We all do IW!

Irregular Warfare is a hot buzzword these days, the kind of generic catch-all phrase that covers all those things the American military doesn’t do all that well but are actually a lot more “regular” than most would like to believe.

The Small Wars Journal linked to an Inside Defense piece (behind a paywall, which the NewsWire does not have the capital to tear down) reporting that the House subcommittee on unconventional threats agrees unanimously that there needs to be an “Executive Agent” for Irregular Warfare. As opposed as I normally am to creating yet another bureaucratic agency, there may be some value in
this. As the SWJ excerpt points out:

“There are a lot of different people that have concerns” with irregular
warfare operations, Smith said, adding an interagency approach would
ensure those concerns would be heard.

Damn straight. Just about everybody has some sort of capability to offer for IW fight. If there is anything my Special Operations class taught me, it is that Major Ray is right. SOCOM is not the beast for this. There’s too much going on.

This wide field is a key reason to assign an overall Executive Agent for this, but it’s also a major challenge. For such an agent to be effective, it’s going to need a few key qualities:

• A clear chain of command. One way of doing this might be to establish a SOCOM-like organization, with its own budget, and fit the civilian agencies into that command structure somehow. Regardless of how it works, if this agent doesn’t have some real power, they’re going to get the shaft. Big Green and Big Blue won’t want to send men or money to this mission, and if they can’t be forced to, they won’t. The same goes for the CIA, or the FBI. Somebody (by which I mean a person, not an agency) has got to be in charge, and they’ve got to be in charge all the way.
• Its own money. This goes along with the issues from above. If this agent can’t buy its own gear, it will get secondhand castoffs that nobody wants anymore. See Operation EAGLE CLAW’s helicopters for an example.
• A bunch of brains. Even though eventually one person (and therefore one agency) is going to be running the show, they can’t be an intellectual dictator. There has got to be a joint discussion going on with this thing. That should seem obvious, but if care isn’t taken to make sure it happens, it just won’t.

Human Terrain Team Member Killed in Afghanistan (SWJ Blog)

Michael… helped the brigade reduce its lethal operations by
60 to 70%, increase the number of districts supporting the Afghan
government from 15 to 83, and reduce Afghan civilian deaths from over
70 during the previous brigade’s tour to 11 during the 4-82’s tour.

My thoughts and best wishes are with Michael Bhatia’s family. His work was exceptional, and he should be remembered with pride.

I’m taking a COIN class here on The Hill, which didn’t really focus on airpower, but the more strategic level–a lot of “get to know the culture!” and “stop killing good guys!” Nothing I haven’t read on Abu Muquwama, although we did read some good books–and I got to write a fun paper that I may be fleshing out more later.

The final project for this class was a debate over this resolution: Airpower plays and will continue to play primarily a supporting role in counterinsurgency, due to the nature of insurgencies.

I was the affirmative. I wish I had seen this article before the debate finished up. Colin Clark has a very interesting piece on how aerial surveillance provided the slam dunk when it came to confirming the Cuban Missile Crisis–but it was really an alley oop. It was HUMINT resources on the ground that gathered the information, gave the spy planes a place to look, and provided the bedrock of the intelligence.

No, Cuba wasn’t COIN, but it was just one more example of how the true effort is–and must be–joint.

So says this blue-suiter, anyway.

My post generated more noise than I expected, most likely due to a blogging by John Robb himself.  To that, all I can say is: wow.

@Neil: While other commentors bring up the several problems that relying on mobile phones in the AOR will cause, this discussion does show the power of the cloud.  These handsets don’t calculate much themselves, but have access to  a massive network of servers, satellites, and other end users.  I have some other thoughts on why we can’t “wait on a committee,” which I will bore you all with at a later date.

@Joel: Completely right, of course.  Use in the AOR is, well, rather unlikely.  On second look I didn’t mention it in the original post, but I was not imagining deployed use.  I was considering more for the urban guerrilla (frankly, this was a half-joking idea until I realized how easy a functional system would be with COTS parts).  If Cory Doctorow ever leads the revolution, for example, he could coordinate over Twitxr from his hot air baloon.

@mystikphish: I’ve use my Pearl for a year now to varying degrees of abuse, including three weeks of field training.  You’re right–it wouldn’t hold up to extended abuse.  See above comment.  You’re also correct about the barrel-cam on the Land Warrior load out.  I do, however, think that a little handset is less likely to give you away than an M16 muzzle with a camera on it–have you seen the pictures of those things?  That’s a big frigging camera.

Good call on police application.  You’re right, it would be interesting to see.  I, of course, was thinking more OPFOR use, but it is useful either way.

@MOGS: Well, he was a cadet.  2LT selects are only right 70% of the time.  He’ll get the other 30% when he graduates UPT.

John Dvorak just posted about the fragility of online social networks. I think he missed the point.

He claims that “there is no such thing as a real community online.” There are only “pretend” communities.

I suppose it depends on your definition of community. Communities come together on the Internet all the time–see Wikimedia’s various projects, among others. People still meet, build relationships, and gain synergistic value from one another. I’m IMing a friend of mine right now that I met from an online community.

That specific community is now defunct, and perhaps this is Dvorak’s larger point–that individual social networks value is transitory at best. But he says himself that these things are generational and evolutionary–once there are too many people on Twitter, the early adopters will have moved on to the next big thing.

Someone in the comments pointed out that real communities are just as fragile. Yogi Berra once said it something like: “No one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.” This is true for electronic or meat networking locations–but the network abides. The location is fragile… the network is simply (and wonderfully) mobile.

In my Information Operations class today, someone started talking about net-centricity and the way it flattens command and control (although he didn’t quite call it that, more’s the pity–he took a fairly high-altitude view of the thing and didn’t even specifically reference Future Combat Systems or Land Warrior).

It got me thinking, though: could I cobble together a Do It Yourself Land Warrior system, like John Robb has started thinking about?

Answer: Yes.

Step 1: Get your team on Helio.
Helio’s Buddy Beacon service serves as the backbone for our DIY Land Warrior kit. A GPS receiver allows you to broadcast your position to track the position of up to 25 friends–five fire teams? Zoomed in far enough, this offers a major part of Land Warrior’s functionality, identification of friendly forces.

Step 2: Tweet and tag.
Sending up “digital chemical flares” is another advantage of the Land Warrior system. Geotagging Twitter tweets is one way to do this. Represented on a map using Twitter and Google Maps APIs, it might look something like this. Add photos to it to share intelligence, and you’ve got this (map example).

Is it that… simple? Well, no, not quite. This DIY system would be neither secure nor fault-proof. The Army system adds a Dead Reckoning module for when GPS just isn’t good enough. But you could track friends, share intel on enemies “instantly,” and, with your phone’s camera, peek around corners. Those seem to me to be the high points of the Land Warrior System, especially for someone operating in the States, where GPS coverage is generally pretty good.

Ahem.  We begin bombing in…

Well, I’m not quite sure.

Life occurs, and it has been way too long since I’ve taken a poke around in here, but that may or may not be changing soon.  As I focus my life, this blog will become more and more focused utnil it is a veritable laser.

Until such focus is attained, this will likely be a place for me to talk about things I’m learning and thinking about.  Things like a DIY Land Warrior system, how to avoid appointing an official American tongue, and how the DoD might be better organized.

So… WNW v2.5, coming up.  If a blog is posted and nobody is pinged, does it make a sound?