Annotations on Planning for Conflict by William Flavin

Warfare studies
Student’s Name
College/University
Course
Professor’s Name
Due Date
Planning for Conflict
Termination and
Post-Conflict Success
WILLIAM FLAVIN
“No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”
— Carl von Clausewitz 1
I
“If you concentrate exclusively on victory, with no thought for the after effect, you may be too exhausted to profit by the peace, while it is almost certain that the peace will be a bad one, containing the germs of another war.” — B. H. Liddell Hart 2
t is always easier to get into a conflict than to get out of one. In 1956, for example, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden with French Premier Guy Mollet planned to unseat President Nasser of Egypt and reduce his influence in the region by a combined and coordinated British, French, and Israeli military operation. The French and British leadership conducted detailed, thorough planning to ensure that the costs and risks were reduced to an acceptable minimum. In violation of Clausewitz’s guidance above, however, the operation was launched without a good idea about termination and what the post-conflict situation would look like. What if landing on the Suez Canal at Port Said and Port Fuad did not force Nasser to step down? Were France and Britain then willing to march on Cairo? Would they have international support for such a move? If they seized Cairo, what would the new Egyptian government look like? Could it stay in power without keeping British and French troops in Egypt for years to come? Would the British and French have world opinion on their side for such an occupation?
In the event, Israel launched the attack and British and French forces landed on the Suez Canal. But the operation did not turn out as planned. The United States and Soviets, along with world opinion, forced the British and French to withdraw. President Nasser, rather than being defeated, became the victor and the leader of the Arab cause, while the British and the French lost prestige and influence. How could rational decisionmakers get it so wrong?3
This article examines the doctrinal basis for conflict termination planning and provides suggestions and approaches for greater success.
Fundamentals
Conflict termination is the formal end of fighting, not the end of conflict. US doctrine holds that the goal of military operations is to set conditions that compel belligerents’ decisionmakers to end hostilities on terms favorable to the United States and its allies. US joint doctrine and NATO doctrine state: “If the conditions have been properly set and met for ending the conflict, the necessary leverage should exist to prevent the adversary from renewing hostilities. . . . When friendly forces can freely impose their will on the adversary, the opponent may have to accept defeat, terminate active hostilities, or revert to other types of conflict such as geopolitical actions or guerrilla warfare.”4 The definition focuses on conflict termination, not conflict resolution. The military fight may stop without the causes of the conflict being resolved.
Current joint doctrine thus recognizes that although coercive military operations may end, the conflict may continue under other means such as terrorism, insurgency, cyber war, economic disruptions, political actions, or acts of civil disobedience. Although the military may be engaged in a “post-conflict” peace operation, the belligerents may continue their struggle using these other means. This was definitely the case in Kosovo and is currently the case in Afghanistan, where the military is engaged in stability operations in the midst of conflict. Even in Iraq, where the coalition military victory is unquestioned, the post-conflict situation remains unsettled.
Conflict termination and resolution clearly are not the same thing. Conflict resolution is a long process. It is primarily a civil problem that may require military support. Through advantageous conflict termination, however, the military can set the conditions for successful conflict resolution.
The keys to successful conflict termination include the following fundamentals: conducting early interagency planning; establishing workable objectives, goals, and end states; providing for adequate intelligence and signaling;
Colonel William Flavin (USA Ret.) is the Associate Professor of Peace Operations Concepts and Doctrine for the US Army Peacekeeping Institute. Before this assignment, he was a senior foreign affairs analyst with Booz Allen and Hamilton on contract to assist the Peacekeeping Institute for doctrine development. While on active duty he served in a variety of assignments on Office of the Secretary of Defense, unified command, service, and NATO staffs.
ensuring unity of effort; harmonizing the civil with the military effort; and establishing the appropriate post-conflict organization.5
Early Planning
Planning for termination and post-conflict operations should begin as early as possible. It must be an interagency, multinational, integrated effort. The first and primary objective in planning for termination and post-conflict peace operations is to establish an achievable end state based on clear objectives. Planners and commanders must realize that this is an initial object that will begin to change over time. They must retain the flexibility to adjust. As Jeffrey Record writes, “Having an exit strategy on the shelf at the beginning of hostilities and sticking to it until the end assumes away the potent influences of military performance on war aims as well as the law of unintended political consequences that attends any major military intervention.”6
The next most important element is achieving unity of effort among the diplomatic, military, economic, and informational aspects of national power. National unity must be harmonized with multinational partners and the community of international organizations and nongovernmental organizations. The commander and planner must visualize the situation from the start of war through termination and into post-conflict peace operations to ensure all of the parts are synchronized. With the concept harmonized, it is then necessary to consider resources. Conflict resolution may not be possible if adequate resources are not available.
With the conceptual plan in place, the information operation can provide the appropriate signaling to the adversaries to provide them an opportunity to terminate the conflict early. The intelligence community will need to identify potential opportunities for termination. The leadership must then have the political courage and will to grasp the opportunity and the perseverance to carry it through and win the peace.
Objectives and End States
US Joint Publication 5-00.1 provides the following guidance: “The National Command Authorities should clearly describe the desired end state before committing the armed forces of the United States. . . . If the NCA do not ade- quately articulate the termination criteria, the combatant commander should request guidance or clarification, as appropriate.”7
The commander thus should seek a clear end state, but this is more the ideal than the reality. The military forces will rarely receive political objectives that contain the clarity they desire. Such is simply not in the nature of the system. General Maxwell Taylor, who had a great deal of experience at the national political level, summarized the most important reasons for this lack of clarity:
For one thing, busy senior officials capable of providing it [political guidance] are usually so engrossed in day-to-day tasks that they have little leisure for serious thought about the future beyond the next federal budget. Also, it is a risky business for a senior politician to put on public record an estimate of future events which, if wide of the mark, would provide ammunition to his adversaries. Similarly, a President who announces specific policy goals affords the public a measure of his failure if he falls short of his hopes. Hence it is common practice for officials to define foreign policy goals in the broad generalities of peace, prosperity, cooperation, and good will—unimpeachable as ideals but of little use in determining the specific objective we are likely to pursue and the time, place, and intensity of our efforts.8
Consequently, political objectives by their nature will be broad, but that is not necessarily bad. Morton Halperin asserts that “unspecified non-rigid objectives increase the chances of arriving at an acceptable compromise and eliminate the domestic costs which would stem from a failure to gain a stated objective.”9 Moreover, there are other reasons why broad objectives are not only appropriate but can also facilitate military operations. If political leaders place a time limit on US involvement—as they did for the Unified Task Force (UNITAF) in Somalia and the Implementation Force (IFOR) in Bosnia—that will influence the course of action chosen by the belligerents. In Somalia, for example, General Mohammed Farrah Aideed could just wait until the foreign forces departed and then continue his quest for power.10
NATO saw this problem and changed its approach when the Stabilization Force (SFOR) assumed the responsibility from IFOR, employing an “end state” rather than an “end date.” The Joint Task Force Commander’s Handbook for Peace Operations recognizes that the end state may be a “moving target, one that needs continuous refinement throughout an operation.” The end state for the first elements of IFOR that moved into Bosnia in 1995 was different from that of the SFOR that remains there in 2003. Because the post-conflict period may last for years, an end state that is general rather than specific may facilitate military operations.11
The most difficult task is to take this general political guidance and produce concrete military objectives for the day after the shooting stops. For example, in Operation Just Cause, the removal of Manuel Noriega’s government in Panama, there was little guidance on what to do after the shooting ended. There is “little evidence to suggest that those planning for restoration either realistically understood or adequately addressed . . . historical and contextual issues” when considering post-conflict plans. What did “restoration of Panama” mean? “What kind of democracy was possible in Panama? How long would it take to establish and secure? What were the major obstacles that had to be overcome? Would an operative civil government exist once the PDF [Panamanian Defense Force] was destroyed? What would replace the PDF? What was the stated objective of the economic and social infrastructure?” What was the military role? What would the measures of effectiveness be? What was the end state? All of these questions describe part of the unknown environment that the military faced on the morning after its successful operation against Noriega.12
Even the supposedly clear political objectives of the 1991 Gulf War were ambiguous in describing the post-conflict end state. A defense principal later confided, “I do not think we had political objectives. . . . The political objectives were to kick Iraq out of Kuwait—that was it. There was no consideration for conflict termination—Where do you want to be politically in 20 years? What are the strategic decisions for this part of the world? None of that was considered.”13
For the 1991 Gulf War, National Security Directive (NSD) 26, NSD 45, and NSD 54 provided clear objectives for the conduct of the operational battle. After Iraq was ejected from Kuwait, however, more clarification was needed on how to apply these objectives. What did the goal of “stability in the region” mean? How did this goal translate into military objectives? Was there a time frame associated with this goal or measures of effectiveness? What was the military expected to do about the resistance operations of the Shiite Marsh Arabs against Iraqi forces being waged in the front of the coalition forces? What about the Kurds and their military operations in the north? How did the goal of stability square with President Bush’s public statements broadcast to the region over a CIA-supported Saudi Arabian radio station urging “the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.”14 What did the goal of the “destruction of Iraqi military capability” mean? How did allowing the Hammurabi Division to withdraw with most of its combat equipment intact square with that objective? What about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? What did “restore Kuwait” mean? Should the US encourage the Kuwaiti citizens to develop democratic institutions, or was the objective for Kuwait a status quo ante? What were the goals of the other countries in the coalition and to what extent should they be considered? All of these questions and countless others led to interagency friction and the lack of a synchronized approach to post-conflict termination in the days following the Gulf War. And this lack of a well-considered termination and post-conflict strategy left the region and the world with unresolved issues that would bedevil the international community for a decade and lead to yet another war. 15
Moving Targets
Another reality is that the objective and end state selected at the start of a conflict most likely will be altered as the conflict proceeds and may not be the same at termination. End state development in one form or another will probably occur.
Early and significant success, for example, can cause the end state to change. The Korean War provides an example. The success of the Inchon landing in September 1950 and the subsequent collapse of the North Korean resistance influenced the United States and UN to alter the end state from status quo ante to a reunified peninsula. This end state was readjusted when the Chinese entered the war and drove the UN force back toward the south.16
In the 1991 Gulf War, the stunning success of the coalition forces also presented an interesting “end state creep” problem. There was tension between doing more and ending the war early. The Director of Operations for the Joint Staff during the war later stated, “We had trouble [deciding] when to stop. . . . Many people had different opinions, even though we knew what the President wanted. There were some claiming we stopped too soon, others that we did not stop soon enough, which is to be expected in any conflict.”17 On 27 February 1991, President Bush and his advisors met and decided that the media portrayal of the war—particularly with regard to the “highway of death”—would be detrimental to the coalition’s achievements in the region and that the objective of freeing Kuwait was essentially achieved. However, to end the war at that point meant that the objective of destroying Iraq’s military capability had to be set aside. “The demand for the Iraqis to leave their equipment [in place] was dropped from Mr. Bush’s speech.”18
Post-conflict objectives and end states may be debated and modified up to and through termination. When this happens, the victor may lose the strategic advantage he possesses at the moment of termination. At the end of the Gulf War, it took a month for the UN Security Council to adopt Resolution 687 to serve as the final settlement. By then the power of the coalition force had departed, and the opportunity for a negotiated settlement in the face of overwhelming military power was lost.19 The psychological initiative had shifted to Iraq. “The Iraqi foreign minister made it clear that they considered this resolution a threat to Iraq’s sovereignty.”20 According to Michael Ignatieff, Saddam succeeded in winning the propaganda war in the Arab world by pretending that the sanctions imposed by the UN aggression were “starving his people, when in fact Saddam himself . . . frustrated attempts to assist them.”21
The situation after World War II also presented monumental challenges for our occupation force in Germany:
American planning for the occupation of Germany divided the wartime Roosevelt administration as did few other issues. Secretary Morgenthau and the Treasury Department, often joined by Cordell Hull [State] and Harry Hopkins [personal advisor to the President], favored the harshest possible treatment for Germany. Secretary Stimson and the War Department, frequently joined by the career foreign service, favored a firm occupation and a swift rehabilitation.22
General Lucius D. Clay, the military governor of the US occupation, found himself maneuvering between these two political camps, trying to execute a directive that seemed to be an unworkable compromise. He was dealing with a government in Washington that he was not sure knew what it wanted in the center of Europe.23
Half a century later, General Wesley Clark wrote that it was more than a month into the air campaign against Serbia over Kosovo before the international community addressed the issues of termination objectives. He observed that end states and objectives can slip and change, especially if the end state is not clear. In his opinion this is a characteristic of modern war. 24
“Even in Iraq, where the coalition military victory is unquestioned, the post-conflict
situation remains unsettled.”
With regard to Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, because there was no interagency plan before the operation started, there was no clear idea about what termination or the post-conflict scenario would look like. What does “promote regional stability” mean? Does it mean nation-building, which the Bush Administration had stated was not a job for the US military? How did the short-term objectives, such as empowering the various warlords with money and arms, promote regional stability? The answers to these questions are still being debated.25
1751310842683









In spite of all of these problems concerning end states, Fred Iklé offers a way ahead. “In deciding how to end a war, the top government leaders usually do not altogether lack a broad view,” he writes. “It does make sense—within limitations—to talk of a national decision and of national objectives.”26 Within that broad view, the military must strive to narrow the focus and determine the appropriate military objectives. They also must participate in the interagency and multinational process. General Clay, for example, played an active part in helping to shape the political objectives. The process itself is important because it “requires careful dialogue between civilian (strategic) and military (operational) leadership which may, in turn, offer some greater assurance that the defined end state is both politically acceptable and militarily attainable.”27
Intelligence and Signaling
Before any conflict starts, the intelligence community must include factors affecting the termination and post-conflict operational area in the Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB). The focus and sources for a postconflict IPB are often quite different from those for warfare and similar to the preparation for a peace operation. The IPB should address political, economic, linguistic, religious, demographic, ethnic, psychological, and legal factors. The sources of information will be nontraditional and include open sources such as commercial ventures, travel agencies, clergy, and international organizations and nongovernmental organizations that have been engaged in the area.
The intelligence operation needs to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions that must exist for the conflict to terminate and the post-conflict efforts to succeed. As Professor Christopher Mitchell has observed, “It is important to direct some attention to the parties’ internal decisionmaking process which depends on the intermittently presented choice of (1) perpetuation, or (2) terminating the conflict: and to the changing evaluations of the costs and benefits of these options, as perceived by the leaders of the parties in conflict.”28 It also must take into consideration a number of variables beyond that of a “rational actor” to understand the motivation of opposing leaderships. At the end of World War II in the Pacific, the Emperor of Japan and his conservative supporters considered the continued existence of the Japanese monarchy to outweigh all other considerations. Any action that the Allies took that could be interpreted as threatening that monarchy would stand in the way of termination and influence the post-conflict attitudes, even though Japan had lost the ability to achieve any of its wartime goals.
The commander needs to know when the situation is ripe for termination and the post-conflict situation will succeed. “Bernard Brodie, among others, has argued that [during the Korean War] the Eighth Army’s operational decision to halt its spring offensive at mid-peninsula forfeited an opportunity to terminate the war at an early date.”29 The UN forces had the initiative and the Chinese armies were disintegrating. The intelligence operation must always be focused on this question. It requires that the commander stay ahead of breaking news events. These events can have significant political and strategic effects and contain signals for termination.
Predictive intelligence is necessary to ensure that the opportunity for termination is not neglected. The intelligence must assess the leverage that all sides possess and the intentions of the opponents. This information is critical to support an information operation so that the proper signals can be transmitted and received.
When the intelligence indicates that leverage is possible and the enemy mindset is ripe for termination, the opportunity must be seized. Signaling intentions is then critical. This requires that each side be able to communicate and not talk past each other. Signaling is an art form and if used correctly can establish conditions for a successful termination and post-conflict outcome.
The value of information operations to shape outcomes is often overlooked. Regimes can blunt leverage through the successful use of signaling. In the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein, through his control of information, was able to turn his defeat into a local victory. His own people never knew of the extent of his defeat at the hands of the coalition forces.30 He was able to build on this ignorance and negate the actual military leverage the coalition had over Iraq.
Unity of Effort
In her research on conflict termination, Dr. Vicki Rast has concluded that the inability to develop a viable end state is often the product of a lack of unity of effort in interagency planning. She describes a less than rational process influenced by personal agendas, institutional biases, congressional pressures, domestic politics, and the emotionalism engendered by the blood and treasure invested in the conflict. The result is usually a plan focused at the tactical level driven by the Defense Department toward an exit strategy.31
The first step toward a solution is for the Administration to establish a process that requires an interagency plan for termination and the post-conflict period and have the discipline to make it work. The Clinton Administration attempted to do that through Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 56. The Bush Administration has issued National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 1, which established a Contingency Planning Policy Coordinating Committee, chaired by the National Security Council (NSC) Deputy for Defense Policy, to produce “political-military plans and plan for contingencies outside the deliberate planning cycle. But [the] NSPD-XX draft which was to replace PDD 56 has yet to be signed and promulgated.”32 Just establishing the organization is not enough.
All too often, the interagency process is not allowed to work. It is captured by small groups of key individuals who truncate the process, exclude experts (especially those with contrary views), and attempt to gain the President’s ear to push their agenda. Research has indicated that this does produce termination of fighting, but not a satisfactory conflict resolution.33 The responsibility lies with the NSC and presidential leadership to force the process to work itself out.
There was no interagency plan developed before Operation Enduring Freedom launched into Afghanistan. A plan was finally requested in April 2002, but what was produced not only fell far short of what was envisaged by the drafters of NSPD-XX but also was too late to shape the conflict termination and post-conflict operation. The end states, interim objectives, and measures of effectiveness were neither disseminated nor used. There was no interagency division of labor and no balance between short-term needs and long-term objectives that would lead to conflict resolution.34
The first key to achieving successful conflict termination and postconflict unity is defining the nature of the crisis. Understanding the key issues and assessing what the potential future might hold is critical. Without executive guidance, however, the process will degenerate into institutional posturing ...