Defense watch

December 2006

Latest Pentagon ‘Roadmap’ Reveals Serious Frustration

By Sandra I. Erwin

When Pentagon officials are confronted with questions for which they lack clear answers, they turn to one of the bureaucracy’s preferred stratagems: the roadmap.

At the Defense Department, there are roadmaps for just about everything — network-centric warfare, unmanned vehicles, strategic communications, hypersonic weapons … The list goes on.

Roadmaps — which involve lengthy studies and exhaustive reports — can be quite useful in highly technical areas that require in-depth research. The latest Pentagon roadmap, however, seeks to address the decidedly non-technical issue of “irregular warfare.”

One would assume that, five years after the United States went to war in Afghanistan and three years after the invasion of Iraq, the Defense Department by now would have figured out what it needs to do to win these unconventional wars. The chaos in Iraq and the sense that nobody knows what to do about it cost the administration its control of Congress and Donald Rumsfeld his job. It remains to be seen whether his replacement, Robert M. Gates, can bring an influx of fresh ideas into an uninspired bureaucracy.

It should come as no surprise that even within the Defense Department there is no agreement on what irregular warfare means exactly.

“We’re working through a definition process,” Navy Vice Adm. Eric Olson, deputy commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, told a House Armed Services Committee panel in late September. Short of a definitive answer, the Defense Department has come up with a “working definition” of irregular warfare, which is characterized as a mix of “insurgency and counterinsurgency, guerilla warfare, unconventional warfare, asymmetrical warfare and much more.”

Lawmakers at the hearing — somewhat startled by the notion that the top counter-terrorism officials at the Defense Department are still dabbling with semantics at a time of escalating violence and rising death tolls in Iraq and Afghanistan — wanted to know how this irregular warfare roadmap is going to help win these wars.

That is not the point of the roadmap, replied Mario Mancuso, who is the deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and combating terrorism.

Speaking in impeccable Pentagonese, Mancuso explained that the roadmap is “about how we can get better and how we can institutionalize some of the best practices … So, as we think about the roadmap it is not tied to anything — it is certainly not tied to Iraq and Afghanistan directly, nor is it tied to any particular operation … The focus of this roadmap is enhancing irregular warfare capabilities and capacity throughout the entire department.”

To reassure Congress that the roadmap will lead to real changes, Mancuso highlighted five major goals: reorganize the Defense Department to support irregular warfare, rebalance general purpose forces to better support irregular warfare, increase special operations forces capabilities, boost the military services’ capacity to conduct counter network operations, and redesign education and training programs to conduct irregular warfare.

But Olson cautioned that the irregular warfare roadmap “is not a campaign plan or a guiding document for the global war on terror. It does not lay out the Defense Department’s total approach to irregular warfare.” Its real purpose, he added, is to “provide resourcing guidance to the services and the Special Operations Command” in developing their 2008-2013 budgets.

Having been enlightened on that issue, lawmakers then wanted to know if the 2008 budget proposal due to Congress next February will have some specific spending plans that reflect the irregular warfare roadmap. Those decisions are being made behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Mancuso said. “The execution roadmaps are guidance internal to the department.”

The baffling discourse and the mumbo-jumbo heard on Capitol Hill only leads one to conclude that the Defense Department is nowhere close to solving the irregular war puzzle — regardless of whether the enemies are called insurgents, guerilla fighters or terrorists.

As many outside experts and military scholars have pointed out, one major impediment remains the Pentagon’s institutional disdain of unconventional warfare. Another hurdle is a failure to understand what is causing these irregular enemies — i.e., radical Islamists — to behave the way they do.

Military war-gaming expert and analyst Mark Herman, who is vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, believes the Defense Department focuses too much on “tactical things” and not nearly enough on “understanding human networks.”

“We are creating conditions that are causing Muslims to raise their consciousness to a global Muslim community,” Herman said in an interview. Events in Iraq are helping create a global Muslim community with a political agenda. This is not good for us.” Ultimately, “We need to think of a strategy to take the stimulus out of the system, fix the things that are causing this trend to continue.” As ethnically diverse as Muslims are, giving them a common cause to rally around only fuels their unity and strength, Herman said. What the United States should do is “push the political agenda from the global Muslim community back to the nation states. Force is not always the answer.”

One of the lawmakers at the HASC hearing, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., said he was hopeful that the Pentagon leadership will figure it out, regardless of what terminology is used to characterize the conflict. The roadmap outlined by the defense officials is titled “irregular warfare,” Smith said, “but at this point it is pretty much ‘regular warfare’ for us. It is what we are doing now in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Please email your comments to Serwin@ndia.org

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