Shifting Priorities?

Defense Department officials are moving ahead with plans to leave a flurry of policy documents for the next Pentagon leadership team covering every mission area outside traditional, force-on-force warfare.

Among the final deliverables set by outgoing Pentagon leaders are a directive on the military’s approach to irregular warfare, plus five companion instructions covering associate disciplines. Namely, those are counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, counterinsurgency and stability operations.

The latter area, in late 2005, received its own directive -- number 3000.05 -- hailed by Pentagon officials as something of a revolution at the time.

The paragraph that stuck the most with defense observers and journalists was this one:

“((Stability operations)) shall be given priority comparable to combat operations and shall be explicitly addressed and integrated across all DOD activities, including doctrine, organizations, training, education, exercises, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities and planning.”

In fact, looking at past news stories referencing the directive, the “priority comparable to combat operations” phrase for many was perhaps the most defining piece of the document.

A draft of the upcoming stability operations instruction, provided to us recently, no longer contains this language.

Judging by the style and completeness of the document, it still has a long ways to go, so there are plenty of things that could still get added or removed.

But the omission in the draft is noteworthy.

One officer told us it could mean either that the mission area of stability operations no longer ranges as high on the priority list of defense leaders as it did in 2005. Alternatively, it could mean that the concept of equal treatment of stability ops and combat ops has become so widely understood that it no longer needs explicit language.