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From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Wed Jun 01 2011 - 08:02:33 EDT
"A chart in the report identified “possible COIN challenges” in 24 countries
and territories where U.S. forces may intervene in future counterinsurgency
warfare.
They are: Pakistan, Mexico, Yemen, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand,
Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Congo,
Ethiopia, Gaza/West Bank, Eritrea, Guatemala, Colombia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Kurdistan, Tunisia and Lebanon"
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/may/31/advisers-urge-military-to-rely-less-on-drones-more/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS
Advisers urge military to rely less on drones, more on expertise
By Eli Lake
The Washington Times
9:22 p.m., Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Military operations in Afghanistan rely too much on intelligence gathered by
unmanned drones, often exclude important publicly available data and do not
focus enough on the recruitment of human agents, a Pentagon report says.
The report by the Defense Science Board, a panel that advises the Pentagon,
says that the defense budget does not properly direct funding for
open-source intelligence collection - information available to the public
and gathered from a wide variety of sources, including academic papers and
newspapers.
“Overall, these problems tend to exclude valuable sources of social and
behavioral science data, including human geography,” according to the
report.
It also says analysts often are overwhelmed by the volume of data collected
by ball-shaped sensors outfitted on the bottom of military aircraft and from
high-tech camera and radar pods placed on blimps and sometimes even
telephone poles. While the technology has helped pinpoint and kill enemy
combatants and to detect cellphone conversations on the battlefield, its
created a “a crisis in processing, exploitation, and dissemination” of the
information.
Drone warfare has taken center stage in recent counterterrorism operations
but is not always considered the best approach for counterinsurgency, which
often requires the military to earn the trust of local populations for
turning people against insurgents.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai this week publicly complained about the U.S.
reliance on drone warfare after a recent bombing that he said mistakenly
killed civilians in a strike targeting Taliban insurgents.
>From an intelligence perspective, the report recommends that the Pentagon
devote more resources to developing expertise in anthropology, sociology and
what is called human-terrain mapping in order to understand and predict
insurgencies. It also says the military and intelligence agencies need to
provide better training in advanced analysis earlier in analysts’ careers.
“The level of analysis is needed at the very front end of any future
conflict, not several years down the road,” the report says.
Another key recommendation calls for the Pentagon to invest more resources
in predicting the locations of insurgencies for use in counterinsurgency
warfare, or COIN in military parlance.
A chart in the report identified “possible COIN challenges” in 24 countries
and territories where U.S. forces may intervene in future counterinsurgency
warfare.
They are: Pakistan, Mexico, Yemen, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand,
Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Congo,
Ethiopia, Gaza/West Bank, Eritrea, Guatemala, Colombia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Kurdistan, Tunisia and Lebanon.
“Whether the United States should engage in any particular counterinsurgency
is a matter of political choice, but that it will engage in such conflicts
during the decades to come is a near certainty,” the report says, quoting
the U.S. military’s 2009 guide to counterinsurgency.
The report states, for example, that insurgency warfare can be caused by a
loss of state power over territory inside a state or in a border region.
“Such areas could become sanctuaries from which to launch attacks on the
U.S. homeland, recruit personnel, and finance, train, and supply
operations,” it says.
The board’s report, released last week, said that interviews with senior
military officials on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance for
counterinsurgency “turned frequently to the subject of technical collection
systems while excluding other collection sources” such as open-source
intelligence, human intelligence and processing, exploitation and
dissemination issues.
It was prompted in part by a December 2009 paper that criticized U.S.
intelligence agencies for their lack of understanding of Afghanistan. That
paper was written by Army Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, chief military
intelligence officer at the time for the International Security Assistance
Force in Afghanistan.
“Ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers
are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlation
between various development projects and the levels of cooperation among
villagers, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers -
whether aid workers or Afghan soldiers - U.S. intelligence officers and
analysts can do little but shrug in response to high level decision-makers
seeking the knowledge … to wage a successful counterinsurgency,” Gen. Flynn
said.
The problem of the deluge of data was emphasized last fall at a national
convention on geospatial intelligence by Marine Corps Gen. James E.
Cartwright, the outgoing vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He told
the convention audience of military and intelligence contractors that data
from a single sensor ball on a predator drone required 19 analysts to
process. As more sophisticated “dense data” drones came online, that number
will increase nearly tenfold, he said.
The report also indicates that the military is moving away from its
strategic posture of preparing to fight two land wars at once in different
regions of the globe. Instead, the Pentagon is orienting its forces toward
fighting low-level irregular warfare against insurgencies.
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