Tactical Jenga vs. The Strategic Stopwatch

[SWJED]

Well, the point here is to get some discussion going concerrning transition.

Several days prior to the briefing I asked Dave K. to present something to the 180 JUW participants that would stimulate thoughts along that line. The tactical Jenga and the strategic stopwatch was simply a visual tool to generate that thought. The bottom line for the brief was to set up key questions and issues, to introduce some ways of thinking about the problem and for Dave to seek participant input via a healthy Q&A session. The brief did all that.

Up to this point (the briefing) the participants had been struggling a bit in coming to terms with the differences in an events driven transition (conditions based) vs. what we all know as a political truth – a time imposed transition. Part of the timed transition is a drawdown in coalition force levels that the tactical commanders have no control over.

Concerning the stopwatch, Dave illustrated what he called the “Aden Syndrome” with his hypothesis that in a timeline-driven drawdown, local allies will turn against the withdrawing power at the approximate midpoint of the drawdown - local allies fearing loss of external support, must consolidate their future power base in an environment that is not going to include external actors, so they turn on departing external power to shore up local support and avoid retribution from resistance actors. He used two examples - Aden, 19 June 1967 and Iraq 31 March 2004.

He went on to discuss the irreversibility of a drawdown – doing so would indicate deterioration of the security situation, admitting deterioration would undermine political support – both domestic and host nation, the shifting of domestic and host nation political expectations as a drawdown continues, and the drop in troop readiness as the extraction of combat forces is completed. A caveat was that the decrease in readiness applied to forces drawn out of theater – not out of major combat operations.

Dave went on later to discuss the evaluation and assessment of the transition posing this – if it’s Jenga, how do you know the stack is getting wobbly? Concerning the stopwatch – if it’s a stopwatch, how do you ask for a timeout?

That’s the wavetop, and again – the purpose here is to get some discussion going on transition and the Jenga slide was posted merely as a means to get that discussion off the ground – for a knuckle dragger like me it most certainly did.

I hear those who have a healthy distaste for PowerPoint but in front of large audience a slide used as prop is quite useful in generating discussion as well as Q&A.

On edit: Mark, welcome back!

[Rank amateur]

Dave went on later to discuss the evaluation and assessment of the transition posing this – if it’s Jenga, how do you know the stack is getting wobbly? Concerning the stopwatch – if it’s a stopwatch, how do you ask for a timeout?

Did Mr. Kilcullen offer a third option? Or are we stuck with two ineffective alternatives?

[Steve Blair]

Gotta go with Gian in terms of the written word often (but not always) being superior to snazzy graphics. That said....

I take the stopwatch to represent the time limit often imposed on any COIN activity by political and domestic realities in democracies (Merom's "How Democracies Lose Small Wars" goes into some of this). It's a fixed scale, although those at the tactical level often don't know just how fixed that scale is (and for that matter neither do the politicians or those that monitor "home front moods"...although I contend that such monitoring is often skewed by the perceptions and biases of those doing the monitoring). I'm not a fan of the Jenga analogy, although it does capture to a degree what can be happening on the ground. Better, perhaps, for some to think of building a house of cards with four players.

Gian said:

I have come to conclude from a military perspective that using American military power to conduct Coin in Iraq is impossible.

This is accurate as far as it goes, but I would change it to state that is isn't really possible to conduct COIN anywhere with just military power. That's been demonstrated time and again. COIN is an integrated show, which might be why Kilcullen chose Jenga as his illustration. All the pieces have to fit together somehow for it to succeed, and when parts start falling out (or being removed) the whole becomes shaky. It's also often a question of how one uses military power. Placing force protection above all is clearly not the way to get things done, and never has been. I could kill the whole thread with many examples from American military history alone of how this is true, but for this discussion that just isn't necessary.

I'd also argue that the Big W and Big B (Warden and Boyd) are not as useful for COIN as many might wish (and no...I'm not doggin' on you, Slap...). Actually, I'm not sure that they are especially useful in any limited war scenario. Elements of their theories and techniques certainly CAN be, but on the whole they tend to worry me in any situation that requires restraint and finesse.

What's the answer, then? I don't claim to have one, but there's some stuff dancing around at the edge of consciousness that's trying to gel into something. The short version is that I don't think Kilcullen's stopwatch line is quite as fixed as it might seem (since public opinion is a malleable thing and politicians have the attention span of an ADD 2 year old on a sugar high) and I also think that the tactical environment is in many ways slightly more predictable (or at least comprehensible) than Jenga might imply. To make the Jenga bit work you'd need to have someone sticking blocks back in toward the bottom from time to time.

[slapout9]

I'd also argue that the Big W and Big B (Warden and Boyd) are not as useful for COIN as many might wish (and no...I'm not doggin' on you, Slap...). Actually, I'm not sure that they are especially useful in any limited war scenario. Elements of their theories and techniques certainly CAN be, but on the whole they tend to worry me in any situation that requires restraint and finesse.

Hi Steve,actually this may surprise you and a lot of other people. The first time I met Warden he told that he thought that a Guerrilla/Insurgency type war is the one situation where he did not think his theory would work He sees them largely as civil wars and we should not became involved in them except as an outside support such as Afghanistan against Russia or El Salvador type ops run by Special Forces.

[Rank amateur]

He sees them largely as civil wars and we should not became involved in them except as an outside support such as Afghanistan against Russia or El Salvador type ops run by Special Forces.

Generally, I would agree with that, but Afghanistan is the "duck bill platypus." Because we were attacked from there, we had to respond.

To make the Jenga bit work you'd need to have someone sticking blocks back in toward the bottom from time to time.

I believe that is our official strategy. Officially, the Iraqis are making progress towards building the necessary blocks but the situation is still to fragile to make the replacement now.

[Steve Blair]

Hi Steve,actually this may surprise you and a lot of other people. The first time I met Warden he told that he thought that a Guerrilla/Insurgency type war is the one situation where he did not think his theory would work He sees them largely as civil wars and we should not became involved in them except as an outside support such as Afghanistan against Russia or El Salvador type ops run by Special Forces.

Sadly, things don't always work out the way folks might like...

Slap, I was never sure if Warden thought his theories would work in COIN or not. I tended to think not, simply because the AF as a whole doesn't really concern itself deeply with COIN, and he was an AF product. What tends to worry me is when other people get their hands on theories and start trying to apply them in places they might not work.

And RA, my comment was directed at the model...not what's happening in Iraq or elsewhere.

[Ken White]

Rank Amateur said, early on:

"...In the real world, people on welfare don't start looking for jobs until the welfare is about to run out. I really think that the Sunni sheiks are smart enough to realize that as soon as there is reconciliation we're going to stop sending them US dollars."

He followed that later with:

"Did Mr. Kilcullen offer a third option? Or are we stuck with two ineffective alternatives?"

My answer to both those is that Kilcullen didn't offer one but I will -- and it takes care of both your concerns. We're gonna be there for a long time.

WM said:

"One thing I do not like about either metaphor is the pessimism that seems operative in each, reflected by the downward trend in each line. Another problem for me was much better put by Tom Odom’s metaphor. I can put this slide to a lot of different uses, not least of which is a mystical example to obfuscate what I took to be an obvious point. (Slapout MTV’s “All Along the Watchtower” link works here: “There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.”) Maybe Slapout MTV also needs a link to the Stone’s tune, “You can’t always get what you want.”"

Agreed, regardless of intent, the slide shows a negative trend line, psychologically (or common sense wise for those of us with no background in psych) a bad ploy.

Steve Blair said:

"...Slap, I was never sure if Warden thought his theories would work in COIN or not. I tended to think not, simply because the AF as a whole doesn't really concern itself deeply with COIN, and he was an AF product. What tends to worry me is when other people get their hands on theories and start trying to apply them in places they might not work."

Emphasis added by me because I think that that is so-o-o important -- and so often ignored, usually to our detriment...

JCustis said:

"I think he recognizes there is a time and place for large formations, but if they aren't being employed properly, the are just shooting our strategy in the foot. We did not have the aptitude, temperance, nor patience to do a good job in 2003-2005, regardless of how many boots we had on the ground. Tie this problem to the woefull reconstruction efforts during that period, and I can totally agree with you that the military was not in control of things in Iraq. Like John T. Fishel said, no matter of troops would have mattered with a crappy strategy.'

Yep; works for me...

[William F. Owen]

1. Smash the stop watch.

2. Set fire the wooden blocks of the Jinga thingy.

3. Go and find the chap who wrote "Knifing Soup on your Trousers" or what ever it was called, and ask him to knock up another slide that we can all understand.

Hope this helps!