteen years, it usually consisted of different organizations socializing their own agency plans for an area, operation, or particular line of effort, with some sharing of information, resources, and logistics.  It was less common to find whole-of-government management approaches that resembled what Cristopher Lamb and Douglas Orton call “cross-functional teams,” which they describe as capable of, “rapidly adjusting functional expertise in coordination with others toward resolving complex problems.”[34]

Multiple Chains of Command and Parallel Management Structures

In several overseas missions, multiple chains of command took root, which were in essence parallel management structures.  Within Afghanistan during the 2009-2011, senior U.S. officials in Kabul sought to address the issue by assigning civilian representatives to serve as peers to military commanders at the district, province, and regional command levels (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: US civil-military chains of command in Afghanistan[35]

To their credit, coordination did improve to some extent, especially in Afghanistan’s RC-East.    For the most part however, in Afghanistan and other theaters, separate chains of command were only unified when personalities and agency missions—often accidentally—were such that personnel could be organized toward complimentary objectives. The model in Figure 1 actually more accurately depicts the isolated chains of command that often formed for civilians and the military.  Also not shown in Figure 1 are the U.S. Special Operations elements and the intelligence agencies that had separate chains of command and did not fall under the command of battlespace owners.  The various defense, development, and diplomacy organizations of coalition countries also had their own chains of command in many instances.

Assumption of Capabilities

Part of the reason why the whole-of-government management deficiency went unaddressed may be rooted in faulty assumptions about the capabilities of U.S. Government agencies. [36]  One National Defense University Study observes:

“In Iraq and Afghanistan, civilian agencies [and many DoD elements] were essentially invited to go into conflict zones and execute their core missions under the banner of the much vaunted ‘whole-of government’ approach, or ‘3 D’ (defense, diplomacy, and development) approach to stabilization. The invitation was apparently based on the untested assumption that by these organizations pushing forward with their own agency core missions, stability and achievement of mission goals would automatically ensue.”[37]

U.S. civilian and military organizations have significant expertise to pursue activities that coincide with their core missions, but in reality, most agencies of the U.S. Government lack a strong capability to adapt standard agency practice within a coordinated strategy to shape relevant actor behavior.  The study found that more often than not, “Individual agencies pursued their own missions in an unintegrated, uncoordinated manner, resulting in activities that were sometimes working at cross purposes and sometimes counterproductive to mission goals.”[38]  This state of affairs was of course not a first-time occurrence for the U.S. Government interagency community operating in conflict zones. In fact, it closely mirrored the findings of RAND researchers Robert Komer and Brian Jenkins who observed similar institutional issues during the Vietnam War.[39]  A significant and deliberate whole-of-government management function would have been required to ensure the agencies were wrestled away from their own core missions and aligned their efforts at the management level.

Recommendations for Strategy Management in the ISIL Campaign

Develop a Campaign Specific Strategy Management Office:  Whole of Government strategy management cannot occur without sufficient management structures.  As shown above, effective structures do not exist and therefore must be developed in the midst of ongoing operations.  It is unrealistic to reform the national security system in time to impact the ISIL campaign.  Thus, the solution to managing the development and implementation of a single, coordinated strategy among interagency and international partners lies in standing up a robust whole-of-government ISIL campaign strategy management office.

Properly Structure, Empower, and Resource the Strategy Management Team:  To date, no individual or office has been given the proper role, authority, and resources to provide holistic whole-of-government management of the ISIL campaign.  It is ultimately less important what office manages the strategy.  The key is that such an office is stood up (or a preexisting office is empowered) with the proper mandate, authority, processes, and resources to be successful.  At a minimum, the office needs a true campaign strategy manager who is empowered by the President to manage campaign strategy development and implementation across the entire U.S. Government. Such a position is different than the policy development teams, line of effort leads, and coalition coordinators of past campaigns.  He/she should be accountable only to the President and the NSC principals, who will ultimately provide higher-level guidance and signoff on the strategy team’s approach, while also ensuring that the campaign strategy nests with broader U.S. national security strategy and foreign policy.   The strategy manager should have the authority to direct the work of all U.S. civilian and military personnel involved in the campaign, as well as the resources and manpower required to perform the management role (At a minimum,  the strategy manager’s team should consist of top strategists, regional experts, functional specialists, operators, and intelligence personnel).  No U.S. action in the ISIL campaign should take place without direction of the strategy management team or its subordinate structures.  Only then will a management function exist that is armed with the job description, capability, and authority needed to successfully formulate and manage a workable strategy to combat ISIL. 

Whole-of-Government and Coalition Participation Supports the Strategy: To the extent an operation has to be a whole-of-government, coalition effort, those agencies that are involved should only be included as the strategy requires.  In order to apply tools of state power effectively, managers must understand the true capabilities and limitations of interagency and coalition partners.  In some instances, where a willing partner is looking to assist but the offer of support may not fit the strategy, it is best to ask for funds or deny the support all together.[40]

Strategic Coherence in the Field

Processes must be put in place to support strategic coherence during strategy execution in the field against ISIL.  Post-9/11, operating processes of the whole-of-government force were much more suitable for individual agencies operating in parallel than they were for strategic coherence.  The result was that even as strategy improved and management structures were refined, execution in the field was ineffective.  Whole-of-government operations were disjointed as civilian and military personnel on the ground developed their own analysis of the problem, concepts of required solutions, and metrics to measure progress.

Varied Concepts of Mission, Strategy, and End-states

The absence of processes for getting all U.S. Government entities in the field on the same page about goals and approaches for achieving them challenged strategic coherence during strategy execution.  Although frequently characterized as a civilian/military coordination challenge, even personnel within the same civilian and military organizations did not always agree on a single way forward.  In the case of Libya for example, outside the responsibility to protect mission (R2P), U.S. Government agencies did not share a common understanding of the strategic political end-state for operations.  Even the very concept of R2P meant different things to different agency personnel.  Therefore, the various organizations involved had a difficult time determining their specific roles.  Similar confusion developed during counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan where personnel operating in the same areas routinely held different perspectives about the nature of counterinsurgency and the requirements of the particular counterinsurgency mission at hand.[41]

In such an environment, U.S. Government personnel regularly developed their own views about goals and specific approaches for achieving them, which tended to correspond to agency core missions as opposed to a particular strategy.  As such, personnel from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Department of State usually prioritized top-down, national-level democracy, development, and human rights agendas, without giving proper consideration to the political impact at the local level.[42]  After all, this is how these agencies prioritize their work for their traditional diplomatic and development missions around the world.[43] The Central Intelligence Agency had its own focus early on in the Afghanistan campaign that did not necessarily account for more long-term strategic end-states. As retired operations officer Cofer Black stated in a 2012 interview with 60 Minutes, “my mission was not to ensure that little girls go to school in Afghanistan. My mission was not to establish, you know, a legal system in Afghanistan. [That] was not my mission. My mission was to destroy al-Qaeda. And to do that, we had to overthrow the Taliban.”[44] Many actions by the special operations and intelligence communities (e.g. night raids and drone strikes) in several countries were ordered to meet goals of removing high-value targets from the battlefield as part of a parallel mandate to pursue a counterterrorism mission.   Without a whole-of-government process to direct, coordinate, and prioritize the agencies’ various activities, agency actions many times had second and third-order effects that negatively impacted progress toward the broader desired end-state for the areas in which the activities took place.  As one civilian in Afghanistan argued, “a lot of brilliant people and a lot of brilliant teams are all digging tunnels through the mountain and they are not going to meet in the middle. There needs to be more strategy."[45]

Understanding the Operational Environment and the Nature of the Conflict

Further challenging strategic coherence in the field, interagency partners frequently lacked shared perspectives on the operational environment and the nature of the conflict, also referred to as a common operating picture.  Although usually characterized as an intelligence failure, in reality, the issue is a whole of force problem.  In fact, a 2012 study conducted on behalf of the Joint Staff by the Center for Joint and Coalition Operational Analysis explains, “In operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, a failure to recognize, acknowledge, and accurately define the operational environment led to a mismatch between forces, capabilities, missions, and goals.”[46]  As an example, in several cases different weight was given to the importance of tribes and other so-called “informal governance structures” to conflict resolution.  Some officials saw efforts to engage preexisting tribal governance structures among the indigenous population in Iraq as contrary to the mission.  They argued that by engaging “informal leaders”, the U.S. was delegitimizing the formal government institutions that it was attempting to support.  Yet others afforded more weight to the importance of tribes and tribal governance structures.[47]  With divergent perspectives among different partners operating in the same area on this issue and a host of others, it is easy to see how resulting confusion occurred during the design and conduct of whole-of-government operations in the field.

Mirror Imaging

Without a common operating picture and a shared sense of strategy, U.S. Government personnel often approached operations through their different individual lenses of what a country needs to be successful. Admiral William H. McRaven, General James F. Amos, and General Raymond T. Odierno reference the issue in their hypothesis that the failure to address human aspects of war may be rooted partially in what they call, “the simplistic idea that other people are like us or, at least, want to be like us.”[48]  The logic was that if activities in the field were pursued according to Western standards, the desired end-state would eventually be achieved.  In executing their own versions of the mission in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. Government agencies mainly focused efforts around preconceived notions of security, governance, and development that did not necessarily synch up. Certainly if coordinated and tailored appropriately, aspects of all these mission-sets could be highly relevant to campaign success.[49]  However, they were frequently pursued with limited attention to a strategy for shaping the behavior of relevant actors.[50]

Assessment Practices

The breakdown in the field was made worse by the assessment practices that were employed.  Different organizations conducted their assessments of progress independent of each other, and usually according to their own version of metrics.  They tended to prioritize measures of performance related statistics of their own organization, as opposed to measuring changes in the operational environment in relation to the successful attainment of the strategic goal.   Assessments were often highly politicized at home in the U.S., which meant that individuals in the field were sometimes under pressure to measure things that were deemed important by leaders in Washington, while not necessarily relevant to the mission itself.[51]

Approaching assessment in such a manner had several interrelated problems.  First, assessments became overly focused on the actions of the U.S. Government, while missing other developments in the operational environment that occurred irrespective of U.S. actions.[52]  Secondly, the focus on measures of performance and measures of effectiveness that were not necessarily linked to a properly conceptualized strategy meant that the metrics were not always relevant to the nature of the conflict at hand.[53]  Third, by measuring the wrong things, assessments would show progress, potentially where none existed or where things had even moved in the wrong direction.[54]  All of these factors together limited the ability of assessments to measure true progress and inform coordinated adaptation and reallocation of resources for enhanced impact toward agreed upon goals.[55]

Continuity of Effort

Equally devastating to strategy execution was the fact that the U.S. lacks a sufficient mechanism for continuity of whole-of-government operations over time.  Continuity of operations is an inevitable friction point in war that was a constant obstacle to good strategy in recent conflicts.  In addition to requiring coordination across interagency and coalition partners, strategy execution requires seamless transition during staff turnover.  The process is more complex than the traditional military ‘right seat ride’ approaches and standard civilian agency turnover processes can manage.[56]  The common description of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts as a series of “one year wars” is a relatively accurate explanation of what took place. However, it is an oversimplification in that what really transpired was actually far more chaotic. Different civilian and military personnel worked various aspects of operations for different periods of time, and not all at once over a single year. Without an agreed upon whole-of-government strategy for replacement personnel to fall in on, there was no forcing function to ensure new personnel continued the work of their predecessors.  As a side note, perhaps even more devastating to continuity of operations in the field is the fact that no mechanism is yet in place to insulate strategy execution from the fallout caused by election cycles and resulting policymaker turnover in Washington.

Attempts to Adapt

Over time, many U.S. personnel went to great lengths to improve strategic coherence during strategy execution in the field.[57]  In Afghanistan’s Regional Command-East (RC-East), civilian and military leaders developed a “Board of Directors” model for interagency planning to facilitate a more unified and targeted approach.  In other cases, civilian agency officials broke multiple guidelines established by the U.S. Department of State Regional Security Officers in order to coordinate better with their military counterparts.  Within the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Office of Civil Military Coordination, the Office of Transition Initiatives, and the Stabilization Unit in Kabul all made attempts to better coordinate agency efforts with military operations.[58]  Military units also made tremendous attempts to coordinate for strategic impact, despite grossly inadequate standard operating procedures, training, incentives, and force structures for irregular warfare, stabilization, and other aspects of the specific missions at hand.  The U.S. Special Forces were particularly adaptable, especially once the Village Stability Operations/Afghan Local Police program developed more formally following several smaller scale attempts to develop local defense forces.[59]  Some agencies also tried to overcome coordination challenges through extensive liaison networks.[60]  In Iraq cases, Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) were embedded with battlespace owners to improve interagency field coordination.[61]  Various new assessment processes were tried in Yemen, Haiti, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and several countries in Africa that were meant to better target U.S. whole-of-government efforts based on shared diagnoses of drivers of instability.[62]

Despite these hard-fought attempts to improve, the barriers to meaningful adaptation for strategic impact were usually insurmountable.  Even when personalities were ideal and individuals had the right mindset, inflexibility of agency core missions, insufficient regulations and authorities, as well as inadequate capabilities all combined to limit strategic progress.  In the many instances when good coordination toward shared goals did occur, limited mechanisms for continuity of operations over time led to a failure of follow-on units to continue in the right direction.   All of these efforts illustrate that new structures for strategic coherence in the field are needed if future whole-of-government operations are to have any chance of succeeding.

Recommendations for Strategic Coherence in the ISIL Campaign

Regardless of what strategy is ultimately decided upon to combat ISIL in the long-term, strategic coherence in the field toward campaign goals will be greatly improved if U.S. personnel adhere to the following principles:

Articulate a Theory of Change to Guide Strategy Execution: A theory of change serves as a tool for strategic coherence in that it helps get everyone on the same page about how the operation is intended to progress toward the strategic end-states.  For the ISIL operation, a theory of change will provide a narrative of how the lethal and non-lethal actions of the U.S.-led coalition will change conditions in the operational environment and lead to the desired behavior by relevant actors.  Those operating at all levels of command must be fully informed with the elements of the theory that are pertinent to their jobs.  This will enable them to complete their work in a mission-relevant way, as opposed to in accordance with their agency core missions or according to preconceived notions that are not in line with the strategy.[63]  The theory of change must be constantly assessed and adapted as changes occur in the operational environment.  It will enable the president, the NSC, and congress to provide mission-relevant oversight, as it will generate assessment briefings that explain how things are progressing (or not) in accordance with the strategy, as opposed to simply reporting on measures of performance and other metrics that may or may not be relevant.

Develop a Shared Understanding of the Operational Environment and Nature of the Conflict:  All relevant personnel must develop a common operating picture that consists of a shared understanding of pertinent aspects of the operational environment and the nature of the conflict.  It is particularly important to identify and develop as thorough an understanding as possible of all actors relevant to the campaign.   A common operating picture helps ensure that the relevant members of the whole-of-government force are armed with the information and mindset they need to do their jobs in a way that effectively supports the strategy. 

Manage Continuity of Effort: Personnel turnover must be a planning factor from the beginning.  Formalized processes are required to ensure that each new military command or team of civilian agency representatives that enter into an ongoing operation has the ability to seamlessly continue forward with executing the strategy.  These mechanisms must also prevent the all-too-common past practice of new commands and civilian agency teams falling in on an ongoing operation, scrapping all past efforts of their predecessors, and starting over fresh with an entirely new approach for the duration of their own assignments.

Conclusion

As the U.S. charts a more comprehensive way forward for the ISIL campaign, it cannot afford to repeat the same recurring mistakes that plagued past whole-of-government operations.  In recent overseas missions, American personnel regularly did exactly what was asked of them, often at great risk, and with tremendous skill.  But the U.S. approach to strategy, the absence of whole-of-government campaign strategy management structures, and a lack of mechanisms for whole-of-government coordination in the field often ensured that their work did not lead to strategic victory.

Many of the issues described have gone unresolved for decades.  Even if they were fixed, there is no certainty that past operations would have ultimately ended in complete success.  The recommendations offered are admittedly difficult to implement and will require national security leaders, the military services, and civilian agencies to step out of their comfort zones and approach war in a different way than they have in the past.  Nevertheless, as the U.S. formulates and executes a more comprehensive campaign strategy to combat ISIL in the long-term, it is critical that these hard lessons are considered and applied.  By learning from the experience of the past thirteen years of war, the country will get the most out of the brave sacrifices of its talented civilian and military personnel and an acceptable resolution to the ISIL crisis will be far more likely.

End Notes