An interesting story in the New York Times today about an Iraqi pirate satellite station, Al Zawra:
The video starts with a young American soldier patrolling an Iraqi street. His head is obscured by leaves, so a red target is digitally inserted to draw the viewer’s eye. A split second later, the soldier collapses, shot. Martial music kicks in, a jihadi answer to John Philip Sousa. The time and place of the attack scrolls at the bottom of the screen.
Briefly, two interesting reports were issued today by the General Accountability Office (GAO). The first is on rebuilding Iraq (and thus related to counterinsurgency) and the other on DoD outsourcing (and thus privatization of force). I’m going through them now and may comment on them here later.
In assessing acquisition outcomes, we found that DOD often entered into contract arrangements with unclear requirements, which posed additional risks to the government. DOD also lacked the capacity to provide sufficient numbers of contracting, logistics, and other personnel, thereby hindering oversight efforts.
Numerous persistent problems have resulted in reduced efficiencies and effectiveness and have exposed DOD to unnecessary risks when acquiring services. Knowing the defense acquisition landscape helps put the magnitude of these problems in perspective—
• DOD’s obligations on service contracts have jumped from $82.3 billion in fiscal year 1996 to $141.2 billion in fiscal year 2005.
• DOD’s acquisition workforce has been downsized during this time frame without sufficient attention to requisite skills and competencies.
These events have occurred as DOD has become more reliant on contractors to provide services for DOD’s operations and as longstanding problems with contract management continue to adversely impact service acquisition outcomes. The lack of sound business practices—poorly defined requirements, inadequate competition, inadequate monitoring of contractor performance, and inappropriate uses of other agencies’ contracts and contracting services—exposes DOD to unnecessary risk and wastes resources. Moreover, DOD’s current management structure to oversee service acquisition outcomes has tended to be reactive and its processes suffer from the absence of several key elements at both a strategic and transactional level.
To produce desired outcomes, DOD and its contractors need to clearly understand acquisition objectives and how they translate into a contract’s terms and conditions. GAO has found cases in which the absence of well-defined requirements and clearly understood objectives complicates efforts to hold DOD and contractors accountable for poor service acquisition outcomes. Likewise, obtaining reasonable prices depends on the benefits of a competitive environment, but we have continually reported on cases in which DOD sacrificed competition for the sake of expediency. Monitoring contractor performance to ensure DOD receives and pays for required services is another control we have found lacking. Many of these problems show up in DOD’s use of other agencies’ contracts or contracting services, which adds complexity as the number of parties in the contracting process increases.
DOD has taken some steps to improve its management of services acquisition, and it is developing an integrated assessment of how best to acquire services. DOD leadership will be critical for translating this assessment into policy and, most importantly, effective frontline practices. At this point, however, DOD does not know how well its services acquisition processes are working, which part of its mission can best be met through buying services, and whether it is obtaining the services it needs while protecting DOD’s and the taxpayer’s interests.
From the Internet-Haganah comes this entertaining “discovery”:
The good Sunni brothers claim to have captured a Shiite in Iraq who was in possession of a “secret” document. They have published a photo of the document and a transcript…
The document reads like an executive summary of a Shiite version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It’s supposedly the results of a secret meeting of Shiites from around the world convened by the Ayatollah Khameini in Qom, and calls for an assortment of actions to be taken – every thing from infiltrating the Saudi and Jordanian military and security services to promoting the role of women as educators.
Suffice it to say we have some doubts regarding the document’s authenticity. We will also point out that the letterhead says in Arabic “The supreme/high council of the Islamic revolution in Iraq — the presidency.” That’s not what it says in English… [“High Council of the Revolution in Iraq West Office Baghdad”]
Can anyone say IO? It would be interesting to trace this through the rumor mill (my $ is it doesn’t go far, too amateurish and too much noise in the system already).
George Packer’s Knowing the Enemy article in The New Yorker has generated a significant amount of necessary discussion on the global information war we’re in. There are many fine commentaries on Packer’s article to read, including Wiggins’ insightful series, so I’ll try to not to be repetitive here. In fact, I’m going to generally avoid getting into those facts and instead offer two other thoughts largely, if not entirely absent, from discussions over Kilcullen provocative and “Occam-like” ideas.
Continue reading “Kilcullen, Griffith and a brief comment on COIN
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How do insurgencies develop? Read this book to see how the people in the middle ground had their options removed and how extremists and criminals had recruiting opportunities handed to them on silver platters, not to mention plenty of time to refine their own operations as neon warning signs were ignored and dismissed.
Because of their similarity and at the same time contrast, my book review here comments on both Chandraskaran’s book and Ambassador L. Paul Bremer’s My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope. Nearly identical in scopy, they are diametrically opposed in their perceptions of reality.
Starting with Imperial Life, Chandraskaran digs into the details like a forensic historian, tearing at the paper castles Bremer and the Administration created for themselves and the American public. He delves into the politics of who was allowed to participate, what information was not shared, and how “loyalists” without appropriate, or in many cases, any experience were placed. Michael Goldfarb, in his New York Times review of the book, hits some of the highlights of Imperial Life, including comparisons between people like the extremely qualified Frederick M. Burkle Jr and who was replaced by the extremely unqualified James K. Haveman Jr for the job of rebuilding Iraq’s healthcare (if the importance of healthcare isn’t obvious, see this RAND report on the importance of healthcare in ‘nation-building’).
The difference between these two books is astounding, quite honestly. Bremer, as Goldfarb writes, has apparently “read one C.E.O. memoir too many”. An accurate states considering the frequent platitudes Bremer heaps upon himself.
Bremer likes to finish a section on a positive reflection while Chandraskaran finishes with reality, a bit of bad reality. For example, on the disbanding of the Iraqi army, CPA Order No. 2, Bremer concludes with Kurdish leader Jalal Talabini telling him that the “decision to formally ‘disband’ the old army was the best decision the Coalition made during the our fourteen months in Iraq.”
On the other hand, Chandraskaran notes Bremer’s plan backfired. Bremer was clearly not concerned with the large number of unemployed he created in a country with already high employment, which he was actually seeking to increase through privatization and restructuring. Failing to heed warnings from the military, State, and logic, Chandraskaran includes an interview with a soldier who had been a part of an Iraqi army protest against the disbanding:
In a land of honor and tradition, the viceroy had disrespected the old soldiers…. I did see another former soldier [months later] who had been at the protest.
“What happened to everyone there?”, I asked. “Did they join the new army?”
He laughed.
“They’re all insurgents now,” he said. “Bremer lost his chance.”
On Coalition Provisional Authority Order No. 1: De-Baathification, Chandraskaran writes about Jay Garner, effectively Bremer’s predecessor who lead the Office of Humanitarian and Reconstruction Aid (OHRA), “barging” into Bremer’s office with the CIA station chief protesting the de-Baathification order. The CIA station chief said the order, which Chandraskaran writes neither National Security Advisor Rice nor Secretary of State Powell had seen, would “drive fifty thousand Baathists underground before nightfall. Don’t do this.”
Bremer, on the other hand, writes the order would only bar “about 1 per cent”, or about 20,000, would be knocked out, according to “our intelligence community.” He describes these top four ranks as “Senior Party Members”. The reality, which Chandraskaran writes, was much broader and deeper than this 20,000. Further alienating a nation without regard to how de-Nazification really worked (which was the model and an image Bremer frequently invokes in My Life).
On a side note, Bremer blames Garner and his men for failing in their job and for leaking information to the press.
One last comparison between the two books that I’ll make is on Bernie Kerik. Despite the obvious need to create security, police training was not given over to an expert, but to Bernie Kerik. It’s interesting how rarely Kerik appears in Bremer’s book. This is probably because of the terrible job he did, which is detailed on many pages in Imperial Life.
Imperial Life’s theme is reward over execution. The civilian leadership, including former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s office and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, disregarded knowledge and history of reconstruction, nationalism, identity, and even Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in favor of placing people who, too often, were selected out of “loyalty” to the Republican party and got their first passport in order to work in the Emerald City, aka the Green Zone. Cause and effect was something that could be manipulated without consideration of reality.
The impact of private contractors in Iraq is evident in Imperial Life, while they are almost completely absent in My Life. From BearingPoint to Haliburton to DynCorp to Blackwater, Imperial Life clearly shows how independent, and even in charge, the contractors were, except when they made a suggestion contrary to Bremer’s perception of reality.
This is not just a book in the “snafu genre”, as Foreign Affairs described it. It is a book on how the situation deteriorated so badly in Iraq.
In the end, I’d skip My Life and read Imperial Life to get one view on how the situation in Iraq got so bad and our missed opportunities. Those two words — missed opportunities — appear too frequently in Imperial Life through interviews of OHRA, CPA, military, and contractors done after the completion of their tours. A clear take-away is the mess in Iraq today was not preordained but the result of our doing our damned best to screw it up.
From a remarkably useful source, People’s Daily Online:
Al-Qaida in Iraq offers to give U.S. troops safe withdrawal
The head of an al-Qaida-backed group in Iraq has offered to give U.S. troops safe withdrawal in an audiotape posted on the Internet on Friday.
“We ask (U.S. President George W.) Bush not to waste this historic opportunity, and you have two weeks to consider it,” said Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, head of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq.
The group was announced in October by the al-Qaida and organizations affiliated to it.
The authenticity of the audiotape could not be verified.
Source: Xinhua
Hat tip to the Duck of Minerva for highlighting the David Brooks op-ed reminding readers of two important articles on how to fight modern conflict. Both are by George Packer of The New Yorker. The first, The Lesson of Tal Afar, contains some lessons from one of America’s current premier counter-insurgency minds, Col. H. R. McMaster (who also wrote the outstanding book Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam). The second article, Knowing the Enemy, is “about freethinkers in the Pentagon and elsewhere who were studying how Hezbollah and the Iraqi insurgents create narratives that demoralize their enemies, energize believers and create a sense of historical momentum.” (See my post on the election of Hamas for related comments.)
As the White House struggles with what to do next, the military maneuvers to cover its ass, and Congress debates on how to proceed, the central element throughout all these discussions is the number of troops in theater. Do we go “big” and throw more troops or do we cut and run? What course we choose is dependent on the number of troops we commit.
There are two fallacies embedded in framing the discussion as a numbers game. The first is assuming quantity is more important than quality. The second is the absence of our supplemental forces already operating in the theater who, if counted as a single entity, would be our largest “partner” in the Coalition. Soon after President Bush landed on an aircraft carrier and declared “Mission Accomplished”, the number of private security contractors in Iraq was pushing 20,000. Two years later, this number would balloon to over 50,000 (this may actually be half of the actual figure) with American and British contractors dropping to less than 10,000 in favor of cheaper “third country nationals” (predominately Latin American and African contractors) and “host country nationals” (Iraqis). When the President’s Coalition of the Willing was at its strongest, there were more than twice as many private security contractors operating in Iraq as the second largest member of the Coalition, leading some to suggest it was really a Coalition of the Billing.
So why don’t we consider the additional tens of thousands contractors that could be brought back over to provide site, transport, and sector security? Because it makes for a messy world of friction, oversight, integration, and accountability. We need to remember the latest incarnation of the Marine Corps’ Countering Irregular Threats intentionally ignored the role of “guns with legs” because it was too complex an issue to deal with.
Going back to the first point, quantity versus quality, includes the contractor question and more. Movies like Gunner Palace, books like Fiasco, Countering Insurgency in Iraq all document a wildly varied appreciation of counter-insurgency and even the need to practice it at all. This blog has raised the negative impacts of Haditha (done by the military) reconstruction failures (done by contractors), all of which are completely ignored in practice. When CENTCOM looks at Thomas Friedman
John Nagl, David Galula
We can’t win unless the population believes we will deliver a solution. Military forces and contractors, armed and not, must be under a strategic direction to start conducting real counter-insurgency operations and public diplomacy operations to rebuild trust with the populations. It may be too late, afterall we spent the last three plus years creating the environment that’s over there now.
Briefly, the Departments of State and Defense held a joint conference late September 2006 on counter-insurgency (COIN). Attendees included senior officials from the National Security Council; the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, and the Treasury; the U.S. Agency for International Development; and the intelligence community; as well as members of Congress and their staff; and representatives from think tanks, academia, the media; and the Governments of the United Kingdom and Australia.
Unfortunately, MountainRunner wasn’t invited as media this time (maybe next?).
At present I don’t have many comments about the content at the web site (more later as I have time to delve deeper), www.usgcoin.org, save one on Dr. Eliot Cohen’s keynote address. I found it odd that he used our war (is that what we call it now?) on the American Indians as an example of how "winning hearts and minds" isn’t always possible:
There was no question of winning Indian hearts and minds; merely of quelling their resistance and herding them, eventually into reservations. [T]here might be local episodes of American diplomacy to secure the assistance or neutrality of some tribes, but in the long run, this was a contest that could have, and did have, only one outcome – the complete subjugation of the native Americans. The style of warfare that emerged reflected these imbalances.
Is this example really instructive for today? This model, no matter where you stand, is based on imperialist expansion usurping rights and constant breaking of trust by the US Government. Pacification or at least peaceful co-existence was never an option unless the Indian was completely subjugated and put off to the side where the White Man wanted them. Is this really the model Dr. Cohen wants to suggest is our plan in today’s world? That’s not counter-insurgency, that’s called imperialism and I can’t see how the COIN best practices of the conferences contributors could be applied because of this.
Briefly, from ABC News the other day comes this story about a confidential Pentagon assessment.
…Officials won’t say how the assessment was made but found that support for the insurgency has never been higher, with approximately 75 percent of the country’s Sunni Muslims in agreement.
When the Pentagon started surveying Iraqi public opinion in 2003, Sunni support for the insurgents stood at approximately 14 percent…
“Where is the government?” one man asked. “Where is the promise of security? Where is the prime minister?”
Society is a very mysterious animal with many faces and hidden potentialities, and… it’s extremely shortsighted to believe that the face society happens to be presenting to you at a given moment is its only true face. None of us knows all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population. – Valclav Havel, 31 May 1990
Modern conflict relies heavily on influencing social strata spanning many lands. Information campaigns are waged, neglected, and abused by attempts to manipulate various audiences. We’ve read the news about how the Pentagon made such a bad decision to hire the Lincoln Group to provide news insertion and pondered over the “real” purpose of the ill-fated Office of Strategic Influence. I’ve sat in meetings listening to individuals more intelligent and more knowledgeable than myself use these examples, among many, to fuel their arguments against the validity today or in the future of any link between the Pentagon and “Public Diplomacy”. An erroneous viewpoint in my opinion that’s removed from reality. Their position isn’t surprising, however. The second paragraph of Joseph Nye’s preface to Soft Power
The SecDef may have learned the meaning of Soft Power by now, but regardless of if he has and regardless of academics accepting the military as participants, with major and possibly central roles, in American Public Diplomacy, the military is in “the last three feet”.
If you’re a reader of MountainRunner, or have searched the archives, you’ll have seen many posts highlighting examples of how the Defense Department, or sometimes more accurately elements within the Defense Department, “gets it”. For example, from the Office of Naval Research Global and its Science Visitor Program (SVP) that’s on par with the old International Visitors Program (IVP) of the State Department to a submarine tender making port calls in the Gulf of Guinea, we see the Navy smoothly sliding into a role of America’s Ambassador.
You may have read my recent post on CSM Daniel Wood, in writing his memo last month, and how he certainly understood the concept of soft power. While some may think we’re in a new way of war, it is clear by Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War the value of creating and engendering cooperation, as in the Mytilenian Debate, is really older than our civilization, let alone a generational shift.
You may also have seen my comments on Counter-Insurgency (COIN) on this site and references to insightful military authors on how to conduct relations at the personal level. Authors such as John Nagl (Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife) have discussed the value of working with and not against or simply amongst populations. Just as the insurgents are, in Mao’s words, fish in the sea of the people, so too are we and we must use the sea as a force multiplier. Books like Ahmed Hashim’s Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq read like case studies on how to work with the “mysterious animal” that our real ambassadors — the military and its agents — come in contact with daily.
In places that increasingly count ("sanctuaries", disaster zones, etc), the “last three feet” of contact with foreign publics is increasingly “owned” by our military. Modern conflict is both kinetic (bullets whizzing and missiles flying) and non-kinetic (creating influence and disruption) requiring new methods of prevention and counter-action. The war of words and pictures are of greater importance over “traditional” metrics of warfighting. In this reality, we’re seeing old texts resurface and get dusted off like Galula (1964), Calwell (1906), and even USMC’s own Small Wars Manual (1940).
These all have something in common: learning to work with and understand the “mysterious animal”. Robert Scales (Culture-Centric Warfare, Clausewitz and World War IV), George W. Smith (Avoiding a Napoleonic Ulcer: Bridging the Gap of Cultural Intelligence), Montgomery McFate (Anthropology and Counterinsurgency, Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture), Robert Pape (Dying to Win), Marc Sageman (Understanding Terrorist Networks), and others have essentially written about using soft power to "get" what Newt Gingrich observed: “The real key is not how many enemy do I kill. The real key is how many allies do I grow.”
Military-authored material on the importance of cultural understanding, building trust, and managing communications appears nearly every day. We can see how insurgents use information operations to cleave our allies and distract us.
Of interest, if only for what it uncovers, is recent monograph by Major Joseph L. Cox, Information Operations in Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom – What Went Wrong? You should read Marc Lynch / Abu Aardvark’s highlighting contradictions and surprising admissions made by Cox. Unfortunately, Cox seems to have normalized “information operations” to the point of improperly conflated it “information warfare”. It also very interesting that Cox argues and accepts the firewalling of IO from Public Affairs (PA), as General Myers, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2004, suggested. This forces the very stove-piping Major Cox said contributed to IO failures elsewhere in his paper. Successful IO requires horizontal integration of interagency operations. Co-mingling of Information Warfare (IW) and IO is a necessary evil in the world of manipulated media. Cox does more than co-mingle but treats them as synonyms based on Army usage.
This is essentially the crux of the post by Patricia Kushlis of WhirledView. PHK rightly condemns the Pentagon for using Rendon and its cut-outs like Lincoln to design IO that will knowingly deceive for short-term gain and reflect this bad information back into the US.
Another look at Colonel Ralph Baker’s The Decisive Weapon: A Brigade Combat Team Commander’s Perspective on Information Operations is instructive. The role of the military as the front-line ‘ambassador’ for the US must be accepted. The theme of Baker’s piece echoes Nagl (if you don’t want to read his book, then I urge you to watch his presentation), Scales, Calwell, and virtually all else on counter-insurgency and “Small Wars”. Sounds like Public Diplomacy? That’s because the principles are the same.
Read the following monograph by Robert D. Steele at the Army’s Strategic Studies Institute: Putting the ‘I’ Back into DIME. Where is the DIME (Diplomacy, Information, Military, Economics)? Where does State really come into DIME? Are they doing diplomacy relevant to contemporary issues?
DOD hits the hotspots while State hides behind fortresses, insulated from the outside (to be fair, too frequently and detrimentally the military is allowed to create mini-America in their fortifications for the comfort of home), requiring new rules to “force” rotations to “hardship” posts.
Is it because Defense emphasizes learning? Afterall, all these monographs are being written by DOD personnel and is there anything from State? Learning is a low (not just lower) priority at State, budgeting maybe 5% of the total budget while Defense allocated 10-15% for this purpose. This is one more example of Defense moving ahead to engage the world. As Robert Scales wrote in Culture-Centric Warfare (US Naval Institute Proceedings, Oct 2004):
“Leveraging non-military advantages requires creating alliances, reading intentions, building trust, converting opinions, and managing perceptions… all tasks that demand an exceptional ability to understand people, their culture and their motivation.”
Defense’s initiatives result from greater funding, but also, and more importantly, a greater prioritization as Eccentric Star points out.
Again, where is State? Where are the reports examining State’s role? We do have countless reports criticizing different aspects of American Public Diplomacy, as conducted by State, but no academic and scholarly analyses from within the establishment like Cox’s and Steele’s. Those “many reports” often have valid points, some don’t go far enough, and others miss the point completely. Reports like the 2004 Defense Sciences Board (DSB) “get it” and call on a new “jointness”:
Other reports, like the Djerejian Report (2003), missed the point and emphasized measuring the immeasurable, a focus on unilateral communication (the “if only they knew us” theory that results in fallacies like Shared Values as “was well conceived and based on solid research”), and ignorance of social networks. And the GAO Report of 2003 falls in the middle with good and bad information, but more importantly missed opportunities. In its appendix, questions in its survey to PAOs simply weren’t analyzed:
PHK’s concern of what will happen as the military continues to ‘own’ public diplomacy is well-placed, but who else will fill the gap? By PHK’s own observation, the military is filling a void and providing training documents for our public diplomats:
In fact, the model that Baker outlines strikingly resembles that used in U.S. Embassy public affairs offices prior to 1999 or at the very least during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath when there were such things as functioning public diplomacy country plans.
If I was involved in training an incoming State Department class of junior officers, I would include Baker’s article in the must read list. I would also invite Baker as a speaker. In fact, I’d probably add his article to more senior embassy officer training because many of the lessons learned and antidotes described are equally applicable to US embassy public affairs efforts.
Lest we forget the man in charge of officially countering misinformation at State has been ordered to not speak to the press while the military actually incorporates media relations into battle exercises with radio, television, and blog media in their own studios to enhance the realism. By the way, if you’re in the US, you’ll have to Google for the Countering Misinformation website because it is intentionally not available via State.gov for fear of "propagandizing" domestic audiences (even though it is the truth).
Lest we also forget Presidential Decision Directive 68 (PDD 68) that established the International Public Information Core Group (ICG), chaired by the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, to coordinate all agencies’ (DOD, State, etc) International Public Information (IPI) activities. PSYOPS were to operate under this umbrella. According to the IPIG Charter:
The objective of IPI is to synchronize the informational objectives, themes and messages that will be projected overseas . . . to prevent and mitigate crises and to influence foreign audiences in ways favorable to the achievement of U.S. foreign policy objectives." The charter insists that information distributed through IPI should be designed not "to mislead foreign audiences" and that information programs "must be truthful.
The Defense Sciences Board report on “PSYOP in Time of Military Conflict” (May 2000) explicitly lists PSYSOP as a tool under IPI: “PSYOP actions are a subset of Information Operations (IO) and International Public Information (IPI) as described by Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 68.”
In working with the mysterious animals that are the societies that are or have the potential of becoming threats to our national security, we need to create a new Jointness like the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, except between DOD and State. PHK is rightly concerned, but with militarized humanitarian aid, physical security concerns, and institutional commitment, we can’t throw out the military’s role when State doesn’t step up.
Fellow blogger Armchair Generalist recently highlighted an item by Thomas Ricks in the Washington Post about “Afghan Road Rage.” Ricks highlighted a recent email (July 18, 2006) written by Command Sergeant Major Daniel Wood and circulated to all Army general officers on Army standards of conduct in Afghanistan. In the memo, Wood nails the need to understand the enduring diplomacy with the public in public in conflict.
AG provided excerpts from the memo but the entirety (cribbed from Political Opinions) is useful for my purpose. Emphasis added by me.
Continue reading ““Afghan Road Rage”: on the frontline of Public Diplomacy, the real PAOs
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I’m having some connectivity issues while in DC so posting yesterday’s event will be later today or even tonight along with a report on today’s events.
Briefly on yesterday, interesting conference sessions with on Science and Technology for expeditionary warfare, assymetric warfare, sea warfare, etc. (see the right side of the ONR page for topics yesterday). Some reporting on this will appear here later.
Also had an opportunity for a 20min interview with the Commanding Officer for ONR-Global which was surprisingly (to me) an excellent example of public diplomacy (better name: science diplomacy) in action. This 20min meeting went 60 minutes when I had to leave, and already late for, John Nagl’s presentation on Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, as part of the Rethinking seminar series. Good information came from that in the Q&A, including a question about private security companies, and from sharing a cold beer with John and others after the seminar.
More to come later.
I didn’t mention that when I’m in DC next week for the 2006 Naval S&T Partnership Conference, I will be also sitting in on “Rethinking the Future Nature of Competitions and Conflict” seminar sponsored with LTC John Nagl, author of the excellent book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (I recommend getting the revised / updated edition). This excellent series – of which the audio, video and presentation are generally available for download – is co-sponsored by the Department of Defense’s Office of Force Transformation and the Office of the Secretary of the Navy.
Continue reading “DC, Nagl, Galula, and the new Army COIN manual
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Max Boot, in the 5 July 2006 LA Times wrote "Our Enemies Aren’t Drinking Lattes" (thanks Small Wars Journal for the heads up). He starts:
A vigourous discussion on an earlier post "How Not to Conduct Cultural Warfare" (to be continued here in a new category "Cultural Warfare") should have a greater obvious context with recent news. As Eccentric Star ("Murdered US Soldiers Linked to Rape & Murder of Iraqi Civilians") notes:
A link — however tenuous — between the two US soldiers who were abducted, tortured, and murdered in Iraq recently and the rape of an Iraqi woman and subsequent murder of her and her family is explosive. From an Iraqi’s perspective, this must make the insurgents who killed the US soldiers look more like righteous avengers than anything else.
At some point who we are, or rather how we see ourselves, becomes disjointed with what we do. At some point, what we do is who we are, especially if it is repeated often enough. Put yourself in the shoes of locals and consider the trend from their perspective. Cultural warfare and public diplomacy (wartime and peacetime sides of the same coin) does this and the Haditha videos (commented on in How Not to Conduct Cultural Warfare) reinforces stereotypes, the wrong stereotypes.
From the US side, Shawn Howard in The Difference Between Us and Them, writing before the news of the rape, echoed a sentiment leaning toward "kill them all, let [insert deity here] sort ’em out" (by the way, I’m not being politically correct, it’s just a tool to ack different perspectives… for all I care, assume God is written there):
…These insurgents have a long pattern of obscene violence that goes well beyond the rules of engagement.
I will not argue that the U.S. military and the private contractors are always choir boys….Also, when we find out about alleged atrocities, we investigate them and hold people accountable. The insurgents are praised when they commit disgusting atrocities….
What we are fighting is a barbaric culture that refuses to develop into a civilized society. Even if we stay for a decade, we will never be able to teach them to respect human life. That is a fight we will not win.
This last paragraph essentially echoes Dan of tdaxp (in the comments here) in our recent discussion, most notably [for this discussion, I’ll move past the comment about investigating and holding contractors accountable]:
Iraq and Afghanistan are not Core [as in Core-Gap of Barnett’s Pentagon’s New Map] states that somehow went off the rails (like Germany and Japan did). They are from the deepest part of the AfroIslamic Gap.
As such a "hearts and minds," or even a narrow Westernization, strategy is out of the question . Attempting to make Iraqi Shia and Sunni like us because of who we are is a fools errand. So would attempting the reverse. Neither is much possible. We’re not going to enrage Iraqis with things like this. Too little, too late.
There is little need for our side to descend to aggregations of Them into a collective evil. It is wrong to say
…the "All in all, I’d rather not have Americans here right now" ship has long since sailed. Those Iraqis that support us do so because they think we can improve their lives…
There are more Iraqis that would support us if a) procedures and policies of both military and private forces and reconstruction efforts considered locals as assets and part of the solution, and b) fear keeps many from secretly or openly from supporting us and hence pushing away criminal and "insurgent" groups.
The reality is, now and in the past (another dig against tempo-centric and situational unaware 4GW here), that an overall environment is necessary to bring out allies as force multipliers (consider the role and purpose of the Green Berets and the fact we don’t need warm and cuddly friendships, just a mutual understanding who the bad guy is).
David Galula, writing in his 1965 CounterInsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, noted the clear need to get the population on your side which you do not do by alienating them. As an example, Galula cites mainland Chinese who, when expected to side with Nationalists during a quick hit and run in fact fought back viciously. Why? Because they knew where they were living and reality of the attack (not to free the people but simply to prick the side of Mao).
Does cultural intelligence matter? Consider this CS Monitor story "What US wants in its troops: cultural savvy" (and many other references to be posted soon, but the CS Monitor article was timely… posted this evening). If cultural awareness matters on the battlefield to diffuse or prevent tensions, why not in peacetime? Hence, public diplomacy… CW (cultural warfare) is a variant of PD (public diplomacy).
I recently finished reading an excellent book on piracy by Benerson Little, The Sea Rover’s Practice
Appropriate to the modern era of small wars? Little generally leaves it to the reading to connect to the present (absent a rare couple of modern analogies in the book), except for one paragraph at the end:
Whatever their vices, weaknesses, and moral ambiguities, these buccaneers have in common with most sea rovers several tactical virtues, including innovation, loyalty, perseverance, adaptability, and courage. Collectively, they prove that a loose, uncentralized, and informal network can conduct significant, complex military operations. They show the effect that an irregular force can have on the resources of a powerful state, causing great economic damage and tying down significant forces. And, most importantly, they demonstrate that elements of broadly divergent and disparate cultures, races, nationalities, classes, professions, and personalities can act as one with a common goal.
My brief comments here don’t do the book justice. The amount of detail Little puts in this book is sometimes mind boggling, not to say amazing. This is not a book that only looks at the past but has a surprising applicability to modernity. I have found it particularly useful in supporting various arguments about privatization of force as well as insurgent warfare.
To continue my previous post, the myth of Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) is distracting from the reality of present andfuture threats. I previously
focused primarily on legitimacy issues of the State and of the use of
force. This post has lingered in various draft forms for a week or so,
even getting posted briefly (and thus picked up by a number of RSS
readers) before I took it down.
Continue reading “Phase IV, 4GW, and Comprehensive Solutions
“
News brief on a story in the NYT tomorrow: U.S. Rebuilding in Iraq Found to Fall Short. Highlights:
Because of unforeseen security costs, haphazard planning and shifting priorities, the American-financed reconstruction program in Iraq will not complete scores of projects that were promised to help rebuild the country, a federal oversight agency reported yesterday….Only 49 of the 136 projects that were originally pledged to improve Iraq’s water and sanitation will be finished, with about 300 of an initial 425 projects to provide electricity, the report says….The planners of the rebuilding effort did not take into account hundreds of millions of dollars in administrative costs, and mostly did not realize that the United States would have to spend money to keep things like power plants and sewage treatment plants running once they had been built, the report says. That ultimately forced the United States to pare the list of projects to cover such expenses….Beyond the huge cost of protecting reconstruction projects, which the report says the planners did not foresee, billions of dollars were shifted from the rebuilding effort to things like training Iraqi police and guarding Iraq’s borders. The report, by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, adds that the overall rebuilding plan was also devised without a clear understanding of the decrepit state of Iraq’s infrastructure after decades of war, United Nations-imposed penalties and sheer neglect….The report was released only days after a separate audit of American financial practices in Iraq uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq, and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt hospital elevator that had been improperly certified as safe….But in contrast to that earlier audit, which focused on rebuilding projects financed by money from Iraqi oil proceeds and assets seized from Saddam Hussein’s regime, the latest report covers projects underwritten with American taxpayer money.
With Hamas looking to field candidates in the upcoming palestinianelection, why are we responding by demanding their candidates be
excluded? We did not do this in Iraq? Is this an example of free
elections? Are we demonstrating how to conduct a democracy?
Sitting in an overseas hotel with BBC World on, I see this headline
followed immediately by the admission and stern defense by Bush that he
authorized wiretaps without FISA warrants. The impact of this is clear:
do as we say not as we do. How can the US continue to consider itself a
world leader as it continues to conduct itself in this manner?
Powell’s December 2005 interview with the BBC is a case in point. His annoyance and frustration with the intel he was given was not also inclusive of the IC’s (intelligence community’s) own questioning of the quality of intelligence [this point is emphasized by Col. Lawrence Wilkerson’s comments]. How, he asked, are we supposed to maintain the moral authority to provide a model to follow when we use questionable, in our clear understanding, intelligence; when we use Gitmo, when we use European territory for "secret prisons"? Implicating European ministers into the CIA prison issue, he calls it the "Casablanca Moment" when the inspector exclaims, "Whoa, this is happening here?"
As Alexander Cooley wrote in Base Politics in Foreign Affairs, overseas bases are a definitive element of public diplomacy the typical American citizen is completely unaware of. Cooley correctly observes our foreign bases are frequently foremost in the eyes and minds and hearts of many in the international community, and not just in the country of our foreign base. These bases are particularly sensitive in oppressed countries granting us these rights.
Turning back to Hamas, they get the nod from the people, their local constituents, not because of their violence, but because they clean the streets and donate to the public good. They address the broken windows like the former Cali Cartels in Columbia. What does the United States do in response? We emply French-style hypocrisy to demand the exclusion of their candidates. The Palestinians see colonial overtones (how many Americans really know the region’s history and how the French and British mandates established the current havoc just a couple of generations ago) when we reject their point of view.
There is a way to win the hearts and minds. This isn’t it. We do not have to accept Hamas, in fact we can continue to deny them participation in the electoral process, but we need to provide alternatives. What are their alternatives? What leadership have we provided? What have we really done to address the corruption of the PA? When the US talks, why should they listen?
[I wrote this post mid-December 2005, but neglected to post it. So now
it posted. So here it is, especially relevant today as Hamas goes into
Palestinian elections tomorrow, 25 January 2005.]
