The Force Multiplier Effect of Money and the Constraints on its effective use by the FARs

This was a class paper one of my mentors suggested I post.

“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."- Thucydides

“And unless that liberty, which is of such a kind as arms can neither procure nor take away, which alone is the fruit of piety, of justice, of temperance and unadulterated virtue, shall have taken deep root in your minds and hearts, there will not long be wanting one who will snatch from you by treachery what you have acquired by arms.” – The Second Defense of the People of England, John Milton

“To confine soldiers to purely military functions while urgent and vital tasks have to be done, and nobody else is available to undertake them, would be senseless. The soldier must then be prepared to become . . . a social worker, a civil engineer, a schoolteacher, a nurse, a boy scout. But only for as long as he cannot be replaced, for it is better to entrust civilian tasks to civilians.” - David Galula

This essay is about money in warfare, money as a weapon, and how that weapon can be effectively used.

The way money is sometimes used can make it as a weapons system money, too cumbersome to be employed to its full effectiveness. In this regard, Galula’s last sentence above is important. Military forces can perform civilian tasks, but currently, not often as well as civilian agencies with people trained in their particular civilian MOS-s. Yes we have CAGs, and yes we are drawing them down at an alarming rate, but therein lie two of many problems. American regulators have codified certain Inherently Government Functions, and who spends the money weapon, and how they are allowed to do that, are both very heavily regulated. The conduct of counter insurgency warfare both in the Haj and on the web, well that is not as heavily regulated, at least not by our enemies, and there is a very basic disconnect there.

Bribery, is the offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of any item of value to influence the actions of an official or other person in charge of a public or legal duty - Black's Law Dictionary.

The F-35 system may cost $1.065 trillion Dollars to field. A hand held water siphon pump, maybe $25 here in America … in the Haj shops much less, and if provided under a DoD contract, perhaps $250. Both of these, the aircraft and the pump, are parts of systems, and both of them are goods which can be used or traded to influence behavior, either continuing behavior, or a change in behavior. They are both able to be used in a quid pro quo, a this for that trade and as such, they can both substitute for money.

If we look, we can see money used as a weapons system every day. The Judas fable tells us that he traded Jesus to the Romans for 30 pieces of silver … the Devil using some man to pull that trigger. The ex governor of Virginia was just convicted of bribery, which in that case was economic warfare. Someone used money to influence his behavior. Some of us may have traveled across borders where a little mordita is expected, and some American political junkies may be familiar with price supports for ethanol or cotton or sugar (great for Iowa caucus votes, bad for economic and energy policy), or, in Hawaii, the Jones Act and the Passenger Services Act. Using Black’s definition above, the parties influencing these bits of legislation were (not could be, or may have been) guilty of Bribery.
Bribery is a weapon, and a very good one. Sun Tzu would have approved it, Cyrus the Great knew about it, and the million dollars in cash (fits in a carry on, if they are uncirculated $100s) that paid Iraqi contractors in the early days of OIF did not represent the actual construction costs. Deciding where to install a well in an Iraqi or an Afghani village can make a large difference in the quality and quantity of cooperation and intelligence months down the road. One of the premises of this essay is that the use of that weapons system needs to be done in the best interests of the mission, and that mission needs to be better, not more strictly defined (von Moltke the elder had a comment about plans surviving first contact). Requiring American legal sensibilities in the procurement process, and in the legislative and regulatory processes of cultures that don’t have our history of those processes, is wasteful and going to fail. That is not to say the cultures don’t have rules, they do, their rules, different rules, chess is not backgammon.
Inherently Government Functions, are

“Functions that, as a matter of policy (rather than law), are so intimately related to the public interest as to mandate performance by government employees. These functions include activities that require the exercise of discretion in applying government authority or the making of value judgments in making decisions for the government. These functions typically involve interpretation and execution of federal laws so as to bind the government; protect the government’s interests; affect private persons’ life, liberty or property; exert control over procurement of the government property; or exert control over the collection, control, and disbursement of federal funds.“ FAR Part 2.101

That forbids, as an example, contractors (who can be armed) from being Warranted or Spending Government Money, which by itself is not an operational problem, except that the trained Government Civilians (Warranted Contracting Officers) are too often insufficient in number, and the Military Contracting Officers, who can be armed, are co-located in contracting offices and neither these Contracting officers, military and civilian, who control the purse strings, are usually forward enough deployed to be sitting cross legged around the fire with a squad of Marines or Soldiers negotiating the types of deals on scene that a third world COIN requires.

T.E. Lawrence offered several thoughts in his Twenty Seven Articles. One of them, number sixteen, stated “If you can, without being too lavish, forestall presents to yourself. A well-placed gift is often most effective in winning over a suspicious sheikh. Never receive a present without giving a liberal return, but you may delay this return (while letting its ultimate certainty be known) if you require a particular service from the giver. Do not let them ask you for things, since their greed will then make them look upon you only as a cow to milk”. This offers some insight into the buying and selling of favors and influence. Always get some quid for your pro quo, and make sure the transaction is fair to you, and is seen as such by your local counterpart. And parts of number Article twenty two “…If the objective is a good one (booty) they will attack like fiends, … If there is plunder in prospect, and the odds are at all equal, you will win.” And the lesson there, is that it does not have to be your money, that treasure looted from their enemy is sweeter than a bribe from their new friend. Does this sound Un-American, maneuvering one bought ally against his enemy to serve our needs of the moment? We are discussing waging war, and to introduce Clausewitz into Lawrence’s paragraph …

“War is a mere continuation of policy by other means. We see, therefore, that war is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means. All beyond this which is strictly peculiar to war relates merely to the peculiar nature of the means which it uses. That the tendencies and views of policy shall not be incompatible with these means, the art of war in general and the commander in each particular case may demand, and this claim is truly not a trifling one. But however powerfully this may react on political views in particular cases, still it must always be regarded as only a modification of them; for the political view is the object, war is the means, and the means must always include the object in our conception.”

Although Clausewitz wasn’t thinking about Lawrence’s style of war, one suspects he would have, were he to have directed his mind to it. For both of them, money was a tool in the armament stage, in the treaty negotiation stage, and in the influencing of alliances and moves toward non aggression of the bordering tribes and countries, and then in the reward and punishment stages of their conflicts.

Mao Tse-tung, one of the next authors we studied, is quoted as saying (correctly I believe) “Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive one; it is man and not materials that counts.” In the case of our COIN studies, it is the population as a whole and the non committed insurgents, some of Kilcullen’s Accidental Guerrillas, or Lawrence’s Bedu tribesmen who would not fight outside of their tribal areas, that are the men we are trying to count. And again, money is one of our weapons. Mao’s second Rule “Do not steal from the people”, can be for our purposes, about more than grain and chickens. It can be about paying for information, about using money as a reward (awarding construction or supply contracts, or engaging in preferred vendor arrangements), it can be about hiring twenty men to dig a ditch when one could have done it faster and less expensively with a backhoe. Men buy the land with blood and treasure, but they then need to be there to hold it. Every Marine knows that without him his rifle is nothing, money is a rifle in a COIN and as a tool, be it fired pursuant the FARs or slid in like a knife. The king cash weapon can buying something that usually has a useful life (Trinquier’s emphasis on the time value of intelligence). Our COIN efforts need to buy, with whatever coin is best suited to our purposes, the loyalty or the fear of the people on the ground, because we may not be there in eleven more years.

David Galula offered a thought on money as a weapon for the insurgent when he talked about the Prerequisites for a Successful Insurgency in his chapter two. Outside support in Algeria came from overt and covert sources. “A great part of the FLN budget came from grants by the Arab League. Red China shipped tea to the FLN in Morocco, where it was sold on the open market.” He goes on, on pages 26-27, to discuss outside support in greater detail, but the underlying message is that what money represents, be that guns or butter or the F-35 or the water pump, is a medium of exchange. For power (Mao’s growing from the barrel of a gun), for influence, for repayment of a past favor or insurance toward a future favor, or just to grease the wheels of the commerce of war, money represents fuel. This author’s opinion is that our combatant commanders need to be freed to use that weapon in the field as though dollars were in the kit to trade for Bullets, Bandages or Baksheesh.

Timothy Deady references Clausewitz’s Center of Gravity, when he focus on how and where to employ the elements of power. That “power and movement, upon which everything depends” (Deady quoting Clausewitz) for the insurgent is, I suggest, the same as it is for the COIN, that mass of the people upon which the insurrection depends, and for whom, at least ostensibly the insurrection is being waged. In the Filipino’s case the mass of people were Americans at home (A we needed the Philippines as a naval base and B, we told ourselves we needed to pick up the white man’s burden), and for the American Army, it was the Filipino people. One of the five fingered fist’s elements of power that Deady writes America used in the Philippines, was economic power (the others were diplomatic, legal, informational, and military). “Even commanders of the smallest detachments were dual-hatted, with their civilian governance roles gradually assuming primary importance as regions were pacified. … [and] As has become characteristic of the American way of war, the economic power employed was significant. Infrastructure improvements such as road building and stringinh telegraph lines aided both military operations and the local economy.” Deady’s two comments above help illustrate the primacy of the COIN in this duality of roles, and that, is one of the things America’s importation of the domestic FAR and D-FAR regulations into COIN conflict zones, doesn’t recognize, at least not sufficiently. Money as a weapon should NOT be used fairly and openly. Our enemies are trying to kill us and control the territories, including the hearts and minds, of the nation-states we are trying to defend. We should have no compulsion to be fair about using any and all of our weapons in the manner that best suits our primary objectives. If bribery, including sole sourcing a construction contract, or a supply contract with a particular chief or a particular village or tribe is going to help secure an area, or help out-bid an insurgent vying for the same ally, then that’s what we should be doing. When Deady quotes Mao ““The people are the sea in which the insurgent fish swims and draws strength.” The American pacification program targeted the sea in which the insurgents swam. It lowered the water level until the sea became hundreds of lakes. As American garrisons drained the local lakes, the insurgent fish became easier to isolate and catch. When the insurgents were unable to sustain a formidable force in the field, confidence in victory—and hence unified opposition—withered.”, he provides more insight in how the COIN needs to keep these pools alive, and make them attractive alternatives to draw other civilian and Accidental Guerrilla fishes. Money, and the combatant commander’s ability to use it as he best decides in the field, is the more powerful bait.

LtCol (now Headmaster) Nagl reminds us in his Hard Lessons, that “American army officers had little of the political-military experience in their early careers that so descivesly shaped the development of a British officer such as Gerald Templar. They spent their noncombat time in garrison tours … isolated not only from the experience of solving political problems in foreign counties, but even from the political life of their own people.” This author submits that the training our COIN forces need is more akin to that of a vice cop working all sides of the street than that of a hard nosed letter of the law prosecutor. Quite specifically, in the two COIN environments where I have most recent experience, Iraq and Afghanistan, we used money to train local entities in the FARs, and did not effectively use the weapon laying in our wallet to coerce, compel and corrupt them. COINs are not conducted in peaceful, law abiding, historically regulated environments. And until those conditions, as Milton said in one of the opening quotes, “have taken deep root in your minds and hearts …” putting American domestic civilian regulations before contingency expediency is not the quickest and most expedient way to conduct a COIN. Winning the war, all of the facets of the war, in the local “chess” environment should come before mandating the war be run by “backgammon rules” just because the oversight doesn’t want to take the time to learn backgammon.

Roger Trinquier, in his conclusion draws on a lesson from one of my favorite historical battles (I carry Henry V’s, St Crispians Day Speech with me). “… the army of the French King refused to use the bow and arrow … [it was] a kind of impermissible cowardliness not compatible with their concepts of honor and chivalry.”, much, this author submits, the same way our current laws and regulations consider the use of money as a weapon by employing bribery, coercion and compulsion. “At Agincourt in 1415, the lessons of Cercy went unheeded. Once again on horseback, with breastplate and sword, French knights advanced on English archers, and once again were crushed.” The lesson seems clear, the weapon is laying there, and the enemy is not reluctant to use it against the COIN operator, no more reluctant than the drug cartels are.

David Kilcullen remarks in his “The Crazies Will Kill Them” chapter, that “roads ain’t roads” and that a particular “… project succeeded, because people used the process of the road’s construction, especially the close engagement with district and tribal leaders this entailed, as a framework around which to organize a full spectrum strategy to separate insurgents from the people, win local allies, connect the population to the government, build local governance capacity, bring tribes that had supported the insurgency onto the government’s side and thereby generate progress across all the dimensions of counterinsurgency.” That my classmates, is best done by cherry picking who the buyer (the party controlling the money weapon) is doing business with … not by putting electronic advertisements up on USACE contracting opportunity websites.
Reaching beyond our class texts, I want to cite some remarks from Armed Humanitarians by Nathan Hodge. In it, he remarks about how hard it was for USAID to subvert it’s efforts to the goals of counterinsurgency strategy, since that conflicted with the Community Stabilization Program’s goals (p.171). He goes on to recall the problems DoS had with recruiting staff to work even in the cushy green zone, to the point DoS was going to implement “Directed Assignments”. I was in Ramadi when USACE was forced to threaten the same thing, and one of the results, for both DoS and USACE, was deploying staff who were in no way suited to contingency environments. Relative to this essay, the use of money as a weapon in warfare, requires it be used offensively, and not as a tool to gold plate the lodging of fobbits, and that the regulations be use to find ways to support the counterinsurgent strategy, and not be used to provide defensive cover for careerists.

Col. Hammes, toward the end of the Sling and the Stone, has a chapter titled “The Future is Flexibility”, and in it he counsels us that “We must reject the concept of seeking certainty and instead focus on dealing with the uncertainty that is inevitable in the real world.”

In a very short conclusion, this author wants to emphasize his belief that contingency warfare is maneuver warfare at both its simplest and most complex levels, and that to win, our warriors in the arena need the freedom to use all of the weapons available. Money is a weapon, buys weapons, provides a shield against weapons and is the lubricant that makes war, and peace, possible.

Sources used in the preparation of this essay include, but are not limited to the following:1) The 27 Articles of TE Lawrence – PDF
2) T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. PDF
3) Mao Tse-tung, On Guerrilla Warfare 1937 (FMFRP 12-18 pub. 1989, Translated by CPT S.B. Griffith 1940)
4) David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare – Theory and Practice, 1964 Praeger Security Ltd. Reprinted 2006 with a new forward by John Nagl
5) Timothy K. Deady, “Lessons from a Successful Counterinsurgency: The Philippines, 1899-1902,” Parameters, 2005. – PDF
6) John A Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, 2002, University of Chicago Press
7) Roger Trinquier – Modern Warfare a French view of Counterinsurgency – c. 1961 trans. 1964 Combat Studies Institute - U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
8) David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One, Oxford, 2010
9) Price, Brian R. “The Use of Local and Oral Histories in COIN and Phase Zero Operations,” Paper presented to the U.K. Ministry of Defence, May 2014 PDF
10) Human Terrain System, Kandahar Province Survey Report, Glevum Associates, 2010
11) Dept. of the Army & Marine Corps, FM 3-24. TRADOC, 2006 Ed.
12) James A Baker and Lee Hamilton et al, The Iraq Study Group Report, Vintage Books 2006
13) Robert Ramsey III (editor), Global War on Terrorism Occasional Paper 19 “Advice for Advisors: Suggestions and Observations from Lawrence to the Present”, Combat Studies Institute Press, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, 2006
14) Nathan Hodge, Armed Humanitarianism, The Rise of the Nation Builders, Bloomsbury 2011
15) James R. Clapper, Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community, Senate Select Committee in Intelligence, January 2014
16) Global Risks 2014 Ninth Edition, World Economic Forum, Geneva 2014
17) Cordesman, Khazai – Iraq in Crisis, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2014
18) USFOR Afghanistan – Money as a Weapons System (MAAWS-A), Commanders Emergency Response Program (CERP) SOP December 2009 Update
19) The Colors of Money – USFOR Afghanistan – Powerpoint and Briefing notes 2012
20) Special Inspector General Iraq Reconstruction, Lessons Learned on the Department of Defense’s Commnader’s Emergency Response Program in Iraq, SIGIR 13-005, 2013
21) H. L. Osterhout, No More Mad Money: Salvaging the Commanders Emergency response Program, Public Contract Law Journal, 2011
22) Johnson, Ramachandran, Walz - CERP in Afghanistan – Redifing Military capabilities in Development Activities, National Defense University Center for Complex Operations, PRISIM 3, No. 2
23) Operationalizing Counter/Anti Corruption Study, Joint and Coalition Operational Analysis, 2014
24) Training on Inherantly Government Functions – Task Force Phoenix, Camp Phoenix, Kabul, 2012, Powerpoint and Class Notes
25) JFOB Force Protection Handbook, United States Army, 2005The Contingency Environment – COR (Contracting Officer’s Representative) Training Module PowerPoint and briefing – 2012
26) R. Patterson, Revisiting a School of Military Government: How reanimating a World War II-Era Institution Could Professionalize Military Nation Building, Kauffman Foundation Research, 2011