Lessons Not Learned

[Surferbeetle]

I sit in all these "Lessons Learned" symposia that the think tanks in DC are putting on, and all they talk about is the inter-agency turfwars, budget fights, contract disputes, and Inside the Beltway bureaucratic fights---but they never focus on the big picture: coordinating our efforts to deliver solutions to the local population, and effective implementation of those solutions. How is this stuff going to get done? Who is doing it in Afghanistan (for Afghans)?

Steve,

When one is on the mat or in the ring solely trying to muscle ones way through the match failure is not far behind...you have to be able use your opponents mass to your advantage in order to win...that and a bit of ruthlessness at the appropriate moments SOF work uses this type of judo/MMA thinking in order to work with the population to achieve common objectives and defeat common opponents.

COIN warfare is population focused, and we are in a COIN match. Throughout the fight we need to understand four basic things in order to win:

1. The mass of the civilian population of Iraq and Afghanistan outmasses the opposing forces, and whomever can add the mass of the population to their side outmasses the opposition.
2. America does not have enough serving native/trained speakers of Arabic, Dari, and Pashto who have professional credentials in politics, planning, agriculture, medicine, infrastructure and who understand the cultural context of the problems and solutions intertwined in the conflict.
3. GoI and GoA have native speakers of Arabic, Dari, and Pashto who have professional credentials in politics, planning, agriculture, medicine, infrastructure and who understand the cultural context of the problems and solutions intertwined within the conflict.
4. Hunting bad guys is equally as important as stabilization operations.

My AAR of our match so far is that we are highly skilled at # 4 and need to hit the gym hard in order to work more on #’s 1-3 if we want to win.

I always thought that, for stabilization and reconstruction, somebody needs to be sitting at the big table (mil/foreign affairs) whose sole purpose is to be an advocate for the civilians (not just the politicians and made men). A properly developed civilian advocacy process (or maybe a bypass loop between them), from the top down to locals, is the only way to take what we know and do, and use it to create propulsion for the locals to find their next level of stability.

Finding a productive job for your son, or shoes for baby, or a meal and some water is the key to S & R, and defeating bad influences.

Instead, we seem to have a lot of disconnected elements, programs and activities that, when you add them up, go nowhere, to help real folks put things back together.

We cannot do this alone. See # 1, # 2, and # 3.

A mixed team heavy on local actors and light on multinational advisers at the 'big table' orchestrating the plan at village, city, region/province, and country would certainly benefit from a simple and defined portfolio of national objectives agreed upon by the populace. This might be as simple as defining the following metrics:

1. W % unemployment by demographic/employment specialty sector
2. X # of security incidents/population size
3. Y kw-hours of electricity/per family/day
4. Z liters of water/per person/day


Steve