Week 3. 13 – 17 April
Monday 13 April: Application of Strategic Theory and Global Integration
The first lesson of the week builds upon the strategic concepts I introduced to the seminar the previous week. The application of strategic theory is a discussion on the competencies of strategic thinking. These include critical thinking, creative thinking, systems thinking, ethical thinking, and thinking in time.
For thinking in time, I once again recommend to the seminar Richard Neustadt’s book Thinking In Time. I discuss how within every planning team, there is someone who raises a comparison or uses an analogy comparing a previous operation or crisis to the problem at hand. The author of the book recommends building a simple chart to display the similarities and differences between the historical example and the current problem set. More often than not, there are more differences than similarities.
The second part of the discussion moves to national interests. I play a short clip of Representative Bachmann speaking about Libya and national interests in 2011, and a second clip of President Clinton speaking on national interests in Somalia. Politics aside, the videos serve as a moment of reflection on the term “vital national interest,” and sparks a discussion on what is vital and what is not. We layer national interests into four broad categories: 1) Survival 2) Vital 3) Important 4) Peripheral. These broad labels assist in how a strategist and planner can think about prioritization of efforts, capabilities and resources towards a problem. Where the labeling of national interests and global integration come together is through this prioritization.
Tuesday 14 April: Strategic and Operational Risk and Theater Assessment
Risk is always a fun discussion. I open the class with a short Seinfeld clip to gain their attention. We talk about strategic and operational risk by first explaining the difference between the two. We come to the agreement that strategic risk is that which affects the United States, and is inherent upon the President or the Secretary of Defense to assume. Strategic risk is more than lives and money, and can include risk to an alliance, risk to national prestige, or even risk to global and regional stability. On the other side of the coin is operational risk. This risk is incumbent upon Combatant Commanders to assume. Typically we break operational risk into the two components of risk to force and risk to mission.
We then discuss the ideas of the 3-legged stool, and how risk is the imbalance of ends, ways, and means. Further, we talk about how planners can avoid mitigating risk by only thinking about and applying more means (troops, money, equipment, and technology) to the problem. It’s not easy, and telling a senior leader to reduce their desired ends is a hard conversation that planners must be prepared to present. Moreover, mitigating risk implies prioritization of capabilities, as we discussed the previous day.
In the afternoon is our lesson on theater assessment. Assessment is paramount to any operation, from the firing of artillery at the tactical (think Battle Damage Assessment /BDA), to the training of a local security force at the operational level. To begin the discussion I play a quick video of the failures of battlefield assessment in the Vietnam War. This short video leads to some story telling in the class based on our own experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I lead off the storytelling by describing the ridiculous Transition Readiness Assessments (TRAs) that tactical units performed on the Iraq Army and Iraqi Police Forces. These flawed assessments were ridiculous, and it was obvious to leaders performing the mission at the tactical level. I will drop in a couple of quotes from The U.S. Army in the Iraq War Volume 1 and Volume 2.
“It was the reverse of body count. It was not the number of guys who we’re killing; it was the number of guys you were training,. Just like a body count that does not really tell you whether you are achieving your operational or strategic goals. The training body count, how many guys are in the ISF does not tell you anything about your strategic or operational objectives and how well you are doing towards achieving them.”
“No rating in the assessment explored the important subjective questions of readiness to fight, and unit cohesiveness. Only 1 of the 15 questions addressed training., and it assessed the percentage of mission essential tasks on which a unit was proficient.”
“as a transition team worked with an Iraqi unit, they would chart the unit’s steady progress, showing its development over the length of their deployment. When the next team arrived, with little basis to judge unit capabilities other than their own experience with the U.S. Army, they would be appalled at the state of the Iraqi Army, and the Iraqi unit ratings would plummet overnight.”
“For a document that emphasized Iraqi independence,…there was little actual input from Iraqis, a fact not lost on Iraqis.”
Even worse in our assessments was the continued counting of hours of electricity, and other random measures of effectiveness and measures of performance to track progress. Most of it was meaningless drivel. I still hold a lot of anger over this. It was so obvious to anyone at the tactical level, yet so many at the operational and strategic level did not get it.
Wednesday 15 April: Discussion on Energy Security and Understanding Strategic Guidance
We spend the first 30 minutes of class discussing a video they watched last night. When we have the course in residence, one of our best speakers for the college is Dr. Sebonis Helf. She speaks on the topc of energy security. I’ve heard her pitch to the class multiple times, and still sit in on each session. As we moved the curriculum online, we had the students watch a video of a previous talk.
Following our discussion on energy, I inform the class that they are now part of a Combatant Command Staff, specifically, the USAFRICOM staff. In the previous week, we introduced the students to various national strategic guidance (NSS, NDS, NMS, etc..). Today, I split the seminar into three working groups and have each group examine specific documents to pull relevant guidance to our fictional / instructional USAFRICOM.
Understanding strategic guidance from the combatant command perspective is essential, but not as simple as copy and paste from the documents. Strategic guidance comes out at intermittent times, and does not always reflect the current situation. Strategic guidance can be ambiguous, contradictory, and at times irrelevant. For example, on February 1st, 2017, the 2015 National Security Strategy was not as germane to combatant commanders as it was on January 1st 2017. Our elected leaders change every 2, 4, and 6 years, and political appointees who help shape strategic direction can change at a faster pace. The worldviews of General H.R. McMaster and Ambassador Josh Bolton don’t exactly line up, just as the worldviews of Secretary Mattis and Secretary Esper are not one-to-one matches. Students must think critically about the strategic direction and national security documents they read and implement.
Thursday 16 April: We continue the discussion on strategic guidance.
Friday 17 April: Introduction to the Interagency, International Organizations, and Non-governmental Organizations
To close out the week, the seminar examines the various organizations that a joint force commander can expect to see in their operating environment.
Week 4. 20 – 24 April
Monday 20 April: Understanding the AOR and Operational Environment
Beginning this morning, students in the seminars pitched a short brief on the country they researched in our USAFRICOM Lite Area of Responsibility. These short overviews then combined to build a larger picture of the AOR. The seminar built a comprehensive description that included each element of PMESI. Moreover, the description includes the various state actors and non-state actors that are physical in and outside of the AOR. This task by itself can quickly overwhelm the class as they struggle to narrow down their analysis to a couple of paragraphs. This aspect challenges the students to start thinking critically about the information they gather, and to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Tuesday 21 April: Explaining the Story and the Strategic Estimate
I began the day by offering the class a different way of looking at the operational approach, and how it relates to our course flow. Often, we are mired in the daily grind, and leave off or forget the larger picture of what we are doing.
“Leaders Don’t Make Decisions from Data, They Make Decisions from the Story you Tell”
I like to explain the operational approach as a way of writing and telling a story. You begin by thinking about the end of the story, and how the good guy will win. We derive this ending to our story form higher-level strategic guidance such as the National Security Strategy, Defense Strategy, Military Strategy, the Joint Strategic Campaign Plan, and the contingency Planning Guidance.
The Operational Approach is the Story. Commanders make decisions from the story the staff tells them, and rarely from the date the staff presents
We then move to the beginning of the story where the author sets the scene and introduces the various characters that will interact in the rest of the story. This is the current environment where we talk about friendly forces, enemy forces, the terrain, and the environment. I then tell them to ensure that the beginning of the story has continuity with the ending. If a gun appears in the opening scene, it needs to be there at the end.
I see the problem statement as the villain of the story. The problem is what is preventing us from getting from where we are now to where we want to be.
Lines of Effort, and other elements of operational design (objectives, effects, decisive points, decision points, etc..) then fill out the middle of the story, and are what get the characters to the end of the story.
Wednesday 22 April: We continue work on the strategic estimate. The estimate, which the students must complete is strait out of Joint Publication 5-0, page B-2.
Thursday 23 April: Guest Speaker and The Problem Statement
The exciting part of today was a morning presentation by our Guest Speaker Gregg Easterbrook. Gregg is the author of multiple books that cover everything from football, to fiction, to national security topics. I asked him to present the themes of his recent book It’s Better Than It Looks, as a way to think differently about today’s global and operational environment. The theme of the discussion centered on how life today, (despite COVID-19), is better than at any other point in history. From life expectancy, to fewer state-on-state wars, to empowerment of women, the world is simply better today. However, this does not mean the world is perfect, nor does it mean there is not more to be done in terms of equality, global warning, or any other contemporary issue that we face. The conversation was engaging, and I like to think pushed the students outside of their comfort zone.
I mentioned this in my last post, and I want to say again that the online classroom gives more flexibility to bringing in guest speakers. There is no cost for travel, lodging, and no need to coordinate for access to the military instillation if the speaker is a civilian. It is as simple as sending a link. Moreover, I can bring in speakers who normally would be too busy to speak in person. All I have to do is ask.
In the afternoon, I discuss with the seminar the ways to develop a problem statement. I begin with a short clip from a favorite television show of mine Lost. Locke’s description of Michelangelo staring at a hunk of marble is the perfect description of why we need to spend time thinking and reflecting on a problem, rather than just jumping right into a solution, or into a course of action. If you get the problem wrong, chances are you will spend more time, effort, money, and lives cleaning up the mess than you are accomplishing the mission.
Thinking through a problem statement should be more than a small group of planners throwing down a paragraph on the whiteboard followed by a bunch of wordsmithing. The scaffolding of a good problem statement comes from identifying tensions between the current conditions and the desired conditions (or endstate). Further, understanding what the proximate cause and the root cause of the current situation is paramount. I then ask them to break up the problem statement into three component parts, 1) the ideal, or the desired conditions, 2) the reality, or the current trends and path we are on, and 3) the consequences of not solving the problem, or why this problem matters.
Friday 24 April: The Operational Approach and the Problem Statement
We continue class this morning a by continuing our discussion of the problem statement, and thinking through how we will develop the operational approach. We do this by looking at the end state, and then developing intermediate military objectives (IMOs) or way-points on our path to the end state. We can then group the IMOs in time and space to flush out what our Lines of Effort (LOEs) will be.
Reflections
Overall, the class is progressing better than I expected. I could sense a little burn out by the end of the week, as sitting behind a desk in the house for a couple hours a day can become exhausting.
The addition of guest speakers every other week seems to break up a bit of the monotony, but I have to balance this addition with the time it consumes from the students. As any military faculty or instructor from the basic training drill sergeant to the war college professor will tell you, the syllabus is a zero sum game. If you want to add something in, be it a speaker, or a reading, you need to take something out.
Taking the time, every couple of days to remind students of how what they are doing fits into a larger picture is paramount to the seminar. Students can become lost in the details of their assignments, and lose track of “the why.” The use of the story analogy within the operational approach seemed to help, and I plan to continue with that technique as I continue to teach other courses.
Building small group or OPT rooms on Blackboard (areas where students can collaborate), is working well. The use of OPT rooms allows students to conduct small group work, and then reconvene in the seminar room to brief their products. In the physical classroom, we tend to mix up the groups each day, but when delivering online, we are sticking with the same three OPTs to reduce friction. Each time students change groups and have to collaborate after the seminar synch session, it requires gathering new emails, phone numbers, and figuring out the best times to meet (we have students in four different time zones from California to Belgium).
During our guest speaker presentation, the director of JCWS listened in on the group. I asked him to say a couple words at the conclusion of the presentation to the students. He was kind enough to speak, and to thank the seminar for their flexibility during the COVID-19 pandemic. In my view, this was important for the students to hear from him.
In war, a commander’s place is at the front. To paraphrase Donn Starry, you don’t have to be leading the charge with your sword drawn, but you have to be there. This aspect of leadership is not limited to operational units, but applies to institutional forces and professional military education all the same. I welcome senior leadership into the classroom, be it online or in the face-to-face physical classroom.