Government Executive - Authors - Greg Grant

The Softer Side of War

Greg Grant — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The Pentagon turns to academia to foster cultural awareness on the front lines.

In an April speech to the Association of American Universities, Defense Secretary Robert Gates outlined plans for the Minerva Consortia-a program to provide Pentagon funding to universities for research in the social sciences to better understand foreign countries and cultures.

Gates evoked universities' past contributions to building "intellectual capital" in national security during the Cold War, creating fields of study such as Kremlinology and game theory. Today's threats, he added, are even more complex and more difficult to comprehend than in the Iron Curtain days. "Too many mistakes have been made over the years because our government and military did not understand-or even seek to understand-the countries or cultures we were dealing with," he said.

To avoid such misunderstandings, Gates, former president of Texas A&M University, is reaching out to academia for help. The project will examine four topics: China's military modernization; translation of documents seized in Iraq; religious and ideological studies of Islamic radicalism; and the New Disciplines Project, involving the studies of history, anthropology, sociology and evolutionary psychology.

Getting help from the social science community could prove a bit of a challenge, Gates acknowledged, as the relationship between the Pentagon and academics in this field often has veered into hostile territory. "These feelings are rooted in history-academics who felt used and disenchanted after Vietnam, and troops who felt abandoned and unfairly criticized by academia during the same time," he said.

But Gates promised openness and said points of view that are critical of the military will not be discouraged. "There will be no room for "sensitive but unclassified," or other such restrictions in this project," he said. The amount of money Defense will direct to academics-about $1 billion in the next five years for "peer reviewed basic research"-might also help smooth over relations with the ivory tower set.

Very little of that funding, however, will go to social science research. The bulk of it will support physical science research, such as stealth materials and laser weapons. "One of the virtues of social science research as opposed to the physical science research is it's relatively inexpensive," Thomas Mahnken, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for policy planning, recently told reporters.

That virtue will translate into a few million dollars for professors and students for Defense-sponsored research in the humanities, according to Mahnken. "We're probably not talking tens of millions of dollars," he said. "This is an area where $2 million or $3 million actually goes a long way."

Even that modest chunk of change has sparked protest from some quarters of academia. A group called the Network of Concerned Anthropologists listed a number of potential problems with the Minerva project in a statement posted on its Web site.

The group said the university system already is highly militarized because many receive significant funding from the Defense Department. Some in the field worry that if a university finds itself dependent on military funding, it "becomes an instrument rather than a critic of war-making," the statement said. The anthropologists question why the Pentagon is outsourcing open-source intelligence work to universities instead of to the many defense contractors that work in the field. The group's statement suggests that Defense might be outsourcing the "mundane tasks of data collection, sorting and analysis [to] low wage undergraduate or graduate students," because contractors are too expensive and the university might lend the effort legitimacy and credibility, which contractors cannot provide.

The network has urged anthropologists not to engage in research that supports the military's counter- insurgency operations. In an effort that is unrelated to the Minerva project, the Pentagon is spending almost $150 million this year to recruit anthropologists and other social scientists to serve with human terrain teams that work with military units.

The teams map the human terrain in Iraq and Afghanistan and use "soft power" to engage local populations, said Andre van Tilborg, deputy undersecretary of Defense for science and technology, at a hearing in April before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities. The program is small, with only eight human terrain teams-six in Iraq and two in Afghanistan. The five- to eight-person teams work with country-specific experts located at the Research Reachback Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The teams use laptop computers and human terrain mapping software to conduct village assessments that provide commanders with a detailed data repository on the social groups within tribal communities, including information on their interests, beliefs, motivating factors and leaders.

The scientific teams typically work with Provincial Reconstruction Teams, small units made up of civil affairs troops and economic development experts from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department, that operate in local communities.

"We learned that the population is the center of gravity, the enemy is hiding among the people and we must understand the culture to win," says Army Col. Martin Schweitzer, who recently returned from a 15-month combat tour in Afghanistan and whose brigade of paratroopers was the first to use a human terrain team. The teams functioned not just as cultural advisers, he says, but identified the key players within tribal communities whose power structure and patronage networks often confound Western minds.

The scientific team's impact was "exponentially powerful," he says, leading to a 60 percent to 70 percent reduction in combat operations in his area. Schweitzer said a PRT commander told him that before the human terrain specialists arrived, his team members were just "ricocheting around," talking to random people until they identified the power brokers in each village.

Addressing the concerns of the academic community about social scientists working in counterinsurgency operations, Schweitzer says: "The team is not an intelligence tool used to target individuals," adding that members are not qualified or trained to aid in identifying or selecting enemy fighters either to be killed or captured. That role, he says, is performed by intelligence officers.

Gates said anthropologists in the war zone could serve a humanitarian function: "The net effect of [the human terrain teams] is often less violence across the board, with fewer hardships and casualties among civilians as a result."

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Commander finds no evidence of Iranian training or weapons in Afghanistan

Greg Grant — Wed, 07 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

"I haven't seen any Iranian weapons or anything of that nature making its way here," said Army Col. Thomas McGrath, who directs the American-led training and equipping of the Afghan army and police in southern Afghanistan, speaking to reporters by phone on Tuesday. "I know we have issues with [the Iranians] in Iraq, but I haven't really seen any of that here."

In a Wall Street Journal story this week, an unidentified senior military official said Iran was training members of the Taliban and providing them with armor-piercing roadside bombs. At a news conference in Paris on Tuesday, Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of State for South and Central Asian affairs, said, "Iran is interfering in a variety of ways [in Afghanistan]. There have been several shipments of weapons."

According to intelligence reports from the battlefield, McGrath said, there were no indications of Iranian support to the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. "I haven't seen any incidents of [Iranian made roadside bombs] in the region. I have no reason to believe they're here," he said.

There was no discernible Taliban "spring offensive" this year, McGrath said, adding that the insurgents appeared to be "stuck in a rut," with low morale and a noticeable decline in their fighting abilities. "If the [Iranians] are training them, they're not doing very well," he said.

Some 34,000 U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, with the recent addition of 3,500 Marines in the Kandahar region, the highest level since the war began in 2001. McGrath said the Marines have moved into Taliban-infested areas to bolster and train the Afghan police forces.

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Army officers warn of atrophy in critical skills

Greg Grant — Tue, 06 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The report, obtained by National Public Radio, was prepared by three Army colonels who have commanded brigades in combat. They wrote that by letting "perishable skills atrophy, we are mortgaging not only flexibility in today's fight, but our ability to fight the next war as well." The loss of critical skills is most acute in the Army's artillery branch, which the authors said has been described as "dead branch walking."

There is a limited need for heavy artillery fire in counterinsurgency warfare, where minimal use of force is encouraged to win the support of the local population. In Iraq, artillery men spend most of their time patrolling neighborhoods as beat cops. Some Army units even leave their artillery pieces behind in the U.S. when they deploy to Iraq.

The paper said limited training opportunities have led to unsafe practices and a rising number of accidents when units do fire their big guns during pre-deployment exercises. The authors said the Army risks an exodus of artillery officers who are "increasingly dissatisfied" with their chosen profession because when they deploy to a combat zone, they are assigned to "hole-filler" duties. "They wanted to be artillery officers and ended up being anything but," the paper said.

Large-scale battles require the careful synchronization of artillery fire in support of fast moving units on a fluid battlefield, a skill set that is rapidly being lost, the report concluded. The authors warned that the Army risks suffering a fate similar to that of Israel's military in 2006, when it proved unable to defeat the militant Hezbollah organization in south Lebanon.

"Israel's years of [counterinsurgency]-focused operations in the occupied territories cost them dearly in South Lebanon," the paper said. The Israeli military's ability to fight large-scale conventional battles "had simply atrophied from neglect," the authors wrote. "We should consider ourselves fairly warned."

Lt. Col. Gian Gentile, a critic of the Army's focus on counterinsurgency, said in an interview that the service only will be able to restore balance among different fighting skills when the demands of the Iraq war lessen and soldiers have more time to train. "When a [brigade] is told when they get back [from Iraq] that they only have a year or year and a half to prepare for returning to Iraq, then they only prepare for counterinsurgency," he said.

Some analysts have concluded that large-scale wars fought on open battlefields are a thing of the past. The rapid pace of urbanization across the world means that future wars are likely to be fought in cities, where heavy firepower could kill innocent civilians and produce an angry populace.

In a speech last fall before the Army's annual gathering in Washington, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the service's overwhelming superiority in targeting and firepower means it is unlikely an enemy would choose to take on the U. S. in a stand-up fight. Instead, potential enemies are likely to imitate the tactics of guerrilla fighters in Iraq, using low-tech weapons such as roadside bombs.

Gates said the Army must strike a balance in preparing for future wars and warned against making the same mistake it did after Vietnam, when it focused on mastering conventional warfare at the expense of counterinsurgency. That decision, he said, "left the service unprepared to deal with the operations that followed: Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, and more recently Afghanistan and Iraq -- the consequences and costs of which we are still struggling with today."

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Marines’ V-22 Osprey returns from first combat deployment

Greg Grant — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The Marines initially feared that the Ospreys in Iraq would be tucked away and not used because of the aircraft's high profile, said Lt. Col. Paul Rock, who commanded the Osprey squadron in Iraq. But it turned out they were used in a wide range of missions across western Iraq, including raids, air assault missions, medevac operations and as scout aircraft.

The majority of Osprey missions were as a cargo aircraft, ferrying troops and supplies. That's the most common role of the CH-46 Sea Knight medium-lift helicopter, which the V-22 is replacing.

Lt. Gen. George Trautman, the Marines' deputy commandant for aviation, was effusive in his praise of the aircraft's performance in a meeting with reporters, saying it exceeded all expectations for reliability and performance. The Osprey required nine and a half hours of maintenance per flight hour, versus 24 hours for the CH-46, according to statistics provided by the Marines.

The flying conditions in Iraq's desert were surprisingly less harsh than those encountered during operational testing in the deserts of Arizona, Rock said. The squadron did not have to replace rotor blades or other parts as often as they had expected, although the region's fine dust and intense heat meant the aircraft's engines had to be replaced frequently. The Ospreys that have returned from Iraq are being stripped down and thoroughly examined for wear and tear on all parts of the aircraft, he said.

There were concerns about the Osprey's vulnerability to groundfire in Iraq, since insurgents there have shot down a number of U.S. helicopters. But no Osprey was damaged by groundfire. Rock said that since the Osprey flies much faster than the CH-46 and has maneuverability similar to a fixed-wing aircraft, its vulnerability to groundfire can't really be compared to that of conventional helicopters.

While the Osprey takes off and lands like a helicopter, it typically cruises at high speeds at around 9,000 feet. Helicopters fly much closer to the ground. Iraqi insurgents did shoot at Ospreys with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, but pilots never considered the groundfire a serious threat, Rock said.

The Osprey had a problem-plagued development phase, including four crashes that killed 30 people. Some analysts said the aircraft's combat deployment was premature, and that the Marine Corps had not solved all of the aircraft's reliability issues. For example, in a 2007 report, the Center for Defense Information said, "It is an aircraft waiting to increase its casualty list single-handedly if it is ever permitted to go to a combat theater."

Most of the critics are simply wrong, Trautman said, while acknowledging that it's too early to draw full conclusions about the V-22's performance. "This was a test, but it's not the final exam," he said. "We're on a journey to exploit a new and revolutionary technology."

Another Osprey squadron of 12 aircraft is currently flying in Iraq. Trautman said there are no plans to deploy the Osprey to Afghanistan, where 3,500 Marines are currently fighting in the southern parts of the country. But he said he is convinced the aircraft would perform better there than the CH-46 helicopters the Marines are using.

The Osprey was designed to rapidly fly Marines from ships based far off an enemy's shore and deposit them directly inland, bypassing defended beachheads. Critics have said that using it as a cargo hauler is a poor use of such a costly aircraft. Cargo operations, they argue, could be better preformed by larger fixed-wing aircraft such as the Air Force's C-130 transport plane. The Marines have struggled to justify the Osprey program's $18 billion cost for use as a cargo plane.

The Marines have taken delivery of 50 Ospreys and plan to buy them at a rate of 30 aircraft per year. The Air Force wants 50 Ospreys for its special operations troops, and the Navy wants 48 for search-and-rescue operations.

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Hybrid Wars

Greg Grant — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

What if the battles of the future are neither conventional nor irregular, but a combination of both?

The October 1973 Arab-Israeli War featured some of the largest set-piece battles fought since the end of World War II. For American defense planners, the conflict provided a bounty of information on the performance of the latest military hardware from Western and Soviet arsenals that had been sold to the Israeli and Arab armies, respectively. After the war, U.S. defense officials went to Israel and picked over the battlefields, searching out lessons from the fighting.

The United States was busy extricating itself from the disaster of Vietnam, and many in the U.S. military, particularly in the Army, saw the big battles fought on the Golan Heights and in the Sinai as an opportunity to refocus their intellectual efforts away from fighting shadowy guerrillas in jungles and back to the conventional, big battles they preferred. The 1973 war displayed the lethality of new precision weaponry. It was the first war to feature large numbers of guided missiles, launched from both the air and the ground. Egyptian and Syrian troops, for example, used vast numbers of Soviet-built Sagger portable anti-tank missiles to savage attacking Israeli tanks.

Now, in a touch of déjà vu, American defense planners are examining another Arab-Israeli clash-this one from 2006, when Israel's army faced off against fundamentalist Muslim organization Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. In a war that lasted 34 days, Hezbollah fought the vaunted Israeli Defense Forces, considered one of the most technologically advanced militaries, to a standstill. The outcome sent shock waves through the world's military establishments, particularly the Pentagon. Ever since, Defense Department planners have been trying to discover how Hezbollah guerrillas could have defeated a conventional army outfitted with U.S. equipment.

High-Tech Guerrilla Tactics

The Lebanon fighting, said Army Chief Gen. George W. Casey in a January speech in Washington, featured "3,000 or so Hezbollah [fighters] embedding themselves in the population, in the urban areas north of Israel . . . attacked by some 30,000 Israeli troops. That's the type of operation that we all need to be thinking about in the future and be preparing for." The fighting, he added, exemplified a new type of war that would become increasingly common in the future: "a hybrid of irregular warfare and conventional warfare."

Hybrid wars, according to retired Marine officer Frank Hoffman, who has written extensively on the subject, blend the lethality of conventional warfare with the tactics and fanaticism of irregular warfare. In the 2006 case, Hezbollah, a quasi-state within a state, fought like a guerrilla force. But it was armed with high-tech weaponry, such as precision guided missiles, that nation-states typically use. Hezbollah forces shot down Israeli helicopters, severely damaged a patrol boat with a cruise missile and destroyed heavily armored tanks by firing guided missiles from hidden bunkers. The organization also used aerial drones to gather intelligence, communicated with encrypted cell phones and watched Israeli troop movements with thermal imaging night-vision equipment.

Hezbollah's members fought in small, dispersed cells from concealed bunkers hidden in mountainous and urban terrain. Their decentralized command-and-control system frustrated repeated Israeli attempts to decapitate the organization. Israel followed a war plan suited for a conventional campaign against organizations with hierarchies and nodal structure, says Hoffman. "Hezbollah is hierarchical at the strategic level, it s political and social structure are very hierarchical, but at the tactical level they fight like guerrillas, in small cells."

Hezbollah, Hoffman says, exemplifies an emerging trend. Future opponents of the United States, particularly nonstate opponents, will wage a hybrid style of warfare because they've learned they can't take on the U.S. military, with its high-tech targeting sensors and overwhelming firepower, in a stand-up fight.

"Lebanon is going to become the Grozny of this decade in terms of case studies," Hoffman says, referring to the Chechen city where Russian forces took a beating in 1994 at the hands of guerrilla fighters. Chechen rebels fought in a traditional tribal style of small dispersed cells, using widely available, yet fairly advanced, weaponry to take a heavy toll on Russian armored columns that became ensnared in the city's urban canyons. Tomorrow's hybrid wars, Hoffman says, will be fought with a rapidly changing blend of tactics and advanced weapons in the "dense urban jungle" of developing world cities.

Israel's plan to defeat Hezbollah relied too heavily on air power, says retired Army major general Robert H. Scales, who advises the service on new weapons and forces to battle hybrid enemies. Precision air strikes can take out an enemy like a nation-state with a fixed structure built around interconnected nodes. But "what if the enemy builds a method of war that is non-nodal?" Scales asks.

This poses a particular challenge to a U.S. war machine that has focused on targeting and destroying an enemy's key command centers and supply lines, usually through bombing campaigns. In Lebanon, even though the IDF fighters controlled the skies, Hezbollah was able to move men and equipment around the battlefield. "To have relatively free rein on the ground under air dominance, literally with fighter aircraft hanging over you, that to me is the essence of hybrid warfare," Scales says.

A hybrid enemy is extremely adaptable. But the U.S. military's weapons buying process is highly bureaucratic. The military lays out requirements that are approved by various oversight bodies. Then manufacturers provide specialized weapons. Hybrid enemies use what's available, most often on the open market, and adapt the weapons to their enemy and the terrain. Suicide bombings confound Western minds, but they are acceptable among hybrid enemies who adhere to what are considered primitive tribal notions of revenge or the heroic warrior. "A diabolical enemy will take you on in an irregular war in order to leverage the best pieces of your technology, but use it the best way he can," Scales says.

An unpublished Defense Science Board report completed last year notes that hybrid enemies are better armed today because lethal conventional weapons can be bought at bargain prices. Staying at a transaction level below that of major weapons' sales, armed groups can rapidly share weaponry and easily exchange knowledge. The availability of commercial technologies means that weapons development costs are virtually nonexistent. Cell phones and digital networks provide advanced command and control. Hybrid adversaries require few of the costly reconnaissance and surveillance systems that travel with U.S. forces to foreign battlefields, such as aerial drones and radar aircraft, because they're fighting in their own territory-often in their own neighborhoods. The report also notes that these potential adversaries use "human guidance"-that is, suicide car bombers-rather than more expensive technical guidance.

One lesson from Lebanon that worries some U.S. military thinkers is that in the many years Israeli Defense Forces spent policing the occupied territories, they lost important skills for conducting major combat operations. IDF units did not train for combat above the small unit level, and key elements such as armor and artillery lost much of their major combat capacity. Army Lt. Col. Gian Gentile has warned that the same thing could be happening to the U.S. military, particularly the Army. At the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., the focus is on counterinsurgency, and large unit maneuver operations are a thing of the past.

Gentile notes that neighborhood policing is different from large-scale maneuver warfare with mechanized units supported by artillery and air power. He says the demands of operations in Iraq mean Army units don't have time to do anything but prepare for counterinsurgency. "If we can ever get through Iraq, then the Army could try to restore some kind of balance and go back to at least partly focusing on conventional war," he says. The lesson of the Iraq war has been not that the U.S. military is weak, rather that it is optimized for a specific task: fighting large conventional armies. And during the past five years it has acquired a new competency-counterinsurgency. The idea of hybrid warfare is to fight in the seam between the two.

The Cult of Technology

Analysts say an important lesson from Lebanon for a U.S. military that is focused on buying expensive weapons systems for shock-and-awe style warfare, was the IDF's over-reliance on technology. In an extensive critique of the IDF's performance, Avi Kober of the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel writes, "The cult of technology has had a weakening effect on traditional military capabilities such as close combat or combat intelligence." The war, he argues, shows that it is difficult if not impossible to destroy a sophisticated guerrilla force by fighting on plasma screens.

Prior to the Iraq war, the archaic notion of lumbering ground forces exchanging blows in close battle was out, replaced with a vision of agile, networked forces fighting on transparent battlefields displayed on computer screens. Enemies would be dispatched with precision weaponry fired from aerial drones or bombers far above the battlefield.

The idea of a revolution in military affairs held powerful sway over U.S. military thinkers because it was based on the notion of American exceptionalism in warfighting. No other nation in the world could afford the enormous costs to develop, build and maintain the battle-network hardware: orbiting constellations of communications, imaging and navigation satellites; a huge fleet of airborne drones; ground scanning radar-equipped aircraft; and command centers crammed with supercomputing power. The conservative writer Max Boot even called it a uniquely American way of war. It has led to a costly cult of technology that dominates the Pentagon's buying decisions. The United States spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined.

America's enthusiasm for high-tech warfare kicked into high gear after the performance of smart bombs in 1991's Operation Desert Storm. The concept "evoked a sense of control" over the uncertainty of war, Army Col. H.R. McMaster noted in a 2003 paper written while he was a fellow at Stanford University. It "swept the imagination off the battlefield and into the computer room and command center." In the past, the thinking went, the fog of battle led to confusion, casualties and uncertain outcomes. In the future, near-perfect intelligence and precision weapons operating from great distances would produce predictability in U.S. military operations.

The initial U.S. campaign in Afghanistan in late 2001, and the oft-repeated story of special operations troops on horseback calling in satellite guided bombs on Taliban positions, confirmed to defense planners that a technology-driven revolution in military affairs had indeed occurred. Taliban fighters who had spent years fighting an enemy with no air force and little artillery stood out in the open and presented easy targets for U.S. air power. The destructive power of 2,000 pound bombs dropped from jet aircraft came as a rude surprise to fighters used to exchanging fire with aged Russian tanks.

But within a few months of fighting, the Taliban changed its tactics. In a study of the March 2002 battle known as Operation Anaconda, military historian and analyst Stephen Biddle notes that every available U.S. surveillance system was focused on a tiny 100-square-kilometer battlefield, trying to find the enemy's fighting positions. But less than half those positions were identified. Assault helicopters dropped U.S. infantry on top of a warren of hidden Taliban bunkers and trenches where they were pinned down by heavy fire and had to be extracted at night. The Taliban positions were then pounded by air attacks for more than a week, but enough fighters remained that U.S. troops had to clear them out in close-quarters fighting.

Dark Places

Hoffman says the United States needs "hybrid warriors," highly adaptable troops able to rapidly shift between competing demands on a chaotic battlefield. They must be prepared for bloody, close-quarters firefights, yet also be ready to protect civilian populations caught up in the fighting. That demands more investment in cultural intelligence and language training to root out an elusive enemy hiding among the people. He says future enemies will avoid the American way of war, refusing to play into our advantages gained through the use of remote sensors and precision firepower.

There are two major components of what the military calls situational awareness: where you are and where the enemy is. Networking has helped troops know better where they are, and where other friendly troops are. But it doesn't solve the problem of finding what some call the "low signature" enemy.

"There's not enough bandwidth and electronic eyes in the universe that are able to stare down a large expanse of ground and detect individuals moving about, particularly in urban clutter and in the midst of people," Scales says. The complexity of warfare stems from the action-reaction dynamic: An enemy being targeted for killing likely will do everything possible to avoid being killed, including hiding from view.

Some say the United States must move away from the current trend of troops fighting via video screens. They can limit situational awareness, analysts say. "Human eyesight is much better than any existing flat-panel display, where you have a very narrow field of vision," says author and historian Steven Zaloga. U.S. Army officers on foot patrol in Iraq often talk about the atmospherics-using all the human senses to evaluate the people and the environment.

According to a 2002 RAND Corp. study funded by the Army Science Board, "An enemy who relies on cover, concealment, deception, intermingling and dispersion will be difficult if not impossible to monitor from overhead assets." Even with projected technological advances, the study noted, "remote assets will not ensure 'understanding' on the future battlefield." By predicating their strategy on remote sensors and long-range precision strikes, analysts wrote, "U.S. military planners could be building a modern-day Maginot line."

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Navy forms fleet to serve Western Hemisphere

Greg Grant — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The 4th Fleet will be headquartered at Mayport, Fla. The Navy will not station ships there permanently, but the establishment of the command will allow the service to respond more quickly to natural disasters such as hurricanes or to emergencies requiring humanitarian relief, Stevenson told reporters on Wednesday. The command will have responsibility for any Navy ship or aircraft deploying to Latin America.

The 4th Fleet originally was created during World War II to hunt enemy submarines and was disbanded in 1950. Today, the 4th Fleet focuses on providing humanitarian assistance and disaster relief in the area, especially in the hurricane-plagued Caribbean. It also provides additional ships, submarines and aircraft for counternarcotics operations in the region.

The surveillance and stealthy monitoring capabilities of Navy submarines make them particularly useful against drug runners, Stevenson said. In recent years, sophisticated drug traffickers have made greater use of small submarines to smuggle drugs into the United States.

The Navy's new maritime strategy elevated disaster relief and humanitarian operations to the same level as combat operations, Stevenson said, and the service's amphibious warfare ships have the shallow draft that allows them to enter the region's ports. They also have the capacity to carry large quantities of medical supplies.

Last year, the hospital ship Comfort provided medical assistance to about 300,000 people. This year, the amphibious ships Boxer and Kearsarge will make about 20 ports of call in the Caribbean and along the East Coast of South America. "It's quite remarkable once the word gets out," Stevenson said about the response when a Navy medical ship makes a port of call.

Navy ships can be positioned nearby when a hurricane is approaching landfall and can move in almost immediately to provide medical care and deliver food and shelter, he said.

Stevenson said the Navy also is mindful of events in Cuba and the chance of another mass migration from the island, which happened in the 1980s and 1990s when thousands fled by small boats for U.S. shores. "If you don't have the capability to rescue these people, you have a disaster on your hands," he said.

In addition, half the nation's oil imports and 40 percent of its exports come from the region. To keep the sea lanes secure, Navy ships partner with ships from other regional naval forces to conduct training exercises and military-to-military exchanges.

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Reconstruction teams hindered by lack of resources, skills

Greg Grant — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

So-called provincial reconstruction teams, which also provide security in local areas, try their best to make do with what resources are available, but the government "has not gone far enough or fast enough," to support them, according to a six-month investigation into the PRT program. "[P]rocesses and structures in Washington still resemble what was used in the Cold War," rather than what is needed in today's conflicts, the report said.

PRTs were supposed to exemplify the type of interagency unit that could combine development expertise with military muscle to conduct nation building in war-torn countries. Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan often perform a local security function, but their main role is to fund local development projects and enhance ties to the national government.

Initiatives that PRTs have undertaken include school construction and repair, initiating hydroelectric projects, building clinics and hospitals, providing medical supplies, conducting village assessments, digging wells, building dams and irrigation channels, founding orphanages, renovating electrical grids and power facilities, and establishing micro-businesses.

Yet, the agencies involved are often at a loss to define exactly what they want PRTs to do because there is no clear definition of their mission or operation plan, the report noted: "[W]e were amazed that, after five years, the PRT mission has not been more clearly defined."

Furthermore, there are no established metrics to judge PRT effectiveness. The committee "disagrees with those who suggest that the only metric for success of the PRTs is when they are no longer needed," the report said.

Of the 26 PRTs in Afghanistan, the United States leads 12, while NATO countries staff the remainder. In Iraq, there are 11 stand-alone teams, and an additional 13 that work as a part of combat brigades. The PRTs in Afghanistan are led by either an Air Force lieutenant colonel or a Navy commander. In Iraq, State personnel lead the PRTs. Their structure is similar, with about 50 to 100 members, including civil affairs and psychological operations teams, along with three or four civilians, typically development experts from the U.S. Agency for International Development or the State Department.

PRTs are mostly ad hoc outfits, commonly described by sources in the committee report as a "pickup game." They are largely personality dependant for their success or failure, and there are no clear lines of authority, because the leaders often answer to multiple commands both in the country where they operate as well as to civilian agencies in Washington.

The report recommended establishing unity of command for PRTs at the local and national levels. "[T]here is no 'quarterback' for PRTs," the report said, nor is there one for stability, reconstruction and security planning or operations. "The nation needs these quarterbacks now."

The lack of clear lines of authority complicates PRT funding as different agencies control various funds leading to "a confusing array of 'pots of money' with differing authorities and limitations." the report noted.

PRTs draw heavily on the military's Commander's Emergency Response Program funds, because of the wide discretion given commanders and for the money's timely dispersal. Funds from other sources, such as from USAID and State, can take months to get approval and come with restrictions that dictate the projects that are funded, rather than actual local needs.

Shortages of basic equipment, such as radios, computers and office equipment, hinder PRT efforts. The teams often are given worn-out or discarded military equipment from combat units, including worn Humvees, which frequently break down. PRTs also suffer from a lack of qualified interpreters.

A significant challenge is finding people with the needed skills, such as civil affairs and development, who also are willing to serve in combat zones. While Defense provides the majority of PRT members, there are not enough civil affairs staffers to fill all the teams' open slots.

For the most part, PRT commanders and military personnel lack civil affairs training, the report said. As the Pentagon makes stability operations a core military mission on par with combat operations, the secretary of Defense must clearly define the important role civil affairs will play and how many more civil affairs trained troops might be required.

The report said because there are not enough people with the needed skills and experience to carry out the PRTs mission, positions are filled with those who happen to be available or who volunteer. Some personnel did not so much willingly volunteer, as they were "volunteered" by their organizations, according to the committee's survey of PRT members. Because government workers lack many of the skills needed for post-conflict reconstruction, private contractors frequently are hired.

The report echoed recent comments by Defense Secretary Robert Gates other agencies with expertise in reconstruction and development must cultivate more of an "expeditionary" capability for nation building in distant conflict zones.

Several sources told committee investigators that they feared that serving with a PRT would be a "career disruption, not career enhancing," because officer promotion boards might not place the same value on this service as they would for troops serving in conventional combat units. PRT personnel said their jobs are more special operations than those of conventional units, and should be seen as the cutting edge of overseas deployments.

Neither the military nor civilian agencies offer a career track for personnel performing what the government calls "stability and reconstruction operations." Some respondents to the committee investigators said they would be willing to serve another PRT tour, but there did not seem to be an attempt to capture past experience for future use, and when finished, they "completely fall off [the government's] radar."

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Anthropologists lend military insight into customs, values of foreign cultures

Greg Grant — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Small teams of social scientists and anthropologists working with American units to map the "human terrain" in Iraq and Afghanistan and use "soft power" to engage local populations have saved lives and are an important tool in nation building, according to military officials.

In today's irregular wars, "battlefields are often civilian neighborhoods" where American troops face an "indistinguishable mix" of enemy fighters and innocent civilians, said Andre van Tilborg, deputy undersecretary of Defense for science and technology, at a hearing on Thursday before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities. Social scientists can help provide the cultural knowledge that could mean the difference between gun battles and peaceful outcomes in troops' daily interaction with foreign cultures, van Tilborg said.

He said the Pentagon intends to spend roughly $150 million this year on social science research to better understand tribal cultures and social networks. The military wants to use part of that money to increase dramatically the number of Human Terrain Teams operating with military units. The proposal is highly controversial in the academic community, which believes it's an ethical violation for social scientists to work hand-in-hand with troops in war zones.

The program is small, with only eight HTTs -- six in Iraq and two in Afghanistan. The 5- to 8-person teams work with country-specific experts located at a Reach-back Research Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

The largely civilian scientific teams, using laptop computers and human terrain mapping software, conducted village assessments that provide commanders with a detailed data repository on the social groups within tribal communities: their interests, beliefs, motivating factors and leaders. "We learned that the population is the center of gravity, the enemy is hiding among the people and we must understand the culture to win," said Army Col. Martin Schweitzer, who recently returned from a 15-month combat tour in Afghanistan and whose brigade of paratroopers was the first to use an HTT.

He said the teams functioned not just as cultural advisers, but identified the key players within tribal communities whose power structure and patronage networks often confound Western minds. The scientific team questioned the aggressive and firepower-heavy tactics the American troops had used to combat Taliban insurgents in a particular Afghan province, Schweitzer said. That approach was based on a misreading of the local tribes, he pointed out.

The HTT learned that the true power brokers in the area were not the village elders, who were mostly Taliban supporters, but rather the local mullahs, who were Islamic clerics. After redirecting their outreach efforts to the mullahs, Schweitzer said his troops saw a dramatic decrease in Taliban attacks. "For five years, we got nothing from the community," he said. "After meeting the mullahs, we had no more bullets for 28 days, captured 80 Afghan-born Taliban and 32 foreign fighters." The "shadow Taliban" government in the area was eliminated, he said.

Addressing the concerns of the academic community about social scientists working in counterinsurgency operations, Schweitzer said: "The team is not an intelligence tool used to target individuals," and are not qualified or trained to aid in identifying or selecting enemy fighters to be either killed or captured. He said that role is performed by intelligence officers.

The Afghan population is exhausted by the constant fighting and deaths of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire, Schweitzer said, so any combat operation, even those that target the Taliban, can be seen as a "step back." The scientific team's impact was "exponentially powerful" he said, leading to a 60 percent to 70 percent reduction in combat operations in his area. The scientific teams typically work with Provincial Reconstruction Teams, small units made up of civil affairs troops and economic development experts from the Agency for International Development and the State Department, that operate in local communities.

Schweitzer said a PRT commander told him that before the HTT arrived, team members were just "ricocheting around," talking to random people, until they identified the power brokers in each village.

While some military personnel might serve with the HTT's, usually reserve officers, the teams are built around social scientists. Much more important than knowledge or expertise in the local Afghan culture, he said, was their scientific training and experience as anthropologists. That allows them to conduct the human dimension analysis and decipher a local culture's norms and values, Schweitzer said. At least one HTT should accompany each battalion-sized unit, roughly 800 troops, deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, he said.

In a speech last week to the Association of American Universities, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Pentagon must further its understanding of foreign countries and cultures with the help of the social science research community.

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Gates tells military services to prepare for unconventional wars

Greg Grant — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Monday urged the military services to stop spending money on costly weapons systems designed to fight big, conventional wars and focus instead on training and preparing to better fight irregular wars and battle terrorist networks.

In a speech to cadets at West Point, N.Y., Gates said the military must better prepare to fight "brutal and adaptive insurgencies and terrorists." In "long, messy unconventional conflicts" against such enemies, he said, traditional measures of military might, such as the amount of firepower that can be directed at a target, will be less important than other elements of national power, such as economic and diplomatic might.

Gates said officers must provide civilian leaders with candid advice and "tell blunt truths." He urged the next generation of Army officers to "take on the mantle of fearless, thoughtful, but loyal dissent," and to protect junior officers who critique the military services. But he also warned officers to stop the practice of using their ties to defense contractors and Congress to do "end runs" around civilian leaders who try to cancel costly weapons programs.

The Defense secretary said that even after a drawdown of forces in Iraq, American troops will continue to battle "violent jihadist networks" in other countries. "To paraphrase the Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, we may not be interested in the long war, but the long war is interested in us," he said.

In a speech earlier in the day to students at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., Gates said, "Ultimate success or failure will increasingly depend more on shaping the behavior of others -- friends and adversaries, and most importantly, the people in between." Crafting a military designed for more complex wars among civilian populations demands that all the services critically examine their cultures, and discard those parts that are barriers to change, he said.

Gates said the Army that invaded Iraq in 2003 was a force still designed and equipped to fight the Cold War that had ended more than a decade earlier. Hard lessons learned battling guerrilla fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan should determine the service's future doctrine, the weapons it buys and the people it recruits, he said. Gates warned against a repeat of historical patterns where "bureaucratic nature" takes hold and the Army's "irregular [warfare] capabilities" are marginalized, an allusion to the post-Vietnam decline in counterinsurgency expertise.

Echoing a theme he has promoted over the past year, Gates told cadets at West Point that the Army should create an advisory corps of soldiers to build partnerships with foreign militaries. "From the standpoint of America's national security, the most important assignment in your military career may not necessarily be commanding U.S. soldiers, but advising or mentoring the troops of other nations as they battle forces of terror and instability within their own borders," he said.

At Maxwell Air Force Base, Gates was particularly harsh in his criticism of the Air Force, saying, for example, that convincing the service to provide more aerial drones in Iraq and Afghanistan has been "like pulling teeth." He blamed a culture that values pilots in the cockpit more than operators remotely piloting drones.

Gates said the Air Force must transform its entire organization in light of the changing nature of warfare. The aircraft the service is buying, he said, are too costly and ill-suited to battling guerrilla enemies who cannot challenge America's command of the skies. "The last time a U.S. ground force was attacked from the sky was more than half a century ago, and the last Air Force jet lost to aerial combat was in Vietnam," he said. The service, he added, must rethink "long-standing … assumptions and priorities" about which missions require "certified pilots" and which can be carried out by unmanned aircraft. He said the Air Force's officer promotion system also must reflect these new realities.

Airmen must undergo cultural and language training, Gates said, because in the future they will do less bombing and more humanitarian operations, working directly with local populations and non-governmental organizations. He said training at the Air Force's premier aerial combat center, "Red Flag," located at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., should be modified to include more nation-building tasks involving civilians and other government agencies.

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GAO: Administration lacks plan to combat terrorists in Pakistan

Greg Grant — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

In a scathing critique of the Bush administration's failure to destroy a resurgent al Qaeda, the Government Accountability Office said the terrorist group is training operatives at a safe haven in Pakistan's lawless tribal region and is in the final stages of preparing another attack inside the United States.

GAO said the administration never developed a plan to destroy the terrorist threat or to shut down the safe havens in Pakistan, despite recommendations by the president's own national security strategy, the findings of the 9/11 commission and legislative mandates from Congress. GAO stated clearly where the blame for this failure resides: "The president of the United States has primary responsibility to ensure that his national security strategy is carried out effectively."

According to the report, the Bush administration has relied on the Pakistani military to combat al Qaeda, but has not adequately monitored billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars sent to the Pakistani government for that purpose. The Pakistani military has had some "tactical successes," GAO noted, and since 2001 has helped kill or capture hundreds of suspected terrorists and al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Despite those successes, and $10.5 billion in U.S. aid, Pakistan's efforts for the most part have failed, GAO said, and officials from intelligence agencies and the Defense and State departments have concluded that al Qaeda continues to recruit and train terrorists and launch attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan from the tribal regions. Al Qaeda's central leadership is based in the tribal regions and is using the safe haven to "put the last element necessary to launch another attack against America into place, including the identification, training and positioning of Western operatives for an attack," the report said.

Pakistan's mountainous tribal region shares a 373-mile border with Afghanistan, and its 3.1 million inhabitants suffer from underemployment and extreme poverty. The area is different from the rest of Pakistan and is governed by a legal and administrative system that's a holdover from the British colonial period; the tribes have almost no political representation and few legal rights.

The watchdog agency said U.S. and Pakistani officials acknowledged that military operations alone will not restore security to the tribal regions. Recognizing the growing terrorist threat, and absent guidance from Washington, U.S. Embassy officials in Pakistan began in 2006 to cobble together their own efforts at combating militant groups involving a mixture of military, development and diplomatic measures.

The embassy plan would provide $2 billion over nine years for economic development and extend to Pakistan government control over the tribal regions. It also would include counterinsurgency training of Pakistani security forces. Administration support in implementing or funding that effort has not been forthcoming, GAO said.

The agency recommended that the White House put together a comprehensive plan using all elements of national power -- integrating Defense, State, the U.S. Agency for International Development and intelligence community resources -- to shut down the terrorist safe haven, and designate one person in charge of coordinating that effort.

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Cost estimates for Army equipment repair, upgrades go up by billions

Greg Grant — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Adding to the cost is the Army's modularity initiative, which is designed to convert its organizational building block from large divisions to more agile brigades. That effort will cost more and take longer than original Army estimates, the Government Accountability Office concluded in recent congressional testimony (GAO-08-669T). The Army needs much more equipment than originally thought because it now plans to convert and outfit National Guard units as well as active units and is adding 74,000 soldiers to its active-duty ranks.

GAO said it lacks a clear picture of the Army's funding needs because the service has yet to provide a plan detailing how it will restructure existing forces and add six new combat brigades. The report said congressional oversight of Army equipment needs has been complicated by multiple funding requests for the same purpose -- such as replacing pre-positioned equipment stocks -- that draw from both the defense budget and emergency supplemental appropriations.

The Army initially estimated that converting to a modular organization would cost $52.5 billion from 2005 to 2011. The service has since said it will take until at least 2017 to make up shortfalls in equipment for modular units, but it has not revised its cost estimate. GAO said the Army's costs will climb because the original estimate was based on a modular design that has since changed, and it assumed National Guard and reserve units would keep older equipment. The Army now wants to outfit National Guard and reserve units with the same equipment as active-duty forces because the Guard and reserve units are frequently used in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In early 2007, the Army estimated it would cost $70 billion to equip six new combat brigades. GAO said that estimate was not "transparent or comprehensive," and likely was too low. The service recently moved up its deadline to complete the expansion from 2013 to 2010, but has yet to develop a revised funding plan, GAO said.

The Army's costs to repair war-worn equipment, which the service calls "reset," also has climbed sharply, from $3.3 billion in 2004 to more than $17 billion in 2007. The service will require reset funding for the duration of the war and for two to three years after combat operations stop. GAO said its estimates show the Army will require at least $118.5 billion for reset from 2004 to 2013. Those costs will increase the longer the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue.

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Defense corporations urge increase in weapons investment

Greg Grant — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The next administration should increase the Defense Department's budget and establish a floor for annual defense spending of no less than 4 percent of the gross domestic product, according to the aerospace and defense industry's trade association.

With demands on the federal budget mounting due to deficits and growth in entitlement and other domestic programs, the next administration must resist political pressure to cut defense spending as U.S. involvement in Iraq is reduced, said a report by the Aerospace Industries Association.

Maintaining the U.S. military's technological advantage over potential opponents requires a substantial increase in modernization spending, the report said, calling for steady weapons procurement funding of $120 billion to $150 billion per year. The Pentagon requested $104 billion for fiscal 2009.

"We want our warfighters to go into battle with a decided technological edge … we are not looking for an even playing field," said Marion Blakey, president of AIA, at a news conference on Tuesday. The costs to the country of fighting a war without that technological edge would be enormous, she added.

Military spending on new weapons systems is being squeezed by rising personnel costs, a sharp increase in the operations and maintenance portion of the Defense budget due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other overseas operations, and the need to repair war-worn equipment.

The report said funding to repair and replace all equipment damaged or worn out in combat operations should come from separate supplemental appropriations and not from the baseline Defense budget. Supplementals should continue for several years after troops leave Iraq and Afghanistan, the study added. "We can't let the cost of the current conflict jeopardize success in the next one," Blakey said.

Weapons and equipment procurement amounted to $50 billion to $70 billion per year in the 2007 and 2008 supplementals, according to the report. There has been pressure from some in Congress to include war-related funding in the Defense budget.

Personnel costs, including pay, health care and training are consuming ever larger chunks of the Defense budget. While all the presidential candidates have called for stepping up ground forces, they haven't talked about an increase in the overall Defense budget, Blakey said.

The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review will begin almost immediately after the next administration comes into office. The 2006 QDR "tilted" toward the kinds of fighting seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, she said, but the 2010 QDR must plan for "near peer regional conflicts," which means countries such as China and Russia, while also continuing the fight against global terrorism.

Blakey said AIA provided the report to the presidential candidates and Congress to inspire debate on defense modernization, so it won't be "left on the side of the table" as policymakers put together future budgets. A follow-up report due out this summer will take an in-depth look at specific defense areas including tactical aviation, space systems and logistics.

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Army urged to develop process to wage war in cyberspace

Greg Grant — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

With wars increasingly fought among the people, information is now an element of combat power as important as lethal action in determining a conflict's eventual outcome, said an Army officer who heads the services computer warfare efforts.

The battle for a population's state of mind demands a sophisticated information operations campaign that responds more rapidly than terrorists and insurgent groups to exploit the virtual battlefield. "There was a day when we were operating at foot speed," said Army Col. Wayne Parks, who directs the service's Computer Network Operations and Electronic Warfare at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. "Now we're moving at cyber speed."

Digitization has dramatically increased the pace at which information moves about the battlefield, he said. Unlike the air and space domains, the Army operates on the ground, which means among the people, Parks said in a conference call with reporters. America's enemies influence a populations' mind-set by using Web sites and chat rooms to spread propaganda that casts the U.S. military in a bad light.

"We have to pick up the pace, … respond, react, be proactive enough to stay out ahead of the speed of megabytes," he said.

The Army has turned to academia for expertise in the humanities and social sciences to better understand foreign cultures and how to influence societies with information operations.

The service now must find a way to "maneuver around" a potential enemy's information campaign, Parks said. Being proactive, rather than simply reacting to an enemy's misinformation, is of utmost importance, he said, because members of the public often believe the first thing they hear, even if it's not true. In addition, the military also hacks into jihadi Web sites to try to stop the spread of enemy propaganda.

Recent surveys conducted by the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan found that the service's training and officers' past combat experience left them "ill-prepared" for the "interactive complexity" of information operations. Operating with the speed and agility that the 21st century information age demands is "not part of their DNA," and the Army "continues to grope for a staff process" to best leverage the power of information, according to a discussion paper e-mailed to reporters.

Rather than the ad hoc approach to information operations the Army has pursued, the paper designated specific staff responsibilities for everything from informing and educating the public (delegated to the public affairs and psychological operations staff) to hacking into enemy computer networks (a task for intelligence officers). The service is recruiting a younger generation of hackers, Parks said, for, as the Army puts it, "computer network attack and computer network defend."

The United States finds itself more often fighting small, distributed terrorist and insurgent cells that are able to communicate and coordinate attacks using cell phones and that can share on Web sites lessons on the best way to attack U.S. forces. The challenge is finding weaknesses in the enemy's computer network that can be exploited, Parks said.

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Military analysts predict prolonged U.S. presence in Iraq

Greg Grant — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

As Army Gen. David Petraeus prepares to deliver his assessment of post-surge progress on the Iraq war to Congress next week, analysts and military officials are saying that while violence in the country is down, the weakness of Iraq's central government and security forces means U.S. troops won't return home any time soon.

After years of denying there is a civil war in Iraq, Petraeus, the former coalition ground commander, told reporters in March that it is now largely a communal civil war for power and resources, both between the minority Sunni and majority Shia populations and among competing Shia parties.

Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, who served for 15 months as second in command to Petraeus, said political reconciliation among competing factions will determine Iraq's long-term prospects for stability. Odierno said the focus of U.S. efforts must shift from providing security to building Iraq's national and local governments.

Some see a reconciliation among the sects and the various armed groups in Iraq as unlikely because so much is at stake. "These are struggles over money and power, which are existential for all of the people involved. … Their lives, their money, everything about them is at hazard," said Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, at a March 26 event.

Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that ending Iraq's communal civil war will require negotiating a power-sharing deal that leads to a cease-fire between competing groups, and then having enough troops to remain in Iraq as a peacekeeping force for years to come. "The challenge for the U.S. military is how to transition to this new phase of the conflict from warfighting to peacekeeping," he said.

There is little chance of U.S. troops coming home in the near future, said Cordesman. "When you see the timelines on the [U.S. military's] PowerPoint [charts] when you're in Iraq, they're not 2009; they're 2012, 2014, 2020." He did not expect troop numbers to remain at current levels, but a significant number will remain for several years in "strategic overwatch," working as advisers and providing a backstop to Iraqi troops.

Cordesman said that U.S. efforts to build a central government in Iraq have proved a failure so far. "We've blown through $44 billion in U.S. aid dollars and $33 billion worth of Iraqi money." Yet, "we have no effectiveness measures and no plan to transfer what has been successful to the Iraqi government, which effectively can't spend its own national budget and which has no ability to provide government services, effective police, or criminal justice."

He said there is little chance of improvement in the near term and that the U.S. military has turned its efforts to improving local level governance, "to make up for the fact that we know we can't make the central government effective within the next few years."

But by focusing on strengthening local power instead of a strong central government, the U.S. could be courting more serious problems. Cordesman said the Iraqi police, a force larger than the Iraqi army, is becoming local and regionally oriented, tied to various governors and local authorities. Those police forces operate with little to no national oversight and without courts or a criminal justice system. "Every other place in the world [where] this has been tried -- without a criminal justice system -- the police become part of the problem," he said. "[They are] corrupt, tied to local political factions, and don't bring the kind of security you want."

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Panel concludes Reserves need greater job flexibility, career choices

Greg Grant — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

To attract the most sought-after employees, the Defense Department must adopt more flexible working environments, similar to the private sector's recognition that today's employees frequently change jobs during their lives, according to the final report on the future of the National Guard and Reserves.

To compete for a shrinking pool of qualified people, the Reserves should provide citizen-soldiers an expanded menu of choices in pay and benefits, and flexibility in the duration of active-duty service, said David S.C. Chu, Defense undersecretary for personnel and readiness at a Center for Strategic and International Studies conference on Wednesday. Chu discussed the final report of the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, a panel established by Congress in the 2005 Defense authorization act.

The Army Reserves has outperformed the active Army in recruitment and retention, partly because it offers a "wider set of choices" particularly as it relates to conditions of service, said Chu. "If offering choice is a key element of why we have been successful in sustaining the operational reserve up to today, should we not extend that set of choice in terms of compensation, in terms of other benefits, and other conditions of service?"

Part of the Reserves' appeal is that the service provides people with more than one way to serve the country in uniform. While many citizens cannot make the commitment to active duty because of career or family, they still want to serve. Pay levels are likely less important to citizen-soldiers, who already receive compensation in the private sector, than providing them with greater flexibility and choice in how to use their civilian job skills while serving on active duty.

The commission's report said because of the demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Reserves has shifted from a purely strategic force to an operational force with frequent combat deployments. But Defense's personnel policies have not changed to account for new realities. The report includes 95 recommendations for reform that will require a "major restructuring of laws and DoD's budget," it said.

The country needs one Army made up of both active and reserve components, not multiple armies, said Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau. And that one Army must be properly funded and equipped. "If we make up half the [Army], we ought to have half the equipment," Blum said. The service also risks losing personnel "because [Defense] is unwilling to buy them a truck or a radio that is modern and works. It's ridiculous… it's all about money, that's what it really comes down to," he said, also speaking at the CSIS conference.

Blum said most of the Guard's funding is in "risky" supplemental funding and not part of the appropriated budget. When the funds to equip and train reserve soldiers come through the supplementals instead of the base budget, "it's almost not realistic," Blum said. "We have not advocated for a separate service; however, if they don't fix this equipping and budget and funding business, you're liable to see that one day. There is more than a moderate desire to establish a separate service," he said.

Blum said the Guard and Reserves are an "operational force," but it's not recognized or properly funded as such. Reserves make up about 40 percent of the Army's total combat power. During the past two years, the Reserves provided more than half of all Army forces deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as 100 percent of the personnel deployed to peacekeeping missions in the Balkans and Sinai, he said. When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005, the Guard provided 50,000 soldiers in six days, while at the same time 70,000 reserve soldiers were deployed overseas.

Speaking for the Army staff, Maj. Gen. David Fastabend, director of Army strategy, plans and policy, said when soldiers are deployed to a war zone there is no difference in how active-duty service members and Reserves are equipped. He said policymakers should realize that the reserve and active components of the Army have separate charters, which dictate whether they're controlled at the federal or state levels as well as different homeland security missions.

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Getting Tanked

Greg Grant — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

With a price tag of $160 billion, the Army's Future Combat Systems might be one tank too many.

When the Defense secretary calls a weapons program unaffordable, it could spell trouble for its future. "If you look at the total cost of the Future Combat Systems, frankly, it is hard for me to see how that program can be completed in its entirety," said Robert Gates before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 6.

Army leaders shrugged off Gates' comments, determined to build their flagship $160 billion FCS modernization program, which includes a new class of armored vehicles, robots, aerial drones and sensors connected by a sophisticated battle command network.

Army Secretary Pete Geren called the seven-year-old program the Army's No. 1 modernization priority and defended its cost. "At its peak, [FCS] amounts to a third of our investment accounts, which . . . represent about a quarter of our overall budget," he told the House Armed Services Committee on Feb. 28. The new FCS armored vehicles, scheduled for deployment in 2015, will equip 15 of the Army's 48 planned active brigades.

After the F-35 fighter, FCS is the Pentagon's costliest weapons program. The Army says FCS will cost $120 billion, while the Defense secretary's office estimates a price tag of $160 billion. A 2006 study from the Congressional Budget Office said, factoring in historic weapons program cost growth, FCS could run $16 billion per year, significantly higher than the Army's estimate of $10 billion per year.

Recently, the Army tried to shift the debate over FCS from the planned eight armored vehicles to the benefits of the battle command network, including what the Army calls "spinouts"-upgraded sensors, defensive systems and digitized communications that can be retrofitted to its existing battle fleet.

In congressional hearings on the Army budget, Army chief Gen. George W. Casey talked about the FCS network and new sensors, but barely mentioned tanks-by far the most expensive hardware in the program. The Army faces a challenge of convincing lawmakers that pricey new FCS armored vehicles are necessary for future conflicts when it's already building thousands of new tanks.

The Army refers to that program, in which it repairs battle-worn tanks returning from Iraq, as reset. The service says the fighting in Iraq is wearing down its armored fighting vehicles at a furious pace. The operational tempo of Abrams tanks, Bradleys and Strykers means a yearlong deployment in Iraq equals about five years of normal wear and tear.

According to CBO, the Army's 70-ton M1 Abrams tank was built for high-intensity combat against Warsaw Pact tanks on Europe's central front, so driving around Iraq's streets should be a breeze. Moreover, many of those tanks sit idle on bases in Iraq. According to CBO, in 2006 the average Abrams tank was about 15 years old and had 5,000 miles on it. Those tanks should be able to accumulate 50,000 miles before being retired, congressional auditors said.

The Abrams tank fleet is actually getting younger, because when the Army sends a tank over to Iraq, it essentially receives a new one in return. This is how it works: When a tank returns from Iraq, it is shipped off to one of the Army's massive repair depots-Red River in Texas, or Anniston, Ala. Then the 70-ton beast is stripped, cleaned and reassembled with mostly new parts, including engines, tracks, drive train and computer network.

Tanks are returned to what the Army calls a "zero hour, zero mile" condition, essentially showroom floor quality. They are outfitted with the most modern targeting computers, infrared and other sensors, and digitized communications. They require a two-year stay at the Army depots at a cost of $5.4 million per vehicle, roughly equivalent to the cost of building a new Abrams tank from scratch.

With the Army building-or rebuilding-a fleet of Abrams tanks designed to last decades, it becomes more difficult to argue the service needs new tanks. The Army says the new vehicles are a key part of the entire FCS network, but officials also acknowledge that the network can be retrofitted to existing tanks.

Another challenge is determining the tank's role in war. Traditionally, tanks fought each other on the open battlefield, but few countries outside the United States amass large tank fleets now. Also, wars fought predominantly in cities are replacing high-intensity open-field battles. In Baghdad, for example, the Abrams often is used as a heavily armored mobile pillbox, guarding key intersections and entrances to bases.

The Israeli army, experienced in urban occupation duty, has tanks with bathrooms so crews can sit inside for days in the Palestinian territories without leaving the safety of the machine. A tank manufactured for urban occupation duty needs thicker armor and less mobility than one designed for open-field battle. The FCS vehicles are lighter with much thinner armor than the Abrams.

The other important role for armored vehicles in urban terrain is to move troops from point A to point B. In a city's narrow streets, wheeled armored vehicles are better than tanks because they move faster, are quieter, carry more troops and do less damage to streets. European armies are busy exchanging their heavy battle tanks for wheeled armored vehicles because they're more useful in places where future wars will be fought.

The Army is buying the Stryker wheeled vehicle, which has proved valuable in Iraq's urban combat. Strykers and Abrams make for a powerful and flexible combination. The Army has yet to make a compelling argument for what the FCS family of armored vehicles adds to the mix.

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Shortage of helicopters hampers troops in Afghanistan, observers say

Greg Grant — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

When President Bush travels to the NATO summit this week he is expected to push member nations to commit additional ground forces to Afghanistan to battle a resurgent Taliban force. While additional troops will help, some say the need for more helicopters to ferry soldiers and equipment on the battlefield is just as critical.

Afghanistan's vast and mountainous terrain places a premium on helicopters to moving soldiers and material, not unlike during the Vietnam War when troops were dependent on the aircraft for mobility. Afghanistan has a limited road network that is easily monitored by insurgents who often have advance warning of approaching American patrols and set up roadside bombs or ambushes.

NATO operations have been hobbled by the lack of heavy-lift helicopters. The alliance even chartered commercial aircraft to aid resupply efforts, but they cannot be used in combat operations. "There are certainly thousands of helicopters available to the alliance, but very few have made their way to support the European allies, and it's a major problem and a major failing of the NATO alliance," said Nicholas Burns, undersecretary of State for political affairs, speaking at a Washington event on Feb. 27.

In the violent Kandahar area of southern Afghanistan, under British command, NATO draws on 11 CH-47 Chinooks -- eight British and three Dutch -- the workhorse helicopter of this war. The enormous twin-rotor Chinooks are essential because they have a "high and hot" capability: the power to carry heavy loads at high altitudes, such as in Afghanistan's arid mountains, during the hot summer months.

The Army has deployed to Afghanistan two combat aviation brigades with 24 CH-47 Chinook heavy-lift helicopters, from its inventory of 450 Chinooks. The aircraft has room for approximately 30 troops or can carry 10 tons of equipment. One heavy-lift battalion of 12 Chinooks deployed to the Kandahar area extended its tour in 2007 to help alleviate the NATO shortfall. But that unit is due to leave Afghanistan early this year. The other Army aviation brigade supports troops in eastern Afghanistan.

The helicopter shortfall is critical because Afghanistan's nascent security forces, spread out in isolated security posts, cannot depend on U.S. and European military firepower if they run into sizable Taliban groups. The Afghan security forces "need to know that they can be saved when they are being attacked," said Rick Barton, director of the Post Conflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"That 15-minute response or 30-minute response, at the very least the one-hour response, has to be provided for them because they are not capable of hanging out there much longer than that. They either have to run or they will be overrun in that period of time," Barton said. Between 70 and 100 additional heavy-lift helicopters are needed in southern Afghanistan, he said.

NATO has tried to transform itself from a defensive alliance to one that can respond to overseas conflicts, but most European militaries remain oriented to defending their own borders. They lack the strategic and tactical airlift found in the U.S. inventory to operate in distant lands.

Bush recently authorized sending an additional 3,200 Marines to Kandahar for seven months to aid British, Canadian and Dutch forces fighting there. The Marines' heavy-lift helicopter, the CH-53E Super Stallion, operates from ships and in maritime environments, and is not as capable in high-hot areas as the Army's Chinook.

There are 55,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, including about 30,000 U.S. soldiers, counting the Marine reinforcements. France announced it will send an additional 1,000 troops, and Britain is expected to send a similar number sometime this spring.

NATO is stuck in a "vicious, paradoxical circle," in which the alliance uses attack jets to compensate for the lack of boots on the ground, said Julianne Smith, director of the Europe Program at CSIS, and Michael Williams, head of the Transatlantic Program at the Royal United Services Institute, in a March 31 commentary. Aerial bombing against insurgents increases the risk to civilians, prompting outrage among the European electorate, which then puts pressure on its leaders to further limit troop deployments.

Convincing European nations to contribute more troops is unlikely, but NATO would do well to buy more helicopters, said Smith and Williams. They advocate establishment of a NATO common operations fund for such purchases.

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Navy must start asking Congress for more money, says analyst

Greg Grant — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

If the Navy doesn't want to end up on the losing side of the budget battle among the military services, it needs to start calling publicly for more money instead of flying below the radar, said a congressional budget expert earlier this week.

Ron O'Rourke, a naval analyst with the Congressional Research Service, said that of all the services, the Navy is the least well-positioned to get what it wants in the looming battle over a Defense budget he repeatedly characterized as "less open ended" than previous budget cycles. He spoke Tuesday at the Navy League Sea Air Space exposition in Washington, D.C.

As the military commitment in Iraq is reduced, pressure on the Defense budget will increase as Congress becomes less willing to provide extra money in emergency wartime supplementals. The Army recently said it needs up to $260 billion per year to continue fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, increase its size and repair war-worn equipment. The Air Force said it needs at least $20 billion more per year for the next five years, or its aging planes will fall out of the sky.

For its part, the Navy largely has been silent about extra funding needs. While that may play well with officials in the Pentagon, O'Rourke said, it's destroying the Navy's credibility on Capitol Hill. The Navy continually has failed to provide accurate cost estimates for its 30-year shipbuilding plan, intended to construct a modern 313-ship battle fleet.

At a March 14 House Armed Services subcommittee hearing, Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., called the Navy plan "pure fantasy" and unaffordable under current budgets.

Adding to the Navy's credibility problem, O'Rourke said, was the agency's characterization as "worst case scenario" estimates from the Congressional Budget Office that pegged shipbuilding costs as much higher than the Navy's own figures. The Navy then released a new cost estimate that was 40 percent higher than the 2007 number -- one that was closer to CBO's figures. O'Rourke said lawmakers now put more stock in CBO's numbers.

O'Rourke said that while competition among the services to fund their prized weapons programs will continue to grow, the Navy is the least well-positioned to lay claim to available funding. Repairing the Army's and Marine Corps' war-worn equipment returning from Iraq is viewed by many lawmakers as a top funding priority. The Navy's maritime strategy that envisioned a partnership with foreign navies to patrol sea lanes convinced some lawmakers that other nations can shoulder that burden.

O'Rourke said most national security discussions focus on terrorism and do not include the issue of Chinese military modernization, a subject directly related to the Navy's shipbuilding plan. He said the Navy should begin talking more frequently, "without exaggeration," about China's military modernization, and the potential risks it poses to U.S. security. He also said the service must begin to lay the groundwork for larger budget requests now by honestly telling Congress how much it needs for shipbuilding.

Speaking at the same event, the Navy's Fleet Forces commander, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, said his service's knee-jerk reaction of wanting to build new weapons or systems immediately as countermeasures when potential enemies field a new missile, ship or aircraft, drives costs to unacceptable levels. He said that while building a new weapon occasionally might be the right approach, seeking "one-on-one" technical solutions to every military challenge forces defense manufacturers to push the technology envelope, an expensive approach over the long haul.

Instead, Greenert advocates a broader "end-to-end" solution that looks at adjusting tactics and doctrine, using deception, seeking out better intelligence and borrowing best practices from the other services.

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GAO: Military should consider breaking up FCS

Greg Grant — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Military leaders should consider breaking up the Army's troubled Future Combat Systems modernization program and field only a subset of the originally planned battle suite of armored vehicles, robots, aerial drones and sensors, if any of the components can be shown to actually work, congressional investigators said. A Government Accountability Office report released this week stated, "DoD concurred with our recommendations."

FCS faces significant delays and soaring costs and is unlikely to deliver the capabilities originally promised by the Army and lead manufacturer Boeing Co., according to the report. "The knowledge demonstrated thus far is well short of a program halfway through both its development schedule and its budget," GAO said. The $160 billion program faces a congressionally mandated milestone review early next year that is likely to be the "definitive decision" on its future.

Prior to the review, GAO recommended that the secretary of Defense establish "objective and quantitative criteria" that the program must meet to "justify its continuation." Along with demonstrating various key technologies, the Army must reconcile its cost estimate with higher independent estimates and show it can afford the program over the long term, given competing budget demands. FCS consists of 14 systems, including eight new armored vehicles to replace tanks, infantry carriers and self-propelled artillery; two classes of aerial drones; several robotic ground vehicles; and an attack missile, all connected by a sophisticated battle command network.

More than five years into the program, "it is unclear exactly what FCS capability can be realistically expected" because tests of vehicle and other prototypes won't begin until 2011, GAO said. Army claims that FCS will "provide capabilities that will be as good as or better than current forces" are based on computer simulations rather than live tests with real equipment. "The [Army's] optimism about FCS capabilities may be premature," GAO said, as live tests often showed computer simulations to be unrealistic.

The program began with ill-defined requirements and major assumptions that entirely new technologies would somehow materialize during development, the report said. Only two of FCS' 44 critical technologies have reached the level of maturity they should have had when the program began.

Those technologies, a casualty assessment tool and a precision artillery round, were in development long before the FCS program began. "Other technologies are now rated less mature, projected maturity dates have slipped and others have shown little advancement over the years," the report said. Eight of the critical technologies either have not progressed at all or were deemed less mature than when the program began five years ago, according to GAO.

The new armored vehicles continue to gain weight with each modification, calling into question the goal to build vehicles light enough to be rapidly flown to distant hot spots. Originally designed to be carried on the Air Force's C-130 transport, the vehicle's weight increased over the years, leading to a new Army requirement: Three vehicles must be flown inside the larger C-17 airlifter.

Combat experience in Iraq showed that a vehicle at the FCS target weight of 24 tons would not survive large mine blasts. The Army then increased the target weight to 28 tons. GAO said the vehicles are not likely to meet even the heavier weight limit as vehicle hull redesigns continue. If weight exceeds 30 tons, three would no longer fit inside a C-17.

Congressional investigators questioned the FCS vehicle's ability to survive on the modern battlefield. "The FCS concept for survivability breaks from tradition" because it relies on technology instead of heavy armor for protection. The Army and Boeing said new technologies would prove to be better than heavy armor because the FCS sensor network would detect an enemy early and soldiers could avoid being targeted. If spotted, an active protection system affixed to the vehicles would shoot down incoming weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank missiles.

GAO identified problems with both the layered defense network and the active protection system: "These layers rely on critical technologies that are largely unproven and that have not yet demonstrated that they can provide adequate information superiority as a substitute for heavy armor to protect Army soldiers."

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Rising Joint Strike Fighter costs could put pressure on Defense budget

Greg Grant — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

In its report (GAO-08-388), GAO found that Lockheed Martin's Joint Strike Fighter program is plagued by design changes and production line troubles that have caused costs to increase by more than $23 billion in the last year alone. JSF will place an "unprecedented demand" on future defense budgets, GAO concluded, with annual costs averaging $11 billion a year for the next two decades. That sum is comparable to what the Pentagon spends on a host of missile defense programs every year.

The Pentagon's planned purchase of 2,458 aircraft will cost $300 billion, with another $650 billion required for life-cycle operation and support.

JSF was intended to provide an affordable, common aircraft design with different variants for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. The production line is expected to run until at least 2034. Lockheed Martin won the JSF contract in 2001.

The Air Force version will replace the service's F-16 and A-10 aircraft. A short takeoff and vertical landing version will replace the Marine Corps Harrier jets. A carrier version will fly alongside the Navy's F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. A number of U.S. allies have signed agreements to buy at least 646 additional JSF aircraft.

The Pentagon has said that replacing aging aircraft with the JSF will reduce overall operating costs because of reliability and maintainability features in the new planes. But support cost estimates have nearly doubled in recent years, from $346 billion in 2005 to $650 billion now. GAO said the operating cost per flying hour of the JSF will be higher than the F-16 it is designed to replace.

GAO's $1 trillion estimate may even be a conservative figure. Congressional investigators have questioned the $300 billion acquisition estimate. Three offices within the Defense Department say it is low by as much as $38 billion. The delivery date is likely to slip by more than two years, GAO said.

Late-maturing technologies and weight increases in the aircraft have slowed production and forced redesigns, while difficulties in wing and final assembly phases meant that the first test aircraft required 35 percent more labor hours than planned. In addition, electrical malfunctions and parts failures in prototype aircraft have delayed flight tests. "A fully integrated, capable production aircraft is not expected to enter flight testing until fiscal year 2012," GAO said.

GAO auditors said they anticipate further increases and schedule delays, and "a major program restructure seems inevitable." A soaring price tag likely will force the military to buy fewer of the new fighters, the report said.

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Report: National security agencies have failed in Iraq, Afghanistan

Greg Grant — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

America's national security institutions have failed and the military has been left holding the bag in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, conducting nation-building tasks for which it is ill-suited, according to the final report of a House Armed Services Committee panel established in 2007 to examine military roles and missions.

The panel looked beyond the military and examined the national security missions of the various intelligence agencies, State Department, National Security Council and other organizations. The effort was prompted by nation-building efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, which have forced the services to assume missions that are not core responsibilities, said the report, which was released on March 7.

Meanwhile, the panel said, the military remains too focused on traditional challenges such as wars between nation states, and does not adequately respond to 21st century security challenges such as global terrorism or insurgent movements in failed states.

The panel's report did not recommend any specific changes to service roles and missions. Rather, it was a collection of short essays designed to "provoke thoughtful public discussion" on pressing national security issues, said the panel's chairman, Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn.

Lawmakers included language in the 2008 Defense authorization bill that required the Pentagon to undertake a review of roles and missions every four years. With national security institutions struggling to adapt to new challenges, panel members were compelled to act because "no visible military champion of change has emerged" from within the defense establishment, the report said. "Our military has resisted change just as they have past efforts at reform."

The congressionally mandated review was intended to highlight the military's core mission areas and to identify the ones for which the services are not ideally organized, trained or equipped. Charged with finding capability gaps as well as duplication of effort among the services, the secretary of Defense will provide a report to Congress before lawmakers debate the 2009 Defense budget.

The military's current structure was established during the Truman administration, said Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, D-Mo, in a news release that accompanied the report. "While that may have been the proper framework 60 years ago, we must ensure that today's military is organized to protect America's national security in the face of 21st century threats."

Nation-building missions in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the military, and civilian agencies must contribute more personnel and resources, according to the report. The State Department, it noted, has gone from "a world of genteel diplomacy" to demanding volunteers to staff provincial reconstruction teams.

The panel divided its effort among three levels. It examined interagency problems with coordination of nation-building, the formation of Africa Command, and the use of American soft power such as economic aid and diplomacy. Another focus was the Pentagon's ongoing procurement and management challenges that have resulted in an "escalating spiral" of "cost growth and schedule delays."

The panel also studied interservice rivalry over who controls airlift and aerial drones. The report said each service developed its own drones, which closely resembled each other but were incompatible. The Air Force used rated pilots to fly its drones, while the Army designed its drones to be simple enough that an enlisted technician with minimal training could operate them, the panel said.

Committee member Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., said the panel's discussions during the past six months raised contentious issues and its members "resisted the temptation to find easy, lowest-common-denominator solutions."

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Army says it needs up to $260 billion per year

Greg Grant — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The battle over how the Defense Department's budget will be divided among the military services heated up this week, with the latest salvo fired by the Army.

In order to maintain its forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, increase its size, train and equip soldiers, repair war-worn equipment and modernize its battle fleet, the service requires funding of $250 billion to $260 billion a year, said Army Deputy Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Stephen Speakes.

That amount equals half the $515 billion requested by the Pentagon for 2009. The Army requested $140 billion in the 2009 defense budget. It also expects to receive additional funds from emergency wartime supplemental spending measures. President Bush requested $189 billion in supplemental funding for 2008, of which Congress appropriated $86.8 billion last year.

Speaking at an event Thursday sponsored by the Association of the United States Army, Speakes said the service gets half its funding from the base budget and half from the supplementals. "Our ability to grow, sustain and improve the quality of the force," he said, is largely tied up in supplemental funding.

Speakes said Army leaders realize that the emergency supplementals won't last forever, so they're trying to shift much of the funding into the base budget. He suggested next year the service will request a significantly larger base budget than this year's.

"Everybody wants their program nested comfortably in the base and not out in the supplementals," Speakes said. But the Army must determine which of its "enduring requirements" belong there, he said. "We're working now this spring on a strategy that makes sense for today and the future and will be able to survive scrutiny" from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the White House and Congress.

While a reduction in demand for troops in Iraq would reduce the need for funds devoted to operations, Speakes said the Army is "out of balance" and that fixing the problem will require more money.

In addition to the high personnel costs associated with relying on an all-volunteer force in a time of war, he said the Army must increase its training for soldiers beyond the counterinsurgency instruction they receive prior to deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan.

The Army must develop a "new, more sophisticated training environment," that more accurately captures the types of conflicts the service expects to face in the future, he said. "Will we ever go back to the way the [National Training Center] was in 2000, devoid of human beings and cities? Of course not. [Our doctrine] says we'll be fighting among the people."

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Former commander in Iraq provides post-surge assessment

Greg Grant — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

As the surge brigades return home from Iraq, U.S. efforts there must shift from battling terrorists and insurgent groups to providing jobs and economic opportunities for Iraq's impoverished residents while also improving national and local government, said Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, former coalition ground force commander, on Tuesday.

"Much work remains to be done in Iraq," he said, in what is widely viewed as a preview to next month's briefing by Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus. Political reconciliation between competing factions is vital to Iraq's future, and until then, there will not be a turnaround in Iraq's long-term prospects for stability. Odierno, who returned two weeks ago from Iraq, served for 15 months as second in command to Petraeus.

The situation in Iraq is now largely a communal civil war for power and resources, both between the minority Sunni and majority Shia populations and among competing Shia parties. Iraq's neighbors continue to meddle in the country's internal power struggles, he said, and no "blanket solutions" exist to resolve the country's many challenges. A reversal of progress in curbing violence could occur if the Iraqi people, particularly the Sunnis, lose confidence in Iraq's government and do not believe it is serving their interests.

Improving security in Iraq also depends on improving the ability of Iraq's army and police to conduct counterinsurgency operations without extensive U.S. military support. That effort continues to suffer from equipment shortfalls and too few competent junior officers. Iraq has begun an officer training academy, but it will take at least three years before new commanders emerge.

Odierno said Iran continues to train, fund and equip Shia armed groups inside Iraq, and Iranian "surrogates" constantly fire rockets into the Green Zone. Iran has "a huge role to play in Iraq as helpful partners." Odierno said the American military continues to find lots of armor-penetrating roadside bombs that commanders have said are built primarily in Iran. "Whether they're still shipping them in or they've been there a while, I can't tell you."

Shia leader Moqtada al Sadr is trying to refocus his movement from an armed militia to helping the poor Shia community have a role and a vote in Iraq's future, Odierno noted. Sadr declared a cease-fire last summer, largely credited as helping quell the country's sectarian violence. Odierno said the U.S. military continues to target rogue elements of the Shia militia, funded by Iran, that have broken away from Sadr's influence.

Odierno said he felt comfortable with the planned drawdown in U.S. troops to 15 brigades this summer, but then recommended a pause after that, until the situation can be further assessed: "I want to see what happens when we go to 15 brigades." He said Petraeus, who is to brief President Bush and Congress in April on conditions in Iraq, will provide another assessment in August or September that is likely to include recommendations on whether to continue reducing troops.

Commanders in Iraq are mindful that a new U.S. administration will take office early next year, said Odierno. While he refrained from providing the presidential hopefuls with suggestions on the way forward in Iraq, he said the next administration must determine what its goals are in that country, and then adjust military decisions and policy accordingly.

Future policy decisions also should be tied to the situation on the ground in Iraq, said Odierno, adding that it's important for the next administration to assess progress in reducing violence, building Iraq's security forces, providing jobs and economic development, and improving provincial and national governance.

He said the reduction in violence in Iraq came because extra troops provided by the surge enabled the military to eliminate a number of insurgent safe havens and sanctuaries established by al Qaeda and other armed groups in the rural terrain surrounding Baghdad. A change in tactics - which got American troops back out into the neighborhoods and walking foot patrols rather than driving around for a few hours and returning to heavily fortified bases -- was equally important, he said.

"Our mantra was 'protect the population, protect the citizens of Iraq.' " After eight months on the ground, the Iraqi people "knew who we were…. they knew the names of the sergeants in the neighborhoods, they knew the captains, the relationships that were built."

Odierno said an important, unanticipated aspect of the surge was that it gave more American units the opportunity to partner with Iraqi units in daily operations, which hastened improvements to Iraq's military. "That is the best way for us to improve their capacity."

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Taking It To the Streets

Greg Grant — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The U.S. military has seen the future, and it involves urban warfare.

This year marks a milestone in human history: For the first time, more than half the world's population will live in cities. A June 2007 report by the United Nations Population Fund said this "decisive shift from rural to urban growth" marks a change in "a balance that has lasted for millennia."

Not coincidentally, Army Chief Gen. George Casey recently gave a blunt assessment of how the United States would wage wars in the future: "We're going to fight in cities."

During his three years as commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Casey tried to come up with a way to fight an adaptive, largely ur-ban insurgency. That he never developed a fully effective approach explains, in part, his replacement by Gen. David Petraeus in early 2007. Petraeus' strategy of moving U.S. troops off huge bases and into local neighborhoods has tamped down violence in much of the country. Whether it will work in the long run remains to be seen.

Cities-from Stalingrad to Moga-dishu to Fallujah, Iraq in 2004-have long played host to history's major battles. In a 2005 speech in Quantico, Va., Marine Gen. Michael Hagee said, "In my opinion, Fallujah is . . . not a bad example of what we're going to fight in the future, and not a bad example of how to fight it. . . . It is about individual Marines going house to house, killing."

The city as battlefield is partly a function of the city as the hub of modern commercial, educational, financial, social and political activity-a trend accelerated by globalization. Densely packed cities are where transportation arteries converge. Troops moving along the path of least resistance, such as paved roadways linking together major urban areas, are at some point bound to bump into opposing troops.

Meanwhile, the urban explosion is accelerating: By 2020, the number of city dwellers will swell to 60 percent of the world's population, and by 2030, it will reach 80 percent. The most rapid growth now is occurring in Asia and Africa, where the ranks of city dwellers increases by a million people every week.

Megacities-those with more than 10 million inhabitants-continue to expand. The U.N. says the wave of urbanization in the developing world could lead to continued unrest and conflict as the growth in population taxes the ability of cities to deliver security and basic services. It also will tax the ability of the U.S. military to adapt to a very different kind of war than it has traditionally waged.

Soaking Up Troops

It's not just demographics that are causing cities to become the focal point of U.S. military operations. Enemies have learned that they don't survive long in wide open spaces, where they are easily targeted with long-range precision weaponry. So they have sought to lure U.S. soldiers into ambushes and close-quarter firefights in urban areas, where limited lines of sight negate technological superiority.

Urban warfare occurs in chaotic spaces, where primitive weapons such as mines and sniper rifles inflict heavy casualties. Enemy fighters intimately know the terrain of their own neighborhoods, and they tend to "hug" U.S. units so pilots overhead fear dropping bombs on friendly troops.

A military adage holds that cities soak up troops like a sponge. A battalion of 800 troops can clear open farmland or desert of a small band of guerrilla fighters rather quickly. But searching for fighters or weapons hidden in a block full of high-rise apartment buildings in Baghdad can take a force that size the entire day.

Improved technology hasn't solved this problem yet. The U.S. military is increasingly reliant on battle networks built to provide troops information superiority from communications, surveillance, reconnaissance, and digital command and control. But radio frequencies depend on line-of-sight for transmission. That simple law of physics means cities are a distinctly difficult environment with ample obstructions literally around every corner.

Buildings block overhead surveillance systems, act as obstacles to radio waves and create electromagnetic dead spaces that render Global Positioning System devices inoperable.

Troops remotely flying aerial drones over Baghdad say it's the most difficult of operating environments. Radio frequency clutter can cause controllers to lose the signal to drones, resulting in crashes. Adding to the problem is the fact that the jammers U.S. troops use to block insurgents' signals to keep them from detonating roadside bombs also gum up communications. And such communications are vital to prevent troops from feeling isolated from their comrades.

In urban areas, perhaps the most significant challenge the military faces is finding the "low-signature enemy," an opponent who blends into the civilian population. In Baghdad, U.S. forces have affixed cameras to towers, hovering blimps and aerial drones to extend what the military calls "situational awareness" over the entire city. But while the thermal imaging devices on these electronic eyes can identify human beings, even at night, from great distances they can't tell whether a person with an AK-47 assault rifle is a police officer patrolling a troubled neighborhood or an insurgent preparing to ambush an American patrol.

In no other war has the car played such a central role as, arguably, it does in Iraq. In a city whose streets resemble Los Angeles at rush hour, the car provides guerrilla fighters a means to stay mobile, attack where they choose and then rapidly disperse. Insurgents trigger roadside bombs from inside cars and then speed away. The ultimate low-tech, guided missile in urban guerrilla warfare, suicide car bombers cruise Baghdad's streets waiting for a cell phone call or text message pinpointing a target. Because of frequent U.S. raids on suspected insurgent hideouts, cars have been turned into what soldiers term "rolling weapons caches," crammed with electrical components, wires, timers, detonators, plastic explosive and artillery rounds, shifted from location to location about the city.

Decoding the Megalopolis

During the Cold War, the military's conceptual approach to city warfare had only two dimensions, says Dave Ozolek, executive director of the Defense Department's Joint Urban Operations Office at U.S. Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va., which is spearheading many of the military's urban warfare initiatives. The first was simply to try to bypass urban areas because they strip away so many of the military's advantages. If forces had to go into cities, the preferred approach was to rely on superior firepower to fight their way through.

Neither option is acceptable anymore. "We realize now that rather than an obstacle, the population is the center of gravity in urban areas. You can't save the city by destroying it, so that takes the firepower solution off the table," Ozolek says. So what does work? Whether the threat is terrorist cells, a network of insurgents, a criminal enterprise or armed thugs, "the faster we get the support of the local population, the faster we defeat the threat," he says.

Ozolek says JFCOM is developing a new approach that looks at cities as complex systems and attempts to assess economic, social and political factors to determine how they work. JFCOM is using computer modeling and simulations to try to understand human behavior in the urban megalopolis and how the military's decisions and actions influence that behavior.

It's like the popular computer game SimCity, only infinitely more complex, says Toni Cerri, JFCOM's chief of modeling and simulation. The command has spent several years developing a synthetic world that models human behavior in urban areas, called the Sentient World Simulation. In it, courses of action can be modeled to test the potential reactions of a populace. "Let's say we decide to level Fallujah," Cerri says. "We run the simulation, find out what world opinion is and what the generational view of that decision is-what will the children of people who lived in Fallujah think about that decision 10 years from now."

Cerri acknowledges that simulating human behavior is an enormously complex undertaking. To understand the behavior of a megacity's population, the simulation must model the behavior of millions of residents, a task JFCOM officials were unable to attempt until they gained access to the Pentagon's supercomputers. He says the models are getting better all the time.

Ozolek said commanders in Afghan-istan are using the simulation to help inform decisions with different population sets following six months of experimentation in the country. "We don't see it as a Magic 8 Ball to answer how the population will react," he says, "but it helps us understand the factors that will lead to a population's reaction." Ozolek said the focus is less on predicting outcomes of certain courses of action and more on identifying what the causes of the outcome would be. The simulations tap into the expertise of anthropologists, social and political scientists, and economists, and then feed that information to a forward-deployed battle staff.

Tactical Technology

At some point troops have to enter the actual urban world. To help them better operate at the tactical level, the military has turned to the defense industry.

Speaking to an audience of defense business executives in 2006, Maj. Gen. Robert Nadeau, head of the Army's research and development efforts, pointed to a photo of Baghdad's crowded streets projected on a huge screen at the head of a conference room. "This is not open field warfare, this is street fighting, this is nose to nose, soldiers jumping over walls, going into buildings," he said. Nadeau told attendees not to bother knocking on his door unless they could tell him how their products would help a soldier fight better in a city. Then he rattled off an urban warfare technology wish list: better radio communications, tagging technologies to track insurgents in civilian populations, the ability to see through walls, better night vision equipment, and a bunker-buster weapon to enable soldiers to blast holes through walls.

The Defense Advanced Research Proj- ects Agency, the Pentagon's cutting-edge battle lab, is pushing the technological envelope in urban warfare. DARPA has produced a handheld sensor that can see through 12 inches of concrete. It weighs less than two pounds and runs off AA batteries. About 50 prototypes have been sent to Iraq for testing. But the device has its limitations: It works only as far as about 20 meters from a building, and cannot penetrate metal walls. A larger device in the works is called VisiBuilding, which can show the internal layout of a building and the people inside. Once fully developed, it will be carried aboard vehicles and even aerial drones.

At the same time, the military is developing smaller versions of such drones for urban environments. The Class I UAV, part of the Army's $200 billion Future Combat Systems program, can hover in place or maneuver down city streets and alleys to show troops what might be lurking around the corner. DARPA developed the WASP aerial drone, which has a 16-inch wingspan and weighs less than half a pound, but can carry two video cameras and a GPS system-and stay aloft for an hour. A swarm of such microdrones could be unleashed by a patrolling squad to scout the streets ahead for hidden threats.

Intensified Training

"Combat, if you break it down by steps, is not altogether complicated," says Adam Harmon, a former Israeli paratrooper and special operations officer who advises the U.S. military. "It's basically fire and maneuver." The complexity comes in trying to size up a situation and make the right decisions while under the terrifying stress of combat. That's particularly challenging in the urban environment, he says.

Israeli soldiers suffered heavy losses in urban combat in Lebanon in 2006, as inexperienced troops clustered together in streets became inviting targets for Hezbollah fighters armed with long-range missiles. Since then, the Israeli Army has nearly doubled its training budget. Harmon says the tactics and techniques of the Israeli troops are fundamentally sound. It's the intensity of training that must be addressed.

Fighting in urban environments demands that adaptability and decision-making be pushed down to the lowest level, because decisions must be made in a fraction of a second. The problem is the traditional military culture of following commands can lead to situations in which people on the ground are looking for direction and guidance. In the meantime, they become targets. In Israeli Army basic training, Harmon says, commanders are killed off in the first few seconds of simulated fighting, forcing the individual to take charge.

Before deploying to Iraq last year, soldiers of the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division spent much of their time training to react to sniper fire, a growing threat to American troops in Iraq's cities. Col. Tom James, who commands the division's 4th Brigade, which is now in Iraq, said leaders sought to break troops of the instinctual reaction of trying to help a member of their team who had been hit by sniper fire, or trying to find cover from the fire, and instead to go after the sniper.

Harmon says that from day one of basic training, Israeli soldiers learn that rocks, buildings and trucks are not cover: "Your weapon is your cover. Fire is your cover." The most important thing is to neutralize the threat.

At the U.S. Army's premier combat training ground, the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., the spread of urbanization is clearly visible. Sprawling pre-fab cities have been built in the once-open desert as the Army prepares its soldiers for street fighting. Considering where the service was five years ago, the Army has made major strides in preparing for urban warfare, Harmon says.

The problem is, America's enemies also are training every day. "The Army likes to say that we have the best training facilities in the world," says Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. "Quite frankly, the Iraqi insurgents are at the world's best [training center] right now. They're there 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, going up against the world's best."

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Agencies join forces to expedite supplies to troops

Greg Grant — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Leaders from the U.S. Transportation Command, Defense Logistics Agency and General Services Administration established this week a formal customer support partnership to expedite supplies to troops in combat.

The agreement established an executive steering committee comprised of senior executives from each agency to oversee joint working groups, which will monitor shared performance measurements and efficiencies. The partnership is specifically aimed at improving information sharing among the agencies. It provides "an excellent opportunity to better align supply chain management and solidify interagency partnerships in support of the warfighter," said Air Force Gen. Norton Schwartz, TRANSCOM commander. TRANSCOM operates its own fleet of ships and aircraft to move troops and supplies around the world.

"This arrangement demonstrates how DoD's strong partnership with GSA is ensuring taxpayer savings through best value strategies," said GSA's acquisition commissioner Jim Williams.

The partnership potentially will reduce delivery times by days or even weeks and save millions of dollars by fine-tuning inventory management. It will improve oversight "of the various supply chain segments [supplier, transporter, theatre] to better understand and resolve bottlenecks," said GSA spokeswoman Viki Reath.

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