June 1, 2009 -- An influential general with a key role in the ongoing Quadrennial Defense Review today argued irregular warfare could become the primary focus of future ground forces, citing Russia's summer 2008 invasion of Georgia to underscore the point.
Critics who say the Pentagon is going too far into irregular warfare should consider what came out of the South Caucasus a year ago, Gen. James Mattis, the head of U.S. Joint Forces Command, told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He said Russia used cyberwarfare and Chechen mercenaries against Georgia.
“Here we saw a largely conventional Russian force that used unconventional [approaches], whether it be cyber or the Vostok Battalion, a bunch of thugs and murderers, and sent them in to completely disrupt the process so that when the Russian army came in it looked like it was actually calming things down,” Mattis said.
The general, who touted the growing importance of well-trained ground troops over high-tech weapons, said his overall point is that hybrid threats will characterize the future.
To address that future, Army soldiers, special operations troops and Marines must form a new triad, he argued, which would be supported by air and naval power. Another new triad should focus on the leader, team and individual warfighter, he said. High-performing, smaller units are now a “national imperative,” he added, noting forces must operate independently at lower echelons.
“My point is you're going to see these hybrid wars where they don't fit neatly into one category or another even though they may be largely characterized by irregular or insurgent or conventional, this sort of thing,” he said. U.S. forces must be savvy and able to switch to different kinds of fighting as needed. The 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon is a “textbook” example of hybrid warfare, he added.
The Pentagon will change the way it equips its forces, Mattis predicted.
“I think you're going to see a significant shift where now, instead of just things we buy -- radios, trucks, ships, airplanes -- we're going to see a shift in resourcing and priorities to how can we better train people, what are the psychological and social and coaching instincts we need to bring to bear?” he said, noting there are technologies that can help -- but stressing that technology alone is not enough.
“We obviously are going to have to be able to move strategically and tactically,” he said. “What does that mean? Whatever we develop on the ground tactically in an anti-access world we've got to get it there and perhaps without the luxury of bases we've had in the past.”
The Navy must be able to “do seabasing over a sustained period of time,” he said. Seabasing calls for preparing for military operations by staging troops and gear at sea, rather than in foreign ports that might be unavailable. In a nod to the Marine Corps, he said the Pentagon needs ground forces that can conduct forcible-entry operations.
Survivable ground vehicles are needed, he said, but ultimately troops will have to get out of those vehicles and work with people on the ground.
Mattis, who last year moved to exorcise the term “effects-based warfare” from the military's official vocabulary, today railed against what he called “silly” three-letter concepts that allow the enemy to “dance nimbly around you.” The Air Force has in recent years promoted EBO as a revolution in warfare -- operations aimed at producing certain effects, as opposed to merely damaging or destroying targets. Last summer, Mattis inked a memo banning the term.
“We must not make wrong turns again, as we have in the recent past,” Mattis told the audience. “I'm speaking very candidly with you, but there was some wrong-headed thinking when we dismissed the unchanging nature of war. The fundamental nature of war is not going to change to suit us. We embraced some wishful thinking. We espoused some untested concepts and we ignored history.”
Mattis also slammed the abstract capabilities-based planning that informed the 2006 QDR and defended the return of specific threat-based planning. The Pentagon must steer clear of a purely capabilities-based approach, he said. By divorcing itself from threat-based planning, the department became less able to articulate the need for the military to the American public, he said. “In a democracy, if you forget the people, it's going to come back to haunt you,” he said.
As Inside the Pentagon first reported, Mattis sent a memo in March to Defense Secretary Robert Gates calling for the creation of a QDR red team to examine defense planning scenarios tied to complex, hybrid threats. Gates has since established such a team, which Mattis co-chairs.
Mattis is not alone in his criticism of the capabilities-based approach. In a recent interview with ITP, senior defense official David Ochmanek said the ongoing QDR will draw heavily on classified, country-specific scenarios for military missions, departing from a previous “infatuation” with capabilities-based planning. -- Christopher J. Castelli
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