Understanding Complex Military Operations

A case study approach

Karen Guttieri, Volker Franke, Melanne Civic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134715633
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume provides materials for active learning about peacebuilding and conflict management in the context of complex stability operations.

Today, America faces security challenges unlike any it has faced before, many of which requiring lengthy U.S. involvement in stability operations. These challenges are exceedingly dynamic and complex because of the ever changing mix and number of actors involved, the pace with which the strategic and operational environments change, and the constraints placed on response options.

This volume presents a series of case studies to inspire active learning about peacebuilding and conflict management in the context of complex stability operations. The case studies highlight dilemmas pertaining to the story of the case (case dilemma) and to its larger policy implications (policy dilemma). The cases stimulate readers to "get inside the heads" of case protagonists with widely differing cultural backgrounds, professional experiences, and individual and organisational interests. Overall, Understanding Complex Military Operations challenges the reader to recognize the importance of specific national security related issues and their inherent dilemmas, deduce policy implications, and discern lessons that might apply to other – perhaps even non-security related – areas of public policy, administration, and management.

This volume will be of much interest to students of conflict prevention, transitional justice, peacebuilding, security studies and professionals conducting field-based operations in potentially hazardous environments.

1 Complex operations

Connecting scholarship and practice

Karen Guttieri and Volker Franke

Complex operations are most simply defined as military and civilian activities to restore and ensure order. These are also sometimes called stability operations, irregular warfare, or counterinsurgency. And although they are not new, complex operations are now more widely discussed since the United States has invested blood and treasure for many years on such missions, most notably in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many observers point to shortcomings in the preparation of military and civilian personnel deployed to such missions as a factor in overall effectiveness in them.¹ The U.S. military’s traditional focus on kinetic operations is one shortcoming in training for and education about increasingly complex missions, but the need for a learning system is not confined to the military. The political and humanitarian agencies involved in complex operations also have need for a system to capture and preserve institutional memory in the policy system. The contributors to this volume address these needs.

The complex operations case study project began in 2008 by engaging more than two dozen scholars and practitioners in the development of educational content for civilian and military classrooms.² The project’s primary aim was to develop instructional materials for active learning about complex operations. While some of the case studies included in this volume are analytic by design, i.e., they include specific conclusions, the majority do not derive specific policy recommendations or “logical” conclusions. Rather, they create opportunities for readers to learn and draw their own. Working through such cases, learners are challenged to recognize the particular national security-related issues and their inherent dilemmas, deduce policy implications, and discern lessons that might apply to other—perhaps even non-security related—areas of public policy, administration, and management.

All cases in the volume are written in non-technical language and should be appropriate for use in professional military education settings as well as graduate and advanced undergraduate civilian academic classrooms. In the introduction to this volume, we offer our insights as educators and writers on the challenges of complex operations and the utility of the case study method for making sense of those challenges.

Why complex operations?

A decade into the new century, the security architecture established in the aftermath of the Second World War “is buckling under the weight of new threats.”³ Today, America faces security challenges from violent extremist organizations, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, global financial crisis and fragile states, including some, like Afghanistan and Iraq, with long years of U.S. involvement in stability operations. These challenges are exceedingly dynamic and complex because of the ever-changing mix and number of actors involved and the pace with which the strategic and operational environments change.

Today’s uncertain and unpredictable global security environment is characterized by diffuse threats, and a high degree of constraint on response.⁴ This contrasts markedly from the threat environment of the Cold War, dominated by peer competition. In that era, some argued that stabilization efforts were a distraction, and for years the mantra of the U.S. military’s post-Vietnam doctrine was to focus on decisive and overwhelming force.⁵ The officers populating the senior officer corps even just a decade ago were largely cold warriors. Their generation prepared for mechanized, maneuver warfare, involving mass and fire, and stand-off engagements against distant enemies.⁶ Today, many argue that focus on major combat may have impaired the development of much-needed skills for effective complex operations that are now a major requirement.⁷ These operations require small units in repetitive patrols and, commonly, face-to-face contact.⁸ It is not always obvious who is friend or foe, or how to measure success. An officer at a combat stress unit in Iraq in 2003 explained: “Our people are not really trained for peacekeeping, and not equipped for riot control. They are trained to fight the enemy and kill them.”⁹ Although the U.S. military possesses an impressive system of doctrine, training, and professional education, this system has been slow to catch up to the realities of the field. As a civil affairs officer in Iraq told the Washington Post in 2003, “We’ve been given a job that we haven’t prepared for, we haven’t trained for, that we weren’t ready for.”¹⁰ The level of strategic understanding required is in some cases beyond the reach of training and must be achieved through education.

Military objectives need constant re-alignment with political guidance that is often shifting, sometimes intrusive, and other times not available at all. Military personnel require better understanding of the civilian realm now that more civilian and humanitarian agency activity in conflict zones has become the norm. The fact that since 2005 peace and stability operations have been declared equally important to traditional combat missions in U.S. policy represents a major shift in the perspective of the U.S. military, with operational and strategic implications.¹¹ Many military and policy leaders now recognize the contemporary security environment as a “whole-of-government fight.”¹² In headquarters and in the field, the ability to achieve mission objectives depends upon military cooperation with civilian agencies.

Mission success also requires civilian cooperation with military elements. In 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates together advocated strengthening civilian instruments of national power and enhancing whole-of-government capabilities—in other words, the synergy of government agencies in complex operations. “Development,” Secretary Clinton argued, is “one of the most powerful tools we have for advancing global progress, peace, and prosperity.”¹³ However, several U.S. administrations have already wrestled with the bureaucratic challenges of establishing a whole of government process for complex operations with little success. As one review of domestic agencies summed up the situation in 2009, “The current structure for interagency coordination on complex operations violates nearly every principle of organizational management and bureaucratic organization.”¹⁴ The system is rife with bureaucratic tension.

The effort to improve the interagency process goes back at least as far as 1997 when U.S. President William J. Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 56 (PDD-56) to guide interagency coordination in “complex contingency operations” through the National Security Council. This approach was abandoned by the successor Bush administration for some time, before shifting the coordination to the State Department. In January 2003, the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq established first the short-lived Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) and then, in May 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Both were led by civilians, retired Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner and L. Paul (“Jerry”) Bremer, respectively, but reported to the Department of Defense (DOD).¹⁵ In composition, the CPA was heavily military, with Bremer dependent upon resources from the U.S. military commander of coalition forces CJTF-7, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez.

In the summer of 2004 the United States Department of State established the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS) to “lead and coordinate [U.S. government] efforts to assist in stabilizing and reconstructing countries or regions in, or in transition, from, conflict or civil strife.”¹⁶ In December 2005, President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 44 (NSPD 44), making the State Department the lead agency for coordinating U.S. reconstruction and stabilization efforts. At the same time, a parallel undertaking was going on at the international level, after multiple efforts to develop a “comprehensive approach” to peacekeeping. The United Nations established its Peace-building Commission (PBC) in December 2005 to develop more integrated strategies for post-conflict peace efforts and to capture best practices with respect to collaboration among political, military, humanitarian, and development agencies.¹⁷ Both institutional innovations struggled to find footing.

Many civilian government personnel deployed to conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. DOD itself expanded its expeditionary workforce to add thousands of DOD Federal civilian personnel to those participating in combat support functions in Afghanistan and Iraq.¹⁸ In addition to personnel from the Department of State and USAID, civilians from other departments, including Justice, Treasury, and Agriculture, deployed to war zones. However, the effort to develop a more systematic U.S. government civilian capacity for complex operations met many roadblocks. The S/CRS considered the two most significant U.S. missions, Afghanistan and Iraq, too much to take on, and focused instead on other conflicts. In 2007 a Rand study judged NSPD-44 implementation as being “at the superficial level.”¹⁹ In Fiscal Year (FY) 2008, Congress funded the establishment of a Civilian Response Corps with a $55 million appropriation in the war supplemental, divided between the Diplomatic and Consular Affairs office of the Department of State and the Bilateral Economic Assistance account of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The goal to establish a Civilian Response Corps with 250 active, 2,000 standby and 2,000 reserve civilians fell short. Funding for the war was cut in FY 2009. “Nearly all of the active and standby members lack full training and preparedness for deployment,” Congressman Sam Farr lamented in December 2010.²⁰ Few civilian agencies are accustomed to expeditionary activity and there are few career incentives to accept assignments outside their home units and institutions. Civilian agencies are far behind the military in training and education systems.

In 2007, President Bush issued Executive Order 13434, to establish a program for education, training, and assigning military and civilian National Security Professionals from all executive departments in the U.S. national security community. That initiative stalled with the change in administration after the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 and remains a work in progress at this writing.

How can scholarship support complex operations?

Although complex operations are prominent in U.S. engagements abroad, they are less prominent in military and civilian scholarship, education, and training. In 2008, the U.S. Department of Defense, State Department, and U.S. Agency for International Development formed a consortium to address that gap. This consortium, later named the Center for Complex Operations (CCO), provided a much-needed focus on research and dialogue about the “whole-of-government” approach. Practitioners require skills to address ambiguity in the field of complex operations and research that will clarify or more effectively confront that ambiguity. Education of scholars and practitioners should aim to improve both the body of scholarship and the skills of practitioners. All benefit from research, both theoretical and empirical, that effectively identifies patterns of conflict, characteristics of complex operations and conditions for their effective conduct.

This inquiry is not isolated to any one discipline—many academic disciplines are relevant, including political science, economics, sociology, law, strategic studies, and peace research. The comparative case study method is practiced in one form or another in each of these fields, providing a systematic approach to understanding the unique risks and challenges of complex operations and enabling readers to appreciate the ambiguous context of these operations.

Systemic case study analyses are valuable, but another type of case study was also needed, the type that leaves room for instructors and students to work through issues together. The case study project focused on the development of teaching cases to address that need. Case studies developed for teaching differ markedly from event-based traditional historical case studies and academic articles. Teaching cases are designed to place students at the center of difficult decisions, force them to wrestle with the complexities, ambiguities, and uncertainties. Whether decision-forcing, problem-solving, or role-playing, teaching cases are effective when they require students to actively participate and confront ambiguity. The results of the CCO case study project presented here provide educational materials for introducing and actively engaging students and practitioners in the intricacies of contemporary national security decision-making.

Learning complex operations

The U.S. security apparatus, both political and military, lacks a systematic learning system. In one respect, this is surprising, because complex operations in various forms have been far more common than full-scale warfare in the U.S. experience.²¹ At least since the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions, international law obliges military forces in foreign territory to provide for civilians under their effective control.²² U.S. troops, often alongside civilian counterparts as “governors,” conducted occupations in the early twentieth century in the Caribbean and the Philippines. The Americans occupying the German Rhineland after World War I recognized that they were woefully unprepared for the scale of those responsibilities.²³ As they contemplated, in the midst of World War II, an even la...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Complex operations: connecting scholarship and practice
• PART I Policy questions
• PART II Security providers
• PART III Coordination challenges
• PART IV Security and development program challenges
• PART V Analytic cases
• Index