2.12: No, You Can’t Have a Phone Call

Aug 28, 2024

The Blue Dome on Union 3, the coalition camp in downtown Baghdad, Iraq. Author’s photo, 2019.

The Turkish invasion of Northeast Syria in October of 2019 was a surprise to a lot of people, but not to Mike and me. Mike was the deputy J3 at a task force, while I was about halfway done with a yearlong tour as the CHOPS for the SOJTF. CHOPS is the Chief of Operations, or the head of current operations.1

What that means is in my world there were just three ‘days’, and I was responsible for only one of them. There was ‘Yesterday’, which ran from one second ago all the way back in time beyond the dinosaurs to the Big Bang. That was for the historian to worry about. There was ‘Tomorrow’, which started on the bleeding edge horizon of 24 hours and raced into the future all the way to the eventual heat death of the universe. ‘Tomorrow’ was either a future ops (J35) or plans (J5) problem. My job was ‘Today’, which was an ever sliding window of the next 24 hours and everything that was currently or could possibly happen within it.

Now, just because I wasn’t charged with working ‘Tomorrow’ problems — ’You’re gonna need to get with the J35 on that’ — doesn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention. There were a lot of very clear and unambiguous signs that Turkey was going to come across the border.2 Ultimately, I think it was just optimism that blinded those who didn’t see it as inevitable this time. I’m a pessimist by nature, so I spent the month of September getting ready. This meant getting as many digital systems in place as I could. However, it also entailed so much more.3

In the end, it still wasn’t enough. When the Turks crossed the border into Syria, all the slack went out of the line, and the whole JOC strained to keep up. We had to monitor our NATO allies, the Turks and the militia forces they ostensibly controlled. We also had the Syrian Regime forces alongside the Russians maneuvering and advising them. Then we had to keep tabs on our SDF partners as they contested the Turks while executing a retrograde.4 Just to keep things spicy, we also had pockets of ISIS and Iranian advisors running around. And that was just in Syria. We also still had the fight against ISIS in Iraq to manage. The volume of reports and units to track outpaced anything we’d needed to maintain eyes on before. And everyone wanted a phone call.

One of the first things the coalition did was stand up the strike bridge so all the JOCs across the theater could quickly relay reports via voice. Strike bridges are a live VTC channel5 that speeds up information flows because everyone can quickly hear what’s being broadcast.6 This was great for major movements or updates, but could never keep up with all detailed reports coming in. Which left the leaders across CJTF all constantly calling on the phone for updates.7

Because of the way the CJTF was designed from the top down, it had a rank heavy bias at the top, with very few NCOs and junior officers. More than one visiting VIP remarked ‘Never have so few been led by so many’. This meant we were loaded down with a lot of data illiterate officers whose dominant communication medium was the phone. Phones have two principal shortcomings when it comes to data. First, any data you share via the phone must be transcribed by hand before it can be reinserted into a data stream. This is very slow and error prone. Secondly, it is very hard to be on the phone and do anything else. When you’re pushing digital info via chat or email, you can also be copying that data somewhere else. You’re not stuck waiting for the other end to respond, so you can fit other tasks in the gaps. When you’re on the phone, you and the person on the other end are only on the phone.

I needed to get the data back into digital streams, but even the few digital systems we had weren’t working well for us, which is certainly part of why everyone kept picking up their phones. Our primary problem was domain and server issues. CJTF and SOJTF both were supposed to use the COP tool AIDE ARES, which should have made it easy to see each other’s work. Except we were on different domains, and the two builds didn’t touch, so we were reduced to pushing KMZs back and forth, often via email. We had Cisco Jabber for chat, but the task force in Erbil didn’t, and we only had a few chat rooms, and none that hosted everyone across the CJTF. If you wanted to make a new chat room on Jabber you had to call a contractor and wait for them to build it. Then you had to add each new member by hand, if the contractor gave you permissions. That process typically took days.

So, I returned to the one system we had which could cross every TF and every domain: mIRC.8 Without the need to talk to a single contractor or get any permissions, I just created a new mIRC chat channel and started driving every other unit into it. Everyone could join without needing their own special permissions, and mIRC’s small file size meant we could quickly email it to anyone who didn’t have a copy. We got hundreds of users up and in the room in under an hour. The bandwidth required for mIRC is vanishingly small, so even remote outstations could log in to the room. mIRC also has the added benefit of chat logs, which meant if you disconnected for any reason, you could just ping the server when you came back online, and it would flood your window with what you missed. In less than a day we had users across all of CJTF dropping text updates which everyone could see, and scripts could quickly ingest. The junior officers and NCOs were early adopters and quickly made the pivot.

I started answering the phone with ‘SOJF CHOPS, are you in the mIRC?’. If they answered 'no' I told them to get on it and hung up on them. This did not endear me to a lot of senior officers, but my boss took their angry phone calls and then also calmly told them to get on mIRC. Slowly, as more and more officers across the CJTF begrudgingly came onboard, the JOC got up on plane. The pace didn’t slow down, but we were no longer getting pummeled by the bow wave.

Which was critical because over the next several days as all those disparate forces converged in Northeast Syria we were able to deconflict a lot of close calls and prevent catastrophic fratricide.9 The situation was complex, and the competing political sides came very close to spilling outside the borders of Syria more than once.

After about two weeks, everything slowly settled into a stalemate, and I took the respite to write down my thoughts on our systems. The challenges of the Turkish incursion were probably the most complex I’d ever had to manage, but they were nothing compared to what a future conflict would entail. Looking at the Ukrainian forces fighting the Russian invasion today, I’m genuinely impressed at some of the innovations they’ve undertaken while fighting the most intense combat Europe has seen in a century. The systems and processes we had back in 2019 would not be up to the task today.

Share Downrange Data

mIRC was not the single solution. In fact, I came away from the whole mess convinced there shouldn’t be a single solution. Redundancy was important back then, and will be critical in a future fight where we have to be constantly on the move in a contested EW environment.10 What was key was pushing the right data into the right streams. At SOJTF, we had five principal tools to use: Phones, Emails, Jabber, VTCs suites, and mIRC. Each had it’s strengths and utility, and each had it’s shortcomings.

Phones

The phones, favorite of the senior officers of the task force, had two prime uses: notification and rapport building. The alerts for chats, emails, and other computer noises can all get missed in the cacophony of a JOC at full tilt. But the incessant ringing of a phone is really hard to ignore. A quick phone call was key to letting other people know when something new or time sensitive had gone out.

But phones are horrible for relaying detailed information. If you find yourself on the phone with someone and you’re telling them something they’re going to have to write down, STOP. Send that to them in a data format. It’ll avoid transcription time and errors, accelerate data sharing, and free up their hands and brains to do other things while you type it up.

While not data, rapport does matter. Our systems can get as flat and fast as possible, but at the end of the day, it’s a person on the other end and you need their help. Short of a face-to-face conversation, a check in phone call is still the best way to bolster the feeling of comradery essential to keeping the whole thing running. As things slowed down, I made a lot of conciliatory phone calls to people, apologizing for how abrupt I’d been in the early days.

Email

Email sucks. Don’t believe me? Poll your office for how many unread emails they have across all their accounts. I’ll wait. Every one of those unread messages could be important, or it could be a waste of your time. You won’t know until you open it. It’s a poor way to send large files, and people too easily fall off the ‘to’ or ‘cc’ lines, meaning messages don’t get out. Email distros help some but are a pain to keep up to date.

However, email is the best way to send long text messages. Documents like SITREP rollups would crush the thread in a chat program, with users having to scroll up for days. Email does come with features like ‘the global’, a massive digital phonebook (emailbook?). When you don’t have the contact info for the person you need, email can help. mIRC mitigates this some with good naming rules, but if you’re looking for someone’s contact info, the signature block in their last email is usually the first stop.11

Jabber

Jabber chat was key to the information flow on the JOC floor itself, or at least it became so once we got the contractor to enable file sharing. I have absolutely no idea why file sharing takes extra permission and a contractor. It should absolutely be turned on by default, and as our military transitions to apps like MS Teams it will be. The digital chat meant fewer transcription errors and a quieter JOC, as no one was screaming grids over the rest of the noise. All you needed to do was drop the file / post and give a quick, ‘In the chat’ shout to the floor and everyone had the updates. Jabber also has a much faster file transfer speed than email. The principal issues with Jabber were our domain challenges, and the inability to build our own rooms on the fly. You will not have everything you need built before you need it, so user level adaptability needs to be default.

VTCs

The standing strike-bridges had their utility, though the ones we used were pretty primitive. They help when you need to push out an alert fast, or to synch movements in near real-time. However, we suffered from only having a couple, as ours were mostly tied to VTC suites. And again, we needed contractors to set them up. They also suffered from the hold music bug I mentioned above. For a great example of what works, check out Discord’s voice channels. You can create them on the fly and drop in and out as needed, no extra permissions required. Unlike the Cisco product we use, they don’t require you to dial in a phone number to join a room, and you can create a new one with a few clicks.

mIRC

As I’ve already detailed, mIRC had a lot of advantages. It was the key tool we needed to traverse domain issues. It was fast, easy to install and setup, and needed very little bandwidth. Web interfaces like Chatsurfer added some more tools, like easily setup auto-alerts. File transfer was turned off for some reason but can be easily enabled. However, keeping the data in free text also helped our coalition partners. Raw text was the easiest thing to translate into another language, and LLM tools like ChatGPT have made this incredibly fast and easy. With incredibly complicated classification sharing rules, eliminating the time it takes to translate into another language will be key to any future fight alongside NATO or another coalition of the willing.

In summary:

COP

One last thing I want to highlight we used was our COP tool. It was just a KMZ we used in Google Earth, but we pushed regular updates to it, and it quickly became a staple across the CJTF. Our KMZ quickly outstripped the small file size I had back in Afghanistan though, which meant breaking up the file into network links. If you tried to turn on the whole thing at once, it choked your computer into submission. So, we offloaded a lot of the data we had to those network links.

In a moment of inspiration, to help those with whom we shared our COP, we added a table of contents. Since KMZs are just xml, it was easy to add some text at the front of the file that would pop up when anyone turned it on. We broke every layer out by warfighting functions, and used colors and bold to let them know what was on by default, what could be turned on, and what was available in another location. Whenever you have an extensive dataset, finding a way to provide a table of contents is well worth the effort.

Drop Your Tools

The Turkish incursion was chaos, but we managed to get on top of it by killing old processes. No PowerPoint slides, less phone calls, more digital and more data. If we hadn’t made that jump, I am confident more people would have died. There were multiple moments where the time to respond was vanishingly small, where the information needed had to get to exactly the right person in moments. As forces converged in Syria, a common sight picture across every JOC in the coalition stopped being a perk and became the only thing keeping more people from dying. Not just the SDF and Syrians who were caught in the middle of an invasion. We would have lost coalition members too. Turks, Americans, NATO partners. We didn’t though. We muddled through a tough challenge because we were smart enough to drop our tools and pick up new ones.12 Which is hard to do, but ironically easier to do when death is on the line. It should be easier to change when we aren’t trying to save lives, when we just want to be more efficient.

Solving the challenges of the aftermath of the Turkish incursion into Syria required a lot of work, in particular by the SDF and coalition forces who were left with a reshaped map in Northwest Syria. To help them out my team down in the SOJTF JOC ended up digging out a tool much older than mIRC. One that was invented less than 1,000 miles away from them, but over 2,000 years earlier.