The Fallacy of HIC vs COIN

[reed11b]

Sir:

Reed:

In overly simplistic terms, but useful I think, what would be the aggregate percentage dedicated to coin vs Hic? Would it be to focus 70% of our resources and training to coin and the rest hic, or vice versa?

The problem here is that in principle we all agree that we need balance, but when you get down into the details then things becomes much murkier and where debate and discussion over these issues I think is relevant and needed.

gian

That is my point; proper training, unit structure and doctrine is effective across a wide range conflicts, from HIC to IW. I feel that the reason we fail to be effective across broad spectrums is 1) An officer culture (training and promotion system as well)that leads to micromanagement 2) The widespread negative effects of the individual replacement system and 3) a failure to train on how to end combat operations after the enemy surrenders or retreats beyond our AO. Of course the simple answer and the big picture is (as Ken loves to say repeatedly, whether anyone wants to hear it or not) proper training.
The unique aspects to COIN call for better abilities and cooperation w/ USD and USAID, not USD and USAID like skills in the Army.

A couple points on the Individual Replacement System (What is the correct term for this?) that I need to cover. I failed to mention that the COHORT test showed improvement in the skills and retention of the soldiers involved. Yet the Army “waited it out” and never implemented it further. Another effect of the Individual replacement system is that initial training is poor for a professional volunteer Army. I have spent some time in a medical support company and I have noticed that non-combat jobs seem to have a better ability to perform there core duties when they arrive at the unit then combat soldiers. A quick look at AIT lengths will also show a disparity between combat and non-combat MOS’s training time. This is backwards. Our Infantry, artillery and combat vehicle crewmen are the core of the Army and the ones facing the greatest risk. They should be trained to a level were they can be expected to perform there duties with competence and confidence upon arriving at there unit. Confidence is a big part of being able to perform independent action and may help reduce some of the tendency to micromanage in the Army.
I also want to make clear that I am not advocating for a simple regimental system or that soldiers can’t move duty stations. Let’s face it, many young men join the Army to get away from home and look forward to the possibility of travel and adventure. There will always be soldiers that will be willing to travel to get promotions or serve with a better unit. I advocate for slowing it down and not making a move every “X” years mandatory. I also like the concept of rotational readiness, but I know that is a tough sell.
Reed

[tankersteve]

Reed,

Have enjoyed your post so far and appreciate your position. I did 5 1/2 years active, then spent a stint in the NG, before coming back on active duty.

The Army had the solution to the personnel turnover problem. It was being implemented when OIF became more than a single 6-month deployment for us all. The Unit Manning process would have locked personnel into a brigade for 3 years. No moves out, and people were going to be encouraged to do a second 3-year stint if the timing was right. This meant that for 3 years, a brigade would have the same people on board. After 6-9 months of a deliberate train-up, culminating in a CTC rotation, the brigade was ready for deployment.

A brigade, once it had completed training and certified for deployment, was now ready to focus on advanced skills. For a heavy brigade, I can imagine this would have included more advanced fieldcraft, maneuver operations at the battalion and brigade level, large-scale combined arms breaching, MOUT under more realistic conditions, advanced live fire training, etc.

Not every brigade would be ready as during the early part of the 6-9 months of standing up, a lot of fire team, squad and platoon training would have to be conducted. However, in the aggregate, we would have more units ready. For instance, 4 brigades in a division, spread over 4 different start points, would end up this way: The 'senior' unit, in its 33d month of activity, would, in the event of a major incident, forego standing down. It is ready for deployment right now. The middle unit, at the 24 month mark, is also ready and can deploy immediately, having been conducting advanced training for quite a while. The next brigade, having been together for 15 months, should have just finished its certification training 4-6 months ago. It is also ready. Finally, the 4th brigade, having just started its training 6 months ago, will probably not be ready for at least 30-60 days. This shows a single division's 4 brigades, with 9 months staggered resets. Even with a brigade that just stood down, 3 brigades are ready to go and the 4th must start training with new soldiers/leadership immediately, with a condensed training cycle to get them in the fight in 4 months or so.

ARFORGEN and OIF killed this. When a brigade is spending 12 months in Iraq, then 12 months at home, before going back again, typical command timelines for BDE and BN commanders became 2 years. This is part of the out-of-sync feeling the Army has right now.

I will not say this will solve all the Army's woes - an interest in quality training versus lots of watered-down iterations is something the Army hasn't grasped yet. And a lot of the support units won't fall into this cycle. But I think it was going to be a really good start.

Hopefully the power holders at HRC didn't kill the unit manning concept. Once our optempo slows, we have to get this back. 3ID and 101st did do this briefly before the war kicked in on second tours for them. I love the idea of having Soldiers who are studs and know it, confident in their abilities and the hard, advanced training they have experienced. As an OC at the NTC, I have often (only 1/2 jokingly) referred to the NTC as the National PLATOON Training Center, based on the level of training some units arrived there at. We are starting to get beyond that now as dwell time increases.

Tankersteve

[Clinkerbuilt]

Greetings All!

This is my first post here, so please excuse me if I cover overly-trodden trails.

@Reed11b:

1. Agreed. There needs to be a holistic understanding of warfare. There are multiple phases in every single operation; it is not simply "shoot 'em and go home".

There needs to be specialization, but there are seldom enough troops in the pipeline to do everything. Both troops and units need to be cycled through both HIC, LIC and Sustainability training, because as living-memory history demonstrates, the second you shelve one form of combat, you are going to get hit with the next one.

2. Much, much bigger problem. At its core, this is a failure of "up or out" in an environment of limited resources and money: the fewer the slots, the more talent is forced out -- or worse, encouraged out.

Changing this is not a simple matter of a mandate from on high -- it involves a fundamental change in political and social culture and will.

3. See #1. Sustainability operations are fundamental to any war effort. Let me reiterate that.

Sustainability operations are fundamental to any war effort.

Ignoring Sustainment operations, in effect, reduces us to blowing the cr** out of some place, destroying their infrastructure and ability to control their populace, and leaving them wide open to being taken over by precisely the kind of people that caused us to blow the cr** out of the locale in question in the first place, who will displace whoever we put in charge (if we even bother) in ten years, or less - probably a lot less.

What's the problem? Refer to #2. Sustainment is dirty, unglamorous, un-sexy, expensive drudgery that the current MSM will jump on, like starving sharks swarming a sinking ship loaded with whole blood, to offer up for the latest pundit-fest of "If It Bleeds, It Leads".

Sorry, but that answer is above my pay grade......

[William F. Owen]

Sustainability operations are fundamental to any war effort.

More detail perhaps? Examples?

[Clinkerbuilt]

It has long been noted, whether it was Europe in WW 1 or 2, China, Korea, Vietnam or later, if you don't watch out for what is going on in your rear areas, you are in for a world of hurt.

Physical security is part of it, in the sense of preventing enemy infiltrators from either gathering intelligence or conducting sabotage against your rear/support echelons, but it goes deeper.

Once you move into and through an area, while you may be able to leave local law enforcement and possibly even local civil government intact, you cannot simply wave on the way by, from then on. In HICO, major damage has likely been done to the national infrastructure, and few towns or villages are truly self-sufficient. As a single example, once the power grid has been successfully attritted, who turns on the lights? When? How? Where does the money come from? The technical expertise? The ironmongery and logistics to get said ironmongery in place?

The argument can be made that something like that is an unnecessary drain on combat optempo. Granted. What about afterwards? Let me try to counterpoint three examples. (Understanding that I'm currently at the day j.o.b., so my ref's are going to be limited.)

First: Germany, 1945.

At the end of WW2, Germany was a wreck. Few cities were even moderately intact, there was virtually no electricity, little running water, and sewage control was spotty, at best.

At least in the West, and granting the general lack of stay-behind activity, the Allies moved swiftly to not only identify Nazi officials for arrest - if only in a haphazard manner - but more importantly, to start restoring services to the population. It took several years, and required heavy investment, but it paid off with the locals, who realized that the Allies actually cared about what happened to them.

This both suppressed most potential resistance without firing a shot, and started West Germany down the road to national recovery and ultimate stability.

Counterpoint: Iraq, 2003.

I'm not going to try and argue the obviously bone-headed politics behind OIF TOE's, as I'm sure that has been done to death already. Instead, let's look at the situation.

For 12 years, 1991-2003, Iraq was variously invaded, shelled, bombed and blockaded. In the aftermath, everything looked fantastic - the dictator was on the run, his officers were being rounded up, and everyone could pat themselves on the back and say "Whew! Look's like we squeaked by, despite the problems we shouldn't have had."

And then? Nothing.

Combat operations were pretty much over. No one was doing any shooting in most of the country -- they were waiting to see what the Allies - and specifically, the US - was going to do: most areas were without power, clean water, effective sewage control, medical care or education.

What the Iraqi's saw - whether it was true or not - was US troops standing around as their museums and banks were looted; as people clearly injured by US weaponry were refused treatment and turned away from US field hospitals where the staff were sitting on their hands (there was a PBS documentary, "CASH", IIRC?). There was no plan for getting food distribution going for the locals, nor restoring electrical power, nor water, nor sewage -- Iraqi's quickly got the message: "Sure, we blew the cr** out of your country and tossed out the dictator-guy...What? You want us to do EVERYTHING for you?"

That does not engender joy-joy feelings.

Throwing c.250,000 soldiers out on the streets without making sure that they were disarmed was another brain-donor idea. Why weren't weapons policed up, or destroyed in place? Why did the Iraqi Army - NOT the Republican Guard - need to be disbanded? As much as the History Channel may desire it, Iraq is not Nazi Germany - there are vast gulfs in difference between the two, and disbanding the Wehrmacht was a workable solution because there were vast numbers of Allied troops left to guard them, and collect their weapons. Sure, the services eventually started to come back on -- but at a price, as it only started to happen on a formal scale when contracts were let to US civilian contractors, at premium prices.

Now, granted, I haven't been in a pickle-suit since 1990, but I don't recall any coupling of supply, motor-t and engineer battalions that could not have at least started these processes at a local level. It's not like you're building from scratch: for the Middle East, Iraq is one of the most cosmopolitan and educated states you could operate in.

It is my opinion that the lack of immediate action at the theatre command and national/allied levels to follow-on with beginning the rebuilding of Iraq as soon as the bullets mostly stopped flying led directly to the events of 2004 and beyond, as that lack of action and planning led directly to the discontent that encouraged both active attacks and active and passive support for such attacks on Coalition forces then and continuing.

Afghanistan is no different.

Granting that there is little in the way of news coming out, I don't see a lot of expenditure in infrastructure investment in the country. Most of it seems to be coming from NGOs - which is good - but it doesn't look good when "the most powerful country in the world" can't supply enough notebooks for a 50-student school.

The fact that a charity can do it is irrelevant - the US should be doing it.

"Warfare on the cheap" may be the realistic necessity, but it should never be the goal.

[Xenophon]

I've been kicking around similar ideas as reed11b, trying to get a formal article put together on the HIC vs COIN myth. But reed11b just did it, and probably far better than I would have. Bravo, sir. Especially your second point. More people need to start flying the BS flag in response to the personnel system.

[Infanteer]

Interesting thread. I've always thought this argument represented a false dichotomy of sorts, at least at the tactical level. In our Army up here, we use the "A War vs The War" idea to frame it. Guys get in silly intellectual debates about it - as if you can have one or the other.

What is "A War" anyways - can you peg down the specific characteristics of a HIC? Who's to say that those characteristics aren't just part of conflict in general. Are we basing our idea of HIC off of 1945 or 1951 that may not even exist anymore in today's environment?

At the tactical level, it is all moot. "Don't fight the scenario, fight the problem", or something to that effect - as long as we have soldiers and leaders being presented with good challenges that force critical thinking under stress, we are prepared for "Any War". It drives me nuts when I pose a tactical problem to my soldiers and I get a "this isn't what happens in Afghanistan/how we did things in....) "

You can either shoot, move and communicate or you can't. Conflicts possess their unique points (theater mission specifics) and I can train soldiers in the near future to get a gas mask on and shoot with it if I have to. Different environment, different factors and different threats - important thing is the basic soldier skills and don't get killed. Every conflict is so unique that to try and split it on "a war/the war" lines is foolish. Smart soldiers will win any battle.

My 2 Cents.
Infanteer