Senator Lugar had a must read op-ed in yesterday’s Washingon Times discussing the need to improve civilian forces for the Long War.

Increasingly, the military is taking on roles once reserved for civilian agencies, such as building schools and clinics, drilling wells and conducting public information campaigns.

This shift did not come from any explicit or deliberate policy, rather it emerged from the reality that DoD has the money and the bodies. This is a sub-optimal policy, however, because…

…we need diplomats who can shape complex bilateral relationships, repair and build alliances and navigate through a labyrinth of foreign languages and cultures. We need foreign aid experts who know how best to promote democratic practices and economic development. And we need communication professionals to get our message across to foreign audiences.
These civilians are our best hope for defusing religious extremism and defeating international terrorism long-term. They are found in the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and other civilian agencies. The military’s encroachment into traditionally civilian activities risks blurring lines of authority and weakening the secretary of state’s lead role in foreign policy.
Worse, it could actually hurt our anti-terror efforts by giving too strong a military cast to our programs and policies, fueling suspicion and resentment overseas.

Sen. Lugar closes his op-ed with three policy recommendations.

Full authority for ambassadors. An ambassador is the personal representative of the president and must direct all U.S. government activities in-country. That means he or she must be consulted ahead of time on all planned U.S. military activities and programs, and must have authority to overrule the Pentagon when necessary.

AFRICOM’s emerging character already reflects this need to coordinate military action within diplomatic efforts.

One voice in foreign policy. All security assistance, like other foreign aid, should go through the secretary of state, who should rationalize and prioritize our many assistance programs according to the president’s strategic vision.

Of course, this requires an explicit grand strategy around which all of these elements of national power can be organized.

Match money to mission. Civilian foreign policy agencies get far less funding than they need. The administration should develop a comprehensive spending plan for robust diplomatic capability and assistance in every country important to our anti-terror campaign. Money should flow to the agencies with the expertise to accomplish the mission, rather than assigning the mission to whomever happens to have the money to pay for it.

Fixing these funding flows represents the logical final step in instantiating the grand strategy.

Great to see this.

By way of Armchair Generalist, this excellent passage from today’s LA Times:

Despite their known lethality, [IEDs] weren’t taken into account by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s program of military “transformation.” Indeed, Rumsfeld bequeathed the Army the Future Combat Systems, a $168-billion extravaganza of computers, sensors and robots deemed by its proponents so deadly to a foe that armor on U.S. military vehicles might be dispensed with altogether.

Such proponents seemed to take it on faith that information dominance could be so complete that situational awareness would replace armor. Reminds me of H.R. McMaster’s Crack in the Foundation: Defense Transformation and the Underlying Assumption of Dominant Knowledge in Future War

Once it became impossible to ignore the threat of all kinds of “home-made” bombs, and EFPs in particular, Rumsfeld responded in orthodox fashion by throwing money at the problem.

A “joint IED defeat” task force was created to address the issue, and last year it was granted $3.32 billion, but with little result. True, each Humvee patrolling Iraqi roads now carries two specially designed jammers, costing $100,000 apiece, that jam radio signals detonating roadside bombs. The other side has simply switched to wire detonators or infrared systems. One hundred towers spouting remote cameras, at $12 million each, watch main roads for bomb planters, with no improvement in attack and casualty statistics.

The first thing to do is decide how you will fight in the future. Skipping this step and jumping to technology incurs prohibitive costs without any comparable improvement in capability.

Had occasion today to re-read this excellent interview with Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper. I’ve highlighted some key passages and emphasized some points in bold.

The first thing you have to understand is how you plan to fight in the future or in a particular engagement, a particular war. And once you understand how you’re going to fight, then you bring the technology to it. If you lead with the technology, I think you’re bound to make mistakes.

When one leads with technology, one is left with an overly technical view of warfare that attempts (implicitly or explicitly) to understand an intelligent adversary through the decomposition analysis of system engineering.

Intelligent adversaries don’t work like that. Instead, they think like this:

If I had watched what happened in Afghanistan and was an enemy of the United States, there are a number of things I would have been concerned about. And I would have wanted to have prepared myself not to be affected by them.

First, of course, is precision-guided munitions. It’s clear that if the United States can locate you on the ground and identify you, its ability to take you out is pretty much above 80 or 90 percent. So how do I avoid being a target? There are a number of things you can do in terms of reducing your signatures or disguising who you are. If you had the means, for instance, you could bring the stealth technology that we’re familiar with in aircraft to equipment on the ground. It’s unlikely that anyone like Al Qaeda or the Taliban could do that, but some more modern enemies might.

If I couldn’t do things like that, then I would certainly spread out. I wouldn’t present a target in one location. I would take advantage of places where America’s technology doesn’t work: in the cellars of buildings or in caves, where some of this technology can’t see or identify me. So I would focus on how to reduce my signature and take away the Americans’ ability to surveil and have reconnaissance on my positions.

War is about adapting. Any potential enemy as well as we, the United States, if we didn’t adapt, learn, and evolve from our past experiences, we would be a species or a nation that would not survive. And any enemy that wants to survive against the United States can’t fight like some of our recent enemies have, or they won’t survive.

Anyone getting any Boyd tingles?

[Regarding Millennium Challenge] I had a great deal of concern about the ideas that they were experimenting with in this particular exercise. I say that because I didn’t think the ideas were intellectually worthy of being tested for that sort of money. Unfortunately, from where I sat, and I think I had a pretty good view, these ideas were never truly tested. Yet the conclusion drawn at the end of the exercise was that they had been and that they were worthy of adoption by our operating forces. I think they’re very shallow. They are fundamentally flawed. They have no true intellectual content. And yet they’re being, in my view, foisted on our operational commanders.

… I’m angered that, in a sense, $250 million was wasted. But I’m even more angry that an idea that has never been truly validated, that never really went through the crucible of a real experiment, is being exported to our operational forces to use.