Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post

a.) Staffs exist to enable Command. That's it. That is all they do. No Commander, no Staff. You don't need staff to support any activity you do not directly command.

b.) Yes staffs are too big. They have been since about the 1950's. Most of what staffs do is utterly irrelevant, to the exercise of command.

c.) Why should a staff for a so-called COIN operation be any different from one concerned with Combat Operations? Command is Command. All the military functions are the same.
Hmmmm...I wish you were right. In the perfect world maybe, but in the real world, here is what staffs have become:

a. Staffs used to enable command by gathering information; now they enable command by filtering it. This means that staffs increasingly do things that used to be strictly in the realm of the commander - a trend partly set off by the multiplication of assistand and deputy commanders you find in many headquarters. Moreover, in Afghanistan, anyway, you have staffs routinely supporting activities they do not directly command. We don't own the territory like we would in a conventional slugfest. Instead, we have to coordinate lots of different players, military and civilian, international and host country, who don't have the personnel or expertise to do their own staffwork. This is the cost of unity of effort vice unity of command.

b. Right on.

c. All I can say is that every staff I have seen overseeing unconventional operations looks considerably different from its normal conventional template. Is that because we have lost the bubble? Maybe, but my sense is that the staff functions vary considerably, if only in emphasis. The air defense staff is zeroed out, as are most of the field artillery staff. Long range planning cells wither away, while PA, CA, MP, and others balloon. Info ops cells, however they are structured, gain in influence and size. Liaison cells metastasize and include a whole new range of skill sets, and odd creatures appear like political advisers, red teams, and the like. And don't even get me started on lawyers. This is because, no matter how much we chant 'war is war', the tasks that staffs have to perform in the clash of modern armies are different than the tasks they have to perform in trying to secure an area from insurgents. So, the staff will inevitably mutate, because not only are the military tasks different, but there are a slew of non-military tasks added to the workload.

And, as I have said, after a decade, we still do not prepare our staffs well to enter that environment.