SFA as part of a campaign design: supporting operational requirements (part 1)

[Rob Thornton]

Bob's World wrote:

My opinion? No. Because it is just one more approach designed to address the symptoms of insurgency.

Here we do agree. Building sustainable capabilities and capacities of foreign security forces that do not represent a legitimate authority by may buy you some time, but probably will not in itself resolve internal political problems.

Context Matters -

Although that may not have been your objective - I say may not because your objective may have nothing to do with defeating an insurgency - but may be in fact to offset a regional actor, disrupt transnational LOCs, create additional capacity in a partner. Once you increase sustainable capability and capacity it may get used in a number of ways, some you probably did not anticipate -here again design may help you look at the range of possible outcomes and even if the policy course is set, at least you will have a better idea of what might be on the horizon.

WRT to the design guide here - this case this was mostly a functional design, meaning that while it did lay out some elements of an operational approach, the details of what to do and why have to come from the hard work of doing a full blown operational design (this is where you inject context) complete with all the relevant LOEs.

Part of the reason I thought a focus on identifying the functional requirements was useful is because it helps you consider the organizational, environmental, and institutional requirements of the FSF to generate, employ and sustain. It seems we often get caught up in a "generate enough for us to employ" loop since it suits our immediate objectives while not looking at the long term requirements.

One of the things that does come to light using operational design for any LOE is the issue of contingent objectives - e.g. you get to points where its unlikely the next thing you want to accomplish in one LOE can occur until there is progress in another LOE -could be economics, could be politics or governance. Doing this ahead of time in an operational design would seem to support unity of effort across the USG and multinational partners.

This may be one of the reasons (there are others) we seem to be having a hard time meeting operational requirements in Iraq and Afghanistan where we are doing this on a large scale and by extension one where our internal political clock has such an impact. I'm not sure we fully understand this issue of contingent development in its operational context. In smaller operations where the footprint is small and largely flys under the domestic political radar (meaning its not threatening anyone's re-election), and where normal USG support has not been subject to the type of contingency where it is truncated or diminished to the point where we now feel compelled to act immediately - the issue of contingent development has more time to surface and be addressed. When it is a matter of the converse, such a misstep can result in a major set back that makes further development more difficult as both internal pressures compounded by enemy activity, and regional politics as well as our own domestic politics compound the issues.

Best, Rob