COIN Tactics

[buglerbilly]

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

COIN Field Manual -- Time for a Rewrite?

Posted by Paul McLeary at 2/17/2010 9:54 AM CST



There have been rumblings for some time that FM 3-24, otherwise known as the Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual—released with such fanfare in December 2006—is due for a rewrite. The document, pulled together by a dream team of smart Army and Marine officers and national security experts led by Gen. David Petraeus before he assumed command of the war effort in Iraq in 2007, has been widely praised for helping to reorient the Army’s mindset at a crucial junction of the war in Iraq. But it has also been panned for being too long, too academic, and aside from the general guidance it provides, not something the average field commander can really use to guide operations.

ARES has learned that a rewrite is indeed in the works and a team leader has likely been identified, but the whole process is being held up because said officer is currently deployed to Afghanistan. There is no rewrite team as of yet, but you can bet that plenty of ambitious officers and civilian wonks will be lining up at the chance to break out their red pens and have a go at the three year-old document.

Maj. Neil Smith, an Army officer currently attending the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, has some thoughts on what the revised manual should look like, and writes in that “I personally advocate shortening the manual - for example, we could eliminate the chapters on stability, design, and advising based on superceding doctrine published in the last 2 years, while adding the host of subjects not addressed in FM 3-24 and still keeping it compact. It takes the US Army almost 300 pages to explain what most COIN theorists do in about a 100 pages.”

The Army has been busily churning out that doctrine. There’s the Army Capstone Concept, released in January, which orders Army priorities from 2016-2028, as well as the Stability Operations Manual (FM 3-07), released in October 2008, which would probably cover much of the COIN manual’s Chapter 6, which deals with developing host nation security forces, and 09–37, Small Unit Operations in Afghanistan, which likely overlaps with the COIN manual’s Chapter 7, Leadership and Ethics for Counterinsurgency.

The reworking of the iconic counterinsurgency field manual will be no small task, and it’s one that ironically looks to have been put on hold, at least in part, due to the counterinsurgency fight in Afghanistan.

[buglerbilly]

Chief of the Defence Force Conference - Counterinsurgency and Stabilisation in the 21st Century

(Source: Australian Department of Defence; issued Nov. 1, 210)

The Chief of the Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston has held the inaugural Chief of the Defence Force Conference at the Australian Defence College in Canberra.

The conference entitled Beyond Asymmetry: Counterinsurgency and Stabilisation in the 21st Century focuses on one of the most challenging issues facing Australia at the regional and international levels.

Air Chief Marshal Houston said the two-day conference would enable the regional security community to come together to analyse the complexity of the modern strategic security environment.

“Stabilisation interventions have occurred in our immediate region, in Timor-Leste in 1999 and 2006 and the Solomon Islands in 2003. These nation-building missions remain ongoing for both the ADF and our various regional partners and other Government agency colleagues,” Air Chief Marshal Houston said.

“Beyond our region, we continue to contribute to military contingencies in areas such as the Middle East and Africa to uphold global security through missions that embrace peace operations, maritime security and counter-piracy.

“In Afghanistan, our aim is to prevent that nation from again being used by terrorists to plan, prepare and train to undertake attacks against Australians. We face a determined, skilled and very well supported insurgent group.

“Broadly, General Petraeus’ comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy uses all means available to us to target the insurgency’s support structures and destroying its ability to disrupt security, development and governance.

“Importantly, the effort is across governments, agencies, military and civilian areas of expertise.

“The ultimate aim for military commanders in any counterinsurgency and stabilisation mission is to ‘shape, clear, hold, build’ against insurgent adversaries and then to transfer the bulk of responsibility for security from the intervention forces to the indigenous forces.

“We must view the building of stability in fragile states as a process in which military assets, political timelines and development benchmarks are sequenced to allow a progressive handover to sustainable governments.”

The biennial conference allows military, civilian and academic professionals who work in the security environment to exchange ideas and learn from field experience and academic analysis.

The conference has been internationally supported with presenters from India, Pakistan, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as several special representatives from Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.

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[buglerbilly]

The Libyan Intervention and the End of COIN

(Source: Lexington Institute; issued May 17, 2011)

(© Lexington Institute; reproduced by permission)

Over the past decade, the U.S. military have mastered the fine art of counterinsurgency, or COIN. When the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan began, the military had neither the theories nor capabilities to practice counterinsurgency. Slowly, painfully, it developed the doctrine, strategy and tactics, created the organizations and acquired the equipment to do well at counterinsurgency. General Petraeus spent several years at Fort Leavenworth writing the Army’s counterinsurgency manual.

Now the Pentagon has nearly 30,000 MRAPs and M-ATVs specifically designed for counterinsurgency operations. It is flying some 60 Predator drone orbits. The Army developed an entirely new rapid acquisition process that provided its troops in the field and the Marines with a host of critical items including improved body armor, better boots and helmets, enhanced night vision goggles, IED jammers, tethered aerostats and special weapons. The Air Force is about to buy a propeller-driven light attack and armed reconnaissance aircraft that can be used in low-intensity conflicts and sold to partner countries. The military is now richly equipped with the theories, experience and material that will allow it to fight successfully future counterinsurgencies.

So it grieves me -- slightly -- to say that all these investments may have created assets of only waning value. The United States did not become involved in Afghanistan and Iraq based on a vision of a world beset by terrorists and insurgents. It had no grand theory for conducting stability operations in the service of nation building from which we derived the missions to liberate Baghdad and save Kabul. Our two wars were driven by a unique constellation of events that carry no larger meaning. The termination of Osama bin Laden’s dreary existence puts something of a period to this era of U.S. foreign and security policy.

The Libyan campaign demonstrates the reluctance of the United States and its major allies to become engaged in new international adventure to secure foreign populations and create new governments and nations. Many of the issues that the military confronted in detail in its counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq were present in Libya: unknown allies, weak or non-existent governments and civil institutions, tribal conflicts, military incompetence, the possible presence of terrorists and the potential for the conflict and its effects to spread.

In this instance, however, rather than the situation triggering a full blown counterinsurgency/nation building response, it produced an abundance of caution. In particular, the U.S. has refrained from engaging in precisely those activities called for by the theory of counterinsurgency. There is no “whole of government” approach, no “three cups of tea” in Libya. If anything, the Libyan operation is a variant of the gunboat diplomacy, march to Kabul approach that served the European powers well during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Libya is important; its oil resources and location make a conflict in that country of concern not only to its neighbors but to Europe and the world. So why, given the U.S. military’s demonstrated capability to drop in on a foreign country and reshape it, has the United States not chosen to exercise its theory and capabilities in Libya? The reason for the evident unwillingness to jump into the conflict is that we have no confidence that we can alter the political and social environment in Libya from the outside.

The lesson of the Libyan experience is that, contrary to the common wisdom, low-intensity conflict and counterinsurgency operations will not be the dominant problem confronting the future force. Our capacity to control and influence the local populations is extremely limited. Moreover, absent catalytic events such as September 11, where will we find the will to remain engaged in nation building and population shaping for the many years that counterinsurgency theory says is required in order to have an impact? As the United States has discovered, it has choices when it comes to intervening in other peoples’ conflict. Increasingly, the United States will choose to limit its involvement in such situations.

Moreover, the government finds itself struggling to find ways to pay for needed military modernization programs such as a new strategic bomber, the F-35 fighter, nuclear attack submarines and strategic forces. As the administration considers the choice between the uncertain political benefits of protracted counterinsurgencies and the need to protect vital national interests against potential Iranian, North Korean and Chinese aggression it is likely to choose the latter.

The second American flirtation with counterinsurgency and nation building is over.

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[buglerbilly]

General Wants Corps to Retain COIN Skills

July 01, 2011

Military.com|by Christian Lowe



While top Marine commanders are trying to steer the Marine Corps mission away from counterinsurgency and land-based occupation roles, a top general says it would be a mistake to abandon the hard lessons learned from 10 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Marine Lt. Gen. Dennis Hejlik said June 30 that the Corps has planned a massive war game slated for early next year that bears a greater resemblance to Iwo Jima than Tarin Khot -- all in an effort to refocus the service back on its “amphibious expeditionary roots.”

“We’re going to get back to our core competencies,” Hejlik said during an interview with military reporters in Washington. “We’ve been locked in a land battle since 2002. So we need to get back to being a naval force that’s forward deployed.”

But Hejlik -- who enlisted in 1968 and now commands all East Coast-based Marines -- warned against letting the leadership skills, small unit tactics, and diplomatic acumen of today’s front-line Marines atrophy while focusing on training for amphibious ops.

“We’ll never get away from [counterinsurgency] skills,” he said. “That would be very foolish.”

With the end of the war in Afghanistan in sight and deployments to Iraq soon a thing of the past, the services are making a concerted effort to shift their training and equipment buys with an eye on traditional missions. Army units want to return to complex maneuver warfare training using tanks, artillery and infantry, Special Forces want to pull away from door kicking and back to working with indigenous forces and the Corps wants its Marine Expeditionary Units back.

It’s like 1999 all over again, strategists argue.

But during the height of the insurgency in Iraq and with a complex guerrilla war in Afghanistan heating up in 2004, the services were forced to relearn the harsh lessons of counterinsurgency operations during the Vietnam War, abandoning their traditional land warfare doctrine for one that emphasized winning people rather than territory.

“If you go back to the combined action platoons in Vietnam that were so successful, where did we pick that up? From the Small Wars Manual from back in the 1930s,” Hejlik said. “We still use that manual.”

Hejlik added that he sees the Corps working more closely with Army Special Forces in the future, linking up with Alpha teams to train foreign forces in places like Africa and South America.

“Say you’re working in Chad … you’d have an Army ODA team working with their special forces and we would be working with their conventional forces,” Hejlik explained. “We've done that in the past and it works pretty well."

© Copyright 2011 Military.com. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

New war game developed to study Army's impact

December 1, 2011

By John Andrew Hamilton, ATEC



WHITE SAND MISSILE RANGE, N.M., (Dec. 1, 2011) -- Games mean serious business at the Training and Doctrine Command Analysis Center at White Sands Missile Range with the development of a new war game that will help evaluate the social impact of Army operations.

The Irregular Warfare Tactical War Game, being developed at Training and Doctrine Command Analysis Center at White Sands Missile Range, or TRAC WSMR, will be used to assess how Army tactical operations impact the population of a host country. The game system is designed to focus on the tactical level of a battalion sized unit conducting operations in an irregular war.

Keeping the game real, the players use the backdrop of Afghanistan, with maps, objectives, operations and other elements all based on information collected from real world sources. In development since 2008, the Irregular Warfare Tactical War Game has already been used by several organizations to conduct some initial exercises with testing of the fully functional prototype that was expected to be finished in November.

"The purpose of this event this October is to prove that we can produce analytic products to support a study," said Paul Works, chief of methods and research with TRAC Headquarters at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. If all goes well, analyses using the war game are expected to begin in April.

Building the game itself required TRAC to assemble new resources that it previously didn't have. While TRAC had the ability to create basic social interaction models for the game, the details of how those models were to interact with each other weren't there.

"We stood up a whole new organization called the Complex Operations Data Development Activity, hired a number of social scientists, the first social scientists hired within TRAC in 20 years, and those folks are dedicated to developing what we call human social-cultural behavioral data," Works said.

It was this data that, when applied to the game models, allows them to represent the Afghan public and generate the information about how Army operations affect them.

The game, with its large-scale simulated world and focus on the tactical unit, is currently being used to analyze if giving greater intelligence access to a company commander will help the company and battalion level units perform better and win local support faster and more effectively. To what level intelligence data needs to be disseminated has been a point of discussion across the Army because the intelligence needs of a company commander are typically specific and tactical in nature.

When going against an irregular enemy like the Taliban however, some Army leaders suspect that providing better access to more intelligence could allow the company commanders to make decisions with a more positive impact on the local population.

"We're pulling information out of the game to determine the differences between the two cases. How do the company commanders perform, are they better at understanding (the enemy) or identifying what they are doing and then interdicting that? Then because our model is social as well, how does that impact the population? Does having this new capability and intelligence allow us to change how the population sees the world or us?" said Maj. Patrick Workman, senior military analyst with the Studies Support Directorate of TRAC WSMR.

The Army is currently evaluating other tools at WSMR intended to get more intelligence to the company commander, making TRAC's work in the field all that more relevant to the Army's current goals.

The game includes a massive amount of play options and features that bring into account the many various elements that would play a part in a modern conflict.

"The way the war game is set up, we have a number of cells effectively competing with each other to influence the population," Workman said. Player groups include the typical "blue" force, the players controlling the U.S. battalion; a "red" force, with players who control Taliban forces and criminal elements like the drug trade in the game; and a "green" force, whose players control the indigenous forces like local military and police.

Filling out the game world is an "operational wrap around" group that handles larger scale portions of the game like blue force brigade level operations and Taliban regional operations.
Adding more layers to the game are models and simulations that represent other aspects of the modern battlefield.

Media reports are simulated and their affect on the population is factored in. Social media is also a factor with the simulation tracking the way that information on a social network passes to friends and family and not directly to the general public like traditional media.

A leadership simulation called "Nexus" is also included in the game. This complex simulation contains the different leadership characters that an Army leader in the field would have to interact with, both directly and indirectly, when conducting operations.

Village elders, government officials, and other important individuals can influence a population in different ways, and the factors in these differences and how they interact with each other and the player's choices.

"It gives our players a way to interact with them, to get them to pass out messages that are supportive, or that may not be supportive if the leader doesn't care for whoever is interacting with them," said Workman.

Forces and personalities aren't the only thing in the system. Essential services and infrastructure are also in play. Electricity, water, medical services, even laws and legal cues are incorporated into the game as well. These elements can play a huge role in a population's outlook and opinions, as the availability of these services increases or decreases.

"We start our war game with services at a specific level and then players are able to interact or attack and decrease those capabilities or improve those capabilities in order to help the population get whatever it is they need," said Workman.

Just because a player chooses to take action regarding a particular service doesn't mean it will turn out as expected. Workman explained that, just like in the real world, in the game it's possible that the contractor hired to improve infrastructure will take the money and run instead of doing the work.

Bringing all these complex interactions together into one comprehensible game is the Planning Adjudication and Visualization Environment. PAVE is a custom software package made specifically to handle large scale simulations like the Irregular Warfare Tactical War Game. PAVE takes all the different actions of each player and system within the game and turns them into interactions, generating and displaying the effects those actions have on the other players and systems in the game world.

"It's the center of our models, so the players interact with it, then it reaches out to whatever model we are using to inform it and it brings the information back in to present it to the players," Workman said.

While the current games being run use Afghanistan as the country being simulated, the game is designed to be able to import data on other regions as well, allowing the game to be used to evaluate possible operations anywhere in the world.

The Irregular Warfare Tactical War Game, though comprehensive and functional, is still a system in development with lots of improvements still in the works. At this time, sections of the game are still played out on a table top, where players draw cards and move pieces around a board.

Furthermore, the game requires a large number of people to play, with the minimum required number of players and operators topping out around 40. Eventually, TRAC plans for the entire game to run out of a computer system, and reduce the minimum number of players and operators down to eight.

[buglerbilly]

DARPA draws upon Adapx for C2 solution

06 December 2011 - 15:13 by Beth Stevenson in London



Adapx has been awarded a $1.8m contract by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to provide advanced C2 speech and sketch interfaces for its Deep Green Program.

The contract, which includes the provision of Adapx’s Capturx system, was announced on 6 December but actually awarded in October.

The Deep Green Program aims to develop decision support systems that commanders can use to create and analyse potential courses of action. The previous two phases of the programme saw the development of the voice and written symbology, also provided by Adapx.

The contract aims to integrate Capturx into battle command systems, enabling commanders to create their own battle plans by ‘simply speaking and sketching their plans using standard military jargon or symbols’, it was explained.

Designed to be ‘faster for decisions and deployment’, Capturx was developed to make battle command easier for soldiers and commanders in an effort to reduce data entry obstacles: ‘You made a decision five minutes ago, and in ten minutes it could be wrong’, a company spokesman added.

Describing itself as a ‘global expert for speech and sketch’, Adapx claims to provide easier interfaces which require less training, and avoid the ‘clunky interface’ commonplace in legacy systems. The company also provides a pen and paper option using special pens for those who use hard copy for mission planning.

The news follows a contract award to the company in October from the US Army Research Laboratory’s Simulation and Training Technology Center (STTC) for the integration of speech and sketch capabilities into battlefield simulators. This aims to ‘streamline course-of–action simulations’ for small unit commanders, which allow them to predict potential courses of action.