FEATURE ARTICLE

April 2005

Irregular Warfare

Counter-insurgency in Iraq Provides Template For Fighting Terrorism

By Roxana Tiron

The anti-insurgency tactics the U.S. military is learning in Iraq could be applied globally, which would turn the war on terrorism into a “war on insurgency,” said Lt. Gen. William Boykin, deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and war fighting support.

“My position is that this is a global insurgency,” said Boykin during a forum on special operations and low intensity conflict.

In Iraq and other trouble spots, the United States has to come to grips with the nature of the enemy, he explained. “It is a web of networks that come together in a coalition of convenience. There are links to drug trafficking, money laundering and the like,” he said.

An insurgency is a political-military activity, in which the political aspects are much more important than the military aspects, explained a Defense Department official who did not want to be quoted by name. “Understanding the political, economic, financial, legal and cultural issues, is at the core of understanding what is going on,” the official said.

The resulting approach means that “we must run a global counter-insurgency if we accept what the war on terror actually is,” said James Roberts, acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and combating terrorism.

The strength and, in many ways, the unpredictability of the insurgency the United States encountered in Iraq, is prompting the Defense Department to accord “stability and security” operations the same priority as combat operations, said Jeffrey “Jeb” Nadaner, deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations. “You have to think about what you can do in terms of stability on the ground immediately,” and make sure that stability operations are part of the campaign plan from the onset, Nadaner said during a workshop at the conference.

To do that, the Defense Department realizes it has to work closely with both the State and Justice Departments and put their experiences to use in these campaigns, he said.

The department has to think about creating military-civilian teams and stress an interagency model, Nadaner pointed out. Depending on the nature of the stability operation, the makeup of the teams could be more military or more civilian, he suggested.

Congress needs to understand the connection between funding the civilian agencies such as the Agency for International Development and the military. “Funding AID is critical for the military, because AID needs to have funds to do its work in the field, because it is not good enough to have its presence. Somebody needs to have the funds to dig the wells and start the schools,” Nadaner said.

The State Department has established what Nadaner calls a heavyweight counterpart to the Defense Department, a new office of stabilization and reconstruction. “The idea behind the office is to be the civilian focal point for these operations for the whole government,” he explained. “We are doing a couple of things at the Defense Department to help that office move.”

The Pentagon is detailing its own personnel to the organization to help with planning and to give its officials the chance to go to military schools. “We are looking for opportunities in operational planning and we are looking to bring them into our exercises and make them full partners,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department is restructuring its approach and rationale to security assistance abroad. “We realized that the world has a shortage of trained peacekeepers,” Nadaner said. “The first country that everyone looks to in time of crisis is the United States,” he said. But the United States has its own limitations and already is stretched thin, he added. “There are many countries that want to participate in peacekeeping, too.”

Thus, a new program that is called the global peace operations initiative is intent on increasing the number of peacekeepers to 100,000 during the next several years. “We secured from Congress the authority to transfer $80 million to the State Department to get this program of the ground,” Nadaner said. “Right now we are working with State and the combatant commands as a joint staff to get this program onto a sound footing.”

It is not clear yet who is going to train the prospective peacekeepers—the military or contractors.

This new approach to stability operations also leaves room for the role civil affairs would play. Civil affairs teams that are drawn mostly from the Reserve force come with strong expertise in law enforcement, education and construction—all necessary skills in rebuilding war torn regions. This added mission comes as the Defense Department seeks to expand the number of civil affairs team in both conventional forces, and not only in special operations to which they currently are assigned.

At the same time, the Defense Department is overhauling intelligence gathering at all levels in the military.

Boykin said U.S. forces need “actionable intelligence,” but he cautioned that it does not mean the United States will start a “fire fight” to get that intelligence. “We are looking at intelligence as an operation just like the CIA does,” he told reporters.

The U.S. military needs to “win the intelligence fight long before and long after a military conflict,” he said. The intelligence community at this point is unable to share raw data and conduct competitive analysis based on access to the same data, he asserted.

While the military and other U.S. agencies need to be able to share information and its analysis, it also is critical to be able to receive and give intelligence support to coalition partners and allies, said Boykin.

There already are three systems in place that allow data to be shared by a coalition. These are the Linked Ops-Intel Centers-Europe (LOCE), the multi-national battlefield information collection and exploitation system-NATO (BICES) and the Combined Enterprise Regional Information Exchange System-Worldwide (CENTRIXS).

These capabilities have been used in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Tsunami relief in South-East Asia.

LOCE consists of a set of servers containing databases and imagery information and a network supporting more than 600 workstations that are distributed between U.S. and multinational users. BICES makes use of a dedicated communications network with bulk encryption devices.

CENTRIXS is a LOCE-derivative with servers in Tampa, Fla., and the Central Command area of responsibility for use with coalition partners in the Middle East, according to MITRE Corporation.

These three systems enable e-mail and web services, a common intelligence picture in the form of databases and imagery, a common operational picture, secure voice, collaboration and a chat function. Information can be shared across combatant commands, other military components, allies and coalition forces. In Boykin’s opinion, CENTRIXS worked better than the military’s current classified network.

A series of demonstrations and exercises are lined up to improve information sharing with coalition partners. Trial Hammer, for example, will take place this month, and it will be the first-ever NATO demonstration focused on suppression of enemy air defenses. Another effort focused on interoperability of intelligence systems will take place in April, under sponsorship of the Joint Forces Command.

Marine Corps Gen. James Jones, supreme allied commander, Europe, and the head of the U.S. European Command, recently received $8 million to fund a NATO intelligence fusion cell, which at first will be manned by the United States, said Boykin. The cell will offer flexibility and agility for immediate response to emerging missions and crises, he said.

For the French, sharing intelligence with the United States and other coalition partners worked particularly well, said Brig. Gen. Benoit Puga, commandant of the French special operations forces. His soldiers brought with them solid experience from the guerrilla wars in Algeria and unrest in Africa’s Ivory Coast.

French forces have learned from their engagements that political and military actions have to be combined. Troops need to keep a close link with the populace and the key is sound intelligence, said Puga. The commandos also have to respond to guerrilla tactics, which means, “work in an area and live in another next to it,” he said. “Do your best to understand the [local] people and be everywhere at all times.”

Soldiers have to spread out and know the area in which they are operating. This concept is something Puga calls “nomadisation.” Part of that is gathering intelligence through what the operators see, hear and feel in their gut, Puga said in a presentation. “They have to know the background noise and produce the background noise,” he said. That means that they should be seen everywhere, often but not for long periods, and make sure that they meet with local officials.

Underpinning this approach is the realization that there should be no dichotomy between intelligence and action, said Puga.

In response to the growing needs for intelligence-gathering capabilities, the research-and-development arm of the U.S. Special Operations Command is placing considerable emphasis on concepts such as the “cultural chameleon,” intended to supply special operations forces with special training and garments that better blend into the environment in which they operate, said Frank Wattenbarger, head of the advanced technology directorate at U.S. SOCOM.

Another concept is “shape shift,” said Wattenbarger. The idea is to be able to insert special operations forces undetected into enemy territory. Although SOF troops have been doing that for decades, in the future, using special thermal masks and stealth garments, they would be able to operate largely invisible.

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