Mattis calls for small-unit, irregular skills - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Mattis calls for small-unit, irregular skills

The U.S. military is unmatched in nuclear and conventional warfare but still needs to develop a similar competency in small-unit, unconventional skills of the sort demanded by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the general who leads the military’s Joint Forces Command said Thursday.

“You take on the U.S. Air Force, or the naval aviation, Marine aviation, at 15,000 feet in a fighter ... you only have one role: fugitive,” said Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis during a Washington, D.C., conference on defense issues facing the Obama administration.

“You’d better fly away real fast or you’re going to get shot out of the air. You take on the U.S. Navy on the high seas, they’ll burn you to the waterline. That’s all there is to it. You take on the U.S. Army in the open desert, in open terrain, mechanized warfare, the Army will annihilate you.

“But the area we are not superior in is irregular warfare,” said Mattis, a combat veteran who also serves as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, based in Norfolk, Va. “And we are going to make irregular warfare ... a core competency of the U.S. military.”

Such competency will require the development of troops, often operating in small units, who can relate to local populations and train local militaries as well as they can engage in the sort of irregular combat operations that have become dominant in ongoing wars where the enemy has fought with roadside bombs, snipers and small unit tactics, Mattis said.

“We do not live in an age where you can say we’re going to send troops into a theater and expect them to have a positive impact unless they are historically and culturally, linguistically, religious-wise, they understand where they’re going,” Mattis said. “In our industrial way of forming armed forces at times, and our desire to use whatever weapons system we have, we sometimes forget that war is a human problem that demands human solutions.”

The key, Mattis said, will be developing this competency — a mix of “soft” and “hard” power — “without surrendering our nuclear superiority and our conventional superiority, behind which the international community gains great benefit.”

Mattis’ remarks echo the oft-repeated thinking of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has championed a greater reliance on diplomacy and nation-building — so-called “soft” power — and who, in a recent article in the journal Foreign Affairs, called for striking just such a military balance between counterinsurgency and foreign military assistance, and the U.S.’s existing conventional and strategic advantage.

While the war in Iraq has produced a string of successes on the heels of a belated application of counterinsurgency tactics, these operations have historically been confined to the special operations community. Mattis wants to see a much broader and more consistent application, particularly in the ability to work with indigenous forces, exemplified by the special operators who fought with Afghan fighters to overthrow the Taliban government of Afghanistan in 2001.

Developing those sorts of skills across the force will require greater use of simulation training — and some give-and-take between the services, Mattis said.

“We’re going to figure this thing out and decide who does what in this effort,” Mattis said. “It doesn’t mean that every service is 50-50 conventional and irregular. Actually, it means an awful lot of our groups can fight across that entire spectrum.”

Mattis said he has recently met with the chiefs of the Army, Marine Corps and U.S. Special Operations Command on the best ways to divide such efforts, and that an agreement has been reached.

“Where we need people to build relationships, that’s going to be a Special Forces kind of job,” Mattis said. “And they’ve been expanded. When we want to just go in and train people in marching, basic marksmanship, first aid, small unit tactics, there’s where I think the general purpose forces will probably pick up most of those.

“That’s why we’re going to need more troops who are culturally adept, who are comfortable working outside Mother Army, Mother Marine Corps ... and able to work in small teams,” Mattis added. “And this requirement for small teams that can operate in combat or as advisers is now a national priority. We are going to have to create high-performance small units.”