More Men on the Ground 2

The Defense Science Board, an organization which
consists of
eminent civilian experts to advise the Department of Defense,  issued a
report entitled

Summer Study 2004: Transition to and from Hostilities. (Hat tip: Cedarford) But it should really
be entitled a Guide to Occupation Warfare, Present and Future. The report
opens with the observation that  "U.S. military expeditions to Afghanistan
and Iraq are unlikely to be the last such excursions." But before setting forth
its recommendations, it notes with some irony that US forces were historically
never designed for occupation and conquest and lack even the conceptual
framework with which to approach "the stabilization and reconstruction
operations that follow hostilities". The study task force consisted of civilians
with considerable military, industrial or diplomatic experience. A full list of
the report's authors is at the

Belmont Lounge. The report was commissioned in January 2004 with the mandate
to examine how best to perform the following tasks in Iraq and Afghanistan:

1. Protect the US forces during occupation;


2. Neutralize and destroy munitions stocks;


3. Exploit intelligence in the aftermath of the fall of the Hussein regime;


4. Stabilize the condition of the civilian population;


5. Re-establish the rule of law; and


6. Rebuild Iraq

It concluded that the United States should create occupation contingency
plans for any countries it was likely to invade. The development of these
plans in their fullest sense was not currently part of the military planning
process. Indeed, they could not be formulated by the military alone. A new
interagency mechanism was needed to generate them.

We believe this management discipline, now focused on combat operations,
must be extended to peacetime activities, to stabilization and reconstruction
operations, and to intelligence�not only in DOD, but across the government.
... The process should be codified in a presidential directive. ... DOD and
the Department of State need to make stabilization and reconstruction (S&R)
missions one of their core competencies. Success in these missions depends
upon a stronger partnership and closer working relationship between the two
departments.

The report called for what amounted to a Colonial Corps. "To be fully
effective the United States will need to have some of its people continuously
abroad for years, so they become familiar with the local scene and the
indigenous people come to trust them as individuals -- tours of duty that we
imagine to be far longer than traditional assignments today."

History indicates that stabilization of societies that are relatively
ordered, without ambitious goals, may require 5 troops per 1000 indigenous
people; while stabilization of disordered societies, with ambitious goals
involving lasting cultural change, may require 20 troops per 1000 indigenous
people. That need, with the cumulative requirement to maintain human resources
for three to five overlapping stabilization operations as noted above,
presents a formidable challenge.

As an aside, one should note that if these recommendations are to be taken
seriously nothing that Donald Rumsfeld could have done in the short term before
Operation Iraqi Freedom would have fitted the bill. Deploying a larger number of
regular military formations as

Fred Kagan has suggested would not have helped much. What was required was
not more combat formations of monolingual young Americans but something rather
different and which America did not then or in the foreseeable future possess.

The report also recognized that occupation warfare required a very large
political and public relations component, which they termed "strategic
communiction"to articulate a political message with the full force of American
media resources. It observed there was an entire propaganda front in which US
military with its rigid separation from the press was not prepared to address
and which had been ceded to the enemy with its purposeful media strategy.

Strategic communication -- which encompasses public affairs, public
diplomacy, international broadcasting, information operations, and special
activities -- is vital to America�s national security and foreign policy. Over
the past few decades, the strategic communication environment and requirements
have changed considerably as a result of many influences. Some of the most
important of these influences are a rise in anti-American attitudes around the
world; the use of terrorism as a framework for national security issues; and
the volatility of Islamic internal and external struggles over values,
identity, and change. ... America needs a revolution in strategic
communication rooted in strong leadership from the top and supported by an
orchestrated blend of public and private sector components.

But most of all America needed better human intelligence capabilities
to successfully conduct any successful occupation warfare. Overhead satellite
imagery and electronic intercepts might help, but they it was eyes on the ground
that were required above all. An earlier post pointed out that 
Howard
Hart, a former CIA clandestine officer alleged there "are far far fewer
clandestine service officers serving abroad than there are faculty members at
the University of Virginia. ... It is hard to reach them to recruit them in the
first place. The universities with the highest concentrations of talent are
hostile toward the CIA." It needed capabilities which were in very short supply
and in some cases nonexistent. But the Defense Science Board concluded that it
was impossible to win occupation warfare without them:

We need to treat learning knowledge of culture and developing language
skills as seriously as we treat learning combat skills: both are needed for
success in achieving U.S. political and military objectives. But collecting,
compiling, and sustaining cultural knowledge of this sort, as well as
developing linguistic competency in a wide array of languages, requires an
effort and attention span that is far longer than the short-term focus that is
typical of those who use and collect information and intelligence today. ...
Language skills are a key enabler of country and area knowledge. Today, DOD
lacks sufficient personnel with the languages and skills that are required for
countries ripe and important.

Earlier Belmont Club posts noted how Middle Eastern warfare, beginning
in modern times from the Franco-Algerian war in the 1960s favored a strategic
withdrawal by its militarily weaker forces into social redoubts, defended not by
concrete fortifications but by a nearly impenetrable barriers of kinship,
language and religion. America might deploy a million men to Iraq and physically
control every inch of ground, but unless it could reach into this social
fortress it could never successfully engage the enemy.

The Defense Science Board believed that in addition to human intelligence the
US needed to pursue revolutionary technologies which would help identify and
track terrorist forces calling for an effort at par with the Manhattan Project.

A variety of available and emerging technologies can be brought to bear to
identify objects or people of interest from surveillance data and to verify a
specific individual�s identification. Available or emerging technologies
include biometrics, tags, object recognition, and identification tokens.
However, further development of sensors and databases is needed to overcome
the shortcomings of conventional intelligence, surveillance, and
reconnaissance systems.

We believe an integrated, coherent approach is required in order to develop
identification, tagging, tracking, and locating (ID/TTL) capabilities that
will give U.S. military forces the same advantage finding targets in
asymmetric warfare that it has in conventional warfare. Although much good
work is going on today, it is disjointed across disconnected activities,
organizations, and interests. What is needed is a discipline�not �just� a set
of excellent programs� focused on the overall ID/TTL challenge. We
recommend that the secretary of defense, along with the new head of the
intelligence community, establish a �Manhattan Project�-like program for
ID/TTL. (Emphasis theirs)

Although it is possible to find occasional -- and very passing references --
to the possible lack of occupation troops and shortcomings in pre-invasion
planning, the Summer Study 2004 report clearly doesn't assign much importance to
the kinds of short-term steps which Kagan and Andrew Sullivan have suggested --
having more troops to guard dams and pipelines -- which essentially consisted of
larger deployments of kinds of military units available in early 2003. The
report makes a far more serious criticism: that the US embarked on a mission to
transform the Middle East in 2003 while lacking even a modicum of the capability
necessary to undertake the task required. Indeed, as

Kevin Drum has observed, if Rumsfeld had acknowledged all that he lacked in
the days after September 11, "the invasion of Iraq almost certainly would never
have happened". Nor, one might add, would have it struck back against terrorism
at all had the full extent of its defense shortcomings been known as the towers
were falling onto Manhattan.

In hindsight the days immediately after the World Trade Center attacks were a
time of naivete for both terrorist and American counter-terrorist strategists.
If Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein erred in believing that the US would fall
after a few sharp blows, America may have wrongfully believed that a sharp
riposte in the Arab heartland would topple the age-old hatreds that had
encrusted there. The generation which marched off to the Western Front in 1914
eventually discovered that no one would be "home before the leaves fall". 
As it happened, the generation of 1914 would return eventually though not as
they imagined and never to the homes they had left behind. The intractability of
Middle Eastern terrorism will eventually call forth a corresponding
irresistability in the American response. "Stabilization and reconstruction
operations" are much more than something Donald Rumsfeld forgot in the lead up
to Operation Iraqi Freedom. They represent a terrifying and historically
inevitable response to the terrorist way of war.

Update

Norman Podhoretz has a long essay called

The War Against World War IV (hat tip:

Roger Simon) which can be read as an eerie companion piece to this post. He
makes two large points. The first is that America has no alternative but to
accept battle against this enemy. The second is quoted by Roger Simon.

Furthermore, facing a conflict that may well go on for three or four
decades, Americans of this generation are called upon to be more patient than
"the greatest generation" needed to be in World War II, which for us lasted
only four years; and facing an enemy even more elusive than the Communists,
the American people of today are required to summon at least as much
perseverance as the American people of those days did-for all their bitching
and moaning-over the 47 long years of World War III. Indeed, in this area the
generation of World War IV has an even more difficult row to hoe than its
predecessors in World War II and World War III.

A Colonial Corps indeed.