zenpundit.com

 I am behind the news curve on this one but here’s a good article from InsideDefense.com ( Hat tip Chris Castelli) on the controversey over the call by USMC General James Mattis to banish “EBO” (Effects-Based Operations) and “Systems” terminology from military doctrine. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. Air Force is less than pleased:

Mattis Sparks Vigorous Debate

….How Mattis’ guidance will be implemented remains unclear, but the memo signals a sea change in the way JFCOM will address EBO.

By declaring that JFCOM will no longer use, sponsor or export the terms and concepts related to EBO, ONA and SoSA in its training, doctrine development and support of military education, Mattis tees up a major opportunity for EBO critics to curtail the use of these terms and ideas in American military discourse. Some EBO proponents see this as a threat, while other EBO advocates see an opportunity to hone the concept and discard unhelpful baggage.

Mattis explicitly calls for refining two joint doctrine publications that dictate how military officials use effects in joint operations in terms of desired outcomes.

….Before Deptula provided comments on the missive to ITP, Air Force headquarters referred questions on the topic to retired officers like McInerney, who unloaded heaps of criticism.

“Even though I am no longer on active duty I am embarrassed for a combatant commander to publish such a document,” McInerney says. “I am a fan of Mattis but this is too much.”

McInerney even encouraged combatant commanders to “ignore” what he sees as a shocking memo.In an e-mail to ITP, McInerney calls JFCOM’s missive the “most parochial, un-joint, biased, one-sided document launched against a concept that was key in the transformation of warfare — and proven in the most successful U.S. military conflicts of the past 20 years (Desert Storm and Allied Force).”

He belittles the two-page memo as a “tantrum” and the accompanying five-page guidance as “puerile” and “totally unbecoming” of a JFCOM commander.Mattis should be “encouraging multiple perspectives for the enhancement of joint operations — not trashing them,” McInerney asserts. The JFCOM memo is “intellectually bankrupt” and the policy’s conclusions are “profoundly out of touch with reality,” he adds.”The rationale ignores any notion of strategic art much less operational art, and instead relies on centuries’ old, discredited ‘commander’s intuition’ to design, plan and execute campaigns rather than offering a demonstrated better alternative,” he insists.

All strategic theories as they percolate through a massive bureaucracy tend to become distorted, misunderstood, inflated, stretched to cover pre-existing agendas, get advanced in tandem with career interests and be misapplied to situations for which they were never intended. EBO is no exception but “banning” concepts wholesale from discussion is less healthy for the long term intellectual good of an organization than is simply subjecting them to warranted criticism.

Those interested in a USAF practitioner’s counterpoint might look at a series from the now defunct FX-Based blog where Sonny was responding to an op-ed by  Ralph Peters, one of the more colorful EBO critics:

In Defense of EBO

In Defense of EBO, Part II.

In Defense of EBO, Part III.

In Defense of EBO, Part IV.

Extensive discussion of the Mattis pronunciamento can be found ( and engaged in) at The Small Wars Council.

A frank but impolitic shorthand assessment of Iraq by one of the fathers of the new American COIN doctrine heated up quickly. Full coverage at SWJ Blog.

Article quotes SWC/SWJ stalwarts ( Hat tip to Menning)

Army Focus on Counterinsurgency Debated Within

“What I saw was an Army that was not as ready to fight this kind of war as it should have been, and so I came back from Iraq determined to help the Army learn how to fight this kind of war more effectively,” Nagl says.

He began helping write the Army’s counterinsurgency handbook, better known as Field Manual 3-24. The manual is like a roadmap for officers: It emphasizes the use of minimal force. The idea in a counterinsurgency campaign, Nagl says, is to drive a wedge between the civilian population and insurgents who live among them.

….Col. Sean MacFarland was among the first to successfully apply counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq in 2006. And yet he was a co-author of the recent internal Army report suggesting that the Army is far too focused on counterinsurgency training. This singular focus, he writes, is weakening the Army.

The report cites field artillery as an example of an area that has suffered from inattention. Since 1775, artillery units have served as the backbone of the U.S. Army. But today, a stunning 90 percent of these units are unqualified to fire artillery accurately – the lowest level in history.

MacFarland declined to be interviewed for this story. But views like his have been amplified publicly by an iconoclastic, Berkeley-educated officer, Lt. Col. Gian Gentile.

“Due to five years in Iraq and six years in Afghanistan, I believe that the U.S. Army has become a counterinsurgency-only force,” Gentile said recently during a public lecture in Washington. He also declined to comment for this story.

Gentile, who served two tours in Iraq, is perhaps the most outspoken internal critic of what he calls the Army’s dangerous obsession with counterinsurgency.

“The high public profile of the new counterinsurgency manual, combined with the perception that its use and practice with the surge in Iraq has lowered the violence, I think has had a Svengali effect on us,” Gentile said during the lecture. “It’s almost like we have a secret recipe for success now involving counterinsurgency and irregular war.”

Dr. Dave Kilcullen begins a COIN series at SWJ Blog:

“Political Maneuver in Counterinsurgency”

Like the Romans, counterinsurgents through history have engaged in road-building as a tool for projecting military force, extending governance and the rule of law, enhancing political communication and bringing economic development, health and education to the population. Clearly, roads that are patrolled by friendly forces or secured by local allies also have the tactical benefit of channeling and restricting insurgent movement and compartmenting terrain across which guerrillas could otherwise move freely. But the political impact of road-building is even more striking than its tactical effect

….But the effects accrue not just from the road itself, but rather from a conscious and well-developed strategy that uses the road as a tool, and seizes the opportunity created by its construction to generate security, economic, governance and political benefits. This is exactly what is happening in Kunar: the road is one component, albeit a key one, in a broader strategy that uses the road as an organizing framework around which to synchronize and coordinate a series of political-military effects. This is a conscious, developed strategy that was first put in place in 2005-6 and has been consistently executed since. Thus, the mere building of a road is not enough: it generates some, but not all of these effects, and may even be used to oppress or harm the population rather than benefit it. Road construction in many parts of the world has had negative security and political effects, especially when executed unthinkingly or in an un-coordinated fashion. What we are seeing here, in contrast, is a coordinated civil-military activity based on a political strategy of separating the insurgent from the people and connecting the people to the government. In short, this is a political maneuver with the road as a means to a political end.

A nice piece, one that reveals the multiple dimensions of connectivity inherent in something so seemingly straightforward as a “road”. The connectivity itself is a weapon against disconnecting, isolating, hyperideological, insurgencies like the Taliban.

Incidentally, this isn’t America’s first foray into road building in Afghanistan; the Eisenhower administration, as a Cold War intrusion into the Soviet sphere of influence, built a modern highway for Zahir Shah that constituted, for many years, Afghanistan’s only paved road outside of Kabul.

Dave Dilegge and Bill Nagl have announced that the already excellent, peer reviewed,  Small Wars Journal is moving on to BETA status:

What’s this BETA / interim stuff?

We have great content now from contributing authors, and it has been hanging fire for too long in the bowels of Small Wars Journal. We are still a lottery ticket and a horseshoe nail away from having the Fully New and Completely Improved SWJ Magazine. So here, as an interim solution, is the partially new and still-improving SWJ Magazine.

The articles published here have been peer-reviewed for content and quality, and accepted for publication.  We’re behind on formatting, editing, etc.  The articles are provided now “as is” because this is the way we can get their important messages out without further delay (which, in some cases, has already been substantial).  Revised versions for edits, formatting, and presentation will be posted when they are available and as site improvements are made.

Note that the individual article Titles, Permalinks, and Comments will stay stable throughout our growth, so don’t worry about us pulling that rug out from under you as you link to or comment upon these pieces.  But the links to the temporary PDF docs will change, so please don’t link straight to them

Growth pains are just a bump in the road. Congratulations on moving forward!