Islamic State on the Road to Waterloo

https://medium.com/the-bridge/islamic-state-on-the-road-to-waterloo-e9ce40952421

This post was provided by Mike Denny, a logistics and procurement manager and U.S. Army National Guard Officer. He is also an editor of the Red Team Journal. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Army, the DoD, or the U.S. Government.

In the late 18th Century, leaders across Europe wrestled with how to handle the upheaval that was taking place in neighboring France. The political environment in France was characterized by chaos, panic, and extremism, and it gave birth to a military leader that would revolutionize warfare and change the geopolitical landscape of the continent. While using the wrong analogy can be dangerous, one can’t help but see comparisons to the situation today in the Middle East.

As Williamson Murray highlighted in War, Strategy, and Military Effectiveness, Napoleon understood the need to mobilize his country’s entire populace to defeat the smaller professional (often mercenary) armies of competing European states. These armed forces were raised through the political will and finances of the crown and supporting lords, who were relatively loyal but did not have the “national zeal” that French forces would bring to the battlefield post-Revolution. Furthermore, by leveraging new logistics means and utilizing the levee en masse to pull from a large recruiting base, the French forces rapidly changed the logistics of 19th century war. Furthermore, volunteers flooded the Army as a means to change social status in opposition to other core European nations with officer commissions for sale and heavy mercenary forces. Waterloo marked the peak of Napoleon’s efforts to exert his power throughout Europe, grown out of the mass response to the effects of the industrial revolution on society.

The Arab Spring in many ways mirrors the French revolution in the Islamic world’s response to the globalization and digital (or cyber) revolution altering the dynamics of modern society. Currently, Western nations resemble the elites of pre-Napoleonic Europe; comfortable in our digital castles and, while more interconnected to the rest of the world than ever before, more politically isolated as a society from risks to our collective safety. On the other hand, we are currently witnessing a strategic overreach by IS that is similar to Napoleon’s overreach shortly before his final 100 days culminating in the Waterloo campaign. ISIL expanded too rapidly and threatened too many states’ national interests, generating a system-wide response to their rapid spread. If countered now, ISIL will likely retreat and resume the first several phases of Mao’s guerilla strategy preventing a transition to Phase III which ultimately leads to permanent governance.

The rank and file of Napoleon’s Army were graduates of the French Revolution, and though ISIL started as a terrorist group during the Iraq War, they grew in scope and power as alumni of the Arab spring.

ISIS Continues Its Assault on Kurdish Town of Kobani in Northern Syria Despite U.S. Airstrikes

Islamic State presses assault on Syrian border town, Kurds warn Turkey

Reuters

October 2, 2014

Turkish army tanks take up position on the Turkish-Syrian border near the southeastern town of Suruc in Sanliurfa province September 29, 2014.

Credit: Reuters/Murad Sezer

(Reuters) - Islamic State insurgents pushed on with their assault on a Syrian border town on Thursday despite coalition air strikes meant to weaken them, sending thousands more Kurdish refugees into Turkey and dragging Ankara deeper into the conflict.

Kurdish militants warned that peace talks with the Turkish state would come to an end if the Islamist insurgents were allowed to carry out a massacre in the predominantly Kurdish town of Kobani, pressuring Ankara to act.

Islamic State fighters have taken control of hundreds of villages around Kobani, beheading civilians in a bid to terrorize villagers into submission, and have advanced to within kilometers of the town on three sides.

U.S. led forces, which have been bombing Islamic State targets elsewhere in Syria since last week, hit a village just south of Kobani on Wednesday and further strikes were heard overnight, Kurdish sources in the town said.

But they seemed to do little to stop the Islamists’ advance.

"We left because we realized it was only going to get worse," said Leyla, a 37-year old Syrian arriving at the Yumurtalik border crossing with her six children after waiting 10 days in a field, hoping the clashes would subside.

"We will go back tomorrow if Islamic State leaves. I don’t want to be here, I had never even imagined Turkey in my dreams before this,” she said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors Syria’s war, said heavy clashes between Islamic State and Kurdish YPG fighters had been continuing on Kobani’s eastern and southeastern outskirts for the last 36 hours.

The sound of a large explosion was heard around midnight at the same time as coalition planes were flying overhead, it said.

About 20 explosions were also heard in the areas of the Tishrin dam and town of Manbij roughly 50 km (31 miles) south of Kobani, resulting from missile strikes believed to be carried out by the coalition, the Observatory said.

The Long Game in Eastern Europe

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stratfor/2014/09/22/the-long-game-in-eastern-europe/ 

By Robert D. Kaplan

Two weeks ago commentators were hyperventilating about a return to the 1930s in Europe, following a Russian invasion-of-sorts into eastern Ukraine. Then, President Barack Obama announced that the United States was on a war footing against the Islamic State. Ukraine — and the Russian threat to Europe, for that matter — was promptly, if temporarily, sidelined. So much for the half-life of stories in an incoherent media age.

Because of that very incoherence, the latest media obsession, if it lasts, will be good news for Russia and China. A renewed American involvement with the Middle East can only ease China’s path to dominance in the Western Pacific and Russia’s path to increasing influence in Central and Eastern Europe. The decade following 9/11 is instructive in this regard. While the United States was preoccupied with Afghanistan and Iraq, Chinese naval forces emerged as a major geopolitical factor in East Asia, threatening American allies from Japan to the Philippines: 9/11 was literally a godsend to Chinese military planners. Will the videos of the beheadings of two American journalists and a British aid worker be of continued benefit to the Chinese, and a godsend now to the Russians?

That depends upon how much discipline the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon can muster. Power is partially defined by the amount of attention the executive branch can devote to a given problem, and if the executive branch is permanently distracted by one problem to the detriment of other important ones, that constitutes a diminution of American power. For the reality of geopolitics in the early 21st century is simultaneity: many different conflicts occurring in various theaters that all, to greater and lesser extents, have to be dealt with. And Russian aggression in Europe as well as China’s military rise in Asia may be in the long run of comparable importance to the Islamic State in the Middle East.

So back to the so-called 1930s in Europe, as the current decade was characterized two weeks ago. Actually, the assertion contains a measure of truth. Russian PresidentVladimir Putin may not be comparable to Adolf Hitler, but he will, nevertheless, keep pushing westwards until he is stopped. Putin’s goal, as has been said, is not the recreation of the Warsaw Pact. The Warsaw Pact, because it was both too time consuming and too expensive for Moscow to maintain, did not work. No, Putin desires instead a more traditional and softer zone of influence in Europe, given that Russia over the course of the centuries has been invaded from the west not only by the French and Germans, but also by the Swedes, Lithuanians and Poles.

For years already, Stratfor has written and argued that the Russians, taking advantage of Europe’s fiscal woes, were attempting to buy banks and electricity grids, oil refineries, and natural gas transportation networks, in addition to other infrastructure, even as they extended their energy pipeline network throughout the former satellite states. Meanwhile, a financially weakened Europe has had less political capital to draw countries like Moldova, Serbia, Bulgaria and Ukraine closer into its fold, in exchange for social and economic reforms. This is how Russian influence had been gaining ground in Central and Eastern Europe prior to the 2014 Ukrainian crisis, which was when the Western media finally started paying attention.

HELPING HUMANITY AND ADVANCING AMERICAN INTERESTS

http://warontherocks.com/2014/10/helping-humanity-and-advancing-american-interests/

Taylor Teaford

October 2, 2014 

Public health advocates welcomed President Obama’s decision to deploy U.S. military assets in an effort to stymie the Ebola epidemic raging in West Africa. After an initially modest commitment, the United States is sending roughly 3,000 personnel to set up treatment centers and train healthcare workers in Liberia. While the principal goal of this move is to tackle an increasingly dire public health crisis, it also creates the potential to expand U.S. military involvement in a region where it has long been absent. In the recent past, humanitarian aid and disaster relief missions have provided the impetus for resetting relations and establishing stronger ties between the United States and recipient states. The Ebola relief effort thus presents an opportunity to develop broader links with regional governments, engage the civilian populations in a positive way, and lay the foundation for a new era of United States-West African ties.

For years, U.S. military participation in West Africa has been largely limited to noncombatant evacuation operations in the restless republics of the Gulf of Guinea. Recently, however, the Pentagon has begun to view the Gulf of Guinea as a critical region. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps have taken the lead in expanding military ties through increased theater security cooperation activities, led by the Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force-Crisis Response (SPMAGTF-CR) and the African Partnership Station (APS). Marine Corps leadership is eager to find a permanent location for its SPMAGTF-CR (currently based in Moron, Spain) in the Gulf of Guinea to situate it closer to potential hotspots throughout Africa. With the exception of a few drone bases, the only permanent U.S. base on the continent is in Djibouti, nearly 3,000 miles away from the Gulf of Guinea in the Horn of Africa.

Theater security cooperation activities help deepen bilateral military engagement, but they do not foster the broad-based political and social connections that result from humanitarian aid and disaster relief operations. Over the past decade, there have been several instances where robust relief operations led by the United States ushered in closer diplomatic and military ties with recipient countries.

U.S. relations with Indonesia provide a useful example and demonstrate how an aid mission can reset relations. In 2004, Indonesia was a new democracy and the Bush Administration was looking for partners in the Muslim world, but Jakarta was highly skeptical of U.S. motives and did not reciprocate. This changed with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the US aid mission that followed. In total, the United States provided a $908 million aid package coupled with Operation Unified Assistance, one of the largest military disaster relief operations in history. The substantial aid package and military response forced close coordination between military and civilian leaders in both states and necessitated the removal of legal obstacles that limited the partnership, creating the momentum for a complete overhaul of relations.

The Navy’s Plans for New Manned and Unmanned Reconnaissance Assets

Triton, Poseidon, & UCLASS: The Navy’s ISR Balancing Act

Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr.

Breaking Defense

October 1, 2014

The first MQ-4C Triton drone to arrive at Patuxent River Naval Air Station shows off some of its 130-foot wingspan.

PATUXENT RIVER NAVAL AIR STATION: The future of Navy long-range reconnaissance, the recently arrived MQ-4C Triton drone, sprawls across its hangar here, with a wingspan 13 feet wider than a Boeing 737 but a body that’s 80 percent lighter.

Designed for 24-hour-plus patrols at 50,000 feet, Triton still can’t do the job by itself, say both the program manager and the admiral in charge of all Navy drones. It will provide the high-altitude, theater-spanning coverage that cues more tactically-focused recon aircraft to zoom in (in both senses of the word). Primarily, that means the manned, land-based P-8 Poseidon and the Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance & Strike (UCLASS) drone. That’s three tricky balls for the Navy to keep in the air at once, especially in a time of tightening budgets:

The P-8 entered service late last year and is meant to work intimately with Triton. But the equipment to let a P-8 crew see all of a Triton’s sensor data and to remotely control the drone “is unfunded at this point,” Capt. Jim Hoke, the Triton program manager, admitted to visiting reporters last week.

Capt. James Hoke, the Triton program manager.

As for Triton, as of late October all three aircraft built so far will be at Pax River for testing. A fourth test aircraft was cut for lack of funds, and an important collision-avoidance radar is behind schedule. The drone will enter operational service in late 2017, on Guam, but the planned buy of 68 aircraft is in some doubt. We can probably get by with fewer, Hoke told reporters, because Triton will be more reliable and spend less time in maintenance than the planning models predict.

Meanwhile, the controversial UCLASS program has not yet asked industry to submit final designs: Its official Request For Proposals (RFP) is delayed pending a top-level review of the 2016 budget, because critics in both Congress and the Pentagon argue the Navy’s requirements focus too much on “surveillance” at the expense of “strike.”

We need all three aircraft, Rear Adm. Mathias Winter insisted when I got him alone during the Pax River visit. But, I asked, echoing the skeptics, why buy two different intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) drones? In essence, his answer was that the Triton is designed to meet the theater combatant commander’s needs, while UCLASS will work directly for the carrier strike group commander.

A notional map of the areas Triton could cover from its five planned land bases.

Winter’s Tale

“The time sensitivity of carrier strike group operations [means] that immediacy of control and execution is critical,” Winter told me. UCLASS will fly from the carrier deck, typically conducting patrols 600 to 1,200 nautical miles from the carrier but able to execute 2,000-plus-mile bombing raids as well. By contrast, Triton will fly from five land bases around the world. Even with its roughly 2,000-mile operational radius, he said, “there are large areas of the globe where they are not going to be.”

THE HEROIC DIFFICULTY: MATCHING POWER AND PURPOSE

Frank Hoffman

October 1, 2014 

Hal Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy: Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014.

Colin Gray, the acclaimed strategic theorist of his generation, said the duty of a strategist was “to try to match purposeful military effort and its consequences with the country’s political interests expressed as policy. This can be a mission of heroic difficulty, even to the point of impossibility.”

Strategy may be difficult, but it’s not impossible. Strategy, both the process and the product, is essential to spanning the gap from policy aims to achieved strategic effect. It translates aspirations to implementable plans designed to obtain specific goals with modes and means most likely to obtain the desired end state. Strategy must be more than mere fluff; it cannot be founded upon an inadequate diagnosis or a mere list of goals. Numerous scholars find flaws in the structure and process by which U.S. policymakers think about developing and applying the various instruments of American power. Some wonder if the United States actually has or is capable of producing and executing a unique national strategy in today’s complex strategic environment marked by the diffusion of power and the proliferation of actors.

Strategy remains the mechanism by which political goals are tightly bound to diplomatic action and military efforts. It is neither an illusion nor an exercise in futility; rather, it is essential for rationalizing the purpose, costs and means of foreign policy and war. As Columbia professor Richard Betts has observed, “without strategy, there is no rationale for how force will achieve purposes worth the price in blood and treasure.” Yet, strategy in process or product is often flawed or studiously ignored. Too often, there is a gap in the strategy bridge — the conduit for the two-way traffic that animates action and provides a continual feedback between ends, ways and means.

The United States is not alone in encountering this gap. In his latest book,Professor Hal Brands of Duke University notes:

The history of international affairs is replete with examples of leaders who have fallen short in this regard-those who confuse core with second interests, pursued contradictory strategic ideas and principles, failed to ration resources or combine them synergistically, or fundamentally misjudged the effects of action or inaction.

Identifying this shortfall in international affairs, Brands offers a profound, but mercifully succinct study of American strategic experience over four different U.S. presidential administrations. In What Good is Grand Strategy?, Brands provides a masterful evaluation of the practice of grand strategy in the United States by Presidents Truman, Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush. The author gives high marks to the Truman administration, whose tenure he credits with the construction of an enduring Cold War grand strategy, as well as the corresponding tools and machinery required to manage the complexity of U.S. foreign policy. His take on the Nixon era is less salutatory, while acknowledging the bleak position that President Nixon inherited and the bold, imaginative agility with which he and Henry Kissinger steered. While appreciative of their strategic design and their outreach to China, Brands comes to a scorching assessment of that pair’s conduct of the American negotiated withdrawal from Vietnam. Instead of a triumph, it was a flawed agreement that barely lasted two years:

Nat Geo's 'American War Generals': A sad tale wrapped around a big contradiction

BY THOMAS E. RICKS

OCTOBER 2, 2014

I watched a new National Geographic documentary, American War Generals, earlier this week. It is built on a series of interviews with eight top generals from our recent wars: Colin Powell, Barry McCaffrey, Wesley Clark, George Casey, Jack Keane, David Petraeus, Raymond Odierno and H.R. McMaster. 

Two things struck me about this documentary, which my New America colleague Peter Bergen was involved in making. First, there is a core of sadness in it. By this, I don't mean the expected sorrow of the losses of comrades. Rather, I sensed a whiff of failure that was known but not being admitted to by most of those interviewed.

And that leads to the second point. There is an essential contradiction to the tale. Powell in his comments especially focuses on the magnificent rebuilding of the Army after Vietnam. Yet H.R. McMaster comes along later and insists that the Army in 2003 went into Iraq unprepared for the tasks it faced and unable to adjust quickly to the jobs of occupation and then countering an insurgency. The American invasion, he says flatly, was "a rush to failure." Well, which was it? In other words, if this was the greatest army in history, why was it unable to prevail in Afghanistan and Iraq?

The answer to the contradiction is that the Army was indeed rebuilt well, but too narrowly. It was well prepared to fight the Red Army on the plains of Europe, or the Iraqi army in the desert of the Middle East. It was not prepared to actually do the job that was handed to it, and it had a generation of general officers who proved largely unable to recognize the problem and devise effective solutions to it. 

In the documentary, Powell uses a phrase about taking a hard look in the mirror. He is correct that the Army did this after Vietnam. I wonder if it will be able to do it now. So far, I see little evidence of that. Generals talk a lot about having an adaptive officer corps, but I don't see much concrete evidence that they are changing the Army toward achieving that end. 

One of the best signs for the Army would be if McMaster is selected to succeed Odierno as Army chief of staff.

The Best Man for the Job? Combatant Commanders and the Politics of Jointness

By R. Russell Rumbaugh

September 30, 2014

JFQ 75 | The Best Man for the Job? Combatant Commanders and the Politics of Jointness

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The U.S. military today fights jointly. A joint commander—reporting to the Secretary of Defense—commands all Service components during military operations. And as a key sign of this jointness, combatant commanders no longer come solely from a single Service as they once did. In fact, the combatant commanders and their control of operations are often considered the greatest expression of jointness.

Chairman and Admiral Samuel J. Locklear, USN, commander, U.S. Pacific Command, talk before departing Camp Smith, Hawaii (DOD/D. Myles Cullen)

Yet the historical record suggests combatant commanders are not as joint as thought; a review of all combatant commanders by Service shows that each military branch has been represented roughly equally for the past 30 years. This consistent balance strongly suggests that Service-based prerogatives still play a role in selecting who commands even the operational commands. If inter-Service politics pervades even the selection of combatant commanders, how much more might it affect those parts of the military commonly acknowledged as less joint—especially acquisition?

Such visible evidence of inter-Service politics belies the more hopeful claims for jointness, underlining that jointness is not a synonym for a unified military but rather a description of a loose collaboration among the Services. The U.S. military must stop using jointness as a euphemism and accept a loss of Service prerogative to ensure more effective defense administration and, more importantly, a more effective fighting force.

The Combatant Commands and Jointness

Combatant commanders sit at the pinnacle of operational command in the U.S. military system. Though the U.S. military is organized, trained, and equipped by the four Services—the Army, Marines, Navy, and Air Force—it is used by the combatant commanders. That is, when forces are tasked to a mission, they come under the charge of the combatant commander who plans and executes operations using forces from all the Services together. Combatant commands are divided between geographic and functional commands. For the geographic commands, the U.S. military divides the entire world into six commands that oversee all forces conducting missions in those regions: European, Pacific, Central, African, Northern, and Southern. The functional commands are Transportation, in charge of getting troops and equipment around the world; Strategic, responsible for operating all U.S. nuclear forces; and Special Operations, not surprisingly, in charge of all special operations forces. During operations, the combatant commander is responsible for effectively using and integrating forces from all Services. But when not tasked to a mission, these forces all belong to an administrative command, which reports through the chain of each distinct Service.

The Air Campaign Against ISIS: Understanding What Air Strikes Can Do—and What They Can’t

by Guest Blogger for Janine Davidson

September 30, 2014

A U.S Air Force KC-10 Extender refuels an F-22 Raptor fighter aircraft prior to strike operations in Syria in this September 26, 2014 photo released on September 29, 2014. These aircraft were part of a strike package that was engaging ISIL targets in Syria. (Russ Scalf/Courtesy Reuters) 

 By Clint Hinote

This commentary comes courtesy of Colonel Clint Hinote, CFR’s U.S. Air Force fellow. He assesses the use and utility of targeted air strikes against ISIS, particularly against their Syrian base of operations, in the context of evolving air power targeting doctrine. He argues that the debate over whether or not U.S. air power will “destroy” ISIS largely misses the point as to the function and intent of these strikes. Disrupting the organization’s infrastructure and assets will refute its claim to “statehood,” blunting its momentum in the process.

The air strikes in Syria signify a departure from military operations over the past thirteen years and a return to strategic concepts that date back to Desert Storm. While supporting ground forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, air forces largely used dynamic targeting, where a commander on the ground directs air attacks according to the situation. Because there are no ground forces in Syria, coalition forces are using deliberate targeting there,where numerous forms of intelligence are brought together to analyze the enemy and determine where strikes will have the most effect.

Both types of targeting have advantages and disadvantages, many of which are illustrated in Syria and Iraq today. In Syria, deliberate targeting through airstrikes is having significant effects in the short term, but these are likely to diminish over time as ISIS hides, disperses, and modifies its tactics. In Iraq, alternatively, the relative weakness of the friendly ground forces hinders the overall effort, even with dynamic targeting from the air. It is hoped that over time, momentum will develop as the ground forces organize themselves and take advantage of the asymmetry of airpower.

U.S. and coalition officers have gathered information from numerous sources and formed a picture of the ISIS network. This is not a perfect picture, but it can be very effective in determining where the network is vulnerable to airstrikes. Targets are chosen based on their importance to the overall function of the ISIS organization as well as the coalition’s ability to find and hit them. While this approach was adopted to guide bombing against Japan and Germany in World War II, the integration of key technologies in the 1980s—especially stealth and precision weaponry—created an opening from an obscure colonel in the Pentagon to advance the theory and propose a targeting framework prior to the 1991 Gulf War.

In 1990, as the planning for Desert Storm was underway, Colonel John Warden argued that precision airpower could be used to attack the most important parts of the enemy network from the first day of the war. If this was done correctly, it could shorten the war and prevent mass casualties on all sides. In Desert Storm, planners applied Colonel Warden’s model for the first time to analyze the Iraq regime (Warden later explained this model in an academic article).

Exclusive: U.S. Special Ops Readied Syria Attack in June

Eli Lake

10.02.14 

Months before the U.S. started bombing Syria, American commandos made detailed plans to hit al Qaeda planners there. But the targeting packages weren’t even sent to the White House. 

In late June, the U.S. military and the U.S. intelligence community had concluded that a shadowy network of al Qaeda veterans in Syria were planning to attack airliners flying to the United States. 

Within the American government, the threat was considered serious enough that the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command—the Pentagon’s elite hunter-killers—prepared detailed targeting packages for the group, with the specific locations of the group’s leaders. But those plans never made it to the White House, according to senior U.S. intelligence and Pentagon leaders. 

“There was sufficient targeting information on these guys in June,” said one senior U.S. intelligence official. “It was good information on who, what, and where and there was an acknowledgment of this at the highest levels.” 

The new disclosure that Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) had prepared target packages against al Qaeda’s cell comes as some critics on the left and righthave questioned whether the White House invented the threat from the so-called “Khorasan Group” in order to justify airstrikes that began in September against al Qaeda and ISIS targets in Syria. Skepticism has also mounted because U.S. officials have walked back claims in the last week that the strikes on the Khorasan Group were an attempt to disrupt an imminent threat. 

Jenan Moussa of Al-Aan Television this week reported that the Khorasan Groupwas actually an elite unit within al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, which has been focused on its fight inside the country. Other U.S. officials tell The Daily Beast that the group is composed of senior al Qaeda planners focused on attacking the West. 

Senior and mid-level U.S. intelligence and defense officials who have tracked the threat tell The Daily Beast that the alarm raised about the Khorasan Group came from within the intelligence community and particularly from the U.S. military’s special operations task forces that monitor al Qaeda and the Levant. “The senior leadership in the military didn’t want to ask the question when they knew the answer would be ‘no,’” said the senior U.S. intelligence official quoted earlier about why the targeting packages were not sent to the White House in June. 

America's Ultimate Weapon of War: Precision-Guided Munitions

Robert Farley

October 2, 2014 

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/americas-ultimate-weapon-war-precision-guided-munitions-11389?page=show

Precision-guided munitions helped the United States military destroy an Afghan government in a few months, with minimal footprint. What can they do against ISIS? 

Editor’s Note: Please also see Five ISIS Weapons of War America Should Fear, Five American Weapons of War ISIS Should Fear as well as Five Israeli Weapons of War ISIS Should Fear.

How has the growth of the Precision-Guided Munitions (PGM) complex changed the balance of international power? More specifically, how has the U.S. military’s embrace of this system of weapons affected its ability to accomplish U.S. national goals? The president’s decision to pursue the war against ISIS strictly through the means of airpower and seapower makes the question particularly relevant. The United States will fight ISIS with precision-guided munitions, and apparently little else. It’s worth asking how effective they are in accomplishing national ends. The answer, it turns out, is surprisingly mixed.

The Question

Last year, Barry Watts contributed an outstanding article to The National Interest on ways in which the PGM has matched, exceeded, and fallen short of expectations based on a much longer monograph for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, Watts concentrated on differences between the expectations of early “Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)” theorists and the actual record of U.S. PGM use. Watts also asked why other countries have been so slow to develop their own systems of support for the use of precision-guided munitions.

In contrast, this article concentrates on an evaluation of the effect of PGM munitions on the ability of the United States to accomplish its interests through military means. The possession of a nearly unique class of weapons would presumably convey upon the United States a massive advantage on the international stage, potentially beyond the advantages that the United States already enjoyed by virtue of its great size and wealth. For any serious assessment, we need to consider the technical effects of PGMs against the political impact of the end of the Cold War. Both have allowed the United States to fight wars differently, and to fight wars in which it might not otherwise have been engaged.

In short, we can imagine that the growth of the PGM complex would have allowed the United States to fight wars more cheaply, with a better chance of success, and with lower overall costs in terms of blood and treasure. We would expect these effects to exist along with the huge increase in relative American power that accompanied the collapse of the USSR.

Unconventional Warfare and Strategic Optionality

This post, originally posted at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s blog The Strategist, was provided by Jan K. Gleiman, a visiting fellow at ASPI.

The recent debate over coalition strategy against ISIL has reawakened a related question: whether to support rebel groups in Syria in their fight against ISIL and Bashar al-Assad, and if so how? Even former US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is now expressing regret at not having armed certain Syrian rebel groups earlier. It seems the US will train and arm some rebels but not send Special Forces to embed with and advise them. Two important concepts appear to be absent from the strategic culture of the US and most Western countries: unconventional warfare and strategic optionality.

Unconventional warfare (UW) is often confused with asymmetric warfare or hybrid warfare. But UW has a specific definition. It refers to ‘activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow an occupying power or government by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force in a denied area’. UW is what the US engaged in at various times throughout the Cold War when it deliberately supported insurgent groups in Tibet, Angola, Nicaragua, Indonesia, and Afghanistan, for example. It’s also what the US did so effectively in the opening stages of Operation Enduring Freedom.

UW is frustrating for the strategist for at least two reasons: the complexity of groups and allegiances, and the principal–agent problem. The first reason is self-explanatory to anyone who’s tried to keep track of the factions involved in the ongoing civil war in Syria. The principal–agent problem, explained by political scientist Idean Salehyan, says proxy forces don’t always act the way you want them to — they have their own interests. That’s what economists and political scientists call agency slack. If there’s too much slack the group may not be a reliable partner. Reducing agency slack requires leverage through economic, physical, and emotional incentives. To influence your insurgent proxy you need to be there on the ground with them, earn their respect, support them, and demonstrate your ability to improve their chances of success. You can’t just drop some bombs on their enemy or offer to train them. They’d be pleased if you did, but would owe you nothing.

Those two challenges help explain why UW campaigns aren’t central to US and Western strategic culture. UW is rarely the main effort of a US military campaign. Usually, proxy forces play a supporting role intended to increase the relative friction faced by an adversary while a larger conventional campaign defeats the enemy force. The OSS support to the French resistance in World War II is an example. For UW to play a more decisive role there must be a more fulsome embrace of the strategy.

While embedding advisers helps address the principal–agent problem, optionality helps address the problem of groups and allegiances. Strategic optionality is best described as the deliberate employment of multiple, parallel efforts to shape the environment and the behaviour of actors within it. Additionally, it comes with the intent of selectively switching support as a campaign unfolds: abandoning ineffective or counterproductive efforts in order to increase support for effective ones. It’s a fancy way of saying ‘create options, seize opportunities, and cut losses’. Strategic optionality means sometimes you have to invest effort and resources at one level in order to ensure that you have options later to influence outcomes at another.

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JOINT FORCE QUARTERLY 75 (4^TH QUARTER, OCTOBER 2014)

Download the Entire Issue

Dialogue

From the Chairman

True and Steady, Inspection Ready
By Bryan B. Battaglia and Curtis L. Brownhill

Forum

Executive Summary

An Interview with Raymond T. Odierno

Theater Airlift Modernization: Options for Closing the Gap
By Robert C. Owen

The Afghanistan National Railway: A Plan of Opportunity
By Lawrence J. Pleis, Richard Lliteras, David A. Wood, Matthew D. Bain and Steven J. Hendrickson

The USCENTCOM Train: The Deployment and Distribution Operations Center Turns 10
By Mark A. Brown

Essay Competitions

2014 Winners

Deterrence with China: Avoiding Nuclear Miscalculation
By David S. Forman

The Limits of Cyberspace Deterrence
By Clorinda Trujillo

Opportunities in Understanding China's Approach to the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands
By Bradford John Davis

JPME Today

Cyber Security as a Field of Military Education and Study
By Eneken Tikk-Ringas, Mika Kerttunen, and Christopher Spirito

Why Military Officers Should Study Political Economy
By Rebecca Patterson and Jodi Vittori

Low Cost, High Returns: Getting More from International Partnerships
By Russell S. Thacker and Paul W. Lambert

Commentary

Asymmetry Is Strategy, Strategy is Asymmetry
By Lukas Milevski

Is Military Science "Scientific"?
By Glenn Voelz

The Best Man for the Job? Combatant Commanders and the Politics of Jointness
By R. Russell Rumbaugh

Features

A Potent Vector: Assessing Chinese Cruise Missile Developments
By Dennis M. Gormley, Andrew S. Erickson, and Jingdong Yuan

Blurred Lines: Cultural Support Teams in Afghanistan
By Megan Katt

Determining Hostile Intent in Cyberspace
By Ramberto A. Torruella, Jr.

Understanding the Enemy: The Enduring Value of Technical and Forensic Exploitation
By Thomas B. Smith and Marc Tranchemontagne

Recall

Challenges in Coalition Unconventional Warfare: The Allied Campaign in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945
By J. Darren Duke, Rex L. Phillips, and Christopher J. Conover

Book Reviews

You Cannot Surge Trust
Reviewed by Dov S. Zakheim

Engineers of Victory
Reviewed by Bryon Greenwald

Next-Generation Homeland Security
Reviewed by Katie Kuhn

Joint Doctrine

Implementing Joint Operational Access: From Concept to Joint Force Development
By Jon T. Thomas

Dealing with Corruption: Hard Lessons Learned in Afghanistan
By Richard J. Holdren, Stephen F. Nowak, and Fred J. Klinkenberger, Jr.

Joint Doctrine Update

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