Roguely Stated

In a recent briefing, General Peter Pace, the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had this to say regarding the latest U.S. military surge and counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts:

“If you try to define this in terms of level of violence, you’ve really put yourself on the wrong metric. It isn’t about X number today, Y number tomorrow, because the enemy gets a chance to vote in that,” Pace said. “The metric really should be for Iraqi citizens. Do they feel better about their lives today than they did yesterday? And do they think they’re going to feel better about their lives tomorrow than they do today?”

While Gen. Pace’s specific remarks were an attempt at explaining the recent increase in the overall level of violence seen in Iraq following the surge, the notion that violence is not the sole effective metric is applicable to understanding and gauging U.S. military efforts as well.

This concept of “metrics redefined” for a COIN environment is reinforced in new U.S. Army doctrine, specifically the military’s new counterinsurgency manual FM 3-24, written in part by General David Petraeus. Chapter 5 of this manual, titled Executing Counterinsurgency Operations, lays out the conceptual foundations of measuring success in this difficult environment.

“The complex nature of COIN operations makes progress difficult to measure. Subjective assessment at all levels is essential to understand the diverse and complex nature of COIN problems. It is also needed to measure local success or failure against the overall operation’s end state”.

Traditionally, military commanders use discrete quantitative and qualitative measurements to evaluate progress. However, the manual, incorporating the hard-won lessons from Vietnam, says that to be successful in COIN, commanders need broad indicators of progress.

“Numerical and statistical indicators have limits when measuring social environments. For example, in South Vietnam, U.S. forces used the body count to evaluate success or failure of combat operations. Yet, the body count only communicated a small part of the information commanders needed to assess their operations. It was therefore misleading… In addition, [statistical] indicator[s] do not measure several important factors: for example, which side the local populace blames for collateral damage, whether this fighting and resultant casualties damaged the insurgent infrastructure and affected the insurgency strategy in that area, and where families of dead insurgents reside and how they might react. For another example, the number of schools built or renovated does not equate to the effective operation of an educational system”.

So how well has Petraeus’ new ethos penetrated the leadership of the regular army currently engaged in fighting insurgents in Iraq? Last week on National Public Radio’s program Morning Edition, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, Commander of the U.S . Army’s 3rd Infantry Division was asked the following question regarding the U.S. Army’s recent COIN operations south of Baghdad and gives us an indication:

Steve Inskeep (NPR): “As you move forward, as you move down the Tigris, how do you measure success?

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch: “Measures of success are based on controlling key terrain; weapons cashes that you’ve taken away; key individuals that you’ve either killed or captured, you know, for example, this deep into the operation, we’ve killed or captured about 180 of the insurgents in our battle space, we’ve taken out over 50 weapons caches”.

Allow me to recap MG Lynch’s understanding of how success is measured: 1) key terrain; 2) enemy equipment captured; 3) enemy body counts. To me, that sounds a great deal like the Vietnam-era measures of effectiveness that failed to provide the military with the right conceptual understanding of what was happening on the battlefield.

While it is true that metrics based on the WWII style of American warfare (firepower and attrition) can be useful for certain phases of a larger counterinsurgency operation, a division commander must have a more nuanced understanding of his battlespace than Gen. Lynch has demonstrated.

However, the argument over metrics is not a simple matter, nor is it easily resolved. The very idea of redefining metrics in the U.S. military is a touchy subject; and the doctrine put forth in Gen. Petraeus’ manual is neither universally agreed upon nor admired throughout the ranks. More than one field-grade officer has shared with me a deep sense of frustration over both the type of metrics used in Iraq, as well as their cautious expectations regarding Gen. Petraeus’ COIN strategy as the commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I). Criticisms of Gen. Petraeus range from producing ambiguous doctrine to providing no clear definition of success to the military in terms it either understands or feels that it can accomplish.

U.S. military officers have expressed the need for more of the clearly defined tactical tasks similar to the type that Gen. Lynch uses to measure success and less of the “touchy-feely” objectives that are difficult to adequately define, let alone quantify. For the individual soldier and marine on the ground, the lack of security in Iraq defines danger, and ambiguity in mission and purpose is neither comforting nor necessarily helpful in achieving tactical or strategic goals.

Furthermore, in contrast to Gen. Pace’s stated metrics, such as whether Iraqis feel better about their lives today than they did yesterday, returning veterans have proposed alternatives such as: are [Iraqis] going to work? Are they sending their children to school? How long are the markets open? How many decapitated bodies are found in any given neighborhood? These are all easily definable metrics that tell [the military] something concrete. According to confidential sources, the U.S. government has long obscured the number of attacks against American forces and it is no secret that accurate data regarding the number of Iraqi civilian casualties is lacking. These are also important statistics, extremely useful both as COIN metrics, as well as defining the true human cost of military intervention.

So which understanding is right? Is Gen. Petraeus correct in trying to learn the lessons from Vietnam, or has he abandoned the simple and clearly defined tactical tasks that warfighters feel are necessary?

Ironically, each position is correct - just in different ways. Both proponents of redefining metrics for counterinsurgencies, as well as those who call for clearly defined tasks are justified in their concerns.

General Petraeus is correct in that metrics designed for attrition warfare on the plains of Europe fighting the Soviets (i.e., interstate warfare) just don’t seem to get the job done in guerrilla wars or against insurgencies. These tasks and metrics conceptually miss the mark because they don’t relate to the larger mission at hand, or what Tom Barnett refers to as “war within the context of everything else”. Additionally, this desire for military-focused metrics (like body counts) is inherent in the nature of American professional soldering, which states that its primary function is “close with and destroy the enemy”. Unfortunately, this may not be the major component of “winning” against an insurgency at the strategic level. To “kill, capture, and destroy” - in a COIN environment - are tasks that should fall primarily to what the military doctrinally refers to as “supporting” and “shaping” efforts; and while these tasks are still very important, and how effectively they are executed will help determine the outcome, they generally are not decisive in a strategic sense. For example, U.S. forces can kill thousands of insurgents, but in the end its actions could very well create just as many new insurgents as they kill. Therefore, an effective strategy requires the nation to understand and utilize all dimensions of national power (Diplomacy, Information, Military, Economic) to address the larger problems that influence insurgencies - not just address the symptoms via the brute application of military force, or the supply of enemy fighters becomes endless.

However, critics of Gen. Petraeus are absolutely correct to point out that the lack of security defines danger, which in turn can threaten the larger mission. To address many of the security concerns requires military force to “kill, capture, destroy, etc.” The dilemma comes when you ask the same group of people to do all of this simultaneously (which we are). Not that this requirement is new in warfare. Various armies over the centuries have done both warfighting and stability operations (or conducted an occupation, depending on your viewpoint), but the US military was not created, task organized, trained nor equipped to fight insurgencies. It was specifically designed to fight other nation states; a conscious choice it has continuously made since defeat in Vietnam.

“In ‘Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife,’ John Nagl argued that instead of learning from defeat, the Army after Vietnam focused its energies on the kind of wars it knew how to win — high-technology conventional wars. An essential contribution to this strategy of denial was the publication of ‘On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War,’ by Col. Harry Summers. Summers, a faculty member of the U.S. Army War College, argued that the Army had erred by not focusing enough on conventional warfare in Vietnam, a lesson the Army was happy to hear. Despite having been recently defeated by an insurgency, the Army slashed training and resources devoted to counterinsurgency”. ~ Comments by LTC Paul Yingling, deputy commander, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. He has served two tours in Iraq, another in Bosnia and a fourth in Operation Desert Storm. He holds a master’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago.

This dilemma, in turn, leads to much of the frustration I hear from the force that is directed toward General Petraeus and the doctrinal manual he produced. All of the frustration is absolutely legitimate, but I believe some of it is aimed in the wrong direction. By its very nature, and true to its criticism, Petraeus’ doctrine doesn’t provide answers or define success: commanders and leaders do that (both military and political) …and this is the actual crux of the problem.

I believe the widespread frustration towards Petraeus’ FM 3-24 is a reflection of this dilemma. It’s a frustration with the lack of concrete ideas, policies, tactics and quality leadership at the general officer level to actually be mad (or pleased) about. I think the real issue and source of anger that the tactical level of the military has is really with the military and government at large: specifically, the World War One style mentality of the general officer corps (the institutional refusal to change tactics and doctrine over the past few decades, even when the enemy and advances in weapon technology require that change) and the lack of clear civilian leadership that explains what the point of its sacrifice is.

Both of these dynamics (military and civilian) are mutually supporting and greatly influence each other. They cannot operate independently or in a vacuum. But, until these dynamics are synchronized and both a clear military endstate and positive foreign policy vision of the future is articulated, we are all in for a rough ride.

Update: Iraq Snapshots 

MORE:

Officers With PhDs Advising War Effort, by Thomas Ricks - Washington Post

The Petraeus Thinkers: Five Challenges, by Herschel Smith - The Captain’s Journal

Understanding Current Operations in Iraq, by David Kilcullen - Small Wars Journal

A Failure in Generalship, by LTC Paul Yingling - Armed Forces Journal

Tags: Army, Baghdad, DoD, Insurgency, Iraq, joint chiefs, NPR, Petraeus
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