What is JCISFA, what is SFA, and how does it fit in the greater scheme of things-PT 1

[Rob Thornton]

Slap - shoot me the proverbial PM - that which has been approved for public release is yours for the asking; that which isn't currently - soon will be, and I'll get you that too. So far its all UNCLASS, and set for unlimited distro. Right now the SFA Planner's Handbook is good to hook and on the streets, and its found a home with a good many J5s, I also passed out a bunch to JIIM community. BTW, while we don't have a uniformed airman in JCISFA yet, we do have a retired airman who is currently a contractor, he and our Deputy Director just got back from USAF's advisor training effort.

Some of the first guys at JCISFA (like SWC member "Old Eagle") are to be thanked for the quality of the SFA Planner's HB. Best, Rob

[Surferbeetle]

Rob,

This is a solid post and will require some time to digest. There is a discussion on the BCKS CMO website concerning 'Best of Breed' that might be of interest to you. I have been thinking about analyzing strategic frameworks using such business techniques as Balanced Scorecard, SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportuniites, and Threats) VRINE (Value, Rarity, Inimitability, Nonsubstitutuability, and Exploitability) among others in support of the CMO effort. By combining these with my ongoing interest in defining applicable metrics I might even find the time, one of these days, to put something together for the website. In the meantime I'll just continue to ramble on here...

Regards,

Steve

[Ken White]

Like Steve, I'll have to digest that for a bit. Out of idle curiosity, does the AF plan on providing some blue suiters?

[Rob Thornton]

Hi Steve,
I found his (LTG Duik's) presentation and philosophical framing of it as an enterprise pretty interesting, and I think spot on - I'd known some PRT folks, but I'd yet to see thinking on building the required institutional bureaucracy, until now. MNSTC-I is working to get the right type of senior level / ministry type advisors in place to help the Iraqis work through this. As many have mentioned before, under Saddam's regime they had a bureaucracy that was not designed to tell the emperor he had no clothes. When the regime was torn/fell apart even those linkages were dissolved.

JCISFA is trying to help them out by providing an advisory course POI (the actual teaching of that would probably go to somebody else with capacity) targeting the skill sets for that level of advising. This is not easy. For a job of such importance you have to start with someone with a level of technical education appropriate to evaluate the existing system, the environment in which the system is supposed to work, how the system will facilitate and sustain the desired endstate - or a combination of all three simultaneously. We're talking high art here I think. This is not something that can be minted and sent out the door.

One of the best analogies I've heard is that of a gardener. Before you can advise somebody on how to garden in a manner that theperson being advised stands a good chance of being successful, the advisor needs to understand gardening pretty well himself. Nobody wants advice on a topic from someone who really has no practical experience in the area he's advising on. At the tactical level, this is challenging enough, but for the most part we get it about right, we and the Iraqis have enough capacity in that area that when a TT goes down range they can at least advise on the technical aspects. These ministry level advisors though are of a different nature - a strategic one.

Not only do they require someone saavy on politics, and the culture of the politics at work, but a senior level mis-step can have far reaching and enduring ill effects. Also, the longer it takes the Iraqis to build their institutional bureaucracy, the less stable, less effective and more vulnerable the overall governmental structure will be to internal and external pressures. Unfortunately the uniformed side does not have allot of experience in this, in fact most of our culture goes far out of its way to stay out of it.

I think his observation is right on, but getting the right people, with a sufficient amount of professional experience in a personnel system that struggles to meet "made to order" requests is going to be tough. Most of the folks I would think best suited to do this level of advising would be OSD SES types, and people who'd served as -Ds, etc. We (the big JIIM "we") can provide them with the skills to "advise", but the core competencies, cannot be built in a short term nature, they are either the product of long term experiences (best case & requiring hand selection based on professional assignments), or potentially a series of courses and schools that at least introduce them to the technical skills (maybe an adequate solution, but will mean selection early and a good deal of supplemental preparation in the technical areas).

Another one of those things with "no easy answers".

Best, Rob

[Rob Thornton]

Ken, my understanding is that there are many who'd like to. We'll see. Best, Rob

[Surferbeetle]

JCISFA is trying to help them out by providing an advisory course POI (the actual teaching of that would probably go to somebody else with capacity) targeting the skill sets for that level of advising. This is not easy. For a job of such importance you have to start with someone with a level of technical education appropriate to evaluate the existing system, the environment in which the system is supposed to work, how the system will facilitate and sustain the desired endstate - or a combination of all three simultaneously. We're talking high art here I think. This is not something that can be minted and sent out the door.

One of the best analogies I've heard is that of a gardener. Before you can advise somebody on how to garden in a manner that theperson being advised stands a good chance of being successful, the advisor needs to understand gardening pretty well himself. Nobody wants advice on a topic from someone who really has no practical experience in the area he's advising on. At the tactical level, this is challenging enough, but for the most part we get it about right, we and the Iraqis have enough capacity in that area that when a TT goes down range they can at least advise on the technical aspects. These ministry level advisors though are of a different nature - a strategic one.

Rob,

You have touched upon quite a few pithy and central points to the reconstruction effort.

Fortunately for the US we have Gen Petraeus on the ground. For an American, he probably has the truest grasp of the many, many changing variables involved and he is the best placed to bring about change.

Iraq is not America. It never will be. The American approach to Time does not apply. Relationships are established and tested before things begin to happen.

In addition to deep technical/technocratic skills, linguistic, and cultural skills for JCISFA teams will truly be key. Failure to have the first two have definite repercussions, failure to have the latter can get you and your team injured or killed. Some of the South Koreans, Bechtel, and ACOE folks found this out the hard way during my tour. These 'silver-bullet' teams would be the poster children for a 'low density MOS' and we would have to careful how they are employed.

Having said this I feel that Iraqi Human Capital is the key issue to the success or failure of our operation. Many of the people I worked with had options and I would be very surprised if they are still around. Many of the engineering directors that I worked with in Mosul during OIF 1 were western educated at the graduate level, multi-lingual, well spoken, and very astute. These gentlemen had been getting things done despite the sanctions and the very difficult political situation for many years...they were survivors, all of them.

These Iraqi Engineers were as effective as they were because they had some semblance of a governance and social network left that they could work with. This social network had options and I would be very surprised if they are still around. By American standards our progress was painfully incremental. I was very thankful for the CERP funding that we had, but in truth it was a bandage placed on arterial bleed. Nonetheless we functioned on the hope of some appropriate future funding to begin the rehabilitation of public infrastructure necessary for supporting a functional and civil society.

The JCISFA teams will need a secure AO, deep funding pockets, and significant time in order to reverse things using a top down strategy. The other possibility that I see is to attempt to quilt together militias for security, quilt together 'electricity-militias' for electricity (one generator/one block at a time), 'water-militias' for drinking water (small filters and a squad of water trucks for a block/neighborhood), tribes & imams for governance (again one block/neighborhood at a time) and a comprehenisve jobs program for each AO. From what I can see this appears to be the pathway that we are on/considering.

As an aside I wonder about the kids. They have seen much and they are the future of Iraq.

How then do we pull the three parts of the country back together or at least end up with functional portions? Perhaps an oil profits sharing program in which each citizen of Iraq gets a share of the countries oil revenue every quarter will be enough to ensure that some semblance of normalcy can return.

I do not know.

3 to 6 million barrels a day at ~$ 100 dollars a barrel can be used to fund the expression of a lot of anger. It can also be used to express hope for tomorrow.

As you indicated if it was easy it would already have been done.

Regards,

Steve

[Rob Thornton]

Hi Steve,
Great points. I do need to clarify something though for people who might pick up the thread without reading the original posts. You'd referred to "JCISFA" teams. JCISFA does not have the capacity to send out TTs from inside the organization itself - as mentioned, we are only about 25 folks.

Like other individual augmentees, these folks who will go out to ministerial level advisory positions come from somewhere else, and go to somewhere else ( assigned to MNSTC-I). They are not assigned to JCISFA. Like other advisory and SFA efforts, we may touch them to different degrees, often indirectly through our effects on the institutional side (like helping to est. a POI specifically for them); or more directly in our support to the operational side - but its a misnomer to call them "JCISFA" teams. If you remember the "BASF" commercial a few years back that "At BASF we don't make________, we just make _________ better" - that might be closer to what we do.

On the support to operational units, we do work with deploying units on challenges such as SFA planning - which could get you to how you might organize to best support ongoing SFA efforts in your AOR, or to how you might take on a larger chunk of the SFA mission. Primarily we are focused on supporting the SFA missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, again with 25 folks - you have to establish some priorities, but we have recognized the need to consider other areas as SFA as a way to build partner capacity and meet other policy objectives in many other areas.

Its probably also good idea to talk about the relationship with the various service training centers. Although we have "Joint" in our name, that does not put us at the top of a training hierarchy. Right after the word "Joint" is the word "center", which for those who have looked out into the world of centers, there is generally not a great deal of authority associated with it. This is a conscious decision when est. a center - you want them un-encumbered to do those things which a center can do. Center then, does not equal command - once you throw command responsibilities into an organization, you change the fundamental nature of what that organization is, and what it does, and how what it does is perceived. What we have done though, is serve as an integrator for education, best practices, etc. - we connect people and efforts so that people have a better understanding of what works and why, and what does not work and why. One of the recent things JCISFA did was bring representation from the various advisory training centers together to talk about ways they could leverage each other in near real time - so the advisors that go through the various service sponsored centers will have had the best and most up to date information.

Another example are the interviews we conduct with TT members, with GOs, and with BCT members about SFA as they saw it during their operational deployment (and how they might see it now), then we figure out how to work that into a product that informs the JIIM community, Ex. I'm working on a SFA Case study that interviews not only folks assigned to TTs in an AOR, but to members of the BCT, members of the higher echelon CMD, members of the PRT, and some of the folks from DoJ who worked advising Iraqi prisons. I'll take all that and synthesize it so what comes out will hopefully be a holistic look at SFA in that area for that period of time that shows the complexity of the SFA environment. The goal of that effort would be that when someone deploying, someone working institutional issues, some one working policy, or just an average civilian considering the war picks it up, they will have a better understanding of the challenges of conducting SFA simultaneously with offensive, defensive and other stability tasks.

Now I want to go back and look at your post in depth, I feel like there are some important things that should be talked about - I just needed to provide a little bit more info on this side of the original thread before doing so.

Best, Rob

[Rob Thornton]

Steve,
You touched on some real considerations that leaders should consider when conducting (before or during) SFA. Since we're talking about assistance to the security sector, one of the first considerations may be to ask ourselves what we hope to accomplish by BPC with the HN? That is probably a 2 part question - the first is how does it help the United States achieve FP objectives, and the second is defining the nature of the SFA the partner requires and desires?

Tackling the first question - about how it furthers our FP - on the surface that probably seems overtly pragmatic. However, given the nature of our political system, and the unpredictable nature of war, the the risk and benefits for using military means to achieve a policy object need to be considered up front and incorporated into strategic communications that consider the domestic, international and regional audiences. Also to be considered with regard to the first question is how is a bi-lateral (or as part of a multi-lateral) SFA effort is integrated into a larger regional picture and potentially as part of a grand strategy where all the elements of national power are being leveraged to create a more enduring effect that justifies the means. We could be talking about a few ministerial level advisors, the routine visits by an ODA, FMS (Foreign Military Sales), or the use of some other emerging TAA (Train, Advise & Assist) effort such as the Marine Corps SC-MAGTF, or the Army TMAAG-F.

The second question is about working with the partner nation's political leadership and also to our other regional partners who have to consider how new capabilities will be integrated into a regional outlook (there could be an existing collective security arrangement, or something informal). Not just in terms of changing the balance of military power, but increasingly, how that partner's ability to govern itself and support the domestic RoL effect other states and interests in the region. Ideally we'd support and facilitate regional diplomatic talks aimed at improving security and furthering stability from a regional perspective.

Once we get the strategic SFA/SSR framework established, I think we can better address important operational and tactical questions about the level of SFA, what types of enablers are needed to support the SFA effort (be they financial, cultural, technical), and how the conditions in the operational and tactical environment can best be overcome or mitigated. We've learned (and continue to learn) a great deal in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines and the HOA - it could also be argued we've had to relearn a great deal of it. The question is how we use the knowledge to inform current and future efforts to achieve our and our partner's goals.

Best, Rob

[CR6]

Right after the word "Joint" is the word "center", which for those who have looked out into the world of centers, there is generally not a great deal of authority associated with it. This is a conscious decision when est. a center - you want them un-encumbered to do those things which a center can do. Center then, does not equal command - once you throw command responsibilities into an organization, you change the fundamental nature of what that organization is, and what it does, and how what it does is perceived. What we have done though, is serve as an integrator for education, best practices, etc. - we connect people and efforts so that people have a better understanding of what works and why, and what does not work and why. One of the recent things JCISFA did was bring representation from the various advisory training centers together to talk about ways they could leverage each other in near real time - so the advisors that go through the various service sponsored centers will have had the best and most up to date information.

Rob has your organization tied in at all with TRADOC's Army Training Support Center? I worked there from 02-04. Although most commonly associated with running the Reimer Digital Library and the Army Correspondence Course program, ATSC was doing some interesting stuff with distributed learning and info sharing that might prove useful to JCISFA's efforts. ATSC has a CAC LNO, BTW.

[Rob Thornton]

Rob has your organization tied in at all with TRADOC's Army Training Support Center? I worked there from 02-04. Although most commonly associated with running the Reimer Digital Library and the Army Correspondence Course program, ATSC was doing some interesting stuff with distributed learning and info sharing that might prove useful to JCISFA's efforts. ATSC has a CAC LNO, BTW.

I checked into it today with the lead on "Advisor University", he gave me thumbs up that they are being leveraged, and that one of their spin offs is helping out too.
Best, Rob

[marct]

Hi Rob,

Not only do they require someone saavy on politics, and the culture of the politics at work, but a senior level mis-step can have far reaching and enduring ill effects. Also, the longer it takes the Iraqis to build their institutional bureaucracy, the less stable, less effective and more vulnerable the overall governmental structure will be to internal and external pressures. Unfortunately the uniformed side does not have allot of experience in this, in fact most of our culture goes far out of its way to stay out of it.

Great series of posts! I'd like to pick up on this particular point and make a few observations. For most people in the West and ex-colonies, "bureaucracy" has a very specific meaning which was pretty much defined and laid out by Max Weber in his Theory of Bureaucracy (a good synopsis available here). There are, however, competing theories of bureaucracy and other models for it, for example Confucianism and, if we go back further, the Temple States model from, you guessed it, Iraq (okay, it was 6-3.5 thousand years ago, but...).

One of the reasons why the reconstruction of Germany post WW II went to well was that we had almost exactly the same conceptualization of bureaucracy. Japan's was roughly similar, but embedded in a radically different cultural matrix; still, there rapid and recent industrialization paved the ground for adopting Western bureaucratic models (they already had them in their industry and military).

Iraq is another story altogether since almost all of the bureaucratic tradition goes back to the Temple States (weird, but it does). Part of this is because of the cultural matrix which defines the responsibilities of key social systems in a totally non-Western manner, i.e. a balance of areas between the Temple (nowadays the Ulama, Imams, etc.) and the State. This is totally different from the Western traditions where "religion" was, following the breakup of the Roman Catholic hegemony ~1500 or so, placed in a subservient position to the State and, in most Western nations, eventually relegated to the personal sphere and occasional ceremonial functions (this is he process of secularization). BTW, all of this is actually implicit (and sometimes explicit) in Machiavelli's The Prince (look at his discussion of government types).

Any long-lasting and effective bureaucracy will have to a) match up with the cultural matrix and b) have a solid, culturally-based justification ("Charter" in Malinowski's terms).