Summary
1. The following observations are of general applicability to the Army and the Australian Defence Force:
a. Make war simply.
b. Executing operations in war is more difficult than conceiving and planning them.
c. Seek to have as much unregulated time as possible in the battle rhythm.
d. Small headquarters are efficient and thoughtful headquarters.
e. It is too risky to not accept substantial risk in war.
f. Contemporary soldiers have a distorted and fanciful perception of wartime soldiering.
g. It is possible to kill your soldiers with kindness.
h. Mission command has become a dogma.
i. It is not under the strain of battle or hardship that discipline breaks down, but through long periods of sloth and inactivity.
j. The Taliban is a poor enemy and provides a poor measure of the quality of the Army’s discipline, skills, equipment and tactics.
k. Understanding the mission, its purpose and its context are vital.
l. Rapid release of known insurgents is the single most important factor in the population’s lack of confidence in the Government in Uruzgan Province.
Observations
2. Make war simply. The Task Force’s experience in Afghanistan reinforced the truism that there are so many variables at play in war that war is beyond human comprehension and is beyond human powers of prediction. Yet much of the Australian doctrine for warfare emphasises effecting circumstances and things in rather specific and precise ways. Australian warfare doctrine also suggests that synchronising the actions of one’s troops and the effects they cause is also very important. Causing specific effects assumes causality and continuity along the lines that if A occurs and then B occurs, that A caused B. Such determinism is rarely evident in warfare except in the most banal of examples.
3. The experience of the Third Mentoring Task Force suggests that the doctrine of synchronisation and effects might have limited application. The Task Force found that the doctrine of synchronisation and effects demands perfect understanding of variables. This demand for precise knowledge tends to create a demand for specific information, which in turn tends to lead to more information gatherers and analysers. Despite larger staff’s the demand for greater clarity is impossible to satisfy. The doctrine of synchronisation and effects, therefore, exposes the knowledge-dependent practitioner to pre-emption and surprise by an enemy willing to act in the absence of a precise understanding of the situation. Surprise and pre-emption make previous knowledge of a situation irrelevant, thereby equalising each side’s knowledge of the circumstances at that moment, or even tilting the advantage in favour of the one who acted first. The Task Force’s experience, where the enemy’s advantage of anonymity almost guaranteed him the initiative, drilled home this important lesson. Except in fairly banal cases where a disproportionately large amount of energy and intelligence resources are applied to gaining knowledge about a particular target, the doctrine of synchronisation and effects falls apart.
4. Rather than trying to piece together an understanding of the overwhelming number of variables at play in Uruzgan Province, Mentoring Task Force commanders and their staffs acted to impose a stabilising condition on events. Drawing from a detailed study of successful counterinsurgencies the Task Force sought simply to get the Afghan Army to weaken the insurgents such that the people would be left with no alternative but to collaborate with the agencies of the Afghan Government (however good or bad they might have been). Rather than seeking to manipulate events or change the beliefs and attitudes of local people, the goal was simply to affect behaviour. …
5. There were strong indicators that the approach seemed to work. In the absence of specific information, repeated action (simply conceived and planned) in insurgent controlled areas regularly generated its own information and opportunities. Persistent presence in insurgent controlled and contested areas, in its own right, limited insurgent freedom of action and gave the insurgents and the population a sense of inevitability of Afghan Government dominance. …
6. Executing operations in war is more difficult than conceiving and planning them. The simplicity of the logic of warfare does not make warfare easy. There is no silver bullet in the form of a theory or process that makes successful conduct of warfare assured. In this case, eliminating or changing the behaviour of those that would wish to violently coerce the local people to do other than collaborate with the authorities of the Afghan Government is not a trivial problem. In war the real difficulty is in the doing, not the planning. …
7. The Mentoring Task Force commanders and staff shunned the processes that define contemporary battle rhythms, such as targeting cycles. They worked on the assumption that hard thinking and personal example have the greatest effect on the quality and correctness of action. …
8. Whether an operation was the correct one to do at that moment, or the extent to which it was well-synchronised within itself and with other events, proved a minor concern. De-coupled plans meant that coordination of activities once underway was more important than synchronising things, events and outcomes in advance. Creating opportunities, recognising them as such, and rapidly seizing them was more important than prediction of decisive points and meeting milestones. The Task Force’s experience seems to indicate that emphasising precision, prediction and synchronisation is unnecessary. An experimental or explorative, trial and error approach is of much greater relevance and value in war.
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10. Seek to have as much unregulated time as possible in the battle rhythm. Acceptance of the unpredictability of war and the effects of the fog and friction of war demands great flexibility. Opportunities and threats tend not to conform to preordained “decision cycles”. Fortunately, the human mind is capable of making decisions in far more sophisticated ways than the flawed concept of an iterative and cyclical OODA loop that has dominated Western military thought for so long. …
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12. There was no apparent loss of shared knowledge of the situation as a result of the infrequency of scheduled meetings, briefings and working groups. In fact, quite the opposite occurred. … In a tight battle rhythm it is easy for staff members to get caught up in a cycle of preparing for the next meeting, leaving little time for reflection and problem solving. …
13. Small headquarters are efficient and thoughtful headquarters. The headquarters of the Third Mentoring Task Force was comparatively quite small … It also had very few field rank officers, and the vast majority of the positions were filled by the lowest rank allowable … . The headquarters broke the contemporary trend toward a continental model of several functional staff cells and was organised using a more traditional model based on two staff “stove pipes”; operations (to deal with problems of doing) and administration (to deal with problems of things and people). …
14. Larger headquarters divided up into the various continental staff sections necessarily demand more information and analysis, and require a greater amount of energy to keep everyone informed and aligned. These things place burdens on time that principle staff would otherwise use for thinking and solving problems. …
15. Some argue that the trend toward larger headquarters in contemporary units and formations is a necessary or inevitable function of the greater complexity of modern warfare or because contemporary units and formations are more powerful and complex themselves. The idea that contemporary warfare is more complex is a commonly made assertion with very little evidence to support it. … The comparatively small headquarters with few field ranking officers proved highly efficient and very swift. The judgment and talent of the two principle staff officers proved to be the most important and decisive factor affecting the quality of the headquarters. The ability of the junior staff to coordinate routine matters, provide timely assessments and provide the detail for plans and orders was the next critical factor.
16. Some would contend that the great complexity of contemporary warfare and contemporary units necessitates robust planning and execution tools. … Planners ought not to assume that an operation will reach a decisive point or a forecast decision point. To do so is to assume that another opportunity for success won’t present, and that the enemy and others will act rationally and according to a design. The strict use of planning tools also tends to come from the assumption that the use of a procedural “handrail” constitutes rigour and discipline, leading to more prudent execution of a plan. The notion is illusory … It is the quality of execution of a plan and the quality of the judgments made in the dynamic and fluid circumstances of execution that has proven most important … No plan survives first contact…
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19. It is too risky to not accept risk in war. …
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23. If the most important risk assessment in war is whether the prize is worth the potential cost, then the management and assessment of hazards must take on a different form than the identification and mitigation of hazards under the orthodox workplace risk management model. …
24. Workplace risk management processes are also suboptimal in warfare because they tend to reduce a commander’s and staff’s awareness of weak signals of looming threats. …
25. Contemporary soldiers have a distorted and fanciful perception of wartime soldiering. One of the great frustrations for the Third Mentoring Task Force was the very different standards of appearance, fieldcraft and field discipline expected by the more senior officers and warrant officers and everyone else. Almost all soldiers, including many sergeants, came to the operation with a distorted image of how a soldier ought to behave, how he should appear, and how his superiors ought to treat him when at war. Contemporary soldiers expect that deployment on an operation entitles them to grow out their hair, go unshaven, question orders and wear their uniform as they please (or not at all). Soldiers seemed to think that standards relating to matters such as fieldcraft, field discipline, and the maintenance and accounting for stores and equipment are normally relaxed during war. In fact, some soldiers perceived certain expectations regarding good fieldcraft as unnecessary rules.
26. Soldier’s perceptions about appearance, fieldcraft and field discipline seemed to be a function of stereotypical images of Special Forces soldiers, … some soldiers believed quite passionately that an Australian soldier is expected to “muck up” on operations. It seemed as though many soldiers felt that they were almost obliged to live up to a rogue, irreverent and scruffy stereotype … and that their leaders ought to tolerate these things. These distorted notions were often reinforced by junior leaders who were similarly attracted to the romance of the stereotypes, or wanted to avoid confronting soldiers about matters generally perceived as petty. …
27. … There is a fine line between relaxed expectations of appearance, plain carelessness and just being a slob.
28. Several soldiers stated … that they expected that when deployed on operations a soldier should be allowed to do pretty-much whatever he wants in his down time, and need only “switch on” when on a task. It seemed as though they treated the patrol base as the equivalent of their “home”; a place where the Army should not touch them. Any task seemed to be perceived as the “workplace”; a place where soldiers subject themselves more willingly to the authority of superiors.
29. Fashion seems to be unduly important to the contemporary soldier. …
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31. … The extent that a soldier will dismiss the advice of an experienced senior non-commissioned officer or an officer is alarming. Reinforcing this trend is the tendency for senior non-commissioned officers, officers and warrant officers to not confront a soldier in these circumstances.
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35. … a trend of over-familiarity is the primary cause of the current loose and surly attitudes of soldiers. Contemporary officers, warrant officers and senior non-commissioned officers tend to encourage relatively high levels of familiarity. … Performance seems to count for less than how the individual is perceived. Therefore, hollow rhetoric, flattery and unwarranted praise are the tools of the contemporary junior leader. The use of nicknames and first names between junior officers, warrant officers class 2, and enlisted men is so common as to be the norm. Junior leaders (even many warrant officers) are reluctant to chip soldiers for minor infractions for fear of how their soldiers might perceive such actions. Similarly, many junior leaders seem to regard checks and inspections as demonstrations of distrust towards their subordinates.
36. … The young leaders pick and choose which orders they will enforce, thereby undermining the authority of their superiors … Consequently, soldiers walk all over their junior leaders and the junior leaders are either accepting or naïve to the fact. Consequently, senior commanders become distrustful of their junior leaders.
37. It is possible to kill your soldiers with kindness.
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39. Well-motivated efforts to make the soldier’s lot more pleasant in peace and in war have made our soldiers quite sensitive to fairly minor trials and adversity. …
40. In the most extreme cases gradual erosion of standards of field discipline and fieldcraft have resulted in the deaths of Australian soldiers. There are examples throughout Australia’s commitment in Afghanistan of soldiers sunbathing in tactical positions, manning single-man piquets as a matter of routine … The comfort of the soldier and gratifying his immediate desires has taken on an absurd level of importance, which is beyond all reasonable expectations.
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42. The current attitude of soldiers is also a function of the Australian Defence Force’s nasty tendency to attend to the comforts and protection of its troops almost at the expense of achieving the mission …
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44. Mission command has become a dogma. Young leaders misunderstand the concept of mission command. There is a fairly dogmatic view that mission command is as simple as telling the subordinate what effect to achieve, resourcing him and then letting him do it however he chooses. Of course, this simplistic view is not entirely wrong. Somewhere along the line though, many junior leaders never picked up the broader and important subtleties of the idea. … There is almost a sense among many junior leaders that the decisions, actions and advice provided by the “man on the ground” are sacrosanct and beyond question by superiors. They transfer the idea of mission command from purely tactical matters (which is the only context in which it is useful) through to decisions about dress, equipment carriage, soldier administration, deviation from established regulations, orders and more. …
45. It is not under the strain of battle or hardship that discipline breaks down, but through long periods of sloth and inactivity. …
46. Similarly, soldiers left in small groups on their own under junior and inexperienced leadership tend to develop inward-looking and narrow-minded attitudes. …
47. The Taliban is a poor enemy and provides a poor measure of the quality of the Army’s discipline, skills, equipment and tactics. … The simple fact is that Taliban tactics are very rudimentary and are very much limited by his circumstances. His advantages are many, but are consistent with the advantages held by insurgents throughout the 20th Century. The idea that the Taliban is somehow more adaptive than other enemies is flawed and is not supported by evidence. His skills are very poor, particularly his marksmanship. The Army would do well to demythologise the Taliban lest it enter the next war against a far more capable enemy and get a very nasty shock. …
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51. Rapid release of known insurgents is the single most important factor in the population’s lack of confidence in the Government in Uruzgan Province. Detention of suspected insurgents is a fraught matter. On the one hand, it is important that justice is seen to be done and that innocent people are not detained unfairly. Unlawful and unfair detention leads to ill-feeling that feeds an insurgency. On the other hand, detaining insurgents only to release them shortly after erodes the confidence of local people in their Government and security forces. They fear intimidation from the released insurgent … The people of Uruzgan Province, even those that are supportive of the Government, rarely inform on insurgents because insurgents are normally released soon after detention. The difficulty in holding detainees is a significant, if not decisive, impediment in the conduct of the war. …
Conclusion
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54. The soldiers of the Task Force have a great deal to be proud of. Nonetheless, there are some trends in the manner of junior leadership and soldier behaviour/expectations that deserve the attention of the senior leaders of the Army and the Australian Defence Force. While some might argue that these trends simply represent the zeitgeist or spirit of the age, they run counter to the good order and discipline of a professional army.
