I hope you'll get value from this.

It's a lengthy anecdote summarising the emergence of the overriding concept of ops where the main effort was Information Campaign that focussed on influencing attitudes by influence and communication, rather than by the use of force - for IFOR in Bosnia 1996. ================================== So heres the situation. NATO meaning HQ ARRC, where I worked as a Major from 1992 to 1996 was fingered to prepare for ops in Bosnia, from the moment in March 1993 that Slick Willy Clinton said he would be prepared to deploy US troops there if a permanent peace could be agreed . In the first instance, that meant planning throughout the rest of 1993, to police the veryquickly-dead-in-the-water Vance/Owen Peace Plan. The second contingency emerged in 1994, after repeated attacks against UNPROFOR, principally by Serb troops, and involved being ready to enter B-H, and extract UNPROFOR against the wishes of at least one of the combatant factions. The plan we developed was NATO OPLAN 40104. The final deployment actually took place in Jan 1996, after Holbrook finally screwed that sonofabitch Milosevic at Dayton. We utilised the OPLAN 40104, because it was all agreed within NATO, would get troops in quick, and there was not time to jump through NATO hoops writing a new OPLAN for the new circumstances. In any case much of it fitted very comfortably. (Better a good plan now . . . . yknow ) As it happens, since I spent my first 2 yrs in post as the Corps Commanders principal Intelligence analyst/briefer, I had long figured that Milosevic was not much worse than any of the other factional leaders: and that there were no good guys at all among the factions. In 1994, close analysis strongly suggested that the Muslim Bosniac faction would be most likely to oppose UNPROFOR withdrawal, at least until they had achieved their strategic aim of getting the USA actively engaged in supporting their cause. This brought many potential problems, not least that Bosniac management of media operations (fronted, in the US principally by their Ambassador in Washington, the lawyer Mohamed Sacirbey) was very effective. This faction was widely regarded in America, UK and Western Europe, as the underdogs or good guys, despite (or rather because of their skill in laying blame on Serbs for) mortaring Muslim civilians for the benefit of international TV crews, by which means they had Madeleine Albright, among others, eating out of their hand. It was pretty clear that all the armoured muscle NATO could muster would look foolish if (say) a NATO-escorted UNPROFOR column on a narrow mountain road should find its way blocked by black-clad Bosniac grandmas, little children and a CNN crew. This recognition sparked the effort to devise an approach that would enable NATO to achieve what the UN system had repeatedly failed to achieve, that is - to get ahead of the likes of Sacirbey, Milosevic and Karadzic as regards impacts on public and governmental audiences within B-H, the neighbouring Balkan states, and elsewhere, not least within NATO countries, and Russia. To assist us in this, we had access to the US Warrior Preparation Center (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_Preparation_Center) training facility at Einsiedlerhof near Ramstein, where we deployed in late 1994. Now that was a great place to go if you wanted to practice the destruction of 3 Shock Army, but the software (much less the staff) on which the place depended, was not programmed to deal with scenarios such as the above. As a consequence, play never really got going, in the computers at any rate, because whenever a Blue (NATO) column encountered a Red (Bosniac women and children) column

guess what! It blew them away and the tech guys would desperately go back into the algorithms, trying to re-configure the un-re-configurable software. Much more important were the discussions that took place outside the pointless wargaming. We had among us US augmentees earmarked for deployment with the HQ, or under it from PsyOp, Intel, you name it. And we had doctrine Ninjas, from TRADOC, tasked to come among us and solve our how to-do-it-right issues. I took them as my personal challenge. I had moved across from Intel analysis, to Deep Ops planning, and in moving from one to the other Id persuaded my 2-Star boss BG Stan Cherrie (ARRCs first DCOS G2/G3) and a small number of other players in between, to a point where they collectively accepted that: a. The extant American doctrine of Overwhelming Force was inappropriate (to say the very least) to any of the foreseeable IFOR contingencies in B-H. b. That success would be principally dependent upon successfully managing all aspects of the publicly visible information surrounding this operation, which meant that: c. The deep dimension in this first-ever NATO land op, which (BTW) was entirely non-linear, would be defined not by how far your kinetic ISTAR/Strike systems can see or hit, but by the audiences that you could reach out to and influence: CINCSOUTHs personal target array would include Allied governments and perhaps State leaders in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, while that of COMARRC would embrace (say) the overall commanders of militias in B-H, even if they were HQd inside AOs assigned to National Div comds in IFOR but we recognised that there would be overlap, and therefore there was a need to ensure that whomever was speaking publicly, the themes articulated must to be consistent from top-to-bottom, side-toside, front-to-rear, and day-to-day. The central theme to be understood by the indigenous factions could be distilled down to a one-liner. In its original 1994 form that was: Opposing the withdrawal of UNPROFOR is against the interests of all parties in B-H . By late 1995 this had been replaced by Opposing the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement is against the interests of all parties in BH. We proposed to give Information Ops primacy over kinetic ops and, (worse, from the PoV of the US PsyOp community) given the fragmented nature of the conflict, and the parochial behaviour of combatants, we knew it would be necessary to devolve day-to-day control of PsyOp to local commanders, who would work within the thematic framework set by the Corps HQ. Now this (like a great deal of this plan) meant pretty much turning standard NATO/US doctrine upside down. That was fine by Stan Cherrie, COMARRC, and others in the HQ. But Stan moved on in late 1994, to be replaced by BG John Silvester: a more overbearing, doctrinaire type of leader, with no close exposure to the B-H thing, and, it seemed to me, distrusting of recasting Information Operations into this kind of primary role: I suspect he saw it as some kind of Brit plot to undermine his position as DCOS G2/G3. This was not good, since he was ARRCs gatekeeper for all force package requests to the US, and he was not in love with the way we proposed his Commander ought to do business in B-H, to the extent that it was not possible to use the formal Staffing route (via G3 Ops) to introduce Gen Walker to it when he took command. To outflank Silvester, in early 1995 I wrote it up as a conceptual piece on Deep Ops for the British Army Review, then asked COMAARC to clear it for publication, in his capacity as head of the Brit Contingent in the HQ.

(That article entitled The Deep End - finally saw the light of day in BAR Dec 1995 - just in time for us to deploy to B-H). American PsyOp guys schooled to the notion that Product could only be approved in Wash. DC objected strenuously and at length to the inverted command arrangement we proposed, which I think they perceived as a watering down of their links to The Pentagon. A lot of kinetic ops guys had less difficulty with accepting these ideas intellectually not least because Stan Cherrie got it straight away: and built into the plan was the idea of periodic firepower demos, for the benefit of select audiences in-country, just to remind folk of what was in the wings if they pushed their luck too far. Under Silvester, however, it was hard to get these guys to act in accordance with that logical acceptance: you might reach agreement in a staff meeting, only to find they would do the exact opposite of what was agreed, once back in the G3 Ops cell and under his eye. Anyway, back at the Warrior Prep Center, along with all the other staff cells in the fleet of boxbody command trucks that make up the field HQ, my Deep Ops planning cell is getting visits from a steady stream of ones and twos of TRADOC ninjas, making the rounds of the entire HQ, eager to tell us how NATO doctrine should be done properly - but, meanwhile, Silvester is pretty much excluding Deep Ops staff from the formal planning process, So, I work up a 15 minute brief for these Ninjas, one that I can do unscripted, drawing on my own analysis of the Intel over time (at this point Ive never set foot in the Balkans), supplemented by anecdotes from guys who have been in country at length. Im majoring on the fact that whatever they may have been told back in the USA there is more to this than one good (Bosniac) side in white hats, and one bad (Serb) side in black. Rather, we have at least 9 identifiable major sub-groups of combatants at war in B-H, and we can easily find numerous examples where members of each ethnic faction have fought alongside, and against, every other ethnic faction engaged in the conflict. There were 2 killer stories: Story 1 w as about the Croat commander whose mortars ran out of ammo while they were bombarding Muslim positions during the war-within-the-war in central B-H. The Croat took a collection from his troops, and with a fat wad of US dollars in hand drove up the hill to meet his one-time neighbour, a Serb, now commanding a mortar section overlooking the Croat/Muslim fight. There he does a deal for x-number-of mortar rounds. Where d'ya want em delivered? says Mr Serb. Well, sez Mr Croat if you could drop them at the track junction, thatll be dandy: Ill get my guys to pick them up, and hump em down to our mortar pit. Never mind that that sez Serb: Just tell me where and when you want them to land In the second story , we have a Croat artilleryman, still fighting Muslims, and hes been delivered a consignment of ammo the wrong calibre for his pieces. So naturally he hoofs it up the way to the Serb gun position which overlooks his piece of the war-within-the-war (which has entertained the Serbs immensely as they sit on the hills, drinking Slivovitz and watching their 2 enemies shooting the shit out of each other for weeks), and does a deal with the commander there, along the lines of Ill rent your guns heres the money how bout it?. Naturally, the Serb wants collateral for the loan. No worries says his Croat enemy: I have brought it with me. Theres a Platoon of unarmed Croat soldiers in that truck over there. Ill leave them as security against me failing to return the guns. And the Serb agrees. The response surprised me the first time but I soon came to recognise it as both natural and standard. By the time I would get to the end of the second anecdote, the pair of fresh, clean

young TRADOC Ninjas before me would have stopped talking, and the colour would have drained from their faces, as they began to perceive that they had barely begun to grasp the nature of the AO into which we are proposing to set foot. At which point I would ask Now: perhaps you could tell me, speaking doctrinally, what kind of operation is this one we are planning?(See 1st Stonkernote below) That led in every case to a long thoughtful pause: by engaging these guys in the evidence, and asking them to do a simple analysis, using their standard terms of reference - I had found a way to kick them off their intellectual tram-lines, and get them thinking about the problem from a standpoint of first principles. Which leads, naturally to O so youre developing new doctrine and a discussion around the role of, and optimum structures for, the conduct of joined-up Information Operations, to integrate National, Theatre and Corps levels, and bring together Media Ops PsyOp, CIMIC etc etc There was no answer in the book they had to start (as I had) from scratch. Understand the situation, identify the key factors and build a plan to deal with them. I never saw a single one of them again: but they had surely been listening and learning very fast, and they must have got somebodys attention back in the US of A. Fast forward a year. HQ ARRC is still in Germany, and UNPROFOR is still in place, but the situation has changed the Merkale market mortar attack which killed dozens of Muslim Sarajevans (attributed to Serb mortar crews, but like Gen Mike Rose, COMUNPROFOR at that time I have my doubts) has led to vigorous NATO air ops against Serb forces, and the inter-ethnic conflict has reached a culminating point, which in turn ultimately means Holbrook gets to work with his thumbscrews at Dayton. The HQ ARRC staff (to be known as HQ IFOR) are going through our final ARRCADE FUSION exercise, as the clock ticks toward D-Day. And although we have pretty much every other mechanism in place: HQ AFSOUTH have understood what we proposed to do, and adopted the approach as their own (a testament to Gen Mike Walkers skills at managing his superior HQ) we still dont have the official signup we need for the proposed unconventional use of US PSYOP units. That only comes on the last morning of this final CPX , which has been used as a final Rock Drill to work through the deployment into B-H, and some in-country contingency planning. We have a good number of folk from outside the HQ, but with B-H experience, including the Brit Bn Comd whose troops were the last Brit contingent in Gorazde before the Dutch took it on, in time for Mladic to wipe the place off the map. This CO (LTC Santa-Ollala, Green Howards) is important to this story, because in Q&A during the final washup session he describes how his unit would do rudimentary PSYOP things, for instance, by distributing handbills or flyers hastily written up to deal with current issues specific to the various factions in his AO. I took the opportunity (so the answer would reach the ears of the senior TRADOC guy, General John Lindsay) to ask him exactly how he produced these flyers, He replied that each one was typed out by a clerk on to a paper skin and then reproduced using one of those hand-cranked ink-roller mimeograph/roneo machines. Pretty primitive. General Lindsay responds to this by looking at the chief US PSYOP guy in the room, and saying to him words to the effect that Looks like you need to turn your PSYOP machine upside down for this operation the first official US endorsement of what I had started arguing for 2 years earlier, and which ARRC/IFOR/AFSOUTH had had slowly understood and very, very belatedly embraced. Ill hand you over shortly, to conclude this lengthy anecdote, to the guy who wrote these words as a footnote to a piece I have quoted extensively in the closing section:

Steven Collins 36. In November 1995, at Exercise ARRCADE Fusion, Walker was prescient when he made it clear that PSYOP and public affairs were to be main players in his land campaign in Bosnia. He invited veteran BBC reporter Kate Adie, who had covered Bosnia extensively, to discuss how the BBC covered the conflict and the dynamics of the news organization's relationship with UNPROFOR. A US Battle Command Training Program team was present, and the chief of the team, General John Lindsay, also made it clear in his comments he believed PSYOP had to be a main player in the IFOR/ARRC effort. That Walker seemed prescient was because he had been extensively and properly briefed over the duration of his time in command, he had quickly understood the rationale that I had developed and disseminated, and he encouraged against resistance from senior staff of various nationalities in his own HQ the establishment of the Info Ops structures and relationships we were aiming for. So that gets us not to the best possible Info Ops posture but to the best we could expect to achieve, given the resistance thrown up all along the way; and I still dont think BG John Silvester got it, even after the fact. In fact, we never properly CPXd or war-gamed any of this before the HQ deployed, because Silvester blocked it, time and time again. So we had changed the doctrine - but to do that, we had to undermine a good many assumptions and habits of thought and behaviour that would have stopped this working at all. Even so, even in the HQ there was lukewarm support in some key quarters, a sizeable chunk of the UK Staff (me included) was rotating out of the HQ shortly after the B-H deployment began to be replaced by newcomers who had not been involved in the intellectual effort and moral struggle involved in getting this new thing to happen. Nor were Walker and his staff set to run the IFOR land component for more than 12 months. This is where I hand the story over to a guy I dont recall ever meeting, by the name of Steven Collins, on the psywarrior.com website http://www.psywarrior.com/ArmyPsyopinBosnia.html He starts with a statement that overstates the importance of PSYOP, and underrates the recognition that in many ways, the medium was the message meaning that every member of IFOR, consciously or otherwise, was delivering a message just by being in-country: and that message might as easily reach a global audience as a local one, courtesy of CNN (and the very young internet) so it was important that everyone was sending consistent messages. Aside from that, this is an excellent overview of the rise and fall of the NATO Information Campaign. It was undone, as you will see if you read on, not by external threats, but from within NATO. Steven Collins: The principal tool available for the NATO-led Implementation Force (IFOR) and Stabilization Force (SFOR) [3] to influence attitudes in Bosnia has been military psychological operations (PSYOP) forces, and most of the PSYOP forces accessible to NATO are in the US Army. The contribution of these forces has been laudable, but there have been many missed opportunities as well as misunderstandings over the last three and a half years regarding what PSYOP can and cannot do. [4] This article examines the performance of PSYOP forces in Bosnia, offering recommendations on how to improve this vital part of the US contribution. With US military involvement in Bosnia planned to continue for some time--and, as this article is being written, with US and NATO forces striking targets in Serbia and Kosovo--such examination is critically important . ===================

Steven Collins PSYOP's Access to Senior Commanders Until October 1996, command and control of theater-level PSYOP in Bosnia was handled jointly by the IFOR and the Allied Command Europe (ACE) Rapid Reaction Corps command groups. US Navy Admiral Leighton Smith (IFOR Commander until July 1996) delegated much of the day-to-day PSYOP approval authority to his Land Component Commander, UK Lieutenant General Sir Michael Walker. Walker became the approving authority for all tactical PSYOP products (loudspeaker messages, handbills, etc.). Those operational PSYOP products disseminated simultaneously throughout the entire country (PSYOP newspaper, radio, and television) were approved first by the ACE Rapid Reaction Corps headquarters and then by the IFOR command group (with final approval by the IFOR Chief of Staff, US Lieutenant General William Carter). Lieutenant General Walker was a godsend for the early PSYOP campaign. Articulate, accessible, and fully cognizant of the importance of PSYOP in Bosnia, he provided very skilled direction. [36] He placed the coordination of the public affairs and PSYOP efforts in the hands of his corps field artillery commander, who was able to provide the needed coordination between all the information operation assets while avoiding the temptation to exert command and control. Nearly every morning Walker chaired an Information Coordination Group meeting with the deputy commander, his information operations coordinator, a G3 (operations) representative, a G2 (intelligence) representative, the public affairs officer, a civil affairs representative, the legal advisor, the political advisor, and a PSYOP representative. In these 15- to 20-minute meetings, the participants discussed shortterm information operations actions (primarily PSYOP and public affairs), and Walker issued guidance on what "spin" to use. In addition, a weekly "perception group" meeting (led by the ACE Rapid Reaction Corps) and a Joint Information Coordination Committee meeting (led by IFOR) were held to coordinate long-term information operations planning. The transition of the IFOR mission to the LANDCENT in late 1996 drastically changed the fashion in which PSYOP was perceived and used at the theater level. In contrast to officers at both Allied Forces Southern Europe and ACE Rapid Reaction Corps headquarters who had studied the Bosnian situation for years in preparation for contingency missions, LANDCENT personnel were not nearly as familiar with the area of operation. Additionally, the importance of PSYOP was not evident in their preparations; LANDCENT did not even have an assigned PSYOP staff member while planning its transition into the Bosnia mission. In an attempt to streamline the chain of command, LANDCENT eliminated the role of the land component headquarters, previously filled by the ACE Rapid Reaction Corps under IFOR. The commander of the successor to IFOR, NATO's Stabilization Force (SFOR), became both the Combined/Joint Forces Commander and Land Component Commander, but gave the day-to-day task of running the land operations to a Deputy Chief-of-Staff. This inhibited the PSYOP effort. First, the new arrangement gave even more autonomy to the division commanders. The ability to centrally plan and coordinate PSYOP activities in Bosnia, difficult to begin with, was now nearly impossible. The SFOR Commander was busy with theater-wide affairs, and the Deputy Chief-of-Staff for Land Operations did not have direct command and control of the divisions. Second, few in a position of command authority at SFOR headquarters took the time to conduct conclusive information operations meetings every day as had Lieutenant General Walker. [37] The PSYOP Task Force, now working largely as a staff section under the guidance of the operations directorate of SFOR, was clearly diminished in importance. Under IFOR, a PSYOP representative met with the Land Component Commander daily; under SFOR, the PSYOP Task Force commander rarely met with the Deputy Chief-of-Staff for Land Operations, much less the SFOR Commander.

Third, perhaps because of LANDCENT's unfamiliarity with PSYOP and the area of operations, approval bottlenecks for PSYOP products were created, making timeliness of PSYOP products even more problematic. A downward spiral was now in place. Because of a seeming mistrust of PSYOP, LANDCENT placed it under more restrictions, making PSYOP even less responsive, which served to deepen the mistrust. This spiral reached its inevitable nadir in the summer of 1997. During an internal political power struggle in Republic of Srpska, SFOR attempted to capture two secretly indicted Bosnian-Serb war criminals near Prijedor on 10 July 1997. Tragically, the PSYOP Task Force, buried in the operations section and out of earshot of the SFOR command group, was not brought into the planning process until the last minute. Consequently, the PSYOP Task Force found itself constantly responding to disinformation coming from the Republic of Srpska radio and television outlets regarding both the war criminal operation and the internal power struggle. The PSYOP Task Force was never able to reverse the negative spin created by the Bosnian-Serb media. For LANDCENT, already unfamiliar with and suspicious of PSYOP, the events of the summer of 1997 caused a serious crisis of confidence in the PSYOP Task Force. [38] As a result, attempts were made to bolster PSYOP capabilities at the theater level. Still, the most critical issue--for the PSYOP Task Force commander to have regular access to the SFOR Commander--was neglected. To be fair, some lessons were learned from the events of the summer, and the PSYOP Task Force was an early and critical participant in another SFOR operation on 18 December 1997 to capture two indicted Bosnian-Croats. This time SFOR was prepared, making sure its version regarding the capture was told first and often, preempting the Bosnian-Croat media spinmeisters. [39] Still, the relegation of PSYOP to that of a subordinate staff component within the operations directorate ensured that the SFOR Commander's messages to the Bosnian people would usually be untimely, filtered, and diluted by various intermediaries in the SFOR headquarters. Now, this started from a discussion about changing the way that armies behave: about learning lessons, changing doctrine and making it stick. Given that I have detected, from some of the smarter voices in all the noise around the Petraeus COIN doctrine, echoes of the thinking behind the Info Ops plan for B-H in the story told above, I hope that in telling it at this length, to have shone some kind of light on: What it takes to make such a change happen, How hard it is to stop the change being undone The ease with which we unlearn or forget important lessons, if they are not in line with conventional thinking.

That concludes this epic. If you have had the patience to read this far, I thank you. I hope you thought it was worthwhile. 1st Stonkernote: One of the potential doctrinal parallels I looked at in prepping myself for these encounters, was The Breakout From Encirclement which I had briefly studied at Staff College, coincidentally, given our recent pm exchanges, we used the Chosin Reservoir action as a case in point. Last Stonkernote: A fuller, independent, academic analysis of the Info Ops campaign in BH, called Target Bosnia can be downloaded from http://www.dinarte.es/saludmental/pdfs/NATO%20PsyOp%20in%20Bosnia%20War.pdf although you can find versions on other sites (Google for Target Bosnia). The author has also published a monograph using the same title. PAS 12 Sep 2009