Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

OPINION: "General McChrystal's New Way of War," by Max Boot, Wall Street Journal, 17 June 2009.

The key bit

Gen. McChrystal's decision to set up a Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell means creating a corps of roughly 400 officers who will spend years focused on Afghanistan, shuttling in and out of the country and working on those issues even while they are stateside.

Today, units typically spend six to 12 months in a war zone, and officers typically spend only a couple years in command before getting a new assignment. This undermines the continuity needed to prevail in complex environments like Afghanistan and Iraq. Too often, just when soldiers figure out what's going on they are shipped back home and neophytes arrive to take their place. Units suffer a disproportionate share of casualties when they first arrive because they don't have a grip on local conditions.

There was a saying that we didn't fight in Vietnam for 10 years; we fought there for one year, 10 times.

This development is far more crucial than news that McChrystal has been offered the right to pick an all-star team, because the rotational approach has long been our Achilles' heel.

As a note, this is basically what Admiral Harry Ulrich (now with Enterra) did (as NATO commander in Naples) with naval civ-mil affairs reservists covering various African regions. He simply told teams they would focus on a small number of African states, year-in and year-out across their careers, and let them work the details regarding their active-duty deployments and reservist duties back home. By giving them such focus, he actually got a lot more effort than officially required, because personnel became deeply devoted to their collective deep dive.

Good move by McChrystal. Good sign for the SysAdmin force's continued development.