In the same vein as USNS Mercy’s tour in the Pacific last year, and USS Peleiu’s current deployment, USNS Comfort is heading to Central and South American on a humanitarian and medical aid mission.

Demonstrating the hybrid character of SysAdmin work, the mission requires coordination between DoD, DoS and NGO personnel:

Planners from the Navy and the State Department have been meeting at each of the host nations to determine where the ship might stop and what services it can offer, sometimes in cooperation with non-government organizations with permanent operations there.

Resources like the Comfort are having less warfighting relevence, while their soft power relevence is increasing.

Designed to support combat troops, the Comfort has seen limited wartime service because of the advanced medical centers the U.S. Army and the Marines have built on land in Iraq. The vessel deployed to New York after the 2001 terrorist attacks and to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, but it arrived after the worst of the crises had passed and never needed its full medical capability, causing some to question its utility.

“People were saying, ‘Why do they need the hospital ships? What purpose do they serve?’” said Navy Capt. Bruce R. Boynton, commander of the ship’s 1,000-bed medical facility. “But what we’ve seen is they can be a very, very powerful platform for projecting America’s goodwill.”

“Obviously we’re going to have an immediate effect on some people’s lives, but I think the real impact will be measured after we leave, in six months to a year from now,” Kapcio said. “Hopefully we’ll be able to show that we’re committed to the region and committed to lasting relationships in the region.”

Read the whole thing.

Over the weekend, I finally had the chance to sit down with John Robb’s Brave New War. While I have precious little to offer to improve upon the reviews offered by others, I still want some record of this important book to show up on my blog.

As one who has been following Robb’s blogs for several years now, I was already familiar with his thinking on the intersection of open source warfare, system disruption attacks and the global black market. I have long wished for a one-stop summary of his work to introduce it to friends and colleagues. Brave New War offers a compelling overview of these concepts, making it a welcome and sorely needed addition to the current strategic dialogue.

One aspect of Robb’s work that particularly stands out after encountering all of these concepts side-by-side is its cross-disciplinary character. Robb links subjects from network theory, law, economics, military theory, history, and complexity to create a compelling picture of how globalization creates new tactical and operational opportunities for small group of insurgent or guerrilla actors.

Brave New War addresses some of the most vexing characteristics of our current conflict with an unflinching and refreshingly clear vision. It should be required reading for professionals in national security, international relations, global business, law enforcement and international development, and is valuable reading for informed citizens.

Throughout the book, Robb’s training in red team thinking comes through clearly and can, at points, lead one to feel as if our adversaries possess an insurmountable advantage. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since our path is by no means an easy one and we need to have a firm understanding of the challenges. It can also lead to dispair, however. At least it did for me, until I reached the quiet realization that these challenges would be even greater if John Robb’s talents were not on our side. I take a certain comfort in that.

Lieutenant Commander Ryan Ramsey, on exchange from the Royal Navy, offers an excellent examination of what our priorities need to be for command and control (C2). LCDR Ramsey’s thesis is that the new generation of warfighters needs to practice Mission Command because

The force who capitalizes on developing intuitive leadership and decision making at the unit level will have an advantage against any adversary and enhance the overall operational warfighting effort and strategic effect.

Many of the current challenges that get categorized as C2 technology problems actually stem from issues in how we assume C2 should operate.

We are in danger of not being able to keep up with the current pace of warfare. This is not because we do not have the correct technology, more that we are not focusing it correctly.

We do not need more intricate data flows to be able to out-innovate 4GW/GG insurgents. Rather, we need simplier command structures that leave subordinates the freedom to address the challenges at hand within a strategic context set by the commander. This is not a new argument - it has been true for centuries - but it demonstrates once again why we must reverse the trend of the past few decades during which:

C2 has evolved from its origins of providing direction and guidance and support to those intellectuals leading at the front line to a self-consuming process continually requiring the decision-making process to move up the chain of command.

At first I was surprised to hear these points being made by a submariner, since they are a community who has markedly less direct contact with the guerilla adversaries, system disruptions and ungoverned regions that characerize our current conflicts. Then, however, LCDR Ramsey pointed out why submariners are particularly sensitive to issues of Mission Command:

The submarine was almost the last bastion of junior leaders being allowed to conduct warfare with autonomy. Other disciplines had already been provided with constant reach-back and reciprocating continual supervision. Submarine commanders were charged with making decisions capitalizing on extensive training and warfare knowledge. …I maintain that by ensuring that teams are trained correctly that you can reduce the amount of reporting and the method to do this is to adopt Mission Command…

LCDR Ramsey refocuses the discussion of C2 away from its technical minutae (such as reducing the problem of situational awareness to fusion algorithms and dynamic networking capabilities) and reminds us of its fundamental purpose: “C2 is the method of transitioning force strategy to the tactical level.” One of the consequences of this perspective is that it brings back in all of the non-technical aspects of situational awareness - for example, understanding the enemy.

We are not effective at knowing our enemy. Not knowing our enemy at an early enough stage in the engagement increases the burden on both sides of the C2 structure as the come to understand them. This was a common theme in the early part of this century and remains so today, particularly as the potential threat database is huge; therefore few of us invested effort in understanding our enemy. This is probably the most important process within operational planning and can ensure that at the unit level it is understood how effect can be achieved on the enemy vice the strategic impact.

This error has been made on strategic levels as well. Furthermore, many efforts to improve C2 have reduced this challenge of understanding the enemy to an activity on a business process diagram that simply says “conduct effects-based assessment,” as if a piece of equipment or software will arrive some day to do that for us. In fact, the effort necessary to truly understand a specific adversary is one of the most irreduciable elements of strategic art that we ask our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines to engage in.

A similar error exists in how we have been engaging junior officers in strategic decision-making.

Continuous superior interference in subordinate level decision-making will also have the effect of rendering subordinate commanders inexperienced in dealing with the challenges that arise.

Instead of articulating a clear strategy to a subordinate and allowing him or her to develop experience dealing with the challenges that arise from instantiating that strategy, this excessive interference leaves junior officers “less capable of decision making as we are forced to pass the decisions up the chain of command because the capability exists.”

In fact, some of the criticisms of the current general officers may stem from systemic flaws in how those officers were trained:

Senior Officers have to learn at some point during their career before they become senior officers, and yet the vehicles to achieve this are not yet in place. Many junior officers are not aware of current doctrine, how national security decisions are made and how they are executed; rather they expect to receive orders and act on them. This level of knowledge is rarely sought until much later in an officers career structure, and then it is slightly too late. If the junior leadership of today is not provided with the opportunity to understand the strategy, relying on C2 to do that for them, they will not be able to exercise command in the next generation of warfare.

Again, the danger of a technology-centric perspective is that challenges of judgement, experience and warfighting art can be offloaded to C2 systems with the implicit assumption that they can do that for us. This, of course, moves us in a direction 180 degrees from where we ought to be going. Our goal needs to be reducing the C2 we need.

Nelson’s ability to be successful in battle was based on the ability to understand the information provided to him, provide succinct guidance delegation and trusting his captains. Decision-making involves judgment and no machine has yet to achieve this core skill to the level required to engage in the art of warfighting.

A WaPo article in yesterday’s paper examines a CRS report on AFRICOM and offers some excellent illustrations of how this new COCOM reflects the accelerating shift away from major combat operations.

At a briefing last month after a trip to six African countries, Ryan Henry, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, told reporters: “We discussed different mission areas . . . emphasizing the humanitarian, the building partnership capability, [and] civil affairs aspects.” He said he discussed working “with the host nations to improve their capacity to exercise sovereignty over any ungoverned spaces” where terrorists could establish training bases.

…Fear that it could represent a first step toward more U.S. troops in Africa led Henry to assure African leaders that the “principal mission will be in the area of security cooperation and building partnership capability. It will not be in warfighting.”

In many ways, then, AFRICOM could well be the first COCOM to implement the priorities of DoD 3000 to such a degree that the majority of its resources will be devoted to non-major combat operations.

Of course, demonstrating this to others will be a challenge, which motivates making a large percentage of the command non-military:

…a State Department civilian official is to be one of the two deputy commanders of AFRICOM, though that official would not be in the chain of command on military operations, according to the CRS report. In addition, more than one-third of AFRICOM headquarters personnel would be from outside the Pentagon. Defense officials told CRS that “the new command will seek greater interagency coordination with the State Department, USAID and other government agencies,” according to the report.

Ultimately, the issues of how to align DoD economic assistance with USAID and DoS efforts will lead to such capabilities being moved out of DoD, but this will not happen until the capability has grown further and there is a more general understanding of its importance.

On a similar note to Feinberg’s op-ed the other day, TCS ran a hard-hitting article by James Joyner and John Burgess discussing the challenges created when DoS and stability operations collide.

The entire article is worth reading, especially because it ties in references to topics, like 4GW and Tom Barnett, that are near and dear to the heart of our little corner of the strategic blogspace.

Marine Colonel T.X. Hammes points out that a truism of 4th Generation Warfare is that “if the government is not succeeding, the insurgents are getting stronger.” That means the government and its coalition partners must quickly get a handle on security and ensure that there is a functioning economic infrastructure. In cases like Iraq, where a regime has been toppled, this will mean training and reforming not just police and security forces but also the court and prison system, banking, currency, customs, public health, business regulation, and taxation.

This is all well beyond the capability of even a highly educated military. Much more needs to be done to augment the military force with help from the State Department and other agencies. One model is the PRTs working in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have done this sort of thing on a smaller scale. They combine coalition and local military, indigenous government agencies, and NGOs and deploy them all as a team. By producing concrete improvements, they foster trust which in turn leads to crucial intelligence. As Robert Kaplan puts it in his book Imperial Grunts, they create “influence without the stigma of occupation.”

Joyner and Burgess discuss some of the challenges that reformers need to overcome while addressing this root problem:

The solution will be in a new and very specialized, cross-trained group populated by young, educated, smart, and (mostly) unmarried men and women who will be willing to go into harm’s way with some belief that they will survive it while accomplishing their missions. The issue of incentives to join just a group will be tendentious. The pay scales for combat troops and FSOs are already wide. But uncompensated, there is no logical reason for FSOs to volunteer for jobs that present immediate threats to their lives. Even within State, a cadre that receives supplemental salaries is problematic. This is currently done in special categories such as legal counsel, doctors, etc. Extending the categories, however, is something Congress, the Pentagon, and the unions will want to consider carefully.

I am heartened to see a growing critical mass of experts with professional experience working on the solution set for the seam between war and peace. Whether Joyner and Burgess’s precise vision of a pistol-packing foreign service officer is the right way to go is less important (for now) than the fact that they are part of a movement that recognizes the problem, recognizes the scale of change needed (their comparison to Goldwater-Nichols is particularly apt) and is thinking creatively about solutions. We need to find a way to get these FSO skill sets into the unstable regions where they are needed. Part of the solution needs to be a new perspective on risk. Part of the solution needs to be new security arrangements.

For all our discussion of DoD reform, it may end appearing insignificant compared to the scale of DoS reform for the Long War.

Bill Gertz reports an example of expediency driving threat assessments:

Moves to gut NASIC could also be coming from the National Reconnaissance Office, which has opposed NASIC’s threat analysis of growing space-weapons dangers and sought threat assessments from contractors. The NRO, which builds and operates military spy satellites, has sought to play down the growing threat to its “birds” in space and is now facing the danger that by 2010, China could destroy all low Earth orbit satellites in a series of strikes, effectively blinding the military.

“The NRO prefers [and rewards its contractors] for threats that are in sync their corporate plans,” the official said. “NASIC has been providing threat information to the NRO for over 10 years, and over the last four to five years many of NASIC threat analyses have caused a great deal of anxiety at the NRO.”

Excellent article from WSJ examining oil disruptions in Kirkuk. Lots of connections for John Robb.

The holes help explain why, four years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq hasn’t been able to match its prewar crude production levels of 2.5 million barrels a day. This year, Iraq is averaging 1.9 million barrels, mostly from southern oil fields that haven’t suffered the unrelenting sabotage seen in the North. Kirkuk currently produces 180,000 barrels of oil a day, but under normal conditions it could produce an additional 400,000 barrels a day. At current market prices, that would bring Iraq up to $20 million of revenue a day. Projected over an entire year, this additional income would amount to about one-fifth of Iraq’s current annual budget of $32 billion.

An interesting angle here is that current smugglers may be building upon smuggling networks built by Saddam:

International smuggling of crude was perfected under Mr. Hussein, who sought to bypass export quotas imposed under the United Nations’ oil-for-food program by orchestrating illicit exports to Turkey, Jordan, Syria and across the Persian Gulf. U.S. officials believe that modern-day smugglers may be taking advantage of the old networks.

One sobering fact that particularly struck me: one stretch of the main pipeline used to export oil from northern Iraq only pumped oil for 43 days of the last six months of 2006.

Also, in the first five months of 2007, one pipeline has been broken into 39 times.

Has anyone seen an analysis of how much potential oil production has been lost due to Venezuela’s underinvestment, MEND’s attacks in Nigeria and these disruptions in Iraq? I’d guess that these three regions alone would account for several million barrels per day.

Richard Feinberg writes a strong op-ed in today’s WaPo, advocating for a more expeditionary foreign service. Citing the problems that fortified embassies and excessive security pose to the work of public diplomacy, intelligence gathering and soft power projection, Feinberg states that DoS simply has to accept more risk if its officers are going to do their jobs.

Yes, it’s a dangerous world, but so is policing our own cities, and we do not suggest that police officers remain barricaded behind their precinct walls. Just the opposite: We now instruct law enforcement officers to walk the streets in their communities, believing that this is the best long-term approach to improving relations with citizens and, ultimately, reducing risk to the officers themselves.

Nor will it ever be possible to eliminate risk for overseas assignments, and attempts to do so become ever more expensive and self-defeating. The only foolproof way to eliminate risk to our diplomats is to bring them home. Better to restore a more considered balance between absolute security and diplomatic effectiveness — and for the nation to recognize that diplomats, no less than soldiers, accept a degree of risk when they enlist.

The comparison to law enforcement officers is apt because it is the one that the military is recognizing. In COIN, law enforcement and stabilization scenarios, force protection is all about personal relationships and understanding the environment. All too often, the term “force protection” seems to be used as a synonym for “body armor,” “barricades,” “mine resistant vehicles,” or “fortifications.” But such forms of protection, as the conflict in Iraq demonstrates, cannot protect against adaptive enemies and can actually impeed other forms of force protection (such as building trusting relationships with local VIPs or learning to feel when things just aren’t right).

Or, Denzel Washington’s character puts it in Training Day,

Alonzo: Roll that window down first.
[Jake rolls down window]
Alonzo: You gotta see the streets. You gotta feel it. You gotta smell it, you gotta taste the streets. How’s your Espanol?
Jake: Uh, mas o menos.
Alonzo: Learn that shit, brother. That shit’ll get you killed. These motherfuckers out there be plotting all types of shit on you.

Alonzo isn’t rolling around LA in an M-1 trying to talk to crackheads through a computer because he doesn’t speak Spanish. This is Feinberg’s point. Doing the job means feeling the streets in foreign and possibly dangerous cities. Since this means that more US diplomats will be killed overseas, he even offers a script for how the secretary of state should respond:

Our professional diplomats are soldiers in the 21st-century battles for information and ideas. They embody our nation’s identity and values. In their service to our country, every day in every major city of the world, they bravely place themselves in harm’s way. We will not let our enemies win by driving us into self-isolation. Those valiant diplomats that fall in the line of duty do so with glory, for honor and the homeland.

The only modification I would make would be to change the tense in the second to last sentence from the future perfect to the simple present: “We do not let our enemies win by driving us into self-isolation.” Maybe more awkward, but I like the implication that we are already not allowing our enemies to drive us into self-isolation and we aren’t about to change that. Gets away from the weakness of bureaucratic prose, where the passive voice and constant assersions of future success dodge the messy questions of who will make those goals reality and how they will do it. It makes clear that the time to do something about the challenge is right now, and that how we deal with this moment can either be a strong reinforcement of our strength or a weak withdrawl towards defeat.

In an article that ties together many of the themes I’ve tracked here at OSD, we get a profile of the USS Peleliu, which is reported to be the first US warship to embark on a purely humanitarian mission.

The amphibious assault ship represents a superior soft-power projection platform. The carrier may have ruled the waves of WWII for force projection in major combat operations at sea, but the amphibious assault ship rules the SysAdmin mission.

Using a government/non-government collaboration to fill the needed skill sets, the Peleiu’s “crew and medical staff [are] drawn partly from civilian charities…such as Project HOPE, the Aloha Medical Mission and dental students from the University of California San Diego.” This crew, combined with the medical capabilities of the Peleiu, will allow the medical staff to treat ten times as many patients as a typical tour would be able to.

While the doctors are treating minor medical ailments, Navy construction battalions will build or repair local clinics and water systems.

While some analysts like Norman Polmar and James Jay Carafano criticize the mission as lacking in military benefit and a waste of activty duty personnel, this use of the Peleiu is a direct result of the reasoning in DoD 3000:

The military’s aid missions didn’t become official policy until Nov. 30, 2005. At the time, acting Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England signed a directive ordering the armed forces to make stability operations – Pentagon lingo for postwar or post-disaster nation-building – a “core mission.”

England largely wanted to make sure that U.S. military forces knew how to plan and carry out reconstruction work of the kind needed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is military value in building these skills and there is a critical national security need - in addition to the moral imperative - for this capability. That is why having a bureaucratic document like DoDD 3000 is so important: you don’t have to reargue this issue every time an idea like this arises.

And, just as Barnett has said, our military enjoys the SysAdmin mission:

The excitement grew this week as the Peleliu’s sailors loaded supplies for their deployment.

“I prefer to do this kind (of mission),” said Petty Officer 3rd Class Hector Camarino, 26, of Brawley. “It makes you feel good. You get a warm, fuzzy feeling.”

A much belated sharing of some of my latest blog finds. I’ve been tracking my blogs using Bloglines for a while now, so these haven’t shown up on my blogroll.

I Am Net-Centric offers good material on NCW. That the title always makes me want to exclaim “My wife and I are both Net-Centric!” a la Life of Brian, is a nice fringe benefit.

FAS runs an infrequently updated but heavy-hitting Strategic Security Blog, focusing on issues of arms control and weapons proliferation.

DEW Line gives great material on military acquisitions and procurement.

That’s it!