Unconventional warfare and strategic optionality

[The Reaper]

Good read.

TR

Unconventional warfare and strategic optionality

http://www.aspistrategist.org.au/unc...c-optionality/
1Oct 2014

By Jan K. Gleiman

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

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

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

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

(Cont. at link above)

[Box]

TR,
The biggest problem we have facing our nation is that the folks that write and sign those manuals don't actually read them.

I can't count how many folks at Starfleet Command have thrown around those two letters like a catchphrase.

...they wont hesitate to lecture you that "the ALP ain't a militia"
...they won't hesitate to tell you that we don't do "movement to contact" we do "armed recce to collect atmospherics"
...ITS CAPTURE/kill not KILL/capture
...etc

Then BOOM you hear the same load of horseshit about conducting 'You-Dubya' in Afghanistan or the CAS etc

If only we had a BN of specially selected and trained UW troops from within a specially selected and trained regiment that foucsed on UW to go to work on this ISIS problem...
...wouldn't that be AWESOME?

I guess we'll just have to send a conventional GO to oversee the Gerneral Purpose SF troops while we "re-FID" the guys that threw down their arms and surrendered after 10 years of training.


Maybe its just that I'm too ignorant to understand the big picture, whatever the fuck that means.


I truthfully don't give a shit anymore - I just nod in agreement.
I imagine things might change anyway if a DA guy was to take over USASOC...

[MtnGoat]

Good read with a lot of topics hit on in a short write up.

I see two separate problems with what is being said in this article over UW and warfare. With the current atmospherics inside the political and military sides. UW will likely never happen like it did in the 70’s and 80’s.

Politically no one wants to send JSOC nor the ABCs into a foreign country and do the needed things. They just don’t want to approve it. A lot runs along what I will take about with the military side of things.

Military wise it seems like the same thing. Currently I hear SF Commands, Company to CJSOTF levels, talk about the “GOLDEN HOUR.” Like SF did do things and get the Job done in Afghanistan from 2001 till about 2007. I remember being in Southern Afghanistan and Firebases having to over an hour for a MEDEVAC Helo. Our Medics did their jobs and the ODAs held their own very well. I just see that with current military politics, military commander done want to lose a guy. So with this "MEDEVAC" mindset they hesitate in approval or action.

I look at this way, look at CONOPs for the ones of us that have rolled through AFG over the years. Look at a Level zero to Level Two. How many slide it now takes to get something approval led!!?? I remember old days sending it up on a VSAT Message, and this was in 2006. Now Commander want to know everything and try to control everything.

I think it also goes along with what BILLY is saying too. The semantics of the current thinking going on. People living in their pleasure house bubbles, whether in the Pentagon, building or on a FOB.

I will say that the whole part about proxy fighters and war in the US and Western strategic culture is very true. Look at why we have shifted from UW to more of a Foreign Fighters style of Proxy fighting. Send the Foreigners in so no US Lives will be lost.

[Streck-Fu]

Erroneously posted in the Ranger/SF thread after returning to the forum to comment. The below was meant for this thread....



That site has some very interesting reading. Obviously I don't have the experience to validate the articles but they make for interesting subjects.

[Flagg]

Originally Posted by The Reaper

Good read.

TR

Unconventional warfare and strategic optionality

http://www.aspistrategist.org.au/unc...c-optionality/
1Oct 2014

By Jan K. Gleiman

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

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

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

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

(Cont. at link above)

I'd be interested in your thoughts if you have the time Reaper.

Could the necessary, but excessive, reliance on Pakistan during 79-89(and maybe before/after) to counter the Soviets be an example of the principal-agent problem you identify?

A principal-agent "excessive outsourcing and delegation" and a "translation" problem perhaps?

Effectively a principal-middleman-agent problem?

By that I mean the over reliance on Pakistani entities to conduct the campaign, but with US influence/control measures to shape the Afghan agent, negated/mutated by the Pakistani middleman.

Is the battle for conducting an effective UW campaign facing similar headwinds of the general outsourcing trend both in the military as well as civvie street corporate world?

Instead of outsourcing food service in a military camp, or outsourcing a business call centre to india, is it partially a problem of trying to outsource or avoid direct "coalface" campaign management that offers "trust, but verify" capability?

How is a solution for this implemented?

Does it start with a senior policy level SME to champion a more effective strategy and course of action?

How much of the problem can you attribute to a disconnect in a perception of high risk of UW campaign political blowback compared to the real risk of political blowback?

[MtnGoat]

Originally Posted by Flagg

I'd be interested in your thoughts if you have the time Reaper.

Could the necessary, but excessive, reliance on Pakistan during 79-89(and maybe before/after) to counter the Soviets be an example of the principal-agent problem you identify?

A principal-agent "excessive outsourcing and delegation" and a "translation" problem perhaps?

Effectively a principal-middleman-agent problem?

By that I mean the over reliance on Pakistani entities to conduct the campaign, but with US influence/control measures to shape the Afghan agent, negated/mutated by the Pakistani middleman.

Is the battle for conducting an effective UW campaign facing similar headwinds of the general outsourcing trend both in the military as well as civvie street corporate world?

Instead of outsourcing food service in a military camp, or outsourcing a business call centre to india, is it partially a problem of trying to outsource or avoid direct "coalface" campaign management that offers "trust, but verify" capability?

How is a solution for this implemented?

Does it start with a senior policy level SME to champion a more effective strategy and course of action?

How much of the problem can you attribute to a disconnect in a perception of high risk of UW campaign political blowback compared to the real risk of political blowback?

FLAGG.. great POINT HERE.. This hit me from left field. Hard thinking here.

[Box]

Good additon to the thread !
...I'm busy formulating a response that isn't dripping with assinine sarcasm.

I have an opinion, but not sure how to voice it without my typical angry sarcasm.

[Sdiver]

Originally Posted by Billy L-bach

Good additon to the thread !
...I'm busy formulating a response that isn't dripping with assinine sarcasm.

I have an opinion, but not sure how to voice it without my typical angry sarcasm.

YOU !!!!!
Angry and Sarcastic ?!?!?!

I haven't seen anything that you've posted that would lead me to believe that ....

[The Reaper]

Just to throw more fuel on the fire, an excellent article about another difficult set of choices in a UW campaign.

TR

JFQ 75 | Challenges in Coalition Unconventional Warfare: The Allied Campaign in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945

By J. Darren Duke, Rex L. Phillips, and Christopher J. Conover | September 30, 2014

http://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/N...ign-in-yu.aspx

During World War II, operatives and military advisors of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was a precursor to both the current Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Special Forces, conducted a challenging unconventional warfare (UW) campaign against the Axis forces with and through guerrilla resistance elements in Yugoslavia. The resistance movement effectively fixed in place 35 German and Italian divisions, consisting of roughly 660,000 soldiers in the western Balkan region during 1941-1945.1 This campaign rendered them strategically irrelevant by preventing their use in other theaters. The combined United Kingdom (UK)-United States (U.S.) contingent achieved this effect with never more than 100 Allied personnel on the ground in the denied area. The number of Axis personnel killed in the Balkans is estimated at 450,000.2 This extremely favorable force ratio and its associated effects commend UW as a low-cost, high-reward method of warfare.

Although ultimately successful, the campaign experienced difficulties. British and American policymakers, primarily President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, chose with great risk near-term military goals over long-term postwar political strategic interests. Failures in operations security, differences in policy goals, difficulties in command relationships, and disparities in talent and skill among Allied personnel often strained the British-American relationship at multiple levels. Clandestine operatives on the ground inside Yugoslavia dealt with an increasingly vicious civil war among factions within the resistance movements that was rooted in longstanding political and ethnic differences. Contemporary policymakers and UW planners considering unconventional options can benefit from an examination of these challenges, experiences, and lessons learned from the Balkans Campaign of World War II.
Unconventional warfare is activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, or guerrilla force in a denied area.3 Special operations forces (SOF) conduct and support unconventional warfare. U.S. Army Special Forces, Green Berets, are the lead SOF Service component for its doctrine and conduct, while other Service components of U.S. Special Operations Command are tasked with conducting operations in support of UW efforts. Currently, no doctrine for joint or combined UW operations exists. However, history shows us that combined UW not only is possible, but also can be highly successful, even if fraught with challenges. The combined UK-U.S. UW campaign in the former Yugoslavia offers several important lessons that should inform and help shape continued efforts to improve UW doctrine.

(Cont. at link above)