The standing operating procedure (SOP) for the unit typically focused on: (1) Planning and establishing the COP; (2) Ensuring route security so each outpost could be kept resupplied; (3) Clearing operations after the COP had been stood up to clear IEDs and find weapons caches; and (4) Census patrols to follow after the clearing operations to consolidate the position and gradually work its way into the human terrain of the area – the real target of MacFarland’s campaign.
*****
This is an excellent paper that discusses some of the key innovations of the war. The main theme that I am getting from all of this, is intelligence, intelligence, and intelligence.(jundism hint)
If you notice in the publication, there are some themes that keep getting repeated. The importance of networks or fusion is one of them. To bring together different groups of experts, and have them contribute to actionable intelligence. And feeding these fusion groups requires interaction with the terrain, population and the enemy.
Hence why COPS or combat outposts are so important. It allows a unit to insert itself into the heart of a population/insurgency center and get as much information as they can via census patrols, sensors, raids, attacks against and by the enemy, etc. All of this is fed into a searchable database that can be cross referenced and searched by other units and organizations, and future deploying units and organizations. In other words, all actions and collected information is fed into the machine.
I also liked the reference to ‘continuous improvement’. Too bad the author didn’t use the term Kaizen in the paper though. I also saw hints of ‘learning organization’, which is also an incredibly important concept for developing winning TTPs and strategies. Because once you have all of this great information and experience, you have to build a snowmobile out of it so you can win the fight. A rigid organization that doesn’t seek feedback internally and externally, work together and with others, or doesn’t innovate, will not succeed.
Now here are my ideas to further the concepts into our industry. Right now we are witnessing the African Union stumbling along in Somalia and trying to gain a foothold. My thoughts on the whole thing is that you could take a PMC that was composed of former military leaders familiar with these concepts, and help the AU to organize accordingly. Or AFRICOM could send a leadership team in there to help organize the effort. Either way, I see no reason why the AU forces could not replicate this strategy in Mogadishu right now.
I also think that PMC’s could learn a lot from these types of strategies. PMC’s have had to set up remote sites that are very similar to ‘COPS in a box’. The CMC projects are a prime example. But what was missing with those operations was deliberate census patrols or the other means of intelligence collection that the Marines and Army could use.
The way human intelligence was collected for these projects was often through the process of hiring and working around locals for guard positions and general labor projects. You learn all sorts of things about the locals when you work around them all day, day in and day out.
Imagine though that if PMC’s actually did census patrols as part of the contract? Or planted sensors in abandoned buildings in their area? That data could not only be useful to that PMC, or future replacement PMC’s, but could also be added to a much larger database that the military could use? A PMC remote site and the routes they travel daily could be an excellent source of intelligence for the military units of that area, but unless that PMC is brought into that fusion process, it will simply be another lost chance at crucial data collection.
It would also be nice if PMC’s could take advantage of that fusion process as well, and access the COPLINK or whatever database that is established locally. It could save lives and win wars, but it also requires both the military and civilian equivalents to talk and work with each other. Stuff to think about as we continue the fight and learn new ways of doing our thing in this war. –Matt
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Innovation in War: Counterinsurgency Operations in Anbar and Ninewa Provinces, Iraq, 2005-2007
James A. Russella
August 2010
To cite this Article: Russell, James A. ‘Innovation in War: Counterinsurgency Operations in Anbar and Ninewa Provinces, Iraq, 2005–2007’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 33:4, 595 – 624
Abstract
This article analyzes operations by three battalions conducting counterinsurgency, or COIN, operations in Iraq over the period from July 2005 through March 2007: the 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment (1-7) along the Iraq-Syrian border in the first half of 2006; the 1st Battalion, 37th Armored Regiment (1-37) battalion operating in south-central Ramadi in the fall of 2006; and the 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment, or 2-1, operating in eastern Mosul in 2005-06. The empirical evidence presented in these cases suggest that, contrary to popular perceptions, the units successfully innovated in war – a process largely executed organically within the units themselves. Innovation is defined here as the development of new organizational capacities not initially present when the units deployed into the theater. The evidence presented in these cases suggests that the innovation process enabled these units to successfully transition from organizations structured and trained for conventional military operations to organizations that developed an array of new organizational capacities for full-spectrum combat operations. The units in this study developed these new capacitites largely on their own initiative.
Conclusion
The case studies in this article chronicle an iterative process of organically generated tactical adaptation and innovation that unfolded over time in a distinctive progression. The process began in what could be described as tactical, ad hoc adaptation in which individual leaders reacted to local circumstance by cycling through different ways of employing their units and equipment on the battlefield. Some of these adaptations succeeded and others failed. As leaders identified successful adaptations, the process gathered momentum and new organizational standard-operating procedures emerged that became more widely adopted in the units.49 Organizational innovation then manifested itself through the emergence of new standard operating procedures that led to fundamental changes to the ways in which the units in this study fought the insurgents over the course of their deployments. As these innovations produced success on the battlefield, they eventually fed into more formalized military doctrine that followed later.50
While execution of the innovation process happened in the field, it is clear the process involved many actors throughout the military chain of command. Individuals, units, and headquarters elements stretching from Al-Anbar to Baghdad, Fort Leavenworth, the Pentagon, and beyond searched for solutions to the problems being encountered on the battlefields of Iraq.
The cases detail a process of wartime innovation that that manifested itself as a series of organic, bottom-up procedures developed within the battalions and brigades fighting the insurgents. While the innovation process developed organically, that process drew upon information and enabling processes nested in a variety of sources outside the units themselves. Innovation occurred within the units through the fusion of the information and enabling processes that ultimately produced new organizational outputs. Basic capstone doctrinal grounding in military operations proved to be a fundamental building block for the innovation process. Previous experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan helped shape the innovation. Non-institutionally blessed sources of information on COIN theory and history were consciously drawn upon by units as they intellectually reoriented themselves towards full spectrum operations. A variety of digital domain platforms helped units freely pass information and lessons learned back and forth that helped the process and adaptation and innovation. The innovation produced new organizational capacities that shaped successful military operations across the spectrum of kinetic and non-kinetic operations to reduce insurgent-generated violence.
Wartime innovation in the cases studied here flowed from agile, flexible, decentralized organizations that featured flattened and informal hierarchical structures. Throughout their deployments, each of the units covered in the case studies demonstrated significant learning capacities that proved central to the innovation process. The cases present a picture of military organizations acting in ways that are contrary to the popularly accepted view that military organizations function as bureaucratically inclined, hierarchically structured organizations slow to respond to changes in the external environment. In the cases studied here, the exigencies of wartime produced very different organizational behavior.
While the execution of the battlefield innovation process happened within the units in this study, it would be a mistake to strictly characterize that process either as ‘bottom up’ or ‘top down’. The processes of wartime innovation in the units studied here did not result solely from factors within the unit, nor was the process solely prompted by top-down process featuring the articulation of a new military doctrine, whether created by forceful civilian intervention from above, or by dynamic senior military leadership at the headquarters level. The innovation process exhibited by the units in this article drew was dialectical in nature and drew upon a complex series of forces both from within and outside the units that fused together in ways to produce organically generated change – change that eventually ‘pulled’ tactical practice, institutional innovation and (finally) authoritative doctrinal pronouncements along behind it.
Established doctrinal processes as described in foundational capstone doctrine like the US Army’s FM 3.0 Operations provided a framework and common understanding for the units as they responded to the insurgency. The US Marine units also drew upon their established doctrine to help provide a framework to structure their COIN operations. All of the units in this study exhibited firm grounding in doctrinally bounded processes and applied those processes to the problem of COIN in Iraq. Instead of being hampered by rigid bureaucratic organizations, the wartime experiences of these units showed that networked, informal, and cross-functional organizations sprang up over the course of military operations, which fused disparate organizational elements, both military and civilian, into a synergistic whole applied in their COIN operations.51
Evidence from these cases suggests that certain American ground units (both Army and Marine Corps) in Iraq evolved into flexible, adaptive organizations taking advantage of twenty-first century human and technological capacities. The units in this study proved to be technologically advanced, complex organizations with a highly educated and trained workforce that embraced environmental complexity and searched for optimal solutions to operational problems. The organizations covered in this study did not satisfice – or take the path of least resistance – in their search for solutions to the tactical problems posed by the insurgency in Iraq.
The units discussed above built new innovative core competencies within their organizations, drawing upon such factors as: (1) digitally based communications and data systems that seamlessly passed information on a continuous basis between units preparing for their deployments; (2) imaginative battlefield leadership that delegated authority, welcomed the concept of distributed operations, encouraged the free-flow of information throughout the organizational hierarchy, and freely changed their organizational structures in the field in order to apply their capacities across the spectrum of kinetic and non-kinetic operations; (3) the use of advanced technologies and analytical methods to combat insurgent networks; and, (4) a continuous education process in which units kept seeking information and expertise from many different sources to aid in their tactical decision-making processes.
The emergence of American tactical COIN competence adds an interesting twist to one of the popular narratives of the period. Prior to the Iraq War, the Bush administration initiated a process called ‘transformation’ to reform the Defense Department’s sprawling military and civilian bureaucracies. This process overwhelmingly featured top-down direction from the Defense Department’s civilian leadership for executing organizational elements. As is well known, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sought to make the Iraq invasion an advertisement for a new American way of war featuring precision guided munitions, speed of movement, and effects-based operations.52 Rumsfeld’s new way of war, however, had little to do with counterinsurgency and activities he derisively referred to as ‘nation-building’.
The irony of the evidence presented in this article, however, is that the certain units indeed ‘transformed’ themselves during the Iraq War though not in the ways envisioned by Rumsfeld. Prior to December 2006 and the promulgation of the new doctrine, the most important part of the ‘transformation’ process occurred not in the invasion but in the counterinsurgency campaign afterwards, and not through top-down direction but primarily through ground-up, organic processes in which tactical units eventually embraced and mastered the very ‘nation-building’ skills that Rumsfeld sought to avoid.
Download the publication here.