From Wired.com:
Army Writes New Manual on Preventing Civilian Deaths
By Spencer Ackerman
June 14, 2011
2:30 pm
Categories: Army and Marines
Follow @attackerman
It’s been a decade since the United States began fighting irregular wars that require protecting civilians in order to have a shot at success. Yet only now is the U.S. Army, alone among the military services, taking steps to redress an institutional shortcoming: giving its officers a practical guide to keeping civilians safe while waging war.
Danger Room has learned that an official with the Army’s Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, Dwight Raymond, is drafting a manual on preventing civilian casualties. The manual, formally known as Army Tactics Techniques and Procedures 3-37.11, will provide practical advice for officers attempting to balance the difficulties of battling a shadowy insurgency while keeping civilians out of harm’s way. No such manual has ever existed before in the Army, or indeed across the entire military. Raymond anticipates publication by January 2012.
It’s also likely to spur controversy within the military. Among its prescriptions, Raymond tells Danger Room, are to be “really judicious and restrictive” about the use of artillery and air support that U.S. troops in Afghanistan rely on to get themselves out of pitched battles with the Taliban. It will advise officers to commit their troops and finite resources to paving over craters caused by homemade bombs and forcing foreign militaries they mentor to respect human rights.
“If you have a short-term, short-sighted approach to conducting operations, and you try achieve mission success and you’re haphazard in terms of causing civilian casualties, that over long term jeopardizes your ability to accomplish the mission,” Raymond tells Danger Room. “That’s the key point.”
Raymond began work on the manual last month — which, as it turns out, is ironic. The United Nations reported this weekend that May was the worst month for civilian deaths in Afghanistan since 2007. While the Taliban caused the overwhelming majority of dead Afghans — 82 percent — the high civilian toll of the war underscores the institutional military’s difficulties in coming up with a systemic approach to civilian protection.
If the manual sounds like a throwback to the days when Stanley McChrystal led the Afghanistan war by emphasizing a minimalist, targeted use of violence, maybe it should. It got off the ground thanks to the director of the Army’s Mission Command Center of Excellence, Col. Charles Flynn, who served as McChrystal’s executive officer in Afghanistan. And its intellectual precedent is a classified study spearheaded by Sarah Sewall, a former Pentagon official and Harvard lecturer, examining how units in Afghanistan could reduce the number and impact of civilian casualties while maintaining their warfighting prowess. It got underway during McChrystal’s tenure.
“This matter is of the utmost importance for awareness of leaders at all levels in our force,” Flynn tells Danger Room. “It would be irresponsible in my view not to capture the lessons learned over the past eight to ten years, but especially the last two to three years, really.”
Sewall’s study, conducted with Larry Lewis of U.S. Joint Forces Command, determined that units down to the company and platoon levels needed to build procedures for protecting civilians into every aspect of their war planning. While it’s still classified, the Joint Civilian Casualty Study effectively indicted the military for remaining “institutionally rocky” on preparing troops to protect civilians, with units having to improvise in the field in the absence of detailed, practical training from their home stations on what to do to preserve civilian life.
“The real goal was to try to bring civilian casuality operational analysis into the institutional military,” Sewall says, calling it “a follow on from what Gen. McChrystal was trying to do.”
She got that opportunity in November. A group of about ten officers gathered at Fort Leavenworth, home of the Mission Command Center of Excellence, to discuss with Sewall and Lewis how to translate population protection into practical guidance for units from the strategic down to the tactical levels. The three-hour meeting had high-level support. A key backer was Gen. Martin Dempsey, then the leader of the Army’s brain trust, the Training and Doctrine Command, and soon to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“Charlie really had fire in his belly,” Sewall recalls. The outcome was to create a publication that would “inform our training base, inform our doctrine, inform the force through lessons learned,” Flynn says. That became the draft Army Tactics Techniques and Procedures manual that Raymond’s writing.
Raymond doesn’t want anyone to think he’s hostile to air power. “I would never say flat out, ‘Don’t use air support,’” he says. “What we want to do is not be able to say, ‘This is what you do in each and every situation,’ but [rather] ‘These are the considerations you need to take account of in each and every situation.” That does, however, lead him to say he would “advise in many situations that you would want to restrict air support,” if it puts civilians at risk. Raymond intends to take the draft to the Air Force at some point to get its input.
Another potentially contentious aspect of the manual: restricting who shoots. Raymond favors having “a dedicated marksman” in a squad, to “rein in situations” where too many shooters inadvertently lead to civilian deaths. A squad leader would say, “‘Jones, you’re our our designated marksman; everyone else, you don’t shoot, Jones is the one who decides to shoot, and you stay with me,’ as opposed to a situation where all 11 members of the squad think they’re the ones who determine whether or not to shoot,” Raymond says.
That advice runs in the opposite direction of the way Gen. David Petraeus is conducting the Afghanistan war. It’s not that his forces are causing more civilian deaths — to the contrary, their percentage of civilian casualties is falling. It’s just that they’re fighting a more intense war than the manual may envisage. Petraeus has increased the air war, unleashed Special Operations Forces, and generally emphasized killing and capturing the Taliban in his recent public statements more than keeping civilians safe. The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Hoss Cartwright, has indicated that the era of counterinsurgency is drawing to a close, yielding a moment of counterterrorism, less focused on expending lots of blood and treasure protecting civilian life and more like the drone war over Pakistan.
Sewall is skeptical about the new manual. The military bureaucracy has been disinterested in her work on protecting civilians for years. And Raymond isn’t writing a field manual, like Petraeus’ famous Field Manual on Counterinsurgency, an indication of how civilian protection still isn’t such an easy fit inside the institutional military.
“If we don’t use this window of counterinsurgency in order to get civilian casualties right institutionally, we never will,” Sewall says. “It’s the limiting strategic factor of every kind of warfare in modern age, whether it’s counterterrorism or historical finger pointing for dead civilians. It is the huge limiting factor in an era of transparent warfare.”
Flynn demurs when asked what’s taken the military so long to develop such a manual.
“I’d flip it,” he says. “I’m really glad that we’re doing this right now. It’s important for us to make sure that we’re capturing what we’re learning from the effects of this on the battlefield. I actually think this falls very clearly into mission command, because it’s about how we operate in and amongst the people we try to protect. The considerations are how you operate in an environment we’re confronted with today and are likely to be confronted with for many, many years to come. Commanders at all levels, leaders at all levels, it’s our responsibility to capture these things.”
Photo: U.S. Army
Army Writes New Manual on Preventing Civilian Deaths
By Spencer Ackerman
June 14, 2011
2:30 pm
Categories: Army and Marines
Follow @attackerman
It’s been a decade since the United States began fighting irregular wars that require protecting civilians in order to have a shot at success. Yet only now is the U.S. Army, alone among the military services, taking steps to redress an institutional shortcoming: giving its officers a practical guide to keeping civilians safe while waging war.
Danger Room has learned that an official with the Army’s Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, Dwight Raymond, is drafting a manual on preventing civilian casualties. The manual, formally known as Army Tactics Techniques and Procedures 3-37.11, will provide practical advice for officers attempting to balance the difficulties of battling a shadowy insurgency while keeping civilians out of harm’s way. No such manual has ever existed before in the Army, or indeed across the entire military. Raymond anticipates publication by January 2012.
It’s also likely to spur controversy within the military. Among its prescriptions, Raymond tells Danger Room, are to be “really judicious and restrictive” about the use of artillery and air support that U.S. troops in Afghanistan rely on to get themselves out of pitched battles with the Taliban. It will advise officers to commit their troops and finite resources to paving over craters caused by homemade bombs and forcing foreign militaries they mentor to respect human rights.
“If you have a short-term, short-sighted approach to conducting operations, and you try achieve mission success and you’re haphazard in terms of causing civilian casualties, that over long term jeopardizes your ability to accomplish the mission,” Raymond tells Danger Room. “That’s the key point.”
Raymond began work on the manual last month — which, as it turns out, is ironic. The United Nations reported this weekend that May was the worst month for civilian deaths in Afghanistan since 2007. While the Taliban caused the overwhelming majority of dead Afghans — 82 percent — the high civilian toll of the war underscores the institutional military’s difficulties in coming up with a systemic approach to civilian protection.
If the manual sounds like a throwback to the days when Stanley McChrystal led the Afghanistan war by emphasizing a minimalist, targeted use of violence, maybe it should. It got off the ground thanks to the director of the Army’s Mission Command Center of Excellence, Col. Charles Flynn, who served as McChrystal’s executive officer in Afghanistan. And its intellectual precedent is a classified study spearheaded by Sarah Sewall, a former Pentagon official and Harvard lecturer, examining how units in Afghanistan could reduce the number and impact of civilian casualties while maintaining their warfighting prowess. It got underway during McChrystal’s tenure.
“This matter is of the utmost importance for awareness of leaders at all levels in our force,” Flynn tells Danger Room. “It would be irresponsible in my view not to capture the lessons learned over the past eight to ten years, but especially the last two to three years, really.”
Sewall’s study, conducted with Larry Lewis of U.S. Joint Forces Command, determined that units down to the company and platoon levels needed to build procedures for protecting civilians into every aspect of their war planning. While it’s still classified, the Joint Civilian Casualty Study effectively indicted the military for remaining “institutionally rocky” on preparing troops to protect civilians, with units having to improvise in the field in the absence of detailed, practical training from their home stations on what to do to preserve civilian life.
“The real goal was to try to bring civilian casuality operational analysis into the institutional military,” Sewall says, calling it “a follow on from what Gen. McChrystal was trying to do.”
She got that opportunity in November. A group of about ten officers gathered at Fort Leavenworth, home of the Mission Command Center of Excellence, to discuss with Sewall and Lewis how to translate population protection into practical guidance for units from the strategic down to the tactical levels. The three-hour meeting had high-level support. A key backer was Gen. Martin Dempsey, then the leader of the Army’s brain trust, the Training and Doctrine Command, and soon to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“Charlie really had fire in his belly,” Sewall recalls. The outcome was to create a publication that would “inform our training base, inform our doctrine, inform the force through lessons learned,” Flynn says. That became the draft Army Tactics Techniques and Procedures manual that Raymond’s writing.
Raymond doesn’t want anyone to think he’s hostile to air power. “I would never say flat out, ‘Don’t use air support,’” he says. “What we want to do is not be able to say, ‘This is what you do in each and every situation,’ but [rather] ‘These are the considerations you need to take account of in each and every situation.” That does, however, lead him to say he would “advise in many situations that you would want to restrict air support,” if it puts civilians at risk. Raymond intends to take the draft to the Air Force at some point to get its input.
Another potentially contentious aspect of the manual: restricting who shoots. Raymond favors having “a dedicated marksman” in a squad, to “rein in situations” where too many shooters inadvertently lead to civilian deaths. A squad leader would say, “‘Jones, you’re our our designated marksman; everyone else, you don’t shoot, Jones is the one who decides to shoot, and you stay with me,’ as opposed to a situation where all 11 members of the squad think they’re the ones who determine whether or not to shoot,” Raymond says.
That advice runs in the opposite direction of the way Gen. David Petraeus is conducting the Afghanistan war. It’s not that his forces are causing more civilian deaths — to the contrary, their percentage of civilian casualties is falling. It’s just that they’re fighting a more intense war than the manual may envisage. Petraeus has increased the air war, unleashed Special Operations Forces, and generally emphasized killing and capturing the Taliban in his recent public statements more than keeping civilians safe. The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Hoss Cartwright, has indicated that the era of counterinsurgency is drawing to a close, yielding a moment of counterterrorism, less focused on expending lots of blood and treasure protecting civilian life and more like the drone war over Pakistan.
Sewall is skeptical about the new manual. The military bureaucracy has been disinterested in her work on protecting civilians for years. And Raymond isn’t writing a field manual, like Petraeus’ famous Field Manual on Counterinsurgency, an indication of how civilian protection still isn’t such an easy fit inside the institutional military.
“If we don’t use this window of counterinsurgency in order to get civilian casualties right institutionally, we never will,” Sewall says. “It’s the limiting strategic factor of every kind of warfare in modern age, whether it’s counterterrorism or historical finger pointing for dead civilians. It is the huge limiting factor in an era of transparent warfare.”
Flynn demurs when asked what’s taken the military so long to develop such a manual.
“I’d flip it,” he says. “I’m really glad that we’re doing this right now. It’s important for us to make sure that we’re capturing what we’re learning from the effects of this on the battlefield. I actually think this falls very clearly into mission command, because it’s about how we operate in and amongst the people we try to protect. The considerations are how you operate in an environment we’re confronted with today and are likely to be confronted with for many, many years to come. Commanders at all levels, leaders at all levels, it’s our responsibility to capture these things.”
Photo: U.S. Army
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