More than a year after the Iraq war began, soldiers are rotating home with a sense of unmet expectations. Consensus seems to be building among them that this conflict was fought brilliantly at the technological level but inadequately at the human level. The human element seems to underlie virtually all the functional shortcomings chronicled in official reports and media stories: information operations, civil affairs, cultural awareness, soldier conduct, and most glaringly, intelligence, from national to tactical.
Technological failures are easy to identify and fix. Human failures are not. The human element in war is not a system built using the laws of empiricism but a collection of seemingly independent thoughts and actions that combine to influence events on the battlefield. The U.S. military is not accustomed to finding collective solutions to address human failures. But this war has shown that such an approach is essential and long overdue.
I asked a returning commander from the Third Infantry Division how well situational awareness (read aerial and ground intelligence technology) worked during the march to Baghdad. “I knew where every enemy tank was dug in on the outskirts of Tallil,” he replied. “Only problem was, my soldiers had to fight fanatics charging on foot or in pickups and firing AK-47s and [rocket propelled grenades]. I had perfect situational awareness. What I lacked was cultural awareness. Great technical intelligence . . . wrong enemy.”
This officer’s remark presaged the difficulties that would be encountered during the present “cultural” phase of the war, where intimate knowledge of the enemy’s motivation, intent, will, tactical method, and cultural environment has proved to be far more important for success than the deployment of smart bombs, unmanned aircraft, and expansive bandwidth. Success in this phase rests with the ability of leaders to think and adapt faster than the enemy and of soldiers to thrive in an environment of uncertainty, ambiguity, and unfamiliar cultural circumstances.
Recent experience in Iraq reinforces the truism that the nature of war is changing. Fanatics and fundamentalists in the Middle East have adapted and adopted a method of war that seeks to offset U.S. technical superiority with a countervailing method that uses guile, subterfuge, and terror mixed with patience and a willingness to die. This approach allows the weaker to take on the stronger and has proved effective against Western-style armies. Since the Israeli war of independence, Islamic armies are 0 and 7 when fighting Western style and 5 and 0 (or 5-0-1 if this war is included) when fighting unconventionally against Israel, the United States, and the Soviet Union.
Yet, the military remains wedded to the premise that success in war is best achieved by overwhelming technological advantage. Transformation has been interpreted exclusively as a technological challenge. So far, we have spent billions to gain a few additional meters of precision, knots of speed, or bits of bandwidth. Some of that money might be better spent improving how our military thinks and studies, to create a parallel transformation based on cognition and cultural awareness.
War is a thinking man’s game. A military too acculturated to solving warfighting problems with technology alone should begin now to recognize that wars must be fought with intellect. Reflective senior officers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have concluded that great advantage can be achieved by outthinking rather than outequipping the enemy. They are telling us that wars are won as much by creating alliances, leveraging nonmilitary advantages, reading intentions, building trust, converting opinions, and managing perceptions—all tasks that demand an exceptional ability to understand people, their culture, and their motivation.
Clearly, these imperatives place an increased premium on the ability of the U.S. military to understand the nature and character of war, as well as the cultural proclivities of the enemy. Yet, increasingly, military leaders subordinate the importance of learning about war to the practical and more pressing demands of day-to-day operations. In a word, today’s military is so overstretched that it may become too busy to learn at a time when the value of learning has never been greater.
The following initiatives, if taken collectively, could increase U.S. combat proficiency far out of proportion to their cost. Implementing only a few would go a long way to creating an environment conducive to fighting an enemy in this emerging era of culture-centric warfare.
Transform Intelligence Services
Recriminations concerning the failure of intelligence services to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq cloud the more significant failure of lower level intelligence. Once the kinetic phase of the fighting in Iraq ended, soldiers and Marines found themselves immersed in an alien culture unable to differentiate friend from foe or to identify those within the population they could trust to provide useful and timely tactical intelligence. The military relied on intelligence-gathering tools and methods left over from the Cold War. A technical intelligence specialist sitting in Maryland could exploit data collected from overhead sensors to count vehicles, spot convoy movement, or report on the level of telephone traffic halfway around the globe. But in spite of good intentions, he could not begin to divine how the enemy intended to fight. Today, the enemy’s motives often remain a mystery, and the cost in casualties of this inability to understand the enemy and predict his actions has been too great.
The military possessed the technological means in Iraq to conduct net-centric warfare with unparalleled proficiency. But it lacked the intellectual acumen, cultural awareness, and knowledge of the art of war to conduct culture-centric warfare. When the enemy adapts and finds ways to obviate the advantages of net-centric warfare, a focus on the art rather than the science of war becomes necessary to secure success. Sensors, computer power, and bandwidth count for little against a dispersed enemy who communicates by word of mouth and back-alley messengers and fights using simple weapons that do not require networks or sophisticated technological integration to be effective.
Tactical intelligence units in Iraq managed slowly to close the information gap. Most useful information came from within the battalions and brigades that had to quell resistance in the cities and towns. It came from payoffs to local tribal leaders, back-alley deals, and intense interrogations. With time to build trust, tips by citizens became more common. But the layers of informational agencies above tactical provided very little that was current and relevant enough to be “actionable.”
The lessons are clear. Computers and aerial drones are no substitute for human eyes and brains. The density of soldiers who do “eyes on” reconnaissance must be increased. The intelligence function in today’s military is too thick at the top and too thin at the bottom. Bureaucrats in the three-letter agencies provide little that is useful to soldiers in harm’s way. This condition must change.
Reform of the entire intelligence function—strategic to tactical—must concentrate on compressing layers and pushing both collection and analysis downward. The focus of every agency must be at the tactical level. In today’s operational environment, information is of little use if it does not benefit the soldier in contact.
In the late 19th century, the British Army “seconded” bright officers to various corners of the world to immerse them in the cultures of the Empire and to become intimate with potentates from Egypt to Malaya. Names such as China Gordon and T. E. Lawrence testify to the wisdom of such a custom. Even today, the British Army has an advantage over the United States in that it possesses officers with the ability to move comfortably between and within the inner circles of foreign militaries. Great Britain’s relative success in Basra owes in no small measure to the self-assurance and comfort with foreign culture derived from centuries of practicing the art of soldier diplomacy and liaison.
The U.S. Army can learn much from its closest ally. Soldiers who spend time overseas immersed in foreign cultures—particularly those most likely to become engaged in conflicts of strategic importance to the United States—should be rewarded for their efforts. At the heart of a cultural-centric approach to future war should be a cadre of global scouts, well educated, with a penchant for languages and a comfort with strange and distant places. These soldiers should be given time to absorb a single culture and to establish trust with those willing to trust them.
A means for creating more global scouts might be a sponsorship program by the services that requires and provides funds for officers and noncommissioned officers to spend long periods in foreign countries. They would be expected to graduate from foreign staff colleges and to stay, perhaps for decades, within their assigned countries, with no diminution in career progression. To ensure these scouts do not interfere or compete with existing requirements, the services would be permitted to add to their end strengths and funding to allow a significant number of officers to participate in such programs without threatening officers following conventional careers.
A successful global scout initiative would require a change of culture within the military intelligence community. In the hierarchy of command, the scouts would take front and center over the intelligence technologists. A culture-centric approach to intelligence collection would demand a fundamental change in how intelligence specialists are selected, trained, and promoted. A shift from a technological to a cognitive approach to intelligence would give priority to those who are able to devote time to studying war and who are capable of immersing themselves in potential theaters of war.
Global scouts must be supported and reinforced with a body of intellectual fellow travelers within the intelligence community who are formally educated in the deductive and inductive skills to understand and interpret the information and insights provided by scouts in the field. These analysts should attend graduate school in disciplines necessary to understand human behavior and cultural anthropology. In addition, officers from other government agencies that routinely ally themselves with the military and perform essential functions in this new era of warfare should be required to attend military schools specifically designed to improve the interagency function in war. Students and faculty would come from all government agencies, to include the departments of State, Treasury, Homeland Security, and Agriculture, as well as the permanent staffs from the White House and Congress. Military attendees would include professionals from foreign area, civil and public affairs, special forces, and information operations specialties. These schools would be of such quality and intellectual integrity they would attract attendees from the media and domestic and international nongovernmental organizations, such as the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders.
Reform the Military Learning Systems
This new era requires soldiers equipped with exceptional cultural awareness and an intuitive sense of the nature and character of war, but where will this culture-centric learning take place? Unfortunately, higher-level military colleges and schools fail to meet this need. Very few military leaders are fortunate enough to be selected to attend institutions that teach war, and those who are, are chosen based on job performance rather than excellence of intellect. Personnel policies affecting the purpose of senior military education have transformed these institutions partly into meeting places to achieve interservice, interagency, and international comity, at the expense of the depth and rigor of war studies. Thus, the central elements necessary to gain a deeper understanding of the nature and character of war—military history, along with war games and military psychology and leadership—often are slighted in an effort to teach every subject to every conceivable constituency to the lowest common denominator.
First, every military leader, particularly those whose job it is to practice war, must be given every opportunity to study war. Learning must be a lifelong process. Every soldier, regardless of grade or specialty, should be given continuous access to the best and most inclusive programs of war studies, and those who take advantage of the opportunity must receive recognition and professional reward for the quality of their learning. Contemporary distance learning technology allows the process to be amplified and proliferated such that every soldier can learn to his or her capacity and motivation.
The latest distance learning technology also permits military students to learn in groups, in virtual seminars, even while on the job in some distant theater. The task of learning therefore should maximize sharing and distribution. Our officers and noncommissioned officers understand this phenomenon; the remarkable success of web sites such as companycommander.com and platoonleader.com testify to the need young leaders have to learn by sharing. Soldiers should become members of a web-based community of learners from the moment they join the service.
Second, those who demonstrate brilliance and whose capacity for higher level strategic leadership is exemplary should be afforded a unique and unprecedented opportunity to expand their knowledge. In this scheme, the traditional staff and war colleges would focus exclusively on the study of war with a constituency selected on intellectual merit. Every officer would be given the privilege of competing for one of the limited seats in these selective courses in residence. The pedagogical model for the school would be the very successful advanced seminars already extant at all service schools (known within the Army as the School of Advanced Military Studies at the intermediate level and the Advanced Strategic Art Program at the senior level).
The military has too few resources to train and educate its leaders, and the commodity in shortest supply is time. Soldiers often are too busy, and for that reason learning has taken a backseat to action in today’s operationally focused force. Thus, a new learning environment should center on the student rather than the institution. Every learning opportunity should be crafted to ensure that the right methods are used to give the military learner what is needed when it is needed using a suitable blend of site and Web-based delivery. Every concession must be made to lessen the burden of learning, which translates to more opportunities to learn at home over the Web. The schools should be held responsible for monitoring and assessing the quality of the students’ achievement while minimizing time students spend in some distant classroom.
Learning as a Command Responsibility
During the past decade, corporations have learned the value of educating their employees. Some of the best managed companies have created chief learning officers and have given managers the responsibility to ensure their subordinates are prepared intellectually to transition to new levels of responsibility. The military can learn from this example. Soldiers do best what commanders demand from them. Commanders focus energy on what their higher level commanders deem most important.
In the past, responsibility for learning has been relegated to military learning institutions. If we are to create a body of leaders capable of fighting future asymmetric wars, responsibility for learning most be shifted to those most responsible for success—unit commanders.
Unit-based learning and leader development must be perceived as a condition for unit readiness. More stable home basing and a cycled rotation system now under development in the Army and extant in other services will allow enough scheduled down time for commanders to establish and actively superintend a disciplined study program for junior officers and noncommissioned officers. A method for monitoring the time devoted to professional development must be established by a disinterested authority divorced from service personnel systems, such as the Joint Staff.
Responsibility for critical decision making in the services continues to drift downward. Today, sergeants make strategic decisions that only a decade ago were reserved for officers of very senior grade. In Afghanistan, special forces sergeants defeated the Taliban by establishing trust and mutual effort with Northern Alliance forces. Sergeants called in precision strikes from strategic bombers, breaking the back of Taliban resistance. Thus, noncommissioned officers must be educated as well as trained for this new style of war. They should be given cultural and language training. Those with the greatest promise should be offered the opportunity to pursue the study of war in either advanced military or civilian educational institutions.
Leverage Learning Science
History teaches that great combat commanders have one trait in common—a unique, intuitive sense of the battlefield. They have the ability to think in time, to sense events they cannot see, to orchestrate disparate actions such that the symphony of war is played out in exquisite harmony. Perhaps no more than one in a hundred among many superbly qualified commanders has this gift. Often those with the operational “right stuff” are found only by accident. Commanders at the National Training Center observe that it frequently is the most unlikely commanders who perform well in the heat of battle. Perhaps they lack a certain pedigree, are rough around the edges, even are profane . . . but they know how to fight.
In the past, the only sure venue for exposing the naturals was battle. Soldiers’ lives had to be expended to find commanders with the right stuff. But today, learning science offers the ability to identify those who can make decisions intuitively in the heat of battle. The Germans called this gift Fingerspitzengefuhl or fingertip sense. Many managers can make the right decision if given enough time, advice, and data. But only combat leaders can make the right decision at the right time in a crisis when the fog of war is greatest: when tired, fearful, and isolated.
The services must exploit learning science by conducting research in cognition, problem solving, and rapid decision making in uncertain, stressful environments such as combat. Leaders must be exposed during peacetime to realistic simulations of uncertainty, fear, and ambiguity such that those who demonstrate Fingerspitzengefuhl are identified early, perhaps as early as commissioning. Those with the right stuff should be cultivated and exercised continuously to sharpen their prowess before they lead soldiers into real combat.
Military intellectual institutions must conduct research to understand the cognitive decision-making process. As much attention should be given to understanding how culture-centric systems interpret and use data as to how net-centric systems collect data. We need to better understand what information is necessary for making decisions. Important in this effort is understanding how different commanders use information. Cognitive systems capable of customizing the decision-making process will emerge from that understanding. Perhaps soon commanders will be offered exercises and decision aids that will optimize their ability to make the right decisions in the midst of a mountain of information that invariably will descend on them in the heat of battle.
The requirement to better anticipate and shape performance in battle is made all the more challenging by today’s conflict environment. Good commanders know how to lead in combat. Great commanders possess the intuitive sense of how to transition very quickly from active, kinetic warfare distinguished by fire and maneuver to a more subtle kind of cultural warfare distinguished by the ability to win the war of will and perception. Rare are the leaders who can make the transition between these two disparate universes and lead and fight competently in both.
Recently, I attended a service-specific war game intended to examine the course of future war. The scenario was placed in the Middle East. I noted that all the players, red and blue, were either American or NATO allies. I asked if perhaps it would be a good idea to include participants from Moslem countries, particularly in the red cell. One of the game directors replied, “Oh, we tried that two years ago, but those guys became too disruptive.” Right. “Disruption”—the need to create uncertainty—should be the aim of war gaming. As a matter of course, every exercise, game, and major joint training event should add uncertainty and unpredictability in the form of alien representation. Otherwise games become exercises scripted through the preconceptions and biases of Western culture.
Acculturate Every Soldier
One division commander in Iraq told me that his greatest worry was that his soldiers were “an army of strangers in the midst of strangers.” During the early months of occupation, cultural isolation in Iraq created a tragic barrier separating Iraqis of goodwill from the inherent goodness of U.S. soldiers, demonstrated so effectively during previous periods of occupation in such places as Korea, Japan, and Germany. This cultural wall must be torn down. Lives depend on it.
Every young soldier should receive cultural and language instruction, not to make every soldier a linguist but to make every soldier a diplomat with enough sensitivity and linguistic skills to understand and converse with the indigenous citizen on the street. The mission of acculturation is too important to be relegated to last-minute briefings prior to deployment. Acculturation policy should be devised, monitored, and assessed as a joint responsibility. Today’s e-learning technologies will permit such a program to be distributed over the Web. Soldiers should be able to achieve proficiency at home and demonstrate their knowledge using assessment tools administered by DoD or the Joint Staff before any overseas deployment.
The military spends millions to create urban combat sites to train soldiers how to kill an enemy in cities. Equally useful might be urban sites optimized to teach soldiers how to coexist with and cultivate trust and understanding among indigenous peoples in foreign settings. Such centers would immerse young soldiers in a simulated Middle Eastern city, perhaps near a mosque or busy marketplace, where they would be confronted with various crises. Interagency and international presence would be as evident in these centers as that of the services and joint agencies, with perhaps a State Department, Central Intelligence Agency, or allied observer controller calling the shots during the exercise.
To assist in the acculturation process, the Department of Defense should be required to build databases that contain the religious and cultural norms for world populations—to identify the interests of the major parties, the cultural taboos—so soldiers can download the information quickly and use it profitably in the field.
Cognitive Reform Is Hard
A process of cognitive and cultural transformation cannot be accomplished in uncoordinated bits and pieces as it is today. If done right, it might well demand change as sweeping and revolutionary as the Goldwater-Nichols Act. The end state of this effort should be nothing less than a revolution in learning throughout the Department of Defense. This much is clear from past efforts, however: reform of this magnitude is essential, long overdue, and undoable without the commitment of the entire military intellectual community.
General Scales served more than 30 years in the Army, commanding two units in Vietnam, serving in command and staff positions in the United States, Germany, and Korea, and ending his career as Commandant of the U.S. Army War College. His latest book, cowritten with Williamson Murray, is The Iraq War: A Military History (Harvard University Press, 2003). General Scales currently is an independent consultant for defense matters.