|
Lessons From The Military
From The Military: Applying 4GW Theory
to The Intelligence Community
Myke Cole
Introduction.
Just a few months ago, a team of retired military
officers representing three branches of the armed services gave an important
presentation at the 16th Annual Army War College Strategy Conference
at the Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania.1
This presentation provided a number of forward thinking
suggestions on how to reverse the setbacks the US is currently suffering
in Iraq and Afghanistan, including real departures from present Department
of Defense (DOD) official lines, such as the over reliance on technology
outlined in DOD’s Joint Vision 20202, and the centralized,
compartmented and hierarchical means of dissemination of intelligence
and orders.
Wilson, Wilcox and Richards state in their presentation
that in order to defeat insurgents and terrorists in Iraq and worldwide
in the post 9/11 era, we have to “become cellular like them”, “leverage
unconventional capabilities”, and “rely on the skill, cunning, experience
and intelligence of our front line forces to convert information into
intel ... while it still means something!”3 These recommendations
represent a debate among military thinkers as our armed services attempt
to transform themselves into a force capable of defeating the networked,
decentralized and transnational enemies we face today. It is part of
a revolution in military thought known as The Military Reform Movement.
This movement, spearheaded largely by retired and active officers across
the services, is challenging the established norms of the military bureaucracy,
and is based around two critical pillars: The teachings of legendary
strategist John Boyd, and the concept of Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW).4
This movement is changing the way we fight on the
ground in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and its honest assessment of the
enemy we face is invaluable to the Intelligence Community (IC). Unfortunately,
while a lively discussion of 4GW and the need for a low-tech, networked,
real-time approach to combating the enemy, heavily reliant on Human
Intelligence (HUMINT), seems to be enjoying a great deal of attention
in the military intelligence circles, it does not seem to have penetrated
the intelligence community at large. A careful examination of these
arguments and their possible application to the entire IC is both warranted
and overdue.
What is Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) and why is
it important to the IC?
While there is some debate as to how to exactly
define 4GW, a widely accepted definition is an “evolved form of insurgency
[that] uses all available networks—political, economic, social, military—to
convince the enemy’s decision makers that their strategic goals are
either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit.”5
This super insurgency “ ... seems likely to be widely dispersed and
largely undefined… It will be nonlinear, possibly to the point of having
no definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction between ‘civilian’
and ‘military’ may disappear.”6
This description, while broad, suggests that the
United States has already faced 4GW opponents in Vietnam, Lebanon and
Somalia and is facing them again today in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other
hallmarks of 4GW opponents find resonance in the experiences of our
troops and intelligence agents currently engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan:7
4GW opponents are united by a conforming ideology.
Mao Tse-Tung, considered the father of 4GW from his development
of “People’s War,” wrote “Political mobilization is the most fundamental
condition for winning the war.”8 Where Mao projected
political ideology to weld together disparate urban workers, rural
peasants, and the Soviet and Chinese schools of Communism, Salafist
extremism unites religiously disparate Sunni and Shi’a as well as
ethno-culturally disparate Arabs, Turks and Persians in their efforts
to combat the interests of the United States.
4GW actors are stateless, either transnational
(international terrorist organizations, drug cartels, etc…) or subnational
(Somali clans, ethnic separatist groups within established states).
They do not wear uniforms or respect national borders and may not
even share a common language. They are defined only by their stated
objective.
4GW actors work patiently. Aware that they cannot
defeat technologically, financially and numerically superior opponents
in a conventional contest, they rely on propaganda, terrorism and
Low Intensity Conflict (LIC) to erode the enemy’s moral, mental
and physical ability to wage war over many long years in the hopes
we will lose patience or the heart to stay in the fight, or at long
last be made weak enough for a conventional coup de grace.9
These additional factors leave little doubt that
we are facing 4GW opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What can the IC take from the military community’s
debate on 4GW?
4GW actors cannot be defeated by the IC’s old cold-war
posture. Retired Naval officer Larry Seaquist puts it more urgently,
“Our failure to understand these new forms of war and to recognize that
they are popping up all over the globe traps us in habits of inaction
that feed and accelerate these armed conflicts and steadily erode our
own military advantages.”10
4GW theory argues that a decentralized, fast-moving,
networked opponent must be defeated by a decentralized, fast-moving
and networked response. There are two major challenges that the IC must
overcome in addressing a 4GW enemy, and the lessons for the IC of the
Wilson, Wilcox and Richards presentation are clear. They are rather
heavy-handedly summed up by Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) expert
Robert David Steele, “Since World War II, an otherwise clever nation
has fallen prey to several erroneous premises, among them that intelligence
demands secrecy; that technology is a fine substitute for thinking ..”11
Dissemination of information in the IC is hierarchical
and compartmented. Dissemination of information among 4GW actors
is networked and unhindered by artificial policy constraints and
information sharing barriers. This allows 4GW opponents to work
inside the IC’s OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) decision loop12
and outpace the IC’s own collection, analysis, dissemination of
and action on, intelligence.
The IC, like the DOD in JV 2020, relies far
too heavily on high technology solutions. New and more complex databases,
analysis applications and an ever proliferating number and variety
of computer networks serves only to hinder its efforts, either by
overwhelming it with collected information that cannot be analyzed
effectively or expending valuable resources that could be put towards
low-tech solutions that 4GW theory suggests would be more effective
(such as language skills, cultural awareness of the enemy and additional
staff in the field). Steele again vehemently attacks the confluence
of the IC’s two greatest weaknesses: obsession with hierarchy and
information compartmentalization and overdependence on high technology;
“We are wasting today at least $10 billion a year on secret technical
intelligence collection systems whose fruits cannot be harvested,
and we are about to waste $60 billion over ten years recapitalizing
these same secret technical collection systems, so that we might
collect 100 times more information, and process still less of it.
Analysts, analytic tools, and access to open sources of information
comprise the 'collateral damage' of the secret war and its obsession
with compartmentation.”13
Our 4GW opponents are far less limited by hierarchical
patterns of information dissemination, and not subject to a classification
compartmentalization system or a large bureaucracy. They make use of
technology in a fast and effective manner, while still managing to operate
inside the IC’s OODA loop and advancing their aims with low-technology
solutions, such as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) that are often
made out of parts a child could buy at Radio Shack. Wilson, Wilcox and
Richards’ presentation shows us what troops on the ground in Iraq are
learning in real-time: To defeat the enemy, we must think and operate
like the enemy.
Using Networked Information Technology (IT) Systems
as a model
Ironically, the best example of the IC’s failure
to work in a low-tech, networked manner is evident in its implementation
of its high technology solutions: the computer networks on which it
relies every day. The low-tech 4GW actor simply relies on “the existing
networks created by the information-based economy. These networks provide
a cheap, robust, redundant system and allows the information to blend
into the trillions of legitimate transaction that take place every day.”14
By using the existing technologies of email, the internet and instant-messaging,
insurgents and terrorists can communicate seamlessly and in real-time,
largely unhampered by a risk-adverse need for bureaucratic approval
from a top-down hierarchical structure. There’s no limitation imposed
by classification compartments or inter-agency miscommunications. Intelligence
and better yet, actionable information that is not yet finished intelligence,
travels in real-time, allowing the 4GW actor to operate inside the IC’s
OODA loop.
In contrast, the IC, like the rest of the federal
government follows the commercial model for designing and operating
its networks,15 while it battles the largest reorganization
in its history. The result is the IC’s operating on a variety of disparate
computer networks that can barely communicate. Various versions of email
applications, operating systems and analysis applications are approved
for use at varying agencies with little to no coordination with one
another. The result is that frequently information cannot flow between
the CIA, the FBI, CIFA, NSA and various other agencies with the speed
needed because of something as basic as sheer mass of technological
incompatibility.
The solution the IC has attempted to implement has
been more technology expenditure. "Success is dependent on networked
information technology systems and the capacity to manage and share
information effectively. . ”16 said FBI Director Robert Mueller,
and yet the FBI’s highly publicized 170 million dollar investment in
its Virtual Case File (VCF) system has resulted in little to no advantage
for either the FBI or the IC at large.17
Meanwhile, the FBI’s Executive Assistant Director
was quoted as arguing against the need for expertise in counterterrorism,
geo-political skills, or Arabic language training. "You need leadership.
You don't need subject matter expertise," Garry Bald testified in an
ongoing FBI employment case. "It is certainly not what I look for in
selecting an official for a position in a counterterrorism position.”18
4GW theory argues strenuously against such thinking,
and holds up the failure of multi-million dollar investments such as
VCF to produce real gains in the war on terror. As the insurgents make
use of easily networked commercially available systems (we would do
well to recall how Somali fighters outstripped communications of the
legendary Delta Force with something as simple and commercially available
as a public cellular phone network19) and otherwise rely
on low-technology systems such as IEDs and suicide bombings, they continue
to move one step ahead of us. We must always remain cognizant of the
fact that 4GW is ultimately about message and political will. Sophisticated
computers and complex databases cannot get our message out nor change
the political will of the enemy or the population who supports him.
Analysts and agents who speak Arabic, and are culturally and geo-politically
literate in the Arab, Persian and Turkish worlds can. We must remember
the critical points made in the Wilson, Wilcox and Richards presentation
already quoted in the introduction as well as one more: Defeat a networked
threat with a network, or as the presenters cite John Boyd, “We should
be the ones in the village, not the people attacking the village.”20
Insurgents and terrorist 4GW actors are not hampered
by the risk-adverse, hierarchical nature of the IC’s bureaucracy. This
allows them to move intelligence and act on it more quickly. The classification
system, and the compartmented nature of classification, is, to put it
mildly, dauntingly complex. Worse, there is no coordination across agencies,
resulting in situations such as ICE and FBI agents not getting critical
information needed to act on domestic 4GW threats because they lack
sufficient clearance, or an inability to make use of the information
anyway because its classification level or compartment would make it
unactionable at a law-enforcement level.
The constant need to wait for approval from the
top down slows the process further. 4GW actors function in a decentralized
manner, with each foot soldier having a clear understanding of a strategic
goal, and being able to move towards it with little direction from above,
quickly and efficiently. They don't have to worry about being unable
to use certain critical pieces of information because they aren't cleared,
nor do they have to wait for permission from a unit chief to take action.
They can just put down their broom, pick up a gun, call themselves an
Al-Qa’ida cell, and boom, they are.
The hierarchical nature of the IC bureaucracy creates
a false distinction in division of labor that prevents the kind of mixing
of skills that creates a fluid network necessary to combat a 4GW opponent.
Here again, the standard IT infrastructure of federal government organizations
provides a good example: Across the government, IT systems are designed,
implemented and documented by engineers, who then hand completed systems
over to administrators/operations staff who maintain and run them day
to day. This is a false distinction created by the need to establish
hierarchy. Engineering positions are believed to be a “rung up” from
administration (although the skills required are near identical). This
is silly on its face. Who better understands the day to day idiosyncrasies
and bugs that will be encountered in a system than the person who designed
it? Who better to run it day to day? And who better to design and implement
new systems than the people who maintain them each day and have a boots
on the ground understanding of the requirements of the customer? The
division is both false and impractical.
Likewise, an analyst or desk officer sits in an
air-conditioned office working on link analysis charts or poring over
reams of data, while the agent/operator collects in the field. The analysts
are stymied by their inability to do even rote investigation on location,
and the operators are lacking critical information they may not be getting
from analysts based on hierarchical interoffice/agency restrictions
and classification compartmental restrictions. Even when the information
does eventually flow, it may be too late by the time it gets to those
who need it. The distinction is, as in the above example, false and
unnecessary. Wilson, Wilcox and Richards sum it up best when they say
“Put our intelligence analysts on patrol with the squads, platoons,
and companies.”21 To the extent that it practically can,
the line between analyst and agent/operator must be blurred to produce
the kind of lateral network we need to move efficiently against a 4GW
enemy.
Conclusion
The discussion of 4GW in the military has many lessons
for the IC. By paying attention to how the military is thinking about
and responding to 4GW opponents, the IC at large can honestly assess
the enemy we are facing today and move to combat him most effectively.
Among the chief lessons for the IC of 4GW theory are:
The enemy operates in a loose network, sharing
information across disparate cultural, linguistic and political
groups to achieve his aim. The IC must respond in kind, operating
in a loose network that shares information quickly across manifold
agencies, departments and IT systems in real-time.
4GW actors operate in decentralized fashion,
moving, planning and acting in small cells. To defeat him, so must
we, letting go of our present obsession with centralized hierarchy
and disseminating command and control functions more widely. Operators
in the field must have the capacity to make decisions and move on
them in real time, without having to worry about the consequences
of stepping outside hierarchical, bureaucratic boundaries. The IC
must disseminate action to small task-forces that operate in cellular
fashion.
The present classification system with its various
compartments is an obstacle to the timely flow of information. It
must be reexamined with an eye on making it simpler and quicker
to navigate. Where information can be declassified, it should be.
In many cases, unprocessed information may be more valuable than
processed intelligence. Strict adherence to the intelligence cycle22
may not always be in the IC’s best interest and slows down our OODA
loop relative to our 4GW opponents.
The IC’s interest in high-technology information
management solutions as the ultimate weapon in the war on terror
is misplaced. 4GW is ultimately low-tech. We must invest in people,
rather than technology. Language skills as well as geo-political
and cultural skills are cheaper to procure and provide more lasting
benefits than computer systems. The money saved can be invested
in additional “boots on the ground” that are critical to winning
a low-tech 4GW conflict.
The IC must eliminate false distinctions in
division of labor. It must give individual agents the ability to
act at all levels of the intelligence cycle, merging the functions
of analysts, desk officers and agents/operators in the field.
Patience. 4GW conflicts take far longer than
past modern wars. Mao Tse-Tung took over twenty years to complete
his conquest of China. The Communist victory in Indochina took even
longer. Many argue that we’ve been involved in a 4GW struggle against
Salafist extremists since 1979.23 The IC should adjust
its strategy to reflect long term strategic goals.
By incorporating these important lessons from 4GW
theory, the IC can begin to close the gap the insurgents and terrorists
presently have opened on us in Iraq and Afghanistan. It can see this
conflict for what it is and focus on what is necessary for victory:
not the capture and death of the enemy, but the subjugation of his will
to carry on the contest.
Myke Cole is a consultant with the CACI Corporation. He
is presently a student in the graduate program in International Security
Policy at The George Washington University's Elliott School of International
Affairs. Please e-mail questions and comments to him at:
achillesva@mailblocks.com.
ENDNOTES
"4GW and OODA Loop Implications of the Iraqi
Insurgency," presented at the Panel on Conceptual Frontiers by COL
G.I. Wilson (USMC), LTC (ret.) Greg Wilcox, USA and COL (ret.) Chet
Richards, USAF. Apr. 2004.
JV2020 is published by the JCS and can be downloaded
for free from dtic.mil.
Wilson, Wilcox and Richards, op. cit.
For more on the life and work of John Boyd,
see Franklin C. Spinney. "Genghis John." Proceedings of the U.S.
Naval Institute. Jul. 1997. pp.42-47.
Armed Forces Journal, Nov. 2004
William S. Lind, COL Keith Nightengale, USA,
CAPT John F. Schmitt, USMC and LTC Gary I. Wilson. "The Changing
Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation." Marine Corps Gazette.
Oct. 1989. pp. 22-26.
For a comprehensive look at the nature of 4GW
actors, see COL(ret.) Thomas X. Hammes, USMC. The Sling and The
Stone. On War in the 21st Century. Zenith Press, St. Paul. 2004.
Mao Tse-Tung. On Protracted War. People’s
Publishing House, Peking; 1954.
For an in-depth discussion of “changing the
correlation of forces” to favor a traditionally outclassed insurgent
body, see Mao Tse-Tung. Yu Chi Chan (Guerrilla Warfare). US Naval
War College. 1937.
Larry Seaquist. "Community War." Proceedings
of The U.S. Naval Institute. Aug. 2000.
Robert David Steele. "The New Craft of Intelligence."
OSS.Net. Jul. 2001.
COL (ret.) John Boyd, USAF. Patterns of Conflict.
Dec. 1986. This briefing was never formally published. A copy
can be obtained from DNI.
Steele. The New Craft of Intelligence.
COL(ret.) Thomas X. Hammes, USMC. op. cit.
p. 197.
For more on commercial standards of best practice
in network design by the industry’s leader, see Microsoft’s Patterns
and Practices Center: Architecture and Design Guides at http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/ArchDes/default.aspx.
Sarah Lai Stirland. "Justice Budget Focused
On Using Info To Combat Terrorism." National Journal’s Technology
Daily – PM Edition. May 2005.
Terry Frieden. "FBI wasted millions on 'Virtual
Case File'." CNN. Feb. 2005.
John Solomon. "BI Failed to Hire Mideast Terror
Experts." Associated Press. Jun. 2005.
Bowden, Mark. Black Hawk Down. Penguin
Books, New York. Mar. 2000.
Wilson, Wilcox and Richards. op. cit.
Ibid.
For more on the Intelligence Cycle and how it
works, please see The CIA FactBook On Intelligence, available
at odci.gov.
1979 marks many significant events, among them
the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Soviet entry into Afghanistan
and the Salafist seizure of the Grand Mosque in Makkah.
|
|
