The Army Capstone Concept: the Army wants your comments

[Steve the Planner]

Wilf:

Sure does set the bar low on the intel and expectations side.

Assume we go into each future complex problem set without a clue or goal, and that our opponent (who sometimes didn't graduate an equivalent of high school and controls no satellites or PhD farms) knows everything.

Where is the challenge to get ahead of background understandings, to develop responses, including non-military ones, before the problem, whether military or not, is dumped in DoD's lap as the agency of last resort for actions beyond US borders?

If I agreed with the above, I would, as an organization, start thinking about defining my enemy as internal, and beginning to understand how to out-game them before they game me.

At that point, none of it is about anything within a reasonable scope of a Department of Defense.

Steve

[William F. Owen]

Wilf:

Sure does set the bar low on the intel and expectations side.

If you cannot get the high bar then set the bar low

Assume we go into each future complex problem set without a clue or goal, and that our opponent (who sometimes didn't graduate an equivalent of high school and controls no satellites or PhD farms) knows everything.

Complex problems? I think you mean conflicts or wars, don't you? What does history show you? How did the US Army fail in Vietnam, Korea, and Mogadishu? Those alone are reasons for upping the bar... and it never was. So why now?

Where is the challenge to get ahead of background understandings, to develop responses, including non-military ones, before the problem, whether military or not, is dumped in DoD's lap as the agency of last resort for actions beyond US borders?

The challenge is the job. Nothing is more difficult than warfare. Non-military responses should not be something done by the military.

Seriously, the paper is predicated on a series of mythical problems. I know why it is doing this, but its a bad thing to do. Why invent a whole range of imagined complexities when the evidence shows the normal everyday conflict is in fact the problem most are finding very hard to imagine and this cannot prepare for.

[Steve the Planner]

Wilf:

Right. I just got finished jotting a response to one of Tom Ricks' Iraq the Unravellings re: a briefing at USIP by MG Caslen who just returned from MND-North en route to Tradoc.

No sense from him that he was confused or overwhelmed by any complex problems. I was very comfortable that he knows what he is looking at, and how to approach/learn/respond to what comes along.

Here's my post:

"Today, MG Caslen, who just left command of my old stomping grounds, MND-North (Northern Iraq), gave a very good account of things.

He explained that at first he was highly reluctant to back out of Ninewa, seeking a SOFA Waiver. Odierno convinced him to try, and he was very pleased with the result---Iraqi Army did step up, proud to take responsibility for their country.

Is it perfect? No. And it wasn't before June 30. In fact, last week, Salah ad Din's lead anti-terrorist investigator was blown up in Tikrit with his deputies.

But, according to MG Caslen, the provincial election made a big difference in the effectiveness of governance in the North. The post-2005 provincial governments were weak and ineffective (the Sunni Boycott impact), but, according to the American guy most likely to know, the new officials are more focused, engaged, and respected; side-benefits? Violence down.

Diyala has been a substantially unstable place since.... the days of the Silk Road. Many confluences that persistently result, over time and history, in periods of substantial instability. Iran border. A gateway in the Qom to Mecca religious path. Mixed populations: Sunni, Shia, Feehly Kurds, Kurds, Turkomen.MEK.

The KRG issue remains unresolved as it has since the 1920's when the idea of a Kurdish State emerged in advance of the organization and resources to establish/maintain it. Times always change, but historical opportunities only come and go.

Beyond Iraq, the influence of neighbors can be a curse and a blessing, but Turkish/KRG relations are strengthening, according to the General, with good results.

Tom's pictures from Diyala hit anyone in the gut, and they are, in most instances, intended to have that effect. But, behind the radicals, there are 28 million moms, dads and kids who just want to get on with life. Maybe their odds will improve AFTER the next elections...

Not perfect, but my enjoyment of Iraqis I met, and respect for their challenges, leads me to continue to cross my fingers for them (and sometimes hold my breath)."

Steve

[Steve the Planner]

One of the first things I discovered in December 2007 was that the provincial boundary maps were all screwed up, and the brigades were aligned to battlespace, and not provincial boundaries.

Might be fine for war, but a real problem for peace-building. Salah ad Din, for example was split among four different brigades---and each was getting into civ/mil stuff like provincial budget execution. Needed valet parking for all the mil leaders who wanted to get into the provincial governance building.

I spent six months figuring out the actual boundaries, and, by the time MG Caslen came in in Oct 2008, the brigades were redeployed by province.

So I sat at his brief looking at the slide that showed the Ninewa Brigade including Mahkmur, which the US thought for a long time was actually and formally a part of Irbil.

All I could think was that if you fight long enough for something, and it makes sense, the Army will do it, even if only in the last year. And a little quiet pride in my small contribution.

How does the saying go? Try everything until, at last, trying the right thing.

Steve

[William F. Owen]

Steve the Planner

Mate, all fascinating, but with respect, so what? Seriously, what is the big problem? Seriously, the agenda here from the "WOW-COIN" generation is to try and say that today A'Stan and Iraq are more "complex" than was Vietnam, the Lebanon and/or even Mogadishu.

Really? Does anyone really believe that?

[PhilR]

Steve the Planner

Mate, all fascinating, but with respect, so what? Seriously, what is the big problem? Seriously, the agenda here from the "WOW-COIN" generation is to try and say that today A'Stan and Iraq are more "complex" than was Vietnam, the Lebanon and/or even Mogadishu.

Really? Does anyone really believe that?

I would extend it to say that we have a generation that think WWII and Korea, etc. was also "simple." I don't think our histories, or how we teach them, necessarily do those conflicts justice. We have created a strawman of "conventional operations" which makes a convenient foil for Irregular/COIN, etc.
I really reject complexity arguments of scale--"more complex", etc. Each conflict is different and each has its own characteristics and distinct complexities.

[marct]

Hi Wilf,

Mate, all fascinating, but with respect, so what? Seriously, what is the big problem? Seriously, the agenda here from the "WOW-COIN" generation is to try and say that today A'Stan and Iraq are more "complex" than was Vietnam, the Lebanon and/or even Mogadishu.

Really? Does anyone really believe that?

A gut guess would be that they do believe it (whoever "they" may be ) for two reasons. The first is that the nice little mental state of "We Understand War" has been blown up because "they" didn't understand these wars. So calling the current setting increasingly "complex" is a reaction to having nice conventional perceptual models destroyed. The second reason, IMHO, has to do with changes in budgets over the past couple of years (i.e. inter- and intra- organizational squabbling over the budgetary pie).

What I'm going to write next might sound like an indictment of TRADOC, but it is not meant that way - I am using them, and this document, as an example of how large organizations operate, so please bear that in mind .

All large, hierarchical organizations rely on standardized knowledge "bytes", i.e. the ability to construct a representational model of their claimed area of responsibility that is a) internally consistent, b) makes "sense", and c) allows for parsing out sub-tasks to specific offices (not individuals; for any interested academics, this is drawing of of Weber's concept of rational-legal authority, Mary Douglas' How Institutions Think, and Abbotts The System of the Professions). These "knowledge bytes" (Abbot calls them Tasks), are assigned to locations in the organizational status system (offices, ranks, branches, MOS, etc.), and are assumed to operate at a minimal level that meets the requirements perceived when they were created (the time element is crucial here).

Now, these organizations compete with other organizations for both resources and, also, for the social "right" to "own" a task-space. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of "professional" organizations is that they exercise, with varying degrees of success, a monopoly over the social right to conduct these tasks and, at the same time, over access to their knowledge systems.

Now, these knowledge systems are all about the containment of socially perceived risk. If a society views a risk as "low", then the resources associated with it tend to be lower, while the obverse is true - high perceived risk leads (generally) to higher resource allocations. Now, playing Darwinian here an applying some natural selection models, how do you think that these organizations will act in the public sphere? Are they going to say that "Things are getting easier"? Nope, things will always be getting "harder", the risk area must always be getting more "complex", simply so that the organization can keep getting a share of the social resources.

But it is also a balancing act; organizations cannot, under any circumstances, allow the decision makers who parse out resources to believe that they are incapable of somehow handling the risk; that would be an admission that their entire knowledge system, and organization, etc., is fatally flawed and would, inevitably, lead to the de-professionalization of the knowledge area or, at least, to a loss of the monopolistic hold of one organization over that area or parts of it (BTW, the history of organized religion over the past 1000 years or so in the West is a good case example of this process).

Now part of this "balancing act" is the construction of a social perception amongst decision makers that the "professionals" know what they are doing. Part of the process of constructing this impression is constructing rhetorical arguments that have enough symbols in them that mesh with the decision makers prejudices (think of it as an IO campaign by the profession aimed at the decision makers). When we look at this document, several of these symbols just jump out: "adaptive", "complex", "unique", etc. They are not used in a semantically rigorous manner; they are used for their emotional impact on the minds of decision makers.

The goal of documents like this is to lay out an emotionally satisfying vision statement that reinforces the perception amongst decision makers that the professional group a) knows what it needs to do, b) is capable of doing it, and c) "understands" their (the decision makers) concerns. At the same time, the document also has to serve as a semantic map for changes made by the professional organization, so the same symbols that are used for their emotional resonance amongst external decision makers also must be capable of being interpreted by members of the profession, i.e. those who have access to the knowledge set, as being "reasonable" and desirable. In order to convey this "double message" as it were, the document must be vague and mildly alarmist without alienating either the decision makers or the members of the profession (BTW, a similar type of document is the recent AAA report on the HTS).

So, back to your question Wilf. I think you have identified the agenda incorrectly; it's not "to try and say that today A'Stan and Iraq are more "complex" than was Vietnam, the Lebanon and/or even Mogadishu" so much as to say "there is a risk and we know how to handle it". The document uses a rhetorical proof set aimed at non-professional decision makers rather than an intra-profession argument and really should be read, at least to my mind, with that in mind. The intra-professional argument will be showing up over the next few months with the production of documents relating to actual changes and their rationales.

[Ken White]

...The first is that the nice little mental state of "We Understand War" has been blown up because "they" didn't understand these wars. So calling the current setting increasingly "complex" is a reaction to having nice conventional perceptual models destroyed. The second reason, IMHO, has to do with changes in budgets over the past couple of years (i.e. inter- and intra- organizational squabbling over the budgetary pie).

As I said back in September:

""It is, broadly, a waste of time and the taxpayer's dollar -- but it is the way we do business. (emphasis added / kw)

It is, as someone mentioned, as much a pre-budgetary guide as it is a pre-doctrinal guide. It isn't a schedule and certainly isn't a map, it is an Echelons Above Reality encapsulation of syllabus. Maybe not even that, maybe a prospectus.""

As you say so well:

...Nope, things will always be getting "harder", the risk area must always be getting more "complex", simply so that the organization can keep getting a share of the social resources.

...The document uses a rhetorical proof set aimed at non-professional decision makers rather than an intra-profession argument and really should be read, at least to my mind, with that in mind...

[Hacksaw]

The goal of documents like this is to lay out an emotionally satisfying vision statement that reinforces the perception amongst decision makers that the professional group a) knows what it needs to do, b) is capable of doing it, and c) "understands" their (the decision makers) concerns. At the same time, the document also has to serve as a semantic map for changes made by the professional organization, so the same symbols that are used for their emotional resonance amongst external decision makers also must be capable of being interpreted by members of the profession, i.e. those who have access to the knowledge set, as being "reasonable" and desirable. In order to convey this "double message" as it were, the document must be vague and mildly alarmist without alienating either the decision makers or the members of the profession (BTW, a similar type of document is the recent AAA report on the HTS).
So, back to your question Wilf. I think you have identified the agenda incorrectly; it's not "to try and say that today A'Stan and Iraq are more "complex" than was Vietnam, the Lebanon and/or even Mogadishu" so much as to say "there is a risk and we know how to handle it". The document uses a rhetorical proof set aimed at non-professional decision makers rather than an intra-profession argument and really should be read, at least to my mind, with that in mind. The intra-professional argument will be showing up over the next few months with the production of documents relating to actual changes and their rationales.

MARCT,
A disclaimer first... I have seen the the TRADOC enemy and he is I... In one way or another I have worked with/for TRADOC or a subordinate command for the last six years... The entire portion I deleted... I think was spot on... it PERFECTLY described how the bureacracy of TRADOC "works"...

The only real issue I take with your assessment is that the concept is an explicit attempt by TRADOC to sway resource decision makers in the manner you describe... Rather, I think TRADOC presumes it's monopoly/legitimacy to address these issues...However, I do agree that the document (at least explicitly) is intended to only drive the internal mechanisms you describe...

What I won't hazard to debate (because I stood/stand to close to the TRADOC hearth) is whether the messaging to resource managers is the de facto self licking ice cream cone portion of TRADOC's relationship with that audience... very real possibility of that - I just have seen no evidence that anyone from Gen Dempsey down to the lowest GS employee views the Capstone Concept in that manner...

Live well and row

[William F. Owen]

A gut guess would be that they do believe it (whoever "they" may be ) for two reasons. The first is that the nice little mental state of "We Understand War" has been blown up because "they" didn't understand these wars. So calling the current setting increasingly "complex" is a reaction to having nice conventional perceptual models destroyed.

MarcT mate,

I do, to a limited extent, understand the human, emotional and organisational behaviour I am witnessing, but I don't want to let it slide. The system is constantly defended by virtue of being "the system." It's the "hate the game, not the player" argument - and that is the source of all the sophistry and evidence free assertions that permeate this thing passing for debate.

Until someone hits the re-set button the error is likely to compound.