The Insider

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'

President Obama last week nominated Maria Sally Matiella to succeed Nelson Ford as the Army's assistant secretary for financial management.

Matiella, who most recently served as assistant chief financial officer for accounting at the Housing and Urban Development Department, has 29 years of federal employment behind her, according to the White House's announcement. She has also served as chief financial officer for the USDA Forest Service, as staff accountant for the Pentagon comptroller's office and as financial manager for the Defense Finance and Accounting Service. Matiella holds a bachelor's degree and a business degree from the University of Arizona, the announcement reads.

U.S. Special Operations Command today announced it is interested in ideas on an airborne system that can provide close air support to troops in contact, according to a government notice.

“The area of interest includes new ideas and innovative approaches to rapidly mature proven technologies to a production readiness state, as well as applications of existing ((commercial-off-the-shelf)) solutions that may be integrated onto an existing airframe,” the notice printed today in Federal Business Opportunities states. “Considerations include speed to field, integration complexity, Technical Readiness Level TRL level of solutions proposed, and overall mission capability provided.”

For years, the Pentagon has been trying to field as many airborne assets as possible to provide intelligence and fire support for troops in the ground. The Defense Department has maxed out its unmanned MQ-1 and MQ-9 production lines in an attempt to get the drones to the battlefield as soon as possible.

Still, manned fighter and attack jets -- like the F-15E Strike Eagle, the F-16 Viper F/A-18 Hornet and the A-10 Warthog -- perform the majority of low-level close-air support missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Air Force is considering purchasing propeller-driven attack planes for irregular warfare CAS missions as well.

Air Force Special Operations Command's AC-130 gunships provide top cover for SOCOM troops. However, because only a small number of planes exist, the high-demand aircraft can only perform so many missions per flight.