Full Spectrum Operations vs. Countinsurgency

Please don't extrapolate from the title of this entry that I am saying that counterinsurgency (COIN) and full spectrum operations are mutually exclusive terms. That's not what I'm saying. It is, however, what a writer from the Los Angeles Times, aided and abetted by a former DOD big-wig and a Colonel on the Army Staff, appears precisely to be saying.


David Zucchino, in an article published September 25 titled, "U.S. military training adjusts its aim: Another counterinsurgency mission like Iraq or Afghanistan is considered unlikely. Army paratroopers are now training for 'full-spectrum operations,' for the first time in years." says, well, the headline there pretty mush sums it up. In so many words, Zucchino is telling us that the COIN operations our forces have been running in the twin theaters of Afghanistan and Iraq are damaging the military's ability to do what it's supposed to do, fight and win in high-intensity combat.

A former deputy SECDEF, Lawrence J. Korb, agrees with with him. "We aren't going to do counterinsurgency again; we're not that good at it," he said. "Many units' major combat skills are rusty because of the counterinsurgency focus."

Zucchino says, "The Army's "full-spectrum operations" doctrine was published in 2008, but most troops are only now beginning to train for it as U.S. troop levels diminish in Iraq." Another of the 'best and brightest," COL Peter Utley from the Army (G-3/5/7) staff, says that even if a unit is scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq, "they will be trained to fight and win in a full-spectrum operations environment."

This is as much unbelievable as it is inexcusable. Someone needs to put a copy of FM 3-0 in these gentlemen's hands, opened to Chapter III, page 3-7, paragraph 3-36, which reads,

"Full spectrum operations require simultaneous combinations of four elements—offense, defense, and stability or civil support."

[It's a bit of bad writing on the part of the folks at the Combined Arms Center, 'the intellectual center of the Army,' for its a bit imprecise to say that you're employing four things simultaneously when there is an "or" between two of them, but that's a horse we can ride another day].

Offensive, defensive, and stability operations. That is full spectrum operations. It's also what they've been doing in Afghanistan since even before General Petraeus wrote FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency Operations."  What all three of these gentleman have missed, (and there are many more like them), is that a counterinsurgency fight includes offense, defense, and stability operations, applied simultaneously; and that the Army applies full spectrum operations doctrine while conducting COIN operations.

The COIN and conventional fights may be contrasted by their disparate levels of intensity and by their different centers of gravity.  (In a COIN fight, for example, the center of gravity is the population; not so in conventional warfare).  Those main characteristics aside, they're essentially the same animal--warfighting.

And it's the Army's job to fight and win the nation's wars, according to FM 1 The Army.  The nation's wars--not the ones we wish for, but the ones that actually happen.  How we fight them is right there in the doctrine.  It's a dereliction of duty to concentrate on what is preferred, what is deemed easier, to the exclusion of what is necessary.  There really is no excuse for David Zucchino, Lawrence J. Korb, or COL Peter Utley thinking the way they do, as conveyed in Zucchino's article.

Reading is fundamental.