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.

CRS Report on Building Partnership Capacity

The entire report can be downloaded here:  http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R44313.pdf

Interestingly the recent Philippines mission is not addressed in the case studies.  The Huk Rebellion is covered as is Colombia.  Not saying the current Philippines should be one of the case studies (and I do think that the Huk Rebellion case is an important case study and I am glad it is included).  But in case anyone is interested here are three charts that put the recent Philippines mission (OEF-P) in historical context and contemporary perspective (from the Foreign Internal Defense (FID)  point of view).  But I do think that the current Operation Enduring Freedom Philippines mission supports the very important conclusion highlighted in the excerpt below. 

Within the case studies explored, BPC was least effective as a tool for allowing the United States to extract itself from conflict (victory in war/war termination). However, it was most effective as a tool for building interpersonal and institutional linkages, and for alliance building."

It is interesting that FID is only mentioned twice in the report (excerpts below).  I think this is interesting because FID is a much broader mission than building partner capacity and security force assistance because by definition it is interagency and whole of government - training of foreign military forces is only one small part of FID - it consists of US government agencies support (advice and assistance) to a host nation's internal defense and development programs so that it can defend itself against lawlessness, subversion, insurgency, and terrorism.

​

​

​

CRS Report on Building Partnership Capacity

 

Extract: "Given that U.S. leaders often argue that a BPC effort could help accomplish more than one of the above goals, determining what constitutes the "primary" strategic objective for a given BPC effort required analytic judgment. CRS organized the cases according to public statements at the time, with particular attention paid to how leaders described the purpose of the BPC effort. Effectiveness was judged based on two criteria: whether the strategic goal was achieved, and whether the effort produced unintended consequences that were obviously and meaningfully damaging to U.S. national interests. Within the case studies explored, BPC was least effective as a tool for allowing the United States to extract itself from conflict (victory in war/war termination). However, it was most effective as a tool for building interpersonal and institutional linkages, and for alliance building."

...

The latter observation is borne out by the current manifestations of BPC across the DOD’s activities. Although the programs and authorities listed above are the focus of most analysis and discussion with respect to BPC, they do not capture the full extent of DOD’s activities and expenditures in this area. This is because DOD has integrated BPC—in its various guises and manifestations (security cooperation, assistance, foreign internal defense, security force assistance, and so on)—across a wide range of its operations and activities (see “DOD Activities That Build Partner Capacity”). In order to do so, different DOD components utilize a variety of funding sources. For example, according to a 2013 RAND study, rather than using DSCA earmarked funds for specific activities with partners, 

Most [BPC] programs are funded by other, less narrow [funding] sources, such as operations and maintenance funds. Examples include exercises overseen by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and military-to-military contacts, which are often (but not always) funded by Traditional COCOM Activity Authority. In each of these cases, DoD uses a specific authority to use its operations and maintenance funds for a given security cooperation activity. In some cases, these funds are then reimbursed, but more often than not, the security cooperation activity comes at the expense of another defense priority.20 

DSCA, with its relatively narrow mandate, oversees only a smaller subset of DOD’s overall BPC activities. This has financial oversight implications, as it is difficult to determine what, specifically, DOD spends on non-DSCA BPC programs. 

...

What Does “Building Partnership Capacity” or “Train and Equip” Mean on the Ground? Given that BPC is a term of art, a number of programs, capabilities, and activities fit under its umbrella. On the ground, this heterogeneity manifests itself in several different ways. The U.S Army, in its Field Manual 3-22: Army Support to Security Cooperation, outlines the main tasks that U.S. ground forces would use to conduct what it terms “security force assistance.” This is an operationalization of both DOD BPC efforts and congressionally authorized “1206 Train and Equip” programs. It also applies to more traditional forms of security cooperation, especially “Foreign Internal Defense” missions performed by Special Operations Forces. The mission to equip is often tailored to different situations in specific countries. 

Individual Training. In this task, U.S. forces train foreign security forces on “military occupational skills appropriate to their organization and equipment.” That is, U.S trainers provide individual members of partner nation security forces with basic instruction in how to shoot their weapons, move in a tactical environment, and communicate with members of their unit. This training may also involve instructing officers and leaders in principles of military leadership, as well as tactical mission planning and execution. 

Collective Training. In this task, U.S. forces train foreign security forces on “collective tasks at the battalion level and below.” That is, units (from a squad of approximately 10 individuals to a battalion of up to approximately 500 individuals) that perform the same type of missions (infantry, reconnaissance, logistics) learn to fight and conduct operations as a unit, increasing in complexity from squad patrolling to battalion-sized maneuvers. 

Staff Training. In this task, U.S. forces train the staffs of foreign security forces in their functions, encompassing “staff training from company level troop leading procedures through military decision-making at the task force level.” That is, staff officers and noncommissioned officers learn how to plan tactical operations and obtain decisions and guidance from commanding officers and noncommissioned officers in leadership positions. Such training could range from planning and synchronizing fires and movements in a platoon defense to coordinating company maneuver and artillery fire in a battalion-sized attack. 

Institutional Training. In this task, U.S. forces train the staff of a foreign nation’s “force generation structure and ministerial or departmental staff.” It may focus on force generation, budgeting, and oversight.30 While largely limited to Army and Marine Corps units (along with Special Operations Forces), the method of conducting basic military training and weapons training, moving along in complexity to unit training, is applicable to all military and security force “train and equip” programs.

I wonder if Sean has public sources for all the people named in the book.  I received the book last night and though I have not read it all yet there is a tremendous amount of information that I do not think has been publicly acknowledged and I suspect a large number of the personnel named in the book probably to did not give permission to be named but were likely named by the apparently many anonymous sources who provided such information.  I am of course not surprised that all the senior officers were named who have been in the public domain but there are a lot of lower ranking personnel whose names I was very surprised to see.  I think some of the "sources" might become obvious because some of them are now television news commentator personalities and their "stories" are treated well.  Also there are quit a few interesting insights about the senior leadership that might come from disgruntled junior members (though there are many lessons that can be learned especially how operations in Afghanistan unfolded from a JSOC/CIA perspective (and Sean does acknowledge that there are differing view points regarding Karzai between JSOC, the CIA and Special Forces.

I wonder where Sean got the definition of Unconventional Warfare: "The use of proxy forces to foment rebellion against an enemy state.  In the U.S. Military it is the primary mission of Special Forces."  Needless to say I am not named in the book and Sean did not ask for my opinion on UW.

But my favorite excerpt (so far) is this on page 162:

But despite - or perhaps because of - his repeated exposure to briefings on the high-end counterterrorism that was JSOC's forte, Rumsfeld's understanding of special operations remained superficial and unbalanced.  He did not recognize the value of unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense (helping an ally defeat an insurgency), which were the specialties of Special Forces as well as SOCOM's psychological operations and civil affairs units.  To Rumsfeld, the value of special operations lay only in the spooky and lethal activities JSOC exemplified, not in training foreign militaries or standing up local militias.  "There were some things that Rumsfeld said and did that indicated that we, his staff, had not fully and well explained to him the nature of special operations forces," said Andrews, a former Special Forces Officer. "He didn't understand and we didn't beat into him an appreciation of counterinsurgency as foreign internal defense, UW [unconventional warfare], the 'white' stuff.

"Rumsfeld ... didn't care about setting up networks, he didn't care about establishing forward operating bases, he didn't want to hear all that shit."  said a Special Forces officer who briefed the secretary frequently.  "He just wanted a way for bodies to show up."  The result was Rumsfeld's almost blind faith in JSOC.  "He didn't truly understand us, but he trusted us," Hall said.   (yes, that is CSM(R) Mike Hall)

I will be using that quote in my next class on Unconventional Warfare for Policy Makers and Strategists. Thank you Sean.

taskandpurpose.com

How Joint Special Operations Command Became America’s ‘Perfect Hammer’

• by Christian Beekman 
•  Sept. 2, 2015 
•  3 min read 
•  original

America’s most elite special operations units have increasingly found themselves in the spotlight. After the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates and Operation Neptune Spear, the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, colloquially known as DEVGRU or SEAL Team 6, became the subject of immense public interest. But many outside the military have never heard about the shadowy command that SEAL Team Six, Delta Force, and other special missions units answer to: the Joint Special Operations Command.

JSOC oversees planning for joint unconventional operations, and conducts much of the “black” side of special operations. A new book, “Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command,” from author and former Army Times journalist Sean Naylor aims to highlight JSOC’s history over the past 30 years. It also illustrates how JSOC moved to the forefront of combating insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Relentless Strike” isn’t the first time Naylor has covered the units under JSOC. His previous book, “Not a Good Day To Die:The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda” is a quintessential account of the March 2002 battle in Afghanistan’s Shahikot Valley, an operation that Naylor was present for as an embedded reporter. Operators from Delta Force, SEAL Team 6, and other JSOC units played a pivotal role in Anaconda, so Naylor is covering some familiar ground. Much like his previous book, Naylor explores the full breadth of the units and personnel involved. From the high-level politicking surrounding JSOC’s formation to the individual operators kicking doors in Iraq, “Relentless Strike” isn’t daunted by the scale of JSOC’s operations.

At the center of the book is the narrative of how JSOC evolved from a small organization with a highly specific counterterrorism mission to the the direct-action juggernaut it is today. The first part of “Relentless Strike” deals with JSOC’s genesis in the wake of the failed Operation Eagle Claw, the disastrous attempt to rescue American hostages held in revolutionary Iran in April 1980. Then, JSOC was mainly focused on a limited set of counterterrorism missions, like the rash of the airplane hijackings and hostage takings during the 1980s. While Delta and the rest of JSOC came close to actually getting the green light on various rescues during their two decades of operational status, their first operations successes came in support of more conventional operations in Grenada and Panama.

The book’s other narrative thrust starts here: the tendency of JSOC being handed difficult mission sets, regardless of whether JSOC was really suited for the problem; highlighting the missions given to SEAL Team 6 in Grenada in 1983, and a regular SEAL team’s airfield assault in Panama in 1989. The book also delves into some of the inauspicious details of JSOC’s birth; such as the fly-by-night antics of SEAL Team 6 founder Richard Marcinko, whose hard-drinking training regimen and unauthorized unit expenditures tainted the unit’s reputation to the point that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Colin Powell considered disbanding the unit all together in the early 1990s.

(Continued at the link below)

http://taskandpurpose.com/how-joint-special-operations-command-became-americas-perfect-hammer/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tp-today

Special Operations Today: FSR Interviews LTG Cleveland (Ret.) Formerly Commanding General, USASOC

From the Fletcher Security Review.  The entire interview can be downloaded at this link: http://media.wix.com/ugd/c28a64_c14626a276f942c0aed3b777abd0dd0d.pdf

I have placed an excerpt regarding the question "highly SOF kinetic" versus "models for the future for SOF on the lower end of the conflict scale" as well as "the important elements of an unconventional warfare campaign" below.

12 August 2015

Special Operations Today:

FSR Interviews LTG Cleveland (Ret.)

Formerly Commanding General, 

USASOC

http://www.fletchersecurity.org/#!ltg-cleveland-interview/c7ay

Lieutenant General Charles T. Cleveland, an Army Special Forces Officer, relinquished command of the United States Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) and retired after 37 years of military service on 01 July 2015. He previously commanded the Special Operations Command Central and Special Operations Command South as well as the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-North during Operation Iraqi Freedom. LTG Cleveland is a native of Arizona and a 1978 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. His military awards and decorations include the Defense Superior Service Medal and the Legion of Merit Medal.

FSR: On a related note, highly kinetic SOF operations tend to get more press than other operations – when prominent terrorists are killed, etc. Can you give examples that you believe to be successes and models for the future for SOF on the lower end of the conflict scale? 

LTG Cleveland: I think it’s natural that those types of operations gain a lot of press. Long term we’ve had good success in the Philippines. Working with the Filipino military has gained us a little bit of notoriety. There are some good cases in Africa, including the efforts to counter Koney [Joseph Kony, leader of the Uganda-based Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group] and the influence of the Lord’s Resistance Army in the region. There are lots of successes coming from our ability to message to his fighters that there is an alternative. You don’t get a lot of press on that, but those are all good successes from an influence ops standpoint. There are also a lot of places where we have had capability building success. In Colombia, for example, we have shown considerable progress in their development and we’ve done so, by and large, under the radar. It took a long-term, disciplined approach to the campaign. 

FSR: What would you characterize as the most important elements of a successful unconventional warfare campaign, or is that even something that can be done given the primacy of context? 

LTG Cleveland: Every one of these [campaigns] is highly individualistic. Every campaign is going to be different. As an example, we’re now changing our vocabulary to talk about special warfare as opposed to just unconventional warfare or foreign internal defense. In reality, what you see is that there are places where we are doing ostensibly a FID [Foreign Internal Defense] mission but it has unconventional warfare activities included in it. There are places where we are doing things that are necessarily part of working 100% with your partner – there are [also] things we do unilaterally, for example at the same time as training and capability building. There are other places – we have very publicly spoken about the Syria train and equip mission. That is a very unconventional warfare activity, but it has pretty significant FID overtones to it. We’re going to “train and equip” – that’s even the words that we use. The Northern Alliance and working with the Peshmerga at the beginning of both Afghanistan and Iraq were unconventional warfare efforts, but again, there was a chain of command and it was done somewhat from sanctuary [at least initially] and so it had FID-like qualities to it. There are a couple of activities in places where it is purely unconventional warfare, working with surrogate groups. So each one of these cases is tailored by the circumstance, what’s generating the problem, and by the capacity and capability of whoever is there. If there is one overriding thing, it’s having the ability to understand the local and indigenous problems and using that and leveraging that in order to develop the appropriate solutions. You have to know up front what it is. You can’t just take the formula from the last successful venture and think it’s going to work in the next one. That is why there is a premium on language understanding and area knowledge.

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