Brother, Can You Paradigm?

"Does this matter, or at least should Ollivant acknowledge to his readers this flip and that at one point he played a significant role in the creation of it all?"

Gian, in my effort to win over the hearts and minds of retired military officers, Beltway reporters and DC pundits, I've been running a sort of Chieu Hoi summer program.

Ollivant, Tony Cordesman, Andrew Exum and others are proud graduates of the Carl Prine School of Callwellian Cosmetology, a makeover program that all the handsome chaps are endorsing.

While that's a fair question, I don't have an answer, Gian. And I read a piece by the very fine Attackerman from 2009 that quoted Ollivant and seems to be at odds with his thoughts.

Sometimes it takes months or years to reconcile memories and distill meaning out of chaotic events. I can't speak to whether he was a source of some of these authors or not; all I can do is take the text I have before me and appraise it as an artifact of 2011.

I put Exum on the couch the other day during a review and I think the session came out very well for him. But I've been reading Andrew for years and because of his military duties Ollivant's work has been spare.

I don't think any of that should diminish his latest essay, which stands on its own.

Gian,

In a nutshell I believe that you see insurgency as war, and COIN as a form of warfare the military conducts to defeat the insurgent, end the insurgency and reestablish stability around the existing government. This is a quick sketch of what I have distilled from your comments on the topic.

You advocate throwing the baby out with the bath, as indicated in your comments on Galula and Thompson. There are indeed keys to success in such works, but first one must distil those keys from the intervening, colonial/containment, military-centric perspectives they are currently jelled within.

I see the two most successful COIN operations conducted by the US as also being within the US. Neither were military operations. The first being the decision to hold a Constitutional Convention that summer of 1787, and the debates that took place in the formation of the document and government that ulitmately emerged. The second was the leadership of LBJ in recognizing the legitimacy and importance of the grievances of our African-American populace and seeking not to enforce the rule of law, but rather to infuse JUSTICE and RESPECT into the law in his strong advocacy for the three landmark civili rights bills that defined his presidency far more accurately than his handling of a mess created by Truman, Ike and Kennedy in Vietnam in an effort to contain China and a Communist ideology employed to extend their influence.

Insurgency is often violent, but it is rarely war, and to wage warfare against one's own populace is the act of despots and tyrants more often than not. What our current doctrine calls COIN is not COIN at all, but interventions for our own interests to support the COIN efforts of governments elsewhere that we seek to preserve in power over the complaints of their own populaces. It is time for us to step back and form a fresh perspective on such interventions, as "friendly dictators" are not the effective tool they used to be prior to the empowering effects of the modern information age.

So yes, I find much to agree with in your criticisms of the COINdinista crowd, and the horrible damage we have done to our national security over the past 10 years. I cannot, however, embrace the equally flawed perspective that I perceive you to hold regarding insurgency. I realize you may be right and I may be wrong, and I am ok with that. If the COINdinista phase helps us to get to the next level, then they served a worthy purpose. If we fall back to the old thinking on this topic, then we are in for even bigger problems as empowered populaces continue to rally to challenge our arrogance and turn to the support of organizations such as AQ to find the liberty they seek.

Bob

Bob T.

Neither more COIN at the hamlet or more killing would have overcome the political aspect that everyone seems to overlook: The West created the fiction of a "North" and "South" Vietnamese states, and then acted to compress the Vietnamese government into the Northern State, while creating a pro-Western government to reign over the South. We never could overcome that original political fiction.

We struggle with a very similar political fiction in Afghanistan, where we helped drive the Taliban government into exile in Pakistan, and elevatd a Norhtern Alliance government into power. We doubled down on that bit of manipulation when we then enabled a constitution that made a Karzai-Led Northern Alliance monopoly on political and economic opportunity the "rule of law," and dedicated a growing Western occupation to help preserve that government over the reasonable revolutionary challenges of the Taliban leadership, and a growing resistance to our efforts among the Afghan people.

Insurgency is indeed politics. Illegal politics practiced by people who are allowed no legal, certain and trusted means of political challenge by the very governments they oppose.

Military leaders can quibble over rather its better to kill the segment of the populace who dares to fight, or to bring development to the villages those fighters hail from and are supported by; but the political drivers of the conflict are invariably within the government being challenged; and in the relationship of that government with the government that intervenes to protect it.

Studying the details of Iraq is fascinating, but offers little clear insights into the nature of insurgency or best COIN practices due to the witche's brew of long suppressed internal conflicts, grudges and competitions between and within groups that Carl describes; the presence of AQ and the foreign fighters from across the Middle East conducting UW among the Sunni and independent guerrilla warfare as well; and of course the general resistance to our very presence and revolution against the government we helped elevate and form.

Military leaders avoid politics, and in so doing always foucs on symptoms rather than problems. The leaders of intervening nations focus on their own political needs first, and as those are exercised through the political thorn of some puppet regime they have either adopted or established for the purpose of supporting those foreign interests, they too avoid the real problem.

For me, the irony of Gian being credited for exposing the flaws of Pop-Centric COIN is that the version of warfare COIN that Gian sells is every bit as flawed... (but he is spot on as to what our military needs to be trained, orgainized and equipped for to best support the interests of these United States).

I would hasten to add, Olivants comments on Afghanistan are cause for real concern. In that sense, the pursuit of COIN tactics may well be having great effect on the insurgency- just as the Viet Cong were by enlarge almost ineffective by 1972.

Like in Vietnam, if we can't find the lasting political component though, it does not bode well.

What Olivant correctly asserts is funnily enough what Petraeus himself acknowledges. Asked in B.B.C defence correspondent Mark Urban's book on JSOC in Iraq "Task Force Black," how important JSOC raids were in reducing violence, Petraeus cites a number of political a military components and no singular factor. So not "the surge" or COIN tactics.

The strength of the success in Iraq was based on the understanding of a POLITICAL problem. That same strength was what was so lacking in Vietnam. We can defend Westmoreland all we want on that one- he sure beat the living daylights out of the communists. But that's not the point: he could not, or was unwilling to grasp the wider complexity of the war effort there. His own military solutions, even though they were in many ways sound given the dilemma at hand, could not solve such a complex problem.

In Vietnam, perhaps there could have been more COIN at the hamlet level...maybe there could have been a greater focus on building up the ARVN from day one. Or maybe just more enemy centric, hardcore violence, more bombing etc...

The point is, all of that was done. In the end, military action, both conventional AND COIN, proved highly effective.1000,000 dead communists are proof of that. It was the POLITICAL component, both in the USA and in South Vietnam, that proved the final flaw when the Americans had gone...

I really do love this quote from Carl's commentary:

"A gaggle of strategists I hang around like to joke that "Everyone is Gian Gentile now." Thats their way of saying that the military and academia slowly have come to agree with that gadflys call to restore the primacy of politics to warmaking and to reject the notion that a suite of tactics cribbed from the years of Maoist revolt can substitute for sound strategy - the ends, ways and means used to achieve realistic, cost-effective foreign policy goals."