Out of the Mountains

by David Kilcullen

  The British Royal Marines’ Commando 21 structure, designed in 2000, went three levels below the brigade, organizing for modularity at the battalion, company, and troop (platoon) levels. Commando 21 is worth discussing in detail, since it was a considered response to the demands of littoral warfare at the turn of the century and was tested in battle during the 2003 Faw Peninsula operation. Commando 21 gave the Commando (a battalion-sized unit) a modular structure of six companies, each of which could be broken down and reassembled in various ways to create a flexible mix of firepower and maneuver.43 The six companies included a command company, a logistics company, two close-combat companies, and two standoff companies. The command company had a headquarters, a reconnaissance troop (a platoon-sized unit with patrols and snipers), communications teams, an antitank guided weapon (ATGW) troop with Milan or Javelin missiles, an 81 mm mortar troop, and a heavy machine-gun troop with .50-caliber machine guns. This capable organization was intended not to fight as a single group but rather to distribute its elements among the other companies while keeping a reserve of firepower, ammunition, and personnel. Close-combat companies had three troops, each with three close-combat sections (squads) and a maneuver support section (a heavy-weapons squad).44 Close-combat sections comprised a pair of four-man fire teams, so the basic building block of the commando group remained the team or “brick.” Standoff companies had one close-combat troop (for local protection, to help carry ammunition, and as a limited assault capability), one ATGW troop with Milan missiles, and a machine gun troop with .50 caliber heavy machine guns. One of the two standoff companies was mounted in tracked Viking armored vehicles, the other in Wolf (armored) Land Rovers, later replaced by the Jackal armored all-terrain wheeled vehicle; close-combat companies moved on foot, in helicopters, or on landing craft from supporting ships.45

  This structure (which was how 40 and 42 Commando were organized for the Faw operation) gave the Commando enormous flexibility in urbanized terrain, letting it disaggregate fires and forces down to a low level but quickly reaggregate them. It could be fought as two half battalions, by pairing each close-combat company with a standoff company and giving each a portion of command company assets. It could also be fought as four company groups, as eight half-company groups, or in troop and section groups. Thus the Commando had the ability to mass fires and fighters at decisive points; it could disperse to pass through broken terrain, and concentrate to overwhelm an enemy. The Commando 21 structure also represented a very significant increase in firepower over the previous organization, with numerous new heavy weapon systems and an extra fighting company. The structure’s major weakness was its lack of protected mobility for logistics and personnel and its dependence on external airlift, sealift, and ground transport.46 Commando 21 is still officially in force, but it was operationally short-lived: once the invasion phase ended in Iraq, the Royal Marines’ next deployment was to Afghanistan, where the need to be interchangeable with army battalions in a rural, landlocked theater led Commandos to regress to their previous organization (essentially the same as a British Army light-role infantry battalion) while on counterinsurgency operations. (Indeed, Commando 21 is a microcosm of the broader pattern we’ve seen already: creative thinking about urbanized littorals, which flourished in several organizations at the turn of the century, was sidelined by the urgent need to fight guerrillas in the land-locked Afghan mountains after 9/11.)

  That said, experiments conducted in Australia, the United States, and Great Britain in 2003–8 suggest that even the Commando 21 level of modularity may not be enough in the future: there may be a need to go down to four-person teams (even pairs, as in Mumbai) that can operate independently, group themselves around a mobility platform (in the manner of a Somali technical), and aggregate into larger units for specific tasks.47 Each team will need a mix of weapons and communications systems so that it can control remote fires from ships, artillery, drones, or aircraft, gather surveillance data, collect and report electronic intelligence, and call for assistance as needed. These “splinter teams” will often operate within a larger organization, and also occasionally provide a framework for small interagency teams including diplomats, aid workers, police, intelligence personnel, or medical specialists. Logistically, teams will need to be self-sufficient for at least the first seventy-two hours of an operation, because it usually takes that long for the chaos of a contested air-sea entry to settle down and for regular resupply to begin. In Timor, for example, I had my first hot meal (of dehydrated combat rations) about thirty-six hours into the operation, which was a pretty typical lag time for infantry troops in the first wave. Our first resupply was on D+3, after the operation had begun to settle down; air and sea assets began to be freed up from the task of moving troops into theater and started running logistic support missions instead. The first fresh food got to us in our new operational area, out on the jungle border between East and West Timor, on D+42, six weeks into the operation. Troops who stayed in the urban area around Dili got their first fresh food on about D+14 (indicating that the logistics system was fully up and running by then).

  After the initial chaos of the landing, the main challenges will be physiological and psychological. Teams may need to operate on a twenty-four-hour cycle of low- and high-tempo operations. As groups become exhausted or suffer casualties, they may be rotated through tasks to allow for rest and refit. Selected individuals (snipers, reconnaissance and surveillance specialists, or intelligence operators) may need to operate alone for extended periods. In the environments we’ve described, this will be both extremely wearing and potentially very dangerous. The psychological and physiological pressures of continuous operations in the urban environment—with constant sensory overload, 360-degree combat, no rear area, and operations around the clock—mean that teams are likely to run out of physiological and psychological “puff” before they run out of supplies, and there may need to be a continuous cycle of groups into and out of action (much as the Egyptian demonstrators did during the bridge battle described in Chapter 4). Several militaries are considering (or already undertaking) physiological and cognitive enhancement programs to allow sustainable high-tempo operations in this environment.48 Some have also studied how adversaries might apply performance enhancements.49

  Perhaps equally confronting for some armed forces will be the need to task-organize around different types of units than in the past. Infantry, cavalry, and tank battalions and brigades have traditionally formed the basis for combined-arms teams. But in the urban littoral, engineers (both combat and construction) and civil affairs battalions may be more appropriate as organizations around which to build task forces. The Israel Defense Forces already organize around armored engineer units for urban operations, and have gained experience with this in battles such as Jenin (2002), Ramallah (2002), Bint Jbeil and the Litani Offensive (2006), and Gaza (2008–9).50 Likewise, engineer battalions formed the basis for Canadian and Australian task forces in Afghanistan, and U.S. engineer and artillery battalions formed maneuver task forces in Iraq. Civil Affairs battalions, on the other hand, are normally broken up into small teams and allocated as specialists to larger units. In the future environment, given the need to keep footprints small, restart stalled urban systems, and deal with governance and capacity problems in a high-threat environment, Civil Affairs units may find themselves acting as the parent organization for task forces. These would need to include more than just civil-military coordination, however: they would also need naval gunfire support and tactical air control elements, intelligence support teams, law enforcement support units, construction engineers, and the ability to rapidly draw on a wide variety of high-readiness individual augmentees to fill particular specialist roles. Thus an organization such as the Marine Corps Force Headquarters Group, a Marine Civil Affairs Group, a naval mobile construction battalion (Seabee) unit, or an army Civil Affairs Brigade (Airborne) might find itself forming the core of a joint interagency task force.51 Something like this has alre
ady been tried in the Horn of Africa, where a composite Civil Affairs battalion based in Djibouti forms the main ground unit in a joint task force that operates across fifteen African countries.52

  I mentioned police just now, and it’s worth touching briefly on police-oriented programs in urban operations. As Chapter 3 made clear, there’s a huge overlap between crime and war when nonstate armed groups are involved, and thus a great deal of commonality between policing and military operations. Police have learned from military population security techniques, and several police jurisdictions in urban areas within the United States are applying techniques or concepts drawn from operations overseas. Meanwhile the U.S. military has studied policing approaches, and has brought along law enforcement advisers on expeditionary operations across the world. Special operations forces and coast guards work closely with foreign police in counterterrorism missions worldwide, and deployable field police (on the model of the Australian Federal Police International Deployment Group, an innovative organization created in 2004 to support security and stability operations both domestically and overseas) or along traditional constabulary or gendarmerie lines, have worked in many war zones.53 Likewise, the Italian Carabinieri, with long experience operating alongside military forces, sponsors the NATO Center of Excellence for Stability Policing Units at Vicenza, Italy, which trains students from police forces and constabularies of many developing nations in stability and community-oriented policing techniques, as well as in human rights and rule of law.54

  One way in which the military could learn even more from police and emergency services, however, is in the use of jurisdictional rather than hierarchical command and control. By definition, in a disaggregated battlefield where forces operate in small teams, most firefights begin with a junior officer or NCO in charge of the team that makes initial contact with the enemy. In a hierarchical command-and-control system, this junior leader is sidelined as soon as the commander of a larger unit turns up, that commander in turn is sidelined when a higher commander arrives, and so on. Thus, if a sergeant in charge of a squad initiates a firefight, it’s quite possible that within fifteen or twenty minutes he will have been superseded by a lieutenant, then a captain, then a colonel. Each of these new arrivals brings greater firepower and more troops but less situational awareness. None of them, except possibly the first, may have a clear idea of the circumstances under which the firefight began, or the locations of noncombatant civilians or key terrain. This system makes authority inversely proportional to knowledge. Meanwhile, the same enemy commander who began the firefight is still in charge (and probably scratching his head in puzzlement at his enemies’ periodic loss of focus as new commanders take over), and new swarms of fighters are self-synchronizing, slotting themselves into position without orders as they arrive. Thus, the hierarchical command system imposes a significant (and entirely self-inflicted) risk of poor or slow decision making, killing innocent bystanders, or even a blue-on-blue fratricide incident, because of a lack of command continuity.

  Contrast this with the jurisdictional or incident-command method used by some police and emergency services. Under this model, the commander first on the scene is designated as incident commander. As other units arrive, their commanders place themselves (regardless of rank) under control of the incident commander, who continues to run the incident until it comes to a natural break point or he hands it off—which he may do at any time by choice, or procedurally when the incident reaches a certain size and complexity. This approach preserves operational continuity and situational awareness, and it allows higher commanders to avoid getting sucked into the current fight and keep their attention on the broader battle and the next and subsequent moves. But in order to work, this approach relies on implicit trust between commanders at different levels and demands a high level of training, reliable communications systems, and a common operating picture down to the NCO level. This in turn implies that junior officers and NCOs must be correctly selected and trained—and then trusted—by more-senior commanders. Many units achieved exactly this level of trust, training, and flexibility through long operational tours in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade. In a coastal urban setting, the complexity of the environment will demand this level of trust and initiative right from the outset.

  Protection

  However they’re organized and commanded, ground forces will have to protect themselves in heavily populated urban environments. In this context, we can think of protection in two modes: direct and indirect. Direct protection is the ability to survive a hit; indirect protection is the ability to avoid being hit in the first place. Heavy armored vehicles such as tanks rely on direct protection: they have enough armor to sit in a street, take a certain number of hits, and keep functioning without needing to leave the area in order to survive, and without having to fire back. In contrast, light armored vehicles rely on indirect protection: they need good enough surveillance and target acquisition systems to detect a threat first, mobility and speed to avoid being hit, and firepower to neutralize the threat by shooting (or launching countermeasures) before they can be hit. Dismounted light infantry and special operations forces, for their part, rely even more heavily on indirect protection—stealth, night operations, speed, deception, and cover from aircraft and artillery—in order to survive.

  While indirect protection might seem smarter, in fact what’s mostly needed in a populated urban environment is direct protection. The 1993 battle of Mogadishu, discussed in Chapter 2, illustrates this very clearly. Light forces (SEALs and Rangers) operating on foot or in soft-skinned vehicles, were dependent on air support in order to remain mobile, suppress threats, and gain situational awareness. When the two Black Hawks were shot down, the lightly equipped ground forces became pinned down in one spot. They lost broad-area situational awareness and had to call in heavy airborne firepower (and make very extensive use of their own weapons) to survive. As well as suffering significant losses of their own, this compelled Task Force Ranger to inflict heavy casualties on the Somali irregular fighters (militia and armed civilians alike) who attacked them, contributing to the shock effect of the battle on U.S. public opinion. Even then, airborne firepower alone wasn’t enough to extricate the force from its encircled position. It was only when the rescue force, in tanks and armored personnel carriers, made its way into the Black Sea that TF Ranger was able to extract. In several cases, tanks sat in the street and took close-range RPG hits without firing back, acting as mobile cover and communications relays for the ground troops.

  Indirect protection (because of the need to see and shoot first, or else risk being destroyed) can be very damaging in an urban area. Lightly armored vehicles may have to suppress suspected enemy positions just in case, or fire their main weapons before positively identifying a threat, because they can’t afford to wait until they’re certain. These weapons (typically heavy machine guns or quick-firing cannons with explosive shells) can easily penetrate walls and structures in flimsy slums and shantytowns. They may travel a very long way through several homes, killing noncombatants or setting fire to an entire area. Alternatively, light vehicles may carry so-called active defense systems designed to detect incoming missiles with radar and shoot them down with a shotgun-like blast (as in the Israeli Trophy or U.S. Q uick Kill system).55 Despite the small danger zone of these systems, they’re problematic in a crowded street full of noncombatants (say, at a checkpoint or a humanitarian relief distribution point). Fragment-free systems such as the European AMAP-ADS offer some improvement—but defeating an incoming missile, while minimizing risk to surrounding civilians or dismounted infantry, is still a daunting technical challenge when it comes to RPGs and (even more so) improvised explosive devices (IEDs).56

  I sometimes hear people express the hope that the IED threat will diminish as Western forces pull out of Afghanistan. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth—the IED has now entered the standard repertoire of irregular forces in urban areas acr
oss the planet, and there are no signs this threat is shrinking; on the contrary, it seems to be growing. As Mike Davis points out in Buda’s Wagon, his excellent history of the car bomb, vehicle-borne IEDs have a long history and have been steadily increasing in sophistication and lethality for decades.57 The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan created a generation of technically adept and combat-experienced bomb makers with skills for hire, and brought together criminal and extremist networks with a common interest in smuggling bomb components. Most adversaries can be expected to quickly field IEDs in the event of new conflict. And, as discussed in Chapter 4, urban populations that have basic familiarity with industrial tools and consumer electronics, plus Internet connectivity, can quickly pick up the necessary knowledge and skills to produce IEDs from scratch. This can be seen in trends in IED usage, which averaged 260 incidents per month outside Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010.58 From January to November 2011, also outside Iraq and Afghanistan, there were 6,832 IED events globally, averaging 621 per month—a huge increase from the previous year.59 These incidents caused 12,286 casualties in 111 countries and were perpetrated by forty regional and transnational threat networks. This isn’t just an international trend: of those totals, 490 events and 28 casualties were in the United States, according to the U.S. government’s Joint IED Defeat Organization.60