The Only Thing Worse than Misusing
SOF is Policy Makers Misusing SOF Operational Methods as a Strategy
By David S. Maxwell
Special operations forces are a
national grand-strategic asset: they are a tool of statecraft that can be
employed quite surgically in support of diplomacy, of foreign assistance (of
several kinds), as vital adjunct to regular military forces, or as an
independent weapon.
Colin S. Gray
For decades now Special
Operations Forces have made numerous important contributions to the military
services from equipment to tactics to actual operations. From pioneering night vision flying to
development of advanced weapons, body armor, personal equipment and advanced
communications, much of the military equipment that is now service common was once
SOF unique. The room and building clearing
techniques that are used by every Army and Marine squad and platoon were once
classified tactics used by special mission units.
“Through, by and with,” was
developed by Colonel Mark Boyatt to describe operations by Special Forces
working with indigenous elements in Haiti was adopted by GEN Odierno in Iraq in
his guidance to the force when the Iraqi military was to take the lead in
operations.
USSOCOM has partnered
with the Army and Marine Corps to ensure there is sufficient emphasis on the
human domain in the full spectrum of war fighting. The Army established the Asymmetric Warfare
Group (AWG) that drew heavily from the active duty and retired SOF community
and often shares SOF tactics, techniques and procedures with the Army and joint
forces.
While the public is
enamored with Special Operations conducted to capture or kill bin Laden in Pakistan
and Abu Sayyef in Syria or rescue Captain Phillips in waters off the Horn of
Africa policy makers have also become enamored with the possibility of using
Special Operations methodologies on a larger scale and have a larger
amount of non-SOF forces conduct operations using SOF methods. Without specifically
saying so US national leadership seems to have based the 2012 Defense Strategic
Guidance on an operational methodology and techniques that are heavily
influenced by SOF. We should consider
this paragraph from the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance:
“…,
we will develop innovative,
low-cost, and small-footprint approaches to achieve our security
objectives, relying on exercises, rotational presence, and advisory capabilities.”
This is a description of
some of the traditional SOF operational methods and seems like a sound way to
operate in a fiscally constrained environment in which the President bases his
strategy on not committing ground troops to overseas conflicts. This is the essence of our strategic problem
today: we have an “ends – ways” mismatch
between what we say and what we will order our military to do. We have said our end is to degrade and
destroy ISIL yet we have constrained our ways and instead are trying to employ
a low-cost, low-risk course of action based on SOF methods that can be very effective
when properly employed in support of an overall strategy but in the wrong
situation can be counterproductive and even lead to mission failure.
However, the above quote
is missing two very important words:
“whenever possible.” I
deliberately left them off because we seem to have forgotten them and now
default to using these techniques and methods without consideration of what is feasible,
acceptable, and suitable. The problem is
that we really do not think strategically and when it comes to SOF we do not
appreciate how it can support policy and strategy with the operative word being
support. SOF does not win wars by itself. Conducting operations “through, by, and with
indigenous forces,” using a small footprint, advising and assisting and
building partner capacity support strategy but cannot
be the sole ways and means of strategy especially when trying to achieve an end
such as the destruction of ISIL. Despite
success host nation forces in places such as Colombia, The Philippines, and
Africa with SOF support through discreet operations by advising and assisting
friends, partners, and allies in support of US strategy, employment of SOF and
SOF methods alone is not a substitute for strategy.
We have built a strategy of words saying we will degrade and destroy ISIL
but it rests on the foundational administration policies of "no boots on
the ground," no nation building (not that I am advocating nation building
at all - I believe the military can be used for stability operations but only
the people of a nation can build a nation and its state - we cannot do it for
them), do nothing that can be associated with Bush 43. It also means that we can have no mission
creep. As an aside, this is really
problematic for anyone who knows that strategy needs to be adaptive and
iterative but any change to the strategy based on assessment
and understanding of actual conditions, both military and
political, is automatically deemed mission creep. This means that strategists have to come up
with the perfect strategy the first time and from then on it cannot be adapted.
Use of air power is controlled from inside the Beltway and airmen are not
allowed to use the full extent of their capabilities to maximize effectiveness
(although administration officials and policy makers remain enamored with the
Air Power and SOF lash up they observed in Afghanistan in 2001 – yet they will
not allow it to be effectively employed).
Worst of all the military is told to destroy ISIL but it will only be
able to outsource the fight to ineffective proxy forces in Iraq and Syria whose
interests are not aligned with the US.
The situation in the Middle East also requires political solutions to
achieve success but the US cannot force the necessary solutions upon the partner
governments and organizations. Perhaps the name of the mission in
Iraq and Syria should be Mission Impossible and the Task Force should be called
the Impossible Mission Task Force.
We really have to get our
"WMD" right - word, message, and deed or as I
like to think: word, mind, and deed -the words mean
nothing to the mind of the target audience unless they are connected to
the right deeds that back up the words. The problem we
have with ISIL is our ends-ways disconnect - degrade and destroy ISIL does not
compute in the minds of ISIL, Syrian "moderate" resistance,
Iraqi government and people, the international community, and the
American public when it is not backed with the appropriate deeds. The "deed" that is not appropriate,
to reiterate, is contracting out the ways to inept proxy indigenous and host
nation forces whose interests are not aligned with ours so that they will not
be able to achieve our ends.
One of our strategic weaknesses is
that we labor under the assumption that we can get people to like us (and even
worse that we should try to make them like us). We should consider
Machiavelli who said it is better to be feared (or better said perhaps,
respected) than loved. We need to
be able to act decisively in our interests and not apologize for trying to
protect those interests as well as our values.
In fact we should consider focusing on protecting our values rather than
projecting them.
Which brings us to the most important point. We have been trying to define the nature of
the conflicts we are experiencing around the world. While we still see the full spectrum from
peace to war what we are observing most are conflicts in the space between
peace and war or between diplomacy and war where effective use of all the
instruments of power to include some forms of military engagement and at times
fighting are required. While we can debate
various names, i.e., "gray zone", "hybrid
threats," "the
missing middle," "asymmetric
warfare," and more, what I fear our strategy is called is
“politically correct warfare,” which is based on our fundamental strategic
weakness above, namely our desire to be liked.
It also leads to another strategic weakness: risk averseness (risk to
the forces, risk to the mission, and most of all risks to the political
leadership) that constrains us from effectively using all the instruments of
national power and again drives us toward the words from the 2012 Defense
Strategic guidance:
“…,
we will develop innovative,
low-cost, and small-footprint approaches to achieve our security
objectives, relying on exercises, rotational presence, and advisory capabilities.”
Former Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates recognizes that the troops on the
ground do not have the latitude necessary to accomplish the mission. If you want the troops on the ground to be effective
then you have to let them do their jobs. The more constraints we place on
them in the misguided belief that by doing so and by micromanaging them from
inside the beltway that this will somehow prevent things from going wrong, the
more we hinder mission accomplishment and the more we put the troops at risk.
In our risk (averse) analysis, as
previously stated, we have three risks: risk to mission, risk to force (people)
and risk to political leadership. Based on not giving the troops
sufficient latitude to do their job we demonstrate that our risk analysis is
only focused on one of the three risks.
We were of course “surprised” by the rise of ISIL, so much so that Brett
McGurk now says we must get a handle on
this on
this and the CIA has had to reorganize to fight ISIL. But our politically correct warfare has
blinded us to the reality of the threats and we have spent the past 14 years
trying to counter narratives and make people like us rather than protecting our
interests and achieving the correct policy and strategic ends.
While all forces from both the conventional force and special operations must
have advisory capabilities we are now developing these capabilities on an
“industrial scale” which of course will conflict with both low cost and small
footprint approaches. Despite General
Dempsey recognizing that
operations are going to be long duration and we must have patience it appears
that the view among some policy makers is if we can send more advisors and
supporting forces of up to some 20,000 to 30,000 as John Nagl advocates then we can
achieve results faster. However, the 450 troops recently announced is
a far cry from what Dr. Nagl and other analysts recommend. As the old adage goes: “Cheap, fast, or good,
pick two because you cannot have three.”
It appears we are going for cheap and fast vice good.
This is a problem caused by replacing strategy with special operations
tactics, concepts, and operational methodology.
This choice should be understood by policy makers and strategists:
if you want a rapid and decisive victory employ conventional forces along with
SOF and all the elements of national power in support of a strategy that can
maximize the effectiveness of all elements. If you want to constrain the
footprint and restrain cost and only work through and with indigenous forces
then employ SOF. However, to do the latter you still must have a strategy
that employs and orchestrates all the elements of national power with SOF in
support and you must accept that it will take time and require patience to
achieve the desired effect. The strategy also cannot simply be based on
training and equipping but must include effective advice and assistance on
operations as well as the effective diplomatic efforts to influence the host
nation government and other partners (i.e. resistance forces). But we
must be prepared to explain the reason for a long duration sustained effort and
seek the support from the American public for a long term commitment using the
U.S. military in a purely secondary and supporting role.
Continuing to add larger numbers of advisors, particularly from the
conventional force will likely dis-incentivize host nation forces from
fighting effectively. It will also
undercut our diplomacy to influence the host nation government to make the
necessary domestic political changes to undercut the legitimacy of the
enemy.
But perhaps the grossest misunderstanding of SOF methodology was
demonstrated in Brett McGurk’s other comments this weekend. He stated what every SOF advisor has known
from long experience. Indigenous forces
always perform better when US advisors accompany them on operations. That is logical and borne out by history. But
the problem becomes when the number of advisors becomes too large you create a
dependent relationship and while their performance improves in the short run it
may not be sustainable over time and after the departure of advisors which is
perhaps a lesson we should learn from the eight years Operation Iraqi Freedom
from 2003 to 2011.
Special
operations and specifically special warfare, from which the expertise of
advising and assisting is derived, is by nature long duration, requiring
presence, patience, and persistence. SOF in today’s Iraq mission cannot
be the main effort or at the forefront of policy and in the public eye where
immediate short-term results are demanded by the 24 hour news cycle. They
are by nature low visibility often discreet operations but of course this no
longer the case with ISIL. And conducting advisory operations on an industrial
scale the way the U.S. military does it is not a small footprint or low cost
especially with all the logistics support required. And worse, the larger
our advisory effort the more we take over operations and strategy and put the
host nation in the back seat and as has been said, dis-incentivizing the host
nation military forces because they know that U.S. forces will pick up all the
slack.
Rather than conducting “politically
correct warfare” perhaps we should consider a political warfare approach though
it may well be too late to make this the foundation of an approach in Iraq. In this case the US Army Special Operations
Command SOF Support to Political Warfare White Paper published in March 2015 is instructive.
Quote:
“Political
Warfare emerges from the premise that rather than a binary opposition between
“war” and “peace,” the conduct of international relations is characterized by
continuously evolving combinations of collaboration, conciliation,
confrontation, and conflict. As such,
during times of interstate “peace,” the U.S. government must still confront
adversaries aggressively and conclusively through all means of national power. When those adversaries practice a form of
Hybrid Warfare employing political, military, economic, and criminal tools
below the threshold of conventional warfare, the U.S. must overmatch adversary
efforts—though without large-scale, extended military operations that may be
fiscally unsustainable and diplomatically costly. Hence, the U.S. must embrace a form of
sustainable “warfare” rather than “war,” through a strategy that closely
integrates targeted political, economic, informational, and military
initiatives in close collaboration with international partners. Serving the goals of international stability
and interstate peace, this strategy amounts to “Political Warfare.” (Page 1)
The
question we should be asking is whether ISIL has crossed the threshold of
conventional war. If not we may be able
to develop an effective political warfare strategy. And
note these important caveats. Political
warfare is not a SOF strategy but instead plays an important roll in supporting
it as is described in the USASOC White paper.
But if ISIL has crossed the threshold of conventional war then we really
must re-evaluate our “end-ways” mismatch and determine the appropriate elements
of the military instrument to employ, assuming we believe their conventional
war fighting capabilities poses a threat to the US. However, even if a larger US military force
is required political warfare will still be able to play an important
supporting role.
In summary, if you want
to make SOF (or SOF methodologies) the lead (which I do not recommend) then
look hard at a strategy based on political warfare and the orchestration all
the instruments of national to achieve the ends. But if immediate or near
term (even 2-4 years) destruction of ISIL is the end state then you might have
to consider a strategy that does not rely solely on proxies. We cannot
contract out the defense of our interests. We can help friends; partners,
or allies defend themselves against their threats but if the threat includes
the U.S. then contracting out operations with proxies may not be the best
course of action for the U.S.
This is the fundamental analysis we must conduct. If the threat is limited and
not a direct threat to the U.S. then indirect means using a low cost, small
footprint advisory approach (SOF methodologies) may be enough to achieve our
objectives by following George Kennan’s definition of political warfare: “In
broadest definition, …the employment of all the means at a nation's command,
short of war, to achieve its national objectives.” But if we
determine the threat is a significant one to the U.S. then we must consider the
use of all means necessary to protect the nation, to include conventional
military forces in a decisive manner.
The bottom line is if we are at war then we need to go to war.
David S. Maxwell is the Associate Director of
the Center for Security Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of
Foreign Service of Georgetown University. He is a retired US Army Special
Forces Colonel with command and staff assignments in Korea, Japan, Germany, the
Philippines, and CONUS, and served as a member of the military faculty teaching
national security at the National War College. He is a graduate of Miami
University in Oxford, Ohio, the Command and General Staff College, the School
of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth and the National War College,
National Defense University.
