The current This Week at War at Foreign Policy has an interesting summary of USJFCOM commander General James Mattis’s talk at CSIS on the future of irregular warfare. The central thesis of his talk is that the U.S. military should alter its operational structure to reflect that of the enemy; that is, move from a highly structured hierarchal organization to a decentralized network. As FP puts it:
Mattis believes that in order to defeat modern decentralized networks, U.S. forces will have to become decentralized themselves. This will entail giving autonomy to and requiring initiative from the youngest junior leaders in the Army and Marine Corps. High-performance small infantry units, “a national imperative” according to Mattis, will need to operate independent from higher control, finding their own solutions to local problems as they implement broader policy guidance.
This idea is quite radical, and very intriguing given the high rank of the source. A wholesale alteration of the basic organizational structure of the U.S. military is the stuff of fantasy, and something I am quite sure Gen. Mattis is well aware of. Creating small units of decentralized teams, however, would provide the flexibility needed to effectively engage and defeat terrorist groups. There are a few issues, however, with this idea that are worth highlighting.
Though it is popular to imagine terrorist cells as being highly decentralized and autonomous, the operational reality of these networks is considerably more hierarchical. From my experience, most terrorist networks are organized as highly clustered layers, with central leadership forming the center, pushing orders downrange to the periphery. Terrorist foot soldiers are rarely, if ever, allowed to act without explicit consent from agents connected to the leadership. As such, it would be unwise to design a counter-terrorism platform based on this misconception. A central authority must be in place to organize and relay tasking to any tactically focused team.
One of the most important organizational advantages terrorist networks have over the military hierarchy, however, is the exclusivity of expertise spread throughout the organization. This is a design feature borne out of necessity, as there are only so many bomb makers, financiers, IT specialist, etc. willing and able to become terrorists; therefore, cells with the appropriate expertise are provided the resources and minimal information needed to complete their tasks; often acting in ignorance of the workings of other cells. This promotes specialization, as well as prevents total network collapse in the event that a given cell is eliminated.
This is in stark contrast to the organization of knowledge in the U.S. military, where each service and intelligence agency have inter- and intra-competing groups that perform the same tasks and vie for the same funding. If the plan that Gen. Mattis describes is to be considered seriously, a strategy of partitioning expertise into modular cells is something that must be at the forefront of the design. The entire cycle of intelligence collection, analysis, targeting to tactical positioning would be greatly enhanced if this approach were applied to a network of sparsely connected counter-terror units working in the field.
Photo: Crossed Crocodiles
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