USA: STRATEGIE & PENSEE MILITAIRE - Strategy & Military Thinking

A la découverte de l'Amiral James G. Stavridis, probable futur SACEUR

2009-03-21T16:49:00.014-04:00

L'amiral (USN) James G. Stavridis vient d'être proposé par le SECDEF, M. Robert Gates pour occuper la fonction de commandant des forces U.S. en Europe (US EUCOM), poste qui va de pair avec celui de Commandant Suprême des Forces de l'Alliance Atlantique en Europe (SACEUR, pour Supreme Allied Commander EURope). A ce titre, à la tête du Commandement Allié « Opérations » (ACO pour Allied Command Operations), il sera l’un des deux commandants stratégiques de l’OTAN.
Si, jusqu'à présent, Jim Stavridis ne s'est pas prononcé sur sa vision de ses futures fonctions qu'il exercera au Grand quartier général des puissances alliées en Europe (SHAPE, pour Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe) , il est intéressant d'examiner l'homme et son œuvre, en particulier celle qu'il accomplit actuellement en tant que US Southern Commander (US SOUTHCOM), commandement unifié Interarmées aux responsabilités régionales similaires à celles d' US EUCOM et aux défis régionaux probablement aussi complexes que ceux que rencontrent les intérêts américains en Europe.

L'Homme

Floridien de 54 ans d’ascendance grecque, fils de Colonel des Marines, James G. Stavridis (« Jim » pour les intimes) est sorti de l’académie navale d’Annapolis en 1976. Affecté aux forces de surface, il s’est particulièrement fait remarquer pour son leadership au commandement de l’USS Barry (DDG 52), du Destroyer Squadron 21, et du Battle Group du CVN Enterprise pendant les opérations Enduring Freedom et Iraki Freedom. Dans ces différentes fonctions il a obtenu de nombreuses récompenses prestigieuses au sein de l'US Navy, telle la "Battenbeg Cup" ou le "John Paul Jones Award." Breveté du National War College en 1992, il détient un doctorat en relations Internationales de la Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy . L’ensemble de ses qualités l’a amené à des postes de responsabilités importants au sein de l'US Navy et du Pentagone, dont celui de « Senior Military Assistant » du Secrétaire à la Défense Donald Rumsfeld.

Il est probablement l'un des plus jeunes officiers généraux US à obtenir le grade suprême en temps de paix, en ayant reçu sa 4^ème étoile d’"Admiral" à 51 ans, le 19 octobre 2006.

Outre ses qualités de leadership, Jim Stavridis a la plume facile et prolifique. Rédacteur ou co-rédacteur de nombreux ouvrages et articles, il a son propre blog. Il est en particulier l'auteur d'un ouvrage, « Destroyer Captain: Lessons of a first Command » qui est la bible en matière de leadership pour les commandants d'unités de l'US Navy. Son épouse Laura Hall Stavridis participe à son aventure littéraire puisqu'elle est l'auteur du « Navy Spouse's Guide ». Ils se sont connus en Grèce alors qu'il avait 8 ans, et elle 3, leurs pères étant en poste ensemble à l'ambassade des U.S.A. Il sont parents de deux jeunes filles, Christina et Julia.

Formé aux relations internationales, Jim Stavridis a une volonté de mieux connaitre ses partenaires et leurs cultures. Parlant Français et Portugais entre autres langues, il a aussi appris l’Espagnol en prenant son commandement à SOUTHCOM et l’a maitrisé parfaitement très rapidement. Il a établi une liste de livres et de films étrangers qu'il conseille aux membres de son état-major pour qu'ils se familiarisent aux divers aspects des cultures latino-américaines.

Adepte des sports de raquette, il aime aussi jouer au basket, malgré sa petite taille qu'il n'hésite pas à plaisanter en public.

Ceux qui le croisent s'accordent à dire que c'est une personnalité charismatique, facile d'accès et allant vers les autres, quelque soit leur grade ou leur nationalité, en usant d'une civilité hors du commun. "C'est un chef extrèmement positif " qui est prêt à écouter avant de prendre une décision, n'a pas d'idées préconçues et est doté d'un esprit pratique. Proche de ses hommes, il met en avant l'équipe plutôt que les individus, lui inclus. Les décisions prises sont consciencieusement pesées au regard des risques encourus, des bénéfices attendus et des coûts estimés.
Réaliste dans son examen de la vision des USA qu'ont les autres nations, il ne parait pas montrer de préférence pour un pays ou un autre.

Sa philosophie du commandement:

- Civilité: "Être aimable, Partager le crédit des résultats et garder le sens de l'humour."

- Confiance tranquille: " Être toujours calme et constant. Ne pas laisser l'égo se mettre en travers du progrès."

- Créativité: "Être une veilleuse. Toujours se demander comment puis-je faire mieux ceci?"

- Travail d'équipe et collaboration: "Travailler ensemble, personne n'est plus intelligent que l'ensemble du groupe pensant ensemble."

- Détermination: "Ne jamais, jamais, jamais abandonner."

- Honnêteté et intégrité: "Ne jamais transgresser la loi ou les règlements. Être inflexible pour dire la vérité."

La Pensée

S'il fallait résumer la pensée stratégique de l'amiral Stavridis, deux de ses expressions favorites la résumeraient assez bien: " Think out of the box" et "Smart Power".

- La seconde révolution dans les affaires militaires

l’amiral Stavridis est un adepte des nouvelles technologies, et en particulier celles de l'information. Dès le printemps 1997 dans un article dans le "Joint Force Quarterly", il s'est penché sur « révolution dans les affaires militaires » (RMA, pour Revolution in Military Affairs), faisant preuve d'une vue visionnaire des conflits asymétriques auxquels seraient confrontés les USA. Il évoque une seconde RMA qui serait la réaction à la première dans la course continue entre "le boulet et la cuirasse". Selon lui une grande partie des technologies utilisées pour la première RMA, qui a pour objectif militaire de remplacer la logique d'attrition de l'adversaire par sa paralysie et sa mise en état de choc, seront (on est en 1997) commercialisées pour des applications civiles . Elles seront facilement accessibles à faible coût à de nombreux compétiteurs. Néanmoins certaines capacités de la RMA, qui repose sur trois piliers que sont le système de systèmes, la domination de l'information et la guerre de l'information, resteront inabordables pour ces adversaires. Se développera alors la seconde RMA, utilisant d'autres méthodes pour contrer les outils qui ne pourront être acquis. Stavridis en donne une liste non exhaustive. Ainsi pour limiter l'effet des frappes de précision les objectifs seront durcis, enterrés, dispersés, multipliés. Pour lutter dans le domaine de la guerre de l'information l'adversaire utilisera des méthodes primitives, s'isolera, contre-attaquera. Les senseurs sophistiqués seront aveuglés, les cibles multipliées, dissimulées et dispersées dans un environnement peu atteignable (population civile). La moindre qualité des hommes et des équipements sera compensée par la quantité et l'effet de masse. Des technologies nouvelles et innovantes adaptées à ces modes d'action seront développées dans des domaines comme la biologie (armes, mais aussi drogues, stimulants et médicaments), les munitions rustiques (missiles de croisière, mines...), la chimie des matériaux (blindages..), ou les armes de destruction massive. A la guerre de manœuvre s'opposera la défense statique et la manœuvre réactive (pièges, embuscades très étendues..).

- Le « Smart Power » et l' « Inter Agency » appliqués à la stratégie régionale

Si, dans ses postes au Pentagone, Jim Stavridis a jugé de l'importance des technologies émergentes pour la transformation des forces armées, il exprime depuis qu'il est à SOUTHCOM que ces dernières ne sont pas la seule réponse aux défis régionaux qu'affronte les États-Unis. Ses vues sur la conduite des affaires militaires y sont très proches de celles exprimées par le Secrétaire Robert Gates. Adepte pratiquant du « Smart Power », il est un fervent promoteur d’une approche inter administrations et d’un lien étroit entre les affaires militaires et la Diplomatie dans les politiques régionales.

L' amiral Stavridis part du principe que votre adversaire est au moins aussi intelligent que vous et très innovant. Pour appliquer à son encontre une stratégie gagnante, le « Smart Power », ne doit pas reposer sur la force pure. Il doit conjuguer une compréhension de la région non seulement au plan géopolitique, mais aussi culturel, social et humain, avec un esprit d'innovation tirant parti de tous les outils de puissance de la nation, mis en synergie par une organisation de type inter administrations (Inter Agency), de ses alliances et relations internationales, et même de partenariats avec le secteur privé.

Cette stratégie, de type « gagnant-gagnant », doit pouvoir être bénéfique à l'ensemble de la région. Elle doit mettre en avant la nécessité de renforcer et soutenir les partenariats internationaux sur le long terme, bâtissant la confiance et la coopération, pour garantir la sécurité d'états stables et le désir de répondre ensemble aux crises.

Pour y parvenir l'amiral Stavridis a complètement transformé l’organisation de SOUTHCOM pour passer son état-major d'une culture de combat à une culture « Inter Agency » et Internationale, ayant maintenant un diplomate comme un de ses deux « Deputy », renforcé la place et le nombre d'officiers de liaison étrangers, intégré d'autres agences fédérales ne dépendant pas du Department of Defense (DoD), développé la communication stratégique et les actions de coopération militaire internationale à but pacifique ( déploiement de navire hôpital, croisières d'instruction etc.), et soutenu activement la lutte contre la menace criminelle régionale au travers de la « Joint Inter Agency Task Force South » (JIATF-S), qu'il voit comme un modèle d'organisation « Inter Agency » et Internationale .

"Hard Power" + "Soft Power" = "Smart Power"

2007-12-06T12:20:00.001-05:00

L'article qui suit complète la reflexion de Robert Gates présentée dans le billet précédent.

Les auteurs sont deux personnages influents de la pensée politique étrangère et stratégique américaine représentant les deux camps, républicain et démocrate.

Le premier, Richard L. Armitage a été sous-secrétaire du Département d'Etat sous Colin Powell. Le second Joseph S. Nyles Jr. a été un des premiers théoriciens du "Soft Power" et a occupé des fonctions de sous-secrétaire aux Départements d'Etat et de la Défense sous les administrations Carter et Clinton.

Maintenant ils dirigent conjointement une commission sur le "Smart Power" (Pouvoir Intelligent) au "Center for Strategic and International Studies".

Le "Smart Power" est une combinaison de "Hard Power", par nature coercitif, et de"Soft Power" atractif, destiné non pas à rendre le Monde semblable aux USA, mais à contrer les durs défis que ce pays aura à faire face.

Pour le bâtir, il faut revigorer les alliances , partenariats et institutions existantes .

C.H.

Why So Angry, America?

The United States is strongest when it is most engaged with the world.

By Richard L. Armitage and Joseph S. Nye Jr.

Washington Post - Sunday, December 9, 2007;

The world is dissatisfied with American leadership. Shocked and frightened after 9/11, we put forward an angry face to the globe, not one that reflected the more traditional American values of hope and optimism, tolerance and opportunity.
This fearful approach has hurt the United States' ability to bring allies to its cause, but it is not too late to change. The nation should embrace a smarter strategy that blends our hard and soft power -- our ability to attract and persuade, as well as our ability to use economic and military might. Whether it is ending the crisis in Pakistan, winning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, deterring Iran and North Korea's nuclear ambitions, managing China's rise or improving the lives of those left behind by globalization, the United States needs a broader, more balanced approach.
Lest anyone think this approach is weak or naive, remember that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates used a major speech on Nov. 26 "to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use 'soft' power and for better integrating it with 'hard' power." We -- one Republican, one Democrat -- have devoted our lives to promoting American preeminence as a force for good in the world. But the United States cannot stay on top without strong and willing allies and partners. Over the past six years, too many people have confused sharing the burden with relinquishing power. In fact, when we let others help, we are extending U.S. influence, not diminishing it.
Since 9/11, the war on terrorism has shaped this isolating outlook, becoming the central focus of U.S. engagement with the world. The threat from terrorists with global reach is likely to be with us for decades. But unless they have weapons of mass destruction, groups such as al-Qaeda pose no existential threat to the United States -- unlike our old foes Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
In fact, al-Qaeda and its ilk hope to defeat us by using our own strength against us. They hope we will blunder, overreact and turn world opinion against us. This is a deliberately set trap, and one whose grave strategic consequences extend far beyond the costs that this nation would suffer from any small-scale terrorist attack, no matter how individually tragic and collectively painful. We cannot return to a nearsighted pre-9/11 mindset that underestimated the al-Qaeda threat, but neither can we remain stuck in a narrow post-9/11 mindset that alienates much of the world.
More broadly, when our words do not match our actions, we demean our character and moral standing. We cannot lecture others about democracy while we back dictators. We cannot denounce torture and waterboarding in other countries and condone it at home. We cannot allow Cuba's Guantanamo Bay or Iraq's Abu Ghraib to become the symbols of American power.
The United States has long been the big kid on the block, and it will probably remain so for years to come. But its staying power has a great deal to do with whether it is perceived as a bully or a friend. States and non-state actors can better address today's challenges when they can draw in allies; those who alienate potential friends stand at greater risk.
The past six years have demonstrated that hard power alone cannot secure the nation's long-term goals. The U.S. military remains the best in the world, even after having been worn down from years of war. We will have to invest in people and materiel to maintain current levels of readiness; as a percentage of gross domestic product, U.S. defense spending is actually well below Cold War levels. But an extra dollar spent on hard power will not necessarily bring an extra dollar's worth of security.
After all, security threats are no longer simply military threats. China is building two coal-fired power plants each week. U.S. hard power will do little to curb this trend, but U.S.-developed technology can make Chinese coal cleaner, which helps the environment and opens new markets for American industry.
In a changing world, the United States should become a smarter power by once again investing in the global good -- by providing things that people and governments want but cannot attain without U.S. leadership. By complementing U.S. military and economic strength with greater investments in soft power, Washington can build the framework to tackle tough global challenges. We call this "smart power."
Smart power is not about getting the world to like us. It is about developing a strategy that balances our hard (coercive) power with our soft (attractive) power. During the Cold War, the United States deterred Soviet aggression through investments in hard power. But as Gates noted late last month, U.S. leaders also realized that "the nature of the conflict required us to develop key capabilities and institutions -- many of them non-military." So the United States used its soft power to rebuild Europe and Japan and to establish the norms and institutions that became the core of the international order for the past half-century. The Cold War ended under a barrage of hammers on the Berlin Wall rather than a barrage of artillery across the Fulda Gap precisely because of this integrated approach.
Specifically, the United States should renew its focus on five critical areas:
-- We should reinvigorate the alliances, partnerships and institutions that allow us to address numerous hazards at once without having to build a consensus from scratch to respond to every new challenge.
-- We should create a Cabinet-level voice for global development to help Washington develop a more unified and integrated aid program that aligns U.S. interests with the aspirations of people worldwide, starting with global health.
-- We should reinvest in public diplomacy within the government and establish a new nonprofit institution outside of it to build people-to-people ties, including doubling the annual appropriation to the Fulbright program.
-- We should sustain our engagement with the global economy by negotiating a "free trade core" of countries in the World Trade Organization willing to move directly to free trade on a global basis, and expand the benefits of free trade to include those left behind at home and abroad.
-- We should take the lead in addressing climate change and energy insecurity by investing more in technology and innovation.
Leadership requires more than vision. It requires execution and accountability, two features in short supply in government today.
Throughout the Cold War, the United States projected an image of vast technical competence: We sent humans to the moon and helped eradicate smallpox. Later, the nation's military victories in Iraq in 1991 and Kosovo in 1999 demonstrated its towering technical proficiency. But today, the United States projects a very different image. The country's tragically inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina, difficulty in restoring basic services in Iraq and inability to address looming domestic issues such as health care, immigration and the cost of entitlements have made it appear that the country can no longer solve tough problems. Some people abroad have always questioned U.S. policy. Today, many are questioning our basic competence.
Smart power could start to change that, but it will not solve all of the nation's problems. Its lasting value is that it may help persuade others to join the U.S. cause. Do not underestimate the importance of having Iran finally hear in stereophonic sound that it must desist from pursuing a nuclear weapons program; given the latest National Intelligence Estimate, it might have actually worked. And do not underestimate the goodwill that a sustained effort to eradicate disease could bring.
Consider the current crisis in Pakistan. The United States might be in a better position today had it not walked away from Pakistan in the 1990s and had it broadened its engagement beyond military cooperation with and support of Gen. Pervez Musharraf over the past six years, as the 9/11 commission suggested. Instead, U.S. favorability ratings are below 20 percent in Pakistan. The U.S.-led war on terrorism is widely seen by Pakistanis as a war on Islam, and American support now tarnishes Pakistani leaders who share U.S. objectives.
And yet, for a brief period in late 2005 and early 2006, U.S. favorability ratings approached 50 percent in Pakistan. Why? Because of the U.S. military's effective and principled response to the October 2005 earthquake there, the largest and longest relief effort in U.S. military history. It showed Pakistanis U.S. commitment and friendship and provided an important source of smart power. It demonstrated, however briefly, that America's standing in the world can indeed be restored.
Now, a year before the presidential elections, candidates from both parties can present a more optimistic vision that balances Americans' desire for protection at home with wiser policies abroad. It would simply be the smart thing to do.
smartpower@csis.org

La vision du Secrétaire d'Etat à la Défense, Robert M. Gates

2007-11-28T00:09:00.001-05:00

Ce ne sont pas les sujets à aborder qui me manquent pour ce blog. Aujourd’hui je rattrape presque l’actualité puisque je vais consacrer ce billet au discours prononcé le 26 novembre par le Secrétaire d’Etat américain à la Défense (SECDEF), Robert M. Gates.

Ce texte, donné à la Kansas State University, fait partie de la série des « Landon Lectures » invitant des conférenciers renommés, dont de nombreux chefs d’Etat.

Ce discours de géopolitique sera probablement considéré comme une référence pour le développement de la stratégie de défense américaine dans les années à venir. Il conditionnera vraissemblablement l’évolution de du Département de la Défense et de l’appareil militaire américain, mais aussi les autres outils de puissance internationale des USA, au premier rang desquels le Département d’Etat. L'analyse que fait le SECDEF le conduit aussi à faire des choix entre les positions exprimées dans débat en cours à propos du futur des forces armées américaines et devrait orienter la prochaine « Quadriennal Defense Review » (QDR).

Ce que je veux en retenir :

Les très nombreuses analyses historiques de Robert Gates qui occupent une bonne partie du discours sont très intéressantes et pertinentes. Mais il faut surtout s'attacher à sa vision des défis actuels et futurs des Etats-Unis en tant que puissance mondiale, la manière dont elle doit les aborder en utilisant la totalité des instruments de Pouvoir dont dispose la Nation, par ce qu’elle va sans nul doute conditionner la politique américaine.

Selon le SECDEF, la fin de la guerre froide et les attaques du 11 septembre on marqué l’aube d’une nouvelle ère dans les relations internationales, une ère dont les défis sont peut-être sans précédent en complexité et en portée.

En plus des maux traditionnels qui existaient à la fin du XIX^ème et au début du XX^èmesiècle, tels, les conflits portés par la haine religieuse ou ethnique , les mouvements révolutionnaires et même le terrorisme, qui avaient été occultés depuis la I^ère Guerre Mondiale jusqu’à la fin de la Guerre Froide, s’ajoutent de nouvelles forces d’instabilité et de conflit. Ce sont entre autres :

- Une nouvelle forme, plus maligne de terrorisme mondial prenant ses racines dans un jihadisme extrémiste et violent ;

- De nouvelles manifestations de conflits ethniques, tribal et sectaire de part le Monde ;

- La prolifération des armes de destruction massive ;

- Les Etats affaiblis ou en faillite ;

- Les états enrichis par la manne pétrolière et mécontents de l’ordre mondial actuel ;

- Et les forces centrifuges qui menacent dans d’autres pays l’unité nationale, la stabilité et la paix interne, mais aussi ayant une influence sur la sécurité régionale et mondiale.

Il ajoute à cela les régimes autoritaires qui voient leur peuple demander plus de liberté politique et de meilleures conditions de vie, ainsi que les grandes puissances émergentes, ou résurgentes, dont le futur cheminement est encore incertain.

Circonscrire ces maux et ces menaces ne peut pas se faire par le seul usage de la force militaire, le « Hard Power ». Il faut renforcer les autres éléments importants de la puissance nationale, institutionnels et financiers, le « Soft Power », et créer la capacité d’intégrer et d’appliquer tous ces instruments de Pouvoir de la Nation aux défis rencontrés à l’extérieur.

Au vu des défis rencontrés depuis la fin de la Guerre Froide, Robert Gates pense qu’il faut changer les priorités de l’appareil de Défense US pour être capable de mieux traiter les « Guerres asymétriques » qui vont prévaloir encore pour un certain temps. En effet, il lui parait difficilement concevable qu’un pays défie militairement les USA de manière frontale dans les quelques années à venir. Au contraire l’histoire montre que des forces irrégulières, insurgés, guérilla ou terroristes, ont réussi à frustrer des armées régulières importantes et semer le chaos.

Ces conflits asymétriques sont fondamentalement politiques par nature et requièrent l’usage de l’ensemble des pouvoirs de la Nation. Le succès ne dépend pas de la capacité à imposer sa propre volonté, mais de celle de modeler le comportement des amis et des ennemis, et plus important encore des populations qui sont entre les deux.

Ces nouvelles menaces imposent que le gouvernement dans son ensemble agisse différemment : avec unité, agilité et créativité. Elles requièrent aussi des ressources bien plus considérables pour les instruments de pouvoir non-militaires des USA.

A ce titre, il souhaite voir augmenter de manière conséquente les ressources budgétaires et humaines du Département d’Etat.

De même les capacités de reconstruction que les armées ont développé en Afghanistan et en Irak doivent être maintenues et institutionnalisées. Le travail en « inter-agences » ou avec des organisations extérieures au gouvernement doit être développé et mieux intégré.

Le SECDEF veut aussi développer la communication stratégique vers le reste du Monde pour promouvoir l’image des USA et de ses valeurs fondamentales.

Tout cela nécessite des fonds et il ne faut pas les concentrer sur les seuls moyens militaires matériels et humains. Avec une diplomatie plus forte l’appareil militaire est moins sollicité.

Il cite enfin l’historien Donald Kagan, estimant que ce qui est le meilleur pour les affaires « c’est la possession par ces Etats qui veulent préserver la Paix du pouvoir prépondérant et de la volonté d’accepter les charges et les responsabilités que requises pour pour parvenir à cette fin », faisant ensuite sienne cette déclaration de W . Churchill: « Le prix de la grandeur, c’est la responsabilité, ... Le peuple américain ne peux pas échapper à ses responsabilités mondiales ».

C.H.

Voici l’extrait significatif de ce discours :

LANDON LECTURE

Robert M. Gates, U.S. Secretary of Defense

Kansas State University – November 26^th, 2007

Looking around the world today, optimism and idealism would not seem to have much of a place at the table. There is no shortage of anxiety about where our nation is headed and what its role will be in the 21^st century.

I can remember clearly other times in my life when such dark sentiments were prevalent. In 1957, when I was at Wichita High School East, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, and Americans feared being left behind in the space race and, even more worrisome, the missile race.

In1968, the first full year I lived in Washington, was the same year as the Tet offensive in Vietnam, where American troop levels and casualties were at their height. Across the nation, protests and violence over Vietnam engulfed America’s cities and campuses. On my second day of work as a CIA analyst, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. And then came the 1970s – when it seemed that everything that could go wrong for America did.

Yet, through it all, there was another storyline, one not then apparent. During those same years, the elements were in place and forces were at work that would eventually lead to victory in the Cold War – a victory achieved not by any one party or any single president, but by a series of decisions, choices, and institutions that bridged decades, generations, and administrations. From:

· The first brave stand taken by Harry Truman with the doctrine of containment; to

· The Helsinki Accords under Gerald Ford; to

· The elevation of human rights under Jimmy Carter; to

· The muscular words and deeds of Ronald Reagan; and to

· The masterful endgame diplomacy of George H. W. Bush.

All contributed to bring an Evil Empire crashing down not with a bang but with a whimper. And virtually without a shot being fired.

In this great effort, institutions, as much as people and policies, played a key role. Many of those key organizations were created 60 years ago this year with the National Security Act of 1947 – a single act of legislation which established the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, the United States Air Force, and what is now known as the Department of Defense. I mention all this because that legislation and those instruments of national power were designed at the dawn of a new era in international relations for the United States – an era dominated by the Cold War.

The end of the Cold War, and the attacks of September 11, marked the dawn of another new era in international relations – an era whose challenges may be unprecedented in complexity and scope.

In important respects, the great struggles of the 20^th century – World War I and World War II and the Cold War – covered over conflicts that had boiled and seethed and provoked wars and instability for centuries before 1914: ethnic strife, religious wars, independence movements, and, especially in the last quarter of the 19^th century, terrorism. The First World War was, itself, sparked by a terrorist assassination motivated by an ethnic group seeking independence.

These old hatreds and conflicts were buried alive during and after the Great War. But, like monsters in science fiction, they have returned from the grave to threaten peace and stability around the world. Think of the slaughter in the Balkans as Yugoslavia broke up in the 1990s. Even now, we worry about the implications of Kosovo’s independence in the next few weeks for Europe, Serbia, and Russia. That cast of characters sounds disturbingly familiar even at a century’s remove.

The long years of religious warfare in Europe between Protestant and Catholic Christians find eerie contemporary echoes in the growing Sunni versus Shia contest for Islamic hearts and minds in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and Southwest Asia.

We also have forgotten that between Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, two American presidents and one presidential candidate were assassinated or attacked by terrorists – as were various tsars, empresses, princes, and, on a fateful day in June 1914, an archduke. Other acts of terrorism were commonplace in Europe and Russia in the latter part of the 19^th century.

So, history was not dead at the end of the Cold War. Instead, it was reawakening with a vengeance. And, the revived monsters of the past have returned far stronger and more dangerous than before because of modern technology – both for communication and for destruction – and to a world that is far more closely connected and interdependent than the world of 1914.

Unfortunately, the dangers and challenges of old have been joined by new forces of instability and conflict, among them:

· A new and more malignant form of global terrorism rooted in extremist and violent jihadism;

· New manifestations of ethnic, tribal, and sectarian conflict all over the world;

· The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction;

· Failed and failing states;

· States enriched with oil profits and discontented with the current international order; and

· Centrifugal forces in other countries that threaten national unity, stability, and internal peace – but also with implications for regional and global security.

Worldwide, there are authoritarian regimes facing increasingly restive populations seeking political freedom as well as a better standard of living. And finally, we see both emergent and resurgent great powers whose future path is still unclear.

One of my favorite lines is that experience is the ability to recognize a mistake when you make it again. Four times in the last century the United States has come to the end of a war, concluded that the nature of man and the world had changed for the better, and turned inward, unilaterally disarming and dismantling institutions important to our national security – in the process, giving ourselves a so-called “peace” dividend. Four times we chose to forget history.

Isaac Barrow once wrote, “How like a paradise the world would be, flourishing in joy and rest, if men would cheerfully conspire in affection and helpfully contribute to each other’s content: and how like a savage wilderness now it is, when, like wild beasts, they vex and persecute, worry and devour each other.” He wrote that in the late 1600s. Or, listen to the words of Sir William Stephenson, author of A Man Called Intrepid and a key figure in the Allied victory in World War II. He wrote, “Perhaps a day will dawn when tyrants can no longer threaten the liberty of any people, when the function of all nations, however varied their ideologies, will be to enhance life, not to control it. If such a condition is possible it is in a future too far distant to foresee.”

After September 11^th, the United States re-armed and again strengthened our intelligence capabilities. It will be critically important to sustain those capabilities in the future – it will be important not to make the same mistake a fifth time.

But, my message today is not about the defense budget or military power. My message is that if we are to meet the myriad challenges around the world in the coming decades, this country must strengthen other important elements of national power both institutionally and financially, and create the capability to integrate and apply all of the elements of national power to problems and challenges abroad. In short, based on my experience serving seven presidents, as a former Director of CIA and now as Secretary of Defense, I am here to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use “soft” power and for better integrating it with “hard” power.

One of the most important lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that military success is not sufficient to win: economic development, institution-building and the rule of law, promoting internal reconciliation, good governance, providing basic services to the people, training and equipping indigenous military and police forces, strategic communications, and more – these, along with security, are essential ingredients for long-term success. Accomplishing all of these tasks will be necessary to meet the diverse challenges I have described.

So, we must urgently devote time, energy, and thought to how we better organize ourselves to meet the international challenges of the present and the future – the world you students will inherit and lead.

I spoke a few moments ago about the landmark National Security Act of 1947 and the institutions created to fight the Cold War. In light of the challenges I have just discussed, I would like to pose a question: if there were to be a “National Security Act of 2007,” looking beyond the crush of day-to-day headlines, what problems must it address, what capabilities ought it create or improve, where should it lead our government as we look to the future? What new institutions do we need for this post Cold War world?

As an old Cold Warrior with a doctorate in history, I hope you’ll indulge me as I take a step back in time. Because context is important, as many of the goals, successes, and failures from the Cold War are instructive in considering how we might better focus energies and resources – especially the ways in which our nation can influence the rest of the world to help protect our security and advance our interests and values.

What we consider today the key elements and instruments of national power trace their beginnings to the mid-1940s, to a time when the government was digesting lessons learned during World War II. Looking back, people often forget that the war effort – though victorious – was hampered and hamstrung by divisions and dysfunction. Franklin Roosevelt quipped that trying to get the Navy, which was its own cabinet department at the time, to change was akin to hitting a featherbed: “You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted,” he said, “and then you find the damn bed just as it was before.” And Harry Truman noted that if the Navy and Army had fought as hard against the Germans as they had fought against each other, the war would have been over much sooner.

This record drove the thinking behind the 1947 National Security Act, which attempted to fix the systemic failures that had plagued the government and military during World War II – while reviving capabilities and setting the stage for a struggle against the Soviet Union that seemed more inevitable each passing day.

The 1947 Act acknowledged that we had been over-zealous in our desire to shut down capabilities that had been so valuable during the war – most of America’s intelligence and information assets disappeared as soon as the guns fell silent. The Office of Strategic Services – the war intelligence agency – was axed, as was the Office of War Information. In 1947, OSS returned as CIA, but it would be years before we restored our communications capabilities by creating the United States Information Agency.

There is in many quarters the tendency to see that period as the pinnacle of wise governance and savvy statecraft. As I wrote a number of years ago, “Looking back, it all seem[ed] so easy, so painless, so inevitable.” It was anything but.

Consider that the creation of the National Military Establishment in 1947 – the Department of Defense – was meant to promote unity among the military services. It didn’t. A mere two years later the Congress had to pass another law because the Joint Chiefs of Staff were anything but joint. And there was no chairman to referee the constant disputes.

At the beginning, the Secretary of Defense had little real power – despite an exalted title. The law forbad him from having a military staff and limited him to three civilian assistants. These days, it takes that many to sort my mail.

Throughout the long, twilight struggle of the Cold War, the various parts of the government did not communicate or coordinate very well with each other. There were military, intelligence, and diplomatic failures in Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Grenada, and many other places. Getting the military services to work together was a recurring battle that had to be addressed time and again, and was only really resolved by legislation in 1986.

But despite the problems, we realized, as we had during World War II, that the nature of the conflict required us to develop key capabilities and institutions – many of them non-military. The Marshall Plan and later the United States Agency for International Development acknowledged the role of economics in the world; the CIA the role of intelligence; and the United States Information Agency the fact that the conflict would play out as much in hearts and minds as it would on any battlefield.

The key, over time, was to devote the necessary resources – people and money – and get enough things right while maintaining the ability to recover from mistakes along the way. Ultimately, our endurance paid off and the Soviet Union crumbled, and the decades-long Cold War ended.

However, during the 1990s, with the complicity of both the Congress and the White House, key instruments of America’s national power once again were allowed to wither or were abandoned. Most people are familiar with cutbacks in the military and intelligence – including sweeping reductions in manpower, nearly 40 percent in the active army, 30 percent in CIA’s clandestine services.

What is not as well-known, and arguably even more shortsighted, was the gutting of America’s ability to engage, assist, and communicate with other parts of the world – the “soft power,” which had been so important throughout the Cold War. The State Department froze the hiring of new Foreign Service officers for a period of time. The United States Agency for International Development saw deep staff cuts – its permanent staff dropping from a high of 15,000 during Vietnam to about 3,000 in the 1990s. And the U.S. Information Agency was abolished as an independent entity, split into pieces, and many of its capabilities folded into a small corner of the State Department.

Even as we throttled back, the world became more unstable, turbulent, and unpredictable than during the Cold War years. And then came the attacks of September 11, 2001, one of those rare life-changing dates, a shock so great that it appears to have shifted the tectonic plates of history. That day abruptly ended the false peace of the 1990s as well as our “holiday from history.”

As is often the case after such momentous events, it has taken some years for the contour lines of the international arena to become clear. What we do know is that the threats and challenges we will face abroad in the first decades of the 21^st century will extend well beyond the traditional domain of any single government agency.

The real challenges we have seen emerge since the end of the Cold War – from Somalia to the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere – make clear we in defense need to change our priorities to be better able to deal with the prevalence of what is called “asymmetric warfare.” As I told an Army gathering last month, it is hard to conceive of any country challenging the United States directly in conventional military terms – at least for some years to come. Indeed, history shows us that smaller, irregular forces – insurgents, guerrillas, terrorists – have for centuries found ways to harass and frustrate larger, regular armies and sow chaos.

We can expect that asymmetric warfare will be the mainstay of the contemporary battlefield for some time. These conflicts will be fundamentally political in nature, and require the application of all elements of national power. Success will be less a matter of imposing one’s will and more a function of shaping behavior – of friends, adversaries, and most importantly, the people in between.

Arguably the most important military component in the War on Terror is not the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we enable and empower our partners to defend and govern themselves. The standing up and mentoring of indigenous army and police – once the province of Special Forces – is now a key mission for the military as a whole.

But these new threats also require our government to operate as a whole differently – to act with unity, agility, and creativity. And they will require considerably more resources devoted to America’s non-military instruments of power.

So, what are the capabilities, institutions, and priorities our nation must collectively address – through both the executive and legislative branches, as well as the people they serve?

I would like to start with an observation. Governments of all stripes seem to have great difficulty summoning the will – and the resources – to deal even with threats that are obvious and likely inevitable, much less threats that are more complex or over the horizon. There is, however, no inherent flaw in human nature or democratic government that keeps us from preparing for potential challenges and dangers by taking far-sighted actions with long-term benefits. As individuals, we do it all the time. The Congress did it in 1947. As a nation, today, as in 1947, the key is wise and focused bipartisan leadership – and political will.

I mentioned a moment ago that one of the most important lessons from our experience in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere has been the decisive role reconstruction, development, and governance plays in any meaningful, long-term success.

The Department of Defense has taken on many of these burdens that might have been assumed by civilian agencies in the past, although new resources have permitted the State Department to begin taking on a larger role in recent months. Still, forced by circumstances, our brave men and women in uniform have stepped up to the task, with field artillerymen and tankers building schools and mentoring city councils – usually in a language they don’t speak. They have done an admirable job. And as I’ve said before, the Armed Forces will need to institutionalize and retain these non-traditional capabilities – something the ROTC cadets in this audience can anticipate.

But it is no replacement for the real thing – civilian involvement and expertise.

A few examples are useful here, as microcosms of what our overall government effort should look like – one historical and a few contemporary ones.

However uncomfortable it may be to raise Vietnam all these years later, the history of that conflict is instructive. After first pursuing a strategy based on conventional military firepower, the United States shifted course and began a comprehensive, integrated program of pacification, civic action, and economic development. The CORDS program, as it was known, involved more than a thousand civilian employees from USAID and other organizations, and brought the multiple agencies into a joint effort. It had the effect of, in the words of General Creighton Abrams, putting “all of us on one side and the enemy on the other.” By the time U.S. troops were pulled out, the CORDS program had helped pacify most of the hamlets in South Vietnam.

The importance of deploying civilian expertise has been relearned – the hard way – through the effort to staff Provincial Reconstruction Teams, first in Afghanistan and more recently in Iraq. The PRTs were designed to bring in civilians experienced in agriculture, governance, and other aspects of development – to work with and alongside the military to improve the lives of the local population, a key tenet of any counterinsurgency effort. Where they are on the ground – even in small numbers – we have seen tangible and often dramatic changes. An Army brigade commander in Baghdad recently said that an embedded PRT was “pivotal” in getting Iraqis in his sector to better manage their affairs.

We also have increased our effectiveness by joining with organizations and people outside the government – untapped resources with tremendous potential.

For example, in Afghanistan the military has recently brought in professional anthropologists as advisors. The New York Times reported on the work of one of them, who said, “I’m frequently accused of militarizing anthropology. But we’re really anthropologizing the military.”

And it is having a very real impact. The same story told of a village that had just been cleared of the Taliban. The anthropologist pointed out to the military officers that there were more widows than usual, and that the sons would feel compelled to take care of them – possibly by joining the insurgency, where many of the fighters are paid. So American officers began a job training program for the widows.

Similarly, our land-grant universities have provided valuable expertise on agricultural and other issues. Texas A&M has had faculty on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2003. And Kansas State is lending its expertise to help revitalize universities in Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif, and working to improve the agricultural sector and veterinary care across Afghanistan. These efforts do not go unnoticed by either Afghan citizens or our men and women in uniform.

I have been heartened by the works of individuals and groups like these. But I am concerned that we need even more civilians involved in the effort and that our efforts must be better integrated.

And I remain concerned that we have yet to create any permanent capability or institutions to rapidly create and deploy these kinds of skills in the future. The examples I mentioned have, by and large, been created ad hoc – on the fly in a climate of crisis. As a nation, we need to figure out how to institutionalize programs and relationships such as these. And we need to find more untapped resources – places where it’s not necessarily how much you spend, but how you spend it.

The way to institutionalize these capabilities is probably not to recreate or repopulate institutions of the past such as AID or USIA. On the other hand, just adding more people to existing government departments such as Agriculture, Treasury, Commerce, Justice and so on is not a sufficient answer either – even if they were to be more deployable overseas. New institutions are needed for the 21^st century, new organizations with a 21^st century mind-set.

For example, public relations was invented in the United States, yet we are miserable at communicating to the rest of the world what we are about as a society and a culture, about freedom and democracy, about our policies and our goals. It is just plain embarrassing that al-Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the internet than America. As one foreign diplomat asked a couple of years ago, “How has one man in a cave managed to out-communicate the world’s greatest communication society?” Speed, agility, and cultural relevance are not terms that come readily to mind when discussing U.S. strategic communications.

Similarly, we need to develop a permanent, sizeable cadre of immediately deployable experts with disparate skills, a need which president bush called for in his 2007 state of the union address, and which the State Department is now working on with its initiative to build a civilian response corps. Both the President and Secretary of State have asked for full funding for this initiative. But we also need new thinking about how to integrate our government’s capabilities in these areas, and then how to integrate government capabilities with those in the private sector, in universities, in other non-governmental organizations, with the capabilities of our allies and friends – and with the nascent capabilities of those we are trying to help.

Which brings me to a fundamental point. Despite the improvements of recent years, despite the potential innovative ideas hold for the future, sometimes there is no substitute for resources – for money.

Funding for non-military foreign-affairs programs has increased since 2001, but it remains disproportionately small relative to what we spend on the military and to the importance of such capabilities. Consider that this year’s budget for the Department of Defense – not counting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan – is nearly half a trillion dollars. The total foreign affairs budget request for the State Department is $36 billion – less than what the Pentagon spends on health care alone. Secretary Rice has asked for a budget increase for the State Department and an expansion of the Foreign Service. The need is real.

Despite new hires, there are only about 6,600 professional Foreign Service officers – less than the manning for one aircraft carrier strike group. And personnel challenges loom on the horizon. By one estimate, 30 percent of USAID’s Foreign Service officers are eligible for retirement this year – valuable experience that cannot be contracted out.

Overall, our current military spending amounts to about 4 percent of GDP, below the historic norm and well below previous wartime periods. Nonetheless, we use this benchmark as a rough floor of how much we should spend on defense. We lack a similar benchmark for other departments and institutions.

What is clear to me is that there is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security – diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action, and economic reconstruction and development. Secretary Rice addressed this need in a speech at Georgetown University nearly two years ago. We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military, beyond just our brave soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen. We must also focus our energies on the other elements of national power that will be so crucial in the coming years.

Now, I am well aware that having a sitting Secretary of Defense travel halfway across the country to make a pitch to increase the budget of other agencies might fit into the category of “man bites dog” – or for some back in the Pentagon, “blasphemy.” It is certainly not an easy sell politically. And don’t get me wrong, I’ll be asking for yet more money for Defense next year.

Still, I hear all the time from the senior leadership of our Armed Forces about how important these civilian capabilities are. In fact, when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen was Chief of Naval Operations, he once said he’d hand a part of his budget to the State Department “in a heartbeat,” assuming it was spent in the right place.

After all, civilian participation is both necessary to making military operations successful and to relieving stress on the men and women of our armed services who have endured so much these last few years, and done so with such unflagging bravery and devotion. Indeed, having robust civilian capabilities available could make it less likely that military force will have to be used in the first place, as local problems might be dealt with before they become crises.

A last point. Repeatedly over the last century Americans averted their eyes in the belief that remote events elsewhere in the world need not engage this country. How could an assassination of an Austrian archduke in unknown Bosnia-Herzegovina effect us? Or the annexation of a little patch of ground called Sudetenland? Or a French defeat at a place called Dien Bien Phu? Or the return of an obscure cleric to Tehran? Or the radicalization of an Arab construction tycoon’s son?

What seems to work best in world affairs, historian Donald Kagan wrote in his book On the Origins of War, “Is the possession by those states who wish to preserve the peace of the preponderant power and of the will to accept the burdens and responsibilities required to achieve that purpose.”

In an address at Harvard in 1943, Winston Churchill said, “The price of greatness is responsibility . . . The people of the United States cannot escape world responsibility.” And, in a speech at Princeton in 1947, Secretary of State and retired Army general George Marshall told the students: “The development of a sense of responsibility for world order and security, the development of a sense of overwhelming importance of this country’s acts, and failures to act, in relation to world order and security – these, in my opinion, are great musts for your generation.”

Our country has now for many decades taken upon itself great burdens and great responsibilities – all in an effort to defeat despotism in its many forms or to preserve the peace so that other nations, and other peoples, could pursue their dreams. For many decades, the tender shoots of freedom all around the world have been nourished with American blood. Today, across the globe, there are more people than ever seeking economic and political freedom – seeking hope even as oppressive regimes and mass murderers sow chaos in their midst – seeking always to shake free from the bonds of tyranny.

For all of those brave men and women struggling for a better life, there is – and must be – no stronger ally or advocate than the United States of America. Let us never forget that our nation remains a beacon of light for those in dark places. And that our responsibilities to the world – to freedom, to liberty, to the oppressed everywhere – are not a burden on the people or the soul of this nation. They are, rather, a blessing.

I will close with a message for students in the audience. The message is from Theodore Roosevelt, whose words ring as true today as when he delivered them in 1901. He said, “…as, keen-eyed, we gaze into the coming years, duties, new and old, rise thick and fast to confront us from within and from without…[The United States] should face these duties with a sober appreciation alike of their importance and of their difficulty. But there is also every reason for facing them with high-hearted resolution and eager and confident faith in our capacity to do them aright.” He continued, “A great work lies ready to the hand of this generation; it should count itself happy indeed that to it is given the privilege of doing such a work.”

To the young future leaders of America here today, I say, “Come do the great work that lies ready to the hand of your generation.”

Thank you.

Le défi du partage du renseignement au sein d'une coalition

2007-11-26T12:08:00.000-05:00

Partager le renseignement est sûrement une des tâches les plus compliquées d’une coalition. La lourdeur administrative et les règles rigoristes, presque « paranoïaques » de protection du secret aux USA rendent cette tâche difficilement réalisable à grande échelle et avec une réactivité suffisante, (excepté peut-être avec les pays membres d’ « Echelon », et encore…). L’article qui suit rapporte que ce constat est partagé par le général James E. Cartwright (USMC), vice-chairman du « Joint Chiefs of Staff » (JCS). Il souhaite réformer les procédures.

Commentaires :

Ce constat est aussi celui de l’ « Office of the Secretary of Defense » (OSD-Policy) qui travaille à modifier en profondeur les règles en vigueur. La tâche est ardue car le département de la Défense (DOD) n’est pas le seul «propriétaire » des informations à partager. Dans la « Global War On Terrorism » (GWOT), tout comme dans les initiatives de sécurité internationale telles la « Maritime Defense Awarness » (MDA), ou la « Proliferation Security Initiative », nombreux sont les renseignements qui proviennent d’agences de « Law Enforcement » (LEA) telles le FBI, la DEA, ICE (Les enquêtes douanières), ATF (enquêtes sur les armes, explosifs, alcools et tabac), et autres services de Police qui ont des règles différentes de partage du renseignement, bannissant souvent leur diffusion automatique aux services étrangers pour des raisons légales.

Un pis-aller est la mise en place d'"Intel Fusion Centers" qui récupèrent le renseignement d'origine LEA et l'adapte à la classification du renseignement militaire en lui retirant ce qui peut être jugé sensible par les agences. C'est un processus qui, ne pouvant être automatisé, est gourmand en ressources humaines et en temps.

Le vrai constat est qu’il faut d’abord changer l’état d’esprit. Cette leçon est en partie tirée de l’expérimentation d’un Joint Intelligence Operation Center (JIOC) menée cette année au « Joint Force Command » (JFCOM) qui a conduit un atelier sur l'intégration des partenaires extérieurs « Allies and Coalition Partners » (ACP) dans un JIOC-X (Experimental Joint Intelligence Operation Center). Y étaient représentés les quatre armées, certains commandements opérationnels (CENTCOM, PACOM, SOCOM, EUCOM, …), des services de renseignement militaires et des partenaires étrangers.

Le concept JIOC vise à créer une synergie plus forte entre le renseignement, la conduite et la planification et travailler en "boucle courte" pour utiliser à temps les données issues du renseignement. L’atelier s’était attaché à faire le point sur les besoins de changement de la réglementation américaine concernant les échanges d'information, les principes devant guider la mise sur pied d'un JIOC avec des partenaires étrangers, ainsi que les besoins en technologie pouvant faciliter le fonctionnement de ce JIOC avec des ACP.

Le concept JIOC est prévu de s'appliquer au niveau opératif. L'idée originelle des Américains était de l'implanter au sein des commandements régionaux. Ce niveau n'ayant pas d'équivalent chez les partenaires à intégrer il a été suggéré de décentraliser les JIOC jusqu'aux Joint Task Forces sur le terrain, là où les ACP déploieront leurs moyens, notamment leurs capteurs.

La principale leçon qui en a été tirée est que les entraves aux échanges étant essentiellement créées par une application rigoriste des règles existantes, changer la loi sans changer l'état d'esprit avec lequel elle est appliquée risque fort d'être une évolution décevante.

C.H.

Vice Chairman Talks Intelligence at Geospatial Conference
American Forces Press Service

By Tech. Sgt. Adam M. Stump, USAF
Special to American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23, 2007 – Intelligence sharing between nations needs to be re-examined and improved, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said here yesterday.
Marine Corps Gen. James E. Cartwright gave the keynote address to more than 2,600 in attendance at the Geospatial Intelligence 2007 Conference. The audience included people from the Defense Intelligence Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service, along with people from 17 foreign countries.
After his speech, the general took questions from the audience. One question concerned classification being a barrier to international intelligence collaboration.
"If you're a parent, explain this one to your kids: It's OK to share a foxhole with an Aussie, have him die for you, but we can't tell him which way the threat's coming from," Cartwright said. "It's just ludicrous." He said collaborating with other nations while protecting classified information is imperative.
"We have to be able to start to differentiate between what it is we really want to keep secret," the general said.
The challenge of intelligence sharing was recently displayed during a national-level exercise, Cartwright told the audience. American and Australian officials tried to get into each other's computer systems to share intelligence, which proved difficult.
"Not sharing is unacceptable," he bluntly said.
During the question-and-answer session, Cartwright also said developing and expanding a common program to gather intelligence information is important to the future of intelligence capabilities. A current system operates like commercial search engines, he explained.
"The customer decides what it is they want to know,” he said. “It's more akin to My Yahoo! or Google.”
That system has limitations, he said. The way ahead, he told the group, is to let the user tell the search engines what to search for as well as what not to search for. However, Cartwright said, fielding intelligence capabilities shouldn't always involve throwing money at the problem to solve it, likening that challenge to the one posed by improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"It's akin to IEDs," the general said. "We can't afford the solution, but we're going to keep trying to spend the money to do it in some technical way instead of stepping out of the architectures and stovepipes," he added, referring to developing an “outside the box” way of solving the problem.

Après l'Irak, quel avenir pour les forces armées américaines?

2007-11-21T12:56:00.000-05:00

Les campagnes irakiennes et afghanes menées par l'appareil militaire américain ont laissé des traces sur celui-ci. Les ressources humaines, materielles et financières ne sont pas inépuisables.
L'article qui suit, traduit en français, résume bien les défis auxquels doit faire face les Forces Armées des USA dans les années à venir.
L'article original en anglais contient de nombreux liens vers d'autres documents interessants. vous pouvez le trouver à l'adresse:
http://www.cfr.org/publication/14721/future_of_the_us_military.html?breadcrumb=%2Fbios%2F13554%2Fgreg_bruno

C.H.

LE FUTUR DES FORCES ARMEES U.S.

Greg Bruno, Staff Writer

CONCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS - 7 Novembre 2007

Introduction

Six ans après le 11 septembre, les forces armées américaines sont à la croisée des chemins. Mises sous pression par le double poids de la guerre en Iraq et en Afghanistan, les ressources humaines et matérielles du Pentagone gravitent à proximité du point de rupture. Les forces terrestres sont particulièrement sous tension. L'US Army (USA), responsable de l'essentiel des opérations au Moyen-Orient, prévoit des déficits en officiers et des pénuries d'équipement alors que les conflits traînent en longueur. L’US Marine Corps (USMC), également, peine à maintenir des niveaux adéquats de préparation aux opérations alors que les pertes en équipements s'accumulent. L'armée de l'air et la marine, moins actifs que leurs homologues des combats au sol, souffrent néanmoins de la plus longue période de conflit depuis le Vietnam. Tous font face à des coupes budgétaires qui risquent de menacer à long terme de leurs capacités.
Beaucoup de choses ont été dites au sujet du « comment » et du « quand » l'armée américaine finira par s’extraire elle-même de ces guerres. Moins d'attention, cependant, a été accordée à ce à quoi l'armée pourrait ressembler à son retour. Les coûts grimpants - à la fois humains et budgétaires - menacent de faire dérailler projets de modernisation des forces que les dirigeants des Forces Armées jugent nécessaires. Et alimenter le débat sur les dépenses nécessaires à la défense fait éclore un désaccord sur la façon dont les menaces contre la nation se manifesteront dans le futur.

US Army (USA)

De l'avis de tous, les composantes d’active et de réserve de l’US Army portent le poids des guerres américaines actuelles. Ainsi en septembre 2007, environ 122.000 soldats de l'Army étaient en Irak, avec un supplément de 18.000 aux côtés de forces de l'OTAN en Afghanistan. Pas moins de 1,4 millions personnels d'active et de réserve ont participé à des opérations de combat depuis le 11 septembre 2001. En avril 2007, le Pentagone a mis en outre plus de contrainte sur l’Army avec l'extension des déploiements à quinze mois au lieu des traditionnels douze. Le mouvement, appelé « Prudent Management » par le Secrétaire à la Défense, M. Robert Gates, est arrivé alors qu’un nombre croissant de soldats ont opté de ne pas se réengager. Pour contrer l'attrition prévue l’US Army prévoit d'ajouter 65000 soldats dans ses rangs en 2010, et de passer le temps entre les déploiements de un an à deux ans. L'armée a également offert des bonifications pour inciter les jeunes officiers à rester sous l’uniforme.
La santé des soldats de retour aussi est en train de devenir une importante préoccupation à long terme. Le « Congressional Budget Office » rapporte que de près de 35000 soldats ont été blessés ou tués dans les combats depuis 2001, et le coût des soins de santé au cours de la prochaine décennie pourrait atteindre 9 milliards de $.
Les problèmes de personnel ne sont pas le seul défi de l'armée, cependant. Le « Center for American Progress » (CAP) et l'Institut Lexington indiquaient en avril 2006 que les contraintes sur les équipements - utilisation intensive et environnement irakien dur - ont réduit l’état de préparation de certaines unités. Le char M1 Abrams, par exemple, est utilisé six fois plus durement qu’en temps de paix, alors que les camions approchent dix fois l'utilisation normale. L'Army estime que 13,5 milliards de $ sont nécessaires pour payer la réparation des équipements essoufflés par la guerre.
Pour faire face à ses défis à long terme, l'Army est en train de rénover sa structure organisationnelle, en créant des équipes "modulaires" de brigades de combat destinées à offrir davantage de flexibilité dans les combats. Mais comme l’explique un documentaire, certains experts se demandent si les réformes ne rendront pas l'armée moins efficace dans les opérations de contre-insurrection.

US Marine Corps (USMC)

Le poids porté par le personnel et le matériel ont aussi accablé l'US Marine Corps. En août 2006 Le « Center for American Progress » (CAP) et de l'Institut Lexington ont signalé que les Marines, à l'instar de l'Army, a trébuché sur une crise des équipements qui menace les futures missions. Près de la moitié des véhicules blindés et de transport de troupes de l’USMC a été déployée en Irak, ont constaté les deux organisations, avec une grande partie endommagée et sur utilisée. Quarante pour cent des équipements de l’USMC pré-positionnés dans des entrepôts en Europe - surtout des véhicules terrestres et des munitions, ont été épuisés, ce qui limite la capacité de l’USMC de réagir à des situations en dehors de l'Iraq.
Certains responsables militaires ont cité les déficits d'équipement comme partie d'une "spirale de la mort" menaçant les réserves stratégiques du Corps; l’estimation des réparations et des remplacements atteignant 17 milliards de $.
Aggravant le sort des Marines, le V - 22 « Osprey », aéronef autour du quel l’USMC a conçu sa doctrine tactique opérationnelle, a été criblé des décennies durant par des problèmes techniques et de sécurité. L’Osprey peut décoller verticalement, puis voler comme un avion conventionnel, mais des défaillances moteur et les restrictions de vol sur ses manœuvres peuvent le rendre beaucoup moins utile dans des situations de combat comme le rapporte le « Times ».
Actuellement, il ya environ 25.000 marines en Irak. À l'instar de l'Army, l’USMC a un plan visant à augmenter en personnel et à réduire le temps entre les déploiements dans les prochaines années. Il n' ya pas de grandes unités de Marines en Afghanistan.

US Navy (USN)

Alors que le rôle de l’US Navy après le 11 septembre a été occulté par l'Army et le Marine Corps, l’Arme maritime de la nation n'a pas été absente de la lutte. Depuis conduite des frappes initiales de missiles de la guerre d’Irak, la marine a participé à la campagne terrestre en apportant le soutien médical et de construction aux unités de Marines; en gardant des centres de détention en Iraq, en envoyant des équipes d'élite de « SEAL » (commandos) contre les terroristes du monde entier. En octobre 2007, un SEAL est devenu le premier membre de la Navy en service en trente ans à gagner la Médaille d'Honneur pour héroïsme au combat. En avril 2007, il y avait dix-sept mille marins en mer en appui des missions en Iraq et en Afghanistan.
Pour accroître sa viabilité à long terme, la Navy est en train de redéfinir ses capacités de combat. Un symbole en est l’appellation « Green-water Navy » attachée à la nouvelle classe de petits bâtiments conçus pour opérer près du littoral, les « Littoral Combat Ships » (LCS). Des dépassements de coûts, cependant, ont conduit à des problèmes.
Plus largement, des plans sont en cours pour élargir les partenariats avec les marines alliées, conduire des missions humanitaires, et protéger les routes maritimes.

US Air Force (USAF)

l'US Air Force fait face à des défis semblables. Depuis 1991 l’USAF a été engagée en patrouillant les zones d'exclusion aérienne en Iraq. Aujourd'hui, elle mène un appui au combat traditionnel et des missions "non traditionnelles" – allant de l’escorte de convoi à la protection des infrastructures. L’USAF est également pris la direction de la guerre cybernétique. Au début de 2007 l’USAF avait trente mille de ses membres déployés dans la région d’US Central Command (USCENTCOM), qui comprend l'Iraq et l'Afghanistan. Pourtant, les guerres ont coûté cher aux aviateurs et à leurs équipements. Selon l’« Air Force Posture Statement » de 2007, un "nombre important" de la force de six mille avions est exploité avec des restrictions de vol en raison de son âge et de la surexploitation. L’âge moyen des bombardiers est plus de trente ans. "En conséquence," conclut l’USAF "l'armée de l'air voit sa capacité de répondre aux exigences de la lutte de demain remise en cause. "
Cette frustration est attestée par ralentissement du développement de nouveaux avions furtifs. Les essais du F-35 « Joint Strike Fighter » (JSF), par exemple, ont été retardés par des dysfonctionnements électriques, et les critiques font valoir que le F-22 « Raptor », un autre avion furtif, est lent et lourd.

L'avenir de la guerre

Tout aussi incertain est le type de conflits dans lesquels le Pentagone sera appelé à se battre. Pour l'instant, l'accent est mis sur les petites guerres, ou soi-disant campagnes de contre-insurrection. Considéré comme la "quatrième génération" de la guerre - derrière la ligne et la colonne, la mitrailleuse et de l'artillerie, le char d’assaut et les avions – ces combats nécessitent un grand nombre de soldats sur le terrain afin d’interagir avec la population et défier une coalition souple de combattants. M. Gates, le Secrétaire d’Etat à la Défense, dit qu'il envisage un avenir où les conflits non conventionnels sont "la pierre angulaire du champ de bataille contemporain."
Néanmoins, certains stratèges militaires affirment que les États-Unis auront besoin d'un vaste éventail de capacités pour contrer les menaces traditionnelles. D'autres encore craignent que le Pentagone ne revienne se concentrer sur la guerre conventionnelle après les guerres en Iraq et en Afghanistan, tout comme elle l'a fait après le Vietnam. L'amiral Michael G. Mullen, chef du Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), a une autre préoccupation. Il s'inquiète la focalisation sur l'Iraq ne conduise le pays à "sombrer dans la complaisance concernant ses responsabilités mondiales qui ne cessent de s’accroitre." Le débat est particulièrement vif au sein de l'Army. R. Gates a déclaré que l'Army devrait améliorer sa capacité à former les armées étrangères, et être prête à reconstruire les infrastructures et relancer les services publics. Cette vision, cependant, est contraire à celle préconisée par l'ancien Secrétaire à la Défense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, qui a appelé à une Army plus petite avec des unités techniques qui évitent clairement les missions d'édification de nations.

Un prix trop élevé

Au-delà des questions d'orientation et de préparation repose une plus grande bataille budgétaire cette fois. Les planificateurs du Pentagone mettent déjà « les chariots en cercle » en vue de la « Quadriennal Defense Review » de 2009 qui servira de cadre pour les dépenses de la prochaine administration présidentielle.

Les planificateurs de l’Army envisagent un monde plein de campagnes de contre-insurrection, où des hommes sur le terrain seraient indispensables. Plus il y a d’hommes, plus grande est la part du budget que l'Army mérite, fait-elle valoir. Les responsables de la Navy et de l’Air Force, en revanche, pourraient espérer un retour à l'ancien ordre mondial de la guerre classique, où les États-nations traditionnels comme la Chine ou la Russie constituent le plus grand risque pour la sécurité. "La grande question pour l'avenir, c'est ce que vous pensez de ce que seront les menaces à long terme", déclare Steven M. Kosiak , un analyste de défense au « Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments », un institut de recherche indépendant. "L'Army ne sera probablement pas particulièrement pertinente si la Chine est votre grande préoccupation."

La base pour le budget du Département de la Défense, actuellement de 483 milliards de $ - presque le double de ce qu'il était au milieu des années 1990 - représente environ 3,9 pour cent du produit intérieur brut américain (PIB), historiquement très bas comparé à des guerres passées, mais les rallonges budgétaires pour les dépenses supplémentaires augmentent les chiffres actuels. Durant le Vietnam, par exemple, les dépenses ont atteint un sommet de 9,5 pour cent du PIB, selon le Pentagone. Mais certains prédisent que les pressions intérieures forceront les politiciens à réduire les dépenses lorsque les conflits actuels s’évanouiront, comme ce fut le cas après la guerre froide. Conscients des querelles budgétaires potentielles, les chefs militaires ont tiré des coups préemptifs. Le secrétaire d’Etat à Air Force, Michael W. Wynne, a déclaré en septembre 2007 que son service aurait besoin d'une tranche additionnelle de 100 milliards de $ au cours des cinq années à venir pour rester apte à répondre aux défis futurs. Pour la Navy, le débat budgétaire peut s'articuler autour de la valeur opérationnelle de cette arme. En Avril 2007 un rapport du »Congressional Research Service » pose au Congrès la question de cette manière: "Les actions de la Navy sont-elles en partie motivés par des préoccupations quant la perception qu’elle est adaptée aux menaces actuelles, ou par un désir d'assurer une partie de son financement ...? "

L'amiral Mullen, lui aussi, a pressé le Congrès de maintenir les niveaux actuels élevé de financement dans les prochaines années. En octobre 2007 il a déclaré à l'International Herald Tribune que les contribuables doivent être prêts à "consacrer plus de ressources à la sécurité nationale", en partie pour la réparation d'équipements et la reconstruction des forces.

Tout le monde n'est pas d'accord. Richard K. Betts, « Senior Fellow » adjoint au « Council on Foreign Relations » dit lui que l’actuel budget de la défense est déjà largement déconnecté de la réalité. "La structure de défense du temps de paix est encore très importante par rapport à la guerre froide", affirme Betts, "et nous n'avons aucune menace comparable à celles qui nous préoccupaient durant la guerre froide."

Critique des plans militaires: les "Red Teams"

2007-11-20T11:39:00.000-05:00

L'article qui suit a été rédigé par une équipe dirigée par le chef d'État-major de la 4ème Division d'Infanterie U.S. déployée en Irak, le Colonel Allen Baschelet. Aiguillonnée par les différents articles critiquant la conduite des opérations par les chefs militaires (voir les billets précédents), l'US Army a vu fleurir un intense débat interne sur l'utilité de la critique, sur son encadrement, et comment la rendre constructive dans la pratique.
Offrant leur expérience actuelle, les auteurs apportent une réponse pratique qu'ils mettent en œuvre en Irak au sein de leur division: Les "Red Teams" . Ce sont des "équipes d'avocats du diable" qui passent au crible les plans militaires avant leur promulgation avec un œil extérieur, en s'appuyant en particulier sur la connaissance de la psychologie et de la culture des adversaires et du milieu .
C.H.

Risking critique

Red Teaming makes open criticism normal in military culture

BY COL. ALLEN BATSCHELET, MAJ. BARRY HAFER AND MAJ. MIKE RUNEY
ARMED FORCES JOURNAL - NOVEMBRE 2007

Openly critiquing one’s boss or his concepts is dicey. Such criticism carries risk and requires wisdom, as well as courage, to successfully transmit a controversial but important message. Challenging an organization’s culture only magnifies the stakes.

In the past few months, a series of retired and active-duty officers have openly criticized the military’s senior leadership. Notably, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling’s critique of the Army’s general officers (“A Failure in Generalship,” May) sparked a professional discussion that is very much alive. In July, Ralph Peters echoed some of Yingling’s argument in a widely published opinion piece. By then, the blogosphere was on fire, but the Internet captured only a fraction of the lively debate that stemmed from both pieces. Much of the discussion, though, has centered on whether the criticism was professional or whether senior leaders are willing to tolerate critical review. Although we do not endorse Yingling’s nor Peters’ arguments per se — the authors of this article each hold differing views on the merits — we emphatically maintain that such professional discourse is vital to the long-term health and credibility of the military profession.

More importantly and near-term, American commanders and military organizations must welcome critical review — by practicing formal and informal Red Teaming: critiquing decisions and bringing alternative perspectives (including non-Western) to the commander and staff in a relevant and timely manner. In the immediate future, mission success hangs in the balance. Longer term, Red Teaming can reshape the American military culture into one that normalizes internal criticism for the betterment of the organization.

For our organization — the Army’s 4th Infantry Division — re-examining modern warfare and urban counterinsurgency is far more than discourse; by December we will be back in Baghdad for the division’s third tour in Iraq in five years. Those who are on the cycle of deploy-reset-redeploy must successfully deal with the challenges of cross-cultural, unconventional, urban warfare in all of its dizzying forms or risk defeat.

We have encapsulated this complex problem set into three challenges: engaging our senior leaders professionally and honestly, integrating cross-cultural dynamics in the staff and command decision cycles, and empowering the staff by changing the culture of thinking among our senior noncommissioned officers, warrant officers and staff officers through critical review.

The first challenge: The division’s senior leaders — today’s general officers and colonels in the field — demand an objective review of their decisions and to have their biases challenged. To increase the effectiveness of such review, the senior leaders decide whom to trust with their thinking, and how and when they are willing to receive honest assessments. Like most people, leaders want people around them with whom they feel comfortable. But warfare is not about comfort, and today’s leaders — especially those going back into the fray — are all too aware of that. Some senior leaders have entrusted selected individuals to challenge and shape their thinking as it develops. That takes guts and involves personal and professional risk.

This need for honest, hard-hitting counsel and reflection is not new, but it is rare for several reasons. Some simply don’t have the moral fiber to either ask for it or give it. Although some argue that the mark of a true professional is one who gives his bosses honest feedback, whether asked or not, the historical reality is such men and women are rare. Culturally, we need a boost of courage.

A near-term solution to producing the objective reviews asked for by the command teams is to establish a framework for intentional but productive disharmony. History demonstrates the need for such free give and take between a leader and his charges. In medieval courts, the jester held an important and appointed role. He was also somewhat immune from the noble’s ire as long as his antics were in the noble’s and the court’s best interests and delivered cleverly.

Today, the need for trusted, timely and constructive review that is also brutally honest is vital to the health of an organization. Who is chartered to intellectually spar with our senior leaders? Minus a jester’s buffoonery, the answer across the joint community has become Red Teams.

These Red Teams serve as the designated critics charged with productively challenging ideas and decisions, bringing fresh perspectives, and ensuring the cultural factors are injected into the decision cycle. Red Teaming as a practice has emerged episodically in Western militaries for more than a century. But only the demands of counterinsurgency operations in an era of global information warfare have made the need so stark, especially among tactical formations in a strategic fishbowl.

BUILDING THE TEAM

The need for a Red Team stemmed from experience, not as a substitute for it. In the case of the 4th Infantry Division, almost every one of its senior leaders has served at least one combat tour in theater. The division’s commanding general covered more than 50,000 miles in the streets of Baghdad on foot and in vehicles. Many on the staff are returning after only a 12-month hiatus.
As the division prepares to resume its former mission, the senior leaders decided early — less than two months after returning from theater — that among the many requirements for redeployment, they wanted a Red Team capability in and among the staff as a physical entity and as a living idea. That small team of three officers is the nucleus charged to bring the division’s senior leaders that critical review and unleash that capability among the staff.

The second challenge: better account for foreign, cross-cultural perspectives in decision-making. Cultural intelligence and aptitude go far beyond the faux pas of showing one’s soles, insensitivity to cross-gender interactions or even holding advanced degrees in humanities. Senior leaders, inundated with the demands of command, are asking how others — our enemies, allies and other parties — will perceive a situation and American actions in the streets of Baghdad. That requires American leaders and staffs to understand worldviews, deep-seated beliefs and the unspoken interests of others. To gain this perspective, the Army is bolstering its staffs and sending many experienced leaders back to theater. For example, brigades are receiving human terrain teams and are partnering with provincial reconstruction teams from the State Department, which began this summer. Our information operations teams, psychological operators and civil affairs leaders are now returning to theater more experienced and more cross-culturally attuned. They understand, ahead of time, how the Iraqi and Middle Eastern audiences will respond to what we say and do, as well as the negative — what we don’t say and do. More importantly, we all better understand the American military is but one actor that wields considerable, but not dominant, power in today’s conflicts. We aim to use that power effectively and judiciously.

The third challenge: Introduce critical review and alternative perspectives into the staff and staff processes and shape our own American military culture from within. Clearly, the addition of a Red Team or something like it introduces new and potentially disruptive dynamics to the staff. To the point, the military’s deliberate decision-making process does not yet explicitly require a critical review, and Army divisions and corps won’t see Red Teams in their organizational tables until 2009 and beyond. Crisis-action planning provides even less margin for re-evaluation.

‘WINNING’ CULTURE WEAKNESS

Changing the professional culture, though, extends beyond staff processes and organizations. Clearly establishing methods and techniques for critical review is the first step to create a new set of expectations. The real challenge, though, is in replacing the military culture’s girders without bringing down the organization. Americans — civilian and military alike — revere “can do” and “make it happen” mind-sets, thereby marginalizing honest and productive criticism. American culture focuses on “winning” and “victory,” sometimes to our own detriment. The sports mind-set prevails: More wins equal the playoffs and a chance to play for the championship. As much as Americans enjoy sports and allusions to them, we must be wary of becoming mired in our own metaphors.

Casting ongoing operations in Iraq as an athletic match can clarify issues to the immediate, American audience. But if taken too far, especially in regard to the Iraq problem sets and warfare in general, sports analogies can limit our thinking unnecessarily and present our operations in a short-term, winner-take-all framework.

In contrast to a sports emphasis toward warfare, our enemies — and even some of our allies — have taken a longer view emphasizing intelligent perseverance. Their framework is generational. Despite facing numerous tactical failures, they continue to learn, grow and test new ideas. Our enemies then re-engage. Although we should adopt our enemies’ persistence and patience, we must reverse the sequence as much as possible: The learning, growing and testing must come first.

To reach that point, as professionals, we must re-examine our individual willingness to have our ideas and work tested before taking action. That combines the best of the American “can do” with other cultures’ perseverance.

Red Teaming as a practice can appear to undermine teamwork and efficiency, both of which are unacceptable costs under tactical pressures and timelines. As a result, many reflexively respond to critical review and alternative perspective by throwing up intellectual and professional defenses. Red Teaming activates a staff’s “antibodies,” especially if trust and rapport have yet to be established by those conducting the critique. Yingling and Peters disregard the staff in their analyses. Arguably, the staff officer culture should be the focus, especially because the military’s next generation of senior leaders is now serving as staff officers. The staff officer, just as much as the commanders, must seek out critical review on his own products and among his own teams.

Just as important, anyone Red Teaming must foster trust by working within tactical timelines to deliver actionable, salient critique to the staff.
Such a shift in American military culture is already occurring. How long it will go and what form it ultimately takes are yet to be seen, but momentum is building among all ranks, including general officers, to re-evaluate how we approach warfare. Acceptance and wide use of critical review will continue when the senior NCO and midgrade officers are on board, not just the senior officers. A few senior officers will lead the charge, but the driven colonels, majors and captains, with the steady hands of forward-thinking and realistic warrant officers, sergeants major and senior battle staff NCOs, will affect the junior officers, NCOs and soldiers in sufficient numbers to carry through the change in culture.

The notion of well-timed, incisive self-critique among staff officers can and should be the ultimate form of teamwork.
The open demand for alternative perspectives and challenges to current thinking is relatively new to the profession; at a minimum, it is new to the current generation in uniform. At the strategic command levels, the recent additions of Red Teams already have proved themselves: They exist at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Army Staff and in some combatant commands. Yet they are new to corps since 2006 and just now are showing up in divisions and brigades.

Three months short of redeploying to Baghdad, the 4th Infantry Division Red Team stood up — with the help of the Texas Army National Guard — not waiting for the new organizational structures to fall in place. Staff integration is ongoing, and all elements of the command and staff have a stake in Red Teaming as a concept: critical review through the lens of alternative perspectives of all their key products and decisions.

The goal is that everyone does “Red Teaming,” not just the Red Team.
It is up to the men and women on Red Teams and all who conduct critical review regularly to earn trust and deliver solid, actionable critiques. They will be most successful when leaders clearly articulate how and when they will receive such frank critique.

Today, Red Teamers and other staff members charged with critical review are in the fray, sweating, eating dust and sometimes bleeding right alongside the soldier, the staff officer and the general. Most often, their struggles are in the meeting, working group or briefing room, focused on making better decisions and orders.

Commanders and staffs in the 4th Infantry Division have bought in to bringing critical review to the battlefield. Although our focus is Baghdad and the foreign culture we encounter there, we are confident the long-term result will also shape the American military profession for the better.

Col. Allen Batschelet is the Army’s 4th Infantry Division’s chief of staff and served as a brigade commander in Baghdad in 2005-06. Maj. Barry Hafer and Maj. Mike Runey serve on the Red Team. All three deployed to Baghdad this fall.

L'échec des généraux US en Irak: Il faut réformer leur sélection

2007-11-18T22:47:00.000-05:00

Cet article du Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Yingling a secoué l'US Army par sa critique ouverte de ses généraux, qui, à ses yeux, ont été incapables de conduire victorieusement la campagne Irakienne. L'auteur rapproche cette incapacité de celle qui a amené la défaite américaine au Vietnam. Pour Yingling, il faut réformer le mode de sélection des officiers généraux et il avance un certain nombre de pistes.
Le Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Yingling est le second du 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment, a servi deux fois en Irak et détient un Master en Sciences Politiques de l'Université de Chicago.
C.H.

A FAILURE IN GENERALSHIP

By Lt. Col. Paul Yingling
Armed Forces Journal - May 2007

For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq’s grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war.
These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America’s general officer corps. America’s generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America’s generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress.

The Responsibilities of Generalship

Armies do not fight wars; nations fight wars. War is not a military activity conducted by soldiers, but rather a social activity that involves entire nations. Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that passion, probability and policy each play their role in war. Any understanding of war that ignores one of these elements is fundamentally flawed.
The passion of the people is necessary to endure the sacrifices inherent in war. Regardless of the system of government, the people supply the blood and treasure required to prosecute war. The statesman must stir these passions to a level commensurate with the popular sacrifices required. When the ends of policy are small, the statesman can prosecute a conflict without asking the public for great sacrifice. Global conflicts such as World War II require the full mobilization of entire societies to provide the men and materiel necessary for the successful prosecution of war. The greatest error the statesman can make is to commit his nation to a great conflict without mobilizing popular passions to a level commensurate with the stakes of the conflict.
Popular passions are necessary for the successful prosecution of war, but cannot be sufficient. To prevail, generals must provide policymakers and the public with a correct estimation of strategic probabilities. The general is responsible for estimating the likelihood of success in applying force to achieve the aims of policy. The general describes both the means necessary for the successful prosecution of war and the ways in which the nation will employ those means. If the policymaker desires ends for which the means he provides are insufficient, the general is responsible for advising the statesman of this incongruence. The statesman must then scale back the ends of policy or mobilize popular passions to provide greater means. If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results.
However much it is influenced by passion and probability, war is ultimately an instrument of policy and its conduct is the responsibility of policymakers. War is a social activity undertaken on behalf of the nation; Augustine counsels us that the only purpose of war is to achieve a better peace. The choice of making war to achieve a better peace is inherently a value judgment in which the statesman must decide those interests and beliefs worth killing and dying for. The military man is no better qualified than the common citizen to make such judgments. He must therefore confine his input to his area of expertise — the estimation of strategic probabilities.
The correct estimation of strategic possibilities can be further subdivided into the preparation for war and the conduct of war. Preparation for war consists in the raising, arming, equipping and training of forces. The conduct of war consists of both planning for the use of those forces and directing those forces in operations.
To prepare forces for war, the general must visualize the conditions of future combat. To raise military forces properly, the general must visualize the quality and quantity of forces needed in the next war. To arm and equip military forces properly, the general must visualize the materiel requirements of future engagements. To train military forces properly, the general must visualize the human demands on future battlefields, and replicate those conditions in peacetime exercises. Of course, not even the most skilled general can visualize precisely how future wars will be fought. According to British military historian and soldier Sir Michael Howard, “In structuring and preparing an army for war, you can be clear that you will not get it precisely right, but the important thing is not to be too far wrong, so that you can put it right quickly.”
The most tragic error a general can make is to assume without much reflection that wars of the future will look much like wars of the past. Following World War I, French generals committed this error, assuming that the next war would involve static battles dominated by firepower and fixed fortifications. Throughout the interwar years, French generals raised, equipped, armed and trained the French military to fight the last war. In stark contrast, German generals spent the interwar years attempting to break the stalemate created by firepower and fortifications. They developed a new form of war — the blitzkrieg — that integrated mobility, firepower and decentralized tactics. The German Army did not get this new form of warfare precisely right. After the 1939 conquest of Poland, the German Army undertook a critical self-examination of its operations. However, German generals did not get it too far wrong either, and in less than a year had adapted their tactics for the invasion of France.
After visualizing the conditions of future combat, the general is responsible for explaining to civilian policymakers the demands of future combat and the risks entailed in failing to meet those demands. Civilian policymakers have neither the expertise nor the inclination to think deeply about strategic probabilities in the distant future. Policymakers, especially elected representatives, face powerful incentives to focus on near-term challenges that are of immediate concern to the public. Generating military capability is the labor of decades. If the general waits until the public and its elected representatives are immediately concerned with national security threats before finding his voice, he has waited too long. The general who speaks too loudly of preparing for war while the nation is at peace places at risk his position and status. However, the general who speaks too softly places at risk the security of his country.
Failing to visualize future battlefields represents a lapse in professional competence, but seeing those fields clearly and saying nothing is an even more serious lapse in professional character. Moral courage is often inversely proportional to popularity and this observation in nowhere more true than in the profession of arms. The history of military innovation is littered with the truncated careers of reformers who saw gathering threats clearly and advocated change boldly. A military professional must possess both the physical courage to face the hazards of battle and the moral courage to withstand the barbs of public scorn. On and off the battlefield, courage is the first characteristic of generalship.

Failures of Generalship in Vietnam

America

’s defeat in Vietnam is the most egregious failure in the history of American arms. America’s general officer corps refused to prepare the Army to fight unconventional wars, despite ample indications that such preparations were in order. Having failed to prepare for such wars, America’s generals sent our forces into battle without a coherent plan for victory. Unprepared for war and lacking a coherent strategy, America lost the war and the lives of more than 58,000 service members.
Following World War II, there were ample indicators that America’s enemies would turn to insurgency to negate our advantages in firepower and mobility. The French experiences in Indochina and Algeria offered object lessons to Western armies facing unconventional foes. These lessons were not lost on the more astute members of America’s political class. In 1961, President Kennedy warned of “another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin — war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat, by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by evading and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him.” In response to these threats, Kennedy undertook a comprehensive program to prepare America’s armed forces for counterinsurgency.
Despite the experience of their allies and the urging of their president, America’s generals failed to prepare their forces for counterinsurgency. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Decker assured his young president, “Any good soldier can handle guerrillas.” Despite Kennedy’s guidance to the contrary, the Army viewed the conflict in Vietnam in conventional terms. As late as 1964, Gen. Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated flatly that “the essence of the problem in Vietnam is military.” While the Army made minor organizational adjustments at the urging of the president, the generals clung to what Andrew Krepinevich has called “the Army concept,” a vision of warfare focused on the destruction of the enemy’s forces.
Having failed to visualize accurately the conditions of combat in Vietnam, America’s generals prosecuted the war in conventional terms. The U.S. military embarked on a graduated attrition strategy intended to compel North Vietnam to accept a negotiated peace. The U.S. undertook modest efforts at innovation in Vietnam. Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), spearheaded by the State Department’s “Blowtorch” Bob Kromer, was a serious effort to address the political and economic causes of the insurgency. The Marine Corps’ Combined Action Program (CAP) was an innovative approach to population security. However, these efforts are best described as too little, too late. Innovations such as CORDS and CAP never received the resources necessary to make a large-scale difference. The U.S. military grudgingly accepted these innovations late in the war, after the American public’s commitment to the conflict began to wane.

America

’s generals not only failed to develop a strategy for victory in Vietnam, but also remained largely silent while the strategy developed by civilian politicians led to defeat. As H.R. McMaster noted in “Dereliction of Duty,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff were divided by service parochialism and failed to develop a unified and coherent recommendation to the president for prosecuting the war to a successful conclusion. Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson estimated in 1965 that victory would require as many as 700,000 troops for up to five years. Commandant of the Marine Corps Wallace Greene made a similar estimate on troop levels. As President Johnson incrementally escalated the war, neither man made his views known to the president or Congress. President Johnson made a concerted effort to conceal the costs and consequences of Vietnam from the public, but such duplicity required the passive consent of America’s generals.
Having participated in the deception of the American people during the war, the Army chose after the war to deceive itself. In “Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife,” John Nagl argued that instead of learning from defeat, the Army after

Vietnam

focused its energies on the kind of wars it knew how to win — high-technology conventional wars. An essential contribution to this strategy of denial was the publication of “On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War,” by Col. Harry Summers. Summers, a faculty member of the U.S. Army War College, argued that the Army had erred by not focusing enough on conventional warfare in Vietnam, a lesson the Army was happy to hear. Despite having been recently defeated by an insurgency, the Army slashed training and resources devoted to counterinsurgency.
By the early 1990s, the Army’s focus on conventional war-fighting appeared to have been vindicated. During the 1980s, the U.S. military benefited from the largest peacetime military buildup in the nation’s history. High-technology equipment dramatically increased the mobility and lethality of our ground forces. The Army’s National Training Center honed the Army’s conventional war-fighting skills to a razor’s edge. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the demise of the Soviet Union and the futility of direct confrontation with the U.S. Despite the fact the U.S. supported insurgencies in Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Angola to hasten the Soviet Union’s demise, the U.S. military gave little thought to counterinsurgency throughout the 1990s. America’s generals assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like the wars of the past — state-on-state conflicts against conventional forces. America’s swift defeat of the Iraqi Army, the world’s fourth-largest, in 1991 seemed to confirm the wisdom of the

U.S.

military’s post-Vietnam reforms. But the military learned the wrong lessons from Operation Desert Storm. It continued to prepare for the last war, while its future enemies prepared for a new kind of war.

Failures of Generalship in Iraq

America

’s generals have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq. First, throughout the 1990s our generals failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly. Second, America’s generals failed to estimate correctly both the means and the ways necessary to achieve the aims of policy prior to beginning the war in Iraq. Finally, America’s generals did not provide Congress and the public with an accurate assessment of the conflict in Iraq.
Despite paying lip service to “transformation” throughout the 1990s, America’s armed forces failed to change in significant ways after the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In “The Sling and the Stone,” T.X. Hammes argues that the Defense Department’s transformation strategy focuses almost exclusively on high-technology conventional wars. The doctrine, organizations, equipment and training of the U.S. military confirm this observation. The armed forces fought the global war on terrorism for the first five years with a counterinsurgency doctrine last revised in the Reagan administration. Despite engaging in numerous stability operations throughout the 1990s, the armed forces did little to bolster their capabilities for civic reconstruction and security force development. Procurement priorities during the 1990s followed the Cold War model, with significant funding devoted to new fighter aircraft and artillery systems. The most commonly used tactical scenarios in both schools and training centers replicated high-intensity interstate conflict. At the dawn of the 21st century, the U.S. is fighting brutal, adaptive insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, while our armed forces have spent the preceding decade having done little to prepare for such conflicts.
Having spent a decade preparing to fight the wrong war, America’s generals then miscalculated both the means and ways necessary to succeed in Iraq. The most fundamental military miscalculation in Iraq has been the failure to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq’s population. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) estimated in its 1998 war plan that 380,000 troops would be necessary for an invasion of Iraq. Using operations in Bosnia and Kosovo as a model for predicting troop requirements, one Army study estimated a need for 470,000 troops. Alone among America’s generals, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki publicly stated that “several hundred thousand soldiers” would be necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Prior to the war, President Bush promised to give field commanders everything necessary for victory. Privately, many senior general officers both active and retired expressed serious misgivings about the insufficiency of forces for Iraq. These leaders would later express their concerns in tell-all books such as “Fiasco” and “Cobra II.” However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public.
Given the lack of troop strength, not even the most brilliant general could have devised the ways necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. However, inept planning for postwar Iraq took the crisis caused by a lack of troops and quickly transformed it into a debacle. In 1997, the U.S. Central Command exercise “Desert Crossing” demonstrated that many postwar stabilization tasks would fall to the military. The other branches of the U.S. government lacked sufficient capability to do such work on the scale required in Iraq. Despite these results, CENTCOM accepted the assumption that the State Department would administer postwar Iraq. The military never explained to the president the magnitude of the challenges inherent in stabilizing postwar Iraq.
After failing to visualize the conditions of combat in Iraq, America’s generals failed to adapt to the demands of counterinsurgency.
Counterinsurgency theory prescribes providing continuous security to the population. However, for most of the war American forces in Iraq have been concentrated on large forward-operating bases, isolated from the Iraqi people and focused on capturing or killing insurgents. Counterinsurgency theory requires strengthening the capability of host-nation institutions to provide security and other essential services to the population. America’s generals treated efforts to create transition teams to develop local security forces and provincial reconstruction teams to improve essential services as afterthoughts, never providing the quantity or quality of personnel necessary for success.
After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America’s general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public. The Iraq Study Group concluded that “there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq.” The ISG noted that “on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.” Population security is the most important measure of effectiveness in counterinsurgency. For more than three years, America’s generals continued to insist that the U.S. was making progress in Iraq. However, for Iraqi civilians, each year from 2003 onward was more deadly than the one preceding it. For reasons that are not yet clear, America’s general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq’s government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq. Moreover, America’s generals have not explained clearly the larger strategic risks of committing so large a portion of the nation’s deployable land power to a single theater of operations.
The intellectual and moral failures common to America’s general officer corps in Vietnam and Iraq constitute a crisis in American generalship. Any explanation that fixes culpability on individuals is insufficient. No one leader, civilian or military, caused failure in Vietnam or Iraq. Different military and civilian leaders in the two conflicts produced similar results. In both conflicts, the general officer corps designed to advise policymakers, prepare forces and conduct operations failed to perform its intended functions. To understand how the U.S. could face defeat at the hands of a weaker insurgent enemy for the second time in a generation, we must look at the structural influences that produce our general officer corps.

The Generals We Need
The most insightful examination of failed generalship comes from J.F.C. Fuller’s “Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure.” Fuller was a British major general who saw action in the first attempts at armored warfare in World War I. He found three common characteristics in great generals — courage, creative intelligence and physical fitness.
The need for intelligent, creative and courageous general officers is self-evident. An understanding of the larger aspects of war is essential to great generalship. However, a survey of Army three- and four-star generals shows that only 25 percent hold advanced degrees from civilian institutions in the social sciences or humanities. Counterinsurgency theory holds that proficiency in foreign languages is essential to success, yet only one in four of the Army’s senior generals speaks another language. While the physical courage of America’s generals is not in doubt, there is less certainty regarding their moral courage. In almost surreal language, professional military men blame their recent lack of candor on the intimidating management style of their civilian masters. Now that the public is immediately concerned with the crisis in Iraq, some of our generals are finding their voices. They may have waited too long.
Neither the executive branch nor the services themselves are likely to remedy the shortcomings in America’s general officer corps. Indeed, the tendency of the executive branch to seek out mild-mannered team players to serve as senior generals is part of the problem. The services themselves are equally to blame. The system that produces our generals does little to reward creativity and moral courage. Officers rise to flag rank by following remarkably similar career patterns. Senior generals, both active and retired, are the most important figures in determining an officer’s potential for flag rank. The views of subordinates and peers play no role in an officer’s advancement; to move up he must only please his superiors. In a system in which senior officers select for promotion those like themselves, there are powerful incentives for conformity. It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties.
If America desires creative intelligence and moral courage in its general officer corps, it must create a system that rewards these qualities. Congress can create such incentives by exercising its proper oversight function in three areas. First, Congress must change the system for selecting general officers. Second, oversight committees must apply increased scrutiny over generating the necessary means and pursuing appropriate ways for applying America’s military power. Third, the Senate must hold accountable through its confirmation powers those officers who fail to achieve the aims of policy at an acceptable cost in blood and treasure.
To improve the creative intelligence of our generals, Congress must change the officer promotion system in ways that reward adaptation and intellectual achievement. Congress should require the armed services to implement 360-degree evaluations for field-grade and flag officers. Junior officers and noncommissioned officers are often the first to adapt because they bear the brunt of failed tactics most directly. They are also less wed to organizational norms and less influenced by organizational taboos. Junior leaders have valuable insights regarding the effectiveness of their leaders, but the current promotion system excludes these judgments. Incorporating subordinate and peer reviews into promotion decisions for senior leaders would produce officers more willing to adapt to changing circumstances, and less likely to conform to outmoded practices.
Congress should also modify the officer promotion system in ways that reward intellectual achievement. The Senate should examine the education and professional writing of nominees for three- and four-star billets as part of the confirmation process. The Senate would never confirm to the Supreme Court a nominee who had neither been to law school nor written legal opinions. However, it routinely confirms four-star generals who possess neither graduate education in the social sciences or humanities nor the capability to speak a foreign language. Senior general officers must have a vision of what future conflicts will look like and what capabilities the U.S. requires to prevail in those conflicts. They must possess the capability to understand and interact with foreign cultures. A solid record of intellectual achievement and fluency in foreign languages are effective indicators of an officer’s potential for senior leadership.
To reward moral courage in our general officers, Congress must ask hard questions about the means and ways for war as part of its oversight responsibility. Some of the answers will be shocking, which is perhaps why Congress has not asked and the generals have not told. Congress must ask for a candid assessment of the money and manpower required over the next generation to prevail in the Long War. The money required to prevail may place fiscal constraints on popular domestic priorities. The quantity and quality of manpower required may call into question the viability of the all-volunteer military. Congress must re-examine the allocation of existing resources, and demand that procurement priorities reflect the most likely threats we will face. Congress must be equally rigorous in ensuring that the ways of war contribute to conflict termination consistent with the aims of national policy. If our operations produce more enemies than they defeat, no amount of force is sufficient to prevail. Current oversight efforts have proved inadequate, allowing the executive branch, the services and lobbyists to present information that is sometimes incomplete, inaccurate or self-serving. Exercising adequate oversight will require members of Congress to develop the expertise necessary to ask the right questions and display the courage to follow the truth wherever it leads them.
Finally, Congress must enhance accountability by exercising its little-used authority to confirm the retired rank of general officers. By law, Congress must confirm an officer who retires at three- or four-star rank. In the past this requirement has been pro forma in all but a few cases. A general who presides over a massive human rights scandal or a substantial deterioration in security ought to be retired at a lower rank than one who serves with distinction. A general who fails to provide Congress with an accurate and candid assessment of strategic probabilities ought to suffer the same penalty. As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war. By exercising its powers to confirm the retired ranks of general officers, Congress can restore accountability among senior military leaders.

Mortal Danger
This article began with Frederick the Great’s admonition to his officers to focus their energies on the larger aspects of war. The Prussian monarch’s innovations had made his army the terror of Europe, but he knew that his adversaries were learning and adapting. Frederick feared that his generals would master his system of war without thinking deeply about the ever-changing nature of war, and in doing so would place Prussia’s security at risk. These fears would prove prophetic. At the Battle of Valmy in 1792, Frederick’s successors were checked by France’s ragtag citizen army. In the fourteen years that followed, Prussia’s generals assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like those of the past. In 1806, the Prussian Army marched lockstep into defeat and disaster at the hands of Napoleon at Jena. Frederick’s prophecy had come to pass; Prussia became a French vassal.

Iraq

is America’s Valmy. America’s generals have been checked by a form of war that they did not prepare for and do not understand. They spent the years following the 1991 Gulf War mastering a system of war without thinking deeply about the ever changing nature of war. They marched into Iraq having assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like the wars of the past. Those few who saw clearly our vulnerability to insurgent tactics said and did little to prepare for these dangers. As at Valmy, this one debacle, however humiliating, will not in itself signal national disaster. The hour is late, but not too late to prepare for the challenges of the Long War. We still have time to select as our generals those who possess the intelligence to visualize future conflicts and the moral courage to advise civilian policymakers on the preparations needed for our security. The power and the responsibility to identify such generals lie with the U.S. Congress. If Congress does not act, our Jena awaits us.

US Army: Revoir la sélection des officiers généraux

2007-11-18T21:58:00.000-05:00

Voici deux articles dont le premier du "Washington Post" annonce que le Général Petraeus, commandant les forces terrestres en Irak, va participer à la sélection des futurs généraux de l'US Army. cette désignation apparait comme une prise ne compte par cette institution des différentes critiques, le plus souvent constructives, qui ont fleuri ces derniers mois dans la presse militaire américaine. Les articles les plus remarquables à ce sujet ont été publiés dans l' "Armed Forces Journal"sont ceux du Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Yingling: "A failure in Generalship" reproduit plus loin dans ce blog, et celui du Lieutenant-Colonel John Nagl: “New Rules for New Enemies,” dont le "New York Times" s'est largement fait l'écho dans les second article qui suit .
C.H.

Petraeus Helping Pick New Generals
Army Says Innovation Will Be Rewarded

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 17, 2007

The Army has summoned the top U.S. commander in Iraq back to Washington to preside over a board that will pick some of the next generation of Army leaders, an unusual decision that officials say represents a vote of confidence in Gen. David H. Petraeus's conduct of the war, as well as the Army counterinsurgency doctrine he helped rewrite.

The Army has long been criticized for rewarding conventional military thinking and experience in traditional combat operations, and current and former defense officials have pointed to Petraeus's involvement in the promotion board process this month as a sign of the Army's commitment to encouraging innovation and rewarding skills beyond the battlefield.

Some junior and midlevel officers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan have been particularly outspoken in their criticisms, saying the Army's current leadership lacks a hands-on understanding of today's conflicts and has not listened to feedback from younger personnel.

"It's unprecedented for the commander of an active theater to be brought back to head something like a brigadier generals board," said retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, former head of the Army War College. A senior defense official said Petraeus is "far too high-profile for this to be a subtle thing."

The board, composed of 15 Army generals, will examine a pool of more than 1,000 colonels to select about 40 brigadier generals, expected to lead the service over the next decade or longer. Although each board member has an equal vote on the candidates, Petraeus will be able to guide the discussion.

Petraeus, a four-star general with a doctorate in political science, has spent three of the past four years in Iraq and has observed firsthand many of the colonels under consideration for promotion. He is well-regarded by military officials for his political skills in Iraq and at home, including winning support from a skeptical Congress for a U.S. troop increase in Iraq.

"Dave Petraeus in many ways is viewed as the archetype of what this new generation of senior leader is all about," Scales said, "a guy . . . who understands information operations, who can be effective on Capitol Hill, who can communicate with Iraqis, who understands the value of original thought, who has the ability through the power of his intellect to lead people to change."

The information revolution "is dramatically changing everything about the way we fight," said Lt. Col. John A. Nagl, an Army counterinsurgency expert. "These enemies cannot defeat us on the battlefield but are trying to sap the public will, so to win you need a very different kind of leader, someone who understands information and asymmetric warfare, and that sort of flexible, adaptive thinker is not necessarily the kind the training and education programs of the Army grow and the skill set we select for."

Petraeus's involvement coincides with the Army's consideration of initiatives to change its promotion system to reward a new generation of officers skilled in today's counterinsurgency warfare.

The Army is struggling to retain experienced younger officers -- recently offering $35,000 bonuses to captains -- who are leaving partly because of their extended deployments in war zones but also because they are alienated from leaders who lack their combat experience, Army officers say.

"There are some great captains and majors who have great insight into this type of warfare. They are not leaving because they don't have enough money; they are leaving because no one is listening to them. They don't trust the people above them," said an Army officer who served two tours in Iraq, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

In a speech at a large Army conference last month, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates raised the need for holding onto young combat veterans and "reexamining assignments and promotion policies that in many cases are unchanged since the Cold War." Gates also stressed that the Army must retain lessons on irregular warfare from Iraq and Afghanistan -- lessons he said were learned but lost after the Vietnam War.

"All these so-called 'nontraditional' capabilities have moved into the mainstream of military thinking, planning and strategy -- where they must stay," he said. Gates later met with Army leaders and discussed promotion policies, according to Army officials.

One initiative would transform the way officers are selected for nontraditional but vital jobs such as leading the military training teams that are in growing demand in Iraq and Afghanistan. Key officers for those teams, which total roughly 7,100 personnel, would be chosen from the same lists as commanders of combat units -- placing the Army's new leaders in those jobs.

"Senior Army leaders are supportive of this idea, and the personnel system is taking a very close look at it," said Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, who is responsible for officer training as head of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The training officers now volunteer or are assigned in an ad hoc manner, and many see the jobs as career detours, often resulting in weaker leaders for jobs that the Army now considers essential, several officials said.

Some officers have also advocated the creation of a permanent Army advisory corps to nurture a new type of leader. "The people who would gravitate toward service in an Army advisory corps would be the type of adaptive, flexible leader skilled in unconventional warfare," said Nagl, who is involved in training the military advisory teams.

Another initiative, favored by many young officers, would incorporate reviews by peers and subordinates into a rating system that now depends largely on ratings by superior officers; the idea is to make the system less hierarchical and prone to producing conformity. An Army task force is looking into incorporating such reviews, known as "360-degree evaluations," into the "officer efficiency reports" that are now completed only by superiors, said Col. Paul L. Aswell, chief of the Army's officer personnel division.

"Now the system is very risk-adverse because to advance in the officers corps, you really only need to make your senior rater happy," said the officer who served in Iraq. "There is every disincentive to challenging that senior officer's worldview. He has the power to stop you in your tracks."

Army Secretary Pete Geren, who was involved in choosing Petraeus to head the board, declined to comment on it but said the board was set to recess this week and give him its recommendations. Petraeus will return to Baghdad by early next week, officials said.

CHALLENGING THE GENERALS

Fred Kaplan
The New York Times - August 26th 2007

On Aug. 1, Gen. Richard Cody, the United States Army’s vice chief of staff, flew to the sprawling base at Fort Knox, Ky., to talk with the officers enrolled in the Captains Career Course. These are the Army’s elite junior officers. Of the 127 captains taking the five-week course, 119 had served one or two tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, mainly as lieutenants. Nearly all would soon be going back as company commanders. A captain named Matt Wignall, who recently spent 16 months in Iraq with a Stryker brigade combat team, asked Cody, the Army’s second-highest-ranking general, what he thought of a recent article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling titled “A Failure in Generalship.” The article, a scathing indictment that circulated far and wide, including in Iraq, accused the Army’s generals of lacking “professional character,” “creative intelligence” and “moral courage.”

Yingling’s article — published in the May issue of Armed Forces Journal — noted that a key role of generals is to advise policy makers and the public on the means necessary to win wars. “If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means,” he wrote, “he shares culpability for the results.” Today’s generals “failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly,” and they failed to advise policy makers on how much force would be necessary to win and stabilize Iraq. These failures, he insisted, stemmed not just from the civilian leaders but also from a military culture that “does little to reward creativity and moral courage.” He concluded, “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

General Cody looked around the auditorium, packed with men and women in uniform — most of them in their mid-20s, three decades his junior but far more war-hardened than he or his peers were at the same age — and turned Captain Wignall’s question around. “You all have just come from combat, you’re young captains,” he said, addressing the entire room. “What’s your opinion of the general officers corps?”

Over the next 90 minutes, five captains stood up, recited their names and their units and raised several of Yingling’s criticisms. One asked why the top generals failed to give political leaders full and frank advice on how many troops would be needed in Iraq. One asked whether any generals “should be held accountable” for the war’s failures. One asked if the Army should change the way it selected generals. Another said that general officers were so far removed from the fighting, they wound up “sheltered from the truth” and “don’t know what’s going on.”

Challenges like this are rare in the military, which depends on obedience and hierarchy. Yet the scene at Fort Knox reflected a brewing conflict between the Army’s junior and senior officer corps — lieutenants and captains on one hand, generals on the other, with majors and colonels (“field-grade officers”) straddling the divide and sometimes taking sides. The cause of this tension is the war in Iraq, but the consequences are broader. They revolve around the obligations of an officer, the nature of future warfare and the future of the Army itself. And these tensions are rising at a time when the war has stretched the Army’s resources to the limit, when junior officers are quitting at alarming rates and when political leaders are divided or uncertain about America’s — and its military’s — role in the world.

Colonel Yingling’s article gave these tensions voice; it spelled out the issues and the stakes; and it located their roots in the Army’s own institutional culture, specifically in the growing disconnect between this culture — which is embodied by the generals — and the complex realities that junior officers, those fighting the war, are confronting daily on the ground. The article was all the more potent because it was written by an active-duty officer still on the rise. It was a career risk, just as, on a smaller scale, standing up and asking the Army vice chief of staff about the article was a risk.

In response to the captains’ questions, General Cody acknowledged, as senior officers often do now, that the Iraq war was “mismanaged” in its first phases. The original plan, he said, did not anticipate the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, the disruption of oil production or the rise of an insurgency. Still, he rejected the broader critique. “I think we’ve got great general officers that are meeting tough demands,” he insisted. He railed instead at politicians for cutting back the military in the 1990s. “Those are the people who ought to be held accountable,” he said.

Before and just after America’s entry into World War II, Gen. George Marshall, the Army’s chief of staff, purged 31 of his 42 division and corps commanders, all of them generals, and 162 colonels on the grounds that they were unsuited for battle. Over the course of the war, he rid the Army of 500 colonels. He reached deep into the lower ranks to find talented men to replace them. For example, Gen. James Gavin, the highly decorated commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, was a mere major in December 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Today, President Bush maintains that the nation is in a war against terrorism — what Pentagon officials call “the long war” — in which civilization itself is at stake. Yet six years into this war, the armed forces — not just the Army, but also the Air Force, Navy and Marines — have changed almost nothing about the way their promotional systems and their entire bureaucracies operate.

On the lower end of the scale, things have changed — but for the worse. West Point cadets are obligated to stay in the Army for five years after graduating. In a typical year, about a quarter to a third of them decide not to sign on for another term. In 2003, when the class of 1998 faced that decision, only 18 percent quit the force: memories of 9/11 were still vivid; the war in Afghanistan seemed a success; and war in Iraq was under way. Duty called, and it seemed a good time to be an Army officer. But last year, when the 905 officers from the class of 2001 had to make their choice to stay or leave, 44 percent quit the Army. It was the service’s highest loss rate in three decades.

Col. Don Snider, a longtime professor at West Point, sees a “trust gap” between junior and senior officers. There has always been a gap, to some degree. What’s different now is that many of the juniors have more combat experience than the seniors. They have come to trust their own instincts more than they trust orders. They look at the hand they’ve been dealt by their superiors’ decisions, and they feel let down.

The gap is widening further, Snider told me, because of this war’s operating tempo, the “unrelenting pace” at which soldiers are rotated into Iraq for longer tours — and a greater number of tours — than they signed up for. Many soldiers, even those who support the war, are wearying of the endless cycle. The cycle is a result of two decisions. The first occurred at the start of the war, when the senior officers assented to the decision by Donald Rumsfeld, then the secretary of defense, to send in far fewer troops than they had recommended. The second took place two years later, well into the insurgency phase of the war, when top officers declared they didn’t need more troops, though most of them knew that in fact they did. “Many junior officers,” Snider said, “see this op tempo as stemming from the failure of senior officers to speak out.”

Paul Yingling did not set out to cause a stir. He grew up in a working-class part of Pittsburgh. His father owned a bar; no one in his family went to college. He joined the Army in 1984 at age 17, because he was a troubled kid — poor grades and too much drinking and brawling — who wanted to turn his life around, and he did. He went to Duquesne University, a small Catholic school, on an R.O.T.C. scholarship; went on active duty; rose through the ranks; and, by the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, was a lieutenant commanding an artillery battery, directing cannon fire against Saddam Hussein’s army.

“When I was in the gulf war, I remember thinking, This is easier than it was at training exercises,” he told me earlier this month. He was sent to Bosnia in December 1995 as part of the first peacekeeping operation after the signing of the Dayton accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. “This was nothing like training,” he recalled. Like most of his fellow soldiers, he was trained almost entirely for conventional combat operations: straightforward clashes, brigades against brigades. (Even now, about 70 percent of the training at the Captains Career Course is for conventional warfare.) In Bosnia, there was no clear enemy, no front line and no set definition of victory. “I kept wondering why things weren’t as well rehearsed as they’d been in the gulf war,” he said.

Upon returning, he spent the next six years pondering that question. He studied international relations at the University of Chicago’s graduate school and wrote a master’s thesis about the circumstances under which outside powers can successfully intervene in civil wars. (One conclusion: There aren’t many.) He then taught at West Point, where he also read deeply in Western political theory. Yingling was deployed to Iraq in July 2003 as an executive officer collecting loose munitions and training Iraq’s civil-defense corps. “The corps deserted or joined the insurgency on first contact,” he recalled. “It was a disaster.”

In the late fall of 2003, his first tour of duty over, Yingling was sent to Fort Sill, Okla., the Army’s main base for artillery soldiers, and wrote long memos to the local generals, suggesting new approaches to the war in Iraq. One suggestion was that since artillery rockets were then playing little role, artillery soldiers should become more skilled in training Iraqi soldiers; that, he thought, would be vital to Iraq’s future stability. No one responded to his memos, he says. He volunteered for another tour of combat and became deputy commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which was fighting jihadist insurgents in the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar.

The commander of the third regiment, Col. H. R. McMaster, was a historian as well as a decorated soldier. He figured that Iraq could not build its own institutions, political or military, until its people felt safe. So he devised his own plan, in which he and his troops cleared the town of insurgents — and at the same time formed alliances and built trust with local sheiks and tribal leaders. The campaign worked for a while, but only because McMaster flooded the city with soldiers — about 1,000 of them per square kilometer. Earlier, as Yingling drove around to other towns and villages, he saw that most Iraqis were submitting to whatever gang or militia offered them protection, because United States and coalition forces weren’t anywhere around. And that was because the coalition had entered the war without enough troops. Yingling was seeing the consequences of this decision up close in the terrible insecurity of most Iraqis’ lives.

In February 2006, Yingling returned to Fort Sill. That April, six retired Army and Marine generals publicly criticized Rumsfeld, who was still the secretary of defense, for sending too few troops to Iraq. Many junior and field-grade officers reacted with puzzlement or disgust. Their common question: Where were these generals when they still wore the uniform? Why didn’t they speak up when their words might have counted? One general who had spoken up, Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, was publicly upbraided and ostracized by Rumsfeld; other active-duty generals got the message and stayed mum.

That December, Yingling attended a Purple Heart ceremony for soldiers wounded in Iraq. “I was watching these soldiers wheeling into this room, or in some cases having to be wheeled in by their wives or mothers,” he recalled. “And I said to myself: ‘These soldiers were doing their jobs. The senior officers were not doing theirs. We’re not giving our soldiers the tools and training to succeed.’ I had to go public.”

Soon after Yingling’s article appeared, Maj. Gen. Jeff Hammond, commander of the Fourth Infantry Division at Fort Hood, Tex., reportedly called a meeting of the roughly 200 captains on his base, all of whom had served in Iraq, for the purpose of putting this brazen lieutenant colonel in his place. According to The Wall Street Journal, he told his captains that Army generals are “dedicated, selfless servants.” Yingling had no business judging generals because he has “never worn the shoes of a general.” By implication, Hammond was warning his captains that they had no business judging generals, either. Yingling was stationed at Fort Hood at the time, preparing to take command of an artillery battalion. From the steps of his building, he could see the steps of General Hammond’s building. He said he sent the general a copy of his article before publication as a courtesy, and he never heard back; nor was he notified of the general’s meeting with his captains.

The “trust gap” between junior and senior officers is hardly universal. Many junior officers at Fort Knox and elsewhere have no complaints about the generals — or regard the matter as way above their pay grade. As Capt. Ryan Kranc, who has served two tours in Iraq, one as a commander, explained to me, “I’m more interested in whether my guys can secure a convoy.” He dismissed complaints about troop shortages. “When you’re in a system, you’re never going to get everything you ask for,” he said, “but I still have to accomplish a mission. That’s my job. If they give me a toothpick, dental floss and a good hunting knife, I will accomplish the mission.”

An hour after General Cody’s talk at Fort Knox, several captains met to discuss the issue over beers. Capt. Garrett Cathcart, who has served in Iraq as a platoon leader, said: “The culture of the Army is to accomplish the mission, no matter what. That’s a good thing.” Matt Wignall, who was the first captain to ask General Cody about the Yingling article, agreed that a mission-oriented culture was “a good thing, but it can be dangerous.” He added: “It is so rare to hear someone in the Army say, ‘No, I can’t do that.’ But sometimes it takes courage to say, ‘I don’t have the capability.’ ” Before the Iraq war, when Rumsfeld overrode the initial plans of the senior officers, “somebody should have put his foot down,” Wignall said.

Lt. Col. Allen Gill, who just retired as director of the R.O.T.C. program at Georgetown University, has heard versions of this discussion among his cadets for years. He raises a different concern about the Army’s “can do” culture. “You’re not brought up in the Army to tell people how you can’t get things done, and that’s fine, that’s necessary,” he said. “But when you get promoted to a higher level of strategic leadership, you have to have a different outlook. You’re supposed to make clear, cold calculations of risk — of the probabilities of victory and defeat.”

The problem, he said, is that it’s hard for officers — hard for people in any profession — to switch their basic approach to life so abruptly. As Yingling put it in his article, “It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late 40s.”

Yingling’s commander at Tal Afar, H. R. McMaster, documented a similar crisis in the case of the Vietnam War. Twenty years after the war, McMaster wrote a doctoral dissertation that he turned into a book called “Dereliction of Duty.” It concluded that the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1960s betrayed their professional obligations by failing to provide unvarnished military advice to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as they plunged into the Southeast Asian quagmire. When McMaster’s book was published in 1997, Gen. Hugh Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, ordered all commanders to read it — and to express disagreements to their superiors, even at personal risk. Since then, “Dereliction of Duty” has been recommended reading for Army officers.

Yet before the start of the Iraq war and during the early stages of the fighting, the Joint Chiefs once again fell silent. Justin Rosenbaum, the captain at Fort Knox who asked General Cody whether any generals would be held accountable for the failures in Iraq, said he was disturbed by this parallel between the two wars. “We’ve read the McMaster book,” he said. “It’s startling that we’re repeating the same mistakes.”

McMaster’s own fate has reinforced these apprehensions. President Bush has singled out McMaster’s campaign at Tal Afar as a model of successful strategy. Gen. David Petraeus, now commander of United States forces in Iraq, frequently consults with McMaster in planning his broader counterinsurgency campaign. Yet the Army’s promotion board — the panel of generals that selects which few dozen colonels advance to the rank of brigadier general — has passed over McMaster two years in a row.

McMaster’s nonpromotion has not been widely reported, yet every officer I spoke with knew about it and had pondered its implications. One colonel, who asked not to be identified because he didn’t want to risk his own ambitions, said: “Everyone studies the brigadier-general promotion list like tarot cards — who makes it, who doesn’t. It communicates what qualities are valued and not valued.” A retired Army two-star general, who requested anonymity because he didn’t want to anger his friends on the promotion boards, agreed. “When you turn down a guy like McMaster,” he told me, “that sends a potent message to everybody down the chain. I don’t know, maybe there were good reasons not to promote him. But the message everybody gets is: ‘We’re not interested in rewarding people like him. We’re not interested in rewarding agents of change.’ ”

Members of the board, he said, want to promote officers whose careers look like their own. Today’s generals rose through the officer corps of the peacetime Army. Many of them fought in the last years of Vietnam, and some fought in the gulf war. But to the extent they have combat experience, it has been mainly tactical, not strategic. They know how to secure an objective on a battlefield, how to coordinate firepower and maneuver. But they don’t necessarily know how to deal with an enemy that’s flexible, with a scenario that has not been rehearsed.

“Those rewarded are the can-do, go-to people,” the retired two-star general told me. “Their skill is making the trains run on time. So why are we surprised that, when the enemy becomes adaptive, we get caught off guard? If you raise a group of plumbers, you shouldn’t be upset if they can’t do theoretical physics.”

There are, of course, exceptions, most notably General Petraeus. He wrote an article for a recent issue of The American Interest, a Washington-based public-policy journal, urging officers to attend civilian graduate schools and get out of their “intellectual comfort zones” — useful for dealing with today’s adaptive enemies.

Yet many Army officers I spoke with say Petraeus’s view is rare among senior officers. Two colonels told me that when they were captains, their commanders strongly discouraged them from attending not just graduate school but even the Army’s Command and General Staff College, warning that it would be a diversion from their career paths. “I got the impression that I’d be better off counting bedsheets in the Baghdad Embassy than studying at Harvard,” one colonel said.

Harvard’s merits aside, some junior officers agree that the promotion system discourages breadth. Capt. Kip Kowalski, an infantry officer in the Captains Career Course at Fort Knox, is a proud soldier in the can-do tradition. He is impatient with critiques of superiors; he prefers to stay focused on his job. “But I am worried,” he said, “that generals these days are forced to be narrow.” Kowalski would like to spend a few years in a different branch of the Army — say, as a foreign area officer — and then come back to combat operations. He says he thinks the switch would broaden his skills, give him new perspectives and make him a better officer. But the rules don’t allow switching back and forth among specialties. “I have to decide right now whether I want to do ops or something else,” he said. “If I go F. A. O., I can never come back.”

In October 2006, seven months before his essay on the failure of generalship appeared, Yingling and Lt. Col. John Nagl, another innovative officer, wrote an article for Armed Forces Journal called “New Rules for New Enemies,” in which they wrote: “The best way to change the organizational culture of the Army is to change the pathways for professional advancement within the officer corps. The Army will become more adaptive only when being adaptive offers the surest path to promotion.”

In late June, Yingling took command of an artillery battalion. This means he will most likely be promoted to full colonel. This assignment, however, was in the works nearly a year ago, long before he wrote his critique of the generals. His move and probable promotion say nothing about whether he’ll be promoted further — or whether, as some of his admirers fear, his career will now grind to a halt.

Nagl — the author of an acclaimed book about counterinsurgency (“Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife”), a former operations officer in Iraq and the subject of a New York Times Magazine article a few years ago — has since taken command of a unit at Fort Riley, Kan., that trains United States soldiers to be advisers to Iraqi security forces. Pentagon officials have said that these advisers are crucial to America’s future military policy. Yet Nagl has written that soldiers have been posted to this unit “on an ad hoc basis” and that few of the officers selected to train them have ever been advisers themselves.

Lt. Col. Isaiah Wilson, a professor at West Point and former planning officer in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division, said the fate of Nagl’s unit — the degree to which it attracted capable, ambitious soldiers — depended on the answer to one question: “Will serving as an adviser be seen as equal to serving as a combat officer in the eyes of the promotion boards? The jury is still out.”

“Guys like Yingling, Nagl and McMaster are the canaries in the coal mine of Army reform,” the retired two-star general I spoke with told me. “Will they get promoted to general? If they do, that’s a sign that real change is happening. If they don’t, that’s a sign that the traditional culture still rules.”

Failure sometimes compels an institution to change its ways. The last time the Army undertook an overhaul was in the wake of the Vietnam War. At the center of those reforms was an officer named Huba Wass de Czege. Wass de Czege (pronounced VOSH de tsay-guh) graduated from West Point and served two tours of duty in Vietnam, the second as a company commander in the Central Highlands. He devised innovative tactics, leading four-man teams — at the time they were considered unconventionally small — on ambush raids at night. His immediate superiors weren’t keen on his approach or attitude, despite his successes. But after the war ended and a few creative officers took over key posts, they recruited Wass de Czege to join them.

In 1982, he was ordered to rewrite the Army’s field manual on combat operations. At his own initiative, he read the classics of military strategy — Clausewitz’s “On War,” Sun Tzu’s “Art of War,” B. H. Liddell Hart’s “Strategy” — none of which had been on his reading list at West Point. And he incorporated many of their lessons along with his own experiences from Vietnam. Where the old edition assumed static clashes of firepower and attrition, Wass de Czege’s revision emphasized speed, maneuver and taking the offensive. He was asked to create a one-year graduate program for the most promising young officers. Called the School of Advanced Military Studies, or SAMS, it brought strategic thinking back into the Army — at least for a while.

Now a retired one-star general, though an active Army consultant, Wass de Czege has publicly praised Yingling’s article. (Yingling was a graduate of SAMS in 2002, well after its founder moved on.) In an essay for the July issue of Army magazine, Wass de Czege wrote that today’s junior officers “feel they have much relevant experience [that] those senior to them lack,” yet the senior officers “have not listened to them.” These junior officers, he added, remind him of his own generation of captains, who held the same view during and just after Vietnam.

“The crux of the problem in our Army,” Wass de Czege wrote, “is that officers are not systematically taught how to cope with unstructured problems.” Counterinsurgency wars, like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, are all about unstructured problems. The junior and field-grade officers, who command at the battalion level and below, deal with unstructured problems — adapting to the insurgents’ ever-changing tactics — as a matter of course. Many generals don’t, and never had to, deal with such problems, either in war or in their training drills. Many of them may not fully recognize just how distinct and difficult these problems are.

Speaking by phone from his home outside Fort Leavenworth, Wass de Czege emphasized that he was impressed with most of today’s senior officers. Compared with those of his time, they are more capable, open and intelligent (most officers today, junior and senior, have college degrees, for instance). “You’re not seeing any of the gross incompetence that was common in my day,” he said. He added, however, that today’s generals are still too slow to change. “The Army tends to be consensus-driven at the top,” he said. “There’s a good side to that. We’re steady as a rock. You call us to arms, we’ll be there. But when you roll a lot of changes at us, it takes awhile. The young guys have to drive us to it.”

The day after his talk at Fort Knox, General Cody, back at his office in the Pentagon, reiterated his “faith in the leadership of the general officers.” Asked about complaints that junior officers are forced to follow narrow paths to promotion, he said, “We’re trying to do just the opposite.” In the works are new incentives to retain officers, including not just higher bonuses but free graduate school and the right to choose which branch of the Army to serve in. “I don’t want everybody to think there’s one road map to colonel or general,” he said. He denied that promotion boards picked candidates in their own image. This year, he said, he was on the board that picked new brigadier generals, and one of them, Jeffrey Buchanan, had never commanded a combat brigade; his last assignment was training Iraqi security forces. One colonel, interviewed later, said: “That’s a good sign. They’ve never picked anybody like that before. But that’s just one out of 38 brigadier generals they picked. It’s still very much the exception.”

There is a specter haunting the debate over Yingling’s article — the specter of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. During World War II, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower threatened to resign if the civilian commanders didn’t order air support for the invasion of Normandy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill acceded. But during the Korean War, MacArthur — at the time, perhaps the most popular public figure in America — demanded that President Truman let him attack China. Truman fired him. History has redeemed both presidents’ decisions. But in terms of the issues that Yingling, McMaster and others have raised, was there really a distinction? Weren’t both generals speaking what they regarded as “truth to power”?

The very discussion of these issues discomforts many senior officers because they take very seriously the principle of civilian control. They believe it is not their place to challenge the president or his duly appointed secretary of defense, certainly not in public, especially not in wartime. The ethical codes are ambiguous on how firmly an officer can press an argument without crossing the line. So, many generals prefer to keep a substantial distance from that line — to keep the prospect of a constitutional crisis from even remotely arising.

On a blog Yingling maintains at the Web site of Small Wars Journal, an independent journal of military theory, he has acknowledged these dilemmas, but he hasn’t disentangled them. For example, if generals do speak up, and the president ignores their advice, what should they do then — salute and follow orders, resign en masse or criticize the president publicly? At this level of discussion, the junior and midlevel officers feel uncomfortable, too.

Yingling’s concern is more narrowly professional, but it should matter greatly to future policy makers who want to consult their military advisers. The challenge is how to ensure that generals possess the experience and analytical prowess to formulate sound military advice and the “moral courage,” as Yingling put it, to take responsibility for that advice and for its resulting successes or failures. The worry is that too few generals today possess either set of qualities — and that the promotional system impedes the rise of officers who do.

As today’s captains and majors come up through the ranks, the culture may change. One question is how long that will take. Another question is whether the most innovative of those junior officers will still be in the Army by the time the top brass decides reform is necessary. As Colonel Wilson, the West Point instructor, put it, “When that moment comes, will there be enough of the right folks in the right slots to make the necessary changes happen?”

Fred Kaplan is the national security columnist for Slate and author of the forthcoming book “Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power.”

Revoir la stratégie Américaine

2007-11-18T21:06:00.000-05:00

L’article qui suit présente une analyse très pertinente et très critique de la politique qui a été conduite par le Président, le Pentagone et les grands commandants militaires américains lors de l’aventure Irakienne. Cette critique est comparable à celle que l’on retrouve dans d’autres articles ou livres. Cependant au delà de la critique ce sont les propositions que fait Douglas Mac Gregor pour faire évoluer la stratégie militaire américaine et l’adapter à notre temps qui méritent l’attention et peuvent être source de réflexion pour le nouveau livre blanc sur la Défense et la Sécurité que rédigent les états-majors français.

Son auteur est colonel en retraite de l’US Army, a participé à la guerre du Golfe et écrit trois livres sur l’art de la guerre moderne et la réforme militaire dont « Transformation Under Fire : Revolutionnizing the Way America Fights ».

Résumé des théories

Partant du constat que « l’occupation en Irak aurait pu être évitée si les dirigeants politiques et militaires à Washington avaient conscience pris du changement tectonique dans les relations internationales créé par la décolonisation après la seconde Guerre Mondiale, ce changement rend toute occupation impossible », Mac Gregor réclame « une nouvelle stratégie militaire nationale destinée à renforcer le rôle que remplit les USA comme moteur mondial de la prospérité, rendant le style de vie américain attractif, et non menaçant, pour les autres. »

La stratégie qu’il développe est un retour à une « Real Politik » limitée aux purs intérêts stratégiques et matériels des USA et dénuée de toute ambition idéologique. Mac Gregor défend que les interventions destinées à éliminer des menaces bien réelles pour les intérêts de sécurité des USA et de ses alliés ne doivent pas conduire à transformer des sociétés fondamentalement différentes de la nôtre pour en faire des sociétés occidentalisées au prix de longues et couteuses occupations. L’histoire du XX^ème siècle a démontré que les chances de succès étaient très minces. Au XXI^ème siècle les forces armées US, au lieu d’essayer d’imposer des régimes démocratiques la où les conditions préalables n’existent pas, doivent garantir un accès commercial et étendre l’influence américaine dans des zones géographiques jugées vitales pour la prospérité et la sécurité des USA et de ses alliés. A ses yeux ces zones sont : le Golfe Persique, l’Afrique de l’Ouest, la mer du Japon, le sud de la mer de Chine, le Bassin Caribéen, l’Atlantique Nord et la Méditerranée.

« Les décideurs et les commandants en chefs doivent réorienter leurs réflexions vers une stratégie qui exalte l’économie des forces lors des opérations expéditionnaires et rejeter les plans qui chercheraient à optimiser les capacités de l’Army et du Marine Corps d’occupation à conduire encore plus d’occupations inappropriées. Ceci est une stratégie qui limite délibérément l’engagement des ressources militaires des USA à des buts et des objectifs atteignables, cohérents avec les intérêts stratégiques US et qui évite le type de guerre idéologique sans fin qui a été prêt de détruire la civilisation occidentale au XX^ème siècle. »

Pour mettre en œuvre cette stratégie dans un environnement financier raisonnable et supportable par la nation, il faut changer l’art de la guerre. Il faut abandonner les structures actuelles de commandement lourdes, divisées entres les armes (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines), forcément onéreuses, ainsi que la philosophie des campagnes actuelles fondées par un héritage historique faite de suprématie des feux, d’assaut de vive force et d’occupation de terrain, pour développer des capacités terrestres où l’interarmées est complètement intégré afin de fournir un plus grand réservoir de forces disponibles, déployables sur alerte capables de remplir un large spectre de missions. Plutôt que des invasions et des occupations, Ces missions seront des frappes pour détruire des régimes ennemis ou des armes à long rayon d’action, des prises temporaires de points clés, des reconnaissances armées, l’entrainement et le soutien de forces alliées, la capture ou la destruction de cellules terroristes, et l’évacuation de non-combattants. Les forces terrestres devront être mobiles, ce qui ne veut pas dire légères, avec une puissance de feu significative. Les procédures et tactiques devront être revues. Cette révolution ne peut se faire sans revoir l’état d’esprit et la sélection des futurs chefs militaires.

C.H.

Armed Forces Journal, oct 2007

Washington's war

BY COL. DOUGLAS MACGREGOR (RET.).

The human and material cost of America's occupation of Iraq is reaching a climax. The ongoing "surge" of ground combat troops into Baghdad and its surroundings is producing higher U.S. casualties, exacerbating intersectarian violence and draining the last reserves of American patience.

Like the French Army in Algeria and the British Army in Ireland, the generals in Baghdad are discovering that soldiers and Marines in Iraq control only what they stand on, and when they no longer stand on it, they don't control it. Meanwhile, the Army grinds itself to pieces while the national military leadership stands by watching, clinging to the promise of more troops for a larger ground force in the future - a promise that is irrelevant to the challenge we now face: getting out of Iraq.

Like so many tragic events in human history, the occupation of Iraq could have been avoided if military and political leaders in Washington had recognized the tectonic shift in international relations created by decolonization after World War II. This shift made any occupation, with the exception of very brief American or European military triumphs over non-Europeans, especially Muslim Arabs, impossible. But the decision to occupy and govern Iraq with American military power was driven by ideology, not strategy. And, when ideology masquerades as strategy, disaster is inevitable.

The U.S. needs a new national military strategy, a strategy designed to enhance America's role as the world's engine of prosperity, making the American way of life attractive, not threatening, to others. However, for a new, more effective national military strategy to emerge that can rationalize the structure and content of the armed forces for operations in the aftermath of Iraq, both policymakers and the flag officers who command our forces must reorient their thinking to a strategy that exalts economy of force in expeditionary operations and rejects plans to optimize the Army and Marine Corps for any more misguided occupations. This is a strategy that deliberately limits the commitment of U.S. military resources to attainable goals and objectives consistent with U.S. strategic interests and avoids the kind of open-ended ideological warfare that nearly destroyed Western civilization in the 20th century.

With another presidential election just around the corner, it's time to begin answering the all-important questions of "What is the strategic purpose for which the U.S. armed forces will fight in the aftermath of Iraq?" and "How should a new president and secretary of defense define strategic objectives for U.S. forces?" How these questions are answered will determine whether our forces and their missions are aligned with the nation's security needs.

Soon after the terrorist attacks against New York City and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush invoked the images of World War II, demanding total victory over a new, demonized enemy: Islamist terrorism. Those who were not with us in the new ideological struggle to democratize the Middle East were suddenly against us. When American forces intervened two years later in Iraq, they did so not in search of indigenous friends and allies in a country tyrannized for a generation, but in search of new enemies to destroy.

With the passage of time, politicians imbued military action to destroy Islamist terrorism with a meaning it never had, equating the unnecessary and destructive American military occupation of Muslim-Arab Iraq with America's special mission to spread freedom throughout the world. Worse, Iraq's forced democratization unleashed reactionary forces Americans did not anticipate. These forces strengthened Iranian regional power and influence, precipitating a dangerous anti-American backlash abroad and creating economic vulnerability at home. We cannot easily reverse the outcome in Iraq, but we can avoid repeating the pattern of behavior that made the Iraqi quagmire inevitable.

In the xenophobic, tribal and desperately poor populations of the Middle East and much of Africa, occupying Christian armies from the U.S., United Kingdom and other European states are unlikely to win significant numbers of hearts and minds. Moreover, the kind of secular democracy the Bush administration sought to export to Iraq through military occupation is synonymous in most of the Muslim Arab world with massive corruption, widening gaps between rich and poor, and moral decadence as seen inside Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf emirates. Where democracy does prevail, Islamism tends to govern. And, where Islamism governs, as seen in Iran - a state that is, in practice, the most democratic in the Islamic world - democracy is subjugated to Islamic Shariah law. This outcome is hardly in the interest of U.S. national security.

Avoiding occupation

These points do not argue for after-the-fact preparation or transformation inside the Army and Marine Corps to fight future insurgencies that arise from unwanted U.S. military occupations. Unwanted occupations should be avoided, not repeated. Many point to the British success in Malaya as a reason to persist in delusions of success in counterinsurgency in developing regions. However, there is a vast difference between a British Army in Malaya commanded by Sir Gerald Templar in 1952, whose publicly stated goal was to end British occupation of Malaya, and the open-ended American military occupation of Iraq that precipitated a popular Sunni Muslim-Arab revolt against an unwanted American military occupation. From the moment we occupied central Iraq with no plan to leave, we were at war with a population humiliated by our presence; it is the kind of conflict the American military should not be asked to fight.

If performing counterinsurgency campaigns against enemies created by the overbearing presence of U.S. ground forces is not the strategic purpose for which U.S. forces should fight, then what is the purpose? As they begin to contemplate the use of American military power after Iraq, policymakers should consider the following points:

First, interventions to remove genuine threats to U.S. and allied security interests should not involve U.S. military occupations that have no chance of altering cultures, societies or peoples fundamentally different from us. America cannot financially sustain open-ended military interventions in failing or failed societies with the object of imposing cultural change through military occupation to convert developing societies' social, political and economic structures into modern Western institutions. Not only do these operations involve expensive, long-term military garrisons on foreign territory, but the probability of success for these interventions, as seen throughout most of the 20th century, is very, very low.

Second, the principal strategic purpose for which the U.S. armed forces must be ready to fight in the 21st century is not the forcible installation of Western-style democracy in societies where the conditions conducive to the rule of law and democratic development do not exist. Rather, the use of American military power will involve guaranteeing commercial access and, if the president and Congress deem it necessary, extending American influence to geographical areas vital to U.S. and allied prosperity and security.

Owing to the geographical positions of those areas most important to American economic interests - the Persian Gulf, West Africa, the Sea of Japan, the South China Sea, the Caribbean basin, the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean - any strategy to preserve access to these areas is exceptionally well-suited to the use of air and naval power. Moreover, unchallenged American control of the oceans and the air gives the U.S. the opportunity to wage war on its own terms, at places and under conditions of its own choosing. Whatever we undertake on land should exploit, not ignore, this enormous strategic advantage.

Third, the security interests beyond America's borders that prompt U.S. military intervention rarely justify the mobilization of the nation's entire military power. In fact, the strategic imperative that emerges from this analysis is the avoidance of total war along with the mobilization of America's human and industrial capacities that total war entails. This will not eliminate the need to guarantee access by occasionally disembarking ground forces from the sea and the air at points along the Eurasian, African or South American periphery - potentially hundreds of miles away from the target - and then moving these forces rapidly over land to the strategic objective.

However, the ongoing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction will make the massing of large ground forces extremely dangerous. Consequently, future expeditionary forces must mobilize organic combat power that is disproportionate to their size and numbers and execute mobile, distributed, yet coherent joint operations. This description points toward joint expeditionary forces designed for operations of limited duration and scope, forces that can be organized, trained and equipped at far lower cost than mass armies created for long-term territorial conquest and occupation.

Fourth, military transformation must be viewed in the context of the strategic, operational and tactical problems the joint force is being asked to solve today and the problems it is likely to face in the future. Once these problems are understood, the joint force can begin changing the way it operates and fights, and initiate the process of selecting the most promising technology options to achieve the desired capabilities.

The challenges to transformation might end there, except that the nation's flag officers tend to operate with single-service frames of reference that define the questions about military power and preordain the answers that they find acceptable. Officers who want to become generals or admirals buy into what questions are acceptable to ask, as well as what answers their superiors will tolerate. The consequence of this cultural environment is that spending on defense guarantees nothing, civilian control of the military is negligible and a host of military structures and supporting institutional concepts of warfare with their roots in World War II and the Cold War persist into the present, even though they are no longer congruent with the nation's strategic needs. The Army's Future Combat Systems , the Marine Corps' Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle , the Air Force's F-22 and the Navy's DD1000 collectively exemplify the problem. On the grounds of cost overruns and strategic irrelevance, all should be canceled.

Understanding the combined power of a massive, permanent defense establishment and defense industry together with a political system that relies on millions in donations for elections makes it difficult, if not impossible, for Congress to exercise effective oversight. This is why the president and secretary of defense must hold flag officers accountable for the readiness of their forces to deploy and fight, for the results - good and bad - that they produce, and how much blood and treasure they spend to achieve their aims. They must demand that flag officers conduct military operations with an appreciation of the direct impact of their actions on the nation's fiscal health and the government's political fortunes and keep in mind that "military" decisions must not be made in isolation from political realities, as Carl von Clausewitz cogently demonstrated long ago.

THE WAY AHEAD

Who should command? Is the commander successful, and how should he fight? These questions should be asked before, during and after military operations. In retrospect, the answers always seem self-evident, because for victory to occur, the winning commander and his force must do most things right, while the losing side must do many, many things wrong.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., stunned the Washington community by having the temerity to question the competence and truthfulness of America's senior military leaders in Washington and Baghdad. For some reason, questioning the decisions and actions of senior officers who decide the life or death of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines made Reid a target for attack from his political opponents. This was unfortunate, because Reid sent a powerful but belated message that professional competence and character under fire should trump fluff and PowerPoint briefings in wartime, the stock and trade of too many flag officers.

The quality of performance must count even when the results are not always the ones originally intended. This is why it is a measure of the frightening disengagement of civilian leadership that the president and the secretary of defense have never acted to relieve a single general officer of command for failure to perform in Iraq or Afghanistan, despite an impressive record of failure in each case.

Indeed, the principal overseer of American military forces in Iraq for much of the occupation, Gen. George Casey, was promoted to Army chief of staff after his strategy failed miserably. One cannot help but make the comparison to Gen. William Westmoreland, who was made Army chief of staff after the strategically disastrous Tet Offensive in 1968. Since the civilians in charge were obviously not happy with developments in Southwest Asia, they must have thought that it was not their role to interfere, a mind-set that seemingly contradicts the whole concept of civilian control of the military. Again, the comparisons of Casey and Westmoreland are instructive.

The bad news is that experience in Iraq has not fundamentally changed the thinking, organization or equipment of the Army and the Marine Corps. While the lethality of every weapon in ground combat continues to rise, as seen recently in the fight between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the level of armor protection, firepower and off-road mobility for soldiers and Marines continues to fall based on a warfare mentality that is delusional - a mind-set that exalts the dismounted rifleman inside communication networks based on the false promise of perfect information.

As repeatedly demonstrated in the towns and cities of Iraq, dismounted riflemen sent against insurgents, rebels or terrorists who use improvised explosives, mines and anti-armor weapons are doomed to fight the enemy's war on the enemy's terms. They are effectively denied surprise and security, their tactical intelligence is extremely limited, and they have no significant edge in armored protection, mobility or firepower. In the 21st century, the goal is to destroy the enemy, not hold ground. Attrition battles that pit Americans with rifles against enemies with rifles favor the enemy, not us.

MILITARY MODERNIZATION

In time of peace or war, civilians who command America's defense establishment must not allow the nation's military leaders the freedom to develop military strategy in isolation, to define their own programs and priorities, control their own funding lines, and then rate their own effectiveness. Clemenceau's dictum, "War is too important to be left to the generals," applies with equal force to the conduct of military operations and, in particular, spending for military modernization.

Today, unity of effort in military operations is more vital than ever and the importance of minimizing losses in our ground forces cannot be overstated, but the initiative to change the way conventional forces organize, train and equip will not come from the ranks of the flag officers. Flag officers in Washington love to talk about change in warfare so much that embracing military transformation becomes a tired cliché. Modernization is not rationalized for new strategic settings. In reality, preserving existing command structures and career patterns, papering over internal bureaucratic inefficiencies, deflecting serious questions about spending, and maintaining as much of the organizational and institutional status quo as possible are the pre-eminent goals of the military bureaucracy.

In a fiscally constrained environment, the nation must re-examine the roles and missions of its armed forces, especially its land warfare services - the Army and Marine Corps. Both are required to deliver ground forces by air and sea to crises and conflicts. Together, the active components of these forces number roughly 675,000, an impressive total by any standard. However, these numbers are not very meaningful within the current organizational structures as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Both services remain organized and equipped to execute operations in accordance with their long and distinguished histories. Today, any enemy that attempts to defend a beach will be targeted and destroyed from the air. The more likely scenario involves area-denial operations that capitalize on sea mines and unmanned systems to protect critical approaches from the sea, while dispersed enemy forces (nonstate or state actors) defend from positions inland. Yet, the Marine Corps remains focused on the conduct of single-service "force entry" amphibious operations against defended beaches.

Contrary to its public claims, the Army remains wedded to the massive application of men and firepower inside large division and corps structures with their roots in World War II, structures that include airborne, armored and motorized divisions that have no useful purpose in the modern era. In a strategic setting where technology and threats are causing missions to converge, the fundamental structures and purposes of these two services must be re-examined and, ultimately, reinvented.

Reorganizing the manpower and capabilities in these large forces within an integrated, joint operational framework to provide a larger pool of ready, deployable ground forces on rotational readiness that can perform a range of missions is essential. These missions include striking inland from points along the periphery of Eurasia, Africa, and Central and South America to destroy enemy regimes, WMD and long-range (strategic) weapons, or temporarily seize key facilities or points on the ground; carry out armed reconnaissance operations, and train and support allied forces; and seize or liquidate terrorist cells and carry out non-combatant evacuations.

These reorganized ground forces would be mobile, armored forces with significant organic firepower and integrated infantry, not light infantry-based forces. How fast ground forces deploy is less important than what they do after they arrive and the tactical skill with which they are employed. Ground forces that capitalize on mobile armored firepower can take punches and keep fighting without taking heavy casualties, provided these forces are not road-bound and not committed in ways the enemy can easily predict. Ground forces operating in a manner within the strategic framework presented here would also allow for the economic maintenance of a credible nuclear force, as well as the security of the nation's borders, coasts and air space - a mission set that must involve more of the nation's military capability than it has to date.

CIRCLING THE WAGONS

If we do not abandon the current strategy of intervention, destruction and occupation to spread democracy, America will end up like the circled wagon trains of the Old West - surrounded by hostile Indian tribes, but with no U.S. cavalry riding to the rescue, because they're also behind the wagons. Fortunately, there is another way.

Politicians can accept America's economic and military limitations and reorient the direction of U.S. national security policy to the traditional English-speaking policy of making the American way of life attractive to others. However, harnessing American military power to this approach will still require more change. This change involves a new attitude among civilian leaders in all American branches of government. All branches must hold commanders of U.S. forces around the world accountable for what happens, and replace commanders who do not produce results. In addition, Congress must be far less willing in the future to go along with any aggressive military action an over-eager president decides to conduct.

In warfare, as in wrestling, the attempt to throw the opponent without first weakening his foothold and upsetting his balance results in self-exhaustion. Without a coherent military strategy or attainable political objectives beyond the vague desire to transform non-European societies and cultures into replicas of English-speaking democracy, American ground forces will fall into the trap of brutal raids, patrols and checkpoints, forgetting that no local government can be legitimate and tolerate foreign occupation for long.

Today, any insistence on simplistic formulas that see the world in terms of good and evil will reinforce the blatant disregard for the cultures of people different from us, and the driving forces of state interest and power. This mentality has worn out America's soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, along with most of their fighting equipment. The next president and secretary of defense will have to cope with the fallout and make fiscal caution an executive fixation.

Selecting, educating and cultivating the right officers within a professional framework based on merit, not nepotism, is vital. Winning combinations of policymakers, military leaders and formulas for military success along with the conditions of unchallenged military superiority they create do not emerge suddenly or swiftly. They are never permanent.

Like international systems, military leadership and thinking should be dynamic. Technology is perpetually changing. The demand for new operational concepts and innovative organizations for combat is never-ending. Thus, decisions that determine the senior leadership, organization and equipment of military establishments, and that occur in the 20 or even five years leading up to the wartime collision, are decisive factors in the complex calculus of victory, often more decisive in their impact than what happens when the fighting takes place.

With the right senior officers and selection system in place, and civilian leadership able to distinguish careerism from professionalism and willing to punish the former and reward the latter, the next president can resolutely implement a new military strategy. Most important, doing what every presidential administration has done since 1945 - going to war with the senior leadership and the force they found on taking office - is no longer an option. If the next administration repeats this mistake, as did the Johnson and the Bush administrations, we will continue to muddle through trying to buy everything and win nothing.

Inside defense, there is far too much management and committee work with diluted and dispersed authority and responsibility, and far too little leadership with centralized and delegated authority and responsibility. This is especially true for the civilians, but the criticism applies to many of the flag officers in the higher headquarters, as well. The next president and his secretary of defense should routinely remind themselves of Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan's advice to Theodore Roosevelt when he assumed his duties as assistant secretary of the Navy: "Sir, no service can or should be expected to reform itself."

Stratégies de contre-insurrection - Connaitre son ennemi : Apport de la sociologie

2007-11-08T00:33:00.000-05:00

Les américains ont découvert, avec retard, qu’ils menaient une guerre de contre-insurrection, tant en Irak qu’en Afghanistan. Comme le décrit si bien le journaliste du Washington Post Thomas E. Ricks dans son best-seller « FIASCO », l’US Army avait exclu cette hypothèse depuis son échec vietnamien. De nombreux penseurs tentent de rattraper le retard doctrinal. Plusieurs articles traitent de ce sujet intéressant.

Ce premier article expose en première partie la pensée stratégique de David Kilcullen, Lt-Colonel de l'armée Australienne, sur la contre-insurrection moderne, principalement vis à vis des mouvements islamiques . David Kilcullen occupe maintenant des fonctions très influentes au sein du département d'Etat U.S. et est très écouté au Pentagone. Il est aussi un des consultants appointés par le Général Petraeus qui dirige les opérations en Irak. Nul doute que sa pensée pèse sur les opérations américaines. Ainsi Killculen a participé à la rédaction de la nouvelle “Quadrienal Defense Review” publiée par le Pentagone en 2006. Il a aussi écrit une série de conseils aux commandants de compagnie sur le point d'être déployés en Iraq et en Afghanistan: Vingt-huit articles sur « Les fondamentaux de la contre-insurrection au niveau de la compagnie ».

La seconde partie de l’article est consacrée à ce que peuvent apporter les sociologues et les anthropologues à l’effort de lutte contre-insurrectionnelle en s’appuyant sur la contribution de Mme Montgomery McFate.

De famille gauchiste, Montgomery Mc Fate a débuté ses travaux en étudiant l’insurrection nord-irlandaise et a découvert, comme David Killculen, la prédominance des liens sociaux dans le fonctionnement de cette rébellion. Mariée à un officier, le 11 septembre l’a conduite à être "Passionnée par un sujet: le besoin qu’a le gouvernement de véritablement comprendre ses adversaires" , comme ce fût le cas pendant la guerre froide.

Alors qu’ils avaient été les clés d'un certain nombre de succès dans les guerres précédentes, les anthropologues n’ont plus été enrôlés dans les projets du Pentagone depuis la guerre du Vietnam. La méconnaissance de la société irakienne a amené erreur sur erreur dans la conduite de la guerre en Irak. En 2004 il est à nouveau fait appel aux anthropologues qui fournissent de la documentation informatique aux unités sur le terrain, mais aussi sont déployés comme « conseillers cultu
rels ».

Résumé des théories:

David Kilcullen a bâti sa réflexion sur son observation comparée des insurrections en Indonésie : Celle des années 50-60 du Darul Islam et celle du Timor oriental dans les années 90. Les mêmes méthodes de contre-insurrection ont été appliquées avec des résultats diamétralement opposés. Victoire complète de l’Etat indonésien pour la première, succès de la sécession pour la seconde. Pour Killculen les facteurs qui ont changé la donne sont simples, une propagande internationale et une couverture médiatique omniprésente : « La mondialisation de l'information rend la contre-insurrection encore plus difficile maintenant".

De son point de vue, ce n’est pas l’idéologie, en particulier religieuse comme l’islamisme, qui est la racine des insurrections, ce sont les réseaux sociaux : "Les gens ne sont pas poussés à la rébellion par leur idéologie. Ils y sont tirés par leurs réseaux sociaux. "

Kilcullen redéfinit la guerre contre le terrorisme comme une "contre-insurrection mondiale." Ce changement de terminologie a de grandes répercussions. Dans une contre-insurrection, la force armée est seulement un quart de l'effort; les opérations politiques, économiques, et d'information sont également nécessaires. Une guerre contre la terreur suggère un ennemi indifférencié. Killculen pense qu’il faut désagréger les insurrections : "Tout comme la stratégie d'endiguement était au cœur de la guerre froide, de même la stratégie de désagrégation consisterait à unifier la conception stratégique de la guerre - ce qui a fait défaut jusqu'à présent." Pour lui, « il ne faut pas faire le jeu de la stratégie d’information mondiale de l’ennemi en faisant de tout un seul combat ».

Plus il apprend à connaitre les insurrections actuelles, plus il pense que les techniques classiques de contre-insurrection, comme celles employées au Vietnam et en Malaisie, sont obsolètes. "La contre-insurrection classique est conçue pour vaincre l'insurrection dans un pays"; "Nous avons besoin d'un nouveau modèle, capable de faire face à une insurrection mondialisée."

Pour lui, les opérations des groupes insurrectionnels comme les talibans "sont essentiellement la propagande d'organisations armées". "Ils basculent entre l’activité de guérilla et l'activité terroriste autant que nécessaire afin de maintenir l'élan politique, et c'est une opération d’information qui génère la perception d'une insurrection grandissante et imparable."

La stratégie d’information semble diriger l’ordre du jour de chaque mouvement islamique radical, que ce soit Al Qaeda en Irak ou le Hezbollah dans sa confrontation avec Israël au Liban. Le but de chaque action est d’obtenir une population intimidée ou acquise et une augmentation des fonds collectés et du recrutement par la stratégie de communication qui l’accompagne, les sources d’information de la population ayant plus que doublé depuis la guerre du Vietnam et étant de surcroit moins contrôlables par le gouvernement.

Kilcullen ne croit pas qu’une approche entièrement « douce » de la contre-insurrection puisse fonctionner contre de telles tactiques. À son avis, gagner les cœurs et les esprits n’a pas l’objet de rendre les populations locales comme vous, mais de les amener à accepter que le soutien de votre part est dans leur intérêt, ce qui exige un élément de coercition.

"Dans une contre-insurrection, la gratitude ne durera que jusqu'à ce que le soleil se couche, et que les insurgés se présentent et disent:" Vous êtes de notre côté, non? Sinon, nous allons vous tuer. "Si un côté est disposé à appliquer la force meurtrière pour mettre la population à ses côtés et l'autre partie ne l'est pas, en fin de compte que vous allez vous trouver en situation de perdant. "

Interrogé pour savoir s’il pense que les USA étaient en mesure de traiter avec succès un Jihad mondial, Killculen répond par l'affirmative en se lançant dans un parallèle intéressant avec la guerre froide qui a débuté bien mal pour les USA en 1953 et qui s ‘est achevé plusieurs décennies plus tard avec succès: il voit la guerre froide non comme une confrontation brutale mais comme une une guerre de propagande subtile qui a nécessité une connaissance profonde des ennemis et des populations. La méthode qu'il propose d'utiliser pour obtenir le même succès est principalement fondée sur une stratégie de contre-propagande.

A partir d’une variété d’études d’universitaires, Killculen a établi une échelle de l’extrémisme graduant l’évolution d’un djihadiste, qui va des vastes masses musulmanes jusqu’aux cellules régionales d’insurgés ; A chaque barreau de l’échelle s’applique des tactiques différentes de contre-insurrection, la force violente ne devant être employée que pour les échelons du haut afin de ne pas créer de nouveaux terroristes.

Il voit trois méthodes de base pour créer une stratégie de contre-propagande : « Il faut créer une résistance à leur message, il faut aider ou coopter ceux qui ont un contre-message, et il faut envisager de créer ou de soutenir la création d’organisations rivales». Il pense aussi que les gouvernements occidentaux doivent créer des réseaux compétitifs fiables dans les pays musulmans ( mosquées, associations professionnelles, etc...)

Mais si le champ de bataille de la contre-insurrection à l'échelle mondiale est intimement local, le gouvernement américain a besoin de ce que McFate appelle une connaissance "granulaire" terrains sociaux sur lesquels il est en concurrence. C'est ce que Killculen conseille au niveau tactique quand il écrit: « Les insurgés sont parmi les adversaires les plus adaptatifs que vous recontrez jamais. Lutter contre eux demande chaque parcelle de votre intellect. » "La première astuce est " Know Your Turf ": " Connaitre la population, la topographie, l'économie, l'histoire, la religion et la culture. Connaitre tous les villages, routes, domaines, groupes de la population, chef tribaux, et les griefs anciens. Votre tâche est de devenir le spécialiste de votre secteur. "

C.H.

KNOWING YOUR ENNEMY

by George Packer

Can social scientists redefine the "war on terror"?

THE NEW YORKER n° du 18 decembre 2006

In 1993, a young captain in the Australian Army named David Kilcullen was living among villagers in West Java, as part of an immersion program in the Indonesian language. One day, he visited a local military museum that contained a display about Indonesia's war, during the nineteen-fifties and sixties, against a separatist Muslim insurgency movement called Darul Islam. "I had never heard of this conflict," Kilcullen told me recently. "It's hardly known in the West. The Indonesian government won, hands down. And I was fascinated by how it managed to pull off such a successful counterinsurgency campaign."

Kilcullen, the son of two left-leaning academics, had studied counterinsurgency as a cadet at Duntroon, the Australian West Point, and he decided to pursue a doctorate in political anthropology at the University of New South Wales. He chose as his dissertation subject the Darul Islam conflict, conducting research over tea with former guerrillas while continuing to serve in the Australian Army. The rebel movement, he said, was bigger than the Malayan Emergency-the twelve-year Communist revolt against British rule, which was finally put down in 1960, and which has become a major point of reference in the military doctrine of counterinsurgency. During the years that Kilcullen worked on his dissertation, two events in Indonesia deeply affected his thinking. The first was the rise-in the same region that had given birth to Darul Islam, and among some of the same families-of a more extreme Islamist movement called Jemaah Islamiya, which became a Southeast Asian affiliate of Al Qaeda. The second was East Timor's successful struggle for independence from Indonesia. Kilcullen witnessed the former as he was carrying out his field work; he participated in the latter as an infantry-company commander in a United Nations intervention force. The experiences shaped the conclusions about counter-insurgency in his dissertation, which he finished in 2001, just as a new war was about to begin.

"I saw extremely similar behavior and extremely similar problems in an Islamic insurgency in West Java and a Christian-separatist insurgency in East Timor," he said. "After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, 'The problem is Islam,' I was thinking, It's something deeper than that. It's about human social networks and the way that they operate." In West Java, elements of the failed Darul Islam insurgency-a local separatist movement with mystical leanings-had resumed fighting as Jemaah Islamiya, whose outlook was Salafist and global. Kilcullen said, "What that told me about Jemaah Islamiya is that it's not about theology." He went on, "There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what's happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not 'Islamic behavior.' " Paraphrasing the American political scientist Roger D. Petersen, he said, "People don't get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks." He noted that all fifteen Saudi hijackers in the September 11th plot had trouble with their fathers. Although radical ideas prepare the way for disaffected young men to become violent jihadists, the reasons they convert, Kilcullen said, are more mundane and familiar: family, friends, associates.

Indonesia's failure to replicate in East Timor its victory in West Java later influenced Kilcullen's views about what the Bush Administration calls the "global war on terror." In both instances, the Indonesian military used the same harsh techniques, including forced population movements, coercion of locals into security forces, stringent curfews, and even lethal pressure on civilians to take the government side. The reason that the effort in East Timor failed, Kilcullen concluded, was globalization. In the late nineties, a Timorese international propaganda campaign and ubiquitous media coverage prompted international intervention, thus ending the use of tactics that, in the obscure jungles of West Java in the fifties, outsiders had known nothing about. "The globalized information environment makes counterinsurgency even more difficult now," Kilcullen said.

Just before the 2004 American elections, Kilcullen was doing intelligence work for the Australian government, sifting through Osama bin Laden's public statements, including transcripts of a video that offered a list of grievances against America: Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, global warming. The last item brought Kilcullen up short. "I thought, Hang on! What kind of jihadist are you?" he recalled. The odd inclusion of environmentalist rhetoric, he said, made clear that "this wasn't a list of genuine grievances. This was an Al Qaeda information strategy." Ron Suskind, in his book "The One Percent Doctrine," claims that analysts at the C.I.A. watched a similar video, released in 2004, and concluded that "bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reëlection." Bin Laden shrewdly created an implicit association between Al Qaeda and the Democratic Party, for he had come to feel that Bush's strategy in the war on terror was sustaining his own global importance. Indeed, in the years after September 11th Al Qaeda's core leadership had become a propaganda hub. "If bin Laden didn't have access to global media, satellite communications, and the Internet, he'd just be a cranky guy in a cave," Kilcullen said.

In 2004, Kilcullen's writings and lectures brought him to the attention of an official working for Paul Wolfowitz, then the Deputy Secretary of Defense. Wolfowitz asked him to help write the section on "irregular warfare" in the Pentagon's "Quadrennial Defense Review," a statement of department policy and priorities, which was published earlier this year. Under the leadership of Donald Rumsfeld, who resigned in November, the Pentagon had embraced a narrow "shock-and-awe" approach to war-fighting, emphasizing technology, long-range firepower, and spectacular displays of force. The new document declared that activities such as "long-duration unconventional warfare, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and military support for stabilization and reconstruction efforts" needed to become a more important component of the war on terror. Kilcullen was partly responsible for the inclusion of the phrase "the long war," which has become the preferred term among many military officers to describe the current conflict. In the end, the Rumsfeld Pentagon was unwilling to make the cuts in expensive weapons systems that would have allowed it to create new combat units and other resources necessary for a proper counterinsurgency strategy.

In July, 2005, Kilcullen, as a result of his work on the Pentagon document, received an invitation to attend a conference on defense policy, in Vermont. There he met Henry Crumpton, a highly regarded official who had supervised the C.I.A.'s covert activities in Afghanistan during the 2001 military campaign that overthrew the Taliban. The two men spent much of the conference talking privately, and learned, among other things, that they saw the war on terror in the same way. Soon afterward, Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, hired Crumpton as the department's coördinator for counterterrorism, and Crumpton, in turn, offered Kilcullen a job. For the past year, Kilcullen has occupied an office on the State Department's second floor, as Crumpton's chief strategist. In some senses, Kilcullen has arrived too late: this year, the insurgency in Iraq has been transformed into a calamitous civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, and his ideas about counterinsurgency are unlikely to reverse the country's disintegration. Yet radical Islamist movements now extend across the globe, from Somalia to Afghanistan and Indonesia, and Kilcullen-an Australian anthropologist and lieutenant colonel, who is "on loan" to the U.S. government-offers a new way to understand and fight a war that seems to grow less intelligible the longer it goes on.

Kilcullen is thirty-nine years old, and has a wide pink face, a fondness for desert boots, and an Australian's good-natured bluntness. He has a talent for making everything sound like common sense by turning disturbing explanations into brisk, cheerful questions: "America is very, very good at big, short conventional wars? It's not very good at small, long wars? But it's even worse at big, long wars? And that's what we've got." Kilcullen's heroes are soldier-intellectuals, both real (T. E. Lawrence) and fictional (Robert Jordan, the flinty, self-reliant schoolteacher turned guerrilla who is the protagonist of Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls"). On his bookshelves, alongside monographs by social scientists such as Max Gluckman and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, is a knife that he took from a militiaman he had just ambushed in East Timor. "If I were a Muslim, I'd probably be a jihadist," Kilcullen said as we sat in his office. "The thing that drives these guys-a sense of adventure, wanting to be part of the moment, wanting to be in the big movement of history that's happening now-that's the same thing that drives me, you know?"

More than three years into the Iraq war and five into the conflict in Afghanistan, many members of the American military-especially those with combat experience-have begun to accept the need to learn the kind of counterinsurgency tactics that it tried to leave behind in Vietnam. On December 15th, the Army and the Marine Corps will release an ambitious new counterinsurgency field manual-the first in more than two decades-that will shape military doctrine for many years. The introduction to the field manual says, "Effective insurgents rapidly adapt to changing circumstances. They cleverly use the tools of the global information revolution to magnify the effects of their actions. . . . However, by focusing on efforts to secure the safety and support of the local populace, and through a concerted effort to truly function as learning organizations, the Army and Marine Corps can defeat their insurgent enemies."

One night earlier this year, Kilcullen sat down with a bottle of single-malt Scotch and wrote out a series of tips for company commanders about to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is an energetic writer who avoids military and social-science jargon, and he addressed himself intimately to young captains who have had to become familiar with exotica such as "The Battle of Algiers," the 1966 film documenting the insurgency against French colonists. "What does all the theory mean, at the company level?" he asked. "How do the principles translate into action-at night, with the G.P.S. down, the media criticizing you, the locals complaining in a language you don't understand, and an unseen enemy killing your people by ones and twos? How does counterinsurgency actually happen? There are no universal answers, and insurgents are among the most adaptive opponents you will ever face. Countering them will demand every ounce of your intellect." The first tip is "Know Your Turf": "Know the people, the topography, economy, history, religion and culture. Know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader, and ancient grievance. Your task is to become the world expert on your district." "Twenty-eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency"-the title riffs on a T. E. Lawrence insurgency manual from the First World War-was disseminated via e-mail to junior officers in the field, and was avidly read.

Last year, in an influential article in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Kilcullen redefined the war on terror as a "global counterinsurgency." The change in terminology has large implications. A terrorist is "a kook in a room," Kilcullen told me, and beyond persuasion; an insurgent has a mass base whose support can be won or lost through politics. The notion of a "war on terror" has led the U.S. government to focus overwhelmingly on military responses. In a counterinsurgency, according to the classical doctrine, which was first laid out by the British general Sir Gerald Templar during the Malayan Emergency, armed force is only a quarter of the effort; political, economic, and informational operations are also required. A war on terror suggests an undifferentiated enemy. Kilcullen speaks of the need to "disaggregate" insurgencies: finding ways to address local grievances in Pakistan's tribal areas or along the Thai-Malay border so that they aren't mapped onto the ambitions of the global jihad. Kilcullen writes, "Just as the Containment strategy was central to the Cold War, likewise a Disaggregation strategy would provide a unifying strategic conception for the war-something that has been lacking to date." As an example of disaggregation, Kilcullen cited the Indonesian province of Aceh, where, after the 2004 tsunami, a radical Islamist organization tried to set up an office and convert a local separatist movement to its ideological agenda. Resentment toward the outsiders, combined with the swift humanitarian action of American and Australian warships, helped to prevent the Acehnese rebellion from becoming part of the global jihad. As for America, this success had more to do with luck than with strategy. Crumpton, Kilcullen's boss, told me that American foreign policy traditionally operates on two levels, the global and the national; today, however, the battlefields are also regional and local, where the U.S. government has less knowledge and where it is not institutionally organized to act. In half a dozen critical regions, Crumpton has organized meetings among American diplomats, intelligence officials, and combat commanders, so that information about cross-border terrorist threats is shared. "It's really important that we define the enemy in narrow terms," Crumpton said. "The thing we should not do is let our fears grow and then inflate the threat. The threat is big enough without us having to exaggerate it."

By speaking of Saddam Hussein, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Taliban, the Iranian government, Hezbollah, and Al Qaeda in terms of one big war, Administration officials and ideologues have made Osama bin Laden's job much easier. "You don't play to the enemy's global information strategy of making it all one fight," Kilcullen said. He pointedly avoided describing this as the Administration's approach. "You say, 'Actually, there are sixty different groups in sixty different countries who all have different objectives. Let's not talk about bin Laden's objectives-let's talk about your objectives. How do we solve that problem?' " In other words, the global ambitions of the enemy don't automatically demand a monolithic response.

The more Kilcullen travels to the various theatres of war, the less he thinks that the lessons of Malaya and Vietnam are useful guides in the current conflict. "Classical counterinsurgency is designed to defeat insurgency in one country," he writes in his Strategic Studies article. "We need a new paradigm, capable of addressing globalised insurgency." After a recent trip to Afghanistan, where Taliban forces have begun to mount large operations in the Pashto-speaking south of the country, he told me, "This ain't your granddaddy's counterinsurgency." Many American units there, he said, are executing the new field manual's tactics brilliantly. For example, before conducting operations in a given area, soldiers sit down over bread and tea with tribal leaders and find out what they need-Korans, cold-weather gear, a hydroelectric dynamo. In exchange for promises of local support, the Americans gather the supplies and then, within hours of the end of fighting, produce them, to show what can be gained from coöperating.

But the Taliban seem to be waging a different war, driven entirely by information operations. "They're essentially armed propaganda organizations," Kilcullen said. "They switch between guerrilla activity and terrorist activity as they need to, in order to maintain the political momentum, and it's all about an information operation that generates the perception of an unstoppable, growing insurgency." After travelling through southern Afghanistan, Kilcullen e-mailed me:

One good example of Taliban information strategy is their use of "night letters." They have been pushing local farmers in several provinces (Helmand, Uruzgan, Kandahar) to grow poppy instead of regular crops, and using night-time threats and intimidation to punish those who don't and convince others to convert to poppy. This is not because they need more opium-God knows they already have enough-but because they're trying to detach the local people from the legal economy and the legally approved governance system of the provinces and districts, to weaken the hold of central and provincial government. Get the people doing something illegal, and they're less likely to feel able to support the government, and more willing to do other illegal things (e.g. join the insurgency)-this is a classic old Bolshevik tactic from the early cold war, by the way. They are specifically trying to send the message: "The government can neither help you nor hurt us. We can hurt you, or protect you-the choice is yours." They also use object lessons, making an example of people who don't cooperate-for example, dozens of provincial-level officials have been assassinated this year, again as an "armed propaganda" tool-not because they want one official less but because they want to send the message "We can reach out and touch you if you cross us." Classic armed information operation.

Kilcullen doesn't believe that an entirely "soft" counterinsurgency approach can work against such tactics. In his view, winning hearts and minds is not a matter of making local people like you-as some American initiates to counterinsurgency whom I met in Iraq seemed to believe-but of getting them to accept that supporting your side is in their interest, which requires an element of coercion. Kilcullen met senior European officers with the NATO force in Afghanistan who seemed to be applying "a development model to counterinsurgency," hoping that gratitude for good work would bring the Afghans over to their side. He told me, "In a counterinsurgency, the gratitude effect will last until the sun goes down and the insurgents show up and say, 'You're on our side, aren't you? Otherwise, we're going to kill you.' If one side is willing to apply lethal force to bring the population to its side and the other side isn't, ultimately you're going to find yourself losing." Kilcullen was describing a willingness to show local people that supporting the enemy risks harm and hardship, not a campaign like the Phoenix program in Vietnam, in which noncombatants were assassinated; besides being unethical, such a tactic would inevitably backfire in the age of globalized information. Nevertheless, because he talks about war with an analyst's rationalism and a practitioner's matter-of-factness, Kilcullen can appear deceptively detached from its consequences.

An information strategy seems to be driving the agenda of every radical Islamist movement. Kilcullen noted that when insurgents ambush an American convoy in Iraq, "they're not doing that because they want to reduce the number of Humvees we have in Iraq by one. They're doing it because they want spectacular media footage of a burning Humvee." Last year, a letter surfaced that is believed to have been sent from Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy, to the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, nine months before Zarqawi's death; the letter urged Zarqawi to make his videotaped beheadings and mass slaughter of Shiite civilians less gruesome. Kilcullen interpreted the letter as "basically saying to Zarqawi, 'Justify your attacks on the basis of how they support our information strategy.' " As soon as the recent fighting in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israeli troops ended, Hezbollah marked, with its party flags, houses that had been damaged. Kilcullen said, "That's not a reconstruction operation-it's an information operation. It's influence. They're going out there to send a couple of messages. To the Lebanese people they're saying, 'We're going to take care of you.' To all the aid agencies it's like a dog pissing on trees: they're saying, 'We own this house-don't you touch it.' " He went on, "When the aid agencies arrive a few days later, they have to negotiate with Hezbollah because there's a Hezbollah flag on the house. Hezbollah says, 'Yeah, you can sell a contract to us to fix up that house.' It's an information operation. They're trying to generate influence."

The result is an intimidated or motivated population, and a spike in fund-raising and recruiting. "When you go on YouTube and look at one of these attacks in Iraq, all you see is the video," Kilcullen said. "If you go to some jihadist Web sites, you see the same video and then a button next to it that says, 'Click here and donate.' " The Afghan or Iraqi or Lebanese insurgent, unlike his Vietnamese or Salvadoran predecessor, can plug into a global media network that will instantly amplify his message. After Kilcullen returned from Afghanistan last month, he stayed up late one Saturday night ("because I have no social life") and calculated how many sources of information existed for a Vietnamese villager in 1966 and for an Afghan villager in 2006. He concluded that the former had ten, almost half under government control, such as Saigon radio and local officials; the latter has twenty-five (counting the Internet as only one), of which just five are controlled by the government. Most of the rest-including e-mail, satellite phone, and text messaging-are independent but more easily exploited by insurgents than by the Afghan government. And it is on the level of influencing perceptions that these wars will be won or lost. "The international information environment is critical to the success of America's mission," Kilcullen said.

In the information war, America and its allies are barely competing. America's information operations, far from being the primary strategy, simply support military actions, and often badly: a Pentagon spokesman announces a battle victory, but no one in the area of the battlefield hears him (or would believe him anyway). Just as the Indonesians failed in East Timor, in spite of using locally successful tactics, Kilcullen said, "We've done a similar thing in Iraq-we've arguably done O.K. on the ground in some places, but we're totally losing the domestic information battle. In Afghanistan, it still could go either way."

However careful Kilcullen is not to criticize Administration policy, his argument amounts to a thoroughgoing critique. As a foreigner who is not a career official in the U.S. government, he has more distance and freedom to discuss the war on jihadism frankly, and in ways that his American counterparts rarely can. "It's now fundamentally an information fight," he said. "The enemy gets that, and we don't yet get that, and I think that's why we're losing."

In late September, Kilcullen was one of the featured speakers at a conference in Washington, organized by the State and Defense Departments, on bringing the civilian branches of the government into the global counterinsurgency effort. In the hallway outside the meeting room, he made a point of introducing me to another speaker, an anthropologist and Pentagon consultant named Montgomery McFate. For five years, McFate later told me, she has been making it her "evangelical mission" to get the Department of Defense to understand the importance of "cultural knowledge." McFate is forty years old, with hair cut stylishly short and an air of humorous cool. When I asked why a social scientist would want to help the war effort, she replied, only half joking, "Because I'm engaged in a massive act of rebellion against my hippie parents."

McFate grew up in the sixties on a communal houseboat in Marin County, California. Her parents were friends with Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and one of her schoolmates was the daughter of Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick and Paul Kantner. Like Kilcullen, she was drawn to the study of human conflict and also its reality: at Yale, where she received a doctorate, her dissertation was based on several years she spent living among supporters of the Irish Republican Army and then among British counterinsurgents. In Northern Ireland, McFate discovered something very like what Kilcullen found in West Java: insurgency runs in families and social networks, held together by persistent cultural narratives-in this case, the eight-hundred-year-old saga of "perfidious Albion." She went on to marry a U.S. Army officer. "When I was little in California, we never believed there was such a thing as the Cold War," McFate said. "That was a bunch of lies that the government fed us to keep us paranoid. Of course, there was a thing called the Cold War, and we nearly lost. And there was no guarantee that we were going to win. And this thing that's happening now is, without taking that too far, similar." After September 11th, McFate said, she became "passionate about one issue: the government's need to actually understand its adversaries," in the same way that the United States came to understand-and thereby undermine-the Soviet Union. If, as Kilcullen and Crumpton maintain, the battlefield in the global counterinsurgency is intimately local, then the American government needs what McFate calls a "granular" knowledge of the social terrains on which it is competing.

In 2004, when McFate had a fellowship at the Office of Naval Research, she got a call from a science adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had been contacted by battalion commanders with the 4th Infantry Division in a violent sector of the Sunni Triangle, in Iraq. "We're having a really hard time out here-we have no idea how this society works," the commanders said. "Could you help us?" The science adviser replied that he was a mathematical physicist, and turned for help to one of the few anthropologists he could find in the Defense Department.

For decades, the Pentagon and the humanistic social sciences have had little to do with each other. In 1964, the Pentagon set up a program called, with the self-conscious idealism of the period, Project Camelot. Anthropologists were hired and sent abroad to conduct a multiyear study of the factors that promote stability or war in certain societies, beginning with Chile. When news of the program leaked, the uproar in Chile and America forced Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to cancel it. "The Department of Defense has invested hardly any money in conducting ethnographic research in areas where conflict was occurring since 1965," McFate told me. After Project Camelot and Vietnam, where social scientists often did contract work for the U.S. military, professional associations discouraged such involvement. ("Academic anthropologists hate me for working with D.O.D.," McFate said.) Kilcullen, who calls counterinsurgency "armed social science," told me, "This is fundamentally about the broken relationship between the government and the discipline of anthropology. What broke that relationship is Vietnam. And people still haven't recovered from that." As a result, a complex human understanding of societies at war has been lost. "But it didn't have to be lost," McFate said. During the Second World War, anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Geoffrey Gorer, and Ruth Benedict provided the Allied war effort with essential insights into Asian societies. Gorer and Benedict suggested, for example, that the terms of Japan's surrender be separated from the question of the emperor's abdication, because the emperor was thought to embody the country's soul; doing so allowed the Japanese to accept unconditional surrender. McFate sees herself as reaching back to this tradition of military-academic coöperation.

By 2004, the military desperately needed coöperation. McFate saw Americans in Iraq make one strategic mistake after another because they didn't understand the nature of Iraqi society. In an article in Joint Force Quarterly, she wrote, "Once the Sunni Ba'thists lost their prestigious jobs, were humiliated in the conflict, and got frozen out through de-Ba'thification, the tribal network became the backbone of the insurgency. The tribal insurgency is a direct result of our misunderstanding the Iraqi culture." In the course of eighteen months of interviews with returning soldiers, she was told by one Marine Corps officer, "My marines were almost wholly uninterested in interacting with the local population. Our primary mission was the security of Camp Falluja. We relieved soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, and their assessment was that every local was participating or complicit with the enemy. This view was quickly adopted by my unit and framed all of our actions (and reactions)." Another marine told McFate that his unit had lost the battle to influence public opinion because it used the wrong approach to communication: "We were focussed on broadcast media and metrics. But this had no impact because Iraqis spread information through rumor. We should have been visiting their coffee shops."

The result of efforts like McFate's is a new project with the quintessential Pentagon name Cultural Operations Research Human Terrain. It began in the form of a "ruggedized" laptop computer, loaded with data from social-science research conducted in Iraq-such as, McFate said, "an analysis of the eighty-eight tribes and subtribes in a particular province." Now the project is recruiting social scientists around the country to join five-person "human terrain" teams that would go to Iraq and Afghanistan with combat brigades and serve as cultural advisers on six-to-nine-month tours. Pilot teams are planning to leave next spring.

Steve Fondacaro, a retired Army colonel who for a year commanded the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Task Force in Iraq, is in charge of the Human Terrain project. Fondacaro sees the war in the same terms as Kilcullen. "The new element of power that has emerged in the last thirty to forty years and has subsumed the rest is information," he said. "A revolution happened without us knowing or paying attention. Perception truly now is reality, and our enemies know it. We have to fight on the information battlefield." I asked him what the government should have done, say, in the case of revelations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. "You're talking to a radical here," Fondacaro said. "Immediately be the first one to tell the story. Don't let anyone else do it. That carries so much strategic weight." He added, "Iraqis are not shocked by torture. It would have impressed them if we had exposed it, punished it, rectified it." But senior military leadership, he said, remains closed to this kind of thinking. He is turning for help to academics-to "social scientists who want to educate me," he said. So far, though, Fondacaro has hired just one anthropologist. When I spoke to her by telephone, she admitted that the assignment comes with huge ethical risks. "I do not want to get anybody killed," she said. Some of her colleagues are curious, she said; others are critical. "I end up getting shunned at cocktail parties," she said. "I see there could be misuse. But I just can't stand to sit back and watch these mistakes happen over and over as people get killed, and do nothing."

At the counterinsurgency conference in Washington, the tone among the uniformed officers, civilian officials, and various experts was urgent, almost desperate. James Kunder, a former marine and the acting deputy of the U.S. Agency for International Development, pointed out that in Iraq and Afghanistan "the civilian agencies have received 1.4 per cent of the total money," whereas classical counterinsurgency doctrine says that eighty per cent of the effort should be nonmilitary. During Vietnam, his agency had fifteen thousand employees; it now has two thousand. After the end of the Cold War, foreign-service and aid budgets were sharply cut. "Size matters," Kunder said, noting that throughout the civilian agencies there are shortages of money and personnel. To staff the embassy in Baghdad, the State Department has had to steal officers from other embassies, and the government can't even fill the provincial reconstruction teams it has tried to set up in Iraq and Afghanistan. While correcting these shortages could not have prevented the deepening disaster in Iraq, they betray the government's priorities.

In early 2004, as Iraq was beginning to unravel, Senator Richard Lugar, the Indiana Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat, introduced legislation for a nation-building office, under the aegis of the State Department. The office would be able to tap into contingency funds and would allow cabinet-department officials, along with congressional staff people and civilian experts, to carry out overseas operations to help stabilize and rebuild failed states and societies shattered by war-to do it deliberately and well rather than in the ad-hoc fashion that has characterized interventions from Somalia and Kosovo to Iraq. Lugar envisioned both an active-duty contingent and a reserve corps.

The bill's biggest supporter was the military, which frequently finds itself forced to do tasks overseas for which civilians are better prepared, such as training police or rebuilding sewers. But Colin Powell, then the Secretary of State, and other Administration officials refused to give it strong backing. Then, in the summer of 2004, the Administration reversed course by announcing the creation, in the State Department, of the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization; the office was given the imprimatur of National Security Presidential Directive 44. At the September conference in Washington, Kilcullen held up the office as a model for how to bring civilians into counterinsurgency: "True enough, the words 'insurgency,' 'insurgent,' and 'counterinsurgency' do not appear in N.S.P.D. 44, but it clearly envisages the need to deploy integrated whole-of-government capabilities in hostile environments."

But the new office was virtually orphaned at birth. Congress provided only seven million of the hundred million dollars requested by the Administration, which never made the office a top Presidential priority. The State Department has contributed fifteen officials who can manage overseas operations, but other agencies have offered nothing. The office thus has no ability to coördinate operations, such as mobilizing police trainers, even as Iraq and Afghanistan deteriorate and new emergencies loom in places like Darfur and Pakistan. It has become insiders' favorite example of bureaucratic inertia in the face of glaring need.

Frederick Barton, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a WashingtonPakistan, where a huge population, rising militancy, nuclear weapons, and the remnants of Al Qaeda's leadership create a combustible mix. According to Barton's figures, since 2002 America has spent more than six billion dollars on buttressing the Pakistani military, and probably a similar amount on intelligence (the number is kept secret). Yet it has spent less than a billion dollars on aid for education and economic development, in a country where Islamist madrassas and joblessness contribute to the radicalization of young people. On a recent visit to Nigeria, Barton heard that American propaganda efforts are being outclassed by those of the Iranians and the Saudis. "What would Pepsi-Cola or Disney do?" he asked. "We're not thinking creatively, expansively. We are sclerotic, bureaucratic, lumbering-you can see the U.S. coming from miles away." think tank, considers failures like these to be a prime cause of American setbacks in fighting global jihadism. "Hard power is not the way we're going to make an impression," he told me, and he cited

If, as Kilcullen says, the global counterinsurgency is primarily an information war, one place where American strategy should be executed is the State Department office of Karen Hughes, the Under-Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Hughes is a longtime Bush adviser from Texas. One of her first missions, in September, 2005, took her to the Middle East, where her efforts to speak with Muslim women as fellow-"moms" and religious believers received poor reviews. Last year, she sent out a memo to American embassies urging diplomats to make themselves widely available to the local press, but she also warned them against saying anything that might seem to deviate from Administration policy. The choice of a high-level political operative to run the government's global-outreach effort suggests that the Bush Administration sees public diplomacy the way it sees campaigning, with the same emphasis on top-down message discipline. "It has this fixation with strategic communications-whatever that is," an expert in public diplomacy with close ties to the State Department told me. "It's just hokum. When you do strategic communications, it fails, because nothing gets out." She cited a news report that the Voice of America wanted to produce on American-funded AIDS programs in Africa. The V.O.A. was told by a government official that the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coördinator would have to give its approval before anything could be broadcast. (The decision was later overruled.) "We're spending billions of dollars on AIDS," the expert said-an effort that could generate considerable gratitude in African countries with substantial Muslim populations, such as Somalia and Nigeria. "But no one in Africa has a clue."

After the Cold War, the government closed down the United States Information Service and, with it, a number of libraries and cultural centers around the world. Since September 11th, there has been an attempt to revive such public diplomacy, but, with American embassies now barricaded or built far from city centers, only the most dedicated local people will use their resources. To circumvent this problem, the State Department has established what it calls American Corners-rooms or shelves in foreign libraries dedicated to American books and culture. "It's a good idea, but they're small and marginal," the expert said. She recently visited the American Corner in the main library in Kano, Nigeria, a center of Islamic learning. "I had to laugh," she said. "A few Africans asleep at the switch, a couple of computers that weren't working, a video series on George Washington that no one was using." She mentioned one encouraging new example of public diplomacy, funded partly by Henry Crumpton's office: Voice of America news broadcasts will begin airing next February in the language of Somalia, a country of increasing worry to counterterrorism officials. In general, though, there is little organized American effort to rebut the jihadist conspiracy theories that circulate daily among the Muslims living in populous countries such as Indonesia, Pakistan, and Nigeria.

According to the expert, an American diplomat with years of experience identified another obstacle to American outreach. "Let's face it," he told her. "All public diplomacy is on hold till George Bush is out of office."

I once asked David Kilcullen if he thought that America was fundamentally able to deal with the global jihad. Is a society in which few people spend much time overseas or learn a second language, which is impatient with chronic problems, whose vision of war is of huge air and armor battles ended by the signing of articles of surrender, and which tends to assume that everyone is basically alike cut out for this new "long war"?

Kilcullen reminded me that there was a precedent for American success in a sustained struggle with a formidable enemy. "If this is the Cold War-if that analogy holds-then right now we're in, like, 1953. This is a long way to go here. It didn't all happen overnight-but it happened." The Cold War, he emphasized, was many wars, constructed in many different models, fought in many different ways: a nuclear standoff between the superpowers, insurgencies in developing countries, a struggle of ideas in Europe. "Our current battle is a new Cold War," Kilcullen said, "but it's not monolithic. You've got to define the enemy as narrowly as you can get away with."

President Bush has used the Cold War as an inspirational analogy almost from the beginning of the war on terror. Last month, in Riga, Latvia, he reminded an audience of the early years of the Cold War, "when freedom's victory was not so obvious or assured." Six decades later, he went on, "freedom in Europe has brought peace to Europe, and freedom has brought the power to bring peace to the broader Middle East." Bush's die-hard supporters compare him to Harry S. Truman, who was reviled in his last years in office but has been vindicated by history as a plainspoken visionary.

An Administration official pointed out that the President's speeches on the war are like the last paragraph of every Churchill speech from the Second World War: a soaring peroration about freedom, civilization, and darkness. But in Churchill's case, the official went on, nineteen pages of analysis, contextualization, and persuasion preceded that final paragraph. A Bush speech gives only the uplift-which suggests that there is no strategy beyond it. Bush's notion of a titanic struggle between good and evil, between freedom and those who hate freedom, recalls the rigid anti-Communism of Whittaker Chambers, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Barry Goldwater. Montgomery McFate noted that the current avatars of right-wing Cold Warriors, the neoconservatives, have dismissed all Iraqi insurgents as "dead enders" and "bad people." Terms like "totalitarianism" and "Islamofascism," she said, which stir the American historical memory, mislead policymakers into greatly increasing the number of our enemies and coming up with wrongheaded strategies against them. "That's not what the insurgents call themselves," she said. "If you can't call something by its name-if you can't say, 'This is what this phenomenon is, it has structure, meaning, agency'-how can you ever fight it?" In other words, even if we think that a jihadi in Yemen has ideas similar to those of an Islamist in Java, we have to approach them in discrete ways, both to prevent them from becoming a unified movement and because their particular political yearnings are different.

Kilcullen is attempting to revive a strain of Cold War thought that saw the confrontation with Communism not primarily as a blunt military struggle but as a subtle propaganda war that required deep knowledge of diverse enemies and civilian populations. By this standard, America's performance against radical Islamists thus far is dismal. Bruce Hoffman, of Georgetown University, a former RAND Corporation analyst who began to use the term "global counterinsurgency" around the same time as Kilcullen, pointed to two Cold War projects: RAND's study of the motivation and morale of the Vietcong in the mid-sixties, based on extensive interviews with prisoners and former insurgents, which led some analysts to conclude that the war was unwinnable; and a survey by Radio Free Europe of two hundred thousand émigrés from the East Bloc in the eighties, which used the findings to shape broadcasts. "We haven't done anything like that in this struggle," Hoffman said, and he cited the thousands of detainees in Iraq. "Instead of turning the prisons into insurgent universities, you could have a systematic process that would be based on scientific surveys designed to elicit certain information on how people joined, who their leaders were, how leadership was exercised, how group cohesion was maintained." In other words, America would get to know its enemy. Hoffman added, "Even though we say it's going to be the long war, we still have this enormous sense of impatience. Are we committed to doing the fundamental spadework that's necessary?"

Kilcullen's thinking is informed by some of the key texts of Cold War social science, such as Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer," which analyzed the conversion of frustrated individuals into members of fanatical mass movements, and Philip Selznick's "The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics," which described how Communists subverted existing social groups and institutions like trade unions. To these older theoretical guides he adds two recent studies of radical Islam: "Globalized Islam," by the French scholar Olivier Roy, and "Understanding Terror Networks," by Marc Sageman, an American forensic psychiatrist and former covert operator with the mujahideen in Afghanistan. After September 11th, Sageman traced the paths of a hundred and seventy-two alienated young Muslims who joined the jihad, and found that the common ground lay not in personal pathology, poverty, or religious belief but in social bonds. Roy sees the rise of "neo-fundamentalism" among Western Muslims as a new identity movement shaped by its response to globalization. In the margin of a section of Roy's book called "Is Jihad Closer to Marx Than to the Koran?" Kilcullen noted, "If Islamism is the new leftism, then the strategies and techniques used to counter Marxist subversion during the Cold War may have direct or indirect relevance to combating Al Qaeda-sponsored subversion."

Drawing on these studies, Kilcullen has plotted out a "ladder of extremism" that shows the progress of a jihadist. At the bottom is the vast population of mainstream Muslims, who are potential allies against radical Islamism as well as potential targets of subversion, and whose grievances can be addressed by political reform. The next tier up is a smaller number of "alienated Muslims," who have given up on reform. Some of these join radical groups, like the young Muslims in North London who spend afternoons at the local community center watching jihadist videos. They require "ideological conversion"-that is, counter-subversion, which Kilcullen compares to helping young men leave gangs. (In a lecture that Kilcullen teaches on counterterrorism at Johns Hopkins, his students watch "Fight Club," the 1999 satire about anti-capitalist terrorists, to see a radical ideology without an Islamic face.) A smaller number of these individuals, already steeped in the atmosphere of radical mosques and extremist discussions, end up joining local and regional insurgent cells, usually as the result of a "biographical trigger-they will lose a friend in Iraq, or see something that shocks them on television." With these insurgents, the full range of counterinsurgency tools has to be used, including violence and persuasion. The very small number of fighters who are recruited to the top tier of Al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist groups are beyond persuasion or conversion. "They're so committed you've got to destroy them," Kilcullen said. "But you've got to do it in such a way that you don't create new terrorists."

When I asked him to outline a counter-propaganda strategy, he described three basic methods. "We've got to create resistance to their message," he said. "We've got to co-opt or assist people who have a counter-message. And we might need to consider creating or supporting the creation of rival organizations." Bruce Hoffman told me that jihadists have posted five thousand Web sites that react quickly and imaginatively to events. In 2004, he said, a jihadist rap video called "Dirty Kuffar" became widely popular with young Muslims in Britain: "It's like Ali G wearing a balaclava and having a pistol in one hand and a Koran in the other." Hoffman believes that America must help foreign governments and civil-society groups flood the Internet with persuasively youthful Web sites presenting anti-jihadist messages-but not necessarily pro-American ones, and without leaving American fingerprints.

Kilcullen argues that Western governments should establish competing "trusted networks" in Muslim countries: friendly mosques, professional associations, and labor unions. (A favorite Kilcullen example from the Cold War is left-wing anti-Communist trade unions, which gave the working class in Western Europe an outlet for its grievances without driving it into the arms of the Soviet Union.) The U.S. should also support traditional authority figures-community leaders, father figures, moderate imams-in countries where the destabilizing transition to modernity has inspired Islamist violence. "You've got to be quiet about it," he cautioned. "You don't go in there like a missionary." The key is providing a social context for individuals to choose ways other than jihad.

Kilcullen's proposals will not be easy to implement at a moment when the government's resources and attention are being severely drained by the chaos in Iraq. And, if some of his ideas seem sketchy, it's because he and his colleagues have only just begun to think along these lines. The U.S. government, encumbered by habit and inertia, has not adapted as quickly to the changing terrain as the light-footed, mercurial jihadists. America's many failures in the war on terror have led a number of thinkers to conclude that the problem is institutional. Thomas Barnett, a military analyst, proposes dividing the Department of Defense into two sections: one to fight big wars and one for insurgencies and nation-building. Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and Colin Powell's former chief of staff, goes even further. He thinks that the entire national-security bureaucracy, which was essentially set in place at the start of the Cold War, is incapable of dealing with the new threats and should be overhauled, so that the government can work faster to prevent conflicts or to intervene early. "Especially in light of this Administration, but also other recent ones, do we really want to concentrate power so incredibly in the White House?" he asked. "And, if we do, why do we still have the departments, except as an appendage of bureaucracy that becomes an impediment?" In Wilkerson's vision, new legislation would create a "unified command," with leadership drawn from across the civilian agencies, which "could supplant the existing bureaucracy."

Since September 11th, the government's traditional approach to national security has proved inadequate in one area after another. The intelligence agencies habitually rely on satellites and spies, when most of the information that matters now, as Kilcullen pointed out, is "open source"-available to anyone with an Internet connection. Traditional diplomacy, with its emphasis on treaties and geopolitical debates, is less relevant than the ability to understand and influence foreign populations-not in their councils of state but in their villages and slums. And future enemies are unlikely to confront the world's overwhelming military power with conventional warfare; technology-assisted insurgency is proving far more effective. At the highest levels of Western governments, the failure of traditional approaches to counter the jihadist threat has had a paralyzing effect. "I sense we've lost the ability to think strategically," Field Marshal Sir Peter Inge, the former chief of the British armed forces, has said of his government. He could have been describing the White House and the Pentagon.

Kilcullen's strategic mind, by contrast, seems remarkably febrile. I could call him at the office or at home at any hour of the night and he'd be jotting down ideas in one of his little black notebooks, ready to think out loud. Kilcullen, Crumpton, and their colleagues are desperately trying to develop a lasting new strategy that, in Kilcullen's words, would be neither Republican nor Democratic. Bruce Hoffman said, "We're talking about a profound shift in mind-set and attitude"-not to mention a drastic change in budgetary and bureaucratic priorities. "And that may not be achievable until there's a change in Administration." Kilcullen is now in charge of writing a new counterinsurgency manual for the civilian government, and early this month he briefed Condoleezza Rice on his findings in Afghanistan. But his ideas have yet to penetrate the fortress that is the Bush White House. Hoffman said, "Isn't it ironic that an Australian is spearheading this shift, together with a former covert operator? It shows that it's almost too revolutionary for the places where it should be discussed-the Pentagon, the National Security Council." At a moment when the Bush Administration has run out of ideas and lost control, it could turn away from its "war on terror" and follow a different path-one that is right under its nose.

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