I also always wondered how much OPSINTEL was being compromised on a daily basis by these activities. And yet, since the Political Science world has shifted towards Rational Choice Theory- we too have tried to stay edgy and cool, and likewise we have come up with all kinds of elegant models and metaphors to try to make life seem simple to us- turning abstractions into concrete concepts and teaching everyone the language of those abstractions through doctrine- which helps in communication, but does little for us in terms of critically knowing ourselves. So when we look to influence the human domain we are looking to influence the general population in ways simple coercion cannot. The implications of this 180 degree strategic sea-change -- to be experienced across the board -- are rather dramatic and, as such, have proven rather difficult for us to grasp and to deal with morally, militarily, etc. By this I don't mean training in TTPs or organizational and topical minutia. So today we, as a nation, are facing an opponent who has recognized our power base and is determined to defeat it in such a way as to have a favorable outcome for their end state. But, I would assert that, excepting the new bureaucracy of SOF, the traditional and tactical (young NCOs and Captains) culture of SOF more closely relates to Mr. Whites stance (in terms of being against the intellectual orthodoxy) as well as anti-militarism in the way that I think Mr. White describes it: as a vast military-industrial bureaucracy that largely wags the dog of foreign policy in both conscious and unconscious ways. that we have generated via, this, our worldwide state and societal breakdown and rebuilding initiative. The Sustainment WFF is composed of all systems, elements and capabilities relating to the provision, movement, sustenance and well-being of personnel, materiel and installations. For the . I sat in so many cultural training sessions for BCT commanders and their staffs at the NTC prior to their training scenarios, but not a single class on the above mentioned insurgent topics---BUT guess what the 11ACR "insurgents" inhaled whatever they could get their hands on in order to replicate the Iraqi insurgency---and they did beat up the BCTs repeatedly much like they would in the old Soviet days. [xxxvii] Which makes things even more difficult for USSOCOM, as it is no secret that those who conduct and specialize in Special Warfare are less influential within SOF. For the human domain, art is the key. Knowingly or not, we in the military are governed largely by a system of systems that theoretically ties the Presidents security strategy to everything the military does, from the way the Army organizes into brigades to the type of rifle infantrymen carry. Sabotage can be done by Cyber types. . The guerrillas M1E is the one piece of equipment that is just as sophisticated and capable as our own. The key is synchronizing this intelligence with other joint operations. For purposes of the definition, the term enemy includes the entire range of threats and the term terrain includes weather. Decisions need to be made and executed quickly. The belief that a well informed insight into the cultural environment of a typical Afghan village would equip you to deal with an armed opponent strikes me as quite absurd. Controlling indirect and direct fires is ultra important. Some call the latter complex operations, and indeed hereafter I will refer to those as complex. It seems rather outlandish to me and reminds me a bit of Marxist literature predicting the rise of the disenfranchised and the oppressed (workers of the world unite!). The enemy forces you speak spend very much time watching every move our forces made and make in Iraq and Afghanistan-outside the wire. For those that do not believe it is possible to have a drug driven insurgency vs the more common Islamist insurgencies we have been seeing for the last ten years-----Mexico is the proof of concept and it is spreading rapidly into the US. My empiricism is not the empiricism that you sometimes criticize, is it? They might not bring the Geneva and Hague conventions with them, but its hardly "special". Officers are power point deep on their MDMP- it is fill-in-the-blank thinking- if you can call that "thinking"- since much of it is copied/pasted from higher's OPORDs. That style of warfighting was inspired by the 19th- and 20th-century German army's delegation of decision-making ever downwardand stands in sharp contrast to the rigid top-down style that . Indeed, impressions have not changed much since the age of the Spanish explorers, who, despite 555 intentions of conquest, were also mystified by the cryptic civilizations of Mesoamerica and South America. For example, on the one hand the methodology implores professionals to critically think, but it then defines the specific ways in which one must think about war, a wholly uncritical approach. Know and define one's friends and allies. Indeed, in any stability op or war scenario beyond covert support/sabotage of an indigenous government it is the CF that will lead the main effort and take the majority of the blame for screwing it up (rightfully so). Thus, given this mission (outlier state and societal transformation) and this problem (the "enemy" can see us coming, so to speak, even before we get on the aircraft), how then might the art and understanding of the sublime help us to overcome these difficulties? The goal is that countries and groups who we are aligned with will become stronger and thus able to handle problems on their own without the need for large numbers of U.S. troops, which arguably get in the way of long-term progress anyway. The DOD Command and Control Research has identified and developed a model with three distinct but closely interconnected domains We will do all of this while we continue down a path that relegates us to being little better than our conventional brethren in terms of operational and strategic prowess. The first is the more political aspects of military operations. It does have a important military purpose. Technical rationality (TR) is closely linked to positivist philosophy and is the antithesis of critical realism: TR assumes the social world can be treated the same as the physical world in terms of philosophical approaches and using the scientific method can gain knowledge about it that can be exploited in action in the future. The autodefensas do appear to resemble the Sunni Awakening, and the Mexican gov't position does appear to recognize the inherent danger the groups pose to Federal and State authority in Mexico (much as Baghdad came to oppose the Sahwa). In fact, I would go even further and submit that without a fundamental cultural shift within SOF, to include our growing hierarchical structure, we will fail to be any better at human domain activities than we are in Afghanistan today. Everything indicates that as the world becomes more complex, unpredictable, uncertain and fragile, many of the institutions, such as formal democracy, the market, centralized justice, the banks, will become obsolete. Identifies strength and weaknesses, Encompasses all activities required to sustain (beans, bullets, band aids), measures taken to protect friendly forces, management and integration of info, deliberate integration with warfighting functions. The use of this scenario in order to drive critical thinking by ODAs who are planning an UW/SW deployment is a given---it offers a massive amount of free play on the planning side as well as not being able to tie it to COIN as one cannot actually get into a clear hold and expand concept. Everything evolved in and out of UW---I am surprised that the current SF senior leaders do not jump immediately back to UW/SW as it is and always has been the core historical success of SF. The HTS was a massively costly program for both the US Army and the taxpayer ---was a total waste of money---ie the Awakening was generated by AQI forking the Sunni insurgency not by anything Gen. P or Nagel did or what HTS provided in many badly written reports. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) commanders to balance their command and control duties, Four Tips to Help You Prepare for the Army Warrior Leader Course, U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM): 10 Cool Facts, and Army Trial Counselor in a Maneuver Enhancement Brigade: My Experience, Army 18F MOS: Special Forces Operations & Intelligence Sergeant, 7 Great Military Tactics And Strategies That Worked. "The goal is that countries and groups who we are aligned with will become stronger and thus able to handle problems on their own without the need for large numbers of U.S. troops, which arguably get in the way of long-term progress anyway.". Until we can break away from our own institutionally-encouraged paradigms and consciously understand where our concepts come from and the weaknesses inherent within them, we should not expect to operate any better at attempting change in others than we have as of late. If our Colonel is a balls out dude he might have a Recon Team with M1E on the target for ten days perhaps a km from the HN FOB. Students at the SWCS routinely repeat higher's intent- to establish a "legitimate" government in Pineland, for instance, and they never once question the implicit factors that are driving our use of force in the scenario. As usual there are a multitude of reasons. 1. Maya descendants still inhabit the Yucatan, but the technology, religion, and practices of the ancient civilization must now be slowly exhumed and catalogued by archaeologists-a difficult task considering the Maya had no central ruling capital. We saw a huge disconnect- at almost every level- from what one level was aiming for and the levels above and below it. They could learn nothing at all about what the people in a platoon outpost are likely to do by looking at small town America. Montezuma was killed during a short uprising in 152115211521 while instructing the Aztecs to make peace with the Spaniards. The rules, laws, events and mechanisms of this underlying reality are at play in all of our observable experiences and events. When 9-11 happened and you moved quickly into Afghanistan, this mood, this background, this context, these connections, this forgotten yet still present military institutional emotional history, alive even if buried deep within, surfaced only at the time of the OBL raid. Is human domain the same concept that we used when we sent human terrain teams into both Iraq and AFG on six digit salaries---what did they miss or fail to accomplish. Maya civilization, often considered to be the most exalted and mysterious of the three, inhabited the Yucatan Peninsula of Eastern Mexico as long ago as 2,6002,6002,600 B.C. It borders on a religion and has been rejected by most disciplines (http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/positvsm.php). Just how many deploying BCTs were trained on the strategy and thinking of AQ---they did in fact have a strategy something the Army did not have and still AQ today drives on strategy ---recently updated as released in September 2013---how many CF personnel have read and understood every word of that General Guidance? He was around twenty, Latino and born and bred in the Bronx. This function provides Army leadership the means to use a targeting process in relation to indirect fires, missile defense, and joint fires in a way that keeps United States troops safe while delivering fires in support of offensive or defensive operations. Today is the hour for citizen self-management. If one took the time to "understand the Sunni, Shia and AQI in Iraq one "saw" them at work---their surveillance, their targeting process, their swarm tactics and especially their thinking on the use of IEDs---and if one "understood" that then one could move onto their strategy which drove their battlefield tactics. If both the people and the leaders of various states and societies in the region had known -- long before Lawrence had arrived and long before he was deployed -- what the end-game objective of Lawrence's masters actually was, then what might have been: This is what we are up against today in the age of globalization and global communications. [xxxiv] White, Curtis, 7. In U.S. doctrine there are today seven joint functions: intelligence, movement and maneuver, fires, information, protec- tion, sustainment, and C2. Maneuver is the employment of forces in the operational area through movement in combination with fires to achieve a position of advantage in respect to the enemy in order to accomplish the mission. To the average North American, the mere mention of Maya, Aztec, or Inca civilization evokes thoughts of great, flat-topped pyramids of mysterious origin, secret cities perched on remote mountaintops, and booby-trapped temples brimming with treasure-hoards of gold. To ex-ecute any of the warfighting functions effectively requires determination, while the object in war is to impose our will on our enemy. On a personal note, I remember when I was in Iraq in 2003, 2004/05, all the internet cafes on the FOBs that allowed our troops lots of free time when they were back inside the wire to communicate with family, friends etc. Outpost are likely to do by looking at small town America what the people in a outpost. 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