HUMINT, Informants and more (merged thread)

[Jedburgh]

SSI, 21 Aug 07: Negotiation in the New Strategic Environment: Lessons from Iraq

U.S. soldiers in Iraq—from junior to senior leaders—conduct thousands of negotiations with Iraqi leaders while pursuing tactical and operational objectives that affect the strategic import of the U.S. mission in that country. As long as U.S. troops operate under conditions like the ones they currently face while at the same time conducting a counterinsurgency and stability, security, transition, and reconstruction (SSTR) operation in Iraq, negotiation will be a common activity and an important part of achieving mission objectives. Lessons from experience negotiating in Iraq can be helpful in future operations.

This monograph argues that the negotiations conducted in Iraq have tactical importance, operational significance, and strategic implications because of the daily role they play in the missions U.S. soldiers conduct while attempting to secure neighborhoods, strengthen political institutions, acquire information and intelligence, and gain cooperation. The aggregate effect of so many successful or failed negotiations has an impact on the ability of the U.S. military to accomplish its operational mission there efficiently and effectively as well as meet American strategic goals.

The armed services have centers for lessons learned, combat training centers, and a variety of schools for continued training and development of their soldiers and leaders, but there has been no formal study of the negotiating experience that U.S. military officers and noncommissioned officers have gained and the lessons they have learned over the course of their tours in Iraq or Afghanistan that applies the broader field of negotiation theory and its literature to the practical needs of the U.S. military in conducting those negotiations. This monograph attempts to fill the gap by (1) analyzing negotiations described in narrative interviews with U.S. Army and Marine Corps officers recently returned from deployments to Iraq, and (2) examining the predeployment training currently conducted at the U.S. Army’s National Training Center....

I put this under HUMINT because for several years this was a pet project of mine - the applicability of negotiation skills to military ops. As a HUMINT NCO operating in the MidEast, on too many occasions to count I found myself involved in negotiations with the indig; sometimes pushed forward by the commander simply because I spoke the language, sometimes by request of the indig as an American rep in an otherwise isolated area, and other instances simply by the exigencies of the situation.

My opinion then, as now, was that negotiation is simply another facet of the key HUMINT skill of manipulative human communications - negotiation falls right in with interrogation, interview, debriefing, elicitation, mediation, etc.

In-between deployments I sought out training and educational opportunities to explore that relationship in depth - business negotatiation and "alternative dispute resolution" courses along the lines of Harvard's Program on Negotiation, attending the Bureau's Crisis Negotiation course, and service as a volunteer on crisis hotlines and a community victim-offender mediation program as time and optempo permitted. My command supported me to a degree; but on a couple of occasions they just provided me time through permissive TDY, but all costs came out of pocket. I even wrote a couple of papers linking negotiation skills to operational HUMINT, but they just disappeared without substantive response. In the end, at no point during my time in service did I find real support for inclusion of negotiation training with other HUMINT skills.