The Threat, the Task, Two, Three and Four

At present the Battle of Baghdad and the War on Terror is locked in mortal combat … in the halls of Congress and between the A and E Rings in the Pentagon. The former and less significant is broadcast daily on the Telly, while the latter is shrouded in cold fury of a battle of whose bowl is about to be broken. It is a war in which the fate of nations is personified by Bush, Gates and Petraeus on the one hand, and the Dichotomist Ghost of Transformation, not yet dead, on the other as described in the Quadrennial Reviews of 2001 and 204. While much of the dichotomous thinking in the QDR is the result of personnel centric conflict between the services, branches, and components of the Defense Department, it is the result of the psychological conflict between staff functions of intelligence, operations, personnel and logistics.


Intelligence is the determination of the strength, composition, and disposition of the enemy to determine possible courses of action, weaknesses and strengths. Operations is the creation of friendly strength, composition, and dispositions expressed in courses of action that will avoid the enemy’s strengths and exploit his weaknesses to ultimately deny the enemy the ability move, shoot, and communicate and present the enemy with an offer he cannot refuse.

In warfare, operations depend upon intelligence. War is threat driven. In peacetime, we train for war and training is task driven. Intelligence is created to provide a focus for training for the Mission Essential Task List and Skill sets required for military operations.

Likewise in warfare, capabilities and courses of action open for operations is determined by the personnel and logistics available, the former by the imbalance of casualties and replacements, the latter by the provision of gas, ammo, food, and repair parts which require a huge transportation network to move them forward.


In peacetime, personnel turbulence is minimal and little ammo or gas in consumed in garrison operations which is most of the time. Likewise, there is little demand for intelligence in peacetime because the enemy is created for the task, and is provided by known adversaries. Training exercises are rarely fought long enough to exhaust gas, ammo, repair parts, food or replacements to give enough work for the logistics and personnel staff to effectively train on.

The absence of meaningful changes in intelligence, personnel, and logistics in peacetime training gives the operations officer the effective control of unit operations. Operations officer slots, therefore, are real career enhancers. The rest of the staff and the troops they represent are consider “tail” vs the more macho “teeth” of the Six and Three. Thus QDR 2006 “shift in emphasis” in black/white dichotomous terminology includes:

“From threat-based planning – to capabilities-based planning” regardless of who or where the threat may be. Thus Enemy and Terrain are purged from METT-T as a basis for planning. The threat that the S2/G2 might pose to the primacy of the S3/G3 is diminished.

“From an emphasis on (hardware) – to focus on … actionable intelligence” which transfers the blame for a failure to act on enemy information to the intelligence officer who is now has to decide what, if any action, is applicable to the intelligence available … as in the flight numbers and dates of the 9-11 bombers was an intelligence failure.

From reactive response to proactive preventative action, and from “crisis response –to shaping the future, which is capabilities based and not on weather, enemy or terrain … such as the intelligence created to provide precision targets on non existent weapons of mass destruction.

The shift in logistics is from “stove pipes” to “matrix”, from “tail” to “teeth” and “from broad-based industrial mobilization- to targeted commercial solutions” which means privatizing, civilianizing, and outsourcing logistics, particularly in no competition bidding to friends of Dick.

The QDR also enshrines a conflict within the operations community, between operations and planning. Planners are usually a separate organization seated outside the inner circle who plan ahead based on assumptions of mission, enemy, terrain, troops available, time and technology and put their recommendations in OPLANS which can be activated by changing paragraph one (enemy situation) on information from intelligence. This requires those in the inner circle to be bound by the dictates of outsiders (plans, intel, personnel, logistics) and is a threat to the purity and essence of warrior-dom. The QDR continues:

“From predetermined force packages – to tailored, flexible forces”, and from “one size fits all deterrence – to tailored deterrence” which don’t have to deconflict – to integrated, interdependent forces. Deconfliction means task organization to meet METT-TT, and integrated independent forces means one size fits nothing Modular Rotational Expeditionary Brigades based in the States to react quicker to Baghdad than from Germany or Japan.

If Bush, Gates and Petraeus have their way, the Modular Brigades would have to be Civil Affairs, Intelligence, Psychological Operations and Civil Engineering brigades. Since these skills are found primarily in the Guard and Reserves, The need for a larger standing army is placed in jeopardy.

Quadrennial Defense Rubbish

On February 2006, SecDef Rumsfeld signed off on the Quadrennial Defense Review Report. This is a typical Pentagon report in which the competing demands of the various factions within the various services staple their druthers under a cover sheet that blesses them all without resolving the differences between them. For example, the preface of the QDR lists a number of the “shift of interest:” including the following:

-From “one size fits all” deterrence - to tailored deterrence for rouge powers, terrorist networks, and near-peer competitors.

-From threat based planning – to capabilities planning.

-From focus on kinetics – to focus on effects.

-From static defense, garrison forces – to mobile, expeditionary operations.

-From battle ready forces (peace) – to battle hardened forces (war)

-From large institutional forces (tail) – to more powerful operational capabilities (teeth).

-From forces that need to deconflict – to integrated, interdependent forces.

-From exposed forces forward – to reaching back to CONUS to support expeditionary forces.

-From set-piece maneuver and mass – to agility and precision.

-From predetermined force packages – to tailored flexible forces.

The “From-To” dichotomy creates a false picture of what was in place in order to provide a nifty counterpart for the new Light Fantastic. Combat veterans of the last fifty years would dispute the assertion that their battles were set-piece, needing “deconfliction” to maneuver, and that their battles were fought from static garrisons. This never happened.

What is more important is that the “to’s” are contradictory. The rejection of “one size fits all”, flies in the face of the current Army plan to create “one size fits all” modular expeditionary brigades. Likewise, the other services are devising identical “expeditionary” forces.

Of greatest oddity is the assertion that threats are to be ignored and focus should be made on effects and capabilities. Rogue powers, networks, and near-peer competitors are very different threats each with differing strengths and weaknesses. It is contradictory to prattle on about intelligence integration if the intelligence is going to be ignored in favor of “capability and effects”.

Likewise, basing forces stateside (CONUS) presumes that forces can be deployed faster to the Muddle East from Kansas than Germany or Kuwait. The intent here is to rotate one size fits all modular brigades to “Spartan” exposed bases without adequate logistics support while the family remains in Kansas so the spouse doesn’t have to change the drapes every PCS. Small wonder the divorce rate is sky rocketing. This smacks of Dien Bien Phu and Little Big Horn.

Only a corporate whiz kid could come up with the notion that out-sourcing the logistics “tail” would change a ton of ammo into a pound. In the event that we have to fight a near-peer, the needs for artillery ammunition will once again drive the logistics train. The default calculations (the old FM 101-10-1) for near-peer warfare call for an average of one ton of artillery ammunition per rifle squad or tank across a near-peer battlefield. This equates to ten tons per gun per day. Ten tons per gun means one 5-ton truck with 5-ton trailer on the road every day which requires engineer support to maintain the roads, MP’s to secure the routes, fuel dumps and pipelines, and mechanics with spare parts to support the whole structure. Tails tend to be five to ten times the size of the teeth, even in the VC/NVA forces operating against us in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

In Iraq, Field Artillery battalions are being used as infantry leaving convoys without artillery support in the mounting pace of ambushes. Meanwhile, unarmed civilians are being shot up, decapitated, and charred in convoys sent in what is best described as behind enemy lines. That is murder by government decree.

This QDR is more an agreement to disagree between the defense department factions than a Chinese Menu. Rumsfeld likely did not read it, or maybe he didn’t care as he likely he had no intention to let the DoD staff think they knew what they were going to do. To do would ruin his fun in jerking the brass around. The QDR is a mish mash more like the Emperor’s New Clothes than coherent policy. If implemented as intended, the entire war making capability will be rendered useless and impotent.

Of lasting concern is the focus of DoD’s focus “from battle ready (peace) to battle hardened (war)” which is another way of stating that DoD intends to wage war without end which goes maintaining the problem so the warrior stays in business.

Congress has the powers to determine what the shape of the military is to be. Given the utter nonsense in the QDR, perhaps it is time for Congress to form a Blue Ribbon Panel of a wide variety of combat veterans, and other experts from the diplomatic community and the defense industry to determine what kind we need. This QDR continues the disastrous policies that have led to the edge of defeat despite having the best trained, best equipped, best led, and best motivated combat force this nation has ever fielded.