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What we needed was to ask of each operation contemplated: “Will this operation create more bad guys than it takes off the streets by its implementation?”
—Gen. David Petraeus, USA (Ret.)
Wars in the American era will be won by changing perceptions rather than by just killing men. I had this truism driven home to me one evening in November 2007 while having dinner with Gen. David Petraeus at his headquarters in Baghdad. It was his birthday, but before joining his staff for a cake-cutting ceremony, we talked at length about war.1
It was a good time for him. The success of the “surge” begun the previous year was no longer in doubt. Casualties, both U.S. and Iraqi, were down enormously. Convoys could drive along roads previously laced with killing IEDs. Petraeus and his commanders felt confident enough to walk about Baghdad without body armor. For the moment, he was winning the war.
The subject of our conversation was far broader than just the day’s wartime events. We spoke at length about military history and the nature and character of the war. As the evening progressed, our discourse was interrupted periodically by a string of staff officers bringing to the dinner table the details of the next day’s operations. I was struck by the uniqueness of the moment. Here was a strategic leader interrupting an interchange on the subject of military philosophy to approve what seemed to me to be mundane operational decisions. These were decisions being made in a manner that previous generations of higher-level commander would not have comprehended. Petraeus’ tactical intercessions were few, to be sure, but they came whenever a military operation was bound to influence the narrative. He was particularly focused on the unintended consequences of sensitive special operations night raids into Sadr City against Shia militia leaders. He wanted these men dead. However, he also wanted support from more moderate Shia leaders in Sadr City and acquiescence of Shia citizens of Baghdad for these intrusive and violent operations.
To understand the significance of the moment, it is necessary to understand the difference between decisions made at the strategic and operational levels of war. Strategic-level commanders like Petraeus make decisions that link operations in the field with the president’s broad national security policies and objectives. The operational level of war ties the employment of tactical forces to achievement of the president’s strategic end state. Strategy wins wars. Operations win campaigns. Tactics win battles. Petraeus contributed to the Pentagon’s strategic war plan, and he superintended the implementation of that strategy though his immediate control of the fighting forces in the field. He left the vast majority of the details of fighting battles to tactical commanders, who sense, track, and kill or capture the enemy every day at the brigade, battalion, and company levels.
The Army’s focus on (some would say obsession with) the operational level of war began in earnest after the Israeli performance in the 1973 Yom Kippur campaign. The Army realized then that the tactical focus of Vietnam had become too narrow, given the larger-scale demands for fighting a very broad, deep, fast-moving, and enormously lethal campaign against conventional forces like those of the Egyptians in the Sinai, the Syrians on the Golan, and, by inference, the Soviets on the north German plain.
The Army’s discovery of war at the operational level led to an intellectual renaissance among the officer corps and its eventual embrace of AirLand Battle—the doctrinal concept that codified a renewal of massive, mounted big-machine warfare, essentially the ultimate embodiment of blitzkrieg. Saddam provided this generation of officers the opportunity for vindication during Desert Storm when five division-sized “big arrows on the map” wheeled across the sands of Kuwait and Iraq in a classic hundred-hour operational maneuver to crush the Republican Guard. Saddam repeated the favor twelve years later, when he opened the door for two division-sized large arrows to conduct a classic operational maneuver, this time linearly and in parallel from Kuwait to Baghdad in three weeks.
The big-arrow school of operational art began to lose its luster somewhere along the march to Baghdad. Gradually, the spontaneous actions of small bands of irregular forces, the “Fedayeen Saddam,” began to make themselves felt. Armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, this pickup team of fighters continually attacked U.S. armored columns on the march. Had U.S. commanders been more observant, they would have seen an enemy in the process of adapting to a technologically dominant force—a phenomenon they should have recognized from their service in Vietnam.
The object of an operational maneuver is to exploit the advantages of fire and maneuver, in order to strike at the enemy’s “brain,” with the intent of collapsing his operational centers of gravity. The collapse of the enemy commander’s ability to control his units in the field would cause a collapse of will—a psychological and emotional meltdown among those in power resulting inevitably in the collapse of the state. During Desert Storm, Gen. Colin Powell was thinking about the link between operational success, the defeat of the Republican Guard, and the cutting-off of the head of the strategic snake (figuratively speaking). It worked then, and it worked momentarily on the march to Baghdad, because the snake had a head—Saddam and his henchmen. Success at the tactical level by winning a succession of battles allowed the achievement of operational success. Victory followed. It is just that the enemy had a vote; on the march to Baghdad, he changed the nature of the war by redefining war at the operational level.
Today, the Islamic terrorist snake has no head. Or maybe better put, it has many heads, each Hydra-like with the capacity to regrow after decapitation. Shortly after the capture of Baghdad Petraeus saw the operational level seem to disappear. Suddenly tactical successes no longer guaranteed strategic success, because there was no operational tissue connecting them. Soldiers did well in places like Najaf and Fallujah; they killed enemies in profusion, but strategic ends continually slipped further away with each perceived success.
Petraeus postulated that maybe the operational level had not disappeared. Maybe it had changed form. Maybe the tenets that ensured success in blitzkrieg-style wars are different in wars fought against irregular enemies who have no heads. To be sure, the end state of war is still the same as it has been for millennia: the moral collapse of the enemy. War will always be a test of will, but this war suggests that the operational means for transferring tactical success to moral dominance has morphed into a shape that was becoming clear enough to perceive and define.
Operational success in blitzkrieg warfare was gained through speed and destructiveness. Embrace the technological power of the internal combustion engine and the wireless to control the clock by committing violent acts of killing that so shock an enemy that he becomes paralyzed, unable to recover his composure before capitulation. But speed of movement and destructiveness are no longer guarantors of success in today’s wars; the clock has stalled. Nearly seven thousand dead Americans testify to the truism that violence is still an ingredient in our wars. However, the connection between tactical and strategic success is no longer direct and immediate. Something else is impeding the translation of one to the other. Some new source of friction keeps killing from being enough.
Just before we left the dinner table, Petraeus looked briefly at each of the next day’s tactical plans submitted by his combat commanders. He attended to his commander’s kinetic plan, but he also filtered the next day’s plan through an intellectual image of the “narrative.” His interest was not in the plan so much as its consequences. After a few moments of reflection he though deeply about the effect each operation would have on the four “audiences” that would be influenced by his decisions: the Iraqis, the enemy, the Arab community, and the American people. Like any strategic leader, he considered the context of these tactical engagements. Would the perceptual consequences of tomorrow’s tactical operation properly feed his intended perceptual outcome? What would all four audiences think if it failed? As I watched him deliberately trace through the details of each intended tactical action, I could not help thinking about the paradoxical juxtaposition between Norman Schwarzkopf’s hand waving across the arrows on a big map during one of his televised briefings and that quiet moment of reflection when Petraeus leaned over the dinner table, stared at each plan, and turned over in his mind the global consequences of even the smallest tactical engagement.
I realized at that moment that the operational context of tomorrow’s wars had changed fundamentally. During the dinner, Petraeus demonstrated a sense that the operational level of war in the American era was now defined by two opponents, each trying to capture and control the “narrative.” The winning side would be the one best able to translate tactical actions, kinetic and non-kinetic, into the most convincing story of the conflict in progress. Petraeus’ four audiences, rather than the enemy’s operational brain, would be the strategic focus of all of tomorrow’s action. The internal combustion engine and the wireless of the industrial era of warfare have given way to the microchip and the video camera as the primary instruments for achieving operational success.
In effect, Petraeus understood that the technological means for winning at the operational level of war had leveled the playing field. The enemy has as good (or perhaps even better) access to the global information network as do the Western powers. Our technological skill in broadcasting information is matched by the enemy’s ability to create distrust within sympathetic cultures concerning our intentions. The enemy’s unique skill at manipulating the narrative serves to create uncertainty and discomfort among the Iraqis, the American population, and our allies.
During his years in command of U.S. forces in Iraq and later in Afghanistan, Petraeus matured his vision on how to translate successful small-unit tactical successes into lasting strategic ends through the use of operational “amplifiers” that feed the narrative. The first amplifier is truth. The enemy’s narrative cannot compete with ours as long as we are not afraid to tell the truth, trusting that the asymmetry of truth-telling inherent in a democracy at war must eventually favor our side to a decisive degree. When done right, speed in truthfulness is analogous to being the first unit to reach the objective in a conventional war. We cannot pause long enough to spin the truth through the cultural filters of the military’s turgid public-affairs bureaucracies. The purpose of getting the truth out first should not be to impress our political ideology or methods on the population but to present ourselves as the only practical alternative for restoring civility to a war-ravaged society. Even among alien populations, such as the Sunnis in Iraq today, the truth about the vile nature of ISIS killers, broadcast repeatedly and witnessed firsthand in places like Mosul, Ramadi, and in small Sunni villages in Anbar Province, can turn the course of the narrative stream and increase its acceptance among the local population. Since the exit of U.S. forces in Iraq, we have discovered to our peril that among the Sunnis this is a fragile task—usually accomplished only when ISIS and Al Qaeda alienate the people through very public and horrific excesses.
The second narrative amplifier, therefore, is speed. Before Petraeus arrived, truth would have to wait until the Pentagon and White House bureaucracies staffed every tactical action captured on video to decide if it was worthy and politically acceptable for the Iraqis and the global media. Today the task of lifting the fog of war depends not on the ability to observe the enemy’s actions but on the ability to be first with the information. With the arrival of global social media, the interval from observation to broadcast has accelerated from days or weeks to hours, in some cases minutes. To compete, Petraeus realized, all intermediaries between tactical units and the media had to be eliminated. Washington had to trust its Soldiers to tell the truth in order to compete with terrorist and anti-American outlets.
Video cameras in the hands of close-combat units is the surest guarantee of speed. Video technologies have become so inexpensive that the U.S. command should equip every small unit on patrol with helmet-mounted cameras linked to a single media clearing-and-collection point. U.S. reporters embedded with close-combat units used to be a common sight in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not so anymore . . . and the American narrative is suffering from the media exit. In the future, we must begin to re-embed media, perhaps by using more reporters from regional countries whose views are more in tune with the culture of the region and whose opinions are more likely to be trusted. Native-speaking witnesses can be harsh in their criticisms, but their messages have great power when they chronicle far more horrific—and common—actions by a diabolical and cruel enemy like ISIS.
The third amplifier is clarity. A “whole of government” approach to fighting an irregular war is a good idea, as long as there are not too many hands on the throttle. The Defense Department often sees an event in somewhat different contexts than the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency. Too often, the facts become too stilted and prescriptive when filtered through an overly bureaucratic and layered process. The greatest credibility comes from young leaders and Soldiers who tell their own stories. Even if not terribly articulate, a young infantryman’s breathless description of a firefight is far more believable than the same story sanitized and filtered by the White House Press Corps.
The fourth narrative amplifier is the offensive. Soldiers take great pride in their will to close with the enemy on the battlefield, but they tend to be less aggressive when closing with the enemy on the global media stage. Our fear of being wrong often allows the enemy to be first when he has no concern about being right. Commanders in Afghanistan today have learned to question first reports but show latitude for second reports. Again, video images of firefights and other incidents tend to confirm second reports. Some senior commanders are still reluctant to release sources and means of observation, but the Cold War is over. It is better to give the enemy a hint of the power of our sources and means than to allow him to get away with a lie that can easily be refuted. Sadly, even after fourteen years of war in the Middle East, U.S. policy makers and commanders still fail to place into context the absolute centrality of the narrative in planning for and executing future warfare. The presumption is that the information campaign should support the combat phase of an operation. In fact, global media attention on any war the United States contemplates reverses this tenet: in the future, the kinetic fight must support the narrative.
Looking back over our past experiences in Iraq, it is interesting to contrast the first and second battles of Fallujah. They collectively provide an interesting example of the real-war consequences of narratives preceding kinetics. Prior to the first attempt by the Marines to take the city, in April 2004, the enemy occupied the Fallujah General Hospital—located in the extreme northwest corner of the city, near the Euphrates River bridge. There Sunni insurgents hanged four Blackwater contractors. The hospital director provided safe passage to the hospital for the international media, which immediately started spouting false stories about the “atrocities” being committed by the Marines. As the battle progressed, the hospital filled with the dead and wounded. The media fed the narrative to the enemy’s advantage, and soon the global outcry over the carnage became so overwhelming that administration pressure forced a premature termination of the battle of Fallujah. The enemy’s propaganda war succeeded in beating the Marine kinetic war.
On the second try to take Fallujah, in November 2004, the Marines changed their operational plan to put the narrative first. The hospital became the first objective to be taken. The media never made it into the hospital this time, and the public was denied images of civilian suffering in the city. Sadly, the total cost in life would have been less had the Marines won the narrative battle the first time.
If perception is the end, then the means to achieve that end is discourse with those we seek to influence. In contemporary irregular conflicts there are competing, perhaps even warring, narratives. Each seeks to sway, through discourse, a very broad and eclectic audience. In an age in which this stream of discourse cannot be easily deflected, the narrative that leads to the fulfillment of the will of the population is given credence. The perception is that battlefield successes (or failures) can be interpreted as signposts pointing toward the side most likely to achieve victory or defeat. The narrative battle is not an even match. We may have truth on our side, but enemies like ISIS have the advantage of proximity, cultural affinity with the people, and a freedom to dramatize the brutalities of today’s irregular conflicts from their perspectives.
Populations will inevitably receive evidence through a series of social, cultural, and ethnic filters. For example, we saw efforts to provide humanitarian relief to the Kurds stranded in ISIS-held territory as a satisfying part of our narrative. ISIS saw it as a very dangerous intrusion that had to be curtailed by escalating the violence to the point where innocent women, children, and the elderly were executed with extreme, and very public, violence. One event, using two separate cultural filters, can feed two dueling narratives. Violence, too, influences the narrative but in a different way. On American television we saw Iraqi military and Syrian civilians blown to bits or gassed, and we were as horrified as the narrator. On ISIS media, the same violent images were filtered through a different cultural lens, and insurgent sympathizers throughout the world agreed with the righteousness of the outcome. Conversely, when we see optical or infrared video feeds from fighter aircraft or aerial drones showing the destruction of enemy insurgents the reaction is not horror for those inside destroyed vehicles but our own brand of righteousness.
Often, tactical action viewed from the perspective of the narrative has outcomes at odds with a blitzkrieg-era perspective. For example, an infantry platoon may destroy a particularly troublesome enemy terrorist cell that is using a mosque as its base by calling for a precision bombing mission, then by delivering an assault to kill or capture those remaining alive inside. However, the narrative may turn against this tactical action when an enemy team arrives shortly after the assault to remove weapons and explosives and distribute bloody Korans to suggest that the target was actually young men at prayer. Of course, most of the population in the immediate vicinity of the attack would realize that the whole thing was a setup. They would also be perfectly glad that the enemy cell was gone. But the weight of evidence, when transmitted and interpreted through the cultural lens across the entire population, is not favorable in this instance to our version of the narrative.
Consideration of the narrative’s influence must be the most important factor for determining whether or not the effort will succeed—or whether it should be conducted at all. How differently history would have played out if Lyndon B. Johnson and the Joint Chiefs had understood the impact of the global media’s coverage of the Vietnam War on a Petraeus-like set of key audiences. General Westmoreland’s early search-and-destroy strategy prior to the Tet Offensive was the proper course of action for destroying Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army main-force units efficiently and in large numbers. Yet, the psychological impact of our Soldiers burning villages created a “David and Goliath” perspective that made subsequent images of Tet all the more debilitating to the psyche of the American people. Media images can be just as important as traditional factors such as logistics, command and control, intelligence, fire, and maneuver. Most critical will be the enemy’s psychological strength and his potential to adapt his narrative to overcome battlefield reverses.
Thus, today’s challenge is to develop another generation of Soldiers equally skilled in the narrative arts. Skill at feeding the narrative is no longer a contributor to achieving strategic success in irregular war. It is in fact the principal determinant, the psychological center of gravity, for shaping the perceptions and influencing the will of the population. We must always remember that the narrative stream is neutral but that who occupies and exploits it is not. In the end, “ground truth” or actual battlefield conditions will prevail. In this new American era of warfare, the art of feeding the operational narrative requires skill at maneuvering across the expanse of human perception rather than an expanse of territory.
At present the enemy’s ability to preempt and dominate the narrative seems to be ascendant. Petraeus once commented that while ISIS has far fewer social media outlets and less network sophistication than the West, it does have command of messaging. Its leaders are able to link religion and cultural bonds to their war aims. They understand Islamic youth and how to touch those most disaffected in the West. They shape the narrative based on the targeted audience: for Muslims in the West, a seductive and romantic view of an ISIS fighter’s life on the front, the prospects of a willing mate, a good salary, and a fast track to Allah for those who die for the Prophet; for Muslims in the region, a celebration of the bloody, brutal, humiliating savagery against apostates beheaded or burned to death on video. Perhaps the greatest advantage ISIS possesses in controlling the narrative is their success on the battlefield. We learned long ago that it is very hard for the losing side to be convincing—and at this writing the Western coalition and the Iraqi government are perceived to be and are losing to ISIS. After more than a year of success, even the Obama State Department seems to have concluded that our ability to win the narrative (or, to use “State Speak,” our “counter-messaging”) is far inferior to the messaging of ISIS. They admit that ISIS is far more nimble in spreading its message than we are in blunting it.2
REMOVE HOPE, WIN THE NARRATIVE
Sadly, today Petraeus is seeing his brainchild, the 2007 “surge,” go into reverse after Obama’s precipitous withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011. ISIS victories have also reversed the narrative; coming in second in the narrative can only lead to defeat. The question is: How to regain dominance in the narrative? The only sure way to turn the tide is to take the offensive and attack the ISIS narrative at its core, to convince the audience that ISIS is no longer winning. A sense of loss for such a fragile entity will inevitably erode the narrative and cause the believers to lose hope that ISIS will succeed.
Hope drives the narrative. Hope for the extremist comes from the belief that ISIS’s harsh brand of theology and rabid ideology will prevail. Hope drives trying—or a “response initiation,” in the psychologist’s jargon. To the extent hope is present, a terrorist will translate belief into action. As hope is removed even the most ideologically attuned enemy will become passive and inert. Think for a moment of hope filling a fragile crucible; an ISIS defeat in Iraq and Syria cracks the crucible. The question is how to do it with enough drama and speed that terrorists all over the world lose hope and become passive. From any perspective, the ISIS enclave in Syria is militarily unassailable. Iraq, however, is a different story.
Arab cultures seem particularly vulnerable to the mercurial collapse of hope though decisive military action. The cosmic swings in hope among Arab Soldiers before and after defeats in Arab Israeli wars in 1948 and 1967 and our victory in the Gulf War against Saddam’s army in 1991 are instructive. The apathy that followed Osama bin Laden’s killing also suggests that hopelessness among terrorists can result from the death of a single terrorist icon. Think for a moment of hope as a crucible that is filled over the years by successful terrorist offensive action against the West and Western-affiliated countries in the Middle East. If hope fills the crucible through violent actions, then only a counter-violent, military response can crack the crucible and empty it of hope. The object of a campaign against hope is not necessarily to kill in large numbers but to find the most vulnerable piece of the crucible and break it dramatically, decisively . . . and quickly.
A campaign against hope, a war to regain the narrative, must start from Baghdad and move northward up the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The vulnerabilities for ISIS rest in the disconnectedness of its garrisons, spotted astride the rivers like a string of pearls. Thanks to recent U.S. bombing, ISIS cannot move between these enclaves. Thus a series of patient, sequential ground assaults against ISIS garrisons in cities like Taji, Hit, Tal Afar, and eventually Mosul will create momentum sufficient to push ISIS back to the Syrian border. These will not be victories so much as very public humiliations, the antidote to hope, signaling a decisive swing in the narrative that favors the legitimate government of Iraq.
Can the Iraqis do it? If so, can they do it soon, before ISIS solidifies its grip on the river cities? One thing is certain: the last best hope for an offensive outcome against the hopefulness of these killers rests with the Iraqi army and the Americans who are trying to turn them into a viable fighting force, or at least a force competent enough to turn the enemy’s hubris into hopelessness. When hopelessness prevails, no slick, social media–driven narrative can prevail. If ISIS is perceived by their audience to be losing in its war against the infidel, the war of the narrative shifts to our side. Loss of hope leads to loss of fighting will; a will to win is the strongest weapon in the ISIS arsenal. Once will is eroded by a loss of confidence in the narrative message, its quest to establish a caliphate is doomed.