War, the military, COIN and stuff

Marines Sending in the Tanks

There has been some skepticism over the Marine Corps’ decision to send a company of M1 Abrams tanks to join the battle in southern Afghanistan, but the use of tanks in a counterinsurgency in general, and in Afghanistan in particular, is hardly new.

In Afghanistan, the Canadians and the Danes have used their tanks to great effect--and Canadian Army Maj. Trevor Cadieu has written a detailed acocunt on how tanks became an integral part of the Canadian fight in Kandahar—the place U.S. Marines are fighting now. In December 2006, the Canadians deployed a squadron of Leopard C2 tanks to Kandahar, and he Major writes that “after deploying forward… the tank squadron and armoured engineers featured prominently in all major combat operations undertaken by the Canadian BG… Since May 2007, the tank squadron has fought almost constantly alongside Canadian and Afghan infantry in close combat with the Taliban.”

The Canadians say that they’ve found so much success in Afghanistan with the German-made Leopard tank that they completely revised plans for the structure of their ground forces. In 2001, the Canadians decided not to replace their aging fleet of Leopard I tanks—the plan was to simply ride them until they died and then transition to a lighter force structure using the Stryker-like LAV infantry carriers as their heaviest piece of equipment. It wasn’t long before the heavy fighting and the toll that powerful roadside bombs Canadian troops encountered in southern Afghanistan changed this calculus, however, prompting the Ottawa government to kick off a “crash program” to buy surplus German and Dutch Leopard II tanks, which began arriving in Afghanistan in 2008.

Please  read the rest of this post over at ARES

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...

Rising Powers, and American 'Declinist' Paranoia

In coming years, the United States will most likely come to rely on “non-traditional” allies and partners such as India and Brazil to cemenet its regional influence as domestic defense budgets shrink and global economic power becomes more diffuse. So says Eric Edelman, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Bush administration, who presented a new CSBA report yesterday titled Understanding America’s Contested Primacy (PDF!)--a look at whether or not the United States is facing a period of decline.

His answer? Despite many obvious fiscal challenges like heavy domestic entitlement spending, the global economic downturn, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States is in no real danger of seeing its global primacy slip any time in the near future. Americans have been worrying about decline since the Puritans fretted the decay of the shining city on the hill, Edelman said, adding that concerns over eroding American primacy have come about every decade or so since the end of the Second World War.

Starting with the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons and the launch of Sputnik and continuing through the fallout from the Vietnam war, the recessions of the late 70s and 80s, talk of the end of the nation state in the late 90s, all the way to the “declinism” talk of today surrounding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rise of economic centers in India, China and Brazil, the theme has been the same: decline is right around the corner.

Edelman finds this kind of talk wanting. Besides, if you think things are rough here, he says, you should take a look at the other guys.....

Please read the rest over at ARES...

Smaller Forces, Less Money, A New Paradigm?

I’ll admit that I’m wading (ever so cautiously) into a debate in which I have yet to really find my footing, but Robert Wall’s post yesterday about the future of the German Bundeswehr is an important one that potentially has huge consequences. Robert writes that the German military has given the Parliament a report that calls for abolishing conscription while reducing the size of the Bundeswehr from its present 247,000 active duty soldiers to 165,000 soldiers.

Robert notes that “one of the interesting acknowledgments in the report is that the German military, as structured now, can't meet the strategic objective to maintain 14,000 deployable troops. The roughly 7,000 troops now deployed are already stretching the force. The report states that Germany has to position itself to at least be able to deploy 10,000 troops.”

But Ulf Gartzke over at the Weekly Standard  doesn’t seem so concerned about all that. From his reading of the issue, he sees the proposed reforms as leading to “the Bundeswehr’s successful transition from a heavy, Cold War-style army exclusively focused on territorial defense to a much more nimble and lighter force capable of quickly launching effective expeditionary operations (while of course maintaining the indispensable homeland protection component).” In other words, the proposed leaner force would be forced to specialize on a few specific tasks, thus making it a more effective member of the European alliance. The reforms, in his view, would also be “welcome news for Berlin’s allies, who could, in principle, count on the support of a militarily more capable Germany, both within NATO and within the EU context.”

Is smaller better? Should NATO and the EU shift to a model in which each nation’s armed forces can perform specific tasks, making it more of an interdependent collaborative? (However unlikely such a scenario actually is.) All interesting ideas for a time in which defense budgets are being slashed across the NATO alliance.

Given these questions and the issues outlined yesterday about the size of the U.S. Navy and what will probably be some contraction in the size of the U.S. armed forced in overall in the upcoming years, I was struck by a few quotes I read the other day in Keith Shimko’s excellent new book The Iraq Wars and America’s Military Revolution. Shimko quotes analyst Jeffrey Cooper as writing that the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) “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 quotes 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...” I’m not saying that these analysts are right, but the questions are endlessly fascinating. What happens in Germany will be interesting to watch.

Shrinking Budgets and Joint Naval Ops

This is also posted over at the ARES blog.

In the interest of providing a little more perspective on what the recent postponement of the Littoral Combat Ship downselect and what frequent criticisms of the program might mean for the future of the U.S. Naval force, it helps to look at some of the figures--numbers of ships, yearly shipbuilding goals, etc.--that the Navy is projecting in its five and thirty-year shipbuilding plans..

A great analysis of the many budgetary factors the Navy must consider as it moves forward with the LCS program was published in the latest issue of the Naval War College Review. Ronald O’Rourke writes that while trying to hammer out a schedule to begin the big build of the expected 55 LCS hulls it wants, the Navy must first grapple with its FY 2011–FY 2015 shipbuilding plan that calls for fifty ships of various classes to be built -- an average of ten per year. O’Rourke charges that this does not “necessarily mean that the service has solved its long-term challenge of shipbuilding affordability.”

The Navy was able to fund this fifty-ship plan in part because twenty-five of those ships—half the total —are relatively inexpensive LCSs and JHSVs [Joint High Speed Vessel]. Since LCSs and JHSVs are to account eventually for about 25 percent of the Navy’s planned 313-ship fleet, they are temporarily overrepresented in the Navy’s shipbuilding plan

O’Rourke crunches the numbers and finds that over the lifespan of the Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan, even if its shipbuilding requests are met, the Navy is currently projecting that it will face “significant shortfalls” in the numbers of attack submarines and cruisers/destroyers--even as the sustainment costs rise significantly. What’s more, after FY15 when the Navy builds less LCS’ and JHSV’s, it will start building a planned twelve replacement ballistic-missile submarines, which at $6-$7 billion a pop, which is equivalent to almost half of the service’s annual budget for new ship construction. In other words, something is going to have to give.

There are a host of things that the Navy and the Pentagon can do, of course, to try and rectify this growing budgetary problem, including increasing the Navy’s budget in real terms; identifying more cost-cutting measures; extending the service lives of ships in the current fleet; relying more on less expensive unmanned platforms; and of course, make a concerted effort to train local coast guards and navies around the world to take more of a role in patrolling off their own coasts, lessening the burden on the U.S. fleets.

A few of these options, we all know, just aren’t going to happen. Given the constrained economic environment the United States--and the rest of the world--currently faces (England and France are sharing aircraft carriers!) defense budgets are only going to tighten. Add to that the fact that we have a Secretary of Defense who projects his intentions by asking a roomful of naval officers “whether the nation can really afford a Navy that relies on $3 [billion] to $6 billion destroyers, $7 billion submarines and $11 billion carriers,” and the budget question is effectively settled.

So, what to do? One of the options mentioned above--partnering with and training allies to share some of the maritime security mission--is a task that many in the Navy see as essential to ensuring the continued flow of goods across vital sea lanes that feed the “just-in-time” economic model that today’s industrialized nations operate under.

In the same issue the Naval Review, Admiral James Stavridis, head of the US European Command, and Lt. Cdr. Richard E. LeBron, explicitly call for more naval partnerships across the globe to help protect sea lanes. They single out NATO’s Operation OCEAN SHIELD, the EU’s Operation ATALANTA, and Combined Task Force 151—all supporting international efforts to combat piracy off the Horn of Africa—as excellent examples of successful collaborative, international, efforts at sea security. While the numbers of ships involved in each operation might be relatively small, “even more valuable would be increased inputs from overhead satellites and greater deployment of maritime patrol aircraft and long-range surveillance assets.” The U.S. Navy, of course, has started to push hard in the unmanned arena, as have the Europeans, as my colleague Andy Nativi reported yesterday.

When it comes to partnership, the U.S. Navy has been running its Africa Partnership Stations for several years now, where it trains local coast guards and naval forces in best practices for securing their own coastlines, but Stavridis and LeBron point to several NATO program that are bolstering “close cooperation and exchange of information related to antipiracy efforts between various players within NATO and between NATO, the EU, the UN, the African Union, and the Arab League,” and call for commercial ships to be added to this network for increased situational awareness on the high seas, since there are more commercial ships than military vessels operating at any given time.

Sticking with the theme of partnership and how it lessens the ultimate load that the U.S. Navy must bear around the globe is a piece by Coast Guard Cmdr. Sean Schenk in the Sept. issue of Proceedings. Highlighting U.S.-sponsored regional training centers, Schenk complains that the multiple, well-intentioned Navy and Coast Guard training, exercise, and equipment transfer programs to partner nations “are often compromised by insufficient follow-though,” and that plans “rarely look past the day” equipment arrives or an exercise winds up, and “comprehensive needs assessments for countries and regions are either lacking or not coordinated among government agencies.”

Sounds familiar, no?

Schenk’s solution is much the same as the one Stavridis and LeBron proposed: partner with regional and international organizations to assist in these missions. He points to several successful training programs in Malta and Kenya as evidence that with the proper guidance, funding, and long-term vision, local forces can provide some level of safety along their own coasts. While this alone won’t solve the Navy’s budgetary headaches, it is a vision for the future that more and more naval officers seem to be embracing.

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?

The Numbers game in Afghanistan

U.S. and Afghan forces on patrol. Pic: Paul McLeary

When it comes to building a reliable and effective national security force, one of the critical questions to be answered is which is more important, quality or quantity. Up until late last year, says Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell, the American officer in charge of overseeing the recruitment and training of all Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), the focus was on quantity, and quality suffered. Speaking on a conference call earlier today, Caldwell said that his command is trying to bring the two a little closer together by growing the force while focusing on things like literacy,  drug use, and professionalism, but some of the number the General used to illustrate the difficulties ahead were less than enouraging.

Given the current attrition rates for both the army and the police, in order for the ANSF to hit its October 2011 goal of 305,000 personnel, an additional 56,000 cops and soldiers will need to be recruited, trained, equipped and fielded. But in order to do that, a staggering 141,000 soldiers and police will have to enter the pipeline to hit that 56,000 number. That means 85,000 of that 141,000 that NATO spends money on not only to recruit and train--but to issue paychecks--will simply vanish.  “If I can put that into some context for you,” the general said, “in order to meet the 2011 goal, we will need to recruit and train, in the next 15 months, approximately the same number as the total strength of the Afghan National Army today.”

That is stunning. Let’s break that down. The Afghan army today has 134,000 soldiers. By next October, that number is slated to swell to 171,000--meaning 37,000 more soldiers need to be trained and fielded over the next 15 months. But in order for that to happen, Caldwell said, “we're going to have to recruit, train and assign 86,000 more people to the army in order to make that growth of 37 thousand.” That means 49,000 men will walk after receiving some form of training/pay/equipping.

And then there is the famously beleaguered, and just as famously corrupt, Afghan police. Their ranks number about 115,000 today, and by October 2011, the force is set to grow to 134,000. But to make that growth of 19,000, NATO is going to have to recruit, train and assign almost 56,000 men. That means 37,000 would-be cops are going to eat up money, resources, and the time of the already thinly-spread trainers, primarily U.S. armed forces personnel. Overall, NATO trainers--who are still only staffed up to about 60 percent of their intended capacity--will have spent time training 85,000 soldiers and cops over the next 15 months, with nothing to show for it.

Morning Reads

AirSeaBattle, reconsidered from an intel-sharing point of view

The U.K. has announced some drastic cuts to their military. A smart appraisal

As Joint Forces Command heads into the sunset, what of NATO’s Allied Command Transformation(ACT)?

Felipe Calderon and the National Security dialogue

Arctic Arms Race

The environmental changes in occurring in the Arctic are as dramatic as they are significant for cooperation and competition among Arctic nations. With the polar ice cap having receded 25 percent since 1978, vast tracts of unexplored ocean rich with natural resources are opening up. In 2009 the United States Geological Survey estimated that the Arctic contains over 90 billion barrels of oil, 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and some 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids—of which the USGS estimates a whopping 84 percent may lay offshore.

While there may not be a “great race” north just yet, there is enough movement— politically, militarily, and commercially—to make things interesting. In 2009, two German ice-strengthened merchant ships sailed from South Korea over the Eurasian coast to the Atlantic Ocean, and that same year, thirteen ships traversed the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic, making 2009 a record-setting year for full transits in the region in a summer season. Of the 135 full Northwest Passage transits since 1903, almost half—sixty—have come since 2000.

Still, the waters of the Arctic won’t be clogged with shipping any time soon. At an event in Washington, DC in April to discuss the emerging strategic significance of the region, Stephen Carmel, Senior VP, Maritime Services of shipping company Maersk Line, warned that navigation in the area is still extremely difficult. “Decent charts really don’t exist,” he said, “aids for navigation don’t exist, emergency response capability does not exist, so there’s things need to be done before you can really support shipping up there.” In general, “there are a lot of things overall that are still far from certain in terms of the practicalities of working” in the Arctic, he concluded.

But where there are economic opportunities, military thinkers start to see potential hot spots. The United States has always retained the most robust military presence in the Arctic of all the Arctic Council members--Canada, Russia, the U.S., Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Finland--and in January 2009 the Bush Administration released an Arctic Strategy paper which placed security as the United States’ primary concern in its Arctic territory. The U.S. Navy followed suit by issuing an Arctic Road Map which laid out the direction that the service wants to pursue to meet the demands of U.S. maritime Arctic security. But U.S. allies have also been busy. Norway has made massive investments in modernizing its Navy, including building five Aegis-capable frigates, and the country’s ground forces have started conducting the yearly Exercise Cold Response which involves more than 10,000 Norwegian and NATO troops, including U.S. Marines who practice cold weather warfare.

In Canada’s 2008 Canada First Defense Strategy and then again with its Northern Strategy in 2009, the Stephen Harper government has called for up to eight Arctic Offshore vessels, a $720 million icebreaker, a new satellite to map the region, a new deepwater resupply port, an army training base, and larger local militias in the region.

While the plans that Ottawa have outlined look great on paper, Dr. Rob Huebert, PhD Fellow at the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute says, none of the programs have made much, if any, headway. “We’re still in project definition” he tells DTI. “The problem is we’re already seeing signs of the government trying to cut back on expenditures,” and some of the projects have been postponed. “Many people on the inside worry that [the Joint Support Ship] has been cancelled,” and “we haven’t seen anything about the Arctic Offshore Patrol Vessels…you get the sense that it hasn’t even moved up to the point where it is going to be put up for bidding and the Icebreaker seems to be even further behind that.” The Russians, meanwhile, with their already large icebreaker fleet have announced plans for more nuclear-powered icebreakers, more ice-capable submarines, and as of 2008, had resumed surface naval patrols in Arctic waters. Moscow has also announced plans to land paratroopers on the North Pole some time this year.

While no one sees the outbreak of hostilities in the Arctic as a real possibility, and cooperation among the Arctic Council is becoming more and more common, the military buildup in the North is still something to watch.

 

Tanks in Counterinsurgency

A sharp, short new report from two researchers at RAND concludes that despite all of the scorn that has been heaped on heavy armor units over the past several years, heavy forces—meaning tanks and infantry fighting vehicles—”are key elements of any force that will fight hybrid enemies that have a modicum of training, discipline, organization, command and control, and advanced weapons (e.g., ATGMs, MANPADS, RPGs, mines, and IEDs). Light and medium forces complement heavy forces in hybrid warfare, particularly in urban and other complex terrain, but they do not provide the survivability, lethality, or mobility inherent in heavy forces. Quite simply, heavy forces reduce operational risks and minimize friendly casualties.”

The paper by David E. Johnson and John Gordon IV, is part of a larger research project that assesses how armor has been used in recent counterinsurgency fights, and the implications this will have for “U.S. Army force mix and capabilities, as well as for the elements that support or operate with ground forces.” The duo spoke with the U.S. Marines, the Brits, the Danes, the Canadians and the Israelis for the project, and found that contrary to what one might think, counterinsurgent forces in Afghanistan actually love their tanks. (Check Johnson’s paper on Israel’s performance during the recent fighting in Gaza for some more background on how the IDF is changing the way it fights.)

The Canadians and the Dutch say that they’ve found great success in Afghanistan with the German-made Leopard II tank, (as I wrote about in more detail here), so much so that the tanks have caused the Canadian military to completely revise plans for the structure of their ground forces. In 2001, the Canadians decided not to replace their aging fleet of Leopard I tanks--the plan was to simply ride them until they died and then transition to a lighter force structure by using the Stryker-like LAV infantry carriers as their heaviest piece of equipment. It wasn’t long before the heavy fighting and the toll that powerful roadside bombs Canadian troops encountered in southern Afghanistan changed this calculus, however,  prompting the Ottawa government to kick off a “crash program” to buy surplus German and Dutch Leopard II tanks, which began arriving in Afghanistan in 2008. Johnson and Gordon write that

The experience in southern Afghanistan has convinced the Canadian Army that armored forces have a very important role in COIN operations. The Leopard II tanks currently operating in Afghanistan have been modified with improved armor (in particular, all-around metal skirts to detonate RPG shaped-charge warheads) and improved crew-comfort items, such as cooling systems to cope with the intense summer heat.

The Canadians have also said that convoys have proven to be less likely to be ambushed if tanks are present. The Dutch have had much the same  experience with the Leopard II in Afghanistan, claiming that the tank’s 120mm gun is so accurate that it minimizes civilian casualties, and the RAND team reports that the Danes “noted that tanks can respond very quickly when contact is made with insurgents, and that it was clear the Taliban respects tank firepower. Indeed, it was stated that Taliban activity drops considerably when tanks are operating in an area.” The Canadians and Danes have been so successful with their Leopard tanks in Afghanistan that the British have taken to relying on them completely for their heavy armor and mobile firepower needs.

Despite having been very happy with the way their Challenger II Main Battle Tanks operated in Iraq, the Brits have decided not to send them to Afghanistan, instead relying on the 30-ton Warrior IFV with its 30-mm cannon for operations in Helmand. In a sharp departure from the Americans, Canadians and Dutch, the Brits are even considering shutting down their heavy tank units for up to three years to allow Tankers to perform other duties. While the final decision rests on what RAND terms as “funding constraints and the need to free personnel for other COIN-related tasks” it will also mean that for a while at least, the heaviest armored fighting vehicle that the British Army will field will be the 30-ton Warrior IFV. As it stand, this would hardly matter in Afghanistan, where the Brits are content to outsource their heavy armor needs to the Canadians and Danes, even though both countries are scheduled to pack up their Leopard II’s and go home in about a year from now.

Photo: Canadian MOD