Five Takeaways from a Decade of War
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, in a keynote address at the Center for Strategic and International Studies this week, signaled to military commanders that they should assume the across-the-board, automatic spending cuts imposed by sequester over the next decade will remain in place indefinitely. “We do not have the option of ignoring reality, or assuming something will change.” Before they decide how to shrink U.S. military forces and allocate scarce resources, however, uniformed leaders will have to decipher the lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to apply them to the coming era of austerity and global instability.
Hagel gave a preview of his own thinking when he argued that the Pentagon should protect investments in cutting edge technologies that are central to the evolving, network-centric model of warfare honed in those conflicts — to include space systems, cyber capabilities, “ISR” (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance), and special operations forces (SOF).
Following Hagel’s speech, three senior retired generals offered their own thoughts on battlefield lessons. Here are five takeaways from the discussion by Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. Peter Chiarelli, former vice chief of the Army; and Gen. Ronald Fogleman, former chief of staff of the Air Force.
The First Information Age War
Just as advances in weaponry such as the machine gun, armored tank and aircraft carrier changed war in the Industrial Age, so have rapid advances in computational power and data-crunching fundamentally changed military operations in the Information Age. And as the first extended conflicts for U.S. forces of that era, Afghanistan and Iraq were a critical testing ground. The U.S. military’s development of a more network-centric, intelligence-driven model of operations employing precision-strike capabilities in Iraq and Afghanistan were an early attempt to leverage revolutionary technology with new doctrines and ways of fighting.
“The U.S. military used the exponential increase in computational power in our command-and-control and data analysis in ways that we never conceived of before these conflicts,” said Cartwright. “The days when we would send a rifle squad out in the field just trolling for the enemy are gone forever. Today we can be much more predictive about where that squad is going, what it will find when it gets there and where it is most likely to be ambushed. That represents a fundamental shift.”
That more network-centric model of operations empowered small units with the intelligence-gathering power that was once available only in division and corps headquarters. Frequently young officers and noncommissioned officers on foot patrol could tap into full-motion video supplied from unmanned drones and other surveillance aircraft flying overhead, or reach back in real time to massive intelligence fusion cells in the U.S. through the magic of satellite and fiber-optic communications. That gave rise to the phenomenon known as the “strategic corporal,” where potentially game-changing authority and decision-making was pushed down to front-line units whose commanders had to react to rapidly evolving circumstances on the battlefield.
“If you take the hunt for IED (improvised explosive devices) cells, that was a 30-day fight,” said Cartwright. The enemy would invent a fuse, U.S. forces would develop a counter to it and the enemy would respond by inventing another triggering device. “And if it took you longer than 30 days to respond to a change in enemy tactics, your people were dying.”
That compressed cycle of action and reaction also meant that with rare exceptions, U.S. forces had to rely on the major weapons platforms in their arsenals at the start of the war, and adapt them to a dynamic battlefield with changes in computer software and cutting edge sensors. “These battlefields were not driven by ‘platform solutions,’ because our major weapons platforms take 15 to 20 years to field,” said Cartwright. The exception, he noted, was the rapid fielding of the MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) armored vehicles to protect troops from IEDs. “Otherwise, we turned a ‘maneuver force’ into an ‘occupation force’ in these conflicts, and did it without platform solutions.”
The New “Jointness”: Special Operations and Conventional Forces
The 1991 Persian Gulf war revealed the immense power unleashed when the separate armed services began operating more synergistically in the post-Goldwater Nichols era, honing the U.S. military’s conventional war-fighting capabilities to an unprecedented edge. Similarly, the post-9/11 “global war on terror” and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have created an unprecedented synergy between special operations forces, intelligence agencies and conventional forces that have profoundly changed U.S. military operations.
In the past, the rivalry that existed between special operations forces and conventional forces was so intense that special operations earned a reputation for not playing well with others. “To me the biggest and most surprising lesson of these wars was the close integration between SOF and conventional forces, especially in the realm of intelligence integration,” said Chiarelli. “That was something I had not seen in my 34 years in the Army, and it’s absolutely critical that we sustain that close integration as we wind these wars down.”
All-Volunteer Force Resilient and Expensive
The all-volunteer force was designed during the early 1970s, in the wake of Vietnam and at the height of the Cold War, as a core around which to build a draft army in the event of a major conflict. Instead, a relatively small all-volunteer force bore the weight of more than a decade of war on its narrow shoulders, revealing a resilience that surprised even many of its staunchest proponents.
“I was in the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, when the plane crashed into it, and if you had told me then that we could sustain a decade of war with no retention problems, with troops doing multiple combat tours on a 12-month deployed, 12-month home cycle, I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Chiarelli.
One of the key lessons of the last decade, however, is that in contrast to past draft armies the all-volunteer force is difficult to rapidly expand even in a crisis. “We learned in these conflicts that you can’t grow the all-volunteer force as quickly as a draft army,” said Chiarelli, who served as vice chief at a time when the service added 20,000 soldiers to help shoulder the load in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It took us a year and a half to recruit and field 20,000 new privates, which was really a slow process.”
With recent evidence indicating that the Pentagon is spending more than $2 million for every uniformed volunteer currently serving in Afghanistan, a number of experts also question whether the all-volunteer force is too expensive to fight extended conflicts in the future. The escalating costs result from a multiplicity of factors, to include expensive force protection measures in combat zones; the rising cost of contractors to help sustain that force in the field; and soaring personnel costs associated with increased pay and benefits. With advances in combat medicine having led to a survival rate of better than 90 percent for troops wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq, medical costs are also soaring.
“The all-volunteer force served us very well in these conflicts, but the problem going forward is that it has become unaffordable at its present size and composition,” said General Fogleman, the former chief of staff of the Air Force. The Defense Department already spends roughly 40 percent of its budget on personnel, he noted, and that number will increase to 60 percent if costs are not contained. “I don’t begrudge a single thing we gave this all-volunteer force, but pretty soon personnel costs are going to squeeze everything else out of the budget. That’s not a sustainable course. ”
Precision Strike and Unintended Consequences
The ability to rapidly direct lethal force to anywhere in the battle-space, with GPS and laser-directed precision, has become a calling card of the U.S. military. Not only do guided weapons result in far less collateral damage and civilian casualties than “dumb” bombs, rockets and mortars, but the need to use far fewer of them to destroy a given target greatly reduces the burdens of moving ammunition through a globe-spanning logistics train.
And yet, just as the cost of an expensive all-volunteer force is driving up the price-tag of this new American style of war, so too are military formations that rely by habit on precision weapons. “I saw instances in the war zone when we were firing precision artillery rounds that cost on order of $110,000 each, when an unguided mortar round costing $60 would have done the job just as well,” said Chiarelli. “I watched as we fired three precision-guided artillery rounds at a IED cell, and thought, ‘Wow, that’s $300,000 worth of precision munitions going down range.’”
The broader implications of war fought increasingly by precision weapons at stand-off distances are also poorly understood. Air Force pilots who fly armed unmanned drones from bases in the United States have a higher rate of suicide, divorce and PTSD than pilots in theater, said Cartwright, perhaps because they have to take the emotional burdens of killing home to their families each night.
The greater reliance on precision weapons and a counter-insurgency strategy that emphasized protecting the civilian population, with the corresponding drop in the number of overall casualties, may also carry unintended consequences. “When historians study these conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, they will find that they represent the first time in history where the population of young men 17-35 actually grew, whereas historically that population declines during wartime until you reach a point when everyone is tired of the conflict,” said Cartwright. “When that population of young men actually grows during a conflict, I’m not sure what that means for ‘termination of conflict.’ But it could be important.”
Counterinsurgency a Long, Hard Slog
There is a reason that Afghanistan represents the United States’ longest war, with Iraq not far behind, and it’s a lesson the United States learned and then tried to forget after Vietnam: counterinsurgency wars are long and dirty conflicts, and they often take a decade or more to settle. They also involve nation-building tasks outside the core competency either of the U.S. military or the U.S. government writ large, and they risk U.S. forces becoming embroiled in another nation’s civil war.
“The integration of kinetic and non-kinetic operations are critical in these kinds of conflicts,” said Chiarelli, because the Iraqi and Afghan governments lacked the essential ministerial capacity to govern — to pick up the garbage, insure clean water and safe streets, to write contracts. The United States in both instances was forced to step in and try and build that ministerial capacity — a task which remains unfinished to this day in both countries — or else risk the insurgents winning over the population.
“The number one takeaway is that if you are going to intervene in another nation’s conflict as a third party, you better admit going in that it’s a cost-imposing strategy that will require an eight-to-ten year effort,” said Cartwright. “That’s the primary lesson of third-party interventions.”
Phi Beta Iota: The above take-aways are superficial and unprofessional. Here are five serious take-aways:
01 Sam Nunn's wisdom is still not understood within the Pentagon, least of all by Chuck Hagel. Here it is again:
I am constantly being asked for a bottom-line defense number. I don't know of any logical way to arrive at such a figure without analyzing the threat; without determining what changes in our strategy should be made in light of the changes in the threat; and then determining what force structure and weapons programs we need to carry out this revised strategy.
02 The greatest threat to the Republic is domestic. Corrupt politicians, criminal banks, flag officers and senior executive officers lacking in integrity, and of course the total penetration of the government by secret societies based on everything from religion to pedophilia and neo-Nazi sado-masochism. We have to clean house. Ruthless pervasive counterintelligence must come to the fore.
03 The force structure must be built as a whole. No one service can be competent as strategy, policy, acquisition, or operations in isolation. Our service chiefs have been allowed to pursue selfish, unprofessional, criminally insane campaigns to protect budget share and keep the money moving. These campaigns have absolutely nothing to do with enhancing national security or achieving any end-states in the public interest. If the Secretary of Defense and the minions around him are incapable of rising to the challenge set so ably by Sam Nunn, they should have the grace to resign, to get out of the way of those better suited to lead with integrity. We recognize that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has no management capability and that the White House has no interest in actually achieving national security. These challenges are best addressed by using intelligence with integrity to define a strategy, policies, inter-service force structure, and personnel solution centered on a people's army, and then taking that show on the road. Settle for nothing less. If the President cannot handle the truth, then tell the truth to the people and let them explain it to him at the next election. Waging peace affordably, interoperably, and sustainably demands a different strategy, force structure, and concept of operations than does waging war in isolation from reality. This from Norman Cousins:
Governments are not built to perceive large truths. Only people can perceive great truths. Governments specialize in small and intermediate truths. They have to be instructed by their people in great truths. And the particular truth in which they need instruction today is that new means for meeting the largest problems on earth have to be created.
04 People matter more than equipment. This is a standard set by the Special Operations community of old, but dishonored today across the board, including within the Special Operations community. The “leadership” across the services has failed to focus on the nurturing of its people, and instead focused on creating more and more senior positions with less and less authority, effect, and legitimacy. Particularly irresponsible across multiple force structure reviews within each of the services individually (OSD is incapable of conducting a holistic force structure review) has been the refusal to reduce shooters by a modicum (5% would do) in favor of thinkers. Over a quarter century after the pioneers defined the future of non-kinectic warfare, and even though Information Operations (IO) now consumes up to 80% of the attention of the best of our commanders, IO receives less than 1% of the budget; the secret intelligence world is largely worthless and delivering less than 4% of what is needed, and the TO&E is still focused on a heavy metal military unable to execute peaceful preventive measures or stabilization and reconstruction campaigns. Today DoD has no strategy, its acquisition is dishonest and ineffective in the extreme, and all four of the services are in a downward spiral for lack of intelligence with integrity, and for having given up the core vision of a people's army (and navy and air force).
05 Contracting inherent functions of government is toxic. This is especially true across the support functions of intelligence and logistics. We have substituted technology for thinking and corporate butts in seats for strategic corporals. Just about everything we do today is dishonest and ineffective.
See Also:
2013 Robert Steele Reflections on Alternative Command & Control (AltC2) — Five Questions and a Game Plan 1.1 [written for NATO ACT Innovation Hub]
2013 Robert Steele — Alternative Command & Control and Four Transformation Forcing Concepts [written for NATO ACT Innovation Hub]
2013 Robert Steele Reflections on NATO 4.0 — Key Challenges AND Solutions 1.2
2013 Robert Steele: Reflections on Reform 2.2 Numbers for 30% DoD Cut over 2-4 Years
2001 Threats, Strategy, and Force Structure: An Alternative Paradigm for National Security
LtCol X: CSA Sends – Strategic Priorities for the Army – with Phi Beta Iota Comments
Marcus Aurelius: CSA Interview + AWC SSI Reminder — Answers from the 1990′s Long Ignored…
