War, the military, COIN and stuff

Security Contractors, Coalition Comms, and Friendly Fire

Even with all of the communications, sensor and intelligence-gathering technologies at the disposal of the modern U.S. military, the battlefield continues to be a crowded, fast-moving, and confusing place. The notion of the “fog of war” may be a cliché, but it’s one that persists despite centuries of effort to clear it up -- and when you add civilian security contractors to the mix, it becomes even more complex.

It is essentially taken as a given that in future military operations, civilian contractors will—as they have in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia and Kosovo—work alongside American and allied forces providing everything from labor to support to security missions. The New York Times has done a good job combing through the Wikileaks files for material that captures the contractors’ role in Iraq, but there’s more.

The Times found that during the six years covered by the Wikileaks reports, “at least 175 private security contractors were killed. The peak appeared to come in 2006, when 53 died. Insurgents and other malefactors kidnapped at least 70 security contractors, many of whom were later killed.” Steve Fainaru did a great job capturing the disorganization surrounding some of the smaller, sketchier security outfits in his book, Big Boy Rules, but even when it comes to the large security companies, mistakes happened. Mistakes like shooting at, or being shot at, by the U.S. and coalition forces.

In one “White-on-Blue” incident exposed by Wikileaks, trucks from security contractor Armor Group was fired on by an American convoy when it tried to pass the military trucks on the highway. The contractor “had previously understood signals…to means that he was cleared to pass.” No one was hurt. In another incident, an American convoy “inadvertently engaged a civilian contractor security element” after two Ford trucks approached the convoy. The trucks were hit three times before U.S. forces realized that they were friendly. No one was hurt.

One hindrance in performing operations as part of an international coalition is the inability to speak to your allies, since different countries use different communications technologies. In Iraq, this led to some hairy moments early in the war between coalition military forces.

 In April 2004, Polish troops in Karbala fired warning shots at “a fast approaching vehicle packet,” which returned fire before turning around. When the convoy turned, the Polish troops recognized the trucks as American Humvees belonging to the Military Police. An investigation found that one coalition troop was lightly injured and the incident occurred because of a “lack of radio communications” between the MP patrol and the traffic control point. In July 2004 the it was the Americans turn to fire on the Poles in Karbala when “unknown vehicles” approached their position one evening. Unaware that any Polish convoy was in the area, and unable to make verbal contact with the vehicles, the Poles withdrew, and no one was hurt.

Please read the rest over at ARES...

How Wikileaks Exposes a New Mission for the Infantry

Given some of the explosive, and some not so explosive, revelations about security contractors, detainee abuse, Iranian involvement, etc. contained in the Wikileaks document dump on Friday afternoon, quite a lot is bound to get overlooked. One of the things I’ve long wondered about is what happens when an Unmanned Air Vehicle crashes in a combat zone – and how prevalent are crashes?

Scanning through the leaked documents over the weekend, it’s interesting to note a new mission that UAVs have helped to invent for infantrymen – UAV recovery. The relevant documents tell the tale of Quick Reaction Forces and patrols being sent out, or rerouted from ongoing missions, to try and recover or locate UAVs that had gone down. In report after report, often unidentified unmanned assets—the only models consistently named are catapult-launched RQ-7 Shadow, the RQ-2 Pioneer, and the hand-launched RQ-14 Dragon’s Eye—lose contact with their ground controllers and go missing, and grunts are sent out the gate to see what they can find. It’s a new mission set for the infantry not seen in previous conflicts, but given the expense and the technologies onboard the aircraft, one that is obviously considered important enough by commanders to put their soldiers’ lives at risk.

Not surprising to note that while American troops are eager to get their assets back, Iraqis are just as anxious to get their hands on these pieces of high-tech gear that fall from the sky. One report from April 2005 notes that after a UAV crashed in a baghdad backyard, it was picked up by a black car before U.S troops could arrive at the scene.....

Read the rest of this post over at ARES...

 

 

Book Review: The Iraq Wars and America's Military Revolution

  What constitutes a true military revolution? If you think you already have a pretty good idea, a look through Keith Shimko’s excellent new book The Iraq Wars and America’s Military Revolution may change your mind. The idea of a “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) has taken quite a beating recently given the very public flameout of the Rumsfeld-era Future Combat Systems suite of technologies that would have given the American soldier an almost impossibly perfect situational awareness of the battlefield. That laudable goal collided hea- on with the realities of the relatively low-tech counterinsurgencies that the United States has fought over the past decade, where the enemy both hides among the population and refuses to mass for conventional set-piece battles.  

But Shimko comes not to pile on, rather, he deftly traces the technological and doctrinal history of post-Vietnam American military advances, making the point that RMAs are not only technologically driven, but must also incorporate a rethinking of doctrine and tactics in order to truly succeed as a game changer. Shimko quotes liberally and deeply form some of the brightest minds in military thinking over the past several decades, balancing claims by both pro-RMA advocates as well as those who have tended to deride the idea that precision weapons and new communication technologies have truly changed the face of war. He quotes analyst Jeffrey Cooper as writing that the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs “may mark the closing of that era of warfare dominated by large military forces and equally large scopes of military operations. This RMA may usher in a new period of military contraction and a return to wars fought for limited objectives by valuable forces too precious to waste in mass, attrition-style warfare.” He also cites George and Meredith Friedman, who write that “for the first time in five hundred years, we are about to see a dramatic decrease in the size of land forces, without a decrease in military effectiveness.”  To balance this, Shimko relies heavily on the deep skepticism of Stephen Biddle, who fails to see anything revolutionary in the fire and maneuver that—even combined with precision weapons—marked the initial American foray into Afghanistan, and the large industrial-war style invasion of Iraq.

While an excellent summation of the debates surrounding military modernization and the effects—or potential effects—it may have on the battlefield that have taken place since the Vietnam war, the book nonetheless ends unevenly, with no real conclusion that states where Shimko falls. There are worse things however, and the history lesson leading up to the final pages is well worth the price of admission.

Moving Day in Iraq

A few weeks back I blogged about Operation Clean Sweep, an Army-led effort to tag, catalog, and ship non-essential items out of Iraq prior to the ultimate drawdown of American forces. The larger story about the operation is out in DTI's October issue. You can read it here.

The Defense Department estimates that between May 2009 and August 2010, 2.4 million of the 3.4 million pieces of U.S. military equipment in Iraq were shipped out. At its height Clean Sweep boasted a force of 20,000 soldiers fanned out among U.S. forward operating bases across the country, poking their heads into warehouses, shipping containers and offices to find out what the military had in its inventory. “Our teams would go out and walk around with the units on the ground and get a good idea of how much stuff was there and what kind of resources we would have to send to get a site cleaned up,” Pagonis says. Some of his troops went so far as to head out with metal detectors to find things such as shipping boxes that were buried in the early days of the war and used as bunkers.

But not everything went smoothly. According to a June 2010 Inspector General’s (IG) report, the 13th Brigade’s Mobile Redistribution Teams (MRTs) ran into trouble with some units. “Not all units supported the MRT mission, limiting the effectiveness of Operation Clean Sweep,” the IG reported. In the course of a series of site visits to bases in Iraq, the IG found there were units “that denied the MRTs access to their excess equipment, did not comply with requirements to sort their excess equipment before the MRT’s arrival and did not provide adequate logistical support to the MRTs.”

And what did things look like when a unit denied or impeded an MRT’s access to their gear, or was being lax in packing their containers? Some storage units that were shipped to Kuwait were “poorly packed and some contained weapons and hazardous material.” Other containers not packed or shipped by MRTs held unserviceable and non-repairable equipment and trash that should have been destroyed or scrapped in Iraq.

But Pagonis downplays the problems his soldiers faced with units on the ground, saying that any initial friction “dissipated once they saw how quickly we could get rid of their stuff.” He adds that the receiving units in Kuwait would typically come across 2-3 containers a week that had problems, which averaged to less than 0.5% of all containers shipped out of Iraq. Most problem containers were those that had slipped through the grasp of the 13th, and more often than not came from units that shipped gear to Kuwait themselves.

Read the rest here

Clearing Out Iraq

Operation Clean Sweep was an Army initiative started in 2009 to begin identifying and shipping out all manner of non mission-critical gear from Iraq that was sitting around unused at the big forward operating bases across the country. In less than a year, the operation shipped 30,000 containers of gear out of the country while putting $1.8 billion worth of equipment back into the Army supply system.

Spearheaded by the Army’s 13th Sustainment Command (ESC), based out of Ft. Hood Texas, the program relied on small Mobile Redistribution Teams to fan out across Iraq, opening containers and asking units what gear they had, and what they didn’t need. Back in June I highlighted a DoD Inspector General report that outlined some of the failings of the program--none of which fell on the 13th ESC, but instead were focused on insufficient guidance from the chain of command and units who were less than cooperative with the Mobile Redistribution Teams who came to tag and bag their unused gear.

In a recent conversation, Col. Gust Pagonis, Support Operations Officer for the 13th ESC, described the complexity of the task: “imagine if you didn’t go though your garage for seven years--what that would look like. Well, multiply that to the size of Iraq.” Col. Pagonis--whose father Lt. Gen. William G. Pagonis was in charge of Army’s logistics operations at the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf war--also downplayed the problems that his soldiers faced with units on the ground, saying that any initial friction that existed, “dissipated once they saw how quickly we could get rid of their stuff.”

Much of the work involved soldiers literally walking into a container or a room full of equipment with a handheld scanner and scanning the items into an Army-wide database that can track what supplies are at depots all the way down to the brigade level. For the "Green" Army equipment this worked well, but the 13th had to develop a “White” database for the commercial off the shelf gear they they came across. Once the green items were logged in, the database would automatically scan across the system and route it to a unit that needed such an item, even going so far as to print shipping instructions.

The 13th actually had what can be considered a practice run at Ft. Hood in 2008 when it was tasked with identifying material that was lying unused, but could be put back into the supply chain. In just a few months the unit identified $65 million worth of gear that other units could use, but was collecting dust at Ft. Hood. That’s all good, but as we know, there are times when the military falls down in the lessons learned aspect of successful programs. Col. Pagonis pointed out that the 13th has briefed subsequent sustainment units heading to Iraq to complete the drawdown of U.S. forces, and has also submitted their lessons learned to the command in Afghanistan so that operation can eventually benefit from the 13th’s experience.

Massive Spending Vs. Wise Budgeting

It’s no secret that after nearly a decade of massive outlays for two shooting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a whole host of programs -- the Littoral Combat Ship, JASSM, F-35, Future Combat Systems, the Marines’ EFV -- that have exploded budgetary estimates and their production schedules, that something had to give over at the Pentagon.

After the financial meltdown that hit home in 2008 put even further stain on federal budgets, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates began bluntly stating that this way of doing the Pentagon's business was coming to a close, cancelling the F-22 and FCS programs and more recently tasking the military services with finding $100 billion in overhead savings during the next five years.

Earlier this month, Gates also announced that he was cutting funding for contractors, freezing hiring, eliminating the Joint Forces Command and two other Pentagon agencies, and taking the axe to 150 senior executive service positions and 50 general and flag officer positions. The moves aren’t just about cutting the defense budget, he said, but instead "It's about reforming and reshaping priorities to ensure that, in tough budgetary and economic times, we can focus defense resources where they belong: in America's fighting forces, investment in future capabilities and, most important, on our men and women in uniform."

A tight economic climate isn’t just an American problem, however. In a good little summation of the global nature of the economic downturn, The Economist reports

This week Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Germany’s defence minister, said he favoured suspending conscription, with the option of resuming it later, in order to create a “smaller but better and more operational” army that would shrink by a third, to about 165,000. The move is part of Germany’s plan to cut €8.3 billion ($10.5 billion) from the defence budget by 2014. Even Britain, which has the largest European force in Afghanistan, is likely to cut defence spending by 10-20% over the next five years, following an overdue defence review in the autumn. Spain cut defence spending by 9% this year; Italy will chop by 10% next. Less drastically, France is freezing defence expenditure.

Left out of this equation is China, a country whose military ambitions are beginning to make headlines in the west. This past spring, Chinese officials announced that its military budget -- or one should say its publicly available military budget -- will rise by 7.5 percent in 2010, a rate only about half recent published increases and the first to fall below 10 percent since 1989.

While the United States will vastly outspend the rest of the world for the foreseeable future on its armed forces, at what point does spending wisely--and keeping to strict budgets--become more important than spending massively?

On the Max Keiser Show

I start at the 13 minute mark, talking about the arms race in the Arctic, Iran, Israel and other fun topics.

Aussies on Board With JLTVs, Marines Not So Sure

Last month, I headed up to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland for a demo of the three Joint Light Tactical Vehicle variants still fighting it out for the final Pentagon contract for the Army's replacement for the iconic Humvee. The way the competition is currently playing out, plans call for two competitors to be awarded contracts for prototypes that will enter the engineering, manufacturing and development phase in December 2011. If all goes well, plans call for final versions of the JLTV to be fielded for testing by mid-2015.

While there I also had the opportunity to speak with Australian army Lt. Col. Robin Petersen, who said his country’s armed forces were preparing for delivery of JLTV variants from the U.S. competitors to begin their own testing for possible buys. I asked him what operational requirements the Australians have that differ from those of the Pentagon, and he admitted that he didn’t see much difference. “We came up with very similar requests,” he said. The countries are “fighting the same fight, facing the same threats” in Afghanistan, and have similar outlooks of what needs will be.

The big question for the JLTV program is whether the Marine Corps still plans to buy in. While the service says it is committed to the program, it has also been actively pursuing a lighter-weight, lower-cost option in the form of the Small Combat Tactical Vehicle Capsule developed by Textron Marine and Land Systems and Granite Tactical Vehicles. Designed as a bolt-on capsule that fits on the chassis of existing Humvees, the design—which has already completed Marine Corps blast and ballistic testing—weighs less than an up-armored Humvee and offers better protection.

As with so much else in the Pentagon’s budgetary pipeline these days, most everything is subject to change.

"We need to think more about strategy..."

While briefing reporters on issues concerning the FY11 defense budget this morning at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Andrew Krepenevich painted a pretty bleak portrait of what he sees as the dearth of real, hard strategic thinking by the Pentagon and among the civilians in the Executive branch.

His comments followed closely the thoughts he put forth in a paper published earlier this month where he complained that the Obama administration’s recently released national security strategy “offers no concrete suggestions on how the administration hopes to achieve [its stated] objectives or how inconsistencies between these objectives might be resolved by establishing strategic priorities.” This morning, he also offered that while the tightening budgets brought about by the current fiscal crisis means that “we need to think about budgets,” it also means that in order to make fully informed budget decisions, “we need to think more about strategy.”

Krepenevich  went on to say that the lack of strategic thinking “is striking to me because if you don’t have that kind of comprehensive strategy when you’re looking across several types of enduring challenges—when you’re looking at shifts in alliance relationships, when you’re looking at declining defense resources—and you don’t have a strong sense of what are the priorities here…the matter of strategy I think has been greatly undervalued.” 

In a paper released earlier this month, Patrick Cronin of the Center for a New American Security also tried to tackle the strategy conundrum that American defense planners have created for themselves. Also taking the financial crisis as a starting point from which to work, Cronin writes that “while the United States stands to remain the world’s preeminent power for some time, the era of boundless commitment and profligacy has passed. To ignore this reality could precipitate decline rather than perpetuate preponderance.” Titled, Restraint: Recalibrating American Strategy, Cronin calls for a less expansive view of American power that must try and stamp out every potential problem that it uncovers in the dustier precincts of the globe.

Instead of calling for an era of isolation, he advocates that in the near-term at least, the United States will need to “think harder before reacting and committing our finite resources, to look for asymmetric responses – those with low costs and high returns – rather than those that deliver high returns at an equally high cost and to get our own house in order.” With a $13 trillion national debt and an economy that is unsteadily digging itself out of what is being termed the “Great Recession,” budgets for both expeditionary military adventures and high-ticket foreign aid packages will be extremely tight, and as a result, Cronin writes, “the United States can best pursue a protracted period of global order by resisting the temptation to solve all the world’s problems. The United States must pursue a strategy characterized by, in a word, restraint. Restraint is not a strategy, but it can help the United States preserve its limited means to focus on essential commitments.” Given the economy and the spiraling national debt, restraint might not be a choice, but rather a necessity.

Logistics Problems On the Road to Kuwait

By the time Labor Day rolls around, there will be about 50,000 American troops left in Iraq as part of the slow, yet significant, exodus of western troops after seven years of war. And like any other military operation, it is the the lonely legions of military logisticians who are the people responsible for coordinating the perversely complicated task of getting the troops and their gear back home, even if their job doesn’t exactly generate a lot of interest from the public, or the press.

Actually, a new report out from the Inspector General of the Department of Defense implies that the units redeploying from Iraq don’t seem to be too interested in what the logisticians have to say, either. Or at least the teams sent to help them pack. You see, the 13th Sustainment Command (ESC) is supposed to be checking and cataloging every piece of equipment that leaves Iraq bound for American depots in Kuwait, (dubbed Operation Clean Sweep), but many redeploying units either don’t know this, or don’t care. The 13^th ESC has deployed Mobile Redistribution Teams (MRT) to catalog all items as they’re packed up in Iraq, and ensure that no weapons or hazardous materials are tossed in with other items. But the DoD’s IG reports that:

… not all units supported the MRT mission, limiting the effectiveness of Operation Clean Sweep. During our site visits to four Forward Operating Bases, we identified units that denied the MRTs access to their excess equipment, did not comply with FRAGO requirements to sort their excess equipment before the MRT’s arrival, and did not provide adequate logistical support to the MRTs.

You see, the order that give birth to the teams didn’t require mandatory participation in Operation Clean Sweep and “the MRT’s mission and goals were not communicated to all units and commanders.” Despite this, the movement of gear has already been epic. From May 2009 to August 2010, it’s estimated that 2.4 million of the 3.4 million pieces of U.S. military equipment will have been shipped out of Iraq. But it’s not like the MRT’s aren’t busy. The 13th ESC reports that from October 2009 to April 2010, the MRT’s “identified and re-established accountability” for about $768 million of American gear.

And what do things look like when a unit denies MRT’s access to their gear, and end up being a little lax about how they pack up their gear? Some storage units that were shipped to Kuwait were “poorly packed and some contained weapons and hazardous material, increasing the risk of injury to Theater Redistribution Center personnel responsiblhings look like e for opening the containers."

Other containers not packed or shipped by MRTs held unserviceable non-repairable equipment and trash that should have been destroyed or scrapped in Iraq. In addition, equipment in these containers was not identified, processed, and brought to record until it reached Camp Arifjan delaying visibility of serviceable equipment in the supply system that may be needed elsewhere, including Afghanistan.”

It’s not a sexy job, checking off boxes on a succession of lists as soldiers load up shipping containers, but it is important, for lots of reasons that last sentence makes clear.

(Pic USMC. Two U.S. Marine Corps CH-53E Super Stallion helicopters fly over equipment and supplies prepared for transport)