2013 Operationalizing Strategic Landpower General Robert W. Cone Commanding General United States Army Training and Doctrine Command 27 June 2013 Landpower is the ability – by threat, force, or occupation – to gain, sustain, and exploit control over land, resources, and people. Commanders Planning Group Headquarters, United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, 950 Jefferson Avenue, Fort Eustis, VA 23604 7/3/2013
Operationalizing Strategic Landpower Introduction The Commanding General of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command was invited by the British Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Peter Wall, to participate in the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Land Warfare Conference as a keynote speaker. On 27 June 2013, General Robert W. Cone delivered a presentation entitled "Operationalizing Strategic Landpower", discussing the ideas behind Strategic Landpower and how the U.S. Army is translating them into action. 2
Operationalizing Strategic Landpower Opening Remarks CGS [Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Peter Wall], fellow general officers, distinguished guests, I am really honored to be here today. I am going to talk about strategic landpower from the U.S. Army ’s perspective. Jacko 1 has granted me more time so I will take two to three hours or whatever it takes to share our ideas. [laughter] I would like to start with some context of where we are. As some of you may know the Army has just entered into a partnership with the U.S. Special Operations Command and the U.S. Marine Corps, creating the Office of Strategic Landpower. Some of you may be wondering why our Army is exploring this idea at this point in time. Why is it important and what is its purpose? I am going to lay that out for you and how we are operationalizing this across the force. Easy War Theories I want to talk about the road to strategic landpower. I would say that one of the most disturbing themes for those of us in the ground force is the current analysis of the lessons learned from the last 12 years of war. It normally starts out with a statement that, “ the last alternative is putting boots on the ground. ” Our lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan were about the horror of putting ground forces in, and we never want to do that again. At one point in my life, during the first two years of the war, I ran the lessons learned program for the U.S. Department of Defense. We collected a lot of lessons, so I would like to take us back. Avoidance of ground operations may be a lesson if you entered the argument in 2004-2005. But I think you have to go back beyond that to 2001-2002 to see what we were attempting to do. Those ideas, Net-Centric Warfare, Rapid Decisive Operations, etc., fall into a 1 LTG Jacko Page - Commander, Force Development and Training, British Army 3
Operationalizing Strategic Landpower category of what I would describe as “ easy war theories. ” I noticed that in your welcome packets you have a great paper by General Huba Wass de Czege, USA, Retired, which talks about the fallacy of those arguments. As we discuss these ideas, one point I would make is that I was part of this process or problem, so I can talk about it. When I was a Lieutenant Colonel just out of squadron command, I was selected by the Army to go to the Naval War College and study under Admiral Arthur Cebrowski to understand the details of Net-Centric Warfare. I then served as the G3 (Operations Officer) of the first digital division and then the commander of the first digital brigade, so we could implement those ideas in ground warfare. The Road to Strategic Landpower Iraq – Rapid Network Digital Nature of War Centric Warfare Divisions Decisive Ops • Remains a • Near perfect • Application of • Attacked every clash of wills intelligence Network Centric key node • Inherently Warfare to • Target enemy • Enemy forces human ground combat decision nodes collapsed • Did not see • Advanced • Precision strike • Strategic human aspects Warfighting objectives far • Complex • Cannot predict Experiment from achieved systems adaptation collapse Relearned importance of language, culture, tribal dynamics And haven't we learned that when you go to war, the outcomes are unpredictable? And anybody who says, - It's gonna be clean. It's gonna be neat....it'll just be swell. Well, most wars aren't that way. - Former Secretary Gates 12 May 2013 2 I think many of you know this theory. It describes viewing the enemy as a complex system, identifying critical nodes, and then striking those critical nodes. This causes the systemic collapse of the adversary, leaving the adversary with little choice but to surrender. Again, the idea is the power of precision strike to achieve those objectives. 4
Operationalizing Strategic Landpower I don’t want to be dismissive of the other domains. I am a joint guy. I believe the power of air, land, sea, cyber, and space domains are all necessary to a successful campaign, so I am not minimizing the importance of precision strike. No one wants the best air force and best navy in the world more than a Soldier. But the fact of the matter is there are certain fallacies in this “ easy war ” theory. I would say one of the things we definitely did in Iraq was apply Rapid Decisive Operations and Net-Centric Warfare. Remember how the war started in 2003 – Shock and Awe. We were going to collapse the air defense systems, collapse the command and control systems, collapse the logistical systems and the maneuver systems and what was supposed to happen was enemy capitulation. As a matter of fact, some of us were there in Kuwait and attended the capitulation rehearsal about how the Iraqis were going to hand over their weapons and then essentially work for us. Well, how did that work for us? Many of us spent much of the next eight years in theater. I think the fundamental lessons learned is that we attacked Iraq with too few ground forces, and basically focused almost entirely on a targeting list and an order of battle. We lacked a complex understanding of this adversary, the language, culture, tribal dynamics, and the history – what would their reaction to this be? This enemy did not capitulate. Essentially the enemy reacted initially by abandoning its positions, etc., but then quickly morphed and found ways to continue the struggle. The Human Nature of War--Strategic Landpower So, I think that one of the key points here is to understand that war is inherently a human endeavor. We did not see the fundamental nature of warfare, which is a clash of wills. 5
Operationalizing Strategic Landpower One of our biggest lessons learned from this, again I think, comes from our Special Operations brethren. One of the things I look back at from my involvement in Iraq and in Afghanistan is the partnership that formed between the Special Operations community and the conventional community. As an armored cavalry officer, the greatest thing I learned from them is the value of the human dimension and the human domain. I learned they start this discussion by understanding people and cultures and then develop their understanding of technology and systems. We often times go in the opposite direction. The initiative in strategic landpower stems from our Special Operators saying to us at TRADOC that as we look at the lessons learned, if we don’t change the way we see war - the lenses, our doctrine, whether we have the human domain, whether we need the 7 th Warfighting function, the structural imperatives by which we see warfare – we are likely to make the same mistakes. What they are really afraid of is that they will go back to their own corner and we will go back to our corner as we deal with the reality of budget cuts and decreasing resources, and that we will lose this lesson. So from that came the decision to form a partnership through the Office of Strategic Landpower. 6
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