Sam Roggeveen and Mark O’Neil have a little back and forth and back again exchange over at The Lowy Interpreter, about whether or not the Army’s recently released Stability Operations field manual represents what Sam calls the ascendancy of “small wars” in U.S. military doctrine.
It just so happens WPR’s current feature articles include a piece by Jack Kem, of the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, on the Stability Ops manual. Kem puts it into the context of doctrine’s purpose in the U.S. Army, and talks of a “doctrinal renaissance” that is being driven by the new focus on “full spectrum operations.” If you read through it, you’ll find that Sam’s assessment is closer to the mark than Mark’s, although Mark is not wrong. Full spectrum operations, ie. COIN and Stability Ops, have caught up, because they were previously categorized as operations “other than war”.
But they are also by definition ascendant, because by they are rising compared to conventional offensive and defensive operations, but also for two other significant reasons. First, as Sam points out, they are the kinds of operations that recent DoD strategy papers have increasingly forecast as the conflicts of the future. But second, and perhaps more importantly, as Kem explains, they represent a fundamental change in the Army’s conception of warfighting:
. . .For the Army, offensive and defensive operations rely on the destructive capabilities of military forces; stability operations rely on the constructive capabilities of the military. The reality of today’s operational environment is that these actions take place simultaneously; what you break and destroy today, you may have to rebuild tomorrow. By putting stability operations on an equal doctrinal footing with offensive and defensive operations, the new stability operations manual introduces the consideration of the consequences of all actions in a conflict into the planning and operational phases. Colin Powell’s famous “pottery barn” rule — “you break it, you own it” — now applies at the operational level.
Kem goes on to discuss the significance of the doctrine’s conceptual framework of “comprehensive approach,” which is essentially the Army recognizing that it is only one among many actors in a conflict zone, and that a stable resolution depends on cooperatively creating “unity of effort” among them all.
Our other feature article by Paul McLeary gives a close up view of how the Army’s Human Terrain Teams of social scientists might potentially further change the nature of warfighting by adding sorely needed resources of cultural familiarity to ground level stability operations. Paul embedded with American forces in Iraq and saw the HTTs at work in the field, and contrary to criticisms from the academic social science community (which has rightly raised concerns about cooptation and the militarization of the social sciences), the teams seem to be an illustration of how understanding (as opposed to knowing) might actually render satbility operations less lethal.
I’ll have more to say on both subjects later, because I share Sam’s concern about the temptation that comes of having such a satisfying “war-lite” conception of conflict:
But the articles by Kem and McLeary give a good basis for understanding what the debate is all about.