Confessions of an Adjutant: the sausage-making of awards policies

I'm a few days late to this discussion, but I wanted the passion surrounding this Air Force Times article on awards to subside a bit before I wrote about it. A soldier may fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon - but that fighting isn't exclusively with the enemy. There are few things soldiers love to argue more about among themselves than awards and fight about it they will. It's such a personal topic, often shrouded in jealousies ("They gave that guy a BSM?!?"), nebulous guidance that leaves awards to commanders with different criteria, rank-based determination of awards, awards for merely doing your job, and the "everybody wins, everybody gets a medal" mentality.

With 6 years of active duty I held a few positions: tank and scout platoon leader, troop XO, assistant S3, brigade planner. I was even an Assistant Support Platoon Leader for two days (seriously - two very long days). But for an entire year I was a squadron adjutant (for you non-military types, think HR representative and administrative assistant to the CEO for a 500+ person organization) at the end of a deployment, through a redeployment cycle, and into a deployment ramp-up and that was the hardest year of my short military career. As the center cog of the awards sausage-making machine I think I can shed some light on why awards are so hard and why there isn't an easy solution to fix the problem.

We should begin by visiting Army Regulation 600-8-22, "Military Awards" which is the Army's user manual for awards. Section 1-12 tells us that "the objective of the Department of the Army Military Awards Program is to provide tangible recognition for acts of valor, exceptional service or achievement, special skills or qualifications, and acts of heroism not involving actual combat" and that "implementation of the provisions of this regulation is a command responsibility." Bottom line is that commanders award awards to recognize what soldiers do. The remainder of the regulation goes through approval authorities, time limits, revocations, and standards for each awards. Gripping stuff.

How does this work in the real Army, beyond the regulatory constraints of Human Resources Command? Well, awards policies effectively fall into three categories: peace-time achievement, peace-time service, and war-time achievement and service.

Peace-time achievement is the simplest to deal with. Commanders have the discretion to give awards for singular acts of excellence, the level of which award depends upon the commander's rank and excellence of the act. Giving awards out make commanders feel like they're really doing something for their soldiers and not merely for those soldiers trying to accumulate promotion points. Top tank at Table VIII gunnery? Here's an ARCOM for the crew. Chaplain's assistant organized a bad-ass Easter Egg hunt? AAM! For lesser achievements commanders can give challenge coins, which they tend to apply liberally. Basically, these awards are the commander's whim, they don't happen too often, and in spite of Ex's anecdote I've rarely seen officers receive them.

The next category - peace-time service awards - is where things start to get complicated. We can start with the fact that there are only so many types of awards - Army Achievement Medal (AAM), Army Commendation Medal (ARCOM), Meritorious Service Medal (MSM) - before we get into medals reserved for General and Flag Officers and their enlisted counterparts. The three awards mentioned are given in peace-time for one of two reasons: permanent change of station or retirement/resignation/end-term-of-service. Generally, retirees E-8 and under get MSMs for their 20+ years of service. Got it. Most units have a rank cut-off for non-retirement awards. For instance, E-4 Specialists and below get AAMs unless they were absolute studs - whether they were moving to a new duty station or getting out of the Army. E-5s to E-7s (maybe -8s) and O-1 thru O-3 get ARCOMs, unless you're coming out of a success command in which case it's an MSM. Etc. Basically there's a matrix for what you get and you know what your service award is going to be before you even start providing that service (unless you're a total stud or dud).

I imagine you're telling yourself a couple of things. First, that this systems isn't complicated at all. Second that for the most part these awards are virtually meaningless and that they might as well just give it to you when you sign in to the unit. The reason this is where awards get complicated is that the first two awards I mentioned, AAM and ARCOM, are the only two awards commanders give for achievement and also the bulk of service awards. The problem is that one soldier gets an AAM for something mundane and stupid and another soldier will get the exact same medal for 5 years of service to his nation. Between that and "everybody wins" a lot of people start questioning the sanity of the system. As an adjutant I had to explain to the commander why someone didn't deserve an award in accordance with our matrix in stead of substantiating why any soldier should get an award. It's ass backwards, it cheapens the system, and it makes soldiers disgruntled.

And that's all before we wade into the minefield that is war-time awards. Achievement awards in combat usually fall under the "heroism" heading (not always - sometimes an intel analyst will really make a breakthrough and the commander will award him or her). Each commander has different criteria for heroism, to include gradations of heroism, with approval for those determinations at the 2-star or higher level. This leaves a lot of room for the commander's whim. It also means that there is a lot of space - physically as well as time and perceptions of reality - between the point where the act took place and the guy who signs off on the award. This can obviously lead to problems. Silver Stars and above usually get thorough treatment and vetting, but criteria for Valor devices (a bronze "V" you pin to an award to denote it was for heroism) vary widely because they require (on the whole) lesser documentation and vetting. You also have problems with the fact that heroism isn't effectively defined in the regulation (how about that definition on page 183...). Beyond that, what delineates heroism deserving a Bronze Star Medal (BSM) with V device versus an ARCOM with V device? Entirely up to the commander. As an adjutant, I didn't take it upon myself to screen the award recommendations for content (that was a commander-to-commander issue) and merely just checked the admin blocks so that the recommendation wouldn't hit a bureaucratic hurdle. But I did lose count of the number of times the commander asked me "Why is this on my desk? This isn't heroic." Frankly, I didn't know what heroic meant when we're comparing completely different situations that occurred when I wasn't around.

War-time service awards are similar to peace-time awards (matrix solution by rank and position) except that MSMs are rarely given and everybody wants a BSM - wars end after all and it's a super thing to put on your resume. Our brigade's policy was Sergeants First Class and above were to be awarded BSMs unless an exception was made. Oh the fight over making sure those couple of young lieutenants who shouldn't have gotten one didn't - it would have been easier to get them Silver Stars than downgrade a recommendation from BSM to ARCOM. Command policy was unless ineligible everyone got an award and according to the matrix. Many of us wondered what the point of that was, especially as we already received combat patches and Iraq Campaign Medals for emitting enough brain waves to board a plane and do our jobs for a year. Why did we need another medal for the exact same thing? The best answer I had was: the commander ordered it.

Frankly, our Army gives out too many awards and too many of these are for simply doing your job. Some awards mean a lot to the people who received them - and you should be proud if you think you deserved it. On the whole - and here's really the crux of the matter - commanders give out the awards they do in the way they do because they want to do right by their soldiers. You don't want to be that major without a BSM going into a lieutenant colonel promotion board and your commander doesn't want to be the guy that ruins your career over a bit of colored ribbon. It's a broken system that awards mediocrity, but those awards mean a lot to the people who get them. And for those that don't deserve them, they know it and it doesn't mean anything to them. For that reason I'm not sure getting rid of all non-combat/heroism awards is the way to go (in spite of what I said on Twitter the other night). I'm proud of some of my medals, including non-combat, and not of others. Medals may cause many an argument, but why deprive commanders of their ability to recognize their soldiers because some admin or supply clerk got a Bronze Star? Life's unfair and that's okay - awards sausage-making has always been ugly. It's not like Brits a hundred years ago weren't bitching around the campfire about that dick from the next company over who got the VC because his uncle was in the cabinet. Or Romans on Hadrian's Wall having the exact same conversation (only about whatever awards they got back then). Soldiers bitch about medals. They always have and they always will and that's because it's important to them.

The doctrinal novelty of "Prevent, Shape, Win"

Or not.

Here's an excerpt from the 1993 revision of FM 100-5, Operations (which was the Army's capstone doctrinal manual until it was re-numbered as FM 3-0), under the heading "The Role of Doctrine":

Doctrine is the statement of how America's Army, as part of a joint team, intends to conduct war and operations other than war. It is the condensed expression of the Army's fundamental approach to fighting, influencing events in operations other than war, and deterring actions detrimental to national interests.

Sounds an awful lot like WIN, SHAPE, and PREVENT, huh?

P.S. Three principal roles, folks, not principle. Geez.

The real threat of hybrid conflict

Talk to ten different military analysts about the meaning of the term "hybrid war," and you'll probably get 20 different answers. Some folks like to talk about hybrid threats, others about hybrid warfare; some talk up hybrid adversaries, and still others worry about hybrid conflict. Usually what they're getting at falls into the grey area between irregular warfare conducted by poorly-armed non-state militants and the purportedly more traditional, "conventional" conflict waged by high-tech, capital-intensive state militaries. In the hybrid future, we're told, irregular adversaries will employ high-tech weapons while sophisticated state enemies are likely to adopt guerilla-style tactics—avoiding American strengths while maximizing their own.

Nearly all wars are a strategic hybrid: a mix of violent action, diplomacy, and messaging, combining destruction, coercion, and persuasion. The modern hybrid war construct implies that future conflict will take on a more tactically hybrid character: that states will employ guerilla tactics in concert with heavy weapons, or that sub-state groups will use sophisticated weapons hand-in-hand with terrorism and insurgency.

You see, as Conrad Crane has said before (and as I love to repeat), there are only two kinds of war: asymmetric and stupid. Capable adversaries will always seek to capitalize on their own strengths and focus on our weaknesses. The hybrid concept simply tells us that violent actors will seek to diversify their capabilities and become less predictable by employing weapons and tactics more frequently associated with different parts of the sophistication and organization spectrum.

Big deal, right? If a weapon system or tactical method is proven to be effective, shouldn't we expect that our adversaries will make it a part of what they do? Frank Hoffman says hybrid war is defined by a "blend of the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular war," which I'm not sure tells us all that much of anything about how it differs from the sort of war we already know. If those capable of state-like lethality had access to a sustaining base of manpower imbued with the "fanatical and protracted fervor" of violent extremists, why haven't they blended the two before now?

Hoffman does put his finger on the characteristic that seems important to the whole range of hybrid warfare disciples, and that's increased lethality. But dramatically increased battlefield lethality has been a challenge for miltary planners and theorists for a century and a half, one that has been addressed pretty well by those militaries with economic and intellectual capacity to adapt. For our adversaries to combine weapons lethality with "fanatical and protracted fervor" doesn't pose nearly so significant a military challenge as does the combination of lethality with effective force employment.

The big problem with the modern hybrid war concept is that it's based both on a misunderstanding of military effectiveness – one that fails to acknowledge that we do, in fact, know with relative certainty what works on the battlefield (Stephen Biddle calls it "the modern system of force employment," and has specified its component parts pretty elaborately in a 2004 book called Military Power) – and on a blurring of the real distinction between success in battle and success in war.

Still, not every organized violent actor fights the same way, and there are a variety of reasons for that. But if you want to kill the enemy, destroy formations, and seize and hold ground, you do your best to employ your forces in line with the dictates of the modern system. That is, if you want to fight, you do the things you have to do to get good at fighting—you learn to shoot, move, and communicate in dispersed formations, operating with a combined-arms team that seeks maximum cover and concealment to blunt enemy firepower, and you procure the weapons and equipment that facilitate those skills.

Some of those that have learned the modern system are still not capable of producing favorable war outcomes, owing to strategic failures or other circumstantial limitations. And other entities do achieve political success even when they simply cannot do the things that are neccessary to operate effectively on the modern battlefield, whether for internal political, cultural, or economic reasons. That's because they wage war in a strategic fashion (asymmetric, even!)—by minimizing the importance of fighting to the accomplishment of their goals.

Futurists hawking hybrid concepts that focus on tactical or technological hybridity often seem to overlook this basic point: tactical effectiveness is really important, and almost every violent actor is going to do his best to achieve it when the political, cultural, doctrinal, or financial barriers are surmountable. But tactical effectiveness isn't everything, and it's often extremely difficult and extremely expensive to achieve and sustain. All the "hybrid warfare" idea tells us is that in the future, the range of potential adversaries is not so clearly dichotomous when we look at buying power, human capital, and tactical and strategic imagination as it may have been before. Sometimes guerillas will want to fight, because they've gotten better at it. And sometimes armies will want to talk, because they think it's gotten too expensive to fight.

We needed a new term for that?

I bring all of this up in relation to an article that ran on AOL Defense last week, headlined "How to Fight Hybrid Threats: Tanks, Airstrikes, and Training." The piece could just as easily have been called "How to Be Good at Battle: Shoot, Move, and Communicate." I don't mean to be too dismissive, though, because it's a useful reminder to the general audience of the point I made above: we know certain things about how to fight effectively, and our recent involvement in the sort of conflicts where fighting power has thus far failed to translate well into "victory" ought not make us forget that.

The piece is built around an interview with Dr. David Johnson, a RAND scholar and retired Army officer who published a book last year about the lessons of the Israel's recent wars. I'm sure some of you will have read (or at least skimmed) Hard Fighting: Israel in Lebanon and Gaza when it first appeared; if not, it's available for free (pdf) on RAND's website, and the AOL Defense interview does a good job of getting at some of the major conclusions.

The driver of the hybrid threat, for Johnson, is the spread of long-range weapons: anti-tank guided missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons (called "man-portable air defense systems," or MANPADS), even relatively unsophisticated long-range rockets like those used by Hezbollah in 2006. When Israeli airstrikes alone couldn't find and destroy the well-hidden rocket launchers, Israel sent in ground troops, only to be bloodied by unexpectedly fierce resistance.

Here we see the bankruptcy of the hybrid idea as a tactical construct laid bare: what's just been described as "the driver of the hybrid threat" is in fact the driver of nearly all tactical adaptation over the last century or so: the problem of the offensive in the face of overwhelming firepower—increasing weapons range and rate of fire, the deepening of the battlefield, and the consequent limitations on tactical and operational maneuver.

So why is "the hybrid threat" any different to the basic military problem we've been trying to solve for all this time? Johnson contends that a shift in Western states' priorities from inter-state war to counter-guerrilla operations has pushed them to forget about that basic problem: instead of worrying about the perfection of protected maneuver in order to close with and destroy a lethal enemy, Israel and the U.S. have focused narrowly on the subsidiary issue of how to identify and target the enemy.

So how can the US prepare for hybrid threats? In part by going back to the future, said Johnson, whose books include a history of how the US learned to use tanks and airpower in World War II. "It is a problem that can't be solved by a single service," he said. The Air Force and Army today work together more closely than ever before in providing air support to ground troops in Afghanistan, but air-ground cooperation has gotten good in past conflicts as well, only to break down post-war when bureaucratic and budgetary battles between the services start to matter more. Hybrid threats will impose serious limits on helicopter operations – as the Soviets found out in Afghanistan after the CIA provided the mujahideen with Stinger missiles – so support from higher, faster, and harder-to-hit fixed-wing aircraft will be essential. Conversely, the Air Force will need the ground troops to root out hybrid enemies from their hiding places, he argued, just as the Israeli Air Force proved unable to spot Hezbollah's rocket launchers from overhead. "Ground maneuver is the only thing that will make him visible because he's hiding from everything overhead," said Johnson.

The challenge of so-called hybrid war is that it's reminded us of the need to consider these two questions together: firepower and maneuver, attack and defense, target identification and force protection. The excerpt above is like a billboard for Biddle's modern system (miraculously, Johnson doesn't cite Military Power in his recent study, though he does take lessons from a recent monograph Biddle co-authored about the Lebanon war): artillery and air power are used in close combination with ground forces to pin down the enemy, force him to keep his head down and allow friendly ground forces to maneuver on his position. But how to separate him from the population, to force him to come out and fight? Well-trained infantry must be capable of meeting the enemy in his sanctuaries – whether forests or mountains or urban areas – to identify, isolate, and fix him for destruction. These are the fundamentals of combined-arms land warfare, as useful for Americans in 2018 as for Germans in 1918.

But this is all somewhat peripheral to the real cause for concern with hybrid war: it exacerbates the expectation–outcome gap so often responsible for puncturing our will to fight. The real problem with so-called hybrid adversaries isn't that they're so much more dangerous than the range of threats we've prepared for—it's that they're so much more dangerous than we expect that they should be, because they're not states. We don't expect Hizballah or the Taliban to be able to deepen the battlefield with anti-access technologies, the sort of weapons that allow them to target exposed forces even when they're not on patrol. We don't expect guerilla fighters to take on Western infantry and armor on the conventional battlefield. When it comes down to it, we frankly don't expect sub-state groups to be able to kill Americans in what we've always considered to be the sort of straight-up battlefield fight in which U.S. arms are dominant; this explains the widespread freak-out in response to Wanat, where American soldiers were killed and positions overrun by Taliban infantry using infiltration tactics and small arms.

I recently mentioned Patricia Sullivan's "War Aims and War Outcomes: Why Powerful States Lose Limited Wars," a paper that I think can help us to understand the true political danger of the hybrid threat. Sullivan constructs a model for war outcomes in asymmetric conflict in which

strong states select themselves into armed conflicts only when their pre-war estimate of the cost of attaining their political objectives through the use of force falls below the threshold of their tolerance for costs. The more the actual costs of victory exceed a state's prewar expectations, the greater the risk that it will be pushed beyond its cost-tolerance threshold and forced to unilaterally withdraw its forces before it attains its war aims. (497)

She goes on to make a compelling case about the difference between wars of coercion and wars of destruction, but that's less germane to our point here. What I'm getting at is this: because we don't expect irregular adversaries to fight in conventional ways and with conventional weapons, we're not prepared for the sort of casualties that are normally associated even with wildly successful conventional ground combat. (This expectation is exaggerated yet further by the experiences of Desert Storm and OIF I, when U.S. forces inflicted historically unprecedented casualty ratios on conventional enemies due to a remarkable confluence of American technological edge, extraordinarily poor Iraqi force employment, and good fortune. Our recent opponents have been irregulars who mostly lack the capacity to engage our forces using the modern system and regulars who proved unwilling or incapable of doing so.) In short, we have forgotten that land warfare has significant costs in men and materiel, even when waged successfully.

This is the real threat of hybrid conflict: that it reminds us of how bloody war is and has always been; that it delivers that reminder during a strategically inconsequential war; and that the lessons we learn about cost tolerance during that strategically inconsequential war shape our expectations for the future in perverse ways and leave us unwilling to sustain the necessary costs when the next Big One comes along.

Strike 1: more on ends and ways in limited wars

I wrote a post (Ends as wasting assets) and it appears to have been a swing and a miss. Not only did Gulliver not understand it, I've had some other feedback along the same lines. Which leads me to believe I really missed something. Please do not consider this a comprehensive explanation of my previous post - that will come later this week when my paid work is caught up - but I did want to hit a two things from Gulliver's post.

First, it seems that Gully's primary confusion with my post is my linking process-driven operations (such as in Afghanistan) with policy-makers who care more about (as Gulliver said) "doing right-looking things than right-ending things, because campaign plans and operational concepts aren't the purview of those politicians."  I don't doubt that he's confused. This was the biggest logical leap of my post. One of those leaps that seemed clear in my head, but that particular intra-cranial clarity was a singularity.  I think my point of view posits that policy-makers don't "care more" about right-looking than right-ending things. The causality in this situation stems from the fact that for the political and policy-making class (which includes high-level decision-makers in U.S. Government agencies who are not General or Flag Officers, including within the Department of Defense, and sometimes including these GOFOs) looking and ending are the same thing in their process-oriented world view. It isn't that they don't care how things end, it's that they believe that if they do the right process it will end correctly. This is a nuanced, yet important, distinction from what Gulliver stated. And this, I believe, is a fundamental aspect of process-driven policies - ends are subservient to the process. It gets a bit tedious to think about this way, but process-driven is ways-driven, giving primacy to one branch of the strategic calculus over the other. Including ends, which while not necessarily primary at least helps decides ways and means.

The second point I'll address now is with regard to the CvC quote I used that surprised Gulliver. I'll avoid his dependence upon the "somewhat more fluent Paret/Howard version" which although true is somewhat blasphemous for CvC constructionists such as myself who prefer the Graham to better understand what strategy wonks of yore had worked with. But before we get into a supranerdy debate on translations of classic texts, let's get on with it. Gulliver is right that the quote I used was meant to set the conditions by which absolute war can come to fruition. CvC does note that the nature of war re-shapes the character of of the political contest. Gulliver points out that "in limited war, our actions are conceived as violent but discrete and purposive acts of policy, while as war moves toward its absolute form our actions are increasingly divorced from discrete political objectives short of the destruction of our enemy."

But this is the whole point of my last post. Limited war does not necessarily attempt to achieve discrete and purposive acts of policy, although that is the ideal. In the wake of the industrial wars of the 20th Century, those events that would push any war, intended as limited but that does not swiftly achieve its purposive objectives, towards its absolute form no longer push in that direction for Western nations.  Modern liberal thought (in the global sense of the rights of the individual above the state, not American domestic political thought) negates the ability of Western nations to wage absolute war because of its human toll. So what happens when decision points occur that in the past would have led to absolute forms of war when limited war fails to achieve its limited ends in a limited time frame?

My postulate is that process has usurped absolute war in such circumstances. Policy and politics can no longer decide to eradicate peoples or their armies in entirety in limited wars (destroyed armies are a bitch to rebuild), so when limited ends can't be met something must replace the nature of escalation to absolutism. I believe this is process - with the assumption that modern liberal thought dictates that many in the policy world would believe that process trumps violence in achieving ends. If it didn't, if we didn't appeal to the rational minds of individuals, the probability to return to industrial warfare would increase. The violence of which would not be proportional to the limited ends of interests, vice security.

So yes, my exegesis of Clausewitz veers somewhat from what he intended (and yes, that counters my constructionist critique of Gulliver's use of the Paret/Howard translation - so shut up and I don't want to hear it because it was a joke), but I think that logically it makes sense given the improbability of absolute war - especially for conflicts begun for limited ends.

I hope this clarifies my previous post - at least somewhat. Again, I hope to tackle the confusion more in depth later this week. Until then, this will have to do. But isn't Clausewitz fun???

Let's just be up front with each other: this is a really long rant about strategy

PRE-CLAIMER: Seriously, just don't even try. tl;dr

I've been thinking quite a lot about Jason's post from Monday night, though I feel reasonably confident that I still don't understand it completely. I've decided to carry the conversation forward with a post of my own rather than simply taking it up the subject in the comment thread, both because I'm hoping (in vain?) it will spur me to return to posting and because it gives me the opportunity to get into a couple of loosely-related ideas I've been kicking around for some time now.

Having read through Jason's post three or four times, I'm still trying to put my finger on just what exactly the problem is that he describes. I take it that he basically agrees with Mark Safranski, whose diagnosis seems reasonably straightforward to me. Here's how I read it: in a democratic society, decision-makers will often select policy options that are reflective of an approval-seeking need to do something—to signal a certain position or preference to a domestic audience rather than to accomplish a considered aim and effect a new reality. This can lead to suboptimal outcomes for the simple reason that the decision-maker's calculus is largely indifferent to outcomes: his incentive structure rewards superficially correct action more than it does substantively beneficial results.

If this isn't what Mark meant to say, then I'll stand corrected. But if it is, then I agree with him.

But here's the part where I get confused: even if civilian policymakers are prone to this sort of error (and I agree that they are), and even if, as Jason writes, "our strategy in Afghanistan is guided by process" (and I agree that it is)... I still don't understand how or why those two conditions should be causally related. Let me put it this way: the fact that our campaign planning in Afghanistan is process-focused seems to me largely disconnected from the fact that our politicians care more about doing right-looking things than right-ending things, because campaign plans and operational concepts aren't the purview of those politicians.

I'm willing to concede that the line between civilian and military reponsibilities in strategy formation and the associated operational planning is a blurry and unstable one, and that what I've laid out as the normative standard isn't always the way things play out in reality. You certainly shouldn't take anything I've written above as an exculpatory argument for our elected officials. But more on this a bit later.

As for our man Carl: Jason's choice of Clausewitz quote is simultaneously interesting and surprising to me. Committed students of the sage will recognize it from perhaps the most remarked-upon pages of On War: Book Eight, Chapter 6B. (If it were an episode of "Friends," they'd call it The One With the Politics By Other Means.) The language Jason excerpted is from the 19th-century Graham translation; just for the purpose of clarity, let's look at the somewhat more fluent Paret/Howard version:

In making use of war, policy evades all rigorous conclusions proceeding from the nature of war, bothers little about ultimate possibilities, and concerns itself only with immediate probabilities. Although this introduces a high degree of uncertainty into the whole business, turning it into a kind of game, each government is confident that it can outdo its opponent in skill and acumen. (606)

This is a pretty difficult passage (especially as I present it here, mostly out of context) but I take it to mean that governments are little interested in ruminations on war's escalatory momentum in the direction of its absolute form, but rather in how violence may be used to achieve concrete political goals. But the paradoxical reality is that addition of violence to politics – violence that is fueled in part by hatred and enmity, violence that is fundamental to war's nature and sets it off as distinct from all other human activity – actually re-shapes the character of the political contest. War's essential violence pressures the political contest to take on the character of a duel or a sporting event; without the harness of policy, war risks becoming a self-contained competition conducted according to its own rules, one where victory is not the mere accomplishment of political objectives but rather a revision of the relationship between the two competitors such that the victor is free to enact his preferences.

The "high degree of uncertainty" that Clausewitz concedes is introduced "into the whole business" is produced by divergence between the things we do in war and the things they are meant to achieve. In limited war, our actions are conceived as violent but discrete and purposive acts of policy, while as war moves toward its absolute form our actions are increasingly divorced from discrete political objectives short of the destruction of our enemy. To put it simply, shit gets crazy in war.

But "policy converts the overwhelmingly destructive element of war into a mere instrument," Clausewitz continues.

It changes the terrible battle-sword that a man needs both hands and his entire strength to wield, and with which he strikes home once and no more, into a light, handy rapier—sometimes just a foil for the exchange of thrusts, feints and parries. (606)

Of course, for the military instrument to be used effectively, its employment must be strategic—that is to say, it must be reasoned.

In the Kings of War post that Jason referenced, Kenneth Payne talks about what behavioral economists and psychologists call "choice-supportive bias"—our tendency to feel a preference more strongly after we've made a choice in its favor than we did when considering the whole range of options. (Payne incorrectly labels this as the "endowment effect," which describes a different cognitive bias – our tendency to value more highly those things that we already possess and stand to lose than those things we might gain – that's closely related to loss-aversion, but that small error is not germane to his point.)

Preferences are not revealed by choices, so much as created by them. That's particularly true if the choice we make is emotionally engaging, as war is—passionately so, ofttimes.

I feel a bit like a broken record, but Clausewitz talked about this, too: war's violent nature and appeal to primal hatred and enmity give it a tendency to escalate toward the absolute, to break free of its harness to policy, to unbalance "the remarkable trinity" that ensures it is purposive and endows it with meaning.

What I take from Payne's brief post is that modern discoveries in behavioral psychology and neuroscience are highlighting just exactly how difficult it is for individuals to behave "rationally," which has a complicating effect on strategy—the method we use to plan and undertake purposive action to achieve our goals. I very much agree with this, but I suppose it's worth including a reminder that while the science may be new, the behaviors that it observes and seeks to explain are not. Strategy has always been complicated by our flawed rationality; it's only now that we're beginning to achieve a more granular understanding of the biases impacting it than the somewhat more homespun generalizations Clausewitz offered on the subject.

That said, I very much disagree with what seems to be Payne's prescription: that we should give up on efforts at "balancing ends ways and means, or even discerning them," and instead conceive of strategy as a sort of elevated form of reactive planning.

Instead it's perhaps better to think about strategy in its less 'grand strategic' sense—and instead to conceptualise it as the organisation of power in the moment, in response to contingencies. Stop trying to anticipate the future so much, because, as Philip Tetlock has shown, we are rather bad at it.

Stipulated! But this form of "strategy" is an exercise in throwing the baby out with the bathwater, conceding initiative to our enemies and foregoing even the possibility of imposing our own preferences on the environment. Strategic thinking will not always be effective, even when the inputs are perceived correctly. But it beats the alternative, doesn't it? And how does Payne's model escape the very same pitfalls of bounded rationality? Even if we "conceptualise [strategy] as the organisation of power in the moment, in response to contingencies," are we not dogged by the same cognitive biases and flawed rationality that impinge on our ability to plan over the longer term?

The problem of modern strategy isn't that we make so many miscalculations—that's to be expected, and it's the very reason that strategy formation and adaptive planning are meant to be iterative processes. The main issue is that the so-called "strategy bridge" is still absent: we are failing to adequately specify – even to ourselves! – how successful operations will create the political effects we seek. When we pretend to do so, we speak in buzzwords, cliches, and generalities.

This is a failing on both sides of the political-military divide. Our elected leaders are responsible for ensuring that we undertake wars that have meaning—wars that can plausibly achieve the objectives set out in policy. And our uniformed leaders must ensure that those meaningful wars are executed sensibly, in a manner that maps military action to intended effect—whether that's the wholesale destruction of the enemy, conquering and holding a sliver of territory, deterring an adversarial regime, or whatever. I feel like I say this a lot, but this is the essence of strategy: developing a theory of victory, a reasonable concept of how the actions you take with the resources at your disposal can combine to achieve the objectives you seek.

The "strategy bridge" is the causal, conceptual link between the accomplishment of military objectives and the creation of political effects, something that is all too often missing in today's strategic thought. We fill that chasm only with bromides, wishful thinking, and specious "plans," then wonder why no one can walk across.

I suppose this is where I come to my issue with Jason's post, which I understand to be saying that the main problem with our strategy in Afghanistan is a failure to recognize that we've met our initial objectives.

We're still fighting a war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan even though they're no longer there because the policy has not adapted. So the military has experimented with various ways (as the means have been dominated by policy-makers) to achieve ends that have effectively been achieved. But we can't say that we've won because there is still so much violence in Afghanistan, so we toil longer and talk about 'winning'—and yet the original policy's ends still have not changed.

The policy objective in Afghanistan is, and presumably always has been, the one the president identified at the completion of the Af-Pak strategy review in March of 2009: "to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future." He further articulated the component parts of that overall objective several months later in the West Point speech announcing the escalation:

To meet that goal, we will pursue the following objectives within Afghanistan. We must deny al Qaeda a safe-haven. We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's Security Forces and government, so that they can take the lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future.

Looking at those intermediate objectives and at the overall policy goal, isn't it obvious that the crippling and fundamental issue has nothing to do with a failure to revise ends in line with progress and change in conditions and everything to do with the government's determination to pursue political aims that were almost certainly unachievable and inaccessible to military action?

The problem in Afghanistan isn't strategy—it's policy. (The more I think about it, the more Jason seems to agree.)

Even if U.S. military operations over, say, a five-year period actually did achieve what the president hoped to – if al-Qaeda were effectively denied a safe haven in Afghanistan for so long as U.S. forces actively operated there; if the Taliban were held off or even decisively defeated over that time period; and if the GIRoA and ANSF were made capable and effective in the maintenance of the country's own internal security – there simply wasn't any plausible explanation presented for how the creation of those conditions would conclusively produce the end states we desired: al-Qaeda's disruption, dismantling, and defeat in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the prevention of its return to either country in the future.

The only conceivable justification for our continued refusal to do this is that winning just isn't all that important to us. And so we've come full-circle back to what Mark Safranski wrote: "the net result becomes burning money and soldiers' lives to garner nothing but more time in which to avoid making a final decision, hoping to be rescued by chance." As long as we're doing something, maybe something good will happen. The same logic animates a great deal of the anti-authoritarian interventionist sentiment we've seen in recent months, but that's a whole separate conversation.

I read a paper recently with the extremely lede-burying title, "The Myth of Military Myopia: Democracy, Small Wars, and Vietnam," by Jonathan Caverley. The thesis can be boiled down to this: those who argue that the military lost Vietnam through the application of flawed doctrine generally fail to recognize that the adoption of militarily sub-optimal courses of action was in fact a result of a rational policy determination by the country's political leadership.

Caverley oversimplifies quite a bit in his assumptions about optimal strategy, but the basic idea is that because the average voter cared far less about the financial cost of war than about the human cost (including not only casualties, but the possible expansion of the draft, etc.), politicians were incentivized to "substitute capital for labor"; i.e. to fight a technology-intensive style of war that was sensitive to the electorate's preference for limiting human costs, even while it was more expensive and less militarily effective. In short, politicians cared less about losing the war than they did about doing what the average voter seemed to want. (Which is, of corse, sort of what democracy is about.) I have some significant problems with the paper and am not sure the conclusions are all that sturdy, but it's an interesting hypothesis.

It's even more interesting if you read it in tandem with Patricia Sullivan's "War Aims and War Outcomes: Why Powerful States Lose Limited Wars," which is one of the most thought-provoking papers I've read in a really, really long time. Sullivan argues that the primary determinant of success for powerful states in small wars is the degree to which prewar expectations about the cost of victory match with reality: a state is most likely to pack up and quit when a war proves more difficult than expected. This often happens with limited wars because of the difficulty of accurately assessing the probability of victory (and associated casualties, duration, etc.) when accomplishment of war aims depends on concessions or lack of resolve on the part of the enemy rather than his wholesale defeat—in short, it's easier to predict how difficult it will be to destroy an army and conquer a state than to accurately project how many sorties are required to compel the enemy to make different political choices. I'm not doing the paper justice, and you ought to read it yourself.

What the hell does any of this have to do with what we were talking about earlier?, you're wondering. Surely I've just gone off on some stream-of-consciousness rant, spilling all the lost blog posts of the last two months into one text box. Well, there's a little bit of that. But try this one on for size: what Sullivan's and Caverley's papers both show is that powerful states often engage in wars that are not particularly important either to the government or to the electorate, and that they often wage them ineffectively and quit early as a result. In other words, states quite literally waste lives, money, and materiel on impulsive trifles, undertakings designed to send a message or show hardness or keep a campaign promise or give the appearance of doing the right thing.

And all of these things are perfectly acceptable uses of military force, perfectly acceptable instrumentalizations of policy... if you can show how the means you've chosen have even the faintest hope of accomplishing those political ends! I'm not at all suggesting that violence should only be used to conquer territory, or to destroy the enemy—not at all. What I am suggesting is that we cease to use military force in an unconsidered fashion. This isn't even an argument for choosing the right wars, but for figuring out whether the things we can do in war have any hope of creating meaning from war. If not, then we really are wasting lives—and those of us who fancy ourselves strategists are wasting our own. It's our job to build the damned bridge.

P.S. I am completely in love with the Kelly-Brennan monograph (pdf) MK mentioned in his comment on Jason's post—I have been since I first read it. I had hoped to discuss it here, but let's be serious: you can't take any more of this right now.

Ends as wasting assets: time's negative effect on policy

One of the truly enjoyable aspects of blogging, at least in the form and community which we do here at Ink Spots, is the interaction this format enables with other bloggers. I've often found that our fellow journeymen can say what I'm trying to better or they provide a different perspective I haven't thought of. To wit, Mark Safranski hand his excellent two-part series on strategy and perspective (here and here) that were riffs on my post of the same subject. You should read them both, but I'm going to focus in on the second.

In his second post, Mark discusses perception and that in Afghanistan the people aren't merely audiences, but participants in the conflict. Further, that civilian leaders are more familiar with processes rather than results, the former of which which is less objective-driven than the latter. [One could argue against this, but any student of civilian-agency programmatic planning versus military planning would be able to demonstrate it rather easily.] Mark continues that "[t]his perspective, while perhaps a career advantage for a politician, is over the long haul ruinous for a country [...] as the net result becomes burning money and soldier's lives to garner nothing but more time in which to avoid making a final decision, hoping to be rescued by chance." If I had to describe our strategic meandering in Afghanistan (and in many other places), this would sum up my opinion rather well.

I believe that it is safe to assume that our strategy in Afghanistan is guided by process, or in strategic parlance: ways. Our publicly released metrics of success focus on killing fewer civilians, creating more Afghan Army soldiers or policemen, aid money spent, kids going to school, etc. But these are not ends - they are means to ends, which I've already averred that we haven't effectively stated for our mission in Afghanistan. I would like to think that our desired ends made sense at some point, but they sure don't now.

Kenneth Payne at Kings of War wrote a post last week discussing strategy and time, a topic that Mark continued on to in the quoted post above. Payne makes the concise and insightful statement:

Strategy, I contend, is inherently about making judgments in time. We seek to use violence instrumentally to reach some desired future state. And we are guided by the past when we do. Strategy is temporal.

Bang on Kenneth. He goes on to observe that "the future we imagine we want might not actually be so pressing when we actually arrive there." Our desired ends down the road may not matter much to us once we get to the end of said road. Of course, they matter not a whit long before that.

One of the many challenges in developing strategy is in the interaction of policy and military plans. As the Grand Poobah of War himself said, "Policy in making use of War avoids all those rigorous conclusions which proceed from its nature; it troubles itself little about final possibilities, confining its attention to immediate probabilities." Policy concerns itself with the here and now and what the instrument of war can attain for it in the near term. Beyond that we get into the conundrum that Payne lays out for us. Further, the onset of a policy which employs war as a tool establishes desired ends according to the probabilities of the day, from which the military derives its plans. And then a divergence encroaches: process by its nature maintains the policy's original ends (possibly with some minor adjustments) while military operations must adapt to the enemy and the realities which it faces on the field. As subservient to the policy, the military thus applies ways and means, with input or allocation from the political class, to ends it cannot, should not, or cares not to attain if the mission continues for such a duration that the original ends become obsolete.

In my mind, this is part of where our strategy in Afghanistan has gone off the rails. We're still fighting a war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan even though they're no longer there because the policy has not adapted. So the military has experimented with various ways (as the means have been dominated by policy-makers) to achieve ends that have effectively been achieved. But we can't say that we've won because there is still so much violence in Afghanistan, so we toil longer and talk about "winning" - and yet the original policy's ends still have not changed. Ends do decrease in their value as time goes on, which requires policy and process to adapt and redefine ends, which goes against the very nature of policy and process.

The drawdown that we'll see over the next few years will be the culmination of that original process-based policy. For 10 years the military has tried to adapt its ways and we've all witnessed the results - some good and a lot bad. This friction at the intersection of policy and military planning is not new and will not go away because this friction between the two are due to the inherent nature of each. And that friction increases as the mission continues over time. I'm not sure this is a lesson the need to change either policy or military planning or to ensure that we do not engage in long-term operations. But it's a problem that we need to recognize as we consider other policies.

Stop loss filing deadline extended again

The Department of Defense has extended the deadline for eligible veterans to apply for Retroactive Stop Loss Special Pay (or RSLSP in DoD parlance which absolutely cannot help itself from making any and every term into an acronym - and yes, DoD parlance is a being unto itself, but I digress) until October 21, 2012. The special pay was authorized in the 2009 War Supplemental Appropriations Act to pay stop-lossed soldiers $500 for every month they were stop-lossed. But in spite of continuous extension for veterans to file for the special pay, DoD has paid out only a fraction of the approximately 145,000 eligible veterans have applied. As Juliet Beyler, acting director of Officer and Enlisted Personnel Management, said in the press release: "Even with extensive outreach efforts, and tremendous support from the President, Congress, the VA, veteran and military service organizations, and friends and family around the world, some qualified individuals have not yet applied." If you think you're eligible for it - apply now. If you know someone you think might be eligible for it, tell them to go apply now. For once, DoD is extending a deadline for the right reason. Take advantage of it - you've earned it.

Robert Bales is not the victim

This past weekend, DoD released the identify of the NCO accused of murdering 16 Afghan civilians last weekend. SSG Robert Bales, 38, assigned to 2d Battalion, 3d Infantry Regiment, 3d Stryker BCT, 2d Infantry Division of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington was flown to Fort Leavenworth within the past couple of days.

Which left major newspaper outlets tripping over each other to explain why it was everyone's fault except SSG Bales' (again, assuming he committed the murders based on his apparent confession) that 16 Afghan men, women, and children ended up dead. For example:

• "Afghan rampage suspect Robert Bales was a soldier strained by deployments" - Washington Post
• "At Home, Asking How 'Our Bobby' Became War Crime Suspect" - NY Times
• "Bales Faced Losing Houses as He Fought 6,700 Miles Away" - Bloomberg

I'm not going to pick on the NY Times article, although it was not free of the same sort of innuendo we're about to pick apart. It just was merely the least offensive of the three. So let's take a look at Robert Bales, victim of society, through the lens of the Washington Post and Bloomberg news.

1. "Years of overseas duty on a sergeant's salary had squeezed the family's resources to the breaking point" via the WaPo. Here you have an "he snapped because of financial troubles because he didn't get paid much as a sergeant" - which begins to take the onus of these crimes off of Bales' shoulders and places them on the American people for screwing down it's military.

Let's take a closer look at this. An E-6 Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army with over 10 years of service, living in the Joint Base Lewis-McChord area would receive per month: $3243 in base pay, $1650 in housing allowance (this is tax-free), and $348 in subsistence allowance (also tax-free). At $5241 per month, SSG Bales had a yearly income of roughly $62,890. The median income for the Tacoma, Washington area in 2010 was $48,673. That's right, SSG Bales made about $14,219 more than the median income for his area because he was a soldier. In fact, his deployments would have netted him more than $750 more per month with Family Separation Allowance, Imminent Danger Pay, and in not paying Federal income tax on his base pay. Deploying is financially good for soldiers, not disadvantageous. (For more on all of this, see Jimmy Sky's excellent post on military pay and benefits.)

This is a bit in the weeds, but if you're going to say that he was near a breaking point because of his pay you need to back it up. But you can't because it's a wrong statement. I don't doubt that Bales had financial problems, but if he did his financial troubles were because he made bad or unlucky choices that had nothing to do with the Army. So no, dear Washington Post, it wasn't his meager salary due to recurring deployments that caused him to do what he (allegedly) did - your statement is factually incorrect.

2. Not getting promoted caused him stress. All three stories mention Bales' not making Sergeant First Class on the 2011 promotion list and that they were all disappointed. I'm sure it sucks not making a promotion list, but you have to be realistic about these things. All three articles mention legal problems for Bales, including arrests or charges for DUI and hit-and-run (there seems to be some info missing about convictions, etc, so it's not clear what the final disposition of these cases were, but suffice to say something happened). Staff Sergeants do get promoted with that sort of baggage, but not often. And it's getting harder and harder as personnel cuts loom. Even a passing mention of it on any of these or related issues were on an NCOER, the odds are a promotion board would not promote him. So while that may be stressful for him and his family, it was not a promotion he was owed or was due to him. Promotions are earned and blemishes on record like those suggested by these stories prevent promotions. While an interesting data point in the "things that weighed on SSG Bales", chalk up not getting promoted caveated by "may have prevented this through his own actions."

3. Repeated deployments, PTSD, TBI, etc. This is the touchiest of all the topics covered by these three stories and generally speaking they did an okay job. All acknowledge that we don't know how much these three factors interact and what exactly they cause people to do. There are some undercurrents however that the Army failed to screen Bales out of his latest deployment. First and foremost, the Army generally does a poor job of screening for, diagnosing, and treating TBI and PTSD. If the current screening hasn't changed too much, it relies extensively on self reporting. So if Bales did want to redeploy, as friends of his say he expressed that he wanted to get back into the fight, then passing the screening is as easy as pie. The Army has to screen a lot people and there just isn't a cost-effective and effective test to manage this problem. Period. Not excusing the Army for this, but there isn't a viable solution as yet. If Bales wanted to deploy, no current screening mechanisms were going to stop him. But for a bigger picture, here are some numbers: between 1 and 2 million servicemembers have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, well over 100,000 of them have deployed three or more times, and 300,000 to 600,000 are suffering from PTSD. So far only 1 person in that large population went out and killed 16 civilians.

4. "He and the family were told that his tours in the Middle East were over, and then literally overnight that changed." Apparently his lawyer said this and I can't believe Bloomberg didn't refute this. Even if some knucklehead said he would never deploy again, he was a healthy NCO in the U.S. Army. Guess what: you can't make - or believe - promises like that. It's not how the military works. Deployment orders suck and are super hard on families, but they are a reality of military life. Again, it wasn't as if the Army broke it's promise - it has no institutional ability to promise one healthy soldier it would never deploy him again.

This probably reads as nit-picking or sticking up for the Army, but it's not. Major news outlets are trying to find an angle and lens from which to view this guy and I get that. But all that's coming out are reasons why the Army is at fault for what happened - included some gross inaccuracies or outright lies, outlined here - and not SSG Bales. It seems there were a lot of factors that probably caused his state of mind that day - I can only guess that they include financial problems, TBI, PTSD, family stress, unhappiness with how his career was progressing - but most of those things fall on SSG Bales, not the Army. Could the Army have done some things differently? Undoubtedly - but stop blaming the Army for what this man did. Do your research, journalists, and stop making excuses for this guy. If the 16 dead were Americans, would we be doing this hand-wringing over why the Army screwed down the perpetrator? (I draw your attention to Fred Wellman's comments in that link.) Being a soldier is hard and while command has many responsibilities, commanders are not responsible for everything. Hundreds of thousands of troops have gone through what SSG Bales has gone through - or worse - and none of them shot 16 Afghan civilians.

This entire situation is sad - for the Army, for Bales and his family and his unit, and especially for the Afghans who lost loved ones. Let's keep perspective on that. And let's not take the easy way out and blame The Man for the actions of a man because it fits your narrative. That's not justice and it's irresponsible. Robert Bales is not the victim here - the victims are in Afghanistan.

Delicate strategic balancing: perception's role in formulating strategy

I, like nearly everyone, am saddened by yesterday's tragic murders in Afghanistan. The details are gruesome and as a father of young children, I react to the needless death of children viscerally. I'll hold off on any sort of analysis of this specific situation until investigation results are released. I'll also defer to others on what it portends for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and suggest must-read analysts Daveed Gartenstien-Ross and Carl Prine.

I suspect it would be helpful to use this incident and similarly bad events that recently occurred to take a look at the role of perspective and how it affects strategy from a broader perspective beyond Afghanistan. I endorse Carl and his fourth point that the deaths of 16 Afghans will not likely drive changes in domestic perspectives and subsequently will not drive changes to our strategy. Our current force generation system - an all volunteer force - allows the government to use force as a tool of policy without burdening the overwhelming majority of the nation's citizens which in turn negates the need to have the people's consent to wage and continue war. Barring a catastrophe such as Mogadishu in 1993, the bombings in Beirut in 1983, or Tet in 1968, domestic perspectives simply do not play a role in determining how the U.S. government uses force in the current era. Both the government and the citizens seem pretty content with this arrangement as it allows them to pursue whatever they wish to pursue with minimal burden.

That all said, incidents in Afghanistan these past few months have caused me to question the validity of strategies that hinge upon the perspectives of foreign audiences*. This is not to negate the fact that foreign perspectives affect nearly every intervention in some way - there has been plenty of writing on this and believe it to be true. I firmly believe that reminding soldiers of this fact was possibly the only redeeming value of the counterinsurgency manual. To say nothing of this excellent work. But strategies that hinge upon the perspectives of foreign populations are another matter altogether.

This is not to say that abusing detainees, offending the religious sensibilities of local populations, killing civilians through negligence or indifference, mutilating corpses, and willful murder are unimportant or that they should not or may not affect the execution of a strategic plan. Iraq came unglued after the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal and Iraqis had every right to be angry, causing them to rebuke U.S. efforts. And of course there were more screw-ups after this incident - the strategic knucklehead is pervasive and unpreventable after all. But in spite of all of that, the U.S. strategy there eventually met most of its goals (reasons for which include a whole bunch of luck, but good strategy leverages luck). While Afghanistan is obviously not monolithic and reactions will vary, every new incident is accompanied by analysis of how much it sets back our mission there, suggesting to me that we're nearing a cusp where winning the approval of the Afghan people will become the determining factor of our outcomes.

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), and continued 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.

*I apologize for the awkward term and I just can't find the right one that doesn't sound trite. Here it means the people living in the country in which your forces are operating.

UPDATE: See the always insightful and on point Adam Elkus on this topic.

BG Richardson, DCG 1CD: Good for the Army, good for women in the Army

As we've been talking of late about women and their role in the military, I would be remiss if I didn't mention BG Laura Richardson's nomination as the Deputy Commanding General for the 1st Cavalry Division. She is the first female general officer to be nominated as a division DCG. As I've mentioned before, aviation branch will lead the way in providing an avenue for women into the highest ranks of the Army. BG Richardson is proving that assumption correct. As her bio notes, she was a UH-60 driver and held a number of command and staff positions with aviation battalions, including command of 5th Battalion, 101st Aviation Regiment. Frankly, I thought it would take a little longer for a move like this to occur, but here we are. She has also held a number of positions in her career that portend that, while division command is unlikely (she did not command a brigade - but I may be wrong here), she will continue to rise within the Army: military aide to the Vice President, assignment to HQDA G-3/5/7, command of the garrison at Forts Myer and McNair, and Army Liaison Officer to the Senate. This is the kind of career track that GEN Petraeus would love and is the kind of background the Army will be looking for in the coming years. And I don't want to hear that this is all about her being a woman - really read her bio. I wish most of the DCGs I've met had this kind of experience.

Congratulations to BG Richardson for breaking this very important barrier in the Army and for doing so based on a track record of excellence. I wish her all the best in this new and challenging endeavor.

Police development: you're doing it wrong

I can't remember who tweeted a link to this excellent report on ANP development (speak up and be recognized!), but if you're interested in police development it is a must read. A product of the Peace Research Institute - Frankfort, the authors (Cornelius Friesendorf and Jorg Krempel) titled the work Militarized versus Civilian Policing: Problems of Reforming the Afghan National Police, looked at best practices in building a civilian police force and the German and US involvement in Afghanistan with the ANP.

The paper dives into a lot of the nitty-gritty of the ANP development program dating back to 2002 and it's worth a read. (I wish it had been translated when I wrote this paper that touched on some of these issues this past spring.) But I want to focus in on some of the conclusions and attempt to draw them into bigger thoughts beyond Afghanistan. They cite numerous issues of donors not effectively supporting the ANP development, recruiting problems, training problems, corruption problems, and so on and so forth. All important.

But what's important in this paper is that they look very closely at the intersection of police and military responsibilities and point how horribly wrong we've been delineating responsibilities between the ANA and ANP. Due to a number of factors - lack of a democratic policing tradition in the years running up to 2001, the use of military forces to train the nascent ANP, and operational needs - ISAF is building a paramilitary force not a police force. While the first of these factors can be overcome in my opinion (Kosovo provides a pretty example of making an adequate police force essentially from scratch), I think the latter two are catastrophic to police development programs if not done correctly. And we're not doing it correctly.

In brief, if a military force trains a police force, that police force is much more likely to look like a military force than a police force. Just as in Iraq, the ANP are formed into military structures (unless that's changed recently), they carry military-grade weapons (including RPGs on occasion), and they have little interest in the tedium of enforcing the law. Simply put, if you train your police with the military, you end up with police who can't police and are an under-trained and under-equipped military force. What you end up with is a force that exacerbates conflict instead of quelling it that primarily acts as a strong-arm of local factions or even national entities (such as in Iraq where the INP became the MoI's private Army). Historical studies have shown that military training of police forces nearly invariably result in this scenario and we need to stop doing it. Of course, that would require building capabilities and/or capacities in our civilian agencies such as ICITAP, OPDAT, USAID, or even INL. Something that seems unlikely given Congress's fetishization of military power over civilian power. Alas.

However, this pales in comparison to the operational necessities that drive police development away from policing and towards military operations. When conducting police development in countries embroiled in an intra-state war, priority is given to the operational needs to defeat the state's enemies, not to stemming crime. The U.S. and other donors have been building the ANP into a counterinsurgency force in their own right to "thicken the lines" as the old Iraq saw went. Community police simply wouldn't be able to defend themselves against any quasi-military insurgency. As they would be among the first targets of the insurgency, police being among the most visible realizations of a state's power, they would simply be slaughtered. This would then require precious military resources to be pulled from finding bad guys and instead guard the police. It's a lose-lose situation for any operational commander. So we've taken the middle path: forget policing and build a quasi-military police force. A force that, again, stinks at policing and stinks at military operations.

This is an offhand synopsis and analysis of the paper I linked to, but it distills to the fundamental flaws of our attempts to build a police force in Afghanistan. Because of the myriad problems underlying our efforts and our militarization of the ANP (because of the two factors discussed here), we're failing Afghanistan by not fielding an effective police force now and virtually ensuring that the ANP cannot transition into a true police force. Friesendorf and Krempel put it much more eloquently, but that's the basis of their conclusion. Nice, huh?

So what do we do about it? Our boys from Frankfurt call for reforms to the program and to ensure that those in ISAF who are assisting in driving the ANP strategy are police experts and not military officers (they don't say it, but an MP is not a policeman, so no, not even an MP should be doing this). Concur entirely. I don't know what else we can do for the ANP at this point. But the lesson we need to draw from Afghanistan and Iraq is that in conflict countries maybe we shouldn't do police development at all until violence reaches levels where they can operate as police and not as soldiers. Police development in the early stages of the war should focus on the ministries responsible and a cadre of officers who are provided with long and intensive training who don't actually do any policing until a violence threshold is met. At that point, DDR programs could help staff the police force around this framework of cadre who can then instill a proper police culture throughout the force and train their policemen to be policemen. Instead of throwing billions of dollars at sub-par police who also are sub-par counterinsurgents as well as conflict drivers, maybe we shouldn't do any of that until the environment is safe enough for an actual community police force to operate.

Unlikely, but maybe in the next war.

These aren't the ends you're looking for

When I wrote about austerity and how it will affect our definition of victory in conflict, I failed to make an important distinction related to this excellent post by Adam Elkus on R2P and the gap between policy and strategy/tactics. Contrary to how we've described our policy goals these past 10 years, I was trying to argue that our policy goals (ends) will be limited in the future and that winning (as Adam says: accomplishing your political object) can no longer be maximal statements of everything to everyone. Or even worse, interpreted in many ways to substantiate practically any military strategy imaginable. Clarity and focus should best describe our political objects in war since we seem unwilling to pay for much more than that. A change in how we perceive victory has to do with our ends, not in our ways. We are, in other words, going to take a much harder look at the first two questions of the Powell Doctrine before we intervene.

There are a few aspects of this that apply to R2P. First among these is the apparent lack of understanding of the military art and science by the policy proponents of R2P. Anne-Marie Slaughter's recent op-ed in the NY Times is a perfect case in point: she attempts to provide a military solution to end the violence that ostensibly uses minimalist objects. A "no-kill zone" sounds like a limited objective, but militarily it is not. Providing the Free Syrian Army with such materiel as "countersniper and anti-aircraft weapons" gives the impression that we'll give them a few tools and some advice and they can carry the fight. However, countersniper weapons are usually other snipers, tanks, artillery and airstrikes, according to U.S. military doctrine. These are weapons of offense, not defense. And they are weapons most effectively used by an intervening force, not a loose coalition of Syrian anti-regime forces. Also, please read Adam's discussion of stalemate and how it's not an end as well as Robert Caruso on the logistics of intervention and Spencer Ackerman on how Dr. Slaughter's plan could easily spin beyond our intended trajectory.

The point of all of this is that statements of ends cannot be "limited" if the ways and means required to affect them are not. Syria is a very good example that limited ends require ways and means that in reality create a new, maximal ends in order to achieve them. This is not to suggest that policy should be dictated by the military - such a path would be against our traditions, however often it actually happens - but policy should be informed by the military perspective to avoid a disconnect between policy and strategy. CvC himself hits on this point:

If policy is right, that is, if it succeeds in hitting the object, then it can only act with advantage on the War. If this influence of policy causes a divergence from the object, the cause is only to be looked for in a mistaken policy.

It is only when policy promises itself a wrong effect from certain military means and measures, an effect opposed to their nature, that it can exercise a prejudicial effect on War by the course it prescribes. Just as a person in a language with which he is not conversant sometimes says what he does not intend, so policy, when intending right, may often order things which do not tally with its own views.

This has happened times without end, and it shows that a certain knowledge of the nature of War is essential to the management of political intercourse.

Right on, Carl. The problem we're facing is that much of the policy world is calling for action to end the violence against civilians in Syria, yet these individuals - while brilliant in many things - have such little understanding of the mechanisms of war that they are unwittingly calling for things which do not tally with their own views. This is a difficult topic as their calls for action come from an honest place: their own humanity. But a full understanding of the military implications of their policies may require more killing that already exists and will very likely naturally expand their intended ends. This also puts those who better understand the required military strategy in the position of allowing the continued killing of civilians by opposing action. Do not confuse this with inhumanity. It (generally) comes from the calculus that intervening (i.e., waging war) will create a great humanitarian calamity and that the risks/benefits equation for the United States doesn't add up to force change to the status quo.

The situation in Syria is tragic, but there is no limited-ends policy to abate it. The military strategy required to affect limited ends create new, broader ends that are likely unpalatable to a nation that has been at war for 10 consecutive years.

The Rubicon Bridgehead: the utility of confidence and an aside on aesthetics

This morning Diana Wueger highlighted an article in International Security on the Rubicon Theory of War (.pdf), which posits that once we've crossed the Rubicon to war and war appears to be imminent, cognitive biases cause us to become overconfident about war, that this overconfidence increases the likelihood of war occurring, and that this same overconfidence causes risky military planning. I agree entirely with the fundamental conclusion of Diana's post (and the article) that we (meaning the populace, decision makers, military and civilian leaders) need to recognize these biases and approach war (or avoid it entirely) with a steely eye unjaundiced by hope and expectations that exceed reality.

However, I see two problems with the original article: one in the mechanisms of the theory and the second beyond. In the first instance I think the theory's creators did not thoroughly plumb the depths of the moral quantities (to use Clausewitz's term) of war and how that plays with confidence (over- or otherwise). If one assumes that war has become imminent, one must recognize the importance of confidence when partaking of events that require courage. It seemed to me on the eve of war with Iraq in 2003 that much of the overconfidence we were sold (shock and awe!) was merely optimism. It was bravado intended to inspire the troops. I can't say if this was intentional or a side-effect of the cognitive bias talked about Johnson and Tierney, but you don't want to send soldiers into harms way with expectations of a long, tedious, and violent war. Doing so would ensure you lose the moral quantities calculus right off the bat and possibly the war.

The Iraqis too had engaged in this sort of nonsense, preying on the fact that their armed forces and people didn't have a very good idea of the poor shape of their forces and the better shape of our own. Would their soldiers fight if they knew much of our equipment was impervious to their weapons? That we would, for the most part, run right through them? Of course they wouldn't. In the need to instill courage (in both the Clausewitzian/utilitarian sense and the Platonic/ Aristotlean sense of courage as virtue) we engage in nearly unbridled optimism when addressing our people and our army. These two functional elements of the wonderful trinity need to be sold on the policies already dictated by the third element or the policy is doomed to failure if it can ever begin. Is it poor military practice to engage in hope and optimism? Sure is. But sometimes it is necessary in order to achieve your political goals. Are these actions - this stoking the flames of easy, short, and victorious war - are they cognizant acts deliberately intended to fool the masses? Or are they unrealized biases of overconfidence? I'd argue a little of column A and a little of column B.

I also think that the authors get a bit into the "imminent war is imminent" meme without addressing how we got to and crossed the Rubicon in the first place. There is little definition around the term "imminent" with regard to the holder of these views, varying between "people" in the generic sense, populations specifically, and those that hold some position of official responsibility. Through a Clausewitzian lens, I would like to know if it matters for each part of the trinity when they become overconfident and how that all works. Does it matter that the U.S. population become overconfident before Operation DESERT STORM? Was their confidence exceeded by reality? Was war not really inevitable unless Iraq withdrew its forces - a variable not under the control of the U.S.? I don't believe the authors laid out the framework of their theory on how imminent came about and to whom, when and the subsequent effects of all that.

But beyond all of that, I'm more interested in looking at what caused this fording of the Rubicon in the first place (certainly beyond the scope of Johnson and Tierney). How did we get to that point and into the realm of "imminent"? It seems that we haven't gotten that far with Iran or Syria, but we're moving in that direction. I'd love to go on and on about the intersection of politics and aesthetics and draw parallels not only to Iraq (2003) but also the Athenian invasion of Sicily and how that all applies to the proponents of conflict between the U.S. and those two nations. But alas, that's a whole other subject for another day. But to wrap things up, I'll quote George Kateb in Patriotism and Other Mistakes: "Mass politics, for example, constantly is taken in and consumed as advertisement and entertainment, with the result that the demotic erodes the democratic. The tendency to get carried away with aesthetics is irrepressible." (If you haven't read that book, I highly recommend it.) Those that see beauty in a certain type of world - without repressive regimes, without our enemies possessing capabilities that we cannot control - are pushing us forward to the banks of the Rubicon for their own purposes, beginning with the people and then the elites. I don't see that Johnson and Tierney apply yet to Syria and Iran, except to those aesthetes who will imagine every possibility imminent for their own ends. How do we stop the feeling of imminent from spreading and avoid triggering the Rubicon Theory of War in reality?

Bill DePuy on COIN, circa 1986

William DuPuy was the first commanding general of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), which was established in 1973 as American involvement in Vietnam was winding down. GEN DePuy had commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam – he was one of those generals falsely caricatured as overly focused on attrition, a guy who "didn't get it" – but is more widely known as a significant influence on the transformation of Army doctrine through the 1970s and 1980s.

I've been reading here and there in his collected papers (pdf; part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), which were compiled, edited, and published (in 1994, two years after DePuy's death) by Richard Swain and others at Leavenworth's Combat Studies Institute. There are a great many really, really interesting things in here, and I'd encourage you to take a look if you're of a doctrinal bent. DePuy was a complex figure, a serious and original thinker who understood the political context of war and led the Army to shape its doctrine in line with that context. His views on Vietnam elide the childish distinction many have drawn between the attrition advocates in the Westmoreland mold and the enlightened pacification proponents of the Abrams school. I'm going to reproduce an extended excerpt from an article he wrote in 1986 (almost a decade after retiring), called "VIETNAM: What We Might Have Done and Why We Didn't Do It" (pdf; begins on pg. 11), that bears this out.

An editorial note: I've replaced DePuy's anachronistic abbreviation of counterinsurgency as CI with the modern acronym COIN for ease of reading. I've also narrowed the excerpt down a very little bit, not so as to change the meaning but rather in the hopes that you'll read all the way through.

The Kennedy Administration, shaken by the Bay of Pigs and threatened by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev with wars of National Liberation, reached for a new initiative in foreign policy. Counterinsurgency (COIN) emerged as their response. If, after all, insurgency was the problem, then counterinsurgency must be the answer.

In the broadest sense, that may be true; but, in application, counterinsurgency tends to focus on a narrower base. In the early days, it was largely a reactive concept. Guerrillas were to be defeated, subversion was to be eliminated and nations were to be built somehow along the lines of the American model—unobjectionable, certainly, even if a bit dreamy and self-centered. One of the interesting things about COIN was that there was a role for almost every governmental agency in Washington.

A sense of movement was created as these agencies were admonished to get cracking. It is easy to issue orders in Washington. By 1962, Washington was awash in committees, seminars, study groups and visiting professors. Counterinsurgency was very much in style. For two years, no briefing on progress failed to include the proud description of a U.S. Army Engineer team which built a much-needed road in Ecuador between the peasant farmers and their market. This bit of good work seemed to resonate beautifully with the self-image of America on the march, providing a practical Yankee antidote against subversion and insurgency in the Third World.

We now know that profound and subtle political issues lie at the heart of counterinsurgency. But in 1962 the program was more grossly defined as a combination of functions and activities in which we excelled—building roads, setting up medical clinics, distributing surplus farm commodities, broadcasting anticommunist arguments and training local armies in the use of U.S. weapons. The political issues were simply assigned to the State Department on a functional basis. In short, the political issues were external to our massive structure for counterinsurgency.

In retrospect, these illusions are amusing, but there was a darker side. The theory of counterinsurgency was one thing, but the reality of Vietnam was quite another. By that, I mean that there was a huge gap between the diagnosis of causes and the reality of Vietnam. This gap persisted for years. Its traces can still be seen. In accordance with counterinsurgency doctrine, the root causes of insurgency were economic and political at the grass roots (hamlet) level. The illusion, therefore, was that remedies were to be found solely in the performance of the South Vietnamese government.

So our attention and action was focused upon that new and clearly struggling government. When things went badly, which was often, we sought the causes in Saigon. By 1963, we were so unhappy with Vietnamese government performance that we supported the ouster of President Ngo Dinh Diem (and his unintended murder) by a cabal of inept generals.

The problem, of course, was much larger and more difficult even than the admitted weakness of the government of South Vietnam. The mother cell which fed the insurgency was in Hanoi. The Politburo in North Vietnam, consisting of the world's toughest and most experienced revolutionaries, had launched a massive effort to liberate South Vietnam under the guise of a homegrown insurgency. Thousands of trained political agents and military leaders had infiltrated into the south. Arms and ammunition were being delivered by coastal trawler. The Laotian trails were traversed by carrying parties.

The National Liberation Front (NLF) [aka Viet Cong] had been established under the control and direction of Hanoi. But emphasis on the North Vietnamese involvement was unwelcome. Emphasis on the military dimensions of the war ran counter to the newly conventional wisdom. The pendulum had been given a mighty push.

If you were "for" counterinsurgency, you were "against" conventional military thinking. Military operational plans were regarded at best as unnecessary and at worst reactionary, unenlightened and stupid.

"The old generals don't understand the problem," it was said. Guerrilla war is not susceptible to conventional solutions—ARVN was organized by the U.S. military for the wrong war under outmoded concepts—we should be fighting guerrillas with guerrillas, or so went the discussions in Washington.

But while these debates went on, a combination of Vietcong skill and North Vietnamese escalation of effort, coupled with the sheer weakness of the government of Vietnam and its army, led to near collapse in late 1964 and early 1965, forestalled only by the emergency deployment of U.S. forces.

U.S. forces were deployed slowly and tentatively at first, with numerous and nervous restrictions on their employment. The very first ground forces (Marines at Danang and the 173^rd Airborne Brigade at Bien Hoa) were sent to defend the airfields from which retaliation air strikes against North Vietnam were being launched. By late 1965 and throughout 1966, the inflow of U.S. troops accelerated. By this time the 1st Cavalry Division, with great valor, had fought the North Vietnamese army in the Ia Drang campaign, and the Marines had met a North Vietnamese army division south of the DMZ. It is interesting to note the missions which U.S. forces were expected to perform. At Honolulu on 1 July, 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara outlined six major operational goals:

• Eliminate 40 to 50 percent of all Vietcong/North Vietnamese army base areas in South Vietnam.
• Open 50 percent of all the main roads and railways in South Vietnam.
• Pacify the four priority areas specified in the joint U.S./South Vietnam directive AB 141 (Saigon, central Mekong Delta, Danang area, Qui Nhon area).
• Secure 60 percent of the South Vietnamese population.
• Defend the military bases, the political and population centers, and the main food-producing areas under government of Vietnam control.
• By the end of 1966, Vietcong/North Vietnamese army forces were to be attrited at a rate at least equal to their replacement capacity.

The first five were classical counterinsurgency goals. But these objectives were patently beyond reach without defeating the rapidly growing Vietcong/North Vietnamese main forces. This problem was addressed tangentially by the sixth mission.

One could say that these missions taken together amounted to placing our priorities on setting the dinner table while the kitchen was on fire. Under this strategic guidance, MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) went to the only possible course of action—defend what needed defending and go after the main forces of the enemy with aggressive search and destroy operations. But "search and destroy," starting in 1966, lost its only hope for decisive results when both the Vietcong and North Vietnamese divisional and regimental formations moved their bases into Cambodia, Laos and the North Vietnamese panhandle north of the DMZ. These were facts which Washington was loath to accept.

Mr. McNamara expected a level of attrition which would put a ceiling on the strength of combined Vietcong main force and North Vietnamese army elements; but aggressive U.S. operations were frustrated by the withdrawal of their quarry to sanctuary where he reconstituted, retrained and reentered South Vietnam only when he was ready for battle and could afford another round of losses.

By controlling those losses, he put the attrition goals beyond reach. By the time the sanctuaries were attacked in 1970, the U.S. force was in the midst of its massive withdrawal.

[...]

The great power of counterinsurgency on the minds of decision makers arose out of its obvious importance. It dealt with security and social progress at the lowest levels—levels where the people lived and worked. Under the aegis of Ambassadors Komer and Colby, the COIN effort reached high levels of effectiveness. Its baleful influence on sound military planning stemmed from the persistent misconception that COIN could do it alone. This view was just as specious and unrealistic as the opposing notion that COIN was irrelevant in the presence of a gigantic clash of national armies.

Before leaving the subject of COIN and its impact on U.S. operational planning, it is worth mentioning that the U.S. effort also foundered on the political track. The ultimate measure of effectiveness of the whole U.S. effort simply has to be an assessment of the comparative national political strength of the South Vietnamese government and the North Vietnamese regime.

This subject is so vast and complex as to deserve a whole shelf of books but, against the bottom line, we never quite induced the growth of a strong independent government of South Vietnam. It was a shaky structure girded and propped by a pervasive American presence.

An external American ignition harness extended to every level. The power generator lay outside the machine itself. When it was withdrawn, the spark plugs no longer fired. It is difficult for this democracy of ours to deal with the political dimensions of insurgency. The kinds of measures and risks that need to be taken – the arbitrary (and often undemocratic) controls which may be required – do not go down well back here at home where the value system is unique and to a large extent nonexportable.

Our Congress is in a continuous state of dither and shock over the vaguest suggestion that we are selecting, installing and supporting strong leaders; yet, when we do not, the other side does. At least, by now we should recognize that we may be reasonably competent in the economic and military fields and even have something to offer on the plane of counterterror, but in the center ring – the political heart of the matter – we are self-constrained by our own history and political processes and are, therefore, vulnerable to failure.

It's impossible not to perceive parallels to our modern counterinsurgency debate, but the most interesting thing for me is the way this reflection undercuts the Krepinevich/Sorley/Nagl narrative about the Army's refusal to recognize the situation and adapt. The Army certainly made mistakes in Vietnam, but for the most part they weren't a product of some stubborn refusal to accept that pacification was a necessary element of the war.