U. S. Army Command and General Staff Col

The U. S. military first began using Female Engagement Teams (FET) in Iraq in 2009 as a means to balance security concerns with cultural sensitivities; form rightly followed function. Eventually it was recognized FETs could be employed beyond conducting searches on the local female population, and their responsibilities grew to include activities such as community relationship building and connecting Afghan families to the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. While it is clear FETs can uniquely support a myriad of security objectives, the efficacy and effectiveness of their engagements rest on the assumptions that the teams are properly recruited, trained, and professionally incentivized. Moreover, their employment assumes FETs' actions support a well-articulated and well-understood strategy about how and why engaging female populations are good for the U. S. military, the women themselves, and the partner nation. Utilizing three case studies from the African continent, the author demonstrated the way in which FETs could (and should) be used to help accomplish U. S. security objectives in Africa. However, to ensure that future FET employments are as efficient and effective as possible, the FET capability needs to be institutionalized within the services - the FET needs to uniformly be understood as a critical enabler versus mandated tasking.

The United States has conducted or supported more than a dozen counterinsurgencies in the 20th century. The emerging strategic environment indicates that the US will be involved with counterinsurgencies in the future and there appears to exist operational shortfalls in the knowledge, planning, and execution of counterinsurgency. To manage the increasing complexity of the counterinsurgency environment, a coherent planning model based in operational art is needed in order to achieve ultimate success. The joint campaign planning model may provide an appropriate means to bridge these shortfalls. The counterinsurgency environment is defined through an examination of the current operating environment and the nature of insurgency. Counterinsurgency theory and current US doctrine are evaluated in order to demonstrate that operational shortfalls exist. Operational art and campaign planning are examined and discussed to provide a basis of evaluation of planning shortfalls. Two historical case studies, the Philippines, 1948-1954, and El Salvador, 1980-1992, are presented to illustrate and analyze counterinsurgency doctrine and campaign planning methodologies and their relative success or failure in the overall conduct of the counterinsurgencies. There is a significant body of knowledge on campaign design that can be applied to counterinsurgency. The joint campaign planning model provides an appropriate outline. There is an immediate need to reexamine US counterinsurgency doctrine in terms of operational art to address shortfalls. The challenge remains to define an integrated operational concept which fully articulates persuasive and coercive elements, through the application of all the elements of national power, into campaign design.

After ten years of global conflict with al Qaeda, the time has come to reassess the threat and determine the parameters within which it operates. Questions regarding its continued validity as a threat, its capability to employ synchronized tactical actions, and its ability to act as a learning organization all must be addressed to better understand this enemy of the United Sates. The purpose of this book is to examine al Qaeda's ability to employ its tactical actions to achieve its strategic goals. This book hypothesizes that al Qaeda practiced operational art in the pursuit of its objectives. The methodology of this book analyzed two case studies that affirm the findings of this book. The first case reviewed the campaign against the United States that began in 1993 with the attack of the World Trade Center. The second case analyzed the campaign al Qaeda undertook in 2004 to discourage allies of the United States from participating in the war with Iraq. Both case studies were compared by elements of operational art: lines of effort, center of gravity analysis, and operational reach, to determine if al Qaeda practiced operational art to improve its ability to meet the strategic objective. This book also provides a way to predict al Qaeda's future actions by applying US Army doctrine on operational art as a tool for planners to see through the complexity of the enemy and their goals through a familiar and already understood framework.