Suggestions for Small Wars Essay Contest?
It's quite possible that in the near future, Small Wars Journal will be in a position to sponsor a writing contest with a significant cash award.
We are looking for some good topics that strike to effectiveness across the community of Small Wars practitioners, don't re-hash ground that's been adequately covered, and ideally have a collateral benefit of raising interest and participation in our community from some of the important but under-represented groups.
At this point, we're thinking that we'll probably run 3 or 4 topics that complement each other somehow, probably concurrent, maybe time phased. We will publish special editions of SWJ Magazine with the entries, and maybe some additional publishing with select partners.
Seeking your suggestions here for essay topics, or a family of topics. Not the topic of YOUR paper, but the question(s) in the Call for Papers that we put out. +/- any suggestions on contest ROE, logistics, etc.
For now, I'll just sit back and listen. I don't want to over-influence the brainstorming in this thread. But believe me, I'll be watching intently.
Developing Metrics for Small Wars
How about:
--Developing Metrics for Small Wars
--Security Forecasting Models for Small Wars
--Statistical Process Control for Infrastructure Development and Operation
--Statistical Process Control for Good Governance
--A Comparison of Select Small Wars Metrics to 20th and 21st Century Small Wars
Steve
Puzzle solving by essays!
1) How did civil & military institutions learn from small wars in the Imperial age (1860-1960)? How do those insititutions learn now in the Internet age? Are the obstacles similar?
2) Can we (the West?) identify a possible small war / insurgency before violence occurs? If identified what do we do first and what do we not do?
3) Fighting small wars a national or international responsibility?
4) The fast technological fix -v- the slow human fix for intelligence in small wars. Can we wait? I'm mindful of Northern Ireland and some CT lessons in Western Europe, e.g. ETA in Spain and the Italian Red Brigades.
davidbfpo
iPhone, FM's and reality...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Uboat509
What about an essay about the roles of SOF and conventional forces in COIN? Prior to OIF, the attitude in the big Army was that COIN was the realm of SOF and they wanted no part of it. That attitude has changed (though not gone away completely) but there is still a disconnect between SOF and the conventional forces. What should each one's role be? What responsibilities should be shared and what ones kept
Uboat509,
This quote of yours has been pinging around in my head today, that and the iPhone comment you lucky...
I would like to share an experience with you that changed my thinking about things SOF. "No ####, so there I was..."
The 2000 copy of FM 41-10 has figure 1-1 which provides a nice clean visual about the continuum of conflict and how we CA-bubbas try and drain the swamp throughout the full-spectrum of things. This is the picture that was in my mind when I hit the ground in Iraq in 2003.
Iraq covers about 167400 square miles / 433400 square kilometers depending upon which website you quote and in this large area I was very aware that SOF were in short supply and conventional forces were plentiful. My AO was too large for me to cover every day but the 101st did a damn fine job of it. When then MG Petraeus shifted the whole DIV from 'Cordon and Search' to 'Cordon and Knock' operations I realized that US conventional forces are capable of COIN op's. When MG Petraeus had his BCT commanders meet with the locals, id problems and work to resolve them I saw that with the right leader and given time and experience conventional forces can excel at COIN. Necessity is the mother of invention and with the current situation Big Army has no choice but to excel at COIN and to keep those skills sharp or risk losing this fight and future fights.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and we have learned this lesson in spades. For SOF, I am of the opinion that we need to ensure that we are regularly inserted further upstream in the time continuum in AO's of concern to US interests to conduct our missions before things get to where they are today. SOF must also effectively educate, advise, and train with our conventional forces on our mission just as we do with host nations. Failure to effectively execute either of these missions is harmful to the nation. In the meantime we all need to play team and kick some ass.
My 0.02 cents,
Steve
Figure 1-1. CA Mission Activities Across the Range of Military Operations
Terrain Complexity in Small Wars?
Hi folks, just getting started here at SWC after following it for quite some time. Bear with me, I've scanned over the previous 30-odd posts in this thread, and seen nothing explicitly related to the role of terrain, broadly speaking, in small wars.
I'm pandering to my own limited expertise here, but as an outgrowth of writing about sanctuary in insurgent and terrorist thought and practice, I've been building a conceptual suite that I've come to think of as "terrain complexity".
Right, the complexity part's not complicated, it means what it means, and gets into the role of networks, complex adaptive systems, and all the "unrecognizables" and incoherence of post-cold war low intensity crises. But the terrain angle is much more convoluted. Complex terrain might be just another word for "ecologies" or "environments", but I hesitate to go that route, thinking that it could be somewhat misleading to the lay, non-security types thinking more about maritime ecosystems and sustainable forests than the problems of CT/COIN battlespace and IPB, esp. in a global context.
Terrain, in this sense, is a weave of material/physical, human/demographic, and cognitive/social threads. It gets into rural vs. urban ops, hard vs. soft COIN, domestic vs. foreign theatres of operation, policing vs. military options, etc. Its ties into processes and conditions of radicalization (historically, not just in relation to today's Iraq and Afghanistan), cross-border migrations and transnational pipelines, etc. And, I think, the notion of terrain complexity underlies, so to speak, a great many of the suggestions that've already been put forward.
Anyway, just a thought.
Received from an SWC Member by PM...
...who prefers to remain anonymous for some unknown reason. Author does credit the discussion here for some of the thought.
FYI, I got the dreaded SWJ Server Death Grip when I tried to post this yesterday. Fortunately, I can recognize it and know who to call. Need to change our host, and apologies to all the people who aren't reading this now because they can't get through. :confused::mad::p
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One characteristic of many small wars is that they are asymmetric: one actor possesses considerably more “hard” or military power than the other. Yet many ostensibly weaker powers seem able to negate this advantage through the use of information. Manipulation of existing news outlets (e.g., newspapers and magazines), and creation of new media outlets (e.g., blogs and websites), may permit weaker actors to achieve end states otherwise unattainable. Under what conditions are such information operations most likely to succeed (e.g, during more traditional military operations, such as the November 2004 assault on Fallujah, or during less traditional military operations, such as the pacification of Anbar)? What are the most efficient ways for weaker actors to use information operations to negate their opponents’ military advantages? Conversely, what are the most efficient ways for stronger actors to deny weaker actors such capabilities (e.g., embedding, foreign-language websites, etc.))? Which branch or branches of the US Government are best able to conduct such operations, and in what ways?
The US military has sought to learn counterinsurgency lessons from the experiences of other militaries as well its own. But to some extent, each military is unique. With respect to the US military, to what extent can lessons from other militaries be applied, to what extent are lessons from other militaries inapplicable, and why? What are the dimensions one should assess when importing lessons from other militaries? What makes such lessons applicable or inapplicable – the nature of the US political system (e.g., division of responsibility for prosecution of wars between Congress and the Executive), the nature of the US military (e.g, dissimilar from the British regimental system), the absence of unity of command within a theatre and separate lines of authority between DOD and State, etc.? For example, to what extent should one apply British COIN lessons from Malaya or Kenya, or Russian COIN lessons from Afghanistan, and what rationales dictate which lessons should be applied when (e.g., British lessons should be applied because the British political system is more similar to the US one, or Russian lessons should be applied because it too lacked a small wars tradition)?
The concepts of guerilla war, unconventional war, insurgency, low-intensity conflict, asymmetric conflict, and terrorism – to name a few – overlap to a considerable degree, but also diverge to a similar degree. Not all insurgencies take place within the context of unconventional wars (e.g., actions during the US Revolutionary and Civil Wars), nor do all asymmetric conflicts necessarily involve insurgencies (e.g., the Israel-Lebanon/Hezbollah 2006 war). Accordingly, distinctions between small wars and large wars may be considerably overstated: a war might be characterized as “primarily” “small” or “large,” but nevertheless contain large components of each. To aid to the complexity, militaries – and organizations more generally – can arguably change only slowly and painfully at best, and/or be capable of doing only one thing. Finally, while the United States is currently waging (at a minimum) two counterinsurgencies, the potential of major or large regional conflicts cannot be discounted entirely. Accordingly, to what extent – if at all – should the US military attempt to organize (or reorganize) itself for small wars? Or, conversely, should the US military be content with the progress it has made in drafting FM 3-24, and reorienting itself toward small wars, and decide its change has been sufficient? What tradeoffs, if any, should be made?
I'm in general agreement.
Agree totally that 'asymmetric' simply describes the way anyone should ALWAYS fight -- attack ones opponents weakest point(s).
If, for example, the opponent is not able to successfully attack us militarily and as a result turns to successfully using IO to weaken our national resolve for completion of a goal, then our effort should be directed toward undermining the opponents efforts in that regard and destroying his credibility. I do not believe that is a military function, it is a governmental function but the Armed Forces are the absolute wrong agency to prosecute the effort.
Other than to covertly remove some of his messengers and destroy some of his dissemination capability, of course...:D
Wilf is correct in that:
Quote:
"...that there are opponents against whom the use of conventional military force is not useful because they shelter and subsist within civilian populations.
. Yet there are also cases where conventional military force is required for one reason or another to open the window for non conventional force or effort to be applied. That effort will vary considerably dependent on the nation(s) involved and the general situation and success will depend on knowledge of the cultures and forces involved and on good intelligence. We do not do well at understanding the former and we have not done well at obtaining and / or promulgating the latter. Hopefully, both those conditions will see improvement in the future.
I do not as strongly agree about 'small wars.' It's a term, no more and some wars are in fact smaller than others. As it is generally applied today, it points toward COIN. I think that the Armed Forces don't “do” COIN, rather they act in support of US Government COIN, they don't conduct COIN but do -- and must be able to -- operate in a COIN environment. I believe that distinction is critical and is not being applied -- and that is why we've been floundering for a while. Volumes have been written about that and about the failure to involve the total government in this effort so there's little to be gained by flogging that stud here.