In the brief introduction to a review of the book, Very Special Intelligence, Dolphin noted that the successful tactical doctrine of using combined intelligence and combat troops in tightly organized teams was being seriously diluted by the U.S. IC (read CIA, DIA, NGA and NSA) who were moving to fold the intelligence elements involved into the bureaucratic mainstream and to automate the intelligence processes involved.
As I noted in an earlier article (The Triumph of Tactical Intelligence) U.S. Forces engaged in counter-insurgency operations (COIN) in both Iraq and Afghanistan have developed an innovative tactical concept, which Dolphin noted was based on research and development work done at the U. S. Naval Post Graduate School by a team under General Dell Daily. The essence of this concept is the High-value Target Teams (HTT) which integrates special operations forces fighters with military and civilian intelligence analysts into tightly organized teams in which immediate tactical intelligence is essential to identifying so called high value targets (usually individuals) and guiding war-fighters to their locations. This apparently was not a case of intelligence support being provided by folks sitting far from the action phoning in information, but of intelligence support being very much part of the operation itself with the war fighters. At a recent hearing of the House Armed Services Committee on Special Operations Forces, Michael D. Lumpkin, Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense said, “USSOCOM [U.S. Special Operations Command] and the CIA currently coordinate, share, exchange liaison officers and operate side by side in the conduct of DOD overt and clandestine operations and CIA’s covert operations.”
Sun Tzu or Bismarck: Who will Prevail in the 21st Century?
[Note: this first appeared in Time's Battleland Blog (here)],
The first three chapters in Sun Tzu’s timeless classic “The Art of War” describe how to make net assessments by comparing your strengths and weaknesses and those of your adversary and how to formulate strategy. Near the end of Chapter 3, he sums up his advice, saying, “Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle.”
The fundamental problem in the American military and foreign policy elite lies in an incestuously amplifying, self referencing orientation that makes it ignorant of both of Master Sun’s categories of knowledge. (I explain how incestuous amplification hijacks a decision cycle in this essay.) Briefly, the American policy elite’s self-referencing Orientation causes it to Observe what it wants to see.
This kind of one-way shaping isolates the decision-making mind from what is really going on in its external environment. As the American strategist Colonel John Boyd showed, Decisions flowing out of an Orientation that overwhelms Observations become disconnected from reality, and therefore, the Actions consequent to those decisions inevitably become irrelevant at best, and more often counterproductive, in that they amplify themselves to drive the collective decision cycle or Observation – Orientation – Decision – Action (OODA) loops ever further away from reality.
Left uncorrected, the result is an inexorable descent into disorder, and eventually a magnification into chaos leading to overload and collapse. (Interested readers will find a short summary of Boyd’s theory in the last part of this essay. A more extended description of the man and his work can be found in Robert Coram’s excellent biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, now in its 7th printing. Boyd’s entire Discourse on Winning and Losing — his art of conflict — can be downloaded here.)
Self-referencing behavior is clearly evident with regard to ourselves, for example, in the entirely predicable — and predicted — chaos of the Pentagon’s uncontrollable long-range budget plan (which is grounded on a combination of inwardly focused power games as well as a deliberately corrupted accounting system — explained here, here, and here). Put bluntly — we know that we do not know ourselves — indeed the evidence I compiled during my 25+ years of research in the the Pentagon’s pathological decision making practices, while employed in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, suggests we do not want to know ourselves and will go to great lengths to avoid doing so (unclassified reports can be found here).
Not only does our elite not want to understand itself, it also does not know its adversaries. That was clearly the case in Vietnam and Iraq and currently in Afghanistan. Consider this farcical, were it not so serious, report in Sunday’s New York Times; it describes how the Taliban and impostors are scamming us in Afghanistan. Bear in mind, this report is just the tip of a huge iceberg of evidence describing the self-inflicted — dare I say incestuously delusional — ignorance: see, for example, like that described by Lieut. Colonel Daniel Davis in his 87 page report, “Dereliction of Duty II” (a summary by ace investigative journalist Gareth Porter can be found here).
But Sun Tzu is a voice from 500 B.C., and his musing may be irrelevant in the 21st Century. Perhaps that’s because, as Otto von Bismarck is alleged to have predicted, just before he died in 1898, there is a “special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America.” As Francis Urquhart would say: “You might very well think that. I couldn’t possibly comment.”
Last Monday, after the Pentagon released its 2013 budget materials, just about every news article I read inaccurately reported the totals. These articles did not just miss some significant bits not in DOD's press release; they ignored another $380 billion in spending for US national security spending if you take the time to parse through OMB's far more complete and accurate budget materials.
How do I get to a $1 trillion US small “d” defense budget; real it below:
The Real “Base” Pentagon Budget and the Actual “Defense” Budget
Winslow T. Wheeler
When the Pentagon released its budget materials and press releases last Monday, the press dutifully reported the numbers. The Pentagon's “base” budget for 2013 is to be $525.4 billion, and with $88.5 billion for the war in Afghanistan and elsewhere added, the total comes to $613.9 billion. (See the two DOD press releases ONE and TWO).
Indeed, if you plowed through the hundreds of pages of additional materials the Pentagon released Monday, you would come up with little reason the doubt the accuracy of those numbers as the totality of what Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was seeking for the Pentagon. It would also seem reasonable that those amounts constitute the vast majority of what America spends on “defense,” defined generically.
Richard Wright's contribution is more interesting to me since the origins of the entire effort to develop this high value targeting was undertaken by General Dell Daily at the Naval Post Graduate School. I knew the research team, there were joint to the bone.
Unfortunately the IC as a whole has tried to automate the process, move it to mainstream and dilute it beyond belief.
Attached are a couple of articles regarding the effort….
The Andrew J. Bacevich article, “Slouching Toward Persistent War” (NYT 19 Feb 2012) points among other things to the rise of Special Operations Forces (SOF) as the instrument of choice to carry out clandestine warfare against individual and groups designated enemies of the U.S. (or close U.S. allies i.e. Israel). It also cited the rise of Michael Vickers to be Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence as further evidence of the growing importance of SOF.
Vickers is a ten year veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces and then served three years at CIA as principal logistic manager for support going to the anti-Soviet Taliban resistance fighters in Afghanistan. These experiences along with a PhD apparently were felt to qualify Vickers to head up DOD intelligence.
What Bacevich failed to take note of was a new and successful tactical concept that was developed by the U.S. Forces, mainly Army and Marine infantry, in the course of the counter insurgency (COIN) operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. This concept has been the subject of a careful study by two researchers at the Institute of National Strategic Studies of the DOD’s Defense University: Dr. Christopher Lamb and Mr. Evan Munsing produced a study titled, “Strategic Perspectives entitled “Secret Weapon: High-value Target Teams as an Organizational Innovation.” In the study they examined the repeated successes of the High-value Target Teams in eliminating al Qaeda and insurgent Taliban leaders. The secret according to the two authors was the combination of special operations forces fighters with military and civilian intelligence analysts into tightly net teams in which immediate tactical intelligence was essential to guiding the fighters to their targets. This apparently was not a case of intelligence support being provided by folks sitting far from the action phoning in information, but of intelligence support being very much part of the operation itself with the war fighters. CIA has increasingly become part of this new concept and the move of General David Petraeus to be Director of CIA may reflect this involvement of the agency with real time support to military operations.
Of course this also means that the probability is that CIA will continue to ignore strategic intelligence or what Robert Steele describes as Whole of Government Decision-Support and also multinational information-sharing and sense-making. In other words, CIA has become MIA (pun intended).
When Spies And Gadgets Come Up Short In The War On Terror
By Dina Temple-Raston
INTEL WARS The Secret History of the Fight Against Terror. By Matthew M. Aid, Bloomsbury, 261 pp., $28
When American aid worker Jessica Buchanan and her Dutch counterpart were freed from a makeshift Somali pirate camp last month, the helicopter flight to the safety of a U.S. military base in East Africa was a brief one. The Black Hawk lifted off under cover of darkness and flew straight to the East African nation of Djibouti, landing at a small American base called Camp Lemonnier.
Matthew M. Aid’s new book, “Intel Wars,” reveals that the base is more than just a dusty, desert lily pad from which to launch covert missions. It is also home to the kind of U.S. intelligence assets that have transformed the way the United States is battling terrorism around the world. Camp Lemonnier, just a small compound next to the Djibouti airport, has a U.S. Air Force/CIA Predator drone detachment and a listening station that, one intelligence official told me, “allows us to blanket Somalia with surveillance.”
According to “Intel Wars,” Somalia is only the beginning.
Camp Lemonnier allows the United States to track “the movement of illegal narcotics between Yemen and Somalia,” the Lord’s Resistance Army in southern Sudan and small guerrilla groups in Ethiopia. Aid says that for the past two years, U.S. intelligence has used Lemonnier to detect “the presence of foreign Muslim fighters claiming allegiance to al-Qaeda fighting alongside Janjaweed militia groups against local separatists” in Darfur, Sudan. The breadth of intelligence Lemonnier provides goes a long way toward explaining how U.S. Special Forces were able to find two lone aid workers and rescue them from that pirate camp in Somalia.
Every chapter in the book is braided with intelligence nuggets. Aid weaves together original reporting, volumes of unclassified documents and his expertise. The book's chapters on Afghanistan and Pakistan are particularly engrossing, although they don't put the intelligence community in a particularly good light.
Aid writes that after 10 years of war in Afghanistan, the United States still doesn’t understand the enemy. “We did not know how many Taliban we were fighting, where they came from or why they were against us,” the late Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told Aid in 2010. “Intel did not even have a good bio for Mullah Omar,” the Taliban leader, and “we did not even know who was on our side and who was on theirs.”
In my Foreign Policy column, I discuss whether Admiral William McRaven's request for greater operational freedom for Special Operations Command will extend to an unconventional warfare campaign in Syria.
This week, the New York Times reported on a draft proposal circulating inside the Pentagon that would permanently boost the global presence and operational autonomy of U.S. special operations forces. According to the article, Adm. William McRaven, the Navy SEAL who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and who is now the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), is requesting additional authority and independence outside of the normal, interagency decision-making process.
After the successful direct action strike against bin Laden and SOCOM's important role in training allied security forces in Afghanistan, the Philippines, and elsewhere, it is easy to understand how McRaven's command has become, as the New York Times put it, the Obama administration's “military tool of choice.” A larger forward presence around the world and more autonomy would provide McRaven's special operations soldiers with some of the same agility enjoyed by the irregular adversaries SOCOM is charged with hunting down.
