Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
Exactly! There is no genetic, organisational or intellectual block to creating officers (and thus and army) skilled in both Combined Arms Warfare/Counter Formation and COIN.

The UK had an entire generation of Officers, who were skilled Combined Arms men - Germany and COIN -Northern Ireland practitioners. We got this purely by accident and ad-hocary. We should (and are apparently failing) to be able to do it by design.

What is lacking is an "This is X and this is Y. You must be good at both" approach to professional military education.
Too true! And the answer to how to create officers - and soldiers - who were solidly capable of both turned out to include thorough, not merely basic, training in the basics. In both initial entry training syllabi and in Unit-training cycles, the emphasis in training progressed from the basics: beginning of course, with individual, sub-unit, then Minor-unit training, and including at the same time most of the the Aid to the Civil Power/Operations Other Than War matter - Humanitarian/Disaster Relief, IS, SSO, CT, COIN, and the like - which is majority individual and small-unit stuff anyway, and finishing off with MCO at Sub-unit and Minor-Unit level; then up through more advanced matter in MCO at Sub-unit an Minor-Unit level; and finishing off with MCO at Major-unit and Formation-level. And during the process, it was inculcated into officers - and soldiers - that there was a real difference in role and mental approach that had to be taken in Aid to the Civil Power/OOTW missions as opposed to the mentality required for MCO and the like - which went along with the whole "flick of a switch" bit by which Commonwealth soldiers are pychologically conditioned. Plus, Aid to the Civil Power/OOTW training, coming as it did at about the same time as individual, sub-unit, and minor-unit level training, allowed for instillation of the appropriate self-displine and mindset - self-control and restraint - prior to going on to full-fledged Operations of War/MCO stuff. Crucially important. It worked, and worked well - once the "formula" had been worked out by time, trial, and error. Considering OOTW ops, such as COIN, to be somehow an "advanced" or "exotic" mission that can only really be attempted after having mastered MCO, is backwards. OOTW is basic, MCO is advanced.

But there were two keys to making it work: sustained unit cohesion (i.e., a Regimental system), and relatively long intitial entry training; the original 4-month syllabus for soldiers eventually increasing to 6-months, in order to relieve Units of the burden of having to bring the soldiers up to standard in the basics, thus preserving much more Unit training time for, well, Unit training.

Wilf is right though, about EBA/EBO/Entropy-Based Warfare/..., and that there is no substitute (so far) for being able to plant your flag on the top of the hill at the end of the day, insofar as EBO is identified with Stand-Off Firepower-type approaches. The NCW concept that has been tied into EBO has, as others have observed, reduced EBO in such cases to little more than the mere servicing of targets, with attendant expectation that somehow the desired effects will occur, and that we will observe them soon enough to take full advantage of them. It hasn't worked out so well in practice, when EBO is synthesized with RMA/NCW.

That said, EBO, properly understood and applied, may be rather more appropriate for COIN than MCO anyway, not least because of the time factor. COIN is long-term, and time is not usually compressed in anything like the way that it is in MCO. In MCO, there is often little time to take much more than an almost spontaneous assessment of what's going on, where things are heading, and what next to do about it. There is precious little time to seek and observe for desired effects - it's a lot more by the skin of your teeth in comparison to OOTW. In COIN, there is much more opportunity to seek to bring about and to observe for desired effects, and then to act accordingly. Then again, as Wilf and others have said or implied, in this respect EBO in some respects does little more than provide a rather more formal targetting-list for an approach that has long been used well before "EBO" ever had a name. It would have been interesting to hear Sun Tzu's take on the EBO concept, especially as to whether it actually offers anything substantially more than what he did.

EBO may also be much more appropriate at the higher, and especially highest, echelons. At the National political level, EBO is potentially quite useful when applied to the conduct of National Strategy. Time is most in abundance at this level, and so are the range of various desirable effects to be potentially had. As you go down the ladder, both time and the range of options decrease, until to get down to OOTW, such as COIN. Then the game changes dramatically, and EBO may come back into its own.

But if EBO offers little more than an extensive targetting list of sorts, then as Eden said, an officer just going down to a decent library and reading up on a few good books may not need EBO's input; he's able to develop the judgement necessary to figure out what effects are desirable, how to try to achieve them, and how to look for the appearance of anticipated effects and then to act upon them. So is EBO really an advance, or is just telling anyone with access to a decent library something they don't already know or can't find out for themselves? slap, is there something that EBA offers that you can't get otherwise?