Welcome to One CA Podcast. Today we have Nicholas Krohley, PhD, Founder of FrontLine Advisory, and author of "The Death of the Mehdi Army," discussing human terrain and the need for better processes to integrate the mission of Civil Affairs with other military elements.
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Transcript:
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As soon as we took our foot off the gas and we backed off, ultimately withdrew from Iraq, it was remarkably fast that the Islamic State kind of rose up from the ashes. And it's a cautionary tale, I think, when you look at it. The money that was spent, the resources allocated,
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the intensity of the campaign that we took against al -Qaeda and Iraq. As soon as you stop, those gains are not consolidated by virtue of what you've been doing. It has to be linked up.
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It has
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and welcome to the 1CA podcast. My name is John McElligot, your host for today's episode. We're joined by Dr. Nicholas Crowley, who is a consultant and researcher. He's the founder of Frontline Advisory and the author of The Death of the Medi Army, the rise, fall, and revival of Iraq's most powerful militia. Nick specializes in firsthand examination of localized dynamics of conflict development and urbanization in the developing world. His work aligns strategic plans with local realities. and equips frontline operational personnel with the skill sets and local insights necessary for success. Nick had previously served as a social scientist with the Human Terrain System. He also contributed to various NATO initiatives to integrate social -cultural information into military planning and operational processes, and he was instrumental in designing and delivering research planning and collection training for the UK's Defense Cultural Specialist Unit. Nick has Ph .D. and M .A. degrees from King's College London and a B .A. from Yale University. His book, The Death of the Mighty Army, was excerpted in Foreign Affairs, reviewed in Millie's Quarterly as, quote, the best recent book on Iraq, and shortlisted by RUSI for the Duke of Westminster's Medal as Book of the Year in the Field of International Relations and Military Studies. Dr. Nick Crowley, thank you for being on the 1CA Podcast, and welcome.
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Thank you. Thanks for having me.
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Now, you're calling from London, where you're currently residing, and you've got your own firm. Where can people go to find out more information about Frontline?
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Yeah, if you look up frontlineadvisory .com, there's a whole overlay of business and what we do and how we do it.
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That's great. And where are you doing some of your work now?
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So our work varies. We're doing some work at Fort Bragg with CA around the concepts we'll talk about today. We're also doing some very similar work in Iraq with the Iraqi government. We're looking to develop capabilities along these lines. Then there's a commercial side of the business. And if you think about the skill sets of human terrain analysis and the idea of helping the military go into an unfamiliar environment and make sense of what's happening on the ground, we do a version of that for Western companies going into the Middle East and Africa. How do they take a local view of what matters about the human terrain, the landscape around them, socially, culturally? dealing with things like labor issues, security issues, community relations, and that sort of thing.
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That's great. And so that's built on your background of working in that area of operations, is that right?
00:04:23 SPEAKER_01
Yeah. So it's based around personal experience in the Middle East and North Africa, principally. And also, my work with the Army was formative in terms of how we think about... entering into difficult environments and the way we take a view on what's happening and what matters. My time with Human Terrain System was definitely a formative experience just trying to go into an environment like Iraq and figure out where do we start to look, what questions do we ask, how do we ask them, and then how do we integrate those answers into a practical decision -making process. So the lessons I took from that early experience back in 2008. has shaped what I've done since then, you know, on the military side from a training standpoint and on the commercial side, providing advisory services.
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That's awesome. And so you referred to some of the questions that we're going to get into. So I wanted to tell listeners about the article that sparked the interest in talking to you today. It was published by the Modern War Institute at West Point. That's part of USMA. It's entitled Moving Beyond Post -9 -11 Manhunt. translating tactical wins into strategic success. And it sounds to me very similar to what we're talking about in the CA community about consolidating gains. You've made some progress on influencing the human population for the commander's intent, moving towards some of the lines of effort and integrating civil information, for example, but how that can be translated to a higher level for strategic success. And I think that's the gist of what you're talking about in this article. Is that right?
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Yeah, and the word integration is key in all this. And you hit on that right there. It's how do we get all these different lines of effort joined up? And the article looks at some of the issues we've had where we develop extraordinary capabilities. And the article itself focuses on lethal targeting. We have this amazing capability, but how well are we actually joining it up with the other lines of effort that have to complement it? so that we can achieve a result. Yeah.
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So we'll talk about that. You argue that despite how the U .S. military has incredible efficiency in hunting and killing enemy targets, the U .S. government is just failing to turn these tactical wins into strategic success. And you argue that lethal targeting, largely through drone strikes, is something that's here to stay. And that can just continue to evolve as new technologies emerge. One article stuck out to me that you wrote, quote, a growing reliance on lethal targeting as a core instrument of foreign policy should be worrying. Why is that the case?
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Yeah, I mean, the short answer to that is because it hasn't worked in terms of delivering a strategic result. The lethal targeting approach, whether you talk about drones, you talk about direct action, it's here to stay, I think, because... At first glance, at least, it's a pretty good or pretty appealing solution to a lot of the asymmetric threats we're looking at in the Middle East and Africa and elsewhere. It's low profile. It's inexpensive comparatively. And we can romanticize this idea of sort of a surgical approach to counterterrorism, a surgical approach to counter -narcotics, and even aspects of stabilization. The problem is that you have to find a way to link it up elsewhere. We look at this idea. We can go in with kinetic action, lethal action, and achieve certain effects. And you look at how good we are at doing this. And the technology involved, the people involved, there are incredible capabilities there. But think about the theaters in which we've applied it. Let's think about one where it's actually delivered a result that's commensurate to our proficiency. And you just don't see it. I don't see a break away from this as an element or a core element of our approach. When you look at the frustration and the disillusionment, the return on investment we got from all the development and capacity building work done in Iraq and Afghanistan, billions of dollars were spent to very limited effect. I was in Baghdad in September. You can go around that city and challenge yourself to find the legacy of SERP spending. How many billions of dollars were spent? And the lingering effect of that are concrete T -walls. It really wasn't as effective as it ought to have been. And we can look back to, well, this didn't work and it's expensive and we don't want to do this anymore. The U .S. isn't in the nation -building business anymore. And it's tempting or it's kind of sexy as well to fall back upon this direct action approach, this lethal targeting approach to just surgically managing threats worldwide. you know, through special operations forces, through drone strikes, etc. But there's danger in that because, again, we haven't seen a result from it. And there are some examples in the article about, you know, instances in which it just didn't deliver. And, you know, what you wind up doing, you know, in the best case scenario, is this sort of never -ending whack -a -mole exercise where you're disrupting networks, like we did in Iraq during the surge, and you're keeping the enemy off balance. But at worst, you can have all kinds of unintended consequences. Civil affairs is very much in the second and third order effects business, right? And you can run these campaigns, and I talk about Mexico in the article. They ran an incredibly efficient lethal targeting campaign targeting the cartels, which had monstrous unintended consequences. We can talk about that a bit later if you want.
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I'm thinking back to a book that I read called The Mission the Men and Me by Pete Blaber. And he's a former Green Beret who wrote about some of his experience in training. And he talked about the need to always have a guy or gal on the ground. And despite the drone strikes that may have been called in, he felt like he needed to have someone on the ground to confirm or deny intelligence and to assist with the targeting. But to get a sense of... what enemy movements have been like and whether the local population is for or against you. And you just can't win things remotely all the time. Right. What has been your experience about having a guy or gal on the ground relating to the human terrain team or the work that you're doing now? What's the value added to that?
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the value added to that? I think having that human being on the ground is absolutely essential. And this is something that's sort of a big theme in the work that I do. And I was over at the staff college here in the UK yesterday, actually, talking about this to a group there. There's a big push toward, you know, the technologization, I guess, to make up a word of analysis and of intelligence and this idea that we can remotely understand what's happening to these various sensor systems and remotely man drones, et cetera. and just sort of keep our hands clean to a certain extent. My point of view is that local human eye is absolutely essential. You need someone on the ground to ask the right questions, to look at what's happening, to make sense of why things are happening, because technology and the systems we have can give us the all -seeing eye. You can have real -time coverage of all these different things, but nothing in that whole system or that system of systems enables us to make sense of it. What does it mean? We see these things happening. We see troop movements. We have various data streams on economic activity, instances of violence, etc. What does it mean? The technology and the rest can show us correlation that can identify patterns, but it can't explain any of it. And the challenge is to have someone on the ground or with access to people on the ground to get into it. Now, that's the first step to my mind. And it's easy, I think, to... not along to that if you think that way where it gets difficult is executing and this is where i remember reading the coin manual back in 2007 where you can read that and you can read the new ca manual i found it to be a very similar document where you can read it and agree and there's all these different you know assess this understand that you know remain cognizant of this monitor that there are these sort of statements of intent of things to do but how do you pivot from theory to action uh you know what do i do with you know i can sit there and think i have human terrain is a decisive terrain and the population is the center of gravity and all these great quotes but if i'm there you know in yemen on a thursday afternoon what do i do with that you know that's a big place where the human terrain system fell down is that it didn't have a systematic answer to that question you know what is the process what is the method through which When we're there on the ground, we figure out what matters. Because one of the huge challenges of any human terrain type endeavor or civil reconnaissance, whatever you want to call it, this is variations of the same thing, is where do you start? If you think about a place like Yemen or even a city, I think of a city like Mosul in Iraq. This is something I talk with the Iraqis about. How do you go into that environment and figure out what matters? How do you go in and take a view of... The fundamentals of the human terrain, what are the different things we have to be aware of? How do they relate to different objectives? How do they relate to the campaign of the enemy? There's so much going on. Knowing where to start and having a process to follow is absolutely critical. That was the biggest takeaway for me from my time with the human terrain system in operational terms. We had to develop on the fly. a process and a method you know our own system uh and then you know refine it over time by doing uh this is something that you know looking around you know