Major Usaf M Shane Riza

The Operational and Tactical Nexus: Small Steps Toward Seamless Effects-based Operations: Wright Flyer Paper No. 22 Major Usaf M Shane Riza

Publisher Marketing: The literature on effects-based operations (EBO) seems to grow each day. Myriad definitions have appeared in service and joint doctrine writings as well as in other writings. Most are too far reaching for current capabilities, and they may be too far reaching for future capabilities. Both the United States Air Force (USAF) and the United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) EBO definitions encompass all facets of national policy, including strategic outcomes. USAF and USJFCOM are attempting a quantum leap when smaller, more manageable steps are indicated to enable and embed an EBO culture in the planning community. Making the effort more difficult, service and joint doctrine writings often convey a sense of multipolarity when it comes to explaining EBO methodology. Joint planning doctrine is conceptually opposed to an idealized EBO methodology. Another impediment to EBO is a dichotomy in the way the USAF trains at the tactical level of war and the way EBO enthusiasts view campaigning at the operational level of war. One view focuses on events, missions, and platforms, while the other focuses on applying capabilities toward affecting systems and achieving a desired end state. The USAF purposefully evolved towards mission-based training programs following Desert Storm to link missions to combatant commanders' desired capabilities. Unfortunately, this change fosters the misperception that missions are capabilities and leads to inefficient force presentation to the combatant commanders. Finally, though service and joint doctrine writings strive to distinguish the three levels of war, the officers who will plan campaigns matured during a time when the lines became increasingly blurred. While it is clear that tactical actions can have strategic effects, the doctrinal desire to segregate levels and the institutional desire to view operational planning as completely distinct from well-founded and practiced tacticallevel effects-based thinking is limiting the evolution of EBO in the operational realm. Solving these mind-set differences and smoothing the disconnects at the tactical/operational nexus may hold the key to seamless effects-based operations in future joint fights. However, small steps, not quantum leaps, are required. This paper proposes two broad modifications to concepts and cultures to embed EBO at the critical nexus of the tactical and operational levels of war. Services, as part of the joint community, must narrowly define EBO in a quantifiable, measurable realm. The USAF needs to solve its tactical training/operational campaigning dichotomy by moving toward capabilities-based training. The services should stop clinging to the antiquated concept of separate and distinct levels of war with minimal similarities where no clear distinction actually exists. These small steps will build synergy between the execution of national policy and the planning that enables it. Such synergy may then aid the evolution toward the seamless continuum necessary for an EBO culture to thrive. Contributor Bio:  Air University Press Walter Gary Sharp Sr. serves as a senior associate deputy general counsel for intelligence at the US Department of Defense, where he advises on legal issues related to intelligence, covert action, intelligence and counterintelligence policy, intelligence oversight, information security, information sharing, security classification policy, information operations, and computer network operations. Prior to his appointment, Dr. Sharp served as an associate deputy general counsel for international affairs at the Department of Defense; the director of legal research for international, comparative, and foreign law at the Law Library of Congress; the director of global and functional affairs within the Bureau of Legislative Affairs at the State Department; and a principal information security engineer at The MITRE Corporation. A veteran with 25 years of service, Dr. Sharp retired as a decorated US Marine Corps lieutenant colonel with prior enlisted service. His military assignments include commanding officer of a field artillery battery, senior prosecutor, deputy legal counsel to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and international law adviser for the commanding general of the Unified Task Force in Somalia during Operation Restore Hope. Dr. Sharp's military decorations include the Defense Superior Service Medal, and his many awards for writing excellence and academic achievement include the Judge Advocate General's School Alumni Association Annual Professional Writing Award and an American Bar Association Award for Professional Merit. Dr. Sharp is the author of numerous articles and three books: UN Peace Operations (1995), CyberSpace and the Use of Force (1999), and Jus Paciarii (1999). He serves as an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center where he currently teaches a counterterrorism course, The Law of 24. He has also taught graduate-level seminars on United Nations peace operations and international peace and security. He lectures internationally in universities and other diverse public forums on wide-ranging topics of international law and national security law, such as international peace and security, conflict management, and peacekeeping operations.