‘Victory, Peace, and Justice: The Neglected Trinity’, Joint Forces Quarterly Vol. 69 (April 2013), pp. 6-12, http://www.ndu.edu/press/neglected-trinity.html

Issue 69, 2 nd Quarter 2013 Reorganizing National Security Transnational Crime Threat Sea Power to Cyber Power J O I N T F O RC E Q UA R T E R LY Inside Issue 69, 2nd Quarter 2013 JFQ Dialogue Editor Col William T. Eliason, USAF (Ret.), Ph.D. Executive Editor Jeffrey D. Smotherman, Ph.D. Supervisory Editor George C. Maerz 2 From the Chairman Production Supervisor Martin J. Peters, Jr. Forum Senior Copy Editor Calvin B. Kelley Copy Editor/Office Manager John J. Church, D.M.A Internet Publications Editor Joanna E. Seich Executive Assistant Ryan Heggs, J.D. Design Amy Ellis and Chris Dunham 4 6 Executive Summary Victory, Peace, and Justice: The Neglected Trinity By Beatrice Heuser U.S. Government Printing Office Printed in St. Louis, Missouri by NDU Press is the National Defense University’s cross-component, professional military and academic publishing house. It publishes books, journals, policy briefs, occasional papers, monographs, and special reports on national security strategy, defense policy, interagency cooperation, national military strategy, regional security affairs, and global strategic problems. This is the official U.S. Department of Defense edition of JFQ. Any copyrighted portions of this journal may not be reproduced or extracted without permission of the copyright proprietors. Joint Force Quarterly should be acknowledged whenever material is quoted from or based on its content. COMMUNICATIONS Please visit NDU Press and Joint Force Quarterly online at ndupress.ndu.edu for more on upcoming issues, an electronic archive of JFQ articles, and access to many other useful NDU Press publications. Constructive comments and contributions are important to us. Please direct editorial communications to the link on the NDU Press Web site or write to: Editor, Joint Force Quarterly National Defense University Press 260 Fifth Avenue, S.W. (Building 64, Room 2504) Fort Lesley J. McNair Washington, DC 20319 Telephone: (202) 685-4220/DSN 325 FAX: (202) 685-4219/DSN 325 Email: JFQ1@ndu.edu JFQ online: ndupress.ndu.edu 2nd Quarter, April 2013 ISSN 1070-0692 13 Organization Theories: Perspectives on Changing National Security Institutions By Anthony J. DiBella 20 Goldcorp Crowdsourcing: An Industry Best Practice for the Intelligence Community? By Jesse Roy Wilson 25 Fostering Constructive Dialogue on Military Sexual Assault By Lindsay L. Rodman Commentary 34 Confronting Transnational Organized Crime: Getting It Right to Forestall a New National Security Threat By Douglas M. Fraser and Renee P. Novakoff 39 42 Democracy Promotion in Oman By Diana M. Holland 49 Joint Communications Support Element: The Voice Heard ’Round the World By Kirby E. Watson 56 Command and Control Vulnerabilities to Communications Jamming By Ronald C. Wilgenbusch and Alan Heisig Restoring the “Unwritten Alliance”: Brazil-U.S. Relations By Lawrence T. Brown PUBLISHER Features 64 72 78 84 GEN Martin E. Dempsey, USA An Interview with Samuel J. Locklear III NATO’s Level of Ambition: Beyond Strategic Reach By Dean A. Nowowiejski From Sea Power to Cyber Power: Learning from the Past to Craft a Strategy for the Future By Kris E. Barcomb The Future of U.S. Landpower: Special Operations Versatility, Marine Corps Utility By Kevin D. Stringer and Katie M. Sizemore PRESIDENT, NDU MG Gregg F. Martin, USA ADVISORY COMMITTEE Maj Gen Joseph D. Brown IV, USAF Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy RADM John N. Christenson, USN Naval War College Brig Gen homas H. Deale, USAF Air Command and Staf College Col Mark Desens, USMC Marine Corps Command and Staf College LtGen George J. Flynn, USMC he Joint Staf Ambassador James B. Foley National War College Maj Gen Scott M. Hanson, USAF Air War College Recall 92 Col Jay L. Hatton, USMC Marine Corps War College The German Military Mission to Romania, 1940–1941 By Richard L. DiNardo LTG Curtis M. Scaparrotti, USA he Joint Staf ADM James G. Stavridis, USN U.S. European Command Book Reviews 99 100 101 Maj Gen Joseph S. Ward, Jr., USAF Joint Forces Staf College The Generals Reviewed by Robert Bracknell The Generals Reviewed by Alan L. Gropman 109 EDITORIAL BOARD Richard K. Betts Columbia University Stephen D. Chiabotti School of Advanced Air and Space Studies The Next Wave Reviewed by George Michael Eliot A. Cohen he Johns Hopkins University COL Joseph J. Collins, USA (Ret.) National War College Mark J. Conversino Air War College Joint Doctrine 103 LTG David G. Perkins, USA U.S. Army Command and General Staf College Aaron L. Friedberg Princeton University Lead Turning the Fight: The Joint Operational Access Concept and Joint Doctrine By Gregory Kreuder Col homas C. Greenwood, USMC (Ret.) Oice of the Secretary of Defense Douglas N. Hime Naval War College Mark H. Jacobsen Marine Corps Command and Staf College Daniel T. Kuehl Information Resources Management College Redefining Information Operations By Carmine Cicalese Col David Lapan, USMC he Joint Staf Col Jerome M. Lynes, USMC (Ret.) he Joint Staf Kathleen Mahoney-Norris Air Command and Staf College homas L. McNaugher Georgetown University Col Mark Pizzo, USMC (Ret.) National War College James A. Schear Oice of the Secretary of Defense LtGen Bernard E. Trainor, USMC (Ret.) ABOU T THE C OV ERS Front cover: USS Laboon (DDG 58) arrives in Souda Bay, Greece, to support maritime security operations and theater security cooperation eforts in U.S. 6th Fleet area of responsibility (U.S. Navy/Paul Farley). Table of contents shows (let to right) C-130 Hercules with 107th Airlit Wing shoots live lares during night formation training mission (U.S. Air Force/Ray Lloyd); Strike Soldier prepares for realistic combat environments during weapon malfunction training session (U.S. Army/Joe Padula); lightning lashes on horizon as USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) operates in U.S. 5th Fleet area of responsibility (U.S. Navy/Greg Linderman); Marine and wife embrace during return ceremony at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina (U.S. Marine Corps/Stephen T. Stewart). CONTRIBUTIONS Joint Force Quarterly welcomes submission of scholarly, independent research from members of the Armed Forces, security policymakers and shapers, defense analysts, academic specialists, and civilians from the United States and abroad. Submit articles for consideration to the address on the opposite page or by email to JFQ1@ndu.edu “Attention A&R Editor” in the subject line. For further information, see the guidelines on the NDU Press Web site at ndupress.ndu.edu. Joint Force Quarterly is published by the National Defense University Press for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staf. JFQ is the Chairman’s lagship joint military and security studies journal designed to inform members of the U.S. Armed Forces, allies, and other partners on joint and integrated operations; national security policy and strategy; eforts to combat terrorism; homeland security; and developments in training and joint professional military education to transform America’s military and security apparatus to meet tomorrow’s challenges better while protecting freedom today. The opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied within are those of the contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Defense or any other agency of the Federal Government. ndupress.ndu.edu From the Chairman Risky Business How to Think about Risk Ancient societies viewed life as subject to arbitrary forces. The discovery of probability in the 16th century gave mankind a sense of greater influence over events. Today, we “make our own luck” by better understanding risk. Risk is a relatively straightforward concept. Simply, it is the probability and consequence of danger. It is not very likely that we will be invaded soon, or that we will face a mass nuclear attack, but the consequences of either would be catastrophic—even existential. On the other hand, the probability that terrorists will attack our interests somewhere 2 JFQ / issue 69, 2 nd quarter 2013 DOD (D. Myles Cullen) T here is risk in daring. As asserted by Niccolò Machiavelli, “Never was anything great achieved without danger.” Every day, the men and women of our Armed Forces dare to be great. Every day, they take risks to achieve something bigger and more important than themselves. It is the risk they willingly take that makes our nation great. We owe our good fortune to more than blind luck. Like no other profession, we pay attention to risk. We study it, forecast it, manage it, and seek to reduce it. We spend endless hours—even years—wargaming risk to our missions and to our forces. We simulate attacks and disasters. We rehearse responses to complex contingencies. We develop strategies and plans for a wide range of threats to our national security interests. As much art as science, judging risk is an essential skill for military professionals at every echelon. Right now, a pilot is judging risk as she climbs into a cockpit. An infantry platoon is doing it while on patrol. A ship’s captain is doing it while navigating in the Arabian Gulf. In my role as Chairman, I have a statutory responsibility to explain risk to our senior civilian leaders, the President, and Congress. I want to share some thoughts about risk with you as well. Chairman and Admiral Samuel Locklear, commander of U.S. Pacific Command, meet at USPACOM Headquarters, Camp H.M. Smith, Hawaii, May 2012 around the world is higher. The consequences—albeit horrific for those at the point of attack—are relatively insignificant in terms of national survival. Probability and consequence are not easily measured, and they do not paint the whole picture. It is just as important to think about how risk changes over time and what opportunities might be available if we accept risk. Cyber attacks, for example, are becoming more frequent and more disruptive every day. Destructive cyber is a reality. In today’s world, bits and bytes can be as dangerous as bullets and bombs. At the same time, advanced cyber tools are creating new options for achieving military objectives. Risk only exists in relation to something we value. At a basic level, we think of the risk to our force—people and equipment—and to our mission. At a more strategic level, we think about risk as it relates to our national security interests. Beyond the survival of our nation, the health of the global economic system is essential to our way of life. Protecting Americans abroad is a national expectation, while upholding our values is part of our national identity. Reliable allies also help to distribute risk. What Risks Are Out There? The risks to our national security interests are real. They are broad and run deep. From a security standpoint, I see risk in the context of a security paradox. To paraphrase Charles Dickens, it is the best of times, it is the worst of times. We serve at a time that seems less dangerous, but may be more so. By some accounts, we are experiencing an evolutionary low point in human violence. Dickens might call this a “season of Light” with low risk. But less violence does not necessarily mean less danger, particularly if both the probability and consequences of aggression are on the rise. We can hope for the light, but those of us in the profession of arms have a moral obligation to be ready in case we confront a “season of Darkness.” Two trends are casting long shadows. First, power in the international system is ndup res s . ndu. edu DOD (D. Myles Cullen) Chairman observes Afghan commandos during demonstration at Camp Moorehead, Afghanistan, April 2012 shifting below and beyond the nation-state, spawning more actors who are more connected and more capable of doing harm. While hostile regimes such as those in Iran and North Korea get the most attention— and deservedly so—the security stage has become much more crowded with violent nonstate actors. At the same time, advanced technologies are proliferating horizontally and vertically. Highly accurate ballistic missiles wielded by middleweight militaries lurk in every theater. Bombs made of homemade explosives can mangle our toughest mineresistant vehicles. A cyber attack from a lone malevolent marauder could disrupt broad sectors of our economy. In many ways, the homeland is no longer the sanctuary it once was. These mutually reinforcing trends ensure an uncertain future that will not mirror the past. They argue for a more competitive security environment that does not follow yesterday’s rules. They call for us to think differently and prepare differently for the dangers we may face. How to Deal with Risk Our responsibilities do not end with anticipating risk. We are expected to take actions to reduce and mitigate risk. Among the many ways to mitigate risk, some of the n d u p res s .ndu.edu most effective include having a sound strategy and a ready force with reliable partners. A solvent strategy keeps our ends, ways, and means in balance. It guards against ambitions that exceed abilities. With our means reduced, we have no choice but to carefully and deliberately prioritize our ends and seek new ways to achieve them. I have been hosting a series of strategic seminars with our senior defense leaders to do just this. The result has been a better sense of where to invest our resources and how to integrate capabilities to meet an uncertain future. We also buy down risk through readiness. A hollow force invites danger. A ready joint force deters threats, assures allies, and can respond quickly to defeat aggression. This is why the Joint Chiefs and I are committed to making sure we sustain the best led, trained, and equipped military on the planet. At the same time, we must make some tough tradeoffs to build the joint force we will need by 2020. We can also share risk. We must continue to look to others to help us deal with threats before they mature. I have made strategy the centerpiece of my dialogues with our pivotal partners. Our allies and partners can bring to bear the kind of additional capability and credibility required to make our strategies work. Of course, we also need our partners to stand up to their responsibilities and be ready with relevant capabilities and adequate capacity. Leading All the Way Leadership is our best insurance against risk. By developing leaders today, we prepare for a turbulent tomorrow. The kinds of leaders we need are those able to adapt to a shifting security landscape. They do not just react to change; they lead it. They do not just manage risk; they embrace it to generate opportunity. By taking calculated risks, we illuminate the path to greatness. Whether we take that path depends on leadership. We are and will remain the greatest fighting force on the planet. Be alert to risk, but dare to be great! JFQ MARTIN E. DEMPSEY General, U.S. Army Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staf issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 3 S enior military leaders, primarily U.S. Army generals and their individual abilities to lead, were recently examined by the awardwinning journalist Tom Ricks. Some leaders, in Ricks’s view, were highly successful, others not so much. I believe that the one critical trait all great military leaders share is that of continuous study and mental development. Great American captains—ones most of us would call geniuses—worked hard to strengthen their mental muscles: Washington, Dewey, Pershing, Marshall, Eisenhower, Nimitz, Arnold, Bradley, Vandegrift, and more. My personal favorite of the World War II generation is George S. Patton, Jr. As the man who would literally write military fighting doctrine and history simultaneously during the campaigns of World War II, General Patton was a voracious reader of a wide range of works. According to one of his biographers, between the wars, Patton had read or was acquainted with the concepts “of nearly every significant writing on mobile warfare that had been produced in English,” regardless of the advocating writer’s subject, including works on infantry, cavalry, air, or mechanization. By the time he would enter into combat in World War II, Patton was without doubt “America’s most effective advocate of a daring armor doctrine.”1 Given that it took Patton three tries to complete a military academy education (once at Virginia Military Institute and twice at West Point), due in part to his dyslexia, we have to respect Patton’s sheer force of will and determination to learn all he could about his profession. In 1935, as a lieutenant colonel at the age of 50, Patton was found by his wife, Beatrice, weeping one evening as he was reading about past heroic commanders, all younger than himself. But study on he did. Many can remember George C. Scott’s portrayal of Patton in the 1970 film that won an impressive seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. In one memorable scene, one of Scott’s lines says it all: As Patton surveys the positive results of the battle in progress between Allied forces and the Nazi army in 4 JFQ / issue 69, 2 nd quarter 2013 northern Africa, he proclaims, “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!” The Rommel book in question was actually about infantry tactics in World War I, and Patton, in his memoirs, refers to reading it during the Saar Campaign of November 1944—far after the portrayed cinematic moment. But the point about reading and study is made just as well by the fact that Patton continued to think, read, and assess his progress, never satisfied with what he knew at the moment—even while engaged in the ultimate test of his leadership in combat. In the flying business, pilots rightly believe that death quickly follows the moment one stops learning. Joint Force Quarterly is constantly searching for new ideas as well as reminders of past events that may yield a path to future successes for our readers. Every platform in the expanding media needs two basic ingredients to succeed: authors and readers. Based on the increasing amount of submissions I have been receiving in recent months, JFQ has a growing source of new and interesting ideas to publish each quarter. Also, on the reader side, our last edition, JFQ 68, set another record for online viewers. While popular media continue to suggest that platforms such as print magazines are failing, the truth is likely less pessimistic. JFQ continues to thrive in both printed and online forms, and while we are considering ways to update the look of the journal in coming months, the one thing we will continue to do is provide a voice for the best ideas to inform, promote, and improve the joint force. In line with the theme of study as a means to improve the mind, this edition’s Forum presents an intellectually challenging set of articles that should assist anyone seeking to find new insights to consider for the future of the military. Professor Beatrice Heuser offers an interesting discussion on a forgotten set of beliefs regarding what should follow war. She suggests that these beliefs date from before Napoleon and that Clausewitz overlooked them. But they were rediscovered by B.H. Liddell-Hart after World War I: the trinity of victory, peace, and justice. As our national security require- U.S. Army Executive Summary General George S. Patton, Jr., USA ments have evolved to encompass a wider interagency effort, cultures have clashed, and reaching shared solutions has been difficult for leaders and organizations. Anthony DiBella suggests that part of the problem is a lack of understanding about how organizations operate and that a more thorough understanding of the cultural differences of these groups could lead to more effective cooperation. In another avenue of discovery for organizational improvement, crowdsourcing has been an increasing focus of how organizations might seek to better operations, especially in industry if not government. Jesse Roy Wilson presents a corporate case study that provides an important lesson that could improve the U.S. Intelligence Community. Next, with the recent headlines of sexual misconduct in basic training, Lindsay Rodman argues that Department of Defense leadership has good intentions to deal with these delicate but serious matters. She suggests that policy may not always be guided by available facts and analysis. Our Commentary brings updates on regional and communications issues from how transnational organized crime should be confronted to whether years of permissive environment operations have dulled our ability to communicate in future ndup res s . ndu. edu n d u p res s .ndu.edu NDU combat. Former U.S. Southern Command Commander General Douglas Fraser, USAF (Ret.), and Renee Novakoff recommend the development of analysts who can better interpret a mix of traditional intelligence, law enforcement information, and open source data to deal with transnational organized criminal activities. In her essay from the 2012 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Strategic Article contest, Diana Holland believes that U.S. efforts to promote democracy in the Gulf region of Southwest Asia should start with Oman, as conditions there are right for a peaceful evolution to a more liberal form of government. Lawrence Brown, in his 2012 Secretary of Defense National Security Essay, argues for a rapid reversal of the continuing rift between the United States and Brazil. Next, one of the long-established joint organizations, the Joint Communications Support Element (JSCE), has a storied if unheralded service record dating back some 50 years. With first-hand experience leading this unit, Kirby Watson outlines the broad range of missions that JCSE is ready to support with leading-edge joint communications capability. Even with our best efforts to keep military communications robust and technologically up to date, however, Ronald Wilgenbusch and Alan Heisig demonstrate that the U.S. military’s overreliance on commercial communications has created severe vulnerabilities in future combat, especially from an old foe of the Cold War era, jamming. In Features, we present an interview and an interesting mix of articles that include a discussion of the U.S. “pivot” to the AsiaPacific, recommendations for the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), suggestions on how to leverage Alfred Thayer Mahan for cyber strategy, insights into how to create U.S. joint landpower, and rethinking how to properly locate and neutralize individual strategic enemies. As we consider how best to execute a rebalancing of our military assets into the Pacific, Admiral Samuel J. Locklear, USN, commander of U.S. Pacific Command, sits down with JFQ to discuss his views on how his command will response. Next, looking at NATO’s Strategic Concept, entitled Smart Defense, Dean Nowowiejski First class of the Army Industrial College, June 1924 cautions that the means to meet Alliance ends may require a lowering of expectations going forward because of an all-encompassing austere budget environment. In a truly joint thinking article, Kris Barcomb channels Mahan and describes a “tailored expansionist strategy for cyberspace” that leads to better economic and physical security for the United States. Seeing an opportunity to leverage the likely future security environment to meet an enduring requirement for engagement with land forces, Kevin Stringer and Katie Sizemore recommend a mix of U.S. special operations forces, primarily from the U.S. Army and Marine Air-Ground Task Forces (MAGTFs), that would allow mission accomplishment with fewer troops—the expected constraint going forward. In an impressive primary document– based historical case study from World War II, Richard DiNardo takes us to Romania as the Germans worked with local forces in preparation for Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of Russia. In this Recall article, we see security assistance, of a very different kind, playing out with many of the same issues modern efforts still face. In the Doctrine section, Carmine Cicalese, former director of the Joint Command and Control Information Operations School at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, helps us understand the important differences between strategic communications and information operations, as well as finding a path to achieving success in military decisionmaking supported by these efforts. Rounding out this edition are a joint doctrine update and three well-written and engaging book reviews. As an editor and educator along with our NDU Press team, I am “zeroed in” on delivering the highest quality content every way possible, so that my battle buddies, shipmates, and wingmen on joint professional military education faculties around the world have the intellectual ammunition they need to develop critically thinking, adaptive leaders for the 21st-century joint force. Let us know how we are doing. JFQ —William T. Eliason, Editor NOTE 1 Roger H. Nye, The Patton Mind: The Professional Development of an Extraordinary Leader (Garden City Park, NY: Avery, 1993), 129. issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 5 Patrick Gruban Norwegian Room, United Nations Security Council Chamber in New York Victory, Peace, and Justice The Neglected Trinity By B e a t r i c e H e u s e r he irst aim in war is to win, the second is to prevent defeat, the third is to shorten it, and the fourth and most important, which must never be lost to sight, is to make a just and durable peace. —Sir Maurice Hankey1 S Professor Beatrice Heuser is a Historian and Political Scientist. She holds a chair of International Relations at the University of Reading, United Kingdom, and is the author of The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2010). 6 JFQ / issue 69, 2 nd quarter 2013 ince the U.S. Armed Forces handed out medals to their troops stationed in Germany to celebrate their “victory” in the Cold War, “victories” have eluded the liberal democracies, and their experiences with violent conflicts have been frustrating. We have seen ephemeral, short-lived, or fruitless victories in the first Gulf War, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Somalia, the Iraq War, and Afghanistan. After George W. Bush famously and rather prematurely proclaimed that the U.S. mission in Iraq was “accomplished” and the press hailed that as a victory, first General David Petraeus and then President Barack Obama have thankfully tended to avoid the term. There has recently been a wave of publications seeking to bring greater clarity to the concept of victory.2 It has been defined by some of Carl von Clausewitz’s followers as success in imposing one’s will upon the enemy and by others as the restoration of the status quo ante bellum (which, given the losses incurred by all sides in war, is never entirely possible).3 Unsatisfactory attempts have been made to introduce criteria of success according to a complex cost-gains calculus.4 William Martel has rightly identified the need to distinguish between victory and the outcome of the employment of force through strategy.5 Colin Gray has presented persuasive definitions of decisive military victory, while carefully distinguishing the result of a military campaign from ndup res s . ndu. edu HEUSER the possible overall achievements on a political level: “decisive [military] victory . . . is hard to translate into desired political effect.”6 We are struggling with the concept of what victory in general means, as the new status quo or state of affairs (or the restored prewar state) has so often proved short lived: when is victory a meaningful concept? In search of an answer, it is worth enquiring as to how victory was seen in the past, what one might retain from past views for the present, and which views have led to dead ends. Victory as Imposition of One’s Will on the Enemy Ever since Napoleon (and his interpreters, among them especially Clausewitz), we have lost sight of a crucial truth that thinkers before Napoleon’s wars fully understood: namely, that victory alone is rarely of much value if it does not bring peace with justice.7 Military victory for its own sake was and is important to the generals and their armed forces, who can think of it as their contribution to fulfilling their side’s strategic aims. In that respect, as Aristotle commented, “The end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of military science victory, that of economics wealth.” Greek and Roman generals were celebrated for their victories, but contemporaries were well aware that the effects of military victories were often of short-lived benefit. As such, they might not lead lastingly to that essential and only legitimate overall purpose of war, which Aristotle identified as “peace.”8 There are cases when the evil that one confronts is so great, and the leadership of the other side is so thoroughly wicked, that the Clausewitzian definition of war as “imposing one’s will upon the enemy” should indeed be applied unconditionally. To conclude a war, peace must be sought by all the belligerents, and, at the very least, this means that the mind of a bellicose adversary must be changed through some means—whether by violence or persuasion, even if the latter does not amount to imposing one’s will upon the enemy fully. To change an enemy’s mind, one may need to deprive him of the hope that he might achieve his own aims more easily, faster, at less cost by using violence. A military victory of the decisive sort, as defined again by Colin Gray as depriving the enemy of any hope of reversing his defeat in the near future, is certainly a particularly useful way to make him reconsider his course n d u p res s .ndu.edu of action; indeed, it may be the only way. Nothing of what is argued herein should suggest that the defeat of enemy forces as a means of persuading the enemy to cease fighting is seen as insignificant. The shock of military defeat is certainly a huge factor in decisionmaking on any side, for which there may well be no substitute, to borrow General Douglas MacArthur’s claim. But often it takes more, and sometimes it takes less, than a military victory. In World War I, for instance, the German Heeresleitung managed to hide the Allies’ military victory from the German population because the Allies did not follow up their success in war by occupation of the defeated enemy country. The Allies did not repeat their mistake in World War II. In that second great conflagration, few took issue with Germany’s unconditional surrender—the practical application in its extreme form of the call to impose one’s will upon the adversary—as the war aim of the Allies, and few have questioned the wisdom of this approach since.9 There is a weighty argument, however, about whether Japan might have admitted defeat earlier had the clause of unconditional surrender been dropped, and had the Japanese population not been led to believe that this might involve the removal of their emperor.10 Either way, crucially, World War II was an extreme case of conflict, as it pitted civilizations believing in the essential human right to life against regimes and their followers who believed mankind could be divided into humans and subhumans, of whom the recognize some legitimacy in many of them, and the need to address all of them in some nonviolent fashion, through reforms, good governance, education, and investment. They can hardly be resolved through an unconditional imposition of one’s will upon the discontented side. The Trinity of Victory, Peace, and Justice Let us return to Aristotle’s definition of peace as the only legitimate war aim. According to the professed ethics of European societies from Antiquity to the French Revolution, the establishment of a better peace was self-evidently seen as the purpose of going to war. We find this argument articulated not only by Aristotle and pagan Roman thinkers but also by one of the fathers of the Roman Church, by East Roman or Byzantine thinkers such as Emperor Leo VI the Wise, and by Western Europeans in the Middle Ages and early modern times, from Christine de Pizan to the many authors of the 16th to 18th centuries who wrote about war. Military victory might be the preferred way to peace, but not the only one. Peace, harmonious order, and the kosmos were recognized as the overarching aims. How this was to be achieved— through negotiations, through the Byzantine equivalent of check-book diplomacy and soft power, through deterrence, coercion, or actual war—depended on circumstances. But is peace alone a suitable aim? The peace of the graveyard—that is, the annihilation of the entire enemy population—was the peace of the graveyard—the annihilation of the entire enemy population—was rarely articulated as an acceptable aim latter could be eliminated or exploited to death with impunity. Confrontations with such extremely evil adversaries as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan are the exception, not the norm. Most belligerents today do not aim at the enslavement of an enemy population, let alone its eradication, as the Germans did under Adolf Hitler. Instead, most wars arise from differences in purpose and aim on a less than existential level. They are conflicts about the distribution of wealth, resources, and territory, about a variance in status of different ethnic or religious groups, and about the right to determine one’s own way of life. It is difficult not to rarely articulated as an acceptable aim by those writing on warfare. A second factor had to be present: not only peace, but also peace with justice. Justice, however, has many facets. Admittedly, most arguments in Antiquity about military victory focused on how to merit and achieve it (piety and virtus were seen as the foremost conditions) rather than on its purpose.11 But already the late Roman Republic saw the transformation of the notion that pious behavior was necessary to gain the support of the gods for one’s military enterprise into a distinct notion that a war must fulfil a certain number of issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 7 conditions to be lawful. This would later be called just war, bellum iustum, and it had to fulfil several criteria with regard to its causes, purpose, and conduct to be defined as such. The criteria that later came to constitute just war theory can be traced back to pre-Christian, Roman Republican concepts of a proper or orderly way to conduct a war, most of which can already be found in Cicero’s and Varro’s writings: ■■ The war has a just cause (self-defense or defense of another). ■■ It has the only just aim of the pursuit of peace. ■■ It is the last resort. ■■ It is conducted after a formal declaration of war. ■■ It is carried out with moderation (which is often referred to as the concept of proportionality). ■■ Balancing the consequences of not going to war or going to war in advance of doing so, it must seem reasonable to assume that the destruction and suffering caused will not outweigh the evil that is fought.12 Pagan Roman just war theory was adapted to Christianity by Augustine of Hippo around 400 CE. He added the need for legitimate authority (God, or his representative on Earth, the Emperor—later taken to mean a legitimate government).13 Augustine’s writings on just war, scattered over several parts of his work, were codified by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century and gained general acceptance in international law. Thus, we find that in 1945, the United Nations (UN) Charter only allows defensive war (chapter VII.51), or action authorized by the UN Security Council in protection of international peace and security (chapter VII). In 2004, the UN High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, in its document “A More Secure World: our shared responsibility,” listed criteria of legitimacy for authorization of military intervention by the United Nations: the seriousness of the threat, the proper purpose, it is the last resort, it is conducted with proportional means, and the foreseeable balance of the consequences favors going to war over living with the consequences of inaction. This last criterion could be termed the choice of the lesser evil, or justice with moderation. Justice cannot be divorced from the peace; if it is, the peace will be worthless. 8 JFQ / issue 69, 2 nd quarter 2013 The pursuit of justice according to classical and later European authors, then, has several facets. The first is the restoration of a just state of affairs, the status quo before the war, or, if the status quo ante was not just, a just settlement of the dispute. In the absence of an international, mutually recognized court of justice to settle a dispute between two or more parties, this has often taken the form of war. Already Christine de Pizan, writing around 1400, tried to introduce an arbitration authority—composed of other princes and personalities of the highest moral authority—to settle disputes between princes. Many thinkers after her deplored the absence of such an authority, or a court of justice. Immanuel Kant, in his 1795 Eternal Peace, noted that war might serve to decide a quarrel but would not necessarily decide in favor of justice: “The field of battle is the only tribunal before which states plead their cause; but victory, by gaining the suit, does not decide in favour of the cause. Though the treaty of peace puts an end to the present war, it does not abolish a state of war (a state where continually new pretences for war are found).”14 As the Prussian General August Rühle von Lilienstern put it in 1813, “War is the means of settling through chance and the use of force the quarrels of the peoples. Or: it is the pursuit of peace or for a legal agreement by States with violent means.”15 Contemporary observers have often noted, however, that not all parties have always sought such a just settlement of a quarrel, or indeed peace. Shortly after the final defeat of Napoleon, Rühle remarked, “Victory . . . is not always the necessary condition of conquest or of peace, and peace is not always the necessary result of victory and conquest.” He added, “Victory and conquest are often causes of the continuation, the renewal and the multiplication of war.” In full cognizance of the old just war tradition, which had been dangerously challenged by Napoleon, Rühle conceded that it should in theory be the case “that one only wages war for [the sake of] peace, and that one should only wage war, in order afterwards to build it the more firmly and intensively on the lawful understanding between States.” Napoleon’s initiatives had shown, however, that wars were not always like this in reality. At times: a warring State only concludes peace for the sake of the next war, [contexts] in which it regards peace as a convenient and irreplace- Jacques-Louis David, Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art FORUM | Victory, Peace, and Justice The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, 1812 able period of calm, in order to continue thereafter the struggle that has been decided upon the more forcefully and completely. There are other contexts . . . in which a State derives some substantial, or perhaps only imaginary, gains from the continuation of war. In such cases, war is by no means waged for the sake of peace, as this would be a quite undesired event, but for the sake of the hoped-for gains, to be achieved through war. Such wars include those that are waged for passion and personal interests of individual military men or officials, of the army—in short, because of some subordinate interest, but not the general welfare of the State.16 Such wars do not, however, qualify as just wars; the problem arising from a victory of the party pursuing it in such a spirit lies in the unlikelihood that the defeated party will accept the outcome of the war. Second, just war theory holds that one must fight the adversary only until the just cause is served. A rare example of a Greek who took an interest in this, Polybius in the second century BCE, opined, “[G]ood men should not make war on wrongdoers with the object of destroying and exterminating them, but with that of correcting and reforming their errors”—or, to use a slightly different translation, “undoing their erroneous acts.”17 ndup res s . ndu. edu HEUSER In a more practical vein, Machiavelli warned his Prince that “Victories are never so overwhelming that the conqueror does not have to show some scruples, especially regarding justice.”18 Other writers went further and advocated justice tempered by clemency. Machiavelli’s contemporary Giacomo di Porcia wrote in 1530, “the duty and office of any political leader, after the battle is won and victory achieved, [is] to save lives [of those] who have not been excessively cruel and overly resistant. For what would be less gentle, indeed more like to the cruel and fiercely brutal beasts, than to handle your enemy without any mercy and meekness? Undoubtedly a leader acting thus will kindle the minds of men against him.”19 Machiavelli’s French admirer, nobleman Raymond de Beccarie de Pavie, Baron de Fourquevaux, appealed to nobler sentiments: “The true office of the conqueror is to pardon and to have pity upon the conquered.”20 Toward the end of the 16th century, Englishman Matthew Sutcliffe exhorted his readers to remember that “In the execution of wars . . . no cruelty should be used.” He urged “moderation even in the execution of justice, not only in the other actions of war.” For to “keep our conquest, there are two principal means which are necessary; force and justice.”21 About half a century later, French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal mused that “justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical. Justice without force is opposed, for there will always be villains. Force without justice is decried. One must therefore bring justice and force together, making what is just strong and what is strong just.”22 Just before the publication of Pascal’s Thoughts, his countryman Paul Hay du Chastelet admonished Louis XIV that the victor “has to preserve a generous humanity for the vanquished, to have compassion with them, to comfort them in their disgrace, and through good treatment, sweeten their rude misfortune.”23 If we consider the most successful pacification of two defeated enemies in the 20th century, Germany and Japan, it is precisely this recipe that worked: Marshall Plan aid for the Germans and reconstruction aid for the Japanese ensured that both nations had a vested interest in peace and stability through their new-found prosperity. Third, the administration of justice is often identified with the punishment of the “guilty” party (usually defined as the n d u p res s .ndu.edu aggressor, but who the aggressor is, and who the just defender or liberator is, are often uncertain in longstanding territorial disputes—think only of the Malvinas/Falklands issue). De facto, the party that calls for punishment is the victorious one, and punishment is meted out to the defeated side once fighting has come to an end. As General Curtis LeMay, responsible for the firebombing of Tokyo, remarked, “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.”24 Polybius did not see punishment as such as a just war aim, postulating that good men should “extend to those whom they think guilty the mercy and deliverance they offer to the innocent.”25 Others argued that the enforcement of justice—punishment for war crimes—can only reasonably take place in a symbolic form, or at any rate selectively, against the leading decisionmakers responsible for these crimes. As the Spanish diplomat and soldier Don Bernardino de Mendoza noted in 1595, one cannot “punish a multitude”26—or if one does, he either has to kill them all, or else the multitude will persuade themselves that this punishment is unjust, and the result, in many historic cases, has been the rise of revanchism. Fourth, writing about postwar justice, Sutcliffe, Mendoza, and others after them argued that one must prevent injustice at the lowest level, such as attacks on individuals, but also pillaging and other ordinary crimes or iniquities that violate local Tiepolo and Corrado Giaquinto. Even the French revolutionaries initially shared these war aims of bringing peace and justice; they saw the populations of Europe as oppressed by tyrannies and thus as brethren awaiting liberation, and they believed they were fighting only against their oppressors, not against the populations.27 The Trinity Neglected by the Napoleonic-Clausewitzian Paradigm Military writings between the time of Napoleon’s wars and World War II, by contrast, were dominated by the pursuit of victory for its own sake, victory divorced from the political settlement of a fundamentally political conflict, victory not as a reward for a just cause or for piety but due only to strength or at best cunning and underpinned by the Social Darwinist notion that the fitter nation deserved to prevail. Both the admirers and the enemies of Napoleon were blinded by his military victories. This was true especially of Clausewitz, who, casting all moral dimensions aside, formulated his famous tenet that “to impose our will on the enemy is” the “object” of war: “To secure that object we must render the enemy powerless; and that, in theory, is the true aim of warfare.” Clausewitz thus reduced the meaning of victory to narrow military conditions: “1. The enemy’s greater loss of material strength; 2. His loss of morale; 3. His open just war theory holds that one must fight the adversary only until the just cause is served customs. Effectively, they called for “good governance,” good administration, and the maintenance of law and order. The prevention of arbitrary arrests, assaults, theft, and arbitrary settlements of local disputes is part of the rule of law and justice. It stands to reason that the administration of justice is essential to a lasting peace. Incorporating some or all of these dimensions of justice, it was a commonplace to see peace and justice as linked or in need of linking before Napoleon ravaged Europe. Allegories placing the two next to each other, depicted as beautiful goddesses draped in silks and often engaged in conversation or embracing, grace paintings throughout Europe, such as those of admission of the above by giving up his intentions.”28 Clausewitz knew full well that he was taking warfare out of its greater political context when he stated this, as he wrote elsewhere: “In war the result is never final . . . even the ultimate outcome of a war is not always to be regarded as final. The defeated state often considers the outcome merely as a transitory evil.”29 Beyond this, Clausewitz deliberately omitted consideration of the trinity of victory, peace, and justice from On War. Only a few writers in the ensuing age, dominated by the imperative of the pursuit of victory at all costs, fully grasped Napoleon’s greatest shortcoming as a strategist: his inability to build a lasting peace. issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 9 Santi di Tito, Palazzo Vecchio FORUM | Victory, Peace, and Justice without victory, there is no survival.”32 Confronted with Hitler’s genocidal ideology and his military machinery of willing executioners, the Allies in World War II had no choice but to adhere to the NapoleonicClausewitzian paradigm. Victory vs. Survival Machiavelli, 16th century In the subsequent age, which was dominated by the Napoleonic-Clausewitzian paradigm, enemies were expected to surrender unconditionally, and summary punishments were imposed upon the vanquished nation by the victor in 1871 as in 1919. The result was rarely a lasting peace, as B.H. Liddell Hart noted in 1939: “The more intent you appear to impose a peace entirely of your own choosing, by conquest . . . the more cause you will provide for an ultimate attempt to reverse the settlement achieved by war.”30 It dawned on Liddell Hart that “Victory is not an end in itself,” as he noted in December 1936.31 In his own extensive reading, he rediscovered the thinking of sages who wrote prior to the age dominated by the Napole- 10 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 onic-Clausewitzian paradigm. World War II, which to the minds of many Britons was due at least in part to the irredentism that the peace settlement after World War I created in Germany, was still an extreme example of the adherence to the paradigm, with its imposition of unconditional surrender, as we have seen. Indeed, a superficial reading of Winston Churchill’s famous “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” speech of 1940 to the House of Commons—with its emphasis on “victory; victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be”—seems quite in keeping with the paradigm. Nevertheless, even Churchill conceded that in this total war, the ulterior aim was the survival of Great Britain, “for The war raised a new question, however: what if military victory and survival became mutually incompatible? A year after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bernard Brodie asserted, “If the [nuclear] aggressor state must fear retaliation,” that is, if there is a nuclear exchange, “no victory, even if guaranteed in advance—which it never is—would be worth the price.”33 He famously noted, “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.”34 Faced with the specter of total nuclear war, strategists to the west, and later also to the east, of the Iron Curtain began to debate whether war continued to be a rational choice—whether it could be the extension of a rational policy to another domain.35 Against this background, Liddell Hart’s rediscovery of earlier thinking about the relative value of victory and his skepticism about the Napoleonic-Clausewitzian paradigm were increasingly shared by others. Doubts persist as to whether nuclear war could ever again be a rational choice, and victory is increasingly seen as a nonsensical concept in the context of a nuclear war. Significantly, in the Cold War, both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and eventually the Warsaw Treaty Organization abandoned victory as a war aim.36 Nevertheless, wars on a lower scale promised to continue; anybody who doubted this was disabused of their optimism by the Korean War, which erupted in 1950. And such wars have generally been fought with the aim of winning them, in pursuit of victory. Indeed, the Korean War experience led to General MacArthur’s already mentioned claim that there was “no substitute for victory” for wars in general. Yet even in less than total wars, the concept of victory is now seen as problematic in the light of the difficulties of turning military victory into lasting success. In “small wars,” limited wars, low-intensity conflicts, wars of national liberation, or whatever term one chooses, victory was difficult to obtain let alone maintain long before the watershed of 1989/1991. Victory, or the translation of a ndup res s . ndu. edu HEUSER military success into a lasting and favorable political settlement, had been elusive also in less than total major wars since 1945 including the Arab-Israeli wars, not to mention the many small clashes—small from a Western the context of the Napoleonic-Clausewitzian paradigm, from peace and justice. In the words of a particularly eminent and influential British defense civil servant, Sir Maurice (later Lord) Hankey, “It must always be kept small wars proved particularly difficult for armed forces that were good at major campaigns in which overwhelming firepower promised success perspective—in which victory eluded the major powers involved, from the successive Indochina wars and Algeria to U.S. involvement in Somalia. Already during the Cold War, Alexander Atkinson noted that Chinese Communism under Mao Tse-tung was not seeking victory through the classical means of war.37 No wonder that, after the experience of Vietnam, American strategists and military instructors long shunned the subject of small wars. They had proved particularly difficult for high-tech armed forces that were good at major campaigns in which overwhelming firepower promised success. A counterfactual question deserves pondering: if nuclear weapons had not been invented, would we have been pushed to reevaluate the concept of “victory”? Counterfactual questions in history defy final answers, especially if they try to focus on single variables. What is clear is that, with or without nuclear weapons, there continue to be those who doubt that humanity can exist without war. Yet critics of war as a means of settling disputes go back at least to pre-Augustinian Christian authors, and individual intellectuals have sought to develop concepts to eliminate war. Nuclear weapons made the pursuit of this aim more pressing than ever before, even to those who recognize that enduring human passions will continue to work against rational, let alone humane, solutions to conflicts. Conclusions As long as war continues to exist, and as long as states upholding the UN’s restrictive rulings on war encounter situations where they see the inescapable need to resort to warfare, there will be the question of how to define war aims in such a context. The works cited at the beginning of this article fell short of a helpful definition of war aims by divorcing victory, which they continued to see in n d u p res s .ndu.edu in mind that after a war we have sooner or later to live with our enemies in amity.” Unless one has genocidal aims—which by definition no state upholding today’s international law can espouse—there are few wars where this consideration need not play a part. Hankey’s logical conclusion from this statement was cited at the beginning of this article: the most important aim in any war must be “to make a just and durable peace.” Victory is nothing if it does not lead to such a peace, and such justice must be seen as reasonable by both sides to make it durable. Hankey added: “Emotionalism of all kinds, hate, revenge, punishment and anything that handicaps the nation in achieving these four aims [of the pursuit of justice] are out of place.”38 The main obstacle to a just and durable peace consists of these all-too-human emotions, in addition to unpardonable collective selfishness, otherwise known as nationalism, chauvinism, or the arrogance and condescension that often underlie religious wars. Hatred, lust for revenge, and chauvinism in turn all too easily become untameable factors in democracies, as World War I and the interwar years illustrated, and as we find in the rampant nationalism that characterizes interstate relations on the Indian subcontinent. All this has practical implications, many of which find their echo in current debates about how to achieve “sustainable security.” It may well be unhelpful to gloat over one’s own success or victory. How different would relations with the Russian Federation be today if the West had not gloated over its “victory” in the Cold War and distributed medals for it, but instead celebrated the joint escape of East and West from the constant threat of World War III as a nuclear doomsday? Emphasizing postconflict reconciliation is thus likely to be a better model in many instances than continuing to humiliate the defeated party. That this model would not extend to defeated National Socialism (or to equally wicked regimes) stands to reason, but as noted, not all adversaries are so utterly evil. Where at all possible, a war must not be conducted in an unforgivable way: the laws of war (ius in bello) must be carefully observed even if it means, as many generals have complained, “fighting with one hand tied behind one’s back.” While this option is hardly available to small states, it certainly is to the world’s only superpower. It secures the moral high ground, which is crucial for the perception of justice, an essential prerequisite for a lasting peace. JFQ NOTES 1 Maurice Hankey, Politics: Trials and Errors (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1950), 26f. 2 See, for example, Jan Angstrom and Isabelle Duyvesteyn, eds., Understanding Victory and Defeat in Contemporary War (London: Routledge, 2007); Boone Bartholomees, “Theory of Victory,” Parameters 38, no. 2 (Summer 2008), 25–36; Dominic Johnson and Dominic Tierney, “Essence of Victory: Winning and Losing International Crises,” Security Studies 13, no. 2 (2004), 350–381; Dominic Johnson and Dominic Tierney, Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 3 Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966). 4 Robert Mandel, The Meaning of Military Victory (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), 4–6. 5 William C. Martel, Victory in War: Foundations of Modern Military Policy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 293. 6 Colin S. Gray, Defining and Achieving Decisive Victory (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2002), 18. 7 Brian Bond, The Pursuit of Victory from Napoleon to Saddam Hussein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 8 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.1 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2011), X.7. 9 Hankey, 25 and following. He was critical of the imposition of unconditional surrender terms for Germany and Italy. 10 For the Japanese problem, see Rufus Miles, “Hiroshima: The Strange Myth of Half a Million American Lives Saved,” International Security 10, no. 2 (Fall 1985); Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 1995); Dennis Wainstock, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996). 11 François Helm, La Théologie de la Victoire de Constantin à Théodose (Paris: Beauchesne, 1992), 20–26. issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 11 FORUM | Victory, Peace, and Justice NEW from NDU Press for the Center for Strategic Research Institute for National Strategic Studies Strategic Forum 280 Russia Still Matters: Strategic Challenges and Opportunities for the Obama Administration By John W. Parker and Michael Kofman Russia’s recent authoritarian turn and Putin’s pandering to anti-American sentiment have highlighted the obstacles to a genuine partnership with the United States, assuring that bilateral relations will be a lower priority for both nations in the next 4 years. Nevertheless, as a key United Nations member, a still formidable military and nuclear power, and new member of World Trade Organization, “Russia still matters,” and the authors find and explore a set of mutual interests and concerns that necessitate pragmatic engagement between Washington and Moscow. In the near term, U.S.-Russian coordination will be required on the issues of Syria, Afghanistan, and missile defense in Europe. On a longer fuse, cooperation will be needed on such topics as the rise of China, security and development in the Arctic, and bilateral trade and development. In all these areas, the authors point out opportunities for the United States to advance its strategic goals. Visit the NDU Press Web site for more information on publications at ndupress.ndu.edu 12 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 12 William Charles Korfmacher, “Cicero and the bellum iustum,” Classical Bulletin 48, no. 4 (February 1972), 49–52; Silvia Clavadetscher-Thürlemann, “Polemon Dikaios und Bellum Iustum: Versuch einer Ideengeschichte” (M.S. Ph.D. diss., University of Zurich, 1985), 127–130. 13 John Mark Mattox, Saint Augustine and the Theory of Just War (London: Continuum, 2006). 14 Immanuel Kant, Zum Ewigen Frieden (Koenigsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius, 1795). 15 August Rühle von Lilienstern, “Vom Kriege,” in Apologie des Krieges, 2nd ed. (1818; repr. Vienna: Age d’homme-Karolinger, 1984). 16 August Rühle von Lilienstern, Handbuch für den Offizier zur Belehrung im Frieden und zum Gebrauch im Felde, vol. I, in The Strategy Makers, trans. and ed. Beatrice Heuser, 171–190 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio/Praeger, 2010). 17 Polybius, The Histories, V.11, trans. W.R. Paton, F.W. Walbank, and Christian Habicht (Boston: Harvard University, 2011), 35. 18 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1961), 122. 19 Giacomo di Porcia, “Clarissimi viri . . . de re militaris liber,” in The preceptes of Warre set forth by James the Erle of Purlilia, trans. Peter Betham (London: E. Whytchurche, 1544), chap. 66. 20 Raimond de Beccarie de Pavie, Seigneur de Fourquevaux, Instructions sur le faict de la Guerre extraictes des livres de Polybe, Frontin, Végèce, Cornazan, Machiavelle, in The Strategy Makers, 47. 21 Matthew Sutcliffe, “The Practice, Proceedings and Lawes of Armes,” in The Strategy Makers, 69, 80. 22 Blaise Pascal, Pensées sur la Réligion et d’autres sujets, published posthumously (Paris: G. Desprez, 1669), item 103–298 (author’s translation). The author is grateful to David Yost for having drawn his attention to this and for his comments on the article. 23 Paul Hay du Chastelet, “Traite de la Guerre, ou Politique militaire, ” in The Strategy Makers, 111. 24 See “People & Events: General Curtis E. LeMay (1906–1990),” American Experience, available at <www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/ peopleevents/pandeAMEX61.html>. 25 Polybius, The Histories, V.11, 35. 26 Don Bernardino de Mendoza, “Theórica y prática de guerra,” in The Strategy Makers, 97. 27 Marc Belissa, Fraternité universelle et intérêt national, 1713–1795 (Paris: Kimé, 1998). 28 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 75, 234. 29 Ibid., 80. 30 B.H. Liddell Hart, Thoughts on War (London: Faber & Faber, 1944), 177. 31 Ibid., 47. 32 Emphasis added. The audio for this speech is available at <www.youtube.com/ watch?v=xjuiMuvHojQ>. 33 Bernard Brodie, The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), 75. 34 Ibid., 76. 35 Beatrice Heuser, Reading Clausewitz (London: Pimlico, 2002), 143–160. 36 Beatrice Heuser, “Victory in a Nuclear War? A Comparison of NATO and WTO War Aims and Strategies,” Contemporary European History 7, no. 3 (November 1998), 311–328. 37 Alexander Atkinson, Social Order and the General Theory of Strategy (Sydney: Law Book Company of Australasia, 1981). See also Richard Hobbs, The Myth of Victory: What Is Victory in War? (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979). 38 Hankey. ndup res s . ndu. edu U.S. Air Force (Allen Stokes) Senior Airman practices rifle fighting techniques during Security Forces Combat Readiness Training ORGANIZATION THEORIES Perspectives on Changing National Security Institutions By a n t H o n y J . D i B e l l a Dr. Anthony J. DiBella is a Visiting Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the College of William and Mary. n d u p res s .ndu.edu issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 13 FORUM | Perspectives on Changing National Security Institutions T he study of national defense and international security has long been a core concern of political scientists. International and interstate security issues fall within a political context of trends, public pressures, and global interests. It is thus not surprising that when it comes to the development and advocacy of particular defense or security strategies, the loudest, or at least the greatest number of voices come from political scientists and not from physicists, linguists, or cultural anthropologists. Yet as has been argued elsewhere, the conduct of national security is more about organization science; it is through the institutions of national security that strategies are ultimately implemented and either succeed or fail.1 It is one thing to conceive and articulate a defense strategy or an approach to homeland security; it is quite another to implement strategy through a complex web of national and international security institutions and organizations. While the Department of Defense (DOD) may not be a business, as some would suggest, it is an organization; but unfortunately, business theory and organization theory are too often equated with one another.2 Organization theory is about how people every day come together to work for some mutual purpose that in the process creates private or public good. Much as there is more than one theory or school of thought to explain economic systems, so too with organizations. One pertinent aspect of my years of teaching military officers at a war college and civilian institutions of higher learning is their singular view of what organizations are. Perhaps this is due to the uniformity of thinking that military training tends to foster, but I suspect it also derives from a rather dated view of what organizations are and how they are best managed. The focus of this article, then, is to explain that organizations may be conceived of in a variety of ways and that this diversity constitutes part of the difficulty in managing institutions of national security. Besides describing various forms or perspectives of organization theory, this article also considers the implications for successfully implementing new defense strategies, especially in a globally networked world. This capacity is essential as defense leaders continue to confront new global realities and defense challenges. The genesis and pressures to alter and adapt defense institutions come from 14 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 both internal and external sources. Internal pressures are often caused from budgetary constraints and shifts in prevailing doctrine as advocated by different political parties. External pressures have come from the effects of globalization and the resultant rise in terrorism or, as Samuel Huntington would claim, the “clash of civilizations.”3 From Organizations as Machines. For thousands of years, the human species made its livelihood outside the context of formal organizations. Pre-agrarian and agrarian societies were based on self-sufficiency and independence. As civilization evolved, more and more people earned their livelihoods from and through formal organizations that there is no one model of organizations, nor is there a universal formula for running effective organizations the buzzword of transformation during the administration of George W. Bush (as articulated most clearly by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) to the call for reform just prior to and now during the administration of President Barack Obama, there always seems to be pressure on the defense establishment to respond to new circumstances. This is probably why General Martin Dempsey explained the latest push for reallocating defense expenditures as indicating the need for the military to act more like “a learning organization.”4 To understand that concept requires some minimal notion of how organizations have been conceived. This article endeavors to shed light on such perspectives and help formulate thoughts about how DOD strategies, regardless of content, can be better implemented through processes of organizational change. Organization Theories and Perspectives If leading organizations effectively was a matter of mechanics or science, there would never be a weapons-procurement project that went over budget, friendly fire accidents, or a company that went out of business. All of us have ideas about how organizations operate and how they should function; there is no one theory or model of organizations, nor is there a universal formula for running or commanding effective organizations. How mental images guide us was elegantly examined by Kenneth Boulding in The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society (1956). More recently, Gareth Morgan used images and metaphors to describe a range of ways in which people think about organizations—as machines, organisms, cultures, brains, and political systems.5 Each reflects a way to understand organizations and has implications for how we think organizations can be changed or transformed. were seen as means to some goal or end much like tools or instruments. Individuals were assigned specific roles or tasks, and the organization was looked at in terms of how these pieces fit together like a machine. Many early practices to manage formal organizations originated in the military. Inspired by the legions of the Roman army and the mechanical inventions of his time, Frederick the Great of Prussia (1740–1786) is considered to have developed the modern mechanistic army. This army is characterized by a rigid hierarchical structure and the standardization of personnel and regulations. The individual soldier (worker) had no identity apart from his particular role and was subservient to the whole. As machines require parts to function and fit together, organizations need jobs to be done and coordinated. The function of management is to identify all those jobs and ensure that people carry out their duties as assigned. This orientation led to the notion of “command and control.” Taken to its extreme, supervisors direct or control workers to behave in specific ways. Contributing to this orientation was Frederick Taylor, considered the father of what came to be known as scientific management. Taylor thought that work should be studied and that workers should merely follow what science dictated they do to maximize efficiency.6 In stable environments where organizational goals and the means to achieve them are unambiguous or remain unchanged over time, efficiency derives from the routinization of work. However, the advantages of this mechanistic approach to production dissipate when new environmental demands emerge (as in different stakeholder or adversarial challenges). Viewing organizations as machines means focusing on how well all the parts are ndup res s . ndu. edu DIBELLA functioning. Are lines of responsibility and communications clear and controlled? Are rules and procedures followed? Do workers (soldiers, sailors) know their jobs and are they trained to do them? While reform may suggest changes in how the machine operates, transformation may imply shifts in what the machine produces. Organizations as Organisms. A second metaphor for organizations relates to what most of us know best as a functioning, organic system: the human body. Its focal point is not goals or a mission but needs and metabolism. To maintain a functioning body, we need certain inputs (water, food, affection), and we need to adapt to our environment (if only to avoid getting too hot or too cold). Organisms are systems comprised of various parts, each of which may belong to subsystems (for example, the heart and spleen are parts of the body’s circulatory system), and there are interdependencies within and between subsystems. A failure in one subsystem is apt to lead to failure in another. Effectiveness is achieved through the proper coordination and balance among efficient subsystems. As the environment changes, organizations adapt and the rate of change in the internal organizational environment needs to match the rate of change in the external environment.7 In effect, internal design must match external complexity. For example, special operations forces are easier to deploy and more adaptive to theater conditions than larger conventional forces. Even as the external environment constrains the growth of certain organizations, it may similarly generate certain opportunities.8 For example, the development of the Internet has spawned a new generation of organizations (Amazon, Google, FaceBook, YouTube) based on entirely new business models. Of course, these developments created new threats to our national security and provided new tools for our adversaries, but they have also given new life to military forces that deal with asymmetric threats and counterinsurgencies. If we view national security organizations as organisms, then we need to acknowledge their subsystems and their needs, the relationships among them, and the processes that make the whole system work. Consideration should be given to how tightly or loosely coupled the subsystems (for example, military Services and combatant commands) n d u p res s .ndu.edu are, their (inter)dependence, and degree of differentiation. Transforming or reforming the national security sector would suggest changing the composition of its subsystems and/or the relationships among them.9 Organizations as Political Systems. All citizens in a democratic society have rights to participate in the decisions that affect them. What happens to those civic rights when individuals enter the portal of their workplaces? If individuals had the same set of needs and wants, answering that question would be easy. Unfortunately, the larger the organization, the more it is apt to employ individuals with different backgrounds, educational levels, and financial needs. The result is conflict between competing needs and wants, from the manner in which compensation is determined to the processes whereby work is assigned. In organizations, power and influence come from a variety of sources and may be vested in groups of individuals more than with individuals per se. In some situations, groups with shared interests form alliances or participate in coalitions to expand their influence even further. Labor unions, for example, are a traditional way for individuals to assert their civic rights through the power of numbers. However powerful groups form, intergroup conflict may promote helpful competition or destructive adversarial relationships. over civil-military (civ-mil) relations is based, in part, on the issue of power and politics. Transformation suggests change in that relationship, but constitutional concerns constrain that possibility. If the current distribution of power within the national security system is the cause and consequence of our failure to reform or evolve that system, then how can its key stakeholders produce the reforms that are being advocated today?10 Organizations as Cultures. While culture was traditionally used to explain differences between whole societies, it has also become a helpful construct to explain why every organization is different in some way. As organizations accrue experience and resolve problems, they develop distinctive ways of doing things. As cultures, organizations offer their members a framework for shared meaning and the development of common action. Culture provides stability and comfort and can be a pathway or barrier to change. Strong or rigid cultures are less apt to respond effectively to internal or external challenges. On the other hand, changes that are consistent with dominant assumptions or organizational values are readily accepted. Culture as a system of meaning establishes boundaries between those who share in the culture and those who do not. In that sense, culture can be a source of differentiation or integration between those inside, outside, or within the organization.11 An the larger the organization, the more it is apt to employ individuals with different backgrounds Power can be used to gain control of vital resources, set policy, determine organizational mission, and control technology. Whether such control is directed toward institutional or personal purposes will depend on the ethical values of those with power, the extent to which personal and institutional goals and objectives are aligned, and the presence of checks and balances embodied in formalized rules and regulations. If power is too diffuse, an organization faces the risk that no one has enough influence to make major decisions or get things done. Transforming or reforming the national security sector as a system of power suggests altering the relative importance of its different constituencies or the processes whereby decisions are made. The perpetual dialogue organization needs mechanisms to acculturate new members and sustain itself when members leave. For example, boot camp is a defining experience for military personnel since it transforms a raw recruit into a carrier of a Service’s core culture. If we view national security as a constellation of distinct cultures represented by the differences between (and within) military Services and civilian agencies, then culture may be more of a force for fragmentation than integration. Yet if national security professionals, military and civilian, share some aspects of culture, reform can be expedited if it is predicated on those shared values. One key is understanding the valence of values that promote commonality of interests among stakeholders versus those issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 15 FORUM | Perspectives on Changing National Security Institutions that make them different. For example, all Americans value individual freedom even though they differ about how such freedom can be ensured. Organizations as Brains. Cognitive functioning is an essential element in making good decisions. In organizations, all sorts of decisions need to be made, from the choice of hiring criteria to selecting work assignments to developing strategy. Organizations are systems in which vast amounts of information and knowledge are processed and used for a variety of purposes, not just decisionmaking. With the advent of computerized information systems, contemporary organizations have an expanded capacity to process and store knowledge. Yet choices still have to be made about what knowledge needs to be acquired or is worth retaining. Another issue pertains to who will have access to what institutional knowledge and how that knowledge is made available. The metaphor of the brain implies one central repository for knowledge and information processing. However, holography suggests that brain functioning can occur at multiple nodes or locations.12 In effect, knowledge and the capacity to process it can be replicated at different locations. Organizations may have a central office or headquarters, but if knowledge and knowledge processing is replicated elsewhere, then decisions can be made closest to where their impact will be felt. Information exchange has been characterized as having the properties of “stickiness” in that barriers to knowledge flow and application can constrain the effectiveness of any system.13 If we view the national security system as a collective brain, then its capabilities would be represented by the information, knowledge, and intelligence it acquires, retains, disseminates, and uses. Transformation suggests changes in any one of these processes or in the nature of the information itself. For example, today’s asymmetric threats could be responded to more effectively if knowledge processing was handled on a more localized basis with less dependence on the Pentagon or the Central Intelligence Agency. An interagency approach would consider how information processing could best be coordinated across a diverse set of organizational actors.14 16 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 Other Views of What Organizations Are (or Should Be) Much as human experience evolves, so too does the nature of organizations and our perceptions of them. The following section outlines some of the latest thinking about what organizations are or need to become. Organizations as Chaords. When VISA International was established in the 1970s, it searched for a business model that would help it operate in a diverse, fast-paced environment in over 200 countries. Dee Hock, its founder, coined the term chaordic (chaos + order) to refer to any complex, selforganizing, self-governing, adaptive, nonlinear system.15 Hock believed that VISA needed to be a chaordic organization, a system that balanced the need for both flexibility and stability. Effective organizational performance requires mechanisms to build a shared culture while allowing for adaptation to local circumstances and shifting environmental demands. The breadth of U.S. national security operations and the mix of functional (military Services and civilian agencies) and geographic units (regional combatant commands) reflects characteristics of chaords. Organizations as Learning Systems. In an article published in the Harvard Business Review in 1988, Arie DeGeus, former chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, made the claim that a company’s ability to learn may be its own sustainable competitive advantage. This insight was followed soon thereafter by Peter Senge’s breakthrough book The Fifth Discipline, and the search for the learning organization was on.16 However, subsequent research has suggested that all organizations, including the military, are learning systems.17 This view suggests that transformation requires changing learning capabilities to meet current security challenges. Of course, time marches on, and now we are much more apt to hear about “learning cultures” than “learning organizations.” That may make General Dempsey’s statement a bit dated, but it is certainly more contemporary than other views of what DOD is or should become. The need for continuous learning is also a capacity fundamental to counterinsurgency, as often expressed by General David Petraeus, its key architect.18 Organizations as Networks. In classical theory, organizations are configured and designed with particular attention to the vertical relationships between operational units (line functions) and administrative units (staff functions). In contrast, today’s networked organizations focus on horizontal relationships and independent action. By emphasizing the latter, organizational architects enable decisionmaking at the periphery (cells or nodes) of an organization by deemphasizing the power of a central office whose chief focus becomes coordination rather than control.19 Transforming our national security system as a network would require changing the number or nature of nodes in that network and the relationships between them.20 That sort of transformation has already been promoted in the private sector.21 The term network-centric warfare encapsulates this view within military operations.22 Each of the brief depictions presented so far offers one way to understand national security organizations, and each has implications for transformation or reform in the national security sector and how it can be expedited. Table 1 lists each of the eight metaphors and their associated goal or focal point. For example, the key issue or concern in a machine is efficiency, while for an organism it is stability. Table 1. Organizational Theory Images Image Goal/Focus Machine Achieving maximum eficiency Organism Maintaining stability Political System Gaining control Culture Propagating values Brain Storing and accessing knowledge Chaord Balancing integration and differentiation Learning Organization Self-realization Network Distributed resources and command ndup res s . ndu. edu DIBELLA The Challenge of Ongoing Change in Military Affairs A major dilemma for DOD is that it is faced with managing a continuous process to integrate new technologies, all the way from the slingshot of Biblical days to the drone aircraft of today. That process often requires fundamental changes in how military personnel think about and execute strategy. Even as the technology of battle evolves, and with it the organizational structures that support it, so does the role of the military in society. With the recent trend toward democratization, especially in the Middle East, the challenge of reform is not a matter of simply integrating new technologies but adapting the military to the current environment of political realities. In discussing the prerequisites for democracy today, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri acknowledge the historical revolution in military affairs in Multitude.23 In doing so, they point out that military reform is guided by historical theories of war and battle, but there is a shortage of theory or guiding principles when considering how to manage the military’s evolving role in today’s democratic societies.24 This shortcoming is exacerbated by the capacity to see and understand organizations in the multiple ways already described. When it comes to changing organizations, individuals also have different views about what change is, whether it is classified as transformational, incremental, or reform, and how it can be managed or achieved. Theories on the processes of organizational change have been characterized as four types: lifecycle, evolution, dialectic, and teleology.25 Table 2 shows how various characteristics of the theories described above match up against these four types of change theory. Lifecycle theories focus on stage development based on changes caused by organic growth. Whether prompted by external or environmental change or internal factors, change is an inevitable outcome of time and experience. Change processes are linear and irreversible. Change may also be framed as teleology guided by a desirable result, outcome, or purpose. How an entity moves or changes and progresses toward that result is not preordained through some prescriptive set of steps. Goals may shift over time prompting new periods of change, reform, or transformation. n d u p res s .ndu.edu Table 2. Types of Images with Characteristics Type Image Lever Progress Evolution - Machine Adaptation Cumulative Growth over time Linear stages - Brain Lifecycle - Organism - Culture Dialectic - Political System Conlict Synthesis Teleology - Chaord Collaboration Movement toward - Learning Organization goal - Network One commonly understood change process is evolution. Much as it has been used to describe the development of species, it can be used to classify organizational change. The evolutionary cycle of change is precipitated by the competition for resources and the adaptation between internal and external characteristics. Change is cumulative and progressive as organizations become more adapted and less adaptable. A fourth and final type of change theory is dialectic based on the Hegelian notion of ongoing conflict between thesis and antithesis leading to synthesis. As the relative power of organizational actors shifts and arguments for one thesis or another win out, the opportunity for change arises. Conflict resolution begets change, but the outcome may lead to worsening rather than improved performance. Implications Changing or reforming our national security apparatus is an imposing challenge given this theoretical potpourri. On the one hand, there are theories about what organizations are, and on the other there is a typology about how and why organizations change. Yet as shown in table 2, there is some correspondence between the two. For example, for organisms and cultures, change is linear and prompted by developmental growth that is characteristic of lifecycle theories. Developing implications from these theoretical orientations for implementing change might best proceed via a series of questions. First, when you think of some branch of the military, what images arise in your mind and how do those images shape your thinking about one Service versus another? If military organizations are cultures, then how do the protocols in the military reflect fundamental cultural assumptions? The role of DOD has been to take action to deter our foes or, failing that, to wage war against them. Nowadays, the military is being asked to serve as “nationbuilders,” which can be viewed as transformational, compared to the image of the military as a “warfighting machine.” The closer a military command is to the field of execution, the greater the concern for efficiency and machine-like or mechanisticlike functioning. However, the greater the role of the command in the development of strategy, the more organic-like its features must be. Once a war starts, it is impossible to know what course it will take and what the results will be. That need, to acknowledge how ambiguity will always be an element of military operations, is what Robert NcNamara conveyed with his “fog of war” metaphor.26 Unfortunately, at the highest levels of strategy formulation, the drive to eliminate uncertainty can lead to incorrect inferences. Winning wars may take precision to put ordnance on a target with fixed GPS coordinates, but many demands placed on our national security apparatus require working with and within a shifting environment. Organic rather than mechanistic metaphors or images would seem better suited for these challenges. That perhaps is one of the key reasons for the introduction of network-centric warfare into the battlespace. What remains to be seen is how such an approach can mesh with or within traditional command and control structures. Ensuring national security today requires interagency operations, or what has been referred to as a whole-of-government approach.27 Reform requires not only changing issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 17 FORUM | Perspectives on Changing National Security Institutions individual organizations but also changing a network of organizations and the relationships between them. That requirement is bound to be difficult when our network of national security organizations seems like an organized anarchy.28 As suggested by change theories based on teleology, progress can be made by slow movement toward the are decentralized or embedded in a network structure?31 As J.M. Kreighbaum suggests, DOD needs to free itself from policies that reinforce mechanistic metaphors or images of its organization.32 When civilians enter the military, they are trained (some might say socialized) to execute orders and not ask questions. the change process should not be to reach development stages but to enable incremental steps whole-of-government approach currently advocated. The change process should not be to reach development stages but to enable incremental steps. For example, it is one thing for the U.S. Army to support a battalion or brigade in a specific theater of war, but it is quite another to manage a joint command or an organization based at the Pentagon or nested in a coalition. The more diverse the set of organizations involved in some coalition, the more difficult it is to coordinate them. However, the ease of using common images to compare and contrast organizations demonstrates that organizations do have a lot in common. Perhaps when Arthur Cebrowski explained transformation in terms of changes in beliefs, attitudes, and cognition, he referred to the ability to work with different types of organizations simultaneously.29 In a speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated that “in order to succeed in the asymmetric battlefields of the 21st century—the dominant combat environment in the decades to come, in my view— our Army will require leaders of uncommon agility, resourcefulness, and imagination; leaders willing and able to think and act creatively and decisively in a different kind of world, in a different kind of conflict than we have prepared for the last six decades.”30 Metaphoric thinking is a way to promote creativity and understand national security organizations (and those of our adversaries) from multiple perspectives. This is not to promote or advocate for any one perspective but to incorporate multiple perspectives into our mental models. If our generals view (and treat) our military Services as machines, how can we effectively respond to asymmetric threats and adversaries whose command and control functions 18 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 Execution is expedited when assumptions are not challenged or tested, and that is a good thing when one is facing an adversary ready to kill him. The training that military personnel receive to standardize their responses to combat situations creates a uniformity of mental models and constrains seeing the world from multiple perspectives. Uniformity of thinking is more justifiable at the tactical level, but at the strategic or flag officer level, it is counterproductive. If all staff officers within a command think alike, their commander has to work with redundancy. The question remains as to what images will best fit national security organizations in an age that contains both evolving asymmetric threats and the potential for traditional threats. Do we shift from a machine to a network or do we alter the properties of the machine? Either way generates change, but one could argue that only the former represents true transformation. The larger question is how we make such a transformation. Given the political context of our national security apparatus, a dialectic framing of the task ahead seems appropriate. That means enlarging our capacity to resolve conflict. While the Project on National Security Reform provided a vision of where we need to go, the challenge remains how to get there.33 In our pluralistic society governed by a political system comprised of checks and balances, radical and discontinuous change is highly unlikely. Perhaps military transformation sounds too daunting a task so we no longer hear of it. Although reforming national security seems more palatable and less challenging, it remains on the periphery. The key takeaway from this article should be a recognition that much as there is more than one mindset about warfare and how to beat the enemy (as typified by the classical thinkers Carl von Clausewitz and Lao Tzu), so too are there multiple ways to think about organizations. To what extent are military and national security leaders aware of the organizational images they carry and their implications? What models, paradigms, or theories do they hold with regard to how such organizations are changed? When senior DOD managers think about and run their operations like a military machine, it should not come as a surprise when they do not operate that way. The bureaucratic nature of a public organization such as the Pentagon provides a sharp contrast with command and control operations in the field of battle. Both the opacity and multiplicity of organization theory contribute to the challenge of working in an interagency or joint environment. It is best to recognize that in those contexts military leaders and civilian managers will have diverse and potentially contradictory views about what organizations are and how they can be changed. Many of us are barely aware of our own theories much less those held by our counterparts who lead other organizations in an interagency or joint context. JFQ The author thanks Dr. J. Douglas Orton for his comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this article. NOTES 1 Steven Kelman, “Organization Studies and Public Administration,” in The Academy of Management Annals, ed. James P. Walsh and Arthur Brief, 225–267 (New York: Routledge, 2007); James D. Orton with Christopher J. Lamb, “Interagency National Security Teams: Can Social Science Contribute?” PRISM 2, no. 2 (March 2011), 47–64. 2 Milan Vego, “Is the Conduct of War a Business?” Joint Force Quarterly 59 (4th Quarter 2010), 57–65. 3 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007). 4 Interview on Face the Nation, January 8, 2012. 5 Gareth Morgan, Images of Organization (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1986); Creative Organization Theory: A Resourcebook (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989); and Imaginization: New Mindsets for Seeing, Organizing, and Managing (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1997). 6 Frederick E. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Row, 1911). ndup res s . ndu. edu DIBELLA 7 Paul R. Lawrence and Jay W. Lorsch, Organization and Environment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, 1967). 8 For information on the field of population ecology, see Michael T. Hannan and John H. Freeman, “The Population Ecology of Organizations,” American Journal of Sociology 82 (1977), 929–964. 9 James R. Locher, “National Security Reform: A Prerequisite for Successful Complex Operations,” PRISM 1, no. 1 (December 2009), 77–86. 10 Ibid. 11 Donna Winslow, “Military Organization and Culture from Three Perspectives: The Case of Army,” in Social Sciences and the Military: An Interdisciplinary Overview, ed. Giuseppe Caforio, 67–88 (New York: Routledge, 2007). 12 Ken Wilber, ed., The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes: Exploring the Leading Edge of Science (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1982). 13 Gabriel Szulanski and Rossella Cappetta, “Stickiness: Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Predicting Difficulties in the Transfer of Knowledge within Organizations,” in The Blackwell Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, ed. Mark Easterby-Smith and Marjorie A. Lyles, 513–534 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). 14 Locher. 15 Dee Hock, Birth of the Chaordic Age (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2000). 16 See Arie P. DeGeus, “Planning as Learning,” Harvard Business Review, March–April, 1988, 70–74; and Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (New York: Doubleday, 1990). 17 Anthony J. DiBella, “Can the Army Become a Learning Organization? A Question Re-Examined,” Joint Force Quarterly 56 (1st Quarter 2010), 117–122. 18 Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 19 Marc S. Gerstein, “From Machine Bureaucracies to Networked Organizations: An Architectural Journey,” in Organizational Architecture, ed. David A. Nadler, 11–38 (San Francisco: JosseyBass, 1992). 20 Erik J. de Waard and Joseph Soeters, “How the Military Can Profit from Management and Organization Science,” in Social Sciences and the Military: An Interdisciplinary Overview, ed. Giuseppe Caforio, 181–196 (New York: Routledge, 2007). 21 C.K. Prahalad and H. Bhattacharyya, “Twenty Hubs and No HQ,” strategy+business enews, February 26, 2008, 1–6, available at <www. strategy-business.com/article/08102?pg=all>. 22 David S. Alberts, John J. Garstka, and Frederick P. Stein, Network-centric Warfare: Developing and Leveraging Information Superiority, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: DoD C4ISR Cooperative Research Program, 2000). n d u p res s .ndu.edu 23 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004). 24 Ibid., 47. 25 Andrew H. van de Ven and Marshall Scott Poole, “Explaining Development and Change in Organizations,” Academy of Management Review 20 (1995), 510–540. 26 James G. Blight, The Fog of War: Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). 27 Locher. 28 Michael D. Cohen and James G. March, Leadership and Ambiguity, 2nd ed. (Boston: Harvard Business School, 1986). 29 Arthur K. Cebrowski, “Transforming Transformation,” Transformation Trends (Arlington, VA: Office of Force Transformation, April 19, 2004). 30 Robert M. Gates, speech delivered at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, NY, April 21, 2008. 31 Delphine Resteigne and Joseph Soeters, “Managing Militarily,” Armed Forces & Society 35 (2009), 307–322. 32 Jay M. Kreighbaum, Busting DoD Bureaucracy: Creating Fundamental Change by Leveraging Concepts and Practices from the Private Sector (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, 2002). 33 Project on National Security Reform (PNSR), Forging a New Shield (Washington, DC: PNSR, December 2008). NEW from NDU Press for the Center for Strategic Research Institute for National Strategic Studies Strategic Perspectives, No. 13 The New NATO Policy Guidelines on Counterterrorism: Analysis, Assessments, and Actions By Stefano Santamato with Marie-Theres Beumler On September 12, 2001, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), for the first time in its history, invoked the Article 5 collective defense clause after terrorist attacks on the United States. In the 11 years since, NATO used a pragmatic approach to fight terrorism, but the impact of this approach was mitigated by the lack of an agreed policy defining NATO’s rightful place among counterterrorism actors. It was not until May 2012 that NATO agreed on a policy to define its role and mandate in countering terrorism. In this study, the authors review the evolution of the terrorist threat, NATO’s response, and the new policy guidelines themselves, which focus on NATO’s strengths of intelligencesharing, capacity-building, special operations, training, and technology. But the guidelines are only a necessary first step. The challenge is to define an Action Plan to implement them. Toward this end, the authors recommend six cross-cutting proposals: apply net assessment, develop counterterrorism strategic communications, establish a homeland security constituency in NATO, promote a border security initiative, develop a “functional” counterterrorism partnership framework, and contribute to the Global Counterterrorism Forum. Visit the NDU Press Web site for more information on publications at ndupress.ndu.edu issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 19 FORUM | Crowdsourcing for the Intelligence Community President Obama departs evening campaign rally in Dubuque, Iowa, November 3, 2012 The White House (Pete Souza) GOLDCORP CROWDSOURCING An Industry Best Practice for the Intelligence Community? By J e s s e r o y W i l s o n Jesse Roy Wilson is a Defense Intelligence Agency Senior Intelligence Officer with U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida. He is currently working on a Master’s degree at the National Intelligence University in Washington, DC. 20 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 ndup res s . ndu. edu WILSON A growing number of businesses use crowdsourcing—that is, they outsource tasks to people outside the organization1—in a way that harnesses the capabilities and knowledge of external individuals on a mass scale to create innovative solutions. This article describes how Goldcorp, Incorporated, an international gold-mining company on the brink of collapse, used crowdsourcing via the Internet to turn its business around. The article then explores some challenges and successes behind crowdsourcing initiatives and offers crowdsourcing as an approach with applicability for the Intelligence Community (IC). McEwen wondered if he could use the same model with the gold mine. Back at Goldcorp, McEwen pitched his idea to take “all of our geology, all the data we have that goes back to 1948, and put it into a file and share it with the world . . . [and] ask the world to tell us where we’re going to find the next six million ounces of gold.”4 He experienced some resistance. For example, the information that McEwen wanted to Goldcorp make public was proprietary. A mining company had never made this information public before.5 Second, the geologists were concerned how the message would reflect on their reputations, which essentially told everyone—including their competitors—that they were unable to find the gold. Nevertheless, McEwen prevailed, and in March 2000 he launched the “Goldcorp Challenge,” the world’s first Internet gold rush.6 The idea was simple. The company posted its entire repository of information on the 55,000-acre Red Lake property on its Web site and offered $575,000 to participants with the best methods and estimates. More than 1,000 participants from 50 countries registered for the challenge with submissions coming from graduate students, consultants, mathematicians, physicists, and military officers. “There were capabilities I had never seen before in the industry,” stated McEwen. Contestants identified 110 potential sites, half of which were new to the company, and 80 percent of them yielded substantial quantities of gold, eventually totaling 8 million ounces. The company estimates that the challenge saved 3 years of exploration time, and in 2001 revenues increased 170 percent, cash flow grew 1,180 percent, and profits soared from $2 million to $52 million.7 The company awarded the top four “virtual explorers” a shared prize of $325,000, and 25 semifinalists prizes totaled $250,000.8 As Wikinomics ends its story about Goldcorp: In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott, a Canadian business executive and one of Thinkers50’s most influential management thinkers, works with coauthor Anthony D. Williams to describe how Goldcorp turned its struggling 1950s gold-mining company into a multimillion dollar success.2 Headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Goldcorp employs 14,000 people who operate 10 mines in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Central and South America. In the 1990s, the company was struggling with high production costs, debt, and strikes. The new chief executive officer, Rob McEwen, was new to the gold-mining business, serving previously as a young mutual fund manager at Merrill Lynch.3 Goldcorp analysts projected the death of a 50-year-old mine in Red Lake, Ontario. Without discovery of new gold deposits, the company seemed likely to go down with it. McEwen held an emergency meeting with his geologists and made the decision to send them with $10 million to find gold on the Red Lake property. Weeks later, the geologists returned with good news. They had discovered gold deposits; however, they were unable to estimate the value and determine the exact location of the gold. During a Massachusetts Institute of Technology conference in 1999, McEwen listened intently to a presentation on the production of the Linux computer operating system using volunteer software developers to “crowdsource” its development over the Internet. The company’s chief architect and software engineer, Linus Torvalds, disclosed the company’s software code publically so anonymous developers could review it and make improvements. n d u p res s .ndu.edu and capability. In doing so he stumbled successfully into the future of innovation, business, and how wealth and just about everything else will be created. Welcome to the new world of wikinomics where collaboration on a mass scale is set to change every institution in society.9 Like Goldcorp, the Intelligence Community could embrace crowdsourcing the company posted its entire repository of information on its Web site and offered $575,000 to participants with the best methods McEwen . . . realized the uniquely qualified minds to make new discoveries were probably outside the boundaries of his organization, and by sharing some intellectual property he could harness the power of collective genius to tap into the knowledge and expertise outside of its boundaries when appropriate. To explore this possibility, we need to understand how crowdsourcing works and its benefits and risks. Crowdsourcing Crowdsourcing is a portmanteau that refers to outsourcing tasks from within an organization to people outside the organization.10 The term originated in 2006 from a Wired magazine article in which Jeff Howe modified the term outsourcing to describe a business model using the Internet workforce without the need for a traditional outsourcing company.11 A variety of other terms are used to describe similar activity, such as open access, open innovation, open source, and collective intelligence. Over the last decade, a number of successful companies have incorporated this approach. Proctor and Gamble uses crowdsourcing to support up to 50 percent of its innovations, helping produce such products as Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and Pringles Prints.12 Other examples include Affinnova, Amazon, Bell Canada’s I.D.ah!, Delicious, Dell’s IdeaStorm, Digg, Goldcorp, Google, IBM, InnoCentive, Kimberly Clark, Kraft, LG Electronics, ManyEyes, Marketocracy, Reckitt Benckiser, Salesforce.com’s Idea Exchange, Swivel, Threadless, and Unilever.13 A key difference, however, between crowdsourcing and open innovation in general is that crowdsourcing typically uses some kind of incentive or reward for the work.14 The most well-known crowdsourcing Web site is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.15 The site gives businesses and developers access to 250,000 on-demand workers. Requestors post jobs and workers choose issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 21 U.S. Coast Guard (Ayla Kelley) FORUM | Crowdsourcing for the Intelligence Community Admiral Thad Allen provides a briefing to the Unified Area Command in New Orleans in response to BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill the jobs they want for the money offered. One highly cited example was the attempt to use Mechanical Turk to find the crash site of American entrepreneur and aviator Steve Fossett, who went missing in his plane between the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Nevada desert. Although the effort did not find the crash site, an estimated 50,000 people looked for Fossett’s plane by reviewing two million snapshots of commercial imagery covering 17,000 square miles.16 Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia, is another example of crowdsourcing. It has over four million articles (and growing) produced, edited, and reviewed by volunteers. Their reward is simply the satisfaction that their work is instantly available to the world. Tara Behrend, an organizational sciences professor at The George Washington University, states that one unrealized benefit of using crowdsourcing over the Internet for research is the potential to reach a wider and more diverse audience to solve a common research challenge.17 There is a growing interest in harnessing crowds to tap the collective intelligence of the masses, experts and nonexperts alike, to forecast events. Known as prediction markets, these initiatives typically pose time-bound questions or statements (for example, Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection) to users in a market, allowing individuals to buy and sell contracts based on what they believe will happen.18 The idea of dilettantes beating experts in certain situations has some merit. Phillip Tetlock, a professor 22 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 at the University of California Berkeley, used his seminal Expert Political Judgment to publish 20 years of research on human prediction capabilities, using more than 20,000 forecasts. His research concludes that experts have no more forecasting skill than nonexperts. The best forecasters were moderate along the ideological spectrum, skeptical of grand schemes, and more likely to consider contradictory evidence and hypotheses and hedge on their probabilities when making bets.19 Challenges The director of innovation and policy at the European branch of RAND, Joanna Chataway, stated, “We have seen plenty of anecdotal evidence that crowdsourcing can work, but there has been little research into how and where it works best.”20 Indeed, organizations must use caution when launching crowdsourcing initiatives to ensure that they do not harm the image of the company and that they strike the right balance between diversity and expertise, offer the right incentives, and determine up front who has intellectual rights over the information.21 For example, the coach of a Finnish soccer club crowdsourced the recruitment of players and game tactics to the team’s fans via cell phone voting.22 The season ended in disaster and the owners fired the coach. James Euchner, a vice president at Goodyear, argues that many online crowdsourcing initiatives are underdeveloped and unsuccessful.23 For instance, during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, public and private parties launched Web sites and wikis to garner ideas from the public about how to stop the oil flowing from the sea floor. Volunteers submitted approximately 20,000 suggestions on the United States Deepwater Horizon Unified Command Web site.24 However, as Euchner points out, most of the submissions were “notional” and lacked real potential. Moreover, it required vast resources to weed through all the information. Although there are challenges to crowdsourcing, there are certain conditions that make success more likely. As we saw with Goldcorp and Mechanical Turk, given the right circumstances, companies can accomplish more by opening their work to the masses than relying only on company workers. In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki provides four conditions that enable the aggregate decisions of large groups to make better judgments than experts: ■■ diversity of opinion (avoids groupthink) ■■ decentralization (so individuals can draw on local and tacit knowledge) ■■ aggregation (using a mechanism to turn individual information into collective judgments).25 ■■ independence The Finnish soccer fans, for example, likely lacked the diversity of opinion and tacit knowledge required to determine recruitment or game tactics. ndup res s . ndu. edu WILSON Like Goldcorp, the Intelligence Community (IC) deals with sensitive information and challenging problems. IC assessments establish what is known, unknown, and where developments might be heading. The IC continues to monitor traditional issues such as the capabilities and intentions of nation-states, but it is now responsible for assessing a growing number of nontraditional topics, such as health threats, resource scarcity, and even global climate change.26 Former Deputy Director of National Intelligence (DNI) for Analysis and National Intelligence Council (NIC) Chairman Thomas Fingar points to the expanding issues in IC threat assessments as evidence of the expanding agenda.27 For example, the IC’s 1996 Annual Threat Assessment covered China, North Korea, Russia, Iran, a few unstable states, terrorism, proliferation, narcotics, crime, and economics.28 In 2012, however, the threat assessment included all of the above intelligence topics plus an extended list of unstable nations, countries in our own hemisphere (Mexico, Cuba, and Haiti), the Arab Spring, tense relationships between countries in various regions, space, water security, health threats, and natural disasters.29 Two trends make crowdsourcing via the Internet an attractive option for the IC. First, as exemplified by NIC assessments on global trends,30 many of the new intelligence topics (and their sources, methods, and judgments) are unclassified and less sensitive than traditional political and military related topics. Thus, classification restrictions are minimal. Second, the required knowledge and expertise on these issues are not typically available through the traditional intelligence disciplines (human, signals, and geospatial) and exist outside the IC in academia, nongovernmental organizations, and business. In 2007, the DNI published a directive on analytic outreach, defined as the “open, overt, and deliberate act of an IC analyst engaging with an individual outside the IC to explore ideas and alternative perspectives, gain new insights, generate new knowledge, or obtain new information.”31 Acknowledging the need for the IC to expand its knowledge base and share burdens, the new policy directs analysts to tap outside expertise, IC elements to establish an analytic outreach coordinator, and the IC to use outside experts whenever possible. The preparation of the n d u p res s .ndu.edu 2008 NIC report Global Trends 2025 included American and non-American contributions through conferences, commissioned studies, and for the first time through a special Web site to allow comments on drafts.32 Embracing expertise wherever it resides is an increasing requirement. Just in the last year, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a crowdsourcing challenge to build an amphibious tank, offering $1 million.33 However, the IC has not attempted a crowdsourcing effort of its own. Building on the DNI directive on analytic outreach and the work of Global Trends 2025, the IC could conduct a pilot program and crowdsource an intelligence problem to the world over the Internet. It could identify existing outreach initiatives and establish a framework to clear certain intelligence topics for public crowdsourcing initiatives. Like Goldcorp, the DNI or NIC would review agency proposals and host the Internet site to pose intelligence challenges with some type of incentive or reward. Contestants would register so the IC could establish contacts and address any counterintelligence concerns. Goldcorp and a growing number of business industries have successfully harnessed the power of crowdsourcing to enlarge their pool of talent and create innovative solutions. The DNI directive and NIC report are a step in the right direction. Globalization will likely continue to drive economic, political, and social tension, thus it is only natural for decisionmakers to have more questions on more issues and to direct those questions to the IC. Given the right circumstances and intelligence issues, the IC can adopt this industry best practice to take advantage of the talent, expertise, and knowledge available across the globe to solve some of the most perplexing problems related to U.S. national security, generating additional capacity to deliver decision advantage to the Nation’s policymakers. JFQ NOTES 1 Adapted from Clare Sansom, “The Power of Many,” Nature Biotechnology 29, no. 3 (2011), 201. A portmanteau is a combination of two or more words into one new word. 2 Unless referenced otherwise, this section relies on Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New York: Penguin Group, 2010), 7–10. 3 Linda Tischler, “He Struck Gold on the Net (Really),” Fast Company, May 31, 2002, available at <www.fastcompany.com/44917/ he-struck-gold-net-really>. 4 Tapscott and Williams, 8. 5 Goldcorp, Inc., “Announcement: Fast Company Selects Goldcorp as a Fast 50 Champion of Innovation,” February 18, 2002, available at <www.robmcewen.com/award/pdf/4.pdf>. 6 Ibid. 7 See Wikinvest, “Goldcorp,” available at <www.wikinvest.com/stock/ Wikimedia Commons (Chuhern Hwang) Applicability to the Intelligence Community Ritter Range of Sierra Nevada Mountains in California, site of Steve Fossett’s plane crash issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 23 FORUM | Crowdsourcing for the Intelligence Community NEW from NDU Press for the Center for Strategic Research Institute for National Strategic Studies Strategic Forum 279 By E. Richard Downes August 2012 Strategic Forum National Defense University About the Author Dr. E. Richard Downes, Lt Col, USAF (Ret.), is an Independent Researcher who has previously served as a Brazil Desk Oficer on the Joint Staff and Associate Dean of Academics at the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies. Key Points ◆■ As Brazil’s power and international standing grow, so does the importance to the United States of a close relationship with Brazil. ◆■ Among emerging powers, politically and culturally Brazil is the closest to the United States. For this South American neighbor, defense technology has become a critical aspect of strategic reorientation and force modernizatio U.S. defense technology,n. Sharing including know-how, would strengthen U.S.Brazil relations. ◆■ The two nations have taken initial steps to strengthen defense relations, including the 2010 Cooperation Agreement Defense irst U.S.-Brazil Defense and the Cooperation Dialogue. ◆■ Full implementat ion of 2010 agreements, pursuit of a shared vision of deeper defense cooperation, and development of a bilateral plan to advance the transfer of defense technology (and know-how) based on Brazil’s National Defense Strategy can improve defense collaboration and provide each country with important beneits. Trust, Engagemen t, Technology Trans and fer: Underpinnings for U.S.-Brazil Defense Cooperatio n by E. Richard Downes O n the eve of the January 1, 2011, inauguration of Brazilian President Dilma Roussef, the State Department noted that the United “is committed to deepening States our relationship on eral, regional and a wide range of bilatglobal issues with Brazil’s government and people.” President Roussef herself declared shortly thereafter, “We will preserve relationship with the and deepen the United States.” During President Barack Obama’s 2011 visit to Brazil, March both leaders cited “the progress achieved on 2010” and stated their defense issues in commitment to “follow up on the established this area, primarily dialogue in on new opportunities for cooperation.” While cal commitments are these rhetoriimportant, will they lead to greater cooperation issues and improve on defense U.S.-Brazil ties? he established dialogue on defense is part of a movement toward U.S.-Brazil defense greater cooperation. On April 12, 2010, U.S. Defense Robert Gates and Secretary Brazil’s Defense Minister Nelson Jobim initialed Defense Cooperation the irst Agreement between the two nations in endorsed multiple over 25 years. It interactions already under way between it also broadened both militaries, but the scope of potential cooperation. he agreement cooperation related endorsed to defense technology including research (R&D), logistics support, and development technology security, military systems and acquisition of defense equipment, products and services, and the sharing of defense technology operational and experiences. he agreement also called for the of commercial initiatives “facilitation related to defense matters” and cooperation mentation and development on “impleof programs and projects on defense applications.” In November technology 2010, Gates and Jobim signed a second accord, a As Brazil’s power and international standing grow, so does the importance to the United States of a close relationship with Brazil. Among emerging powers, Brazil is politically and culturally the closest to the United States. For this South American neighbor, defense technology has become a critical aspect of strategic reorientation and force modernization. According to author E. Richard Downes, sharing U.S. defense technology, including know-how, would strengthen U.S.Brazil relations. The two nations have taken initial steps to strengthen defense relations, including the 2010 Defense Cooperation Agreement and the first U.S.-Brazil Defense Cooperation Dialogue. Full implementation of 2010 agreements, pursuit of a shared vision of deeper defense cooperation, and development of a bilateral plan to advance the transfer of defense technology (and knowhow) based on Brazil’s National Defense Strategy can improve defense collaboration and provide each country with important benefits. www.ndu.edu/inss SF No. 279 Visit the NDU Press Web site for more information on publications at ndupress.ndu.edu 24 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 1 CENTER FOR STRATEg IC RESEARC H Trust, Engagement, and Technology Transfer: Underpinnings for U.S.-Brazil Defense Cooperation Goldcorp_%28GG%29/Data/Gross_Profit/1999/ Q4>; and Goldcorp, Inc. 8 “US$575,000 Goldcorp Challenge Awards World’s First 6 Million Ounce Internet Gold Rush Yields High Grade Results!” 2001 Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada Conference, Toronto, Canada, Infomine.com, March 12, 2001, available at <www.infomine.com/index/pr/ Pa065434.PDF>. 9 Tapscott and Williams, 10. 10 Adapted from Sansom. 11 Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired (June 2006), available at <www.wired.com/ wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html>. 12 Paul Sloane, “The Brave New World of Open Innovation,” Strategic Direction 27, no. 5 (2011), 3. 13 List adapted from Sloane; and Eric Bonabeau, “Decisions 2.0: The Power of Collective Intelligence,” MIT Sloan Management Review 50, no. 2 (Winter 2009), 46. 14 Sansom. 15 Tara S. Behrend et al., “The Viability of Crowdsourcing for Survey Research,” Behavior Research Methods 43, no. 3 (2011), 802. 16 See Steve Friess, “50,000 Volunteers Join Distributed Search for Steve Fossett,” Wired, September 11, 2007, available at <www.wired. com/software/webservices/news/2007/09/ distributed_search>. 17 Behrend et al. 18 See, for example, Intrade, available at <www. intrade.com/v4/home/>. For background on examples in business that have predicted circumstances accurately, see Aleksandar Ivanov, “Using Prediction Markets to Harness Collective Wisdom for Forecasting,” Journal of Business Forecasting (Fall 2009), 9–14. 19 Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), chapters 2–3, 5. 20 Sansom. 21 Bonabeau. 22 Ibid. 23 James A. Euchner, “The Limits of Crowds,” Research Technology Management 53, no. 5 (2010), 7–8. 24 Ibid., 7. 25 James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (New York: Doubleday, 2004). 26 For example, compare Director of Central Intelligence, “Worldwide Threat Assessment Brief to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence by the Director of Central Intelligence, John M. Deutch,” February 22, 1996, available at <www.cia. gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/1996/ dci_speech_022296.html>, with Director of National Intelligence, “Unclassified Statement for the Record on the Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US IC for the House Permanent Select Com- mittee on Intelligence,” February 2, 2012, available at <www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/ Testimonies/20120202_testimony_wta.pdf>. 27 Thomas Fingar, Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence Analysis and National Security (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 27. 28 Director of Central Intelligence. 29 Director of National Intelligence. 30 See, for example, National Intelligence Council (NIC), Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (Washington, DC: NIC, November 2008), available at <www.dni.gov/files/documents/ Global%20Trends_2025%20Report.pdf>. 31 Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Intelligence Community Directive Number 205: Analytic Outreach,” July 16, 2008, 1, available at <www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICD/ ICD_205.pdf>. 32 Fingar, 56. 33 Spencer Ackerman, “DARPA Offers a Million Dollars for Crowdsourced Amphibious Tank,” Wired.co.uk, October 3, 2012, available at <www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-10/03/ darpa-swimming-tank-contest>. ndup res s . ndu. edu U.S. Marine Corps (Tyler J. Bolken) Marine Corps Drill Instructors train enlistees currently part of delayed entry program in Arrowhead Meadows Park, Chandler, Arizona Fostering Constructive Dialogue on Military Sexual Assault By l i n D s a y l . r o D m a n A t a press conference in January 2012, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta stated that he estimates there were 19,000 sexual assaults in the military in 2011.1 That number is derived from a statement in the Department of Defense (DOD) Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military, Fiscal Year 2010.2 The report does not actually explain its methodology for arriving at the number, but it does state the number is based on data from the Defense Manpower Data Center 2010 Workplace and Gender Relations Survey.3 Perhaps more importantly, the report does not refer to 19,000 sexual assaults, but rather 19,000 reports by individuals of unwanted sexual contact. The Defense Manpower Data Center 2010 survey never uses the number 19,000. Rather, the document relays the results Captain Lindsay L. Rodman, USMC, is a Judge Advocate currently stationed at Judge Advocate Division, Headquarters Marine Corps. n d u p res s .ndu.edu of a survey of 10,029 Active-duty female Servicemembers and 14,000 Active-duty male Servicemembers. The survey itself is forthright and explicit about the numbers it produces and its methodology. The sample size and sample composition necessarily make extrapolation military-wide problematic. The sample was clearly weighted toward female responses, and the definition of unwanted sexual contact did not align at all with the colloquial understanding or any statutory or legal definition of sexual assault. Nevertheless, the number 19,000 arose as an extrapolation from the numbers in this issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 25 FORUM | Fostering Dialogue on Military Sexual Assault sampling, and this number has pervaded the media discussion ever since.4 Most practitioners of justice and criminal investigators throughout the military should agree that the figure cited by Secretary Panetta is unrealistically high. Inconsistent definitions and an inability to delve into problem definition and problem framing have plagued discussions of sexual misconduct in the military since the days of the Tailhook scandal.5 Now, renewed pressure on military commanders has been sparked by an uptick in media attention resulting from Secretary Panetta’s statement as well as a new documentary6 and a lawsuit filed against DOD and Navy leadership.7 Civilian and uniformed military leadership has tended to react to inflammatory stories and inflated numbers without taking a thoughtful, deliberate, and measured approach to the problem. Attention to these matters comes from a genuine desire to make change for the better, but it is not always guided by rational and well-founded information. In more recent months, Members of Congress have petitioned DOD to acquiesce to a human rights inquiry, provide relevant testimony, and most recently to establish a commission to review this problem. While further study is often warranted, there has frequently been a rush to find a solution without properly defining the problem. Over time, due in part to political pressure, DOD has attacked this sophisticated problem, framed in the wrong way, by simplistically overprosecuting. Current leadership struggles under public pressure to address sexual assault numbers by implementing increasingly draconian policies and sending more military Servicemembers accused of sexual assault through the courtmartial process. Secretary Panetta stated during his January 18 press conference that the reason prosecutions are not successful is due in part to insufficient evidence and “aggressiveness” from prosecutors. As a result, DOD leadership has become increasingly frustrated by the lack of results. By seeking to prosecute anyone accused of sexual assault without understanding the source of the underlying problem, leaders are actually contributing to the same cycle of acquittals they seek to avoid. Criminal prosecution is not the answer to resolving many of these reports. Overprosecution only perpetuates the problem because con- 26 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 victions are simply not achievable in many of these cases. Clear-cut accusations against perpetrators that can be proven in court because an investigation yielded admissible and persuasive evidence will almost always result in a guilty plea. Savvy defense attorneys understand when the cards are stacked against the accused,8 and they will likely advise their clients to accept a plea negotiation. The difficult cases that cause consternation are the closer calls. and setting realistic expectations, as well as providing counseling and resources to accusers. We should not be revictimizing victims by convincing them that the criminal justice system is an appropriate forum for adjudication, requiring them to undergo scrutiny and multiple rounds of interviews, testimony, and cross examination only to result in acquittals that appear to be referenda on the victim’s credibility, integrity, and character. For better or worse, commanders have attempted to accommodate public pressure to sound bites and platitudes have detracted from the ability to engage in thoughtful conversation about the actual problem There are many meritorious and prosecutable accusations of sexual assault in the military. However, this issue has not been treated carefully or with precision. Sound bites and platitudes have detracted from the ability to engage in thoughtful conversation about the actual problem and have therefore prevented thoughtful proposals for solutions. This article aims to illuminate where the conversation has faltered. The problem plaguing the military is the desire—from commentators, the media, Congress, and even military leadership—for this situation to be a zero-sum game. Either the victim is telling the truth, in which case a conviction should be obtained, or the victim is lying. If a conviction is not obtained, the victim will often complain that he or she was not heard, was not taken seriously, or was made out to be a liar. Military justice practitioners often see victims who experience real trauma as the result of a sexual encounter, but who would never be able to achieve a conviction in any criminal justice system against the person with whom they had sex. A traumatic sexual encounter may not necessarily be a criminal sexual assault. The inability to obtain a conviction in many of these cases is not the fault of the commander, prosecutor, or military justice system. Rather, it is a problem of expectation and misunderstanding about the capabilities of a criminal justice system. Instead of blaming the military for not taking these allegations seriously,9 we should be fostering a more constructive conversation about prosecutorial discretion, alternative accountability measures where appropriate, prosecute in these cases. The accusation that commanders do not take these cases seriously is completely unfounded. The truth is quite the opposite; commanders feel hamstrung to prosecute sexual assaults to the fullest, regardless of the possibility of success at trial. Political pressure from victims’ rights groups have created an environment in which Servicemembers are no longer presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, which is a constitutional travesty. Public complaints that the military does not take sexual assault seriously have prompted overprosecution in cases that would likely not go to trial in the civilian world. This creates a vicious cycle of acquittals in the courtmartial system, continuing to compound an optics problem in the military. Empirically, we have more victims than we have criminally convicted offenders. This result is actually an appropriate outcome. There are sexual encounters that result in trauma and produce victims, yet at the same time do not rise to the level of criminality or provability that a rape or sexual assault charge in a felony court would require for conviction. This article proposes a new lens through which to view sexual misconduct allegations. Civilian colleges and universities have dealt with sexual misconduct allegations for as long as the military has, and there are lessons to be learned from their experiences and practices. After explaining the problem with a prosecution-focused approach, this article proposes a new approach to understanding how we can have victims in cases where convictions are inappropriate. ndup res s . ndu. edu RODMAN U.S. Marines with Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, conduct census patrol in Sangin, Afghanistan, January 2011 U.S. Marine Corps (Dexter S. Saulisbury) n d u p res s .ndu.edu issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 27 FORUM | Fostering Dialogue on Military Sexual Assault Nonprosecutable Sexual Assault Allegations Consider the following hypothetical: two Marines, one male and one female, drink to the point of intoxication at a party. They retire to a barracks room and proceed to have sex. The next day, the female Marine reports a sexual assault. There are no helpful witnesses. The male Marine explains that he believed the sex was consensual. The criminal justice system—both the civilian and military systems—would most likely not produce a criminal conviction, nor should we want it to. Constitutionally, the she could only have blacked out—her point of intoxication would not have been enough for her to pass out.13 PFC Lamb and Pvt Peterson acknowledged that they had sex but stated that it was consensual. Given the victim’s memory lapse, there is no way to know whether the sex was consensual. Both cases resulted in convictions at the trial level, but the Navy–Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the convictions based on the toxicology evidence. Many attorneys interpret Lamb and Peterson to create a black out/pass out distinction in courts-martial. The previous finders of fact will often find reasonable doubt if they can only consider an incomplete story accused may only be convicted of a crime if it has been proven, beyond any reasonable doubt, that he or she committed a crime. There is often (but certainly not always) inherent reasonable doubt in a “he-said-shesaid” scenario. Alcohol contributes to reasonable doubt by making stories less plausible. If we encourage conviction in that case without more facts, we are infringing on the constitutional rights of the accused. This hypothetical is not far from the prototypical sexual assault allegation in the military. Many cases also involve memory loss. In most instances, the victim is female and the accused is male. The female victim will often report that she does not remember what happened, or that she only remembers snippets of the sexual encounter. In those cases, convictions are even more difficult to obtain because the finders of fact (a panel of Servicemembers or a military judge10) will often find reasonable doubt if they can only consider an incomplete story. Recent case law out of the military appellate courts suggests that even if a conviction is obtained where the victim suffers a memory lapse, the case could be overturned on appeal. In United States v. Lamb11 and United States v. Peterson,12 two companion cases, a female Marine private first class (PFC) was invited to drink with two male Marines, PFC Lamb and Private (Pvt) Peterson. Both male Marines had sex with her. The next morning, the victim stated that she passed out and was then sexually assaulted by both PFC Lamb and Pvt Peterson. Her blood draw showed that 28 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 version of Article 120 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ)14 defined aggravated sexual assault as a sexual act committed against the victim by placing the victim in fear, causing bodily harm, or committing the act while the victim was “substantially incapacitated.” Anecdotally, substantial incapacitation is the most frequently charged type of aggravated sexual assault. (Rape, by contrast, is defined in most cases as a sexual act by force. But it can also be charged for rendering the victim unconscious, personally administering a drug or intoxicant causing substantial incapacitation, causing grievous bodily harm, or placing the victim in fear of death, grievous bodily harm, or kidnapping.15) If the victim can remember bits of the night, as the victim could in Lamb and Peterson, biologically she was likely not completely passed out. Where a victim has blacked out rather than passed out, a reasonable possibility exists that she had enough capacity to consent at the time of the sexual act. That possibility would preclude conviction beyond a reasonable doubt, and that leads to acquittals, or in these two cases, reversal by the appellate court. Analogy to the College and University Setting Colleges and universities face a similar problem of difficult-to-prosecute sexual assault allegations. Rarely, if ever, are college students held criminally accountable for sexual assault. The most cited sexual assault statistics from colleges and universities are 15 to 20 years old, but they typically state that between one in four and one in six college women are sexually assaulted during their tenure in school.16 The Duke Lacrosse scandal of 2006 is instructive on this point. It was an attempted civilian prosecution of college students for rape in a he-said-she-said scenario. Part of the reason the case achieved so much notoriety was its uniqueness. Aside from the Duke case, prosecutors rarely attempt to achieve a conviction in a civilian court in cases arising from this context. Moreover, in the Duke case, prosecutor Michael Nifong eventually lost his bar license for prosecutorial misconduct due to his overreaching as the case fell apart.17 Most civilian prosecutors are ethical and understand the limitations of the criminal justice system and thus routinely decline to prosecute these cases. Instead, colleges and universities have developed a variety of administrative forums and procedures for addressing these matters. Alternative dispute resolution, disciplinary boards, and honor boards are just a few of the standard answers to this problem. Higher education institutions have learned over time that the criminal justice system cannot provide a solution for the standard he-said-she-said sexual assault allegation. In a typical college setting, the 18- to 24-year-old cohort lives together in dormitories in a culture that includes a high incidence of alcohol-facilitated sexual encounters. Similarly, enlisted Servicemembers live in barracks with access to alcohol, and I posit that they tend to drink and have sex with a frequency comparable to their civilian counterparts. There are no solid statistics for the military or civilian sectors regarding the prevalence of sexual encounters on the whole (consensual or nonconsensual) or sexual assaults among this age cohort.18 Because there is no way to obtain accurate data on how much sex there is or how many sexual assaults there are in either the college/university setting or military setting, we cannot know whether the military number is greater or lesser than the civilian number. Anecdotally, it seems clear that there are high numbers of victims in both communities who are traumatized by sexual encounters that they do not believe were consensual. A fair argument could be made that we should hold Servicemembers to a higher standard than we do college students; however, it would be unwise to ndup res s . ndu. edu RODMAN ignore the experience of these institutions, their similar demographics, and the similar problems they face. Therefore, best practices should be shared between the two communities to provide a more holistic approach to fighting this problem. Training, Education, and Resources The military has drastically increased its education and training about sexual assault. Servicemembers are taught to report any sexual encounter in which they feel they were taken advantage of. Specifically, the military teaches women to consider any sexual encounter or contact to which they believed that they did not consent as “rape.”19 That is not necessarily a bad thing: no woman should be subjected to any sexual contact to which she does not feel she consented. However, the training can be misleading because the term rape is a legal term that implies that a conviction for rape could or should result from that encounter. Training and education are immensely valuable. However, they have to be nuanced enough to distinguish between “rape” or “sexual assault” and “sexual misconduct.” Sexual misconduct, as used in this article, includes any sexual conduct in which the victim does not believe she consented, regardless of what can be proven in court. Sexual assault, on the other hand, is often colloquially discussed as the conduct captured in sections (a) and (c) of the 2008 version of Article 120 of the UCMJ: “Rape and Aggravated Sexual Assault.”20 As a legal term, sexual assault is not clearly defined in the 2008 version of Article 120, but it did become a specific, technical term under the newest 2012 revision.21 There may be offensive conduct (for example, unwanted touching) that does not rise to the colloquial understanding of “sexual assault” that might otherwise be properly discussed as sexual misconduct or possibly sexual harassment. Statistics can be misunderstood or inflated by misusing the terminology. Even within DOD, different offices use other definitions of sexual assault that do not align with the statutory landscape. Training within the military— for both leaders and subordinates—about rape, sexual assault, and sexual misconduct is misguided if it does not capture these nuances. The military has also created institutions and resources for victims of sexual n d u p res s .ndu.edu assault that are unparalleled in civilian society. Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Offices exist in DOD and at each Service and department. These offices coordinate the provision of education and training. They also ensure that every command has a Uniformed Victim Advocate and access to civilian victim advocates who are available as resources for any Servicemember who claims to be the victim of a sexual assault, regardless of whether that allegation can be substantiated. Counselors are provided to victims, and victims can avail themselves of additional mental health resources if they so choose. In addition, Secretary Panetta universalized a policy in his January 2012 press conference that was already in place in some Services including the Marine Corps: all reporting victims will be allowed expedited transfer away from their units. The existence of these resources is immensely important and helps foster a community that encourages healing and provides resources for anyone who is victimized by a sexual encounter. Provision of these services does not and should not hinge on whether the military justice system will produce a conviction in a certain case. The military also has “restricted reporting,” an opportunity for a victim to avail himself or herself of resources without prompting an investigation or Quick Primer on the Military Justice System The military justice system differs from the civilian criminal justice system in a few significant ways. A court-martial trial itself looks remarkably like a civilian trial, with the exception that the jury is replaced by a panel of Servicemembers. The major procedural differences between courts-martial and civilian trials reside in pretrial and posttrial processes. Unlike in the civilian world, the prosecutor does not own the criminal case; the commanding officer of the accused Servicemember owns the case. It is up to the commander to determine what forum is appropriate for addressing the misconduct; that is, whether to choose administrative punishment of some kind, a misdemeanortype “special court-martial,” or a felony-type “general court-martial.”23 Rape or sexual assault prosecutions are appropriately tried at a general court-martial. To refer a case to a general court-martial, the charges must be vetted by an impartial officer who is either a judge advocate or field-grade officer.24 In practice, these investigations, codified in Article 32 of the UCMJ, are almost always conducted by a judge advocate so legal expertise can be applied to the analysis.25 These investigations are intended to provide a hedge against prosecutorial to refer a case to a general court-martial, the charges must be vetted by an impartial officer prosecution. However, it is difficult for a Servicemember to submit a restricted report without making a mistake that would convert the submission to an “unrestricted report,” that is, one that prompts investigation. Restricted reporting can only be communicated to a chaplain, medical professional, or victim advocate or counselor.22 Consequently, when a Marine confides in his or her best friend about a sexual encounter, that friend is obligated under military order to disclose the communication to the command. Many investigations begin when a roommate reports on behalf of another Servicemember. While that is beneficial in some cases, in other cases it forces the victim into a role he or she has not chosen and does not want, that of an accuser. misconduct and overreaching, much like the grand jury system in Federal criminal courts. After thoroughly investigating the misconduct, the Article 32 investigating officer will write a report providing recommendations to the commander about how to dispose of the case. Typically, the first commanding general in the accused’s chain of command has the authority to convene a general court-martial. The commanding general will only decide on how to proceed after receiving advice from his or her staff judge advocate (SJA), a judge advocate assigned to the commanding general’s staff as a legal advisor.26 Despite this robust vetting process, commanding officers and commanding generals often neglect to heed the advice of their legal advisors—the prosecutor, the Article 32 issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 29 FORUM | Fostering Dialogue on Military Sexual Assault officer, and/or the SJA—and push forward on sexual assault cases that lack merit at trial. They do so because they fear they will be perceived as taking the accusations lightly. Facts Drive Outcomes The problem in these cases is the facts. They often cannot be developed fully enough to achieve proof beyond a reasonable doubt, as illustrated above by the alcohol-induced he-said-she-said hypothetical. When a prosecutor does not have good facts, conviction cannot be the expectation. Nor should we want there to be a conviction in many of “taken into account” during the process. In 2012, Article 120 was revised again, but it does not appear that the revision will renew focus on the victim or address these concerns. Rather, some commentators believe that the focus on the offender is even stronger in the new version.28 Using Tort Law “Negligence” to Understand the Problem The disconnect between a victim’s trauma resulting from a sexual experience and the inability to obtain a conviction is a large contributor to the perception of a if the finder of fact believes it is possible that the accused reasonably believed the victim consented, an acquittal must result those cases. That would require a standard below the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, creating an exception in criminal law for sexual assault cases in direct contravention of the Constitution. Some victims have expressed frustration at the inability of commands to obtain convictions, or even to pursue investigations in their cases. Some of this criticism unfairly targets processes that are necessarily not victim-focused. Criminal investigations are focused on the accused. If the investigating law enforcement agency can identify the accused, its job is to investigate impartially to provide whatever evidence it can to the commander so he or she can decide whether to prosecute. By law, victims are kept informed of the progress of the investigation, and their preference is considered, but it will never be dispositive, nor should it be. Similarly, prosecutions themselves should not be victim-focused. The military sexual assault statute, Article 120 of the UCMJ, underwent substantial revision in 2008. The revision was intended in part to take the focus away from the victim in order to protect him or her.27 The question before the trier of fact is based on whether she was forced by the accused, and not whether she consented. The ironic consequence of that revision is that what was going through the victim’s head at the time, or her subsequent trauma, is irrelevant to the question of guilt. Perhaps in part for that reason, victims can often believe that they were not “heard” or 30 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 “sexual assault problem” in the military. The problem is actually in large part a tort problem. However, the tort paradigm is inherently problematic for addressing sexual assault. Therefore, despite being analytically more appropriate, both the military and civilian worlds have been reluctant to discuss sexual assault with tort terminology. A tort is a harm inflicted by one party against another. Torts are the subject of civil lawsuits. When one party believes that another has behaved negligently or recklessly with regard for another, and harm is inflicted, the harmed party can sue and collect in court for the value of the harm. In cases where a sexual assault allegation might not result in a conviction, the complaint may have resulted from a harm inflicted by a Servicemember, perhaps due to lack of due care (negligence) or even recklessness regarding the victim’s desire to participate or level of intoxication. Nevertheless, it may not achieve the level of criminality or intent required for a rape or sexual assault conviction. If consent is an issue at trial (that is, where the accused argues that the victim consented, not that sex did not occur), a sexual assault conviction can be achieved only where the government has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the victim did not consent or that the accused was not reasonably mistaken that he or she consented.29 In other words, if the finder of fact at court-martial believes it is possible that the accused reasonably believed the victim consented (even if she did not),30 an acquit- tal must result. Again, this is appropriate; the Constitution demands it, and the penalties for a guilty finding are severe. In reports of sexual assault, we often see victims who were harmed through negligence or recklessness. In an aggravated sexual assault case that hinges on substantial incapacitation, even if the victim cannot show that she was passed out beyond a reasonable doubt, it may be that she was intoxicated enough that the accused was reckless or negligent in pursuing sex with her. The accused may have acted in a way that does not meet the level of care that we want Servicemembers to have for one another, but perhaps the accused was not malicious. A tort outlook may be a more appropriate framework with which to approach analysis of sexual misconduct. By using the negligence framework, we can capture the category of cases that involve a victim who believes he or she was taken advantage of, but where a prosecutor cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt at trial that there was force (rape) or substantial incapacitation (aggravated sexual assault) under the 2008 statutory framework. If the accused caused harm to the victim, the harm is still real. The accused may even have done something morally wrong under the circumstances. But it may not have been a crime. A Negligence Discussion Only Begins to Frame the Problem The problem with using the tort paradigm is that it drives seemingly unacceptable solution sets. The necessary consequence of using tort language is that it suggests lawsuits are the answer. Neither military leaders nor victim advocates are likely to accept an argument that we should encourage Servicemembers to sue each other over harms that result from sexual encounters.31 The hope in introducing this paradigm is not to encourage lawsuits but merely to reframe the analysis. The criminal law framework used to address sexual assault allegations in the military continues to be ill-equipped to handle many cases. Colleges and universities appear to have abandoned criminal law as a tool for this reason, except in the most clear-cut circumstances. Instead, these institutions pursue a host of alternative adjudicative tools to address the problem. No one argues that these solutions in col- ndup res s . ndu. edu RODMAN leges and universities have eliminated the problem. However, the solution imposed on the military—encouragement to prosecute questionable cases and be more “aggressive”—has our leadership going in the wrong direction entirely. For those who believe that the military does not prosecute to the fullest, going farther down the path of pursuing more prosecutions in more cases will not achieve the desired outcome of more convictions. It may end up doing more harm than good by failing to manage the expectations of victims and forcing them through a frustrating process. Recent Developments Aside from encouraging more prosecution, recent developments in law and policy may change the landscape somewhat in sexual assault cases. First, Congress passed a revision to Article 120 of the UCMJ that became effective on June 28, 2012. One major change in the new statute is that the accused will face a “knew or should have known” standard about whether the victim was incapacitated. Results from cases arising under these statutes should just be starting to come in as this article is published. Nevertheless, legal analysts have begun to consider the 2012 revision, and some point out that the shouldhave-known standard applied in incapacitation sexual assault cases actually appears to create a negligence (or possibly recklessness) standard, leading to the belief that the landscape will change with application of the new law. However, the new law merely requires the government to prove that the accused knew or should have known that the victim was incapacitated, whereas the old law did not have a knowledge requirement. Under the old statute, the finders of fact were charged with determining whether they believed the victim was substantially incapacitated regardless of what the accused understood. Therefore, although the change looks like it embraces “negligence,” the new approach actually may make conviction even harder by requiring the government to prove more than before; moreover, it does not address the overarching problems with the old statute. The new Article 120 will not capture those cases in which the accused’s general decisionmaking lacks due care for the perspective of the victim. Another significant change to Article 120 is the revocation of the affirmative defense of consent, which created an unneces- n d u p res s .ndu.edu sarily complicated legal landscape. The term substantially incapacitated has also been replaced with “asleep, unconscious, or otherwise unaware that the sexual act is occurring,” or situations in which a drug or intoxicant renders the victim incapable of consenting. Although these changes will move the inquiry further away from a victim-focused question of consent, questions of force or incapacitation and consent will always be inextricably intertwined. Finally, the definition of sexual assault will include a broader definition of sexual conduct and sexual acts, thus potentially enabling more prosecutions in cases that do not involve sexual intercourse (and potentially making it a target for constitutional overbreadth challenges). These changes help tidy up the language of an unwieldy and complicated statute, but they will likely not affect many of the problematic scenarios discussed above. The issue boils down to proving, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the victim did not consent or did not have the capacity to consent, especially in cases where alcohol and memory lapses are involved. The new revision may allow more convictions at the margins (though it may result in fewer as well), but it is not likely to be a panacea. commanders, hopefully this will result in a culture where the decision not to prosecute in certain cases comes with credibility and faces less criticism. General Martin Dempsey published his Strategic Direction to the Joint Force on Sexual Assault Prevention and Response on April 30, 2012. Although the document highlights the importance of this matter to the highest ranking leaders within the military, it does not present new or novel approaches to the issue. It merely recommits the joint force to existing programs and policies. Within the Marine Corps specifically, the commandant spent the spring and early summer of 2012 on a “Heritage” tour, asking Marines to honor their traditions, behave morally, and hold each other accountable for their missteps. In his brief, the commandant described the distrust that Members of Congress and the public have in commanders, manifested to him directly, and their skepticism that Marine Corps leadership takes these issues seriously. This lack of faith in the genuine efforts of leadership has the potential to drive bad policy outcomes. The commandant also cited a “sexual assault” statistic of 343 reports in 2011, though he defined “sexual assault” to include the issue boils down to proving, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the victim did not consent or did not have the capacity to consent Another major policy development was the release by Panetta of a Secretary of Defense Memorandum on April 20, 2012, that withholds disposition authority of sexual assault cases to the O-6 level. This memorandum requires some commanding officers, who would otherwise have the authority to decide whether to prosecute certain cases, to obtain the decision from their higher headquarters. Most sexual assault case disposition decisions are made at the flag-officer level, so this memorandum may not affect that decisionmaking process greatly. However, it indicates that the senior levels of DOD leadership continue not to trust the commanders making disposition decisions. The hope is that by elevating the rank of those empowered to decide, the decisions will carry more weight with outside observers. Therefore, despite the lack of faith that this policy change exhibits in lower-level everything from unwanted touching to forcible sexual intercourse, as well as allegations that were later unsubstantiated. This figure, despite being derived from an overly broad definition of “sexual assault,” also serves to contextualize how problematic the 19,000 extrapolation is. Any sexual assault is one sexual assault too many, but if the goal is to have a targeted and productive discussion about the actual problem in order to derive corresponding solutions, the discourse has certainly not gotten there yet. The commandant has decided to reorganize the Marine Corps legal community to facilitate better oversight, supervision, and mentorship. With the creation of Regional Trial Counsel Offices, the Marine Corps will have a vastly improved means of surging capability and expertise to strategic and complex cases, especially sexual assault cases, wherever they arise. The new construct gives issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 31 FORUM | Fostering Dialogue on Military Sexual Assault the Marine Corps flexibility and a better ability to pair the appropriate experience and ability level with the appropriate case. However, what these initiatives cannot do is change the facts or the law: prosecution of many sexual assault cases will continue to be an uphill battle. Conclusion The next step in addressing this problem is to embrace the existence of a gray area. To approach the problem constructively, we must acknowledge that a report from a victim will not achieve a conviction every time. Certain cases produce victims through sexual encounters that lead to trauma due to nonconsent or uncertainty about consent. Sometimes those same cases should not or cannot result in criminal convictions, either due to evidentiary issues or just the level of certainty—proof beyond a reasonable doubt—required to achieve a conviction. Even in a straightforward blackout case in which a woman consented while intoxicated to the point of memory loss, but not to the point that she passed out or was otherwise incapacitated, there could easily be trauma. It is likely terrifying to wake up next to someone without knowing how one got there and whether that person is trustworthy. It may require therapy and support for a victim to come to terms with what happened under those circumstances. In many of those cases, however, no crime occurred or no crime can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. We should still encourage those victims to avail themselves of every resource. They should have advocates and therapists and be able to move away from the source of their trauma. However, commanders should not be criticized for their inability to obtain convictions, or even their decision not to prosecute in many of those cases. A sophisticated understanding of the capacities of criminal law, including its strengths and weaknesses, will hopefully help bring the conversation about the military “sexual assault problem” away from blaming commanders for not taking the problem seriously because they are not obtaining convictions. If we perpetuate the cycle of unsuccessful prosecutions, no one wins. Victims are dragged through a process that can only traumatize them more without achieving their desired endstate: accountability for the harm done to them. At the same time, the accused has to endure a highly stressful 32 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 court-martial process and is made out to be a pariah when he or she may not have done anything criminal. We do not need to deny the victimization or trauma of the accuser in order to acknowledge that prosecution is inappropriate in many instances. Using a negligence paradigm, perhaps both military and civilian leadership can come to appreciate that there are many instances in which a sexual assault allegation is made but no conviction would result: the gray area. In those cases, much like in civil cases, despite the unlikelihood of successful prosecution, there is a clear, articulable harm that results to a victim. Embracing that gray area should help shift the focus of the conversation away from the current selfperpetuating cycle of encouraging further prosecution to address a frustrating conviction rate. Colleges, universities, and civilian prosecutors routinely decline prosecution in these gray area cases. Yet civilian leadership seems to expect military commanders to approach this common problem differently. The military is being asked to be better than society at large, which the military should strive to be. However, the expectations associated with such a request must be reasonable and achievable. As we strive to be better, we should focus on ensuring that victims are provided with treatment and resources, managing expectations about the capacity of the criminal justice system, and limiting criticism of military commanders who genuinely care, but cannot achieve convictions in many cases. JFQ NOTES 1 Department of Defense (DOD) News Briefing with Secretary Leon Panetta from the Pentagon, Washington, DC, January 18, 2012, available at <www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript. aspx?transcriptid=4959>. 2 Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military, Fiscal Year 2010 (Washington, DC: DOD, March 2011), 97, available at <www.sapr.mil/index. php/annual-reports>. 3 Defense Manpower Data Center, Workplace and Gender Relations Survey of the Active Duty Members (Washington, DC: DOD, March 2011), available at <www.sapr.mil/index.php/research>. 4 For the numbers to work out according to their math, this extrapolation necessarily requires that half of those victims (up to about 10,000) would be male, which anecdotally seems questionable. 5 In 1991, at an event at the Las Vegas Hilton attended by the naval aviation community, 83 female and 7 male military Servicemembers were groped, sexually harassed, and sexually assaulted by as many as 100 other Sailors and Marines. When reported, the event turned into a scandal and forced the military to confront questions about a culture of hostility toward women in the military in the media and in multiple congressional hearings. 6 The Invisible War, produced by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, has screened at various film festivals. The Web site for the film is <http:// invisiblewarmovie.com/>. 7 The complaint was filed in Federal district court in Washington, DC, and is on file with the author and available at <http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/TODAY/Sections/Today%20 People/2012/03%20-%20March/Klay%20complaint.pdf>. 8 In the military justice system, the term accused is used where the term defendant is usually used in the civilian justice system. 9 See, for example, The New York Times editorial “Sexual Violence and the Military,” March 8, 2012, available at <www.nytimes.com/2012/03/09/ opinion/sexual-violence-and-the-military.html>. 10 “Members panels” in the military justice system take the place of a civilian “jury.” 11 United States v. Lamb, 2010 CCA LEXIS 334 (N-M. Ct. Crim. App. 2010). 12 United States v. Peterson, 2010 CCA LEXIS 336 (N-M. Ct. Crim. App. 2010). 13 The term black out refers to an alcoholinduced memory lapse, whereas pass out refers to loss of consciousness. Often the person who either blacks out or passes out would not be able to discern the difference. Other witnesses or evidence would be necessary to make the distinction. 14 10 U.S.C. § 920 has been amended. The new changes went into effect on June 28, 2012. The Lamb and Peterson cases were tried under the 2008 version of the statute. 15 10 U.S.C. § 920 (2008). 10 U.S.C. § 925 (Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice [UCMJ]) also criminalizes forcible sodomy, another type of sexual assault. For simplicity’s sake, I refer mainly to Article 120 cases, but Article 125 cases face similar hurdles to Article 120 cases. 16 See National Institute for Justice (NIJ), The Campus Sexual Assault Study, NIJ Grant No. 2004-WG-BX-0010, October 2007; One in Four, a list of sexual assault statistics compiled with citations, is available at <www.oneinfourusa.org/ statistics.php>. 17 “Nifong Will Be Disbarred for Ethics Violations,” Associated Press, June 18, 2007, available at <http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/19264396/>. 18 Even the Federal Government has trouble achieving reliable statistics on this question. In The Sexual Victimization of College Women (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, December 2000), ndup res s . ndu. edu RODMAN Bonnie S. Fisher, Francis T. Cullen, and Michael G. Turner describe the problem of achieving reliable numbers. The study attempts to measure the problem and arrives at roughly 35 instances of sexual assault per 1,000 college women. Study available at <www.nij.gov/pubs-sum/182369.htm>. 19 This statement is based on my own anecdotal experiences at various trainings and during interactions with victims in my capacity as a judge advocate. 20 10 U.S.C. § 920 (a)-(d) (2008). 21 What used to be called “aggravated sexual assault” is now simply called “sexual assault,” thus simplifying the terminology. 22 Deputy Secretary of Defense Directive-Type Memorandum, Confidentiality Policy for Victims of Sexual Assault (JTF-SAPR-009), March 16, 2005. 23 Misdemeanor-type crimes and uniquely military offenses are typically tried in special courts-martial. Administrative punishment could be the result of a summary court-martial or nonjudicial punishment. 24 10 U.S.C. § 832 and Manual for CourtsMartial United States (Washington, DC: DOD, 2008), Rule for Courts-Martial 405. 25 In the Army, by contrast, line officers (as opposed to judge advocates) often serve as Article 32 investigating officers. 26 10 U.S.C. § 834. 27 See James G. Clark, “‘A Camel Is a Horse Designed by Committee’: Resolving Constitutional Defects in Uniform Code of Military Justice Article 120’s Consent and Mistake of Fact as to Consent Defenses,” The Army Lawyer, July 2011, 3. 28 James G. Clark, “2012 UCMJ Article 120, effective 28 June 2012,” 2012 Emerging Issues 6423, available at <www.jagcnet.army. mil/852577C1004877F2/0/CD7859AC835EC 94A85257A2B004F57D4/$file/2012_Emerging_Issues_6423__Clark_on_2012_UCMJ_ Article_120.pdf>. 29 10 U.S.C. § 920 (r) & (t)(14)-(16). 30 Throughout this article, I use male and female pronouns in reference to both the accused and the victim. However, “he or she” can be cumbersome and distract from the meaning within a given sentence. In those cases, I default to the most common scenario: a male accused and a female victim. I do not mean to exclude any cases in this discussion, and I apologize for the exclusion and the oversimplification where it occurs. 31 See, for example, The National Crime Victim Bar Association, Helping Crime Victims Pursue Civil Justice, available at <www.victimsofcrime.org/our-programs/ national-crime-victim-bar-association/case-law>. NEW from NDU Press for the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs Institute for National Strategic Studies China Strategic Perspectives, No. 5 Managing Sino-U.S. Air and Naval Interactions: Cold War Lessons and New Avenues of Approach By Mark E. Redden and Phillip C. Saunders The United States and China have a complex, multifaceted, and ambiguous relationship where substantial areas of cooperation coexist with ongoing strategic tensions and suspicions. One manifestation involves disputes and incidents when U.S. and Chinese military forces interact within China’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Three high-profile incidents over the last decade have involved aggressive maneuvers by Chinese military and/or paramilitary forces operating in close proximity to deter U.S. surveillance and military survey platforms from conducting their missions. Why do these incidents continue to occur despite mechanisms designed to prevent such dangerous encounters? Could new or different procedures or policies help avoid future incidents? According to authors Mark Redden and Phillip Saunders, if U.S. policymakers seek a change in Chinese behavior, they need to understand the underlying Chinese policy calculus, how it may change over time, and potential means of influencing that calculus. U.S. policymakers have several broad avenues of approach to alter the Chinese policy calculus and thereby influence Chinese behavior, but given the importance that China places on sovereignty, no single option is likely to be sufficient. A mixed approach, particularly one that influences a larger number of Chinese decisionmakers, may maximize the probability of success. Cooperative approaches require time for the benefits of cooperation to accrue and for normative arguments to be heard and heeded, both in China and internationally. Visit the NDU Press Web site for more information on publications at ndupress.ndu.edu n d u p res s .ndu.edu issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 33 U.S. Coast Guardsmen unload $36 million worth of confiscated cocaine and marijuana, St. Petersburg, Florida DOD (Matthew Bash) Confronting Transnational Organized Crime Getting It Right to Forestall a New National Security Threat By D o u g l a s m . F r a s e r a n d r e n e e P . n o v a k o F F General Douglas M. Fraser, USAF (Ret.), was the Commander of U.S. Southern Command from 2009 to 2012. Renee P. Novakoff is a Senior Defense Intelligence Analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance at U.S. Southern Command. 34 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 ndupres s . ndu. edu FRASER and NOVAKOFF S ecurity threats to the United States are evolving. For most of the 20th century and before, threats were state-on-state. Since 9/11, however, threats to the homeland have grown to include terrorism and transnational organized crime (TOC) groups and networks. These networks represent a different danger than we experienced during the Cold War. This is not a force-on-force threat but rather something more insidious. These borderless groups infiltrate levers of power to create spaces from which to carry out their activities unimpeded. Currently, these groups are destabilizing friendly governments not by direct means but through behind-the-scenes attempts to gain political space to develop their illegal businesses. These groups also have ties in the United States, endangering our citizens and our economic infrastructure. The scale of their enterprises, the impact they have on legal economies, and their prospective continued growth argue for sustained national and international attention and resources as a tier-one security threat.1 To understand and counter these threats, the U.S. Government must work across bureaucratic lines, which will take new organizational constructs and relationships that are not wedded to parochial border norms. In addition, the Intelligence Community will be the first line of defense. To fully understand the motivations and vulnerabilities of these TOC networks, the Intelligence Community will need to develop analysts who can assess a sophisticated mix of opensource, law enforcement, and traditional intelligence. The United States will need to deploy a new type of intelligence professional who is able to work across organizational and geographic boundaries and is willing to share information. This analyst must be an integrator who can work in the collection and analytical worlds and communicate with counterparts in all parts of government, academia, and partner nations. Background Over the past 10 years, TOC networks have grown in importance and influence throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. In Brazil, for example, the Red Commandos have woven a complex network in which different illegal factions have the power to intimidate, interact, and control entire sectors of cities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.2 These groups not only n d u p res s .ndu.edu affect security at the local level, but also have the ability to compromise national security. According to Moisés Naím, “Today more than ever, these structures have the capacity to operate on a global scale, connecting remote places of the planet and the most cosmopolitan cities, above all, with accumulated political power. Never have criminals been so global, so rich, or had so much political influence.”3 All indicators show that TOC networks will continue to grow, and, in the worst cases, they will work with or will corrupt government institutions to form alliances to gain space to do business. Virtually all criminal cartels and gangs organize in networks connected by violent crime of all types. To survive and prosper, these thugs have become highly intelligent and ruthless. This is affecting societies throughout the Western Hemisphere. In nearly every country in the region, populations state that personal security is their number one concern. Across the region, murder rates are generally higher than 10 dwarfs defense budgets in the subregion and allows significant criminal penetration into governmental organizations, including security forces and judicial systems, as well as legitimate financial networks. The overall value to these criminal networks from the cocaine trade alone is more than the gross domestic product (GDP) of every country in Latin America except Brazil. The White House estimates in its 2011 Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime that money-laundering accounts for $1.3 trillion to $3.3 trillion—or between 2 and 5 percent of the world’s GDP. Bribery from TOC adds close to $1 trillion to that amount, while drug-trafficking generates an estimated $750 billion to $1 trillion, counterfeited and pirated goods add another $500 billion, and illicit firearms sales generate from $170 billion to $320 billion.4 These total to some $6.2 trillion—10 percent of the world’s GDP, placing it behind only the United States and the European Union, but well ahead of China, in terms of global GDP ranking. TOC networks will corrupt government institutions to form alliances to gain space to do business years ago. In addition, drug use is up—a sign that regional drug-trafficking is increasing. Moreover, the traffickers often pay middlemen in product as a way to increase their customer base. As the primary transshipment zone for illicit trafficking to the United States, Central America is an epicenter of TOC activities. The problem is particularly acute in the “Northern Tier” countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Belize, where criminal networks exploit weak rule of law, corrupt officials, and porous borders to traffic in drugs, precursor chemicals, weapons, people, and bulk cash. In all four countries, gangs and other violent criminal groups are contributing to escalating murder rates and deteriorating citizen security. This has overwhelmed civilian law enforcement departments and court systems, many of which were nascent to start with and are characterized by pervasive corruption and chronic underresourcing. Challenges faced by these countries are further exacerbated by the economic power wielded by criminal groups. The value of cocaine destined for North America Other estimates of global criminal proceeds range from a low of 4 percent to a high of 15 percent of global GDP.5 Analysts have described the situation in several countries in Latin America as a criminal insurgency. Its effects on Central America are clear. The murder rate is the highest in the world. MS-13 and M18 gang members routinely torture and intimidate citizens. The homicide rates in El Salvador and Honduras alone, where MS-13 operates extensively, are 82 and 66 per 100,000 inhabitants, respectively—over 13 times the rate in the United States.6 Gang leaders in Central American prisons direct member activities inside the United States. MS-13 operates throughout Central America and in at least 40 U.S. states according to a 2008 report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.7 In October, the Obama administration designated MS-13 as a drug kingpin organization. The sanctioning of MS-13 is the latest step in a 21st-century arms race between sovereign governments and violent nonstate networks empowered by technology and globalization.8 TOC access to regional governments is gaining momentum and leading to co-option issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 35 COMMENTARY | Confronting Transnational Organized Crime in some states and weakening of governance in others. The nexus in some states among TOC networks and elements of government—including intelligence services and personnel—and big business figures threatens rule of law.9 New communications technologies have led to new criminal business models of widely distributed, constantly shifting networks of personal contacts and fleeting alliances to produce, market, transport, and distribute illegal goods—sometimes drugs, sometimes human beings. These activities are abetted by extortion, kidnapping, counterfeiting, and whatever else turns a profit.10 TOC networks insinuate themselves into the political process through bribery and in some cases have become alternate providers of governance, security, and livelihoods to win popular support. As an example, members of Mexican cartels reside in Central America and, according to former Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom, have influence over entire departments there. Polls in Guatemala show that a majority of citizens would exchange less democracy for more security.11 Guatemala City is experiencing record levels of violent crime and at the same time a high-rise building construction boom, though with only a 25 percent occupancy rate, which is usually a sign of large-scale money-laundering that can only be successful with the support of government agents.12 A key to countering TOC groups is understanding the smaller networks that make up these larger groups. Transnational criminal organizations can move anything, and will for a price. Major crime groups such as Mexican cartels or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia contract with smaller, local criminal organizations or “transportisters” that will move goods from one country to the next. These are that ultimately cross U.S. borders undetected thousands of times each day. The actors along the pipeline form and dissolve alliances quickly, occupy both physical and cyber spaces, and use highly developed institutions including the global financial system, as well as ancient smuggling routes and methods.13 They are middlemen who have little loyalty to one group and often have no illusion of developing their organization into a major trafficking network. They make a living by moving goods and ensure that they and their families are safe from the TOC group, who may threaten to kill those who do not assist them. Effect on the United States For the United States, these networks challenge national welfare, not necessarily national security. Strong U.S. law enforcement efforts and effective policing have kept gangs and cartels from having the same effect they do in other countries in the hemisphere, but their influence is growing. Latin American gangs with connections to the United States are primarily MS-13 (estimated at 6,000 to 10,000 U.S. members) and the 18th Street Gang (estimated at 30,000 U.S. members), with up to 70,000 for both in Central America (primarily El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala), where they challenge local authorities for control of streets and towns. Pushing Back on TOC The 2010 National Security Strategy acknowledges the challenge these organizations pose and that combating transnational criminal and trafficking networks requires a “multidimensional strategy that safeguards citizens, breaks the financial strength of criminal and terrorist networks, disrupts the actors along the pipeline form and dissolve alliances quicky, occupy both physical and cyber spaces, and use highly developed institutions important elements of the TOC network but little is known about them. These franchises operate in, and control, specific geographic territories that allow them to function in a relatively safe environment. These pipelines, or chains of networks, are adaptive and able to move a multiplicity of illicit products (cocaine, weapons, humans, and bulk cash) 36 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 illicit trafficking networks, defeats transnational criminal organizations, fights government corruption, strengthens the rule of law, bolsters judicial systems, and improves transparency.”14 The solution to transnational crime in this hemisphere lies in helping improve Latin America’s domestic institutions and coordination across these institutions—ranging from law enforcement and judicial sectors to education and health— that improve opportunities for young people. Understanding the varied political landscape (the human terrain) of the hemisphere is also important as geopolitical fragility opens the way for gangs and cartels to further destabilize civil life. More than any other problem the United States faces, this particular challenge blurs the line among U.S. institutions. The size, scope, and reach of TOC networks far surpass the ability of any one agency or nation to confront this threat alone. In Central America, increasing military involvement in domestic security is a reality, at least until the TOC threat is degraded and the capabilities of civilian police institutions are expanded. This will not happen overnight, and it will not happen in isolation. This effort requires the commitment of Latin American governments and their societies. It requires their commitment to build the capacity of their law enforcement, judicial, and penal organizations. It requires their commitment to the use of their militaries only as a security bridge as they develop other institutional capacities. It requires their commitment to address endemic corruption throughout their societies. And it requires their commitment to engage regional and international institutions to enhance coordination and cooperation—supporting the development of national and regional security plans, enhancing regional defense and security institutions, and improving human rights training. Furthermore, it takes concerted collaboration and sustained commitment by the United States and the international community—both governmental and nongovernmental organizations—to address this complex problem and help support regional governments in building strong, capable, and accountable institutions. Innovative approaches, creative public-private collaborations, and synchronization of efforts among numerous U.S. Federal agencies—the Department of State, Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Agency for International Development, and Department of Homeland Security—will be necessary to create a cooperative national and international network that is stronger and more resilient than any criminal network. Key to success will be information-sharing within the U.S. interagency community, partner ndupres s . ndu. edu DOD (Michael De Nyse) FRASER and NOVAKOFF Servicemembers secure crew of drug-smuggling vessel in Gulf of Aden nations, and finally among other countries in question. A Way Ahead Interagency focus and organization are needed for the United States to have the greatest chance at pushing back TOC network gains in the hemisphere. To succeed, partner nation capacity must match or at least keep pace with national and regional campaigns to arrest TOC leaders and dismantle their networks. Building capacity has a military dimension, but is far more dependent on other branches of the U.S. Government—the Departments of State and Justice, for example. Capacity of police forces must be supported by investigative and judicial capacity and competency. The judicial branches must be led by uncorrupted and effective legislative and executive branches. Democratic partner nation capacity development is dependent on the support of the partner nation population. These reforms are not the domain of the Department of Defense n d u p res s .ndu.edu (DOD), and they require extensive investments of time and effort. In an effective strategy to combat illicit trafficking, all approaches have relevance. The disruption line of effort should be balanced against partner nation capacity. If the social services and effective local law enforcement can only fill a small vacuum, then we should only target a small area. Operations that create a vacuum in TOC operations and businesses should be paired with aggressive non–law enforcement engagement and social services in a coordinated fashion. This type of coordination requires agencies beyond law enforcement and DOD, from both the country itself and from international contributors. With the exception of the first mission set (detection and monitoring), helping partner nations build and sustain their security capacity is a key component of all DOD counter-TOC efforts: ■■ detection DOD Role in Countering TOC and monitoring training ■■ counternarcotics support ■■ defense equipment (Foreign Military Financing/Foreign Military Sales) ■■ defense training (International Military Education and Training) ■■ defense institution-building ■■ human rights training ■■ multinational training exercises ■■ defense engagement ■■ TOC network analysis and information-sharing. DOD plays a small but important supporting role in countering TOC networks; it brings unique capabilities in support of U.S. and partner nation law enforcement. Its role in countering TOC networks generally falls into the following supporting lines of effort. The role of helping partner nations build capacity cannot be overstated. But this role will only succeed when it supports each regional partner’s commitment and investment to build its institutional capacity. The ■■ counternarcotics issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 37 COMMENTARY | Confronting Transnational Organized Crime main effort for the U.S. interagency community should be to help build and sustain partner nation capacity across law enforcement, military support to law enforcement in the counternarcotics mission, the judiciary, and social organizations. There organized criminal networks in the Western Hemisphere, the United States will face an asymmetric security threat in the homeland in the next several years. Left unchecked, TOC networks will continue to infiltrate governments, businesses, and financial the WISRD environment brings a more holistic approach to understanding TOC activities and supports decisionmakers in developing strategies are significant capacity problems that could be addressed by military engagement and cooperation that could have substantial short- to mid-term impacts in creating conditions for deeper reform and progress. These would include improving border security and partner nation military capacity to support law enforcement in disrupting and interdicting movement and transfer of illicit products. Finally, one of the continuing important roles of the U.S. military in supporting the effort to counter TOC networks is intelligence analysis and information-sharing throughout the region. U.S. Southern Command’s Whole-of-Society Information Sharing for Regional Display (WISRD) program was developed to create a wholeof-society, enterprise process capability that provides participating organizations with a comprehensive common visualization of the TOC environment to satisfy a range of agency information requirements and allows information-sharing across U.S. agencies and partner nations. The WISRD model provides the fidelity via a three-dimensional spatial and temporal visualization that can be tailored to enable users to intuitively analyze complex data and formulate better conclusions. WISRD not only promotes the “responsibility to share” within the U.S. interagency community, but also allows users to reach out and share information with nontraditional whole-of-society partners to include the academic and business communities. The WISRD environment brings a more holistic approach to understanding TOC activities and supports decisionmakers in developing strategies to combat the complicated and fluid TOC problem set. Outlook Without a concerted U.S. interagency effort to counter the threat of transnational 38 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 institutions, increasing the difficulty of countering these insidious organizations before they reach more robustly into the Nation. Information-sharing both in the United States and among its partner nations will be a key facet of countering these groups. Stovepiping information helps the enemy. We must develop a new prism from which to confront this new type of enemy, which has no boundaries. WISRD is the first step, and it must be followed up by increased information-sharing between the interagencies and partner nations so the TOC environment can be mapped. Then we can have the same common operational picture to support actions against TOC networks in order to gain the advantage. JFQ NOTES 1 Douglas Farah, Transnational Organized Crime, Terrorism, and Criminalized States in Latin America: An Emerging Tier-One National Security Priority (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, August 2012). 2 Juan Carlos Garzón, Mafia & Co.: The Criminal Networks in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, June 2008), 11. 3 Moisés Naím, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy (New York: Doubleday, 2005). 4 Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime: Addressing Converging Threats to National Security (Washington, DC: The White House, July 2011), available at <www.whitehouse. gov/administration/eop/nsc/transnational-crime>. 5 Farah; for details, see Estimating Illicit Financial Flows Resulting from Drug Trafficking and Other Transnational Organized Crimes (Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, October 2011), available at <www.unodc. org/documents/data-and-analysis/Studies/Illicit_ financial_flows_2011_web.pdf>. On the higher end, in a speech to Interpol in Singapore in 2009, U.S. Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden cited 15 percent of world gross domestic product as the total annual turnover of transnational organized crime networks. See Josh Meyer, “U.S. attorney general calls for global effort to fight organized crime,” Los Angeles Times, October 13, 2009, available at <articles.latimes.com/ print/2009/oct/13/nation/na-crime13>. 6 Isabella Bennett and Stewart M. Patrick, “CFR: Sanctions on MS-13: Not Enough but a Good First Step,” Council on Foreign Relations Blog, October 27, 2012, available at <http://blogs. cfr.org/patrick/2012/10/26/sanctions-on-ms13-not-enough-but-a-good-first-step/>. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime. 10 Robert Killebrew, “Criminal Insurgency in the Americas and Beyond,” PRISM 2, no. 3 (June 2011), available at <www.ndu.edu/press/criminalinsurgency.html>. 11 Dinorah Azpuru, Political Culture of Democracy in Guatemala, 2010: Democratic Consolidation in the Americas in Hard Times, IX Study of Democratic Culture of Guatemalans, Vanderbilt University, May 2011, available at <www.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/guatemala/2010-political-cultureEnglish.pdf>. 12 Robert Killebrew and Jennifer Beranl, Crime Wars: Gangs, Cartels, and U.S. National Security (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security, September 2010), available at <www.cnas. org/node/5022>. 13 Farah. 14 National Security Strategy (Washington, DC: The White House, May 2010), 49, available at <www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/ rss_viewer/national_security_strategy.pdf>. ndupres s . ndu. edu Democracy Promotion in Oman By D i a n a m . H o l l a n D C ooperation with and support from the strategically positioned Persian Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are critical to America’s stated national interests: security, prosperity, human rights values, and international order.1 In the Gulf region, Iranian hegemonic ambitions, piracy, and violent extremism pose threats to those interests. The United States has spent billions on military assistance and foreign aid programs in the past decade to ensure the stability and cooperation of Gulf governments. Nonetheless, as the “Arab Awakening” demonstrated in 2011, some of these governments face significant internal opposition and could be at risk. If these states devolve into chaos, or if anti-American regimes come to power, the United States could face greater challenges in the region. Colonel Diana M. Holland, USA, is Commander of the 130th Engineer Brigade at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. Al-Shamikh, one of three Kahreef-class Corvettes under construction for Royal Navy of Oman at Portsmouth, England Wikipedia n d u p res s .ndu.edu issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 39 COMMENTARY | Democracy Promotion in Oman One way to sustain stable and friendly governments in the Gulf is to increase democracy promotion programs designed to encourage timely and peaceful transitions to more representative forms of government.2 In fact, the 2010 National Security Strategy contends that the United States must promote democracy because governments that respect democratic values “are more just, peaceful and legitimate” and ultimately protect America’s national interests.3 The United States does not currently have many democracy promotion programs in the Gulf, but if a threat to stability is internal dissatisfaction with autocratic governments, then stronger efforts toward reform supported by the United States could foster a more peaceful political transformation. This process should begin with the Sultanate of Oman because many of its citizens desire reform and are willing to work with the existing government of the 1980 hostage rescue attempt in Iran, as well as more recent combat operations in the region. The two countries signed a Free Trade Agreement in 2006, which assists with economic diversification in preparation for the depletion of Oman’s oil reserves in the next 15 years. In 2010, the United States provided Oman $1.5 million and $8.9 million under the International Military Education and Training and Foreign Military Financing programs, respectively. Oman aligns with American positions on the Arab-Israeli conflict more frequently than other Arab states do.6 The United States and Oman are strong friends, and through this relationship America can encourage substantive reforms in that Gulf state. To appreciate the potential for change in Oman, it is important to understand its recent history. Discussions about modern Oman focus on Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Oman has unique potential for democratic development and could serve as a model of reform for the other Gulf states to that end.4 Furthermore, Oman has unique potential for democratic development and could serve as a model of reform for the other Gulf states. Foreign policy discourse about the Middle East and American national security interests there often neglects Oman. The omission is surprising considering the state’s geographical position vis-à-vis Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Arabian Peninsula. One reason for the neglect is that the Gulf region, aside from its role in exporting oil, is overshadowed by the dysfunction of the rest of the Middle East. Regional policymakers and commentators devote much of their attention to palpable tension or outright conflict between Israel and its neighbors, the Palestinian refugee problem, and Iranian nuclear ambitions. Moreover, the other Gulf countries eclipse Oman because the former have large oil reserves, host major U.S. military headquarters, and control substantial financial assets. Finally, the Omanis themselves downplay their ties with the United States in order to maintain a close relationship with Iran.5 Though the U.S.-Omani relationship is inconspicuous, the two countries cooperate in many areas. Oman authorized the use of its military facilities by U.S. forces in support 40 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 Said and the remarkable transformation of the country during his rule. Sultan Qaboos replaced his father in 1970 following a palace coup. The new sultan immediately confronted and ultimately defeated a 14-year insurgency. He then turned his attention to economic and social development, as well as national unification. He enacted policies that improved infrastructure, education, and health care for all Omanis. In the 1990s, Qaboos instituted significant political reforms. He created a bicameral legislature under the Basic Law in 1996. Omanis elect the members of the Majlis al-Shura (Consultative Assembly), and the sultan appoints members of the Majlis al-Dawla (State Assembly). Women also gained additional rights under Qaboos including the right to vote in 2003.7 Compared to their neighbors, Omanis enjoy considerable religious toleration and economic interaction with the outside world. The country is relatively safe even without the trappings of a police state. It also attracts tourists, who can freely and independently traverse most of the country. Ibadism is the dominant form of Islam in Oman, and its effect on development is important in any assessment of the country’s potential for political reform. Ibadism encourages leaders to make decisions through consultation and consensus. It stresses moderation and toleration toward fellow members of Omani society, as well as foreigners and those of different belief systems. Finally, Ibadism dictates that communities choose leaders through elections. These tenets are deeply rooted in the Omani conscience and over time have established conditions conducive to democratic principles.8 Despite Oman’s potential receptiveness to liberalization, U.S. policies toward the Sultanate, like those toward the rest of the Gulf, normally focus on security and defense capabilities rather than governance. Yet the dearth of democracy programs in this region is also due to the extraordinary wealth of the oil monarchies. They are not dependent on American aid and, therefore, the United States cannot use financial incentives to leverage them to accept democracy promotion programs.9 However, Oman is not as wealthy as the other Gulf states and faces economic uncertainty because of its dwindling oil reserves.10 Thus, economic incentives might be more effective in achieving political change in Oman than in the other member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The major entities that employ such programs in the Middle East are the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its affiliates,11 and the Department of State’s Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI). A survey of these U.S.-sponsored democracy programs confirms that Oman is largely overlooked; the United States provides negligible support and incentives to Oman through these organizations. USAID does not allocate any funding toward governance.12 NED and its affiliates have little engagement in Oman, especially when compared to their efforts in other parts of the region. One of the affiliates, the International Republican Institute, sponsors a single program that provides training in legislative procedures. The other NED affiliate with the mission to train and educate citizens on democratic principles is the National Democratic Institute; however, it has no ongoing programs in Oman.13 Finally, MEPI sponsors 17 programs in Oman, but they generally focus on economic development and opportunities made possible by the 2006 Free Trade Agreement.14 ndupres s . ndu. edu HOLLAND Even if U.S. policymakers decide to increase democracy programs, it is important to ask whether Oman wants such attention. Clearly, the Omani people, and especially the younger generation, desire reform. The citizens participate in elections in large numbers, the Shura continuously presses for more legislative authority, and protesters in early 2011 articulated the desire for change within the existing institutions.15 Additionally, although the sultan is personally popular, there is concern that he is over 70 years old, has no children, and has not announced an heir.16 Upon his death, there will certainly be questions surrounding future reforms. If Qaboos’s successor is not viewed as legitimate, or does not demonstrate the intent to reform the government, the opposition could become more aggressive. The sultan himself has stated in numerous forums throughout his reign that Oman must become more democratic, though at its own pace and according to its own traditions.17 Within those guidelines, future democracy promotion programs should be specifically designed to encourage gradual adjustments rather than dramatic transformation. Programs must be inconspicuous and not associated with the U.S. Government because of Oman’s relationship with Iran and the danger of antagonizing radical groups in the region. This means that private, nongovernmental organizations such as NED, rather than USAID or MEPI, should sponsor democracy promotion in Oman.18 Steady reform in Oman could stabilize the country and serve as a model for other Gulf states that face potent opposition forces. The Sultanate’s history suggests that it has unique potential for democratic reform, and recent events confirm that its citizens desire it. Furthermore, Oman is in a position to positively impact U.S. interests in the region. With these considerations in mind, American policymakers should designate Oman as a priority recipient of democracy promotion efforts. Ultimately, if such programs are successful, the region may avoid a violent “Gulf Awakening” and, in turn, deliver the additional benefit of preserving America’s national interests. JFQ n d u p res s .ndu.edu NOTES 1 National Security Strategy (Washington, DC: The White House, May 2010), 17. 2 There are several definitions of democracy promotion. Because the definition of the concept is not the focus of the argument, the author uses Peter Burnell’s simplified description: “a wide range of largely non-coercive attempts to spread democracy . . . a kind of political intervention in the domestic affairs . . . to affect the distribution of power.” See Peter Burnell, Promoting Democracy Abroad (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011), 1–2. 3 National Security Strategy, 37. 4 Kenneth Katzman, Oman: Reform, Security, and U.S. Policy, RS21534 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, August 26, 2011), summary. 5 Ibid., 11–12. 6 Ibid., 7–15. For example, Oman did not end diplomatic relations with Egypt after the latter concluded the 1979 peace treaty with Israel. Sultan Qaboos hosted working groups to support the Madrid Peace Process. Israel is allowed to participate in the Desalination Research Center located in Oman. Finally, Oman expressed interest in renewing trade ties with Israel if the latter would halt settlement construction in the West Bank. 7 Additionally, the sultan has appointed 14 women to the Majlis al-Dawla since its founding. See Marc Valeri, “Liberalization from Above: Political Reforms and Sultanism in Oman,” in Constitutional Reform and Political Participation in the Gulf, ed. Abdulhadi Khalaf and Giacoko Luciani, 189–193 (Dubai: Gulf Research Center, 2006). Omanis elected one woman to the Majlis al-Shura in October 2011. See “Omani Elections Leaves Questions Unanswered,” The Financial Times, October 17, 2011, available at <www.ft.com/ cms/s/0/33e00b18-f893-11e0-ad8f-00144feab49a. html#axzz1dQnSF7hM>. 8 Hussein Ghubash, Oman—The Islamic Democratic Tradition, trans. Mary Turton (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2–3, 200–203. 9 Tom Pierre Najem, “Good Governance,” in Good Governance in the Middle East Oil Monarchies, ed. Tom Pierre Najem and Martin Hetherington, 14 (New York: Routledge, 2003). 10 Ranked 78th of the 226 countries in the world in terms of gross domestic product (GDP), Oman is the poorest of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Bahrain has a lower GDP than Oman, but it has one-third of Oman’s population and therefore a much higher GDP per capita. Oman’s GDP per capita ranks in last place along with Saudi Arabia, but the latter’s overall GDP is nine times that of Oman and the wealth greatly empowers the Saudi ruling family. See Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The World Factbook (Washington, DC: CIA, 2012), available at <www.cia.gov/library/publications/ the-world-factbook/>. 11 The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has four affiliates: the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), and the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE). Each is aligned with a political party or major U.S. interest group and promotes reform in other countries in accordance with the agendas of those parties and interests. ACILS (now termed the Solidarity Center), for instance, conducts training and education on unions and labor; CIPE designs programs that facilitate small business. 12 U.S. Agency for International Development, “Middle East Countries,” available at <http://transition.usaid.gov/locations/middle_east/countries/ index.html>. 13 International Republican Institute, “Gulf Program Overview,” Washington, DC, 2010, 1; National Democratic Institute, “Where we work,” available at <www.ndi.org/wherewework>. 14 Middle East Partnership Initiative, “Oman Country Profile,” March 20, 2010, available at <www.abudabi.mepi.state.gov/currentprojectsby countryoman.html>. 15 Reform groups consist mostly of younger Omanis, many of whom are unemployed and largely motivated by the country’s economic conditions. The unemployment rate was last measured at 15 percent in 2004. The overall GCC average is 4.2 percent. See Elizabeth Broomhall, “Bahrain and Oman have highest Gulf unemployment rates,” Arabian Business, July 7, 2011, available at <www.arabianbusiness.com/bahrain-oman-havehighest-gulf-unemployment-rates-409116.html>; and Angus McDowall, “Protests in Oman Sputter,” The Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2011. 16 Katzman, 2–3. The sultan has established a succession process. The “Ruling Family Council” will meet to designate a successor within 3 days of Qaboos’s death. If it fails to select someone, it will unseal a letter left by Qaboos in which he names the next sultan. This process is controversial in Oman because it contradicts the Ibadi idea of consensus and election. See Valeri, 192–193. 17 Joseph A. Kéchichian, “A Vision of Oman: State of the Sultanate Speeches by Qaboos bin Said, 1970–2006,” Middle East Policy 15 (Fall 2008), 17; Judith Miller, “Creating Modern Oman: An Interview with Sultan Qaboos,” Foreign Affairs 76 (May–June 1997), 14. 18 Madeleine K. Albright and Vin Weber, cochairs, In Support of Arab Democracy: Why and How, Independent Task Force Report No. 54 (Washington, DC: Council on Foreign Relations, 2005), 4–9. issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 41 Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus learns about Brazilian riverine operations at Estacao Naval Riverine Base, Manaus U.S. Navy (Kevin S. O’Brien) RESTORING THE “UNWRITTEN ALLIANCE” Brazil-U.S. Relations By l a W r e n c e t . B r o W n T he primary challenge the United States faces in the 21st century, according to historian and diplomat Joseph Nye, “is not one of decline but what to do in light of the realization that even the largest country cannot achieve the outcomes it wants without the help of others.”1 Acknowledging Brazil as a genuine partner is problematic for American leaders since the United States exercised tremendous unilateral influence in South American affairs throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Today, U.S. hubris lingers in relations with Brazil. This residual attitude prompts some U.S. leaders to consider any Brazilian disregard for U.S. interests as an affront. Instead of regarding Brazil’s 42 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 economic growth as a challenge to U.S. hegemony, U.S. leaders should commend it as a regional achievement. Additionally, some current perceptions of the two countries’ strategic interests as continuing to diverge are historically shortsighted. Such a view affirms a U.S. failure to adapt long-range diplomatic strategies to match the global rise of many countries. Undeniably, the United States needs Brazil—now and in the future. Economically, Brazil is becoming the most important country to the United States in the Western Hemisphere. It will become the fifth largest world economy by 2015, while Canada will be eleventh and Mexico fifteenth.2 Moreover, “By the end of 2009, Brazil’s economy represented forty percent of the total gross domestic product (GDP) of Latin America and the Caribbean, and fiftyfive percent of the GDP of South America alone.”3 Brazil will host both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics; accordingly, it is investing billions of dollars in infrastructure and security improvements throughout the country. Additionally, a new oil field has been discovered off the coast near Rio de Janeiro. The find has drawn great interest from the United States, which is seeking oil Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence T. Brown, USA, is the Director of Operations for the Office of the Defense Representative–Pakistan. ndupres s . ndu. edu BROWN autonomy from the Middle East. This offshore oil field and others will double Brazil’s output of petroleum by 2020.4 Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed a “new 21st Century reality—that GDP matters more than military might.”5 Her pronouncement reprioritized economics to the forefront of U.S. foreign policy. She cited Brazil and India as examples of 21st-century economic success.6 As U.S. foreign policy focuses more on economics, the U.S. relationship with Brazil assumes greater importance. If economics has become the primary interest in U.S. foreign policy, then failure to build a stronger strategic partnership with Brazil will be a huge opportunity lost for substantial economic trade and growth. Already Brazil has concluded Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR) free trade agreements with Israel, along with a separate trade arrangement with Egypt.7 Additionally, Brazil has entered into special trading agreements with South Africa and India, which are also rapidly growing global economies.8 The European Union and various other countries have recognized Brazil’s rise and future economic potential. They, too, plan to make the most of what Brazil’s economy has to offer. Tides of History The United States so far has not viewed its bilateral relationship with Brazil through the lens of history. Brazil’s recent economic growth should not be regarded as a miracle of a Third World country. Rather, its rise represents the reemergence of a global economic and diplomatic player from the early to mid-20th century. At that time, the United States supported Brazil’s preeminence in South America. President Theodore Roosevelt even hoped that Brazil would be the responsible party for supporting the Monroe Doctrine within the region.9 Approximately 20 years later, Brazil became one of the original members of the League of Nations and committed the only Latin American ground forces to the Allied cause in World War II, deploying an entire division to Europe. Unfortunately, Brazil’s rise to preeminence in South America was interrupted by authoritarian military rule that sapped its international credibility for over two decades. Only now has Brazil regained its capability and potential for regional and global leadership. As before, there is a window of opportunity for Washington to n d u p res s .ndu.edu redefine the U.S.-Brazil strategic relationship and restore the “Unwritten Alliance”10 that was initially established by Secretary of State Elihu Root, whose work toward greater panAmerican understanding contributed to his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912. leadership through the Monroe Doctrine and Rio Treaty—and receiving much dissent along the way. Now it is Brazil that is criticized for both taking action and not taking enough action. But Brazil has the wherewithal to successfully manage this transition. Brazil’s rise represents the reemergence of a global economic and diplomatic player from the early to mid-20th century Consistent Player Today, Brazil sees itself as a regional leader. Its strategy is not to disrupt or disturb any multilateral organizations, despite its growing power, “but to adapt them and employ [its strengths] as platforms to advance Brazilian interests.”11 This strategy nests nicely with two of President Dilma Rousseff’s areas for action: “diversifying relations by forging stronger economic and political ties with other nations of the developing world; and supporting multilateralism by pushing for the democratization of global governance.”12 Brazil has recently proved its unfaltering pursuit of these goals, and this commitment has not been lost on the other 11 South American countries. In view of Brazil’s significant economic progress, its neighbors acknowledge that Brazil is now a serious global player and economic powerhouse. Proximity to Brazil will not only benefit these South American countries, but also position regional relations to eliminate the need to look elsewhere for economic support. Historically, Brazil has already exercised leadership in conflict disputes between other countries in the region. In 1942, it played a key role in resolving the Ecuador-Peru war. Brazil arbitrated a peace settlement between them again in 1995.13 Likewise, it has shared hydroelectric power with its neighbors and entered into cooperative security agreements, brokered distribution of fresh water, and managed regional environmental programs. However, Brazil’s government has had difficulty with indigenous minority groups. For example, it is constantly challenged to persuade the Amazon aboriginals that they will benefit from certain regional infrastructure projects. Still, through protracted negotiations, it has generally compensated displaced and dispossessed peoples. Essentially, Brazil is growing into its role as the regional leader. The United States once held this difficult position in South America, exercising History is on its side. Brazil has remained at peace with its neighbors for nearly 150 years. No other emerging power in the world enjoys this kind of accomplishment. Brazil’s Defense Minister Celso Amorim has recently stated that his government’s goal is to transform South America into a true “Peace Zone.”14 Brazil has largely accomplished this goal. The United States should actively support Brazil’s ongoing objective of a continental Peace Zone. Such U.S. support would help convince the majority of Brazilians and Latin Americans that the primary U.S. interest is not to pursue imperial power and resource domination, but to promote international trade, investment, and security. Indeed, greater leadership roles for responsible countries in the global system actually strengthen U.S. worldwide interests and U.S. domestic security.15 Understanding Motivation The United States, however, must do a better job understanding how Brazil approaches diplomacy and difficult problems. In terms of interests versus values, Brazil emphasizes its constitutional values more than at any other time in its history. Self-determination, nonintervention, defense of peace, peaceful settlement of conflicts, repudiation of terrorism and racism, cooperation among peoples for the progress of mankind, and granting of political asylum are among the salient constitutional values that Brazil uses to shape its international relations today.16 Out of these, the peaceful settlement of disputes is highlighted in the preamble of its constitution. Indeed, it is the singular driving force behind Brazil’s foreign policy. For example, Brazil has been exhibiting its constitutional values of nonintervention and peaceful settlement of conflicts when dealing with truculent Iran. As a nonpermanent member of the United Nations Security issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 43 U.S. Army (Kaye Richey) COMMENTARY | Brazil-U.S. Relations USSOUTHCOM director, at Conference of Directors of Peacekeeping Operations, discusses opportunities for cooperation Council (UNSC), Brazil voted against implementing sanctions on Iran in 2010. In its minority vote with Turkey, Brazil claimed that “sanctions will most probably lead to the suffering of the people of Iran and will play in the hands of those, on all sides, that do not want dialogue to prevail. Past experiences in the U.N., notably the case of Iraq, show that the spiral of sanctions, threats and isolation can result in tragic consequences.”17 In this case, Brazil acted according to its core principle of the peaceful settlement of disputes. In addition, along with Turkey, Brazilians did not believe they were allowed enough time to culminate their tentative agreement with Iran. Brasília’s principal complaint was the perceived rush to sanctions. Likewise, Brazil’s abstention the following year on UNSCR 1973, which authorized UN member states to take all necessary measures to protect civilians under threat of attack in Libya, also demonstrated Brazil’s consistent pursuit of peaceful diplomacy. Explaining Brazil’s abstention, Ambassador Maria Luiza 44 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 Ribeiro Viotti argued that “No military action alone would succeed in ending the conflict. Protecting civilians, ensuring lasting settlement and addressing the legitimate demands of Libyan citizens demanded a political process.”18 The ambassador was somewhat prophetic: the militias that overthrew Muammar Qadhafi with assistance from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization over a year ago are now the overlords of cities and towns across Libya, while the fledgling police and military are too weak to control them. Libya watchers and international media note that the recent surge of militant violence against foreign diplomats, military, and police officers demonstrates a largely lawless Libya with little stability or security.19 Again, Brazil’s vote affirmed its value of nonintervention and peaceful settlement of conflicts. This common thread of values is woven throughout Brazilian diplomacy. Along with 137 other countries, Brazil recently supported a UN General Assembly vote condemning Syrian leaders’ ongoing violations on their citizens’ human rights. It also supported an Arab League plan for a political transition in Syria.20 Brazil’s support, which moved from an earlier abstention in December 2011 on a similar resolution, still focuses on a peaceful political transition, not a violent one. Whether it is resolving a border conflict in South America, dealing with the erratic Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, or negotiating with the radical Islamic regime in Iran, Brazil has shown itself consistent in word and deed to its core constitutional values. It is a responsible and rational actor in its foreign policy and regional relations. Diplomatic Recommendations Several proposals would set the U.S.Brazil relationship on a positive path for the next 20 years. They would also allay Brazil’s historic concerns for sovereignty and reciprocity. Implementation of these recommendations would garner immediate reciprocal benefits from the Brazilian government and lay the groundwork for future bilateral coop- ndupres s . ndu. edu BROWN eration both regionally and globally. Stronger U.S.-Brazil relations would bolster homeland, regional, and international security. First, Washington needs to formally endorse Brasilia’s bid for a permanent seat on the UNSC. The United States extended this support to India. Brazil’s nominal GDP is projected to grow to the fifth largest in the world by 2015 while India’s will grow only to ninth largest, immediately behind Russia.21 India’s GDP may surpass Brazil’s in the future based on the purchasing power parity (PPP) methodology, but once PPP GDP is adjusted per capita, Brazil will remain ahead of India in 2015.22 Furthermore, “Unlike India, [Brazil] has no insurgents, no ethnic and religious conflicts nor hostile neighbors.”23 It is problematic that India, which has yet to resolve its conflict in Kashmir and Jammu with Pakistan, should receive a permanent UNSC seat before Brazil.24 Any future UN political agreement regarding Kashmir would be severely limited by an Indian veto on the UNSC if this proposed agreement is not in New Delhi’s best interest. Other permanent members of the UNSC—France, the United Kingdom, and Russia—all affirmed their support for Brazil’s bid for a permanent UNSC seat.25 China, however, remains uncommitted to both Brazil and India. Vociferous against Japan’s candidacy for a permanent UNSC seat, China has remained silent with regard to India. It is unlikely that China would support India’s bid for a permanent UNSC seat due to its growing strategic partnership with the United States to counter China’s military rise. Also, China does not want to jeopardize its growing friendship with Pakistan. If Beijing does eventually support Brasilia’s bid to the Security Council, Washington would remain the last holdout. In March 2011, President Barack Obama endorsed the concept of an equal partnership.26 But to be equal partners, Brazil and the United States should be seated side by side on the UNSC as permanent members. Failure to endorse Brazil’s bid to occupy a permanent seat would confirm Brazil’s lingering suspicions that “the United States commitment to a mature relationship between equals is largely rhetorical.”27 Second, at the earliest opportunity, the U.S. President should advance Brazil’s position in the National Security Strategy (NSS) from secondary to one of primary interest. Informed by this higher priority, Brazil’s leaders would be assured of U.S. intentions to n d u p res s .ndu.edu improve bilateral relations and cooperation across a wide range of security and economic issues throughout the world, particularly in South America. This reprioritization would also lend legitimacy to President Obama’s pledge to treat Brazil as an equal partner, not a junior one. The NSS declares: “We are working to build deeper and more effective partnerships with other key centers of influence—including China, India, and Russia, as well as increasingly influential nations such as Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia.”28 This statement clearly delineates two groupings of nations. First, it lists China, India, and Russia as key centers of influence. Next, it lists Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia as increasingly influential nations. Both China and Russia already occupy permanent seats on the UNSC affirming that they are key centers of influence. Listing Brazil in the NSS as only an “increasingly influential nation” after considering the evidence of its economic power is unsound. Regardless, designating India a “key center of influence” is consistent with U.S. support for India’s bid for a permanent seat on the UNSC. Furthermore, the United States and India are already strategic partners because of shared concerns over a potentially hostile China. However, there are enormous differences in security, diplomatic, economic, and democratic contributions to international order between South Africa and Indonesia, on one hand, and Brazil on the other. The strategic designation of Brazil as an increasingly influential nation and not a “key center of influence” supports former U.S. Ambassador Luigi Einaudi’s view that “Washington’s identification of Brazil with Latin America and the Third World hampers its appreciation of Brazil’s importance to the United States.”29 Consider this: South Africa’s and Indonesia’s economies are respectively the 28th and 18th in the world. Significantly larger, Brazil hosts the world’s seventh largest economy.30 Acknowledging Brazil’s global status in the NSS would foster a stronger relationship. It would place Brazil on equal ground with other major global players such as China and Russia. And it would require Congress, the Department of State, and the Department of Defense to give greater attention to our new equal partner to the south. Interestingly, the 2011 U.S. National Military Strategy (NMS) actually supports South American regional structures and implies Brazil’s leadership: “We welcome efforts by Brazil and our other regional partners to establish economic and security mechanisms, such as the South American Defense Council (SADC).” The SADC is a suborganization of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR).31 It was modeled after the European Union, whose long-term goals of continental integration are similar. Another regional South American organization not mentioned in the NMS is MERCOSUR, in which Brazil has become the natural leader due to its expansive economy. Through these organizations, Brazil has exercised regional leadership by addressing regional problems “without having to turn to extra-regional powers, such as the United States.”32 In the NSS, President Obama specifically cited Brazil’s exceptional role in Latin America: “We welcome Brazil’s leadership and seek to move beyond dated North-South divisions to pursue progress on bilateral, hemispheric, and global issues.”33 These policy statements clearly indicate that the United States prefers to work with any organization, sovereign or multilateral, that is proactively working to solve problems. UNASUR, MERCOSUR, and even the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States are potential U.S. partners for hemispheric and regional progress. President Obama has welcomed Brazil’s leadership in these organizations in executive policy documents, but his statements have not been matched by specific actions. Appointing a U.S. Ambassador to UNASUR, as Washington already does for the European Union and Organization of American States, is one measure that would immediately demonstrate practical U.S. support for regional “economic and security mechanisms,” as stated in the NSS. There are several benefits for the United States. Latin American multilateral institutions such as UNASUR provide an alternative to Hugo Chavez’s version of Bolivarianism within the region, which is a definite concern of the United States. Instead of criticizing the policies of the Venezuelan regime directly, Brazil has decided to use its own example of establishing generally good relations throughout the world to encourage Chavez to act more rationally than he would if confronted directly about his radical tendencies. This approach has apparently worked.34 By participating as an active observer in regional organizations, and by establishing formal diplomatic relations with issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 45 COMMENTARY | Brazil-U.S. Relations UNASUR, the United States would do much to extinguish any lingering doubts about the “Colossus of the North.”35 Brasilia’s regional activism enables Washington to focus its diminishing foreign aid budget on the unstable parts of the developing world. These proposed diplomatic initiatives are good faith measures crafted to lay the groundwork for greater friendship. They should allay Brazilian concerns regarding sovereignty and reciprocity. Additionally, more positive U.S.-Brazil relations will facilitate future bilateral cooperation on economic and defense measures regionally and throughout the world. Military Recommendations Strengthened military relations naturally flow from improved diplomatic relations. As regional leaders, the United States and Brazil can focus their combined security efforts and resources against common threats to both nations—and to the entire Western Hemisphere. Intelligence-sharing during the upcoming World Cup and Olympic games, coordinated counterterrorism measures in the Tri-Border Area (TBA, the name given to the area surrounding the border shared among Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay), and disrupting narco-trafficking between South America and Africa are among the more pressing cooperation initiatives that can bring greater security to both countries and to the hemisphere. Close security and defense cooperation in the future, absent the historic shadow of U.S. tance has provided Underwater Explosive, Critical Incident, and Special Events Management, Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and related equipment training.”36 Both the 2006 World Cup in Germany and the South African event transpired successfully with low-key U.S. security assistance. There were no terrorist attacks despite ongoing large-scale operations against terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan at the time. When President Obama visited Brazil in 2011, one of the agreements resulting was a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the United States and Brazil concerning world sporting events cooperation. Security was one of the MOU’s six focus areas of cooperation. This MOU is foundational for the U.S. Departments of State and Defense to provide any future support desired by the Brazilian government.37 One of the great strengths of the United States resides in its intelligence databases, whose holdings and effectiveness have grown substantially since 9/11. For the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil, an intelligence-sharing mechanism would help deter terrorism threats. Successful physical or virtual sharing could continue afterward to address other regional security threats, such as drug-trafficking and organized crime. Of course, extending temporary intelligencesharing after the events may be problematic due to Brazilian memory of its authoritarian past, when the military regime collected intelligence to deter internal dissent.38 U.S. officials have the next 4 years to convince close security and defense cooperation would help in reestablishing the Unwritten Alliance dynamic imperialism, would help in reestablishing the Unwritten Alliance dynamic between the United States and Brazil that flourished in the first half of the 20th century. When Brazil hosts the World Cup and Olympics, it will be in the U.S. national interest to assist its efforts in countering terrorism, curbing drug-trafficking, and reducing international crime. The United States provided similar support to South Africa during the World Cup in 2010, assisting in preventing devastating terrorist attacks on that world stage. South African security services benefited from security grants and extensive training: “Specifically, Anti-Terrorism Assis- 46 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 the Brazilian government of its benign intentions. With less than 2 years before the opening kick of 2014 World Cup, beta testing of this provisional intelligence-sharing arrangement should begin immediately to track terrorist threats likely to originate in the Tri-Border Area. Exposed Southern Flank The United States has long worried about the Tri-Border Area. In these border towns, laws are minimally enforced, money is laundered, and weapons, drugs, and people are trafficked. Organized crime and Islamic extremism have thrived there due to a lack of effective law enforcement from the three border nations.39 Concerns increased after 9/11 that al Qaeda could transit porous borders, perhaps through Mexico, to attack U.S. interests in North America.40 Today, as the specter of war with Iran rises because of its purported pursuit of nuclear weapons, the concern has moved from attacks by al Qaeda to attacks by Hizballah and its patron Iran. As recently as October 2011, Iran was accused of authorizing and financing an assassination attempt against the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States and contemplating further attacks in Argentina.41 Successful terrorist attacks against Argentina were carried out in 1992 and 1994 by a Hizballah militant organization supported by Iran. Terrorists exploited the TBA during each operation.42 The most telling evidence of potential terrorist attacks out of the TBA surfaced during a Hizballah militiaman’s interview by Spanish television station Telemundo. The militant stated emphatically that if the United States attacked Iran, Hizballah would conduct retaliatory attacks inside the United States.43 Counterterrorism expert Edward Luttwak described the TBA as Hizballah’s most important base outside Lebanon, from which they have already supported terrorist attacks: “The northern region of Argentina, the eastern region of Paraguay and even Brazil are large terrains, and they have an organized training and recruitment camp for terrorists.”44 The historical evidence of terrorist activity emanating from the TBA is chilling. If the current crisis with Iran is not resolved by the time of the World Cup and Olympics, the Brazilian government will need substantial help in preventing terrorist attacks aimed at disrupting the games and attracting a global audience. Even now, Hizballah terrorists may be inclined to strike at Israeli or American targets in the Western Hemisphere in retaliation for a recent UNSC resolution that placed additional sanctions on Iran. Hizballah attacked its targets in Argentina for lesser reasons in 1992 and 1994. This is why intelligencesharing with Brazil must start now. The last time the United States held a 3+1 Group Meeting (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and the United States) on TBA security was in 2004.45 This group should reconvene at the earliest opportunity to assess the current terrorist threat within the TBA and ndupres s . ndu. edu BROWN determine the probabilities of Hizballah becoming operational if Iran is attacked. Nevertheless, collaborative intelligence initiatives must extend to the World Cup and Olympic timeframes if Iran continues to violate UNSC resolutions concerning its nuclear program. It is in both countries’ national interests to prevent attacks against their homelands. Certainly, Brazil does not want its territory used as a springboard for attacks within the region. Full cooperation in this security arena would assist in preventing the unthinkable until the Iran crisis over dual-use nuclear material is resolved. Narco-terrorist Connection Cooperation in breaking the Brazil– West Africa narcotics connection is another area where national interests converge. In 2009, Brazil became the primary embarkation point for South American cocaine headed for West Africa, where “there is evidence by the U.S. Drug Enforcement [Administration] . . . that Latin American traffickers are collaborating with [al Qaeda] in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and Hezbollah to smuggle cocaine to Europe.”46 The executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime also confirmed that terrorists from Africa used money from drug-trafficking to resource operations, purchase equipment, and provide salaries for their ranks.47 It is common knowledge that the United States conducts counterterrorist operations against AQIM and seeks to stop any funding derived from the transshipment of cocaine from Latin America. Although Brazil itself does not produce significant amounts of cocaine, it does have 10,500 miles of mostly unsecured coastline. In addition, three of the world’s top producers of cocaine border Brazil: Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru. Brazil has invested more heavily in enforcing its borders since its economic boom, but the United States could assist by continuing the same intelligencesharing mechanism that has been proposed for the World Cup and Olympics. Additionally, Brazil’s unmanned aerial surveillance program is currently in its infancy; it could benefit from the experience and systems of the mature U.S. programs. Building on the predicted intelligence successes of the World Cup and Olympics, this cooperation could expand to neighboring countries. Eventually, it could evolve into a hemispheric security network serving the national interests of all participating nations. n d u p res s .ndu.edu Brazil’s Initiative for Cooperation Conclusion The last area of convergence and cooperation is not American, but Brazilian. Brasília is as interested as Washington in a stronger relationship. Former foreign minister Celso Amorin, who is now the defense minister, recognized that there is enormous potential for structured cooperation between Brazil and the United States in areas of the world such as Africa, where there is great need for development and stability.48 Minister Amorin has cited the trilateral cooperation agreement among Brazil, GuineaBissau, and the United States as an example of productive cooperation. This was a first of its kind agreement for the United States and Brazil in Africa. These trilateral agreements make strategic sense because bilateral agreements between the United States and relatively poor countries usually elicit criticism that the world’s only superpower is engaging in exploitive neocolonialism. Having itself been a Portuguese colony, Brazil is viewed as a moderating influence on perceived expansive U.S. foreign policy. It is also considered a friendly observer to the Non-Aligned Movement of 120 countries that are distrustful of superpower diplomacy.49 Plainly spoken, if Brazil is part of a U.S. agreement with an impoverished country, that country feels more comfortable making an agreement with the United States because Brazil, a guarantor of U.S. intentions, is part of it. Brazil welcomes this role because it enhances its position as a regional and world leader, establishes a singularly special diplomatic relationship with the United States, and fulfills two of its foreign policy action areas. 50 And its role as a third-party broker does not end with Africa or other poor regions. Brazil sees itself as a viable broker for peace as evidenced by its last-ditch diplomatic effort with Iran, which attempted to resolve the uranium-processing crisis. Minister Amorin shared his idea to expand trilateral frameworks with Secretary of State Clinton during President Rousseff’s inauguration. Although Secretary Clinton seemed open to it at the time, there is no evidence of further action. One hopes this was not an opportunity missed with Brazil. It aligns impeccably with President Obama’s pursuit of more partnerships and greater burdensharing. With the war in Iraq over and the war in Afghanistan winding down, the United States has the opportunity to reassess its global strategic interests. U.S. leaders must carefully scrutinize Brazil’s potential as a long-term strategic partner. A new era of security cooperation with Brazil supports the interests of both nations and strengthens the Western Hemisphere. Collaboration on World Cup and Olympic security is vital to the whole world. Many hemispheric homelands are at risk if war breaks out with Iran for whatever reason. Also, drug lords moving narcotics from South America to Europe through Africa represent new relationships of convenience that provide funds for AQIM and other terrorists that further converge U.S.-Brazil interests. As Brazil grows, so will its security concerns. It has become a responsible international player that is seeking greater diplomatic and security cooperation with the United States. It is willing to help secure the hemispheric and global commons to ensure freedom, stability, and prosperity.51 However, the United States, acknowledging its domineering past in this region, must give a little to gain a lot. Only then can the Unwritten Alliance be restored. JFQ NOTES 1 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “The Future of American Power: Dominance and Decline in Perspective,” Foreign Affairs 89, no. 6 (November–December 2010), 2–12. 2 International Monetary Fund (IMF), “IMF Data Mapper,” September 2011, available at <www.imf.org/external/datamapper/index.php>. 3 James K. Rose, “BRIC in the Backyard: Brazil’s Economic Rise and What It Means for the United States,” Issue Paper, U.S. Army War College, July 2011, CSL-2, available at <www.csl. army.mil/usacsl/publications/IP14_11.pdf>. 4 Roberto Setubal, “The Opportunities and Challenges for President Dilma Rouseff,” Americas Quarterly, no. 2 (Spring 2011), 63–64. 5 Leslie H. Gelb, “Hillary Hits the Mark,” The Daily Beast, October 14, 2011, available at <www. thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/10/14/hillaryclinton-speech-to-economic-club-of-new-york-abrilliant-moment.html>. 6 Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Economic Statecraft,” October 14, 2011, available at <www.state. gov/secretary/rm/2011/10/175552.htm>. 7 Rose, CSL-3. 8 “Trade between India, Brazil and South Africa set to grow to $25 bn by 2015,” The issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 47 COMMENTARY | Brazil-U.S. Relations Economic Times, October 19, 2011, available at <http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes. com/2011-10-19/news/30297859_1_trade-ministers-trade-data-southern-african-customs-union>. 9 E. Bradford Burns, The Unwritten Alliance: Rio-Branco and Brazilian American Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 172. 10 See Elihu Root, Speeches Incident to the Visit of Secretary Root to South America: July 4 to September 30, 1906 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), 61. Unwritten Alliance is a term derived from Secretary of State Root’s speech given to the Federal Senate of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro on August 6, 1906. This term was used to describe the strong diplomatic relationship between the two countries from 1906 to 1942, when a formal alliance was signed between the countries: “Let us know each other better; let us aid each other in the great work of advancing civilization; let the United States of North America and the United States of Brazil join hands, not in formal written treaties of alliance, but in the universal sympathy and confidence and esteem of their peoples—join hands to help humanity forward along the paths we have been so happy as to tread.” 11 Samuel W. Bodman and James D. Wolfensohn, chairs, Global Brazil and U.S.-Brazil Relations (Washington, DC: Council on Foreign Relations, July 2011), 46. 12 Peter J. Meyer, Brazil-U.S. Relations, RL33456 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, October 2012), 11. 13 Luigi R. Einaudi, Brazil and the United States: The Need for Strategic Engagement, INSS Strategic Forum 266 (Washington DC: NDU Press, March 2011), 7. 14 Celso Amorim, “Reflections on Brazil’s Global Rise,” Americas Quarterly, no. 2 (Spring 2011), 50–55. 15 Walter Russell Mead, “U.S. to China and Brazil: Take Up the White Man’s Burden,” The American Interest, November 9, 2011, available at <http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/ wrm/2011/11/09/us-to-china-and-brazil-take-upthe-white-mans-burden/>. 16 Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil, 3rd ed. (Brasília: Documentation and Information Center, 2010), Title I, Article 4. 17 Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, “Security Council Explanation of vote—Resolution on Iran,” June 9, 2010, available at <www.un.int/ brazil/speech/10d-mlrv-csnu-explanation-voteiran-0906.html>. 18 United Nations, SC/10200, “Security Council Approves ‘No-Fly Zone’ Over Libya, Authorizing ‘All Necessary Measures’ to Protect Civilians, By Vote of 10 in Favour with 5 Abstentions,” February 16, 2012, available at <www. un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/sc10200.doc.htm>. 19 Mathieu Galtier, “Militias are taking over in post-Gadhafi Libya,” USA Today, January 3, 48 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 2013, available at <www.usatoday.com/story/news/ world/2013/01/03/libya-militias/1802523/>. 20 United Nations, GA/11207/Rev.1*, “General Assembly Adopts Resolution Strongly Condemning ‘widespread and systematic’ Human Rights Violations by the Syrian authorities,” February 16, 2012, available at <www.un.org/News/Press/ docs/2012/ga11207.doc.htm>. 21 IMF. 22 Purchasing power parity (PPP) determines relative size of the economy based on adjusted parity of currencies for all goods and services in a year. It is most useful in discussing measures of gross domestic product (GDP) and individual relative incomes and costs, but usually not optimal in discussing entire nations’ GDPs as it relates to international trade. For example, PPP GDP will appropriately explain whether an American, Chinese, or Brazilian can afford food and housing right in his own domestic market since it accounts for trade inside the country as well. Nominal GDP explains how much value an economy produces as agreed upon by the current world market (for example, U.S. produces x, China produces y, and Brazil produces z). Nominal GDP is the preferred measurement when discussing international trade relative to other countries. 23 “Leaders: Brazil takes off,” The Economist, November 14, 2009, 15. 24 “India–Kashmir (1947–first combat deaths),” Ploughshares, March 31, 2011, available at <www.ploughshares.ca/content/ india-kashmir-1947-first-combat-deaths>. 25 Bodman and Wolfensohn, 47. 26 “Remarks by the President to the People of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,” March 20, 2011, available at <www.whitehouse.gov/the-pressoffice/2011/03/20/remarks-president-peoplebrazil-rio-de-janeiro-brazil>. 27 Bodman and Wolfensohn, 48. 28 National Security Strategy (Washington, DC: The White House, May 2010), 3. 29 Einaudi, 1. 30 IMF. 31 “What Is the South American Defense Council?” Just the Facts, June 9, 2010, available at <http://justf.org/blog/2010/06/09/ what-south-american-defense-council>. 32 Meyer, 13. 33 National Security Strategy, 44. 34 Bodman and Wolfensohn, 55. 35 Thomas P. Anderson, Politics in Central America: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1988), 225. 36 Jana Winter, “U.S. Helps South Africa Beef up Security for World Cup After Al Qaeda Threats,” Fox News, April 9, 2010, available at <www.foxnews.com/world/2010/04/09/helpssouth-africa-beef-security-world-cup-al-qaedathreats/>. 37 U.S. Department of State, “Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. and Brazil on Cooperation to Support the Organization of Major Global Sporting Events,” March 19, 2011, available at <www.state.gov/documents/organization/158857.pdf>. 38 “World Briefing, The Americas; Brazil: Suspensions for Domestic Spying,” The New York Times, September 2, 2008. 39 Glenn Curtis, Terrorist and Organized Crime Groups in the Tri-Border Area (TBA) of South America (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, July 2003, revised December 2010). 40 Mark S. Steinitz, “Middle East Terrorist Activity in Latin America,” Policy Papers on the Americas 14, Study 7, July 2003. 41 Richard Esposito and Brain Ross, “Iran ‘Directed’ Washington, DC, Terror Plot, U.S. Says,” ABC News, October 11, 2011, available at <http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/us-irantied-terror-plot-washington-dc-disrupted/ story?id=14711933#>. 42 William R. Long, “Islamic Jihad Says It Bombed Embassy; Toll 21,” Los Angeles Times, March 19, 1992, available at <http:// articles.latimes.com/1992-03-19/news/ mn-5905_1_islamic-jihad>. 43 Pablo Gato and Robert Windrem, “Hezbollah builds a Western base,” MSNBC.com, May 9, 2007, available at <www.msnbc.msn.com/ id/17874369/ns/world_news-americas/t/hezbollahbuilds-western-base/#.TzgJ1pikdCo>. 44 Ibid. 45 U.S. Department of State, “Communique of the 3+1 Group on Tri-Border Area Security,” December 6, 2004, available at <www.state.gov/p/ wha/rls/70992.htm>. 46 Nancy Brune, “The Brazil-Africa Narco Nexus,” Americas Quarterly, no. 3 (Fall 2011), 59–62. 47 Antonio Maria Costa, “Africa Under Attack,” United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, December 8, 2009, available at <www. unodc.org/unodc/en/about-unodc/speeches/200908-12-africa-under-attack.html>. 48 Amorim, 55. 49 “Profile: Non-Aligned Movement,” BBC News, August 7, 2009, available at <http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2798187.stm>. 50 Meyer, 11. 51 Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, January 2012), 3, available at <www.defense.gov/news/Defense_Strategic_Guidance.pdf>. ndupres s . ndu. edu JCSE JCSE members ensure rapid connectivity to multiple users accessing network and deploying assets during operational exercise Joint Communications Support Element The Voice Heard ’Round the World By k i r B y e . W a t s o n I n early January 2010, a catastrophic 7.0-magnitude earthquake rippled through Port-au-Prince, Haiti, affecting more than 3 million people and resulting in one of the worst natural disasters in history. More than 250,000 homes and buildings were destroyed including the Presidential Palace, National Assembly building, and headquarters of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. Additionally, the earthquake knocked out communications systems and electrical networks that were essential to respond to the various needs of Haitian citizens during this time of extreme devastation. Enter the Joint Communications Support Element (JCSE), which arrived in Haiti within 24 hours of the earthquake and provided the first joint and secure communication capabilities in the country. JCSE communications equipment enabled the Haitian government to communicate with the U.S. President, Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Department of State to identify the way ahead for relief operations. In Colonel Kirby E. Watson, USA, is Commander of the Joint Communications Support Element at MacDill Air Force Base. n d u p res s .ndu.edu issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 49 COMMENTARY | The Voice Heard ‘Round the World addition, JCSE provided the initial secure voice, network, and video-teleconference capabilities for Joint Task Force (JTF)–Haiti commander, Lieutenant General Ken Keen, USA, and his staff. Without JCSE’s ability to provide these essential communications in 2011, both the JECC and its subordinate commands were reassigned to U.S. Transportation Command. Despite JCSE’s continuous evolution over the last 50 years, the essence of the original CSE mission has remained at the JCSE’s persistent focus on expeditionary, joint communications support has taken it all over the world to assist in some of the most highly publicized U.S. military operations of the last half century capabilities in the time period immediately following the earthquake, it is possible that U.S. humanitarian assistance efforts may not have been as successful. This article demonstrates that communications during a disaster relief operation is only one of the many mission sets that JCSE is prepared to support. With over 50 years of joint communications experience across the full spectrum of military operations, JCSE has earned the designation of the “Voice Heard ’Round the World.” The Establishment of JCSE JCSE, a subordinate command of the Joint Enabling Capabilities Command (JECC), was originally established at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, in 1961 as the Communications Support Element (CSE) under the now disestablished U.S. Strike Command (USSTRICOM). With just over 400 Air Force and Army personnel assigned, the CSE was established to serve as a quick response communications unit during crisis and contingency operations. In 1972, the Navy and Marine Corps joined the CSE, and it was appropriately redesignated as JCSE. Operational control was transferred to the Joint Chiefs of Staff while U.S. Readiness Command (USREDCOM) gained responsibility for administrative and logistical support. At the deactivation of USREDCOM in 1987, administrative control of JCSE was reassigned to U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) where it remained until 1998 when it transferred to U.S. Atlantic Command (which transitioned to U.S. Joint Forces Command [USJFCOM] in 1999) along with operational control. In 2008, the JECC was established and JCSE became one of its three subordinate commands. Following the disestablishment of USJFCOM 50 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 forefront. JCSE’s persistent focus on expeditionary, joint communications support has taken it all over the world to assist in some of the most highly publicized U.S. military operations of the last half century. Ever-changing Mission When JCSE was initially stood up in 1961, each branch of the Armed Forces already maintained its own signal/communications units. However, those resources were typically predesignated for specific mission sets and therefore could not meet the demand for joint or multi-Service crisis operations. JCSE was established to fill this gap as a dedicated communications resource for shortnotice contingency operations. Additionally, as a multi-Service and eventually a fully joint unit, JCSE had the unique ability to enable commanders to communicate across multiService platforms and leverage the most efficient means of communication to accomplish the mission. Within the first two decades of its existence, JCSE’s two original Active-duty squadrons—the 1st and 2nd Joint Communications Squadrons (JCS)—employed their expertise to a variety of military operations including: ■■ Support to the commander of JTF-Leo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1964. JCSE established the initial communications connectivity from JTF-Leo to the commander of USSTRICOM. ■■ The international peacekeeping force organized to counter the rebel invasion of southern Zaire in 1978. JCSE provided a communications link for the former Military Airlift Command between Zaire and Corsica.1 ■■ The evacuation of U.S. citizens from Nicaragua under the fall of the Somoza gov- ernment in June of 1979. Within 14 hours, JCSE had provided secure communications to USS Wainwright and USS Saipan in the vicinity of the Panama Canal. As word of the element’s capabilities spread throughout the Department of Defense (DOD), the demand for JCSE increased exponentially. Additionally, in the mid-1980s, JCSE adjusted its mission to provide concurrent joint communications support to more than one commander. Specifically, this included direct JCSE support to two JTFs and two joint special operations task forces simultaneously. For JCSE to provide communications to multiple, simultaneous missions, two Air National Guard units—the 224th and 290th Joint Communications Support Squadrons—were aligned to the JCSE mission. Over the next few years, JCSE solidified its position and value within DOD during various noteworthy operations such as: ■■ Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm: JCSE provided the communications between the in-theater forces and the commander of USCENTCOM. ■■ Operation Restore Hope: JCSE provided a package capable of supporting a JTF with satellite communications, secure voice, facsimile, and telephone.2 ■■ Operation Support Hope: JCSE provided essential communications support to the JTF headquartered in Entebbe, Uganda.3 Within the past 10 years, JCSE’s primary focus has been on operations in the USCENTCOM area of responsibility following the attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror. JCSE members were deployed within weeks of 9/11 and were actively involved in operations in Afghanistan barely 2 months later. JCSE troopers were some of the first military responders to arrive in Iraq to support Operation Iraqi Freedom in March of 2003 and have since maintained a continuous presence in the country throughout that operation (March 2003—August 2010) and the duration of the follow-on mission, Operation New Dawn (September 2010– December 2011). Over 2,000 JCSE members have rotated through Iraq in support of these operations, and as U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq following the completion of New Dawn on December 15, 2011, the final three JCSE members in Iraq deployed to home station, ndupres s . ndu. edu JCSE WATSON JCSE team sets up Deployable Joint Command and Control system thus ending JCSE’s uninterrupted support to a mission that spanned almost 9 years. Additionally, since March of 2002, JCSE has provided continuous communications to joint and special operations forces units in various locations throughout Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere for multiple missions stemming from Operation Enduring Freedom. In March 2005, JCSE was tasked as a global joint force command, control, communications, and computer (C4) enabler. Reorganizing existing resources to add another Active-duty squadron (3rd JCS), JCSE was postured to support this new role. The 4th JCS, an Army Reserve squadron, was added in 2006 to bring additional strategic depth and flexibility supporting the successful execution of the JCSE mission. In 2008, the JECC was established to provide rapidly deployable, mission-tailored joint capability packages to combatant commanders in order to facilitate the rapid establishment of joint force headquarters, fulfill n d u p res s .ndu.edu Global Response Force execution, and bridge joint operational requirements. Currently commanded by Rear Admiral Scott Stearney, USN, the JECC offers a highly skilled team that rapidly increases joint force command and control capability at the operational level of a newly formed joint force headquarters. In addition to JCSE, the JECC also gained two other subordinate commands upon its establishment: the Joint Public Affairs Support Element and Joint Planning Support Element. Additionally, in 2008, the Secretary of Defense tasked JCSE with the maintenance and operation of the Deployable Joint Command and Control (DJC2) systems for U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM), U.S. Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM), U.S. European Command, and U.S. Africa Command. The DJC2, an integrated command and control headquarters system, can provide unclassified/classified network access to a full JTF of up to 1,500 users. If a full JTF is not needed, the versatile DJC2 system can be broken down into reduced portions to provide communications to small mobile missions or midsize JTFs. These condensed packages have the same functionality as the full DJC2, only on a smaller scale. To support the aforementioned geographic combatant commands, JCSE maintains direct support detachments of 16 members, each responsible for the maintenance and employment of the DJC2 at their respective command headquarters. When additional support is needed, JCSE can deploy a surge team of 10 members, who are also trained on the DJC2 system and can fall in on the detachments for extra assistance. Since being tasked with the DJC2 mission set, each of the combatant commands’ DJC2 system has been used during both Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff’s exercises and realworld operations. Most recently, USPACOM deployed its DJC2 system and detachment to Yokota Air Base in support of Operation Tomodachi, the issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 51 COMMENTARY | The Voice Heard ‘Round the World humanitarian assistance operation following the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear disaster in Japan. Once notified, it took the JCSE team approximately 72 hours to forward deploy and have the DJC2 system set up and fully operational. The communications provided to the joint force commander, which included unclassified and classified network access and videoteleconferencing, was critical to ensuring the military units could communicate quickly and effectively during relief efforts. Revolutionizing Military Communications Early in its history, JCSE began working with industry to develop joint solutions. This practice—along with JCSE’s ability to rapidly test, integrate, and field the latest communication technologies—led the Joint Chiefs of Staff to initiate a JCSE modernization program equitably funded by each Service. JCSE’s modernization program integrates emerging technology into certified systems to fill gaps in joint force C4. JCSE partners with commercial industry to integrate, test, and certify C4 systems based on commercial off-the-shelf technology and equipment. After obtaining formal One of the major contributing factors in this significant reduction of both manpower and equipment was JCSE’s initiation of the “Everything over Internet Protocol” (EoIP) communications architecture. Legacy communications systems used circuit-based networks that required serial cabling and consumed large amounts of valuable bandwidth dedicated to specific communication services. The EoIP architecture sends communication services over IP satellite modems that allocate bandwidth as required, resulting in a pool of available bandwidth and increasing user flexibility to change between communications services on demand. JCSE’s transition to EoIP technology, led by the operational and technical vision of Colonel Thomas Hopkins, USA, the JCSE commander from 2004 to 2007, enabled the element to radically condense its communications packages into smaller and more deployable entities that were increasingly cost efficient and resulted in a more effective and flexible network for joint forces. An additional advantage of the EoIP technology is the ability for JCSE to tailor its communications packages to a fluid, developing mission. During the initial formation of a JTF, JCSE normally deploys a from small, mobile team missions to full-sized JTFs, JCSE can deploy assets rapidly and scale support to provide the necessary capabilities Joint Staff interoperability and information assurance certification, JCSE’s lightweight and highly mobile systems are completely interoperable with Service communications equipment and capabilities. Over time, this modernization program has enabled JCSE to create communication packages that are consistently smaller, lighter, and faster than previous iterations. The goal is not only to make the equipment more reliable and efficient, but also to reduce the size and footprint of the equipment, as well as the personnel needed to move and operate communications packages. For instance, 40 years ago, a communications package servicing 20 users weighed more than 30,000 pounds and required a C-130 aircraft to transport. Today, a comparable package can fit into four airline checkable cases and weighs less than 300 pounds. 52 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 small package that supports just five users. However, as the JTF increases operational capability and additional forces begin arriving, JCSE can scale that same basic package to support up to 1,500 users without any interruption to service. JCSE’s rapid integration of this technology was particularly important during the disaster relief operations following the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The destruction of the storm left the Gulf coast without much of its communications infrastructure, and it was imperative that senior military leaders, who were challenged by the intermittent operations of land/cellular phone lines and commercial Internet, had the ability to communicate quickly and reliably. JCSE took this opportunity to employ an innovative EoIP communications package to support Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré, USA (Ret.), the JTF-Katrina commander. A small executive communications kit was designed specifically for the mission to provide 24/7 access to secure/nonsecure voice, data, and Internet via the EoIP architecture. The kit, which Honoré took with him wherever he traveled, allowed him to sustain command and control of the numerous agencies supporting the relief efforts. JCSE uses a bottom-up approach in designing, testing, fielding, and sustaining its capabilities. This approach is focused on small unit deployments at the tactical edge for proof of concept while planning for scalability to larger size deployments and operations up to a JTF headquarters. This approach also emphasizes the on-scene commander as primary mission support. JCSE uses its unique strengths to rapidly field sustainable, certified solutions meeting joint force requirements. It does this by: ■■ building on the vast amount of knowledge and experience in planning, executing, and supporting joint force missions ■■ collaborating within the joint C4 community to identify requirements unique to the dynamic tactical environment ■■ leveraging JCSE ability to field solutions through the acquisition process. As JCSE’s mission expanded over the past few years, DOD has entrusted the management and employment of various communications assets to the element. As the leader in global C4 capabilities, it was only fitting that JCSE have a major role in these evolving technologies. In partnership with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), JCSE maintains the Defense Information Systems Network–Tactical Edge (DISN-TE), a global enterprise network capable of supporting all combatant commands. This network was established to integrate, manage, and control a wide variety of communications interfaces between the network and deployed tactical satellite C4 assets. DISN-TE is an EoIP enhancement of the existing Standard Tactical Entry Point (STEP)/Teleport reachback service consistent with the overall structure of the Global Information Grid (GIG) architecture and GIG master plan as formulated by DISA. DISN-TE encompasses telecommunications collection and distribution points that provide deployed warfighters with multiband, multimedia, and worldwide access. ndupres s . ndu. edu JCSE WATSON Soldiers establish connectivity after airborne jump during combined tactical warfighting training The system provides extended connectivity via multiple military and commercial satellite communications frequencies and increases overall capability. Along with DISA, JCSE operates eight DISN-TE sites around the world and therefore can provide the deployed warfighter with a level of support that is unmatched elsewhere in DOD. Responsibility for Unique Missions The current national security environment has increased the number of “no-notice” JTFs that are needed to support a wide range of operational and humanitarian missions. Although these operations feature a wide variety of forces, organizations, and mission sets, they share a common need for rapid deployment of communications capabilities to establish effective command and control in the shortest time possible. Since the JCSE mission set spans theater strategic, operational, and tactical levels, it needs to be flexible enough to respond to whatever mission it is tasked with. JCSE n d u p res s .ndu.edu has succeeded in this arena by developing a versatile concept of operations that can be applied across the full spectrum of military operations. From small, mobile team missions to full-sized JTFs, JCSE can deploy assets rapidly and scale support to provide the necessary capabilities. Additionally, as part of the Global Response Force, JCSE is the premier source for a joint force commander’s immediate and early entry C4 capability. In compliance with the guidelines outlined in the Global Response Force Execute Order, JCSE maintains an alert-postured force that can deploy and have its communications packages fully operational within hours of notification for an emerging requirement.4 Delivering Capabilities to the Joint Force All JCSE operations are performed within the context of ensuring reliable and secure delivery of both capability and readiness across the full spectrum of military operations in multiple domains. On a daily basis, JCSE executes three essential “no fail” tasks: ■■ operate, secure, and manage a global network supporting distributed operations (conventional forces) and global pursuit (special operations forces) ■■ understand operational and technical requirements across geographic combatant commands and U.S. Special Operations Command to deliver near-ubiquitous communications and services in all combatant command theaters ■■ prepare technically and tactically taskorganized teams across the full spectrum of operations in ground, maritime, air, and cyber warfighting domains. Within the framework of these three persistent tasks, JCSE has pursued several initiatives aimed at setting conditions for success in the future joint operational environment. JCSE’s primary focus areas for future operations are enabling joint force mobility and conducting joint cyber operations. issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 53 COMMENTARY | The Voice Heard ‘Round the World Enabling Joint Force Mobility. A current focus of JSCE is to develop, test, and field capabilities to enhance joint force mobility. Mobility applies to both the physical and electronic components of the ground, maritime, and air domains. With regards to physical components, JCSE enables mobility through its reliable, secure, and lightweight communications equipment packages. These commercial is designed to minimize the time required to transfer the equipment between different UAV platforms. JACS V3 also provides reachback capability to a tactical operations center through an embedded Ku-band radio. JACC/ CP provides the joint force with in-flight/ enroute secure voice and data communications on board C-130 and C-17 aircraft. JACC/CP supports a command and control element of up to 14 people. JCSE’s stellar reputation allows it to seek out only the best network and system administrators, satellite and field radio operators, and data network specialists from each Service off-the-shelf systems are easily transported and activated at the deployed location. The systems, designed to be displaced with little effort and minimal service disruption, have a sufficiently small footprint allowing for the use of commercial transportation as much as possible. Ensuring mobility for electronic components includes having the ability to support distributed and maneuver element operations while maintaining access to required information. JCSE can provide mobility for both physical and electronic components throughout the ground, maritime, and air domains. In the ground domain, JCSE enables joint force mobility through its small, lightweight, and scalable communications packages. The Initial Entry Package (IEP), Early Entry Package (EEP), and Joint Mobility Package provide secure and nonsecure voice, video, and data to small mobile teams operating worldwide. The IEP and EEP can be rapidly scaled to meet force surge requirements from small dismounted teams up to an advance echelon joint headquarters of 40 users. GIG services are extended to the deployed location through connection to JCSE’s DISN-TE gateways located at selected STEP locations. In the airborne domain, JCSE enables mobility through its Joint Airborne Communications System (JACS) and Joint Airborne Communications Center/Command Post (JACC/CP). JACS provides an airborne radio relay connection for VHF and UHF communications range extension and relay. JACS Version 2 operates from either a C-12 or C-130 airframe. JACS Version 3 (V3) increases operational flexibility by operating from an unmanned aerial vehicle. JACS V3 54 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 In the maritime domain, mobility is enabled by a maritime variant of JCSE’s lightweight communications kit. The maritime variant provides connectivity and services to an embarked JTF headquarters. As a platform agnostic system, the maritime variant is a critical component of JCSE’s integrated architecture for supporting distributed operations in the maritime domain and helps meet joint force requirements for: ■■ aerial layer networking to an extended range of maritime communications ■■ increased intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance receipt and dissemination throughout the operating area ■■ connectivity to the supported geographic combatant command headquarters ■■ information exchange with special operations forces ■■ information exchange with coalition partners ■■ reachback to national-level intelligence assets in the continental United States ■■ network operations covering all combined JTF operations and network nodes ■■ enroute planning and communications capability. Conducting Joint Cyber Operations. JCSE’s joint cyber operations take place in an operating environment where threats to mission accomplishment are growing in both complexity and frequency. Threats to cyber assets can be internal or external and caused by natural or manmade events. Adversaries have demonstrated an ability and willingness to use cyberspace to deny, degrade, or disrupt friendly force communications and information flows. JCSE applies operational art to the cyber domain by following four principles: ■■ define the cyber battlespace to identify the joint area of influence and area of interest ■■ comprehend friendly networks to baseline network performance and behavior to support anomaly detection ■■ train the force through an integrated training curriculum, including both industryand military-focused education, knowledge, and experience ■■ link cyberspace to intelligence and operational activities by integrating cyber intelligence support into mission planning and operational processes. Value Beyond the Battlefield Part of what makes JCSE stand out from other communications units is the 24/7 reachback support it provides. In addition to its world-class communications equipment, JCSE ensures reliable communications through its Joint Network Operations Center (JNOC), maintained from its headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base. The JNOC employs, operates, and defends the DISN-TE enterprise 24/7, while providing assured network availability, information protection, and delivery across the full spectrum of operations. Moreover, it provides the only military-specific communication network using EoIP technology. Essentially, the JNOC is JCSE’s heartbeat for real-time situational awareness. In addition to the JCSE communications packages that were deployed to support JTF-Haiti, the value of the JNOC was validated during this operation. The JNOC worked diligently with USSOUTHCOM, DISA, and JTF–Global Network Operations to establish a common operation picture as well as a network operations management capability for JTF-Haiti. This capability, known as the Joint Network Operations Control Center (JNCC), essentially provided full network situational awareness by monitoring networks from all the Services supporting JTF-Haiti with a specific focus on maintaining information assurance and network defense. The use of the JNCC was the first time that this level of coordination and visibility had been available during a large-scale operation and was critical to the mission’s success. ndupres s . ndu. edu WATSON Key to Continued Success JCSE’s success is a direct result of the combined efforts of its highly trained, dedicated, and professional members. Fortunately, JCSE’s stellar reputation allows it to seek out only the best network and system administrators, satellite and field radio operators, and data network specialists from each Service. For those personnel in a communications specialty, a position at JCSE is a desirable stepping stone that often leads to key assignments when they return to their respective Services. With an ever-increasing operational tempo, JCSE’s Servicemembers, especially noncommissioned officers (NCOs), have taken on more responsibility and an enhanced leadership role. JCSE NCOs participate in planning and operational support at a level that previously would have been reserved for more senior personnel. NCOs and junior enlisted personnel at JCSE pass through a screening process to ensure they are up to the task. They receive technical and leadership training from Service schools, as well as additional training from industry. Continual emphasis is placed on planning, training, and execution at the team level. JCSE NCOs have exceptional flexibility in identifying those areas in which their teams need additional training and then designing those training programs. Additionally, JCSE offers an opportunity for enlisted personnel to earn joint experience. A troop may work with or for NCOs from each branch of the Armed Forces, contributing to a well-rounded and comprehensive understanding of the various communication capabilities of each Service. This thorough joint expertise is not only a fundamental benefit during JCSE deployments, but it is also a knowledge base that troops can employ during future assignments with their own Services. A position within JCSE is rewarding because of the opportunity for members to excel and hone their skills. JCSE affords members the freedom to identify areas in which they may want to gain additional knowledge and then fully supports them in their endeavors. Regardless of the member’s Service branch or position in the element, JCSE leadership encourages cross-training, initiative, ambition, and invention and vows never to hinder or deter a member who shows passion for furthering his knowledge and training. n d u p res s .ndu.edu The element’s unique position allows it to leverage all Service schools. Troops assigned to JCSE can expect to have opportunities to attend the airborne and air assault schools, along with pathfinder, survival, evasion, resistance, escape training, mountain warfare training, and various Service technical schools. JCSE members train extensively on commercial telecommunications systems and obtain civilian certifications on operation and protection measures for hardware and software. Former JCSE members have taken such pride in their time and experiences that they founded the JCSE Veterans Association in 2001. With over 300 members currently, the association connects members of JCSE and its squadrons, both past and present. In addition to maintaining a detailed account of JCSE’s history, the organization supports current Servicemembers and their families through scholarship programs and fundraising events. The Joint Communications Support Element is regarded as the center of excellence in joint military communications. Its communication/equipment packages are cutting edge, its services are extremely reliable, its members are the most highly skilled, and its performance is flawless. JCSE’s exceptional communication technology and service already has or soon will impact every single member of the Armed Forces. As technology advances at an increasingly rapid pace in the next few years, JCSE will be sure to remain at the forefront to lead the charge as the Voice Heard 'Round the World. JFQ NOTES NEW from NDU Press for the Center for Strategic Research Institute for National Strategic Studies Strategic Forum 278 Offshore Control: A Proposed Strategy for an Unlikely Conflict By T.X. Hammes This paper is the start of what the author hopes will be a deep, wide-ranging discussion of potential strategies for a conflict with China. While such a conflict is undesirable and highly unlikely, it is driving many of the Pentagon’s investment decisions today. Under a proposed strategy of “Offshore Control,” the United States would work with Asia-Pacific nations to interdict China’s energy and raw material imports and industrial exports, while protecting our partners. This strategy would have several advantages: it would slow a crisis down, reducing escalatory pressure on decisionmakers; align U.S. strategic requirements with the resources available; take advantage of Pacific geography to provide strategic, operational, and tactical advantages for U.S. forces; provide a way for the conflict to end that is consistent with previous Communist Chinese behavior; and finally, provide for conflict resolution that does not require an unobtainable “decisive” victory. 1 Military Airlift Command was inactivated in June of 1992, and its remaining personnel and resources were reassigned to the Air Mobility Command. 2 Operation Restore Hope was the 1992 U.S.led intervention into Somalia to establish a secure environment for humanitarian relief operations. 3 Operation Support Hope was the 1994 U.S. military effort to provide humanitarian assistance to refugees of the Rwandan genocide. 4 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Global Response Force Executive Order Mod 2 DTG:272126Z September 2012 (SECRET). Visit the NDU Press Web site for more information on publications at ndupress.ndu.edu issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 55 Command and Control Vulnerabilities to Communications Jamming By r o n a l D c . W i l g e n B u s c H and a l a n H e i s i g I f the United States ever has to face a peer adversary in a no-holds-barred fight, we will encounter a serious operational obstacle. The way we command and control our forces is highly vulnerable to disastrous disruption. Modern operations have become dependent on high-capacity communications, and this vulnerability could cause our forces to sustain a serious mauling or, perhaps, not to prevail. Why is this? The ability to provide the information required for successful high-impact/ low-committed asset warfare has developed an overwhelming reliance on unprotected communications satellites. There is an increasing public awareness of these vulnerabilities and the relative ease by which jamming can foil our methods of highly effective warfare. In this article, jamming is defined as electronically rendering a circuit or network unusable by disrupting it so it cannot be effectively used as a means of communication for purposes of command and control. Such an attack could be directed against any portion of the communications system and be of extended duration or else just long enough to lose crypto synchronization. Jamming is at the discretion of the enemy. It does not have to be constant or dependent on large fixed sites. It is often difficult to immediately distinguish jamming from other information flow disruptions caused by systemic disturbances such as cryptographic resets, system management changes, and natural phenomena. U.S. Air Force maintenance technicians conduct pre-flight checks on RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle DOD (Andy M. Kim) 56 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 ndupres s . ndu. edu WILGENBUSCH and HEISIG While we have placed an appropriate emphasis on cyber warfare, we have neglected the less sophisticated threat of jamming. At some point prior to or during combat, an adversary might decide spoofing, intrusion, and exploitation of our networks are insufficient. The adversary could try to shut our networks down. Then what? If our networks are jammed, commanders in the field, at sea, and in the air would not be able to employ their forces adequately. Our warfighters are dependent on these links to coordinate joint information, make reports, request supplies, coordinate land, sea, and air operations, and evacuate wounded. Clever application of jamming might go undiagnosed for a long period. Most likely, initial attribution would be to equipment malfunction, crypto problems, or operator error. This dependency is a significant vulnerability—one that can only get worse unless action is taken soon to direct our communication paths toward more protected communications systems. In 2010, Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute published an article pointing out this gap in future warfighting capability.1 He stated that 80 to 90 percent of all military transmission travels on vulnerable commercial satellite communications channels and that only 1 percent of defense communications is protected against even modest jamming. He asserts that the “only satellite constellation the military is currently building that can provide protection against the full array of potential communications threats is the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) system. . . . The feasible, affordable answer is not to begin a new program, but to start incrementally evolving AEHF towards a more robust capability.” His assessment recognizes the persistent historic demand for greater capacity through satellite communications links. In January 2012, the Department of Defense (DOD) released its Strategic Defense Guidance entitled Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Rear Admiral Ronald C. Wilgenbusch, USN (Ret.), is a Consultant in Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence (C4I). During his career, he served as an Electronic Technician, Surface Warfare Officer, and Acquisition Professional. Captain Alan Heisig, USN (Ret.), is also a Consultant in C4I. He commanded several surface ships and amphibious squadrons. n d u p res s .ndu.edu Defense. The guidance states, “we will continue to invest in the capabilities critical to future success, including intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance [ISR]; counterterrorism; countering weapons of mass destruction; operating in anti-access [and area-denial (A2/AD)2] environments; and prevailing in all domains, including cyber.”3 We have taken great strides along these lines, but are we fully prepared? The space-enabled communications systems used by the U.S. military are the most omnipresent information infrastructure to deployed forces. The military depends largely on commercial broadcast satellite systems architectures. In some cases, it leases capacity from the same operators of satellite systems that commercial organizations use. These systems are virtually unprotected against jamming, which is probably the cheapest, most readily available, and most likely form of denying or degrading the reliability of information flow. Communications networks are decisive in all aspects of U.S. global military responsibilities. Commander of U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Samuel Locklear, highlighted this issue: “we still have to be able to operate the networks that allow us to produce combat power . . . so one of my priority jobs is to ensure those [command] networks will survive when they have to survive.”4 Why So Critical? Since the 1980s, the U.S. military’s approach to conventional operations has become more dependent on access to spacebased systems—particularly long-haul satellite communications and the precision navigation and timing information provided by the Global Positioning System (GPS) constellation. For this reason, the military has invested heavily in developing battle networks to detect, identify, and track targets with sufficient timely precision to enable them to be struck. Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems reflect how dependent U.S. forces have become on access to the orbital and cyber dimensions of the global commons.5 In concert with the move toward precision munitions, U.S. warfighting doctrine has become inseparably joint at all levels of the Services. Joint coordination between widely dispersed forces is only possible by assured information flows. Moreover, all Services have an increasing realization of their dependencies on protected communications. The protection of information and ability to maintain freedom of maneuver in space is essential to Army success;6 the highly mobile Army of the future requires communications on the move with networked operations. It depends on the availability of highbandwidth, reliable, protected satellite communications to achieve this goal.7 The Air Force is hotly debating the methodologies to ensure space capabilities, including protected communications, at a balanced cost and risk.8 The Navy has reorganized its entire information apparatus to focus on information dominance as a key element of its future. The Joint Staff has reestablished its J6 Command, Control, Communications, and Computers/Cyber Directorate due to the increased importance of and dependence on assured information technology and networks. The dependence on information flows (communications) of all kinds has produced superior combat efficiencies and effectiveness. Today’s Army uses significantly smaller and dispersed units to operationally control battlespace areas than in prior warfighting constructs. The shift to strategic small units is possible, in part, because of the significantly increased lethality of smaller units enabled by the use of ISR and precision weapons. This precision, however, depends largely on reliable communications. This overall change in operational concepts has become a fundamental shift in military thinking. The Army is starting to build around the platoon level and the Marine Corps around the squad. Special operations forces build around the team. This shift exponentially expands the need for high bandwidth information, particularly ISR. The ability to provide the required voluminous information has so far developed a strong reliance on unprotected satellites including the ability to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and beyond-lineof-sight capabilities for over-the-horizon control and real-time communication. This has led to an increasingly widespread public discussion of the vulnerabilities of using unprotected satellite communications.9 The ubiquitous use of unprotected commercial wideband satellite communications leads to a false sense of comfort and assurance of availability, which is deceptively dangerous. Jamming is the enemy’s side of asymmetric information warfare. issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 57 U.S. Air Force (Raymond McKoy) COMMENTARY | Vulnerabilities to Communications Jamming Air Force cadets defend their network during National Security Agency’s Cyber Defense Exercise at U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs Potential adversaries have a variety of options to accomplish disruption including physical destruction of satellites and ground stations, cyber, and jamming. Jamming is an important element of any communicationsdenial plan. It is cheap to obtain and simple to operate. It can effectively be used surgically or in broadly based attacks. The absence of planning and programmatic actions to protect against a jamming threat is worrisome given the likelihood of its use. Jamming and Antiaccess/Area Denial A principal priority of the Strategic Defense Guidance is to project power despite A2/AD challenges.10 The recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan do not provide experience against an adversary employing significant communicationsdenial methods. Information access was assured in those conflicts. Potential adversaries in other areas of the world have studied U.S. force enablers for two decades. They realize how dependent we are on assured communications. They understand that the best way to confront U.S. military power is to prevent it from deploying. China, for example, has sent clear signals of its intent through a variety of activities including a naval buildup, submarine deployments, ballistic missiles capable of targeting aircraft carriers, cyber activities, and an antisatellite demonstration. There can be no question that jamming capabili- 58 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 ties would play a significant part in any A2/ AD campaign. The ability to counter area-denial activities depends in many ways on reliable satellite communications capabilities. Such capabilities exist today in China11 and, by extension, any surrogate or client regimes with area-denial agendas. U.S. forces must be able to operate in this challenging environment. The obvious counter to jamming is to protect communications for operational forces. The necessity for protected communications is not limited to A2/AD scenarios. A striking example is the strong reliance by the Intelligence Community on UAVs for tactically relevant information supporting ground troops. These vehicles require wideband satellite communications systems for over-thehorizon control and real-time information dissemination. Future tactical forces will rely on robust and reliable information systems. They are at huge risk to jammers. China and Russia have well-documented satellite jamming capabilities. Some versions of militarily effective jammers are even commercially available.12 The proliferation of jamming technology has led to an increasing utilization of strategic and tactical jamming.13 Satellite jamming, in particular, is proliferating. Military jamming equipment can be purchased on the Internet by anyone, including nonstate actors. The attraction of this economical, highly effective capability to disrupt vastly superior forces is an ominous reality. The omnipresent capability by widely divergent players almost guarantees that jamming source attribution will be a problem even after detection is accomplished. In February 2012, the United Nations International Telecommunications Union hosted the World Radiocommunications Conference in Geneva. In recognition of the upswing of satellite jamming in 2011, the union issued a change to its regulations and a call to all nations to stop international interference with satellite telecommunications.14 Moreover, recent incidents illustrating the need for action were the jamming of satellite operators EUTELSAT, NILESAT, and ARABSAT.15 Jamming has occurred from a variety of locations recently across the globe. Interference with satellite television broadcasting has come from Indonesia,16 Cuba,17 Ethiopia,18 Libya,19 and Syria.20 Additionally, in the case of Libya, the use of tactical jamming of satellite telephones was reported during the course of combat operations.21 The proliferation of jamming does not have to depend on land-based fixed or mobile facilities. China is not tied to castoff Soviet naval designs. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has small, fast, and capable craft with good seakeeping capabilities such as the Houbei missile attack craft. Even a cursory look at the craft’s superstructure shows that attention is paid to shipboard electronics. The superstructure could be equipped with powerful jammers and operated collaboratively far from U.S. forces. This could seriously complicate U.S. naval or air power projection. The PLAN continues to field these state-of-the-art, ocean-capable, wave-piercing aluminum hull SWATH craft. According to in-country open sources, by February of 2011, the PLAN had fielded over 80 type 22 Houbei-class fast attack craft, and the number is growing.22 The question is no longer who has jamming capabilities but, rather, have we prepared to operate effectively when it happens. At present, the answer is a resounding no. Causes and Actions Historically, protected communications were viewed as the realm of strategic existential threats to the Nation. The underlying principle of U.S. protected communications continued to have its raison d’être linked to nuclear communications survivability and essential, highest-level command and control. The approach was heavily focused on getting ndupres s . ndu. edu DOD WILGENBUSCH and HEISIG Arleigh Burke–class guided missile destroyer USS Hopper (DDG 70), equipped with Aegis integrated weapons system, launches RIM-161 Standard Missile through a small number of human-to-human messages on which dispersed forces could execute preplanned objectives. This focused view kept protected communications capability development geared toward the “Armageddon” context and did not significantly influence tactical requirements. During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, laser-guided bombs, Tomahawk landattack missiles (TLAMs), and the GPS-aided conventional air-launched cruise missiles demonstrated that U.S. forces had the capability to hit almost any target whose location could be pinpointed. For this reason, the U.S. military has invested heavily in developing battle networks to detect, identify, and track targets with sufficient timely precision to enable target strikes. ISR systems such as the RQ-4 Global Hawk, GPS constellation, and photoreconnaissance satellites reflect how dependent U.S. forces have become on access to the orbital and cyber dimensions of the global commons.23 The preplanned targeting initially envisioned for these types of precision weapons incrementally has given way to a need for real-time responsiveness. n d u p res s .ndu.edu Desert Storm also highlighted the inadequacy of the existing satellite communications architecture. The starkest reality was the inability to transmit large data files to tactical forces. The air tasking order (a daily compilation of all joint and coalition aircraft planning and execution) was unable to reach the significant airpower resident on Navy carriers. The reprogramming of TLAMs, laser-guided bombs, joint direct attack munition, and other precision munitions took exceedingly long times to transmit and overwhelmed the beyond-line-of-sight systems of the day. The vulnerability of unprotected broadband communications went unchallenged in the last two decades. Recent conflicts have not been fought against major adversaries with comparable capabilities.24 The U.S. military was able to accomplish its ends cheaply by taking advantage of a commercial overbuilding of satellite communications capacity in the late part of the last century and the early years of this one. That convenient resource is no longer available. Market developments have made commercial leasing a much more expensive alternative. Moreover, commercial communications satellites retain their inherent jamming vulnerabilities. Realization and Acceptance of the Requirement The paucity of protected communications below the highest levels of requirements of nuclear command and control is starting to wend its way into the thinking of military leadership. A 2010 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)–sponsored wargame, with over 60 Active-duty troops and civilian representatives from each of the Services, tried to grapple specifically with the loss of assured satellite communications. The players made several key comments as they became aware of the impact of threats to existing warfighting doctrine. The consensus among participants was that “significant risk” to mission success occurred when protected beyondline-of-sight communications were limited to existing capabilities. In the presence of even modest jamming capability, participant reaction was to revert to Cold War–era doctrine and tactics. issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 59 COMMENTARY | Vulnerabilities to Communications Jamming U.S. Soldiers set up tactical satellite communication system in Shekhabad Valley, Wardak Province, Afghanistan U.S. Army (Russell Gilchrest) 60 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 ndupres s . ndu. edu WILGENBUSCH and HEISIG Those reactions were immediately frustrated by a lack of available older systems; the infrastructure to accomplish those doctrines and tactics no longer exists. The combat functions of planning, command and control, movement and maneuver, intelligence, fires, force protection, logistics/ personnel support, and special operations were all significantly or critically degraded. Additionally, there were issues with force structure, organization, training, and equipment. Essentially, the entire spectrum of warfighting capability beyond preplanned initial insertion and organic logistics was significantly adversely affected. These risks translated into longer engagement timelines, increased casualties, and the need for a larger force structure for each mission and reduced multimission capability.25 The wargame specifically focused on satellite jamming as the most mature and economically available means to deny satellite capability. The issue of physical destruction of orbital assets was not addressed as it had several military/political elements that were deemed too expensive or carried a significantly disproportionate geopolitical risk. The same denial effect is achieved by spot jamming without the protagonist having to develop physical methods of interfering with space-related infrastructure. Pinpointing the source of jamming is not easy. Jammers can appear innocuous and can be quite mobile. They can be intermittent in operation. A jammer can physically appear as some sort of commercial system, such as a news uplink vehicle or normal receive antenna on a fixed site. We have many lessons to draw on that point to a future where a large component of beyond-the-horizon communications must be protected. Given the huge advantages that space communications provide, it makes sense to protect the capability against the inexpensive and ubiquitous development of disruptive capability by potential adversaries. The risk of not protecting it is an exponential rise in force structure and cost coupled with the plummeting warfighting effectiveness of existing forces. Accordingly, DOD will continue to work with domestic partners and international allies and invest in advanced capabilities to defend its networks, operational capability, and resiliency in cyberspace and space.26 In the President’s words, “Going forward, we will also remember the lessons of history and avoid repeating the mistakes n d u p res s .ndu.edu of the past when our military was left illprepared for the future.” Are There Options? Optimists would say that the picture is not so grim—that there are options. So what might these options be if or when we encounter an enemy who wishes to shut down our communications? How quickly can we turn options into operational capabilities? Are these really viable options that will keep our forces fighting as they have trained? The most frequently discussed option is that we would “go old school.” Participants in the previously mentioned DIA-sponsored wargame suggested that they could still accomplish their warfighting missions by using old-school techniques such as high-frequency (HF) radio links. But, on examination, they came to realize that this is not viable. The worldwide system of fixed HF transmitters and antennas that was once the mainstay of our HF communications systems is gone. Even if it was still in place, the skilled HF operators needed aboard ships and ashore have been cashing retirement checks for years. There is a more basic issue. Our satellite links have enabled completely different types of operational communications and tactics and procedures that cannot be supported on HF. This includes high bandwidth machine-to-machine data exchanges, video teleconference, Web sites, chat, email, and other mechanisms that in a large context allow decisionmaking to be viable at low levels in the chain of command. That is the fundamental capability that enables quick, adaptive, and effective warfighting that exponentially multiplies smaller force capabilities. Yet going old school, reverting to HF, was exactly the alternative a senior Navy officer suggested as the course of action in trying to overcome a potential jamming threat at the 2012 Navy Information Technology Day briefing. A second knee-jerk option is that we would “shoot the jammer.” This is a nonstarter. Almost everyone has seen the massed army of television trucks/vans wherever and whenever some sensational news event occurs. Imagine downtown Baghdad or Kabul with the same number of trucks. Any one of them could be a jammer. Which one should be shot, and how long would it take to sort them out? Even if the jammer was working in the middle of an open desert in enemy-controlled territory, it would still be a tough target. The jammer could stand out in the open just long enough to disrupt the crypto set on the link/network. Then it could go silent, move to another location, or focus on another satellite link. As mentioned, operators frequently confuse jamming with equipment problems or a self-imposed mistake. At best, locating and shooting the jammer is a difficult targeting problem that would certainly tax the intelligence and strike assets assigned to other high-value targets. A third option is that we would attempt to reconstitute the satellite constellations by rapidly replacing capability on orbit. This usually implies a set of smaller satellites already in storage. It also means the availability of a nearly immediate launch period acceptable for military operations. However, replacing one disrupted satellite with another equally vulnerable to jamming hardly seems to solve the problem. Furthermore, none of the smaller satellites that have been proposed has the capability to replace the types of satellites used today. At present, there are simply not enough launch vehicles or launch sites available to support such an alternative. A fourth option might be to design an entirely new satellite system with new features. This is theoretically feasible. However, it is hard to envision what this solution additionally offers in the sense of timeliness, cost reduction, and operational improvement over expanding the constellation of existing protected communications satellites such as advanced extremely high frequency (AEHF) ones. The current and evolving technology is understood and carries known programmatic risk. We can certainly improve and expand the AEHF constellation much faster than engage in multiple new technology program starts. A fifth option is centered on redundancy. In this alternative, even though most communications links are not protected, there are many of them. It is hard to imagine an adversary who could take the entire infrastructure down simultaneously. High-level DOD officials have suggested that an enemy might be able to mount a jamming attack that would leave operational forces with only about 60 percent of our present capability. But when was the last time we were using only 60 percent of our satellite communications capacity? We must further assume that an intelligent enemy would have at least determined issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 61 COMMENTARY | Vulnerabilities to Communications Jamming Likelihood of Occurrence for Types of Communications Attack Unsophisticated and Cheap Sophisticated and Costly User Requirement Orbital Kinetic Harder and Time Consuming Cyber Jamming Ease of Tactical Employment our most critical links to operations in progress. Those are likely to be the first to go. More concerning is the fact that a swept tone jammer could take out all our links, or certainly more than DOD officials estimate. The 60 percent figure appears unsupported by analysis. In any event, forces experiencing jamming without prior training and a management plan would create operational chaos. Managing heavy jamming attacks in this environment becomes an effort to plan for gradual degradation of communications. Operational concepts must be modified on the fly as individual circuits are lost. Training must also be conducted both to recognize and counter jamming as it occurs. These actions should be pursued. It appears at present that little progress has been made in this direction. The reality is that many important circuits have no backup. For example, many UAVs have only one form of over-the-horizon communication available. It would not be difficult for an adversary to learn where to target his jamming efforts for the greatest effect against UAVs. It has been suggested that the present military satellite communications system is composed of too many and too large satellites that are overly vulnerable, overly complex, and unnecessarily costly. The proposed solution is to develop and deploy disaggregated system architecture to replace present architectures. There are two obvious problems with this suggestion. First, it presupposes that there is a disaggregated architecture that 62 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 Easier and Quickly Adaptable would offer the same capability at a reduced deployed cost. In order to make a disaggregated satellite constellation acceptable from a cost standpoint, it would have to be supported by math to show that it is less expensive than the evolving current highly effective and efficient systems. Second, it is suggested that disaggregation would reduce vulnerability, but in fact no amount of disaggregation could offer protection against effective jamming or ASAT attack. Furthermore, simple logic would tell us that, if it is known that an attack on our strategic antijam main asset, AEHF, is tantamount to an act of war, extending the use of that same asset to provide secure coverage for both tactical and strategic forces would make the tactical support more secure simply by being on the same strategic asset. On the other hand, disaggregating the two missions on different satellites would seem, from a logic standpoint, to make the disaggregated tactical asset more vulnerable to attack. After all, would jamming one of many tactical assets be considered an act of war? Additionally, a disaggregated architecture presents questions of technical risk and complexities not yet answered. Of course, there are other alternatives, such as adding antijam capability to unprotected wideband systems. The properties of transmission physics dictate that an increase in antijam capability implies modifications to the waveform that would, of necessity, cause a reduction of the data rate. There are no halfway measures. There is no point in adding just a “little antijam.” We either defeat the jamming capability or we do not. So we have to be prepared to defeat the most likely jamming threats. One alternative put forth that seems to offer potential is to supplement the existing satellite system through the development of the Aerial Layer Network (ALN). However, like an entirely new satellite system, it is not fully defined and has yet to be built. ALN is a solution that might be able to take existing satellite technology, scaled down in size but not in capability, and have it ready for rapid deployment to enable our forces to operate in some scenarios in the face of jamming. This involves engineering developments that carry all the risks of any new start. By its nature, it is best used in a permissive environment or one with airspace dominance. This concept seems ripe for use as a pseudosatellite augmentation to support a land area of operations or a battlegroup maneuvering at sea. Dr. Thompson’s thesis of incrementally expanding the capability of AEHF is not sufficient; it should be matched with a realization that the EHF spectrum also contains the capability to accommodate a wide variety of high bandwidth requirements. This could provide ground, maritime, and atmospheric forces with the protected wideband capabilities that complement the mobile, highly integrated forces the U.S. military fields today and will field tomorrow. Conclusion Jamming is a highly effective technique that could cripple U.S. military operations, and our potential adversaries know it and ndupres s . ndu. edu WILGENBUSCH and HEISIG have the capability to employ it. We should not underestimate what they might do. Realizing our current operational dependency on reliable high data rate communications, and considering the attractiveness and availability of jamming to potential adversaries, we have only two choices. The first is to reduce our dependency on communications—an unlikely alternative for obvious reasons. Doing so would reduce operational effectiveness and require a correspondingly larger and more expensive force structure. It should be obvious that the way we have learned to fight over recent years simply will not allow a reduction in the amount of communications capacity we will need. The second choice is to ensure that our communications infrastructure is sufficiently resilient to withstand the type of attack discussed herein. As one unnamed senior officer put it, in our present situation and failing to add more protected communications, we could be “out of Schlitz by noon on the first day of battle.” This is clearly not where we ought to be. Increasing the capacity of protected communications is an essential part of this latter alternative. Failure to address the predictable jamming threat could (will) lead to mission degradation or failure. The time to act is now. JFQ NOTES 1 Loren B. Thompson, “Lack of Protected Satellite Communications Could Mean Defeat for Joint Force in Future War,” Lexington Institute Early Warning Blog, April 14, 2010, available at <www.lexingtoninstitute.org/lack-of-protectedsatellite-communications-could-mean-defeat-forjoint-force-in-future-war>. 2 Antiaccess/area denial is defined thusly: “anti-access capabilities [are] ones that slow deployment of friendly forces into a theater, prevent them from operating from certain locations within that theater or cause them to operate over longer distances than they would like. Areadenial efforts are those that reduce friendly forces’ freedom of action in the more narrow confines of the area under the enemy’s direct control.” See Phillip Dupree and Jordan Thomas, “Air-Sea Battle: Clearing the Fog,” Armed Forces Journal (June 2012), available at <www.armedforcesjournal.com/2012/05/10318204>. 3 Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, January 2012). n d u p res s .ndu.edu 4 Admiral Samuel J. Locklear, USN, U.S. Pacific Command change of command address, March 2012. 5 Barry D. Watts, The Maturing Revolution in Military Affairs (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2011). 6 U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (USTRADOC), The United States Army Operating Concept, TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1 (Fort Monroe, VA: Headquarters Department of the Army, August 19, 2010), available at <www.tradoc.army.mil/tpubs/pams/tp525-3-1. pdf>. 7 Warfighter Information Network–Tactical Commanders Handbook, Version 1.6. 8 C. Robert Kehler, “Implementing the National Security Space Strategy,” Strategic Studies Quarterly (Spring 2012), 18–26, available at <www.au.af.mil/au/ssq/2012/spring/kehler.pdf>. 9 “Protecting [unmanned aerial vehicle] satellite communications links also will be an important challenge in the future,” stated Stuart Linsky, vice president of communications systems at Northrop Grumman. “Where it once took an advanced nation state to jam U.S. military communications, new ubiquitous technologies now expose unmanned systems to jamming and cyberattacks. ‘The ease with which the bad guys can do bad things has gotten easier.’” See Henry Kenyon, “New satellite capabilities target UAV needs: Waveforms and spacecraft help support warfighter mission requirements,” DefenseSystems.com, March 15, 2012, available at <http://defensesystems.com/articles/2012/03/15/satellite-2012-uavsatellite-needs.aspx>. 10 Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership. 11 Andrew Erickson, “China Testing Ballistic Missile ‘Carrier-Killer,’” Wired, March 29, 2010, available at <www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2010/03/asbm_graphic_admiralwillardtestimony_chinese-article.png>. 12 Available at <http://jammerfactory.en.madein-china.com/product/DMcQoSlPCNWE/ China-100W-Military-Communications-JammersBackpack-Blockers.html>. 13 Electronic and information warfare techniques including hacking into computer networks and electronic jamming of satellite communications links are negation capabilities that are becoming increasingly available to both state and nonstate actors. A number of incidents of electronically jammed media broadcasts have been reported in recent years, including interruptions to U.S. broadcasts to Iran, Kurdish news broadcasts, and Chinese television (allegedly by the Falun Gong). Iraq’s acquisition of Global Positioning System (GPS)–jamming equipment for use against U.S. GPS-guided munitions during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 suggests that jamming capabilities are proliferating; the equipment was reportedly acquired commercially from a Russian company. See Space Security 2007 (Waterloo, ON: Project Ploughshares, August 2007), available at <www.spacesecurity.org/SSI2007.pdf>. 14 “International Broadcasters Call for End of Satellite Jamming,” Broadcasting Board of Governors, January 24, 2012, available at <www.bbg. gov/press-release/international-broadcasters-callfor-end-of-satellite-jamming/>. 15 See David Klinger, “Satellite-jamming becoming a big problem in the Middle East and North Africa,” March 28, 2012, Arstechnica.com, available at <http://arstechnica.com/science/ news/2012/03/satellite-jamming-becoming-a-bigproblem-in-the-middle-east.ars>. 16 Recent examples of satellite jamming include Indonesia jamming a transponder on a Chinese-owned satellite and Iran and Turkey jamming satellite television broadcasts of dissidents. See “Space, today and the future,” available at <www.dod.mil/pubs/spacechapter2.pdf>. 17 Broadcasting Board of Governors, Washington, DC, July 15, 2003. 18 “Ethiopia Jamming Eritrean Television, Knock out own Satellite channel,” available at <www.topix.com/forum/world/eritrea/ TKPS5MNR2DH67LOFM>. 19 Peter B. de Selding, “Libya Accused of Jamming Satellite Signals,” Space.com, March 1, 2011, available at <www.space.com/11000-libyasatellite-jamming-accusations.html>. 20 The Obama administration asserts that the Syrian government, with Iran’s help, is actively jamming private communications and satellite Arabic television networks in an aggressive campaign to cut off antigovernment organizers from the outside. See “Officials: Obama ramps up aid to Syrian opposition,” Associated Press, April 13, 2012, available at <www. usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-04-13/ syria-un-annan/54258456/1>. 21 “Thuraya Accuses Libya of Jamming Satellite Signals,” SpaceNews.com, February 25, 2011, available at <www.spacenews.com/satellite_ telecom/110225-thuraya-accuses-libya-jamming. html>. 22 David Lague, “Insight: From a ferry, a Chinese fast-attack boat,” Reuters, May 31, 2012, available at <www.reuters.com/ article/2012/05/31/us-china-military-technology-idUSBRE84U1HG20120531?goback=. gde_104677_member_120627756>. 23 Watts. 24 Ibid. 25 Verbal assessment comments from Protected Communications Wargame Outbrief, May 26–27, 2010. 26 Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership. issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 63 FEATURES | Interview KC-135 Stratotanker maintenance crew prepares aircraft for departure to support RIMPAC exercises U.S. Air Force/Jacob N. Bailey AN INTERVIEW WITH Samuel J. Locklear III Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, USN, is the Commander of U.S. Pacific Command, Camp H.M. Smith, Hawaii. He was interviewed by Joint Force Quarterly’s William T. Eliason. 64 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 ndupres s . ndu. edu LOCKLEAR JFQ: President Barack Obama and other officials have called for an increased focus on your command’s area of responsibility [AOR] in recent years. Can you describe what you have called a “rebalance” of security strategy and policy in terms of how this change in strategic focus will affect U.S. Pacific Command [USPACOM]? admiral locklear: The strategy that the President put out last year could not have been better timed. The strategy was a byproduct of discussions we were all having about what happens to the U.S. military—the joint force—as we go forward into the future after what we believe will be the conclusion of more than 10 years of war in the Middle East. Our forces have to be very much appreciated for the magnificent work they have done there under some difficult challenges and environments. To some degree it has shaped our joint force in a way that might not be the best for what we see as our emerging interests in the 21st century. So what this rebalance represents is a hard look at where the interests of the United States are and what will concern our children and grandchildren most in the future. Every vector pointed to the Asia-Pacific and, in fact, the Indo-AsiaPacific in significant ways where not only our security interests will be at stake but our economic interests, too. That’s kind of where this started. So I was lucky to come into this job with that kind of guidance. It is also fortuitous because of big decisions being made in our government about the size of discretionary spending and the future of defense spending. I have to leave those decisions to the political leaders, who are working on them as we speak. This rebalance perspective will hopefully provide the guideposts for decisions we make about how we reshape the military into probably a smaller but more lethal, more agile, more technologically capable one best positioned to support U.S. global interests, many of which will be in the USPACOM area. There are several aspects to this. One is about employing new concepts regarding improving our capabilities across a broad spectrum of traditional and nontraditional mission sets. It points out the need to strengthen our alliances; we have only seven treaty allies in the world, and five of those are in the USPACOM AOR. We are also working on building partnerships with key nations such as India and Singapore. We are building n d u p res s .ndu.edu a partner relationship with China that some people find surprising, but I believe it is in our best interest to do so, especially from a USPACOM perspective, in order to achieve our desired endstate. Through the rebalance Muslim countries. It also has the smallest country in the world. It has 7 of the 10 largest armies in the world. It has the largest navies in the world. It also has the highest propensity for natural disaster. the United States has significant interests in this Indo-Asia-Pacific environment now and for the foreseeable years and decades to come we’ll be able to strengthen the security architecture and frameworks in this vast and complicated region, ultimately ensuring a security environment that protects U.S. citizens and U.S. interests, provides necessary support to our allies and our partners, and withstands any challenges we might face. For instance, the USPACOM AOR is full of large natural disasters; this year alone I think we are on super typhoon number 26 or 27. The average is about 16. We are seeing more of this type of event, which will put large population centers at risk. If those population centers are at risk and cannot be managed by the security environment, they have a tendency to make the environment unstable. As we move forward on the scale of events that can occur, the security environment must be able to endure such shocks to the system, including territorial disputes, nationalistic perspectives from nations as they pursue their interests at the expense of others (security interests), or the security environment. Therefore, the endstate is to create a future in this vast part of the world that has the ability to ensure that American interests are secure. Interestingly, the USPACOM area—if you consider only the Pacific Ocean—is the largest object on the face of the Earth. If you look at a map, you would not see it that way because maps distort the true appearance of the world. You could take every land mass in the world, including Greenland and Antarctica, and put them in the Pacific Ocean and still have room for another African continent and another North American continent. I don’t know if most people recognize that fact. There are 3.6 billion people in the USPACOM AOR. The area stretches from the coast of California to the border between India and Pakistan and running basically north to south. In addition to a population of 3.6 billion, the area has the world’s largest economies. It has the world’s most populated countries. It has the world’s most populous The United States, as a Pacific nation, has significant interests in this Indo-AsiaPacific environment now and for the foreseeable years and decades to come, so the strategy is designed to ensure that we can help create a security environment that protects these interests. JFQ: Assuming there will be continuing pressures on the global economy and more reductions in the Federal budget, can you discuss what measures you are considering in terms of force structure and operations within your command area of responsibility? admiral locklear: I think we will have the joint force, and our civilian leadership will have a discussion in earnest over the next year or so about what the future force structure should look like in the military. We are already being affected by that to some degree by continuing resolutions and sequestration, but I don’t want to spend a lot of time on that because I think they are near-term issues that we will get through; on the other side, it will be just another factor in determining what our joint force will look like. But there are several underlying aspects of the USPACOM AOR that I think have to be recognized. Because of its size, there remains a tyranny of distance. In the cyber domain, the space domain, and in some cases the air domain, distance is not as significant because the ability to move and transport things globally has greatly increased during my time in the military. But the tyranny of distance still affects certain aspects of what we do in this region, particularly concerning maritime security. Because it entails the difficulties of moving and providing logistics support of forces as they try to remain forward, maritime security represents a huge feature in our AOR, and it puts a premium on forward presence. Moreover, I think it will for some time to come. So whatever our issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 65 U.S. Pacific Command FEATURES | Interview Admiral Locklear visits People’s Republic of China force structure will look like when we get through this period—and I hope our next Quadrennial Defense Review will address some of these issues—there has to be an understanding of the importance and significance in having a number of assets forward in the Asia-Pacific: 1) to demonstrate U.S. commitment to the region, 2) to create the ability to partner day-to-day with those allies who mean the most to the United States, and 3) to provide a deterrent or calming perspective. Ask any nation in the USPACOM AOR if it can imagine the Pacific without U.S. military presence; I have yet to find one that claims it would want to imagine such a scenario. So the value of that forward presence and the type of assets that we put forward will be important. We are advocating in that forward presence that these forces be the most capable and the most highly trained. Because of the growth of militaries and the investments we are seeing in military capabilities in our AOR, some of the most highly technical capabilities will be developed in this 66 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 region and probably proliferated to other regions of the world. Therefore, it is important that the assets we do put forward are the best and that they keep pace with potential threats. We must make sure that these forces are capable when faced with a human disaster threat, a terrorist threat, a threat to the maritime environment, or perhaps a destabilizing event in the region that would lead us to conflict. They cover a lot of areas. It’s not about ships and airplanes and submarines and ground forces. It’s about cyber capabilities. It’s about space capabilities. It’s about information operations. If you take a realistic look at the rebalance, USPACOM military forces are only one component of the effort. The rebalance uses a whole-of-government approach. It has to do with economic, diplomatic, and law enforcement efforts, and drug and counternarcotics trafficking and the flow of human capital, among other issues. We want to make sure that USPACOM forces, once we come to the end of our decision cycles about what our force is going to look like, will be relevant to the current security challenges we face in the region and those we expect to face in the future. JFQ: What steps have you taken in your first year to orient your staff to account for this rebalance proposition? Why were these changes, if any, necessary, and what do you hope to gain from the effort? admiral locklear: Any time you receive guidance from the Commander in Chief that you should put a finer point on or refocus your effort, it requires staffs to take a hard look at what they do. To begin, we had to educate ourselves on what we thought were the compelling aspects of the rebalance to ensure that USPACOM strategy was consistent with the President’s strategy. We did a full review. We looked at the emerging threats we would have to deal with in the security environment in the region. We looked at how we were structurally organized to work more closely with our partners from the interagency [community]. ndupres s . ndu. edu And we made some moves to beef up our staff’s capability and capacity to achieve that by bringing in more interagency folks. I also took a look at this staff, which has been historically made up of U.S. personnel only, and we’re making some changes to bring a more international perspective to the group. In the coming months, I expect to see more general and flag officers and staff officers from our partners arriving who wish to participate. I believe this broadens our perspective and improves the quality of the way we think through our role here in the Asia-Pacific. I’ve taken a look at the internal workings of the staff and, without getting into a lot of detail, we need to make sure that it is manned and equipped to be able to look across the AOR and manage what we can from a [militaryto-military] perspective including the dayto-day shaping and security operations that ensure we remain in a peaceful environment rather than one of conflict. From my perspective, peace in the Asia-Pacific for decades to come will allow the same things that happened in the last 60 years to happen for the nations in the region to enjoy peace and prosperity. So we’re going to make sure that we spend as much time thinking and working on the success piece as we do on the failure piece. The failure piece would be if you have to get into a conflict. But rest assured that if somewhere down the road we find ourselves in conflict, we will be properly organized and equipped to be predominant. JFQ: Given your recent efforts to engage with the People’s Republic of China through activities such as the RIMPAC [Rim of the Pacific] exercise, in what ways do you plan to reassure allies and partners who might be concerned about what they see China becoming? admiral locklear: Personally, I think that the invitation to RIMPAC for the Chinese was overdue. In and of itself, the invitation is a reassuring activity. When I consider the USPACOM AOR and I speak to our partners, they understand that the rise of China will have an impact on the AOR. We understand that, too. A nation can go from being a prospective Third World country to an economic superpower in just a few decades without it having an impact on the economic environment, social environment, or security environment. The USPACOM community of nations in the n d u p res s .ndu.edu U.S. Pacific Command LOCKLEAR Admiral Locklear visits Republic of the Philippines Indo-Asia-Pacific has an opportunity to do what we can to help ensure that the rise of China happens in a productive way in which China emerges as a positive member of a security environment or a positive contributor to the security environment rather than a potential adversary. Every country in the AOR recognizes that it is not in their best interest for an adversarial relationship to exist between them and China or between the United States and China. Therefore, we are looking not only at RIMPAC but also across the spectrum to determine how we encourage engagement between our allies, partners, and ourselves with China. RIMPAC is just another step in this process. We’ve had fits and starts over the years regarding our relationship with China. Its leadership, for instance, would not agree to use the [military-to-military] relationship as a first move toward security cooperation. From my perspective, that decision was counterproductive for the security environment, and from what I have observed over the last year, we are making a lot of progress in not allowing that to happen again. By working with our allies and partners in building a partnership with China, managing the competition between two potential economic superpowers—certainly powers that have a global security impact—in a way that assures success is important to all of us. We have invited the Chinese to RIMPAC. I hope they come. I hope they come ready to participate fully and be integrated into the great work that we do there. And I expect that all the other partners who participate in RIMPAC will welcome the Chinese just as we welcomed the Russians this past year, which worked well. We hope that the Chinese bring great ships to Pearl Harbor and join in the festivities that are associated with RIMPAC. It’s hard to build relationships with people you don’t know. Having China participate in what is easily the largest naval exercise in the world—42 nations participated last year—instead of remaining outside RIMPAC looking in can only be good. JFQ: What are your thoughts about developments in the last year on the Korean Peninsula? Do you see an opportunity to return U.S. forces in the Republic of Korea to levels seen before 2001? admiral locklear: Let me talk about the developments first. I believe they will continue to be quite disturbing, at least in North Korea. North Korea continues to pursue—even under the new leadership of Supreme Commander Kim Jung-un—policies and activities that run counter to the United Nations Security Council [UNSC] resolutions, which, I think, most find reasonable. [North] Korea continues to prioritize issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 67 FEATURES | Interview USS George Washington (CVN 73) steams through South China Sea, July 2012 DOD/Paul Kelly 68 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 ndupres s . ndu. edu LOCKLEAR military spending—spending on nuclear programs and ballistic missile systems to be able to deliver them prior to the needs of its underprivileged population. This continues to be disturbing, and the road ahead of where we are going with North Korea as it continues to proliferate and continues to violate UNSC resolutions will be important not only for the United States and its allies and partners in the region—as well as China and Russia—but also the rest of the global community, especially now that it appears North Korea will be continuing its path of nuclearization. To address your question of what the U.S.-ROK [Republic of Korea] alliance will look like, let me first say that this alliance remains a cornerstone of U.S. security perspectives in Asia and certainly on the peninsula. We continue to grow that relationship, and the capabilities of the ROK military continue to improve. Our connectivity and ability to share information and work together continue to improve, but it is not without challenges. We will go through a process here in probably the next year where we will take a look again at how we feel about the positioning of forces and agreements and where we have them and how we are supporting the people on the peninsula. Do I anticipate a large change in U.S. force numbers on the Korean Peninsula? No. If what we see in North Korea today is what we see in the next year or so, our number there will remain consistent. Unfortunately, the North Korean leadership gets a vote in all of this. If it votes poorly, then it could certainly rapidly change our view on how we would support the security situation on the peninsula. [producing] tremendous weapons systems and linking architectures and interoperability between Services. We would ask if we can look at the emerging threat environment using our long experience in USPACOM and I would say that the cyber enterprise in general is underresourced based on the size and complexity of the problem how we best can leverage the technologies and capabilities we have specifically purchased to address these issues, which I refer to as antiaccess/area-denial [A2/AD] threats. And where you can, does it point you in the direction of investments? You might need to close those seams. Or does it point you toward asymmetric advantages that you want to improve to increase your overall asymmetric advantage? This is important to USPACOM and all of our components; we are briefed routinely on the work being done in Washington, DC, on A2/AD and ASB. We make suggestions to them because, in the end, USPACOM forces will be called on to be successful in a highend environment, should that day ever come. Therefore, it is critical that we do all we can to solve these problems and shortfalls with the capabilities that we have already bought. No matter how we might feel about the future, the reality is that for the next several decades, the force you see today will be about 80 percent of the force USPACOM will have. We have got to make it work during an increasingly challenging environment. JFQ: How do concepts in development such as Air-Sea Battle affect your command’s approach to planning and operations? Are you able to assist in their development in a way to leverage your unique environment? JFQ: Joint Force Quarterly has featured a series of articles on cyber operations and the need to better integrate these operations into the joint force commander’s command and control. What is your assessment of the way ahead for cyber operations for the joint force? admiral locklear: First, I would applaud the Navy’s and Air Force’s efforts on Air-Sea Battle [ASB]. A lot of good work and thinking went into it. I believe we had an AirLand Battle process several decades ago that produced similar thinking. Unfortunately, ASB has been misinterpreted, particularly by some of our allies and partners, as a strategy rather than a concept. I try to explain that ASB is not a secret weapon. ASB is where smart people in smart Services come together where U.S. investments have been made in admiral locklear: Cyber operations have become a serious focus for us in the region. This particular theater is important because the tyranny of distance is heavily reliant on cyber, space, and an assurance of access to cyber and space. Not to consider these facts in our planning would be remiss. Right now I think we are a little behind, and we are making steps as a joint force to catch up. I was supportive of the creation of U.S. Cyber Command and remain supportive of it. U.S. Cyber Command, in conjunction with the n d u p res s .ndu.edu combatant commands, is working quickly to establish the right supporting-supported relationships in this very dynamic environment. We are patterning our exercises to make the training realistic so we can put pressure on ourselves to ensure that 1) we can maintain access to our own networks should they ever be attacked, and then we can defend those networks, and 2) we start to look at other networks and other architectures outside of our own—how would we understand those and leverage those if necessary during a conflict to our benefit? So we’ve got some work to do. I would say that the cyber enterprise in general is under-resourced based on the size and complexity of the problem. I believe the joint force will move to correct some of that. I believe we are already moving in that direction. And I believe we now understand the problem and we have a way ahead. We just have to be fast enough to stay ahead of how fast the cyber world is changing. JFQ: You are a graduate of one of our joint professional military education colleges, then known as the Industrial College of the Armed Forces [ICAF], now the Eisenhower School at National Defense University. How well did your joint education and experience prepare you for joint assignments? admiral locklear: I have been through a fair amount of joint education over time, and I can tell you that the experience I had at ICAF was probably one of the most valuable as it related to any ability I have as a strategic thinker beyond the realm of joint warfare. The ability as a graduate to contemplate the intricacies and importance of understanding economics, logistics, and all the other aspects of national and international power that go into how I make strategic decisions has paid off multiple times. To answer your question, my joint education was exactly what I needed to aspire to be a combatant commander, particularly in the USPACOM AOR. JFQ: How has jointness changed USPACOM over the years, and do you see the possibility that some day the commander might be from another Service? issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 69 DOD/Keith Deviney FEATURES | Interview Ships and submarines participating in RIMPAC 2012 sail in formation around Hawaiian Islands, July 2012 admiral locklear: I won’t speculate on the decisions of our civilian leaders because I believe that the President and Secretary of Defense are in a good position to evaluate potential combatant commanders. My guess is that any decisions will be made on the personality and capability of the officers who are available and not so much on the uniform they wear. That said, when you look at the history of this region, it represents a significant maritime theater. A huge part of what I do here includes a large component of the maritime domain. I don’t think that is going to change or that it is going to get more complex. Furthermore, the allies and partners in this region have a long historical perspective that we, as Americans, sometimes don’t possess. They have been comfortable, I think, over time with USPACOM having a maritime face—the face of an admiral—so it could change and they would probably accept it, but I would just say that they are comfortable with the current situation. This issue 70 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 would be in the calculus of the decision that our civilian leadership would have to make if they should decide to change the uniform of the USPACOM commander. JFQ: As USPACOM commander, can you characterize your perspective of the Russian Federation regarding the security environment in the Asia-Pacific? admiral locklear: From the USPACOM perspective, we view Russia as a potential security partner. I just had a chief of defense conference that was held in Australia, and Russia’s deputy minister of defense—who at one time happened to be the Eastern Flank Commander—attended and spent 4 or 5 days with us and we had good discussions and good dialogue. As I mentioned earlier, we just had Russian ships participate in RIMPAC, and that was quite successful. So I look at Russia only from the USPACOM perspective. I know that U.S. European Command has to look at it from a different perspective, and certainly, there is another view from the larger global perspective. But from where I sit, there is benefit in having Russia participate in whatever way it can because its force levels in the Pacific are not significant compared to other places it might be, at least today. Having Russia as a productive partner in the overall security environment, particularly as we look at maritime activity that might be moving north into the Arctic, is important. In fact, the relationships we have in the region with allies and partners contribute to an overall understanding that allows us to operate with and around each other. JFQ ndupres s . ndu. edu DOD/Michael Holzworth LOCKLEAR Sailor fast-ropes out of MH-60S Knighthawk helicopter during RIMPAC 2012 n d u p res s .ndu.edu issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 71 NATO’s Level of Ambition Beyond Strategic Reach By D e a n a . n o W o W i e J s k i crisis. Challenges to the euro and potential default of nations threaten Europe’s economic unity. The United States borrows 40 cents on the dollar to finance its entitlements and wars, with no political solution in sight. Confronting challenges to security with sparse resources forms the context of NATO’s strategic situation. In light of that test, the heads of state and government, the political leaders of NATO, met in Lisbon in November 2010 and agreed on a new strategic concept for the Alliance, entitled Active Engagement, Modern Defence. This concept not only reaffirmed the collective defense of the Alliance, but also established an ambitious level of effort, particularly given the current low level of national investment in NATO via defense budgets, and the significant economic challenges that most member states face. Some details of this strategy are outlined in this article. This strategic statement offered a new concept for a new century, and was immediately put to the test with the NATO operation in Libya, Active Endeavor. NATO NATO T he North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) faces many strategic challenges based on the international security environment. As an alliance at war, not only does NATO have to confront an uncertain future in Afghanistan, but also shadowy threats of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, cyberwar, and terrorism. The 21st century promises to become an even more complex environment over time, while national resources for defense are dwindling. Both sides of the Atlantic face budgetary NATO Secretary General speaking at 2012 Supreme Allied Commander Transformation seminar in Washington 72 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 ndupres s . ndu. edu NOWOWIEJSKI demonstrated a core tenet of the new strategic concept by executing aggressive crisis management. Active Endeavor provided air cover over Libya to protect citizens and enforced an arms embargo on the high seas to prevent resupply of weapons to the regime. Libya established a new realm of the possible with the new strategic concept in place and reaffirmed the Alliance’s stated purpose of reaching beyond its own territory proper to ensure the lasting security of the member states. But the operation simultaneously revealed significant flaws in capability that have forced reconsideration of the way the Alliance will develop resources in the future. Since Libya, the growing pressure of the Eurozone crisis leads to questions about the viability of the strategic concept itself given the limited focus it gave to resource use. How will the level of ambition in the concept be met by members who are giving less, not more, to the needs of the Alliance? How will the Alliance restore balance among the contributions of its members, when the U.S. share is openly acknowledged to be around three-quarters of the whole? This article argues that the constraints of Alliance resources should force a reconsideration of the strategic concept itself, both to incorporate as a stated purpose the concept of “smart” defense, and to consider a more limited level of ambition, focusing on less security through crisis management. Extended Reach and Limited Resources Active Engagement, Modern Defence was released from the NATO Lisbon Summit (November 19–20, 2010). At the time, its concepts reflected an achievement in consensus and forethought, as the heads of state and government reaffirmed their commitment to the bedrock principle of collective defense, while expanding their strategic ambition to include out-of-sector missions, missile defense, cyber defense, access to the global commons, counterproliferation, counterpiracy, countertrafficking, and modernization. Stating that nuclear weapons should ideally be abolished, the Alliance reaffirmed its commitment to nuclear weapons as an instrument. The heads of state agreed to Dr. Dean A. Nowowiejski is the Ike Skelton Distinguished Chair for the Art of War at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. n d u p res s .ndu.edu implement ballistic missile defense over the populations of Europe and, in the same vein, wrestled with their ongoing partnership with Russia. All of these missions were affirmed at the same time that operations in Afghanistan demanded great effort. All in all, this was a path-breaking summit with a strategic document to match: Alliance ambition toward the circumstances of a new century. The affirmation of three “essential” core tasks formed the heart of the strategic concept. The increased level of ambition for the Alliance lies between the lines that announce these tasks. Collective Defense. This task affirms Article 5 of the Washington Treaty—the charter document of the Alliance—with the addition of a goal to deter and defend against emerging challenges. This goal of combating emerging challenges is what takes the Alliance out of sector and into where ance is postured for success in the near term against evolving international threats and a threatened international economy. Closer review of the strategy seems to confirm such lack of fidelity regarding strategic means. The Alliance confirmed its desire to reform, modernize, and transform to meet the operational needs of worldwide commitments. NATO required resources for this new set of missions, and the Allies affirmed their desire to reduce unnecessary duplication, develop and operate jointly, and preserve and strengthen common capabilities. Beyond these broadly stated goals of transformation, not much detail is offered in the strategic concept about what specific means are available to execute the strategy. This inattention may stem from the economic distractions of the heads of state when the document was written, or it may be intentional. At the time, the European stating that nuclear weapons should ideally be abolished, the Alliance reaffirmed its commitment to nuclear weapons as an instrument they emerge, whether in Libya, the Horn of Africa, or Afghanistan. The task emphasizes expeditionary operations by modernized and deployable conventional forces. Crisis Management. This task addresses international crises affecting the Alliance before and after they erupt, stops ongoing conflicts before they affect security, and consolidates stability. It commits the Alliance to a wide range of tasks in operational environments that extend beyond territorial boundaries. Cooperative Security. This task encompasses security cooperation, arms control, nonproliferation and disarmament, and expansion. At the end of the list of core tasks and principles, there is this statement: “In order to carry out the full range of NATO missions as effectively and efficiently as possible, Allies will engage in a continuous process of reform, modernization and transformation.”1 This is the only reference to resources in the core principles. This short statement, buried at the end, seemingly implies a limited focus in the strategic concept on the potential means needed to execute such an advanced strategy. From this simple statement, our analysis must determine whether the Alli- economy was struggling with the effects of the international downturn from 2008, the threatened default of Greece and perhaps more European countries, and the growing need for rescue measures. Declining defense budgets and reduced contributions to Alliance operations and modernization were already a contemporary trend. So the Allies faced a significant challenge—and how to deal with it makes no appearance in the strategic concept. This could mean that the omission of detail regarding Alliance resources was necessarily intentional. Consensus concerning Alliance resources may have been just too difficult. Whatever the cause, the concept was short on details of how to deal with a burgeoning resource crisis, and nothing has rectified the imbalance since. This became clearer as NATO engaged Libya. NATO and Libya Within months of the promulgation of the new strategic concept, NATO entered an unexpected phase of execution, Operation Unified Protector. This operation both offered a glimpse of the future potential of the Alliance to react quickly to emerging threats, and a reminder of how the previous lack of issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 73 FEATURES | NATO’s Level of Ambition resource commitment left the air campaign short of precision munitions; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR); intelligence fusion; electronic warfare capability; and air component logistic support. Following a successful and fairly rapid conclusion on October 31, 2011, the pundits and academics began to debate the relevance of the Alliance.2 Alliance proponents, such as the NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Supreme Allied Commander Europe Admiral James Stavridis, USN, and U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO Ambassador Ivo Daalder trumpeted the success and sought means to address shortcomings in the future. Their reviews echoed the themes that next round of national austerity measures, better allocating (and coordinating) the resources the Alliance does have, and following through on commitments to the Alliance and to each other.4 Given the NATO standard of consensus, bringing these issues into the open marks Secretary Gates’s departure as a brave episode of truth-telling. The idea that the Alliance really needed a more robust commitment from its European members in order to survive the challenges of the 21st century struck home, at least in academe and the media. Secretary Gates’s remarks also serve as a call to reexamine the relevance of the strategic concept. He brought into stark contrast the problems of an alliance with grand ambitions yet an anemic the idea that the Alliance needed a more robust commitment from its European members struck home NATO responded quickly and was ultimately successful in reaching the goal of protecting the Libyan people, but the success revealed stress fractures in the Alliance. These shortcomings were those of resources as outlined above, limited member participation (only 14 of 28 members participated), and reliance on the United States for precision munitions and ISR. Unified Protector provided the first evidence of a mixed record with the new strategic concept in practice.3 The Gates Challenge These various assessments crystallized in a confrontational moment in Brussels at the NATO Defense Ministerial in June 2011. Departing U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates offered his colleagues a candid assessment of the potential future of the Alliance. He echoed the assessment that prospects in Afghanistan were improving and that Libya was a qualified success for NATO, but he also offered a warning. Highlighting the increasing imbalance of member contributions in support to NATO, to the extent that the U.S. accounted for more than 75 percent of NATO defense spending, Secretary Gates warned of a potential retrenchment by the United States. This would come from increased budget pressure to the Congress. He called for three positive things to happen to ensure a solvent future for the Alliance: making a serious effort to protect defense budgets from being further gutted in the 74 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 resource reality. In his view, the Alliance still suffers from strategic shortcomings in procurement, training, logistics, and sustainment. He openly linked the decreasing level of investment on the part of the European community, the lack of strategic and operational enablers as called for by the strategic concept, and the potential that U.S. leaders in the future would not be willing to continue to invest as strongly in the Alliance when they have domestic budget problems of a crisis nature. Would the Alliance change its ways, and pay for what it wanted to do? Secretary General Shapes a Response Fortunately, the Alliance seems to have a leader who addresses problems strategically and openly. Secretary General Rasmussen repeatedly addresses the problem of low investment in the face of expanded strategic ambition, seeing it as a threat to the future viability of the Alliance. He uses a variety of forums, some outlined below. The solution to the problem of limited resources most often repeated by Secretary General Rasmussen is the concept of “Smart Defence.” The concept of Smart Defence was officially promulgated by the heads of state and government at the Chicago Summit in May 2012 in their “Summit Declaration on Defence Capabilities: Toward NATO Forces 2020.” How Secretary General Rasmussen led them toward the concept, and how they thus validated the strategic concept reached in Lisbon, follows. The Secretary General’s timely article in Foreign Affairs addressed the lessons of Libya and the relative decline in defense spending of Europeans in a widely read forum.5 Rasmussen cited statistics of a 20 percent decline in defense expenditure at a time of simultaneous 55 percent growth in gross domestic product (GDP) for European NATO members. Rasmussen emphasized both the potential loss of the chance to be relevant in a changing world, and the potential of turning the United States away from Europe in the same way as outlined by Secretary Gates. In outlining solutions to this general problem, Rasmussen offered the idea of Smart Defence and began to list its key characteristics, without offering a precise definition. This softness of concept probably allowed Alliance partners to interpret Smart Defence for themselves, within national constraints, as they moved toward consensus acceptance. Smart Defence, according to Rasmussen, “is about building security for less money by working together and being more flexible.” It charges member nations to set spending priorities on the basis of threats, cost-effectiveness, and performance, since they cannot afford everything. Smart Defence includes the key idea of NATO nations working in “small clusters to combine their resources and build capabilities” with the Alliance serving as a matchmaker for the partners. Rasmussen then concluded that he had been trying to engage the transatlantic partners in this strategic dialogue of smarter use of resources ever since the Lisbon Summit, since what NATO requires is an agreement that results in deployable and sustainable capabilities. Secretary General’s 2011 Annual Report In his first Secretary General’s annual report, Rasmussen returned to many of the ideas in his Foreign Affairs article. He again cited statistics about the low level of member investment in defense, stating that, for 2011, annual defense expenditures for 18 of the 28 Allies were lower than they had been before the global economic crisis began in 2008. Furthermore, he outlined that only 3 of the 28 member nations were at the required level of defense expenditure required by the Alliance (2 percent of GDP). Levels of investment in modernization were similarly low. The U.S. share of NATO expenditures grew to 75 percent.6 ndupres s . ndu. edu NOWOWIEJSKI The Secretary General’s 2012 Annual Report By the time of Rasmussen’s annual report, Smart Defence had grown important enough to merit its own section in the document, and a refined explanation of what the concept means. This includes “greater collaboration and coherence of effort . . . prioritizing the capabilities needed the most, specializing in what Allies do best, and seeking multinational solutions.” The Secretary General highlighted an agreement made in Lisbon to invest in 11 critical needs, demonstrating that concern for strategic resources dates at least to the same time as the new strategic concept itself. He also pointed ahead to the Chicago Summit where defense ministers agreed to “deliver a range of substantive multinational projects” to be made available to the Alliance by that time. This effort for resource harmonization extends to NATO staffs working with the European Union (EU) to avoid unnecessary duplication with EU pooling and sharing. The annual report thus outlined some specific areas where the idea of more efficiency is already in progress. Secretary General Rasmussen is still emphasizing Smart Defence, and as time passes, his calls for adequate defense resources seem to grow more strident. His second annual report, released January 31, 2013, has a major section calling for securing capabilities for the future. NATO Forces 2020 and Smart Defence are principal to this effort. The principles announced in Chicago remain the same, but the number of Smart specifics in these historical statements, the real work of fleshing out the idea and putting it into practice will be confirmed as the Allies collectively announce and execute collaborative Smart Defence projects. Key to successful implementation will be whether the heads of state and government will be willing to make the bold political decisions that keep the organization funded to its level of ambition in the face of declining resources. They may have to demonstrate this resolve in a deepening economic crisis. Expect Smart Defence Twelve nations contribute to NATO strategic airlift capabilities The Chicago Summit declaration connected the idea of Smart Defence to the concept of NATO Forces 2020: modern, tightly connected forces equipped, trained, exercised, and commanded so that they can operate together and with partners in any environment. It outlined the need to cooperate more closely in acquiring capabilities, prioritize what is needed most, and consult on changes to defense plans. It spoke of the need for a strong defense industry in Europe. The declaration recognized that “as technology grows more expensive, and defence budgets are under pressure, there are key capabilities which many Allies can only obtain if they work together to develop and acquire them.” Allies would take forward specific multinational projects to this end designed to deliver improved operational effectiveness, economies of scale, and closer connections between forces. The words of the declaration carry forward ideas originally offered by the Secretary General. Smart Defence “represents a changed outlook, the opportunity for a renewed culture of cooperation in which multinational collaboration is given new prominence.” In these charter words, the heads of state offered the broad principles under which Smart Defence will be executed.7 n d u p res s .ndu.edu NATO Summit Declaration on Defence Capabilities, May 2012 Defence projects has now increased to 25. The Secretary General proudly announces that European Allies lead around two-thirds of these projects, with one-third of the 25 projects purely European. Yet the Secretary General warns that continued decreasing levels of defense investment by Alliance partners will lead to potential capability gaps between European Allies, across the Atlantic, and with respect to emerging powers.8 Beginning at least with the post-Libya NATO assessments, Secretary General Rasmussen called for better resourcing within the Alliance in order to meet the ambition outlined in the strategic concept. Smart Defence is the key response to the current Alliance resource shortfall, and appears to be an evolving concept. Though vague on to continue to evolve within the constraints of international threat and the relative economic health of its members. What’s Missing: Coherence and Realism What do we make of the overall NATO resource problem? A common conclusion for many years is that NATO spends too much money on personnel costs, and not enough on modernization or development. This criticism extends to the type of forces in which European members customarily invest: conventional land forces with limited deployment readiness and not enough strategic lift. These conditions lie behind the conception of the NATO Response Force (NRF) a decade ago. Not much has changed. issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 75 FEATURES | NATO’s Level of Ambition substance to the ambition for missile defense and ISR in the midterm, then the concept appears to be more viable. The proof will be contained not in strategic tasks, but in member investment in defense and modernization over the next decade. deterrence and defense, crisis management, and security cooperation, and what the Alliance will have over time to accomplish those ambitions. This comes to the question of whether Smart Defence will work to solve the problem. European partners are not going to increase expenditures, and as they decrease them, Smart Defence becomes how to do less with less. Smart Defence requires Alliance members to act with great foresight and trust in a time of economic crisis. It requires member states to forego individual purchase of key operational capabilities in order to enter a collective arrangement that requires other members to deliver those capabilities. The risk of this approach is that in crisis, the partner nation will withhold needed capability. To a degree, Smart Defence requires members to surrender sovereignty over resource decisions to the Alliance. In many ways, the decisions over defense resources for European members parallel the difficulty EU members face with salvage operations of the Eurozone. They require collective action in a time of economic crisis and dwindling resources. It is a steep order. Much of the potential success of Smart Defence will be signaled in implementing the Chicago Summit Declaration on Defence Capabilities. If the principles outlined by the Secretary General are put into action, if the priority programs are resourced, if there is An Alternative: Update the Strategic Concept NATO The NRF, once proved in principle and declared fully operational in 2006, has had limited activity. One wonders if called upon, would it be ready, given the commitment of the Alliance to the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan? This may be behind the recent U.S. declaration that, while shifting focus to the Asia-Pacific, it would dedicate an Army brigade to the NRF in order to bring to life a concept that may have gone dormant. The basic problem for NATO’s strategic execution is one of resources. NATO has high ambition for capable operational forces but struggles to afford them. In reality, the Alliance has a limited expeditionary, conventionally modernized capability. There is certain incoherence to the member nations’ investments. They buy the wrong things, or not enough of the right things. Consider the acknowledged shortage of lift, ISR, precision munitions, cyber capability, and supply. Deployable forces are required, but not yet built. For years in Afghanistan, commanders have struggled with national caveats on operational use of forces. Because of these shortages and caveats, the United States increased its member investment in Alliance capabilities to the point of unsustainability. Insufficient investment and out-ofbalance investment imply lack of realism in what the Alliance can really do. There is a simple mismatch between global ambition in 76 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 The questions remain, given successful execution of Smart Defence, is the 2010 strategic concept viable? Even smarter spending cannot overcome insufficient spending, and the NATO strategy requires sufficient resources in the areas of collective defense, crisis management, and security cooperation. Collective defense remains the cornerstone of the Alliance, and will likely consume whatever limited resources are available, given real world contingencies requiring multinational defense. How many more prevention situations will NATO enter into? How many more Kosovos, Afghanistans, and Libyas are there? Given increasingly scarce resources, it is the crisis management pillar that is likely to suffer, particularly the ability to stop conflicts before escalation or to stabilize them long after they have concluded. There is a pending struggle over the ability of the Alliance to stabilize Afghanistan over the long term. NATO is still committed to stability in Kosovo after a dozen years, thus demonstrating the resource drain of commitments to long-term crisis management. Perhaps the pending U.S. step back from long-term stability operations, as announced in the January 2012 defense strategy guidance, will work its way through the national counsels of the Alliance, and curtail appetites for long-term crisis management, counterinsurgency, stabilization, and reconstruction. If European defense budgets continue to dwindle, the appetite for these types of operations may be suppressed. Of course, if members have not yet invested in crisis capability in the first place, then the simple status quo remains. There is the perception in some circles that the new strategic concept is really U.S. ambitions pitted against European means, that the pressure for continued stability operations stemmed from the U.S. commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan at the time of the Lisbon Summit. If this is true, then the January 2012 U.S. defense strategic guidance may be the first glimmer that the protagonist of such missions is beginning to realize they ndupres s . ndu. edu NOWOWIEJSKI are beyond capability, and the NATO strategic concept should follow suit.9 Conclusion This article concludes with two small proposals. One is that the Alliance-wide strategic concept could use more tacit recognition of the problem of means and the necessary dedication by members to the ambition of the Alliance through defense spending. If Smart Defence proves successful as an approach, then maybe it deserves inclusion in the published concept. As it is, the document is lean on recognition of the impact that declining expenditures on the wrong things will have on the ability of the Alliance to execute its desired missions. Since the draft of the strategy was produced in the office of the Secretary General before Lisbon, perhaps the Secretary should now include his increasingly better defined Smart Defence concepts in the published NATO strategy. This would give substance to the need to focus on strategic means. The second proposal is that NATO members may need to amend their level of ambition. Within the next 3 to 5 years, they will be forced to reconsider in realistic terms how much they can do. The strategic concept published at Lisbon was incredibly ambitious, expanding the reach of the Alliance beyond its borders with more missions. It was lean on detail about how to pay for that level of ambition. Economic realities, even with Smart Defence, may soon dictate that the Alliance take a step back from what it tries to do. Collective defense is a cornerstone mission that cannot be reduced. Security cooperation, as it plays out over time and in a variety of small-scale ways, is good value for the investment. Contingency response is the core task most suspicious of successful long-term execution. As governments realize that they cannot afford to pay for reconstruction and stability operations for decades, perhaps this core task in the strategy needs reexamination and further restriction in scope. Contingency response should pay as a reduced strategic goal if NATO cannot come to terms with the reality of its modernization and defense investment challenge. JFQ NOTES 1 Active Engagement, Modern Defence: Strategic Concept for the Defence and Security of the Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Brussels: NATO, 2010), 9, available at <www. nato.int/nato_static/assets/pdf/pdf_publications/20120214_strategic-concept-2010-eng.pdf>. 2 See facts at NATO Web site, “NATO and Libya,” available at <www.nato.int/cps/en/SID2CF4288B-6562C4E3/natolive/71679.htm>. 3 For various assessments of Operation Unified Protector, see Ivo Daalder, “Leadership, Lisbon, and Libya,” Remarks to the Aspen Strategy Group, June 10, 2011, available at <http:// nato.usmission.gov/>; Ivo Daalder and James G. Stavridris, “NATO’s Triumph in Libya,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2012; Steven Metz, “Swan Song: Is Libya the end of NATO?” The New Republic, April 15, 2011; Fareed Zakaria, “A New Era in U.S. Foreign Policy,” CNN.com, August 23, 2011; Jamey Keaten and Slobodan Lekic, “NATO Bounces Back in Libya, But Troubles Remain,” Associated Press, August 23, 2011; “Europeans Retreat on Defense Spending,” Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2011; “Libya’s Lessons for NATO—and U.S. Defense Cuts,” Christian Science Monitor, August 24, 2011. 4 Robert M. Gates, “The Security and Defense Agenda (Future of NATO),” Brussels, Belgium, Friday, June 10, 2011, available at <www.defense. gov/Speeches/Speech.aspx?SpeechID=1581>. 5 Anders Fogh Rasmussen, “NATO After Libya,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2011, 2–6. 6 NATO, “The Secretary General’s Annual Report 2011,” January 26, 2012, available at <www. nato.int/cps/en/SID-95ACA050-DC78A506/natolive/news_83709.htm?selectedLocale=en>. 7 “Summit Declaration on Defence Capabilities: Toward NATO Forces 2020,” May 20, 2012, available at <www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_87594.htm?mode=pressrelease>. 8 NATO, “The Secretary General’s Annual Report 2012,” January 31, 2013, available at <www. nato.int/cps/en/SID-482A978C-0B70AC4D/natolive/opinions_94220.htm>. 9 The author wishes to thank Professors James Cricks and James Varner of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College for their review of this article. This idea stems from Professor Cricks’s personal experiences while assigned to Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. NEW from NDU Press for the Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction Case Study 5 he Presidential Nuclear Initiatives of 1991–1992 By Susan J. Koch In late 1991 and early 1992, President George H.W. Bush announced a series of changes to U.S. nuclear forces that became known as the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives. Intended to be primarily unilateral, the proposals challenged the Soviet Union to take comparable actions. It did so, in responses irst by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and then Russian President Boris Yeltsin. he initiatives, which resulted in the reduction of nuclear forces and changes in nuclear practices, were unprecedented on several levels: the broad scope and scale of the reductions, their unilateral nature (even though they were reciprocated), and the extraordinary speed and secrecy in which they were developed (3 weeks compared to months and years for traditional arms control measures). his case study discusses the general context of the initiatives, the concerns that motivated them, and the national and international processes that saw them carried out, including the texts of the key U.S. proposals and Soviet/Russian responses. Visit the NDU Press Web site for more information on publications at ndupress.ndu.edu n d u p res s .ndu.edu issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 77 From Sea Power to Cyber Power Learning from the Past to Craft a Strategy for the Future U.S. Navy cryptologic technicians preview Integrated System for Language Education and Training program at Center for Language, Regional Expertise, and Culture, Pensacola, Florida 78 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 U.S. Navy (Gary Nichols) By k r i s e . B a r c o m B ndupres s . ndu. edu BARCOMB Naval strength involves, unquestionably, the possession of strategic points. —Alfred Thayer Mahan A lfred Thayer Mahan saw the ocean for what it is. While it spans the globe and covers a predominant portion of the Earth, not all parts of it are equally important. Mahan offered a focused naval strategy in an era when America was struggling to define itself as either isolated from, or an integral part of, the larger international community. The force structure of the U.S. Navy hinged upon leaders deciding between protectionism and expansionism. Rather than simply a mechanism to defend the coasts, Mahan envisioned the Navy as a powerful means for promoting American economic prosperity. In one sense, his strategy allowed the Nation to achieve both objectives simultaneously. By projecting naval power at key points around the globe, Mahan’s approach allowed for economic expansion and had the second-order effect of pushing conflict away from U.S. shores. Cyberspace represents a similar challenge. The United States now faces a contemporary struggle between expansionism and protectionism in this domain. We can learn a great deal from Mahan’s methodology for delineating and prioritizing the sea domain into actionable terms. Thus, this article identifies strategic categories in cyberspace by adopting Mahan’s approach. In doing so, it seeks to identify similarities and differences between sea power and cyber power. The aim is to provide senior leaders with a better understanding of the salient aspects of cyberspace, offer insights for securing those points, and suggest a new paradigm for the proper role of the military in this domain. This tailored expansionist strategy for cyberspace should provide the United States with Major Kris E. Barcomb, USAF, is a Cyberspace Strategist for 24th Air Force at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas. n d u p res s .ndu.edu both economic growth and security akin to Mahan’s approach to sea power a century ago. A Mahanian Approach to Cyberspace Mahan did not view the Navy as an end unto itself, but as a key component of the larger economic welfare of the Nation. He tied the very existence of the Navy to commerce when he wrote, “The necessity of a navy, in the restricted sense of the word, springs, therefore, from the existence of a peaceful shipping, and disappears with it.”1 Similarly, while cyberspace originated through U.S. Government investment, the domain owes its rapid expansion and modern character to commerce. In this sense, sea power and cyber power share a common objective. They both primarily exist to protect economic interests within their respective domains. and overcome resource constraints: “The search for and establishment of leading principles—always few—around which considerations of detail group themselves, will tend to reduce confusion of impression to simplicity and directness of thought, with consequent facility of comprehension.”3 In accordance with these two principles, this article identifies seven strategic points of concentration in cyberspace: operating systems (OSs), search engines, physical communications infrastructure, cloud computing, governance forums, cryptography, and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). Each of these categories has unique challenges, and some are more established than others. Fortunately, the United States holds dominant roles in many of these categories, such as operating systems and search engines, and it must define strategies sea power and cyber power both primarily exist to protect economic interests within their respective domains Two principles guided Mahan’s analysis. First, Mahan looked for strategic points of convergence and concentration. He stated, “In general . . . it will be found that by sea, as by land, useful strategic points will be where highways pass, and especially where they cross and converge.”2 As a result of his foresight and the willingness of key U.S. leaders to act on it, such as President Theodore Roosevelt, American influence secured the Hawaiian Islands, the Philippines, Guantanamo Bay, Puerto Rico, and the Panama Canal, to name a few. Despite both the realities and perceptions of the decentralized nature of cyberspace, careful inspection reveals several points of concentration. Second, Mahan emphasized the need to minimize the total number of points considered important to communicate priorities to maintain those positions. In others, such as physical communications infrastructure and cloud computing, the United States has played a leading role in their early development, but the future share of influence is still uncertain. Here, more proactive measures must be taken to help assert U.S. influence. Key Differences Before continuing with a detailed review of each category, it is important to evaluate the salient differences between the nature of the sea and the essence of cyberspace. First, while the government played a key role in helping establish the technological foundations of the Internet, commercial interest quickly surpassed the government in terms of influence over the domain. Martin Libicki, a senior policy analyst at the RAND issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 79 FEATURES | From Sea Power to Cyber Power Corporation, succinctly described the current state of government influence: “As it is, the days when governments were leading-edge consumers and manipulators of information technology are long past. . . . Man for man, it cannot compete with Microsoft.”4 The second important difference is the relationship between hard and soft power in each domain. Mahan emphasized hard power, and he viewed the threat or use of force as foundational to protecting maritime interests. He also tied sea power to command when he asserted, “These national and international functions can be discharged, certainly, only by command of the sea.”5 Yet his view of command and the role of force do not translate well into cyberspace, where soft power plays a predominant role. In for centuries.9 Europeans recognized that they could not control the outcome of the economy as a whole. Instead, they established policies to facilitate economic growth. In contrast, China’s attempt to control its economy too tightly led to its decline. Given that commercial interests dominate cyberspace, and influence is based largely on merit, the United States must act more like the Europeans than the Chinese of the middle ages. So far, we have established convergence and simplicity as key components of a Mahanian-style analysis for cyberspace. We have also established how the proper employment of both sea power and cyber power is intimately linked to promoting economic growth. Yet the two also have important differences. Commercial entities wield more influence over cyberspace technology than governments, power and influence in cyberspace are based on attraction and cooperation rather than command, and low barriers to entry into cyberspace likely require a decentralized security model. William McNeill wrote about how European sea power in the 16th century was quasiprivate in character. Neither the British Royal Navy nor Spanish Armada significantly differentiated themselves from their respective merchant shipping enterprises until after 1600.7 The utility of a government-led navy was not realized until the barriers to selfprotection increased beyond practical limits of individual commercial entities. As barriers to entry increased, the security paradigm shifted from a distributed model to a centralized one. This belief in a centralized security model persists today, even though it may not be relevant in cyberspace. Instead, the much lower barriers to entry into cyberspace may require the reversion to a distributed security model dominated by private interests. USS George H.W. Bush in Naples, Italy, in support of maritime security operations and theater security cooperation U.S. Navy (Betsy Lynn Knapper) Seven Strategic Points in Cyberspace cyberspace, strategies centered on relationship-building, performance, and legitimacy will be more effective than those based on force. In contrast to Mahan, Joseph Nye stated, “To succeed in a networked world requires leaders to think in terms of attraction and co-option rather than command.”6 The final differentiator is ease of access. Cyberspace has much lower barriers to entry than the sea. Perhaps this key difference will lead to a devolution of norms with respect to the proper role of government and military in protecting private interests in cyberspace. 80 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 While Western navies were expanding the sphere of European influence, events in the East were unfolding differently. In 1433, in an attempt to inhibit the link between military and commercial enterprises, the Chinese imperial court halted naval expeditions. Then, in 1436, the Chinese government banned the construction of new seagoing ships.8 Because the Chinese economy was only allowed to function within the narrow limits defined by the government, commerce failed to expand, thereby allowing European interests to dominate the global economy The first strategic point is operating systems. While cyberspace is distributed and lacks a centralized authority, a single company has tremendous influence over nearly every desktop computer on the planet. Microsoft Windows commands 92 percent of the global market share, followed by Apple’s Mac OS at a distant 6 percent, and Linux trailing at only slightly more than 1 percent.10 In real numbers, this equates to over 1.25 billion computers running versions of the Windows OS.11 Despite the complaints about security flaws and functionality restrictions in Microsoft product offerings, the United States can be thankful that Microsoft is a U.S.-based company subject to its own laws and cultural norms. Similarly, U.S. companies currently dominate the global market share of mobile operating systems, although not to the degree of concentration seen in the desktop market. The breakdown of the top four companies is Google Android at 43 percent, Nokia Symbian 22 percent, Apple iOS at 18 percent, and Research in Motion at 12 percent (Microsoft carries less than a 2-percent share).12 The U.S. position in the mobile OS space is a relatively recent development. Nokia ceded the top spot in 2010 as a result of the transformation of cellular phones from simple voice communication devices to “smart phones.”13 ndupres s . ndu. edu BARCOMB From a national security standpoint, even if the government or military cannot directly control the software powering the bulk of the world’s desktop and mobile devices, it is far better to at least have the preponderance of software come from a U.S.-based company. Imagine if we woke up tomorrow and 92 percent of the world’s personal computers ran on an operating system designed by a strategic competitor to the United States. We would quickly wish for the good old days of Microsoft. Search engines are the second strategic point in cyberspace. While operating systems define the technical performance characteristics of systems, search engines exert tremendous influence over ideas. In many ways, they embody Nye’s concept of soft power; they must attract users through superior performance, and the results they return are a powerful form of agenda-setting and preference-shaping. Most users can easily switch from one search engine to another, yet they often choose only one: Google. The company commands 91 percent of the global market share for search.14 Google’s search algorithm returns what it believes are the most relevant matches to a user’s request from its index of over 1 trillion unique URLs.15 Since people generally only review the top three to five results, the company wields historically unprecedented ability to shape preferences. Over 1 billion times every day, Google decides what is and is not important across the Internet.16 That is power. The struggle for control of this strategic point in cyberspace has already begun. For example, China and Google have had a public dispute over the Chinese government’s efforts to censor Google’s search results within its borders and the government’s attempts to hack into Google’s infrastructure.17 In a demonstration of corporate soft power, Google withdrew its search services from mainland China in 2010 and rehosted them in Hong Kong. Google’s absence in mainland China opened the door for the government to increase its own authority over Internet searching. The state-run search engine Baidu became a de facto monopoly over the country’s 400 million Internet users.18 Prior to pulling its search engine out of the mainland, Google had over 35 percent of the Chinese market share. As of June 2011, Google’s dispute caused them to slip to an 11 percent share, while Baidu rose to over 83 percent of the Chinese search engine market.19 n d u p res s .ndu.edu To maintain its dominant position in both operating systems and search engines, the United States must continue to adhere to economic principles that promote growth and innovation. It must also be extremely cautious in exerting hard power in either of these categories. For example, antitrust regulation that fostered U.S. competition in the industrial era may now open a door for global competitors to rise to the top. The United States should also guard against mandating controls or censorship within either of these areas. Too much government interference could delegitimize companies such as Microsoft, Apple, and Google and subsequently facilitate the ability of non-U.S. companies to take their place. of driving that traffic to infrastructure outside of U.S. control.21 Additionally, some U.S. companies have been shortsighted with regard to expanding their services. After the dot-com bubble of 2000 burst, these companies were either not in a financial position to invest in physical communications infrastructure or were unwilling to take another chance on risky technology. This myopic stance allowed non-U.S. interests to attain those resources and open independently owned and operated communications paths.22 A more farsighted investment strategy combined with targeted financial incentives could have helped the United States retain the preponderance of ownership. antitrust regulation that fostered U.S. competition in the industrial era may now open a door for global competitors to rise to the top A third strategic point in cyberspace is physical communications infrastructure. In particular, this category relates to those physical systems supporting the backbone of the Internet. Only a handful of companies, known as Tier 1 Internet Service Providers, control the bulk of the communications passing through cyberspace. The United States has historically held the majority stake in this category, and until recently, nearly all Internet traffic has been routed through U.S.-owned infrastructure. In an address to Congress in 2006, former Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden acknowledged this point: “Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge.”20 Unfortunately, from a national security standpoint, this situation is rapidly changing as information technology costs decrease and the legal environment governing the protection of electronic communications grows more uncertain. In this environment, lawmakers must be mindful of unintended effects as nations become increasingly willing to recreate their own communications backbones to reduce the need to pass through U.S. infrastructure. For example, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act in part to help monitor nefarious cyber activity, but the law had the unintended consequence The fourth strategic point is cloud computing. While physical communications infrastructure established the need to maintain influence over the global communications paths, this category deals with maintaining similar influence over the current trend to centralize processing and storage on the Web. Cloud computing providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google allow users to rent storage and processing capacity on hosted infrastructures. While the current market for this category is relatively small, it is an emerging aspect of cyberspace that will be important in the near future. As the market for cloud services grows, more and more data will flow across the infrastructures of a handful of providers, making it a strategic concentration point in cyberspace. For now, U.S. companies are the cloud computing market leaders, but that could change. If it does, it could mean that an increasing share of cyberspace data, including that of U.S. citizens, could be hosted on machines operating outside the boundaries of U.S. law. The United States should encourage the development of these services within regions covered by U.S. jurisdiction. It should incentivize U.S. cloud service providers through both appropriate fiscal policy and continue to participate in the governance bodies defining standards for this emerging capability. U.S. Government organizations such as the National Institute issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 81 FEATURES | From Sea Power to Cyber Power of Standards and Technology (NIST) have performed well in building a foundation of legitimacy and credibility in the cloud computing arena. These kinds of activities need encouragement. The fifth strategic point is governance forums. Governance in cyberspace is more like a cultural phenomenon than a means of control. There are many consortiums made up of various interested parties that work together to decide the standards for communicating in cyberspace. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, International Telecommunications Union, World Wide Web Consortium, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, and many others play integral roles in shaping the characteristics of the cyber domain. A detailed description of each forum and its relevance to the cyberspace is beyond the scope of this article, but it is enough to emphasize that the United States must make a concerted effort to support, participate with, and help set the direction for these governing bodies. Another area where NIST has been instrumental in exercising U.S. Government soft power in cyberspace has been in the sixth strategic point, cryptography. The mathematical underpinnings of cryptography provide the foundation of security in cyberspace. If the modern methods for securing data were broken, the entire economic engine of the Internet would crumble almost overnight. Fortunately, the odds of that happening are extremely low because of the NIST’s transparent process for defining cryptographic standards. Since 1972, NIST, in coordination with the National Security Agency, has been instrumental in testing and certifying cryptographic standards and making them available to the general public. A 2001 economic assessment determined their efforts had improved the U.S. economy by $1.2 billion as of 2000. 23 While more recent data were not available, given the exponential growth of e-commerce, it seems clear that this number has grown tremendously since then. The U.S. Government has an important role to play in this field because of the fragility of cryptography when poor practices or design implementations undercut its theoretical foundations. Enigma, the cypher machine used by the German military to encrypt communications during World War II, provides an excellent historical case study to support this point. R.A. Ratcliff describes the negative consequences of decentralizing the management of cryptography and how it undermined the German war effort.24 A similar problem would arise if individual companies were left to define their own cryptography standards. Cryptography also represents the elements of soft power in cyberspace since the government cannot dictate its implementation outside its own networks. Yet NIST’s open, competitive process for defining standards helps attract security conscious private entities that recognize the value of such a process. The United States must also continue to support research and development efforts into quantum computing as a subset of the cryptography category. Quantum computers have the potential to undermine the fundamental security assumptions of modern encryption. Fortunately, quantum computers are currently too immature to achieve this feat, but when and if they do reach that level of complexity, it is in the best interest of the United States to be at the forefront of this next generation of computing technology. U.S. Air Force (Jerry Morrison) Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn briefed on cloud computing by Google representatives 82 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 ndupres s . ndu. edu BARCOMB The final strategic point, IPv6 (the next generation standard), is associated with the fundamental routing protocol of the Internet. The current standard, IPv4, was formally defined in 1981, and it has sufficient capacity to handle over 4 billion unique Internet addresses.25 While this number sounds impressive, all of the available addresses were allocated as of February 3, 2011.26 There are many economic barriers associated with adopting IPv6, which will dramatically increase the total number of unique Internet addresses. While there are financial incentives for adopting the new standard, many companies are concerned that if they are the first to move to the new space, they will also have to bear the cost of dealing with security or design flaws. This makes adopting IPv6 a classic example of a public good, and therefore the U.S. Government should play a role in helping overcome this critical hurdle. Another pressing reason to facilitate IPv6 adoption in the United States is China’s national push to do the same. China has already developed a substantial program to implement the standard across its next generation of Internet architecture.27 With over 400 million users and a growing economy, China has the potential to wield significant influence over the IPv6 standard, its hardware implementations, and its governance forums. The United States must take a more proactive role in helping its own commercial interests overcome the adoption hurdles and curtail the possibility of losing the preponderance of influence over this critical piece of the Internet. Conclusion While the United States cannot dictate the direction of the overall global economy, it can take steps to facilitate the growth of American private enterprise in cyberspace and thereby maintain or improve U.S. leadership in the key strategic points of this domain. Securing the ocean’s concentration points with sea power helped foster American economic dominance for decades. Similarly, purposefully selecting, prioritizing, and capitalizing on the strategic “locations” of the electronic world could secure American influence in cyberspace. Like coastal defense, tactical security in cyberspace will emerge as a function of projecting cyber power at these key points, while also facilitating economic growth. n d u p res s .ndu.edu Hard power will be secondary to soft power in cyberspace for the foreseeable future. Strategies aimed at attracting and co-opting will be more successful than those attempting to control through force. This limits the role the military will play in cyberspace, but it does not invalidate the need for tailored government programs and policies. The United States must resist the current trend toward protectionism in an effort to maintain the status quo. Excessive attempts to control or exert hard power will likely do more harm than good. Like Mahan’s strategy for sea power, if the United States exerts soft power appropriately in these seven strategic points of cyberspace, it will be able to achieve both expansionism and security simultaneously. Through tailored fiscal policy, partnership with private enterprise, and prioritized research and development, the United States will continue to wield cyberspace power in the 21st century. JFQ NOTES 1 Alfred Thayer Mahan, Mahan on Naval Strategy: Selections from the Writings of Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, ed. John B. Hattendorf (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1991), 28. 2 Ibid., 118. 3 Ibid., 97. 4 Martin C. Libicki, Conquest in Cyberspace: National Security and Information Warfare (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 281. 5 Mahan, xx. 6 Joseph S. Nye, The Future of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 101. 7 William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 102. 8 Ibid., 45. 9 Ibid., 49. 10 NetMarketShare, “Desktop Operating System Market Share,” available at <http://marketshare.hitslink.com>. 11 Matt Rosoff, “Right Now, There Are 1.25 Billion Windows PCs Worldwide,” Business Insider, December 6, 2011, available at <http:// articles.businessinsider.com/2011-12-06/ tech/30481049_1_android-apps-ios>. 12 “Gartner Says Sales of Mobile Devices in Second Quarter of 2011 Grew 16.5 Percent Yearon-Year; Smartphone Sales Grew 74 Percent,” Gartner, August 11, 2011, available at <www. gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1764714>. 13 “The Nokia Story,” Nokia.com, available at <www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/company/ about-us/story/the-nokia-story/>. 14 “Browser, OS, Search Engine including Mobile Market Share,” Statcounter.com, available at <http://gs.statcounter.com/>. 15 “Our history in depth,” Google.com, available at <www.google.com/about/company/history. html>. 16 Steve Lohr, “Google Schools Its Algorithm,” The New York Times, March 6, 2011, available at <www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/ weekinreview/06lohr.html>. 17 Nye, 140. 18 Ibid., 115. 19 Viet Hoang, “Baidu vs. Google: Is the battle already lost for Google?” February 21, 2012, available at <http://digimind.com/blog/marketindustries/infographic-baidu-vs-google-is-thebattle-already-lost-for-google/>. 20 John Markoff, “Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S.,” The New York Times, August 29, 2008, available at <www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/ business/30pipes.html?pagewanted=all>. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 National Institute of Standards and Technology, “Planning Report 01-2: The Economic Impacts of NIST’s Data Encryption Standard (DES) Program,” October 2001, ES-1, ES-3. 24 R.A. Ratcliff, Delusions of Intelligence: Enigma, Ultra, and the End of Secure Ciphers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 215. 25 Internet Engineering Task Force, “Internet Protocol: DARPA Internet Program Protocol Specification,” September 1981, 7. 26 ICANN, “Available Pool of Unallocated IPv4 Internet Addresses Now Completely Emptied,” February 3, 2011, available at <www.icann.org/en/ news/press/releases/release-03feb11-en.pdf>. 27 Ben Worthen, “Internet Strategy: China’s Next Generation Internet CIO.com,” CIO.com, July 15, 2006, available at <www.cio.com/article/22985/ Internet_Strategy_China_s_Next_Generation_Internet>. issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 83 U.S. Air Force (Mike Buytas) The Future of U.S. Landpower Special Operations Versatility, Marine Corps Utility By k e v i n D . s t r i n g e r and katie m. sizemore Army Special Forces on patrol in Iraq 84 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 ndupres s . ndu. edu STRINGER and SIZEMORE A merican military landpower, represented by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, finds itself in a period of transition. This phase is characterized by troop drawdowns from the decade-long, manpower-intensive counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan; an uncertain budgetary perspective given impending defense cutbacks; and a divisive debate on the appropriate roles and missions for ground forces in the future. This article aims to provide a forward-looking view of U.S. landpower for the next decade. While the sheer difficulty of predicting the future is known, the demands of policy and force planning require some attempt to delineate at least the rough contours of this upcoming period. To achieve this tour de horizon, the article first provides an overview of the current state of American land forces. It then highlights the fiscal, demographic, and doctrinal challenges that impact American landpower. The authors then propose a more subtle application paradigm for landpower that is both indirect and preventive. The lead instruments for this approach are U.S. special operations forces (SOF) and Marine Air-Ground Task Forces (MAGTFs). Their missions involve interceding in priority geographic combatant command regions to stabilize, prevent, or preclude conflict situations in order to avoid manpower-intensive and costly conventional or counterinsurgency interventions, which will be unsustainable given future fiscal and demographic constraints. Examples from the most relevant or representative combatant commands for the future—U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM), U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM), and U.S. Africa Command (USAFRICOM)— demonstrate the developing nature of this “light touch” approach. The conclusion supports the premise that demography, finance, and threats dictate a more nuanced and sophisticated use of landpower than in the past. Current State and Fiscal Challenges U.S. landpower consists of its Army and Marine Corps elements, both of which bear consequences from the troop drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan, national demographic trends, and continuing controversy over roles and missions. The Army consists of 45 Active and 28 Reserve Brigade Combat Teams, while the Marine Corps is broken down into 29 Active and 9 Reserve Infantry Battalions.1 As of June 2011, there were 571,108 Active Army personnel and 200,827 Active Marine personnel stationed worldwide.2 When former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates itemized the fiscal year 2012 Department of Defense (DOD) budget, he stated that by the beginning of 2012, there would be fewer than 100,000 troops deployed in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He also added that by 2015, Army Active force levels would be reduced by at least 27,000 and the Marine Corps by 15,000 to 20,000 troops, assuming that the majority of troops in Afghanistan exit by 2014. This level would still be 40,000 troops larger than in 2008.3 demography, finance, and threats dictate a more nuanced and sophisticated use of landpower But given a new Presidential strategy that envisions a regional focus on the Asia-Pacific, the Army may be reduced to 490,000 troops from 570,000 and the Marines to 175,000 from 200,000 over the next few years.4 To place these figures in historical perspective, the Army today has 200,000 fewer Active-duty troops than in 1991.5 While the projected numbers may seem sufficient for national defense, these troop strengths depend upon a wider and highly volatile fiscal context that could bring further reductions. In this period of economic uncertainty, Congress is targeting DOD for cost reduction measures. The Congressional Budget Control Act passed in August 2011 seeks to reduce defense spending by $882 billion over the next 10 years.6 Furthermore, lack of congressional decisionmaking could result in lowered “sequestration” ceilings on spending that would effectively cut more than $500 billion from what the Pentagon has projected, plus sequestration cuts that would further indiscriminately slash as much as $500 Dr. Kevin D. Stringer (Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army Reserve) is an Associate Professor at Webster University Geneva. Katie M. Sizemore is a Master’s degree candidate in International Peace and Conflict Resolution in the School of International Service at American University. n d u p res s .ndu.edu billion more.7 In all, sequestration constraints could trim anywhere from $500 billion to over $1 trillion from projected long-term defense spending.8 The results could be devastating, with grave implications for the land components. As Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stated, “It’s a brigade without bullets. . . . It’s a paper tiger, an Army of barracks, buildings and bombs without enough trained Soldiers able to accomplish the mission. . . . It’s a force that suffers low morale, poor readiness and is unable to keep up with potential adversaries. In effect, it invites aggression.”9 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey echoed this view by stating that the U.S. military’s capacity to deploy ground forces for future operations would be reduced by around 15 percent as a result of defense spending cuts over the next decade. Concretely, American land forces would retain capability across the spectrum of conflict, but the frequency and capacity for use would be greatly limited.10 In the face of these unprecedented budgetary limits, defense planners face some nightmarish dilemmas about how best to maintain real flexibility and cost effectiveness.11 For instance, the Middle East remains the highest priority in terms of a continued military commitment, while Africa and Latin America receive the lowest priority for a large American military presence.12 The Asian theater increases in importance, but it does not require a large number of ground forces. Hence, policymakers must choose how to allocate declining resources and determine which areas require a strong U.S. military land commitment. Demographics In addition to budget cuts, demographic trends have the potential to strain recruiting as well as retention for the land components. Of the military Services, the Army deployed the largest number of personnel to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan but struggled to maintain and increase its end strength in accordance with congressional authorization. With recruiting and retention a stated priority for the Army, 2009 witnessed a decrease in issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 85 FEATURES | The Future of U.S. Landpower longer life expectancies further affects these numbers.17 This development leaves the American population with a lower number of young people of recruiting age as a proportion of the total population. This phenomenon partially explains the slight decrease seen in 2009 retention. Also, since military personnel tend to retire earlier due to the nature of the system, the overall ground force faces declining numbers at both ends of the military career spectrum.18 Finally, from a purely supply-side perspective, only 3 out of every 10 young Americans (17–24 years old) meet the medical, educational, and moral standards of the U.S. military.19 These facts equate to a smaller pool of personnel from which to recruit and retain.20 These combined fiscal and demographic limits imply a much smaller land component, which must still maintain adequate flexibility and combat power for future contingencies, yet be used sparingly for only the most crucial national security interests. Doctrinal Roles At the same time that American military landpower navigates a period of fiscal and demographic transition, threats to national security continue to multiply. A 2010 U.S. Joint Forces Command21 study on warfare lends credence to the view that the U.S. Marine Corps (Daniel A. Negrete) recruiting by 14.2 percent, or some 24,120 Soldiers. Retention measurements, referring to the number of Soldiers who reenlist within a given fiscal year, also saw a decrease in 2009 of 3.2 percent, or 3,830 Soldiers.13 Conversely, the Marine Corps has met or exceeded all of its recruiting goals in terms of quantity and quality every year since 2000, but these goals were lowered by 10 percent over the period 2000–2006.14 Several studies seem to confirm the challenges of future recruitment in a modern society. One Armed Forces & Society article looked at propensity to serve in the military, which is shown to be a strong predictor of actual enlistment. Propensity to serve is declining among American youth, and there are not sufficient “high propensity” youth to meet manpower needs, so harderto-reach segments must be targeted and recruited.15 Another study from the same journal explored underlying themes affecting enlistment while illustrating that the U.S. military faces substantial recruiting challenges. These hurdles stem from the high percentage of youth pursuing education beyond high school, cyclical fluctuations in civilian job opportunities, and the occurrence of international events that can lead to periods of heightened concern.16 The demographic trend of a “graying” population due to lower birth rates and U.S. Marine with Air-Ground Task Force posts security during jungle patrol exercise in Poptun, Guatemala 86 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 future holds a high potential for instability due to demographic, energy, and climate trends.22 Hostile great powers, once the predominant threats to American security, have been supplanted by rogue states, failed states, and nonstate actors—all of them pursuing asymmetrical strategies to offset U.S. military strengths.23 In Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, an intertwined wave of violent extremism and criminality confronts governments and populations.24 China and other emerging regional powers, often with opaque intentions, represent potential risks too. This future implies the commensurate need for adequate ground forces to address the contingency operations produced by such a volatile world.25 American society needs landpower for a diverse set of national security objectives: to fight and win major wars, secure a U.S. presence overseas, confront counterinsurgencies, execute stability operations, and assist in domestic disturbances and national disasters at home and abroad. Yet while the general public can create such task lists, policymakers struggle to organize or prioritize these missions since there is no objective standard to determine what constitutes “enough” security, or what particular mix of goals and resources is best. 26 To address this broad societal mandate, U.S. Army doctrine clearly describes future expectations for an expeditionary, campaign-quality Army that is proficient at full-spectrum operations—conventional warfare, hybrid warfare, irregular warfare, humanitarian assistance, stabilization operations, and any other mission the Nation gives it. The complexity of these missions defies the concept of a “one-size-fits-all” force structure. There are too many variables and uncertainties to expect a homogeneous army to be equally proficient and optimally organized for any mission in any scenario. This combination will most certainly require tradeoffs in force structure, training proficiency, and future acquisition programs.27 Similarly, the Marine Corps, considered a general purpose force in DOD, operates on the land, sea, and air, but is not optimized to dominate any of them. Rather, the Marine Corps is designed to be expeditionary. Organized in MAGTFs ranging in size from a 2,000-man Marine expeditionary unit (MEU) to a 45,000-man Marine expeditionary force, the Marine Corps can provide rapid response to humanitarian ndupres s . ndu. edu STRINGER and SIZEMORE crises, traditional power projection, forcibleentry capabilities, and sustained, large-scale combat operations.28 Yet ongoing military operations in two wars have exposed the difficulties of accomplishing critical policy aims while maintaining flexibility within manpower restrictions. In these conflicts, the Nation relied heavily on the Army to carry a significant portion of the national effort on land.29 Equally, operations in Iraq and Afghanistan required the Marine Corps to fight as a second land army.30 These campaigns strained the fullspectrum flexibility of both organizations. This recent history raises an important question for landpower usage in the future: What concept should determine land force employment, training, and structure in a limited personnel and fiscal context? To date, the debate centers around whether conventional means or counterinsurgency concepts should predominate.31 The next section summarizes this controversy and then offers a relevant third way for consideration. respectful of human rights.34 Sufficient U.S. troop numbers for counterinsurgency would most likely not be available in the future given budgetary and demographic limits. Additionally, institutional resistance stays strong inside the Army, despite recent growth in its special operations components. Though the Marine Corps remains comfortable with counterinsurgency because of its long history of small wars and policing operations, the Army, notwithstanding considerable experience in small wars, has never viewed counterinsurgency as anything other than a diversion from its main mission of conventional combat against like enemies.35 Contemporary supporters of the conventional view, notably Colonel Gian Gentile, contend that counterinsurgency has become the new American way of war prematurely and without proper examination.36 He calls for a reassessment of the doctrine in order to reach a more complete and operational role.37 Gentile rejects a doctrinal approach that places Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency, tional conflicts.”42 This article subscribes to this view and proposes an indirect and preventive land force paradigm where worldwide ground engagement is led by SOF and the Marine Corps. This approach finds support from several sources. As Secretary Gates noted in a February 25, 2011, speech at West Point, the United States will not send large land armies into the Middle East again, and the most plausible, high-end scenarios for the U.S. military are primarily naval and air engagements—whether in Asia, the Persian Gulf, or elsewhere. The strategic rationale for swift-moving expeditionary forces, whether Army or Marine, airborne infantry or special operations, is self-evident given the likelihood of counterterrorism, rapid reaction, disaster response, or stability or security force assistance missions.43 The new DOD strategic guidance confirms that U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.44 With versatility and flexibility vital characteristics for future landpower Mission Dissonance Landpower experts typically divide into two camps. Proponents of counterinsurgency such as Colonel Robert M. Cassidy, John Nagl, and David Kilcullen advocate U.S. ground forces addressing asymmetric conflicts for the future. They believe the U.S. military is more likely to be called upon to counter insurgencies, intervene in civil strife and humanitarian crises, rebuild nations, and wage unconventional types of warfare than it is to fight mirror-image armed forces. In this school, U.S. forces should focus on winning the “hearts and minds” of the population through compromise, negotiation, and above all the defeat of the insurgent’s strategy. The essential role of military forces is to create the preconditions necessary for nonmilitary measures to succeed.32 Yet such circumstances require large numbers of properly trained ground troops for securing population centers and infrastructure, maintaining order, providing humanitarian relief, and facilitating revived delivery of such fundamental services as electric power, potable water, and refuse collection.33 As one researcher noted, counterinsurgency campaigns are winnable if they attain a sufficient force density, are defending a generally popular and capable government, and rest largely on the shoulders of indigenous forces who are skilled, flexible, and n d u p res s .ndu.edu the Army has never viewed counterinsurgency as anything other than a diversion from its main mission of conventional combat against like enemies above conventional capacities. He writes that “the future of war is not only the counterinsurgencies of Iraq and Afghanistan” and that “the choice should be to build an army on the organizing principle of fighting.”38 He demands a military more heavily weighted to the requirements of conventional war.39 This latter perspective follows the intellectual tradition of Colonel Harry Summers in his 1982 On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, which repudiated the counterinsurgency lessons of Vietnam.40 Proponents of this group find succor in the 2008 Russo-Georgian war and the 2006 Lebanon war, both of which demonstrated the need for adequate levels of conventional capabilities.41 Given this impasse, it seems a third way is needed for the future. In a prescient article, Michael Cohen summarized thinking on the counterinsurgency and conventional approaches and concluded that both camps have it wrong. He asserted the argument of Steven Metz that, “in the end, perhaps the focus of the U.S. military and American foreign policy, writ large, should be to avoid counterinsurgencies—and to avoid conven- operations, coupled with the need to husband scarcer ground force personnel, SOF and the Marine Corps both possess capabilities and cultures for early and successful initial ground engagement in the exceedingly complex, unpredictable, and unstructured world that confronts the U.S. military. Their characteristics also complement those of the more conventional Army. While the regular Army remains expert at large-scale land combat and the integration of huge formations against similarly sized foes, SOF concentrate on irregular warfare—that is, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, psychological operations, and foreign internal defense. 45 The present and future environment is so complex that SOF can use their high levels of warfighting expertise, coupled with cultural knowledge and diplomacy skills, to lay the groundwork for interagency development, defense, and diplomatic activities that contribute to overall U.S. national interests. 46 Similarly, the Marine Corps offers real cross-functional utility. The Service can bridge the critical seam between Army issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 87 FEATURES | The Future of U.S. Landpower and Navy operations, is culturally and operationally adept and comfortable with irregular warfare, and can transition to fight as a second conventional army if needed. While SOF and Marine Corps land activities would be undertaken to preclude larger and more costly interventions, if these “steering” engagements, often interagency in character, are not successful, adequate numbers of heavy Army conventional forces should remain for reinforcement. David E. Johnson eloquently makes this case in a recent RAND study on the future of the heavy army. Army Heavy Brigade Combat Teams provide a crucial hedge against the full range of potential enemies that the United States could face in the future: nonstate irregular, statesponsored hybrid, and state adversaries.47 But these assets, most likely limited by fiscal constraints, should be kept in reserve. Rather, the future of landpower employment, based upon regional priorities, already tends toward giving SOF primacy of engagement, while simultaneously utilizing the versatility of the MAGTFs. This trend should be reinforced. Landpower by Geographic Combatant Commands U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), U.S. Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM), USCENTCOM, U.S. European Command (USEUCOM), USPACOM, and USAFRICOM form part of the unified combatant command community and are charged with the command and control of the U.S. military on a geographical basis.48 This arrangement is controversial. Some experts question whether these commands should be modified or rendered obsolete altogether given the limitations posed by a rigid regional organization that no longer fits comfortably in today’s global security environment.49 Ambassador Edward Marks, noting that one of our foremost security challenges is international terrorism, makes the following observation: The lead for planning (and often conducting) military counterterrorism campaigns falls on the shoulder of [U.S.] Special Operations Command—a global, functional command. Another major security challenge is monitoring and securing weapons of mass destruction . . . a task that falls to another global, functional command—[U.S.] Strategic Command. In other words, the [geographic combatant commands] are not designated as 88 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 the lead military organization for managing our two primary military challenges.50 Conversely, Ambassador Mary Yates views an interagency combatant command like that found in USAFRICOM as more relevant to the post-9/11 environment through a close integration of both military and civilian efforts.51 While acknowledging this debate and the imperfections of dividing the world into regional commands, a prioritized combatant command lens provides useful examples to show the utility of SOF and the Marine Corps to shape, influence, manage, or deter specific risks found in key regions in the future. In terms of priorities for future landpower employment, four of the current combatant commands stand out and illustrate the relevancy of leading with SOF and Marine Corps capabilities. USCENTCOM remains a priority for strategic landpower since it oversees operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and conducts a theater-wide campaign against al Qaeda.52 USPACOM’s importance grows as American foreign policy pivots away from the greater Middle East to the Asia-Pacific. President Barack Obama’s United States. Yet as troop withdrawals continue, the future role of landpower in USCENTCOM is unclear. As Secretary Gates noted, a large land army will not be a part of the U.S. role in the Middle East in the future, but rather a lighter, more diverse force will shape the strategic architecture of U.S. engagement in the region. The reduction of conventional troops will likely place a larger burden on SOF formations as well as increase their roles in the region. As a case in point, the majority of Army Special Forces are operating in the USCENTCOM area of responsibility.56 In addition to carrying out direct combat and counterterrorism operations, in-theater SOF conduct a wide variety of indirect missions including psychological, training, and support operations for paramilitary forces.57 Besides SOF, the Marine Corps is active. The 15th MEU demonstrated a perfect example of the future of land warfare in USCENTCOM when it simultaneously provided close-air support in Afghanistan, conducted evacuation and disaster-relief operations in Pakistan, and secured and removed suspected pirates from the container ship Magellan Star in the Gulf of Aden.58 in-theater SOF conduct a wide variety of indirect missions including psychological, training, and support operations for paramilitary forces new “Hedge” strategy confirms this shift.53 Finally, USAFRICOM is uniquely focused on building security capacities rather than warfighting and serves as a surrogate example in this section for the equally vital USSOUTHCOM given their similarities in mission.54 These two latter commands, USAFRICOM and USSOUTHCOM, will merit more attention in the future since instability in these regions is multigenerational and represents a long-term threat to security in an increasingly globalized world.55 USNORTHCOM and USEUCOM, while important as logistics bases and power projection platforms, are less relevant for the landpower discussion given the lower threat profiles found there. USCENTCOM. While overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. Central Command has been the focal point of the combatant command community for most of this decade. Its region includes Pakistan, which together with Afghanistan constitutes the epicenter of the terrorist threat to the USPACOM. Similarly, the security environment in the Pacific demands versatility and flexibility from the military’s land forces. Currently composed of 250,000 personnel, U.S. Pacific Command’s major effort has been enhancing the stability of the AsiaPacific region. Its main focus areas include strengthening and advancing alliances and partnerships, remaining prepared to respond to a Korean Peninsula contingency, and countering transnational threats.59 As in USCENTCOM, SOF are uniquely organized and prepared to counter the present threats. U.S. Special Operations Command Pacific (SOCPAC) has increasingly used an indirect approach to combat terrorism in the region and the threats posed by al Qaeda. SOCPAC’s efforts consist mostly of foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare. It works closely with host nation militaries and political leadership to foster ties and coordinate efforts so that they can develop the capability to provide security ndupres s . ndu. edu STRINGER and SIZEMORE three principles of collaborating with African partners, approaching the continent within a regional framework, and cooperating as part of an interagency team. While a conventional military conflict in Africa is unlikely, the challenges created by crime, poverty, corruption, illicit trafficking of materials, terrorism, and institutional weakness call for a more varied and preventive security cooperation approach.65 A traditional military culture focused primarily on major land conflict has difficulty using this capacity-building methodology in foreign nations, yet since it is the heart of USAFRICOM’s mission, SOF formations, with their versatility, play an important role in its execution.66 In September 2011, General Carter Ham, commander of USAFRICOM, asked for more special operations forces. His statement referenced the growing counterterrorism effort in Africa due to signs of increased collaboration between al-Shabaab in East Africa, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and Nigeria-based Boko Harem.67 To avoid future high-profile wars, subordinate commanders were told to focus on “smart power”—that is, training national armies to keep the peace and neutralize threats before they reach the headlines.68 The Army’s role in USAFRICOM places stability operations on par with major combat missions through its SOF elements within Special Operations Command Africa.69 Meanwhile, U.S. Marine Corps Forces Africa (MARFORAF) focuses on engagement through military-to-military training with partner nations. In anticipation of this broader future, the Marine Corps created a Security Cooperation Marine Air-Ground Task Force concept tailored for security cooperation and civil-military operations. This force provides another expeditionary option to augment joint and interagency capabilities that are already available to geographic combatant commands. This formation will help partner nations in not only Africa but also Southwest Asia and South America in order to foster stability and prevent conflict in their respective regions.70 In Africa, Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force (SPMAGTF) 12 exemplifies this concept by sending small training groups to partner with local militaries in an effort to indirectly blunt the spread of extremist groups across the continent. The task force has dispatched teams across a wide swath of Africa over the course of its 6-month deployment in support of MAR- U.S. Marine Corps over the long term. SOCPAC land forces have learned to do more with less via an indirect approach of institution- and capacitybuilding for addressing asymmetric threats in USPACOM.60 In addition to SOCPAC’s unique efforts in the region, the self-contained and sea-based MAGTFs are the best kind of fire extinguishers—because of their flexibility, reliability, logistical simplicity, and relative economy.61 The Marines were scheduled in 2012 to begin reorienting from Afghanistan to the Pacific because of the increasing emphasis on a ground force presence in the region.62 For example, the Marine Corps showcased its expeditionary force readiness by deploying within 20 hours to Japan and beginning humanitarian assistance following the devastating tsunami in March 2011.63 Forward-positioned MAGTFs, supported when necessary by immediately deployable reinforcements, enable swift power projection and rapid crisis resolution throughout the USPACOM area of operations.64 USAFRICOM. Created in 2007 as the newest addition to the geographic combatant commands, U.S. Africa Command covers all 53 countries on that continent. The USAFRICOM mission operates on the U.S. Marines with Echo Company, 4th Reconnaissance Battalion, demonstrate amphibious assault during Marine Week Saint Louis, June 2011 n d u p res s .ndu.edu issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 89 FEATURES | The Future of U.S. Landpower FORAF, sending from 5 to 50 Marines into partner nations from days to months at a time. The 180-troop-strong unit was formed over the summer of 2011 from Marine Forces Reserve units and equipped with two KC-130 Hercules aircraft to ferry teams to and from African countries. The unit is among the first of its kind. In Uganda, the Marine team of force reconnaissance, infantry, and combatengineering troops taught common soldiering skills that Ugandan soldiers need for use against the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army. More specialized follow-on training was designed to help Ugandan field engineers counter al-Shabaab insurgency tactics in Somalia, where urban obstacles and improvised explosive devices reminiscent of the Iraq War are common. This small task force represents one of the first significant security cooperation missions undertaken by DOD in Uganda, a nation more accustomed to State Department interaction. Under Secretary of the Navy Robert Work singled out the task force as a prime example of the type of “low footprint, high payoff operations” the White House is seeking as a means of maintaining global defense postures as the Pentagon pledges to cut at least $450 billion in spending over the next decade. Using a small group such as the one in Uganda could simplify the complex politics associated with deploying and hosting troops in a foreign nation. During testimony to Congress on February 29, 2012, General Ham noted that African nations’ reluctance to host large numbers of U.S. troops was one reason for USAFRICOM headquarters to remain in Europe despite growing threats in Africa. SPMAGTF 12 missions on the continent could represent an early example of a long-heralded Marine Corps return to quick reaction operations.71 President Obama’s decision announced in November 2011 to redeploy 2,500 Marines to Australia in order to expand and solidify military alliances with Asia, and subsequent policy documents, provide a glimpse into this evolving future of American landpower. Small, versatile forces judiciously placed in key locations to symbolize long-term American military commitment could provide expandable platforms for capabilities across a range of missions—humanitarian crises, power projection, and disaster relief. This blueprint mirrors the new strategic guidance that states, “Whenever possible, we will develop innovative, low-cost, and small footprint approaches to achieve our national security objectives.”74 This foretaste demonstrates that even in times of stringent budgetary cuts and adverse demographic trends, the measured use of landpower remains a strategic tool for projecting American interests and influence abroad.75 JFQ Conclusion While many uncertainties cloud the future, the United States must possess a flexible land force—one that can engage, respond, and project—to operate across the domains that challenge its ability to execute global responsibilities.72 Yet demographic, financial, and future threat parameters dictate that the use of landpower must become more nuanced and sophisticated than in the past. Rather than argue the merits of counterinsurgency or conventional approaches for the future, the U.S. military should concentrate on a subtler application paradigm for landpower that is both indirect and preventive. In this setting, SOF and MAGTFs lead the ground force effort to prevent, deter, and contain threats in USCENTCOM, USPACOM, USAFRICOM, and USSOUTHCOM in order to avoid manpower-intensive engagements. Conventional and heavy land forces remain on hand, but they are husbanded as the strategic reserve to be used only if the SOF and MAGTF efforts fail. This model still allows “strategic pluralism,” an approach that calls for a wide variety of military forces and weapons to meet a diversity of threats.73 NOTES U.S. Navy (Josh Ives) Security force team member for PRT Farah provides security during key leader engagement 90 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 1 Frank A. DiStasio, Jr., The Army Budget Fiscal Year 2012: An Analysis (Arlington, VA: Association of the United States Army, 2011). 2 “Active Duty Military Personnel by Regional Area and by Country,” Department of Defense, Defense Manpower Data Center, 2011. 3 DiStasio. 4 Mackubin Thomas Owens, “The President’s Risky Defense Strategy,” The Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2012. 5 Max Boot, “Slashing America’s Defense: A Suicidal Trajectory,” Commentary, January 2012, available at <www. commentarymagazine.com/article/ slashing-americas-defense-a-suicidal-trajectory/>. 6 David W. Barno, Nora Bensahel, and Travis Sharp, “How to Cut the Defense Budget Responsibly,” Foreign Affairs, November 2, 2011. 7 Based on President Barack Obama’s fiscal year 2012 budget proposal to spend over the next 10 years. 8 Defense Spending, the Super Committee, and the Price of Greatness (Washington, DC: Defending Defense Project, November 17, 2011), available at <http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/2011/pdf/ defendingdefense.pdf>. 9 Leon Panetta, Department of Defense news conference, Washington, DC, November 10, 2011. 10 James Blitz, “U.S. military cuts will affect ground forces, says Dempsey,” The Financial Times, December 1, 2011, 4. 11 Philip Sabin, The Current and Future Utility of Air & Space Power, Discussion Paper No.1 (Wilt- ndupres s . ndu. edu STRINGER and SIZEMORE shire, UK: Royal Air Force Centre for Air Power Studies, 2010). 12 Barno, Bensahel, and Sharp. 13 U.S. Army Sustainability Report 2010 (Washington, DC: Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy, and Environment, 2011). 14 Recruiting, Retention, and Future Levels of Military Personnel (Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office, 2006). 15 Todd Woodruff, Ryan Kelty, and David R. Segal, “Propensity to Serve and Motivation to Enlist among American Combat Soldiers,” Armed Forces & Society 32, no. 3 (2006), 353–366. 16 John Eighmey, “Why Do Youth Enlist? Identification of Underlying Themes,” Armed Forces & Society 32, no. 2 (2006), 307–328. 17 George H. Quester, “Demographic Trends and Military Recruitment: Surprising Possibilities,” Parameters 35, no. 1 (Spring 2005), 27–40. 18 Ibid. 19 Michèle A. Flournoy and Alice Hunt, “The State of US Ground Forces: Fact Sheet,” Washington, DC, Center for a New American Security, 2008. 20 Laura B. Shrestha and Elayne J. Heisler, The Changing Democratic Profile of the United States, RL32701 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, March 31, 2011). 21 U.S. Joint Forces Command was formally disestablished August 4, 2011. 22 Joint Operating Environment 2010 (Norfolk, VA: U.S. Joint Forces Command, 2010). 23 Jeffrey Record, The American Way of War: Cultural Barriers to Successful Counter-Insurgency, Cato Policy Analysis, no. 577 (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, September 2006), 6. 24 Cheryl Pellerin, “Commanders Cite Unpredictable Future Threats,” American Forces Press Service, 2011. 25 Kevin D. Stringer, “Global counterinsurgency and US army expansion: the case for recruiting foreign troops,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 22, no. 1 (2011), 142–169. 26 Richard A. Lacquement, Jr., “In the Army Now,” American Interest 6, no. 1 (2010). 27 “Revisiting Priorities for the Army’s Future Force,” Military Review 89, no. 5 (2009). 28 James T. Conway, “The Posture of the U.S. Marine Corps,” Military Technology 34, no. 9 (2010). 29 Lacquement. 30 Conway. 31 Lacquement. 32 John A. Nagl, “Let’s Win the Wars We’re In,” Joint Force Quarterly 52 (1st Quarter 2009); Robert M. Cassidy, “Why Great Powers Fight Small Wars Badly,” Military Review 82, no. 5 (2002); John A. Nagl, “A Better War in Afghanistan,” Joint Force Quarterly 56 (1st Quarter 2010); and David J. Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency,” Journal of Strategic Studies 28, no. 4 (2005). n d u p res s .ndu.edu 33 Record, 7; and Max Boot, “The Struggle to Transform the Military,” Foreign Affairs 84, no. 2 (2005). 34 Carl Conetta, “No Good Reason to Boost Army, Marine Corps End Strength,” Project on Defense Alternatives, Briefing Report No. 20, Washington, DC, 2007. 35 Record, 10. 36 Gian P. Gentile, “Is Counterinsurgency the Right Path in Afghanistan? No,” U.S. News Digital Weekly 1, no. 40 (2009). 37 Gian P. Gentile, “Time for the Deconstruction of Field Manual 3-24,” Joint Force Quarterly 58 (3rd Quarter 2010). 38 Gian P. Gentile, “Let’s Build an Army to Win All Wars,” Joint Force Quarterly 52 (1st Quarter 2009). 39 Gian P. Gentile, “A (Slightly) Better War: A Narrative and Its Defects,” World Affairs Journal (Summer 2008), available at <www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/ slightly-better-war-narrative-and-its-defects>. 40 Harry G. Summers, Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1982). 41 Roger N. McDermott, “Russia’s Conventional Armed Forces and the Georgian War,” Parameters (Spring 2009). 42 Michael Cohen, “The Counterinsurgency Trap: Future of the US Military,” The New Atlanticist, March 23, 2009, available at <www.acus.org/new_atlanticist/ counterinsurgency-trap-future-us-military>. 43 Robert M. Gates, speech, West Point, NY, February 25, 2011. 44 Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense (Washington DC: Department of Defense, January 2012), 6. 45 Lacquement. 46 Eric Olsen, “Context and Capabilities in Irregular Warfare,” Special Warfare 23, no. 5 (2010). 47 David E. Johnson, Heavy Armor in the Future Security Environment (Santa Monica: RAND, 2011). 48 “U.S. Unified Combatant Commands,” International Debates 8, no. 6 (2010). 49 Edward Marks, “Rethinking the Geographic Combatant Commands,” Interagency Journal 1, no. 1 (2010). 50 Ibid. 51 Mary C. Yates, “U.S. Africa Command: Value Added,” Joint Force Quarterly 52 (1st Quarter 2009). 52 “U.S. Unified Combatant Commands.” 53 Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership. 54 Jerry Lanier, “Foreword,” in African Security and the African Command: Viewpoints on the US Role in Africa, ed. Terry F. Buss et al. (Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press, 2011), x. 55 “Doctrine Man,” Defense Technology International, January 2012, 73. 56 Kate Brannen, “U.S. Army Special Operations Force Not Expected to Grow Beyond 2017,” Defense News, 2010. 57 John J. Kruzel, “Special Forces to Remain in Iraq through Drawdown,” American Forces Press Service, 2010. 58 George J. Flynn, “Versatility in the Age of Uncertainty,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 136, no. 11 (2010). 59 Robert F. Willard, “United States Pacific Command Strategic Guidance,” available at <www.pacom.mil/about-uspacom/strategicguidance.shtml>. 60 David P. Fridovich and Fred T. Krawchuk, “Winning in the Pacific: The Special Operations Forces,” Joint Force Quarterly 44 (1st Quarter 2007). 61 B.H. Liddell Hart, Deterrence or Defense (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1960). 62 Daniel A. Wetzel, “Future of the Marine Corps Afghanistan Drawdown,” Marines Blog, December 1, 2011. 63 Ibid. 64 Flynn. 65 “United States Africa Command: Statement of General Carter F. Ham,” Washington, DC, House Armed Services Committee, 2011. 66 Edward P. Donnelly and Robert Maginnis, “Preparing Soldiers to Help Foreign Partners Meet 21st Century Challenges,” Military Review 91, no. 3 (May–June 2011). 67 Robert Burns, “Terror Collaboration in Africa Worries U.S. General,” The Washington Times, September 14, 2011. 68 “American in Africa: A Light Footprint, the Pentagon’s Unusual African Arm,” The Economist, April 14, 2011. 69 “United States Africa Command: The First Three Years” (Stuttgart, Germany: U.S. Africa Command Public Affairs Office, 2011). 70 Vincent J. Ciuccoli and David A. Anderson, “Marines Are Optimizing Forward Presence,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 136, no. 11 (2010). 71 Jad Sleiman, “Small footprint, high payoff: US Marines train Ugandan forces to face alShabaab, LRA,” War on Terror News, March 14, 2012, available at <http://waronterrornews. typepad.com/home/2012/03/small-footprint-highpayoff-us-marines-train-ugandan-forces-to-faceal-shabaab-lra-.html>. 72 Flynn. 73 Owens. 74 Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership, 3. 75 Jackie Calmes, “Obama and Gillard Expand U.S.-Australia Military Ties,” The New York Times, November 16, 2011. issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 91 The German Military Mission to Romania, 1940–1941 By r i c H a r D l . D i n a r D o W hen one thinks of security assistance and the training of foreign troops, Adolf Hitler’s Germany is not a country that typically comes to mind. Yet there were two instances in World War II when Germany did indeed deploy troops to other countries that were in noncombat circumstances. The countries in question were Finland and Romania, and the German military mission to Romania is the subject of this article. The activities of the German mission to Romania are discussed and analyzed, and some conclusions and hopefully a few takeaways are offered that could be relevant for military professionals today. Wikimedia Commons Creation of the Mission Finnish Volunteer Battalion of German Waffen-SS return home from front in 1943 92 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 The matter of how the German military mission to Romania came into being can be covered relatively quickly. In late June 1940, the Soviet Union demanded from Romania the cession of both Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. The only advice Germany could give to the Romanian government was to agree to surrender the territory.1 Fearful of further Soviet encroachments, the Romanian government made a series of pleas to Germany including a personal appeal from King Carol II to Hitler for German military assistance in the summer of 1940. Hitler, however, was not yet willing to undertake such a step. Thus, all Romanian requests were rebuffed with Hitler telling Carol that Romania brought its own problems upon itself by its prior pro-Allied policy. Hitler also ndup res s . ndu. edu D I NARDO urged the Romanian government to settle its problems with Hungary peaceably.2 Having been urged by Hitler to attain a peaceful solution, Romania and Hungary then asked Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini to act as arbitrators in their dispute over the contested area of Transylvania.3 Much to Romania’s chagrin, however, Hitler and Mussolini tried to split the difference but in Hungary’s favor. On August 30, 1940, Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Romania signed the Second Vienna Award. By the terms of that agreement, Romania had to cede about half of Transylvania to Hungary.4 The territorial losses incurred during the summer of 1940 caused considerable political instability in Romania. The Second Vienna Award, coming after Romania’s agreeing to conduct a pro-Axis foreign policy, completed the discrediting of Carol’s government. Carol appointed Romania’s top military leader, General Ion Antonescu, as prime minister on September 4, 1940. Antonescu promptly forced Carol’s abdication on September 6, with exile following soon thereafter. The now vacant Romanian throne was then occupied by King Michael, a callow youth of 19, while Antonescu assumed dictatorial powers and the title of “Leader,” much in keeping with his Nazi and Fascist colleagues.5 With Antonescu’s ascension to power, the relationship between Germany and Romania warmed considerably. Antonescu began by promising closer collaboration with Germany. He also renewed the request for German military assistance, with the idea of having Germans train and reorganize the Romanian army. This time, Hitler agreed and on September 19, 1940, he decided to send a military mission to Romania. The improvement in relations would culminate on November 23, 1940, with Romania’s adherence to the Tripartite Pact.6 To be precise, Germany actually sent four missions to Romania. The umbrella organization was the German military mission, commanded by Army General Erik Hansen, who was also the military attaché to Bucharest. Hansen also commanded the German army mission (Deutsches Heeres Mission in Rümanien, or DHM) to Romania. Richard L. DiNardo is Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College in Quantico, Virginia. n d u p res s .ndu.edu The next major element was the German air force mission (Deutsches Luftwaffe Mission in Rümanien, or DLM), commanded by Luftwaffe Lieutenant General Wilhelm Speidel. The final part of the military mission was the German navy mission, headed by Admiral W. Tillesen.7 This article looks at the activities of the DLM to a small degree, but the major focus will be on the DHM. Hitler laid out the chains of command for the elements of the German military mission in his directive of October 10, 1940. Each service mission traced its administrative chain of command to its respective headquarters in Germany. Hansen, as head of the military mission, would decide matters of common concern. Political matters would be turned over to the German minister in Romania, who looked after German foreign policy interests there.8 German Me 109E, German Hs 112B, and Romanian IAR 80A fighters. The bomber fleet included German He 111s, French Bloch 210s and Potez 63s, Italian SM 84s, Polish PZL 37Bs, and Romanian IAR 37s. The Romanians used several of their own aircraft models for reconnaissance as well as British Blenheims. Under these circumstances, the best the Germans were able to do was to train ground troops extensively in aircraft identification and make sure the Romanians received British aircraft and parts captured in Yugoslavia in 1941.10 The DHM and Romanian Army The major effort in Romania was made by the German army mission, the DHM, first commanded by Hansen and later by General Eugen Ritter von Schobert. Aside from Schobert’s own staff, the presence of the DHM would be manifested initially in with Antonescu’s ascension to power, the relationship between Germany and Romania warmed considerably The DLM and the Aerial Defense of Romania The DLM had two principal missions. The first was to create air defenses around the vital oil region of Romania in the vicinity of Ploesti and the Black Sea port of Constanta. Also involved was the regulation of air space over the defended areas. The second mission was to modernize the Romanian air force. The DLM was more successful in completing the first mission. Speidel and his staff were able to use both Romanian and German materiel and procedures to make Ploesti one of the most heavily defended targets against air attacks. This was to prove invaluable in the initial Romanian participation in Operation Barbarossa. Between late June and midOctober 1941, Ploesti and Constanta were attacked 91 times by Soviet aircraft. Led by the efforts of the Luftwaffe’s Jagd Geschwader 52, the combined Romanian-German defense brought down some 81 Soviet aircraft.9 Modernizing the Romanian air force proved a bridge too far for the DLM to travel. Bringing the air force up to date assumed growing importance for Germany as Romanian participation in Barbarossa became a certainty. The most notable problem was the veritable plethora of aircraft used by the Romanian air force. This mélange included the form of a division-size unit. At first, this was to be Friedrich Wilhelm von Rothkirch’s und Panthen’s 13th Motorized Infantry Division, but was later expanded to include Hans Valentin Hube’s 16th Panzer Division as well. Several infantry divisions were added in the course of 1941 as German plans first for the invasion of Greece and later the Soviet Union took shape.11 Like the DLM, the DHM had two missions. Aside from the training mission, the German units were to assist the Romanian force in erecting defenses against a possible Soviet invasion, although the mere presence of German units in Romania did act as a guarantee against further Soviet encroachments. The second mission was to train the Romanian army up to a level that was as close to German standards as possible. These units would play a part in the invasion of the Soviet Union. Hitler had distinctly mentioned this in his December 5, 1940, speech to the heads of the Wehrmacht. Both Finland and Romania are mentioned as possible allies in the execution of Operation Barbarossa in Hitler’s first official directive on the subject issued December 18, 1940.12 The DHM’s ability to carry out its training mission was hampered by several factors outside of its control. The first was an issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 93 RECALL | The German Military Mission to Romania earthquake that struck Romania on the night of November 9–10, 1940. German soldiers in the 13th Motorized Infantry Division found themselves in the unaccustomed position of rendering humanitarian assistance to Romanian civil authorities, which did yield some dividends in terms of goodwill.13 The second factor that disrupted DHM activity was the tension between the Antonescu government and Romania’s contribution to fascism, the Iron Guard. By January 1941, Antonescu decided that cooperation between his government and the leader of the Iron Guard, Horia Sima, was no longer possible and that the Iron Guard would have to be dealt with decisively. For his part, although he had more affinity ideologically with the Iron Guard, Hitler decided that Antonescu was a much more reliable ally with whom to deal. The result was the suppression of the Iron Guard by the Romanian army, in some cases with German support. Horia Sima and some of his principal followers fled to Germany, where they were offered safe haven.14 Third, DHM efforts were interrupted by the German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece, an operation that had to be mounted from Romania. The German High Command had already indicated to Antonescu that some 500,000 German troops slated for the invasion of Greece would pass through Romania. While the troops would be under the tactical command of Field Marshal Wilhelm List, the Twelfth Army commander, List would be subordinate to the head of the DHM for the purposes of the preparation and conduct of the Twelfth Army’s passage. As head of the DHM, Hansen would keep Romanian headquarters informed of the army’s progress.15 Since there were large numbers of German troops passing through Romanian territory, the DHM also had to negotiate a status-of-forces agreement with the Romanian government. German troops were instructed not to buy too many goods from the Romanians, especially items from the countryside, since it would weaken the Romanian economy. Romania was already paying for the two initial instruction units that would conduct the training of its army for the DHM. German soldiers were told to present as friendly a face to the Romanians as possible and to help the Romanian people when circumstances required. Finally, training of the Romanian army by the DHM was set back by the hard winter of 1940–1941, especially in Moldavia.16 94 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 Aside from these problems, members of the German military mission in Romania, especially in the DHM, had to avoid stepping into the minefield of ethnic minority politics. For the DHM, this centered around the Volksdeutsche (ethnic German) community in Romania. Like all ethnic German communities in that part of Europe, the Volksdeutsche in Romania had major connections to the Nazi Party, and the Nazis had newspapers and political organizations in Romania. Not surprisingly, German language newspapers ran articles welcoming the German military presence.17 A sticky issue for the DHM was the fact that the Volksdeutsche in Romania were subject to conscription and service in the Romanian army, which they were resistant to for a variety of reasons. Matters were made more complex by the presence of the Schutzstaffel (SS) recruiters in Romania who were eagerly seeking ever more members for Heinrich Himmler’s expanding SS empire. The Romanians naturally objected because they sought this manpower for their own army, and avoiding military service in Romania was in fact a crime. Both issues were eventually solved. When a local Volksdeutsche leader, Gauleiter Fromm, came to Hans lowed by Himmler’s recall of all SS officials from Romania.18 As these problems were dealt with by Germans or Romanians or both, the DHM got on with the business of training the Romanian army. Training was conducted at the tactical and operational levels, at least in a theoretical sense. There was also an ideological aspect to the training. Tactically, the Germans set up training centers for the Romanian 5th, 6th, 13th, 18th, and 20th infantry divisions as well as for the Romanian Panzer Division. These centers aimed at training Romanian soldiers in both German weapons and tactics. Later on in the spring of 1941, the Germans extended the training in a limited way to artillery.19 They also sought to improve the quality of Romanian general officers through education. The DHM set up the equivalent of the German Kriegsakademie in Romania. All aspirants for general officer rank were to take a 2-year course of instruction. Like its German counterpart, the Romanian war college was tactically oriented and focused on division-sized operations. The course was also aimed at producing officers who could undertake all staff and administrative functions associated with division and brigade operations. A course was also set up for general officers and older staff officers as well, lasting from 1 to 3 months.20 like its German counterpart, the Romanian war college was tactically oriented and focused on division-sized operations Valentin Hube on January 28, 1941, he complained about Romanian conscription and recounted all manner of mistreatment of Volksdeutsche by Romanian authorities. Hube sidestepped Fromm’s complaints first by expressing skepticism of his tales of Romanian mistreatment, and then got around the conscription issue by telling Fromm that service in the Romanian army was also service to the Führer. The activities of Himmler’s SS recruiters were also curbed after the SS was able to recruit about 1,000 men from the Romanian Volksdeutsche. The German minister to Romania, Manfred Killinger, wrote to Himmler that if so many young German men were removed from Romania, the remaining female Volksdeutsche in Romania would have no choice but to marry Romanians, thus polluting good German blood lines. This was fol- As might be expected of such an effort mounted by a country such as Nazi Germany, there was the previously mentioned ideological component to DHM activities. In a situation report, Hube noted that, in addition to the need for measures to be taken against corruption in the officer corps, friendly attitudes toward Great Britain and the Jews had to be eliminated. To aid this, German propaganda was disseminated that found a degree of receptivity in Romania, although not as much as the Germans hoped.21 The various endeavors of the DHM brought about a record of mixed success. The biggest problem the DHM had was a lack of time. Given all of the issues discussed above and the ever-looming onset of Operation Barbarossa, the DHM had at best 4 months to train with the Romanians before they would be committed to combat against the ndup res s . ndu. edu D I NARDO n d u p res s .ndu.edu The final problem faced by the DHM in conducting its activities was lack of standardization in the Romanian army. Like many of the armies in that part of the world, Romania did not have an armaments industry sufficient to equip the army by itself. To make up the difference, the army made all manner of weapons purchases. The result was that by the time the German military mission arrived in Romania, the Romanian army was using a bewildering variety of weapons including Czech, Russian, French, and Austrian rifles; French, Russian, and Czech machineguns; and German, French, Italian, Russian, Czech, Romanian, and Austrian artillery pieces, all of varying calibers. Although the Romanian army tried to mitigate this situation by minimizing the number of different weapons allocated to specific divisions, the lack of standardization made training difficult.27 The Test of Combat The ultimate outcome of DHM activities was the record of the Romanian army in combat. In this regard, the Romanian record was mixed. Broadly put, Romanian participation in Barbarossa could be divided into two German Federal Archive Soviets.22 This was particularly important regarding the issue of mindset. During the interwar period, Romania’s closest ally had been France. Naturally, such a relationship had a military component. Romanian officers attended French schools, and, institutionally, the Romanian army was greatly influenced by French doctrine and thinking. If it proved difficult to get more senior Romanian officers to abandon what the Germans saw as the overly “schematic” and methodical French approach to combat operations, the younger officers, in contrast, proved more receptive to German concepts and doctrine.23 A major problem faced by the DHM involved the lack of interpreters. To be sure, the mastery of a foreign language was a requirement for graduation from the Kriegsakademie. The vast majority of German officers who studied a foreign language generally gravitated toward French or English. In 1932, for example, a language examination was administered by Wehrkreis (Military District) III in Berlin. Some 178 officers took examinations, the great majority of which were in French or English. Only 34 took the examination in Russian, and no one took it in Romanian. Examinations administered by the Luftwaffe showed a somewhat wider variation, but again Romanian was well down on the list.24 Consequently, the German divisions with the DHM had relatively few interpreters available to provide instruction and training to the Romanians. The 16th Panzer Division, for example, had only two interpreters on its staff, a wholly inadequate number given the tasks set for the unit. The Romanians did not have the resources to make up the shortfall. They were able to provide only one interpreter to the German 170th Infantry Division.25 Another major problem the Germans saw in trying to train the Romanian army was the lack of a professional noncommissioned officer (NCO) corps able to carry out its responsibilities. In the German army, the day-to-day conduct of training and, indeed, the daily running of the army at the lowest levels were often left to its NCOs and junior officers. In the Romanian army, however, such positions were not held in the same degree of esteem. In the eyes of DHM liaison officers, too many Romanian NCOs looked upon their positions as chances for personal monetary gain.26 Ion Antonescu with Adolf Hitler in Munich, June 10, 1941 issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 95 RECALL | The German Military Mission to Romania 96 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 which was also operating on that part of the front, thanks to the efforts of German liaison officers with both formations.32 The siege of Odessa proved long and costly to the Romanians. The Soviet High Command was able to keep the Independent Coastal Army, garrisoning Odessa, supplied by sea. That allowed the garrison to conduct an active and energetic defense. Several successful Soviet sorties forced the Fourth Army to fight repeatedly over the same ground in bloody assaults. It was only after the Romanians Radu Mihai Crisan phases. The first phase extended from the start of the invasion on June 22, 1941, up through the first week of July. During this time, the Romanian army was tasked by Hitler to defend the Pruth River and then gain some bridgeheads across it. The army would also defend the Romanian oil-producing areas and the Black Sea port of Constanta.28 The second phase of the Romanian army’s part in the invasion would begin with the crossing of the Dniestr River once Army Group South penetrated the Soviet defenses to the north. Ultimately, the army would advance across the Dniestr and Bug Rivers into what would become Transnistria, and the Romanians would eventually besiege and finally occupy the port of Odessa on October 16, 1941.29 Since the main Romanian effort was to be made by General Petre Dumitrescu’s Romanian Third Army, Romanian headquarters concentrated the majority of divisions that had German training under Dumitrescu’s command. In addition, the German-trained divisions enjoyed a greater degree of standardization in terms of weapons and equipment. For the basic small arm, for example, these divisions used the Czech 7.92mm rifle, which could take German ammunition. Reserve units would have to make do with the previously noted plethora of Russian-, Austrian-, and Frenchmade weapons.30 In the first phase of the campaign, Romanian performance might be regarded as satisfactory. The army was able to accomplish its task even though, in a number of places, the Romanians’ Soviet opponents were often better armed and equipped. Even Colonel General Franz Halder, the chief of the German Army General Staff and no particular admirer of Romanian military prowess, confessed pleasant surprise at the initial performance of the Romanians. The liaison staff with the Romanian 1st Border Division thought well enough of the division’s conduct to submit the names of some 37 members for German military awards.31 Things were much tougher in the second phase of the 1941 campaign. The Romanian Third and Fourth Armies were now required to undertake missions well beyond their normal operational radius. That often left them requiring logistical support from the Germans, who were not always in a position to deliver it when needed. Dumitrescu’s Third Army narrowly avoided a deadly clash with the Hungarian Mobile Corps, Ion Antonescu secured key points in the fortress’s defense system, combined with the threat of intervention by German airpower on a massive scale, that the Soviets evacuated the city on October 15, 1941. Odessa’s occupation marked a clear end of the campaign for what was by that time an exhausted Romanian army.33 Takeaways for Today So what can be drawn from the experiences of the German army mission to Romania that would be of use to today’s military professional? The first takeaway concerns the size and composition of liaison staffs. The German effort in this regard was consistently hindered by the fact that liaison staffs were small. An army-level liaison staff, headed by a general officer, usually did not exceed 18 members, while a corps-liaison staff, normally led by a colonel, would be no more than 10. Division and brigade staffs were tiny, consisting of no more than an officer, a major or even a captain, plus an interpreter and a driver. This made it difficult for liaison officers to be absent from their units for any length of time, whether for official or personal business.34 In addition, it did not take into account the fact that liaison officers, like other human beings, were subject to problems such as sickness or sheer exhaustion. The difficulties associated with the small size of German liaison staffs mirror the complaints of many involved with Mobile Training Team efforts in Iraq during the 2005–2008 timeframe and more recently in Afghanistan.35 The structure of liaison teams is also an issue. Some current critics, such as T.X. Hammes, suggest that the Army replace field-grade officers on staffs with skilled and professional NCOs. This would allow company-grade officers to spend more time at the company level, and reduce the number of field-grade officers. At the same time, he calls for the creation of larger advisory teams to work with allies against fourth-generation warfare opponents.36 While Hammes’s call for larger advisory teams is correct, the German experience detailed above suggests that more officers, not fewer, are needed, especially when it comes to working with foreign partners. Hammes, like his German counterparts in the DHM, comes from a military culture that values the NCO. Such was not the case in Romania. German reports consistently noted that capable Romanian NCOs were rare. Too often, Romanian NCOs were corrupt and abusive. On the other hand, it does seem clear that Romanian officers regarded NCOs as not much more than privates who had a bit more rank.37 Getting a military culture to create a professional NCO corps where one has not existed previously involves a profound change in mindset, a process that would require great investments of time and patience. This was true in Romania in 1940 and it is just as true today. Rank also becomes an issue here. As noted previously, both the German military culture of World War II and contemporary American military culture value the judgment as well as the independence of NCOs and relatively junior officers. In other cultures, this is not the case. In Germany, sending rela- ndup res s . ndu. edu D I NARDO tively lower-ranking officers to units as liaison officers was at times regarded as an insult by the commanders of those units, who believed that their status demanded that they deal with a liaison officer of higher rank.38 This is still true today, and using short-term expedients such as frocking NCOs with field-grade ranks and sending them out as liaison officers, as we did in the Gulf War, will simply not do. continue to impact our efforts in a negative sense, and it will not yield to the type of quick fix so desired by both American military culture and the broader society it represents. The experience of the German military mission to Romania holds a good many lessons useful for today’s military professional. Like so many other events from history, when placed in the context the German effort was consistently hindered by the fact that liaison staffs were small A third takeaway concerns language. As noted previously, German officers who were attendees of the Kriegsakademie were required to study a foreign language. The vast majority of them, however, took French or English, the foreign languages they were most familiar with and had probably already had some knowledge of from their days as students in the German educational system. French and English were also, as the biographer of one of Germany’s most successful field commanders noted, the languages of Germany’s two most likely enemies. This had also been the case for an extended time.39 Not much thought, however, had apparently been given to training people in the languages of those countries that might be allies. Thus, while cultural and historical factors alleviated a need for the Germans to have interpreters when dealing with the Finns and Hungarians, the Romanians and Italians were another story.40 Consequently, Germany, especially the army, found itself consistently short of Romanian and Italian interpreters. Complaining that the allies were not doing their parts, as the Germans did in regard to the Romanians, although gratifying emotionally, was not a solution to the problem.41 Solving the problem of language, especially the more difficult ones, again requires a long-term attempt at a solution, while understanding that the problem may remain insoluble. Providing language instruction to field-grade officers at intermediate-level professional military education institutions, as the U.S. military has been doing over the past few years, frankly yields too little return for the size of the investment made. A longer term solution would be to improve the type of education in language afforded students in the education system generally, but this is too problematic to ensure the desired outcome. In short, the issue of language will most likely n d u p res s .ndu.edu of contemporary events, the story of the German mission once again shows the wisdom of William Shakespeare’s words carved outside of the National Archives in Washington, DC, “What Is Past Is Prologue.” JFQ NOTES 1 Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1949–1956), Series D, vol. X, document no. 28, 27–28. Hereafter cited as DGFP, vol. X, no. 27, 27–28. Unless otherwise noted, all references to DGFP are from Series D. 2 DGFP, vol. X, nos. 51, 56, 80, and 171, 52–53, 58, 91, and 218–219, respectively. 3 Romania was awarded Transylvania as part of the Treaty of Trianon in 1919. Prior to that, Transylvania was part of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. 4 DGFP, vol. X, no. 413, 583. The First Vienna Award was allocated on November 2, 1938, when Hungary was given a piece of the rump Slovak state that had survived the Munich agreement. See Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany, vol. 2 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994), 472. 5 DGFP, vol. X, no. 57, 60; Mark Axworthy, Cornel Scafes, and Cristian Craciunoiu, Third Axis/ Fourth Ally: Romanian Armed Forces in the European War, 1941–1945 (London: Arms and Armor Press, 1995), 23; and Richard L. DiNardo, Germany and the Axis Powers: From Coalition to Collapse (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 96. 6 Franz Halder, The Halder Diaries, vol. 4 (Washington, DC: Infantry Journal, 1950), 201; DGFP, vol. XI, nos. 19 and 80, 25 and 136–137, respectively; Jürgen Förster, “Die Gewinnung von Verbündeten in Südosteuropa,” Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 4, Der Angriff auf die Sowjetunion (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 1983), 338. 7 Axworthy, Scafes, and Craciunoiu, 26. 8 DGFP, vol. XI, no. 171, 281–282. 9 Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), “Defense of Constanza and Oil Area,” February 20, 1941, Bundesarchiv-Militäarchiv File 2 II/271, Freiburg, Germany (hereafter cited as BA-MA); Deutsches Luftwaffe Mission in Rümanien (DLM), “Report on the Defense of the Romanian Oil Area,” December 14, 1941, BA-MA RL 9/62; DLM, “Defended Air Space in Romania,” July 16, 1941, National Archives Records Administration, Microfilm Series T-405, Roll 49, Frame 4888173, College Park, MD (hereafter cited as NARA T-405/49/4888173); and Alexander Statiev, “Antonescu’s Eagles Against Stalin’s Falcons: The Romanian Air Force, 1920–1941,” The Journal of Military History 66, no. 4 (October 2002), 1102. 10 Statiev, 1094; and DLM to Luftwaffe High Command, “Yugoslavian Booty for Romania,” July 5, 1941, NARA T-405/49/4888254. 11 DGFP, vol. XI, no. 80, 136; Deutsches Heeres Mission in Rümanien (DHM), “Build-Up and Action of the Romanian Army Since the Start of the German Army Mission,” January 18, 1942, NARA T-501/269/000069; and Förster, 337. 12 DGFP, vol. XI, no. 532, 900; and Förster, 338. 13 DHM, “Build-Up and Action of the Romanian Army”; DGFP, vol. XI, no. 84, 145; DHM, “Order of the Day No. 4,” November 12, 1940, NARA T-501/272/000418; and DiNardo, 98. 14 DGFP, vol. XI, nos. 9, 652 and 691, 11, 1090–1091 and 1169, respectively; and Förster, 339. 15 DGFP, vol. XI, no. 664, 1114; and Oberkommondo des Heeres (OKH), “Instructions on Command Relationships in Romania,” December 28, 1940, BA-MA RL 2 II/271. 16 OKW, “Instructions for the Behavior of German Soldiers in Romania,” January 11, 1941, NARA T-501/281/000230; Förster, 338; and DHM, “Build-Up and Action of the Romanian Army.” 17 See, for example, the Banater Deutsche Zeitung, December 14, 1940, NARA T-315/680/000045. 18 German 16th Panzer Division, “Partial Record of Conversation Between Gauleiter Fromm and General Hube,” January 28, 1941, NARA T-315/680/000088; DGFP, vol. XII, no. 258, 444; and “Killinger to Himmler,” February 26, 1941, NARA T-175/128/2653688. 19 DHM, “Build-Up and Action of the Romanian Army”; DHM, “Course of Instruction for Romanian Artillery Officers,” May 12, 1941, NARA T-315/1516/000402; and Artillery Commander 20, “Report on the Establishing of Liaison with the Romanian II Corps and the Romanian 10th Division on 21/22 May 1941,” May 24, 1941, NARA T-501/275/000329. 20 DHM, “Build-Up and Action of the Romanian Army”; DHM, “Handbook for German Trainers in Romania,” September 23, 1942, NARA T-501/286/000522; and Chief of the General Staff of the DHM, “Training of General Officers,” February 1, 1941, NARA T-581/281/000216. issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 97 RECALL | The German Military Mission to Romania NEW from NDU Press for the Center for Strategic Research Institute for National Strategic Studies Strategic Perspectives, No. 12 James J. Przystup’s Japan-China Relations 2005–2010: Managing Between a Rock and a Hard Place, An Interpretative Essay, examines the metafactors shaping the ChinaJapan relationship: the rise of China, a competition for regional leadership within a shifting balance of power, and history. At the strategic level, there is intense, but quiet political competition for the mantle of leadership in the Asia-Pacific region. The author discusses the increasing integration of the two economies—for example, within Japan’s business community, the China boom is widely recognized as the driving force behind Japan’s recovery from its “lost decade” in the 1990s. Nevertheless, the Japan-China relationship is also marked by a number of combustible political issues including conflicting territorial claims, a disputed maritime boundary in the East China Sea, and security anxieties in both countries. Moreover, highly nationalistic, zero-sum issues relating to sovereignty, such as the September 2010 Senkaku incident, have the potential to derail the relationship at significant cost to both nations. These issues must be managed with care if Sino-Japanese relations are to reach their full potential. STRATEGIC PERSP ECTIVES 12 Japan-China Relati Managing Between ons 2005–2010: An Interpretative a Rock and a Hard Place Essay by James J. Przystup Center for Strategic Research Institute for National Strategic Studies National Defense University Visit the NDU Press Web site for more information on publications at ndupress.ndu.edu 98 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 21 Commander of Training Staff II to DHM, “Situation Report,” February 7, 1941, NARA T-315/680/000134; and Radu Ioanid, The Sword of the Archangel: Fascist Ideology in Romania (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1990), 193–194. 22 Adolph Hitler’s initial military directive made it quite clear that the invasion of the Soviet Union would involve Romanian participation. DGFP, vol. XI, no. 532, 900. 23 DHM, “Build-Up and Action of the Romanian Army”; German 13th Liaison Command, “Final Report of the German 13th Liaison Command,” October 29, 1941, NARA T-501/275/000706; and DHM, “Report and Map Annexes of the German 2nd Liaison Command on the Campaign of the Romanian Fourth Army,” October 25, 1941, NARA T-501/275/000605. 24 Wehrkreis III Foreign Language Examination (Oral), Berlin, October 7, 1932, Nachlass Freytag von Loringhoven, BA-MA N 362/1; James S. Corum, The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918–1940 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 253; and DiNardo, 21. 25 German 16th Panzer Division, “List of Officers for the Staff of the 16th Panzer Division from 1 November–11 December 1940,” December 11, 1940, NARA T-315/680/000013; and DHM, “Course of Instruction for Romanian Artillery Officers,” May 12, 1941, NARA T-315/1516/000402. 26 Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and US Army Performance, 1939–1945 (Westport: CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 121–123; DHM, “Build-Up and Action of the Romanian Army”; and Commander of Training Staff II of the DHM in Romania, “Situation Report,” February 7, 1941, NARA T-315/680/000134. 27 OKH, Foreign Armies East, Taschenbuch Rümanisches Heer, February 1940, NARA T-501/281/000004; and German Liaison Staff with the Romanian I Mountain Corps and the Romanian 4th Mountain Brigade to the Chief of the General Staff of the DHM, April 23, 1941, NARA T-501/275/000284. 28 DGFP, vol. XII, nos. 614 and 644, 1004–1005 and 1048, respectively. 29 DGFP, vol. XI, no. 532, 901; Friedrich Forstmeier, Odessa 1941: Der Kampf um Stadt und Hafen und der Räumung der Seefestung 15 August bis 16 Oktober 1941 (Freiburg: Verlag Rombach, 1967), 18; and DiNardo, 112. 30 DHM, “Build-Up and Action of the Romanian Army”; OKH, Foreign Armies East, Taschenbuch Rümanisches Heer, February 1940, NARA T-501/281/000004; and German Liaison Staff with the Romanian I Mountain Corps and the Romanian 4th Mountain Brigade to the Chief of the General Staff of the DHM, April 23, 1941, NARA T-501/275/000284. 31 German XXX Corps to German Eleventh Army, “Evening Report,” June 22, 1941, NARA T-314/823/000258; German 13th Liaison Headquarters, “Final Report of the German 13th Liaison Headquarters,” October 29, 1941, NARA T-501/275/000706; Halder, 214; and German 37th Liaison Command to German 2nd Liaison Command, “German Awards for Romanian 1st Border Division,” August 2, 1941, NARA T-501/280/000854. 32 “Inspection Report of Major (General Staff) Stephanus of 25 and 26 July 1941 to German XXX and XI Corps, Romanian Third Army,” July 26, 1941, NARA T-312/359/7933496; Romanian Third Army to German Eleventh Army Quartermaster, “Memo on Supply of Romanian Third Army East of the Bug River,” August 21, 1941, NARA T-312/354/7927680; and “Dumitrescu to German Eleventh Army,” August 15, 1941, NARA T-312/360/7934785. 33 Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944, trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), 66; and DHM, “Build-Up and Action of the Romanian Army.” 34 DiNardo, 105; and “Second German Liaison Command to Subordinate Liaison Commands, Official Operation of German Liaison Commands,” July 30, 1941, NARA T-501/280/000971. 35 This is an observation made to the author by one of his students, an Army major with considerable experience in this duty. 36 Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (St. Paul, MN: Zenith Press, 2004), 244, 264–265. 37 German 13th Liaison Headquarters, “Final Report of the German 13th Liaison Headquarters,” October 29, 1941, NARA T-501/275/000706; DHM, Build-Up and Action of the Romanian Army”; and DHM, “Handbook for German Trainers in Romania,” September 23, 1942, NARA T-501/286/000522. 38 An excellent example of this comes from the German experience working with the Italians in North Africa. See German Liaison Officer to Italian Fifth Air Fleet, “Report of Liaison Officer to Italian Fifth Air Fleet in North Africa to Commanding General of German X Air Corps,” May 19, 1941, BA-MA RL 2 II/38; and DiNardo, 62. 39 Wehrkreis III Foreign Language Examinations; and Charles Messenger, The Last Prussian: A Biography of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt 1875–1953 (London: Brassey’s, 1991), 13. 40 German was taught as a second language in the Finnish school system from early on, while all officers who graduated from the Hungarian General Staff College had to know German since about half of the school library books were in German. DiNardo, 108; and telephone interview with Bela Kiraly, December 20, 1993. Kiraly was a Hungarian officer who served on the eastern front in World War II and one of my professors in graduate school. 41 DiNardo, 100; and German 107th Liaison Command, “Annex to War Diary of German 107th Liaison Command, Experiences,” September 17, 1942, NARA T-501/282/000184. ndup res s . ndu. edu BOOK REVIEWS the generals: american military command from World War ii to today By Thomas E. Ricks Penguin Press, 2012 576 pp. $32.95 ISBN: 978-1-59420-404-3 Reviewed by ROBERT BRACKNELL T om Ricks is no stranger to criticizing the modern crop of generals. A fellow at the Center for New American Security, Ricks decisively established his national reputation with Making the Corps, followed by two successful analyses of the Iraq War, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq and The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008. Along the way, Ricks became a cynic, relentlessly critiquing the decision to go to war in Iraq, the conduct of the conflict, particularly the generalships of Tommy Franks and Ricardo Sanchez, the utter dysfunction of the strategic decisionmaking and interagency processes required to make America’s modern conflicts successful, and, most saliently, the failures of the conflict’s most senior military leadership. Ricks weaves critiques of Army leadership, in particular, into a fluid, meticulously researched tapestry, but leaves room for debate about his ultimate conclusions. Ricks’s focus on the technical and strategic prowess of generals causes him to gloss over the moral and ethical components of leadership that have eviscerated the legacies of a number of senior generals. Even so, failing to consider and evaluate the themes that Ricks identifies risks maturing a crop of generals for whom the professional n d u p res s .ndu.edu end simply is wearing stars, not leading the military properly into the next century and candidly rendering their best military advice to our nation’s civilian leaders. Ricks convincingly traces modern failures of generalship to their origins in the interwar period, through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and Operations Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom, and Enduring Freedom. He juxtaposes successful Army and Marine generals through their histories with the characteristics of history’s failed generals. Ricks draws specific, substantiated conclusions about generalship, Army culture, civil-military relations, and the way the Army has elected to organize, train, and equip itself in ways that ultimately suboptimized Service performance. Specifically identifying the Army’s modern-era reluctance to effect senior leader reliefs as a departure from the pattern of history, Ricks paints an image of the ultimate country club, self-righteously convinced of its own infallibility—an Army for the sake of The Army, rather than for the sake of the Nation. The result is an outline of what ails the modern Army, with lessons to be considered not only for that Service to correct itself, but also for all the Armed Forces and their civilian leaders. Convincingly, Ricks identifies history’s A-list of generals—George C. Marshall, George S. Patton, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Matthew Ridgway, O.P. Smith, Creighton Abrams, William E. DuPuy, and David Petraeus, among others. Not surprisingly, on his B-list of general officer failures, Ricks singles out Douglas MacArthur, William Westmoreland, Norman Schwarzkopf, Franks, and Sanchez, suggesting strongly that their failures in generalship have amounted not only to massive strategic failures, but also to unnecessary loss of American lives, from Korea through Afghanistan. Ricks works to identify tangible, quantifiable historical trends and specific strategic, operational, personnel, and program decisions that yielded undesirable shortand long-term effects. He bemoans the Army’s gravitation away from the concept of meaningful relief (performance-based firing, as opposed to mere conduct-based) as a leadership-shaping mechanism. Once upon a time, senior leaders fired generals because they believed line Soldiers deserved to be well led and not to have their lives squandered. Now, suggests Ricks, the needs of the institution and concerns over the senior leader’s career compete for consideration in the decision space. In an effort to demonstrate an example of “doing it right” in the modern era, Ricks reaches deep below the senior-leader level to examine the relief of Colonel Joe Dowdy, USMC, the commander of First Marine Regiment in the march to Baghdad. Dowdy’s (not uncontroversial) relief demonstrates that there is no indispensable man, and if a commander loses confidence in a subordinate, the subordinate must go. In Ricks’s view, if it is a close call, senior leaders should err on the side of relief: the human and strategic costs of getting that call wrong are virtually unconscionable. Ricks rightly concludes that too much emphasis has been placed on the “career consequence” of relief for individual officers. For leaders who ascend to flag rank, the Armed Forces must rewrite the “promotion contract” with an unspoken clause: if you accept this position, and things go wrong on your watch, you will be sacrificed on the altar of generalship, regardless of whether it was your “fault.” This clause is not unfamiliar; our senior leaders talk about it a lot, but enforce it very little. Wanat springs to mind.1 If Ricks comes up short anywhere in this tome, it could be that he attempted to write a neutral and unbiased analysis on a topic that he feels so strongly about. It is no secret that Ricks has taken his disdain for the professional failures of Franks, Sanchez, and their cohorts and elevated them to a level of malice that approaches a personal grudge. Ricks’s writing on Franks and Sanchez is a bit like trying to take seriously a critique of Red Sox pitching written by Don Zimmer. Moreover, while Ricks’s book was complete and published prior to Petraeus’s spectacular fall from grace, Ricks’s loving treatment of Petraeus suggests that he views generalship more like being an accountant—a brilliant technical specialist—than being a priest, whose principal currency of authority is moral. Ricks underestimates the moral component necessary to maintain the respect of privates, sergeants, captains, and colonels, a shortfall roundly and regularly on display on the front pages of the Washington Post. True generalship is an ability to borrow elements of Patton’s technical military competence and the moral pureness of Ghandi, mixed with Bill Clinton’s artful communication, issue 69, 2 d quarter 2013 / JFQ 99 BOOK REVIEWS Ryan Crocker’s diplomatic savvy, and George Kennan’s strategic acumen—in other words, to approximate a fraction of the soul of George Marshall. The Generals is a serious study of senior-level leadership that rivals H.R. McMasters’s Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, and Lewis Sorley’s A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam. Ricks’s tone toward certain of his subjects eclipses censure and borders on vituperation, while others bask in the gentle glow of his prose. This may bother some readers, but not this reviewer—in fact, it is refreshing to read a commentator calling a spade a spade in terms of his unvarnished criticism of the shortfalls of certain generals (and their civilian counterparts and seniors) whose decisions unnecessarily cost American lives and strategic currency in Vietnam and Iraq. His warranted criticisms of the leadership failures of certain senior generals, insidious careerism, moral cowardice, and self-interest (Maxwell Taylor, MacArthur, the Vietnam Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom Joint Chiefs of Staff), the policies that led to those failures, and the dysfunctional civil-military relationships (Harry Truman–MacArthur, Lyndon Johnson–the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Donald Rumsfeld–the U.S. military writ large) are underwritten by scholarly research and meticulous documentation. If the military truly is as reflective and self-critical as it likes to advertise, The Generals should land on the Chairman’s and Service chiefs’ reading lists soon. JFQ Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bracknell, USMC, is a Staff Attorney with the Trial Judiciary, Office of Military Commissions. NOTE 1 See Thomas Shanker, “Three Officers Face Reprimands Over 2008 Battle,” The New York Times, March 13, 2010, A8. 100 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 the generals: american military command from World War ii to today By Thomas E. Ricks Penguin Press, 2012 576 pp. $32.95 ISBN: 978-1-59420-404-3 Reviewed by ALAN L. GROPMAN T om Ricks has done it again, producing an interesting and useful book. He has two major themes in The Generals. The first is with Army generals today: senior leaders are unable to remove inadequate generals. His second is more important: the costly incapability of the generals to think and act strategically. In every case of disaster Ricks cites, strategic thinking was absent. The book contains 30 chapters (and an epilogue) covering World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the two Iraq wars. The author sketches portraits of U.S. Army (and one Marine Corps) general officers from World War II forward. There are heroes including George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, O.P. Smith, Matthew Ridgway, and David Petraeus (the book was published before Petraeus resigned from the Central Intelligence Agency). There are also villains including Maxwell Taylor, William Westmoreland, Tommy Franks, and Ricardo Sanchez. The strategic debacle in Vietnam is exceptionally well treated. Ricks’s cogent analysis is a searing critique of errors that we must never make again, and it tells readers how to lose a war—and in doing so damaging America’s reputation, severely weakening the home country, provoking runaway inflation, and, most importantly, wasting 58,000 American lives. Ricks’s generalized portraits of the World War II generals will meet with broad acceptance. His model officer is Marshall, an Army chief of staff who was in the right, place at the right time. The main attribute Ricks cites is Marshall’s inclination to relieve officers he thought were inadequate to the task. He let hundreds go in his 6 years as chief, which became a lost art (except for Ridgway) after he left. His number one antihero is Taylor. Ricks, unfortunately, gets carried away here: “Maxwell Taylor arguably was the most destructive general in American history. As Army Chief of Staff in the 1950s, he steered the U.S. military toward engaging in ‘brushfire wars.’” Also, “[H]e encouraged President John F. Kennedy to deepen American involvement in Vietnam. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he poisoned relations between the military and the civilian leadership. He was also key in picking Gen. William Westmoreland to command the war there.” To begin with, Taylor steered neither the Army nor the military in any direction while he was chief of staff. Dwight Eisenhower was the President, and his grand strategy did not focus on “brushfire wars,” and certainly neither did the Air Force strategy. This was the era of strategic bombers, massive retaliation, and bomberpilot generals put in command of Air Force fighter commands by bomber-pilot chiefs of staff. Secondly, Eisenhower was never the ultimate decisionmaker (certainly not in the 1950s), and in the next decade, he worked under a strong-willed Secretary of Defense and determined Presidents who were much more culpable for the Vietnam tragedy. There is, therefore, a balanced shortcoming in this book. Ricks has abundant examples of senior officers failing in their missions because they were strategically inept, but all of them had civilian supervisors who, while not getting a complete pass from Ricks, are not nearly as appropriately condemned by the author. I realize the title is The Generals, but there are levels of authority above combat general officers. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson did not have to follow Taylor into oblivion in Vietnam. Johnson was not required to let Westmoreland fight with a totally backward ground strategy while dropping more tons ndup res s . ndu. edu BOOK REVIEWS of bombs on South Vietnam than were dropped on Germany and Japan combined in World War II. President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney did not have to let Norman Schwarzkopf stop Operation Desert Storm after 4 days of ground warfare, leaving Iraq’s Republican Guard nearly intact and prolonging Saddam Hussein’s murderous reign for more than a dozen years. Regarding Operation Iraqi Freedom, Generals Tommy Franks and Ricardo Sanchez were tacticians when strategists were needed. The former rushed to Baghdad leaving his support forces to be mauled by bypassed mujahideen, and the latter permitted the inhumane treatment of Iraqi insurgents and rounded-up civilians as well as the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison. These actions made enemies of the Iraqi population, and Ricks completely misappropriates the blame. Finally, Ricks appears to believe counterinsurgency combat is a valid combat mission for the U.S. military. It is not. I do not understand why any political decisionmaker, after costly failures in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, would advocate counterinsurgency. We go to war in places we do not understand—in order to save nondemocratic and often corrupt states that are open to attacks by insurgents—against adversaries who have greater knowledge than we do of the countries we fight. We need to continue to study counterinsurgency art to advise states seeking our help, and who are worthy of our help, ever careful to avoid mission creep, but not sacrificing our people—58,000 in a losing effort in Vietnam, thousands more in Iraq—and our wealth, estimated to be $1 trillion in Iraq. Tell me what we got for our money and our lost men and women. That said, read Tom Rick’s The Generals to appreciate better the awful costs to the United States of failures in strategic thinking. JFQ Dr. Alan L. Gropman is Professor Emeritus in the Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resources Strategy at the National Defense University. n d u p res s .ndu.edu the next Wave: on the Hunt for al Qaeda’s american recruits By Catherine Herridge Crown Forum, 2011 272 pp. $25.00 ISBN: 978-0-30788-525-8 Reviewed by GEORGE MICHAEL I n the final years of his life, Osama bin Laden served mainly as an inspirational figure rather than an actual commander. He counseled his faithful that jihad was an individual duty for every Muslim capable of going to war. Ominously, a small but notable number of Americans have answered his call. In fact, American recruits are highly valued by al Qaeda for their passports and abilities to blend in with American society. In her book The Next Wave, Catherine Herridge explores the travails of prominent American jihadists. She draws on her 10-year experience reporting on the war on terror and cites numerous military and intelligence officials and analysts. The chief focus of her book is Anwar al-Awlaki, who played an important operational role for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and reached out to several American jihadists. For instance, al-Awlaki exerted a strong influence over Major Nidal Malik Hasan, with whom he exchanged several emails. On November 5, 2009, the Virginia-born Muslim and U.S. Army psychiatrist went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, that killed 13 people and left 38 wounded. On Christmas day of that same year, a young Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutuallab, attempted to ignite an explosive device that was sewn into his underwear while he traveled on Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit. According to Herridge’s sources, al-Awlaki had coached the Nigerian on security and surveillance in Western countries and was the middleman between Abdulmutuallab and the bombmaker. Al-Awlaki’s sermons also inspired Faisal Shahzad, a seemingly upright and assimilated middle-class computer technician and U.S. citizen who lived in Connecticut but was born in Pakistan. Shahzad attempted to detonate three bombs in an SUV parked in the heart of Times Square in New York City in May 2010. Once characterized as the “bin Laden of the Internet,” Al-Awlaki’s pronouncements have been broadcast on jihadist Web sites and YouTube. Fluent in both Arabic and English, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of Islam and was regarded as a gifted speaker who was capable of moving his listeners to action. Al-Awlaki was born in 1971 in New Mexico, where his father pursued his higher education. Sometime in 1977 or 1978, the family returned to Yemen, where the senior al-Awlaki went on to become a well-respected and well-connected government minister. In 1991, Anwar al-Awlaki returned to America to pursue a degree in engineering at Colorado State University. He misrepresented himself as foreign born, presumably to receive a $20,000 scholarship from the U.S. State Department in a program intended for foreign students. On his Social Security application, he claimed that he was born in Yemen and was issued a new Social Security number. When he renewed his passport in 1993, however, he presented his birth certificate, which indicated that he was actually born in New Mexico, but he used his fraudulently obtained Social Security number. After graduation, al-Awlaki moved to San Diego where he became the imam of the al-Rabat Mosque. While there in the late 1990s, he met regularly with Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, two of the 9/11 hijackers. Herridge avers that al-Awlaki was part of a support cell sent to the United States prior to 9/11. Sometime in 2001, he moved to Falls Church, Virginia, where he became the imam of the Dar al-Hijra Islamic Center and crossed paths with Hani Hanjour who, along with Hazmi and alMidhar, hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, which slammed into the Pentagon. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents took an immediate interest in al-Awlaki issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 101 BOOK REVIEWS NEW from NDU Press for the Center for Technology and National Security Policy Institute for National Strategic Studies Defense Horizons 73 Toward the Printed World: Additive Manufacturing and Implications for National Security By Connor M. McNulty, Neyla Arnas, and homas A. Campbell Additive manufacturing—commonly referred to as “three-dimensional printing”—is a fast-growing, prospective game-changer not only for national security but also for the economy as a whole. his form of manufacturing— whereby products are fabricated through the layer-by-layer addition of material guided by a precise geometrical computer model—is becoming more cost-efective and widely available. his paper introduces nontechnical readers to the technology, its legal, economic, and healthcare issues, and its signiicant military applications in areas such as regenerative medicine and manufacturing of spare parts and specialized components. Visit the NDU Press Web site for more information on publications at ndupress.ndu.edu 102 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 and interviewed him at least four times in the first 8 days after the 9/11 attacks. Nevertheless, the unflappable and mediagenic al-Awlaki was often the go-to guy for sound bites on local and national broadcasts for the Muslim-American perspective on 9/11. In fact, Herridge discovered that al-Awlaki had participated in a Pentagon outreach program to moderate Muslims in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Despite his veneer of moderation, alAwlaki continued to consort with Muslim radicals and came under increasing scrutiny by Federal investigators. In June 2002, a Denver Federal judge issued an arrest warrant for al-Awlaki based on his fraudulent misrepresentations on his Social Security and passport applications in the early 1990s. He left the United States sometime in 2002 but returned on October 10. When he arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport, Federal agents apprehended and held him but quickly released him because on that same day the Federal judge had rescinded his arrest warrant. According to the official explanation, prosecutors did not believe there was enough evidence to convict him of a crime; moreover, the 10-year statute of limitations for lying to the Social Security Administration had expired. Before the end of 2002, al-Awlaki left the United States for the last time, after which he went first to England and then to Yemen. For her part, Herridge believes the government has not entirely come clean on al-Awlaki. During her investigation, she noted that the mere mention of his name to a government official can be a conversation killer. She questions why the FBI instructed customs agents to allow al-Awlaki to reenter the country in October 2002. The decision, she concludes, must have come from higher up. Why then, she muses, did the FBI want al-Awlaki in the country? She finds it odd that the decision to rescind his arrest warrant came the same day he returned to the country. Adding further suspicion is the fact that the U.S. Government has not released all of the intercepted emails between the Fort Hood killer and al-Awlaki. As Herridge explains, through new media, offbeat loners can be self-radicalized and become dedicated terrorists. She characterized al-Awlaki as a “virtual recruiter” who almost never met his jihadists in person. In the final months of his life, al-Awlaki encouraged American jihadists to launch lone wolf attacks on their own initiatives. In addition to his propaganda, U.S. officials believed that al-Awlaki was involved in the operational planning of terrorist attacks. After his return to Yemen, he skillfully used his connections to expand his influence in the jihadist movement. Despite his U.S. citizenship, in the spring of 2010 he was placed on the Central Intelligence Agency kill-or-capture list. On September 30, 2011, two Predator drones fired Hellfire missiles at a vehicle carrying al-Awlaki and other suspected al Qaeda operatives as they traveled on a road in Yemen’s al-Jawf Province. Shortly thereafter, Yemen’s defense ministry announced that al-Awlaki was killed. Herridge’s book is interesting but leaves many questions about al-Awlaki unanswered. Moreover, she left out many important details about al-Awlaki’s activities after he left America, including his stay in England and his role in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula while in Yemen. Surprisingly, Herridge made no mention of another prominent American jihadist, Adam Gadahn (also known as “Azzam the American”), arguably the most recognized American al Qaeda spokesman on the Internet. The young California native and convert to Islam is believed to be an important member of al Qaeda’s media committee—as Sahab—under whose direction the organization’s propaganda has become more sophisticated. In recent years, Gadahn has emerged as somewhat of an Internet celebrity on Web sites such as YouTube. Still, Herridge provides an interesting journalistic study of the radicalization of American jihadists and their connections to their ideological brethren overseas. As such, it will be of interest to students of terrorism and political extremism. JFQ George Michael is Associate Professor of Nuclear Counterproliferation and Deterrence Theory in the U.S. Air Force Counterproliferation Center at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. ndup res s . ndu. edu Lead Turning the Fight The Joint Operational Access Concept and Joint Doctrine By g r e g o r y k r e u D e r Our nation and Armed Forces are transitioning from over a decade of war to a future that presents us with a security paradox. While the world is trending towards greater stability overall, destructive technologies are available to a wider and more disparate range of adversaries. As a result, the world is potentially more dangerous than ever before. —General Martin E. Dempsey In peace prepare for war, in war prepare for peace. The art of war is of vital importance to the state. It is matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence under no circumstances can it be neglected. —Sun Tzu O ver the last decade, U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken advantage of an unprecedented level of unchallenged operational access. This linchpin to virtually all military operations will become increasingly contested during future operations. The Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC) proposes how future joint forces will achieve and maintain access in the face of armed opposition by adversaries under a variety of conditions as part of a broader national approach.1 Until these concepts become reality, there will be a gap in joint doctrine regarding how U.S. Armed Forces synergistically leverage cross-domain capabilities to overcome emerging threats and ensure operational access. The good news is that the joint doctrine community has options available that can help solve this dilemma. This article discusses how the changing operational environment, combined with emerging antiaccess/area-denial (A2/AD) threats, is creating doctrinal gaps. It then discusses the relationship between doctrine, policy, and concepts, along with ways to accelerate the transition from concept to doctrine. Finally, this article draws current concepts from the JOAC and suggests tools that proponents can use to make their concept reality and to ensure U.S. operational access for future joint operations. n d u p res s .ndu.edu Most concepts gradually become extant and incrementally inform joint doctrine. Before proposing ways to accelerate this process, it is important to emphasize that all concepts must first be validated. Because of this requirement, those not familiar with the process occasionally see doctrine as lethargic or nonresponsive.2 On the contrary, doctrine can rapidly inculcate validated concepts. However, if doctrine responded to every seemingly “good idea,” it would unnecessarily thrash the baseline for joint force employment. Worse yet, it could yield unpredictable and potentially tragic consequences. To highlight the damage an unproven concept can cause, consider the example of effects-based operations (EBO). Initially seen as a reasonable approach to help targeters metaphorically “see the armored division, not just the tank,” it later became something else. Along with operational net assessment (ONA) and system of systems analysis (SOSA), EBO morphed into an attempt to bring mathematical certainty to warfare, an inherently uncertain endeavor. The Israeli Defense Forces applied EBO in the Israeli-Hizballah conflict in 2006 and failed. Israeli Major General Amiram Levin, former commander of Israel’s Northern Command, lamented that EBO, “ignores . . . the universal fundamentals of warfare. This is not a concept that is better or worse. It is a completely mistaken concept that could not succeed and should never have been relied upon.”3 General James Mattis, USMC, then commander of the disestablished U.S. Joint Forces Command, terminated the use of EBO in the development of future concepts and doctrine as the “underlying principles associated with EBO, ONA, and SOSA are fundamentally flawed and must be removed from our lexicon, training, and operations. Current EBO thinking, as the Israelis found, was an intellectual ‘Maginot Line’ around which the enemy can maneuver.”4 Although EBO may well have future potential, it is not ready for joint doctrine at this time. Although many have tried, no concept has yet improved upon the Clausewitzian trinity that describes the nature of war: violence, chance, and reason.5 As the capstone publication and foundation for all joint doctrine, Joint Publication (JP) 1, Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States, makes the point crystal clear: “War is a complex, human undertaking that does not respond to deterministic rules.”6 On the other hand, Clausewitz describes how a war is fought, and where it lies along the spectrum of conflict can and will change.7 Concepts that recognize the immutable nature of war, yet correctly predict and address the changing character of warfare, have the potential to affect force employment at a historic level. These are the concepts that proponents must learn to identify, validate, and accelerate to joint doctrine. Consider the German concept of “mission-type tactics,” or Auftragstaktik, which specified a clearly defined goal and empowered subordinate leaders to act independently in order to achieve their commander’s intent.8 The German army and air force combined this concept with maneuver warfare and unleashed a historic offensive that overwhelmed numerically superior French and British forces in May 1940.9 General Mattis describes two additional concepts that had a similar effect on U.S. military forces in the 1980s: Concepts can transform organizations. I believe this. I have witnessed it twice in my Lieutenant Colonel Gregory Kreuder, USAF, is a Joint Doctrine Planner Action Officer in the Joint Staff J7 Joint Doctrine Division. issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 103 JOINT DOCTRINE | Lead Turning the Fight military career, when the introduction of the Air Land Battle doctrine transformed the Army and Air Force in the 1980s and the introduction of maneuver warfare similarly changed the Marine Corps a few years later. One may argue these were doctrines rather than concepts, but at the heart of each was an innovative operating concept—an underlying idea for how Army or Marine Corps forces would operate in dealing with their respective challenges—and that concept was a driving force behind the dramatic institutional changes that those Services experienced.10 It is reasonable to conclude that the JOAC could produce as profound an effect on the joint force as Auftragstaktik and Air Land Battle. The JOAC is derived from the Capstone Concepts for Joint Operations, which outlines 10 primary missions through which U.S. joint forces will protect future American interests. Of these missions, the JOAC emphasizes the importance of being able to “project power despite [A2/AD] challenges.”11 There is nothing new about the need to gain and maintain operational access in the face of a formidable and capable adversary; this has been a consideration throughout history. For any force to fight on foreign land, it must first gain access to it. This is understandably not in the best interest of the opposing force that attempts to deny access by any means necessary. Throughout history, opposing forces have sought an asymmetric advantage that will deny access. This ability can blunt an otherwise overwhelming offensive by a vastly superior force. King Leonidas of Sparta demonstrated the importance of A2/AD during the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE. His numerically inferior yet determined force exploited local geography, significantly delayed operational access to the Persian Empire, and arguably altered the outcome of the Persian war in the Greeks’ favor.12 Although operational access has proven a challenge throughout history, the underlying conditions that will affect future U.S. operations are going through slow moving yet tectonic shifts. The JOAC outlines three emerging trends that will challenge operational access. The first is the dramatic improvement and proliferation of weapons and other technologies capable of denying access to or freedom of action within an operational area. These threats can employ not only advanced technologies, but also innovative applications of basic, even crude, capabilities. The second trend is the changing U.S. overseas defense posture, which is a consequence of markedly decreased support abroad for an extensive network of military bases around the globe and projections of severely contracting resources following a decade of war. The third trend is the emergence of space and cyberspace as increasingly important and contested domains in the projection of military force.13 Potential adversaries are exploiting rapidly evolving and relatively inexpensive technologies to upgrade their A2/AD capabilities. Furthermore, antiaccess technology is generally much easier to develop than Way Ahead: A Campaign Approach to Operational Access Antiaccess and Area-denial Capabilities in an Integrated Defense Unconventional attacks on infrastructure that supports deployment, employment, and sustainment 104 Space and cyber attacks on the systems and networks that support deployment, employment, and sustainment JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 Antiship ballistic missiles and surface combatants Theater ballistic missiles and submarines Attack boats, surface-to-air missiles; rotary-wing aircraft and unmanned aerial systems Fixed-wing aircraft and advanced antiship cruise missiles Guided rockets, artillery, mortars, and missiles; naval and land mines; ground maneuver units; and antiaircraft artillery ndup res s . ndu. edu KREUDER technology that ensures access. Technologies under various stages of development could also create antiaccess challenges for the United States including accurate surface-, air-, and submarine-launched ballistic and cruise missiles; long-range reconnaissance and surveillance systems; antisatellite weapons; submarine forces; and cyber attack capabilities. Key area-denial capabilities include advances in adversary air forces and air defense systems designed to deny local U.S. air superiority; shorter range antiship missiles and submarines employing advanced torpedoes; precisionguided rockets, artillery, missiles, and mortars; chemical and biological weapons; computer and electronic attack capabilities; abundant land and naval mines; armed and explosives-laden small boats; and unmanned aircraft and vehicles, which could loiter to provide intelligence collection or fires in the objective area.14 Many of the more advanced capabilities, for example the Chinese HQ-9 and Russian S-300 surface-to-air missile systems, are already extant. Others are progressing through the prototype stage, such as the Chinese J-20, J-31, and Russian Sukhoi PAK-FA stealth fighters. Other threats do not require advanced systems, yet highlight potential vulnerabilities that a savvy adversary can exploit using available technology, similar to how improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have challenged access for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The joint force must reorient itself to meet these existing and emerging A2/AD threats. Although the emerging trends addressed in the JOAC reflect vulnerabilities that in some cases already exist, current joint doctrine’s coverage of A2/AD is not keeping pace. JP 3-18, Joint Forcible Entry Operations, is dedicated to overcoming area denial in order to establish a lodgment, but does not yet address these emerging challenges and has only seen modest updates during the last decade. JP 3-01, Countering Air and Missile Threats, and JP 3-09, Joint Fire Support, vaguely reference the importance of overcoming A2/AD challenges to operational access. None of these, or any other JPs, address the emerging trends and challenges identified in the JOAC; this is partly intentional, as many of the necessary capabilities are not yet extant. Aside from IEDs, however, ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have not faced significant nd u p res s .ndu.edu A2/AD challenges. As a consequence, the doctrinal gap is large and growing. This highlights an important point. As the emerging trends outlined in the JOAC gradually challenge future U.S. operational access, mitigating concepts requiring new capabilities will need to be inculcated into the joint force. These concepts may someday have a sweeping impact on joint doctrine similar to Auftragstaktik, Air Land Battle, and maneuver warfare. The key is in identifying these concepts early, validating them, and finding ways to accelerate their introduction into joint doctrine. Proponents must take a proactive approach and not passively wait for concepts and capabilities to gradually become fully extant in the field before socializing them throughout the joint community. Before identifying the tools available to accelerate these concepts and capabilities, it is first important to briefly discuss what doctrine is and what it is not. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) Instruction 5120.02C, “Joint Doctrine Development System,” and CJCS Memorandum 5120.01, “Joint Doctrine Development Process,” provide guidance on the development of joint doctrine: “Joint doctrine establishes the fundamentals of joint operations and provides the guidance on how best to employ national military power to achieve strategic ends.”15 More specifically, joint doctrine is: based on extant capabilities; i.e., current force structures and materiel. It incorporates time-tested principles (e.g., the principles of war, operational art, and elements of operational design for successful military action) as well as contemporary lessons learned that exploit US advantages against adversary vulnerabilities. Joint doctrine is authoritative guidance and will be followed except when, in the judgment of the Joint Force Commander (JFC), exceptional circumstances dictate otherwise.16 To alleviate some common misperceptions, it is worth noting what joint doctrine is not. First, joint doctrine is not policy, although the two are closely related. Each fills separate requirements, as policy can “direct, assign tasks, prescribe desired capabilities, and provide guidance for ensuring the Armed Forces of the US are prepared to perform their assigned roles.”17 In most cases, policy informs doctrine. If an identified need can only be satisfied “using prescrip- tive words such as ‘shall’ and ‘must,’ then the void is in policy and policy development should precede doctrinal development.”18 In other words, doctrine should not be used as a forcing function to change policy, yet policy can and often does drive changes to doctrine. Doctrine shares a similarly close and complementary relationship with concepts. In general, a concept expresses how something might be done. Before discussing how the JOAC can inform joint doctrine, it is imperative to fully understand this relationship: In military application, a joint concept describes how a Joint Force Commander may plan, prepare, deploy, employ, sustain, and redeploy a joint force; guides the further development and integration of the Capstone Concepts for Joint Operations and subordinate joint concepts into a joint capability; and articulates the measurable detail needed for . . . assessment and decision making. From a ways, means, and ends perspective, concepts and doctrine both describe how (the ways) a joint force uses given capabilities (means) in a generic set of circumstances to achieve a stated purpose (ends). There also is an important distinction between the two. Approved joint doctrine is authoritative, describes operations with extant capabilities, and is subject to policy, treaty, and legal constraints, while joint concepts—whether near-term or futuristic in nature—can explore new operational methods, organizational structures, and systems employment without the same restrictions. Joint concepts provide the basis for . . . assessment. These concepts are refined and validated during . . . modeling and simulation, selected training events and exercises, and capabilities-based assessment.19 Concepts respond to perceived inadequacies in current joint capabilities, test new capabilities, or propose innovative solutions to military problems. Worthwhile concepts should improve upon joint force effectiveness, not only propose another way to do something already addressed in approved doctrine. However, lessons learned from recent operations and emerging capabilities with relevant military applications also improve upon methods in doctrine. Since concepts usually project an operating environment in the future, they describe new approaches and capabilities that, when developed, should enable the military to operate issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 105 JOINT DOCTRINE | Lead Turning the Fight successfully. On occasion, forecasting may uncover ideas that could improve how joint forces operate now and could have an immediate impact on current doctrine. Before changes are made to doctrine, operational joint force commanders will validate these concepts. These concepts must represent an extant capability and clearly demonstrate how they will improve doctrine. Finally, the joint doctrine community assesses concepts and their exercise results to determine necessary changes to approved doctrine.20 Now that we have established what doctrine is, what it is not, and its relationship to policy and concepts, it is time to discuss how concepts can make their way into approved joint doctrine. There are roughly four general methods: through scheduled JP revision, through a change recommendation, through a joint test publication (JTP), and through a joint doctrine note (JDN). The first method, routing a JP for revision, is the traditional and most common method of informing doctrine, and it employs the preexisting doctrinal review process. The Joint Staff J7 Joint Doctrine Division (JDD) goal is to maintain current, relevant doctrine that is no more than 5 years old. The JDD has conducted multiple user studies that consistently indicate doctrine over 3 years old begins to lose relevance to the joint warfighter. To meet that objective, approved doctrine is normally assessed for revision when approximately 2 years old. Revision begins with a formal assessment of the JP, where the combatant commands, Services, Joint Staff, and combat support agencies provide feedback on recommended changes. The percentage of the publication affected by the recommended changes determines the scope of the change. If 20 percent or less of the publication needs to be revised, a change-in-lieu-of-revision is likely; if greater than 20 percent, a full revision is warranted. In either case, any authorized organization can recommend changes, which will be evaluated on merit during the joint doctrine development process.21 This traditional method is the simplest, although not necessarily the most timely. With sufficient justification, however, proponents can accelerate this timetable and request an early revision to a JP. The second method of informing doctrine is through an urgent or routine change recommendation. This may be the best choice if a proponent wants to submit a 106 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 capability that recently became extant and the affected publication was just signed. Any member of the joint community can submit changes at any time. These changes are specifically designed to assist when a joint publication is current and not undergoing revision. Urgent changes are “those . . . that require immediate promulgation to prevent personnel hazard or damage to equipment or emphasize a limitation that adversely affects operational effectiveness.”22 Actions on urgent changes begin within 24 hours of submission. If the change does not meet urgent criteria, a routine change may be more appropriate: “Routine changes are those changes to JPs that provide validated improvements; address potentially incorrect, incomplete, misleading, or confusing information; or correct an operating technique.”23 The third method of introducing concepts into doctrine is the joint test publication. Although concept-based changes to doctrine are usually incremental rather than sweeping, on occasion a concept addressing a doctrinal gap may be large enough in scope either to affect a significant portion of an existing JP or justify creating a new JP. Semiannual joint doctrine planning conferences, hosted by the Joint Staff J7, approve proposals for developing JTPs. Once the designated lead agent develops the JTP, it enters the assessment phase, where combatant commanders exercise the JTP and its associated evaluation to “field test” the concept. Unlike testing of emergent concepts, JTP field-testing should use extant forces and capabilities. Concepts that propose a different way of performing a mission with today’s forces are also known as concepts of operations. Exercising concepts with capabilities and forces that are still emerging can yield useful information, but should not be included in joint doctrine. Once testing of the JTP is complete, evaluation results will recommend one of the following disposition options: “discontinue work on the JTP with no impact on joint doctrine, incorporate the JTP or portions of it in existing JPs, or develop the JTP into a new JP.”24 The fourth method, the JDN, is relatively new to U.S. joint doctrine, although the British Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre has used them successfully for years. The JDN is considered part of the initiation stage of the joint doctrine development process. JDNs are intended to socialize potential best practices and capabilities that have demonstrated early and strong potential to positively impact joint force operations. Although predoctrinal, JDNs present generally agreed fundamental principles and guidance for joint forces. Although they must contain capabilities and concepts somewhat rooted in reality, they are not necessarily constrained by purely extant capabilities. JDNs also have flexibility in scope and size, and they can address doctrine at any level and range, from a few pages in length to several hundred. Since they are not approved joint doctrine, JDNs are not necessarily beholden to the same vetting requirements that JPs are. JPs can take years to develop; a JDN can be written and published in less than 1 year. This can save significant amounts of time that would otherwise be required before a concept gains visibility in the joint community. If the joint community accepts a published JDN, it can then be transitioned into a JTP for validation. If already sufficiently validated and extant, the JDN can instead transition directly into an existing JP or become a JP of its own. JDNs thus introduce flexibility into a necessarily procedural doctrine development system and have the ability to bridge the gap and accelerate the transition of a concept into doctrine. The JOAC is already driving the creation of several concepts that demonstrate potential as future JDNs and JTPs. The Air-Sea Battle concept, under development by the Air-Sea Battle Office, is a prime candidate. It describes how to organize, train, and equip land, naval, and air forces to address evolving adversarial A2/AD threats. The preliminary objective of Air-Sea Battle is to provide combatant commanders networked and integrated forces that ensure freedom of access in the global commons.25 Air-Sea Battle’s goal is to develop forces capable of “networked, integrated, and attack-in-depth” operations across land, sea, air, space, and cyber domains in order to counter A2/AD capabilities and provide operational advantage to friendly joint and coalition forces.26 In 2012, then–U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz outlined the importance of this emerging concept: Ballistic and cruise missiles, the advanced submarines, fighters, and bomber aircraft, enhanced electronic and cyber warfare capabilities, and over the horizon surveillance and modern air defense systems, as ndup res s . ndu. edu KREUDER well as the improved ability to network and integrate these capabilities; these all present significant challenges that will contest our access to and freedom of action, freedom of movement in strategically important areas. And in vital areas such as the Hormuz or the Malacca Straits, even low technology capabilities such as rudimentary sea mines and fast attack craft or shorter range artillery and missiles can turn vital free flow movements in the global commons into maritime choke points to be exploited by aggressive or coercive actors. These capabilities, both the more advanced and the less exquisite, are increasingly available, effectively affording modestly resourced actors, including some non-state entities with the ability to shape outcomes in regional operating environments and perhaps even on the geostrategic environment indirectly. And the ability that was once the exclusive domain of only well funded and well endowed nation states.27 Proponents looking to create a JDN concerning Air-Sea Battle in the near term should select portions of this concept that can employ existing capabilities in new ways to counter the A2/AD threats that General Schwartz highlights as similarly extant today. It may take the Air-Sea Battle Office significant time to develop some of the capabilities that would be appropriate for a JDN. Proponents could justify a JDN much sooner, however, by developing innovative solutions that synergistically apply current joint force capabilities to counter extant A2/ AD threats. The JDN, when published, could inform the joint force on a timeline years before a JP ever could. If the JDN gains widespread acceptance by the joint force, it can be transitioned into a JTP to be validated by combatant commanders or, if both validated and extant, can be transitioned directly into joint doctrine. Another JOAC concept that proponents could soon seize to create a JDN is Gaining and Maintaining Access (GAMA). Prepared by the Army and Marine Corps, this concept recognizes emerging AD trends identified in the JOAC. It is a logical extension in the scope of operations designed to seize a lodgment, currently only discussed in JP 3-18. GAMA recognizes that future operations will face increased challenges to the relatively permissive operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that allowed forces to build in-theater before commencing operations. Future access to the nd u p res s .ndu.edu global commons and “ports, airfields, foreign airspace, coastal waters, and host nation support in potential commitment areas” will become increasingly competitive.28 In addition to emerging adversary capabilities, internal factors will complicate the application of the principles of war. For example, surprise will be more difficult to obtain due to “political transparency combined with the instantaneous transmission of information around the world.”29 The central idea of GAMA is to “contribute to the joint effort to gain and maintain operational access by entering hostile territory without benefit of domain dominance and by using littoral and ground maneuver to locate and defeat area-denial challenges.”30 As with A2, many AD threats are already extant, such as air and missile defenses, antishipping capabilities, and enemy maneuver units. Precision-guided munitions have seen widespread use since Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and potential adversaries have had over two decades to similarly upgrade their arsenals and employ them to deny operational access. Other adversary threats under development include guided rockets, artillery, mortars, and missiles. Despite these threats, GAMA discusses the importance of “seizing key terrain in order to deny it to the enemy or to facilitate the introduction of follow-on forces” and rapidly project “follow-on forces that can be employed with minimal need for reception, staging, onward movement, and integration or dependence on local infrastructure.”31 Forces must be able to conduct “simultaneous force projection and sustainment of numerous maneuver units via multiple, distributed, austere and unexpected penetration points and landing zones in order to avoid established defenses, natural obstacles, and the presentation of a concentrated, lucrative target.”32 GAMA proposes to counter these effects through cross-domain synergy in “the air, sea, space and cyberspace domains by locating/seizing/neutralizing/destroying land-based capabilities that threaten those domains.”33 Potential adversaries may field layered and fully integrated A2/AD defenses in multiple domains in an attempt to deny operational access altogether, “while others with less robust and comprehensive capabilities may simply attempt to inflict greater losses than they perceive the United States will tolerate politically.”34 When sufficient joint force capabilities are identified and then created to address AD, proponents should consider creating a JDN, which would inform the joint force and ease the transition to joint doctrine. Although discussing a concept still in its early stages, GAMA is an important step in recognizing how emerging trends will make future operational access both more important and challenging. The JDN can be a mix of concept and extant capabilities, but should be executable with the existing joint force. Similar to the suggestion for Air-Sea Battle, this JDN (if accepted by the joint force) can be transitioned into a JTP for validation or transitioned directly to joint doctrine if it meets doctrinal requirements. Finally, the JOAC itself may someday drive a joint publication and subsequent realignment of subordinate joint doctrine. As a recent example, in December 2012, Lieutenant General George Flynn, USMC, director of Joint Staff J7, approved development of JP 3-XX, Joint Support to Security Cooperation. This publication recognizes security cooperation as the overarching activity that encompasses other joint doctrine such as JP 3-22, Foreign Internal Defense, and JDN 1-13, Security Force Assistance, which is currently under development. Once this new joint publication is developed, it may either absorb doctrine on foreign internal defense and security force assistance or retain them as subordinate publications. As capabilities become extant, the JOAC may drive production of a JTP or even a JP similar to JP 3-XX, perhaps entitled Achieving Joint Operational Access. This publication, once validated, could provide authoritative guidance for ensuring the Armed Forces are prepared to gain and maintain operational access in future joint operations. This could subsequently drive subordinate joint publications, possibly including Air-Sea Battle and GAMA. Regardless of the mechanisms that proponents employ to make JOAC a reality, joint doctrine stands ready to assist. The JOAC outlines concepts that address emerging trends that will challenge the relatively permissive operational access U.S. forces have enjoyed in recent operations. The joint force is rapidly developing concepts that attempt to address the widening doctrinal gap these trends are creating. The traditional method of informing doctrine may prove too slow and, in the meantime, issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 107 JOINT DOCTRINE | Lead Turning the Fight holds the joint force ability to gain and maintain operational access at risk against extant threats. The JTP and JDN are available tools that proponents, who are willing to pick up the flag, can use to accelerate the validation and subsequent transition of valid concepts into joint doctrine. By proactively employing these available tools, JOAC proponents can help keep the leading edge of joint doctrine razor sharp and ready to provide authoritative guidance to the joint warfighter. JFQ NOTES 1 Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC), Version 1.0 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, January 17, 2012), 1. 2 Joint doctrine is much more responsive than it was a decade ago. The average age of the 82 joint publications is 2.8 years, or roughly half what it was then. 3 Matt M. Matthews, We Were Caught Unprepared: The 2006 Hezbollah-Israeli War, The Long War Series Occasional Paper 26 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2008), 62. 4 James N. Mattis, “USJFCOM Commander’s Guidance for Effects-based Operations,” Parameters (Autumn 2008), 23. 5 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 89. 6 Joint Publication 1, Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, 2009), I-1. 7 Clausewitz, 220. To avoid confusion, joint doctrine distinguishes between “war,” which is unchanging, and “warfare,” which is ever changing. 8 Jochen Wittmann, Auftragtaktik (Berlin: Miles Verlag, 2012), 33. 9 David T. Zabecki, World War II in Europe: An Encyclopedia (London: Taylor and Francis, 1999), I-1175. 10 James N. Mattis, “Vision for Joint Concept Development,” attachment to Memorandum for U.S. Joint Forces Command, Subject: Joint Concept Development Vision Norfolk, VA, 2009, 1. 11 Capstone Concept for Joint Operations: Joint Force 2020 (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, September 10, 2012), 1. 12 Alfred S. Bradford, Leonidas and the Kings of Sparta: Mightiest Warriors, Fairest Kingdom (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), 87. 13 JOAC, 9–12. 14 Ibid., 9. 15 As described in Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (CJCS) Instruction 5120.02C, “Joint Doctrine Development System,” A-5. 16 Ibid., A-2. 108 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 17 Ibid., A-3. Ibid. 19 Ibid., A-7. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., A-8. 22 As described in CJCS Memorandum 5120.01, “Joint Doctrine Development Process,” B-20. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., B-26. 25 “Air-Sea Battle: Multi-Service Collaboration to Address Anti-Access & Area Denial (A2/AD) Challenges to the Joint Force,” Washington, DC, Air-Sea Battle Office, 2013, 6. 26 Ibid., 6. 27 Air-Sea Battle Doctrine: A Discussion with the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and Chief of Naval Operations (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2012), 9. 28 Capstone Concept for Joint Operations, Version 3.0 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, January 2009), 6. 29 Gaining and Maintaining Access: An Army– Marine Corps Concept, Version 1.0 (Fort Eustis, VA: U.S. Army Capabilities Integration Center and Marine Corps Combat Development Command, 2012), 5. 30 Ibid., 7. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 JOAC, 13. 18 Joint Publications (JPs) Under Revision JP 1, Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States JP 1-05, Religious Affairs JP 2-0, Joint Intelligence JP 2-01.3, Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Operational Environment JP 3-00.1, Strategic Communication and Communications Strategy JP 3-02, Amphibious Operations JP 3-05, Special Operations JP 3-06, Joint Urban Operations JP 3-07.4, Counterdrug Operations JP 3-09.3, Close Air Support JP 3-10, Joint Security Operations in Theater JP 3-11, Operations in Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Environments JP 3-13.2, Military Information Support Operations JP 3-14, Space Operations JP 3-16, Multinational Operations JP 3-17, Air Mobility Operations JP 3-24, Counterinsurgency Operations JP 3-26, Counterterrorism JP 3-27, Homeland Defense JP 3-28, Defense Support of Civil Authorities JP 3-29, Foreign Humanitarian Assistance JP 3-30, Command and Control for Joint Air Operations JP 3-32, Command and Control for Joint Maritime Operations JP 3-40, Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction JP 3-52, Joint Airspace Control JP 3-57, Civil-Military Operations JP 3-63, Detainee Operations JP 3-72, Nuclear Operations JP 4-0, Joint Logistics JP 4-01, The Defense Transportation System JP 4-05, Joint Mobilization Planning JP 4-08, Logistics in Support of Multinational Operations JP 4-09, Distribution Operations JP 4-10, Operational Contract Support JPs Revised (within last 6 months) JP 2-03, Geospatial Intelligence Support to Joint Operations JP 3-04, Joint Shipboard Helicopter Operations JP 3-07.3, Peace Operations JP 3-12, Cyberspace Operations JP 3-13, Information Operations JP 3-18, Joint Forcible Entry Operations JP 3-35, Deployment and Redeployment Operations JP 3-59, Meteorological and Oceanographic Operations JP 3-60, Joint Targeting JP 4-01.6, Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore ndup res s . ndu. edu Redefining Information Operations By c a r m i n e c i c a l e s e W hether it is strategic communication, information operations, or cyberspace operations, the Department of Defense (DOD) recognizes the importance of conducting operations within the information environment. Over the past decade, several information-related capabilities have grown or matured revealing that the military recognizes the value of conducting operations in the information environment. Computer network operations have expanded to cyberspace operations, and the Services have established cyberspace component commands to complement U.S. Cyber Command.1 Military information support operations forces have also matured as the U.S. Army Special Operations Command has established the Military Information Support Command and added another group-level command.2 The Air Force continues to increase the number of behavioral influence analysts, integrating them into joint commands.3 In August 2012, the Joint Forces Staff College hosted the Office of the Secretary of Defense–sponsored Information Environment Advanced Analyst Course to further develop the military’s ability to analyze and operate in the information environment. To capture the power of information, DOD must recognize the value in understanding the information environment and articulating the integrating processes required within information operations. Despite continued misunderstanding and rewording, information operations is an important integrating function for achieving the commander’s objectives through the information environment—a complex and dynamic environment depicted by human Figure 1. Decisionmaking Cycle: Dimensions Are Linked interaction with other humans, machines, and subsequent cognitive determinations or decisions. This information environment further comprises three interlocking dimensions—physical, information, and cognitive—that are interwoven within a decisionmaking cycle (see figure 1). This article uses historical vignettes to offer greater clarity in understanding the difference between strategic communications and information operations and adding depth in recognizing how military information-related capabilities affect the decisionmaking process. The New War of Words A Secretary of Defense memorandum signed January 25, 2011, stresses the importance of strategic communication (SC) and information operations (IO) in countering violent extremist organizations, while also redefining IO for DOD and subsequently the joint force. As Dennis Murphy noted on mastering information, “The U.S. military will achieve such mastery by getting the doctrine right.”4 The Secretary’s memorandum was a step in the right direction leading to recent doctrinal changes. Joint IO is now defined as the “integrated employment, during military operations, of information-related capabilities in concert with other lines of operations to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision-making of adversaries and potential adversaries while protecting our own.”5 This new definition detaches itself from a reliance on the previously included core capabilities of computer network operations, operations security, and military information support operations—previously known as psychological operations, electronic warfare, and military deception. This change should benefit the force. First, it allows the commander and staff to consider more options for affecting decisionmaking than simply relying upon the previously stated capabilities. Simultaneously, it allows capabilities to grow and change unencumbered by a doctrinal or fiduciary connection to IO. Lastly, the new definition recognizes the ability of the commander to affect adversary and potential adversary decisionmaking. All the while, IO remains an integration function, not a Colonel Carmine Cicalese, USA, is a former Director of the Joint Command, Control, and Information Operations School at the Joint Forces Staff College. n d u p res s .ndu.edu issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 109 JOINT DOCTRINE | Redefining Information Operations capability owner, and one that is directed at foreign rather than domestic audiences. This new IO definition is a long overdue improvement, though one might make the improper interpretation that IO is only about coordinating the themes-and-messages part of the SC “say-do” rubric as it is included within the same overarching DOD memorandum on strategic sommunication. The joint force commander (JFC) should synchronize communication and operation efforts to support the national-level SC process and overall narrative. By conducting IO coordinated with public affairs, the JFC can effectively communicate to the variety of intended audiences and affect adversary decisionmaking to maximize effects in the information environment. Since 9/11 and the start of the war on terror, the author has frequently heard fellow military officers calling for a supporting global IO campaign. These continuous calls are problematic because, doctrinally, IO in itself is not a campaign. The applicability of a global IO campaign can be challenged as the military cannot apply many IO or information-related capabilities, such as military deception or military information support operations, toward a U.S. domestic audience. Synchronizing communications and actions may not yet be a doctrinal campaign, but it is vital to support a combatant commander’s coherent theater campaign plan. For those who insist on some sort of an information campaign, a synchronized communication plan could supplant the heretofore unending calls for an IO campaign. Because of these reasons and the previous IO core capabilities having improved capacity, one might infer that IO is no longer relevant, as the strategy’s narrative or message would be paramount to all information. However, the narrative without IO is not enough to affect decisionmaking. At the 2011 World Wide IO Conference, much of the first day’s discussion supported the notion that strategic communication and IO are the same. The discussion centered on coordinating geographic combatant command Phase 0 (figure 2 depicts the notional phases) messages and the programs that support these activities to shape the operational environment. It was not until the afternoon panel session—when Colonel James Gferrer, then commanding officer of the Marine Corps IO Center, commented, “IO is more than just messaging”6—that the 110 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 conference discussion duly adjusted. IO is much more than coordinating themes and messages or being the military’s version of a chattering class. While several military informationrelated capabilities deliver a message that can support communication strategy and IO, IO is still about affecting information content and flow as it relates to adversaries’ and potential adversaries’ decisionmaking cycles. Synchronized communication itself, while a contributing factor, is not enough to affect adversary and potential adversary decisionmaking because it solely focuses on the broadcast or dissemination of the commander’s message. Even though listening, understanding, and assessing are all part of the communication process, the primary communication goal is to send a message. While important, the commander’s message is but one of several messages competing for the audience’s attention. This only affects the commander’s information content output to adversaries and potential adversaries. It does not affect the adversary’s information content or flow, neither is it the sole means of protecting the commander’s decisionmaking capability. Figure 1 depicts a comprehensive decisionmaking cycle and annotates how the commander’s message is part of the dissemination step within this cycle. To affect adversial decisionmaking and protect his own, the commander must demand his IO cell look beyond best practices and templated planning. He must insist upon an agile plan capable of affecting the information environment in more ways than coordinated themes and messages. More Than Themes and Messages Just as J2 has the intelligence and counterintelligence mission and J3 (operations) has the fires and counterfires mission, the Information Operations Working Group, on behalf of the commander, should also consider the countermessage mission. Limiting oneself to coordinating and delivering messages as a countermessage mission, however, is insufficient when engaged in a contest as it is both limited and inherently reactive. Phase 0 (shape) is the predominant phase across the combatant commands, and the commander’s communication plan should include all information-related capabilities. Still, the IO professional needs to think beyond just messaging. He needs to maintain a holistic perspective of affecting the adversary’s decisionmaking cycle to include part of the countermessage mission. Figure 2. Notional Operation Plan Phases ndup res s . ndu. edu CICALESE In practice, the IO cell needs to consider a counterinformation or even counterdecision cycle approach. As former Secretary Robert Gates noted to Congress, “adversaries leverage multiple communications platforms, to proselytize, recruit, fund, exercise [command and control], share tradecraft and perpetuate their ideology. Understanding the increasing complexity of the information environment and the compelling need to leverage information effectively as an element of national power is critical to achieving the Department’s military objectives.”7 Other nation-states have acknowledged a similar approach when they removed media access to their countries’ populations. For example, on February 12, 2010, U.S., British, and German broadcasts accused Iran of deliberately jamming their outputs to deny Iranian citizens access to an opinion that counters the Islamic Revolution.8 Also, on March 12, 2010, Yemeni authorities seized the transmission gear of al Jazeera and al Arabiya channels over their coverage of deadly unrest in the south of the country. Yemeni officials stated such equipment “should not serve to provoke trouble and amplify events in such a way as to harm public order.”9 Iran and Yemen are not engaged in a legally declared war with one of the offended parties, but they still chose to limit a platform that was disseminating nonsupportive messages. The author does not advocate this tactic as a form of censorship, but instead recognizes the action as part of the IO integrating function. Iran, a potential U.S. adversary, recognizes the value of affecting the information flow of its potential adversaries. IO professionals should understand how to affect the cycle depending on the overall situation more than the designated operational phase. Thus, a geographic combatant commander could ably adjust from Phase 0 to Phase 1 (deter) and future phases depicted in figure 2. The Wartime Information Cycle Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) demonstrated an understanding of using a range of options to affect information during the period of the organization’s apex from February 2006 to July 2007. AQI destroyed antiterrorist radio stations in Baghdad, deliberately assassinated Iraqi reporters in Mosul, and lethally targeted U.S. psychological operations teams in an effort to limit the messaging capabilities of AQI adversaries. nd u p res s .ndu.edu Meanwhile, the coalition inclination to counter AQI information was mostly limited to delivering broadcasted messages via handbill, radio, television, or any standard means of communicating across the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. The proclivity toward using paper resulted in an insufficient “death by a thousand paper cuts” approach. The tactical coalition commanders saw a threat in AQI’s Internet presence. This could have warranted a coalition response to deny AQI freedom of access on the Internet. The Internet presence, however, is just the transmission point within the communication process. An online video of an improvised explosive device destroying a coalition convoy vehicle is the culminating point of the process. A videographer must first record an event and move the video to a point where it can be uploaded to the Internet. Today’s videographers often have the means to complete the entire information cycle, thus taking a tactical kinetic attack and transforming it into a strategic information attack. Presuming the videographer broke host nation law by inciting violence toward legal authorities, the tactical commander could realistically interdict the information cycle by arresting the videographer. The terrorist message is never transmitted—or at least it is delayed—and the ability to keep transmitting is affected without having to fight for authorities to stop a possible Internet transmission. This is how an IO professional must view the situation. Beyond the Information Cycle The IO perspective is not limited to counterterrorism or counterinsurgency. It is also applicable in stability or peacekeeping operations (PKO) where adversaries may not be shooting at the U.S. military but are nonetheless in opposition to the combatant commander’s objectives and mission. For example, three ethnic groups are vying for position. Two are willing to disarm, but the third and most powerful is reluctant. United Nations (UN) and coalition-led town meetings are popular operations during PKO as a means to bring the belligerent parties closer toward mutual governance. The typical pattern for a town hall meeting is for representatives from the parties to socialize, discuss matters for an hour, come to tentative agreements, and then take a break. During the break, the representatives contact their superiors via mobile devices for further guid- ance on any tentative agreement. It is not uncommon for one of the parties to return to the meeting with a renewed reluctance to agree with what was otherwise tentatively achieved, such as an agreement to disarm. At this point, the IO professional should consider actions and outcomes to the following possibilities: ■■ What happens if the town hall representatives are unable to communicate with their superiors during the break and thus unable to renegotiate a new position? ■■ What happens if a public demonstration calling for immediate disarmament occurs inside or outside the town hall? ■■ What happens if the host nation media suddenly confront the supreme leader of the most powerful ethnic group over his plans to support a tentative disarmament? The answers to these questions lie in the IO professional’s ability to understand the culture, emotion, and status within the adversary’s decision cycle and a way to integrate a variety of activities as a means to inform, influence, or even persuade the adversary into taking action favorable to the commander’s mission. While the events may occur around the spoken events of the town hall, the message is but a facilitator to something larger. To accomplish some of these hypothetical tasks, especially disrupting potential commercial communication means, the IO cell should consult with the electronic warfare and staff judge advocate staff to understand the commander’s authorities. According to the UN Charter, electronic warfare jamming may violate national sovereignty and be legally construed as an act of war.10 Likewise, it may violate the UN General Assembly determination that freedom of information is a human right.11 Still, these determinations may not apply to the situation. To overcome any limitations, the IO staff must make an argument for what the current situation requires as opposed to what the past allowed. Authorities underpin the mission at all levels, and much of the responsibility for acquiring the authorities for the commander rests on the joint IO staff. The Authorities Barrier In spring 2002, the Coalition Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC) in Kuwait developed the ground invasion plan issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 / JFQ 111 JOINT DOCTRINE | Redefining Information Operations that became known as Running Start. IO planners were embedded within the command’s strategic plans and civil military operations teams for planning Phase 2 through Phase 4 (dominance) operations. The CFLCC commander was keenly interested in the IO plan to support the invasion and wanted a separate brief on it so he could get more details. The attached plans team developed a thorough plan to use the available IO capabilities to support the land component commander mission to destroy Saddam’s ground forces by focusing IO efforts to disrupt the decisionmaking of the Iraqi ground forces’ center of gravity, the Republican Guard. As a supporting effort, IO would influence the Iraqi people not to interfere with coalition operations. The commander optimized the force and plan to swiftly and violently destroy a nation-state military more than stopping to deliver a message to the Iraqis. The IO planner was cognizant of a variety of capabilities that could achieve palpable effects to support the CFLCC mission. However, the planner knew of problems in attaining authorities for some of these capabilities. For the prebriefing to J3 leadership, the planner inserted a slide titled “Issues” with five bulleted items to acknowledge up front what the IO plan did not cover. As soon as the J3 saw the slide, he directed the IO planner to remove it from the briefing. The IO planner was too inexperienced to understand the need never to discuss issues with the commander until the staff tried to resolve them first. While the planner was unable to convince the J3 that the issues were germane to the plan, the intermediate leader was too inexperienced with IO to understand why the issues were significant and assist the staff in resolving them. When the IO team briefed the CFLCC commander, the commander was dissatisfied with the IO plan. He believed that it did not go far enough and push the envelope. The commander thought IO could win the war without firing a shot. Within the first 5 minutes of the briefing, he inquired about three of the five items listed on the excluded Issues slide. The IO planner was on the right track, but he did not know how to resolve the authority issues. Later, open source media reports indicated the coalition tried to influence a coup of Saddam from within his inner circle using emails and other means.12 While no U.S. or 112 JFQ / issue 69, 2 n d quarter 2013 coalition government official or agency has ever confirmed this, the notion of instigating a coup that targeted regime member decisionmaking might have satisfied the CFLCC commander’s thirst for a more comprehensive IO plan. The planner’s lesson learned was to develop a bold yet feasible plan and then seek the authorities to execute the plan instead of accepting the past authorities as an impediment to future plans. The IO planner later added a second lesson learned. After further analysis, such an attempt to avoid conflict is an example of deterrence. Shape and deter phases matter. Even though Congress is cutting the DOD budget on such information programs,13 today’s joint force continues to invest more time and effort in planning and executing IO throughout the range of military operations. Conclusion Joint IO is evolving. The strategic communication process is improving as commanders inform all audiences. IO is much more than coordinating themes and messages. The IO integrator certainly needs to understand the coordinated message but needs to understand the information environment as it relates to the information and decisionmaking cycles of foreign audiences, adversaries, and potential adversaries even more. Communication synchronization is vital, but when the bullets are flying even the best messages are insufficient to affect decisionmaking. Future military operations will require IO professionals with an understanding of past authority limitations to explore the realm of the possible and justify new operations originating in the information environment. IO, as these vignettes revealed, is never a “cookie-cutter” or “best practices” solution. Planning and executing IO in accordance with its doctrinal definition requires thought and adaptation facilitated by operational analysis. Meanwhile, many information-related capabilities are growing in capacity. All of this is for the better as the Defense Department’s ability to operate within and affect the information environment remains a growth industry. To make the most of these processes and capabilities, the joint force commander needs a limber staff capable of maximizing the commander’s options and minimizing staff frictions in order to achieve the commander’s effects and complete the mission. JFQ NOTES 1 “Army establishes Army Cyber Command,” available at <www.army.mil/article/46012/ army-establishes-army-cyber-command/>. 2 Curtis Boyd, “The Future of MISO,” Special Warfare 1 (January–February 2011), 22–29. 3 Air Force Instruction 10-702, Operations (Washington, DC: Headquarters Department of the Air Force, June 7, 2011). 4 Dennis M. Murphy, “The Future of Influence in Warfare,” Joint Force Quarterly 64 (1st Quarter 2012), 47–51. 5 Joint Publication 3-13, Information Operations (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, December 2012). 6 Colonel James Gferrer approved the author using this quotation from an otherwise nonattribution conference discussion. 7 “Request for Support of Funding Authorities to Combat Information Operations,” Office of the Secretary of Defense, Washington, DC, 2010. 8 “International Broadcasters Condemn Iran Over ‘Jamming,’” BBC, available at <http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8511921.stm>. 9 “Yemen Seizes Arab Satellite TV Gear Over Southern Unrest,” Agence France-Presse, available at <www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ ALeqM5gkrWanPN6xBGeMX_ax8TdFNrC9Ow>. 10 United Nations, Charter of the United Nations, 7/51, October 24, 1945, available at <www. un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter7.shtml>. 11 GA Res 424 (V), UN GAOR, 5th Sess., Supp. No. 20, UN Doc. A/1775 (1950), (“Freedom of information is a human right.”). 12 Peter Ford, “Is it too late for a popular uprising inside Iraq? Refugees report signs of unrest in Baghdad,” Christian Science Monitor, January 27, 2003, 14. 13 Walter Pincus, “Lawmakers Slash Budget for Defense Department’s Information Ops,” The Washington Post, June 22, 2011, available at <www. washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/lawmakers-slash-budget-for-militarysinformation-ops/2011/06/22/AGVC3cfH_blog. html>. ndup res s . ndu. edu NEW from NDU Press The Chinese Air Force: Evolving Concepts, Roles, and Capabilities Edited by Richard P. Hallion, Roger Cliff, and Phillip C. Saunders The People’s Liberation Army Air Force has undergone a rapid transformation since the 1990s into a formidable, modern air force that could present major challenges to Taiwanese and U.S. forces in a conflict. To examine the present state and future prospects of China’s air force, a distinguished group of scholars and experts on Chinese airpower and military affairs gathered in Taipei, Taiwan, in October 2010. This volume is a compilation of the edited papers presented at the conference, rooted in Chinese sources and reflecting comments and additions stimulated by the dialogue and discussions among the participants. Contributing authors include Kenneth W. Allen, Roger Cliff, David Frelinger, His-hua Cheng, Richard P. Hallion, Jessica Hart, Kevin Lanzit, Forrest E. Morgan, Kevin Pollpeter, Shen PinLuen, Phillip C. Saunders, David R. Shlapak, Mark A. Stokes, Murray Scot Tanner, Joshua K. Wiseman, Xiaoming Zhang, and You Ji. Strategic Reflections: Operation Iraqi Freedom, July 2004–February 2007 By George W. Casey, Jr. General, U.S. Army Retired Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom were the first major wars of the 21st century. They will not be the last. They have significantly impacted how the U.S. Government and military think about prosecuting wars. They will have a generational impact on the U.S. military, as its future leaders, particularly those in the ground forces, will for decades be men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is imperative that leaders at all levels, both military and civilian, share their experiences to ensure that we, as a military and as a country, gain appropriate insights for the future. When General George W. Casey, Jr., was the Army chief of staff, he encouraged leaders at the war colleges, staff colleges, and advanced courses to write about what they did in Iraq and Afghanistan so that others could be better prepared when they faced similar challenges. This book is General Casey’s effort to follow his own advice, offering narratives and insights about his tenure as commander of MultiNational Force–Iraq so that future leaders can be better prepared for the next conflict. Available in PDF and e-book formats at: www.ndu.edu/press/strategicreflections Council of War: A History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1942–1991 Steven L. Rearden’s Council of War: A History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1942–1991 surveys the role and contributions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) from the early days of World War II through the end of the Cold War. The JCS, an organization of military advisors and planners established early in World War II, first advised the President on the strategic direction of U.S. Armed Forces in that war and continued afterward to play a significant role in the development of national policy. Because of their relations with the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council, a history of their activities, both in war and in peacetime, provides insights into the military history of the United States. The importance of their activities led the JCS to direct that an official history of their actions be kept for future generations to study. Dr. Rearden’s Council of War follows in the tradition of volumes previously published about JCS involvement in national policy, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Using a combination of primary and secondary sources, and adopting a broader view of previous volumes, this fresh work of scholarship examines the military implications of problems from 1942 to 1991. Although focused strongly on the JCS, Rearden’s well-researched treatise deals too with the wider effect of crucial decisions and their ensuing policies. JOINT FORCE Q UA R T E R LY Published for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by National Defense University Press National Defense University, Washington, DC