You can find more details, and possibly even access, some of the articles here (the uncertainty being that the site is currently down).

This quotation from early on in the report is quite representative:

The growing frequency and significance of operations amid populations suggests a regular—rather than rare—need for U.S. military forces to be able to gain control of situations, perform their tasks, and protect themselves without using deadly force. Although nonlethal options have long been essential in law-enforcement missions, in which ensuring public safety with minimum violence is stock-in-trade, they have been regarded by the military as having only limited utility in only exceptional circumstances. … Although foreign insurgents present dangers exceeding those that police face in American cities, U.S. military forces could remedy a major shortcoming they face in COIN and other important missions if they had nonlethal capabilities that could produce a range of effects and the skills to use them. Such options would offer typical small units more flexibility, self-sufficiency, and speed; less risk of making mistakes with wide political repercussions; and better odds of accomplishing their missions.

As the report also makes clear, the distinction between lethal and non-lethal is itself too crude, as it implies that everything below the threshold of lethality can be grouped together. This simplistic notion is pushed aside in the report, which instead argues for a continuum of non-lethal to lethal force, and with the understanding that even if a weapon does not kill, its unintelligent use can still have devastating consequences for a force operating with transient legitimacy and limited public support:

“Pain, shock, or injury may turn a crowd into a mob, a mob into a confrontation, or a confrontation into a cause célèbre that can fuel insurgency. Therefore, the ability to calibrate nonlethal force from none to mild to moderate to intense can be as important as simply not causing death. The need is for a continuum of force.”

The challenge is knowing and deciding which intensity of force to use when and where, so the problem is still fundamentally a human one. There is, in other words, no technological fix here, but nonetheless an appreciation that when military operations are conducted among populations whose support or at least acquiescence is necessary, it behooves the relevant armed forces to develop more options than simply ‘inactivity’ or ‘death’. It is intriguing to me that after years operating in urban environments – in Iraq, to a lesser degree in Afghanistan, but also throughout the 1990s – these issues have not attracted more attention.

You can read the rest of this report here.

As a final thought, I wonder whether it is at all coincidental that this report was commissioned by the Office of the Secretary of Defence, rather than by the Army.

Reviewed by David H. Ucko

In A Question of Command, Mark Moyar argues that “counterinsurgency is a ‘leader-centric’ warfare,… in which the elite with superiority in certain leadership attributes usually win” (p. 3). These leadership attributes are gleaned through nine historical case-studies: initiative, flexibility, creativity, judgment, empathy, charisma, sociability, dedication, integrity, and organization. Moyar argues that, together, they produce the ideal counterinsurgency commander and, more forcefully, that it is the quality of leadership that determines the outcome of any counterinsurgency campaign.

Moyar helpfully underlines the importance of good leadership and the demands placed on a commander in counterinsurgencies. The case-studies are thoroughly researched and engaging. Moyar also strays beyond the over-cultivated campaigns of Malaya and Vietnam to explore settings rarely seen in the counterinsurgency literature, such as the American Civil War and the Reconstruction of the South. Throughout, Moyar illustrates how good leaders, and the sacking of bad leaders, has made the difference. A forceful conclusion is that raising security forces is not a numbers game: host-nation forces require competent commanders to have a positive effect. In the conclusion, Moyar usefully elaborates on the leadership practices derived from his case-studies and indicates how these lessons may be used, today and tomorrow.

The case-studies emphasize the role of leadership far above the conflicts’ political context. This is perhaps unsurprising, as Moyar argues that “major social, economic, or political changes” have ‘historically had much less impact’ on a conflict’s outcome than leadership (p. 4). At times, however, the analysis appears slanted to prove this contention. Progress, at any level, denotes good leadership; upsets, or good decisions implemented badly, mean poor leadership; and if the counterinsurgents are failing, it is because they are “still held back by a shortage of good leaders” (p. 181). Ultimately, the explanatory power of ‘leadership’ depends on its definition. Yet as the leaders in A Question of Command range from heads-of-state, senior officials and corps commanders to lieutenant-colonels and captains, the conclusions drawn lack precision. Leadership explains everything, but also nothing.

The somewhat forced focus on leadership, not as an important factor, but as the decisive variable in the outcome of campaigns, also sidelines counterinsurgency’s intensely political nature. The chapter on El Salvador, for example, ascribes the outcome there to leadership factors yet barely mentions the critical role played by the Cold War’s passing. Also, a solution in El Salvador was not to be found purely in professionalizing the military, but by addressing a century-long history of socio-economic bifurcation, requiring the ‘negotiated revolution’ of the Chapultepec process (and even then, the results were uneven). Similarly, Gen. Templer was an exemplary leader in Malaya, and good commanders helped defeat the guerrillas there, but absent an appropriate strategy, these examples of superior leadership would mean little: critical in this instance was the British willingness to leave Malaya and the formation of a new Malaysian state in which ethnic Malay and Chinese populations could coexist. Here and elsewhere, the political essence of counterinsurgency loses out to overly personalized stories of individual leadership, important and fascinating though they may be.

This brings us to Moyar’s theory of leadership, where detail is regrettably lacking. If the ten leadership attributes are truly the winning formula behind counterinsurgencies across time and space, some elaboration might have been useful. Why exactly ten attributes? Why not ‘decisiveness’, ‘boldness’, ‘courage’ or ‘intelligence’? What constitutes a leader and how are we to understand the effects of leadership when good leaders coexist with bad ones? Moyar snipes at the Army for being less adaptive than the Marine Corps, yet provides no indication of how these services deal differently with leadership issues. How does the recent FM 6-22, Army Leadership, play into the debate? Space that might usefully have been allocated to these questions is instead devoted to historical case-studies, which, for their richness, do little to justify the categoricalness of the ten leadership attributes listed in the introduction.

Moyar’s book might have been narrower, focusing on the development and shared characteristics of counterinsurgency commanders, both American and foreign. Such a focus would have greatly added to the literature, without necessitating the bold claims of newness that accompany the elaboration of ‘leader-centric’ warfare. Yet Moyar does not seek to add to the literature but to displace it. He effectively challenges the emphasis in FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, on “social and economic programs” as “counterinsurgency tools” (p. 283). Too often, however, the critique disappoints, as it misconstrues current doctrine. Moyar claims that FM 3-24 sees security forces being used “only to protect the population from exploitation” (p. 3), when it really envisages a full range of military and civilian tasks. He claims that ‘recent theorists’ believe that ‘counterinsurgents should use as little force as possible’ (p.2), when the language in FM 3-24 and elsewhere is consistently of employing appropriate levels of force. Moyar finally plucks one sentence from FM 3-24’s appendix regarding outreach to women, and uses it to deride the manual’s softness and naïve devotion to do-goodism. In the same spirit, Moyar presents a thinly veiled and inadequately defended faith in the use of overwhelming force, approvingly citing one commander’s advice that ‘the more violent you seem and the more scared they [the population] are, they more they cooperate’ (p. 245). In absence of greater elaboration, this challenge to the extant ‘consensus’, such as it is, is a step backward rather than forward. In fact, Moyar’s ‘leader-centric’ approach to counterinsurgency can readily justify a return to an ‘enemy-centric’ paradigm rather than create a new one.

Moyar provides a useful illustration of the challenges of leadership and of developing leaders for counterinsurgency. Its historical analysis is valuable, though occasionally slanted; the author’s phrasing when he tells us he is out “to find supporting evidence from a wide range of cases” may be unintentionally revealing (p. 3). As an exposition of new counterinsurgency theory, or as a defense of a ‘leader-centric’ paradigm, A Question of Command is unconvincing, falling somewhere between historical analysis and theoretical deliberation.

You can read the whole transcript here.

Of course, it is my duty to draw your attention to ‘Whither NATO?’, the chapter written by Professor Mats Berdal, Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and myself on the evolution of NATO and its possible role in international peace and security. Offering an overview of NATO’s attempts at transformation since Kosovo, the chapter points to the need for NATO, on one hand, to embrace, more than it has done, stabilization and wider peacekeeping as core activities, and on the other, to think about more modest, yet still important military tasks that it has the capabilities to conduct and around which political agreement may also be struck, now between 28 member-states. It is not an entirely pessimistic take on the future of the trans-Atlantic alliance, but it should be considered a call for much greater realism regarding its constraints on NATO’s role as a global security actor.

Click here for more information on the book from the publishers, and here to get a preview or to buy the book.

I was really taken by this paper on Operation Arrowhead Ripper in Iraq, in which Colonel Fred Johnson talks about his 15-month tour as the Deputy Commander of 3-2 Stryker Brigade Combat Team (SBCT) and comments on its configuration, as stands, for operations across the spectrum.

Certainly from the lay-out of its structure, and from anecdotal evidence, I was convinced that the SBCT was not that well configured for  stability operations, so it was interesting to hear Col Johnson explain how through the inspired command of Colonel Steve Townsend and through the effective task organising of his brigade, his Stryker BCT was apparently able to become a highly successful stability operations unit.

I am all for building a ‘full-spectrum’ force, but I also have trouble imagining ways of hard-wiring the required adaptability and broad base of expertise within one unit. Based on his operational experience, Colonel Johnson suggests that “the Army does not require unique skills beyond those needed for conventional operations to perform stability operations”. To me, that sounds dangerously like making stability operations a ‘lesser-included’ eventuality again, like saying that any soldier trained for war can manage those pesky insurgents and guerrillas as well.

Is it also possible that Colonel Townsend’s leadership made the difference? Certainly all comparative success-stories from Iraq and Afghanistan involved conventionally-structured units, task-organised for the challenge at hand? So is building a full-spectrum force more a matter of leadership than of structural change to the Army’s units? That would probably be the contention of Mark Moyar, whose book A Question of Command, I am currently reading.

That raises the question of how to train and educate the force to produce good leaders. In that regard, this quotation from ‘Arrowhead Ripper’ is very intriguing:

“an embedded reporter asked me what special training I had to prepare me for leading the reconstruction effort. After thinking about it, it occurred to me that my military training really did not teach me anything about how our CMO team conducted operations in Baqubah. Some extremely talented people, who pointed me in the right direction, surrounded me, but any success I personally enjoyed in Baqubah was a result of what I learned in my dad’s bar in Southern Illinois and as a point guard on my college basketball team. Being a good listener and reading Baqubah like a playing court was more important in directing the reconstruction effort than anything I learned at the Command and General Staff College.”

The blurb:

The widespread practice of intervention by outside actors aimed at building ‘sustainable peace’ within societies ravaged by war has been a striking feature of the post-Cold War era. But, at a time when more peacekeepers are deployed around the world than at any other point in history, is the international will to intervene beginning to wane? And how capable are the systems that exist for planning and deploying ‘peacebuilding’ missions of fulfilling the increasingly complex tasks set for them?

In Building Peace After War, Mats Berdal addresses these and other crucial questions, examining the record of interventions from Cambodia in the early 1990s to contemporary efforts in Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The book analyses the nature of the modern peacebuilding environment, in particular the historical and psychological conditions that shape it, and addresses the key tasks faced by outside forces in the early and critical ‘post-conflict’ phase of an intervention. In doing so, it asks searching questions about the role of military force in support of peacebuilding, and the vital importance of legitimacy to any intervention.

Berdal also looks critically at the ways in which governments and international organisations, particularly the UN, have responded to these many challenges. He highlights the pivotal role of politics in planning peacebuilding operations, and offers some sober reflections on the future prospects for post-conflict intervention.