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August 2007

Army Must Embrace Unconventional Fight

By Lt. Col. James A. Gavrilis

The U.S. military campaign in Iraq has raised difficult and thought-provoking questions about the future of the Army as a counterinsurgency force.

Many observers are confused because conventional weapons and tactics are used in Iraq. And they wonder whether the Army’s recent efforts to adopt unconventional tactics will lead to a permanent shift in the way leaders think about and plan for conflicts in the future.

To be sure, even a major unconventional campaign such as Iraq can have major conventional operations as part of it. In war the two are not mutually exclusive. The trick is finding the right mix.

But executing conventional tactics in a combat zone under the guise of counterinsurgency does not make it counterinsurgency. Likewise, executing counter-guerrilla operations within a conventional campaign plan does not make the campaign a counterinsurgency.

There is more to counterinsurgency than counter guerrilla operations, search and destroy missions, and detention operations. Adjusting tactics is not enough.

It has been widely acknowledged that, in the future, civil wars, insurgency, lawlessness, subversion and sabotage will be more prevalent than large force-on-force engagements. Weak and failed states will be the source of instability, and will require more nation building. Consequently, there should be an expectation of permanent counterinsurgency capability in the conventional Army as well as regular interaction with the special forces community.

Although the Army has made remarkable and commendable adjustments to accomplish the counterinsurgency missions, it must go further.

Counterinsurgency demands close relationships and effective communications with the locals. Yet the military has not had resounding successes integrating public information activities with operations or countering the vast amount of insurgent propaganda.

The military services in Iraq have not yet applied a counterinsurgency strategy uniformly. Application varies from sector to sector, and from rotation to rotation, even in the same sector. It depends on the individual commander, and how much he accepts or understands or desires to apply counterinsurgency principles and guidance. This inconsistency can be destabilizing and self-defeating, and limits the depth of relationships with locals.

Last year the Army published a new counterinsurgency field manual. But is it understood by the commanders in the field? Is the document just another field manual on the shelf, or is the Army changing its character to be able to win these kind of wars? Will counterinsurgency tasks be permanently placed on unit mission essential task lists?

Reconstruction efforts are slow and weak. More care and deliberation are needed to select the right people with the right expertise and the right level of authority for this job. In Vietnam, the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development and Support (CORDS) program was much larger and deeper. It had a wider distribution across the country, and it had a much higher level of authority in the command structure. Today we are still hard at work getting unity of effort, and far from unity of command.

The embedded advisor teams and the provincial reconstruction teams are two counterinsurgency tactical elements that are having a strategic impact in Iraq. The Army should institutionalize these into permanent organizations.

Traditionally, the Army has confined itself to security aspects of nation building, and that generally works in peacetime. But it is less useful in the current counterinsurgency, which requires military forces to also do political, economic and information operations.

U.S. commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan know this, and are doing a greater range of activities, but the larger understanding has not yet been codified.

One of the obstacles to institutionalizing counterinsurgency is that there is a tradition in the military that views counterinsurgency as not really warfare and a distraction from real, conventional, warfare. The fact is that insurgency is a form of warfare, and the United States must be able to fight and win all wars regardless of their form.

However, the nation’s defense spending reflects the traditional thinking. The Pentagon’s budget doesn’t match future operational needs. Budgets reflect conventional warfare requirements, and do not match the call for more irregular warfare capabilities.

More spending is needed in areas that will enhance the conventional Army’s counterinsurgency skills, such as construction and engineering, negotiations, public administration and conflict resolution.

Also, more money and effort should be spent integrating special operations forces and the regular Army.

Despite its abundant experience in unconventional wars, the Special Operations Command had little to do with the new counterinsurgency manual or the counterinsurgency academy in Iraq. The special forces community has not been that involved in assisting the Army with embedding advisors or the counterinsurgency center of excellence at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

It is puzzling why the conventional Army has not made use of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Training Center at Fort Bragg, N.C., as a resource center.

On the ground, special forces teams work closely with regular army battalions, but current command and organizational structures do not have special forces advisors embedded with Army units and do not provide for unified or combined headquarters and chains of command. U.S. troops have not had a special forces commander in charge in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, when special operations task forces controlled the northern and western fronts. A special forces general officer in command of the Multi-National Force in Iraq, or the Multi-National Corps, or a division or brigade, would integrate the two communities, disseminate counterinsurgency concepts to the whole Army, and ensure uniformity of counterinsurgency operations.

A good indicator of real acceptance of counterinsurgency would be the establishment of permanent structures for interagency as well as special operations forces integration in both Iraq and Washington, D.C. The new war czar at the National Security Council may improve interagency integration, but the position may not last. Without institutionalization, many of the advances made will disappear.

The Army appears to be accepting counterinsurgency as a mission much more than it did in the past, certainly more than it did after in Vietnam. The Army modified its training exercises to include the unconventional aspects of warfare and the various challenges that civilians present to military forces. The Army established a counterinsurgency academy in Iraq to train commanders as they begin their tours there. Stability operations is also a core course in intermediate level education for officers. Real intellectual energy was put into improving doctrine and into the writing of the new counterinsurgency field manual. Instructors are training soldiers at Fort Riley, Kansas, for transition teams and embedding with Iraqi security forces.

The Army does not need to become a “special operations” force, but it must be able to operate and achieve objectives in low-intensity conflict. The Army needs to broaden its range of activities and capabilities by modeling certain attributes of special forces that are useful in counterinsurgency, such as cultural understanding, regional studies, and language skills as well as integrating civil affairs, local outreaches and indirect approaches.

One of the major changes has to be in the mindset of conventional forces. They must realize that the population is the military objective, not part of the physical terrain.

Furthermore, foreign internal defense should not be solely a special forces mission. The entire Army has to be able to train and work with foreign forces. To that end, the Defense Department created the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq. NATO is doing the same with the Afghan National Army.

There are several useful ways to divide the labor of foreign internal defense. Conventional forces can teach basic military skills such as shooting, moving, and communicating under fire, and can supervise conventional forces in combat. Unconventional forces can train unconventional skills to designated foreign special forces and supervise them in combat.

Special forces are the best at finding insurgent leaders and uprooting their infrastructure. But developing and expanding the host nation’s capacity and control is overt, and conventional Army units can and should do this. Also, for successful counterinsurgency, conventional forces should work on reducing the vulnerabilities of the population, such as providing basic services and security. About 75 percent of counterinsurgency is defensive in nature and entails the physical protection and development of facilities, infrastructure and leaders, which conventional forces are designed to do.

The divisions of labor described here are almost completely in place in Iraq, but not yet formalized in any plan or doctrine, and therefore must be re-learned and re-negotiated repeatedly, many times inadequately. Without substantial changes in our military institutions, these counterinsurgency lessons will not be learned.

Lt. Col. James Gavrilis is a career Army special forces officer who has served two tours in Iraq. He is currently a political-military planner in the Iraq division of the strategic plans and policy directorate on the Joint Staff. This commentary reflects the author’s views and does not represent the position of the Defense Department or the U.S. government.

Please email your comments to SErwin@ndia.org

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