The Civil Warfighting Function: Political Considerations on the Modern Battlefield

The time has come for anew warfighting function (WFF) in U. S. Army doctrine. The way in which the U. S. Army perceives the nature of war has changed. In our Army’s history, until recently, “political considerations may have governed the strategic conduct of war, [but] they had little connection with the tactical-level management of violence. That was purely military — army business.”1 Our experience with counterinsurgency operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan has fundamentally changed our way of thinking. Whereas, the current six warfighting functions (movement and maneuver, intelligence, fires, sustainment, command and control, and protection) were sufficient for past conventional enemies, we currently face enemies whose objectives are “essentially of a political nature” and fight wars in which “politics becomes an active instrument of operation.”2 Thus, future armed conflict will require that the military decisionmaking process (MDMP) be augmented with the introduction of a ‘civil’ WFF, which emphasizes the primacy of political considerations on the modern battlefield. Before an argument for a civil WFF can be elaborated, it becomes necessary to review three basic assumptions about the future operational context the U. S. Army will face. Future Operational Context Assumptions The argument for a civil WFF is predicated on three assumptions regarding the nature of future armed conflict: Assumption 1. The political nature of warfare must not be divorced from a strategic, operational, and tactical understanding of the battlespace in which we operate. The 2009 Army Capstone Concept posits that “future enemies will attempt to influence the will of the American people and key allies through propaganda, disinformation, and attacks on U. S. and ally assets at home or abroad.”3 The political means through which our adversaries will attempt to control both American and foreign populations will continue to be decisive in our current and future operations. Operational success can no longer be measured in terms of damage inflicted on opposing forces. The Army learned, through its experiences in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, that it can win tactical and operational battles, but still lose the war if it is unable to win the strategic battle for hearts and minds. Also, the growing emphasis on the political nature of warfare is not an isolated phenomenon unique only to the counterinsurgency conflicts the U. S. Army fights today. Should the Army engage in a future high-intensity conflict, it must be assumed that enemy forces will employ a hybrid strategy using both conventional and nonconventional tactics to “limit the U. S. forces’ ability to develop the situation out of contact and achieve overmatch with long-range weapons.”4 In short, the U. S. Army must be prepared to engage enemies across the full-spectrum of operations, even if they are primarily conventional forces. Assumption 2. The U. S. Government will continue to rely on the Army to conduct stability operations abroad. Stability operations are defined as “military missions, tasks, and activities conducted outside the United States in coordination with other instruments of national power to maintain or reestablish a safe and secure environment, provide essential govern- 22 mental services, emergency infrastructure reconstruction, and humanitarian relief… before, during, and after combat operations, across the spectrum of conflict.”5 The deployment of the 2d Brigade Combat Team (BCT), 82d Airborne Division, to Haiti following a catastrophic earthquake is the most recent example of employing U. S. forces in support of stability operations. Other examples include the 2004 tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia and the devastating 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. These stability operations are often politically charged, have international implications, and are just as complex and challenging, if not more so, than high-intensity conflicts. Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell, commander, U. S. Army Combined Arms Center, explains the important role of stability operations best in U. S. Army Field Manual (FM) 3-07, Stability Operations, as “America’s future abroad is unlikely to resemble Afghanistan or Iraq, where we grapple with the burden of nation building under fire. Instead, we will work through and with the community of nations to defeat insurgency, assist fragile states, and provide vital humanitarian aid to the suffering.”6 Assumption 3. As defined below, the elements of combat power in future (and current) armed conflict are inadequately captured by today’s WFFs: “Combat power: The total means of destructive, contrastive, and information capabilities that a military unit/ formation can apply at a given time. “Elements of combat power: Leadership and information plus the six warfighting functions, which include movement and maneuver, intelligence, fires, sustainment, command and control, and protection. “Warfighting functions: A group of tasks and systems (people, organizations, information, and processes) united by a common purpose that commanders use to accomplish missions and training objectives. “Intelligence: The related tasks and systems that move forces to achieve a position of advantage in relation to the enemy. “Fires: The related tasks and systems that provide collective and coordinated use of Army indirect fires, joint fires, and command and control warfare, including nonlethal fires, through the targeting process. “Sustainment: The related tasks and systems that provide support and services to ensure freedom of action, extend operational reach, and prolong endurance. “Command and control: The related tasks and systems that support commanders in exercising authority and direction. “Protection: The related tasks and systems that preserve the force so commanders can apply maximum combat power.”7 Indeed, the terms “combat” and “warfighting” are misleading terms when used during the MDMP due to the widely varied operations the U. S. Army executes at the low end of the spectrum of conflict. The current six WFF exclusively focus on the application of the Army’s power against a conventional threat operating within a political vacuum. In fact, the only WFF that even remotely considers political or civil-military factors is intelligence. Yet, even this WFF addresses such factors only with regard to area, structures, capabilities, organizations, people, and events (ASCOPE) relating to villages, towns, cities, and other populated areas within a unit’s area of operations (AO). Future operational challenges the Army will face will increasingly be compounded by political and civil-military factors, which will have theater, regional, and international implications. The Case for a Civil Warfighting Function The Department of Defense’s (DOD) 2008 National Defense Strategy states that “arguably the most important military component of the struggle against violent extremists is not the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we help prepare our partners to defend and govern themselves.” Political initiatives of this nature will improve the socioeconomic conditions of our partner nations, “undermining the sources of support, and assisting in addressing root causes of turmoil.”8 Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates echoed this theme in a 2007 speech: “One of the most important lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that military success is not sufficient to win … [Future] conflicts will be fundamentally political in nature, and require the application of all elements of national power. Success will be less a matter of imposing one’s will and more a function of shaping behavior — of friends, adversaries, and most importantly, the people in between.”9 There appears to be a deliberate effort from the DOD to subordinate the importance of the military’s combat efforts to an overarching political strategy that “integrates all elements of national power,” increasingly referred to as the “whole of government approach.”10 This strategic paradigm shift necessitates an increased appreciation of the political context and civil implications when conducting mission analysis of the Army’s missions. The current six WFFs largely ignore such a context. The only WFF that even remotely addresses such “Operational success can no longer be measured in terms of damage inflicted on opposing forces. The Army learned, through its experiences in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, that it can win tactical and operational battles, but still lose the war if it is unable to win the strategic battle for hearts and minds. Also, the growing emphasis on the political nature of warfare is not an isolated phenomenon unique only to the counterinsurgency conflicts the U. S. Army fights today.” 23 civil military implications is command and control, which includes tasks for both information engagement and civil affairs tasks. To gloss over other civil-military tasks, such as stability operations, security cooperation, and security force assistance, seems incongruent with the realities of today’s operational environment. Although, realistically, Army forces are applying political and civil considerations to operations every day, there exists no doctrine to acknowledge the primacy of political considerations during the MDMP. A good illustration of this peculiar doctrinal gap is demonstrated by the following excerpt from an article reviewing Africa Command’s (AFRICOM) mission, “Not overly focused on traditional warfighting capabilities, the [AFRICOM] mission emphasizes professionalism within African militaries so they can independently conduct peacekeeping operations.”11 How can the nation’s newest combatant command, responsible for the entire continent of Africa, operate without emphasis to the ‘traditional’ WFFs? This command, which focuses primarily on security force assistance and stability operations, finds itself in the precarious position of employing its combat power in an operational environment that does not neatly fit into the preexisting WFFs. Clearly, it would make sense to have a WFF that could doctrinally bridge the gap between ‘traditional warfighting capabilities’ and tasks that are more prominent in environments other than high-intensity conflict. A more recent example of this doctrinal gap is the early 2010 offensive, Operation Moshtarak, in Marja, Afghanistan. During this offensive, which Richard C. Holbrooke (U. S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan) argues is perhaps “the greatest [offensive] in the history of counterinsurgency,” there was a very deliberate effort to clear Marja of Taliban forces, hold the city, build the infrastructure and government, and transfer authority to Afghan forces and officials.12 The hold, build, and transfer elements of this offensive clearly fall within the realm of proposed civil WFFs because they involve the use of forces to improve infrastructure and socioeconomic nodes, and increase the legitimacy and effectiveness of the Afghan political authorities. Without the benefit of official operations orders or after-action reports for this offensive, it appears as if the clearing portion of the offensive was a shaping operation for the far more crucial political and socioeconomic portion, which was likely the decisive operation. The concept of a civil WFF is not a novel concept here; it merely reflects the realities on the ground. Therefore, it is time to introduce anew civil WFF, one that further defines related tasks and systems to facilitate a greater appreciation of the political, socioeconomic, cultural, and organizational considerations in the operational environment, and provide integrated and coordinated efforts to shape these conditions to achieve a position of advantage for commanders. This function includes tasks such as enhance situational understanding; conduct psychological operations (PSYOP) activities; conduct civil-military operations (CMO) activities (to include civil affairs activities); impose civil order; perform local economic assessment and engagement; build partnership capacity with other nations; and humanitarian relief operations. To understand the implications of adding a civil WFF, it is necessary to further examine its proposed tasks:  Enhancing situational understanding is accomplished by informing the commander of the political context in which his unit is operating, enabling a better understanding of second- and third-order effects, which are affected by the commander’s actions.  Psychological operations are “operations that convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately influence the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”13  Civil military operations are “the activities of the commander that establish, maintain, influence, or exploit relations between military forces, government and nongovernment civilian organizations and authorities, and the civilian populace in a friendly, neutral, or hostile operational area of operations to facilitate military operations, to consolidate and achieve U. S. objectives.”14  Imposing civil order means that U. S. forces work in conjunction with local authorities to reestablish security, essential services, and authority during times of crisis.  Local economic assessment and engagement is the process U. S. forces use to conduct atmospherics to determine the economic viability within an area of operations, identify key businesses, and decide how best to apply programs such as commanders emergency response program (CERP) funds to aid economic reconstruction.  Building partnership capacity with other nations implies the use of security force assistance, security cooperation, and foreign internal defense.  Humanitarian relief operations are missions, such as natural disasters in foreign countries, to which U. S. forces are tasked to respond. The civil WFF can be used as part of any one of the operational themes, which include peacetime limited engagement, limited intervention, peace operations, irregular warfare, and major combat operations. Whereas, the movement and maneuver and fires WFFs are less applicable on the ‘stable peace’ end of the spectrum of conflict (see Figure 1),15 a civil WFF would be equally applicable throughout the entire spectrum. Additionally, like Figure 1

Major Combat Operations Irregular Warfare Peace Operations Limited Intervention Peacetime Military Engagement 24 other WFFs, it can function as a decisive, shaping, or sustaining operation. Implications Adding a seventh WFF would have important implications on how the Army plans its missions. A doctrinally sanctioned civil WFF would increase the weight of civil considerations during the mission analysis portion of the MDMP, particularly when conducting intelligence preparation of the battlefield (IPB); identifying specified, implied, and essential tasks; determining constraints; and identifying critical facts and assumptions.16 It should also be used when analyzing relative combat power and should be weighted heavily as an evaluation criterion when conducting a course of action comparison. A civil WFF could also impact how command posts function. It may prove advantageous to add a civil functional cell to the command post organization, which would reinforce the importance of political implications to current operations, future operations, and plans integrating cells (see Figure 2).17 The intent here is not to add an extra level of bureaucracy to the business of command posts or increase their already robust footprint, but merely to stress the importance of a civil WFF in the operational environment. A civil WFF would further ensure that our forces integrate with U. S. Government interagency partners more effectively. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that President Obama wants to make sure that our “civilian and military efforts operate in a coordinated and complementary fashion where we are engaged in conflict.”18 Dedicating more effort and manpower toward a civil WFF would increase our capacity to provide liaisons for interagency partners and contribute to a ‘whole government’ approach during daily operations. Ultimately, the addition of a civil WFF would more accurately capture the elements of combat power available to commanders. Combat power encompasses not just a unit’s destructive capabilities, but also its constructive and information capabilities.19 A civil WFF would augment the constructive and information components of combat power elements, thus more accurately depicting the complete situation on the battlefield and enable leaders to make well-informed decisions. The WFFs, to include civil, combined with information and leadership, form the elements of combat power. Our military leaders continue to enforce the idea of subordinating the military sphere to the political sphere. It is important to remember that the application of military power is but one tool among a host of many others that the U. S. Government uses to meet its foreign policy objectives. The National Defense Strategy has already reinforced this concept, and although President Obama has not yet released his National Security Strategy document, members of his cabinet have hinted that he will continue to stress the fundamental pillars of our foreign policy — we should “lead with diplomacy.”20 This article proposes nothing radical; our Army has been operating in an operational environment over the past 9 years in which the political and civil demands of reality on the ground have already necessitated recognition of the primacy of politics in our operations. The addition of a civil WFF would merely reinforce this reality with solid doctrinal recognition. It would truly reflect the entirety of the elements of combat power available to commanders on the ground. Notes 1 John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2005, p. 115. 2David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, Praeger Security International, Westport, CT, 2006, p. 5. 3Headquarters (HQ), U. S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Pamphlet (Pam) 525-3-0, The Army Capstone Concept, Operational Adaptability: Operating under Conditions of Uncertainty and Complexity in an Era of Persistent Conflict, Fort Monroe, VA, December 2009, p. 7. 4Ibid. 5Headquarters, Department of the Army (HQDA), U. S. Army Field Manual (FM) 3-07, Stability Operations, U. S. Government Printing Office (GPO), Washington, DC, 2008, p. vi. 6Ibid., foreword. 7HQDA, U. S. Army FM 3-0, Operations, GPO, Washington, DC, 2008, pp. 4-1 to 4-7. 8Department of Defense, National Defense Strategy, June 2008, pp. 8-9. 9Robert M. Gates, “Landon Lecture (Kansas State University),” 26 November 2007, http://www.defense.gov/speeches/ speech.aspx?speechid=1199, accessed 4 February 2010. 10Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, February 2010, p. 1. 11Colonel Stephen J. Mariano and Major George L. Deuel, “Crisis Prevention: USAFRICOM, Partnerships, and the U. S. Army,” On Track, Autumn 2009, p. 34. 12Jordan Reimer, “Holbrooke Hails Marja Operation, Relationship with Pakistan,” American Forces Press Service, 16 March 2010, http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/03/16/35909- holbrooke-hails-marja-operation-relationship-with-pakistan/ index.html?ref=home-headline-link0, accessed 18 March 2010. 13HQDA, FM 3-13, Information Operations: Doctrine, Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures, GPO, Washington, DC, 2003, p. 2-3. 14HQDA, FM 3-05.401, Civil Affairs Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures, GPO, Washington, DC, 2007, p. 1-4. 15FM 3-0, Operations, p. 2-5. 16HQDA, FM 5-0, The Operations Process, GPO, Washington, DC, March 2010, Chapter 3. 17HQDA, FM 5-0.1, The Operations Process, GPO, Washington, DC, March 2006, Chapter 2. Diagram based on Figure 2-2, p. 2-7. 18Derek S. Reveron, Atlantic Council, Obama’s National Security Strategy Unfolding, 16 July 2009, http://www.acus.org/ new_atlanticist/obamas-national-security-strategy-unfolding, accessed 7 February 2010. 19FM 3-0, Operations, p. 4-1. 20Derek S. Reveron, Atlantic Council, Obama’s National Security Strategy Unfolding. Captain Sean Castilla is currently assigned as assistant operations officer, U. S. Army Armor School, Fort Benning, GA. He received a B. A. from the University of Texas and an M. A. from Saint Mary’s University. His military education includes U. S. Army Ranger School, Army Reconnaissance Course, and Airborne School. He has served in various staff and leader positions, to include aide de camp, Special Operations Command, Africa; and platoon leader, C Company, 1st Squadron, 32d Cavalry, 101st Airborne Division, Fort Campbell, KY.