Category Archives: Military

Weapons Still Don’t Make War

by dptrombly Posted on August 10, 2012

Colin S. Gray notably claimed that “weapons don’t make war.” Gray did not mean that no relationship existed between weapons, policy, and strategy, but that as instruments, weapons only have meaning in the context of policy and strategy. While this idea seems intuitive enough, it is easily muddled; particularly when weapons appear to provide technical solutions, policymakers and strategists may be tempted to abdicate their duties by substituting a weapon for a policy or strategy.

One significant part of the problem is that analysts and advocates alike can be tempted to impute weapons with certain political, strategic, and moral considerations that do not derive from some inherent aspect of the weapon itself. This problem is rampant in commentary on drones. Even in the most cogent critiques, analysts often imbue drones themselves, rather than they ways they are wielded, with a sinister quality that has little do with drones as drones, and more to do with drones as a stand-off strike platform being deployed in a targeted killing campaign.

Imbuing drones with strategic or political qualities they do not actually possess distorts discussion of the targeted killing campaign. Firstly, it feeds into a false narrative that targeted killing is easy and cheap, when in fact it involves massive amounts of hardware and personnel. Witness the casual calls by some commentators for the U.S. to simply put Assad on a drone “kill list,” as if Syria’s significant air defenses would not pose any problem for drones which have never had to brave the hostile firepower of a state-equipped military. Secondly, it needlessly injects irrational fears and erroneous thinking into all discussion of drones. Few Americans worry about the fact that military-grade assets such as helicopters and light aircraft have been frequent fixtures of American law enforcement, and even fewer think these would ever be deployed against Americans they way they are against enemies in a war zone. Yet such logical leaps pervade drone commentary, inserting a bizarre suspicion into the discussion of all unmanned systems, despite the fact that military operating concepts for unmanned systems treat them primarily as an additional, useful tool to fill already established operating parameters and military missions.

Murtaza Hussain’s recent article in Salon serves as a good example of this common sort of drone analysis. Hussain rightly recognizes that unmanned aerial systems (UAS) follow in the footsteps of millenia of human innovations in the quest to find a way to kill hostile humans more effectively with less harm to oneself, but still insists that drone warfare is “particularly insidious,” for three primary reasons.

First, Hussain argues, drones inherently undermine the Geneva Convention, specifically, Article 41 of Protocol I, which prohibits killing of those “hors de combat.” Since a potential drone target cannot surrender to an unmanned aerial system, there is no choice but to kill them.

Is this an inherent quality of a drone? There is no opportunity to surrender to a sniper whose location is unknown to his target, and who may not be in a position to take his target prisoner anyway. There is no opportunity to surrender to a mortar bombardment. There is certainly no opportunity to surrender to a Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, or the precision-guided bomb of a B-2 stealth bomber. The inability to surrender to a drone is not a problem unique to drones, or even particularly insidious, but a context, in some cases, of the way we may choose to employ a stand-off weapon, and not one that is all that morally or legally questionable. –

Rule 47. Attacking persons who are recognized as hors de combat is prohibited. A person hors de combat is:

(a) anyone who is in the power of an adverse party;
(b) anyone who is defenceless because of unconsciousness, shipwreck, wounds or sickness; or
(c) anyone who clearly expresses an intention to surrender;

provided he or she abstains from any hostile act and does not attempt to escape.

‘Hors de combat’ status is determined not by the type of weapon, but by the military circumstances. For example, in the controversy over an American attack helicopter killing Iraqis who appeared to be surrendering, it may not have been possible to establish clearly that they were. Throwing up one’s hands but then getting back in a vehicle and traveling is not surrender, since retreating or fleeing is distinct from surrender under international law. Virtually no signatory of the Geneva Convention believes there is an unmitigated legal obligation to accept surrender in circumstances where receiving surrender is militarily impossible or would impose significant risks to personnel granting quarter.

The issue with drone strikes is not that unmanned systems carry them out (any stand-off weapon would face this problem), but that, outside the use of drones as close air-support in Afghanistan, drones are being deployed with only minimal special operations and covert personnel on the ground. That is, it is the nature of the conflict-a series of covert, clandestine, and stand-off strikes outside the context of a major conventional ground deployment-that causes these issues. And, indeed, looking in the larger context of the targeted killing program and the types of organizations they target, the much bigger - and more blatant - issue is the relentless violation of Article 41, which prohibits combatants to engage in perfidy, and which contributes to the next problem Hussain outlines.

As Hussain correctly notes, much reporting about the drone program indicates that their massively increased precision compared to other weapons systems is not particularly useful if the U.S. fails to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants for want of adequate intelligence. The problem of which Hussain speaks is one of any force confronting an enemy which flirts with violations of international humanitarian and customary prohibitions against perfidy. This Any veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan could explain that identifying legitimate combatants and targets is difficult even with troops on the ground. The moral issue at stake here - killing a potential noncombatant because their behavior may indicate hostile attempts at perfidy - has very little to do with the platform itself. If anything, drone operations, which occur in concert with manned Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft, prolonged surveillance, and ground-based covert or clandestine units, provide more opportunity for discrimination than simply lobbing TLAMs or JDAMs would (or conduct ascribed even to men with boots on the ground after curfew in purported “free fire zones” or “Indian Country” in Vietnam). It is not a problem with the so-called drone war, even less drones.

I say so-called drone war because that term fundamentally replaces context and analysis of the war with the weapon most publicly associated with it, significantly contributing to my issue with Hussain’s third point, which is that drones are insidious for enabling a “no cost” form of warfare. As one of this blog’s guest posters has pointed out for Foreign Policy, while drones may be cheaper than using other types of weapons for the same mission, that does not make the mission cheap. The argument that drones make war more likely, or let it persist for longer, does not hold up to any serious scrutiny.

The notion that somehow drones created low-risk, low-scrutiny warfare lacks historical or contemporary perspective. If there were no unmanned systems, casualties would still be low, and a massive targeted killing campaign could still be affordable, albeit with a slightly different execution. Open-ended authorizations of force for clandestine programs pre-date drones and do not require them. It’s not even as if drones allowed such secret wars to employ aircraft, either - the notion of a secret CIA air force precedes drones by decades.

That these campaigns are “low risk” has less to do with drones and more to do with the fact that the governments of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are all basically acquiescent, tacitly or overtly, with Americans killing suspected terrorists or insurgents inside their borders, and that the targeted insurgents lack the military equipment or tactical acumen to inflict serious casualties on such a force. This targeted-killing program, employing a wide variety of air, land, and sea-based, manned and unmanned, overt and covert assets, is enabled by the unrelenting U.S. desire to kill terrorists and an open-ended legal authorization or acquiescence from Congress and the public. When Hussain argues:

Thus to a degree unprecedented in history the advent of drone warfare has given the government a free hand to wage wars without public constraint and with minimal oversight

he is doubly incorrect. The “nature” of the targeted killing program is inherent in the targeted killing, not drones or even “drone warfare,” since high-value targeted killing campaigns can take place with anything capable of lobbing a warhead to a forehead. And furthermore, the kind of conflicts we are seeing now are, by any empirical metric, not unprecedented in their lack of public oversight, their duration, or material constraints, regardless of platforms.

Another common fallacy of the sort of thinking that ascribes strategic or moral values to weapons or weapons systems is that of “lightly” or “defensively” arming foreign irregular groups, particularly in Syria. Critics who oppose arming Syria’s rebels rightly note that arms do not inherently constrain the purposes of human beings using them, and fear that adding more weapons to a major civil war could lead to post-conflict arms trafficking and their use in less-than-desirable activities, such as terrorist attacks, reprisal killings, continued internal violence, and attacks against the arming powers’ own interests.

The problem with linking arms provisions with defense of safe zones or protection of civilians is that there are no weapons systems that cannot be used to violate these intentions. Particularly with weapons that individuals or small groups can transport and operate on their own, speaking of an “offensive” or “defensive” weapon is foolish. A man-portable surface-to-air missile is defensive when it shoots down a helicopter strafing a rebel position, but it is offensive when its users encamp outside an airfield and use it to shoot down a landing transport or airliner.

The behavior of armed factions in Syria will be determined by their interests and the strategic context in which they seek to achieve them. Weapons are only part of that strategic context, and they are not a driving or controlling factor. For example, one justification analysts such as Anne-Marie Slaughter and others have long used for arming the Syrian rebels is that this would enable the creation of “safe zones,” but safe zones may not be the best military or political strategy for the rebels. If they believe taking those weapons and waging a continued guerrilla campaign that focuses on exhausting the regime as the goal, and considers the protection of civilians a secondary priority, then providing nominally “defensive” weaponry enables an offensive campaign.

When Slaughter and many others argue for providing “anti-tank, countersniper and portable antiaircraft weapons,” they are banking on several things. First, that whoever signs pledges to behave defensively actually means it and won’t manipulate foreign backers for their own interests. Second, that whoever signs the pledge has effective command and control down to the front lines where the weapons get used. Finally, that in the post-ceasefire or post-Assad stage, those weapons will not be used contrary to the desires of the rebels’ foreign patron. Characterizing the weapons as “defensive” or “light” does not eliminate any of these problems.

Consequently, arguments for arming the rebels often imbue the weapons with the intentions of the policy proponent. Take the following example. In this article, the author makes the case for providing RPG-7s and other light anti-armor weapons to the Syrian rebels, because they pose a low risk for post-conflict violence or a low degree of threat to the American counterpart to Syria’s tanks - the M1 Abrams. This is a perfect example of ascribing implicit political and strategic characteristics to a weapon rather than the context of its use: provide RPG-7s for destroying tanks, and dismiss it as a threat because post-conflict violence is less likely to involve tanks, and the weapon in question does not seem dangerous to American tanks.

It could not be more misleading. RPG-7s can do serious harm to virtually every other vehicle in the American land arsenal, and not only that, they have done serious harm to American aircraft, such as the Black Hawk helicopters in Mogadishu or, more recently, Extortion 17. RPG-7s have very short arming ranges, which make them particularly useful for urban combat, and they have more than enough firepower to destroy cars and armored personnel carriers, or to attack targets inside buildings. The number of terrorist attacks involving RPG-7s likely numbers in the tens of thousands. Simply because rebels received them to kill Syrian government tanks hardly means they cannot make use of them in a post-conflict environment. Nor, under the criteria of the safe zone advocates, would they necessarily make safe zones feasible. They hardly solve the issue of Syrian artillery, and anyone familiar with the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan can explain how RPGs, along with improvised explosive devices, mortars, snipers, and other weapons systems, can enable tactics to further a guerrilla movement or terrorism.

It is not only when discussing the arming of rebels that weapons are used as totems for broader discussions of policy. In Libya, Syria, and many other conflicts, the use of air power is often seen as a signal that a government’s suppression of a rebellion is reaching some sort of policy-relevant turning point. Aerial defections receive nearly as much attention as political defections. But why should that be? Air power may be used for indiscriminate bombings, but few regimes rely on their air power for conducting such operations. Nor is the air force the critical element of regime military strength. Indeed it is their artillery, as Brett Friedman explains, that provides the backbone of their killing power in operations for reducing cities. Pro-regime paramilitaries operate without much in the way of heavy weapons, let alone airpower, yet we frequently hear - from the highest levels of government - that it is helicopters that will “escalate the conflict quite dramatically.” What does this actually mean?

The primary effect of helicopters appears to be psychological. The greatest amount of violence will come from more mundane weapons, and the story of Syrian air power is hardly the bellwether of the Syrian civil war. Overly focusing on Syrian air power not only distracts from the more important drivers and dynamics of conflict, it also distorts discussion of potential policy solutions.

Calls for “no fly zones” over Syria play into a problem that is at least relatively easy for Western powers to solve - taking the Syrian air force out of operation - but will likely not produce meaningful strategic or political results. If the object of an intervention in Syria is to prevent the government’s reduction of urban centers or end the violence, merely targeting Syrian air power is not a particularly effective way of doing so, since such actions would not immediately or effectively impede the action of the more critical Syrian ground forces. If a certain type of intervention is unlikely to be efficacious in actually achieving our overall aims in a conflict, that is important to know. Focusing on a weapon system rather than the strategic context and outcomes impedes that process significantly.

Gray’s statement holds true. Weapons still do not make war. They are wielded and directed by humans against those of an opposing force or forces, in the midst of a host of mitigating factors, to achieve strategic aims. When Gray made his argument, he was challenging the notion of “strategic weapons” - weapons which have much more credible claims to transformative power or unique political or strategic quality than any of those discussed here - but even they are ultimately still devices whose meaning for politics, policy, and strategy derives from that broader ensemble of factors. Understanding what weapons systems are capable of is absolutely important for determining what kinds of strategies and policies are feasible, but they must be viewed as instruments subordinate to established ends. While weapons may appear easier to grasp than the complexities of warfare and the even more multifaceted issue of war, they should not take a lead role in coloring our analysis of policy.

Posted in Military, Small Arms, Strategery | 1 Comment

You Don’t Have to Go Home But You Can’t Stay Here: A Review of Last Men Out

by Diana Wueger Posted on August 7, 2012

I grew up hearing fantastical stories about the fall of Saigon from my dad, who witnessed the terrifying and chaotic final days of South Vietnam as a young foreign service officer. Panicked South Vietnamese parents, having heard horror stories about the brutality of the approaching North Vietnamese Army, tossed infants over the U.S. embassy gates in the hopes they’d be taken to safety. Rich politicians and their wives demanded that their gold-bar-filled luggage and prized dogs be allowed on board the tiny helicopters, even though space and weight were already at a premium. Helicopters were pushed off flight decks of Navy ships into the South China Sea so more could land. Stories like these seemed absurd and unbelievable to me, so when I was offered a copy of Bob Drury and Tom Clavin’s Last Men Out to review, I jumped on it, if only to get some independent verification of these tales. Who knows? Maybe my dad made it all up.

Not pictured: My dad (he’s behind the cameraman).

Except… turns out he didn’t. In roughly 270 pages, Last Men Out covers the finals days of April 1975 when, in the face of General Van Tien Dung’s push towards Saigon, the United States finally closed up shop after 25 years in Vietnam and rocked a helicopter-based evacuation called Operation: Frequent Wind. Last Men Out narrates the fantastical evacuation through the lens of the Marine Corps Security Guards (MSGs) posted to the embassy at Saigon and a few other provincial capitals, and it’s all there - thrown babies, gold and dogs, the disposal of perfectly good helicopters into the sea.

The authors do not, of course, mention Afghanistan, but the parallels are hard to miss.* The heroes and villains are clear: the MSGs are the very portrait of Real American Heroes, while the CIA, the State Department, and Washington come out covered in mud. Sound familiar? The narrative of America in Afghanistan is that the troops are doing their best with the policies and information available to them, while the politicos and policymakers that are to blame for the way things are going.

Interestingly, NVA’s General Dung, who (SPOILER ALERT) conquers Saigon in the end, is treated generously for refraining from attacking the city until Americans had left. The calculus behind his decision to wait for the Americans to evacuate gave me pause. While Dung certainly wanted to punish the U.S., he chose not to close on the city lest the Americans come back en masse to rescue or avenge their countrymen. I’m hardly suggesting we’ll see Kabul encircled by the Taliban on the day we finally close up shop - merely noting that the enemy has a say in how that day goes. Looking past the end of major combat operations in Afghanistan to the idea of a small advisory mission that will continue to help the Afghan National Security Forces, Last Men Out makes clear that as the number of U.S. troops declines, the risk to those still on the ground grows. The twin pressures of weak and fearful local allied forces and an enemy emboldened by fewer troops and the reduced likelihood of open hostilities could put any advisory mission in jeopardy.

In their treatment of the South Vietnamese, the authors display a frustrating tendency to stereotype - the politicians are corrupt, the civilians are childlike and helpless, the local security forces are sullen and liable to turn on their allies. Scattered moments of heroism and agency are all the more notable for their scarcity. The final moments of chaos in which the Vietnamese attempt to get to the roof to catch the last helicopter out make them seem like animals or barbarians - not frightened human beings who know what will happen when the NVA arrive. Again, this tracks with current popular understanding of the Afghans - politicians corrupt, civilians can’t help themselves, green-on-blue killings becoming endemic, etc. - with little attempt to understand the war from the Afghan perspective.

Honestly, it’s hard to read Last Men Out as straight history. It reads somewhat like a historical novel, like the war nerd’s version of The Other Boleyn Girl, and it’s a gripping story, especially if you’re not familiar with the intricacies and dramatis personae of Frequent Wind. You’re not sure who will live or die, whether the NVA will enter Saigon before the MSGs get out, or who gets left behind. If you can suspend disbelief a little bit it makes for a real page-turner (the level of detail suggests some liberties were taken with the dialogue and descriptions, but the authors address this in the endnotes, so I’ll forgive them that).

But it also makes for some sobering reading when read with half a mind to the next war we’ll leave unfinished. Though the parallels are not perfect, it’s especially worth considering how we treat - and leave - our local allies, both civilian and military, and how they’ll perceive themselves to have been treated. The image of 400 non-Americans patiently standing in the embassy courtyard waiting for a helicopter that never came is haunting, much like the stories about Iraqi interpreters left languishing in visa application purgatory. While we can’t save everybody, and we can’t and shouldn’t stay forever, we should take care not to offer false hope and to do what we can where we can.

* NB: I’m not arguing that Afghanistan is Vietnam 2.0, nor am I suggesting analogical thinking is particularly valuable in this instance. I’m merely noting the elements of this narrative that led me to consider their modern parallels.

Posted in Afghanistan, Book Reviews, Iraq, Military, War | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

I Won’t Back Down

by Jonathan Rue Posted on June 4, 2012

I have to admit, I’m a little nervous. When I write something, I fully expect people to disagree with me and to call me an idiot after reading my “analysis.” But I rarely expect to anger people. My latest article has the potential to really anger a lot of people. About 6 million of them.

I’ve got an op-ed at The National Interest on the need to reform Tricare, the military healthcare system.

The numbers, however, do not allow for continued inaction. Increasing health-care costs in DoD’s budget mean less money for bombs, bullets and training. Fielding a military but supplying it with obsolete equipment and minimal training is the definition of a hollow force. Sensible reforms, like the ones proposed in the administration’s FY2013 budget request, will not break faith with military retirees and their families. But Congress must acknowledge that Tricare is merely a policy, part of a larger military compensation package that seeks to recruit and retain the best men and women for military service. It was never intended to become an inalienable right.

Due to space constraints, I had to omit things that I fear might lead some readers to question my support for military retirees. I want to go on record with some things here.

  1. I do not believe Tricare should be abolished or that retirees should not have access to subsidized healthcare in some form.
  2. I do believe military retirees should contribute more than they currently do. They should expect to pay, on average, at least 25% of their healthcare costs as was intended by Congress when it established Tricare in 1996.
  3. Enlisted veterans should not pay as much as officers. Tricare enrollment fees should be tiered based on retirement pay.
  4. Working age retirees who earn over a certain amount each year (including retirement pay), say $150,000, should not be allowed to use Tricare. They should be forced to use their civilian employer’s healthcare plan. Once they stop working, they can join Tricare for Life.
  5. Reforms must grandfather some people into the current system.
  6. Tricare enrollment fees should be indexed to inflation for the general healthcare sector, which should go a long way toward stabilizing DoD’s costs.
  7. I do believe that we are dangerously close to viewing veterans as a privileged, entitled class of people. This I fear is corrosive to civil-military relations and widens the gap between those who serve and those who don’t. The challenge is fighting for and receiving the care veterans deserve without becoming entitled.

Andrew Bacevich used a great quote from FDR in a recent book review that I wanted to crib, but didn’t. After General MacArthur broke up the “Bonus Marchers” camp in Washington, DC, Roosevelt let it be known that “no person, because he wore a uniform, must therefore be placed in a special class of beneficiaries.”

Anyway, read the whole thing here.

 

Posted in Civil-Military Relations, Military | 11 Comments

We’ve got drones and SOF teams. Who should we go after?

by caidid Posted on May 22, 2012

‘We’ve got drones and SOF teams. Who should we go after?’

This is how the target selection process sounds to me when I read about it. My semi-secret fear is that this might be quite close to how this process actually works. The Global War on Terror, the shadow war, the overseas contingency operation - whatever you want to call it, I’ve long worried that its reach and the place of importance it is given are out of proportion to any threat posed by Al Qaeda or any similar group, and I’ve long feared that the way we go about ‘countering’ terrorism may in fact cause more problems than it solves, possibly by orders of magnitude. I am no insider. I don’t see the process. I would like to think that more care is put into these decisions than it seems from the outside. But from here, from the outside, it seems like no matter how many times - through decades of experience - we see the second and third order effects, the collateral damage, the side effects of our actions, the people making the decisions are not really concerning themselves with taking time to consider how the benefits balance out against the potential unintended consequences and long-term effects. And it’s not just about doing things we maybe shouldn’t be doing; it’s also about failing to do things we maybe should be doing.

Then when I read an article like this one by Kimberly Dozier (and I strongly recommend reading that), it reads very cart-before-horse to me, like ‘Who are we going after with these drones and SOF guys?’ and not ‘This AQ leader is a terrible threat. What are we going to do about that?’ I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have contingency plans in place for how to deal with potential real threats to U.S. security, but it seems like more than that. I fear that maybe we use these tactics just because we can, that because we have drones and incredibly skilled and versatile SOF teams and such, we just look for people to use them on. That scares me because it implies a casual attitude toward the many forms of potential collateral damage, scant consideration of long term effects (and therefore the absence of a robust long term guiding strategy), meaning finally, an approach to national security that is not actually optimized to keep our nation secure.

The drones aren’t the issue any more than any other tool or tactic is - they are a tool, and can be a very valuable one - but if we’re looking around for people to kill with them rather than using them only in service of a true strategy or to counter a clear threat that has arisen, then we’re doing it wrong, and if we’re doing it wrong - and this is true even if you are concerned only with American interests and are fully indifferent to the collateral damage done to and within local populations in the areas of operation - we risk having to pay a harsh price in five years, or ten, or twenty, when the right things we didn’t do and the collateral effects of the things we did do comes back to haunt us.

But please tell me I’m wrong. I’ll feel a lot better if I am.

Bonus reading: h/t to Rob Caruso for linking up three great recommendations for current reading on operations (which yes, very much do consist of more than just drones): “Offshoring CT: Towards a Dissection” - Dan Trombly for Abu Muqawama; “The Vickers Doctrine” - Robert Caruso at Rocky Shoals; and “U.S. Foreign Policy and Contested Sovereignty” - Micah Zenko for CFR. All good reads that bear on various aspects of this subject, none quite addresses the question of what kind of big-picture, long-term strategy guides these operations, although Caruso comes closest to getting into this in that his (very interesting) post offers guidance on structure and prioritization in operations going forward.

Posted in Military, Strategery, Terrorism, Uncategorized, War | 6 Comments

This isn’t a gunfight

by Jonathan Rue Posted on May 22, 2012

Over at the Marine Corps Gazette blog, Capt Brett “King of Battle” Friedman, pens an insightful piece using current U.S. operations in Yemen as a model for the future of the Marine Corps. In essence, Friedman is advocating a future for the Marine Corps very much in line with what the Commandant has been saying since he published his planning guidance in Fall 2010. In the Commandant’s words, the Marine Corps is “[A] middleweight force, we are light enough to get there quickly, but heavy enough to carry the day upon arrival, and capable of operating independent of local infrastructure.”

Friedman believes that Marine operations of the future will look very much like Marine operations of the early 20th century.

A low number of ground troops, allied with a local government (or some other type of organization) will advise and fight alongside indigenous security forces against irregular enemies while being supported by naval and aerial assets. The gear we will use in these operations may be different, but the outline of the operations could have been cut and pasted from Nicaragua in 1912, Haiti in 1915, or the Dominican Republic in 1916.

He offers the Marine Corps three recommendations to ensure it is ready to execute these missions and firmly positioning itself as a “middleweight force,” but his last recommendation is the one I want to explore further.

3) Send in the POGs

If future wars do indeed resemble current operations in Yemen and SOF forces are already on the ground with indigenous infantry forces, infantry Marines very well may be the least likely Marines to go ashore. There are already enough shooters on the ground in Yemen but in a pinch, SOF or allies may need fire support, supplies, mechanics, EOD, combat engineers, or any of the numerous other capabilities that a MEU can provide. For example, a planned Yemeni assault could be support by an EFSS battery with an attached EOD platoon lifted onshore specifically for the assault and returned to ship afterwards. No grunts required. The idea that only the grunts will engage in ground combat has been an ill-informed fantasy for decades, and it’s time we truly live up to the “Every Marine a rifleman” ideal. Frankly, the two-weeks of combat training every non-infantry Marine gets at MCT should have been expanded a long time ago and there’s no time like the present. We are already re-evaluating combat training for the WISRR program and may as well look at the possibility of at least doubling the time spent at MCT. Additionally, the disruption to the training pipeline that this will cause will be easier to accomplish once the Marine Corps has finished contracting somewhere around 2017. Critical enablers that the MEU possesses can be better utilized if each Marine unit is more capable of operating independently on the ground with only joint or allied forces.

America’s advisory effort in Iraq was comprehensive. That’s an understatement. The United States literally built an army from the ground up. Initial efforts were by necessity directed at ensuring the Iraqi army could fight by emphasizing individual and small unit tactics. A lot of effort was spent teaching soldiers how to properly BZO their rifles and procedures for clearing a house. As the Iraqi army grew in size and security improved, advisory efforts shifted to sustainment, ensuring the Iraqis could supply themselves and fix their own Humvees.

I don’t want to say that making the Iraqi logistics system function and getting the Iraqis to use that system was harder than teaching them how to fight and engaging in combat operations alongside them, but it was harder. Much harder. A couple of factors made sustainment a difficult proposition. First, making a system function required focused effort at multiple levels of command. Advisors from the battalion to the Ministry of Defense had to coordinate their efforts. Given the rate of turnover, the fact that advisors were from different services, and an opaque advisor chain of command, this was not an easy task. Second, the Iraqis were accustomed to getting what they wanted from the Americans. The U.S. may have given an Iraqi division 300 Humvees and told the division commander to distribute them to his brigades, but that doesn’t mean it actually happened. Often times, it didn’t.

Grunts weren’t the ones making the Iraqi logistics system work. And they weren’t the ones training Iraqi jundee to fix Humvees. It took a lot of logistics specialists, mechanics, and motor transport operators.

While Friedman is quite right that we will likely not engage in advisory missions on the scale of Iraq or Afghanistan for the foreseeable future, combat support and combat service support Marines or soldiers are a vital component of any security force assistance mission. That’s because the majority of security force assistance missions are to countries not gripped by civil strife or conflict. The United States has teams of advisors deployed across the world engaging in SFA with the intent of improving partner capability and capacity. These SFA missions do not always focus on infantry tactics. Advisor teams partner with a host nation military to improve intelligence operations. Or they teach best practices for maintenance or communications.

Grunts can do these jobs, but they’ll be better done by troops who are specifically trained in those specialties. And the U.S. will be better served having partner militaries that are proficient across all six war fighting functions.

Posted in Military | Leave a comment

Gimme Shelter

by Jonathan Rue Posted on May 17, 2012

In 1972, Marine captain Francis “Bing” West published an unadulterated account of a Marine Combined Action Platoon in Vietnam. The Village was and remains the seminal account of the Marine Corps Combined Action Program. Born out of lessons learned in the Banana Wars of the early 20th century, the Combined Action Program paired a Marine rifle squad with Vietnamese Popular Force militiamen and assigned the combined platoon responsibility for protecting a village or hamlet. West’s chronicle of fifteen Marines who lived, fought, and died alongside their Vietnamese brothers for 485 days in Bing Nghia offered a trove of lessons for military advisors fighting a brutal counterinsurgency.

Forty years later, Owen West, a Marine reserve major and Bing’s son, has published his own gripping saga of a modern day variant of the Combined Action Platoon – the Military Transition Team (MiTT) – fighting a similarly brutal counterinsurgency in Iraq. The Snake Eaters follows the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Brigade, 1st Division (3/3-1) of the Iraqi Army and their American military advisors – known by their all-too-appropriate radio call sign, Outcast – during the dark days of 2005-07 as they attempt to defeat an insurgency and win the allegiance of Khalidiya, a village halfway between Fallujah and Ramadi. It’s a raw account of a motley crew of reservists called up for duty to fight a war for which they were ill prepared, ill equipped, and ill supported. Through force of bravery and grit, Outcast and their Iraqi brothers-in-arms overcome the enemy and, sometimes, their own chain-of-command.

In a sense, Outcast was lucky. Lieutenant Colonel Mike Troster, the team leader during the hard days of 2005-06 and a Drug Enforcement Agent when he wasn’t moonlighting as a reserve infantry officer, instinctively understood both advising and counterinsurgency – many MiTTs had leaders that didn’t. Troster understood the necessity of constant patrolling. He also knew his MiTT needed to accompany 3/3-1 on every patrol in order to gain credibility so that their advice would be heard and heeded. He knew that in order to run constant patrols with a ten-man team, normal rank protocol went out the window. He flattened Outcast’s hierarchy – every man did every job. The military hadn’t trained him for this, but he knew what needed to be done and did it.

Troster led a team varied in complexion; it was a typical group of reservists. Sergeant First Class Mark Huss ran a plumbing company in Iowa and spent his reserve weekends “teaching soldiers how to maintain laundry facilities.” Sergeant First Class Eliezer Rivera, the team’s senior non-commissioned officer, was a post office supervisor. Specialist Joseph Neary was “a heating technician by day and a rock-and-roll guitarist by night.” Sergeant Shawn Boiko was a flooring manager. None had infantry training.

Once teams like Outcast were assembled, the Army and Marines had to train them. Here too, efforts fell far short. But as West incisively notes, much of this was a result of the divide between ground truth and Washington fantasy about the war’s progress and the nature of counterinsurgency. Early advisor teams received, as they described it to West, “forty five days of ill-conceived classes crammed into ninety.” The classes at Camp Atterbury were taught mostly by people who had never been to Iraq and who had never been advisors. The entire training program was premised on the notion that the advisor teams would be living on large, American run Forward Operating Bases, training Iraqi soldiers in basic soldiering skills and staff work. “It was as if Atterbury was preparing the advisors to defend a log fort against a Sioux attack in 1863,” West writes.

As Outcast brutally discovered in late summer 2005 upon arriving in Iraq, their training had been worthless. The Snake Eaters, the name 3/3-1 gave itself, were coming off six months of hard combat and expected more as they were newly responsible for of the more dangerous areas of Anbar Province. The Iraqis didn’t need classroom teachers – they needed combat advisors.

Outcast shouldn’t have succeeded; at least, not on paper. A disparate group of ten reservists with no infantry training or combat experience is a perfect metaphor for America’s efforts in Iraq. But Outcast conducted over 1,500 combat patrols. Team members like Sergeants First Class Huss and Rivera each logged more than 450 combat patrols in a ten-month deployment. Outcast hit fifty improvised explosive devices. Seven of the ten were wounded. One died.

And yet they persevered, overcoming the normal aspects of hard combat and a Spartan existence on a small combat outpost, devoid the normal accouterments found on the larger FOBs, and even a lack of support from their own side. Outcast looked to Task Force Panther, a National Guard unit – who, it should be noted, was also ill prepared and ill equipped for the mission and fight they were given – that was supposed to “partner” with 3/3-1 and support the advisors. But Panther and its higher headquarters didn’t get it. First, there was the order mandating the Iraqis patrol in armored vehicles. Think about that one for a second. Then there was Panther’s refusal to conduct joint patrols with 3/3-1. And as if Outcast’s existence wasn’t Spartan enough, Panther removed the main generator providing power to Outcast’s small outpost. With insightful vignettes like these, West demonstrates one of the main challenges advisors often face is the U.S. military command.

By the end of the book, it’s clear that many of the lessons gleaned forty years ago were either discounted or forgotten when the U.S. military scrambled to field advisors to the newly rebuilt Iraqi Army in the summer of 2004. This inability to retain lessons learned is somewhat surprising. Combat advising is not a new concept – the United States has been in the business of training foreign militaries for at least 100 years. The Marine Corps, as noted earlier, has a long heritage of partnering with and advising foreign militaries. As all Marines are steeped in the Corps’ history, there is institutional memory and widespread awareness of Marines as advisors. The U.S. Army institutionalized combat advisors by creating the Special Forces; however, the pernicious effect of this decision was to insulate this mission within this small community – regular Army units and commanders came to despise the mission. Since their inception in the early days of the Cold War, the Green Berets have been the principal force for advising foreign militaries. They spend years training, and when it comes to advising, the Green Berets are the best the United States has to offer. Regrettably, the task of building and advising the new Iraqi Army after it was disbanded in 2004 vastly exceeded the capacity of the Green Berets to do alone. The Army and Marine Corps were thus forced to field advisor teams like Outcast.

Unfortunately, the services did so with little understanding or appreciation for the task in front of the MiTTs. As West notes:

Our generals are uncomfortable prescribing advisors as a solution to these twenty-first century wars. Advising a foreign military requires nontraditional training that takes years; soldiers need a wonk’s cultural awareness, the rudimentary language capability of a border cop, a survivalist’s skills, and the interpersonal savvy of a politician. Military hierarchy is built on control, so it feels unnatural for the leadership to dispatch these small bands of advisors, who on paper cannot give orders, to live among foreign, sometimes hostile soldiers in an effort to stabilize their countries.

Indeed, being an advisor requires patience, understanding, and tact – three traits not normally emphasized in military training and culture. Throw in an organizational culture that disdains advising as an inferior mission and promotion policies that delineate a career path to the top – advising is, uh, missing – and the result was an advisor selection and training program that emphasized quantity, not quality.

Advising is a mindset. An otherwise outstanding officer might be a terrible advisor, and the most incompetent infantry corporal might be incredibly effective. It’s less instruction and more persuasion. The Army initially turned to reservists like Outcast and later adopted the Marine Corps model, meeting its requirements by pulling individuals from disparate units across the fleet, which sometimes incentivized commanders to send underperformers. West, in his typically blunt manner, notes, “Selection for advisor duty was not rigorous. Soldiers could not be overly prejudiced, handicapped, or too fat to deploy.”

In his history of America’s involvement in Vietnam, Summons of Trumpet, retired Army Lieutenant General Dave Palmer writes: “Another unchanging reality of advising is the more or less constant cocoon of frustration enveloping the advisor. Adjusting to advising is a greater individual challenge than can be easily imagined by anyone who has not done it.” The challenges an advisor faces over the course of a combat deployment are impossible to overstate. Owen West succeeds simply by telling Outcast’s tale. But what really sets The Snake Eaters apart from the other advisor memoirs* to come out of Iraq is his sharp, evocative prose – “a group of jundis who were watering the pavement with spent brass casings” – and his thorough account of the various challenges Outcast faced and their relation to the strategic direction of the war.

When the American military was fielding advisor teams like Outcast in 2004-2005, they could almost be forgiven for forgetting lessons learned from successful advising concepts from wars past. After all, the military did an exceptional job of purging the lessons of Vietnam during the late 1970s and 1980s, and by 2004 Vietnam was but a distant memory. The same cannot be said for our advisory efforts in Afghanistan.

As a part of our campaign plan in Afghanistan, the U.S. is beginning the transition out of the lead for combat operations, just as we did in Iraq. As combat units rotate home, they will be replaced by what the Army is calling Security Force Assistance Teams (SFATs). The good news is that these SFATs will be composed primarily of officers and senior staff non-commissioned officers pulled from the same brigade staff, so there will be a level of familiarity with one another not found on teams like Outcast. More good news is that the SFATs will spend five weeks at their home station focusing on individual and team military skills like land navigation, weapons usage, and patrolling techniques. The bad news is that the pre-deployment training repeats many of the same mistakes from 2004. After the SFATs complete training at their home station, they’ll go to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Ft. Polk where they’ll receive – wait for it – three weeks of advisor training. Three weeks.

Given the spike of so-called “green-on-blue” incidents in the last six months – 22 ISAF deaths in 2012, or 13% of total ISAF KIA, have come at the hands of Afghan security force personnel turning on their advisors – the lack of cultural, negotiation, and language training is troubling. Like the advisors sent to Iraq in 2004-05, the SFATs are not getting the proper training. Green Berets spend years learning how to advise foreign militaries. Even the Marine Corps puts its MiTTs through roughly five months of pre-deployment training, with a heavy emphasis advisor skills like best practices for speaking through an interpreter and cultural do’s and don’ts. These are reinforced throughout the training program so that they become second nature. Of course, this training isn’t perfect, but at least the USMC MiTTs are being set up for success.

The story of American military advisors in Iraq and Afghanistan is not well known. Should Americans read The Snake Eaters and learn more about a little known aspect of the savage wars less than one per cent of their fellow citizens have been fighting, great. But the audiences who will gain the most from reading West’s book are mid-career officers attending the Army and Marine Corps staff colleges in Fort Leavenworth and Quantico. Outcast is a testament that advisors can succeed even when the armed services do not appreciate their mission. The advisor needs robust, appropriate training and the full support of his command as soon as his boots hit the ground because as long as we continue to wage counterinsurgencies as a third party, advisors are our saving grace. As West notes, “No matter how we enter these murky twenty-first century wars, all roads out lead through the combat advisor.”

* Here are the three other memoirs about the military advisor experience to come out of Iraq. Interesting that all four are written by Marine officers.

Folsom, Seth. (2010) In the Gray Area: A Marine Advisor Team at War. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.

Gray, Wes. (2009) Embedded: A Marine Corps Adviser Inside the Iraqi Army. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.

Navarro, Eric. (2008) God Willing: My Wild Ride with the New Iraqi Army. Washington: Potomac Books.

Posted in Afghanistan, Iraq, Military, Reviews, War | 3 Comments

Still in Saigon

by Jonathan Rue Posted on May 7, 2012

GEN Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has released his Chairman’s reading list. So far, this one is receiving better reviews than the reading list he released during his short stint as Army Chief of Staff last summer, which received some harsh reviews. Just about every general officer publishes a reading list, formal or informal, but the Chairman’s reading list and those of the service chiefs generally get the most press.

These reading lists are easy to poke fun at and critique because no list is perfect. That said, they serve a useful purpose. Most of the books, especially those targeted to field grade and general officers, are intended to get the military reader thinking and learning about larger, strategic issues that govern the military profession or affect U.S. foreign policy. For instance, both of Dempsey’s reading lists had Robert Kaplan’s Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power and Samuel Huntington’s The Soldier and the State. On the other hand, the generals have a tendency to include some weird stuff, like books about starfish and spiders.

Last summer, I re-read E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed. The GOP primary season was nearing its pinnacle of farce and I thought to myself that this book ought to be required reading for anyone who sought the office of President because anyone who wants to be Commander-in-Chief needs to bone up on the consequences of their decisions to send American boys and girls to war. While the military does an exceptional job of publishing reading lists to help officers and staff non-commissioned officers better understand civilians, the reverse is, sadly, not true.

In that spirit, here is a reading list that, if the G&L collective was President or National Security Advisor, it would require each civilian political appointee working in State, Defense, or the NSC to read. Like GEN Dempsey’s list, this one is not exhaustive and I’m sure there are some things we missed or omitted. This will be a list-in-progress and we’ll be adding/subtracting titles. So, feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments section.

America, F Yeah!

Democracy in America
Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy
For the Common Defense
9/11 Commission Report
The New American Militarism
Arsenal of Democracy
Buying National Security

The dogs of war, they’ll carry you away (or: How smart people make bad decisions)

The Guns of August
The Best and the Brightest
Rubicon Theory of War

On combat (or: Carrying shit and killing people is not pleasant)

The Face of Battle
With the Old Breed
If I Die in a Combat Zone
A Rumor of War
Achilles in Vietnam
No True Glory
On Killing

Big(ish) Think

On War (Books I-III, VIII)
Twenty Years' Crisis
Bureaucracy
Arms and Influence
War and Politics
Perception and Misperception in International Politics
War and Change in World Politics
Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy
Shield of Achilles

Posted in Analysis, Civil-Military Relations, Military, War | 3 Comments

All About the (Private) Benjamins

by Jimmy Sky Posted on March 17, 2012

Lets get this out of the way upfront: there is no way to objectively calculate what military members “deserve.” Military life can be rough even in peacetime, and the risk and sacrifices expected of military members are even greater during war, or whatever we’re calling this thing now. But it’s misleading to say it’s all sacrifice.

Here is the bottom line on active duty military pay and benefits. They are much, much, much better than anyone realizes, and by “anyone” I really mean anyone. Pay and benefits are probably the best-kept secret in the military and over the last 12 years they have increased at a substantial rate. The Tenth Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation from February 2008 states that

…compensation for members of the uniformed services compares favorably to compensation in the civilian sector, and the differential is substantial when the comparison includes not only cash compensation but also elements of a generous benefits package. But this fact is not well understood by service members in general. While service members tend to understand that their cash compensation compares favorably to the cash earnings of comparable civilians, they do not appreciate the full extent to which their total compensation—including benefits—exceeds that of their civilian counterparts.

This widespread ignorance is problematic for a couple reasons. First, it contributes to military personnel making career decisions without fully understanding what life is like outside the military. Second, it feeds into the myth amongst the military, the general population, and Congress that every facet of military existence is perpetual sacrifice and that the least we can do is pay them more. On several occasions this has even led to Congress tagging an additional 0.5%* across the board pay increase beyond what the Pentagon requested (FTR, this happened under both Bush and Obama). This mentality also discourages us from facing the uncomfortable truth that money put into personnel compensation may be more advantageously spent elsewhere.

Complicating all of that is the convoluted nature of the military compensation system. Pretty much everyone who has studied this issue has stated, in varying degrees, that the compensation system is too complicated to allow for sound policy decisions: the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Research Service, RAND (in at least two reports). Even the Department of Defense says as much in the most recent QRMC and the Defense Advisory Council on Military Compensation. (it should be noted that most of these documents explicitly avoid answering the question ‘How much should we pay the military?’)

So let’s try to break it down a bit. Every report on this topic utilizes a slightly different formula to calculate military compensation, but I’m primarily using the graphics from the 10th Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation, published in February of 2008. Yes, surprise! This is enough of an issue that there is a statute that every four years the President must establish a committee to study the topic and report back to him (incidentally, I’m also enough of a nerd to know that the 11th QRMC has been delayed - my guess is to assure that its findings align with the new fiscal realities within the department).

So, here is what military compensation currently looks like…

Why is this important? Because any time you hear someone talking about military “pay” (basically the right hand side of the pie chart) they are essentially ignoring over half of the monetary value that military members receive.

The term used to describe this 48% of the pay and benefits pie is RMC, meaning “Regular Military Compensation.” After controlling for education, the military is consistently higher than the 70th percentile of earned income. Relatively to this 70th percentile metric, officers have it slightly better than enlisted.

A couple of things to point out in these graphs; First off, for both officer and enlisted there is a steady, predictable increase in take home income. This, of course, will vary somewhat from individual to individual, but based on the fairly standard promotion timelines for service members (especially officers), the military provides an income that places them in the upper levels of their social cohort for the duration of their career. Keep in mind, all of this is before you include the Deferred and Noncash benefits.

You should also note that for the “typical” young enlisted member in the top chart (18-yo, without college) the military provides an additional $10,000 a year over what they could anticipate earning as a civilian for the first few years of their career.

All of this paints a picture of a fairly well compensated military force relative to the general population of the country. However, once you include the monetary value of the additional benefits (the left-hand side of the pie chart above) the picture changes considerably. The term used for the inclusion of the entire benefits and compensation package is MAC: “Military Annual Compensation.”

The income percentile for the military, both officer and enlisted (blue line), jumps up to between the 80th and 90th percentile for the majority of a 20 year career. At the start of an enlisted career, the service member is actually exceeding the 90th percentile income bracket for his cohort. For officers, the movement into the 90th percentile occurs both at the beginning of a career and again beyond the 18-year mark.

So, how well paid is the military? Even if you take out all the Noncash and Deferred benefits listed above and just focus on take-home pay, the military still has it pretty good. There is a longer discussion to be had over the “deferred benefits” (aka retirement), which I discussed at length here and here). But there is a natural tendency to focus on the “take-home” salary of military members – and by doing so, we are inadvertently contributing to a continued narrative of the military being underpaid.

So aside from demonstrating how much I hate America and setting myself up for a brutal comment section, what am I trying to accomplish here? I’m not advocating that we reduce the take-home pay of military members, but we do need to take steps to convey to military personnel, the public and Congress exactly how well compensated the military is relative to the rest of the population. This means taking some basic steps like simplifying the compensation system and updating servicemembers’ LESs so that the monetary costs of benefits is reflected.

In addition, we also need to assure that we are clear-eyed about the impact compensation packages have on the overall budget. Military compensation, like all government spending, should be limited to the minimum amount necessary to achieve goals; in this case the maintenance of a certain quality of life for the All Volunteer Force. The problem is that this has to simultaneously be balanced with the need to maintain adequate personnel numbers and sustain retirement benefits. Unfortunately, no one seems to really want to delve into what that actually means.

For example, in 1999 there was a push to address a “13% pay gap” between the military and their civilian counterparts. The problem is that this number seems to have been largely arbitrary and not the result of a serious analysis (if someone has a study reference for this, please point me to it). On the contrary, the 13% pay gap was actually refuted fairly convincingly at the time by the CBO. Regardless, this lead to a new law that authorized Congress to increase that annual military pay raises by an additional 0.05% beyond the Employment Cost Index every year for the next 6 years in an effort to close this (questionable) gap. [The Employment Cost Index is set by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and is the baseline for annual raises for all federal employees including military]

However, when the six years was over, Congress continued to fund this additional 0.5%* for several more years, even though there was no longer any legal requirement for it and the Pentagon was no longer even requesting it. [In the interest of full disclosure, I personally benefited from several of these pay raises and never once complained]

There are a few indications that the attitude towards pay and benefits is starting to change. The Pentagon has made long overdue changes to the costs of Tricare for both Active Duty and working age retirees. They have also begun prorating ‘Imminent Danger Pay,’ which may have been the single most abused benefit in the history of the DoD. Basically, if you spent a single day out of the month in a hostile area, you were paid an additional $225/month. This meant that the entire military rushed to make it into theater before the end of the month and drug their feet in order to stay in theater until the 1st day of the next month. A finance officer relayed the story of one senior USAF official who made 6 trips into theater in one year, each trip approximately 60 days apart, but conveniently straddling the monthly transition. That means he made an extra $2700 ($225 x 12) that year for a spending a just few weeks in theater (also all tax free if I recall the rules correctly)

I sincerely don’t want to oversimplify this issue. There are myriad reasons why people join the military along with a largely different set of reasons for why they stay. An aspect of that decision is certainly financial. However, to act as if the only way to maintain the status of the all-volunteer force is by perpetually increasing the compensation and benefits for military service members is an indictment of our policy makers’ ability to make sound fiscal judgments and an insult to uniformed personnel. The compensation policies we have pursued over the last decade imply that we think service members are solely motivated by personal financial gains. Let me assure you, this is not true, but the question remains; how much is too much? Where do we draw the line? How much do you pay people when it’s impossible to objectively determine what they deserve?

Also, if you are one of those people who breathlessly criticize slowing active duty military compensation growth and reductions in retiree benefits and the drawdown of personnel, you need to come to grips with the fact that all of these items come from the same ‘pot’ of money. Since it’s now becoming clear that the DoD is going to face a truly flat budget over the next few years that means that this ‘pot’ can no longer grow at the unchecked rates it has over the last decade. That means that from here on out, every dollar that goes into active duty compensation or retiree benefits is a dollar that doesn’t go into maintaining the size of the active duty force. Secretary Panetta has announced the planned drawdown of 80,000 from the Army and 20,000 from the USMC. Ostensibly, this is because we no longer need to sustain forces at these levels, but you have to ask if it is possible that we might “need” these personnel a little more if we could afford to keep them.

UPDATE:

* Thanks to Justin T. Johnson (@justinjdc) for pointing out that my pay raise number should have been 0.5%, not 0.05%.

Posted in Big Money, Careerism, Military, War | 42 Comments

Build a House and Burn It Down

by Jonathan Rue Posted on March 14, 2012

In the last five years, ANSF members have killed more than 75 ISAF military advisers. In 2012, 1 out of every 4 ISAF casualties has been at the hands of a member of the ANSF. These deaths present a huge problem to the U.S. exit strategy, which is based on the expectation that the ANSF will be able to provide enough security for Afghanistan that will prevent the reemergence of the Taliban or use Al Qaeda’s unimpeded use of Afghan territory to plan attacks.

But only a very small percentage of Afghan National Army battalions are capable of conducting combat operations on their own, which means ISAF military advisers will be in Afghanistan for a long time. The need for trust is crucial – and may be gone for good. We can expect these advisers to be dispersed throughout the country on small combat outposts without major American support nearby. How will they simultaneously protect themselves from militants and the Afghans they are advising? How will policymakers ask troops to advise an army that might kill them at a moment’s notice?

Being an adviser can be an incredibly frustrating experience.* Regular military units typically don’t trust you because of your close association with local forces; meanwhile, advisers often see regular units as working at cross-purposes to the advisory mission. Advising local forces can be like herding cats; it requires patience, understanding, and tact—three traits not typically emphasized in American military training. An adviser must spend hours and hours each day with the men he is advising - even when he’s not advising or assisting with an issue at hand, he’s hanging out, building a relationship. While everyone else is at salsa night or playing Xbox, the adviser is having chai with his counterpart. Actually, a proper campaign plan doesn’t even give the adviser an option to attend salsa night on the FOB - he’s out on an indigenous base living with his counterparts.

Moreover, an adviser must enter his deployment knowing that he will not likely succeed. At the very least, he has to revise his standards for success. My team leader, who served on three different adviser teams, put it like this: “Advising is like pushing a huge boulder up a steep hill. You’re not going to push the boulder to the top; you just have to prevent it from rolling to the bottom.” Making lasting changes to another country’s military cannot be accomplished in a standard 7 or 12-month deployment; the best you can hope for is not to lose ground and hand the unit off to the next adviser team in as good a state as you found it.

An example: the Iraqi Army, which is generations more advanced than the Afghan army, has developed an organizational culture derived from Russian military doctrine and the personality of Saddam Hussein. In American military doctrine, the S-2 intelligence officer is always in communication with the S-3 operations officer. Intelligence drives operations. Operations result in new intelligence, which begins the cycle anew. The Iraqi Army, however, does not subscribe to this doctrine. The S-2 and S-3 officers often do not communicate at all. The S-2 officer runs his own operations based on his own intelligence. The S-3 officer has his own sources through family or tribal connections. S-2 officers are often more concerned with the insider threat. Altering a culture of separation that ingrained is challenging; advisers may have success at the individual unit level, but they’re not going to change those kinds of behaviors across the entire organization in 9 months. It would take an entire generation or longer. The adviser must learn to work within the organizational culture of the military he is advising, not necessarily try and force the advisees to conform to American military doctrine. And this is independent of the need for cultural understanding, which, suffice it to say, requires another dose of patience, understanding, and tact.

Traditionally, advising has been almost exclusively the purview of the Army’s Special Forces, the vaunted Green Berets. Historically, regular Army and Marine units do not train for this mission. That’s not to say that conventional forces haven’t done it, it’s just not something that the service chiefs like to do as it impedes on their traditional missions and budgets. Once policymakers recognized that the only way we were going to leave Iraq with any semblance of stability was by [training Iraqi soldiers to be good at their jobs], the advisory mission took on new importance. But the scope of the task was so big that Green Berets alone could not do the job, and the Army and the Marine Corps began organizing and training Military Transition Teams (MiTT).

The Marine Corps fashioned its MiTTs out of individual augments, which meant that a team was composed of Marines pulled from their regular units across a range of military occupational specialties. Officers and staff non-commissioned officers (SNCOs) would typically pair up with Iraqis who worked in the appropriate staff section, e.g. an infantry officer would work with the Iraqi S-3 to advise him on planning and conducting operations while an intelligence officer would pair up with the Iraqi S-2 to advise and assist him on intelligence matters. The MiTT team leader would advise the Iraqi battalion commander. This was repeated for the other staff sections as well — logistics, training, administration, etc. Marine MiTTs also had junior Marines to serve as drivers and gunners on MiTT tactical movements, but the Marines also used them as advisers to great effect. My team used their expertise to teach classes on weapons, tactics, maintenance, and communications to enlisted Iraqi soldiers.

My MiTT spent three full months working up together. Our training package emphasized language, culture, and negotiating. We also spent the requisite amount of time patrolling, running convoys, and practicing other team and individual military skills. We spent 3 weeks in Twentynine Palms for a final exercise that included native Iraqis as role players in a full, mock up Iraqi village. There were hundreds of us out there and many of the scenarios in the exercise repeated themselves in Iraq. It was intense.

And it wasn’t nearly enough. I could have used more training. A lot more. We all could.

As a part of our campaign plan in Afghanistan, the US is going to begin transitioning out of the lead for combat operations, just as we did in Iraq. As combat units rotate home, they will be replaced by what the Army is calling Security Force Assistance Teams (SFATs). The good news is that these SFATs will be composed primarily of officers and senior SNCOs pulled from the same brigade staff – they will not be individual augments pulled from disparate units – so there will be a level of familiarity with one another not found on teams like mine. The bad news is that the pre-deployment training is close to worthless. The SFATs will spend five weeks at their home station focusing primarily on individual military skills (land navigation, weapons usage, patrolling techniques, etc.). Afterwards, they will go to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Ft. Polk where they will receive - wait for it - three weeks of adviser specific training. Three weeks. We are taking soldiers and expecting them to absorb at least four months’ worth of training in three weeks.

I don’t know if the trust between American advisers and their ANSF counterparts is broken for good. But I do know that sending teams of “advisers” to Afghanistan with nothing more than three weeks of training is not likely to help get it back. If advising is the backbone of our exit strategy, and we’re not preparing ourselves properly for the challenges, we shouldn’t be surprised if this strategy fails.

*Based on my one-year deployment to Iraq as an adviser. This isn’t meant to be a sweeping proclamation of how the entire Iraqi army behaves, or how all advisers experience their deployments. There are, of course, exceptions to every rule.

**If you served on an Army or Marine MiTT in Iraq or Afghanistan, I’d love your assessment and thoughts, especially if I missed anything. Please email me at [email protected].

Posted in Afghanistan, Iraq, Military, War | 13 Comments

Shadow wars and shoddy policy

by dptrombly Posted on February 16, 2012

As the government begins the painful process of paring down the bloated defense establishment, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and its best known component, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), is likely to continue its rise in prominence - and in deployments. As with many of the transitions in U.S. defense policies, this has not come without controversy.

The rise of JSOC in the War on Terror has been due in large part to the military difficulties and political costs stemming from the use of large conventional formations. However, the rapid expansion of covert operations as conventional ground forces reduce their presence in budgets and battlefields alike, its activities in areas not officially declared war zones, and its seeming lack of Congressional accountability, have all raised significant consternation from foreign policy and defense commentators.

Marc Ambinder recently highlighted many of these concerns in his excellent recent work with D.B. Grady, The Command, and reiterated them in an interview with Spencer Ackerman at Danger Room. JSOC’s processes of review are internal to the organization, and Congress has little bearing on JSOC’s actions. Already commentators suspicious of American military power or foreign policy have decried the rise of JSOC for eroding Congressional checks on war-making power or for enabling America to embark on a path of perpetual conflict.

Inexplicably, some American commentators worry over the decline of Congressional authority over war-making power. However, this fear is both somewhat ahistorical and very optimistic in its assessment of Congress today. Congressional authority for war does not require a formal declaration of war, nor is the approval of Congress necessary for a state of war to exist. Congressional authority is merely required to initiate a state of war that was not already brought about by hostile action. So long as Congress continues to fund and approve the war, the war is essentially retroactively legalized by Congressional action.

Regardless of how legal JSOC’s activities are abroad though, relying on Congress to hold JSOC accountable assumes that Congress actually cares to do so. There is an unexamined belief about the pacific inclinations of legislative bodies that absolutely does not reflect modern realities. As should be obvious, the current Congress is not interested in restraining the war powers of the executive, nor is it interested in undermining JSOC.

And really, since when has Congress been a reliable dovish influence on American military power? Since never - Congress has been supported wide-ranging, undeclared wars since the beginning of American history. In the Quasi-War with France , Congress approved and funded an undeclared war across the world’s oceans against France – a geopolitically risky activity considering the relative power of France to the young United States. This war was not merely limited to commerce – it also involved naval landings against France’s ally Spain (specifically its colony in what is now the Dominican Republic), despite the United States not being at war with Spain .

Congress has displayed no qualms about declaring offensive wars either - the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War, both officially declared wars, were also two of the most nakedly territorially aggrandizing wars in U.S. history. Members of Congress have even tried to push the executive into wars it did not desire, or forced it to take hawkish positions that it might have preferred to avoid. In American relations with China, for example, Congress has generally been the more belligerent of the branches, while the presidency has generally sought to preserve the diplomatic entente Nixon forged. Even before the existence of the People’s Republic of China, a strong China lobby enabled funding of the Republic of China’s war-making effort against Japan. During the Cold War that lobby continued to militate for action to defend the Republican Chinese government in Taiwan. Eisenhower and the military did not want to become engaged in a war to defend Taiwan during the Quemoy and Matsu crisis, which they thought would require using nuclear weapons against the Chinese mainland and compromise America’s other diplomatic prerogatives. Yet many of the so-called isolationists in Congress vigorously pushed the President towards a more confrontational stance. Even today, it is still Congress where the most ardent defenders of Taiwan push for legislation that may antagonize China - not the executive.

Regardless, the ugly truth about JSOC is that Congress will not hold it accountable not because it cannot, but because Congress has absolutely no incentive to do so. There is no reward to Congress in trying to hold JSOC accountable or reduce the role of special operations forces in U.S. policy. Congress has demonstrated its support for a wide-ranging war on terror through the Authorization for Use of Military Force and the subsequent National Defense Authorization Acts. Congress, not the executive, will not initiate massive cuts SOCOM even as other branches receive potentially deep reductions in funding.

JSOC, or at least the elements that the American public identifies with JSOC, are extremely popular. Are Americans worried about secret assassination campaigns? No - a significant majority of Americans support the use of drones in targeted killings, and most even support the use of drones against American members of terrorist organizations abroad. And really, Americans identify JSOC with elite operators, not killer robots. Nobody doesn’t love a Navy SEAL, right? Congress, on the other hand, is less popular than the Internal Revenue Service. Act of Valor, starring active U.S. special operations forces, is set to be a blockbuster. Nobody would watch a movie billing active Congressmen as its main characters unless it was a remake of Home Alone with the legislators as the thieves. JSOC has produced some of the most public and stunning successes in the War on Terror - even if a few Members want to increase Congressional oversight, there is no political incentive for the majority to rein in JSOC. Voters won’t reward Congress for meddling in JSOC’s business.

The desire to fight terrorism, combined with a dissatisfaction with the expensive and bloody military campaigns that began as a consequence, have enabled JSOC and the drone program to continue with so little accountability. JSOC has been tasked with leading the way in the new iteration of the Global War on Terror, and every request it sends for increased operating capabilities is a reflection of its attempt to enact popular policies that ideally lead to smaller footprints and more contained violence. Indeed, the wide-ranging Operational Preparation of the Environment actions JSOC undertakes are to avoid becoming embroiled in the larger, more serious conflicts that non-JSOC military-led counterterrorism campaigns might require. The desire not to be sent in blind or become embroiled in another Iraq or Afghanistan is one of the crucial factors behind JSOC’s global strategic moves.

Indeed, rather than militating for more war, a serious concern might be that JSOC would frustrate or resist the executive’s desires for another “big war.” General McChrystal, for example, has made critical remarks about the Iraq war’s effect on the overall war on terror and also negatively assessed American preparation and assessment of the environment in Afghanistan. If anything, JSOC could become an obstacle to wider military action. A powerful and more influential JSOC would be better able to resist executive desires for expanding U.S. military presence in some theaters beyond their preferred levels. This would be a civil-military problem in its own right, but it is not automatically safe to assume that JSOC wants to use its status to militate for high-tempo combat campaigns everywhere. Because JSOC is not a massed force, it indeed cannot take on the burden of conducting all-out wars.

Some commentators are concerned that an increased reliance on an elite force for waging covert or small wars necessarily means the US will lose its ability to conduct large, nation-building type wars. If that ability is lost, however, it’s not because of SOCOM – it’s because the military and policy establishment has largely rejected this approach to warfare. It is certainly true that SOCOM cannot do everything, but general purpose forces do not exist to make the costs of bad policies more politically bearable. Massive investments in nation-building capabilities and a large land-based force have led to the exhaustion of those forces - and have challenged the government’s ability to finance their operations. If SOCOM is expanding in operations, it is because the policies advocated by Boot and many others were tried on the battlefield and were found wanting.

The truth is that the biggest problems with SOCOM generally, JSOC in particular, and American foreign policy lie in exactly that – American foreign policy. Take, for example, Jeremy Scahill’s excellent new piece on Yemen, which describes a litany of failed counterterrorism efforts resulting in massive blowback in the country. Scahill essentially describes an incoherent strategy that used, but was not driven by, the tools at hand. American policymakers sought to kill terrorists until those aiding and abetting them decided instead to throw their lot in with an admittedly noxious government that we nevertheless chose to support because we depended on Saleh’s people for a permissive environment and targeting intelligence. Yet much of that intelligence was faulty or deliberately manipulated by the regime itself to support its own political needs. As a result, the capabilities the U.S. built up have been expended to defend the regime’s existence - not to fulfill U.S. counterterrorism priorities.

What might policymakers have done to prevent this? As in Pakistan, one uncomfortable answer is that building up a large human intelligence network independent of a potentially uncooperative host government, perhaps even using stay-behind networks of assets posing as civilian contractors, businessmen, or other ostensible non-combatants or maybe arming militias answering primarily to the U.S. rather than the Yemeni government, could have provided more accurate intelligence and avoided the consequences inherent in supporting Saleh’s regime. Incidentally, such a task would have been the responsibility of JSOC and the CIA. The failures of Yemen are failures of policy, not of JSOC or drones.

One might even further note that a counterterrorism campaign in Yemen that relied on apprehending rather than killing terrorists would have required JSOC’s capabilities to be used more aggressively in Yemen, or else let captured suspects rot in Saleh’s brutal prisons. A campaign of capturing terrorists and rendering them to the U.S. would have required far more direct action assets, forward operating locations, and airbases for local air support. Capturing Awlaki, for example, probably would have involved hundreds of soldiers, pilots, and support personnel deploy to Yemen, and likely would have resulted in either his death or those of American operators. Even less lethal counterterrorism campaigns could well entail the continuing expansion of JSOC or CIA covert forces.

No kind of capability is a magic bullet, and no combination of capabilities is a magic bullet either. SOCOM is an instrument of policy, and policy is, even in JSOC, still made by politicians and policymakers, not military officers. If they become proconsuls, it will be because of willful abdication by their civilian superiors, not praetorian machinations by those in uniform. Disentangling instruments from policies is a vital task if the United States is to correct course on the War on Terror. While not all tools are appropriate for all policies, pursuing a bad policy is going to result in undesirable outcomes. Accountability is worthless if those supposed to be designing policy cannot develop realistic standards or are not interested in developing any standards at all for anyone to be held accountable to.

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