The relationship between 5th Group and the highest levels of Pentagon officialdom had, in those precious, historic weeks of autumn 2001, evinced the flat bureaucratic hierarchy which distinguished not only al-Qaeda but also the most innovative global corporations… The captains and team sergeants of 5th Group's A-Teams did not communicate to the top brass through a yawning, vertical chain of command. No, they weren't even given specific instructions. They were just told to link up with the indigs (in this case the Northern Alliance) and help them defeat the Taliban. And to figure the details out as they went along. The result was the empowerment of master sergeants to call in B-52 strikes. The 5th Special Forces Group was no longer a small part of a massive defense bureaucracy. It had become a veritable corporate spin-off, commissioned to do a specific job its very own way, in a manner of a top consultant. The upshot was that con-ops (concepts of operation) were approved orally within minutes, whereas now in Afghanistan, two years later, it took three days of paperwork, with bureaucratic layers of lieutenant colonels and other senior officers delaying operations and diluting them of risk, so when attacks on suspect compounds finally took place, they often turned up dry holes.
That is worth rereading.
Kaplan defines the most serious of our problems in a few sentences.
The new (and enormously successful) flat organizations he refers to are explained beautifully in the book, The Starfish and the Spider by Bronfman et al.
For the Record the 10th Special Forces Group had similar success in Northern Iraq. There 25 A Teams (600 Men) hooked up with the northern alliance and defeated 12 Iraqi Republican Guard Divisions. Thereby clearing out the reinforcements that would have been available to counterattack our army and USMC units assaulting from the south.
Conventional army generals could not stand it. One 3-star said - that is the last time Special Forces gets ahead of us.
Later, in a speech to non-SFers at Ft Bragg he called SF house-sitters.
America has invested 56 years creating a low-cost COIN solution and it works. But in order for it to work well the generals have to give up some personal control and that goes against everything they believe and were taught.
Combining Special Forces and the regular army in the same battle space has always been an explosive mix.
The best solution now is to to create a separate unconventional force...similar to the Coast Guard concept.
Creating such a separate force may look expensive, but nothing is more expensive than fighting 2 wars for six years and winning nothing, while simultaneously informing America that we are going to keep fighting this way for generations.
Neither America nor Iraq needed the surge. As Kaplan points out in that book, what we need is more A Teams on the ground with sufficient air support and unimpeded clearance to use it.
A Teams (ODAs) do not need much ground support. As they did so successfully initially in Afghanistan and Northern Iraq, ODAs will create their own army at the scene. They will go into the villages and recruit, equip and train local indig to fight for themselves.
Replacing large troop units with ODAs is the only quick way out for our major land forces, that will still leave us a win option. But you will not get the concept into the Pentagon OPS Center. Unconventional ideas don't make it past the 700,000 (yes! 700,000) DOD civilians bogged down in the human traffic jams at Pentagon and other DOD latte wagons.
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