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Training and Simulation
Lesson for Army: Forget Everything You Learned Before You Went to Iraq
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By Grace V. Jean
ARMY WAR COLLEGE, Carlisle, Pa. — The Army has never designed the perfect organization with which to go to war.
That may not be a realistic goal, the Army has learned. Instead, it will try to groom leaders who can adapt to many forms of war, says Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chief of the Army Training and Doctrine Command.
When the Defense Department sent Dempsey to Iraq in 2003 to command the 1st Armored Division, he was in charge of the quintessential heavy division built for the plains of Europe — but was not capable of taking on the governance, economic development and reconstruction duties that the military was assigned after the fall of Baghdad.
Troops learned the hard way. “By the time we left Iraq, the division was nothing like it was when we first got there,” he says.
Since then, the Army has made significant adjustments. Long centered on its divisions, the service has evolved into a brigade-centric force with emphasis on its smaller units.
“We’re probably going to get the materiel close, but not perfect. We’re probably going to have some guidance that’s good, but not exact,” he says. “It’s the leaders who will take organizations, materiel and guidance and turn them into something that succeeds. I think we’ve demonstrated our ability to do that, but we can’t take it for granted.”
Threats increasingly will come not from nation states, but from transnational groups such as al-Qaida, Hezbollah and Hamas, whose organizations are decentralized and networked. To defeat such groups the Army, too, must become decentralized and networked, leaders say.
That has many implications for the service. The more decentralized an organization becomes, the more it requires stronger leadership throughout its lower ranks. Developing those leaders has become a focus of the Army’s efforts in recent years, and the service is changing the way soldiers are trained.
“Early in my career, the way we developed leaders was we challenged them with mass — the Soviet array coming at you — and compressed time,” says Dempsey. “If you wanted to raise the bar, you either added more mass or you compressed the time.”
Today’s leaders need to be challenged in a different way, he says. The complexity of the situation must be increased and the time must be expanded.
“I think that the recent conflicts and everything we can learn about potential future environments suggest that when you choose to use the military instrument of power, you commit it over time,” says Dempsey. During that period, often measured in months and years, the adversary will “find ways to confront you where you don’t have the advantage,” he says.
One only needs to look at Iraq to see how the insurgents repeatedly found the U.S. Achilles’ heel and exploited it throughout the years.
Committing a force over time means that the Army must understand how to cultivate its leaders so that they know how to anticipate changes and solve complex problems.
“When I got to Baghdad at the end of ’03 in the 1st Armored Division, and my mission became ‘establish a safe and secure environment in Baghdad,’ I’m not so sure that problem was clear to me,” admits Dempsey.
A concept called “commander’s appreciation for campaign design” is aimed at helping soldiers understand how to take a broad look at a problem, says Lt. Col. Phil Coyle of Training and Doctrine Command’s joint warfare branch.
“We look at the environment in which we’re going to operate, look at who key actors are, environmental factors, the history, and we use it to create a problem framework,” he says. “Once we have a frame, that provides the commander with a point of departure so he can direct planning on how he can achieve the goals of the national government.”
The notion that the Army should understand the operational environment from non-military points of view is a new development in leader training, says Harvey Perritt, a spokesman for TRADOC.
Participants in the “Unified Quest” war game here are being put through the paces to test and develop the concept. Four regional panels are tackling scenarios in the Central Command, Pacific Command, Northern Command and Southern Command areas of operation during the 2018 to 2025 time frame.
On the Pacific Command panel, Lt. Col. Chels Chae is leading a 50-member team through a scenario in which North Korea invades the southern peninsula. U.S. forces notionally have launched counterattacks into the north, prompting a call for ceasefire. But the North Koreans, who have developed nuclear and chemical-biological weapons, refuse to cooperate with blue force demands to dismantle or secure those weapons.
Chae has a group of intelligence officers from Fort Leavenworth, Kan., that is trying to produce a holistic view of North Korea so that the panel can better understand the motives and thinking behind the belligerence. This application of the commander’s appreciation for campaign design concept is raising a lot of issues on the panel.
“Hard questions are being asked,” Chae tells reporters.
That is exactly what officials want to hear.
“The next step is to call it simply ‘design,’ and introduce it broadly into our education system,” says Dempsey. The concept could be introduced at the major’s level at command and general staff college, because that is where planners begin to grasp and understand such complex problems, he says.
“They need to embrace the complexity of the security environment and not try to oversimplify it. For majors and lieutenant colonels, they’re entering that portion of their career where they need to feel increasingly comfortable with complexity. Everything I see suggests that they’re quite capable of doing it,” says Dempsey.
But they have to be challenged beyond the classroom, he cautions.
The Army is taking steps to promote that. During a recent rotation through the Army’s National Training Center in California, where deploying troops are tested in realistic battlefield scenarios, there were 27 data sources and 1.2 million “injects” — information and intelligence introduced by the opposing force — to stress Army commanders. “The leader going through training can begin to establish tribal patterns, threat networks. They can begin to understand the complexity of fighting among the population. That’s a big difference,” says Dempsey, who was always taught to stay away from urban areas to avoid fighting near the local population.
He also was taught to analyze the enemy within a narrow context. “Now we also realize that it’s not as much about the enemy as it is about your friends, and how you can help your friends,” says Col. H.R. McMaster, director of concept development and experimentation, at TRADOC’s Army Capabilities Integration Center.
“Look at Somalia, where you have these networks — terrorist organizations — that are brutalizing the people and trying to take control over territory to advance their extremist agenda,” he says. “How do we prevent some of these crazies from getting worse?”
Army officials believe that educating soldiers to become better leaders will give them tools to solve such problems in the future.
“Preparing ourselves to accomplish those missions is very rewarding work for us intellectually, and it’s our duty to do it,” McMaster says.
Dempsey agrees. “I think what we’re really about is trying to build an Army and develop leaders who will be versatile and agile enough so that when we get it wrong, they’ll be able to adapt to the situation.”
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