Tuesday, March 15, 2005
(4:15 PM) | Anonymous:
Pentagon to Model War Tactics From Al-Qaeda
A Pentagon division of the Department of Defense called "The Office of Force Transformation" is in the midst of an 18 month experiment called WolfPAC.A high ranking Pentagon official said in an interview on February 10, 2005 that WolfPAC was "launched on it’s own accord", apart from the normal examination of the US Marines Combat Development Command and Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. WolfPAC attempts to combine exotic strategies and technologies to create a culture of confusion and fear within the ranks of the "enemy". Some of their theories have already been applied, most notably in the attack on Fallujah in 2004, and the training of the Iraqi police force.
The methodology behind this concept is to insert small combat teams into enemy territory without being detected. The name "WolfPAC" has been credited to studying the behavior of wolves, and their ability to operate in groups with a natural leader and coordinate their actions. However, two researchers for the Swedish Department of War Studies and the Swedish Department of Man-System Interaction credited in unclassified documents as ideological creators of WolfPAC conclude that optimizing human systems (through training, intelligence, and personnel increases) "will fail in cases where survival is valued higher then achieving maximum optimization." WolfPAC’s emphasis then is on the means, rather than the end.
But the Office of Force Transformation calls U.S. Navy Cmdr. Gregg Glaros WolfPAC’s "architect". And Cmdr. Glaros should be familiar with the ideals employed by WolfPAC, as he was a fellow on the Strategic Studies Group XXI, a Navy program which investigated FORCEnet, a concept that combined intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance into one effort. The conclusions of that investigation were that total performance was lowered, due to an information overload by commanders, sometimes resulting in conflicting and opposing orders.
WolfPAC uses the same method, combining multiple nations, agencies, divisions, forces and strategies into a small singular unit. Glaros however claims that with this approach combined forces will "keep coming at you from different vantages, different approaches at such a high rate…that you have no capacity or ability to respond", asserting that confusion is the key to success against the enemy.
In a statement released by the Department of Defense, Cmdr. Glaros says that his model for WolfPAC’s adaptability is Al-Qaeda. "Al-Qaeda has been learning at a far faster rate than we’ve been able to operationally engage in," says Glaros. "…it’s [the insurgents are] more successful than we are…that’s why almost every day one of our soldiers or Marines die. Because they are out-learning us…"
So how are WolfPAC strategies being implemented? According to Glaros, "we actually do it by trial and error right now. Which is okay." To date, there have been a total of 43,422 confirmed dead in Iraq since the US invasion.
Cmdr. Glaros adds, "But we’d like to get at the fundamentals." Those fundamentals were announced along with a trip to Iraq by Glaros and other Pentagon officials. "It’s very easy for us to sit in Washington and pontificate and to read the reports and derive some understanding from it," says Glaros, "…but gathering first-hand observations of ongoing operations [would]...get ground truth to find out [whether] what we’ve written is indeed valid for the assumptions that we’re making." Of the confirmed dead in Iraq, 21,129 of them have been civilians.
But observations of WolfPAC’s fact-finding trip will also be to craft war games scheduled later in the year. "Most people start with a model and then go into the real world and see if its accurate…we’ve gone into the real world…and now we’re going to see if we can get our exercises to act like that," explains Cmdr. Glaros.
According to the Office of Force Transformation, those exercises will begin in late summer "in the Atlantic off Virginia and Newport, R.I., and in the Pacific off the California coast."
