Tactical Jenga vs. The Strategic Stopwatch

[John T. Fishel]

I was stumped by the slide. Even worse, this old fogie had never heard of Jenga, so what was I to make of it. Wish Kilcullen or SWJED (yeah, Dave ) had put it in simple English.

To move tangentially, don't make too much of the unity of the Salvadoran Armed Forces - police really didn't answer to the military high command; they were under a separate Vice Ministry of Public Security and the 3 police institutions didn't like each other very much. Today, the police - National Civil Police - are under a wholly separate ministry and there are still some tensions with the Ministry of Defense, but not as bad. Final comment, the Philippines with US assistance, was able to defeat the Huk Rebellion - see Edward G. Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars.

But I still don't get the slide so that is the reason for my tangential reaction.

Cheers

JohnT

[slapout9]

The slide looks like a poor imitation of Warden's TVA slide. The Time Value of Action. I sent SWEDJ a copy to post if he wants. I could not figure out how to do it But basically it is meant to convey that the longer you take to achieve your objective the more things can go wrong and the more likely you will fail in achieving your objective.

This is a good picture one Warden's posters it combines both the business and war response in it,
http://estore.websitepros.com/1761861/Detail.bok?no=27

Warden was talking about this over a decade ago!

[Gian P Gentile]

I was stumped by the slide. Even worse, this old fogie had never heard of Jenga...Final comment, the Philippines with US assistance, was able to defeat the Huk Rebellion - see Edward G. Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars. JohnT

John T:

Dont feel bad because when I first saw Jenga without looking at the slide I thought it was perhaps some obscure counterinsurgency war which i had never heard of; or, perhaps subliminally I mixed it up with Jena.

Acknowledge your elaboration of El Salvador and your point on the Huk Rebellion. I did not use the Huk Rebellion because American efforts toward it were largely in supplying military equipment as compared to El Salvador which had a lengthy commitment of American advisers. But your point is well taken and thanks for putting it up.

I am working on an essay but cant get anything down so I keep clicking on SWJ or AM blogs; sort of like I am having a "25 or 6 to 4" moment. You know the classic 70s rock group Chicago song about having writers block.

gian

[slapout9]

Gian you need some Slapout MTV

[Gian P Gentile]

Gian you need some Slapout MTV

Slap, buddy, I just listened to it. Not a big fan of R/B;

as grand master of ebo (respectfully stated of course); what effect are you trying to produce.

gian

[slapout9]

Slap, buddy, I just listened to it. Not a big fan of R/B;

as grand master of ebo (respectfully stated of course); what effect are you trying to produce.

gian

Whatever it was I don't think I succeded....You seem like a Hendrix guy to me?

[jcustis]

Well...

From my perspective (and I've sat through Kilcullen so I think I know his mindset wrt slide), I've started to form the opinion that Shinseki's call for larger force numbers wouldn't have made a difference. This runs totally counter to what I've opined in the past, and as painful as it is for me to retract my opinion, it's been an interesting ride .

I think we would have be able to smother areas with forces and make ourselves happy that we "had things on lockdown", but the reality is that we would have simply provided more targets, pissed off more people, and prolonged things.

We weren't ready for Phase IV execution, for a number of reasons we have beaten to death here. And since I believe we are just finally getting to a point where we are effectively understanding and employing COIN, we would have been woefully miserable at it five years ago, but would have just had more forces plodding around and breaking more pottery.

[John T. Fishel]

I'm really glad I'm not alone and that you young whippersnappers can join me in my senior moments.

In some ways the Huk thing was a lot like El Sal. Lansdale had a small team to advise and work with Magsaysay. The rapport worked and they introduced an effective COIN strategy with suppoting operations and tactics.

Concerning numbers and Phase IV: JC, numbers without a good strategy would have been ineffective. But without the numbers I really don't think any strategy would have worked. We have the numbers today - not even mainly US but rather Iraqi...

Cheers

JohnT

[Gian P Gentile]

We weren't ready for Phase IV execution, for a number of reasons we have beaten to death here. And since I believe we are just finally getting to a point where we are effectively understanding and employing COIN, we would have been woefully miserable at it five years ago, but would have just had more forces plodding around and breaking more pottery.

Although I always read your thoughtful postings with interest, I have to disagree with you here. I think we have succumbed to a meta-narrative that tells us that we have been screwed up in Iraq up until Feb 2007 and then once the Surge hits then the corner is turned. As you probably can tell from my writings in other places I disagree violently with this interpretation.

I do think massive amounts of more troops would have made a difference if we were looking to really control the country with military force. I remember as a BCT XO in April 2003 in Tikrit trying to balance early Coin ops with raids, and with trying to secure all of the ammo dumps around; we simply did not have enough troops to do it all. To think that with the same number of troops but in your implied counterfactual having them trained on Coin and perhaps with a General like General Patraeus at the helm then things would have turned out differently places way too much on the idea that the American military is really in control of things in Iraq.

For example and jumping ahead to the current situation; if it was the additional brigades under the Surge practicing so-called new coin tactics that lowered violence in the latter half of 2007 and if the majority of those brigades continuing to practice their so called new methods are still in place, then how do you explain the recent increase in violence not only in the south but in Baghdad?

The assumption to Dr Kilkullen's thinking is that good Coin methods underpinned by sound theoretical thinking can replace mass of troops on the ground. I dont buy it and I never have. His Jenga slide actually reminds me of the way many airmen during world war II and even after would use metaphor and theoretical constructs to explain how the relatively simple act of dropping HE bombs on structures and blowing them up would have this sophisticated network-like, systems effect on the entire enemy economy. John Warden's rings comes to mind here too.

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

gentile

[Gian P Gentile]

Whatever it was I don't think I succeded....You seem like a Hendrix guy to me?

totally; and thanks for the tip on "25." fixed it.

although I am sure the great Jimi had some threads to plenty of good R/B folks.

gian

[Mark O'Neill]

I have to admit, like some other people who have posted in this thread, I had no idea what 'jenga' was. It is not played in Australia.

When I first saw the title I also wondered which insurgency the 'Jenga' had fought in and why I hadn't previously heard of them......

That said, Dave D, I get nothing from that slide other than a motherhood statement of the obvious - I think that without context it might be doing DK a disservice.

Cheers

Mark

[John T. Fishel]

is an Aussie!!!!

[Mark O'Neill]

is an Aussie!!!!

That is exactly the point in my title - he has been working with the US so long that he uses terms that Aussies do not use or understand...

You could walk thorugh Sydney for days and quiz people about what 'Jenga ' is - most would probably guess it is a type of Indian Takeaway.....

[Tom Odom]

looking at a wrist watch.

I know it must be useful 'cause someone built it...

But I could use it equally to keep track of my left wrist versus my right

Or as a reminder which hand to use when...

[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.