John Nagl is a really smart guy, but this is just goofy excuse-making

Josh Rogin got his hands on an advance copy (pdf) of the Final Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel, the group of bipartisan defense experts charged by Congress with Monday-morning quarterbacking DoD's work in writing the official QDR. The panel was composed of a whole bunch of big names in the field, including Stephen Hadley, William Perry, Richard Armitage, Jack Keane, Eric Edelman, John Lehman, Jim Talent, and John Nagl.

The report is broadly critical of the QDR, which puts Nagl in the uncomfortable position of having to defend the work of his colleagues while not being too rough on the woman who founded the think tank where he's now president, former CNAS pooh-bah and current Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy. This is even harder than eating soup with a knife!

Nagl ... told The Cable in an interview that his panel's report doesn't necessarily contradict Flournoy's document.

"The QDR was a very good product and did a good job of focusing on the wars we're in, but was unable to focus on the far out, which is was congressionally mandated to do. Plus the panel could look at things that were outside the Department of Defense," he said. "We also have the luxury of thinking deeper and seeing some troubling trends."

Who else thinks that saying you're "unable" to do something that's required by law is a tolerable excuse? I mean, seriously, that's your excuse? They were unable to do what Congress has mandated they do because there was some other stuff going on? Can you imagine trying that one at work (or on the IRS)?

Ok, so the panel had some luxuries, like not fighting a war at the same time as trying to accomplish its goal. (The Defense Department also has something like a squillion more people to devote to the task than the QDR Independent Panel, but whatever.) And I know how hard it is to develop a massive document like this, especially one that's consensus-built. But there is really no excuse for failing to do what's directed.

Oh, wait. Yes there is.

One of the problems with the QDR was that it came out before President Obama's National Security Strategy and therefore couldn't be properly aligned with the overall vision, Nagl said. "The entire process is not as tightly organized as we would like to see it and it doesn't cascade down from the top as we'd like it to."

Yeah. That is a problem.

As I've told you before, the way we formulate national strategy is all kinds of effed up right now. The QDR should really be informed by a National Military Strategy that's nested within a National Defense Strategy that's nested within a National Security Strategy, all of which should coherently articulate American interests, strategic objectives, means, choices, and associated risk. But let's be clear: the QDR is not a strategy, per se; it's a strategic review. The QDR is overlaid on the various strategies, articulating how the various tools of national power housed in DoD will be applied to threats and strategic challenges. The NSS hadn't yet been published when the QDR came down the pike, and that's a problem. (Of course, the NSS sucks so badly that it wouldn't have helped to produce a better QDR anyway, so I've always found the bleating on that note to be sort of silly.)

All of this is a long way of saying that I agree with the Independent Panel report's general conclusions about the shortcomings of the QDR, as outlined in the introduction:

The initial Bottom-up Review [the QDR's predecessor] was considered a success. Of course there was much debate about the conclusions, but Congress thought the process was worthwhile and mandated that it be repeated every four years. Unfortunately, once the idea became statutory, it became part of the bureaucratic routine. The natural tendency of bureaucracy is to plan short term, operate from the top down, think within existing parameters, and affirm the correctness of existing plans and programs of record.That is exactly what happened to the QDR process. Instead of unconstrained, long term analysis by planners who were encouraged to challenge preexisting thinking, the QDRs became explanations and justifications, often with marginal changes, of established decisions and plans.

I'm not going to get into the specific recommendations made by the panel in the sections of the report that amount to a re-do of the QDR (but suffice it to say that it's definitely informed by the now-published NSS, and amounts to something like "more of EVERYTHING, wwwhhhheeeeee!!!!"). But the fact of the matter is that the QDR needs to be focused on the big picture, on strategic evolution, and on reconceptualizing the way that the nation's military tools can be applied to the task of achieving our strategic goals -- not our intermediate operational objectives. I didn't hate the document as much as some people did, but the Independent Panel got this part right.

Is John Nagl on the New York Times editorial board?

The Defense Department just announced that our NATO allies are falling short in their commitment to deliver more institutional trainers to Afghanistan, necessitating a stopgap deployment of about 150 U.S. Marines and a U.S. Army battalion through the end of the summer. The Times weighs in with an op-ed decrying this development:

NATO agreed that non-American members would provide half of the 5,200 trainers.
Since December, those capitals have pledged to send only 1,000 trainers, and they have been very slow to deliver. Mr. Gates is now expected to send Americans to cover 600 of these slots for 90 days.

While the Americans are close to complement, General Caldwell also had to fight hard to secure enough troops to fill the American slots as well as management positions on his staff. For all of the talk about new missions and new thinking, there are still a lot of brass — and those who want to become brass — who don’t consider training a warrior’s job or a path to promotion. That culture needs to change.

American and NATO officials also need to look seriously at creating a standing corps of combat advisers who are trained and equipped to develop indigenous national security forces in overseas conflict zones.

That last couple of paragraphs are the most interesting for me. There's obviously merit to the idea of institutionalizing a training and advising capacity in the American land forces, but there's a lot of debate about the best way to do this. Nagl has been calling for the establishment of a 20,000-troop standing advisor corps for the last several years, and the Army has dismissed his suggestion for a whole host of sensible reasons. It's interesting to me that the New York Times wakes up one day to an advisor shortfall and suggests that "American and NATO officials... need to look seriously" at this problem, as if the Defense Department and the Army haven't been doing exactly that for the last four to six years.

So what do you think? Permanent advisor corps (pdf)? Modular brigades augmented for security force assistance? Bifurcated, Krepinevichian army (pdf) with separate forces for the different points of the spectrum of conflict?

Is precision-fire artillery less important than we thought?

I noticed an interesting comment in Defense News' account of GEN Peter Chiarelli's testimony to the House Armed Services subcommittee on readiness Tuesday:

The vice chief also discussed the series of portfolio reviews the Army is conducting as it develops its next six-year spending plan. By looking at a portfolio of systems, for instance precision munitions, rather than looking at individual systems, the service can make more informed cost-benefit decisions about the capabilities it needs, said Chiarelli.

"There are probably systems that we have in the United States Army that have precision that don't need precision or don't need to be at the numbers we thought," he said.

"Not that precision isn't important, but does that mean that every system has to have a precision component? I would argue that's not the case," he added.

For example, a round from a 155mm cannon costs roughly $650 apiece, said Chiarelli, but if it is made into a precision round with an accuracy of 10 meters, the
round's cost goes up to $78,000 apiece.

I've really only included the first bit for context, as I'm not that interested in talking about the POM or whether portfolio review versus system review is a more effective or efficient process. The interesting bit is the last part, about the importance (or non-importance?) of precision artillery rounds.

The 155 round that Chiarelli referred to is Excalibur, which has proven itself to be both devastatingly effective and shockingly expensive... or at least, that's what I've always heard. (Just ask Gunslinger, who will rave about his experience with the munition.)

How exactly do you quantify the marginal utility of that extra $77K? Well, it turns out you might not really have to, seeing as precision artillery rounds and "dumb" rounds really are meant to perform different missions. Here's a clip from a 2004 article in National Defense entitled "Army has high expectations for smart artillery rounds" (which, interestingly, cites Raytheon's pre-production cost estimate of $29,000 per round for Excalibur, as compared with $4,000 for a standard 155 round):

A source of continuing debate within the Army is whether artillery should serve in a “precision strike” role, as opposed to its traditional “area suppression” function, for which pinpoint accuracy is not as important.

The article also mentions the 2002 cancellation of the Crusader self-propelled Howitzer, originally intended to replace Paladin -- that is, the system that was meant to fire Excalibur. If you'll remember, Crusader's cancellation is often cited as a move away from set-piece, big-war, firepoweritis and towards mobility, speed, and flexibility: Secretary Rumsfeld criticized Crusader as being too slow and too heavy to support the rapidly-moving shock forces so vital to his network-centric Revolution in Military Affairs. Back to National Defense:

Excalibur made headlines two years ago when the Defense Department cancelled the high-tech Crusader 155 mm howitzer, intended to replace the aging Paladin. At the time, Pentagon officials said advanced munitions such as Excalibur were more important than the guns themselves.

“The accuracy touted for Crusader really comes from Excalibur and not from Crusader,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told reporters in 2002. Many artillery experts disagree, however, claiming that no matter how precise a round might be, artillery units need a fast vehicle that can keep up with the tanks and infantry carriers.

So after Crusader's cancellation, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz assured everyone that the good parts of the system were really a product of the round that was being fired, which wasn't getting cancelled. And that brings us back to today: we've got precision tube-fired munitions, but what's the point? Which is the more important mission - -or even, really, the fundamental, primary mission -- for artillery: precision strike, or are suppression?

Well, like pretty much all system/program decisions, this sort of hinges on what kind of wars you're trying to fight. But to say that big war requires one system and small war requires another is to oversimplify, seeing as the range of combat and stability tasks will be present to some greater or lesser extent in nearly every sort of campaign. A whole lot of precision fires were used during the theoretically hug-centric Surge, for example. But couldn't these missions be executed by air assets in most instances, and even occasionally (depending on geography) by naval gunfire? Isn't that what the Joint Force is all about?

If we're looking for uses for slow-moving or stationary gun batteries, it seems to me that the traditional area-denial, suppressive-fire role is a more natural one. I seem to recall reading that that's how H.R. McMaster used his guns in the much-ballyhooed COIN effort in Tal Afar, though I can't recall where. (Does anybody know where this was? I'm certain the piece talked about how 3rd ACR shaped its AO by firing high-volume missions on certain zones, denying open fields and whatnot to the enemy and channeling insurgents into a more concentrated area.) And artillery certainly played a role in shaping operations leading up to the battle of Fallujah. In a world where the threshold for infantry units justifying supporting fires has been raised so dramatically (as GEN McChrystal has done in Afghanistan), where troops in contact must give assurances that the area is free of civilians, isn't it far more likely that artillery will be used in scenarios where the AO has been largely cleared of noncombatants?

In 2006, then-LTCs John Nagl and Paul Yingling made the opposite case in an article in Field Artillery magazine (which, tangentially, basically makes the argument that the field artillery should focus on developing advisor skills as a secondary competency, considering what the two assert as its declining relevancy to modern operations):

Precision fires will play an essential role in future combat and are essential for America to maintain her dominance in MCO. In those comparatively rare instances when our enemies choose to mass and defend terrain, precision fires enable US forces to destroy targets with minimal losses to friendly forces or innocent civilians. Coupled with our superb maneuver and support forces, precision fires enable us to destroy our enemies’ capacity to defend terrain.

Precision fires also play an important but more limited role in COIN. Time sensitive targets in areas where friendly security forces cannot strike are ideal targets for precision fires in COIN. However, effective COIN makes such targets rare by denying insurgents sanctuaries outside the reach of friendly security forces. Precision fires have a more limited role in COIN due to the inherent difference between COIN and MCO.

In MCO, friendly forces use the maximum force allowable to destroy the enemy. The rapid and overwhelming application of force hastens the collapse of enemy forces with minimal loss to friendly units. In COIN, the opposite is true—units must rely on the minimum force needed to subdue insurgents. In fact, in COIN,“the more force you use, the less effective you are.”

In a COIN environment, the use of fires can affect intelligence collection adversely, and intelligence is the lifeblood of COIN. When we capture an insurgent, we can exploit his knowledge of the terrorist network; when we kill an insurgent, his knowledge of the terrorist network dies with him.

The use of fires also can affect civilian perceptions of security adversely. After the use of fires, insurgents often claim that the strikes were necessary due to the host-nation government’s inability to provide security or that the victims of the strike were innocent civilians. The truth of these claims is beside the point; by employing fires, we create an insurgent propaganda opportunity. Commanders must weigh these adverse effects carefully when employing fires in COIN.

So while writing "precision fires have a more limited role in COIN," the message is really that "fires, period, have a more limited role in COIN" -- Nagl and Yingling aren't making the case that precision fires are more useful, but rather that artillery isn't particularly useful at all.

Lester Grau, whose work on Soviet operations in Afghanistan is unparalleled in the English language, drew a different lesson while concluding that artillery used in the Soviet style was not particularly effective in COIN. In the conclusion of a 1997 article entitled "Artillery and counterinsurgency: the Soviet experience in Afghanistan," Grau notes as the sixth of his seven major historical lessons that "precision-guided munitions and other specialty rounds have an increasing role in counterinsurgency." This seemingly common-sense observation is followed, though, by the seventh lesson: "the biggest problem artillery has in counterinsurgency is finding a viable target." One might reasonably contend that under the policies GEN McChrystal has instituted at ISAF, the difficulty of finding a viable target comes from the very definition of "viable"; that is, it's hard to find viable targets because there aren't any, by ISAF ROE.

Back to GEN Chiarelli: is he right to suggest that precision artillery may be less important to future operations than we think? Understanding that 1) the effects of these fires are often replicable through the use of air power; 2) western commanders are increasingly constrained in their ability to employ any type of fires in urban areas or in the presence of civilians; and 3) that terrain denial and area suppression missions, which do not require precision fires but rather a high volume and rate of fire, can be used effectively to shape the AO and control enemy movement in either a COIN or MCO environment... I think it's worth considering.

Paul Pillar wrote the essay I should've written six months ago

I never sat down and did it, and then it was December. By then I would've just looked like a bandwagoner, right? Oh well. Mine would have been an obnoxiously over-sourced 9,000-word jeremiad, totally lacking in the clarity and elegance of Pillar's piece. So go read his. Here's a taste:

It would be fruitless to search the contours of current international terrorism for a compelling explanation of why the United States is escalating a military campaign in Afghanistan. Clearly there is a disconnect between where war is being waged and where terrorism is rearing its ugly head. The appropriate response is not to run off, guns blazing, to find new battlefields, be they in Yemen or anywhere else. The U.S. military, pressing the limits of sustainability and winding up one war while slowly winding down another, does not have the resources to open a new front in every territory that may become associated with terrorism. There is no shortage of such places.

Regardless of the available resources, it is a mistake to think of counterterrorism primarily, as Americans have become wont to do, as the application of military force to particular pieces of real estate. This pattern of thinking is rooted in a history in which the vanquishing of threats to U.S. security has consisted chiefly of armed expeditions to conquer or liberate foreign territory. The pattern has been exacerbated by the unfortunate “war on terror” terminology, which confuses and conflates the seriousness of, the nature of and the means used to counter the threat.

The strength of a terrorist adversary, al-Qaeda or any other, does not correlate with control of a piece of territory in Afghanistan or elsewhere. If a terrorist group has a physical safe haven available, it will use it. But of all the assets that make a group a threat—including ideological appeal and a supply of already-radicalized recruits—occupation of acreage is one of the least important. Past terrorist attacks, including 9/11 (most of the preparations for which took place in scattered locations in the West), demonstrate this.

Also, if you're interested, John Nagl disagrees. (Or as Josh Foust put it, Nagl says we're at war because the President says we're at war. Or something like that.)

A question for those who think the Afghan war is essential to maintaining stability in Pakistan

The argument about the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons tends to be nested into a multi-pronged rationale for why escalation in Afghanistan is necessary -- very few people will say "the one and only reason we need to be in Afghanistan is to keep Pakistani nukes out of al-Qaeda's hands." But a lot of people (including John Nagl and Dave Kilcullen, unfortunately) will tack this on to whatever other justifications they've got, toss this one in there ominously. And why not? They probably think that even the slightest risk of weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of terrorists is just about the most terrifying thing most Americans can imagine, and they're probably right.

I guess I should also make it clear that I agree about Pakistani stability being important. In fact, I think it's probably the most important feature of the entire war, and I have no qualms saying that regional stability in south Asia ought to be a bigger priority for America than the utter annihilation of al-Qaeda (which, like Rid, I think is probably impossible and possibly unnecessary) or the vaunted denial of the much-talked-about terrorist safe haven.

But lemme come to the point already: if you think that keeping Pakistani nuclear weapons safe is an important reason for us to stay in Afghanistan in significant numbers, then I want you to answer a question. Ready?

Why do we imagine that a third-party counterinsurgency campaign in the country without the nuclear weapons will be more effective in guaranteeing their security than small-footprint, foreign internal defense (FID)-oriented backing for the government that actually possesses WMD?

Can't we do more to prevent weapons from getting to AQ by engaging with the Pakistani government and military than by running around Helmand shooting at opium smugglers?