The Insider

Senator Kit Bond (R-MO), in a letter sent today, is calling on the Obama administration to adopt the Missouri National Guard's model to stabilize Afghanistan.

According to the missive, sent to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the National Guard Agriculture Development Teams have been extremely successful in Afghanistan. Though the Missouri Guard sent the first ADT team to Afghanistan in February 2008, there are now 10 other states with teams of their own, Bond writes.

"It makes sense to utilize further this already successful National Guard model to serve as a vital bridge between the military capabilities of the Department of Defense and the civil capabilities of the State Department," he adds.

Furthermore, Bond attaches a proposal from the Missouri National Guard's adjutant general that backs establishing a "civil branch" of the National Guard as a pilot program and supports establishing the Missouri Regional Training Institute at Ft. Leonard Wood to serve as a "center of excellence" to train civilians, among other recommendations.

The proposal "uses existing, proven, and cost-effective National Guard assets to achieve stability in troubled areas based on the successful State Partnership Program and the Agriculture Development Team concept," Bond concludes, urging Gates and Clinton to review the proposal.

Strykers work very well in Iraq but are not as effective in Afghanistan, House Appropriations defense subcommittee chairman John Murtha (D-PA) told reporters during a briefing today on Capitol Hill.

He said he has spoken with a British general who said he plans to change the way Strykers operate in the country, but Murtha did not provide further details.

Strykers have been criticized as ineffective and unsafe in Afghanistan, most notably in a Washington Times article published last month. That piece quoted one soldier who called the Stryker "the most dangerous ride of my life."

"Equipment is a big worry," Murtha said today.

Northrop Grumman's threat to drop out of the Air Force's next-generation tanker competition is a “blow to the program,” House Appropriations defense subcommittee Chairman John Murtha (D-PA) told reporters this afternoon during a briefing on Capitol Hill.

Yesterday, Northrop President and COO Wes Bush told Pentagon acquisition executive Ashton Carter that without major modifications to the KC-X draft request for proposals, the company would not submit a bid for the lucrative contract.

The Pennsylvania Democrat is slated to meet with Carter tomorrow to discuss the KC-X competition, Murtha said. During that meeting, Murtha said he would advocate for splitting the tanker buy between Northrop and Boeing, a position he has maintained for several months.

The formation of a Defense Department-wide task force on improvised explosive devices last month suggests there is still sand in the wheels of the counter-IED bureaucracy.

We asked Kenneth Comer, the new deputy director for intelligence in the Joint IED Defeat Organization, what he thinks the move means, aside from the high-level talk of "breaking down stovepipes" within DOD, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates has put it.

The task force was set up "because JIEDDO does not have all of the authority or oversight or coordination capability over all of the things that are done in countering IEDs," Comer said.

"We don't make MRAPs, for example," he added, using the acronym for the blast-proof trucks. Another example of limited "oversight" on JIEDDO's part, he added, is intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance -- both in terms of the ISR Task Force as an organization and ISR goings-on in general.

Maybe -- and that's a big maybe -- the new task force could lead to new "authorities" for JIEDDO in the area of social network analysis, the secretive craft aimed at understanding the inner dynamics of extremist networks, according to Comer.

"Vehicle armor, ISR task force, ISR in general, social networks and social dynamics and non-kinetic measures, and having JIEDDO at least having more of a coordinating role with any or all of those would be something that will be open to discussion," he said.

Earlier this afternoon, the White House held an on-background, curtain-raiser briefing featuring "senior administration officials" regarding President Obama's plan for a 30,000-troop build-up in Afghanistan.

According to one official in the transcript released by the White House:

In his speech tonight at West Point the President will begin by reaffirming the core goal of the United States in the region, which comes -- draws from the March 2009 strategic review. And just to be clear, that goal is to disrupt, dismantle and eventually defeat al Qaeda and to prevent their return to either Afghanistan or Pakistan.

In order to achieve that goal we have subordinate goals for first Pakistan and then Afghanistan, which I'll outline briefly before getting to your questions.

In Pakistan we need to sustain our focus on al Qaeda and we need to help the Pakistanis stabilize their state. That second part, stabilizing Pakistan, really has three dimensions: a political dimension, an economic dimension and a security dimension. The Pakistanis require help across all three of these aspects, in particular on the security front where they face internal extremists, the Pakistani Taliban, if you will, who actually threaten their state. But also on the political and economic front, the Pakistanis require our assistance, and our long-term aim with Pakistan is to establish and then sustain a strategic partnership, which helps them bring stability to their state; in turn, to the region.

Let's shift to Afghanistan. There, our goal is to prevent the return of the Taliban -- I'm sorry, of al Qaeda -- and to prevent the Taliban from overthrowing the Afghan government. The President tonight will announce a new approach as to how we will accomplish those goals in Afghanistan. The concept that he'll describe is to surge American forces to do several things: first, to reverse the Taliban's momentum, which has been building steadily over the last three or four years; to secure key population centers, especially in the south and the east; to train Afghan forces, and then as quickly as possible transfer responsibility to a capable Afghan partner.

Just to review the bidding, in terms of what that means for troops, today there are just at 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan; 33,000 of those were committed this year, in 2009. The President will announce tonight that those 68,000 will be joined by an additional 30,000 Americans by next summer, by the summer of 2010. He will also announce that this surge, if you will, will be for a defined period of time. For more details on the timelines and so forth, you should tune in to the speech tonight.

Now, what will these troops be doing? They'll have the following military mission. First of all, they aim to degrade the Taliban in order to provide time and space to develop Afghan capacity. Most directly, the Afghan capacity we're developing are the Afghan security forces, so the army and the police. They also want to degrade the Taliban for a second purpose, and that is so that as we begin to hand off responsibility to the Afghan army and police, those emerging security forces are able to handle the Taliban because it's at a diminished strength.

The other key task for the military, this additional 30,000 over the coming months, is to train and partner with the Afghan security forces to accelerate their development. The broad aim here is to open a new window of opportunity for Afghanistan and to create conditions to begin to transfer to Afghan responsibility by a date which the President will specify in his speech.

A new version of the joint operating concept for irregular warfare is in the works and could be released as soon as next month, according to a document obtained by InsideDefense.com.

The current version, 1.0, is dated September 2007. And version 2.0 could be out in December, the document states -- but it could also slip as far as February.

Two key reviews are approaching. The first, slated for Dec. 19, is a meeting of the three-star service operations deputies. After that will be a senior-level Tank review, which is not yet scheduled, the document states.

The Army is nearing the release date for its revised Capstone Concept, a document that has received a lot of attention over the last few months. A new, slick video from the Army's Training and Doctrine Command introduces the ideas behind the latest version of the paper, which will be publicly released Dec. 21.

The Capstone Concept serves as a vision paper that looks out 10 to 15 years, describing what the Army sees as the future and its role within that.

"It is a logical assumption to conclude that what we'll experience in the future is very much like what we're experiencing now," says Col. Robert Johnson in the 15-minute video. He serves as chief of the Joint and Army Concepts Division at TRADOC's Army Capabilities Integration Center. Also making cameos in the video are Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, ARCIC director; Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who led the rewrite of the paper; and Gen. Martin Dempsey, TRADOC's commanding general.

This revision of the Capstone Concept is "particularly important," says Dempsey, because it captures the lessons of the last eight years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Israeli experience in Southern Lebanon in 2006. One of the lessons learned is that major combat operations alone will not characterize the future operating environment, says Vane.

"The most fundamental shift in our thinking is to embrace the enduring uncertainty of war," says McMaster.

The video paints a future marked by urban population growth, water scarcity, poverty and political instability, making the case that situational awareness will require much more than advanced technology. Instead, human intelligence and knowledge of history and culture will prove crucial to success, according to McMaster.

Information dominance "was not my experience in Iraq," says Capt. Robert Green, a member of the concept-writing team. "Our information technologies and our reconnaissance and surveillance and UAVs and those kinds of things played a critical role in the operations that we did, but they probably gave us, in my experience, maybe 10 percent of the information that we acquired. Most of the information that we got was from doing reconnaissance the old-fashioned way -- going out, looking with our eyes, listening with our ears and talking to people."

FURTHER READING:

• A Sept. 21 draft version of the Army Capstone Concept
• 'Draft Army Capstone Concept Released, Marking Break From Past'
• 'Army Rejects Ideas Made Popular Under Defense Transformation'