EBO critics have been scoring some critical hits recently.

Zenpundit linked to an extremely potent four page essay by Dr. Tim Challans challenging the DoD’s vision of Effects-Basd Operations (EBO). InsideDefense.com posted an email from retired USMC Lt. Gen Paul van Riper to AF Lt. Gen. David Deptula concerning the incoherence of EBO (subscription required, sorry). Recall that Riper commanded the red forces in a notorious 2002 wargame where he savaged the EBO-focused blue forces… before the organizers reset the exercise, told him to “play by the rules” and declared the game a victory.

Two points from Riper’s email are so powerful that they bear repeating here. First, regarding complexity:

. . . neither [Deptula] nor Colonel Warden showed that they had any understanding of the differences between structurally complex systems — such as integrated air defense systems and power grids — and interactively complex systems — such as economic and leadership systems. Operational planners can understand the first using the reductionism of systems analysis. They can only understand the second type of system holistically. Tools for one type of system are inappropriate for the other.

Second, regarding EBO’s ignorance of maneuver warfare:

…by introducing the effects-approach you contributed, in my opinion, to a decades long undermining of the powerful and coherent professional lexicon created at some cost during the intellectual renaissance of the late 1970s and 1980s…
The dichotomy you build between those who support an attrition focused approach and an effects-based one is false. You apparently missed reading or understanding such seminal documents as the Army’s 1982 and 1986 editions of Field Manual 100-5, Operations or the Marine Corps’ 1988 Fleet Marine Force Field Manual 1, Warfighting. The latter document states on page 59; “. . . the aim in maneuver warfare is to render the enemy incapable of resisting by shattering his moral and physical cohesion–his ability to fight as an effective, coordinated whole–rather than to destroy him physically through incremental attrition, which is generally more costly and time consuming.” Contrast this with your words in Effects-Based Operations: Change in the Nature of Warfare:

‘Today, the permanence of the philosophies of attrition and annihilation tend to inhibit the development of organizations and doctrine that capitalize on effects-based operations that enable parallel war.’

I am unsure of who you think had or has this ‘permanence’ for attrition and annihilation. It certainly was and is not the mindset of the soldiers and Marines I have known over the past twenty years. Nor in recent years have I found many sailors or airmen with such a mindset.

EBO reeks of an overly-technical view of warfare. If it reflects that some folks have realized that annihilation is not necessary for incapacitation, then that’s great. But instead of trying to build their own doctrine from scratch, they ought to integrate this realization with the existing doctrine Riper cites. An existing doctrine, by the way, that recognizes that adversary systems (as a whole) are not the same as adversary infrastructure.

We can’t avoid or innovate away the need for strategic thinking in leaders. Technology, networks and the like ought to improve the tools available to those leaders, but ultimately success depends upon the strategic skill of our leaders. None of this is new - Wohlstetter (among others) was making this point fifty years ago. His 1954 SAC bomber study wasn’t influential because of its technical insight, it was influential because it was framed with an understanding of the fundamental strategic environment. He portrayed the Soviet armed forces as a thinking adversary, who had to be answered with more than OR optimizations. All conflict-worthy systems need this sort of robustness. Technology informs and amplifies, it does not rule.

UPDATE

I just finished reading Barnett’s latest Esquire article, “The Monks of War.” In it, Gen. Wallace enunciates a similar view of technology’s role in warfare:

“I think that those of us that have been in the fight, we recognize that the technical solutions only enable the individual solder and small unit to do his business a little bit better… there aren’t any precision-guided squads.”

The Army and the Marines get it; they’re the ones living the reality on the ground. Wallace, Mattis and Petraeus aren’t talking about EBO, they’re talking about countering and out-innovating the enemy.