Army’s adaption to counterinsurgency gives hope for work that remains - Army Community - Army Discussions - Army Times

Army’s adaption to counterinsurgency gives hope for work that remains

Lost amid the clamor and din of our national debate on Iraq is the story of how our amazing, overworked Army is taking on the mission of counterinsurgency, or COIN.

From the first Gulf War to 2004, the Army was shrunk, modularized and networked in the name of peace and progress. The Pentagon experimented with America’s first line of defense, chasing a vision of a light mobile cyber-powered force that could win wars with stealth, speed, standoff precision and a fraction of the troops. Unfortunately, satellites and laser guidance won’t help disarm a suicide bomber sitting in your cafeteria.

Since 2002, the Army has been in a six-year drag-out ground fight in the most manpower-intensive and technology-unfriendly sort of warfare: COIN. The tough work of COIN requires mass, thick skin (literally and figuratively) and a close proximity to friend and foe alike. The focus is nonkinetic operations, which is military speak for being a politician, diplomat, aid worker and policeman — all those things we were anxious to avoid in the 1990s and thus — didn’t dare train for. This has created a steep learning curve for soldiers.

But there is good news. While the outcome of Iraq remains in doubt, the Army is working its tail off to get a lot smarter on COIN (even as it works its other tail off just to meet deployment schedules). Two and three rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan have created a savvy and experienced body of officers and units. Gen. David Petraeus led the development of new Army-Marine Corps COIN doctrine before heading off to lead U.S. forces in Iraq. The innovative leadership of Gen. Peter Schoomacher and Gen. George Casey as Army chiefs of staff has empowered the Army’s training and education centers to aggressively adapt pre-deployment training for the evolving COIN environment.

If you visit the Army National Training Center, for example, you will find a rigorous COIN training environment that captures every aspect of the mission in Iraq, from engaging provincial leaders on reconstruction projects to manning checkpoints and investigating IED attacks. The nonkinetic challenges are not a secondary program, as an Iraq or Army skeptic might assume, but an equally robust part of the training and perhaps the aspect that most challenges the brigade combat teams on their rotation. Other major training centers such as Joint Readiness Training Center, Joint Multinational Training Center, Battle Command Training Program, Fort Bragg, N.C., and the Marines’ Twentynine Palms, Calif., have or are creating similar programs.

Much work remains, however. Too much of the Army’s understanding of COIN is a function of personal experience and unfiltered advice from the battlefield. There is too little interaction with nonmilitary actors such as the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development and others. The Army also needs to create an integrated training effort from the basic school to the combat training centers.

A key challenge is priorities: How does the Army distill the complexity of the irregular environment into digestible training programs for field commanders and soldiers? Getting smart at headquarters and schoolhouses isn't enough. The Army needs to prioritize the different training elements of COIN for each unit level and type. An infantry company needs different COIN training from that needed by a civil affairs battalion or division staff.

We also need to move beyond the simplistic “hearts and minds” interpretation that COIN is just a question of building infrastructure, holding elections and creating jobs. COIN is much more of a political challenge than a reconstruction challenge. Whether it is Belgrade’s influence on Bosnian Serbs or tribal influence in Anbar province, effective COIN leverages existing social and political networks to address the political causes of instability. Political, reconstruction and security activities must be tightly coordinated to build pragmatic support within these networks and separate the insurgency from the population.

Community presence, communications and movement control also play an important role. We must assess efforts based on their impact on stability and political support, not how much was spent or how many things were built.

It’s harder-nosed and more sophisticated than the “Field of Dreams” approach of “if we build it, stability will come.”

Learning to effectively engage communities translates into the most important resource in the COIN battle space: intelligence. Intelligence is essential not only to know where the bad guys are and what they are up to, but also to know who matters within a community, how reconstruction assistance would be most effective and what political compromises are possible. This should be the focus of COIN training, particularly among general-purpose forces. Less important: trying to rebuild the economy and the government to American standards. Yes, we need some specialized skills, but largely within civil affairs, the Army Corps of Engineers and nonmilitary agencies.

The greatest challenge? Sustaining this reform. The Army’s amazing adaptation efforts are heroic right now given how stretched and stressed the force is and how tight resources are. Army training budgets have been decimated by operational needs and slow supplemental funding. The Congress and the Pentagon must support another three to five years of sustained implementation to build the kind of irregular warfare capability needed. We also need a more collaborative effort with nonmilitary agencies such as the State Department, USAID, Justice Department and others.

The irregular battlefield was the most common environment of the last 15 years and will be for the next 25 years. The most casual assessment of American military power tells our enemies that this is where we are vulnerable. We need to institutionalize COIN training as quickly as possible and continue the investment in rebuilding and reforming our Army to meet the COIN challenge.

The writer is president of IDS International Government Services, which provides civil-military training for the Army’s National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. He coordinated policy on stability operations in the Balkans while serving on the National Security Council staff in the Clinton administration. Alexis Albert of IDS International also contributed to this piece.