Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 66

68 TTPs too many! Or, why lists like that won't help improve our junior officers

By Captain Jordan
Blashek, USMC


Best Defense guest
respondent

Captain
Jesse Sladek is the type of leader I would want as a commanding officer. ‘Just
giving a damn' goes a long way in leadership, and Captain Sladek clearly does. The
learning curve for a new infantry officer is steep, and there is no substitute
for a good company commander to mentor him through the first few months.

That
said, I don't find Sladek's "69 TTPs" particularly useful. They
range from insightful (#61: Often
commanders ... are not tracking the same reality as you), to obvious (#51: Lead
from the front), to uselessly vague (#57:
Be aggressive). The majority are lessons every infantry officer should have
taken away from the schoolhouse.

The
real problem though is that they were written as a list without explanations
for why
each one is important. To give the simplest example, #2 says to "wake up before
0500 five out of seven days a week." Why? What does that have to do with
leadership? The answer might be that a good leader should be the first to
arrive and the last to leave every day because it demonstrates dedication and
earns loyalty. Or perhaps, if your subordinates consistently see you arriving
after them, they will assume you were sleeping while they were working. But
waking up at 0500 just for the sake of getting up early is senseless.

Here's
a more serious example: TTP #65 says, "70% now is better than 100% an hour from
now." But is this always true? The reason it might be true is that in combat
there is a trade-off between time and certainty. When making decisions, platoon
leaders will never have the amount of certainty they want due to the fog of
war. There is risk in acting without enough information, but there is also risk
in waiting too long because the enemy is maneuvering too. Since the enemy
operates in the same environment of uncertainty, we can gain an advantage by
acting more quickly than him if we
have enough information. New platoon leaders should think about how they will know when 70 percent is
enough. This requires critical thought, a nuanced mind, and the ability to ask
the right questions to the right people both in training and in combat.

I
appreciate Captain Sladek's effort to pass on good information. I just would
prefer fewer TTPs with better explanations for why they are good practices. Just
like in a mission statement, the intent -- or the reason why -- is always the
most important part of any task. Lists are great for not forgetting things, but
they're less effective when it comes to learning valuable lessons or thinking
critically. In fact, the military already has far too many lists that feed the
uncritical bureaucratic mentality that Major Matthew Cavanaugh so eloquently
decries in his inaugural post on Warcouncil.org.

So
rather than trying to remember 69 different TTPs, I would suggest that 2nd lieutenants
focus on just one: "Think deeply about your job and figure out the why behind everything."
Everything else is secondary. The best infantry officers are those who
possess a certain mindset developed by thinking deeply about their job, their
leadership style, and the challenges they will face in combat. Adopting
hundreds of tried TTPs will help you as you develop, but it's the ability to
face the confusion of the modern battlefield that matters in the end. That
requires a nuanced mind capable of critical thought and the humility to ask the
right questions. Such character and maturity required for this can't be
assembled from a checklist of TTPs.

Captain Jordan Blashek is an infantry
officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. He served as a weapons platoon commander and
company executive officer in 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, deploying in 2011 to
Southeast Asia and the Horn of Africa on the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit. In
2013, he deployed to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, as an advisor to the Afghan
National Army's 215 Corps. He graduated from Princeton University in 2009 with
a bachelor's degree in international affairs.

Kafka and Orwell: The rest of this headline has been redacted by the NSA

By Ben FitzGerald


Best Defense office of
national security literary affairs

Kafka,
not just Orwell, helps us understand surveillance programs.

Edward
Snowden's revelations have drawn
frequent and understandable references to George Orwell's dystopian vision from
1984, with notable mentions
by Judge
Richard Leon
and Snowden
himself.
Orwell offers a powerful literary metaphor for understanding the perils of a
surveillance state. However another literary master, Franz Kafka, can help us
understand the deeper philosophical and governmental issues at hand today.

In
The Trial, Joseph K begins his
Kafkaesque nightmare in shock at his arrest for an unnamed crime he does not
know he has committed. Unlike Winston Smith, K. "...lived in a country with a
legal constitution, there was universal peace, all the laws were in force..."
making his subsequent treatment all the more horrifying. Judged by an unnamed
organization, K.'s world is turned against him, he is consistently denied
access to information about his case, and any insight he gains simply reveals
more secret bureaucratic machinations, further heightening his helplessness and
isolation.

Storing
and analyzing people's data without their knowledge "affects
the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state" in a Kafkaesque
manner, as Daniel
Solove
argues. But the problem goes beyond this argument. Taking a ‘big data' approach
to surveillance moves analysis from causation to correlation. ‘Collecting
everything'
to find potential threats therefore means that the data of the innocent is
being used to find the guilty, analyzing all parties without their awareness.

The
tools for this collection and analysis aren't intentionally overt as in a
totalitarian Orwellian state. Rather, backdoors and bulk collection
techniques subtly leverage the everyday technological tools of free and open
societies. This ‘dual use' subversion means that, like K., we don't just suffer
from the shock of surveillance (or arrest) but from losing trust in our
technology and government while also wondering what other actions are being
taken without our knowledge. As with K., the answers are unknowable. The
director of national intelligence does not provide accurate
testimony
on their surveillance programs and if Apple, RSA, Cisco and their peers were
in fact creating surveillance backdoors with the NSA, they would still be
forced to issue similar denials.

We
do not yet live in an Orwellian state so, in theory, we have legal recourse as
another means to ease our surveillance concerns. Unfortunately, legal process
has been perhaps the most Kafkaesque aspect of this whole affair with ongoing
challenges to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, prohibitions on
businesses reporting
on NSA data requests,
the Department of Justice providing wholly redacted
arguments,
and judges offering circular
arguments.

Considering
Orwell and the technical act of collection is vitally important but focusing
purely on this problem runs the risk of missing deeper issues or, worse,
pushing for reforms that weaken the NSA in areas where it operates legitimately
to protect our national security. Transparency and trust, or the lack thereof,
are at the heart of both Kafka's writing and our current surveillance issues.
Addressing the Kafkaesque aspects of the government wide bureaucracy, policies
and laws behind collection programs offers an opportunity to address these
fundamental issues.

Ben FitzGerald is a senior fellow and director of the technology
and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. He spelunks in the relationship between
strategy, technology, and business as it relates to national security. You can
follow him on twitter @benatworkdc.

The Gates files (VIIth, and last): Why the Pentagon didn't care about fighting wars

Because, under reforms of the 1950s and
then Goldwater-Nichols, winning wars is not its job.

As my friend and mentor Bob Killebrew
puts it:

"I would just add that by taking the chiefs out of the strategy
business, and making them responsible for building the force, they are no
longer responsible for winning wars (or for strategy) but for the maintenance
and support of their institutions. I suspect this is at least partly why Gates
found such a business-as-usual attitude in the Pentagon, and why you see the SecDef
dealing so much with the combatant commanders and so little with the chiefs.
They are effectively neutered." 

Also, just so's youse have it, here's your
last chance to read the review I wrote of Robert Gates's memoir for the New York Times Book Review.

The end.

How to be a platoon leader in 69 steps

Three score and more
tips from the guys at War Council. (The above illustration refers to no.
34.)

On Lulofs' thoughts about war: The good old days you remember? Never happened

By John Haas


Best Defense guest
respondent

Sean Lulofs's "Thoughts about Fallujah" is a welcome
addition to what's becoming a wide-ranging debate over America's strategic
posture at this difficult time in our history. This is a debate we all need to
be having, and Lulofs's sincerely expressed view is an important one to attend
to. It is worthy of our attention if only because it is representative of the
thinking of the vast majority of our fellow citizens.

Lulofs presents us with a jeremiad: Once upon a time,
Americans got the job done; now, "we're just not built to win
anymore." What happened? Don't blame the military -- it is still as
effective as ever, or would be, if only our national leadership wasn't so
"piss-poor." Of course our leaders only become our leaders because
the people have elected them, so they have a share of the blame, too. Our
leaders are more concerned with "public opinion" than doing what
needs to be done to win decisively, says Lulofs. These same people then turn
around and refuse to "hold our leaders accountable for completing the
mission of the war." Of course, that not only the U.S. military, but
militaries worldwide, have routinely blamed the politicians and the people as
insufficiently supportive of their men (and women) under arms should not dissuade us
from considering that, this time, the complaint may be right.

America's military declension, says Lulofs, has been an affair of "the
past 50 years." He appears to hold Eisenhower -- with his willingness to
cut our losses in Korea in 1953 -- responsible for initiating our losing
streak. It's unclear why he begins there. It was Truman, after all, who
"lost" China and went on to reject Douglas MacArthur's victory
strategy in Korea, settling instead for containment in Asia. It was Truman also
who failed to take on the task of driving the Red Army from Eastern Europe,
settling for containment there, too. By my estimate, Lulofs should be claiming
that the United States has labored under a cloud of infamy for at least the
past 70 years. Be that as it may, Lulofs knows who is responsible for America's
decline: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Clinton,
another Bush, and Obama, and all the voters who elected them and then failed to
hold them to account.

Not content to complain, Lulofs points toward a solution, too: If America wants
victories of the sort that gave us "the defeat of the Axis powers" in
World War II -- our last decisive military victory -- it will need to overcome
its "unwilling"-ness to win, rediscover its "willpower,"
and demonstrate "resolve." In other words, international affairs
aren't very different than football games. We may be down for the moment, but
it's still only halftime, and coach is reminding us that if we could only dig
deep, find some gumption, and believe in "true victory" again, the
good old days will come back.

As I said, large numbers of Americans find this sort of analysis thoroughly
attractive: Part Ralph Waldo Emerson, part Émile Coué, part Dale Carnegie,
and thoroughly Hollywood, it's sentimental and naïve talk of the sort we've
used for more than a century to silence our insecurities and convince ourselves
we really can "get out there and shine!" It's also enormously
dangerous. One would think Americans had learned by now that the world isn't as
susceptible as we've wished to "I think I can"-ism. 

But, then, what about those good old days? The ones when America won decisive
victories over enemies that only understand "strength and force"?

The first thing to be said is there were precious few of them. Lulofs's notion
of "victory" is at the heart of what Russell Weigley called "the American way of war." Articulated most
forcefully by Douglas MacArthur, it has always been more a dream than a reality -- at times a deadly
aspiration, and also, given our blithe ahistoricism, a myth.

Of the dozens of armed conflicts the United States has engaged in over the
centuries, only three have followed the decisive "victory" script: the
Indian Wars, the Civil War, and World War II. All had unique features that
cannot be replicated by simple force of will.

Each, for example, was perceived at the time as an existential conflict, a zero-sum
game where it was believed that America's future and well-being was at stake. Failure,
we believed, was not an option. (Most historians probably agree with those
estimates, though they might offer some caveats on the Indian Wars.)

That kind of belief, as necessary as it is for sustaining the kind of massive
military efforts required to produce "victory," cannot simply be
willed into existence out of thin air. President Obama can talk until he's blue
in the face, but he will not convince Americans that the United States has an
existential stake in determining which faction of kleptocratic Pashtuns rules Kabul.

These "victorious wars" were massive commitments (well, two of the
three were). Each death in the Iraq War brings immeasurable pain to those
closely involved, but the national commitment to the war is reflected in the
numbers: About one per 20,000 Americans of military age gave the ultimate
sacrifice. One in 25 Americans of military age died in the Civil War; if it
were held today, with losses proportional to our current population, there
would be around 7,000,000 casualties. In World War II, with 12,000,000 men and
women under arms, about one in 160 military age males died, and the financial
burden was huge -- the U.S. government spent more than 120 percent of GDP to
achieve that victory.

Is there any way Americans could come to believe that whatever (considerable)
effort it would take to pacify Ramadi is a rational policy option?

The Civil and Second World Wars each involved an onerous draft, significant
taxes, the reorganization of the private sector around the war effort,
troubling infringements on civil liberties (far beyond merely collecting
metadata), and the mobilization of huge propaganda campaigns to keep the people
in line.

Again, eliminating the most extreme of Sunni Islamists from Fallujah may sound
attractive, but even our most robust effort would still leave only slightly
less extreme Sunni Islamists in charge. I doubt any amount of propaganda will
convince Americans of the wisdom of sacrificing whatever blood and treasure it
would take to secure a more desirable outcome.

If you want a World War II-style victory, you need to put forth a World War
II-level effort. That's simply not going to happen unless we face a World War
II-level threat.

As for the Indian Wars, we will not see their like again, so we should expunge
them from our memories, at least insofar as they beguile us into believing
they're anything like a model for the future. The Indians could offer
courageous and effective resistance on occasion, but the
final outcome was never in doubt. Disorganized (relative to the United States),
out-manned, out-armed, demoralized, and (most of all) devastated by diseases,
the white man was winning the West, no matter what.

I won't elaborate here on the Revolution, 1812, the Mexican War, or Grenada,
but none of them even begin to rise to the level of "decisive military
victories." Indeed, even World War II -- our most iconic war -- didn't end
quite the way we recall. In Europe, it was a Soviet war: Without their effort,
with its massive casualties, eroding the Wehrmacht, it is doubtful the Allies
could have prevailed. Indeed, they might never have gotten off Omaha Beach. In
Asia, even our atomic bombs couldn't compel the Japanese to agree to a truly
unconditional surrender. The threat of Soviet occupation played a much larger
role in Japan's capitulation than we prefer to appreciate.

In sum, the good old days weren't quite what we think, and our recent failures
are more a salutary recognition of reality than a failure to measure up to the
standards of the greatest generation. We have fought the way we've fought for
the past 70 years not because "on or about December 1947, American character changed," but because we are fighting different
enemies with much less at stake. If we ever align the America of our
imaginations with the America that really has been and is, we may find
ourselves waking to a vision that, while less romantically satisfying, might
also find us inflicting less unnecessary tragedy on ourselves in the pursuit of
glories that never were.

John H. Haas , Ph.D.,
teaches U.S. foreign relations, American history, and the political geography
of North Africa and the Middle East at  Bethel College
in Indiana .

The Gates files (VI): Iran, Pakistan, Doug Lute, and other things that kept him busy

Gates on Iran: "a kind of national security black hole, directly
or indirectly pulling into its gravitational force our relationships with
Europe, Russia, China, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states."




On Pakistan: "I
knew that nothing would change Pakistan's hedging strategy; to think otherwise
was delusional." Later, "I knew they were really no ally at all." (Tom's
question: So how do you leverage a hedging strategy?)




In Afghanistan in
2008, the average size of an IED was 10 kilograms. By 2010, it was three times
that. I didn't know that.




Both Secretary of
State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Gates wanted to fire Karl Eikenberry
when he was U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, but "the ambassador was protected
by the White House." Gates adds that he thought Eikenberry's Afghan policy
"recommendations were ridiculous" and that his "pervasive negativity" permeated
the U.S. embassy.




In something that
might be related, Gates singles out for his disdain Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, the
White House policy coordinator for Iraq and Afghanistan. "Doug turned out to be
a real disappointment in the Obama administration." At one point, he instructed
Gen. James Mattis, then running Central Command, "that if Lute ever called him
again to question anything, Mattis was to tell him to go to hell."




Just a great line:
"I was eating my Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner at home [when] the president
called." That could be the first line of a thriller.




(OK, just one more
Gates item to come.)

Ok, let's talk about the views of NCOs

By
"A. Grumpy Sergeant"


Best
Defense guest grouch

Thanks for asking me as an NCO
how things are going and how we can improve. 

Overall I think we're doing okay
in the section. It's good that you introduced yourself to everyone, told us a
bit about yourself, and let us know what your standards and goals for the
section are. I think the most important reason for a successful section or unit
is a healthy NCO-Officer relationship. We both need to know what our respective
roles are and maintain standards (tactical, technical and ethical), and we need
to help each other succeed.

How was my last deployment? If I
may be candid, sir, my last deployment was frustrating. We had a toxic
NCO-Officer situation; as a result the section overall was miserable. Most of
the soldiers left the unit as soon as we returned home and a few left the
military altogether. On the officer's part, he was not very competent in his
branch. And worse, rather than spend time getting up to speed and talking with
his NCOs and lieutenants (most of whom had deployed before and knew some useful
stuff), he avoided interacting with most section members. And because he was
insecure, he didn't hold his NCO to a good standard. I gotta tell you sir: That
was a time I really felt an officer needed to be relieved. And he was a major.
Ultimately I blame his leaders for
tolerating him. Guess they put loyalty over competency, I don't know. Maybe that's
a larger issue with our Army's personnel manning system. Clunky. In World War
II all sorts of officers were relieved.

He also had a bad attitude
towards women and minorities. It's not like he had a poster of Nathan Bedford
Forrest on his wall; it was a subtle (and occasionally nasty) attitude that
affected the way he treated some members of the team. I am tired of having to
give equal opportunity and sexual assault/harassment classes, but the problem
is not just with privates. Anyway, the kicker was, our platoon sergeant had all
the same problems, so it was a perfect storm of toxicity.

To my eternal shame and regret, I
criticized them in the presence of subordinates. Complain upwards, not
downwards, I was taught, and I failed to uphold that standard of
professionalism.

Sir, let me stress the major was
the exception, not the rule. I have served under many good officers -- West
Pointers, former infantry NCOs, ROTC, National Guard, and direct commissions. I
don't assume one category is any worse or better than the other, like some NCOs
do. We have a lot of smart officers who genuinely care about soldiers.

I do think the NCO-Officer
relationship needs to be explained at all levels of leadership. These days it
seems like we learn it in a school for an hour, and then that's it. Of course,
with all the deployments there wasn't much time, but now that they're are
winding down a bit, it's time to do some basics. The NCO-Officer thing needs to
be explained and discussed at all levels -- squad leader, platoon sergeant,
first sergeant, sergeant major, and the same for the Officers Corps.

Sir, I will treat you with
respect, loyalty and integrity. I want our mission and you to succeed, not just
take care of soldiers. I will never again criticize a leader in the presence of
subordinates. I will keep and maintain a leader's book, counsel soldiers in a
timely manner, and know what they're up to, unlike my last platoon sergeant. By
the way, sir, did you know Specialist Jones has a Master's degree in political
science? Yeah, she was a teacher. If we go back to Afghanistan, Sergeant Smith
was a police officer who was born in Turkmenistan. He's a good troop and can
get up to speed quickly on Dari.

Anyway, I don't need
micromanaging, just give me adequate time and resources for a task. By all
means, ask me what's going on, I'll be candid with you and won't give you the
"stay in your lane" comment. Some NCOs misuse that.

And sir, here's that PowerPoint
presentation you asked for. If I may ask a favor, sir, could you not let anyone
else know I know PowerPoint? Thank you, sir. 

A "Grumpy Sergeant" is
just that. Grumpy served in the U.S. Army and Army National Guard for 12
years. Grumpy did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as an NCO and later went back
there as a civilian contractor, which made Grumpy grumpier. These opinions are
Grumpy's alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S Army, the U.S. Army National Guard, the Defense Department, or the U.S.
government.

Tom is again handled gingerly in an official U.S. military pub -- and that's good

In
the new issue of Joint Forces Quarterly,
retired Army Col. George Reed, now at the University of San Diego, writes that, "Former Washington Post journalist and author Thomas Ricks launched a public salvo against the
war colleges in a series of ForeignPolicy.com blogs where he actually called for
their closure, describing them as both
expensive and second-rate. While his criticism is sometimes hyperbolic and
tends to be disregarded by those within the system, he raises some good points
and serves as a watchdog of sorts as evidenced by his recent accounting of
personnel changes that resulted in the reduction of civilian professor
positions at the Army War College."

I
love how I always seem to get such arm's-length faint praise in official
military publications -- Look, I ain't
saying I like the guy, but you got to pay attention to part of maybe one or two
things he says, sir.

As
for closing costly and ineffective military institutions: Perhaps the thoughts do
appear hyperbolic to those of small imagination. Yet in
my experience, what seems unimaginable one year may become reality in another.

For
me, the bottom line is a bit like our discussion of strategy the other day: If
the military establishment begins to feel too comfortable with me, I would feel
I was not playing my role. The founding fathers, in their wisdom, gave us an
adversarial system. If I were bear-hugged by the U.S. military, sought out as a
speaker who would be reassuring and not ruffle any bird colonels' feathers, I
would worry that I was not being sufficiently critical.

So
I will take the uneasiness as a sign of health.

If you are comfortable with your strategy, you may not be making very good strategy

The new issue of Harvard Business Review has a good article about how strategy-making
should feel. Usually I am
wary of applying business lessons to military operations, but I do think that
the business world knows a lot about strategy because its leaders have to think
about it every day, while a military leader can slide by for decades without
having to think seriously about it -- or to have his lack of thinking tested by
reality.

Basically, making
strategy should not feel good, avers Roger L. Martin. (The article is titled "The Big Lie of
Strategic Planning," but I don't think that really captures what it is really
about.)

"Fear and discomfort are an essential part of
strategy making," he writes. "In fact, if you are entirely comfortable with
your strategy, there's a strong chance it isn't very good.... You need to be
uncomfortable and apprehensive: True strategy is about placing bets and making
hard choices. The objective is not to eliminate risk but to increase the odds
of success." Indeed, if there is not much risk, there probably isn't much
strategy, he emphasizes: "Strategy involves a bet."

But, you say, you've written strategy documents, and you felt
just fine? Martin suggests that you probably were actually mistaking planning
for strategy. "A common trap," he soothes.

Another insight:
The better your strategy, the shorter it likely will be. "There is no reason
why a company's strategy choices can't be summarized in one page with simple
words and concepts." (Indeed, U.S. strategy in World War II didn't even take up a page.)

The article
reminded me a bit of Michael Porter's classic admonition that, "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do." Speaking of that approach, there
is a good essay to be written by someone applying that thought to President
Obama's foreign policy: The essence of his administration may be in what it
chose not to do. That's not a bad thing -- I think the same was true of
President Eisenhower's administration. For example, Ike's rejection of the
recommendation of the majority of the Joint Chiefs that he nuke Vietnam. He
wasn't against using nukes, he just thought that ground forces would inevitably
follow, and he was determined not to get involved in another land war on the
periphery of the Communist bloc.

Churchill: The airplane led to the tank

Rummaging around in
early Churchill, I came across his assertion that the military use of the
airplane led to the tank. I hadn't thought about that.

As he explains it,
in World War I, the British use of fixed airfields in Belgium made it necessary
to defend them against German cavalry raids. This led to the use of Rolls-Royce
sedans that had armor affixed to them. Later, armored cars were designed from the
ground up. But then the German cavalry dug ditches across roads to impede them.
This led to the development of armored vehicles with tracks. "The armoured car was the child of the air;
and the Tank its grandchild."

As a general I know
says, all warfare is a lethal version of Rock-Paper-Scissors.