Return-Path: <sentto-279987-2255-1001257197-fc=all.net@returns.onelist.com> Delivered-To: fc@all.net Received: from 204.181.12.215 by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-5.1.0) for fc@localhost (single-drop); Sun, 23 Sep 2001 08:01:10 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 18646 invoked by uid 510); 23 Sep 2001 15:00:20 -0000 Received: from n13.groups.yahoo.com (216.115.96.63) by 204.181.12.215 with SMTP; 23 Sep 2001 15:00:20 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: sentto-279987-2255-1001257197-fc=all.net@returns.onelist.com Received: from [10.1.4.54] by jj.egroups.com with NNFMP; 23 Sep 2001 14:59:57 -0000 X-Sender: fc@big.all.net X-Apparently-To: iwar@onelist.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_2_2); 23 Sep 2001 14:59:57 -0000 Received: (qmail 28700 invoked from network); 23 Sep 2001 14:59:56 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l8.egroups.com with QMQP; 23 Sep 2001 14:59:56 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO big.all.net) (65.0.156.78) by mta2 with SMTP; 23 Sep 2001 14:59:56 -0000 Received: (from fc@localhost) by big.all.net (8.9.3/8.7.3) id HAA07493 for iwar@onelist.com; Sun, 23 Sep 2001 07:59:53 -0700 Message-Id: <200109231459.HAA07493@big.all.net> To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List) Organization: I'm not allowed to say X-Mailer: don't even ask X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL1] From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net> Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list iwar@yahoogroups.com Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:iwar-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com> Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001 07:59:53 -0700 (PDT) Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com Subject: [iwar] [fc:A.New.Mindset.for.Warfare] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit A New Mindset for Warfare By William M. Arkin Special to Washingtonpost.com Saturday, September 22, 2001; 1:00 PM "We ... are going to have to fashion a new vocabulary and different constructs for thinking about what it is we're doing," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week. "Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen," says President Bush. It is not World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, or Kosovo. "We will direct every resource at our command - every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war," the President promises. But in thinking about what is to come, Rumsfeld says he wants to "disabuse people of trying to draw parallels between previous conflicts and this one." So the natural question to ask is: What is to come? Unified Vision Pentagon planners have actually anticipated the question. In June 2000, the U.S. military completed the last in a series of futuristic experiments called Rapid Decisive Operations (or RDO for short), testing, according to an after action briefing, " a concept to achieve rapid victory by attacking the coherence of an enemy's ability to fight." RDO war gamers set about to re-enact the 1999 Operation Allied Force, charged with the mission to bring to bear "the full range of our national capabilities in timely and direct effects-based operations" in a thinly veiled Yugoslavia renamed Gordo with a leader whom the gamers called "Slobotwo." The target now, of course, isn't a national leader but a network. Yet the approach is the same. The mode for fighting Gordo in the RDO game was to employ "asymmetric advantages in the knowledge, precision, and mobility" of the United States "to create maximum shock" thereby defeating Slobotwo's "ability and will to fight." Wargamers tested three different approaches, two following current U.S. military doctrine, and the third, labeled "Candidate C," that made full use of information operations, political, economic and military capabilities "to simultaneously influence, deter and coerce a potential adversary." As one participant says, "While capabilities were not revolutionary, the timing and target set against which they were employed was also not conventional." The RDO game was perhaps most prescient in employing "effects-based operations" (EBO) followed by two earlier EBO games: Global Engagement IV and JEFX 99. In each succeeding game, there was more and more of an attempt to break out of a "stovepiped" design for current warfare, whereby military and other efforts are essentially separated by bureaucratic interest. Instead, the gamers created a "single, integrated, coordinated and synchronized 'National Campaign Plan' orchestrated by White House." In other words, our current war against terrorism. From Conquest to Effects The jargon is obscure--RDO, dominant effects, asymmetric warfare, network-centric warfare--but it reflects the fact that before September 11, there were already an abundance of competing futuristic concepts being bandied about to reflect a new paradigm about warfare. The common thread is the effects-based operations concept. It is, as a Joint Chiefs of Staff background paper acknowledges, "a loosely defined concept." But like the campaign envisioned by President Bush, it "aims to encompass all elements of national power and influence--not solely destruction by military force--to achieve positive political outcomes." Effects-based targeting brings the concept to the battlefield. Its proponents call for the selection of targets and the means to engage them based on contributions to the desired effect, while minimizing any undesirable or negative effects. The target, an RDO paper says, "may be a physical object or structure, a geographic location, a network or system, part of the electromagnetic spectrum, a person, group, constituency or population." The "ultimate target" of attack, it concludes "is the will and perception of the decision-maker." The Rapid Decisive Operations gaming suggested how the U.S. may go after terrorist networks based in the Middle East. The RDO experiment examined all possible leverage points in confronting Gordo's "political influence entities" (military, leadership, public opinion, opposition, economic, and religious decision-makers and institutions). This included "axiological" targeting, psychological profiling, network modeling, commodity flows, synergies, and collateral damage estimates and unintended consequences. Traditional military operations such as bombing were undertaken, but they were fully integrated with deception, psychological operations, computer network attack, traditional electronic warfare, special operations reconnaissance, "direct action," and the "tagging" of key targets. A Complex Adaptive System As Infinite Justice (or whatever the U.S. campaign winds up being called) unfolds, there are many--many even inside the military--who insist on using the old words and the old paradigm (airpower, invasion, counter-insurgency, even tactical nuclear weapons) in describing the coming war. President Bush says that this war may include "dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations secret even in success," and this should be a signal to conventional thinkers and pundits that they need a new way of thinking and a new vocabulary. Though RDO and other games are mostly focused on wars against nation states in 2010, they provide a rich basis for thinking about American's current adversary. They help us envision the enemy, not as a traditional nation state but as a "complex adaptive system." Much of the enthusiasm for EBO in the U.S. military is based upon technological advances in communications distribution, data-mining tools, graphical display, and social/demographic modeling tools similar to those used in advertising, marketing and political campaigns. The task being undertaken now by Pentagon targeters is calculating the value, as well as the risk and cost of engaging a specific target, or set of targets, based on the effect produced by its physical or functional destruction, neutralization, denial, exploitation or manipulation through all available means -- direct and indirect. Those who have participated in the RDO series and other EBO games stress that unifying all instruments of national power into a tightly integrated team is not easy in the laboratory, let alone in these trying times. What is more, the central requirement of EBO -- engaging the right "targets" with the right weapons or tools at the right times for the right reasons -- requires better intelligence than the U.S. currently possesses. This has been the conclusion of every wargame. Says one EBO study: "While we have made enormous advances in precision, accuracy and explosive power we have lagged behind in the intelligence, knowledge and understanding required to truly exploit these new weapons and platforms." As the U.S. prepares for military action, planners are mindful of the limitations of intelligence. They see EBO as providing the opportunity to "shape" terror networks and their supporters, with military and non-military action serving as much to generate new intelligence as to exact revenge. "Anything we do up front is just the first letter of the alphabet," says one military planner. Meanwhile, inside the Pentagon, the language of this new war is being deeply debated. EBO proponents don't particularly think that the doctrinaire (and dominant) current language of "fire" and "maneuver" won't at some point come into play. But they already see that the EBO concept is at the center of what the Bush administration is thinking. It is what the White House wants to hear from the Pentagon as it prepares for war. © 2001 Washington Post Newsweek Interactive ------------------------ Yahoo! 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