What Fighting Terrorism Can Teach Us About Confronting China

America’s quicksilver foes in Iraq and Afghanistan forced U.S. Central Command to rethink how it used intelligence — in essence, to behave more like a network than a hierarchy. These hard-won lessons must now be applied across the U.S. military and, in particular, used to confront China, says Rear Adm. Paul Becker, who spent much of the past decade in and around the wars in the Middle East and also served as U.S. Pacific Command’s director for intelligence. Becker, whose most recent job was intelligence director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sat down earlier this month with Defense One’s Bradley Peniston.

Defense One: What can wars that were largely about counterterrorism tell us about China?

Becker: Here are three very specific lessons: One, in order to achieve success, we need to understand and fight an adversary’s strategy, not just their forces. Two, we need to provide a detailed context to a complex battlespace. And three, we need to build an intelligence-sharing network that’s fully integrated — within our U.S. intel community, but also incorporating our allies and partners.

Regarding the first: Gen. [David] Petraeus was fond of saying, “You can’t kill your way out of an insurgency.” You can’t kill your way out of an anti-access/area denial problem either. A2/AD is an American phrase which describes the military component of what China calls their counter-intervention strategy. So I would equate counterinsurgency to counter-intervention, and counterterrorism to A2/AD.

What we found out early in our CT fight was that there were lots of tactical successes but we didn’t link them up at a strategic level and — obligatory Sun Tzu quote — “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." Putting them together coherently, understanding that individual tactics and actions may be part of a pattern, is important for the U.S. national security enterprise.

Defense One: Are we not currently set up to do that?

Becker: It’s my experience that there’s a wide variance of understanding of Chinese grand strategy and military operations, and it ranges from outstanding in select key nodes to none in other locations. Kurt Campbell [a former deputy Secretary of State for East Asian affairs] was a prominent voice calling for a return to something like our China Hands program, which was a World War II-era program that built cultural and language experience. At CENTCOM, we got a program underway that provided some success: Afghanistan-Pakistan Hands, which involved both language and cultural predeployment training. We don’t yet have a similar whole-of-government plan to train Chinese experts. We could use one. The Navy has a program called Asia-Pacific Hands, but it’s service-specific.

All the services, to some degree, have their foreign area officer programs, but I think we need something more comprehensive and focused because China’s very transparent strategic aim is to be the preeminent power in Asia by the year 2049.

Defense One: So how should the U.S. military increase its understanding of this complex environment?

Becker: We can start by sending experts forward. This was a great lesson from the CENTCOM theater in the CT fight. You can “reach forward” — which is a twist on the term “reach back.” You can always call back to Washington and ask for a red team, or some kind of specific expertise, but when you have interagency partners, embedded in key intelligence and operations centers forward, you build up speed, reliability, and effectiveness.

If you, in your office in the rear, are sending someone forward who is so good that you say, “It’s really going to hurt us,” that’s the right person to send. That’s exactly the type of liaison officer who can speak with authority, who can train other personnel forward. Ultimately, they bring tactical and operational exposures and experiences back to the strategic rear. And there's a virtuous cycle there. One of my former air wing commanders, the late Art Cebrowski, was fond of saying, “No one learns as quickly as when being shot at...and usually no one at a senior HQ is being shot at.”

Defense One: Most personnel are deployed for long stints: a year or more. You’d change that?

Becker: Yes, with a combination of short-term and long term postings. You can send an analyst from a national intel agency here in DC for a four-month temporary duty at an afloat training group, or to a command center in Hawaii or Japan. Or you could send them on a two- or three-year rotation. It’s a combination of both, I think, that would work.

Defense One: How would they change the way intel centers work?

Becker:  In CENTCOM, we put our analysts forward in groupings called fusion cells — places where there’s focused collection, where you can rapidly analyze the results, identify changing battlespace indicators, and then you respond with either more collection or direct action — as the case may have been for counterterrorism — but whatever the operational commander may see fit as the situation dictates in an A2/AD environment. The process, the cycle of intelligence, that we used in southwest Asia was called F3EA — Find-Fix-Finish-Exploit-Analyze — pioneered by then-Lt. Gen. Stan McChrystal and his Joint Special Operations Command team-of-teams in Iraq.

Defense One: “Finish,” as in “go hit a target”?

Becker: The definition of “finish” may be quite different in a counterterrorism operation than in a Phase Zero, peacetime operation in the South China Sea, but in any case: find and fix and whatever finish may mean, then we exploit and analyze.

We have fusion cells already – we may not call them fusion cells – but they are intelligence centers from Hawaii to Japan, to air operations centers, to maritime operations centers afloat and ashore. The goal is not necessarily to create more of them, but to ensure that those that we have are linked up, so that they may be decentralized, but they’re not disconnected.

One tool to help bring them together is another CT best practice: the daily operations and intelligence brief, the O&I brief, which allows a commander and all the decentralized forces, intelligence and operational, to synchronize across a lot of different time zones what’s going on. And drive a common understanding of what needs to be done.

Defense One: Sounds valuable, but it also sounds like one more meeting.

Becker: Yes, this would be a key battle rhythm event. There’s a difference between battle rhythm and meeting rhythm, and I was always careful to differentiate between the two. Meeting rhythm is just things you need to do to take care of your daily business. Battle rhythm is warfighting readiness.

Speaking of warfighting, competition with China is inevitable; conflict is not. Especially if we understand their grand strategy and their operations and vulnerabilities. And applying these best practices — hard-learned in the CENTCOM theater — helps put us on a path to better understand the Chinese. My recommendations, by the way, are consistent with a January 2012 Joint Staff document called “Decade of War: Enduring Lessons from a Decade of Operations.”

Defense One:  Are you saying that the F3EA construct is not widely used outside of CENTCOM and now the military needs to propagate it elsewhere?

Becker: I would say that. I would say the concept has applicability beyond the CT fight and should be applied in an A2/AD environment.

Defense One: It’s one thing to implement that if you’re Stan McChrystal at JSOC, but another to do it across the whole Pentagon.

Becker: Change is hard, but change is necessary, if we are going to really seek to be effective. So there would be some physical, financial, and administrative changes required to adapt this successful methodology to the Pacific.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.