Changing the army structure for the hybrid warfare fight

Two ideas have come to me recently on how to change some the Army's organizational structure for fighting hybrid wars. The first is to train civil affairs personnel to embed in units down to the company level as political officers and the second is to embed MI personnel into companies as well. Neither is particularly original, but the discussion on the is important. Both were discussed some in David Kilcullen's 27 articles.

The first idea came about after reading an article in Small Wars journal about how civil affairs guys have become contract management officers for conventional units because of encroachment of the rest of the army into what they do and conventional guys not knowing what to do with them.

The solution in my mind is to make civil affairs guys political officers, preferably at the company level. Train them in cultural anthropology, some information operations and some counterinsurgency theory. Then, they could be a huge asset for a company commander running his AO (Area of Operations). As a political officer there job would be to develop, maintain, and push a narrative for their AO. A narrative is a story that explains why we are doing what we are doing and why the enemy is doing what he is doing. A narrative is very important because it sets the stage for the political battle and thus determines whose side the population supports. Insurgents develop a narrative and then carry out attacks and non-kinetic methods to support it. A political officer would be in charge of determining what narrative has the most appeal in his AO first and foremost. This should ideally be done at the company level since AOs vary so much. Next, he should assist the commander in developing full spectrum operations to further it, and develop and information operations campaign to set the basis for it.

The second idea, to embed MI personnel at the company level, is important because in hybrid war, intel comes from the lowest level generally and drives operations at the company level. A company commander is not told nowadays to simply "attack in that direction" but must develop his own picture of his AO. They way we are currently set up is that battalion S-2s get intel from people they don't know or trust like company patrols or technical assets, guess what these tell them, and then feed that information down to people that don't trust them. Having intel guys at the company level will ensure that the companies intel is synthesized and tracked by someone who the leadership knows, trusts, and is right there with them.

The biggest problem with both of these ideas is that many of us combat arms types think like baboons and just want to be told which direction to attack in. I tend to think like that way on Mondays and Thursdays but otherwise no. However, the current debate about COIN and experiences when deployed should have changed most of our attitudes. I get the sense that many people come back from in theater thinking it would have been nice to have dedicated intel and political guys and might have set aside some of their own guys for the job.