Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

LAND WARFARE PAPERS: SysAdmin: Toward Barnett's Stabilization and Reconstruction Force, by James B. Ellsworth, The Association of the United States Army/The Institute of Land Warfare, No. 57, September 2006, 13 pages.

Although I always welcome critiques of the SysAdmin force concept from experts in the field of musical theater, it's also cool when somebody with professional expertise examines it.

Jim Ellsworth is a former colleague of mine who's on the faculty at the Naval War College. He's got an Army intell background, with an interesting amount of joint perspective (faculty at NWC but also experience in the Air Force Auxiliary). At the college, he teaches the resident elective on the Future of Armed Conflict.

Jim presents the paper at a AUSA conference next week in DC, so it's a reasonably big deal in the professional military education world on two counts. Obviously, having someone of Jim's caliber take on one of your concepts in such a public way is very cool.

Some excerpts:

Foreward by Gordon R. Sullivan, General, United States Army Retired, President

While current operations have brought new emphasis to Stability, Security, Transition and Reconstruction (SSTR) operations, missions focused on these operations in their own right have likely received less attention than they did before the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland--overpowered by immediate lessons and imperatives from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Yet as Thomas P.M. Barnett makes clear in his books The Pentagon's New Map and Blueprint for Action, power projection for humanitarian purposes is a potent extension of a time-honored military principle into the realm of grand strategy. To be effective, however, the forces engaged in these missions cannot merely be assembled ad hoc from units designed, equipped and trained for major combat.

This paper explores these issues, concluding that a force structure approach to this challenge is called for and--drawing on the example of USSOCOM--recommending creation of an independent joint command for SSTR.

In Jim's intro, he makes the case that SSTR ops have actually received less overall attention post-9/11 precisely because there's been such a huge uptick in postwar ops in Afghanistan and Iraq. That may seem counter-intuitive, but you have to realize that Jim's exploring SSTR writ large, to include all the usual crisis response and humanitarian disaster relief ops that always go on--year after year and in both war and peace--despite the current high-profile ops in southwest Asia.

Now, those operations have generated a load of interest and response, but Jim's right, attention to SSTR as a whole is down, primarily because of that huge sucking sound called Iraq--and, quite frankly, IEDs.

No argument in current priorities here, but rather an argument that our long-term force structure thinking needs to adjust to the overriding reality that says SSTR is no longer a niche concept, capability or force structure requirement.

I know, I know, it's inconceivable to the mainstream military, but as the operational experience piles up and the Petraeuses and Mattises of the Army and Marines move toward 4th stars, this argument becomes less fantastic because the historical record is clear to those who've spent the bulk of their operational careers in the post-Cold War reality of what I call the Gap.

Why focus on my articulation of concepts that have been around for a while? According to Jim:

Barnett's discussion is especially salient because his is among the most compelling strategic characterizations of the global conflict in which America and her coalition partners are now engaged--making the prominent role he gives SSTR operations (and his arguments for forces dedicated to them) worth careful consideration.

All right then...

Nevertheless, Barnett's focus on grand strategy naturally leaves many details of the road toward his SysAdmin force somewhat vague. What follows seeks to fill in some key blanks, where Barnett leaves them...

The horizontal meets the vertical--sounds good to me.

A good bit:

In theory, the types of interventions described above [postwar, post-strife, post-disaster] could be conducted by one of more civilian agencies, appropriately funded and equipped with an equivalent logistical capability--some would even argue at a significantly lower cost. Furthermore, the presence of the U.S. military in a country on the cusp between peacemaking and peacekeeping may actually inhibit the parties from reaching terms "under the gun," or worse, may weaken their perceived need to keep honoring those terms once that gun is removed.

Unfortunately, these arguments overlook the fact that motion along the spectrum of conflict is neither unidirectional nor predictable. The notion that the combat troops necessary to coerce opposing sides to the bargaining table should be replaced by nonmilitary peace forces once they're seated at it glosses over the opportunity--to tip the balance back toward war--that such transitions offer those who would never have bargained of their own accord. Perhaps more disturbing, having a civilian force--maybe lightly defended by attached military units--to oversee humanitarian missions risks a bloodbath (like that seen recently with United Nations relief workers in Africa) should that balance tip back too far in that direction, too quickly.

As for cost, it seems unlikely that significant savings would result from building new organizations that look like military combat support or combat service support units--instead of simply using those units that already exist.

Further:

Barnett's "pistol packin' Peace Corps" faces the same obstacles to its realization and effectiveness--obstacles including the fact that the joint culture and interoperable command and control structure SSTR operations demand currently exist only within DoD--where they required two decades of evolution under the transformative mandates of the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Elsewhere across the federal government, "jointness" is far less advanced: the State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS)--likely the most ambitious and advanced effort to build a thoroughly interoperable capability--exists in a barely embryonic form today and has drawn its only significant funding via a special, congressionally-authorized transfer from DoD. Barnett himself acknowledges that "the SysAdmin force must grow within... the confines of the Defense Department, even while advocating its divestiture "in the not-too-distant future." His "Department of Everything Else" may in fact represent the desired end state--but the United States, and the world, require SysAdmin capabilities today.

Unfortunately, even the U.S. military--while possessing the capabilities for such operations--is generally not structured for them. Needing a brigade for SSTR, one could get part of what is required with an Army engineer battalion or a Navy construction battalion, but this force might require another unit to purify water, plus a couple of medical units, a military police unit or two, some civil affairs troops to help the populace reestablish civil governance--and maybe a few Marines in case things get ugly. Yet no such standing force structure exists. Most often, planners have taken that Marine unit or some Army infantry, bolstered it with a few of the other assets identified, and sent it out.

Sometimes, something has been forgotten--like some armor in Somalia--with disastrous results. Usually, planner shave muddled through, underutilizing the combat portions of the force for lack of actual combat and overworking the rest, to the point of having to regularly call on reservists--who then exit the ranks in droves because they, their families and their employers didn't anticipate their being gone so much when they signed up. When these units return, senior leaders, policymakers and the public are distressed to learn that they are not as proficient at their "real missions" anymore--and that extended operations in an environment have conditioned them to a degree of caution and second-guessing that is getting them killed in force-on-force exercises.

Such anecdotal reports are widely familiar and suggest that a structural transformation is necessary. The rationale is simple: the ad hoc approach of the past made sense when uniquely humanitarian missions were uncommon and SSTR was an emerging concept of uncertain relevance--but that concept is now proven and enshrined in doctrine. Even before 9/11, the military understood it held unique capabilities for such operations, and even critics of these missions saw that they would likely become more common and require specialized units.

Then Jim goes through a lot of historical evidence and studies from the post-Cold War era, where naturally Somalia and the Balkans loom large.

Jim then explores a number of force structure options, including the usual matricing of existing capabilities for rapid packaging (which he believes will accomplish little), my DoEE proposal (which he sees as too big an immediate leap), and then two intermediate concepts: the Joint Task Force model (a standing command with forces that can be obtained from other commands) and an independent joint command model (a USPEACECOM based on USSOCOM's model).

The latter two ideas are very similar, with the JTF being Jim's "cautious" approach and the PEACECOM being the "aggressive" one.

Me? I would expect a JTF before a PEACECOM and a PEACECOM before a DOEE, and I would see that evolution naturally unfolding over years--and much pain from failure mixed with rising confidence from initial-cut successes.

Jim then finishes with arguments about the reserve/active duty mixes of a PEACECOM.

The concluding para:

For a force that largely remains structured for great-power war, Barnett's challenge may appear daunting. But three years after the "shock and awe" of the major combat phase gave way to post-hostilities chaos in Iraq, and to an insurgency fueled by the difficulties that conventional U.S. forces had in dealing with that chaos, this seems a small price (and a wise investment) for the present--to say nothing of the future.

Here's the weirdest thing about the USPEACECOM proposal: people might assume it would be a massive waste of resources because you'd be stockpiling resources and people that wouldn't be used frequently enough, thus drawing resources from the Leviathan force. In truth, the exact opposite is virtually guaranteed (save for the war-with-China dreams of some), as it will be USPEACECOM that's operating round the clock while it's the traditionally-arrayed forces of the regional commands that will spend the bulk of their optempo doing exercises and standing ready.

As drill-downs go, this one just cracked the surface of the details of what's being proposed here, but these initial cuts are crucial because they take my 30,000-foot arguments and get them down to some bureaucratic and command and control realities. In effect, Jim's working to steer this debate to some very practical point-by-point discussions of where this is all going. As soon as you cross the threshold into force structure, you've past the skin and gotten much closer to bone.

That Jim has gotten this paper presented at the AUSA conference next week in DC is especially encouraging in this context.

I hope the paper will be posted in full somewhere online soon. If it is, we will link.