Michael Yon has left Afghanistan (probably best for all concerned) and is currently in Bangkok covering the troubles there...if you're on Facebook, it is well worth subscribing to his page where he has been delivering a steady commentary - a dozen + feeds each day - on the situation there...he offers an interesting counterpoint to the more sensationalist news media 'reporting' and depicts the human side of this drama very well...it is great to see that Michael has returned to the type of 'boots on the ground' that he is so very good at...

The rules murdering their troops...

A top article from the NY Post on the COIN Center blog - most definitely stimulating for the grey matter and really makes you wonder what's it all about. The day of 911, I was working with a guy who had just come back from a US college and I clearly remember him saying that this was like Pearl Harbor all over and from this point on, America would consider itself at war. The implications of this were that the gloves would come off and any pretence of being a team player would vanish if it got in the way of the main effort...

Somewhere along the way, the 'war' seems to have been lost out of the whole war amongst the people model - the key part is that, unlike peace support and reconstruction and peacekeeping and all the nice safe sounding words (like offshore and deployment and operations...) is that war is war and there not very much nice about it - certainly it is not about trying to be nicer to the bad guys or potential bad guys than to your own troops, or hobbling them with rules to prevent anything bad happening (apparently except to them)...this is a war. Bad things happen in wars. Sometimes people get caught in the middle and get hurt. That's war but we accept these risks because there are bigger things at stake...Any non-combatant death is bad but the key is whether there was an intent to kill, either directly or passively by failing to apply a reasonable duty of care (key word: REASONABLE!!)...war is and always has been (possibly always will be so long as people are involved) messy, untidy, dangerous and indiscriminate...we should not be kidding ourselves that we can write a book and toss in some technology and all of a sudden make it squeaky clean and politically palatable.

However, this article and FM 3-24 both skirt around or possibly even overlook the key point which is that the keys to successful COIN are probably endurance and habit forming - the foe that can stick it out the longest AND ensure that the habits it desires are embedded over a couple of generation (Note: speed is not a characteristic of COIN!!) will most likely be declared the winner...while the Malaysian Emergency make have been declared over (won?) in 1960, the last CT did not surrender til 1988; similarly, and they are probably halfway there, it will still be another ten or so years before anyone can confidently state that the troubles in Ireland are truly over. You want to be out of Afghanistan in ten years? You're dreaming - you might as well pull the pin and bail out right now...

Wars are wars and you can not fight (definitely not win) them with a sterile big arrows, little maps approach...forget the non-lessons of DESERT STORM and get down and dirty...

First thing

...that I need to do is address my my bad from last night and post the link to Josh's Interbella brief from the other night....and here be the original Interbella paper published in Colloquium in June 09...

In the UK papers last year, there was a new spin on the UK MP Troughgate scandal as it has now been linked to the UK Government's unwillingness to invest in decent kit for its soldiers in Afghanistan - even more embarassing when it comes out that soldiers have been moonlighting as security guards in the very office responsible for censoring the files on MPs' accounts and it was apparently their comments over smoko that led to the original leak. This topic takes up the first five pages in one of the papers and is in stark contrast to the big front page write up in the DomPoston all the new personal soldier equipment our Government has just invested in...

While YOU were sleeping...

Amir stirred at his post and sat up…he always hated this last stint before Salatu-l-Fajr…with the Americans, bad things always seemed to happen when it was dark. All the faith in the kingdom couldn’t overcome their cursed technology.

A faint rumbling filtered through the mist. Probably the brothers in the next valley getting a bounding from NATO aircraft again - he hated the German Tornados with their time-expired MW-1s that scattered a deadly rain over the fields for a kilometre or more. A intermittent groaning rose through the rumbling - it sounded nearer. That, whatever that was, wasn’t in another valley, it was here!

He should wake the others but what would he say? What if it were only the wind - they would laugh at him and make him do more sentries, like the time he had mistaken chickens for soldiers crawling towards their position. He squinted thought he could make out a dim shape, or was it just a shadow? There, again!

A squat shape emerged from the mist, carrying the distinctive H antenna of the New Zealanders. Had they deployed a new secret weapon? Over the sandy camouflage, he could barely make out a word stencilled on the hull: What in Allah’s name was Interbella? A head that could have come off a Roman coin 2000 years ago emerged from a hatch. The devil El Josh! He had heard whispers of this wily foe from the elders but it looked like that day had come….

The Kiwis had deployed their Think Tank…

In a war of ideas and ideologies you have to come to the party armed. There is also no monopoly on good ideas and the US Army in particular has realised this. As a result it was a Kiwi conducting an online presentation to a COIN Center audience at 0300 this morning...the topic? An alternative method of considering issues and influences in the complex environment we now live in...

It's name? Interbella...

District 9.

15 minutes into it, I'm going "Uh-oh, another Quarantine". Carmen, meantime, only a seat away and watching the same movie is saying "Another Quarantine - Excellent!" But the end of the movie, we both arrived at "That rocked!!" It's an interesting movie: the trailer gives absolutely nothing away and the first hour or so is like up-market Blair Witch Project - sorta kinda interesting but once you've seen it...y'know? The second hour takes it all some place way above that. Taken at face value, it's a scifi non-hero yarn that you can take or leave; dig a little deep within the pain of the South African context and it has apowerful message about doing the right thing, making the right decisions, being the one voice that in the end says "Enough!" And that it doesn't take a hero...

I've listed this under the Thursday-Friday War because time and again, values emerge as a key enabler in complex conflict. When the heat is on, we will act as who we are inside, follow the heart...

More than meets the eye...

...reading through the programme for the Chief of Army's Conference in September, I wondered if this whole transformation thing is nothing more than just more buzzword bingo like the great (NOT!) RMA from the 90s - I think it is and, in fact, one of the presentation's covered exactly that issue and came to a similar conclusion...but move away from the lingo and the underlying theme is the clear need, not so much for change, but ongoing evolution to match the environment of today and tomorrow...no more Maginot Lines or Malemes...

It has been a long day, departed the hacienda at 5 and got back around 9 tonight but so very worth it: I have screeds of notes to digest before I forgot what my scribbles meant; caught up with some people I haven't seen for years and made a couple of new contacts on the lessons front. Exceptionally well-catered which is good as a general principle but must have been appreciated by the participants who had travelled from all over the country and good food during smoko and lunch breaks always fosters better discussion...

I was disappointed not to have been able to catch up with Michael Evans who I have corresponded with off and on but never actually met - he has said he will be back over this way a couple more times this year so we will see - his presentation on Krulak's (bastard) step-children was my favourite of the day - I don't think I should really get into good, better, best comparisons because I thought they were all rather good - certainly I got a nugget or two from each...A really good turn-out: Minister of Defence (in the PM), the Army obviously (not all of them but enough for challenging discussion), Air Force and Navy, as well as reps from Police, MFAT and Customs and a good mix of civilian staff and academia (would a loony academic be an academia nut?)

Old brass for new

An interesting starter on The Strategist ...

"If there is ONE enduring lesson, it is that none of this is new - bits and pieces may fade in and out of favour but the basic themes endure...IMHO the writings of Clausewitz, Jomini, Napoleon (interpreted perhaps through the Maxims), etc are as topical today as they ever were...what we are constantly seeing, just as the leadership 'manuals' discussed the other week, is old (but still good) brass being polished up and presented as new...

Principles and rules are not necessarily things that relate to right/wrong or good/bad in a moral sense but are examples of distilled wisdom (Sun Tsu being an example of watered-down viffle-vaffle) and guidance that one is not bound to follow but which should be disregarded with care and caution...

So far as MBA v leader officers, maybe there should be an accompanying correlation between states of war/peace at the time that each type had precedence - I would argue (as I did on the CAC COIN blog last week if anyone is interested) that when the rubber hits the road and actual war breaks out, metrics-focussed leaders are a rare breed indeed. They may have a number-crunching staff but that is management and neither leadership nor command...

...of course, you need real war to prove that..."

I really feel quite strongly on this one as I connect it with the ongoing thrust towards metrics where such things do not exist and can not be accurately or honestly invented. If we invest resources in training the military to develop and then apply their professional judgement based upon their training and experience, then why do we persist in trying to second-guess them through a consultants and analysts lacking that very experience and judgement?

Maybe this resource would be better applied to metricising the Reserve Bank or other agents of the Government who seem equally dependent on chicken entrails or training and experience to predict the future and develop policy and courses of action.

What we really need is less number-crunchers and more command and leadership...a drive towards developing an ethos and culture based upon leadership and comand in those agencies still focussed (very Third Wave-like) on management and metrics...

Less talk, more do...

Interesting discussion at The Strategist on leadership....and another on the ideal recruit for any organisation: less NCEA and more common dog....maybe we should send half our lawyers and HR specialists off to the third world (they could also take the three Maori seats now spare in Auckland with them so they could take turns sitting down) so they can pass on all their accumulated knowledge (which should take until tea time) but once they are there, we should leave them there are seem how quickly common sense breaks out to fill the gap...

A long time ago...

...in a life far far away, I started in an extramural Masters programme at Waikato. The programme folded after the first year but in that year, my output was a paper examining aspects of 'Future War', inspired by Martin van Crefeld's 'On Future War'. Looking back, it is a bit disjointed and has some unfinished 'lines of inquiry' ever since I have been meaning to rewrite and expand on it but it's always been on the 'gunner' list...

Anyway, somewhere in the Blogdom I came across an entry questioning 'resource wars' as a valid description of the conflicts we will be facing in the next few years. I thought at the time of writing that paper and still do that this description is somewhat narrow, shallow even and is not indicative of its inventor actually applying much grey matter to the question. We are not entering a new era of conflict, we are there now have been been for some time, probably since Gulf 1. Conflicts since 1991 are not over questions of resource but could be better described as 'me, me, me' wars - it's all about self-interest as the driving force behind them whether the waved flag is religious, haves v have-nots, historical or over resource, to rattle off but a few...

It continues to amuse me that these pundits still try to present where we are now as something new when it is in effect as old as the hills (read Alexander's sitreps from Aghanistan!)...

Final shots

...on metrics...it was at the back of my mind last night but the penny only dropped this morning when I started to listen to Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope on the drive to work (45 minutes each way each day so where I get a lot of my 'reading' down - go Audible.com!). In Chap 3, he is discussing what it means to be a politician and juggle promises, commitments, family and conscience - he concludes that politics is not like building a house, with a clear and rigid plan (the metrics world) but more an ongoing conversation with shifting alliances, changing priorities and fickle supporters - sound more like our world??

We were watching the Politically Incorrect Parenting show (if you don't have this overseas, it should be on the TVNZ site somewhere for download - well worth a watch) which is bloody funny and and all the more funnier because it is so damn true - everything you really needed to know about bringing up children before the nice (metrics!!) people took over...the bottom line last night was 'make your child's problem, THEIR problem - not your problem' and this is probably just as true for COIN as it is for child-rearing. We can apply all the resources we like, feel their needs and their pain, and move amongst the people as a fish through the sea (blah, blah, blah) but it all means nothing if the people aren't prepared, ready and/or willing to grip up their own problems. It is all too easy to start a COIN/Stability campaign and wake up one morning stuck in the middle of a cargo cult where you are expected to solve all ills, ailments, blights and other problems AND deal to the bad people.

Many years ago (decades) I got a brief on how Guatemala, Guyana or some other country beginning with G addressed their insurgency problem, using a big map, some coloured pins and relevant effects:

• If your village was a 'green' village, then you got active support from the security forces and government, access to aid programmes and life was generally pretty good.
• If your village was an 'orange'village, then you got a bit of sporadic aid, but more checkpoints, shakedowns, etc but you knew how to raise your status from fence-sitting bet-hedger to 'green'.
• If your village had a 'red' village, then look out - relocations, wells filled into, overt and aggressive security force presence, the whole nine yards of COIN uncool stuff BUT there were ways of moving up the colour spectrum if you really found all this a bit onerous and sought a quieter life.

The point is that is not often if at all you ever get anywhere by being nice and empathic with everyone - in fact nanny-stating is probably a pretty good general recipe for disaster, failure, plague, fire, pestilence and other bad things. It simple just doesn't work - sometimes you really do have to be cruel to be kind and let your child/failing nation make some decisions for itself and actually commit to a path...

Someone sent me an interesting article the other day suggesting a similar strategy for Afghanistan, based upon a protection racket where possibly the people have to choose between the lesser of evils for progress to occur. This needs to be in a more substantial form than just rolling out to vote because that on it's own will achieve little - the insurgents will still be there and like criminals, may not be particularly worried that they have been voted (technically) out of existence - they might actually find it somewhat amusing as they plan and prepare their next attack....in the end it is all about action and willpower...

On metrics

I was talking to Josh re six degrees of separation, global networking etc. He also brought out a good point re blogs and stuff in that maybe we should be looking at using them for adult (no, not that kind of adult stuff - out of the gutter, all of you!!!) show and tell a couple of mornings each week to stimulate discussion and perhaps feedback that discussion back into the blog (maybe more on this on The Strategist). I really do get the impression that many people are quite shy about commenting on a blog...whereas I've always been a bit short on shame (or so I'm told)...

Anyway...metrics...I hate them...balanced scorecards...I hate them too...I'm not anti trying to do things smarter, not at all, but I am totally anti any attempt to try to beancountise things that can not be easily quantified, more so when, IMHO, what this is really doing is saying to those professionals who are involved that "...we don't really trust (understand) you unless you can convert what you do (or say you do) into a nice little spreadsheet preferably with good use of colour..." Sometimes you just have to and should trust to the experience of others - which then implies that what we should be doing is whatever needs to be done to make sure that that experience contributes to an accurate (as possible) SUBJECTIVE assessment.

If you look across the staff branches (or one variation on the theme anyway) from 0-9, (0=comd/coord and includes legal probably because no one else will have them; 2 = intel; 3 = ops; 4 = log; 5 = plans or civ-mil affairs, works either way for this argument; 6 = comms/CIS; 7 = training; 8 = conepts and evaluation; 9 = finance/resources), some lend themselves to quantifiablity (1, 4, 6, 9 perhaps) and others (0, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8?) to qualifiable judgements (based on training and experience). In the end it all comes down to the professional opinion of the guy in charge, and that's something the beancounting/BI community need to get their heads around.

Squashing the info hierarchy

This item from Peter Hodge's The Strategist opens up a whole can of worms regarding command and control concepts, trusting subordinates (and superiors) and also making sure that they have the tools including the training and experience to actually do the damn job!! It is so easy these days to talk the talk and be found wanting when it is time to actually get out there and walk the walk.

The Procarta web meeting I had last year really drilled into this issue and the question about whether you want nice safe validation and verification processes or whether actually getting the good OIL rippled across the system now now now is more important. The trouble with this approach is that people in charge need to accept risk and all players need to be able to accept responsibility for their actions - applying doctrine with judgement comes at a price, you know...