Battles of Military Doctrine
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:
….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:
Extensive discussion of the Mattis pronunciamento can be found ( and engaged in) at The Small Wars Council.
September 7th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
I think Gen Mattis was put in charge of JFCOM to bring that command back to earth and back to basics. EBO is a concept that has proven worse than useless in the recent wars. With limited resources, I can understand why the JFCOM CG would want to get rid of it.
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Besides, EBO will be resurrected with another TLA (three lettered acronym). The Air Force likes the concept too much for them to acknowledge the death of their concept. As a counterpoint, can you imagine a GEN Dunlap, the 2012 nomination to command JFCOM (and a historic pick at that, since MG is a friggin lawyer!), putting out a directive that Maneuver Warfare be killed as a concept?
September 7th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
I think the entire military has become too infatuated with new doctrines, new concepts, and anything that sounds cool. It’s been a trend since the end of the Cold War, and I for one am glad that Mattis has deep-sixed EBO for the time being.
The old story of Napoleon’s corporal should apply to any new doctrine, theory, concept or invention when it applies to military affairs. If it’s too complex to be understood by a 21st Century American specialist, it’s probably going to confuse a whole lot of other people as well.
I was never sold on EBO – mainly because it just gave another name to strategic bombing if one uses Warden’s "Checkmate" plan in ODS as an example. Ok, you try and isolate the enemies army by bombing C4ISR nodes, key leadership, political and intelligence facilities, and so on. What happens when the Army cannot be easily identified like we have seen in OIF and OEF? What happens when you cannot target easily?
It’s clear to me at least that the nature of warfare is in flux today, and there are a seemingly endless string of new theories, ideas and concepts to try and identify these new trends. From EBO to NCW to 4GW to Hybrid War to Mosaic War…I can keep going…it’s become a vast miasma of jumbled thought, theory and what if’s. We are so quick to try and identify these trends that we don’t allow them to play out to see if they are really trends or just blips on the screen.
Sorry for rambling.
September 7th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
I’ll make this simple – and I had to fight the EBO battle from its inception – first as an assistant to LtGen Van Riper and then as a Marine rep on a USMC – USJFCOM cosponsored program – General Mattis did the right thing.
For those inclined to dismiss his memo I enjoin you to clear your head of all preconceived notions and read each line. Effects have been part of military operations since Christ was a corporal – JFCOM bastardized the whole meaning of effects – cheered on by the Air Force. Attacking and measuring nodes as part of a physical infrastructure that have signatures are one thing – they can be hit kinetically and the effects have hard metrics.
It is another thing when you add in the social infrastructre or human element of warfare. JFCOM attempted to plop one template over the other and complicated the whole process by touting Operantional Net Assessment – ONA – an automated system that would spit out metrics for the entire network – real time.
EBO was nothing more than a bumper sticker con job that kept a lot of otherwise useless people employed full time at tax payers expense. And that is a crying shame if not criminal.
September 7th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Hi guys,
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Wow! Fantastic comments all around -especially Dave’s. I’m not dismissing the memo and I am neither an expert in nor an uncritical supporter of EBO but I’ll respond to a couple of your key points:
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"Ok, you try and isolate the enemies army by bombing C4ISR nodes, key leadership, political and intelligence facilities, and so on. What happens when the Army cannot be easily identified like we have seen in OIF and OEF? What happens when you cannot target easily? "
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I’d say that’s not a time to use an EBO based operational strategy and such enormous gaps in knowledge themselves point to an overriding, urgent, need to make intelligence a high priority and that air power is probably best considered for a support role. EBO was best suited for attacking modern, urban, complex, industrial to information based societies but the caveat is – and has been since the great Strategic Bombing Survey – that the reach of strategic bombing has historically always exceeded the promised grasp.
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It’s very hard to permanently knock out "critical nodes" from the air or forsee the actual redundancies built into complex systems ( frankly, we don’t even really know where all of our own redundancies are until some disaster strikes, much less somebody else’s). That said, EBO type air attacks have caused measurable and important degradation of enemy systems of command and control, power, civilian communications etc. and forced adversaries into expensive investments like laying fiber optic cable communication lines and deep "super-bunker" construction projects ( which just basically tell us where they are going to hide initially). We don’t want to go overboard in the other direction.
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"Attacking and measuring nodes as part of a physical infrastructure that have signatures are one thing – they can be hit kinetically and the effects have hard metrics. It is another thing when you add in the social infrastructre or human element of warfare. "
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Very true. Human social systems are among the most complex ( akin to say, planetary climate) imaginable in terms of predictive modeling. That there are secondary and transient sociopolitical effects in war is certain but calculating what is essentially more art than science ( psychological warfare) ahead of time or in real time is unlikely to ever be possible. Too many variables, most of which are unknown. A pruning back here of EBO to a reality-based, quantifiable domain, approach would be good.
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"EBO was nothing more than a bumper sticker con job that kept a lot of otherwise useless people employed full time at tax payers expense. And that is a crying shame if not criminal."
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I get the impression that you have a strong opinion here, Dave. 🙂
September 7th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
I get the impression that you have a strong opinion here, Dave.
Ya think?