Roguely Stated

Well I’m back from Africa, and in the interest of healthy and spirited debate, I’d like to use my space this week to wholeheartedly disagree with my colleague Sean Kreyling and his July 7th post entitled “Is the US Military using the Wrong Metrics in Iraq?” Sean, I respect your intellect and patriotism, but I think you’re way off the mark on this one. In my humble opinion, you’re missing the forest for the trees and in doing so, only perpetuating the dismally superficial counter-insurgency “debate” that Americans witness every day on the news shows.

To describe a cliche with a cliche, talking about “metrics in Iraq” is like “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic:” We may come up with some pretty nice designs, but man oh man– we’ve got bigger problems! And by no means do I support the growing voice in Congress predicting “inevitable defeat” in Iraq (As I’ve articulated clearly in “Small Wars Journal” .) But I do contend that unless we drop the semantics and make real reforms to the way we conceive of, plan for, and conduct warfare, well… we’re all sunk.

I’d like to introduce two concepts that may be informative:

The Granularity Paradox.

As Sean suggests, the military has long had a love affair with measurable quantities (number of bombs on hand, number of “enemy” killed, number of caches recovered). Why? They facilitate the time-honored, WWII era philosophy of centralized control. After all, how can a general officer decide where to send troops and direct operations if he can’t “see” where the enemy is strongest? Yet, the potential solutions summarized in Mr. Kreyling’s article only encourage the “big Army” to take small pieces of wisdom and use them in the worst possible way. When a Lieutenant returning from a combat tour observes that in his sector, an improvement in school attendence or work attendance was a good way to (approximately) gauge attitudes, an inevitable phenomenon results: Well-intentioned, but misguided senior officers attempt to apply the Lieutenant’s lesson as a “magic bullet” new metric for the entire theater of operations. The rationale goes something like this: We can’t count how many bad guys we killed because we’re fighting an insurgency? Well, then let’s count how many kids are in school, or how many murders occurred (or X, Y, Z). While new and “improved” metrics may have a limited benefit, they also have a hidden cost: They continue to reinforce centralized control. I can just imagine the kinds of innumerable, color-coded slide shows being spun out by the staff officers in Baghdad to capture every conceivable new type of metric. Here’s a dialogue I’d bet dollars to donuts is being played out every morning:

“Sir, as you can see on the map, 3rd Brigade’s sector went from Yellow to Orange in terms of school attendance and from Orange to Red in terms of daily hours of electricity.”

“Well, you call down to that commander and tell him to DO SOMETHING!! Have him pay a visit to each school, then meet with the manager at the power plant. And let’s plan an operation down there to clear out the insurgents before they can get a foothold.”

This is precisely the wrong approach. Amidst this entire debate over metrics, there is an elephant in the room and its name is granularity. Simply put, what works for A may not work for B (in fact, it may mean the exact opposite!). Every region is drastically different in terms of ethnic, geographic, political, and religious factors. We can collect all the data in the world regarding various Iraqi cities and their corresponding voter turnouts, birth/ death rates, public opinion polls, school attendance, etc., but the data becomes less useful (and more befuddling, even) the higher up the chain it goes. Only the lowest level commanders– those who walk the city streets every day, know the locals by name, and develop a sense for the intangible “feel” of an area– can truly decipher which metrics (if any) are most important in their neighborhoods, and what actions can best effect the local populace. Counterinsurgency campaigns are won and lost at the lowest levels, with the initiative, imagination, and hard-earned experience of junior leaders. Obsessing about metrics only takes power and authority away from units engaged in the fight and concentrates it in the hands of senior officers echelons removed from reality.

Metrics should be– at most– one of many tools available to junior leaders to attempt to understand their environment and affect positive change. If General Petraeus wants to know things are in Al Yusafiyah, don’t have him look at the latest prepared chart. Have him call the company commander and ask him.

Organization and Culture instead of Tactics.

The money quote from Mr. Kreyling’s article:

“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.”

Again I think we’re missing a key piece of the debate here. This quote, at least by my reading, almost makes it sound as if general officers could simply publish a set of policies and tactics that would specifically clarify what the Army needs to do in order to be effective. A corollary is that the Generals in Baghdad could simply publish a plan that tells every subordinate unit how to win. Change isn’t so simple. While there certainly has been a conspicuous lack of vision in much of the published DoD guidance, what’s needed is a far more fundamental reorganization of the military as a whole, and a reorientation of its culture. In the same way that Goldwater-Nichols unified the various branches (Army, Navy, Air Force) in the aftermath of the Desert One fiasco, we need a “Goldwater-Nichols Part Deux” (for lack of a better name) to unify the military with various interagency elements, civilian contractors, reconstruction entitities, indigenous forces, and other groups when deployed overseas.

Most importantly, the military’s longstanding Napoleonic structure and methodology needs to go. Senior commanders can no longer hold the puppet strings for the entire war effort. We must learn to embrace the concept of “mission-type guidance” (whereby subordinates are given only rough parameters regarding “success”, then trusted to figure out how to best achieve goals in support of the overall effort). And we must become much, much more comfortable with the idea that “junior leaders” may not always wear military uniforms– State, Justice, AID, (even Border Patrol!) all have roles to play in the new organization. With these organizational changes in place, the real strength of the nation–its incredibly talented young leaders–would be given the freedom and support to adapt to changes on the ground and succeed.

Finally, let’s not forget the role of culture. The only real institutional impetus that can sustain such a change must come from hands-on training. The much-hyped “new” counterinsurgency manual, though a step in the right direction, is just a book– and essentially a bland conglomeration (and in some cases extreme glossing over) of long-known and accepted counterinsurgency theory. The manual does almost nothing to address the critical tasks of “vetting” allies (something performed exceptionally poorly within the Iraqi Police and much of the Army), building networks, or safeguarding HUMINT resources. More importantly, it can’t place stress on the reader. Soldiers and leaders need to be challenged to think like terrorists and guerrillas. Before they deploy, they need to practice dealing with an indigenous “friendly” commander that is secretly torturing detainees and extorting money from locals. They need to defuse a town meeting. They need to learn to identify infiltrators in their ranks. These concepts are still alien to most military training centers, which still struggle to create realistic scenarios using outsourced roleplayers and limited resources.

The lesson to take away here is that even though we’ve seen a rash of new DoD guidance and doctrine concerning counterinsurgency, the very nature of counterinsurgency is that no set of fixed rules or procedures or tactics can assure victory. By my reckoning, the key is organization and culture. Build a military that is genuinely better at learning and adapting, better at working with interagency and civilian partners. Train leaders to operate independently with minimal guidance, then test them again and again in countless varied scenarios. That’s the path to victory– and no general’s speech, or set of metrics, or new formula can ever replace it.

Fernando’s Alternative Reading List for those interested in Counterinsurgency:

The Savage Wars of Peace, Max Boot (the definitive study of America’s small wars, and proof that major conventional conflicts like WWI and WWII are the exception not the rule)

War of the Flea, Robert Taber (the guerrilla’s perspective from the only American to fight alongside Castro)

Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, and Peacekeeping, Frank Kitson (a cult classic, hard to find)

Small Wars, C.E. Callwell (the counterinsurgent’s perspective, from a master)

Without an Exit in Vietnam, Sir Robert Thompson (echoes of Iraq)

Street Without Joy, Bernard Fall (the French experience in Vietnam, indispensable)