Toward Operational Art for Policing

by John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus -

The military, facing a complex and intractable mixture of “wicked problems” on the battlefield, has responded with a doctrinal revolution in the production and practice of operational theory.  But most police agencies don’t incorporate the “operational level of maneuver” into their planning and concept of operations.   We face a constellation of complex “high-intensity policing” problems such as counterterrorism, transnational organized crime and gangs that demand development of a true operational art and doctrine, rather than current focus on tactical response. The police service desperately requires an understanding of operational theory and must develop operational doctrine to successfully address contemporary threats.

The Mumbai operation demonstrates the problem facing tactical counterterrorism response. Multiple elements utilizing swarming tactics and an overarching command and control node overwhelmed a police command overwhelmingly oriented on tactical encounters. Closer to home, cartels and street gangs have posed operational challenges to police throughout Latin America, showing discipline and coordination largely disdained by American gangsters.

Police practice is largely structured around managing individual incidents and cases.  This is often expressed as tactically responding to calls for service or individual SWAT responses. A broader, comprehensive view of the operational space as a whole, and the impact of multiple tactical operations is largely absent.  Concepts such as operational space shaping, intelligence, threat early warning and operational maneuver are largely ignored. This tactical mindset hinders coordination of complex crimes and disasters and degrades interagency cooperation. The closest thing to operational coordination in police operations is the Incident Command System (ICS) and National Incident Management System (NIMS). While NIMS provides the backbone for operational coordination in active incidents, it is mainly logistical and command-oriented. NIMS’ incident-specific nature does not provide a “command concept” for continuing and future operations

Police are understandably wary of appearing to be too militarized, but the near systemic ignorance of operational theory and insights arising from the military counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations will not serve police well if criminal insurgents or terrorists target the domestic space. The trend of “global guerrillas” waging netwar has been observed for twenty years and there is little reason to think that it will cease.  Additionally, there is a convergence between police and military operations abroad that could be a source of insights for police response to potential and emerging high intensity threats.

Perhaps most harmful is the lack of an intellectual forum for doctrinal research and development. Police journals focus overwhelmingly on the tactical or technical level of operations. It is important to make sure that tactical response is pitch-perfect and that use and acquisition of equipment is satisfactory to police needs. These are the building blocks of operational response. But in order for operational innovation to occur law enforcement agents on the local, state, and federal level must be able to share their insights with each other in a scholarly forum. Journals and forums for doctrinal debate, red teaming and strategic futurism would do much to help the growth of operational police doctrine.

What would operational theory for police look like? In military theory operational art occurs at the theater level, the place where strategic objectives are implemented tactically. Yet the operational art is not a collection of tactical engagements. Rather, it is a concept of how to best use organizational resources to implement strategic aims. The operational level of police engagement is much smaller than the military theater level. But on the regional level, particularly in major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles County or New York City, the challenge is just as great. Operational doctrine for police would focus on harmonizing three strategic capabilities: understanding and shaping the operational space, intelligence/investigations, and operational response.

Understanding and shaping the operational space is easily the most important of the three. Gaining advantage over criminal netwarriors and terrorists requires deployment of police resources in flashpoints or trouble spots, understanding the population through community policing, and formation of plans for community resilience.

As response to irregular foes is largely a targeting duel, developing an ability for targeted intelligence and investigations on a “geosocial” level is an important tool. Police already carry out investigations of organized crime and terrorism, but such investigations need to be integrated into a larger capability for net assessment of the operational space as a whole. Police need mechanisms for building a holistic view of the operational space, including open-source intelligence and social scientific survey. These abilities can inform operational concepts for action as well as better guide deep indications and warning (I&W) assessments to head off terrorism, crime, and insurgency.

Operational response must be formulated to deal with swarming. We have outlined such a concept in our papers “Postcard from Mumbai: Modern Urban Siege” and “Preventing Another Mumbai: Building a Police Operational Art.” Police must mobilize quickly to halt attackers in place, isolate their positions, and then neutralize them with heavier follow-on forces. In turn, command and control (C2) functions and doctrine must become agile enough to support police during operational level engagements. The police commander must be able to visualize his forces in space and time.

All of these steps can help build what RAND analyst Carl H. Builder called a “Command Concept.” Command concepts of future operations inform the usage of resources and the nature of information that must flow up and down the chain of command. They enable a more intuitive command and usage of information. Command concepts are indicative of a genuinely operational focus. Tactical focus, however, inevitably leads to a focus on the technical level of operations as a means of supporting tactical missions. In a complex emergency, a tactically and technically-focused commanding element finds themselves a prisoner of their tactical equipment, reacting to rather than guiding events.

Building a command concept for police operations will not be easy. An institutional focus on tactics will be difficult to overcome. Building operational concepts—i.e., an appreciation and application of operational art—is essential to future excellence in the modern operational space.   An understanding of the operational level of maneuver and conflict, as well as the development of doctrine and “network protocols” for operational maneuver is necessary to address the new constellation of challenges and threats facing the modern urban “global city.”

John P. Sullivan is a career police officer. He currently serves as a lieutenant with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department where he is assigned to the Emergency Operations Bureau. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies on Terrorism (CAST). His research focuses on counterinsurgency, intelligence, terrorism, transnational gangs, and urban operations. He is co-editor Countering Terrorism and WMD: Creating a Global Counterterrorism Network (Routledge, 2006).

Adam Elkus is an analyst specializing in foreign policy and security. He is currently Associate Editor at Red Team Journal. His articles have been published in Red Team Journal, Small Wars Journal and other publications. Mr. Elkus blogs at Rethinking Security, Dreaming 5GW, and the Huffington Post. He is currently a contributor to the Center for Threat Awareness’ ThreatsWatch project.

For Additional Reading

John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus, “Police Operational Art for a Five-Dimensional Operational Space,” Small Wars Journal, July 2009.

John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus, “Preventing Another Mumbai: Building a Police Operational Art,” CTC Sentinel, June 2009.

John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus, “Postcard from Mumbai: Modern Urban Siege“, Small Wars Journal, February 2009.

The Homeland Security Council: End of an Experiment?

By M. Powell, Ph.D. -

In the past few months, the debate over the continued need to maintain a separate Homeland Security Council  (HSC) in addition to the National Security Council (NSC), and their respective staffs, has reached a crescendo. The HSC and the NSC and their staffs are supposed to work in parallel, but critics believe the organizations really do not work in concert.  They believe that the HSC is redundant and creates unnecessary organizational stovepipes as homeland security and national security are intrinsically linked and any distinctions between them are artificial. Proponents of maintaining the HSC as a distinct organization argue that homeland security issues are indeed distinct from more traditional national security issues and would lose priority in a forum such as the NSC, which has traditionally focused on external threats.  However, modern terrorism can quickly erase distinctions between external and domestic threats, and homeland security is an intrinsic part of national security.  Government organizations must recognize this and not create divisions where none should exist.

Transition Plans

The creation of the Homeland Security Council came out of the same security mindset that pervaded the country after the September 11th terrorist attacks. The notion of homeland security in terms of policy and organization became a priority within national security discourse, creating the Office of Homeland Security (OHS) and later the HSC and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The HSC was created to coordinate, among other issues, domestic policy between federal agencies and state and local entities. HSC is statutory, but its staff is not. However, since its creation, the HSC has been criticized for ambiguous and overlapping functions with the NSC, organizational stovepiping, and policy guidance to departments and agencies that conflicts or is inconsistent with policy guidance from the NSC process.

As a new President and political administration is about to take office, the issue is a priority of President elect Barack Obama’s transition team. Although this issue is likely to be formerly reviewed after the inauguration, and any dissolution of the HSC itself will have to be ultimately approved by Congress, on January 8, the New York Times reported that the transition team is in favor of disbanding or merging the position of the Homeland Security Advisor and the HSC staff into the NSC. On January 9th, media outlets announced that President elect Obama has named CIA official and past front-runner for the job as Director of the CIA, John Brennan as his pick for deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism with a dual hat as the White House Advisor for Homeland Security.

Critics of the move to subsume the HSC under the NSC fear that the homeland security missions will be undermined by the more traditional focus of the NSC on foreign policy and security threats.  Proponents of merging or subsuming the HSC into the NSC are being careful not to convey the impression that they are downgrading the importance of homeland security, but rather are streamlining all facets of national security into one cohesive council. Should a terrorist attack occur on US soil or a poor government response to a major natural disaster, it is almost guaranteed that the dissolution of the HSC will be seen as a lack of priority for homeland security.  However, there are a number of issues that need to be addressed in more detail to determine the ultimate success of such a move.

Access

Currently, the HSC staff through the Homeland Security Advisor have direct access to the White House. The current Deputy National  Security Advisor for Counterterrorism is a dual-hatted direct report to the National Security Advisor as well as the HLS Advisor, more formally known as the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Several HSC staff members may be invited to stay, but their access may be diminished by having to go through several channels of the NSC focused on its own security priorities. According to the New York Times, the deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism, the role envisaged for John Brennan would report to incoming National Security Advisor, one level away from direct access to the White House. However, considering the complexities of Presidential advisors and reporting chains, this situation may be subject to change.

Overburdening and Coverage of Portfolios

The portfolio for counter-terrorism and homeland security is huge and diverse, and may be overly burdensome for one deputy national security advisor.  Another fear is that the NSC will simply become overburdened with such a large overall mission and either dilute its focus on major issues or prioritize its focus on particular issues, leaving other issues to fall through the cracks.  There is also a question of what will happen to specific homeland security portfolios in HSC. Who will take responsibility for the integration of federal, state, local, and tribal authorities and how will public-private partnership cooperation work especially in regards to critical infrastructure protection?

The Department of Homeland Security

Any dissolution of the HSC is bound to affect DHS as well. To some extent the HSC has functioned as an advocate for DHS. Now that DHS as an operational entity has been in existence for over five years, it is perhaps time that it can stand on its own, and it will have to without the HSC.  According to the report “World at Risk”, the Report of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation and Terrorism,  “Now that the Department of Homeland Security is fully operational, however, the two parallel councils create ambiguity and unnecessary redundancy..” It is certainly likely that DHS will have to adjust some of its own approaches without an HSC.

Policy Coordination and Coordinators

Top level national security policy is coordinated through the Principals’ Committee, which consists of most the same people on the HSC and the NSC – the membership is virtually the same, and for big issues that involve the same agencies, it is the same.  At the Assistant Secretary level, the various Policy Coordination Committees (PCCs) that comprise both staffs are redundant, duplicative, and conflicting and inconsistent.  They can be merged to eliminate redundancy and inconsistency, and still have the same attention paid to any given regional or functional issue that the ordinary NSC process would otherwise give it.  But natural disasters, critical infrastructure protection, and vertical integration of state/local/private sector are huge issues that sometimes happen to touch on counterterrorism.  Counterterrorism (CT) itself is a huge issue that touches on the vertical issue only in terms of preparedness and response (and some prevention, but not much).  The two need coordination for purposes of keeping things from falling through cracks and making sure all are moving in one direction, but the two are profoundly different missions with profoundly different players, and it is not a natural match to bring policy coordination of all of these issues underneath one portfolio – CT policy is about strategy to destroy an adversary, mainly international.  Vertical integration, disaster preparedness, etc., is about balancing equities, many of which do not belong to the Fed government, most of which are domestic, but are agnostic about which adversary is actually doing the attacking.  All are part of national security, but expertise is vastly different.  Thus, there can be one NSC, but with several portfolios.

Plus, what about the statutorily created WMD-T Coordinator? Congress passed the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007, which established the Office of the United States Coordinator for the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism. This Coordinator would be the principal advisor to the President on the prevention of WMD proliferation and terrorism and in charge of U.S. strategy and policy in this field. The position is still vacant but cannot be disbanded without Congressional action.  This position will directly affect the new national security structure. Will John Brennan assume responsibilities for this position as well? Or will someone else be appointed to this position and what would be the nature of the relationship with Brennan?

(HomelandSecurity.com original analysis)