Deptula stands by concept

Mattis Sparks Vigorous Debate On Future Of Effects-Based Ops

Inside the Pentagon, August 28, 2008 -- Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis’ decision to exorcise the term “effects-based operations” from U.S. Joint Forces Command’s vocabulary is sparking passionate debate as the military mulls potentially sweeping implications for doctrine, training and operations.

Over the last decade, the Air Force has promoted effects-based operations (EBO) as a revolution in warfare -- operations aimed at producing certain effects, as opposed to merely damaging or destroying targets. It is supposed to be backed by a framework called operational net assessment (ONA) enabling commanders to capitalize on unprecedented high-tech information about the battlespace as well as an analytical process called system of systems analysis (SoSA) focused on exploiting enemy vulnerabilities.

But somewhere along the way it all stopped making sense, according to Mattis, who writes in an Aug. 14 memo that EBO, ONA and SoSA are “fundamentally flawed” and must be removed from the military’s lexicon, training and operations.

“I am convinced that the various interpretations of EBO have caused confusion throughout the joint force and amongst our multinational partners that we must correct,” Mattis writes, charging that EBO has been “misapplied and overextended to the point that it actually hinders rather than helps joint operations.”

Sister publication Inside the Navy reported on the JFCOM chief’s memo on Aug. 18.

There has been a spirited debate about EBO in recent years. Critics such as retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper and Naval War College professor Milan Vego have vivisected the concept, while Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, one of EBO’s main proponents, and other advocates like Naval War College professor James Ellsworth have repeatedly argued its merits.

Mattis’ memo is not the end of the debate, but the start of a new chapter. Deptula is defending EBO while welcoming further discussions that will follow from JFCOM’s guidance.

“I stand by the efficacy of EBO as a proven joint planning construct and welcome internal discussions on the topic as different viewpoints in joint doctrine are important in raising dialogues that ultimately result in enhancing joint force operations,” Deptula tells Inside the Pentagon.

What now?

How Mattis’ guidance will be implemented remains unclear, but the memo signals a sea change in the way JFCOM will address EBO.

By declaring that JFCOM will no longer use, sponsor or export the terms and concepts related to EBO, ONA and SoSA in its training, doctrine development and support of military education, Mattis tees up a major opportunity for EBO critics to curtail the use of these terms and ideas in American military discourse. Some EBO proponents see this as a threat, while other EBO advocates see an opportunity to hone the concept and discard unhelpful baggage.

Mattis explicitly calls for refining two joint doctrine publications that dictate how military officials use effects in joint operations in terms of desired outcomes.

JFCOM, however, is also pursuing changes beyond the realm of doctrine, says Capt. Dennis Moynihan, the general’s spokesman.

“EBO has implications for more than doctrine, including areas such as training, planning and command and control,” Moynihan tells ITP. “We’re in the initial stages of looking at how to best refine each of these areas to comply with the guidance contained in the memo.”

Quick praise for Mattis

Van Riper is among those touting Mattis’ memo. He tells ITP he hopes the memo will lead the U.S. defense community to move away from “what is essentially conceptual nonsense based on pseudo-science.”

For Van Riper, a long-time EBO critic, JFCOM’s new position could not have come soon enough.

“Unfortunately, it comes after nearly eight years of wasted intellectual effort and the expenditure of literally tens of millions of tax dollars to develop and promulgate a ‘non-idea,’” he tells ITP via e-mail. “Largely unrecognized is the opportunity cost incurred by this endeavor. It diverted attention away from real operational problems that the U.S. military needed to resolve, insurgency being at the forefront.”

Vego, who authored a critique of EBO two years ago in the National Defense University’s Joint Force Quarterly magazine, praised Mattis’ memo as a “great paper” that will broaden debate about the merits of EBO.

In an interview with ITP, Vego advocated pruning out EBO ideas and related “systems perspective” terminology from joint doctrine, particularly in two publications cited by Mattis: JP 3-0 Joint Operations and JP 5-0 Joint Operation Planning.

Moynihan tells ITP that work on revisions to JP 3-0 and JP 5-0 was under way before Mattis’ memo was issued under the normal revision cycle for these publications. Both documents are expected to be updated by December 2010, he said. The combatant commands, the services and the Joint Staff are involved as members of the joint doctrine community, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff oversees the process, he said. The lead agent for JP 3-0 is JFCOM. The lead agent for JP 5-0 is the Joint Staff’s J-7 directorate.

The possibility of such changes already has some EBO proponents up in arms.

“Numerous adverse consequences will arise from the implementation of this policy if carried out as the [Mattis] letter implies,” retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney tells ITP. “Namely, by directing the removal of systems analysis, a resulting attritional approach will emerge and place many American military personnel, both short-term and long-term, at much greater risk. It will also lead to far greater inefficiencies in developing and employing our forces.”

JFCOM’s policy decision circumvents the joint doctrine development and approval process, he asserted.

According to Vego, however, what today’s doctrine says about EBO has a tangible, negative impact on the battlefield. As evidence, he cited a 2008 paper by Army Maj. Gen. David Fastabend, titled “Books to Baghdad: Theory and Doctrine after a Tour in Iraq.” Fastabend wrote that he went to Iraq in 2006 believing “EBO was merely useless, an attempt to build a doctrinal theology around the notion that actions have consequences.”

“But in its more radical interpretation,” Fastabend wrote, “EBO advocates a strict planning focus on outcomes isolated from actor or method, and this in turn leads to operational planning that rapidly devolves into a ridiculous essay, a listing of aspirations: ‘let us eliminate corruption, isolate the border, prevent sectarian tension.’ Such aspirations, with no consideration of who must do what by when are worse than useless; they are damaging because they conceal the need to make hard choices. Therefore, I now believe the EBO concept is not merely useless but actually damaging to our ability to plan realistically and conduct operations.”

Retired Navy Capt. Sam Tangredi, now the director of San Diego operations for Strategic Insight and the author of the new book “Futures of War,” says he is sympathetic to much of what Mattis argues in the memo.

He also said he agrees with author and former Boeing strategist Edward Smith, who has stressed that EBO is not a new concept. Smith wrote that good generals and diplomats have always focused on outcomes and war’s human dimension.

Attempting to go beyond this interpretation, Tangredi cautions, leads one to either conclude that EBO is best achieved by airpower’s precision-strike capabilities or to embrace the Soviet notion that one can develop an algorithm that identifies what will influence enemy decision-makers. Tangredi said he disagrees with both points.

“The problem is we don’t necessarily know what effects particular actions achieve,” he says.

Vego predicts Mattis’ memo will spark more debate.

“No, I don’t think this is the end of the debate because I think there is still residual resistance to what Gen. Mattis [wrote],” the professor tells ITP. Much money has been spent on EBO over the years, so contractors who have worked on it are now unhappy with the memo, he notes.

“I’m sure there are a lot of people who are not happy,” Vego says.

McInerney unloads

Not surprisingly, the memo is ruffling feathers in Air Force circles.

Before Deptula provided comments on the missive to ITP, Air Force headquarters referred questions on the topic to retired officers like McInerney, who unloaded heaps of criticism.

“Even though I am no longer on active duty I am embarrassed for a combatant commander to publish such a document,” McInerney says. “I am a fan of Mattis but this is too much.”

McInerney even encouraged combatant commanders to “ignore” what he sees as a shocking memo.

In an e-mail to ITP, McInerney calls JFCOM’s missive the “most parochial, un-joint, biased, one-sided document launched against a concept that was key in the transformation of warfare -- and proven in the most successful U.S. military conflicts of the past 20 years (Desert Storm and Allied Force).”

He belittles the two-page memo as a “tantrum” and the accompanying five-page guidance as “puerile” and “totally unbecoming” of a JFCOM commander.

Mattis should be “encouraging multiple perspectives for the enhancement of joint operations -- not trashing them,” McInerney asserts. The JFCOM memo is “intellectually bankrupt” and the policy’s conclusions are “profoundly out of touch with reality,” he adds.

“The rationale ignores any notion of strategic art much less operational art, and instead relies on centuries’ old, discredited ‘commander’s intuition’ to design, plan and execute campaigns rather than offering a demonstrated better alternative,” he insists.

McInerney concedes EBO has been twisted and over-hyped, but he blames JFCOM.

“That many prior or current JFCOM staffers and associated contractors distorted EBO concepts and made promises as to their effectiveness is fact -- and addressing such should be the limit of the stated policy’s aims,” he says. He also gripes that the memo ignores the basis of many existing approaches successfully utilized by combatant commands, services and other defense agencies.

Taking an inter-service jab at Mattis, McInerney says the JFCOM commander may be on the path to turning the entire U.S. military’s joint doctrine into a larger version of Marine Corps “three-block war,” discarding other operational and strategic perspectives along the way.

But not all EBO proponents view Mattis’ memo in such terms.

Between the lines

Naval War College professor James Ellsworth, who has defended EBO in the pages of Joint Force Quarterly against criticisms raised by Vego, says a careful reading of Mattis’ memo reveals a nuanced approach that could help refine the concept.

However, the memo’s strong criticism of EBO will lead some to conclude Mattis wants nothing to do with idea, the professor tells ITP.

On its surface, the memo appears to be no less scathing an indictment of effects-based thinking than earlier scholarly critiques offered by Vego and others, Ellsworth notes.

By couching his verdict in language and examples so critical of effects-based thinking as a whole, Mattis boosts the odds that readers of his directive will see a blanket condemnation and miss the parts of an effects-based approach that he is saying must be retained and refined, Ellsworth says.

“A closer examination, however, shows Mattis drawing a much more nuanced distinction between EBO’s facts and follies -- one similar in many regards to the approach I have urged in Joint Force Quarterly,” he adds.

Ellsworth said it is “high time for a warfighter” like Mattis to “take the reins at Joint Forces Command and bring some of our more esoteric emerging concepts back down to the cold, hard realities of the battlefield.”

The greatest potential contribution of the Mattis memo is the weight of its author’s experience and credibility, Ellsworth argues, reinforcing the scholarly admonition that even the most revolutionary new concepts must be developed and applied in concert with, not in defiance of, the enduring truths of war.

“Yet if we are not careful in its reading, it may instead toss the baby out with the bathwater,” the professor warns. He argues the full wisdom of Mattis’ assessment is summarized most effectively in paragraph two on the first page.

“Read it first,” Ellsworth says.

That paragraph calls for a return to time-honored principles and terminology that U.S. forces have tested in the crucible of battle, and which are well grounded in the theory and nature of war.

“At the same time, we must retain and adopt those aspects of effect based thinking that are useful,” Mattis writes. “We must stress the importance of mission type orders that contain clear Commander’s Intent, unambiguous tasks and purpose, and most importantly, links ways and means with achievable ends. To augment these tenets, we must leverage non-military capabilities and strive to better understand the different operating variables that make up today’s more complex operating environments.”

Ellsworth concedes EBO has problems.

“Like many innovative theories that have shown early promise, the aspects of effects-based thinking around which its evangelism coalesced tended to be those that were easiest to do: precision targeting and assessment, especially from the air,” he tells ITP via e-mail.

Mattis is right in noting that this is “no sound basis for a comprehensive operational concept,” Ellsworth says. The general is probably equally right, the professor adds, to imply that Israel’s attempts in the 2006 Hezbollah-Israeli conflict to make EBO the basis for an operational concept contributed powerfully to Israel’s defeat.

But Ellsworth also says the memo’s references to EBO’s utility for targeting against well-defined, “closed systems” like power grids, roads and railways should spark concern because this is not what the effects-based vision was about. Mattis himself concedes this in the memo when describing the many elements of the concept he deems worth salvaging, Ellsworth asserts.

“At its core, the promise of effects-based thinking is precisely the ‘hard stuff’ of complex adaptive systems against which it has not performed well,” the professor says.

This, Ellsworth argues, is the paradox of change: Research consistently shows an initial drop in performance when even the most effective innovations are adopted because new concepts and processes must be tested, refined and mastered -- and because real innovation tends to be aimed at “wicked” problems that simply do not give way readily to solutions.

Ellsworth says Mattis’ memo implicitly acknowledges that the real promise of effects-based thinking has to do with identifying the emerging problems of this kind that warfighting doctrine must evolve to address.

These complex problems include the “interaction between military, interagency and international organizations, socio-economic makeup, political systems and other factors in the operational environment”; the coordination of broad, “whole-of-government” action toward accomplishing commander’s intent; “nodal analysis as it relates to targeting” (against the entire, complex adversary system, to include in the information battlespace); and the fluidity of the contemporary operating environment, which does not lend itself to the kind of static assessment products and processes of bygone years, Ellsworth says. -- Christopher J. Castelli