Selección de objetivos de precisión e industrialización del ciclo de inteligencia en los campos de batalla de Irak y Afganistán
| Autor | Matthew Ford |
| Páginas | 222-243 |
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Ver Nota1
The apparent increase in the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) by the United States in its targeting of al-Qaida operatives such as Anwar al-Awlaqi in Yemen has resulted in a great deal of interest among commenta-tors (Raghavan, 2011). Typically the focus has been on the legality, efficacy and future of these sorts of tactics. On the one hand critics question whether the use of forcé by remote UAV in another sovereign territory is legal (Ackerman, 2011). On the other it is not entirely clear whether these sorts of targeted killings positively affect campaign outcomes or hinder the chances of achieving a meaningful political resolution (Strick van Linscho-ten and Kuehn, 2011a and 2011b). At the same time questions are being asked as to whether this heralds a new phase in the United States' approach to warfare where counterinsurgency (COIN) is dropped in favour of remote precisión targeting (Haddick, 2011).
Whilst this 'drone war' has increased in prominence, the foundations for undertaking this sort of operation lie in perfecting intelligence gathering, analysis and exploitation methods over the past ten years on operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Facing an irregular enemy hidden among the people, the ambition of the US military has been to increase the speed of the intelligence cycle so as to identify and engage insurgents before they organize themselves to commit violence. This article is, then, concerned with ex-ploring how some of the techniques and methods associated with identify-ing insurgents have emerged out of the campaigns over the past ten years. Some of the ambitions associated with precisión targeting have a long his-tory, a history that this article is not intended to cover.2 Nonetheless, it is
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clear that a number of techniques associated with targeted killing have been refined and honed to the point that they have led to the emergence of a new tactical doctrine known as Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit and Analyse (F3EA). It is to the way that this doctrine has emerged, the difficulties it has faced as it has been integrated into wider COIN operations and the problems it has sought to overeóme that this arricie will turn.
This arricie starts then with an examination of the processes and methods used by the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq in its efforts to iden-tify and target insurgents. This is followed by a discussion of how these tactics map to wider counterinsurgeney operations. This then leads to an exploration of the way that these tactics have been applied in Afghanistan from 2010 and posits some limitations with the technique in light of President Obama's strategy review and West Point Speech in 2009. The conclusión discusses the assumptions and implications that arise out of the application of this technique to wider COIN operations.3 Ultimately the ambition of this article is to make the intelligence model that enables F3EA more explicit.
In the context4 of civil war in Iraq it is the contribution of General Stanley McChrystal, commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), that has recently garnered a considerable degree of attention (McChrystal, 2011); (Ackerman, 2011).5 Indeed, when compared to the ongoing trudge of soldiers undertaking mundane patrols on the streets of Baghdad and elsewhere, JSOC's shadow activities have been portrayed by President Bush as 'awesome' (Woodward, 2008a). Prior to the reléase of Bob Woodward's
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The War Within it had been thought that the surge of an additional 30,000 troops into Iraq in 2007 had by itself helped reduce levéis of violence (Woodward, 2008b). Woodward revealed that JSOC operations in Iraq had provided a true 'breakthrough' in operational capabilities in terms of 'lo-cating, targeting and killing' High Valué Targets and it was this new tech-nique that had made a significant contribution to the overall effectiveness of the troop surge.6 The reasons for the decline in violence in Iraq are con-tested and complex (Ford and Michaels, 2011: 352-384). What is clear, however, is that McChrystal and JSOC have recently come out of the shad-ows and are increasingly being touted as having made a considerable contribution to the campaign in Iraq and, as will become evident, continued to do so in Afghanistan.
McChrystal's initial ambition was the reorganisation of the intelligence-gathering, analysis and distribution cycle so as to map insurgent networks quickly and preferably in real time so that special forces could engage those targets that had been identified. This iteration of the intelligence cycle led to what some have called the 'industrialisation' of the technique (Kaplan, 2010). Consequently the gap between button and bang, between the sur-veillance, analysis and the launching of a kill or capture mission could be reduced in time. This 'industrialised' process might mean going out on one operation, exploiting the information that had been found in that location and then launching another strike almost immediately. The speed and coor-dination of these operations produced circumstances in which as many as ten raids might happen in far-flung parts of Iraq on just one night (McChrystal, 2011). What emerged then, was a special forces doctrine that became known as F3EA or find, fix, finish, exploit, analyse (McChrystal, 2011)7
In the context of the Iraq insurgency, speeding up operations so that US forces could strike before the insurgent had organised themselves to make an attack potentially gave the Coalition a coercive lever that they could use to influence the campaign. However, if F3EA were to work
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then having timely access to surveillance and analysis, including intelligence producís developed from a number of sources owned by a number of different agencies, was essential.8 The difficulty was that the intelligence sources that might prove relevant to JSOC included not only feeds provided by Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnais-sance (ISTAR) assets provided by drones but also information coming from signáis intercepts, triangulated cell phone calis, forensic information and data found on captured IT equipment.9 On top of this information might be obtained from human sources (HUMINT) that was not only generated following the capture of someone located at a raid site and therefore within JSOC's realm of responsibility but was also derived from sources provided by other agencies.
To make effective use of these sources and construct a near real-time in-terpretation of an adversary network McChrystal had to reorganise the vari-ous intelligence and military organisations into 'Fusión Cells' where all of the necessary information could be combined quickly (Warrick & Wright, 2008). For as Admiral Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated, 'We're living in a world now where targets are fleeting' (Warrick & Wright, 2008). The sheer quantity of information available could, how-ever, cause significant problems for the analysts working in this intelligence shop. Accordingly, aside from the procedural and organisational changes what was needed to help sift the valuable intelligence from the noise was a method for mining the available data so that the various patterns associated with the insurgent networks could be made explicit.
In this respect, the method that has become synonymous with the Global War on Terror, the Long War and now Overseas Contingency Operations is Social Network Analysis (SNA). Described by one officer as 'death by link diagram', SNA was first explicitly recognised in the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual FM 3-24 (Grey, 2009: 139); (Anón, 2006: Appendix B). Purportedly the method that underpinned the capture of Saddam Hussein, SNA helped analysts pare down the data sets and focus
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analytical efFort so that an intelligence picture could slowly be built up of the former Iraqi leader's relationship network.10 The method's utility de-rived from its focus on the relationships between people. These relationships could be tracked every time someone used a phone, wrote a letter or had some form of contact with another person.
For example, the data being collected by counterinsurgents may well de-tail familial connections. By treating each person as a node on a chart, SNA can be used to graphically represent how different members of a family are related. By adding layers of complexity to this, for instance by including a reference to how many times various members of a family have talked to each other in a certain period of time, the relative importance of individuáis in that family can be further deduced. If one person communicates with most of a family then it might be established that they have the most influ-ence in that group: that their large number of connections gives them a high degree of centrality within their network.11 SNA therefore reveáis the size, density, degree of connection, centrality, closeness, betweenness (the con-nectivity of a node's neighbours) and the clusters of a social network (Koschade, 2006: 567).
Clearly when SNA is applied to mapping an insurgency it becomes at least theoretically possible to explore the organisational dynamics of those posing the threat (Reed, 2007). The factors that influence relationships between nodes may become more easily observable and the correlations between factors more easily exposed. For example, a network that demon-strated a high density and a high degree of connection might lead the ana-lyst to deduce that the organisation's focus was on work efficiency rather than covertness (Koschade, 2006: 571). This might be indicative of a forth-coming attack and might suggest countermeasures...
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