Getting to Know Our Neighbors: Classifying and Locating Insurgent Support Zones

July-August 2011 41 An aspect of operational adaptability for deployed Armor leaders and soldiers is successful employment of a combined-arms approach to counterinsurgency at platoon and company level. In other words, success depends on a combined-arms approach itself; use of intelligence assets; skillful collection of atmospherics; an accurate census; focus of the COIN force’s efforts at platoon and company level; and synchronization of those efforts at battalion level. From these factors, the COIN force can classify insurgent support zones unique to its area of operation and target them appropriately. A basic COIN tenant is separating the enemy from the population because, for an insurgency to be successful, it requires a support zone. The Army must therefore seek out insurgent support zones and render them incapable of reconstitution. To find a support zone, the Army must understand its framework and intent because it can’t be seen. A support zone is any area, network, political or legal umbrella in which the insurgent can operate with impunity. To understand where, when and how the insurgent can find this sanctuary is critical to defeating the insurgency. An example of this is the “awakening” of Sunni tribes in Iraq. In this case, the Sunni tribes were the sanctuary al-Qaeda used as their support zone. Once the tribes revoked their support, al-Qaeda in Iraq was unable to realize its aim of overthrowing the Baghdad government and forcing out the American Army. This article will discuss several areas:

• Insurgent cells and networks are never standardized but can be put into a template.

• Platoon and company leaders can find and classify a support zone by identifying its functions and quantifying its effects.

• Once the support zone is exposed to the Army, it loses its effect and is then defeated. Anatomy of a support zone All insurgent support zones are permitted to function by constraints imposed on the Army or limitations of the Army’s combat power. The insurgent identifies these two factors by using sources, informants, reconnaissance and surveillance. The insurgent then operates from the gaps. From this support zone, the insurgent projects effects on the Army and the local population compatible with his agenda. The support zone’s purpose is to enable the insurgent cell to perform its functions, which are to refit, reconstitute, plan and project combat power. The support zone itself is echeloned with layers of sensory nodes that provide connectivity with other cells and support networks. These nodes are also a disruption belt that gives early warning about penetrations and other actions that may affect its functions. Penetrating or isolating a support zone are the only ways to defeat it. This is because infiltrating a support zone requires an extensive human-intelligence effort beyond most brigades’ capabilities.1 Intelligence officers and noncommissioned officers in an Army brigade are seldom employed in a manner that synchronizes their intelligence work with the maneuver plan. Further, a high priority is currently placed on imagery obtained via unmanned aerial surveillance rather than on cultivating an informant network. This prioritization causes a gap in our intelligence and maneuver efforts the insurgents capitalize on. With continued lack of understanding about how a support zone functions and its critical nature to the insurgent’s efforts, the Army forfeits a large swath of ground to our enemies. Gaps left in our intelligence efforts allow the support zone to develop into three mutually supporting operational spheres. The first sphere consists of a root from which all the insurgent’s effects indirectly stem. This root is the steady-state operations cell, which may consist of active or passive supporters, or both. This operations cell is a normal and functioning part of its environment. Impenetrable and integrated, the operations cell appears to be a legitimate part of the community. Tracing the cell through its effects shows it resembles the hub of a wheel. The wheel’s spokes serve as the cell’s lines of effort. These spokes are the second operational sphere. The spokes are individuals who may be dedicated operatives or unwitting civilians used on sporadic occasions for a variety of missions. There’s no template for these spokes because their formation can be diverse and complex. Examples include a chain of farmhouses, a group of cab drivers, a political party, etc. The spokes are the conduits that provide intelligence, financial support, logistics and combat power. Both active and passive supporters, as well as trained operatives, can make these spokes effective. There is no way to observe them in operation or template what they look like without a very skilled HUMINT source. The final sphere is the support zone’s echelon of connectivity. These nodes serve as sentries for the support zone. They provide warning, disrupt the Army when it gets close and communicate with cells in other support zones. It’s important to understand that individuals operating in this capacity may be confined to singular roles or may have multiple duties. Soldiers targeting the support zone must grasp that they may be facing an ambiguous and complex network that relies either on a variety of specific events or on certain situations in which to perform its function. These three operational spheres can be perceived as a succession of battle positions that are sometimes manned by leaders, operatives or supporters, based on whichever echelon is task-critical. Identifying and classifying support zones The support zone can’t be seen or made into a template unless it’s first understood. The way to understand the support zone is to know it by its effects. An effect is something resulting from an action the insurgents took. For example, a direct-action cell emplaces improvised explosive devices along a route. Following detonation and injury to coalition forces, the Army subsequently classifies the route as “black.” The effect is that the community along the route is now unreachable by the Army. There will be other effects, too, such as exploitation of the incident by insurgent propagandists. These effects will be footprints that lead to the roots. A root in this case is the group of people who benefited from the effect. A large and complex number of roots facilitate insurgent operations and protect support zones. By collecting on and analyzing roots, the Army will conclude where and how the insurgent action stems from it. This will be the support zone. There are five types of support zones traceable from any single root or group of roots. They are:

• Restrictive terrain (rural). This is an effective support zone when the Army is incapable or unwilling to project combat power into it. An example is the mountainous terrain in Afghanistan, where an Army unit is burdened by excessive body-armor requirements and, because of this, they forgo the ability to carry a sizable sustainment load. The unit then depends on being close to its vehicles as support platforms. The roots for this support zone are tangible and the most apparent. Caravans, lines of communication, proximity to assault positions on Army installations, key terrain and any life-sustaining location beyond the Army’s reach are likely support zones.

• Restrictive terrain (urban). This is an effective support zone when its disruption belt is in the form of either a sympathetic or coerced population support base. The population gives warning, acting as sensors for the support zone. The population is also the cover and concealment for the insurgent cell. Roots leading to these support zones are very difficult to find and can only be uncovered based on extremely good HUMINT that is corroborated with a detailed census and continuous atmospherics.

• The ideological umbrella. This is an effective support zone when the insurgent sphere masquerades as a political or religious entity, winning popular support and media cooperation by pretending to be a legitimate force. It Figure 1. The insurgent support zone consists of three operational spheres that can be portrayed as a wheel. The steady-state operations cell is the wheel’s hub, since all insurgent effects stem from it. The wheel’s spokes are the second operational sphere, the cell’s lines of effort. The outer rim is the final sphere, the support zone’s connectivity nodes, which warn the insurgents, disrupt the Army and communicate with other cells. 9 has highly placed supporters among the government and social elite that exert pressure to legitimatize the insurgency and deny the Army the ability to defeat it. This elite serves as the support zone’s disruption belt, and the ideological protection it offers constitutes the support zone. This is extremely dangerous when coupled with another support zone. To penetrate it, the effect is akin to conducting multiple breaches simultaneously. This support zone’s vulnerability is that the insurgent group becomes intolerable to the elite if it in-dulges in excess. Also, the elite will abandon the cause if its power base or comfortable means of living is jeopardized by its support of the insurgency. Another element of the political umbrella is a nation that doesn’tallow the Army to pursue insurgents across its border, and it doesn’t cooperate with the Army to interdict the insurgent as he retrogrades across the border. The neighboring country becomes the support zone for the insurgent, who can then perpetuate the war endlessly.

• The legal umbrella. Effective when the insurgent notices that the Army is constrained by requirements, laws or rules of engagement. The insurgent isn’t bound to the same laws, will operate outside of them and will use those laws to cover his operations. Examples of this are establishing fighting positions in mosques and hospitals, knowing the Army either is prohibited from engaging them there or may have to wait for permission to engage them there. Another example is the more common one, which is an operative pretending to be a civilian who observes the Army and triggers ambushes on it. In this case, the Army unit must be trained to recognize the observer for what he is and be enabled with rules of engagement allowing it to take action without fear of reprisal. Otherwise, soldiers will hesitate to take action due to fear of being prosecuted – for instance, they may shoot the observer and are prosecuted because a superior officer who is removed from the mission’s danger determines the observer didn’t show what the superior officer construes as hostile intent. The insurgent will use this technique with impunity if it is successful.

• The false flag. This is where the insurgent presents himself to the Army as a businessman, interpreter or other type of cooperative ally and works to develop influential personal relationships with naïve soldiers. From this relationship, he will work to enable and protect his insurgent mission. Even when compromised, he will still be effective because he will have alienated truly cooperative local-nationals from the Army unit, which will likely become unreasonably paranoid because of the insurgent’s betrayal. Further, the false flag can refer to insurgents exploiting soldiers as sources by falsely presenting themselves as agents of a government or entity to which the soldier is sympathetic. Finding the support zone Commonsense information collection that is corroborated with atmospherics and reliable HUMINT are the elements that enable the Army to locate the support zone. But first, the Army must know and understand its environment from as close to a native’s point of view as possible. That being said, all collection methods will be inconclusive and may lead to misanalysis if not supported by a detailed census of the area. The census is a numbering and lettering of a given area’s homes, institutions and businesses, with the corresponding people listed. From the census a commander issues specific information requirements that his soldiers collect on patrol, which feeds the link chart the company intelligence-support team makes. As soldiers identify key leaders, they nominate them to the battalion intelligence officer (S-2) or civil-military operations officer (S- 5/S-9) as lethal or nonlethal targets. Most important is the awareness of the targeted individual’s connections and role in the community. If there isn’t a thorough understanding of the community’s dynamics and its personalities, and the way people in the community relate to and depend on each other, the information collected will not be effectively corroborated with local atmospherics. This will lead to mistakes that will alienate the population and turn them toward the insurgent. To develop the required understanding, soldiers should conduct a social-network analysis. (An excellent introduction to this can be found in Appendix B, FM 3-24.) Every house, business, institution and essential service must be documented. Without this knowledge, the Army is blind. Without the identification available from a census, the insurgent support zone can be effectively concealed and reconstituted regardless of how many times the Army detains or kills its members. After building the census, the Army can understand the human terrain in its AO. It won’t be dependent only on the word of interpreters and atmospherics. From the census the intelligence officer and civil-military operations officer can quantify the social, economic and political entities that make up the communities in their AO. By corroborating personalities and dependent relationships with these entities, it becomes evident who in the area would be the “go to” person for a specific need or agenda. Also, institutions such as schools and mosques will be identified that provide essential services and are a necessary ingredient for the community to function. These institutions and people will be the sources to collect on based on how they relate to the effects of an insurgency in their area. The Army must continually develop close personal relationships with all these individuals and place intelligence sources in institutions to be able to assess where the insurgent’s lines of effort are. From these assessments, the Army can then classify sources according to their capabilities in helping the insurgency. Once those who aren’t capable of being part of the insurgent line of effort are eliminated from the collection effort, collection assets can be made more efficient by focusing them on those who are. A weekly assessment must be made to the commander on the sources’ possible involvement with the insurgency. Sources must be cultivated to be counteractive to the insurgents’ cause. This will be the key in beginning to isolate the support zone even if its location is never identified. A counteractive source is an individual who will be reliably proactive in contradicting the insurgent agenda on one or more lines of effort. Many sources will never be reliable but will be subject to the sway of whichever side puts on the greatest pressure or offers the greatest incentive. Others will never stop serving the insurgent agenda. Once sources that facilitate insurgent lines of effort are identified, they must be used to lead the Army to the operations cell, either knowingly or inadvertently. This, combined with a counteractive source, is what makes penetration of the support zone possible. However, penetration isn’t complete until the Army identifies the operations cell. Concealing the cell is achieved by total immersion with its environment so it can easily be glanced over as just another establishment – for example, an electronics store, cab company, fertilizer distributer, etc. The key to identifying it as an operations cell is to trace the effects of the insurgent cell back to the other operational spheres of the support zone. From this tracking method, the intelligence officer can identify the op- 10

AO – area of operation COIN – counterinsurgency FM – field manual HUMINT – human intelligence erations cell by process of elimination. He simply crosses out the unfeasible causes and roots of the effects, then targets the feasible roots with the appropriate intelligence-collection assets. Sometimes inadvertent containment of the cell will cause it to dissipate without the Army ever noticing where it was. This is dangerous because the cell will then be able to reconstitute once the Army’s focus shifts away from it. Trying to just contain the support zone is futile because the insurgent cell is still able to use the support zone to reconstitute, plan future operations and maintain the integrity of its formation. In the same respect, clearing the area the support zone is believed to be in is also futile because the cell will simply pose as local civilians who are then bypassed – and in some cases even assisted – by the Army. The operations cell is likely made up of pre-existing members of the community who have normal jobs in the area. Their own families probably don’t know they’re operating for the insurgency. This may not be true in support zones that are remote from the Army’s physical presence because the remoteness shields the family; this likely will encourage sharing of information between operatives and their families. In urban areas closer to the Army’s outposts and patrols, the level of secrecy goes up so the insurgent’s family won’t compromise him. Whether the operations cell is local or not doesn’t make a difference in how the cell needs to blend in to the population. The only difference is that the non-local cell requires the community leadership’s permission to operate. If no permission, the cell has to either bribe or threaten the locals, and that makes its operational security more tenuous. What makes the operations cell extremely difficult to locate is when they are not only ingrained into the community but also when they are only part-time insurgents. Further difficulty arises when the operations cell outsources its work to cells from other areas. This creates effects that aren’t as obvious and uses non-local sources – and leads the Army’s intelligence efforts away from the operations cell that’s actually in its area. If there are any insurgents to be targeted lethally with extreme prejudice, it’s those who can be classified as part of an operations cell. It’s they who coordinate and plan missions and, more importantly, maintain the framework for the support zone to continue without them. The most effective operations cell doesn’t need the community’s popular support because its community doesn’t know its members are insurgents. They use the community’s resources and lines of effort for the appearance of a legitimate enterprise, but in reality, they serve the insurgency’s purpose either as a nested effort or for their own purpose. Get the root The support zone that harbors the insurgency operations cell may be located by targeting the effects of the cell’s lines of effort. Lines of effort can only be discovered by quantifying the roots that facilitate them. To destroy the support zone, it must be either isolated or penetrated. This can’t be done if a census and social-network analysis isn’t first performed to establish counteractive sources who can dissuade the population’s support of the insurgency. Platoon- and company-level soldiers must get to know their local-national neighbors well; anything less will allow the support zone to reconstitute in another place or time. MAJ Joseph LaBarbera is a student at the Army’s Command and Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, KS. He has completed four Global War on Terrorism deployments totaling 44 months. He served in various command-and-staff positions in the continental United States, Iraq and Afghanistan, including rifle-company commander, 2-14 Infantry, 10th Mountain Division; armored-reconnaissance company trainer (observer-controller), National Training Center, Fort Irwin, CA; and three transition-team billets as an adviser. The adviser assignments were to an Iraqi army brigade S-3, the 4-6 Iraqi army brigade commando company commander and the 303rd Afghan Police Corps G-2 in Northern Afghanistan. He received a bachelor’s of arts degree from the City University of New York and is completing his thesis for his master’s of arts degree in national security studies at American Military University. Notes 1Primarily this is because of the murky legal constraints that prevent Army officers from handling sources. Field Manual 2-22.3, Human Intelligence Collection Operations, states in Chapter 5 that “[o]perations with formal contacts are only conducted by HUMINT collectors and [counterintelligence] agents who are specifically trained and authorized to do so.” The article’s author attempted to find a quotable source to specify who could be authorized but was told that the applicable regulations are classified. This seems ridiculous when considering that a small-town police detective can run a source who is an American citizen but an Army officer in a combat zone is prohibited from doing so with a local national. Platoon- and company-level soldiers must get to know their local-national neighbors well; anything less will allow the support zone to reconstitute in another place or time. (photo by SPC Kristina L. Gupton) Acronym Quick-Scan 11