One of the nice things about this blog is that periodically, smart folks will send me their unpublished material for feedback and private commentary. This comes in a wide variety of formats – manuscripts, articles, book chapters, powerpoint, sometimes an entire book or novel! It is flattering and almost always informative, so I try to help where I can or at least point the sender in the direction of someone more appropriate.

Recently, I was given a peek at a very intriguing paper on “Transition Operations” by Dr Rich Ledet, LTC Jeff Stewart and Mr. Pete Turner, who blogs occasionally at quesopaper.  Pete has spent a good chunk of the past ten years in a variety of positions and capacities in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he currently is with American troops in a remote rural district and it was he who passed their draft to me. They have taken a fresh look at the subject.

While I can’t give away their “secret sauce” in detail,  I particularly liked the fact that while the  focus and advice for executing transition operations is aimed at field grade officers and their civilian agency counterparts, their vision is in sync with the ideal of having policy-strategy-operations and tactics as a seamless “whole-of-government” garment. If only we could get our politicians to think in these terms, half the battle would be over.

Their paper is now headed to a professional journal; when it is published ( as I think it will be), I will definitely be linking to it here and hopefully, that will be soon.

My reason for my bringing this up – I have the permission of the authors to do so – is that the trio have put their finger on the major doctrinal problem faced by the United States military in Afghanistan – “transition operations” being a politically charged topic, laden as it is with implied foreign policy decision making by heavyweight policy makers, is treated in very scanty fashion by FM 3-24. Compared to other aspects of COIN, very little guidance is given to the the commander of the battalion or brigade in the effort to coordinate “turnover” of responsibilities and missions to their Afghan Army, police and government allies.

This at a time when the “readiness” of Afghan units and officials to accept these burdens in the midst of a war with the Taliban is questionable, variable, controversial at home and politically extremely sensitive in Afghanistan.

And at a point where, ten years after September 11, the US State Department is no more able in terms of personnel and vision or sufficiently funded by Congress, to step up their game and take the lead role in Afghanistan from the Pentagon than it was on September 10, 2001.  SECSTATEs Condi Rice and Hillary Clinton deserve great praise for making State do more with less, but State needs wholesale reform to fit the needs of the 21st century and the money and budgetary flexibility to split foreign policy tasks more equitably with the Defense Department.

State is not going to be playing a major role on the ground in our transition out of Afghanistan, which makes guidance to our majors and colonels – and in turn to their company and platoon leaders stationed there-  all the more important.

The Snake Eaters by Owen West 

Just received a review copy yesterday, courtesy of Simon & Schuster.  Full disclosure, by happenstance, I am on a private listserv with Major West, but you can take data point that alongside the fact that until today I hadn’t realized he was also the son of Bing West.  🙂

Judging from West’s already accomplished biography, the apple does not fall far from the tree.

Flipping through briefly, this book seems to be part high octane action story, part memoir,  part COIN treatise by other narrative means. The “novel-like” format appears to be an emerging trend in military and national security publishing distinguished from traditional, eye-in-the-sky, synthesizing, narratives like Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars.  Pre-publication materials sent described The Snake Eaters, thusly:

….The Snake Eaters takes readers into the streets, schools and homes of Khalidya [Iraq] – where the people WQest’s team were trying to protect were indistinguishable from the enemy they were trying to kill, and the the Iraqi battalion they mentored was both amateurish and hostile….By the end of the mission, the Snake Eaters was the first Iraqi battalion granted independent battle space, the insurgency was wiped off the streets of Khalidya, and peace was restored

Ok, that is just PR stuff which can be taken with a grain of salt, but the respected Bill Roggio of  The Long War Journal was embedded with the Snake Eaters in Iraq 2007 in the deadly Anbar province, when they were under Major West’s tutelage:

….Instead of moving out on Humvees, the Snake Eater’s platoon of scouts, accompanied by 5 MTTS and myself, struck out on foot from the battalion base, which sits on a hill overlooking Khaladiya, and moved into the city. The patrol moved through the desert hills between the base and the town. This approach is dangerous, particularly during the day, as soldiers are silhouetted behind the sky when coming over the hills, perfect targets for the snipers in the area.

On the march into Khaladiya, we overheard four mortars fall into one of the bases in the distance. The mortars were blind fired and we were told they didn’t hit a thing. The ever present semi-wild Iraqi dogs howled in the distance, and their howls grew louder as we approached and they shadowed our patrol. The insurgents couldn’t ask for a better early warning system.

This group of Iraqi Army scouts were the most disciplined and tactically proficient Iraqi soldiers I have seen while accompanying Iraqi troops outside the wire. They moved sharply, covered dangerous intersections and rooftops, effectively used hand and arm signals, and maintained their intervals. The scouts clearly embraced the idea of the “predator-prey” relationship. On the streets of Khaladiya, they were the hunters.

That doesn’t hurt the street cred (though TTP is way, way outside my area of expertise – I’ll leave that for folks who know what they are talking about to assess).

Incidentally, the FID/advisory/transition ops theme of The Snake Eaters is likely to make it very relevant reading in 2012 -2013.

A review will be forthcoming – have a bit of a backlog of reviews that I need to clear  (The End,  All In and The Hunt for KSM)

To continue, my last post was inspired by analysis by Jason Fritz at Inskspots and I would like to continue to use excerpts from his post as a foil to ruminate about strategy:

Delicate strategic balancing: perception’s role in formulating strategy

….We have a whole suite of problems with our strategy in Afghanistan, foremost of which are a failure to state specific and achievable ends as well as a misalignment of ways and means to achieve the pitifully-described desired ends we have written down. But if our strategic success now depends upon selling to the Afghans that we mean well and that they are now more skeptical than not of us, well we have a very, very serious problem. Balancing the Say-Do equation is an imperative. However, if public perception is that mistakes and crimes committed by individual U.S. service members is indicative of U.S. policy or strategy, then public communications begins to drive strategy instead of the other way around.

….Public communications and information operations to influence perceptions are ways, but the U.S. keeps falling into the trap of making perceptions ends in themselves. If our ends, ways, and means were better formed and aligned, I suspect that the “Do” side of the equation would be solid enough to negate the affects of mistakes. But this is not the situation in Afghanistan where continued programs of questionable efficacy, strategic drift with regard to ends (compare this and this for instance), andcontinued support for an illegitimate and ineffectual government abound. If ways and means are not succeeding (to what ends?!?) or are the wrong ways and means entirely then your strategy rests in total upon Afghan perception that you’re making a difference instead of in part, which amplifies individual disasters such as we’ve seen of late. While it is unlikely that the United States will change course at this juncture, we need to start paying attention to this phenomenon now and avoid it in the future so we can avoid codifying perceptions as ends and put influencing them back where they belong: as ways. A successful strategy would go a long way to restoring this balance. Once again, maybe in the next war.

….When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men’s weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength

Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain

Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.

Sun Tzu

[by J. Scott Shipman]

This is cross-posted at http://tobeortodo.com

Earlier this week I had the privilege of speaking at the Navy Expeditionary Forces Conference (NAVEXFOR 2012) in Virginia Beach, VA. The theme for this year’s conference was “innovation in constrained environments.” In my talk, I focused on potential internal cultural constraints and deliberate actions to mitigate resulting threats. Not surprisingly, other speakers focused on our enemies and the constraints they place on our forces, and the fact those enemies impose constraints with innovative methods and weapons like roadside IEDs.  Yesterday, through a friend on Twitter, I learned that insurgents in Iraq had used cell phone geotags to destroy AH-64’s; innovation, indeed.

One speaker made the comment in this post’s title: “Our enemy is adaptable, we must be, too.” He went on to characterized their adaptations as “simple.”

Using this description, through simple adaptation, our enemies disrupt our activities, destroy our equipment, and kill or maim our service members using cheap, simple, but deadly tools. The resulting affect isn’t limited to physical casualties; their innovations also disrupt our ability to control the initiative, and perhaps just as importantly our sensemaking abilities. The ability to alter an opponent’s sensemaking will inform and increase the complexity of an already complex environment, so adaptability is essential.

In most situations we counter these simple adaptations by employing complex and expensive solutions. This has been accurately called, “adaptation at acquisition speed.” Those expensive and complex solutions must make it through byzantine acquisition processes rife with political maneuvering, operating in a culture of “no,” which results in increased costs, schedule, and ultimately our frequent inability to be responsive to troops in field. Institutional inertia in the defense bureaucracy prevents significant change in the short-run, so these facts must be considered an on-going constraint.

In spite of these constraints, our troops are thinking and acting—they are adapting, using simple tools, like remote control vehicles.  This “toy” was used to inspect vehicles and detect IEDs. Instead of an expensive long lead-time solution, they went to Radio Shack—and the vehicle lasted for several years—so they got another. According to the report, at least six lives were saved as a result. Not surprisingly, the folks closest to the problem produced an effective solution. No doubt there are other stories of ingenuity and adaptation, but this story exemplifies the possible. The underlying point is this soldier was thinking and acting—he was adapting in a way that allowed him and his colleagues to remain more safe.

Sun Tzu and the ultimate in adaptability

The speaker’s quote reminded me of this quote from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Chapter VI Weaknesses and Strengths (page 153 in the Samuel B. Griffith translation):

Now an army may be likened to water, for just as flowing water avoids the heights and hastens to the lowlands, so an army avoids strength and strikes weakness.

And as water shapes its flow in accordance with the ground, so an army manages its victory in accordance with the situation of the enemy.

And as water has no constant form, there are in war no constant condition.

Bear with me, as I like word pictures and synonyms and what follows is a bit like “plodding,” but I’ve found adjacencies in language illuminating (if I could draw this, I would). Water as a metaphor for adaptability presents any military force (or any other group) a daunting task. Considering the physical qualities of water several synonyms come to mind:

• Water is transparent, so to be adaptable, we need to promote and practice clarity in internal communications and actions. Keeping ambiguity to a minimun is one method of promoting clarity, and practicing honesty is a good way to practice.
• Water is physically cohesive, while being ultimately pliable. Think about it; put water in a jar, it conforms to the jar, pour it out, it follows gravity, and water surrounds whatever is submerged in it. Water moves as one, just as a group adaptability needs to be a key characteristic of any successful team. But in a larger sense, when one considers what I call the “bordering language” of synonyms, one discovers a greater depth to the concept of coherence, words like intelligence, comprehensibility, understandability, intelligibility, decipherability,  conncinity (my favorite),  unity, and harmony—just to name a few. Concinnity is a harmonious arrangement of things; where a culture is arranged and led in such a way as to promote and sustain harmony. My friend Ed H. has the best working definition for harmony that I’ve found. Ed derived his description from the novelist Douglas Adams and French impressionist painter Georges Seurat:

You don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same note. Harmony is the marriage of the contrary and of the similar; marrying discordant elements, regardless of tone, of color, of line, of thought and of purpose…

• Water as described by Sun Tzu is fluid. Fluidity can be a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, fluidity implies adaptability, flexibility, fluency, smoothness, and ease. On the other, fluidity implies instability, unstableness, fickleness, inconstancy, changeableness, shifting, and flux. For cultures in a competitive environment, having the first form of fluidity is desired, while inflicting the second on the competitor. In addition, fluidity’s synonym fluency implies an eloquent and skillful use of language—or mediums of exchange. Fluency is possible only through practice, lots of practice. So much practice the skill becomes tacit knowledge, thus simple (effortless?)…even intuition.

Simplicity

Articulation in language and action are elements of simplicity. Simplicity implies tacit. As simple as the force of gravity directing water down a hill, going around and engulfing obstacles, thus is the potential of a group that has made their purpose/mission tacit and have the freedom to act. In fact, the sum of the skill sets may be so simple as to defy explanation—and more often than not in these cases, others learn by close association; watching, failing, learning, and making tacit those capabilities needed to cope and adapt. Boyd said as much in the abstract of Conceptual Spiral:

To flourish and grow in a many-sided, uncertain and ever-changing world that surrounds us, suggests that we have to make intuitive within ourselves those many practices we need to meet the exigencies of that world.

“To make intuitive within ourselves those many practices we need” implies the development and nurturing of habits that will enable us to adapt.That which is habitual becomes simple (and as mentioned above, yet another route to tacit).

Close

To the troops using the remote control vehicle mentioned above, the solution was obvious, and seemingly simple. Importantly, they were in a unit where they could act on their idea—and they did so outside the bureaucracy at little cost, and saved six lives (maybe more).

Taking a riff from the conference title, our leaders should be checking to make sure the rules of engagement (ROE) and other rigid rule sets aren’t implicitly making their folks hopelessly incapable of adaptability. As we increase adaptability, the more adaptability becomes a habit—and when it is a habit, it becomes simple. Just a thought.

Postscript:

The best short book I’ve read on tacit knowledge is Michael Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension, the best long book on the same topic is Personal Knowledge by the same author.

Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus

This is one of the more inane, disrespectful and lavishly wasteful ideas to come out of the Federal government in some time.

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, who should have more sense, has proposed in his “21st Century Sailor and Marine Initiative” the idea of normalizing a breathalyzer test (!) for Sailors and Marines reporting for duty. Yes, that’s correct. Showing up for duty is going to be regarded as probable cause for drug testing, as if our AVF were composed primarily of skid row derelicts.

Nice move Mr. Secretary. Stay classy.

That this is yet another example of the demeaning, exploitative, contempt towards normal Americans by our Creepy-state bipartisan elite goes without saying, but the reaction of those so insulted is worth noting:

Best Defense (guest post):

….This is among the most paternalistic, professionally insulting concepts I’ve seen in all my years of service, and I’m not sure I will submit. Yes, I know my options, and I just may exercise them and go right over the side the first time the duty blowmeister shoves a plastic tube in my face and treats me like a drunk driver for daring to report for duty. To the CNO, CMC, CMC of the Navy, and SgtMaj of the Marine Corps, here’s my question:  At what point will one of you four exercise your duty to tell the Secretary of the Navy, “Hey, Boss, WTF, over?” and that he really ought to fire whichever clown came up with this idea to screen everyone to identify serial alcohol abusers who are readily identifiable through other means.  One or more of you needs to find the moral courage to recommend relegating this part of the initiative to the dustbin of really bad naval ideas.

USNI Blog (BJ Armstrong):

….Recently a string of new policies and programs have washed over the decks of our Navy. We’re told they are designed to address everything from the surge in CO firings, to alcohol abuse, to the identified need to increase “diversity.” Training, trackers, new layers of bureaucratic offices, and new ways of testing/identifying the “bad apples” are all in the works. Some of the initiatives appear more connected to reality than others. The issues, like sexual assault and substance abuse, are serious and are challenges that our Navy should be addressing. In many cases, however, we are attempting to install programmatic and bureaucratic solutions to what are essentially humanistic problems. These are problems of leadership, character, and integrity and must be addressed with wisdom as much as programs and bureaucracy.

I suspect, if we were to scrape away the insincerely saccharine and frankly deceptive rhetoric offered by Mabus for this kind of a camel’s nose in the tent program, we will see old fashioned venality at work.  Off the shelf commercial breathalyzers are not exactly cheap and testing 500,000 active duty personnel who make up the Navy and Marine Corps daily,(!) the DoD civilian contractor support for counseling and “training” program development, supplemental extensions for testing the reserves and so on, will represent lucrative paydays in the billions for somebody.

Will those “somebodies” be friends of the current administration? Let’s place our bets now.

[ Sidebar: Let’s also guess how long before this initiative is extended elsewhere, in the civilian world, with results, recorded, tracked and shared without your consent by your employer. Can’t happen here? Oh, Really? I bet you once never expected to have government employees demand to take nude pictures of you at the airport either]

The diversion of resources this proposed insanity represents from warfighting, acquisition, real military training or PME, medical care for our wounded or a thousand other authentic needs of the Navy or Marine Corps would be a scandal in an earlier era.  But we do not live in an earlier era, and the defense budget is just another pile of seed corn to eat as far as the beltway boomer oligarchy are concerned.

Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, Great Britain’s greatest military hero, when asked about his soldiers, described them as “The scum of the Earth, enlisted for drink”.  Winston Churchill, over a century later, said the culture of the Royal Navy was based upon “Rum, sodomy and the lash”. This encapsulates an aristocratic worldview of rulers toward their servants and comprises a long military tradition in whose footsteps Navy Secretary Mabus is following.

It just isn’t an American military tradition.