Consider this a “working post.” This is not a dissertation that I have spent months painstakingly assembling (as will soon become painfully obvious). This is more of a gut reaction piece that I hope and expect people will pick apart in the comments.
I think that we have all heard others refer to COIN as the “graduate level of warfare.” This is of particular annoyance to many of us. Saying that X operation is the graduate level is like saying X university is the graduate level and Y university is the undergrad level, when we all know that X and Y have both undergrad and graduate programs. Since I cannot kill this annoying phrase, I will attempt to redefine it. The graduate level of war is the ability to leverage professional knowledge in abstract situations in pursuit of a desired outcome, regardless of the type of operation.
Ironically, the reason that some assert COIN to be some higher level of warfare is because those people misunderstand the root of our difficulty with it. They see inadequate training and conclude that our skills have been focused on a specific level of (less) complexity, rather than recognizing that our skills have been focused on one specific set of missions. If two grapplers prepare for a bout, but one bows out before the fight and a stand-up fighter replaces him, we do not say that the remaining grappler failed to prepare for the "higher level" of fighting. He simply prepared for the wrong type of fight. Likewise, our training thus far has been in preparation for the wrong type of operation.
Some who may agree with me thus far will likely not agree with me after this sentence. Our preparation has been flawed not because we prepared for the wrong war, but because we prepared for A specific war. Our training must not be geared toward specific operations. Our training must be geared toward developing Soldiers and units capable of adapting to any situation. Unfortunately, we are trapped in a system where we break down our training into "tasks" rather than the development of professional skills.
Problem: We train to standard, rather than to outcomes sought
Suppose that you were tasked with conducting a company raid in order to eliminate known members of an insurgent cell and then prepare for follow on operations in that location to gather intelligence and prepare to provide security for an upcoming election. This is simple enough. A raid can be broken down into collective tasks that match up nicely with your task organization. Each platoon can break down its tasks into squad-level collective tasks of enter a building and establish a foothold and squads can break down tasks into team-sized tasks, like clear a hallway or enter and clear a room, and so on. Individual tasks will include load, operate, and engage targets with assigned weapon and move tactically as a member of a fire team. No problem. There are prescribed standards for these tasks which your Soldiers have demonstrated the ability to perform up to. Now your leaders just need to properly apply them all.
As you approach your objective, you realize that the situation does not resemble what the S-2 briefed (far-fetched, I know). You were briefed, and the fuzzy aerial photos seemed to confirm, that the target buildings were an old ice factory, an abandoned fire house, and an abandoned residential building. Now, it becomes apparent to you that your target buildings may include a school, a clinic with a rickety generator, and a mosque. Looking at your commander’s intent, you see that your Brigade and Battalion Commanders seek an endstate that includes minimal impact upon daily routines of the populace, a cooperative populace that is willing to share intelligence, and minimal damage to infrastructure.
Suppose that, in the context of the vignette above, a Soldier is moving down a street as a member of a dismounted squad of Infantrymen. He encounters a teenage male, standing in the gateway outside of a residential home, with an assault weapon slung behind his back, and 4 females in conservative dress peering out the front door of the home. The Soldier’s team leader has been confronted by a man who appears to be dressed like an Imam and speaks broken English. The Soldier falls back upon his training and tries to figure out which “skill” to apply to this situation.
Here is a link to a list of skill level 1 tasks.
Let’s see, there’s Report Intelligence Information (in SALUTE format?), Comply with the Law of War and Geneva and Hague Conventions (I suppose that’s a good idea), Comply with the UCMJ (another helpful one), and maybe Perform Surveillance without the Aid of Electronic Devices (click on that one – is it really helpful?).
One way to look at this issue is to observe that, if training was driven by the list of tasks, then we have not given this Soldier the right skills to respond to this situation. If that were the case, and this were a COIN operation, some would say that the Soldier lacks “COIN skills.”
Another way to look at this issue is to observe that we should train our Soldiers to be thinking, adaptive individuals, who can respond to a situation even if they have not been validated on a list of skills that we fortuitously devised prior to operations. We should ask whether this Soldier has been taught to think through the impact that his body language and weapon posture has upon the thought process of the teen or whether the Soldier can make a judgment of the teen’s state of mind and take the proper action or inaction.
Okay, maybe there is not a good task listed there, but we all know that Soldiers routinely detain people, even if there is no task listed as “zip-tie person” or something similar. So maybe this Soldier has rehearsed approaching, disarming, and detaining an individual. Or maybe he has been taught how to say “hello” in the local dialect and simply does so and waves.
My problem with the vignette above is that a question is unanswered: what should the Soldier have done and how do we know this? Where is the skill level 1 task called, “make hasty assessment of individual’s state of mind, based upon posture and surroundings” or “project message to populace through body language and readiness posture”? Is the failure to create those tasks, or others, a failure to anticipate how a given operation might unfold? Is it realistic to suggest that we cannot adequately forecast how operations will unfold? The task-based approach to training limits the readiness of our Soldiers by narrowing their range of skills into the list that we brainstorm when attempting to anticipate how operations will unfold. As evidence that I am right and that consensus opinion is in agreement with me, I would point to the emphasis being placed upon cultural awareness.
Cultural awareness is knowledge, not a skill. It has been recognized that our Soldiers are lacking adequate knowledge. Is there a task-condition-standard evaluation for “cultural awareness”? There might be a quiz to demonstrate a baseline of explicit knowledge. But how do we evaluate the ability of a Soldier to apply cultural awareness? In my opinion, there is no objective means of doing so. If we attempted to create one, it would probably look like this…
Task: Win hearts and minds
Condition: Given all assigned weapons and equipment in a lower-middle class neighborhood of an Arab country experiencing a violent insurgency, while traveling as a member of a squad-sized reconnaissance patrol
Standard: Travel down street, waving to individuals and, upon hearing “As-Salāmu `Alaykum”, promptly respond, “Wa `Alaykum as-Salaam” while waving and then placing hand over heart.
You cannot objectively evaluate most tacit knowledge. You can only evaluate the thought process applied and the ability to consistently bring about desired outcomes. The success of our cultural awareness education will depend upon the ability of leaders to teach Soldiers how to apply it, not their ability to drill into a Soldier how to demonstrate skills consistent with it, in an objective test that rewards a lack of creativity and lack of critical thought.
Now, as noted above, the Soldier in the vignette may have received training in addition to the small universe of skills in the manual. There are good trainers out there who go beyond what is expected of them. Great. But what about those Soldiers who have not received that training? Trust me, they are out there. Lots of them. Why have they not received the right training? In my opinion, it is because the task-condition-standard methodology and the larger training and evaluation program stresses the ability to perform specific tasks under specific conditions without regard to shaping the outcomes sought.
The evolution of warfare is not an endless exercise in brainstorming tasks to train our Soldiers on. These tasks are designed for mass production of Soldiers. Much in the same way that we would fashion an assembly line for identical or slightly differentiated products, we have these tasks that we use to add capabilities to the Soldier. Rather than developing thinking, adaptive individuals, we are treating Soldiers like raw material or a work-in-progress on an assembly line. Breaking down complex operations into a list of tasks is certainly simpler, and very appropriate for the mass production of conscripts into an industrial-age fighting force. Should the Third Reich ever rise from the dead and need to get its ass re-whooped, then this might come in handy. For that specific war in which two industrial powers threw their people and stuff at one another, it was sufficient for our conscripts to have a specific set of skills that would allow their units to prevail in most circumstances that would be faced in that particular war. Training was simple by necessity. How else could a small professional force train a few million new recruits, while simultaneously fighting a war? But now, when we have a relatively stable number of troops, that model no longer makes sense. There is no reason why we cannot train Soldiers to think and adapt, rather than just installing tasks and using them like robots who will perform those tasks when ordered.