Engaged?

The most difficult task any planning staff in an aviation task force can do right now is engagement area development. Honestly. It is. I dare you to walk up to any new pilot on Mother Rucker and ask them about EA development, and they would give you the same blank stare that they typically reserve for an instructor pilot who asks them about the requirements to enter Class B airspace. There might even be a ribbon of drool coming from their mouth after a second or two. It's not their fault though. This is part of the insidious nature of the quick reaction force mentality of today’s attack reconnaissance aviation. Engagement area development has little to no place in the QRF world of gimme-grid-freq-call-sign-and-we’ll-figure-it-out-enroute because it requires more than just using what you have on the rail to achieve an effect that you may not be totally sure of. There is little planning in QRF planning. Let’s be honest. It requires highly adaptive and responsive leaders who have a high level of shared situational understanding with the ground force commander to really get any semblance of mission success… without causing unforeseen area of operations lunacy later.

First of all, what is an engagement area, and how does one develop it?

An engagement area is an area in which the commander intends to contain and destroy an enemy force with the massed fires of all available weapons. The size and shape of the engagement area is determined by the relatively unobstructed visibility from the weapon systems in their firing positions and the maximum range of those weapons. Sectors of fire are usually assigned to subordinates to prevent fratricide. An EA should have four things:

1.) multiple battle positions from which to attack

2.) obstacles to channel the enemy and permit use of direct and indirect fires

3.) standoff from the enemy, to minimize enemy counter fire while maximizing the friendly probabilities of kill

4.) continuous visibility of the targets

The two most significant things to me would be items 3 and 4, and I’ll tell you why. It focuses the planning staff and the training of young pilots in the formation. But more on that in a second.

This has practical application in many different facets of everyday life. Have you ever gone genocidal on a hill of fire ants with a big stick and a can of Raid? Yeah, THAT is EA planning and execution. You massed all available weapon systems to achieve the desired effect, minimizing your own exposure to counterattack through standoff and a fire distribution plan. Look at you… all tactical. That's hot. 

EA development is simple when you know what it is, but the subtle nuances can lead unforeseen difficulties. Let’s go back to items and 3 and 4 now.

Number 3 is simple. If you don’t know what a system looks like on the sensor you’re  using, how can you engage it?

I have to know how to find and kill what the ground force commander wants dead. This means two things: I have to know how to use the systems on the aircraft to fix the enemies disposition and then I have to know what effect I want to have on the enemy, based on what the ground force commander really wants.

Item 4 is a little tougher. There is a subtle difference “dead,” you know.

In order to achieve “a high probability of kill,” I have to know what kind of kill the ground commander wants. Does he want a mobility kill? What about a personnel kill? A firepower kill? Or does he want a total kill… the infamous K-KILL? All of these have different requirements for individual weapons and targets. While one AGM-114P+ (our UAS brethren’s missile of choice) can be enough for a sedan full of Haqqani fighters, one AGM-114R (your standard HF radar missile) is not going to  even make a dent in a reactive-armored T-72 main battle tank, the preferred tank of all good communist oppressors and soviet-backed warlords the world over.

In short, one Hellfire missile does not equal one dead tank. 

Despite the increase in knowledge on the part of our ground forces on what varying weapons may be hanging from the racks of an AH-64D, this hasn’t gotten us back to positive effects based planning. We, as aviation specialists, have to ask the right questions. “What effect do you need?” Not “what weapon do you want.”

So, this is important to note because the ignorance of real weapon effects is an epidemic across the Army today. This is because we neither understand how to predict them, nor how to train for them. We’re still focused on the need for grid-freq-call sign-use-what-you-got. In the effort to return the Army to standards and effective training for the next war, we have an obligation to young pilots to foster tactical curiosity about the enemy they will face in the future.

At some point, we will hand the young LTs and WO1s a can of Raid and a stick, pointing them in the direction of a former soviet-funded nanny state to do their worst. We should probably engage that issue now. 

Additional Doodies

I promise! No air ground integration gripes today. Today we are going to let the company commanders of the Army Aviation community breathe a collective sigh of liberating relief. We're going to talk about something near and dear to your hearts: additional duties. And then we're going to say all the things you always wished you could say to the people who gripe about them…

Catharsis, my fellow signers of the commander’s hand receipt. It's healthy.   

Ahh, additional duties. We’ve all had them. The AER officer, the Aviation Life Support Equipment dude, the voting assistance officer, the snack-o… all of these duties are assigned for three reasons:

Additional duty orders dating to the Civil War. And you
thought you had it rough when you were getting ready
for the Command Inspection Program!

1. Provide diligent oversight and management of critical tasks within the company or troop that one person cannot manage alone to ensure accountability, safety, good performance, and standardization.

2. Provide a school-trained or certified point of contact for issues or concerns regarding the maintenance or management of a specific program, who is also a user of their own program and thereby provides a sense of “ownership” to ensuring that systems function smoothly.

3. Give the commander something to discuss on your OER… other than your self-proclaimed awesome skills at flying. Which really? You’re not as awesome as you think you are, especially when you’re a CW2 with 310 hours and you’re six months out of flight school.

The positive side of additional duties is the benefit of being able to give a diligent officer a measure of additional responsibility... one that extends beyond their primary duty of sitting around the pilots’ office, telling dick and fart jokes, and pretending to study emergency procedures and limitations in order to avoid the wrath of the company’s standardization pilot. The commander, 1SG, and platoon leaders cannot hold down all the jobs associated with a functioning line aviation company, and still effectively manage the primary task of leading that company. If they attempted this, they would be huddled under their desk, nursing the hidden fifth of Jack Daniels in their desk drawer and chain smoking.

In embracing the fact that, if you’re an untracked warrant officer, you’ll probably have an additional duty, you will realize that this is part and parcel to being an officer in Army Aviation. Suck it up. Drive on. Get over yourself.

With that said, don’t write an Observations, Insights and Lessons Learned paper about why your additional duty blows. In the subversive wording, we didn’t find a single viable solution to any of the problems you posed that would benefit the Army. An OIL paper is supposed to propose a viable Army-wide solution to problems. Your paper proposed one underlying theme: that you didn’t really want to do your assigned duty.

I’m sorry you got stuck with that additional duty (not really). I’m sorry that you had several additional duties to manage, along with being a competent pilot in command (also not really). Seriously? Everyone has to do that. Your whines, gripes, and general malaise about your pitiful situation in life while deployed to a large and well-furnished base in Iraq don’t impress me.

Well, if your additional duties are really that difficult to manage, I guess we can make them your primary duties… and you can enjoy the remainder of your deployment watching your buddies “act as a combat multiplier for the commander by moving parts, people and things throughout the southwest part of Iraq.” If you really believe that your job is to “get things done,” then part of that means that you might have to say no to the occasional game of Call of Duty with your buddies at their CHU or B-hut while you’re deployed, and buckle down, and get your chores done.

And anyway, everything we do in aviation supports the GROUND FORCE COMMANDER, not the aviation commander. Perhaps a little perspective is in order…

PERSPECTIVE. Now you have it.

… Well, okay… maybe a little AGI. Come on. Can you blame me?

Okay, now for an actual “lesson” for Aviation Company and Troop commanders:

In preparation for deployment, you’ll have to ensure that your night vision goggle (NVG) program is functioning smoothly because your goggles will break the moment you get downrange and take them out of their stylish, padded purse. Part of this program is completing period inspections for adequate function and safety. You don’t have to go off the FOB to find a certified inspector. Inspections can be done internally to the unit, provided you have inspectors assigned and trained with orders. Link in with your CECOM LAR and the Army Material Command and to have several people in your company attend this one-day training. Do it before you deploy, if you can. Get your fellow company commanders on board and make it a group thing (kinky). You can even have your trainer to come to you (help Uncle Sugar get his money’s worth from their services). This limits having to take your NVGs off-FOB for inspection and keeps your resources in the fight.

Field San(-ity)

So, as you know, we are rewriting aviation’s doctrine up here in the Penthouse. Part of sorting and rewriting manuals is figuring out what is really critical to retain and what you might be able to delete. It’s like cleaning out the fridge, but without finding something moldy in the back that growls at you when you pick it up. During this process, we have all really come to enjoy evaluating the things that are important when conducting operations, like movement to contact, and the things that are REALLY important to conducting operations, like field sanitation.  

And, really, there is only one part of field sanitation that anyone in the field truly cares about.

I couldn’t hold this back from the field any longer. Technically you cannot conduct planning and operations using draft doctrine or publications. It all has to be provided to the field (in Big Reveal style) by the Army Publishing Directorate. Consider this critical piece of technique (which is a method that is non-prescriptive in nature, as defined by JP 1-0)… like a “best practice,” as my boss is so fond of saying.

Actually, this was inspired by that same boss. He’s pretty smart, that boss of mine.

Take a good, long look, kiddies. This is what happens on a Friday in TRADOC.
We have cocktails... and write doctrine.
Don't say that "it will never happen" to you...





If you like this, then you'll love the rest of the chapter and the manual that covers it for Army Aviation: ATP 3-04.15, Aviation Sustainment. 

Helicopters in COIN: Quality versus Quantity



MAJ Crispin Burke.
He wants YOU to help rewrite the COIN manual.

Carl Prine penned a missive called A Strategy for the Birds back in November of 2011, and it’s been stuck in my craw ever since. It also got me involved (albeit, inadvertently) with the counterinsurgency crowd, even though I have my doubts about aviation’s positive impacts on COIN, especially in Afghanistan. But, whatevs. Strategy is not my bag. I leave that up to much smarter men than I.

Aviation tactics and techniques? Now those are my bag.

There is no doubt that helicopters are a critical tool for the ground force commander. This is doubly so in a nation where vast stretches of land have little or no infrastructure to aid in the penetration of what would typically be seen as insurmountable terrain. Afghanistan needs helicopter support to advance the efforts of ground tactical commanders in securing both physical and human terrain in the fight against Taliban insurgency.

Unfortunately, it’s not a panacea like some might have you believe.  Some… like most aviation battalion, squadron and brigade commanders. Now I love me some CAB and BN task force commanders, don’t get me wrong. My heart is wedded to the idea that commanders must advance the efforts of their formations, especially when that formation is part of the Movement and Maneuver Warfighting Function.

But when it comes to the assessment of our effects on battlefield, ADP 5-0, The Operations Process, should have us taking a step back and considering how we, in aviation, measure our effects when it comes to nesting our aviation tactics with the national strategy of winning a nearly unwinnable conflict.

I know. I knoooooow. Today, as I write doctrine, I feel impotent and not important. But my goal is to get planning staffs to make their assessments of their success more important… and less impotent.

Flaccid?

Flat?

Yeah. Flat. Sounds less smutty that way. 

So, anyway, back to the aviation doctrine stuff.

The American military loves technology. The way the ground force commanders fetishize (great word, Carl) aviation technology is unparalleled in today’s fight. Unmanned aircraft, attack helicopters, air assaults… we rely on rotary and fixed wing aircraft to do nearly everything that we once relied on pack animals, 5-tons and tanks to do in previous wars. We use Whackhawks to keep guys off roads that are riddled with ambushes and improvised explosive devices, but why? It comes back to the idea of helicopter-as-tactical-panacea when we should be addressing the strategy of breaking the IED network to make the roads safer for travel and transport. When we fly over the terrain, we miss the fights that we should be getting into: those critical counterinsurgent activities that connect the coalition to the weapon system of choice in a COIN-centric fight, the civilian population.

At best Army Aviation is a pusher to addicts, junkies strung out on the use of rotary wing to accomplish the missions that haven’t been enabled by political and national strategy to accomplish. Strategy has created a dependence on the helicopter, and then hamstrung the ways that we can use it. I’m not talking about the rules of engagement, which already embed multiple (and sometimes unnecessary) control steps in the process of engaging enemy targets during troops-in-contact, but use of modularity: the plug-and-play nature of aviation into the brigade combat team fight.

Yeah, it’s an Air Ground Integration b*tch-fest again.

Carl is right about application of air power as a curative to the ills of a gapping strategy, void of good assessment tools that are both qualitative and quantitative in nature. Since modularity cuts us off from the ground forces that we could organically deploy with, we don’t get the chance to develop the shared understanding of capabilities, limitations, and mission as an air and ground team. We can’t reach the point where our shared understanding of using helicopters transcends the simple application of technology in a fight. This leaves aviation leadership wondering what metrics are critical to assessing their battlefield successes. They ultimately go back to the old reliable ones: number of missions flown, people and cargo transported, air assaults completed, hellfire missiles launched, and bad guys killed.

In ADP 5-0 we see that “effective assessment incorporates both quantitative (observation-based) and qualitative (opinion-based) indicators. Human judgment is integral to the assessment.” It also concludes that “a key aspect of any assessment is the degree to which it relies upon human judgment and the degree which it relies upon direct observation and mathematical rigor.” Rigors offsets bias. Human judgment helps us to reach past mathematics of success and see that intangibles factor in the situation, especially in the highly fluid nature of COIN. There is a balance between quantity and quality of results. This is why Vietnam’s focus on the body counts failed its leadership as a good metric for success. It’s why we should avoid defining our success metrics in aviation by the same measure.

So, back to Carl. Whole fleets today can’t make Karzai’s regime more legitimate or puissant. I agree with that. Don’t you? But I want to take another approach at this statement and thought process. Negativity does not educate. 

Army Aviation cannot legitimize governments. Bombers in WW2 could not legitimize the allied efforts against the nationalist socialist party. Linebacker II was never going to succeed in giving the government in South Vietnam the legitimacy it deserved. Aviation cannot legitimize things. We delegitimize efforts through the failure of development of good success metrics and mission assessment tools that nest with the ground force commander’s intent.

Carl was right. Strategy of the ground force mission isn’t for the Birds after all. But the ground force’s tactics are. Let’s recage our instruments, get back to good air ground integration, and prove him wrong.