Liveblog of War and Military Operations in the 21st Century: Civil-Military Operations conference at UNC, Day 2 morning sessions

Liveblog of War and Military Operations in the 21st Century: Civil-Military Operations conference at UNC
click to enlarge flyer ->Back to the conference, in a room with actual power plugs...

This morning's panel:

Civil‐Military Relations in the Field during Operations
Presenter: BG H.R. McMaster, USA, US Army Training and Doctrine Command
Commentators: Tom Ricks, Center for New American Security; Andrew Rathmell, Libra Advisory Group
Moderator: Joseph Caddell, UNC‐Chapel Hill
Joe Caddell was one of my professors back at NC State in the early 90s, teaching Military History and recent US history

BG McMaster is on the podium by the time I found a parking space. Yay, campus parking...
McMaster earned a PhD in History from UNC before he was assigned as a professor at West Point back in the '90s

We undervalued the idea of 'victory' and tried to fight Iraq with the bare minimum level of force to achieve some low level of 'success'. The problem with the bare minimum is that it gives you no flexibility to adjust to new realities on the ground (ie, Spring 2004 in Iraq).
"minimum force" is "barely winning" and that's a lousy way to fight a war.

Situational understanding in CA will never be delivered by sensors, systems analyses, or database. It can't be aggregated, and it can't be collected into a powerpoint slide, because as soon as it gets collected, the fine details get lost. S/A in CA is inherently local and can't be aggregated beyond the village.
Implication is that you need a LOT more people on the ground.

Americans tend to take a very narcissistic, engineering-focused approach to war.
Need to continually re-assess and re-frame the character of the war.
Adaptation of strategies is necessary as character of the war changes, and changing the strategy doesn't mean that the old strategy is bad, but that the facts on the ground have changed.
Iraq in 2006 was no longer policing up old regime, but now a civil war with transnational terrorism and Iranian meddling in the 'government' of a failed state.

Metrics combined with PPT is really dangerous in CA situations because it over-simplifies complex problems.
It confuses "activity" with "progress" which is hard to aggregate when it's village by village.

We tend to redefine war as we would like it to be.
We need a better definition of victory, and we need the willingness to see it through.
Americans will support a war effort - even a costly one - if they understand the implications and dangers of not winning. If your strategy is to "muddle thru" then the American public isn't likely to support it.

---- McMaster remarks wrap here, and the commentators take over before the Q&A ----

Tom Ricks is up first...

A Ricks story about McMaster's HQ in Tal Afar in '06 in which a CPT got a spanking from a senior NCO over a 'lost' disk.
Mistakes of activity should not be punished, but mistakes of passivity (lack of action) should be. Ricks says he saw too many commanders up through DIV level in Iraq 03-07 who just wanted to get out with their skin/honor intact and not do anything if it meant a chance of screwing up.
Chains of command were not unified, especially interagency, and chains of command were not unified until back in Washington DC.
Afghanistan today is even worse, b/c the lack of unity of command completely kills the unity of effort.

In Iraq 03-04, the military undercut the civilian authority.
The military was given a mission to invade Iraq and convert it to a shining beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Military pushed back and said "we don't do revolutionary warfare". Bremer pushed forward with the mission. The military ignored the CPA directives and redefined their mission themselves as a 'stability' mission.
Bremer wanted people off the gov't payroll, but US commanders instead stood up their own local WPA that directly overturned the CPA national directives at the local-by-local level.
Ricks question - around Galoula (sp?)... Civilian needs to be the head of the national effort in the war zone, and civilian-military cooperation starts there.
Ricks' direction question to McMaster: "Would you have been willing to take orders from a civilian?"

Andrew Rathmell now asking some intentionally provocative questions about how the rebuilding of a failed state should happen
1 - Are we really willing to either (a) develop an expeditionary police force to support local national police with augmentation/training, or (b) reduce domestic policing to send police downrange.
We need the debate about whether or not these foreign adventures are "worth it".
US and UK have stumbled into quagmires over the last few years, such as Basra, Fallujah, Helmand without a coherent strategy ahead of time as to why they were there and what they expected to accomplish.
2 - Many challenges working at the national level in a joint/interagency environment and how to better cooperate at that level. Assumption in the doctrine (both US/UK) is that there is a legitimate authority to support there. Doctrine based on 'small wars' - and small unit actions - between WWI and WWII and the post-colonial era, all focused on COIN.
What we haven't looked at is the COIN/peacekeeping/full-spectrum ops that doesn't meet that model, such as in sub-Saharan Africa where infrastructure investments are having payoffs of preventing insurgencies rather than countering them.
How are military integrated into this? US log efforts, but much of success there is ignored by military doctrine and not integrated into wider discussion of COIN.
3 - What other allies (and non-allies) could we cooperate with?
Why not work with Russia, who are constantly involved in COIN around their borders (and quite often badly)?
Why not greater integration with Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc, who provide many of the forces for UN missions?
What about working with the states themselves, the way "Plan Colombia" came together? Mexico? Pakistan? Philippines?
What can the military do to support other agencies with support (NOT leadership) with understanding of environment, planning, etc?

---- All that out of the way, and BG McMaster's chance to respond ----
1 - McMaster's answer to whether or not military would work for civ? Danced around it by talking about how civ-military efforts are often disjointed by overcome by personalities willing to work together.
Challenge of how to subordinate military to civ in theater is at what level is that 'control' - if it's national, might work, but if every regional civ leader 'owns' his own units, then it makes it much harder for the military to respond to changing realities on the ground.
2 - Challenges of how to coordinate national civ-led efforts with military, especially when you don't want to 'scare' the locals. When lots of people with "US Army" on their uniform show up, it's probably not a safe place to be hanging out.

---- Q&A from audience ----
How to balance avoiding "minimum use of force" with personnel strains/rotation policies?
McMaster - what you want to achieve must incorporate how to sustain it, while retaining the initiative.
Every decision you make in Iraq/Afghanistan has a downside. If you don't undergo de-Baathification, how many people would be disenfranchised out of fear that nothing changed?

Remember that the conflict evolves over time. Leaders were "quite rightly concerned" with the public perception of the US as an occupying power and therefore there was crash course in standing up indigenous security forces to show US wanted to leave. Even AQI recognized this, and attacked Iraqi Army to stunt it. Iraqi Army got stunted by attacks, but political efforts charged on without the parallel military efforts and the de-synch'ing led to a lot of problems.

Ricks believes that Iraq is still edgy enough that we are likely to have 30-50k troops there for 5 years at least.
Says that the '03 invasion was clearly the worst foreign policy decision in US history.
Says Crocker once told him that "I think we're headed for success in Iraq. I think it'll look like Lebanon." I say draw your own conclusion about that remark... :)


Q&A is running rather rapid-fire, and hard to catch up with... lots of questions, with answers being held toward the end...

Links for all conference articles:
GrogNews: Liveblog of War and Military Operations in the 21st Century: Civil-Military Operations conference at UNC
GrogNews: Liveblog of War and Military Operations in the 21st Century: Civil-Military Operations conference at UNC, Day 2 morning sessions
GrogNews: Liveblog of War and Military Operations in the 21st Century: Civil-Military Operations conference at UNC, Day 2 morning session 2

By: Brant