Six steps to fix a broken Mali

By Greg Mann

 

Posted on March 18, 2013 in Bridges from Bamako

 

It’s too soon to declare Operation Serval a success, and there are already concerns about its eventual end, but the French-led military intervention in Mali has at least brought the country back from the brink of disaster, and opened up a space in which Malians can finally begin to chart a way forward for their nation. If I were advising the people who hold Mali’s fate in their hands — not only Mali’s interim president, but members of influential donor governments in North America and Europe — here’s what I’d recommend: six steps to reform the Malian state, settle conflicts and restore stability.

Gen. McMaster: Raiders, Advisors And The Wrong Lessons From Iraq

By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

Published: March 20, 2013 in AOL Defense

WASHINGTON: On the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq one of the Army's leading thinkers, warned Washington not to learn the wrong lessons.

Army Maj. Gen. H.R. McMaster, now chief of the tank and infantry school at Fort Benning singled out two pitfalls in particular, one about over-reliance on Special Operations raiders, the other about over-reliance on proxies and advisors. Call them (our words, not his) the Zero Dark Thirty fallacy and the Lawrence of Arabia fallacy.

The first mistake is what McMaster called "a raiding mentality": the idea that we'll get a "fast, cheap, and efficient" victory if we can only identify the crucial "nodes" -- enemy leaders, nuclear weapons sites, whatever -- and take them out, whether with a Special Ops team like the one that killed Bin Laden, a long-range smart weapon, or a drone, McMaster said in his remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Mali's Model Democracy Myth

The international community seems intent on "restoring democracy" to Mali. But it was the pre-coup status quo that led to collapse in the first place.

Article | 8 February 2013 by Joe Penney 

Bamako, Mali:

Both the Malian people and the international press have been almost unanimous in lauding the French military campaign in Mali, which started in earnest on January 11. The ultimate French goal appears to be returning Mali to its status quo circa 2011 – i.e. before the start of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) campaign in the north. In accordance with this plan, Mali’s interim president, Dioncounda Traoré, recently announced imminent elections for July 2013.
Thus France will claim to have completed its dual objectives of regaining Mali’s ‘territorial integrity’ and accomplishing a ‘democratic transition’. The French then plan to withdraw smoothly, replacing its fighters with a UN peacekeeping force and conceding the presence of some jihadist fighters in the Adrar des Ifoghas Mountains.

Making sense of Mali's armed groups

After spending weeks reporting from the country's restive north, Al Jazeera's May Ying Welsh reviews some of the different groups and what they want.

May Ying Welsh   Last Modified: 17 Jan 2013 10:19 French planes have bombed targets in Mali in what they consider a fight against al-Qaeda-linked fighters. But the region is a cauldron of instability with a diverse blend of religious fighters, ethnic militas and secularists. MNLA (National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad) The secular separatist Tuareg rebel group wants an independent state in northern Mali called Azawad. MNLA say they want this state for all the peoples of northern Mali (Tuaregs, Songhai, Arabs, and Fulani are the main ethnic groups). They have some token members from the Songhai ethnic group, but the fact is that 99 percent of MNLA fighters are Tuaregs whose motivation is to have a Tuareg state.

Afghanistan: Green on Blue Attacks Are Only a Small Part of the Problem

During the last few weeks, coverage of the Afghan War has focused on ‘green on blue attacks’ - the killings of U.S. and other International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) soldiers by members of the Afghan security services. This is part of a natural tendency to ride the headlines, but the coverage has often been misleading, and it reflects a persistent failure to address the far broader range of problems emerging in the war and the needs for major changes in virtually every aspect of the way it is fought.

Read more: http://csis.org/publication/afghanistan-green-on-blue-attacks-are-only-small-part%20of-proble

John Boyd and strategic theory in the postmodern era

John Boyd and strategic theory in the postmodern era
By Frans Osinga

We live in the postmodern era, the French sociologist Francois Lyotard told us in the early eighties. Postmodernism has come to signify a break with traditional modes of behavior. This includes warfare. Two dominant strands of strategic thought have both earned the label of postmodern warfare: Network Centric warfare (NCW) and Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW). One takes its inspiration from the postmodern information society, the other from the eroding authority and power of the modern-era political institutions. Both are also unified in a common conceptual father: the late USAF Colonel John Boyd, the first postmodern strategist. Few people in the past three decades have surpassed his influence on western military thought, but, like Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, he has also often been superficially read and understood.

Read more: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/boyd/osinga_boyd_postmod_copyright2007.pdf

Great debate on military reform!

Great debate on military reform!

Here is a two and 2/3 hours of greatest debate I have ever heard on military affairs. It is on what is actually important in building a force to be able to win wars. I strongly recommend watching it to all military and military related people – makes you think and understand the priorities in creating the really successful defense of any State.

You will see Colonel John Boyd, Senator Gary Hart etc in front of the House Committee Armed Services in 1991. I can promise that the time will be well spent.

Some keywords: personnel policy, military education, doctrines, bureaucracy, high tech, maneuver warfare, Gulf War.

Credit goes to Major Donald Vandergriff (U.S.) for appointing it out. Thanks Don!

See the video: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/AfterO

Mission Command: Questions for the Army Personnel System

Mission Command:  Questions for the Army Personnel System

Don Vandergriff

So, how do we create strategic corporals, strategic lieutenants, strategic majors, and strategic colonels?  The trick is to instill a culture like the one embodied in the Army’s new TRADOC Pam 525-3-0, The Army Capstone Concept Operational Adaptability—Operating Under Conditions of Uncertainty and Complexity in an Era of Persistent Conflict.[1]  The emphasis is on evolving toward the practice and culture of Mission Command.  The essence of this approach is to ensure that we lead through Auftragstaktik, a German word that implies that once everyone understands the commanders’ intent (two levels up), then people are free to and indeed duty-bound to use their creativity and initiative to accomplish their missions within the intent. Within such an environment, teams will largely self-organize within the doctrinal framework to accomplish the mission. Such a military culture that supports Mission Command takes time to develop, must be embraced across the entire spectrum of the Army, practiced in every institution—operational and generating forces—while decrees from above cannot magically decentralize operations conducted by Adaptive leaders.[2]

Irregular Warfare and Adaptive Leadership

Irregular Warfare and Adaptive Leadership

Paul Yingling

When I was a battalion XO in Iraq in 2003, I served with a company commander whose vehicle was struck by an early version of an IED. The fragmentation shattered his windshield and severed his antennas, the smoke and dust obscured his vision and the blast temporarily deafened him. In the first critical seconds after the blast, the commander saw the ubiquitous white pickup leaving the blast area, but didn’t pursue it. His battalion commander was furious, and later harangued the captain for his failure to act. The company commander was crushed; he felt the battalion commander was questioning his courage, and in fact he was.

A Review of The Pentagon Labyrinth

A Review of The Pentagon Labyrinth

By Werther via Don Vandergriff

In a recent radio interview, the British historian Timothy Garton Ash stated that his overall impression of the United States was one of dynamism and entrepreneurial spirit, such as in the Silicon Valley. But Washington, D.C., he said, reminded him of Moscow in the former Soviet Union.

In the context of the interview, he probably intended that as a criticism of the U.S. capital as being stagnant, status quo, and wedded to obsolete theories. But in a more pointed way he may not have consciously meant, it is equally true that Washington is remarkably like late-Brezhnev era Moscow in the sense of being very visibly the capital of a garrison state. With its billboard adverts for fighter aircraft in local Metro stations, radio spots recruiting for “the National Clandestine Service,” its ubiquitous Jersey Wall checkpoints, and its electronic freeway signs admonishing motorists to report suspicious activity (whatever that may be), the District of Columbia quite accurately simulates the paranoid atmosphere of a cold war era capital of Eastern Europe, say, East Berlin or Bucharest, albeit at two orders of magnitude greater cost.