Lines of Operation

[ChrisPaparone]

Yesterday my faculty partners and I had a seminar session with Army staff college students and found ourselves still (after 5 years of "settled joint doctrine") struggling with the new, more abstract idea: logical lines of operations.

Here is a slightly edited version what I wrote the students this morning -- and would appreciate your comments (I invited them to engage here and take a look at SWJ blogger comments as a follow-on).

In a conventional, force-on-force fight, operational art involves examining the integration of physical lines of communication (LOCs—the “pipeline” where forces and sustainment move from one base to another base) and physical lines of operations (LOOs—the line of maneuver between the force’s base and its objective). During WW II, the U.S.’s Pacific theater provides a superb example of the “island hopping campaign” where LOOs established new LOCs and LOCs enabled new LOOs (involving physical orientations on THE ENEMY FORCE).

Several years into the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are characterized more by FID- and COIN-oriented activities and goals, doctrinaires searched for a way to define the metaphysical (“logical”) links between military activities as they relate to more nebulous goals like “population security,” “support to insurgents,” and “increasing legitimacy of the host government.” These writers searched for the additional abstraction to describe how to intertwine activities of other agencies and organizations that are nonmilitary in nature (and may constitute the main effort with the military-in-support). Army doctrinaires called these “lines of effort” while joint doctrinaires labeled them “logical lines of operations.”

Keep in mind that these efforts are geared to desirable social and psychological change; hence, are not clearly tied to the physical world. Logical lines of operation are more existential (subjective, interpretive, infused with human-created meaning, etc.) in that they address PEOPLE -- changing minds, social norms, ideas about legitimacy, and so on. In essence, you are orienting military activities and nonmilitary activities on the opinions, values, and attitudes of a POPULATION (be they good guys, bad guys, &/or “fence sitters”).

In short, the joint doctrinaires used the old reliable operational art concept of LOO and metaphorically extended the "physical meaning" in it into a new, much more abstract meaning, i.e. "logical" (the reasoned way of expressing intentional causality). Both kinds of LOOs (physical and logical) serve to reasonably link actions toward a purpose. The former is more easily measured (because it has a physically identifiable “end state” like “we secured objective bravo at map grid so and so”). The latter desired condition is much more difficult to measure because it is so open to subjective interpretation even if we try and operationalize (objectify) it (e.g., “on average, the local population has improved its trustworthy feeling toward the central government;” “the enemy’s morale is deteriorating;” or, “on average, US citizens support the war effort.”). Such reifications of subjective reality are what makes logical lines so difficult to apprehend (as social scientist researchers have found, our "operationalized variables" are, at the end of the day, quite ambiguous; albeit, they sure seemed reasonable when invented).