Kim Kagan's think tank, The Institute for the Study of War, held a release event for a new paper by LTG Jim Dubik, a Senior Fellow there. He was Commander of MNSTC-I (min-sticky) in 2007/8 and oversaw a large and successful expansion of Iraqi military and police forces. His paper is titled "Building Security Forces and Ministerial Capacity: Iraq as a Primer" and you can download it here. My review: LTG Dubik and his team had the task of creating as many reasonably qualified Iraq security forces as possible to complement LTG Odierno's mission as MNC-I Commander of fighting and winning the war. They came to an agreement that MNSTC-I would be a subordinate command, even though the two officers held the same rank. LTG Dubik adopted the mantra "We're in the security business" and focused his command's efforts on supporting the warfighting mission. A more conventional approach would have been to have a separate command that churned out as many security forces as possible, LTG Dubik saw that simply minting new Iraqi forces that did not directly support the over all war effort would have been self-defeating. Several decisions he made were responsible for allowing the Iraqis to take a much more active role in the Surge. Two important ones were to conduct iterative training and to deploy the new forces in unit sets. But the most important was to create the capacity to support, sustain and command these forces by greatly expanding the capabilities of the Ministry of Defense. It would have done no good to simply launch these new units into a void with no entity capably of controlling them and no infrastructure to back them up. He called this creating a "Security Enterprise" which combined the force creation with the creation of a force support structure. We called this approach “Two Bangs for One Buck.” The one buck was the force generation and force replenishment process. The first bang was tactical improvement—Security Force Assistance; the second bang was strategic improvement—Security Sector Reform. This shifted MNSTC-I’s framework from a train and equip approach to an enterprise approach that better described the task required by the Crocker/Petraeus Joint Campaign Plan and in support of MNC-I’s counter-offensive operations. This approach led to more Iraqi forces available to support the Surge, but not simply disposable forces to be fired and forgotten. Back to the other two decisions, iterative training and unit set deployment. The third major program that MNSTC-I implemented was an iterative approach to training. Rather than requiring all individuals and units to be fully trained before they were fielded, MNSTC-I trained them at intervals. We recognized that we needed to place into battle as quickly as possible, individuals, leaders, and units who are sufficiently prepared to fight; then, we could improve them over time. The Iraqis gained a sufficient level of proficiency that allowed them to be deployed and then to build on that as they gained experience. They were not fully functional, but they could serve valuable roles as they progressed and they expanded the security presence that the population saw, instilling confidence. The other factor that increased the speed and coherence of the forces was unit set deployment. The second major program we developed was a unit-set fielding and replacement package approach. In the early fall of 2007, MNSTC-I and the Iraqi Joint Headquarters started to field army brigades as a unit-set. We assisted the Iraqi Joint Staff in identifying a central location for this fielding; publishing standards for unit training; coordinating issuance of all minimum essential combat equipment before training began; and assigning and delivering the unit’s leaders to the training site, also before training began—then sending the unit’s soldiers directly from basic training graduation to the unit training site. MNC-I ensured that the unit’s embedded advisors also arrived in time to go through training with their brigade. Training consisted of squad, platoon, and company tactical skills and rudimentary staff training for battalion and brigade staffs. The result was a cohesive unit delivered to its battlespace ready to fight. This combination sent more forces to the fight more quickly and with the increased abilities of the Ministry to provide all the operational and administrative support functions ensured that these were not temporary cannon fodder, but the baseline for a long term security enterprise. There were many factors that led to the success of the Surge and our change to a COIN strategy. A major one was the existence of competent Iraqi security forces to help in the kinetic action against the enemy and to take control of areas that had been cleared. This paper shows how that was accomplished and can serve as a framework for how to do so in other failed or failing states. End Review. There was a discussion moderated by Kim Kagan including short presentations by LTG Dubik and LTG Barno, who commanded Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan for 19 months. There were many luminaries of the national security world there including Paul Wolfowitz, Bud McFarlane (Nat. Sec. Advisor to President Reagan), John Nagl and others. I was happy to actually get the last question of the event and thank Ms. Kagan for that given the august company. The discussion focused largely on what lessons we learned from this and how to adapt this model to other situations. The obvious target market is Afghanistan and the many differences between the two were highlighted i.e. lack of a national military historically, very weak central government, restrictions on the actual size of the Afghan Army due to the NATO Bonn Agreement that set out which countries would have responsibility for what functions within ISAF and others. Even given these aggravating factors the consensus seemed to be that given the time and resources required, a competent Afghan security enterprise could be created as well. The question I wanted to ask came from BLACKFIVE's own Grim and concerned the ability for even a well trained Afghan security force to operate and sustain itself both logistically and politically...
Read the complete post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Blackfive/~3/A7K3EmEM0FM/review-of-building-security-forces-ministerial-capacity.html
Posted
Sep 10 2009, 10:30 AM
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BLACKFIVE