New Rules of War

[Scott Shaw]

Shloky,

Here's the thing. How do we coordinate the "swarming" or attacking from multiple directions/with multiple means across the whole of government? We have a hard enough time within DoD with inter-service rivalries and equipment that doesn't talk to each other. And that's just tactical. Who's the person that is going to coordinate the inter-governmental "swarm" that will be the strategy? The only department in our government that has the global capability is Defense (lift, comms, people, money, and compulsory service) and (since this will inevitably involve a nation) the ambassador works for the President and not a combatant commander (or some special four-star). How long did it take for us to get relationships right in Iraq? How long will they take in Afghanistan with that many more nations? What Arquilla says is "strategic" what he describes is tactical and operational. The quote in the box of you 11:28 PM post says it all.

As to Don Vandergriff - I've read his stuff and talked to him about it. It's not new either. It's brought to the attention of folks who need to see it, but it's done on a daily basis in units in our army. Ken White had some great points here. http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/200...irregular-war/ But it's still at the tactical level. If it is something that folks latch onto and can say, look we're improving our Army with it, then fine, but it (like many other ideas being thrown around) isn't new. It came from Kriegspiel. I do think that there are some good ideas there, but they're what we did in Korea when I was a platoon leader and what I put my platoon leaders through when I was a company commander. Reading and playing out scenarios on a terrain board and then critiquing it isn't new - but again (like Ken says) it works and builds adaptive leaders. Just so Don doesn't hate on me, I do think that it needs to be more in TRADOC courses rather than death by slide and I do think that it needs to be more draconian and folks need to be called out when they make mistakes.

Scott

[shloky]

Shloky,

Here's the thing. How do we coordinate the "swarming" or attacking from multiple directions/with multiple means across the whole of government? We have a hard enough time within DoD with inter-service rivalries and equipment that doesn't talk to each other. And that's just tactical. Who's the person that is going to coordinate the inter-governmental "swarm" that will be the strategy? The only department in our government that has the global capability is Defense (lift, comms, people, money, and compulsory service) and (since this will inevitably involve a nation) the ambassador works for the President and not a combatant commander (or some special four-star). How long did it take for us to get relationships right in Iraq? How long will they take in Afghanistan with that many more nations?

Sure. That's not a flaw in swarming as doctrine, that's question of implementation.

That said, JSOC is a pretty good starting point of achieving what Arquilla's talking about, and how to achieve it. Highly trained, small, distributed teams to conduct complex operations with teams as small as two to several hundred.

What Arquilla says is "strategic" what he describes is tactical and operational. The quote in the box of you 11:28 PM post says it all.

Few units above the company grade; ridding the DoD of all the fat accumulated in the last few decades. Those are strategic choices, focused on restructuring your force to leverage an enhanced information environment. Indeed, the quote does say it all.

As to Don Vandergriff - I've read his stuff and talked to him about it. It's not new either. It's brought to the attention of folks who need to see it, but it's done on a daily basis in units in our army. Ken White had some great points here. http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/200...irregular-war/ But it's still at the tactical level. If it is something that folks latch onto and can say, look we're improving our Army with it, then fine, but it (like many other ideas being thrown around) isn't new. It came from Kriegspiel.

I do think that there are some good ideas there, but they're what we did in Korea when I was a platoon leader and what I put my platoon leaders through when I was a company commander. Reading and playing out scenarios on a terrain board and then critiquing it isn't new - but again (like Ken says) it works and builds adaptive leaders. Just so Don doesn't hate on me, I do think that it needs to be more in TRADOC courses rather than death by slide and I do think that it needs to be more draconian and folks need to be called out when they make mistakes.

Of course its not new. Not sure anyone has ever claimed that adaptive leadership is new. To claim it's prevalent is disingenuous though.

Training by rote is the norm, training by innovation is rare. Don's work is a useful framework for approaching it.

In the context of swarming, his work can help address the need that Ken brought up - ensuring we have highly trained, highly adaptive guys in the field.

[William F. Owen]

Those are strategic choices, focused on restructuring your force to leverage an enhanced information environment. Indeed, the quote does say it all.

Sorry what does this mean? What is an "enhanced information environment?" Knowing stuff?

[shloky]

Sorry what does this mean? What is an "enhanced information environment?" Knowing stuff?

Knowing more stuff, better, faster, than before.

[Scott Shaw]

Shloky,

I don't know what your perspective is, but just by the nature of the conversations on this board by members of our armed forces and government shows that adaptive leadership is more prevalent than many would like to point out. How far have we come since 2003? How about since 1974?

Check out Paul Yingling's stuff on TRADOC vs the operating force. (as a side not before I bash TRADOC - Is TRADOC completely full of those who want the status quo? Of course not. Folks in TRADOC come from the operating force and therefore fresh blood in. And it's getting much better than it was.) The operating force adapts everyday in Iraq and Afghanistan. I left theater in Jun 2008 and returned in Aug 2009 and then entire division AO had changed rules completely. No more unilateral operations, no more "1 Iraqi = combined ops" A bunch of officers including general officers, NCOs, and Soldiers had to start over in and be ready to go again against some hard fighters in about 30 days. That's adaptive.

Yeah, I acknowledge that we have some work to do, but cut us some slack. Don's primary arguments are against the institutional Army and they are changing as well. Don's website and the USMA Department of Military Instruction show it.

So, no, I don't think that I'm being disingenuous.

And JSOC's small teams doing stuff is still tactical or at the very highest operational. They may have an effect that is seen at the strategic level, but that is still only one or at max two elements of national power. IF we were to expand USSOCOM's mission to affect all of the elements of national power, it would only be able to do it in a small region. And if we were to expand it completely, we might as well re-name USSOCOM the "Department of Everything." It might be easier, but again, every other department within the USG would have to sign on to it - as they did the stability operations doctrine.

Scott

[shloky]

Scott,

Hey, sure. There's been progress on the training front, not trying to discount that. We're not 'there' yet though.

And JSOC's small teams doing stuff is still tactical or at the very highest operational. They may have an effect that is seen at the strategic level, but that is still only one or at max two elements of national power. IF we were to expand USSOCOM's mission to affect all of the elements of national power, it would only be able to do it in a small region. And if we were to expand it completely, we might as well re-name USSOCOM the "Department of Everything." It might be easier, but again, every other department within the USG would have to sign on to it - as they did the stability operations doctrine.

My point was JSOC is a good prototype. A model that can be used as a starting point for implementing a swarming doctrine across DoD.

As you describe, of course reforming bureaucracy will be a long, arduous process full of compromises - that's the nature of reform. Don't think that's a good reason not to though.

[Schmedlap]

By "swarming" are we referring to a tactic similar to what the guerrillas used against the US COP in Wanat? That is fine if you're a third-world guerrilla. American forces have a much pickier public back home that gets upset if anyone dies.

For us, why bother swarming? I'm reminded of a book that I read before joining the Army. While it's focus is on Special Operations forces, the lessons in it are equally applicable to any force the is outnumbered or facing a well-prepared enemy. Swarming seems like a less efficient use of resources, that is more difficult to C2, with negligible, if any, benefits.

[wm]

Sorry to come late to this debate, but . . .

In WWII, the US spent approximately $ 330 billion 1940 dollars to wage war. By any standard that was a lot of money. However, for that fantastic sum, the US received a considerable strategic and tactical ROI including: contributing to the destruction, defeat and occupation of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan; the deaths of roughly 11 million Axis soldiers and civilians; according to John Keegan, producing enough equipment and munitions to outfit 1200 divisions; thousands of combatant ships; 300,000 planes and three functioning atomic bombs, two of which saw use against the enemy.

Now, taking the lower-end estimate expenditure of $ 1 trillion for the war on terror, how does the ROI today compare to the example of WWII?

We have killed or captured low thousands (less than 10k) Islamist insurgents, some of who are al Qaida (President Bush claimed 75 % of AQ leadership) but AQ has held out against the US more than twice as long as the Wehrmacht and still has refuge in Pakistan. We have occupied Afghanistan and overthrown the Taliban government that hosted AQ, but the Taliban too has a refuge in Pakistan and continues to field fighters in Afghanistan. We invaded and occupied Iraq and needed a prolonged campaign to pacify the country and managed to exterminate an AQ affiliate there ( that only appeared because of our invasion). We have circumscribed AQ's operational capacity but from 2001-2010, the group has still managed to sporadically sponsor/inspire significant acts of terrorism in allied countries.

It might be worth comparing apples to apples. The two efforts are of completely different kinds in oh so many fundamental ways. As a simple example consider constancy of purpose in the two conflicts (and that is problematic because OIF and OEF are, and were, not one conflict.) From the Allies’ perspective, World War II had a fairly constant scope. I do not think the same can be said for the efforts now categorized as overseas contingency operations in the CENTCOM AOR. When scope and requirements are not defined early and held constant, then the cost of execution rises significantly. Don’t just take my word for it; take a look at most Defense acquisition programs.

There are significant potential costs to not having big forces. Agreed. I am not interested in having a military that cannot operate large units.
That said, using big units where smaller ones work with greater efficiency and effectiveness is a poor tactical choice.
It is a poor strategic choice if you cannot afford to deploy large units in order to use them inefficiently for years on end. This too is a significant cost - a threat actually - to our overall military capabilities
We can have big units and use them where/when big units work best and select more appropriate tools or degrees of force for other tasks, husbanding our resources for larger problems when they come along.

. . .

You can only fight to the degree and for so long as you can afford to pay for the kind of fighting that you are doing. Different kinds of fighting incurs (sic) different sets of costs. Paying enormous costs for marginal strategic results is not "winning". Ignoring fundamental economic trade-offs in selecting military tactics and operational approaches is simply stupid. This is not an argument for doing nothing, but to do it with eyes open and with a long-term perspective.

The assertions made in this second set of quotations have no basis. Where is the double blind test that shows that small units do better than “big battalions” in a given operational scenario? Comparing the effort from the initial days of OEF in Afghanistan with how things happen to be proceeding on the ground today is another example of comparing apples to oranges. The thinking expressed in this combined quotation is similar to the stuff that Bentham and Mill used to justify Utilitarianism as a moral theory. One sets a problem that is impossible of solution when one tries to justify a decision by comparing its consequences to the hypothetical consequences of a decision not made or a course of action not taken. One cannot turn back the hands of time, replay the tape, and choose a different path. One can say that a given action produced more happiness, greater cost benefit, etc. than another that was not chosen but that is because the act not chosen, being unchosen, produced nothing. But, that is really the degenerate case.

[Firn]

After having read quite a bit about self-organization, mostly concerning ants and termites I want to throw in some thoughts. An interesting presentation can be found here.

According to Scott Camazine.. [et al.]:

“ In biological systems self-organization is a process in which pattern at the global level of a system emerges solely from numerous interactions among the lower-level components of the system. Moreover, the rules specifying interactions among the system's components are executed using only local information, without reference to the global pattern.[7]

So far so good. A slide of the linked PPP.

Basic ingredients:

1. Multiple interactions
   
2. Amplification of fluctuations and Randomness
   
3. Positive feedback (e.g., recruitment and reinforcement)
   
4. Negative feedback (e.g., limited number of available foragers)

To make self-organization work you need a lot of active and responsive components which interact through a complex web communications and feedbacks. For termites this includes a "random" walk in search of food, the amazing construction of huge mounts to the highly integrated defense of it against attackers*.


Another slide.

How is self-organization achieved?

Communication is necessary:

1. Point-to-point: antennation, trophallaxis (food or liquid exchange), mandibular contact, direct visual contact, chemical contact, . . . unicast radio contact!
   
   
2. Broadcast-like: the signal propagates to some limited extent throughout the environment and/or is made available for a rather short time (e.g., use of lateral line in fishes to detect water waves, generic visual detection, actual radio broadcast
   
   
3. Indirect: two individuals interact indirectly when one of them modifies the environment and the other responds to the new environment at a later time. This is called stigmergy (e.g., pheromone laying/following, post-it, web)

We see that in this case pretty much every form of conceivable communication is used to self-organize the colony. There is lot trying things out (random walk, coordinated raid), reaction to local events (scout reports food sources to the next ant), to global events (the broadcasted "alarm" signal warning termites of an attack gets broadcasted through the whole colony by "relay termites"), adaption (switching from a no longer worthwhile food source, stopping an attack on too well defended termite mount). At the core all interesting stuff, most already known, but hard to implement as it touches a lot of subjects. Due to our human nature organizational things become both a further bit more complicated and easier.


Firn


*Very interesting stuff but I do not know if it fits in.