Current Issues

Red teaming, by its very nature, can be antagonistic to policy. The purpose of a red team is to challenge official TTPs, plans, and estimates. So it is no surprise that a red team report by Jeremy Bordin on the growing distrust between Afghan soldiers and NATO is causing such a stirrup.

The killings of American soldiers by Afghan troops are turning into a “rapidly growing systemic threat” that could undermine the entire war effort, according to a classified military study.The study by Jeffrey Bordin, a political and behavioral scientist working for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, warns that the magnitude of the killings “may be unprecedented between ‘allies’ in modern history.” Based on interviews with some 600 Afghan troops, the report concludes that there is a dangerous “crisis of trust” between Afghan forces and American soldiers that is being ignored by top commanders. …Mr. Bordin and other similar researchers, part of a so-called Red Team within the military, are tasked with finding weaknesses and shortcomings that the enemy may exploit.

      Red teaming is not a search for a worst-case scenario, but rather a look at the role of assumptions. Some assumptions can prove to be valid if accurately defended. Others are not.
       One red team study I’d like to see on Afghanistan would be on the feasibility of the emerging “Biden-plus” consensus. While the flaws of the current policy have been detailed, I have yet to see a substantial look at the assumptions of the lighter footprint model.

When I launched Red Team Journal in 1997, the U.S. military was still savoring its Desert Storm victory. The largely self-congratulatory concept of the revolution in military affairs dominated U.S. military thought, and no “peer” competitor was anticipated for many years. 1997 also marked an increasingly mad rush toward the dot-com bust of 2000. Even Chicken Little was feeling safe and making money.
      Back then, we needed red teaming to remind us that our forces were not invincible, that not every dot-com wonder would make it big, and that clever and determined bad guys still planned to do us harm.
      Thirteen years later, we are (or should be) greatly humbled. We all remember the events of 9/11, but it’s becoming difficult to ignore our eroding financial position, our fractured polity, and the success our adversaries enjoy in eluding and circumventing our military forces. Today, Chicken Little frets about a dystopian future in which the United States is broken and broke.
      We no longer need red teaming to remind us we’re mortal; we know we are. Today we need red teaming to remind us we’re neither as rich nor as smart as we think we are. [click to continue ...]

The idea that one should study warfare and national security history, theory, and “science” in order to make instruments of national security more effective is so accepted within government and the military that is banal. In academia, it is substantially more controversial. Without giving into stereotypes of “tenured radicals” that are less valid today (a time of heightened cooperation between academics and the government on national security), it is eminently justifiable to point out that the intimate connection between government and academia fostered during World War II and the early years of the Cold War is a thing of the past. Moreover, the idea that the study of warfare in order to make one’s nation more effective at the winning of military operations, campaigns, and wars is vastly more controversial today than it has been in the past. However, it shouldn’t be–and enabling one’s forces to win is a noble goal for research and analysis. [click to continue ...]

It is a tenet of modern strategic theory and practice that globalization has made local problems international. An ethnic revolt, tyrannical dictator, environmental disaster, or criminal gang’s operations in a distant land can have repercussions in Miami, Los Angeles, or New York. The problem is that these analyses start by stating a threat and then proceed to strategies for dealing with them. Rather, we ought to begin to think about our policy. [click to continue ...]

As campy is it is (especially in light of Chuck Norris’ general canon), the trailer linked above represents one of decision-makers’ worst national security nightmares during the 1960s to the early 1980s: a hijacking and hostages scenario. What UCLA’s David Rapaport calls the “New Left Wave” of paramilitary terrorism featured a number of groups, ranging from highly competent state-supported terrorists with military training and tactical skill to disjointed student radicals playing Che with pipe bombs and poorly written “radical manifestos.” Many groups were somewhat in between. It is sometimes difficult to recognize it in today’s threat environment, but the state’s tactical and operational response to the New Left Wave’s tactical challenge is one of the great success stories in national security policy. [click to continue ...]

I am something of a science fiction fan. I love things having to do with giant robots, artificial intelligence, aliens, etc. And as I’ve written with Crispin Burke, science fiction can be an interesting lens to look at present defense debates. One of the more interesting contemporary examples of this is Robert Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers. [click to continue ...]

One of the biggest hot-button issues in strategy today is limited war. The degree of restraint and the amount of force that can be employed without jeopardizing the mission is both an ethical and operational controversy in counterinsurgency theory and practice. There’s also a growing frustration over the way that the West has been constrained in utilizing force against irregulars and rogue states that do not play by the rules. Shelby Steele’s June 21 op-ed, “The Surrender of the West” typifies a certain kind of reaction to this feeling of futility. The problem, however, is that we have been living in an era of what might broadly can be called “limited warfare” for over sixty years. And this limit may be structural. [click to continue ...]

Watching the counterinsurgency debate, I can’t help but observe two dueling strawmen. Critics of American COIN see it as armed nation-building and deride population-centric COIN as ahistorical and invalid. Some proponents of COIN respond to these criticisms by portraying the current mode of COIN as superior to a supposed alternative rooted in brutality towards the civilian population and “search and destroy” missions. In reality, however, there is no real practical difference between “enemy-centric” and “population-centric” COIN. Since COIN is a mission that matches military force against military force, it will by necessity focus on the enemy as the primary object, since it is the opponent’s presence that is causing the direct problem (as opposed to root one) that military force seeks to solve. It seems that the American COIN debate’s complications originate from factors outside of purely COIN theory and doctrine. [click to continue ...]

To expand and simplify some of the issues I raised in the last post, I want to explore in greater depth the idea of OPFOR conventional high-end asymmetric challenges. The point raised in many discussions of anti-access and denial challenges by “hybrid” threats is that conventional tactical challenges and defeats by a state or non-state OPFOR is more likely due to technology diffusion. But what would happen after tactical setbacks? What strategic effect would these have? The implicit idea, it seems, is that a tactical challenge of a modern “Task Force Smith” would result in strategic deterrence of the West. We can explore some of the problems with this in several tactical sketches. [click to continue ...]