Wha?
So, a pair of former DoD senior types have an op-ed in the Washington Times saying essentially “let SOCOM run GWOT”. Sorta.
It’s time to alter U.S. strategy by putting USSOCOM generals and admirals truly in command of the global war. And in Iraq, conventional forces could best serve by providing ground, air and sea support to USSOCOM and Iraqi security forces and sealing Iraq’s porous borders with hostile and/or dubious neighbors in Iran, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to prevent foreign jihadists, arms and sophisticated munitions from entering the country.
I’ve got some problems with that. First off, SOCOM does have the ball for that–but there’s no way we’re going to instantly turn DoD into a giant SOF unit. That’s why there are the four SOF Truths:
- Humans are more important than hardware.
- Quality is more important than quantity.
- SOF cannot be mass produced.
- Competent SOF cannot be created after the emergency arises.
Here’s an older example of a framework for using SOF. If the idea is to make the regular folks more effectively in support of SOF, we’ve done a lot of changing to do that; check this discussion from one of the Marines trying to successfully adapt into a world that uses SOF a little differently by standing up MARSOC. I could also point out that the four star brought back from retirement to run the Army is a snake eater, and used to run SOCOM; he groks SOF and as a service chief will be sympathetic to the concerns of SOCOM.
So that can’t be the issue. Perhaps what the Washington Times op-ed is pushing is support of the directive to let SOCOM run the GWOT at the flag/general officer level. This makes more sense, but still has some severe problems associated with it that are going to take more than a generally focused op-ed to address.
- There now are several geographic combatant commanders, four star officers with responsibility over an area of operations. CENTCOM? That’s one of them. There may be one more coming down the pike. Check out how they used to be arranged in this older map:
- There are also commands with four stars and no geographic area, but functional resonsibilities. STRATCOM, for instance, owns a box of “odds and ends” of things that need watched over all over the globe, such as space (the old SPACECOM was folded into STRAT) and the old nuclear triad. SOCOM is a slightly different beast than the others because after being ignored for a decade or so by the rest of DoD Congress gave SOCOM purchasing authority–and money is power. The difficulties all the functional combatant commanders have to deal with involve using assets that may be under the operational command of a geographic COCOM, making messes in that COCOM’s AOR to get cleaned up, and performing actions that the geographic COCOM might not necessarily want to happen.
- There are also service chiefs, the people living in the Pentagon that organize, train, and equip those forces. A COCOM gets a Navy asset that was bought through the bucket of money assigned to the Navy, trained prior to deployment by Navy, and returns to the Navy–even though there’s a COCOM also assigned that asset when it’s back from deployment and home.
- Unless you control the asset, or the money, you don’t get much control of what happens with that asset. Only one guy can successfully be responsible at any given time.
- It’s not as though SOCOM is going to be better than a conventional fighter at controlling conventional forces, for the same reason that the Washington Times op-ed wants the SOCOM guys in charge: you get expert at the things you study and practice. A shift isn’t easily done without training staff.
- DoD is working through these issues. I’ve seen most organizations, with one glaring example, work hard to collaborate and coordinate as much as possible. SOCOM’s working through some hard issues to get done what they want–and the other COCOMs are also doing the same. The real problem, however, is Leviathan versus SysAdmin–we need interagency badly, and there’s not a Gramm-Rudman to join all aspects of the executive branch together like we did with joint. Gripe all you wish, but we’re now joint. The mistakes that killed people in Grenada and Desert One don’t happen any more; we make new mistakes instead.
- We likely won’t address the failure to work interagency until we get an equivalent to Desert One and Grenada, where we finally get congressional impetus to make it easier for a DoD guy, for instance, to work well with a DoS guy who needs help from the Department of Agriculture for a SysAdmin job in the Horn of Africa.
The problem isn’t that we need a snake eater to run things. The problem is that our structures are complex and not sewed together easily, that the different departments need integration of some kind like we had to do inside DoD, and that this is a war where the enemy knows our seams and capitalizes on them. Maybe a SOF commander is the right guy–but if so, there will be problems just as thorny to get through.
13 Responses to “Wha?”
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December 29th, 2006 at 5:47 am
Amen to all this. If you want proof of that, imagine letting Stratcom be in charge of ….(fill in the blank)………..
There is a reason for the words, “supported” and “supporting”. SOCOM supports every other COCOM and it probably is a pretty good arrangement as is.
December 29th, 2006 at 11:30 am
Good logical counter to the Op-ed proposal.
The reason everything is so tenuous now isn’t the command organizations or who/what background the commander is, but the present ROE and as you so diligently point out, the failure of the infowar. Even if they were miraculuosly able to increase the number of SOF by a factor of one, it still wouldn’t be enough to man and command an operation against an insurgency as big as the one in Iraq.
Although I respect the authors I get the feeling that they may have watched too many episodes of “24″ or (you name the action movie). They ought to go back and read the Ranger Manual.. There’s tactical and there’s strategic. Not much crossover there.
Rhetorical?: I ain’t going to go there……but how was any insurgency in world history ever put down/defeated/”won”? Don’t like the answer? Don’t expect a solution anytime soon. I’m getting more cynical all the time. A ruthless enemy requires ruthless tactics AND strategies. Don’t like the word ruthless? OK- insert aggressive instead. Is that more appropriate?
Realigning the deck chairs on the Titanic isn’t going to affect the outcome. Only action is. Consider the stakes.
b2
December 30th, 2006 at 10:04 am
“If you want proof of that, imagine letting Stratcom be in charge of ….(fill in the blank)………..”
We’re already seeing that in missile defense w/STRATCOM and future of JTAMDO…it hasn’t been pretty thus far.
- SJS
December 30th, 2006 at 11:23 am
Oh, if I were able to tell some stories…
December 30th, 2006 at 5:05 pm
“Oh, if I were able to tell some stories…”
(clearing throat) Couldn’t we invoke the cloak of “plausible deniability? ”
- SJS
December 30th, 2006 at 6:31 pm
On this blog? Heh. That would be a “no”–it’d show up in the command comms matrix in a heartbeat. In this case I have to work within the system to attempt to add better value to the nation. And as a lowly iron major equivalent in the bowels of an organization whose existence is not exactly celebrated, it’s an uphill battle.
Let’s just say that I’ve gained a reputation for noisy abrasiveness because of my forceful but necessarily ineffective attempts at making things be a less perfect vaccuum. I’ll keep the fight within the lifelines, as it were, but it is a fight…
December 30th, 2006 at 11:56 pm
“he groks SOF ” … more than I could say. Despite working with them when I was a Brigade S-5 in AF…
We pay alot more attention to the SF than H. Norman CIOgar ever did in Gulf I. Gah.
December 31st, 2006 at 6:36 am
You are not saying that the USAF practices retribution are you? Perish the thought…………….
They prefer to think of it as re-education. First perfected at the USAF Academy………………………………..
December 31st, 2006 at 12:08 pm
Not USAF specific, just the likely fate of a dissenter in a bureaucracy. I want to effect change, not just make noise, so I tread lightly in some places and heavily in others. So far I have had about three Good Days at work, where we started going the direction I wanted.
I am lucky to get good support horizontally and vertically up to a point (I’m too junior)–and I’ve been able to seize the moment a couple of times. Now, my concern is inculcating that change effectively, getting around some dirty pool players, laying the seeds for improvement outside the building when it’s time, and not becoming the Designated Dissenter who gets consulted and ignored because then people think they have listened to all sides when they go the way they planned to in the first place.
Bottom line: An organization’s vision must have a good understanding of what they could do, what they uniquely do, and what they should not be doing. Just because a command could do something does not mean it is the best command to do it, or that the command should be doing it in the first place.
January 1st, 2007 at 1:28 am
I think I’ll have to dissent here. The conventional types, for the most part, don’t get COIN. I see that every day in Iraq.
When waging COIN, the JFC should establish a JFCMOCC as the supported commander. The LN populace is the COG; we should be organized accordingly. If CMO is not the supported commander, the maneuver commander sees its mission as to keep the civilians out of his way.
I thinkthe new AFRICOM should either establish a CMOCC or a Deputy for CMO (civilian rep of POTUS, three-star equivalent) with directive authority over USG civilian development agencies. If we don’t go with a civilian deputy, legislation authorizing Dod authority over other USG agencies in this situation will be necessary. Look at the CORDS model under Blowtorch Bob Komer; Google “Reorganizing for Pacification Support.”
January 1st, 2007 at 1:45 am
Sir, I don’t think I disagree with what you say here, at least the part I know anything about. I do think, though, that merely putting a snake eater on top isn’t going to fix the problem–and that’s what I read that op-ed as saying. A post or two above this one talks about some of the fifty pound brains talking about global COIN where each local area has its own LN COG, and that makes sense to me.
Conventional forces *can* get COIN–the Marines always tended to be better at it than others over the centuries, for instance. There are a lot of conventional forces out there, and those guys need employed effectively too. If we have to grow ‘em different, let’s do so; we don’t have enough SOF to do it and it’s not as if you’re going to get an old fat sailor like me to do that many pushups–although I’m useful if employed in the right place. SOF are bad choices for infantry jobs because they’re being wasted if you use them that way. Infantry are bad choices for SOF jobs because they’re not SOF. Both can do aspects of the other’s job if done right.
I think this is the book discussing the point you mentioned.
Here’s a big problem I can’t see a way to fix: The Africa command is so contentious inside DoD that the basic aspects are still being fought over (what’s the name? What’s the AOR? Where’s the HQ?)–and it’s all within DoD, mostly within EUCOM. There’s no interagency there, and this command would benefit from being built interagency from the ground up. I don’t see that happening without congressional involvement–and I don’t know of any staffers working it.
January 1st, 2007 at 1:48 am
Oh, and one other historical example I think would be useful is “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell and John Paton Davies, Army and State officers, working together to fly over the Hump to support Allied fighters against the Japanese in China.
January 1st, 2007 at 3:47 pm
Chap -
Bingo! That’s the one.
I forgot to mention that the Marines get COIN; I would love to see a Marine four-star appointed as MNF-I CG. Or as I like to call it, the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone. You are spot on WRT on required AFRICOM structure; I see on a daily basis that our non-interagency organization in Iraq ain’t working.
The mission should determine the supported/supporting relationships. The GWOT is more accurately described as a global counter-insurgency, which is a SF-e job. We can’t rapidly increase the number of Special Operators wihout decreasing quality, and that SOF and Infantry are not interchangeable. We need the 50# brains to figure out how the conventional forces can best support this effort and what changes needs to be made.
And you’e not going to get a fat old sailor like me to do much more than the minimum required number of pushups either.