An exploration at Information Dissemination.
A roundup of my latest:
At Abu Muqawama, I look at why predictions of “virtual war” ignore strategic history.
I’ve posted at CTOVision on Facebook’s IT concepts.
I took on the bizarre concept of “cyber arms races” at CTOVision.
I analyzed the importance of cyber history at the CTOVision.
I recognize my last missive, scribbled in a bit of haste, might have seemed a bit opaque. I was in a bout of intense frustration and simply wanted to get something out before I returned to analyzing the intricacies of the G.O.O.D. Music vs. YCMB beef, (big hint: I’m rooting for Pusha-T—any rapper in the game who compares himself to Ric Flair gets my vote).
But since Carl Prine has picked up on the essential content of my blog, I’m encouraged to continue (thanks Carl):
Like Adam Elkus…I’ve come to take the Callwellian position that COIN is merely any operation designed to address the problems caused by guerrillas.
Carl has hit on something important. The last ten years and the spur of interest in counterinsurgency it provoked have fundamentally de-naturalized American counterinsurgency theory and practice. What do I mean by de-naturalize?
In social theory, to de-naturalize is to take a given idea, set of social norms, or law and reveal it to be a conscious construction. Many ideas once taken for granted from the early 20th century have been revealed over time to be the outcomes of particular social practices and power relations. When I first started reading COIN theory in 2004, I assumed that there was one defining form of COIN and it was revealed by Galula. Eight years, Iraq and Afghanistan, and countless books and journal papers later, I realize that there is nothing essential to counterinsurgency in what Galula thought of. He was the product of a particular political, social, and political milieu and not even a particularly good exponent of that setting compared to Roger Triniquier’s franker writings.
The COIN battle over the last ten years has been many things, it is above all a struggle to naturalize a particular view of COIN. The process of naturalization includes the idea that a particular way of COIN is the font from which all operations against irregular forces springs. Once we accept that a particular way of COIN is the natural way of things, we also automatically accept its policy and strategy drivers. We ignore our own choice as implied by the policy. This is what Prine notes when he argues against associating post-2006 American population-centric counterinsurgency with all counterinsurgency. Doing so would imply that engaging in counterinsurgency means “government-in-a-box” and generational commitments.
Recognizing that COIN is what armies do against guerrillas may seem a bit analytically useless. But it’s actually liberating. It allows the United States to wage COIN any way it wants to, free of the intellectual shackles of long-dead French colonial enforcers. Most importantly, it allows our military to develop truly joint COIN doctrine based on a realistic conception of the national interest(s) and capabilities.
And the US will engage in COIN in some shape or form again. It is, in fact, is engaging in COIN in Yemen this instant, albeit not in a particularly strategically effective way. Yes, you heard me. A CT mission has become a counterinsurgency mission once the US allowed the Yemeni government to internationalize the civil war and equate US opposition to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) with suppression of rebels against the government. See how artificial the distinction between counterterrorism and counterinsurgency is?
It may seem a bit much to argue that the US war in Yemen is a COIN effort, but this is far from the first time a Western power has used special forces and airpower to fight a foreign insurgency in Arabia. And should the North Korean regime collapse (and many think it is a matter of time), do you think the US will not be conducting some form of counterinsurgency operations alongside Republic of Korea forces against former regime elements?
Let’s bypass the silly COIN debate and forge some doctrine that helps our armed forces fight the wars of the future.
Don’t even bother reading Elizabeth Bumiller’s article on the counterinsurgency debate. It’s stuck in the same bizarre post-Surge time loop all mainstream articles on COIN are.
Instead, let’s go through some basic pointers. My own views on this have evolved significantly over the years due to reading and simple observation of the debate and its operational and strategic outcrops.
COIN is not a strategy. Nor is it necessarily a set of tactics. COIN is just an activity. COIN is what armies do when faced by insurgents. That’s it. By engaging in COIN, you are not inherently committing to one kind of strategy or set of tactics. It’s just a descriptor that makes note of the fact that an army is facing an organized set of substate opponents with a political goal. There is also no normative content to COIN. Normatively, COIN is really only what counterinsurgents make of it. The US has a particular brand of COIN it over-generalizes as somehow the natural state of affairs, and other countries have different approaches.
And let’s face it: COIN is also a modern term that refers to a particular kind of irregular threat. Armies and paramilitary forces in the past have faced terrorists, partisans, guerrillas, and light infantry reserves that may or may not have the same kind of relationship to the population that modern insurgents do. We have a variety of different terms for how armies deal with them because there is no one kind of irregular threat that exists as a pure metaphysical object. And this is normal. Sea warfare is cohesive but we have need for distinctive terms like Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) which nonetheless do not compromise or conflict with the parent term of naval warfare. COIN and other descriptive subsets will overlap, and armies that put all of their doctrinal eggs in one basket will be left in the cold. Is COIN the best umbrella term? Maybe. But that doesn’t eliminate the problem.
Finally, COIN in and of itself has no policy or strategy implications. One can wage a low-footprint COIN or an intensive COIN effort supporting a policy of colonization, as the French did during the late 19th century.
The last of Rei Tang’s posts on foreign policy decisionmaking in the Obama administration. As always, guest posters express only their own opinions.
As Third Way’s Mieke Eoyang said, “As a general principle, if people think someone is checking their work, they are more careful… Small groups can fall victim to group-think.” Thus far, the president’s advisers have helped him through avoiding the pitfalls of national security bureaucracy, but they could go too far in the other direction. Once the president has a certain level of control, going against the president’s inclinations can be dangerous, and if it’s not seen as disloyal by the president, it can be seen as such by his advisers.
If the Obama administration gets a second term, their achievement of White House control and effective politicization of national security can become an unthinking habit as they become tired and burned out. This administration’s pace has been extreme. Steve Clemons has written about Donilon’s more than 700 deputies meetings and no sick days. The president’s “optionality” could turn into giving the president the easy rather than right choice.
Irving Janis’s classic study of groupthink in foreign policy decisions points to all these risks. The role of “devil’s advocate” and “vigilant appraisal” the president’s advisers played in the Afghanistan process can turn into what they were protecting themselves against. Organizational psychologist Karl Weick warns against losing “mindfulness”—paying attention to near misses and failures, reluctance to simplify interpretations, sensitivity to operations, resilience, and deference to expertise—in complex and fast-moving situations.
Organization theorist James March describes two ways organizations learn: exploration and exploitation. Exploration is the experimentation of a new process or capability, where there is no playbook. Exploitation is the streamlining of existing processes or capabilities to be made more efficient.
High-value targeting can be seen as exploration over the past decade; its evolution from SOF tasks forces in Iraq 2004 to its role in the national security bureaucracy today, especially with the killing of bin Laden. The pattern of the Obama administration’s personnel decisions points to it having firmly explored high value targeting and it now dominates through its exploitation.
The concept of exploration and exploitation is similar to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s popular explanation of the innovator’s dilemma. An organization can innovate by improving on existing product lines, but they can be overtaken by completely new technologies as cassette tape replaced vinyl, CDs replaced cassette tape, and MP3s and the internet are replacing CDs. Businesses face the need to improve existing products lines, but not be overtaken by completely “disruptive innovations.”
The “global war on terror” has followed similar evolutions with changes in policymaker preferences and the adaptations made by the threat, from Rumsfeld’s hi/lo-tech small unit invasion of Afghanistan to the high-tech conventional forces invasion of Iraq, from counterinsurgency to counterterrorism today.
Does the exhaustion from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the rising, more autonomous strands of al-Qaeda in places like Yemen demand other evolutions? Brett Friedman at Marine Corps Gazette thinks a conventional force augmenting SOF advisers is the future. There’s also been a greater call for human intelligence capabilities. At the same time, a competing narrative in the military is the Asia pivot, often expressed through AirSea Battle. The changing political landscape of the Middle East with the Arab Spring is another complication.
Organizations with the ability to balance exploration and exploitation have what James March calls ambidexterity. Research has shown that completing exploitation-like tasks is easier with a smaller, well-knit group of people, while exploration-like tasks require larger networks and weak ties. The Obama administration has managed to exploit high-value targeting, but, as they say in Washington, “personnel is policy,” who is in the next line of officials and what will be policy in the next four years? Can they be ambidextrous? Can they be disruptive?
Graham Allison brings up that by excluding Gates and Mullen, the administration may have missed its chance to reach a better relationship with Pakistan. The drawdown from Afghanistan might be too precipitous, to the point where the administration won’t bother with the political effort to keep Kabul standing. As for the high-value targeting program, tough questions about strategy, in Jeremy Scahill’s documentation of the conflicts Yemen and Somalia for example, loom large and, although legal in practice so far, matters of principle about war, covert action, and human rights are facing challenges.
The administration runs the most risk where it is most proud of itself, on “how easy it has become to kill someone.” Again, it’s not likely to run into any rogue operations given the president’s engagement in national security. What is problematic is the underlying rules of the game in the executive branch that is set by legislation – how budgets are formed, reporting requirements, bureaucratic authorities and boundaries.
The most instructive example is the Title 10/Title 50 divide. Title 10 refers to military authorities and Title 50 refers to covert authorities (CIA) in the U.S. Code. Simply, the military uses force overtly, under appropriate war powers procedures, while the CIA uses force covertly, where the U.S. can deny involvement. These statutory distinctions were made during the Cold War and were tightened up during the 1970s after abuses became known. Now, covert action requires presidential findings and reporting to congress. The executive branch banned assassination with executive orders 11905, 12036, and 12333. (High-value targeting is not technically assassination, as the U.S. is at a state of war. In a state of war, all leaders in the enemy’s military chain-of-command are fair game. A commonly used example is the shoot down of Admiral Yamamoto in World War II.)
The issue these authorities are running into now hinge on the strategic question of whether the United States is at war and what it is at war against. All of the authorities today are based on prerogatives of self-defense (which have been used disproportionally) and the decade old Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists against those who involved in the September 11 attacks those who harbor and aid them. This seems dated with the demise of bin Laden and the new and growing formations of Al-Qaeda outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The administration seems to be continuing along with the arrangement of personnel it has put in place, “exploiting” what provided its greatest national security victory. It is rare in a war for targeted killing to be decided at such high levels. The Phoenix Program, for example, was run from South Vietnam. While higher level involvement would demand greater consideration of political risk, thereby more accountability, it also means less attention paid to strategic issues. Where will we be after the drawdown in Afghanistan? Will we be stuck with whack-a-mole for the foreseeable future?
The second of Rei Tang’s series on foreign policy decisonmaking in the Obama administration. As always, guest posters express only their own opinions.
Every president needs fixers—people who come from places where it almost looks like nepotism, who have unimpeachable loyalty, who understand politics, and are quick studies of policy. It looks slimy sometimes. Harry Hopkins for Franklin Roosevelt, Clark Clifford for Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy for John F. Kennedy, and so forth… Samuel Berger for Bill Clinton.
These teams have had spectacular successes and failures. In the Kennedy administration alone, they had the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but steered through the Cuban Missile Crisis. They have different styles. Eisenhower, with his famous “hidden hand,” held his cards close and let his people, with their staff experience in the fully mobilized army of World War II, shape the proposals coming through the bureaucracy.
Eisenhower had NSC staffer General Andrew Goodpastor send orders for U-2 flights, an ancestor, perhaps, of drone flights outside of theaters with “combat operations.” The U2 flights backfired when the Soviets shot down Francis Gary Powers on the eve of an East-West summit meeting. As a result, Eisenhower lost his chance to realize his ambition of attaining a nuclear arms control treaty, which did not happen until a decade later. Then again, without the U-2, Kennedy might not have discovered the Soviet missiles in Cuba.
Nixon and Kissinger did much of everything—Vietnam peace talks, China, SALT—by themselves. Brzezinski’s heavy handedness went too far and Carter failed to rein him in. Reagan didn’t pay attention to national security; he relied on the domestic and image-focused “troika.” Left to bureaucratic entrepreneurs motivated by the administration’s sharp anti-Soviet rhetoric, the NSC had become operationally involved in illegal covert activities in Nicaragua.
Clinton took a while to find out who was comfortable with, eventually delegating to and supporting special envoys like Richard Holbrooke. The George W. Bush administration had to overturn the Pentagon bureaucracy to carry out the Iraq surge.
The Obama administration’s style is unique. They are image markers, but are engaged in foreign policy. As a result of their engagement, they won’t let covert action abuses happen like the hands-off Reagan administration. They work fast in crises, but slow down large decisions. They have Kennedy’s energy, but Eisenhower’s deliberateness. Reflecting “No Drama Obama,” they don’t have big egos, neuroticism, or paranoia, but are very political and not afraid to exercise power in cutting people out of the process and putting themselves in key positions. There are no martinets like Kissinger or Brzezinski.
They’re not perfect. Obama has not made any substantial power plays on the world stage. The president’s approach runs several important risks.
“In a perfect world, “smart power” would mean the synchronized use of guns and butter to achieve a common goal, not a more clever way to substitute butter for guns.” — This quote in comments from Vitesse et Puissance at the bottom of an article on “Ink Spots of Success” is all you need to know about the ‘smart power’ meme.
(Source: smallwarsjournal.com)
Rei Tang, a Project on National Security Reform (PNSR) alum, brings his historical and organizational expertise to bear in analyzing foreign policy decisionmaking and the Obama administration. Part one of three. As always, guest posters express only their own opinions.
“Maximize the President’s optionality.” Spoken in bureaucratese, this is what Thomas Donilon wanted to do as he took over the role of President Barack Obama’s national security adviser. Like most bland things in national security, this phrase is loaded. Graham Allison compares Donilon to Robert F. Kennedy who protected President John F. Kennedy’s options during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It speaks to how the president sees his relationship to the executive branch, his inclinations and limits. It speaks to how the president chooses and trusts his advisers and officers.
For a confident new president who respected national security pragmatists like Jim Jones, Joe Biden, Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, and Dennis Blair, making national security policy should have been straightforward. Obama and, former NATO supreme allied commander and marine commandant, General Jones created an open and orderly national security policy process—layers of interagency committees teeing up options to the National Security Council. Every department and agency would have a chance to say something. This would lead to good policy. But it ran into problems. In the NSC staff, now the “national security staff,” those who had been through the campaign with Obama had their access to the president downgraded. In the Afghanistan surge decision, the Department of the Defense and the military had boxed in the president. The more open the process, the more policy became stuck in the bureaucracy. In crisis decision-making, which takes up an extraordinary amount of bandwidth and which is politically delicate, bureaucracy can’t be allowed.
The president came to find out this is not what he wanted. As the president gained experience, what he did want shows in the people who survived and thrived in the administration. They understand politics. Donilon, Panetta, Biden, and McDonough have worked on campaigns and understand the imperative of mitigating Obama’s political problems on national security. They’ve not only put in place the national security policy structure, but they control it—the information, the direction. They’ve expanded the president’s space to make careful, deliberate decisions. And to have “no leaks.”
In Graham Allison’s account in Time of the president’s decision-making in the Osama Bin Laden raid, several deeds stand out.
• When the president was informed that the CIA might have found Bin Laden’s compound, Panetta brought him information outside of the normal channel of the daily threat matrix briefing, outside of the usual NSC process.
• While the CIA worked to confirm Bin Laden’s locations through a number of secret collection methods, from August to December, “Obama, Donilon, Brennan, Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough, the Vice President’s National Security Adviser Tony Blinken and Biden, supported by Panetta and [Deputy DCIA Michael] Morell” were the only people who knew what was going on.
• Realizing they needed the military, Panetta, bypassing the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff (the National Command Authority), reached out to the Vicechair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright, who brought Joint Special Operations Command’s Admiral William McRaven and a B-2 bomber commander into the circle.
• It wasn’t until the final six weeks before the raid that the “war cabinet” of the NSC began to deliberate, and, practically, by that time the question before them was not about which options to choose, but whether to go ahead.
Characteristically, Panetta said of his perspective on the decision, “Take the view of the man in the street… If ordinary Americans knew what we knew, they would think it was a no-brainer to go.” Donilon put together the call list for the NSC to notify other officials and foreign governments of what had been done. Special operations forces were rewarded with becoming a part of the inner circle.
Allison has an interesting way of describing the months from receiving information about bin Laden’s location to the raid: “Hunters know that the toughest choice they face is when to fire. If they shoot too soon, they will miss the mark, allowing the kill to escape. But by waiting, they risk a sound that will be made that will spook the target. And yet Obama waited five months after first hearing about bin Laden’s whereabouts and acting.”
Another story is David Sanger’s account of the president’s shift in the Afghanistan war. There is no need to go through the entire history save for the latest episode. In the most recent process, uncomfortable with the surge, by early 2011 Obama “told his staff to arrange a speedy, orderly exit from Afghanistan. This time there would be no announced national security meetings, no debates with the generals. Even Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton were left out until the final six weeks.”
And controversially, this approach is taking place with high-value targeting. As Kimberly Dozier writes, “White House counterterror chief John Brennan has seized the lead in choosing which terrorists will be targeted for drone attacks or raids, establishing a new procedure for both military and CIA targets… The effort concentrates power over the use of lethal U.S. force outside war zones within one small team at the White House.”
The article details further separation of CIA and DoD/Joint Special Operations Command targeting procedures, more discretion for the White House, and the streamlining of past targeting review processes.
At what point does the White House go too far? If history is any guide, it’s the norm for White Houses to exert more control over the national security bureaucracy through ways that upend authorities of stalwart institutions like the military and State Department. Seemingly young, unknown, inexperienced, and political staffers at the White House elbow out cabinet secretaries and generals. The claim of executive privilege that bars Congressional oversight over the White House makes it somewhat of a black box.
Some reflections on John Mackinlay’s latest piece at Abu M.
Now blogging at Information Dissemination. Thanks so much to Galrahn for enabling this opportunity. I have followed ID for a while and hope to start blogging tomorrow on naval, strategic, and technological subjects.