Gen. H.R. McMaster Tapped to go to Kabul

On Tuesday, our pals at Danger Room broke the news that Gen. H.R. McMaster, who served as part of Gen Petraeus’ “brain trust” in Baghdad during the “surge” years, has been tapped to head to Kabul with Petraeus to take over the war in Afghanistan. I had the opportunity to sit down with McMaster back in February just after the release of the Army Capstone Concept planning document was released, which McMaster spearheaded.  Titled Operational Adaptability: Operating Under Conditions of Uncertainty and Complexity in an Era of Persistent Conflict—2016-2028, the document’s premise is that combatant commanders will fight for information as tenaciously as for ground, while “integrating their efforts with a broad range of partners in complex environments and among diverse populations.” Sounds a bit like the battlespace in Afghanistan, no?

We kicked our conversation off with a bit about the COIN vs. traditional combat arms debate, and McMaster warned that “there is a real danger in over-categorizing war. You may go into a humanitarian assistance effort of significant scale such as that in Haiti and encounter spoiling groups, organized resistance groups and militia-type organizations, and then obviously you’re going to have to fight those organizations. If you over-categorize conflict and say you want to optimize for a certain end of the spectrum, what you do is create opportunities for the enemy who can then evade that narrow set of capabilities. So I think the important thing is to call warfare warfare, understand the broad range of threats that the armed forces will have to deal with and then prepare for that range of threats….combined-arms capability, the ability to fight, is the price of admission to any operation, so I think what we have to do in the Army is to figure out how to make the [counterinsurgency versus conventional war] debate a false choice. We have to do both."


And all this will be done in a joint operating environment, with military and civilian and multinational agencies sharing the battlespace?

We wanted to emphasize the continuous interaction with an adaptive adversary, the need to have those qualities of operational adaptability. So while you’re acting, you’re continuously evaluating the responses and reactions of the enemy, adapting your actions, innovating further to seize and retain that initiative and to continue to make progress toward achieving policy goals and objectives. The environment in which we do that is a multinational environment, it’s an interdepartmental environment, it’s a joint environment, so you begin to see all the skill sets leaders need to have to conduct these kinds of operations. This whole idea that you can conduct operations in the joint world consistent with this shock-and-awe thing­—rapid, decisive operations—is utterly unrealistic.


In Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in Africa, a big part of the Army’s mission is to train indigenous militaries and police. Where is Army doctrine heading when it comes to making this mission a core competency?

In the Capstone Concept, we say we need to exert a psychological and technical influence. It is not adequate just to build capable security forces—we’re not an NGO (non-governmental organization). We have to ensure that those security forces are employed in a way that is consistent with our interests and with the interests of the people there. We have to build capable security forces, but also security forces that earn the trust and confidence of the population. So we must understand the Army’s role in not just building battalions or the police, but understanding that we have to do it in a way that is consistent with political strategy and what we want to achieve overall. In security force assistance, what we really want to focus on is that we have to make sure we develop the institutional capacity of the relevant ministries and subordinate organizations so that whatever we do, the indigenous forces can sustain. [It is also important] that [local forces are] under effective leadership. The first thing in any endeavor like this is effective leadership.

Can the Army draw down in Iraq, escalate in Afghanistan and still run training missions in places like Africa simultaneously?

Actually, the Army has always taken this on. We did this from the Revolutionary War to the frontier wars, post-Civil War reconstruction, the Philippines insurrection—the Army has always had those capabilities. In fact we have a statutory responsibility to provide military governance until we can transition. So what we wanted to do [in the Capstone document] is make sure that we acknowledge that the Army not only has always had to do these sorts of operations, but that we’re going to do them in the future, and we’re going to have to prepare our force to conduct the full range of operations.

Photo credit: U.S. ARMY

Comments

[jim hruska]

Why is the Army responsible to train police forces when the Army is not a police organization?
Why has this function been moved from D o State?
Are we in the business of creating police states?
Do not police blossom from democracy and not the way we're doing it.
Police forces seldom equate to freedom.
jim at rangeragainstwar.