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This collaborative meeting can be the most effective weapon available today.

INNOVATION

Counterinsurgency Doctrine Benefited from Nonmilitary Help

The openness of the U.S. Army and Marines to nonmilitary experts is part of the success of the acclaimed Counterinsurgency Field Manual FM-24, released in December 2006. The manual is the foundation of a new counterinsurgency doctrine that Gen. David Petraeus is implementing in Iraq.

The authors under Petraeus’ leadership called on independent outside experts to troubleshoot an early draft and suggest revisions—an unusual departure from practice.

Petraeus turned to retired Lt. Col. Conrad Crane, a West Point classmate, to lead the project. The effort, writes Maj. David Nagl, a professor at the U.S. Army War College, was “perhaps the most important driver of intellectual change for the Army and Marine Corps.”

Crane, who has a doctorate in history from Stanford University, “called on the expertise of both academics and Army and Marine Corps veterans of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.” He assembled a core writing team that outlined the new manual “and the principles, imperatives, and paradoxes of counterinsurgency that would frame it,” Nagl writes in the manual’s public edition.

IBIS will revolutionize tactical decisionmaking in combat. (Photo by E. Poole)

The big innovation was when Crane brought together “journalists, human rights advocates, academics, and practitioners of counterinsurgency” at a Fort Leavenworth conference in early 2006. The outsiders worked to revise and improve the manual. “Some military officers questioned the utility of the representatives from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the media, but they proved to be the most insightful of commentators,” says Nagl.

“James Fallows, of the Atlantic Monthly, commented at the end of the conference that he had never seen such an open transfer of ideas in any institution, and stated that the nation would be better for more such exchanges.”

New Integrated Command and Control

General Dynamics Land Systems has developed a new integrated command and control technology to help commanders improve combat decisionmaking. Its Integrated Battlefield Information System (IBIS) for armored vehicles provides real-time tactical information to commanders at the section, platoon, company, and battalion levels.

Commanders see and communicate tactical information using a turret-mounted integrated display and control unit. Full-color screens show tactical maps, messages, and turret weapon controls. A touch-screen display and other devices allow digital entry of commands and data. Target location is determined automatically using data from the laser range finder, global positioning system, inertial navigation system, and line-of-sight angle sensors.

IBIS is compatible with U.S. Army Joint and Multinational Digitization plans.

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From the September/October 2007 issue of Serviam.