MG Flynn (on intell mainly)

[Entropy]

Ok, I've read the piece now and there is some good and bad. I can't comment extensively at present so, for now, some bullet points:


1. The Good: I liked the focus on Commander responsibility and the fact that Commanders set intelligence requirements. The bad: If Commanders are responsible for intelligence and if they are not, as the authors seem to indicate, providing proper guidance to support COIN, then why all the negative waves at the intel community? One example of many: "The U.S. intelligence community has fallen into the trap of waging an anti-insurgency campaign rather than a counterinsurgency campaign." The intelligence community fell into that trap? Who is the tail and who is the dog here?

2. The Good: The report does a good job identifying many of the systemic problems. The Bad: Most solutions offered are unnecessary reinventions of the wheel. Example: Bandwidth should not be an issue for transmitting narrative reports from the field - you can't tell me we don't have the bandwidth to transmit a few pages of text daily.

Even if there is no bandwidth available, there are more efficient ways to get info from the field than sending people out to collect it by hand. We used to do this before we had all these fancy intel IP-based networks. You pop a disc into the theater mail system, or you mail actual paper containing written or typed reports! We can get stairmasters out to BFE Nuristan but we can't get a disc or some paper to HHQ without sending someone out to collect it? I don't buy it.

Additionally, we don't need a massive proprietary database to store information - all we need is info posted in web format and accessible by a search tool like google (and regardless, the best tools are made by enterprising junior folks in-house). All one needs to do is provide every unit a web-space where they can upload their text reports and any images (with metadata!) - search engine spiders will take care of the rest.

Alternatively, we already have wiki's that are ready to use but remain are largely unused and maintained by a few evangelists - mostly on their own time. To turn them into information clearing houses, all that's required is one order to institutionalize them along with a small staff of editors & researchers to maintain it.

3. The Good: "Information centers" focused on "white" information. The bad: The paper says these need too be staffed by civilians. How is ISAF/USFOR-A going to get national agencies to cough up the bodies and buy-in to this idea? Does the military really need outside analysts, over which it will have no operational control, to analyze and disseminate information derived from military units on the ground?

The biggest take-a-away issue I get from this paper is the lack of information sharing. This IS a real problem and information at the lowest levels is not shared or retained. Inteltrooper - your anecdote about meetings with locals and asking the same questions is no surprise to me and is an illustrative example of this. It just seems to me that is an easy fix - hold Commander's accountable for sharing information up the chain to senior Commanders and HHQ and provide a proven, existing and easy way to help them do so. Structural solutions that require buy-in from agencies outside the military are unnecessary and ill-advised. This is one area where KISS can go a long way.

[BayonetBrant]

PIRs are supposed to be tied to decision points: "I need to know this so I can decide A or B". How many of the PIRs out there actually do that, or are just "things to wake up the commander for" like the death of a soldier?
(Note: I'm not trying to minimize the death of any of our soldiers, just pointing out that it's likely not a PIR that's tied to a decision point within the context of an operation)


Additionally, the understanding of the environment and area in which people operate won't happen when we rotate units every 6-9 months, and rotate them back to different areas within the country, or different countries altogether. No one wants to advocate for longer tours, but that's probably what's actually needed for Joe-on-the-ground to really get a good understanding of his environment.


Finally, many of the digital toys that would support this level of information collection, management, sharing, and visualization already exist, but are held up in some form of contracting, development, certification, documentation, or outright miscommunication process within the current commands trying to get involved in the fight. Not everything can (or should) get dumped into CIDNE and there's a lot of information that could be disseminated that's not because of bureaucratic hold-ups.


Sigh. I'm depressed now.

[Steve the Planner]

Entropy's comments:

Agree. Bandwidth ain't the issue. Even in Iraq, we were flying maps and DVDs around in helos. But basic stuff like large-format scanners were a huge whole, especially when we were trying to quickly borrow, scan and return sensitive stuff from the civilian side (yes, they have sensitive stuff too).

As a "blue badger" (DoS), I can assure you that that blue badge allowed me to cross many more boundaries than a DoD or mil badge could. Military folks felt comfortable passing on stuff that they couldn't float upward very easily, and civilians, including Iraqis in sensitive positions, and with important data, would not engage with.

As many people know, CIDNE has a great many holes (including Legacy data), and, as BayonetBrant pointed out, RIPTOAs are killers of data, when the computers are shipped away with all that good stuff on them.

What is needed is not a map, or a data source, but a data system--- a process to collect, update, and use current and valuable stuff. That's not going to come from an outside contractor, or just be tied to a rotational element or command.

It is something else. But the framework and templates already exist---they just need to be focused on this purpose. Example: NGA Country Teams go back and forth all the time on six month rotations---same folks, same work, same continuous links to the same mapping data. Some of thjem can get as much if not more work (of certain types) done in Bethesda than at Baghram, but they need a continuous feeder system back to Afghanistan to make it work.

NGA is one of those many agencies with the capability to tackle some pieces, but not all. It's something else.

Steve

[BayonetBrant]

What is needed is not a map, or a data source, but a data system--- a process to collect, update, and use current and valuable stuff. That's not going to come from an outside contractor, or just be tied to a rotational element or command.

....

NGA is one of those many agencies with the capability to tackle some pieces, but not all. It's something else.

http://defense-update.com/features/2...ht_141009.html
http://mapht.org/

[Steve the Planner]

BayonetBrant:

I'm still trying to figure out how to figure this out.

I spent two months in 08 listening to the drumbeat for CIDNE---the magical all-purpose elixir. Then, it gets to Iraq, and needs to be populated---it's like a GIS system with no shapefiles. Then the population problems.... Then the transitional control problems (iraqi turnover?). Then....

Now, we move to a new, and no doubt, very expensive mapht. Go figure?

Starts to sound like USAID. Why solve a problem if you can just let a contract.

OK. OK. HT is the way forward. Wasn't that the message a few years ago? So where's the result?

OK. It's complicated, and will take many years (strategic patience). Ok, but where's the path, what's the schedule? How many years? Who has the plan?

Is it so complicated that we can't have a plan until later?

It always seems to come back to the same old anthropological/tribal stuff but no hard data, no focused background information. Tactics. Tactics. Strategy requires something else.

I had a few interactions with people involved in the big review. Like MG Flynn describes, they were looking for normal and typical hard data, and nobody had it---fortune telling.

Then the double-barrels from UN and CSIS (Cordesman: Winning battles, losing the war). All of them need something more than: "It's complicated!"

And not just for us, but for the Afghans. A colleague send me the news about the 4 kids killed today; 80 injured. Real and focused answers are needed by everybody else. Or the mission will not be able to continue. (Just the facts of life).

I truly hope that Fixing Intel means more than "do more of what we have been doing."

Was it a call for something different, or just do the same better? Was it a path to better answers: How to be ahead of problems rather than just reactive?

I guess that's what we'll find out soon enough.

Steve

[BayonetBrant]

To me the biggest thing that intel supports is making the right decisions at the right times for the right reasons to create the right effects.

Blow stuff up? We know the calculus on that.

Population-centric warfare, where the population is not an inherent component of the enemy, but the environment in which he operates? I'm not sure we know what the "right" effects are, and some of the answers that we're pretty sure are right we (honestly) don't have the stomach for.


Until we know what the right effects are, we can't begin to define what tools can be used to create those effects.

Until we know what tools we can use, we don't know what the contraints are within which we can operate.

Until we know what the constraints are, we don't know what information we do/don't need to make the right decisions on implementation of tools for the purposes of creating the effects we desire.


Someone *really* needs to start with the effects and work backwards from that.


The Map-HT tools are a set of population-focused tools that are designed to offer a robust picture of the "green COP" and not just an S2/S3 'maneuver-focused' SITREP. There's a lot more that can be handled in that toolkit and it colors shades of gray for the commander quite nicely. More to the point - it forces the collectors/assessors to spend time digging for real information to support the non-kinetic analysts rather than just rolling into town and counting AK47s on a drive-by basis. It gets the non-kinetic questions out of the S2's hands and into the S9 where they belong.

All that said, until you can answer the questions about effects, it's just collecting data to collect data, so that criticism is spot-on.

[Steve the Planner]

Eloquent answer beyond: It's complicated.

Effects on the land and people---I think that starts with the ways to define and differentiate the land and people---then to start thinking about how to model effects on them.

I think one of the gaps, which the military only has to do as the force of last result, is to now look at what is beyond the conflict issues.

We saw today in the kids killed and injured what many people have talked about as a challenge to typical COIN practices. Troops bring conflict. How does that get factored into obvious effects?

Also, sometimes troops bring population displacement.

Talk on another thread about safe zones and refugee areas. Do those get factored in before conflict? Are they a critical component of winning hearts and minds while not losing population? Is there a process? (Warn. Resettle. Clear. Rebuild. Repopulate. Hold.)

I keep watching the metric of 6.5 million in schools and growing. What are they going to do when they graduate? Better educated opponents, or a central part of the solution? (Tick. Tick. Tick.)

There was a poultry processing plant in Tikrit, and every new deployment would bring folks who spent US dollars trying to restart it (for the supposed thousands of jobs), but it wasn't going to work until you restarted agriculture. I sure as hell hope that these kids can be uptrained to be the Johnny Appleseeds instead of, every year, another deployment of US ag teams.

Be nice to understand the framework and processes of sequenced job evolution before what the UN calls the Ticking Time Bomb (one million per year graduating form school).

Those big factors are, I believe, the more critical gap that is separating us from a clear picture. Lots of bits around to assemble, but bits don't make strategy.

Etc...

[Pete]

There are some great quotations in the article. After describing how intelligence information usually flows from top to bottom during conventional conflicts, the authors state:

In a counterinsurgency, the flow is (or should be) reversed. The soldier or development worker is usually the person best informed about the environment and the enemy. Moving up through levels of hierarchy is normally a journey into greater degrees of cluelessness.

On PowerPoint briefings:

Microsoft Word, rather than PowerPoint, should be the tool of choice for intelligence professionals in a counterinsurgency.

Does this mean that the "PowerPoint Ranger" tab will soon be a thing of the past?

[Outlaw 7]

Gen. Flynn's article brings to the forefront a core discussion that has been moving under the radar screen since 2007. It highlights the core difference between anti-insurgency which is focused on kill/capture and the elimination of IED cells/networks or true counterinsurgency which focuses to a high degree on population control and security.

It is interesting that FID and unconventional warfare which were the bread and butter of Special Forces from their inception to the early 1970s was forced into extinction by the big Army as they drove to disband Special Forces who had to rebrand themselves as the "Strategic Recon types" in the 80s/90s in order to survive. This rebranding cause internal problems for SF when they discovered the need to shift back to FID/UW.

Now we are back to FID and unconventional warfare and big Army went left in Iraq and that is now not working in Afghanistan which went right and is a true insurgency with characteristics of a full blown phase three guerilla war. It is refreshing to see a Spad called a Spad.

Now just maybe big Army can focus in learning just what is insurgency, what drives an insurgency, and how does that insurgency evolve--and not learning it out of the COIN FM or from CTC scenario rotations. It is amazing that many in the old guard (Vietnam vets) have pointed to key lessons learned about FID, but were brushed off and now there is the sudden interest in books written about FID in Vietnam--lessons learned though from the Special Forces CIDG program seem on the other hand to still be ignored. One of the most important books written in the early 80s "Silence As A Weapon" written by retired COL. Herrington goes along way in describing the use of silence by an insurgency in the control of populations.

Since Gen. Flynn has gotten some attention on the MI side maybe attention should be paid to a concept developed by John Robb called "open source warfare" (2004/2005) and just recently scientifically verified by the Nature magazine article "Ecology of Human Warfare". For the first time via computer research one can make specific outside changes/impacts to the insurgency environment and see the results on the insurgency movement without having boots on the ground. And it goes a long way in explaining the media impact of their operations which can be verified by the impressive increase in video releases on the part of the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2008.

[Jedburgh]

Since Gen. Flynn has gotten some attention on the MI side maybe attention should be paid to a concept developed by John Robb called "open source warfare" (2004/2005) and just recently scientifically verified by the Nature magazine article "Ecology of Human Warfare". For the first time via computer research one can make specific outside changes/impacts to the insurgency environment and see the results on the insurgency movement without having boots on the ground. And it goes a long way in explaining the media impact of their operations which can be verified by the impressive increase in video releases on the part of the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2008.

I would hesitate to say it is "scientifically verified". A magazine article doesn't verify anything, and the research is far from conclusive.

This link is to the full Nature article and this one is to the supplementary notes. The Mathematics of War website was set up by the authors to accompany the publication of the article and provide additional background.

Here is a critique of the Nature article by Drew Conway: On the Ecology of Human Insurgency.

Which elicited a response from John Robb and more discussion from Drew Conway. None of which really settled anything.