The Art of Battalion Command in Counterinsurgency: Part Two - How We Think and Who They Are

The Marine Corps University Counterinsurgency Leadership In Afghanistan, Iraq and Beyond: The Art of Battalion Command in Counterinsurgency transcript (PDF) is so good, I have decided to post the entire thing in four installments. I believe there are important insights in these discussions not only for Afghanistan, but in the context of US Navy discussions as well. The participants were:

Bing West, Correspondent, The Atlantic
Col. Dale Alford, Institute for Defense Analyses, USMC
Col. William M. Jurney, US Joint Forces Command, USMC
Col. David Furness, Marine Corps Liaison Office, US House of Representatives

Held on Wednesday, September 23, 2024 at 10:30 at the National Press Club, Washington DC, part two is the presentation by Col. David Furness.

Thank you. I’d like to thank Marine Corps University for including me on the panel and so I join two of my friends and distinguished Marine officers.

Mark Moyar asked me to talk about battalion command in counterinsurgency operations. That’s kind of a broad left and right lateral limit. So what I’ll do is I’ll kind of define it to actions that we took prior to going into combat and then those that we did while we were in combat.

Now, these are no new ideas here. There’s nothing earth shattering. Most of them were borrowed from peers that I respect, like the two gentlemen to my right, things I learned while I served on the staff of the 1st Marine Division in ’03 and ’04, and things that I read through self-study. So I tried to apply them in a dynamic environment, and so here are some of the lessons that I learned.

There’s the agenda. Here’s how I broke up the topic. Just a little bit of orientation. Here’s Baghdad, Fallujah, and Ramadi. So my experience was all based in southern Baghdad in ’05 when I was commanding officer BLT 11, part of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit. And then in ’06 at a place north of Fallujah, a place called Karmah which - or “bad karma” as we’d like to refer to it. But it was all eastern Anbar province, western Baghdad.

As you drill down, here’s Karmah. It’s about 10 kilometers northeast of Fallujah. The other little red dots are small villages that were my principal population centers in and around the area: Saqlawiyah, Sitcher (ph), Ganether (ph), (Abu Ghraib ?). I had part of the northern Zadon which was kind of a no man’s land at times. But this is the area in ’06 that I operated in when I was attached to RCT-5.

Pre-combat leadership - we’ve all said, you know, what’s the difference between a leading battalion and conventional battalion and leading battalion, counterinsurgency? And I think it was covered well by the brigade commanders and I won’t repeat it.

I will say it’s a decentralized fight. Everybody agrees with that. And if you’re going to be successful in a decentralized fight, you have to operate on commander’s intent. We all - no one will dispute that. But how do you get people to understand intent and be able to use intent? And then who really tells you about that?

What I learned from watching Gen. Mattis at the division level, go down to the PFC level and just embed his ideas, his thought process, what was important to him down to the private. I said, okay. That’s what I have to do when I get battalion command.

So what we did was everybody’s got philosophies of command, philosophies of training, philosophies of this and that, and I’m no different. I came into command with them and spent a lot of time trying to craft a language that actually meant something.

But I handed those things out, had a one pager for the Marines and NCOs. I had a more complex, a little longer version for staff NCOs and officers. I gave them out. I had them read them, and then in groups of 20 platoon size, I went around after they had read them and we had discussions. We had (team meetings ?). What am I talking about when I say this? What does this mean? What am I telling you to do?

And you try to operationalize it because you want them to understand in so that when they’re in that point where they have to make a decision and no one’s around and it’s corporal so and so, he can do it. He knows what Furness would want him to do and that’s probably the only thing - if that’s the only thing he can remember, it’s something he can fall back on and hopefully it gets him through that difficult decision.

So I think that’s the most important thing that you have to do right upfront as a battalion commander. You’ve got to put your fingerprints on your unit right from the start, the first day you grab the guide on.

And once they understand it, then you reinforce that every day by what Gen. Krulak used to say “leadership by walking around.” You’ve got to get out of your office, you’ve got to get away from the computer and you’ve got to talk to your Marines, and sailors, and you’ve got to - where they work, what do they care about, and everything they do, you give them a little, that’s the way I want it done, pat on the back, or hey, next time you do it, how about his way, you’re doing a great job, but you have to imprint what you feel is important into their brain housing groups.

The next point, individual small unit discipline is the key in counterinsurgency. Gen. Zinni once said that elite units are better at counterinsurgency because they have greater discipline. And discipline is what’s going to give you restraint, which is going to give you discrimination in the use of fires, and it’s the bedrock on which everything else is build. So you have to instill it.

With our op tempo going 100 miles an hour, discipline can sometimes fall by the wayside because we don’t have time to correct it right on the spot, you know, we’ll get to that later. Well, you can’t do that.

I think you have to be - somebody said, well, if you could do anything to a battalion to prepare it for counterinsurgency operations, what would you do? I thought for a minute and I said, I’d put him through recruit training, all as a group, and let a bunch of gunnies with Smokey Bear hats just beat discipline into them for 13 weeks. And I think when you came out the tactics are fairly simple but the discipline is hard to instill.

The sergeant major - I had a big long talk with staff NCOs and NCOs about their role in helping me attain a level of individual and small unit discipline which would carry the day when we got into this dispersed dynamic environment.

And I also told them is, your discipline will be your hallmark and it’s the only IO message that as a small unit in Iraq you control. You control how you’re perceived by the population, the way you walk out the gate, the way you wear your gear, how you carry your weapons, they instantly perceive that and that’s the only IO message that you control as a small battalion in this big, wide, long war.

The thing I focused more on in pre-deployment training is NCO training because, again, I think Gen. McMaster said it: That’s where it’s going to be won - corporal, sergeants, lieutenants. That’s where you have to focus on because that’s who is going to be way out there on the edge of the empire, the pointy end of the spear, like we say. Those are the Marines that are going to make those tough calls and if they’re not trained to deal with that type of decision making, if they don’t have the requisite excellence and their weapons handling and their small unit tactics, they’re not going to be able to do that job.

So we ran a battalion in house through the PTP and all the things you have to do with that, we ran a battalion in house. We call it the Leaders’ Course because there were some lance corporals that were filling NCO billets that got the training as well.

But the bottom line was we wanted to control how Marines would be led in 11. We didn’t have enough quotas for the great sergeants’ course or the division squad leaders’ course. You just couldn’t put them through the pipeline fast enough so we did it ourselves. It was each company took a block of instruction and it was basically a five-week course. It could have been better. I’m sure it could have.

But it was good enough and it focused on prep for combat, how to give an order, how to prep a unit to get out the door and do a mission, how to inspect them, how to do a post-mission critique and learn from what you did right, what you did wrong. And so you’re teaching them the skills that then you’re going to demand that they use when they get out there in a very challenging environment in Iraq.

We talked about language training. What I did on my first deployment - Col. Greenwood got DLI instructors from Monterey to come in the battalion. We had about a 60-day emerging course, 30 days in Camp Pendleton and then in the trans-Pacific - when you’re on the ships, you’ve got nothing to do. We had about 100 Marines at that time in language training, and then, when we go to Kuwait, the instructors went back home and we have a fairly good training base.

What I changed the second time I deployed as a battalion commander is I gave everybody the DLAB so we looked at people who had propensity to learn languages as we picked those people. And then like Gen. McMaster said, I look for people who just naturally had a gift of gab because we wanted to add those talkers in every squad throughout the battalion.

And so, with those two elements, we picked 150 Marines. They did a 90-day immersion course because I had the contacts with the instructions from the previous deployment, brought them down to Camp Pendleton, and that’s all these Marines did. They were Marines that already had a tour under their belt so as far as going through the PTP, again, with a five-month turnaround I felt I could assume risk without putting them through it. I didn’t ask anybody. But they didn’t do anything but study language.

And some of them I was amazed at how quickly they picked up conversational Arabic. And could they write it? No. Could they read it? A little bit. But they could speak it enough to where they could act on it on the street.

And everybody said this is a fight for information or intelligence. Well, if it is, you’ve got to talk to people to gain it. If you talk to them in their own language they are much more perceptive to talk to you because they realize most Americans don’t speak Arabic and they’re kind of impressed when you do.

And it’s one of those things, to build report which is the first key to starting up a relationship, and relationships mean everything in this culture. It really helped and I think it paid significant dividends. And I would even do more Marines if you could and for longer periods of time because I think it was that important.

Culture training was the same as every other unit. The basic infantry TTPs - they’re important but the tactics are not so - they’re not complex. The decisions are complex, and that’s again, what you focus on. You use your training always as a vehicle to put people and test their decision making through TDGs all the time so that you can do this.

Intelligence collection you had to spend a lot of time training on because we don’t routinely do it at the squad, platoon, and even battalion level. So we looked at a process to do that.

Here’s how I organized to solve the problem, and the only thing I’ll talk about on this slide is H&S Company - 245 Marines in H&S Company: cooks, bakers, candlestick makers. But what I used them for is to reinforce my main effort because I formed provisional security platoons out of H&S Company because most of H&S Company’s duties are to life support for the battalion. But when you live on Camp Fallujah, you don’t need any more life support. You’ve got more life support there than you do at Camp Pendleton.

So I put these guys out in the fight and they loved it. Every Marine or rifleman, they’re actually doing fixed site security so my infantry Marines, when they come back from an eight-hour patrol don’t have to stay on guard duty. They can either do mission prep or sleep, rest, do something else. But it increased my ability to maneuver.

ROE - the thing I’ll talk about at this is it’s a commander’s issue, and I taught it. Now, the JAG was with me for any technical questions but Marines don’t like lawyers. They don’t listen to them. And they don’t want to be talked to the guy who they think is a pencil-neck geek anyway. Most of your Marines didn’t go to college. They don’t understand lawyers and they don’t want to be told about a very critical part of their decision making process, which is a law of armed conflict, by somebody they don’t respect. They want to hear from their commanding officer. And so that’s why I taught it.

We reset - every time we pulled platoons out to give them a shower, hot chow, we reset and re-taught LOAC, and we went over vignettes that we had either done well or things we didn’t do well while we were executing the mission.

The thing you have to remember is your hearts of your Marines will harden overtime. If you don’t understand that, you miss the point. These guys are on third, fourth tours. They’ve seen buddies get killed, blown up. They may have been blown up themselves and come back to duty. It’s hard to tell them to like these people but you have to talk to about it in a relevance to the mission and how - treating them well and using the law of armed conflict. It benefits them as far as their legitimacy, as far as their ability to execute the mission and actually save fellow Marines’ lives.

Combat leadership - I’ll say this is the big thing: supervise, supervise, supervise. You come out there. Once you’re in the fight, you have to get out of that CP and go see every unit. I had, at one point, seven maneuver companies, 30 platoons. It took a week to see everybody face to face. When I talk about two levels down I’m talking looking the lieutenant in the eye, having him brief you on what he’s doing. You know what he should be doing because you’ve given him the order, but you’ve got to go out there and see them actually do things.

Again, the non-kinetic focus - what I’ll talk about here is the kinetics are easy. We get that. The non-kinetic civil affairs CI ops, IO, working with civilian leaders, that’s the hard part. I’m not saying going to guns is not important - and I think Gen. McMaster said it well: don’t ever lose a firefight, pursue those guys until you got them, that’s shooting. No one gets a free shot, is what I used to say. I don’t care how far you’ve got to chase them. Chase them, run them down, and kill them if they choose to oppose you. But focus your efforts of your staff, the battalion on the non-kinetic aspect of the fight.
Partnership - you’ve to eat, live and sleep with them to be effective.

And I don’t care about that. I’ll get to the last slide. The last bullet is if you remember nothing else, I would say - we had all these signs that said, complacency kills. And I told my Marines that that’s really not true because it’s the divine right of the PFC lance corporal to be complacent. That’s his right. He gets to do that. After he has his first firefight, he’s going to be complacent. He’s going to get comfortable in his environment and it’s his leadership that mitigates that natural phenomenon.

If his leadership isn’t caring, active, involved, he will be complacent and he will get himself killed because you didn’t have the balls to do it right, get in his face, jack him up, and make sure he did it right.

So that’s my presentation. Thank you very much. (Applause.)