Expanding the community of interest Change seems to be the

Transcription

1 Brigadier General JB Burton tells Gwyn Winfield about making 20th CBRNE Command relevant to more people Expanding the community of interest Change seems to be the only constant in CBRNE. In October 2012, in an interview with brigadier general (BG) Les Smith, then commanding general of the 20th support command (as was), we spoke about the shift in the aim point and the transition from operations in Iraq to other activities. In October 2013 it seemed that with the sarin release in Ghouta brigadier general JB Burton (then new in post) was living in the new normal. Nearly two years later there has been still more change. The threat of chemical weapons, both conventional chemical warfare agents (CWA) and toxic industrial chemicals (TICs), has not gone away but the 20th has also responded to emerging infectious diseases (EID) in the shape of the west African Ebola epidemic. As part of its capability to deal with biological weapon agents (BWA) the 20th has always been able to deal with any pathogen, but this was the first time that it had been tasked to deal with a non-military one in a country without ongoing military operations. Previously I might have been rash enough to make a prognostication on whether or not this is a flash in the pan, but with all the changes of the past four to five years it would be foolish to try and make any prediction. It s fair to say that the volatility of the situation has not been lost on BG Burton, as he has spent much of his time in post proving the flexibility of the 20th to army service component commanders and combatant commanders (COCOMs). Caption Copyright 10 CBRNe WORLD June

2 Indeed he has been working up multifunctional capabilities that translate to an all hazard response, and building the necessary DOTMLPF (doctrine, organisation, training, material, leadership & education, personnel, and facilities) within the organisation. The worry would be that the 20th is changing to deal with the threat too fast for the Department of Defense (DoD). Departments and ministries of defense tend to be monolithic entities, which change slowly but emphatically small course corrections are as difficult as large ones. While the 20th might be positioning to deal with the implications of its latest mission, Ebola and EIDs, the DoD might still be gestating the lessons from Was there a risk that the 20th s mission was outstripping the DoD s response time, that a thick bundle of doctrine would be delivered dragging it back to 2013, or had enough happened to prevent that from happening? That can be answered with yes, noes and wait and sees!, said BG Burton. First, there is a clearer understanding of the complex realities of chem, bio, rad and explosive threats. Since 2013 the 20th has picked up a lexicon that we have interjected into all our conversations that steers us away from neatly bucketing the world into: who has WMD and who has not. That had become extremely limiting considering that we were preparing for operations anywhere on the globe. We started looking at the operational environment through a sense of lens which was categorised as C, B, R and E, and not just weaponised agents. If we only focused on the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) categorisation there would be a large portion of our organisation that was just waiting on the call. When we look across the globe through this lens we come up with a much more complex tapestry and a much more informed dialogue of where forces might need to be employed or where expertise might contribute to safety, security and readiness of partner nations, local civil authorities etc. That gets into the question of will this be something that passes once funding and interest is no longer there. Once you look at the world through that lens then you increase the dialogue and concern. There is an increased desire to partner with us once we explain that in this region while you may not have a traditional WMD concern you have nefarious actors with access to all sorts of readily available chemicals and, when combined with these capabilities, it produces this type of hazard and that is playing out in front of you NOW! If you can communicate that what you are doing is an accurate reflection of how the world is and is likely to be, then you can get the momentum going as we have seen. Is there broad acceptance of what we are doing? I can t say, as we are a relatively small part of the DoD capability, however we have not yet met anyone that says you have it all wrong, and that includes the doctrine experts. If you ask me whether WMD should be our sole focus or we should be an all hazard force, then I think it s the latter. We last spoke to BG Burton when he had managed to change the name of the command from 20th support to 20th CBRNE. If the force continues to shift to deal with a variety of non-traditional CBRNE tasks could we see a change on the cards to 20th all hazard command? What kind of change would that engender within the military machine? BG Burton did not see that scale of change on the cards. There is always the danger, when you are faced with an environment of limited resources which sequestration portends, that people will say stop, do what you are told and we will let you know when we need you. The 20th has so many responsibilities, the homeland mission, the defence support to civil authorities and law enforcement officials, CBRNE remediation activities, a global response; when you tell that formation to go to ground there are two options. One says don t do anything unless we tell you, and then nobody ever tells you to do anything, and there is a great deterioration of skill sets. The other side is to continue to fight for clarification of those roles and responsibilities and get those captured in documents and orders that allow the perpetuation of the enterprise and the readiness of this formation. We have taken the latter approach: here is the mission set that you have given us, these are all the orders that have come into this command since its inception, let s codify all of these in a new mission framework. We have done that and had it approved, so we have our mission essential task list approved (which replicates everything we have been told to do), and this provides us with foundational information and authority to go out and pursue various lines of effort to improve readiness. [In terms of a change of name] It is institutionally understood that WMD is a money puller. That term is captured in the army warfighting challenges: countering WMD. When you reduce the discussion of WMD then you have an institutional challenge as there is money behind the term. There are doctrinal efforts that will take time to adjust. Through our engagement with the army service component commanders and COCOMs we have begun to develop the necessary momentum to better tailor our force structure and maintain dialogue with those commanders about what we can put in place to assist. We have been able to inject frameworks, concepts and complexities into the training environment, which now causes colonel level commanders and above, to look towards our CBRNE commanders as subject matter experts in all hazards environments. A lieutenant colonel leading a multifunctional CBRNE formation may not be a qualified scientific expert, but we enable them through robust technical reach back capability to communities of interest; national labs, the joint improvised explosive device defeat organisation (JIEDDO) etc. Institutionally it will take time, so how do you accelerate matters when there is all that inertia in a bureaucratically based organisation that depends on processes to move ideas forward? We wrote a concept of operations (CONOPs) for higher HQ that has been accepted by our training June 2015 CBRNe WORLD 11

3 Expanding the community of interest and doctrine command (TRADOC), that our command will operate across all hazards. WMD, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and endemic diseases become subsets of a broader CBRNE lexicon. It takes primacy from WMD and places it in CBRNE, which allows them to see potential adversaries desires to transition from TICs to low yield explosive dispersal devices on a pathway to something more nefarious. We have done that with the doctrine, we are in partnership with the manoeuvre support centre of excellence writing another army training publication for the execution of other CBRNE task force operations that has some momentum. We have got ourselves involved in, and scheduled for, several multifunctional CBRNE battalion sized formations in partnership with brigade rotations both at the national training centre and the joint readiness training centre over the course of the next three years. We are scheduled for participation in the army s network integration experiment, which brings together CBRNE type objectives with a CBRNE multifunctional formation in support of a brigade combat team and a joint force component, out of Fort Bliss, Texas to ensure that we have the right interoperability and systems in order to be successful. In addition to all that we are partnered with the joint programme executive office for chemical and biological defence (JPEO CBD) on a joint advanced technology capability demonstrator to ensure that our soldiers and civilians have the best equipment possible for operating in this environment. These are all efforts that keep our dialogue going and then, in continued partnership with TRACDOC, that will shape the institutional view of us and help codify it formally in our doctrinal concepts. The re-education of any organisation as varied, changing and reified as the DoD is a massive undertaking and, as BG Burton points out, requires constant effort. This endeavour has been further complicated by the inclusion of the EID mission into the 20th s role. Combating EID is an undertaking as large as the global war on terror. It requires a daunting skill set, a speedy logistic response and a technology footprint outside that of the military. Personally it seems like a downward spiral, as while the 20th can perform that mission successfully, it is not the command s fight. Soldiers are not public health officials and can often send the wrong message in a country trying to deal with a devastating epidemic. (There are plenty of lunatics who think that the whole Ebola outbreak was engineered by the US military that need no further encouragement.) This should be a Defense Health Agency operation in conjunction with the World Health Organisation (WHO), among others, and if the 20th becomes the go-to organisation for EID it will quickly move away from anything to do with CBRNE. BG Burton disagreed, and stated that even though he didn t have the luxury of picking and choosing his mission the Ebola mission fitted into the 20th s skill set and provided a great opportunity for the soldiers and the command. That viewpoint does not consider the aim of our first tier medical lab, it s role is to understand bio hazards, whether weaponised or not. We will follow the orders of the DoD regardless. But what we were able to do by showing we were part of that enterprise was demonstrated by our ability to give depth, at low cost, and go and participate in an international crisis at short notice. A team of 23 people with their lab going over for a mission which is consistent with what they are intended for did not negatively impact our formation to fight the more common hazards that we are focussed on. It is a win-win. I understand your concern, but if anything it gave credibility to this command s capacity in matters beyond traditional characterisation of WMD and gives us the ability to build readiness and stay relevant. As you know anything which is unused is most likely ready for the chop, so by being engaged in emerging threat strains with our core competencies we remain relevant and viable to the DoD capabilities as other actions emerge. In BG Burton s closing address to his troops he stated that: We needed to train the force. We embarked upon an extremely aggressive training programme that would involve emergency deployment readiness exercises, and a continuous flow of forces into the combat training centres (CTCs) at Fort Irwin and Fort Polk. We knew this was an essential aspect of building readiness and credibility. What we did not fully anticipate, was the lack of available training resources at the combat training centres. So, instead of admiring the problem and allowing the lack of training resources to be a distraction we built our own. These comprise full scale radiological facilities, biological and chemical laboratories, underground facilities and a wide range of IEDs and radiological dispersal devices in an attempt to replicate the full range of hazards our troopers and the supported forces were likely to encounter, when the times comes. Much of this is highly impressive (and covered in detail later), and represents a great deal of work, but this was under way before the Ebola mission arose. Providing support to an EID mission in another country requires another series of doctrine, tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) and training, and unlike traditional warfighting missions there are very few places that the 20th could go for this kind of preparation. The orientation with local government, multi-national aid organisations and other NGOs all of which do business in a more softlysoftly way to the military was a massive, alien, undertaking. BG Burton suggested that it wasn t the case, and not that different from other biological missions, meaning they could go to TRADOC for them. We had to call on our TRADOC friends for that. For our traditional operational environment we have to understand biological threats as they manifest and provide that information to the supported commander and his medical advisors so they can decide how best to operate in that 12 CBRNe WORLD June

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5 Expanding the community of interest environment. We have a capability to detect, monitor and advise and we can leave it to more qualified medical experts to tell us how to go about operations in that environment. In terms of our other training scenarios, it was somewhat of a challenge. First we had to get ourselves into the CTCs. We were able to get invited to the training centres as this fell right in line with chief of staff army s strategic priorities, which are to prepare the force to operate in WMD and CBRNE contested or complicated environments. As a Forcecom unit we were invited to the dance, but it was not prepared for us to participate, as there was no robust training venue to exercise our full suite of skills. We had to build our training venues and invested money, sweat and material in Polk and Irwin to build some pretty robust training facilities that included traditional EOD devices and hybrid IED devices, which combined TICs or weaponised CWA with low yield distribution devices. We built a network around them so we could facilitate the attack of the network idea and we also built chem-bio labs in partnership with some of the national labs in CONUS so we knew that we weren t making things up. We built underground radiological centrifuge facilities and radiological dispersal devices, we replicated as best we could the full suite of CBRNE hazards from WMD level munitions and capability down to the more emergent threats that we see. We built the dance floor so the soldiers and civilians can participate in the support of the manoeuvre formations while writing scenarios, in partnership with the training centres, to make sure that the manoeuvre commanders would be interested in these threats. So by not attending to these threats appropriately there had to be an associated penalty. If you don t go out and seize the chemical production facility for weaponising VX then that gets laid on top of you in the next artillery barrage. We built the networks and scenarios, created the penalties and costs for not dealing with those and played out the full scale of CBRNE operations. And then we had to build our own observer controller and trainer teams that travel with these multifunction CBRNE formations and provide them with coaching and guidance and evaluate their performance in those operational and tactical contexts. This allows information to flow back to us so we know how to address doctrine properly, how to address capability shortfalls and how to better effect home station training requirements to prepare us for future operations in an expeditionary and training role. It has been a very robust investment in an area that was largely absent in our army s dialogue for over 14 years. We grew the interest through TRADOC command as it does no good for the command to evaluate itself fully internally. It is always suspicious when you grade your own papers. External observers have been able to capture the capability and doctrine gaps and take them back into the institution for correction. As much as this information has been gathered for the benefit of the 20th, it does not have to end there. The 20th has been active in a number of training engagements over its history and has close relationships, either through EOD or CBRN, with republic of Korea, Jordanian and Iraqi forces. So as the command bundles up the work of the past two years, how does it decide what is useful for some of these partners? It is no good trying to provide the doctrine and understanding for an expert detection force, for example, if they only have three colour detector paper on sticks. How then does the command package up some of this learning and pass appropriate elements to its allies? There are a couple of angles here. In each of the army service component commands, which are our direct link to the COCOMs, we have protection cells but these people might not have been raised in the 20th and might not understand our full capabilities. In many cases over the past two years it was not on their minds, and if they were concerned about CBRNE threats they would not come to us to ask for assistance, they would go back to TRADOC or Intel and say, how do you get at this? We have five seven-person teams with chem, EOD and rad/nuke expertise along with a robust comms package.we base our regional alignments with the protection cell leaders and operations officers of the army service component commanders to help understand the CBRNE threats and hazards and build the linkages so that partner nations can make appropriate requests for our capability and we can go in and help them. In the case of Jordan we have worked with the UK MoD, put a team into the Kingdom of Jordan and helped develop their own CBRNE capability. Iraq is different. We have folks working with US central command (CENTCOM) to work out the Iraqi state s needs in terms of national readiness and response capabilities. When we met the Iraqis a year ago they were seeking advice for a multi-functional state level capability for internal defence. We said, we re glad you asked and started a relationship that we are pursuing through continued activity to shape an enterprise that had been fractured by our movement from combat operations but is still heavily needed in that region. How do we disseminate our ideas and maintain engagement with our own forces? BG Burton continued: Our O6 commanders work with corps commanders and army service component commanders and they are out and about. We have built a pretty robust bit of connecting tissue and exercised that over the past two years. It provides us with the necessary inroads to shape the discussion. Currently you cannot ask for a multi-functional formation through our global resource management process, instead you have to ask for an EOD or decon capability - individual things. What we have been able to do with our engagement with the army service component commanders is help shape that request for forces, so that when it lands in the army s lap we can deliver multifunctional capability in either an advisory or expeditionary role to support 14 CBRNe WORLD June

6 the COCOMS with their engagement strategy. Some of our partner nations might not be prepared for this yet, but there is a definite thirst and interest in creating a multifunctional capability within their own borders. It is no surprise that Iraq and Jordan have picked up the CBRNE baton with neighbours like theirs. As per the current series of articles in CBRNe World (see Dr Dany Shoham's article on page 42) it is difficult to be sure of the direction of CBRN usage in the Levant and beyond. Whether it is a matter of sheer expediency, using what comes to hand, an attempt to see what works or dedicated progression up the toxicity ladder is hard to tell. What in BG Burton s opinion is the current situation telling him? Is this going to be a growing problem? Yes to all your suggestions! Your last article stated, and I am paraphrasing, that the ability to develop nuclear weapons is relatively difficult, the scale and complexity of the resources required increases the higher up the spectrum you go. Low end dissemination technology, with easy access to TICs is being pursued by guerrilla and transnational actors but also nation states. It allows the latter to run a very thin line between what OPCW characterises as reportable WMD and what is not. If someone can get away with large chlorine plants to purify water for their citizens they also get ready access to something that can create harm, cause concern and affect the will to fight. Since 2003, and even before that, we have seen chlorine used in the same way that conventional chemical weapons would have been, causing harm and death and impacting operational tempo. It is not too far away from using large quantities of agricultural pesticides against a formation. Even though it won t cause a lot of deaths it will cause sickness and concern, all of which slows down the operational tempo of a formation. This then allows an adversary to pursue its own objectives or consolidate gains. It is not a blip, it is a growth enterprise. The adversary understands the ability to take readily available material, apply readily available technology and then couple it to an ideology that seeks to harm western-minded nations or anyone else that might be preventing another actor from getting what they want. As outgoing commanding general what, then, are his past highlights and future challenges? Having been at the helm during a period of unprecedented change, what is he most proud of overcoming? My greatest pride is in the soldiers and civilians that have taken on this mission without hesitation. Second is operationalising this command and the concepts necessary for it to deliver on its assigned mission. When we first talked about all hazard, multi-functional formations we had to make an intensive dive into the core competencies of our CBRN and EOD technicians to remind them of what the army says they should be able to deliver as individuals. Once we had defined that it became irrefutable and then we needed to train to it. I am very proud that this team has taken on those concepts and moved them forward to build and operate a legitimate, respected operational capability. Along the way we have discovered limitations and capability gaps. We were challenged on our ability to deploy; so we began a robust and aggressive emergency deployment exercise programme that honed our skills at picking up, packing up and going as multifunctional formations on short notice. We also found that we were significantly challenged in our tactical competencies; if you can t fight your way to the objective, or participate with the support of force, then you are seen as odd and unnecessary baggage. So we invested in building those tactical competences, ensuring that they were soldiers first, technicians second and operationally minded and expeditionary capable. As departing commander I am extremely confident that if any formation asks us to pick up and go to a demanding environment the 20th can do so, confidently and successfully. Challenges remain within the modernisation of the force, but we have a good line on that now. We need to clearly articulate what we need versus what we want, it is a discipline challenge. The pursuit of bright shiny objects for the issue of the day does not usually supply a sustainment solution, so we need to discipline our force modernisation project. Managing the force command itself is a challenge that our human resources have been able to overcome so that we are now identified as a go-to formation for skilled soldiers. What can impact us most is a lack of imagination. In considering the world as it is, we need to build the necessary competencies to ensure that we can meet the challenges as they are. There are the challenges of modernisation, command and control that allows for rapid distribution of information across a community of interest and back again to the foremost CBRNE soldier. We need to get to a tailorable protective ensemble as we still operate with JSLIST that is designed to protect our soldiers from heinous concentrations of chemical agent, but might not be needed everywhere we go. The one size fits all concept is wrongheaded. We need better decon capability that allow us to reduce our reliance on large volumes of water, because of the heavy logistics burden it places on this formation and supported formations. We need to use fewer consumables / expendables. When you see a CRT emerge from a single entry event you will see them cut out from volumes of expendable gear which is then disposed of. So imagine how much waste is generated from numerous entries over a large operational area. Our integrated laboratory management system, which allows immediacy of information from the tester to the community of interest, has also been identified as something to pursue. This is BG Burton s last active posting, but he admits that we are unlikely to have seen the back of him: This CBRNE business is rather like Lyme disease, it gets under your skin and you want to be part of it, to fix it. Fortunately, and despite all his work, as the challenges above show there is still a lot of fixing to do, so we might yet be seeing more of James Bart Burton! June 2015 CBRNe WORLD 15