A View from Canberra: Strategy at all levels | ADM May 2012

Coming out of the conflict in Somalia in the early 1990s, the three-block war envisaged soldiers on the battlefields of the future delivering humanitarian aid, conducting peacekeeping and fighting, all in the one city locality. This was highly influential and one consequence has been awareness that soldiers deploying into conflict zones need a diversity of skills beyond that of warfighting.

That’s certainly been evident in Iraq and Afghanistan. US officers, who might originally have been trained to fight the Warsaw Pact on the north European plain, found themselves negotiating with tribal elders to facilitate aid projects in Mosul and Fallujah.

Krulak’s other concept, that of the strategic corporal, has also endured and relates to the devolution of command responsibility to its lowest level in the highly complex environment of the three-block war. These junior leaders, Krulak wrote, needed to exercise an exceptional degree of maturity, restraint and judgment.

The Australian Defence Force agrees. In 2002 then army chief General Peter Leahy declared the era of the strategic corporal was here.

“The soldier of today most possess professional mastery of warfare but match this with political and media sensitivity,” he said.

This is quite an ask for a young junior leader with his or her actions broadcast to the world by CNN or al-Jazeera and judged for good or ill by those remote from the battlefield and generally wholly lacking knowledge of the context in which the activity occurred. Exceptional performance will most likely go unremarked but the media will gleefully leap on the slightest stuffup.

And there lies a corollary of the strategic corporal, most aptly outlined last September in an article on the influential Small Wars Journal website by another marine, Lieutenant Colonel Butch Bracknell, and titled “The Strategic Knucklehead”.

In Australia, that perhaps best translates as the “strategic f%$kwit” and refers to the soldier whose poor judgment or misconduct exerts a wholly negative strategic impact. Sadly there have been numerous recent examples.

Writing late last year, Bracknell referred to Raymond Davis, a CIA contract employee whose escapades in Lahore, Pakistan, in January 2011 seriously compromised the delicate US-Pakistan relationship. Davis shot dead two Pakistanis in questionable circumstances while a third was killed by a car dashing to his rescue. Topping it all, he was then arrested and held for six weeks. Much worse followed.

At the main base US at Bagram, no-one thought hard enough to conclude it was a really bad idea, firstly, to burn copies of the Koran confiscated from insurgent prisoners along with the rest of the trash, and secondly, to do it in a way that speedily became common knowledge outside the base.

Most egregiously, US army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales crept out of his base in Kandahar province and into homes in nearby villages, gunning down 17 Afghan villagers, the majority women and children.

These are likely watershed events in the history of the Afghanistan conflict, conceivably speeding the US drawdown and inevitably that of other coalition nations including Australia.

If that’s what occurs, it will be down to the actions of perhaps two or three soldiers, in the same manner as US policy in Iraq was very nearly derailed by a handful of reservists assigned to the Abu Ghraib prison. For the coalition effort in Afghanistan, this could conceivably get worse as the Bales case wends its way through the US judicial system.

Just why he did it hasn’t been explained and it may be he never will give an adequate explanation. However Stratfor’s George Friedman provides an intriguing perspective and one relevant to Australia’s experience in Afghanistan.

Friedman noted that Bales was in Afghanistan on his fourth combat tour, having previously served in Iraq in tours of nine, 15 and 12 months - that’s three years, with Afghanistan taking him into his fourth year. In Vietnam, only volunteers served more than a year while in World War Two, comparatively few US servicemen fought for the duration.

“In US history only the Civil and Revolutionary Wars lasted as long as Bales had served,” Friedman said, observing that a consequence of a decade of conflict was a force containing a large number of troops at the limit of their endurance.
Some Australian soldiers have served multiple tours in Afghanistan but it would seem none remotely as long as Bales.

A couple of factors would appear to mitigate against the type of burnout Bales experienced. Most undertaking multiple tours come from the special forces - units with exceptional esprit d’corps - and their tours typically run four months or less. Defence is well aware of the potential for exhausting its best soldiers and has taken steps to ensure this isn’t overdone.

Through good luck or good management or both, Australia has yet to produce a “strategic f%$kwit” remotely near the league of Robert Bales or Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib fame. Maybe no-one outside Australia would notice even if we did.

Yet the antics of the small number of Australian defence members involved in the ADFA “skype scandal” and in the misconduct aboard HMAS Success show the potential is there. The Navy likely isn’t nearly as well regarded in Noumea after an appalling incident in 2006 in which a drunken Australian sailor bashed an elderly woman to death. He’s now serving a 12-year jail term.

However, your correspondent can only think of one incident involving Australian military personnel which might have had strategic consequences. That was a Navy training exercise conducted soon after the 1990-91 Gulf War when Australian warships were intercepting vessels smuggling oil out of Iraq.

Pretending to be non-compliant crew members of a boarded tanker, a group of sailors dressed up in Arab garb and were filmed by a Navy camera crew ostentatiously pretending to pray to Mecca.

There it could well have remained. But the vision was then blithely released to the media. This wasn’t a good look even back then and if repeated today could conceivably spark the kind of mob outrage against Australia as occurred after the Bagram Koran burning incident.