Remarks for Irregular Warfare
Scholars and the Special Operations Campaign Artistry Program (SOCAP)
June 17, 2016
David S. Maxwell
Good morning.
Congratulations on your graduation from what I think is one of the most
important programs in today’s military.
I wish that the Irregular Warfare Scholars and the Special Operations
Campaign Artistry Programs had existed when I was in the Army. I would have
fought to be part of these programs.
Perhaps you think it odd that I envy you but someday in the future you
will be grateful for the education you have received and say you were fortunate
to have been here at Ft Leavenworth which after all is the center of universe
(or at least the other center when you are not at Fort Bragg). The late Colonel
Ola Mize used to say that a Special Forces soldier should only want to be in
two places during his career – overseas working with indigenous forces and back
in the schoolhouse training and getting educated.
There are a few standard things that are said at all
graduations. Almost always you will hear
speakers say that you will not remember what the graduation speaker said and
everyone hopes the speaker will follow the rules of my mentor Bob Collins who
told me long ago the three rules for briefing which are known as the “Three
B’s” -
“Be brief, be brilliant, be gone.”
Since no one can bat 1000 I am hoping for a 600 average and get two of
three right; brief and gone, but in the end I know I will maintain a solid 300
by being gone at some point.
But I do remember some graduation speakers. When I graduated from SAMS the former CSA
General Sullivan was our speaker. He had
been our CGSC speaker the year before and gave a formal address as senior
leaders must do. However, when he spoke
to us at SAMS after his retirement he gave an unforgettable speech as he
started out telling us about the time he could now spend with his grandchildren
and how he was able to read children’s books that he realized had strategic
leadership relevance. He proceeded with
the rest of the speech telling us the leadership lessons from Dr. Seuss and
while humorous and enjoyable it was actually quite brilliant. While in retirement
he had a lot of time to engage with his grandchildren yet it was clear that he
had not lost one of the most important traits of a senior leader; which is to
be a lifelong learner and even as a former CSA he could still learn from Dr.
Seuss. I would offer one quote that
that sums up the importance of being a lifelong learner:
"Education should implant a will
and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people.
In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find
themselves equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." – This is
from Eric Hoffer, who is someone everyone in special operations should know as
he wrote The True Believer.
I would ask everyone to reflect on those words not just today
but throughout the rest of your careers.
I have had chance to listen to a lot of graduation speeches over
the past 5 years at Georgetown. Few are
memorable but some, like last month’s, are quite provocative. The graduate school had a Polish poet who was
a human rights advocate in Mexico. She
proceeded to lecture us about how it is America’s fault that the Mexican people
are oppressed. She tried to make the
argument that Mexican oppression was caused by American imperialism that began
with the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny.
She told us that we should give California, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado,
and even Arizona back to Mexico. This
was especially interesting because one of our graduating students was
Lieutenant Jack McCain. In the audience
keeping a perfect poker face was Jack’s father, Senator John McCain.
I will have to admit that I cannot offer anything as humorous
or brilliant as General Sullivan and I hope not to be insulting and
disrespectful of our students and guests here.
The second thing we hear at graduation is that at this point
in time we have been at war for nearly 15 years. Of course I do not need to
remind any of you of that as most of you have spent your entire careers up to
this point fighting in this war. Nor do
we need to remind your family and friends.
And in the wake of San Bernadino and Orlando we may not need to remind
the American people though I worry that for the public the memory that we are
at war could soon fade as we return to going to the mall.
But after 15 years it is time to reflect on where we are and
how we have arrived at this point in time with the threats we continue to
face. In the last 15 years there has
been tremendous heroism and sacrifice.
There are heroes among you. All
of you have reached a level of technical and tactical expertise that is
unmatched by any previous generation. I
am not ashamed to say that I was not anywhere near as competent as you when I
was a Captain or a Major. All of you
have contributed to the tactical successes and important innovations that have
been achieved, from F3EAD – find, fix,
finish, exploit, analyze, and disseminate to VSO – Village Stability
Operations. You are capable of bringing massive
amounts of fire power to bear on the enemy or employing non-standard logistics
to get people and equipment to remote locations to ensure sustained combat
operations or exploiting intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems
and processes that we only dreamed about before 9-11.
But we need to pause and reflect. Where are we, how did we get here, and where
are we going? All of you are at the proverbial inflection point in your career
which I think could be a fancy name for a fork in the road – and of course when
faced with a fork remember Yogi Berra who told us “when you come to a fork in
the road, take it.” While that used to
be humorous and people would laugh, I interpret that in other perhaps non-
humorous ways: carpe diem or seize the
day, be decisive and make a decision, whichever way you go make it work, reach
down for Clausewitz’ coup d’oeil – that inward looking eye of military genius
that allows you to make the right decision at the right time and right place
despite the fog and friction of war – whether that war is characterized by
conventional, irregular, hybrid, unconventional, or political warfare.
You are transitioning from the tactical to the operational
and the strategic. This is very
important to consider. We should ask why if we have been so
successful tactically we continue to be faced with such a large number of
complex and diverse threats around the world that require we expend so much
blood and treasure?
People do not like to invoke Vietnam but there are still many
lessons we can learn and many that have been learned by SOF – VSO is a reincarnation
of the CIDG program – the civilian irregular defense group. You can take the tactical tips from
Detachment B-52 and see how they have evolved to the advanced operational
techniques that you employ as a matter of routine today. Your ability to employ fires from the air and
indirect fires from the ground is a natural evolution from our brethren who came
before us.
But like Vietnam we made and continue to make mistakes. We should recall Colonel Harry Summers speaking
with his Vietnamese counterpart at the negotiating table in Paris when he said,
“You know, we have never been defeated on the battlefield.” And his Vietnamese counterpart replied, “That
may be true, but it is irrelevant.” I hope you all have read Giap’s strategy of
Dau Tranh as we are seeing a 21st Century version of it.
Today we need to evaluate our policies, our political
objectives, our strategy, and our campaign plans. We need to look at our failures and our
mistakes. Take our recent efforts in
Syria – should we be fighting a war with a program – a train and equip
program? Should we be supporting
indigenous forces when our interests are not sufficiently aligned? Should we be forcing our indigenous partners
only fight for our interests and not theirs? Or should we be campaigning which
of course will include training and equipping as one part of the plan to
support the strategy? Most important, are
we able to achieve the President’s strategic guidance of degrading and destroying
ISIS or do we have an ends-ways mismatch in that we are not applying the ways
and means to achieve the stated end? I suppose a generous assessment is that we
are still in the degrade phase.
Of course I am being critical. We seem to be doing somewhat better in Syria
now that we are employing a mix of our special warfare and surgical strike forces
and I truly hope we are employing the right forces for the right missions. But we have a problem as a nation and a
military. I think that we are
ineffective at strategy. We are unable
to achieve our political or policy objectives.
We do not “do strategy” well.
One of the reasons that we do not do strategy well is that we
do not understand our adversaries’ strategies.
(And we should remember that Sun Tzu not only said that it is the acme
of skill to win without fighting, the true strategist must understand and be
able to attack the enemy’s strategy).
We do not understand the strategies because since 9-11 we
have defined everything in terms of terrorism and in addition to terrorism,
today we also define the major power threats in a neo-Cold War framework of
great power competition.
We are reaching for new terms to try to help us describe the
phenomena we face – the popular new term is the Gray Zone. I would characterize the threats we face in
terms of the Gray Zone as a spectrum of cooperation, competition, and conflict
in that space between peace and war. We
seek and desire cooperation, we have to be able to compete, and while we want
to avoid conflict we must prepare for it.
One of the important forms of conflict can be described by revolution,
resistance, and insurgency with our adversaries from AQ to ISIS to the Russian
Little Green Men to the Iranian IRGC or China’s PLA all executing strategies of
modern unconventional warfare, with their own unique characteristics, to
exploit the conditions of revolution, resistance, and insurgency to achieve
their strategic political objectives.
This is a complex environment. As the late Sam Sarkasian said in 1993 in his
seminal work, Unconventional Conflicts,
we are seeing a strategic environment that can be described this way:
1. Asymmetric
conflicts: for the US these conflicts are limited and not considered a
threat to survival or a matter of vital national interests; however, for the
indigenous adversaries they are a matter of survival.
2. Protracted
Conflict requires a long term commitment by the US, thus testing the
national will, political resolve, and staying power of the US.
3. Ambiguous
and Ambivalent Conflicts: It is difficult
to identify the adversary, or assess the progress of the conflict; i.e., it is
rarely obvious who is winning and losing.
4. And finally, conflicts with Political-Social Milieu Center of Gravity – or in
today’s parlance population centric warfare or war among the people.
So the question is how do we
operate in this complex environment? How do we support the policies and achieve
the political objectives established by our political leadership?
The answer is in large part
you. You are going to leave here and if
the personnel system is going to evolve to effective talent management it will
assign you now or in the near future to positions of great responsibility where
you can contribute to campaigning. While
campaigning is not as sexy as kicking down a door or advising an indigenous
force to capture or kill a high value target, it is incredibly important. Frankly, we have great soldiers, sailors,
airmen, and Marines who will accomplish any tactical mission we give them. But they need to be given the right mission –
the mission that will achieve or support the achievement of our political
objectives. We need men and women who
can think critically and strategically: who
can campaign. When you are in
these critical positions you are going to do a few basic things that will
contribute to achieving our political objectives. I will list seven.
1. Use design thinking to understand the
challenges we face. Must go beyond
situational awareness to attain situational understanding – Make understanding
a principle of war (Frank Hoffman)
2. Contribute to policy and strategy development
– do not abdicate responsibility by saying this is the province of civilian political
leaders – You have a responsibility to inform, educate, and when appropriate to
advocate for the correct employment of the military instrument of power.
3. Develop campaign plans.
4.
Employ red team techniques.
5.
Assess and reassess continuously.
6.
Challenge assumptions constantly.
7. Ensure balance and coherency among ends,
ways, and means with a recognition of threats, risks, and opportunities. And to ensure balance and coherency you must
not be afraid to recommend changes to the end state.
(And never forget the 12 SOF
imperatives,* the SOF truths, and the SOF mission criteria.)
These
7 tasks are fundamentals and not all inclusive, they are common sense, and they
are really simple or at least simple to state and remember. As Clausewitz reminds us, in war everything
is simple but even the simplest thing is hard.
These 7 tasks are hard and it will take your intellectual ability and
disciplined leadership to execute them effectively. You have learned and know these 7 tasks and
you are well equipped as Irregular Warfare Scholars to go forth and make
important contributions to campaigns and strategy.
Let me tell one final story. In my class at Georgetown, “Unconventional
Warfare and Special Operations for Policy Makers and Strategists” I have a Navy
SEAL Lieutenant. I asked him why he was
taking the course because as a SEAL he already is an expert special operator. He described one of the weaknesses of the
SEAL community and that is that it is very tactically focused. He said that the commander of the Naval
Special Warfare Command, RADM Brian Losey (who by coincidence is a National War
College classmate of mine and someone I am proud to call a friend) has put out
the message that SEAL officers have to learn how to campaign and must grow
beyond the narrow tactical focus of direct action, counterterrorism, and
surgical strike. They have to be able to
plan for and employ the entire joint special operations force. Most important they have to be able to
campaign to support strategy. As they
say, that SEAL and RADM Losey get it.
And so do you.
I have one recommendation for
you. This is really more of a request or
even a heart felt plea. Please
write. You have expertise and experience. You have ideas. You are critical thinkers. Write.
Contribute knowledge to the profession of arms and to the national security
dialogue. Use the tools you found here
and the intellectual gift you have.
You are Irregular Warfare Scholars
and graduates of the SOF Campaign Artistry Program because you know how
important it is to be able to campaign.
You came to the fork in the road here at Leavenworth and have taken
it. I expect that all of you will go on to make
great contributions in many different ways which should be the goal for all of
us: To make a substantive contribution
to our national security. Be the quiet
professional. As we used to say in SAMS,
be more than you appear. Never forget
the words of the late GEN Downing who adapted this from the SAS motto: who thinks, wins.
I will close with the words of T.E.
Lawrence that I think are the foundation of your education here: “Irregular
warfare is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.” As I used to tell my Special Forces
soldiers: I know you can outfight any
enemy but to win you must outthink him as well.
I know you are well prepared to outthink any enemy the United States
will face.
I wish you the best. Thank you and de oppresso liber.
*SOF Imperatives
- Understand the operational environment
- Recognize political implications
- Facilitate interagency activities
- Engage the threat discriminately
- Consider long-term effects
- Ensure legitimacy and credibility of Special
Operations
- Anticipate and control psychological
effects
- Apply capabilities indirectly
- Develop multiple options
- Ensure long-term sustainment
- Provide sufficient intelligence
- Balance security and synchronization
