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| | Speaker #1 requested that participants do two things during the Seminars: 1. Be rigorous in their use of language during discussions 2.Recognize that discussing Principles of War is really a national and ultimately an international debate that must at some point be done in public Speaker #2 (Selected comments and descriptions mostly related to experiences with OIF) - “Smart bombs” are really only “pretty obedient bombs”
- Things that didn’t happen were as important as things that did
- No WMD
- None of the enemies stayed on to man the tanks and provide resistance on the way to Baghdad
- Not much held up the speed of advance
- No ecological disasters occurred
- No huge refugee problem
- Meant that the war played out differently from the plan – it always does/p>
- How do Principles of War play when things are so different than in the plan?
Speaker #3 - OIF: We are finally getting joint warfare right.
- US was able to use a perception of pressure on enemy even when not there
- That operational pause wasn’t one to the Iraqis
- Air power kept pushing even if ground forces weren’t moving much
- Worked because the services worked together
- US got a lot from convergence
- Battle commanders couldn’t tell where the strikes they were ordering wer actually coming from
- For first time in history (probably) two sides of enveloping arms of a pincher maneuver came from different services
- Partially because there was a new mind set at the command level in which the Army and MC expected to work together in operational maneuver
- One came from a fixed position & the other from a mobile
- Enemy could not set itself against one without exposing itself to the other type
- Related to interdependence of the forces
- Special Ops were very important but not just done by SOF folks
- There has been a trickle down effect to the rest of the force
- Did not come from a doctrinal change
- More Darwinian – commanders could see the successes
- With more maneuverability naturally created more decentralized operations
- Training, education and leadership are highly important to changes going on
- Need to identify what good leaders from various backgrounds have in common
- Command leadership was very different than in Gulf I
- A collegial dream-team that could work together well
- Knowledge, speed, and precision were very important to OIF
- Speed: A+
- Moved masses of everything from strategic to operational requirements from home bases
- Enemies saw what the US could do
- Precision: A+
- About 87% of the weapons were precision guided
- Precision now a tactical & operational tool
- E-6/E-7 can have precision weapons for their tasks
- Next big things:
- Get precision even more widely deployed
- Making sure that forces have the right weapon for each job and determining how to match them up
- Knowledge: not so good
- Often forces had perfect situational awareness but no cultural awareness
- Knew where all the empty tanks were but did not know that the Iraqis would be using Toyota trucks with small arms
- What’s needed:
- Cultural environment information
- Intentional knowledge
- Luckily, Iraqi forces weren’t that bright but could take enormous losses (up to 90% or more) and keep fighting
- Got some help for background info from Other Government Agencies
- As forces arrived in the cities
- Needed more
- Commanders had difficulty in moving from kinetic battles to handling anti-insurgency issues
- Some Principles of War issues remain throughout history
- Wars planned on paper are never the ones that are fought
- As Clausewitz says, chance will make something unpredictable happen during a battle
- Can be just the stupidity of the other side or anything else
- Also have the problem that human nature filters new information through a haze of previously held notions
- So technology cannot be the whole answer
- Technology does not
- tell much about intent
- estimate a people’s will to fight
- reach out for other intangibles
- Many failures to understand a situation relate to human nature issues
- Now in a new era of warfare
- US center of gravity is “dead Americans”
- Enemies understand this and they
- Learn just don’t loose to US
- May not necessarily win – can’t win using traditional forces
- Must rely on wars of attrition
- Need to string together tactical victories to reach a strategic end
- At first in Iraq US thought there had to be a single force behind the insurgency
- There seemed to be some synchronization but that can happen by accident
- Maybe decapitating the self-centered, deluded leadership was not a good idea
- Now must fight lots of small groups
- Some of groups may actually be competent at the tactical level
- Human factors issues need to be looked at along with technology
- Enemy can create fog of war no matter how long it took to develop a technology
- All of our recent problems have been human issues at tactical & strategic levels
- What the US needs to do in the future
- Lower the intelligence loop so that ever smaller units have access to the same information that now at upper levels
- Fusion has to happen at brigade level to make forces adaptable
- Start working to develop the right kind of leaders at the NCO and very junior officer levels
- Must already have taken in Principles of War & strategic feel for battles long before they reach command level
- Need more education at a younger age – not in19th year of service
- Develop leaders with a sense of the battlefield (court sense)
- Identify those who have it innately
- Pull them out from the mundane procedures
- Build them up further
- Develop a body of global scouts
- More Foreign Area Officers with finger tip feel for their regions
- Develop the Ralph Peters of the future
- Acculturate all soldiers with an understanding of regions they will be serving in – long before deployment
- Needs more than a few hours just before shipping out
- Develop the types of leaders that can easily move from fighters to town mayors
- Look at 19th Century British Army as bad examples
- They were too busy too learn about peoples, doctrines, etc.
- Stretched thin with many duties in difficult places
- Had won many simple victories over simple peoples
- Then had difficulty handling the Germans in WWI
- Took pride in avoiding book-learning and doctrine studies
- Suffered from and intellectual malaise until 1946
- Look at Napoleon’s failures as another bad example
- As a genius, he couldn’t accept collective judgments
- Had not considered what relationships should be after a battle
- Marshall: Get aims of war right; then a lieutenant could write the strategy
Q&A Session - Has the existence of nuclear weapons changed the Principles of War since both sides would lose?
- At least the presence of nuclear weapons should ensure no large scale wars will be fought in the immediate future
- Mistake in Iraq: US thought the center of gravity was in the elite which was unconnected to the people but did have military backing
- Instead it was the will of the people unconnected to the elite
- Provides a whole new meaning for Mass
- New meaning for economy of force: be able to determine where to place force so that the force does make a difference
- US may still have the center of gravity for warfare in general but
- This is being warped by the concepts of terrorism
- Now must deal with issues of Risk Aversion
- Are all the Principles of War equal?
- Can we learn and accept the Principles of War and then go ahead and violate them because of the changes that terrorism has caused?
- US forces still need to strike at the center of gravity, but must do it decisively so that they can get out of the situation as soon as possible.
- Risk aversion of the American people may be a problem
- An arithmetic problem develops as each day a few more deaths are recorded – What will be the tipping point in public opinion?
- Rapid communications has changed elements of the Principles of War
- Instant information-sharing has changed elements of national power
- Future fighters need to be able to dissect old insurgences in order to avoid those mistakes
- Requires much study to develop a finger tip feel for similar situations
- Social capital may also be important even in the days of instant communications
- A commander in OEF had good comms back to the command he had just left and could use relationships there to get what he needed quickly
- There needs to be more understanding of ethno-centrism
- Cultural understanding needs to be put into regional war games
- Bringing in regional players may be disruptive but necessary
- US military because of its diverse cultural background may be less ethno-centrically oriented than many others, however:
- The longer a war goes on the more the enemy is seen as ethnically “the other”
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