Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Budget Uncertainty Could Derail Expansion of US Special Ops Forces

Excerpt;

In a May interview with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, retired Army Lt. Gen. Frank Kearney, SOCOM’s former deputy commander, suggested that SOCOM’s expansion is vulnerable to current budget realities, saying “the force is going to shrink — the general purpose force — therefore, there’s going to be less people to feed the special operations force.”
Kearney also said he worried about the effect on SOCOM if it continues to grow while the services — which provide forces to staff SOCOM — shrink.
“If we go to 72,000,” he asked, “is that sustainable given the service populations?”

Within that 72,000 number how much of the growth is in the big three of SOF: e.g., Special Forces (Green Berets), SEALs, and Rangers? (MARSOC is discussed below.)  I think that there has been no growth in the "operational force" above the numbers of the 2010 QDR (and of course no growth in Special Forces since the 2006 QDR called for growth of 5 additional battalions, the last of which should have become fully mission capable in August of 2013 which illustrates how long it takes to grow the operational force).  I would argue that most of the growth in the 72,000 number is in "enablers" - forces that support SOF but that do not go through any of the SOF training "pipelines" to produce the operational force.  I think we should always be careful when we throw out that 72,000 number.


But LTG Kearney's point is well taken. We are not going to be able to grow the operational force as the services draw down (nor do I think we should grow it).  But those who are "SOF lovers" who think that SOF is a panacea or silver bullet do not, I think, understand the true nature of US SOF in more of bigger is not always better.
V/R
Dave


Budget Uncertainty Could Derail Expansion of US Special Ops Forces

Nov. 4, 2013 - 07:12PM   |  
By PAUL McLEARY and HOPE HODGE SECK   |  
    Marine critical skills operations troops train in this undated file photo. Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command will continue to build a force of 844 operators; it now has more than 700.
    Marine critical skills operations troops train in this undated file photo. Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command will continue to build a force of 844 operators; it now has more than 700. (Marine Corps)
    • FILED UNDER
    US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, center, meets with Maj. Gen. Mark Clark, head of US Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, during a July visit to MARSOC's Stone Bay complex in North Carolina. / US Marine Corps
    Ambitious plans to expand the US military’s elite special operations command are in jeopardy as the Pentagon considers whether to freeze force levels amid widespread budget cuts, Defense News has learned.
    As the perceived need has grown for such surgical missions around the world, US Special Operations Command was thought to be immune to the current downsizing sweeping the military. Indeed, plans call for SOCOM to expand from 66,000 personnel today to 72,000 by 2017.
    However, the US Marine Corps has announced it won’t be allowed to add more than 800 special operations jobs, which officials there had sought to round out its ranks, according to Capt. Adrian Ambe, a spokesman for Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC), headquartered at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
    Ambe told Marine Corps Times, a sister publication of Defense News, in October that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s office issued guidance last summer freezing all special operations forces at their current manning levels.
    Officials at SOCOM said they have not heard of any such directive from Hagel’s office, and policy staffers at the Pentagon said no such orders have been issued.
    However, one Pentagon source added that as part of the Future Year Defense Plan for 2015-2019, slowing the planned growth of special operations forces is among the range of options that has been discussed.
    The source stressed, however, that no final decision has been made.
    A defense official who declined to speak for attribution said: “There are a range of options being considered across the Department of Defense as part of our future years defense planning and the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). As these are both ongoing activities, it would be premature to comment on the details.”
    A QDR is undertaken every four years to inform the Pentagon’s decisions about military strategy, and serve as a roadmap for its capabilities and force structure.
    Yet faced with the long-term budget cuts known as sequestration, which are eating into all of the services’ personnel accounts, Pentagon and SOCOM officials have stayed largely silent on the impact that those shrinking budgets could have on special operations.
    For MARSOC, the freeze will cap end strength at its present authorized size: 2,742 personnel. A Marine spokesman at the Pentagon, Capt. Tyler Balzer, explained that MARSOC will continue to grow until it reaches that number.
    Ambe said he did not have a figure for MARSOC’s current size.
    Previously, plans called for MARSOC to top out just above 3,600. A year ago, MARSOC rolled out a detailed plan to bulk up its combat service support structure, the enablers who back up critical skills operators by gathering intelligence, for instance, or serving as joint tactical air controllers.
    (Continued at the link below)
    at No comments:
    Labels: , , , , , ,

    Pacific Strategy: Adm. Locklear ‘Spreads The Theater’

    Has Sydney scooped the media?  This is the first I have heard "spreading the theater." of Excerpt:

    At a conference here last week, the four-star chief of Pacific Command made clear he sees the whole 4,000-mile arc from north to south as a strategically interconnected whole. The emerging term of art for this approach: “Spreading the theater.”
    What’s the strategy behind the slogan? As different as they are in language, culture, and geography, Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia are linked by sea lanes, economics, and history. All of them must also cope with an increasingly assertive China, a problem they’ve been faced with on and off for over 2,000 years. So US policy can take advantage of those shared interests and anxieties; US action in Northeast Asia can have positive repercussions in Southeast Asia, and vice versa; and shifts on either flank can affect the balance with Beijing. ”They’re interconnected,” Adm. Samuel Locklear told me after his public remarks to the National Defense Industrial Association conference onexpeditionary warfare.
    V/R
    Dave 

    usmc-amphibs-pacific
    PORTSMOUTH, VA: For decades, America’s Pacific strategy has focused on the northeast corner of that vast theater, with major forces and bases in Korea and Japan. But aseconomies boom and tensions rise in Southeast Asia, the Pentagon has played catch-up, deploying more forces to Australia, Singapore, and Guam.
    At a conference here last week, the four-star chief of Pacific Command made clear he sees the whole 4,000-mile arc from north to south as a strategically interconnected whole. The emerging term of art for this approach: “Spreading the theater.”
    What’s the strategy behind the slogan? As different as they are in language, culture, and geography, Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia are linked by sea lanes, economics, and history. All of them must also cope with an increasingly assertive China, a problem they’ve been faced with on and off for over 2,000 years. So US policy can take advantage of those shared interests and anxieties; US action in Northeast Asia can have positive repercussions in Southeast Asia, and vice versa; and shifts on either flank can affect the balance with Beijing. ”They’re interconnected,” Adm. Samuel Locklear told me after his public remarks to the National Defense Industrial Association conference onexpeditionary warfare.
    But there’s no East Asian equivalent of NATO, I protested. While Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, New Zealand, and Thailand are all treaty allies of the United States – and Taiwan is a de facto ally – they’re not all allies of each other. So, I asked the admiral, if China starts shooting at the Japanese in the north over the Senkaku Islands, do South Pacific partners like the Philippines help out? If China starts shooting at the Filipinos over the Scarborough Shoal, do our Northeast Asian allies risk Beijing’s wrath by taking action? In short, do our allies all hang together or all hang separately?
    “I always stay away from hypothetical questions,” Locklear replied, “but what I would say is that the interests of the nations in the region are tied together pretty tightly, as ours [are] with the region’s — including those of China…. Everything’s interlocked.”
    Unlike the Cold War between economically separate Western and Soviet blocs, everybody in the Asia-Pacific is heavily invested in each others’ economies, including the US and China. “It’s a different world we’re in because it’s not a clear-cut divide between one set of driving interests and the other,” Locklear told me.
    Admittedly, that kind of interconnection didn’t help Europe avoid World War I, but Locklear argued that East Asia wouldn’t repeat that unhappy history. “We have a rollingbilateral relationship with China,” he told me. “So I don’t mean to make it sound Pollyannish or that the situation couldn’t potentially be dangerous, but I think we’re generally [moving] in a positive direction on the Pacific as it relates to security matters — generally. That doesn’t mean we won’t have fits and starts.”
    What Locklear is getting at is that the US “rebalance” to the Pacific is not just about reassuring our partners that we’ve got their backs against an increasingly assertive China: It’s also about reassuring China that it can find its place in the sun through peaceful means. If you want a visual image for this strategy, think of a long arc connecting our allies and partners, from Seoul in the north to Manila in the middle to Darwin, Australia in the south. But then you have to superimpose upon this north-south arc another line running straight east-west to represent our sometimes-fumbling outreach to China.
    pacificbasin-map
    “The world’s not quite sure what to do with China, if it can do anything at all,” Locklear told the audience at the NDIA conference. After decades of dramatic growth, he said, “they’re now becoming a global security concern or a global security partner, depending on how you look at it.”
    East Asia’s problem is that there is no structure like NATO or the European Union providing coherence and guidance. Given the region’s sheer size and diversity – it has eight times as many people as Europe and at least four major language families compared to Europe’s one (Indo-European) – it’s unlikely there ever will be. “We have to kind of figure out how to make what’s there work as best as we can,” Locklear told the group. There is a host of overlapping bilateral alliances and local multilateral organizations, mostly notably the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), to work with. “The best we can do in this century is kind of pull those together,” he said, so if a crisis erupts, “it doesn’t just tear apart.”
    “Because if it tears apart,” Locklear said grimly, “we’ve got seven of the 10 largest armies in the world, we’ve got all the largest navies in the world, and we’ve got the most heavily militarized part of the world here, because they’ve got the cash.”
    The risk of war weighs heavily on US military minds. In fact, the first person I heard talk of “spreading the theater” – though he attributed the concept to Locklear – was the Marine Corps’ Deputy Commandant, Lt. Gen. Kenneth Glueck, and he was definitely thinking in terms of major conflict, not just peacetime engagement.
    In a head-on conflict in the East China Sea – Glueck didn’t say “with China,” but it was pretty clear what he meant – “you’re looking at more or less attrition warfare,” he told me in a sidebar conversation at the conference. (China’s land-based missile arsenal can hit US forces well out to sea and our airbases in Japan and South Korea). In that scenario,  ”we’re going tit for tat,” Glueck said, “and we can’t play that game. So what we’re going to end up doing, you talk with Adm. Locklear, he’ll spread the theater. He’ll deter, deny, and do other operations to throw them off game.” In classical military terminology, this is called exploiting “exterior lines”: China may be in the center of the theater, closer to everything that counts than we are – an advantage known as “interior lines” – but the US can turn the Middle Kingdom’s central position into a liability by striking on both flanks at once.
    (Continued at the link below)

    at No comments:
    Labels: , , ,

    Sunday, November 3, 2013

    Why a strategy is not a plan (Book Review)

    Have not read Freedman's entire book yet but the parts I have read are useful.

    Excerpts:
    Above all, he argues, it is about employing whatever resources are available to achieve the best outcome in situations that are both dynamic and contested: “It is about getting more out of a situation than the starting balance of power would suggest. It is the art of creating power.”
    …
    Sir Lawrence examines this idea in three main forms. The first is the “strategy of force”, which deals with the military sort, from Clausewitz to nuclear game theory and the rise of asymmetric warfare today. The second is “strategy from below”, which looks at political varieties, particularly those of 19th-century professional revolutionaries such as Karl Marx, who saw themselves as the general staff of the downtrodden. And the third is “strategy from above”, which examines the development of strategy in business, mainly a late-20th-century phenomenon, at least in its most self-conscious form. In all three spheres strategy is seen as the way to get a decisive and thus lasting result.

    Why a strategy is not a plan

    Strategies too often fail because more is expected of them than they can deliver

    Nov 2nd 2013 |From the print edition
    Strategy: A History. By Lawrence Freedman. Oxford University Press USA; 751 pages; $34.95. Buy from Amazon.com
    EVERYONE, it seems, is in need of a strategy. Governments have lots of them: strategies for health care, energy, housing, and so on. Each area of policy is made to seem more purposeful if there is a strategy behind it. Similarly, no company these days would dare to admit it lacks one. If things are going badly it will often be put down to the lack of good strategy. People even talk about using it to improve their lives—from coping with stress to losing weight or just making other people like them more.
    Related topics
    Over time, the word “strategy” has been drained of meaning by ubiquity and overuse. Sir Lawrence Freedman’s aim in his magisterial new book, “Strategy: A History”, is to find a workable definition of what strategy is and to show how it has evolved and been applied in war, politics and business. Above all, he argues, it is about employing whatever resources are available to achieve the best outcome in situations that are both dynamic and contested: “It is about getting more out of a situation than the starting balance of power would suggest. It is the art of creating power.”
    Sir Lawrence, who for more than 30 years has been one of Britain’s foremost historians of military strategy, examines how the origins of the word can be found in Greek mythology and the Bible. A recurrent theme emerges: the dichotomy between strategies based on the application of superior force (personified by the heroic Achilles) and those based on the application of guile (personified by the crafty Odysseus, who came up with the idea of the Trojan horse). Guile is more seductive because it offers the possibility of cleverness defeating brute power.
    A few hundred years after Homer’s “Iliad”, Sun Tzu, a Chinese general, was writing “The Art of War”, a book that celebrates cunning by arguing that the way to win is by always doing the opposite of what your opponent expects. Sun Tzu gave birth to a long tradition that believed strategic goals could often best be achieved by avoiding the destructive uncertainty of pitched battle. It was preferable to use “stratagem and finesse” to defeat an enemy—famine was a favourite tactic of Sun Tzu’s—than to expose yourself to “the chance of arms”. His teachings are still used in business schools and military academies today.
    No one is more associated with strategies founded on deceit and psychological manipulation than Niccolò Machiavelli, who is also still studied. However, as Sir Lawrence argues, guile alone can be overrated, particularly against enemies that are clever as well as strong. Machiavelli believed that his prince needed both the cunning of the fox and the strength of the lion to keep power. If David’s slingshot had missed the gap in Goliath’s helmet, which unaided by God it might well have done, things would have gone badly for him.
    It is, however, not really until the late 18th century, partly as a consequence of the Enlightenment and partly through the impact on military and political thinking of the Napoleonic wars, that the concept of strategy as it is usually understood today made its first appearance. It was seen as a way of uniting operational art in the military sphere with political objectives. As Carl von Clausewitz, a great Prussian strategist, put it: “War is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means.”
    (Continued at the link below)

    at No comments:
    Labels: , ,

    To avoid failure, you must recognize success

    I fully concur that we need to be able to develop and execute strategy during austerity and for a long time to come.  But the debate about looking forward or backward reminds me of Cohen and Gooch's book Military Misfortune in which posit that military failures are a result of three "failures" failure to learn, failure to adapt, and failure to anticipate.  I think we have to look back and forward as we develop and execute strategy in the age of austerity (and in any age for that matter).  I do concur that we need to use caution in not over-inflating threats or chase after threats merely to justify force structure and military spending.  I think the old tactical construct of identifying the most likely and most dangerous threats can be useful but I think what might to often happen is that we focus on the most dangerous threat without consideration of the likelihood of the threat occurring.  But good strategy will focus somewhere in between and provide the agility to address emerging threats that may or may not have been identified.

    I am also reluctant to toss the futurists out in favor of history.  When we look at the Global Trends reports some of us criticize them because past forecasts did not occur the way they were described or did not happen in the time frames suggested.  I think a good historical study would be to look at the past Global Trends forecasts and conduct an analysis of what conditions arose or events occurred that prevented the negative forecasts from coming to fruition.  I would hope that some things did not occur because strategies and actions were developed and executed that altered the course of the forecasts.  To me this is the value of the Global Trends, if the report can identify future possibilities that we either want to happen or want to prevent from happening, policy makers and strategists can do something about them.  A future forecast may not need to simply translate to the idea that we need to spend more on high end military expenditures or increase or maintain current force structure but could identify how our scare resources might be more effectively allocated to support our national interests and achieve our desired ends.  And perhaps most importantly identify how other instruments of national power, other than military, might be employed to achieved desired ends.
    V/R
    Dave


    DAVID LONGSTREATH/AP
    A destroyed Iraqi tank rests near a series of oil well fires during the Gulf War, March 9, 1991, in northern Kuwait. In the 1990s, observers increasingly came to believe that while the U.S. had won the Gulf War, it had lost the peace. But the U.S. was not losing the peace. In fact, it had already won it.
    Published: 01 November 2013 04:09 PM
    Updated: 01 November 2013 04:09 PM
     By Joshua Rovner 



    The Department of Defense is in for some serious belt-tightening.
    It already lost $37 billion as a result of sequestration, and much deeper cuts are coming. The Budget Control Act of 2011, along with the end of war-related spending, may end up costing the Pentagon about a third of its budget. It will surely affect the thousands of Texans associated with the defense industry in Dallas-Fort Worth.
    Defense officials hope for a political compromise that would help them avoid this fate, but the outlook is not promising, and both parties have shown that defense spending is no longer sacrosanct. Moreover, few lawmakers will take the political risk of cutting military pay and benefits, which account for most of the rise in defense spending, so shrinking budgets will mostly affect decisions about what to buy and how to use it.
    For policymakers and military planners, strategy under budget austerity is the new normal.
    How can leaders make strategic decisions under these conditions? Last week’s Tower Center Conference on National Security at Southern Methodist University put the question to a range of military officers and national security scholars.
    One answer reflected traditional thinking about threat assessment. When faced with uncertainty, the best solution is to survey the world for new threats and focus on meeting them. This is a common-sense approach to dealing with a range of uncertain challenges. Done well, it can alert officials to new issues for which they are insufficiently prepared. But it can be taken too far: The constant search for new threats may cause officials to exaggerate the real danger to national security, turning small problems into large ones and making it difficult to set priorities.
    To avoid these pitfalls, a different approach would look not to the uncertain future but to the known past. Instead of warily scanning for new threats, it would focus on evaluating the results of recent U.S. strategy. This would include a frank discussion of mistakes and missed opportunities, but also a recognition of U.S. victories. The ability to see success is not just a feel-good excuse for patriotic backslapping. If we are interested in making prudent decisions about future strategy and defense spending, it is essential to see what worked and why.
    Unfortunately, the U.S. is not always able to see victory, even when evidence of success is clear and abundant. In the 1990s, for example, observers increasingly came to believe that while the U.S. had won the first Gulf War, it had lost the peace. They worried that Saddam Hussein would remain a threat as long as he was in power and that he would eventually crack the international coalition arrayed against him. This view was widely held in Washington, and by the end of the decade, regime change became stated U.S. policy.
    But the U.S. was not losing the peace. In fact, it had already won it. It had demolished Iraq’s conventional forces in the war, and it was doing so much damage to Iraq’s economy that it would take decades to rebuild. U.S. forces and international inspectors eliminated Iraq’s arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and forced Saddam to mothball his nuclear program.
    Most of all, they altered Saddam’s basic worldview. Before the war, he sought to be a regional hegemon and rejected any international criticism as an insult to Iraqi honor. After the war, he focused his attention inward, doing whatever he could to keep his domestic enemies at bay, while simultaneously allowing international weapons inspectors to run around the country. Saddam was still in charge, but Iraq was no longer a meaningful threat to the United States or anyone else.
    (Continued at the link below)
    at No comments:
    Labels: , ,

    Friday, November 1, 2013

    Five Profound Choices Special Ops Face Next Year

    I could be mistaken, but I think the Theater Special Operations Commands (TSOC) remain OPCON to the Geographic Combatant Command (GCC) with the change being that they are now under the combatant command (COCOM) of USSOCOM.  They do more than merely "serve" the GCCs and chiefs of mission as I believe they and all SOF deployed into theater are under the operational control (OPCON) of the GCC.  But I could be wrong as Linda is much closer to the commands than I am.  But leading off with the statement that ADM McRaven has assumed control may lead the reader to believe that the GCC does not have any real control because following up the explanation with making it clear that SOF is there to "serve" the GCC seems an afterthought especially since "serve" is not a doctrinal description of a command or support relationship.  (Then again maybe "serve" has been added to the lexicon since I left.)  Not being clear that the TSOCs and deployed SOF are OPCON to the GCCs may contribute to the bureaucratic tension and infighting.  I do agree with the TSOCs being COCOM to USSOCOM because they will be better supported logistically and in terms of personnel manning which will be better for the GCC but I think the perception that SOF will be conducting operations not under the OPCON of the GCC leads to problems (and of course we know that in certain situations the President and Secretary of Defense may determine that SOF not be under the OPCON of the GCC but I would submit that is the rare exception and certainly not the rule.)

    Fix the commands. This year, the four-star Special Operations Command led by Adm. William McRaven assumed control of the theater special operations commands which are responsible for region-wide special operations with the intent of making them more capable. This is a vitally important part of the legacy of changes wrought by Adm. McRaven, and for it to bear the intended fruit, the theater SOF commands must be manned by the appropriate personnel and receive adequate resources in order to become world-class elite commands like the counterterrorism command. Second, for this change to be successful, the special operators must make clear at every step that they are there to serve the geographic command and ambassadorial intent. Otherwise, a new source of bureaucratic tension and infighting will be the result.

    And not to beat a dead horse but there is no discussion of the SOF and in particular SF's core mission of unconventional warfare.  It is the mission for which traditional SOF (Special Forces and Psychological Operations) were developed and as I have argued unconventional warfare is one of the three forms of warfare that threaten our national security interests and while we may not exercise the strategic offensive option of conducting unconventional warfare, those who have long been trained and educated in it can contribute both tactically and strategically to the campaign plans and strategies to counter unconventional warfare.

    But Linda makes a very interesting conclusion.  It is difficult for USSOCOM to engage in real leadership success planning when the services still control promotions and assignments of their personnel?  The services will nominate ADM McRaven's successor and as an example has the Army every nominated a career Special Forces officer (defined as one who has commanded at every level from SF ODA to Group to TSOC) to command USSOCOM? I am certainly not privy to what has gone on in the Pentagon but if the Army has nominated one, he was not selected for the position.
    V/R
    Dave
     

    SEALS training
    U.S. special operations forces face decisions of profound consequence in 2014 after having been empowered by a series of policy directives taken over the past year. One of these directives has been, contrary to the caricature of unilateral commando forces popularized by video games such as Call of Duty, an unequivocal message from their command and the U.S. president: go forth and partner.
    If 2013 was the year of decisions, 2014 will be the year special operations forcesimplement their roadmap for the future. But where exactly does that road lead? The trajectory will be determined by several budgetary and policy choices that the U.S. military, policymakers and Congress will make in 2014.
    JSOC paratroopers
    Does size matter? Special operations forces recruit most of their members from the ranks of conventional forces, a universe of personnel that is expected to shrink. It would be far better to accept a lower force level of uniformed special operators than to lower standards and keep the number at 33,000. This would maintain the existing rigorous standards to ensure that experienced, professional troops populate the elite forces. One of the key lessons of the past decade that must be enshrined for posterity is that how forces are used matters far more than their numbers.
    Special operations forces can easily be frittered away in tactical and episodic missions that have no enduring or strategic value. Thoughtful application of their capabilities generally means two things: persistent presence combined with either conventional and/or multinational partners. This can mean infantry squads helping small teams of Green Berets, SEALS, and Marine special operators or Estonian, Lithuanian, Romanian and Polish special operators — to name just a few of the two dozen countries who sent SOF to Afghanistan. This footprint does not have to be thousands or tens of thousands — most often a few hundred can have an enormous impact — if they are deployed in back-to-back rotations for five to 10 years. The key here is for policymakers and U.S. ambassadors, who are the gatekeepers for U.S. forces in non-war theaters, to embrace the value of these long-term advisory missions.
    (Continued at the link below)
    at No comments:
    Labels: , , , ,

    Thursday, October 31, 2013

    Thoughts on the Future of Special Operations: A Return to the Roots - Adapted for the Future

    Please go to Small Wars Journal to read the entire essay. http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/thoughts-on-the-future-of-special-operations
    V/R
    Dave

    Thoughts on the Future of Special Operations

    by David S. Maxwell

    Journal Article | October 31, 2013 - 2:44pm
    Thoughts on the Future of Special Operations: A Return to the Roots - Adapted for the Future
    David S. Maxwell
    As the post 9-11 era of the War on Terrorism winds down, the Services are rightly looking to the future.  With the severe fiscal constraints, drawdown of personnel, and an uncertain future of threats there is a debate on whether the military should focus solely on traditional war fighting and deterrence or sustain and further develop the capabilities to deal with the unconventional warfare threats posed by state and non-state actors from the Iran Action Network to North Korea’s Department 39 to Al Qaeda.  The Special Operations community is having this debate as well and it has resulted in controversial visions for the future including establishing a Global SOF Network (GSN). 
    The purpose of this paper is to briefly argue that the future of Special Operations rests in a thorough understanding of its fundamental and traditional missions and then adapting sound, tried and true, and still relevant historical doctrine, mission sets, and tactics, techniques, and procedures for the uncertain future operating environment.
    In summary this paper will briefly highlight six specific points.
    1. The U.S. faces national security threats in three fundamental forms of warfare: nuclear warfare, conventional warfare, and unconventional warfare.
    2. The future is characterized by the need to conduct unconventional warfare (UW) and to be able to counter unconventional warfare.
    3. The U.S. has the greatest surgical strike capability in the world but it needs to prioritize and resource equally our special warfare capabilities. 
    4. The U.S. needs Strategists and Policy makers who have a deep understanding of and value the strategic options of UW and Counter-UW.
    5. Effective Special Warfare is counter-intuitively characterized by slow and deliberate employment – long duration actions and activities, relationship establishment, development, and sustainment.
    6. SOF will always have a role in hybrid conflict and conventional warfare. 
    Unconventional Warfare
    Unconventional Warfare is defined as “activities to enable a resistance or insurgency to coerce, disrupt or overthrow a government or occupying power through or with an underground, auxiliary and [or] guerrilla force in a denied area.”  This is not an exclusively U.S. centric definition but in fact describes the activities from Al Qaeda to the Iran Action Network.  There are myriad resistance movements around the world including but not limited to the Free Syrian Army to the Uighurs in China to the FARC in Colombia, Boko Haram in Africa and both Moro Islamic organizations and the New Peoples Army in the Philippines just to name a few.  It may be in the U.S. strategic interests to either support some of these movements through unconventional warfare or counter the unconventional warfare efforts of others.
    The current doctrinal definition above does not describe the full range of unconventional warfare conducted by the U.S.  There is controversy over the definition and many do not agree with it even in the Special Operations Community.  One seemingly slight controversy is that the definition reads “underground, auxiliary, AND guerilla forces” implying that to conduct UW all three elements are required.  Some, as I do, argue that “and” should be replaced with “or” because a guerrilla force is not always necessary and in fact most people seem to get think the unconventional warfare equals guerrilla warfare.  In the 21st century effective unconventional warfare does not require a guerrilla force and certainly not one in the “traditional” sense as in World War II, Korea, or Vietnam.  Undergrounds and auxiliaries can be much more sophisticated elements of a resistance movement and employ terrorist tactics to achieve their political aims.  Rather than focus on the terrorism conducted, we should really consider how such organizations are actually conduct a form of unconventional warfare to achieve their strategic aims.
    Therefore, it is important to look deeper into the meaning of unconventional warfare particularly since here is no agreed upon theory of unconventional warfare and certainly nothing to balance with theory of special operations put forth in Admiral McRaven's seminal work on special operations raids and direct action with his important principles of how small special operations forces can defeat larger ones.  The no longer published 1997 Joint Doctrine Encyclopedia is that last time that UW was fully described in non-SOF military publication.  This excerpt provides a foundation for the concept of UW that remains relevant today:
    UW is the military and paramilitary aspect of an insurgency or other armed resistance movement and may often become a protracted politico-military activity. From the U.S. perspective, UW may be the conduct of indirect or proxy warfare against a hostile power for the purpose of achieving U.S. national interests in peacetime; UW may be employed when conventional military involvement is impractical or undesirable; or UW may be a complement to conventional operations in war. The focus of UW is primarily on existing or potential insurgent, secessionist, or other resistance movements. Special operations forces (SOF) provide advice, training, and assistance to existing indigenous resistance organizations. The intent of UW operations is to exploit a hostile power’s political, military, economic, and psychological vulnerabilities by advising, assisting, and sustaining resistance forces to accomplish U.S. strategic or operational objectives.
    When UW is conducted independently during military operations other than war or war, its primary focus is on political and psychological objectives. A successful effort to organize and mobilize a segment of the civil population may culminate in military action. Strategic UW objectives may include the following:
    • Undermining the domestic and international legitimacy of the target authority.
    • Neutralizing the target authority’s power and shifting that power to the resistance organization.
    • Destroying the confidence and will of the target authority’s leadership.
    • Isolating the target authority from international diplomatic and material support while obtaining such support for the resistance organization.
    • Obtaining the support or neutrality of the various segments of the society.
    Although this is from 1996 this offers a description of the kind of activities that SOF can conduct “to coerce, disrupt or overthrow a government or occupying power” in support of U.S. strategic objectives and is as relevant at the time of President Kennedy as it is at the time of President Obama.  It also can describe what organizations such as Al Qaeda and the Iran Action Network are doing today.
    Since 9-11 we have reinvented numerous terms and concepts from counterinsurgency to irregular warfare to describe what many thought were new phenomena. John F. Kennedy and Barak Obama each articulated the enduring threats that we faced in the 1960’s and that we still face in the 21st century with these two quotes:
     “This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origins - war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of combat; by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It requires - in those situations where we must encounter it - a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore, a new and wholly different kind of military training.” 
    “History teaches us that nations that grow comfortable with the old ways and complacent in the face of new threats, those nations do not long endure.  And in the 21st century, we do not have the luxury of deciding which challenges to prepare for and which to ignore.  We must overcome the full spectrum of threats – the conventional and unconventional; the nation-state and the terrorists network; the spread of deadly technologies ad the spread of hateful ideologies; 18th century-style piracy and 21st century cyber threats.”
    Both Presidents describe similar threats for their times and each includes elements of unconventional warfare.  This is a timeless activity that evolves over time.  As one simple example today undergrounds and auxiliaries (these exist in some form even if the resistance organizations do not use this terminology) make extensive use of modern communications for recruitment, political mobilization and activities, psychological warfare, and for planning and coordinating operations.  Although some call UW an anachronism because their view is limited to World War II style resistance operations, a thorough study will reveal that UW is widely practiced in various forms today and has adapted to modern conditions, and thus the U.S. must be prepared to both practice it and counter it in accordance with its strategic interests.  It is imperative that the U.S. military and strategists and policy makers have a deep understanding of unconventional warfare and the requirement to counter it in the coming years.
    Surgical Strike and Special Warfare
    Although Title 10 of the U.S. Code in Section 167 lists the ten special operations activities in so far as they pertain to the conduct of special operations, all Special Operations can be described in two broad categories, Surgical Strike and Special Warfare.  These two categories should be useful to policy makers and strategists because these terms can broadly characterize “the yin and yang” of special operations which has variously been described has direct and indirect approaches or hard and soft power.  As yin and yang imply, SOF is most effective when there is the proper balance among its capabilities but that balance constantly shifts as conditions change.   Most importantly, the capabilities are not mutually exclusive but instead are mutually supporting and reinforcing when they are integrated to support national policies, an integrated strategy and comprehensive campaign plans.
    Surgical strike as defined in ADRP 3-05, Army Special Operations is “the execution of activities in a precise manner that employ special operations in hostile, denied, or politically sensitive environments to seize, destroy, capture, exploit, recover or damage designated targets, or influence adversaries and threats.”  The Title 10 missions that fall within this category are counter terrorism, direct action, special reconnaissance (including all the advanced surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities developed to support SOF since 9-11). Although not designated in Title 10, counter proliferation of weapons of mass destruction would require support from the surgical capabilities resident in SOF.  The U.S. has developed a surgical strike capability that is the envy of the world.  It has a capability to find, fix, finish, exploit and analyze (F3EA) that has captured and killed numerous high value targets as well as disrupted and destroyed networks and cells conducting or threatening to conduct operations against U.S. interests.
    Special warfare as defined in ADRP 3-05 3-05 Army Special Operations is “the execution of activities that involve a combination of lethal and nonlethal actions taken by a specially trained and educated force that has a deep understanding of cultures and foreign language, proficiency in small-unit tactics, and the ability to build and fight alongside indigenous combat formations in a permissive, uncertain, or hostile environment.” 
    The Title 10 activities that fall under special warfare include unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, civil affairs and military information support operations (formerly psychological operations).  There are three other activities listed in Title and these include humanitarian assistance, theater search and rescue, and such other special activities designated by the President or Secretary of Defense.
    Special Warfare has been the traditional mission of the majority of U.S. SOF.  It can be seen in the traditional names of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, Special Warfare magazine that dates from the 1960’s and the Navy’s Naval Special Warfare Command.  In the 1962 edition of theSpecial Warfare Magazine special warfare consisted of three distinct and overarching missions: Unconventional Warfare, Psychological Warfare, and Counterinsurgency.  A similar construct is useful today with the recognition that surgical strike is a mission of co-equal importance to special warfare.
    Some today argue that the use of “warfare” in the name is counter-productive due to perceived (and I would suggest unwarranted) sensitivities with other U.S. government agencies.  Some offer judgments that Ambassadors do not want military personnel coming to their country team announcing that they are there to conduct special warfare.  We should keep in mind that the credibility of SOF lies first and foremost with its combat prowess across the joint SOF force and the ability of every SOF operator to fight and win across the spectrum of conflict.  There should never be an apology for the fact that SOF operators are fighters first who possess special skills and training that allow them to conduct the myriad missions of special warfare and surgical strike.  SOF should never run from its reputation and failing to recognize both its roots and its capabilities by jettisoning special warfare would compound the mistake that was made by eliminating psychological operations for military information support operations.
    (Continued at the link below)
    at No comments:
    Labels: , , , , , , ,
    Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

    Giving Tuesday Recommendations

      Dear Friends,  I do not normally do this (except I did this last year and for the last few years now, too) and I certainly do not mean to ...