Culture-Centric Warfare
By Major General Robert H. Scales Jr., U.S. Army (Retired), October
2004
DOD (MARSHALL EMERSON)
Transformation has been interpreted as exclusively technological,
but against an enemy who fights unconventionally—as this civil military
operations team faced in Afghanistan—it is more important to understand
motivation, intent, method, and culture than to have a few more meters
of precision, knots of speed, or bits of bandwidth.
More than a year after the Iraq
war began, soldiers are rotating home with a sense of unmet expectations.
Consensus seems to be building among them that this conflict was fought
brilliantly at the technological level but inadequately at the human
level. The human element seems to underlie virtually all the functional
shortcomings chronicled in official reports and media stories: information
operations, civil affairs, cultural awareness, soldier conduct, and
most glaringly, intelligence, from national to tactical.
Technological failures are easy to identify and fix. Human failures
are not. The human element in war is not a system built using the laws
of empiricism but a collection of seemingly independent thoughts and
actions that combine to influence events on the battlefield. The U.S.
military is not accustomed to finding collective solutions to address
human failures. But this war has shown that such an approach is essential
and long overdue.
I asked a returning commander from the Third Infantry Division how
well situational awareness (read aerial and ground intelligence technology)
worked during the march to Baghdad. “I knew where every enemy tank was
dug in on the outskirts of Tallil,” he replied. “Only problem was, my
soldiers had to fight fanatics charging on foot or in pickups and firing
AK-47s and [rocket propelled grenades]. I had perfect situational awareness.
What I lacked was cultural awareness. Great technical intelligence .
. . wrong enemy.”
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This officer’s remark presaged the difficulties that would be encountered
during the present “cultural” phase of the war, where intimate knowledge
of the enemy’s motivation, intent, will, tactical method, and cultural
environment has proved to be far more important for success than the
deployment of smart bombs, unmanned aircraft, and expansive bandwidth.
Success in this phase rests with the ability of leaders to think and
adapt faster than the enemy and of soldiers to thrive in an environment
of uncertainty, ambiguity, and unfamiliar cultural circumstances.
Recent experience in Iraq reinforces the truism that the nature of
war is changing. Fanatics and fundamentalists in the Middle East have
adapted and adopted a method of war that seeks to offset U.S. technical
superiority with a countervailing method that uses guile, subterfuge,
and terror mixed with patience and a willingness to die. This approach
allows the weaker to take on the stronger and has proved effective against
Western-style armies. Since the Israeli war of independence, Islamic
armies are 0 and 7 when fighting Western style and 5 and 0 (or 5-0-1
if this war is included) when fighting unconventionally against Israel,
the United States, and the Soviet Union.
Yet, the military remains wedded to the premise that success in war
is best achieved by overwhelming technological advantage. Transformation
has been interpreted exclusively as a technological challenge. So far,
we have spent billions to gain a few additional meters of precision,
knots of speed, or bits of bandwidth. Some of that money might be better
spent improving how our military thinks and studies, to create a parallel
transformation based on cognition and cultural awareness.
War is a thinking man’s game. A military too acculturated to solving
warfighting problems with technology alone should begin now to recognize
that wars must be fought with intellect. Reflective senior officers
returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have concluded that great advantage
can be achieved by outthinking rather than outequipping the enemy. They
are telling us that wars are won as much by creating alliances, leveraging
nonmilitary advantages, reading intentions, building trust, converting
opinions, and managing perceptions—all tasks that demand an exceptional
ability to understand people, their culture, and their motivation.
Clearly, these imperatives place an increased premium on the ability
of the U.S. military to understand the nature and character of war,
as well as the cultural proclivities of the enemy. Yet, increasingly,
military leaders subordinate the importance of learning about war to
the practical and more pressing demands of day-to-day operations. In
a word, today’s military is so overstretched that it may become too
busy to learn at a time when the value of learning has never been greater.
The following initiatives, if taken collectively, could increase U.S.
combat proficiency far out of proportion to their cost. Implementing
only a few would go a long way to creating an environment conducive
to fighting an enemy in this emerging era of culture-centric warfare.
Transform Intelligence Services
Recriminations concerning the failure of intelligence services to find
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
cloud the more significant failure of lower level intelligence. Once
the kinetic phase of the fighting in Iraq ended, soldiers and Marines
found themselves immersed in an alien culture unable to differentiate
friend from foe or to identify those within the population they could
trust to provide useful and timely tactical intelligence. The military
relied on intelligence-gathering tools and methods left over from the
Cold
War. A technical intelligence specialist sitting in Maryland could
exploit data collected from overhead sensors to count vehicles, spot
convoy movement, or report on the level of telephone traffic halfway
around the globe. But in spite of good intentions, he could not begin
to divine how the enemy intended to fight. Today, the enemy’s motives
often remain a mystery, and the cost in casualties of this inability
to understand the enemy and predict his actions has been too great.
