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March 29, 2016

Harnessing the Influence of Senior Enlisted Leaders

Over the past 11 years I have had the privilege to serve as a senior enlisted leader (SEL) in a variety of billets. I have engaged with a wide audience of enlisted and officer leaders in a variety of formal and informal settings. Although I have been fortunate to work for many officers who valued my skill sets, it has become clear to me that many leaders are not fully harnessing the influence and capabilities of their SELs. SELs today now serve on a much broader scale than perhaps in previous generations, influencing and advising Service and Department of Defense (DOD) leaders and staffs at the operational and strategic levels—but perhaps we have failed to completely consider and effectively communicate the full value we can provide. It is important for commanders to understand the full potential of the SEL position to align expectations and ensure they know how to get “max return on investment” from us; similarly, as SELs, we must understand how our roles and influence change in these billets to ensure we are providing maximum value to our commanders.

March 29, 2016

Cheap Technology Will Challenge U.S. Tactical Dominance

The convergence of dramatic improvements in the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence, materials, additive manufacturing, and nanoenergetics is dramatically changing the character of conflict in all domains. This convergence is creating a massive increase in capabilities available to increasingly smaller political entities—extending even to the individual. This new diffusion of power has major implications for the conduct of warfare, not the least of which are the major hazards or opportunities that it presents to medium and even small powers. The outcome will depend on the paths they choose.

March 29, 2016

The Missing Lever: A Joint Military Advisory Command for Partner-Nation Engagement

With the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and the subsequent requirement to retrain a partially collapsed Iraqi military and provide advisors to moderate elements of the Syrian opposition, the primacy of the military advisory mission for U.S. forces comes again to the forefront. Though the tradition of military advising efforts is ancient, modern U.S. efforts began with Korea and Vietnam and continue with Iraq and Afghanistan. The military advisory mission has proved cost effective with relatively small footprints and inexpensive technologies, while leveraging foreign partners. These characteristics make the advisory focus both attractive and effective in today’s sequestration environment.

March 29, 2016

Back to Basics on Hybrid Warfare in Europe: A Lesson from the Balkans

The complex mix of aggressive behaviors Russia used in Georgia and Ukraine is commonly referred to as hybrid warfare, defined by one scholar as “a tailored mix of conventional weapons, irregular tactics, terrorism, and criminal behavior in the same time and battle space to obtain political objectives.” North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) leaders fear Russia will use hybrid warfare to destabilize or occupy parts of Poland, the Baltic states, or other countries. They are trying to devise more effective responses to counter such a possibility. Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg asserts that NATO must adapt to meet the hybrid warfare threat. Speaking at the same event, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter agreed and suggested “part of the answer” was “increased readiness, special operation forces, and more intelligence.” Several months earlier, Carter’s deputy, Robert Work, declared the United States also needed “new operational concepts” to confront hybrid warfare. Meanwhile some NATO countries are establishing special units to counter hybrid warfare tactics, and the U.S. Congress has required the Pentagon to come up with a strategy to counter hybrid warfare.

March 29, 2016

Economic Development in Counterinsurgency: Building a Stable Second Pillar

The future of U.S. participation in counterinsurgency (COIN) is uncertain, but not so the probability that future adversaries will avoid U.S. conventional military dominance by using asymmetric, unconventional methods. As COIN theorist David Kilcullen warns, “Any smart future enemy will likely sidestep our unprecedented superiority in traditional, force-on-force, state-on-state warfare. And so insurgency . . . will be our enemies’ weapon of choice until we prove we can master it.”1 Unfortunately, because no two insurgencies are exactly alike, mastering COIN will be a perpetual endeavor.

March 29, 2016

Defense Entrepreneurship: How to Build Institutions for Innovation Inside the Military

Fears of slipping dominance are driving an American push for military innovation. But while the accomplishments of American industry are enviable, not all innovation is grounded in technology or flows from the private sector. The U.S. Armed Forces have a considerable history with internally driven innovation, and today a new class of innovators is emerging within the Services. These public entrepreneurs watch for opportunities, make decisions under uncertainty, and then meld the factors of change in sticky (that is, locally commercialized) ways. Their entrepreneurship sometimes falters, as the controlling tendencies and vested interests of the bureaucratic apparatus resist. Defense entrepreneurs must overcome greater barriers than those faced by private entrepreneurs, but policymakers could speed their progress by building the right organizational models in staffing, structures, and incentives.

March 29, 2016

If We Fight Joint, Shouldn't Our History Reflect That?

American forces are fighting joint as never before in conjunction with the armed forces of allied nations. Joint and combined operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and current operations over Iraq and Syria have demonstrated conclusively that the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 came at the right time and has subsequently produced impressive results.

March 29, 2016

Thoughts on Force Protection

One of the prime objectives of an adversary is to inflict damage on the joint force. With thinking enemies, vulnerability is an inescapable characteristic of conflict, and every joint force will have vulnerabilities. Contemporary threats transcend space far easier than in the past, and operational protection is not confined to lethal threats to formations located in hostile environments overseas. With modern technology, even individual Servicemembers can be targeted directly or indirectly through families or communities and by both lethal and nonlethal means. For example, in August 2015 the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant published the names, photographs, and addresses of 100 U.S. military personnel and encouraged sympathetic individuals to attack them.

March 29, 2016

Joint Doctrine Update

Joint Publications (JPs) Under Revision (to be signed within 6 months)

March 29, 2016

Book Review: Counterinsurgency in Crisis

Writing in his seminal The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, David French concluded that the United Kingdom had created a “chequered history of gathering, analyzing, and disseminating the lessons” from its irregular campaigns. This conclusion contrasts with Dr. John Nagl’s case study of Britain’s superior organizational learning in Malaya in his Eating Soup with a Knife. Both books focused on Britain’s imperial past. More recently, veterans from the United Kingdom’s campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have sided with French, stating that “despite our institutional [counterinsurgency] heritage,” the study of small wars “[has been] relegated to a position of almost complete institutional irrelevance.” This is now reinforced by a new assessment of British operations, Counterinsurgency in Crisis, which argues that Her Majesty’s armed forces overestimated the relevance of their past imperial policing to contemporary challenges.