Of course Security Force Assistance (SFA) in its present form was not invented until 2008 when the wheel of FID was reinvented.  

The one lesson that we should learn is that SFA or FID does not work unless there is a strategy that it supports (a strategy with balance and coherency among ends, ways, and means) and this must include the political objectives to be achieved.  We think that if we simply train security forces that they will somehow magically succeed for us.  We pay lip service to "through, with, and by" and treat it as a silver bullet because we have no idea how hard it really is to accomplish political objectives indirectly when by definition you are not in complete control and dependent on indigenous forces that are not the equivalent of US forces despite us trying to create them in our image through SFA.

Below this article I have pasted my Eight Points of Special Warfare, LTG Cleveland's comments about indigenous forces and my description of Frank Hoffman's principle of understanding.

Regarding the discussion of Korea in the article:  We should remember that our FID/SFA security assistance efforts prior to 1950 likely contributed to the failure of the ROK Army on June 25, 1950.  Based on poor assessment and erroneous assumptions we refused to allow the ROK military to develop a combat capable force capable of both combined arms defense and maneuver.  We allowed only a constabulary force to be established to defend against north Korea subversion.  We allowed this force to restrict the ROK from being able to attack the north to achieve unification.  And of course the Soviets and the Chinese placed no such restrictions on the north and when 100,000 combat hardened soldiers returned from the Chinese Civil War they were provided with Soviet T-34 tanks and the rest is history.  We of course learned our lesson and help the ROK to develop a military that is optimized for combined operations (ROK and US) with interoperability and not necessarily completely independent operations.

The Trump administration wants to send more military advisers to Afghanistan. Good luck with that.

• www.washingtonpost.com
• View Original
• May 15th, 2017

Marines salute during a handover ceremony at Camp Leatherneck in Lashkar Gah, in the Afghan province of Helmand. They returned there April 29, as embattled Afghan security forces struggled to beat back the resurgent Taliban.Photo by: WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP/Getty Images

Senior Trump administration officials have proposed sending 3,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. Their mission? Advise and assist Afghan security forces.

The Obama administration’s plan was much the same. So is the U.S. strategy for Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Ukraine, Niger, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, Mauritania and many other locations around the world. In all these places, U.S. strategy relies on Security Force Assistance (SFA): using a small U.S. force to advise, train, equip and assist local allies to do the difficult ground fighting that Americans would rather avoid.

There’s a reason Security Force Assistance is so common. But it rarely works.

Why is SFA so widely used? The United States faces threats to interests that are real but often limited. U.S. officials feel the need to do something, but they are unwilling to send tens of thousands of American troops. SFA’s low cost and small footprint makes it look like a cheap solution that seems appropriate to the stakes.

But results are often disappointing. The massive train-and-equip program in Iraq after 2003 yielded an army that dissolved facing Islamic State forces in the June 2014 offensive in Mosul. SFA operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan fared little better.

That’s no accident. As we show in our recently published paper in the Journal of Strategic Studies, the low-cost SFA strategy rarely succeeds. Only when the host nation’s interests align very closely with Washington’s — and when the U.S. presence is both substantial and conditional — can SFA really substitute for a larger U.S. troop deployment.

Why Security Force Assistance often goes to waste

The United States rarely conducts SFA missions in Switzerland or Canada — because allies like these don’t need it. Rather, SFA usually goes to weak states with corrupt, unrepresentative regimes whose military shortcomings gave rise to the need for assistance in the first place.

[Did U.S. aid win hearts and minds in Afghanistan? Yes and no.]

This weakness also leads to a mismatch between U.S. interests and those of SFA recipients. Americans are looking for a local partner to fight an external threat, such as the Islamic State. But local leaders are typically more concerned with threats to their own rule from other elites within their state, especially the risk of a coup d’etat from dissatisfied officers or militia leaders.

SFA partners thus have a strong incentive to use U.S. aid to bolster their own internal security, rather than for whatever military operations that the United States wants.

Host regimes therefore often look the other way when their officers sell U.S. supplies on the black market, pocket the U.S.-provided salaries of “ghost soldiers,” use U.S.-provided equipment to settle scores with rival groups or extort protection payments from local civilians. This kind of corruption buys the loyalty of heavily armed elites who might otherwise be rivals, and it protects the regime’s internal political position. But it saps military readiness and undermines combat motivation: Why should Afghan or Iraqi soldiers risk their lives in combat for corrupt, cronyist officers who care only about lining their own pockets? The result is a military designed for internal politics, not for effectiveness against the external enemies that Americans care about.

Security Force Assistance can work, but only if the stars align and the conditions are right

In our paper, we looked at three historical examples where the United States sent significant security force assistance: Iraq from 2003-2014, El Salvador from 1979-1992, and South Korea from 1949-1953. These examples show just how hard it is to pull off SFA successfully.

[Three flawed ideas are hurting international peacekeeping]

In Iraq, the United States invested more than $25 billion on the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), deployed thousands of trainers and advisers, and by 2007 fielded more than 100,000 other U.S. troops to provide security until the ISF could take over. Yet the resulting Iraqi military collapsed in June 2014 when challenged by numerically inferior Islamic State fighters in Mosul. How could all this assistance produce so little real military power?

Here’s the problem: The U.S. and Iraqi governments had two very different visions for the ISF. The United States wanted trained military technocrats who could defeat the insurgency. The Iraqi regimes of  Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Nouri al-Maliki, however, saw that kind of ISF as a danger to their power, not an asset. The regime preferred a corrupt military it could control to a professionalized one it could not. All that U.S. effort thus created a military that was well-suited to Jaafari’s or Maliki’s internal political requirements, but a very poor tool for defeating ISIS.

The Salvadoran civil war, by contrast, is often seen as an SFA success story. Between 1979 and 1982, $5 billion in U.S. aid and fewer than 200 American advisers helped the Salvadoran government survive the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front insurgency. And U.S. SFA certainly was helpful. Without it, the government could well have fallen.

[The U.S. needs a new approach to counterinsurgency. Here’s an idea.]

Yet a closer look reveals that the results of the U.S. investment in SFA were only modest. The Salvadoran regime shared the U.S. goal of preventing its overthrow, but the regime also wanted to preserve its internal position. Hence the regime permitted just enough military improvement to keep the FMLN from toppling the government, but never enough for the army to get proficient enough to deliver a knockout blow. As a result, the war lapsed into a long, bloody deadlock that ended only when the Cold War came to a close. The net result was a real — but limited — payoff for SFA.

The one major SFA success we examine — Korea — is the exception that proves just how hard it is to do effectively. When North Korea invaded the South in June 1950, a weak, corrupt South Korean army collapsed. For South Korean President Syngman Rhee, the threat of outside conquest by North Korea now posed a more immediate threat than internal violence. His personal interests now aligned with that of the Americans in an urgent need to defeat a strong external enemy.

The United States rapidly expanded its aid, but it also monitored its use and threatened to withdraw assistance from Korean units that didn’t professionalize to U.S. standards. Since Rhee was more threatened by North Korean conquest than by a coup from within, he accepted these conditions and permitted politically risky military reforms that Iraqi and Salvadoran elites resisted. The result was major improvement in South Korean military proficiency by 1953. But the Korean case shows just how much the stars must align for SFA to work.

Sending more usually isn’t the answer

U.S. officials and politicians often see SFA as engineering rather than politics: Just send enough military aid and an ally’s forces will improve. When SFA falls short, as it often does, this implies the aid wasn’t enough — and so critics call for more.

But this view misses the key fact that SFA often directly affects local politics. SFA is unlikely to work unless the U.S. invests enough to gain leverage over its local host, and puts conditions on that aid to help ensure that the partner’s military really does improve.

On balance, then, SFA does not really offer a free lunch. Where limited U.S. interests mean that the U.S. will not deploy large numbers of its own troops, SFA will not yield major results from minor investments. For the foreseeable future, small footprints mean small payoffs for the United States.

Stephen Biddle is professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University and adjunct senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Julia Macdonald is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House and an assistant professor at the University of Denver.

Ryan Baker is a PhD candidate at George Washington University.

Eight Points of Special Warfare:

If there is an indigenous contribution to the solution of a complex political-military problem apply the Eight Points of Special Warfare (which apply to both UW and FID).

1.  Must determine the acceptable, durable, political arrangement that can achieved. Without this clearly articulated and understood there is no way to achieve unity of effort or to judge mission success. I think Congress must demand this from the Administration.

 2. Eliot Cohen & John Gooch: Military Misfortune:  All military failures are a result of a failure learn, failure to adapt, and failure to anticipate.
 Look at Mali and Yemen. Did we anticipate the Turegs and the Houthis?  I would submit that SOF on the ground reported on the growing threats to Mali and Yemen yet our myopic focus on CT blinded us at the strategic level.

3. Larry Cable (the discredited COIN theorist who wrote Conflict of Myths) The three P’s: Presence, Patience, Persistence.  You have to be present to make a difference.  You have to be patient because it takes a long time to influence indigenous forces and develop indigenous capabilities. It takes persistence because mistakes will be made, every operation will include discovery learning and we will have to learn and adapt.

 4. Assessment - must conduct continuous assessment to gain understanding - tactical, operational, and strategic.  Assessments are key to developing strategy and campaign plans and anticipating potential conflict.  Assessments allow you to challenge assumptions and determine is a rebalance of ends, ways, and means is required.
 Understand the indigenous way of war and adapt to it.   Do not force the US way of war upon indigenous forces if is counter to their history, customs, traditions, and abilities.

5.  Assure US and indigenous interests are sufficiently aligned.  If indigenous and US interests are not sufficiently aligned the mission will fail.  If the US has stronger interest than the indigenous forces we can create an “assistance paradox” - if the indigenous forces believe the US mission is "no fail” then the US forces will not allow them to fail and therefore they do not need to try too hard.  They may very well benefit from long term US aid and support.

 6. Employ the right forces for the right mission. US SOF, conventional, civilian agency, indigenous forces.  Always based on assessment and thorough understanding of the problem and available resources and capabilities.  Cannot over rely on one force to do everything.  

7.  Learn how to operate without being in charge.  If we usurp the mission indigenous forces will never be successful on their own.  You cannot pay lip service to advising and assisting.  This is why operations in Colombia and the Philippines achieve some level of success.
 This is not “leading from behind.”  This is the appropriate understanding of the relationship between USSF/SOF and indigenous forces in a sovereign nation or with indigenous forces seeking self determination of government.

 8. Campaigning  - we have to develop the campaign plan to determine the resources and authorities - and then execute the campaign - we have to get good at campaigning and it has to be more than a military campaign.  While disrupting terrorist attacks and attacking terrorist networks, finances and auxiliaries are important they are not a strategy. They can be part of a strategy and campaign but they are not sufficient.  We have to campaign beyond counter-terrorism with a campaign focused on attacking the enemy’s strategy.  This requires deep understanding to include especially understanding the enemy’s political objectives.  Once we understand the enemy ways and means can be employed to counter the enemy’s strategy and his political objectives.  Campaigning is important because it will orchestrate all the activities to achieve the strategic objectives or the acceptable, durable political arrangement we seek.   Campaigns identify the resources necessary (forces, bases, funding).  Campaigns identify the authorities necessary.  Although many in the military and government desire blanket authorities that is not the right way to operate.  However, establishing programs and funding lines such as 1206, 1207, 1208, and 1209 are not effective either.  Authorities need to be specifically applied to each campaign. And with an approved campaign plan Congress can more effectively provide oversight rather than managing funding programs.  Focusing on effective campaigning can discipline the application of the military instrument of power.  Of course it would useful for other elements of national power to be able to “campaign” as well.  (As an aside, we perhaps need to take another look at the 1997 PDD 56 which was for the management of complex contingency operations in the interagency – a disciplined process to orchestrate US government agencies and harmonize the instruments of power.)

·      A Principle of Special Warfare: "Go early, go small, go local, go long”  LTG(R) Charles T. Cleveland remarks at NDU November 30, 2015

·      Understanding indigenous forces:  ”Potential allies always start as at least unproven.  It is hard work that starts with assessments and making the best of who you have, seeking to improve your position (and your partners’) over time.”  LTG (R) Charles T. Cleveland, email January 18, 2016  (Note:  This can apply to resistance in nK)

·      Frank Hoffman's Principle of Understanding. I am a supporter of Dr. Frank Hoffman’s idea that we need a new principle of war called understanding.  Although that seems like a no-brainer – as far back as Sun Tzu we have be told that we must know our enemies and know ourselves to be victorious.   We all know we need to understand war and warfare, the conditions that give rise to conflict, and the politics that lead to and endconflict.  Yet even though the need for understanding is so obvious that we think we do not need to even mention it, it is surprising how so many of our failures can be traced to our lack of understanding.  SOF, through its various assessment capabilities and engagement with indigenous populations can make a key contribution to understanding.

A very long read with a unique look at two cases.

This article explores the security and political effects of militia forces in Afghanistan and Mexico. From these case studies, it draws lessons for how to engage with militia forces more effectively and presents broader implications for U.S. foreign policy. In Afghanistan, building up militia forces has long been an important element of U.S security policy. In Mexico, anti-crime militias emerged spontaneously. Eventually, the behavior and visibility of the militias forced the government of Mexico to react to them, but the United States has not been involved with them in any way. Along many dimensions, the two cases are very different, and that is one reason why I chose such a compare-and-contrast pairing. Mexico is a middle-power country with a relatively strong economy, even though the state has been historically weak or absent in large areas, including those where militias are currently strong. In contrast, for several decades, Afghanistan has been a failed state or hovered on the verge of failure. For decades, Afghanistan has been caught up in insurgencies, civil wars, and foreign interventions. Only over the past decade has Mexico experienced highly violent crime. In Afghanistan, the United States and the Afghan government at least assumed that they could control some of the militias, such as those they actively recruited, including the Afghan Local Police, and steer some of the others that had existed, metamorphosed, and sometimes outright metastasized in Afghanistan since the late 1970s. At the same time, the Afghan government, the United Nations, and the United States have sought to disarm and dismantle other militia forces that came to be seen as particularly problematic.[1] In Mexico, the anti-crime self-defense forces emerged spontaneously without a direct and formal state effort to recruit them and without any nominal state control. Historically, of course, the Mexican government and military often recruited militias to fight insurgencies such as in Guerrero and Chiapas.

I would like to thank the author for saying this.  I would hope these two paragraphs could be committed to policy makers' and strategists' brain housing groups. 

The key assumptions of U.S. external assistance for such internal defense policies is that there is a sufficiently strong overlap between U.S. interests and those of the selected external partners to design and conduct anti-militancy efforts in a way that is consistent with U.S. objectives, and that such an overlap of interests can be sustained for a sufficient period. In other words, through internal defense assistance, the United States hopes to motivate external actors to deliver U.S. objectives without the United States being extensively sucked into difficult internal conflicts abroad and without having to sacrifice U.S. blood and treasure on a large scale.

Building partner capacity and assisting in internal defense are concepts much broader than simply standing up militia or proxy forces. Indeed, ideally, internal defense or partner-capacity-building efforts would focus on state military and police forces only and be fully integrated into an official strategy of the host country to undertake security sector reform (SSR).[7] The ideal conditions and design for such an undertaking include a post-conflict setting, without the presence of low-intensity conflict still simmering or increasing, and with U.S. security-aid programming focused on creating a legitimate monopoly of force for the state. Such an assistance program would be a comprehensive systematic effort easily lasting a decade or more.

Paper | July 21, 2015

The dubious joys of standing up militias and building partner capacity: Lessons from Afghanistan and Mexico for prosecuting security policy through proxies

http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2015/07/21-afghanistan-mexico-security-policy-felbabbrown?rssid=u+s+military+affairs

By: Vanda Felbab-Brown

Introduction

After a decade and half of being involved in large-scale military operations in the Middle East and South Asia, the United States is increasingly looking for ways to prosecute its security interests with minimal involvement. The number and complexity of military conflicts burning in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia make large-scale military involvement prohibitive and potentially disastrous. Nor are desirable outcomes easy to achieve even when the United States is willing to devote large blood and treasure resources to such interventions. Yet allowing for large territories around the world to disintegrate into brutal conflicts or be dominated by terrorist and militant groups threatening the United States and its assets and allies may also be highly detrimental to U.S. interests. Increasingly, the United States has there embraced a strategy of building up the capacities of partners in such conflicts—preferably, those of national governments. But when national forces prove unable or unwilling to defeat the threat, such as in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Nigeria, and Somalia, the United States increasingly faces decisions whether to support (or establish) local militia and other irregular forces. Indeed, militias are back in vogue as a tool of U.S. security policy.

Building partner capacity and standing up militias may at times turn out to be the least bad of available policy options, and chosen as a last resort. The two approaches are not identical: Building up the official forces of a country allows for greater levels of accountability of the host nation to the donor and of the forces to their population than standing up irregular forces. Building up official partner capacity is thus clearly a preferable policy than embracing militias.

Nonetheless, both policies need to be adopted with a clear understanding of how limited their contribution will be to the prosecution of U.S. interests. Despite the seductiveness of the belief that in situations of limited U.S. engagement and resource transfers others will do for the United States what it is not willing to do for itself, a robust alignment of U.S. interests with those of its presumed partners will often be lacking. Instead, after a momentary intersection of interests, the United States could find its partners unreliable, having divergent interests, and prosecuting policies directly contradictory to those of the United States. Even when militias seem to be defeating the enemy du jour, they will have a tendency to go rogue and themselves become the source of long-term and deep-seated drivers of conflict. Partner governments may well pocket U.S. assistance and have a tendency to conduct policies to satisfy U.S. objectives only minimally while they use the U.S. resources for their own political objectives, including perhaps marginalizing or eliminating political rivals. Nor will the United States find it easy to extricate itself from such indirect interventions. Consequently, when relying on such proxies, U.S. long-term engagement, monitoring, and rollback capacities will often be necessary for securing U.S. interests.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2015/07/21-afghanistan-mexico-security-policy-felbabbrown?rssid=u+s+military+affairs

Tuesday Evening Readings

If they have enough time.  They might consider what preparations they can begin making now and not wait for two or three years to begin a cold start toward unification (though I know they are not really waiting)

But I will again ask the question to US policy makers.  What is the US doing in terms of developing a plan to support the ROK in achieving unification because unification is the only way to both end the north's nuclear program and stop the horrific suffering of the Korean people living in the north who are subjected to some of the worst human rights abuses in modern history at the hands of the mafia-like crime family cult of the Kim Family Regime.

Panel pushes to finish unification preparation in 3 yrs

http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/northkorea/2015/03/03/28/0401000000AEN20150303005600315F.html

Video at the link.  Can't tell if this is real or trick photography.  I am sure that if it is real that no American taught them to do something like this (or at least I hope not).

Afghan Special Forces demonstrate scary sharpshooting (Video)

AUTHOR: ARTURO | MARCH 2, 2015 | IN: ENDURING FREEDOM

HTTP://THEBRIGADE.COM/2015/03/02/AFGHAN-SPECIAL-FORCES-DEMONSTRATE-SCARY-SHARPSHOOTING-VIDEO/

Source

CATEGORY: ENDURING FREEDOM

N. Korea ready to fire medium-range Nodong missiles: military source

http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2015/03/03/24/0301000000AEN20150303004800315F.html

MARSOC SHARES GLIMPSE INTO ASSESSMENT, SELECTION

By Sgt. Donovan Lee, Defense Media Activity

http://www.marines.mil/News/NewsDisplay/tabid/3258/Article/571247/marsoc-shares-glimpse-into-assessment-selection.aspx?utm_content=buffer3041c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Excerpt:

But beyond the knee-jerk criticism, the president’s National Security Strategy is not just a bowl of rice pudding. Although readers won’t find a strategy aimed at a unitary threat with clear ends, ways, and means, there is a pretty coherent philosophy at work. This strategy is the second and last of Obama’s presidency, and it rightly describes a world beset by challenges and in dire need of American leadership (“lead,” “leader,” and “leadership” appear 94 times in the context of the United States’ role in the world). It is not “leading from behind,” as the president’s restless and war-ready critics love to claim. Nor is it hard-charging unilateralism.

Instead, the world of President Obama’s National Security Strategy is one in which the United States’ economic and military might serve as the bedrock of strong, participatory, and rules-based global institutions. It’s smart multilateralism—working within the international system while also being willing to bear the burden of defending it, although not always with military power. This is likely as close as we’ll get to an “Obama Doctrine.” As the president told West Point graduates in a major foreign policy address last year:

Here’s my bottom line: America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will. The military that you have joined is and always will be the backbone of that leadership. But U.S. military action cannot be the only—or even primary—component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail. And because the costs associated with military action are so high, you should expect every civilian leader—and especially your Commander-in-Chief—to be clear about how that awesome power should be used.

A lot of good words.  The problem in my mind is that a strong leader does not telegraph his strategy or publicly remove any options, e.g., a superpower can never remove military force as an option and in fact by leaving military force on the table and demonstrating not only the capability but the will to use it, can actually result in better diplomacy and in fact allows a leader to always be able to lead with diplomacy and refrain from using military force.  But stating self-restraint in public (in the vain hope that it will generate good will for the US) can lead to self defeat in statecraft.

Obama's Last National Security Strategy

The President and the Philosopher

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143207/janine-davidson/obamas-last-national-security-strategy#cid=soc-twitter-at-snapshot-obama_s_last_national_security-000000

Tuesday Morning Readings

Good article from Michael.  Finally a scholar and foreign policy adviser who writes about and understands special operations.

Some good recommendations.  In addition to the resurrection of the LIC Board from the Reagan era I would also consider the Special Operations Policy Office (SOPO) which might be especially important for special operations support to political warfare.

My summary of Michael's thesis from a paper I am working on:  SOF (surgical strike and special warfare) is not either/or, it is both/hand and must have a yin/yang relationship. Just as good strategy requires balance and coherency among ends, ways, and means (and this is a constantly adjusting relationship - thus the requirement to "do strategy") there needs to be the proper balance and coherency among the disciplines of special operations, surgical strike and special warfare.

Michael's conclusion:

Surgical strike-oriented SOF will remain key pieces for countering terrorism and conducting other critical assignments in both war and peace. But the recent Russian practices of using political and unconventional warfare in Ukraine, the situations in Syria and Iraq, and conflicts elsewhere show that special-warfare SOF supported and enabled by non-SOF military forces and other interagency partners will also be very busy for the foreseeable future. Again, both are valuable instruments in the United States’ toolkit of capabilities, but are best used when the circumstances dictate their use. Policymakers and the public should not become too enamored with their being a panacea for providing perfect solutions to difficult problems.

THE SEDUCTIVENESS OF SPECIAL OPS?

Michael Noonan

March 3, 2015 · in Commentary

http://warontherocks.com/2015/03/the-seductiveness-of-special-ops/?singlepage=1

UN watchdog ‘seriously’ worried by North Korea nuclear program

By Agence France-Presse on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2015

https://www.defencetalk.com/un-worried-nkorea-nuclear-program-63346/

U.S. spy chief says he got a mixed reception in North Korea

WASHINGTON Mon Mar 2, 2015 7:42pm EST

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/03/us-usa-northkorea-idUSKBN0LZ01R20150303

Quote:

“There’s a distinction to be made between the tactical/operational effect and the strategic one,” Leed said. As a deterrent to aggression and a tripwire triggering US commitment, a small force can have a strategic impact out of proportion to its size.

This is an important change for obvious reasons and is good to see.

Excerpt:

Not to discredit Aquino, but more credit goes to social media. The democratic country is rich in competing interests and free speech. Now with the surge in smartphone cameras and mobile devices, an opponent who sees someone in office take money or drive a bling-y new car can send a tweet or post the dirt to Facebook. “Right now everyone in government and outside government is monitoring each other,” Manila-based Banco de Oro UniBank chief market strategist Jonathan Ravelas says. “Social media are there to ring the bells, so people try to be very careful in how they do things.” Graft remains, he says, but “it has gone down significantly.”

FORBES ASIA 3/02/2015 @ 9:00PM 1,068 views

Why Graft Is Declining In The Notoriously Corrupt Philippines

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphjennings/2015/03/02/why-graft-is-declining-in-the-notoriously-corrupt-philippines/print/

Putin Won’t Blitz Baltic States — But NATO Has A Plan. ...

By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on March 02, 2015 at 2:00 PMhttp://breakingdefense.com/2015/03/putin-wont-blitz-baltic-states-but-nato-has-a-plan/

The story of a Russian soldier’s war in Ukraine: “We all knew what we had to do and what could happen”

http://euromaidanpress.com/2015/03/02/the-story-of-a-russian-soldiers-war-in-ukraine-we-all-knew-what-we-had-to-do-and-what-could-happen/

Does not appear to be a pretty picture.  Excerpt:

Most of the losses in the Afghan Army over the past year appear to be due to desertion, the coalition said in a written response to questions about the newly declassified data. Smaller percentages came from ordinary discharges and, more worryingly, from deaths in combat, of which there were more than 1,200 last year, a record for the army.

But no matter the reasons, the numbers cast a harsh spotlight on one inescapable fact: The army, the centerpiece of the American-led campaign to stabilize Afghanistan, is losing people far faster than it can replace them. The rate of decline, if not reversed, could leave the army effectively incapable of fighting the Taliban across much of Afghanistan within the next year or two, according to some American military officials and analysts.

Figures From U.S.-Led Coalition Show Heavy 2014 Losses for Afghan Army

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/world/figures-from-us-led-coalition-show-heavy-2014-losses-for-afghan-army.html?_r=0

(Linda Robinson Interview) Beyond Hollywood, 'Call Of Duty': Why Special Forces Are The Future Of The U.S. Military

I do have to take issue with these excerpts:

But, I want to get to this issue of the actual Special Operations themselves; you're most recent book talks about how Special Ops are the future of American warfare. And, we've been hearing this for some time that this really is the way in which we're going to be fighting our wars in the future. 

I think it is fair to say that Special Operations will make an important contribution to national security strategy but the fighting of US wars will always be done by the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and conventional and special operations forces.  Special operations as a way of war and special operations are certainly not war winners by themselves.  Special operations can play a role in helping others to help themselves in their wars but to say that special operations is the way of future American warfare does a disservice to both conventional and special operations forces and also imprints in the public mindset unrealistic, unsupportable, and unattainable expectations.  Small footprint with special operations working with indigenous and host nation forces is a nice concept and very useful in many cases but it and special operations are not a panacea or silver bullet and we need to be careful about implying it as such.  I know that is not what Linda Robinson means but it is obvious by the reporter's questions and the questions and comments of the press and pundits that they are implying that small footprint special operations are the answer to everything.  It should not be touted as the future of American warfare.  We do not need that kind of cheerleading for special operations.

And it pains me to read this:

So what I viewed, what was happening in Afghanistan was they were kind of recovering their roots, and going back to working with populations and also working with indigenous military forces.

This is actually counter to the discussions in this very article about Colombia, The Philippines, and East Africa where Special Forces continued since 9-11 and continue to this to operate in accordance with their "roots."

Beyond Hollywood, 'Call Of Duty': Why Special Forces Are The Future Of The U.S. Military

By BRIAN HARDZINSKI & SUZETTE GRILLOT & TREVOR FORD

HTTP://KGOU.ORG/POST/BEYOND-HOLLYWOOD-CALL-DUTY-WHY-SPECIAL-FORCES-ARE-FUTURE-US-MILITARY

• 
  Soldiers from the U.S. Special Forces review map data while conducting an operation in Panjawi district, Kandahar province July 10, 2010.

  Sgt. David Russell U.S. Army

The so-called “light footprint strategy” has been a hallmark of President Obama’s military engagement strategy as he pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq and winds down the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. That drawdown of massive units of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and civilian support staff means a stronger reliance on smaller, more elite military groups.

RAND Corporation senior international policy analyst Linda Robinson focuses on national security strategy and these types of units in her latest book One Hundred Victories: Special Ops and the Future of American Warfare. It covers the two years she spent embedded in Afghanistan.

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14:41

Listen to Suzette Grillot's conversation with Linda Robinson.

Before the Middle East, she started her career focusing on insurgencies in Latin America. She studied and wrote about the role of U.S. Special Forces in a counter narcotics effort that eventually evolved into a true counterinsurgency against FARC rebels in Colombia.

“One officer had said, ‘Nothing has been written about us since Vietnam. Much of what was written in that era wasn’t good, so let’s take a chance on this reporter and see if she’s willing to give some in-depth research on us.’,” Robinson says.

According to Robinson, U.S. special operations have doubled in size since the September 11, 2001 attacks and the subsequent October invasion of Afghanistan. But they still operate in small numbers, and Robinson calls that the model of the future.

“About 12,000 people can be deployed around the world at any one time as a sustainable number,” Robinson says. “And some people may say, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s a lot.’ Well, if you consider it compared to 100,000-plus [the 2006 counterinsurgency] in Iraq, it’s not.”

In Afghanistan, these small units worked among indigenous populations by going into villages and seeing if residents wanted to form self-defense groups and a local government.

“They had done this in the Vietnam era, but they had gotten away from that in the years after 9/11,” Robinson says. “And that is a more long-term solution while recognizing they still do the direct action raids, but that is more of a temporary piece of the puzzle.”

FULL TRANSCRIPT

SUZETTE GRILLOT, HOST: Linda Robinson, welcome to World Views.

LINDA ROBINSON: Thank you Suzette, I'm delighted to be here.

GRILLOT: I have to start by asking what drew you to that topic, why focus on Special Forces and Special Operations?

ROBINSON: Well I did get that question a lot and I actually started my career focused on insurgencies down in Latin America. First in Central America but also in Peru, Colombia, Mexico, and elsewhere. And also the democratization issue was something I covered heavily there. But the insurgency, or small wars, issue led kind of naturally to the flip side which is counterinsurgency, what the people do when they're trying to combat an insurgency. Since that is one of the main missions for the Special Forces, I gained some entree, really first in Colombia, down in Latin America, where the Special Forces were ramping up a counterinsurgency support effort. So, the Colombians were in the lead, but US Special Forces were helping them and training them what had originally been a counter narcotics effort, morphed into a counterinsurgency effort because there were two very strong insurgencies. 40 years the FARC was the larger of the two groups in Colombia that had really grown in strength to control half of the country. So it was a good, real, first lesson for me in what Special Forces could do to help a country. And, right now, flash forward a decade or so later, Colombia is engaged in very serious peace talks with the remnants of the FARC and there is quite a strong expectation that they will be able to wrap up their war, with the negotiated accord. So, of course the Special Forces weren't solely responsible for that progress but it gave me a window into the various things that they do and I had to go through a lot of hoops to gain that access. So I spend a lot of time on doing research and attending exercises and briefings. They had really not let anyone inside to see what they do, and one officer had said, "Nothing has been written about us since Vietnam, much of what was written in that era wasn't good, so let's take a chance on this reporter and see if she's willing to really give some in depth research on us." 

GRILLOT: Well I want to get back to that issue of your access, and specifically what it is you did on the ground, you know, what that was like, spending time with the Special Forces. But, I want to get to this issue of the actual Special Operations themselves; you're most recent book talks about how Special Ops are the future of American warfare. And, we've been hearing this for some time that this really is the way in which we're going to be fighting our wars in the future. But you begin your story in this most recent book, at a time when you say that Special Forces were at a crossroads, that they were very unclear about their goals that they were unsure of their procedures and the effectiveness of those procedures. So, when was it, that it became more clear that Special Forces were going to be the way that we were going to fight wars, and what's the reason for that?

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