Culture-Centric Warfare
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The military possessed the technological means in Iraq to conduct net-centric
warfare with unparalleled proficiency. But it lacked the intellectual
acumen, cultural awareness, and knowledge of the art of war to conduct
culture-centric warfare. When the enemy adapts and finds ways to obviate
the advantages of net-centric warfare, a focus on the art rather than
the science of war becomes necessary to secure success. Sensors, computer
power, and bandwidth count for little against a dispersed enemy who
communicates by word of mouth and back-alley messengers and fights using
simple weapons that do not require networks or sophisticated technological
integration to be effective.
Tactical intelligence units in Iraq managed slowly to close the information
gap. Most useful information came from within the battalions and brigades
that had to quell resistance in the cities and towns. It came from payoffs
to local tribal leaders, back-alley deals, and intense interrogations.
With time to build trust, tips by citizens became more common. But the
layers of informational agencies above tactical provided very little
that was current and relevant enough to be “actionable.”
The lessons are clear. Computers and aerial drones are no substitute
for human eyes and brains. The density of soldiers who do “eyes on”
reconnaissance must be increased. The intelligence function in today’s
military is too thick at the top and too thin at the bottom. Bureaucrats
in the three-letter agencies provide little that is useful to soldiers
in harm’s way. This condition must change.
Reform of the entire intelligence function—strategic to tactical—must
concentrate on compressing layers and pushing both collection and analysis
downward. The focus of every agency must be at the tactical level. In
today’s operational environment, information is of little use if it
does not benefit the soldier in contact.
In the late 19th century, the British Army “seconded” bright officers
to various corners of the world to immerse them in the cultures of the
Empire and to become intimate with potentates from Egypt to Malaya.
Names such as China Gordon and T. E. Lawrence testify to the wisdom
of such a custom. Even today, the British Army has an advantage over
the United States in that it possesses officers with the ability to
move comfortably between and within the inner circles of foreign militaries.
Great Britain’s relative success in Basra owes in no small measure to
the self-assurance and comfort with foreign culture derived from centuries
of practicing the art of soldier diplomacy and liaison.
The U.S. Army
can learn much from its closest ally. Soldiers who spend time overseas
immersed in foreign cultures—particularly those most likely to become
engaged in conflicts of strategic importance to the United States—should
be rewarded for their efforts. At the heart of a cultural-centric approach
to future war should be a cadre of global scouts, well educated, with
a penchant for languages and a comfort with strange and distant places.
These soldiers should be given time to absorb a single culture and to
establish trust with those willing to trust them.
A means for creating more global scouts might be a sponsorship program
by the services that requires and provides funds for officers and noncommissioned
officers to spend long periods in foreign countries. They would be expected
to graduate from foreign staff colleges and to stay, perhaps for decades,
within their assigned countries, with no diminution in career progression.
To ensure these scouts do not interfere or compete with existing requirements,
the services would be permitted to add to their end strengths and funding
to allow a significant number of officers to participate in such programs
without threatening officers following conventional careers.
A successful global scout initiative would require a change of culture
within the military intelligence community. In the hierarchy of command,
the scouts would take front and center over the intelligence technologists.
A culture-centric approach to intelligence collection would demand a
fundamental change in how intelligence specialists are selected, trained,
and promoted. A shift from a technological to a cognitive approach to
intelligence would give priority to those who are able to devote time
to studying war and who are capable of immersing themselves in potential
theaters of war.
Global scouts must be supported and reinforced with a body of intellectual
fellow travelers within the intelligence community who are formally
educated in the deductive and inductive skills to understand and interpret
the information and insights provided by scouts in the field. These
analysts should attend graduate school in disciplines necessary to understand
human behavior and cultural anthropology. In addition, officers from
other government agencies that routinely ally themselves with the military
and perform essential functions in this new era of warfare should be
required to attend military schools specifically designed to improve
the interagency function in war. Students and faculty would come from
all government agencies, to include the departments of State, Treasury,
Homeland Security, and Agriculture, as well as the permanent staffs
from the White House and Congress. Military attendees would include
professionals from foreign area, civil and public affairs, special forces,
and information operations specialties. These schools would be of such
quality and intellectual integrity they would attract attendees from
the media and domestic and international nongovernmental organizations,
such as the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders.
Reform the Military Learning Systems
This new era requires soldiers equipped with exceptional cultural awareness
and an intuitive sense of the nature and character of war, but where
will this culture-centric learning take place? Unfortunately, higher-level
military colleges and schools fail to meet this need. Very few military
leaders are fortunate enough to be selected to attend institutions that
teach war, and those who are, are chosen based on job performance rather
than excellence of intellect. Personnel policies affecting the purpose
of senior military education have transformed these institutions partly
into meeting places to achieve interservice, interagency, and international
comity, at the expense of the depth and rigor of war studies. Thus,
the central elements necessary to gain a deeper understanding of the
nature and character of war—military history, along with war games and
military psychology and leadership—often are slighted in an effort to
teach every subject to every conceivable constituency to the lowest
common denominator.
First, every military leader, particularly those whose job it is to
practice war, must be given every opportunity to study war. Learning
must be a lifelong process. Every soldier, regardless of grade or specialty,
should be given continuous access to the best and most inclusive programs
of war studies, and those who take advantage of the opportunity must
receive recognition and professional reward for the quality of their
learning. Contemporary distance learning technology allows the process
to be amplified and proliferated such that every soldier can learn to
his or her capacity and motivation.
The latest distance learning technology also permits military students
to learn in groups, in virtual seminars, even while on the job in some
distant theater. The task of learning therefore should maximize sharing
and distribution. Our officers and noncommissioned officers understand
this phenomenon; the remarkable success of web sites such as companycommander.com
and platoonleader.com testify to the need young leaders have to learn
by sharing. Soldiers should become members of a web-based community
of learners from the moment they join the service.
Second, those who demonstrate brilliance and whose capacity for higher
level strategic leadership is exemplary should be afforded a unique
and unprecedented opportunity to expand their knowledge. In this scheme,
the traditional staff and war colleges would focus exclusively on the
study of war with a constituency selected on intellectual merit. Every
officer would be given the privilege of competing for one of the limited
seats in these selective courses in residence. The pedagogical model
for the school would be the very successful advanced seminars already
extant at all service schools (known within the Army as the School of
Advanced Military Studies at the intermediate level and the Advanced
Strategic Art Program at the senior level).
The military has too few resources to train and educate its leaders,
and the commodity in shortest supply is time. Soldiers often are too
busy, and for that reason learning has taken a backseat to action in
today’s operationally focused force. Thus, a new learning environment
should center on the student rather than the institution. Every learning
opportunity should be crafted to ensure that the right methods are used
to give the military learner what is needed when it is needed using
a suitable blend of site and Web-based delivery. Every concession must
be made to lessen the burden of learning, which translates to more opportunities
to learn at home over the Web. The schools should be held responsible
for monitoring and assessing the quality of the students’ achievement
while minimizing time students spend in some distant classroom.
Learning as a Command Responsibility
During the past decade, corporations have learned the value of educating
their employees. Some of the best managed companies have created chief
learning officers and have given managers the responsibility to ensure
their subordinates are prepared intellectually to transition to new
levels of responsibility. The military can learn from this example.
Soldiers do best what commanders demand from them. Commanders focus
energy on what their higher level commanders deem most important.
In the past, responsibility for learning has been relegated to military
learning institutions. If we are to create a body of leaders capable
of fighting future asymmetric wars, responsibility for learning most
be shifted to those most responsible for success—unit commanders.
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U.S. NAVY (LATRICE AMES)
With time in short supply, the military must craft learning opportunities
to lessen the burden on its people. This means leveraging alternative
methods, such as Web-based delivery that can be accessed at sea
and at home.
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Unit-based learning and leader development must be perceived as a condition
for unit readiness. More stable home basing and a cycled rotation system
now under development in the Army and extant in other services will
allow enough scheduled down time for commanders to establish and actively
superintend a disciplined study program for junior officers and noncommissioned
officers. A method for monitoring the time devoted to professional development
must be established by a disinterested authority divorced from service
personnel systems, such as the Joint Staff.
Responsibility for critical decision making in the services continues
to drift downward. Today, sergeants make strategic decisions that only
a decade ago were reserved for officers of very senior grade. In Afghanistan,
special forces sergeants defeated the Taliban by establishing trust
and mutual effort with Northern Alliance forces. Sergeants called in
precision strikes from strategic bombers, breaking the back of Taliban
resistance. Thus, noncommissioned officers must be educated as well
as trained for this new style of war. They should be given cultural
and language training. Those with the greatest promise should be offered
the opportunity to pursue the study of war in either advanced military
or civilian educational institutions.
Leverage Learning Science
History teaches that great combat commanders have one trait in common—a
unique, intuitive sense of the battlefield. They have the ability to
think in time, to sense events they cannot see, to orchestrate disparate
actions such that the symphony of war is played out in exquisite harmony.
Perhaps no more than one in a hundred among many superbly qualified
commanders has this gift. Often those with the operational “right stuff”
are found only by accident. Commanders at the National Training Center
observe that it frequently is the most unlikely commanders who perform
well in the heat of battle. Perhaps they lack a certain pedigree, are
rough around the edges, even are profane . . . but they know how to
fight.
In the past, the only sure venue for exposing the naturals was battle.
Soldiers’ lives had to be expended to find commanders with the right
stuff. But today, learning science offers the ability to identify those
who can make decisions intuitively in the heat of battle. The Germans
called this gift Fingerspitzengefuhl or fingertip sense. Many managers
can make the right decision if given enough time, advice, and data.
But only combat leaders can make the right decision at the right time
in a crisis when the fog of war is greatest: when tired, fearful, and
isolated.
The services must exploit learning science by conducting research in
cognition, problem solving, and rapid decision making in uncertain,
stressful environments such as combat. Leaders must be exposed during
peacetime to realistic simulations of uncertainty, fear, and ambiguity
such that those who demonstrate Fingerspitzengefuhl are identified early,
perhaps as early as commissioning. Those with the right stuff should
be cultivated and exercised continuously to sharpen their prowess before
they lead soldiers into real combat.
Military intellectual institutions must conduct research to understand
the cognitive decision-making process. As much attention should be given
to understanding how culture-centric systems interpret and use data
as to how net-centric systems collect data. We need to better understand
what information is necessary for making decisions. Important in this
effort is understanding how different commanders use information. Cognitive
systems capable of customizing the decision-making process will emerge
from that understanding. Perhaps soon commanders will be offered exercises
and decision aids that will optimize their ability to make the right
decisions in the midst of a mountain of information that invariably
will descend on them in the heat of battle.
The requirement to better anticipate and shape performance in battle
is made all the more challenging by today’s conflict environment. Good
commanders know how to lead in combat. Great commanders possess the
intuitive sense of how to transition very quickly from active, kinetic
warfare distinguished by fire and maneuver to a more subtle kind of
cultural warfare distinguished by the ability to win the war of will
and perception. Rare are the leaders who can make the transition between
these two disparate universes and lead and fight competently in both.
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Recently, I attended a service-specific war game intended to examine
the course of future war. The scenario was placed in the Middle East.
I noted that all the players, red and blue, were either American or
NATO allies. I asked if perhaps it would be a good idea to include participants
from Moslem countries, particularly in the red cell. One of the game
directors replied, “Oh, we tried that two years ago, but those guys
became too disruptive.” Right. “Disruption”—the need to create uncertainty—should
be the aim of war gaming. As a matter of course, every exercise, game,
and major joint training event should add uncertainty and unpredictability
in the form of alien representation. Otherwise games become exercises
scripted through the preconceptions and biases of Western culture.
Acculturate Every Soldier
One division commander in Iraq told me that his greatest worry was
that his soldiers were “an army of strangers in the midst of strangers.”
During the early months of occupation, cultural isolation in Iraq created
a tragic barrier separating Iraqis of goodwill from the inherent goodness
of U.S. soldiers, demonstrated so effectively during previous periods
of occupation in such places as Korea, Japan, and Germany. This cultural
wall must be torn down. Lives depend on it.
Every young soldier should receive cultural and language instruction,
not to make every soldier a linguist but to make every soldier a diplomat
with enough sensitivity and linguistic skills to understand and converse
with the indigenous citizen on the street. The mission of acculturation
is too important to be relegated to last-minute briefings prior to deployment.
Acculturation policy should be devised, monitored, and assessed as a
joint responsibility. Today’s e-learning technologies will permit such
a program to be distributed over the Web. Soldiers should be able to
achieve proficiency at home and demonstrate their knowledge using assessment
tools administered by DoD or the Joint Staff before any overseas deployment.
The military spends millions to create urban combat sites to train
soldiers how to kill an enemy in cities. Equally useful might be urban
sites optimized to teach soldiers how to coexist with and cultivate
trust and understanding among indigenous peoples in foreign settings.
Such centers would immerse young soldiers in a simulated Middle Eastern
city, perhaps near a mosque or busy marketplace, where they would be
confronted with various crises. Interagency and international presence
would be as evident in these centers as that of the services and joint
agencies, with perhaps a State Department, Central Intelligence Agency,
or allied observer controller calling the shots during the exercise.
To assist in the acculturation process, the Department of Defense should
be required to build databases that contain the religious and cultural
norms for world populations—to identify the interests of the major parties,
the cultural taboos—so soldiers can download the information quickly
and use it profitably in the field.
Cognitive Reform Is Hard
A process of cognitive and cultural transformation cannot be accomplished
in uncoordinated bits and pieces as it is today. If done right, it might
well demand change as sweeping and revolutionary as the Goldwater-Nichols
Act. The end state of this effort should be nothing less than a revolution
in learning throughout the Department of Defense. This much is clear
from past efforts, however: reform of this magnitude is essential, long
overdue, and undoable without the commitment of the entire military
intellectual community.
