Ace of Spades HQ

June 19, 2008

General Casey finally clues up
— Purple Avenger

Previously, I'd been no fan of Casey's. His handling of Iraq was less than stellar -- on a par with Sanchez's. But I have to give him some props here for realizing that our non-mainstream forces need to have a career path to keep the talent and institutional knowledge we pay so dearly for intact. Lessons learned need to stay learned.

Casey recently sent this out:

From: GOMO
Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2008 2:32 PM
Subject: CSA Sends - Transition Team Commanders (UNCLASSIFIED)
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE
CSA SENDS
Soldiers that serve on our Transition Teams (TTs) and our Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) are developing exactly the type of knowledge, skills and abilities that are vital for our Army to be effective in an era of persistent conflict. These are tough, demanding positions and the members of these teams are required to influence indigenous or surrogate forces as they execute missions that are of vital interest to this Nation. The tasks associated with Transition Teams, from direct combat to stability operations, will be a major part of full spectrum engagement in theaters of interest now and for the foreseeable future. I want to ensure that the officers that lead these teams are recognized and given the credit they deserve.
I am directing that the Major's positions on these teams be immediately designated and codified in DA PAM 600-3, for all branches, as Key and Developmental (KD). Any officer holding one of these positions will be considered "KD" for his or her branch as a Major. Additionally, these officers will be afforded the opportunity, should they desire, to hold an additional 12/24 months of a branch specific KD position (e.g. XO, S-3, etc). Our promotion board guidance already stresses the importance of these positions and this additional information will be added to all upcoming board instructions. Additionally, because the success of these teams requires our best leaders, I have directed HRC to award Centralized Selection List (CSL) Credit for LTCs serving specifically in the TT Commander positions that have direct leadership responsibility for a training/transition team.
Therefore, we are creating a new CSL sub-category called "Combat Arms Operations". It will be open to all eligible officers in the Maneuver, Fires and Effects (MFE) branches and to Foreign Area Officers (FAO). It will fall under the Operations category and will be effective on the FY 10 CSL board which meets this September.
As a bridging strategy, for FY09 we will activate officers for these command positions from the alternate lists of all four major MFE command categories - Operations, Strategic Support, Training, and Installation. Officers accepting and who serve will be awarded CSL credit in the Operations category for serving as a Transition Team Commander. Additionally, if selected by the FY 10 CSL board, the officer may opt to command in the category they are selected after completion of their TT Command. Those that do command will receive credit for a second CSL command. If chosen, and they opt not to command, they will still receive credit for their TT command.
Our ability to train and operate effectively with indigenous forces will be a key element of 21st century land power. We need our best involved.
GEN Casey

More commentary on this significant administrative development over at The Donovan and Small Wars Journal.

Particularly interesting was this comment at The Donovan: (I'll quote in full because their comments aren't hotlinkable):

Good morning,
I am an Army Major currently attending Intermediate Level Education (ILE), what used to be known as Command and General Staff College (CGSC). I came across your posting about GEN Casey's message and wanted to share a little bit more information about how the Army is changing.
In addition to recognizing officers who are capable in the current fight with promotion, another key aspect of changing the service culture is education. The Army has started changing this also. For example, my history class this morning is a 2 hour class on the history of counterinsurgency (COIN) operations from the Peninsular War in Spain (1808-1814) to the USMC experience in Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s. Yesterday, we had a two hour question and answer session with one of the primary authors of the new FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency. Our Operational Law classes and Ethics classes have focused on our responsibilities and duties during COIN operations.
In short, the Army is starting to take its lessons learned, think about them, and distribute them out to the force throught its education system. Previously, the Army did everything in its power to avoid COIN and thinking about COIN. This effort by the Army will help to ensure that the steep learning curve that we went through in Iraq from 2003-2007 doesn't get repeated, because the lessons will have been taught to the next generation of officers.
For the obligatory note, nothing in this post reflects the official opinion or views of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. The opinions and thoughts in this post are my thoughts alone.
Sincerely,
Scott T. Kastelic
MAJ, FA
Foreign Area Officer
ILE Class 08-004/Staff Group 30B
Fort Belvoir, VA

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 02:12 PM | Comments (56)
Post contains 865 words, total size 6 kb.

1 It's nice to see officers at the General level recognize and learn what an incredibly valuable resource we've just developed in Iraq/Afghanistan during the last 5 years, and that offering incentives and rewards for key skills and persons are key to retaining them.

Posted by: EC at June 19, 2008 02:24 PM (j2Tjh)

2 Casey wasn't too bad as MNF-I commander. The problem with commanding in-theater is you have to have a boss that doesn't want to stick your hand up your ass like a sock-puppet. I met him once very briefly when we were taking a break on Camp Victory and playing tourist at Al Faw Palace. Seemed nice enough.

One thing I didn't know, and he has kept very quiet, is that he was one of Charlie Beckwith's guys when Delta stood up. After Desert One he went back to Big Army for the sake of his home life. I just wish he'd put a stop to some of the madnesses of his predecessors, like the black berets and the planned discarding of the green Class A's.

Posted by: SGT Dan at June 19, 2008 02:58 PM (0Yr25)

3 I just graduated from ILE. We spent a lot of time on COIN, strategy, and operational arts. Probably too much. Our classes are the antithesis of the current leadership's classes. I'm sure a big clash is coming. We didn't study the science of warfare that was pounded into the heads of the current leadership. If you asked me how to move a division from point A to point B with fuel, ammo, food, water, etc.. I'd have a tough time. But if you asked me to get inside the head of a culture and their government, create strategy, or work with the inter-agency (ugh) I'd pass with flying colors. I'm not being critical of the program. I liked what I learned there but I think we could have had a better mix. I'm also concerned that we over corrected on COIN and that we are moving away from conventional warfighting. That's what happened to Israel and it's one of the reasons they had a tough time in 2006 with Lebanon.

Posted by: Major Scarlet at June 19, 2008 03:53 PM (s3A2i)

4 Have you read Gen Magruder's "Recurring Logistics Problems As I Have Observed Them"?

Its a rather good look at logistics snafus over the years.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at June 19, 2008 04:51 PM (c55NW)

5 I'm missing something in your lingo, mate. As far as I know the ILE I know has never had anything to do with ground force logistics. "Graduated" to me insofar as GFL is concerned means you came out of Fort Lee program - more my speed. We obviously have come to depend a lot more on contractor support but GFL movements have always been in house & as far as I've read & heard that hasn't changed. I don't know where you got the "over corrected on COIN" idea from - some of the force enhancement from last year was necessary to avoid the COIN trainers from getting bogged down in existing mandates & now the Iraqi forces are so good at the concepts they can handle two or three generations. If ever there was a mission accomplished in this war COIN is it & its a big part of why those who say "the surge is working" have something real to point at. But "conventional warfighting"? Where is you want to arrange to hold this "conventional war" you refer to? Back to Maginot? And no way is do the Israeli forces abilities or lack thereof with "conventional war" have the first freaking thing to do with 2006 - noone in the Israeli forces ever imagined that the Shia militias & their Lebanese converts were going to line up in rows & I would be shocked if you could credibly point to one single instance of that. Lebanon if it had any dominant character in that conflict at all was about muscling up on the long-standing strategy of redeployment of positioning missile crews & mobile rocket launchers in urban populations - except with as things got hotted up there was less room to move & hide from the Israeli GFs in mopping up mode - but that turned out like wack a mole. I supposed if you mean by conventional warfare Hiroshima then okay but that was not going to happen. -- So explain yourself Major - sir.

Posted by: Diderots Dog at June 19, 2008 05:27 PM (1FH/2)

6 D's Dog, sometime you and I need to have a chat. You're not the liberal troll everyone accuses of you of around here, but I haven't figured you out yet.

Posted by: SGT Dan at June 19, 2008 05:38 PM (0Yr25)

7 A good book on "small wars" is Max Boot's "Savage Wars of Peace," which is about the small war experiences of the US military. One of Boot's arguments is that despite much chatter from the uninformed or those with very selective memories, the norn for US military has actually been small or unconventional warfare, with "big wars" fewer and farther between than is generally assumed.

Another of Boot's theses is that in general the USMC has been much more tuned into fighting small wars, has studied them far more than the Army has, and was in fact the only service to produce a warfighting manual directed at small wars.

A thesis that I believe was correct until very recently. The Army has reluctantly (at first) moved away from their exclusive stress on battalion level and above operations and maneuver warfare. One of the most interesting chapters, to me, was the one on Vietnam and the strategies and effectiveness of the two services. In fact, he makes a very compelling case that Westmorland grievously misjudged the character of the war and his insistence on fighting batallion sized actions prevented the Army from treating the war as an insurgency, which aside from Tet was a more realistic approach. The North's reliance on heavy combat formations was predicated on the unconventional war preparing the ground, which is what did happen in 1975.

Posted by: Steve Skubinna at June 19, 2008 06:20 PM (rvJrw)

8 Steve,
"Summons of the Trumpet" by Dave Palmer did an excellent job of showing the folly of the battalion and above approach to COIN. As I recall, the Australian operations in VN were predicated on squad/platoon level operations, coordinated at the company level, generally in a patch of territory that they "owned".

Posted by: XBradTC at June 19, 2008 06:32 PM (kddTy)

I read General Casey's message, and I'm not convinced that it's genuine. I agree the general thrust of the message, but like the discredited Rathergate memos, some things about the memo don't ring true.

I'm ex-Navy, not Army, and I left the Navy in 1984, so my analysis my be off-base. So, please view my analysis through that lens. The things that make me questions the memo are:

First, "Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2008 2:32 PM" The military doesn't use that date/time format.

Second, "Caveats: NONE" That's nothing I've ever read in a Navy message. Is that part of an Army message?

Third, the signature "GEN Casey" doesn't seem correct. As I recall, it should be something along the line of:

George William Casey, Jr.

General, US Army

Fourth, in Navy jargon the closing would be "Respectfully" if written from a senior officer to a junior officer, and "Very Respectfully" if written from a junior officer to a senior officer. This correspondence doesn't include a closing phrase.

Fifth, the use of acronyms is wrong. The military, especially a message to a single branch, doesn't need to explain an acronym.

Sixth, some of the grammar is not correct. For example, " KD position (e.g. XO, S-3, etc)" the correct use of "e.g." would be "KD position, e.g., XO, S-3, etc." The e.g., should not be in a parenthesis. A message from the top Army commander would not contain such errors.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Posted by: O-Dub at June 19, 2008 07:58 PM (4p/QX)

It's the nature of the beast that the service will swing the pendulum too far one way or the other, and after the crisis has passed. By the end of Vietnam, the Army found itself wonderfully trained and equipped to fight counterinsurgency, but without the training or resources to fill its mission in Western Europe. It took the 1973 war in Isreal to shock the system into response. The story of the Army rebuilding itself in the 70's and 80's is a remarkable one that needs a good popular history.

Sgt Dan, I was thrilled when I heard that they were going to kill the Class As.

Posted by: XBradTC at June 19, 2008 09:36 PM (kddTy)

O-Dub, I think some of that is formatting from the original e-mail. Caveats is a standard header intem in military desktop version of MS Outlook. Too many people at SWJ and elsewhere probably got this in their work e-mail. I didn't get it in mine since I'm only an E-5 but I'll have a look on AKO.

The Army personnel command has been renamed three times in the last five years or so, so I know career S-1 sergeants who don't know all the new lingo. The official DC-approved acronyms change faster than we can keep up.

Also, we just have a lot of senior officers' staffs who aren't as grammatically sharp as they might wish.

Posted by: SGT Dan at June 20, 2008 01:44 AM (YzCiM)

12 Where is you want to arrange to hold this "conventional war" you refer to?

The Dutch Antilles is a distinct possibility if Hugo decides to get a little feisty in the future. That's something the Dutch won't be able to do on their own.

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