Brian Hancock hosts Major J. David Thompson, a Civil Affairs planner out of U.S. Africa Command, to discuss military campaigning, just war with post-modern conflict and avoiding civilian harm in conflict.
One CA is a product of the civil affairs association
and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail dot com
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
Special thanks to Relax Music for sampling "Trio Riberto's song "Yellow Summer." Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stpq54O2qO0
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Credits
Sponsor: Civil Affairs Association
Host: Brian Hancock
Showrunner / editor: Jack Gaines
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00:00:03 Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes.
00:00:38 BRIAN HANCOCK
Welcome. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock, and I will be your host for this session. Today, we're going to explore the concepts of military campaigning, civil harm mitigation, and how to align just war with postmodern conflict. To get after this, I have with me Major J. David Thompson. He's a civil affairs major assigned to the U .S. Africa Command. He holds a Juris Doctorate from Washington and Lee University School of Law. He is a Ph .D. candidate at King's College London, where he is researching the ethics of proxy warfare. Major Thompson, welcome to the show.
00:01:15 J. DAVID THOMPSON.
Glad to be here, sir.
00:01:16 BRIAN HANCOCK
All right, before we begin, Dave, our quick disclaimer, a reminder to our audience that all remarks made are those of the presenters solely. All right, let's begin. Dave, can you tell me a little bit about your current positions and duties of what you're doing there at U .S. AFRICOM?
00:01:35 J. DAVID THOMPSON.
Thank you. So I am a same military operations planner at U .S. AFRICOM. That's within the JFOLA. With same forward division, we have also the humanitarian assistance portfolio, largely, I think, the ODACA programs. We have a number of interagency representatives from the Health and Stabilization Office of the Department of State, foreign policy advisor from State Department, a public health advisor from DHEP. We also have a liaison from Pacific Disaster Center of PBC Global, and the PBC Global liaison works with California. That's a lot. Yes, that is a lot, but luckily we have really good leadership and good control. Arrow Division.
00:02:22 BRIAN HANCOCK
Fantastic. I was worried you were never going to get to sleep with all those duties on your plate. All right, let's jump into our first varsity -level question. You recently wrote an award -winning civil affairs issue paper. Let me read the exact title. Campaigning the Campaign Plan, Focusing on the Fundamentals at the Combatant Command by Assessing Civil Affairs Operations, Activities, and Investments. The famous OANI is there. Now, it feels to me that the Army's come full circle. When I started my career 18 years ago, military campaigns were a thing. They were discussed. And then suddenly the term fell out of vogue. I never understood quite why. But now it's back. So campaigns are back on the menu, huh?
00:03:16 J. DAVID THOMPSON.
Afghanistan, partly with global war on terror. I had the opportunity to meet Joel Stane. He was talking to me and he was doing this battlefield circulation, was the commander, and I was telling him all the things we were doing about the Afghan security forces. And he said, what would you do if you hadn't stayed here until the war? And can you think that, well, I would... Probably spend a little bit more of a tele -focus on doing a partner for us so that way I could hand this off to somebody because I was doing it. And ideally, it needs to be somebody else for us to win. So that started me thinking of how my rotation fit into Baylor's attention. So then we changed our approach. And during that time, I made it a little, to use a sports analogy, the ball was on the 20 -yard line and I was going to try to get it to the 30 -yard line. And that will mean our soldiers doing more and us doing less. That's being within that advice in a such role.
00:04:21 BRIAN HANCOCK
That makes sense to me. And I love your analogy on incremental movements, right? When we're talking about all these very complicated systems and politics and economics where strategic objectives tend to lie, these are not things that are solved quickly, especially in areas where you've got deep sectarian violence and hatred. And, you know, at the end of the day, I think not only as civil affairs officer, but as military officers in general, you know, we need to keep moving that needle to the right. Love that anecdote that you mentioned with General McChrystal to one of the generals in, you know, the famous book, The Four Star. Very interesting individual. For the audience, I think that their experience with the word campaign is in a political sense rather than in a military sense. For clarification, how does the Department of Defense define that term? And if you don't mind, can you just explain how it's different from an operation, an engagement, or a theater plan, which are other terms we hear bantered about a bunch?
00:05:25 J. DAVID THOMPSON.
So there is Champagne, as in Philippe, which is in J .F. Station, Rio. And I'm going to read a bit of the definition here.
00:05:45 J. DAVID THOMPSON.
Now that differs from campaign plan and campaign, which comes from the joint publication final. So campaign is a series of laden operations with a given time and space, and a campaign plan is a joint operation plan. through a series of related major operations within its habit space. So ideally, you have the campaign plan, which lists LFP -CAN -8 objectives, the intermediate military objectives, and then the effects, subordinate to those IMOs or intermediate military objectives. Then you have the campaign formula, which provides TANAS to components. These TANAS generate operations, activities, and investments, or OAIs. So components can then have OAIs linked to tasks in the combatant command. It can have tasks linked to effects linked to IMOs linked to championing objectives. So if you think about it linearly, you should be able to draw a line between an operational activity or investment in OAI directly to the champion.
00:06:50 BRIAN HANCOCK
I know NATO talks a little bit about in -states as opposed to objectives, just a different way of looking at it. or desired conditions as you're moving towards things in a plan. It seems that based upon how DoD looks at a campaign, it's kind of on that cusp between operations and strategy with an ability to be broken down to tactical tasks and activities that support it. Let's go deeper into strategy and operations. In the paper that you published, you mentioned that the connection between strategy and operations is inherent. I know you've read Sean McFake's work. You're pretty well read. In that, he and other military scholars argue that America has actually lost every war since World War II, as measured by a failure to complete the strategic objectives of those conflicts. Now, given the potential connection between strategy and operations, what do you think went wrong? As a force, did we just suck at operations, and that in turn causes our strategy to fail in many of these wars? What do you think?
00:07:57 J. DAVID THOMPSON.
So first, one of the unique things about that paper was, it didn't call for any new .lltf piece, which just uses current dapering as what we have available. So anybody can go through and use it. Now the paper is published with the Silhouette Association as publicly available. Another kind of spent on looking at this, I talked to the OAIs and the campaign objectives. I forgot to mention maybe the measuring and assessments of those tasks, which are important and maybe lead to your point. You should be able to measure, both quantitatively and qualitatively, measure them with facts and measure the performance, if the OAIs are what people are being tasked to do for helping to reach the campaign objectives. If not, why not? Do there need to be new structures, new processes, more guidance? machine resources in the 40s. She must really do all of assessments comes into play. So he doesn't show McFay. So he wrote a book, The New Rules of War, about the same time that Richard Cox wrote, A World in Disarray. And they both looked at the same question broadly and approached it in two very different ways. And there were solutions to solving that. I think if you read those two books side by side, you can follow all conclusions.
00:09:23 BRIAN HANCOCK
Thanks for that. Obviously, these are hot political issues as well as military issues. To use an egregious example, if we take a look at the war in Iraq, I don't know if you read Mark Perry's book, The Pentagon Wars, but he makes a pretty cogent case that the Iraq War actually reduced security abroad, caused some chaos, empowered Iran. Russia and ISIS damaged relationships between the civil and the military, nearly bankrupt the nation, and of course got many, many Americans as well as Iraqis killed. And relative to the strategic objectives, it doesn't look like that is a victory. So going back to what you said about assessments, did we just... pick the wrong things to do, and then therefore the rosy assessments, which I saw were just measuring the wrong things. Yeah.
00:11:54 BRIAN HANCOCK
That's great. I think we could probably have an entire podcast on just talking about the different definitions of victory and competition. I think those are hot terms.
00:12:23 BRIAN HANCOCK
from maybe a political lens or a socioeconomic lens, perhaps not. So I think that's one of the challenges, and you talk about it in some of your other papers, with the graying of modern warfare, our definitions just kind of haven't kept pace. Let's move on to the next question. You spent some time addressing assessments in your publication and referred to it earlier. Now, these are critical, and particularly as we move up echelon, they often direct... Now, in my experience, assessing non -lethal effects are challenging. Many of the things we're trying to affect are complex adaptive human systems, which have a relation to operations, activities, and investment. Now, to use an example of a difficult non -lethal assessment, one of the taskings we often get at U .S. Army, Europe, and Africa is for a civil affairs action team or a four -man cat team. to assess a tactical ODACA project. You talked about ODACA there earlier in your office. And typically that team has not been part of that project before and may not have contacts or baselines. And it is asked to assess how that typically tactical level project has advanced U .S. and NATO strategic objectives. And unfortunately, the team is usually only given a few days to accomplish this. Now, given math and science required to conduct a statistically valid assessment, how do you think we can do this better? Can we do this better?
00:14:16 J. DAVID THOMPSON.
Perhaps I can put our CPM manager in touch and they can share some best practices. But I think one of the other things about this is looking when civil affairs forces are getting these very complicated tasks to do. I think that's one of the great things about being a civil affairs officer or soldier. We get tasks to do a hard thing. We don't solve easy problems. So we recruit and train. smart people when we put them through teams with other talented, smart people. And then we give them complex, challenging problems to solve. So, it's fascinating. And generally, they come out successful. Like, I would be hard -pressed to think of a time when I've seen a team take on a challenging problem and not come away with some ideas that were very creative and help solve it. They're really about success. So that's one of the great things about being a Civil Affairs soldier.
00:15:15 J. DAVID THOMPSON.
one of the great things about being a Civil Affairs soldier. If that appeals to anybody who's listening, who's not a Civil Affairs soldier, definitely get in contact with Colonel Hancock, myself, anybody in the Civil Affairs Association, I'm sure it's willing to help you. To the first part of the question about the assessment speech, right? So at the Geographic Combat and Command level, I think about assessments maybe a little bit different than like a tactical U .S. assessment. We want to know for assessments, are the things we're doing helping us reach our campaign objectives? So, great, let's keep doing. If not, again, what do we need? Do we need a new structure, process, guidance, resources? What is it that we need to do to help them achieve these campaign objectives? As far as the individual assessments of an evocative project, those are great, but at the command and command level, what I'm more interested in are all those assessments helping somebody else make a decision. I'm not so concerned about that decision, just that we have forces available working towards doing that and that they're informing people who are making decisions. The process of what we call civil knowledge integration.
00:16:25 BRIAN HANCOCK
I actually like your characterization of that, right? All models are wrong, but if it's useful, then it's worth investing in. in relation of a project to strategic impact is hard to measure. But if it moves the ball forward, if it teaches us something we didn't know, if it builds a valuable relationship we didn't have, then that is still useful in and of itself. All we're required to do as a government is conduct legal acceptance, which is more of an MLP, right? Let's say the project was to build a fuel pumping station, just making this up. Does it pump fuel? Does it hold fuel? Is it safe? Okay, yeah. And is the