7-minute read
Observations of LSCO during OIF I.
I have been grappling with this question for 25 years, since I began writing the first Army/Marine Corps Civil Affairs Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTP) manual, published in 2003. Shortly after submitting the publication for final editing, I deployed as a member of the Operation Iraqi Freedom Study Group (OIF-SG). This mission produced the book “On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom” (see “About the OIF-SG Team” on pp. 437-439) and contributed to “All Roads Lead to Baghdad.” During the first OIF rotation, I interviewed 110 civil affairs (CA) and maneuver unit commanders, staff members, team members, and others at operational headquarters and field locations across Iraq, in Kuwait, and back at Fort Bragg from May to July 2003. I spoke with:
- A CA major in the V Corps planning cell who was told to “sit down, quit your psychobabble, we’re not doing that” when he warned the other planners about a “rolling phase IV” in the corps rear that needed to be addressed as combat forces continued to move north toward Baghdad.
- Members of several six-man civil affairs direct support teams (CADSTs) who moved with brigade combat teams (BCTs) from the berm to Baghdad and beyond, and said they were often told the locations of nearby enemy fighters when they engaged locals during lulls in fighting.
- A division commander whose division was flexed from Baghdad to secure the third-largest city in Iraq, with no preparation for the mission by anyone on his staff or in higher headquarters; his staff had no maps of the city or surrounding area, no understanding of how the city was run, and no rosters of civic leaders, organizations, activities, etc., before going in.
- A BCT commander who said he and his units were totally unprepared for the looters who ravaged Baghdad while U.S. forces waited for an Iraqi army that never reappeared after the 2nd BCT, 3rd Infantry Division’s (3ID’s) Thunder Run on 7 April 2003.
- An infantry/foreign area officer colonel serving as the Corps G5 (CA staff officer designation at the time) who said the Corps staff thought the planned siege of Baghdad would be like Stalingrad, in which they would have at least 90 days to plan Phase IV.
- Soldiers from 3ID who said that, while they were playing soccer with some local kids in a Baghdad neighborhood during a relief-in-place with a brigade of the 1st Armored Division (1AD), the kids stopped to throw rocks at a passing 1AD convoy because the incoming brigade commander had embarrassed one of their elders by kicking the elder out of an introductory meeting.
Observations of LSCO planning in a training event.
In 2007, I participated in a scenario planning session for a Prairie Warrior exercise – the capstone event of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, KS. The fictitious scenario featured two BCTs and an experimental intelligence brigade formation that would operate in a friendly partner nation at the partner nation’s request to push back a belligerent neighboring country’s forces across the border, since the partner nation was incapable of doing so on its own. During the consolidation of gains, the intelligence brigade was tasked with securing an archaeological dig being looted by locals – a challenge, since the brigade did not have any organic security forces. A lieutenant colonel playing the role of one of the BCT commanders was intrigued by my suggestion that, during the planning phase of the operation, the Division G9 (redesignated CA staff officer position) could coordinate through U.S. Embassy or host nation partners to have a host nation security force of military or civilian police personnel occupy the dig site as soon as it was liberated by U.S. forces, without using U.S. military resources for the requirement. I recall him asking, “Do you mean we would have gone to that level of detail during pre-mission planning?”
Not quite LSCO, but with similar information requirements.
In 2010, while serving as a senior CA officer on the Combined Joint Task Force-82/Regional Command-East (CJTF-82/RC-E) staff at Bagram Airfield during Operation Enduring Freedom Rotation 10 (OEF X), I was tasked with running the Stability Operations Information Cell (SOIC). Similar to the civil knowledge integration (CKI) cells in current CA doctrine, the SOIC collected, organized, analyzed, illustrated, and disseminated civil information from multiple information systems to support the CJTF, BCTs, and partner government agencies with analytic products that directly enhanced non-lethal targeting efforts. The SOIC concept, the brainchild of USAR CA Command Sergeant Major Anthony Riccio, who was assigned to CJTF-82/RC-E, is outlined in the article “Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan” (where it’s described as a “center” instead of a “cell”).
With this renewed emphasis on understanding the civil component of the operational environment, I developed a fragmentary order (FRAGO) outlining tasks for multinational BCT commanders to organize and use organic and Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) CA and civil-military coordination (CIMIC) assets to build a civil information network that “provide[s] relevant and current information about GIRoA and population-centric issues necessary for RC-E decision-makers to effectively allocate resources for the advancement of Governance and Development, to support the stability operations campaign objectives, and [to] facilitate the exchange of HNIR-centric information across the spectrum of provincial and district knowledge users throughout RC-E.”
Unfortunately, the CJTF-82/RC-E J-3 would not allow his staff to publish my FRAGO. His position was, “We don’t tell commanders how to suck eggs; we provide them resources, and they figure out how to best use them.” My position was that this approach doesn’t work when it comes to properly using CA resources. Based on what they had observed in previous rotations and among the PRTs, commanders and staffs in RC-E held a common belief that CA forces were there to deliver humanitarian assistance (HA) or to create and oversee commanders’ emergency response projects (CERP). Despite my best efforts to advise them otherwise, I hadn’t seen a BCT or PRT commander effectively use all the CA resources at his disposal, especially against the new problem set outlined in Fixing Intel.
Just before I left Bagram at the end of my tour, I spent about 20 minutes in a one-on-one with the Division commander. He was the first CJTF commander to add governance and development lines of operation to his original security and information lines of operation, which he did just before deploying from Fort Bragg the previous year (and was the reason I was there in the first place). He admitted that “we have never done anything like this before,” meaning the pivot to population-centric stability operations while still engaged in combat operations against enemy forces. I took that to mean in his experience. He wished we had arrived better prepared to integrate the civilian organizations that had become so critical to the operations in RC-E at all levels. [An article I later wrote about how we organized for stability operations with civilian partners in RC-E was published in the National Defense University’s PRISM in 2012.]
CA in Army efforts to refocus on LSCO.
Years later, while participating in U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC)-led How the Army Fights exercises, U.S. Army Special Operations (USASOC)-led Silent Quest experiments, and reviewing Army concepts and doctrinal manuals in the wake of Army transformation and the refocus on LSCO, I continued to be amazed and disappointed by how many planners and experimenters had no idea how to integrate a capability that has existed in the Army for over 80 years and began as a combat support role. It often felt as if they were relying on their limited, usually misinformed, experience with CA forces in non-combat situations and had no interest in, or imagination for, the possible roles of CA in LSCO. COL Jay Liddick, former CA commandant and the first CA capability manager, used to say that if we want to know how to use CA forces in LSCO, all we have to do is look at the longest and most complex LSCO of the last 100 years: World War II (WWII).
The story of civil affairs and military government operations during WWII and how the lessons of that armed conflict can be applied today will be explored in CATR Post #s 29-35.
Questions for our teammates: Do you have any observations of CA in LSCO from your experience in named operations, training events, or exercises you’d like to share?
Send a note to the Civil Affairs Team Room.
Subscribe for updates to the Civil Affairs Team Room Blog
Don’t forget to check out our affiliated sites
Quiet Signal (formerly LC38 Brand) – Use code CATR2026 at checkout
Aerial Resupply Coffee – Use code CATR2026 at checkout
