NetWars

RMA, Cold War End for Army

“Ideas matter.” So says the first sentence in the Army’s newly published Capstone Concept, titled Operational Adaptability: Operating Under Conditions of Uncertainty and Complexity in an Era of Persistent Conflict. It bears the imprimatur of its primary author, Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster, a revolutionary thinker. Not surprisingly then, its the most revolutionary document the Army has produced in a long time because it discards two very big ideas – actually it discards one and demolishes the other — that have driven Army doctrine and weapons buying over the past three decades.

The first idea retired by the new capstone concept is AirLand Battle, the big think the Army came up with in the early 1980s to defeat Soviet Shock Armies if they tried to blitzkrieg their way across the North German Plain. AirLand Battle was important as it gave the Army intellectual focus around which it could rebuild institutionally after the pain of Vietnam and develop the “Big Five” weapons systems, and in so doing produce the force that steamrolled Saddam Hussein’s army in 1991’s Desert Storm.

The second idea, the one the concept demolishes, was always rather foggy and not very intellectually refined; not surprisingly it also led to the Army’s biggest weapons buying fiasco: the Future Combat Systems (FCS). This was the whole “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) idea, more commonly known by its bastard child “transformation,” that dominated military thinking during the 1990s. RMA proponents said technology had fundamentally changed the way war would be fought: far seeing sensors and precision strike meant wars would be fought at a distance by soldiers staring at plasma screens.

The dubious RMA concept didn’t survive the reality of brutal, bloody and very human war fought at close range: in Tora Bora in Afghanistan in 2001; Objective Peach in Iraq in 2003; Fallujah in 2004; the IED war in Iraq that began in 2003 and continues today and has spread virus-​​like to other world battlefields; the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006; and pretty much every firefight in Afghanistan over the past eight years.

The RMA said electronic eyes would provide near perfect situational awareness of the enemy’s whereabouts. Nope. Humans hide, move and seek the means to survive. War is an endless action-​​reaction cycle where even the most adaptable combatant will realize only a temporary advantage until the enemy in turn adapts. There is a constant ebb and flow to initiative. Because of that inescapable reality, “the Army must take an evolutionary approach to capability development rather than pursue leap-​​ahead capabilities that may prove irrelevant by the time they are mature,” the new pub says. That is the intellectual stake through the FCS heart.

The pub identifies the current and future “hybrid” adversary: “both hostile states and non-​​state enemies that combine a broad range of weapons capabilities and regular, irregular, and terrorist tactics; and continuously adapt to avoid U.S. strengths and attack what they perceive as weaknesses.” How to counter the hybrid enemy? In a word: adaptability. That’s the big new idea the new concept puts forward. In a few more words:

“Countering enemy adaptations and retaining the initiative in future armed conflict will require balanced forces capable of conducting effective reconnaissance operations, overcoming increasingly sophisticated anti-​​access technologies, integrating the complementary effects of combined arms and joint capabilities, and performing long-​​duration area security operations over wide areas (to include in and among populations).”

The pub says over-​​reliance on overhead electronic sensors for information on the enemy’s whereabouts and the seductive pull of computer screens with red and blue icons sets one up for failure in an era where the convergence of the electronic tubes carrying digital data will be targeted. Army forces must be prepared to fight and win on an emerging “cyber-​​electromagnetic battleground,” where disruptions to network connectivity are the norm.

Soldiers must fight for information, the capstone concept says, one of six “supporting ideas” identified as contributing to operational adaptability:

“Since enemy forces will use countermeasures such as dispersion, concealment, deception, and intermingling with the population to limit the ability of the joint force to develop the situation out of contact, Army forces will have to fight for information… Army forces must gain and maintain contact with the enemy to observe, assess, and interpret enemy reactions and the ensuing opportunities or threats to friendly forces, populations, or the mission.”

The other five supporting ideas are:

• Conduct combined arms operations

• Employ a combination of defeat and stability mechanisms

• Integrate joint capabilities

• Cooperate with partners

• Exert psychological and technical influence

Because the enemy will disperse and fight in small groups, among the people and continually react to Army force initiatives, rarely will a “common operational picture” exist from which everybody can operate in harmony. Instead, soldiers must be able to fight decentralized, with decision-​​making authority pushed down to ever lower levels, always keeping in mind commander’s intent. Small units that can fight dispersed and yet quickly coalesce will be essential.

For a highly centralized and hierarchically configured institution, that will require some serious adaptation, as the pub acknowledges. It will demand “an institutional culture that fosters trust among commanders, encourages initiative, and expects leaders to take prudent risk and make decisions based on incomplete information.”

US Afghan Intel ‘Ignorant’ And ‘Incurious’

The top intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, just released a damning report urging a wholesale shakeup of the intelligence gathering and analysis effort there. The report, Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan, released through the Center for New American Security, a Washington DC think tank, is a devastating assessment of the failed intelligence effort in Afghanistan. It details how poorly the U.S. intelligence community has adjusted to the demands of counterinsurgency, as well as the community’s continuing obsession with unnecessary secrecy, a Cold War legacy that hinders its effectiveness in a world where the vast majority of useful information is open source.

Basically, the top intel officer in Afghanistan says the intelligence community is largely irrelevant to the war effort there. The industry that isn’t irrelevant and actually provides useful information and intelligence to war fighters, according to Flynn: the media.

“Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy. Having focused the overwhelming majority of its collection efforts and analytical brainpower on insurgent groups, the vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade. Ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of cooperation among villagers, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers – whether aid workers or Afghan soldiers – U.S. intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high level decision-​​makers seeking the knowledge, analysis, and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency.”

The intelligence failure occurs at every level from small units to higher echelon headquarters, the report says. At battalion and below, intel shops know quite a bit of relevant information about their immediate surroundings, but they are woefully understaffed and thus can’t mine what they have for useful nuggets. Too much of their analytical effort is focused on rooting out enemy IED networks. While understandable, bomb emplacers are mere foot soldiers, readily dsicardable and easily replaceable. Taking out IED cells is certainly a laudable goal, but the cells are just enemy units, and low level ones at that. “A single-​​minded obsession with IEDs, while understandable, is inexcusable if it causes commanders to fail to outsmart the insurgency and wrest away the initiative.”

Higher echelons, brigade and regional commands, provide ground units with little information that is useful or that they don’t already know. While the higher headquarters have access to vast amounts of intercepted signals intelligence and imagery provided by drones and satellites, they use all that high-​​speed intel to try and spot IED emplacers. “Some battalion S-​​2 officers say they acquire more information that is helpful by reading U.S. newspapers than through reviewing regional command intelligence summaries. Newspaper accounts, they point out, discuss more than the enemy and IEDs.”

When it comes to providing information on local populations and governance issues, the higher echelon intel shops are useless. “If brigade and regional command intelligence sections were profit-​​oriented businesses, far too many would now be “belly up.”

The problem isn’t a lack of available information, again, most of it open source. The real problem is cultural, according to the report’s authors. “It is a culture that is strangely oblivious of how little its analytical products, as they now exist, actually influence commanders. It is also a culture that is emphatic about secrecy but regrettably less concerned about mission effectiveness.” Because of the secrecy and insularity of the community, lousy intel officers are rarely called on the carpet. “Too often, when an S-​​2 officer fails to deliver, he is merely ignored rather than fired. It is hard to imagine a battalion or regimental commander tolerating an operations officer, communications officer, logistics officer, or adjutant who fails to perform his or her job.”

The war in Afghanistan is a counterinsurgency war, and hence a political war, the authors point out. Gathering local level information on personal and power relationships, tribal dynamics, social connections, power brokers and economic development, the “down in the weeds” information, is the truly useful stuff. “One of the peculiarities of guerrilla warfare is that tactical-​​level information is laden with strategic significance far more than in conventional conflicts.” While that information offers few clues about where to find insurgents, “it does provide elements of even greater strategic importance – a map for leveraging popular support and marginalizing the insurgency itself.”

Flynn’s prescription is to create civilian analytical teams that can mine the reams of data provided by both military and civilian sources, then write that data up into something that is actually useful. And when he says “write” he means it: “There are no shortcuts. Microsoft Word, rather than PowerPoint, should be the tool of choice for intelligence professionals in a counterinsurgency.”

The civilian analysts will travel to ground units and Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) to gather information and then compile it into “meaty” descriptions of “pivotal districts throughout the country,” containing political, social and economic information vital to counterinsurgents. Every effort will be made to keep classification to a minimum.

Flynn says civilian analysts are preferable to military intelligence analysts. Why? Because there aren’t enough smart guys in uniform to do the job, quite frankly, and civilians are better trained at analysis and writing. The authors cite a report by the 18th Airborne Corps on the dismal state of military intelligence officers:

“Intelligence analytical support to COIN operations requires a higher level of thinking, reasoning, and writing than conventional operations. In general, neither enlisted nor officer personnel were adequately trained to be effective analysts in a COIN environment…. In an overall intelligence staff of 250, CJ2 leadership assessed four or five personnel were capable analysts with an aptitude to put pieces together to form a conclusion.”