Did CT Kill COIN?: Perspectives on the Special Forces Raids by David Ucko, Kings of War.
James Kitfield, author of the classic text Prodigal Soldiers, has penned an interesting ‘five takeaways’ article about the two US Special Operations raids in Somalia and Libya last week. One of his observations is that the raids vindicate the advocates of CT – or counter-terrorism – in their ‘heated debate’ with the advocates of counterinsurgency. He concludes that ‘the news of the nearly simultaneous U.S. commando raids this past weekend drives home just how decisively advocates for a limited counter-terrorism strategy have won the argument’.
I have no doubts that we are or will soon be leaving this particular ‘counterinsurgency era’, a period defined by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Kitfield is also correct in noting the US administration’s and the public’s aversion to protracted, costly and ambiguous state-building operations. Still, there is something a little troubling about the interpretation of this shift, from COIN to CT, as a ‘winning argument’…
Comments
Gian, John,
If I follow this exchange correctly, Gian doubts that the victor automatically assumes the role of occupying power and rejects the premise that there exists a law that defines what is an occupying power. John disagrees and explains that international law dictates that the victor assumes the role of occupying power as long as he controls the ground.
It appears that legal consensus is on Gian’s side. Legal scholars continue to debate the topic and as of present there is no one law that definitely defines the term “military occupation” or “occupying power.” The relevant body of law addressing occupation is weak when the term occupation, with its entire emotional connotations, is rejected by one party or another. You can say that the concept of occupation is actually juristically inoperative especially since it is disputed in practically all contemporary conflicts, particularly those involving guerrilla and irregular warfare.
John is also correct because the 1907 Hague Regulations, like those of 1899, assume that a military occupation occurs in the context of a war, and consists of direct control of one hostile State’s territory by a rival hostile State’s armed forces. But what if there was never a formal declaration of war? No declaration of war; no war?
A fair rule of thumb, proposed by Adam Roberts is that “every time the armed forces of a country are in control of foreign territory, and find themselves face to face with the inhabitants, some or all of the provisions of the law on occupations are applicable”. In essence, it appears that you are free to pick and choose how much of an occupying power you are.
http://bybil.oxfordjournals.org/ at Columbia University Libraries on January 22, 2013
r/
MAC
John,
An agreement and a clarification. No question, we suffer from poor strategy. More accurately we suffer from a very poor framing of both the nature of the problems we face (or too often create); and we also have a very skewed, biased perspective on the timeless dynamic of insurgency and governmental response to insurgency that is heavily shaped by Western experiences heavily dominated by military action to sustain colonies, contain other nations, and most recently to deny sanctuary/provide bases of operation to chase AQ. This bias poisons our plans and our doctrine. All of the good tactical action in the world is unlikely to produce the effects we intend when it is built upon such a faulty strategic foundation and then framed in such inappropriate ways by our plans and doctrine.
As to chewing gum and walking, I think this is a very important topic. COIN is best viewed, IMO, as a domestic operation. Period. To use a wedding analogy, when we show up in some foreign country to assist a partner with his insurgency it is very much like showing up at a wedding as the Best Man to assist a buddy who is the Groom. Best Man and Groom must work closely together toward the same cause, but both have very unique roles, status and responsibilities. If the Groom is not doing his job well, you can't simply declare that you too are the Groom and assume his duties for him until such time as he proves himself to meet your standards for what an effective Groom should be. Yet we do this in "COIN" by doctrine and practice every day.
To take this analogy a bit farther down the aisle, let’s look at those groomsmen we brought with us. Typically they do not know, like, or much care about the fact that this particular groom is getting married. They are only there because we, the Best Man, either bribed, cajoled, coerced them to be "willing" groomsmen; or as often because they perceive it is in their best interest to stay on the good side of this powerful Best Man. This is very much our coalition in Afghanistan under ISAF.
That is no way to run a wedding. Equally, it is no way to help some place and the people who live in a troubled land truly and effectively deal with an insurgency. Almost always government must change in part, and sometimes in whole, to resolve insurgency. Almost always the actual insurgent is just the tip of an iceberg of popular discontent, support, and sanctuary that resides deep in some segment or segments of the population. What the people want or need is lost, what the host nation government wants or needs is lost, what the coalition partners want or need is lost. It becomes all about us, and we don't know what we are doing or how to achieve what we want. But we make them follow us all the same.
Frankly, it’s embarrassing.
Bob
Bob--
Agree with your analysis of the FID role. Question: who says we (and anybody else for that matter) can't walk and chew gum at the same time?
It seems that you, Gian, and I all agree (and I suspect that David Ucko would as well)that the critical issues are at the strategic and policy levels. If those are well thought out then we have a chance of success; if not, then no matter how good our tactics, we will fail.
John
Have agree with John on this, that he is not saying that one has to stay and occupy, but rather that if one does a resistance insurgency is apt to result. This is the one type of COIN that I believe can fairly be classified as war, as it is simply a continuation of warfare. Two separate systems clash, one defeats the government and the military of the other, and then must in turn defeat the population as well in order to exercise its dominion over them.
But we did not set out to exercise our dominion over either Iraq or Afghanistan or the people their. So in fact, we were never doing "COIN" in either place, though certainly we provoked a resistance insurgency against us by our occupation in both. We may have destroyed any effective host nation governance, yet for all of that, we were still in the FID role in both places due to our status and our intent. We set ourselves on a path of illegitimacy and years of frustration by not appreciating that our actions would spark resistance, and equally by not staying in our lane as the FID actor from the start. The role one defines will in turn define the family of actions one takes. We picked the wrong role and it led to all manner of wrong families of actions. The results speak for themselves.
We also then decided shortsightedly to conduct CT against insurgents. Not just in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Pakistan, Yemen, Mali, Somalia, etc, etc, etc. All this can hope to accomplish is perhaps suppress the current generation of actors, but at the same time drive the conditions of iinsurgency deeper into the fabric of those societies, and also drive the motivation to wage acts of transnational terrorism against the US in deeper as well. We pat our backs for our tactical successes, but whistle past the cemetery regarding our strategic failures.
Gian--
Au contraire, mon ami :). If we - or any other country uses ground forces, then by law we are the occupying power for as long as we stay on the ground. In the case of a raid, no occupation takes place (except in the most technical sense) but as we just proved in the
Somalia raid we had responsibility for civilians caught in the firefight as long as we were there. In the case of Libya, we - NATO - chose not to have boots on the ground so our intervention did not incur the obligations of an occupier. Whether we should have put troops in and incurred those obligations is a question of strategy and policy. I agree with you that strategy should drive the operations we conduct and tactics we use and government policy should drive strategy (don't know if you would go there or not - I think you probably would - but that is how I see it).
It seems to me that the decision to overthrow a sovereign government is a policy decision. Once we made that decision we needed a strategy to carry it out. In Libya we chose, with our allies, to conduct an air campaign and leave the ground fighting to the Libyans. The result, while not all bad, has left us with a very fragile state. In Afghanistan, we assisted a variety of groups in overthrowing the Taliban using air, Special forces, and CIA's Special activities Division. That alone would not have incurred a national occupation obligation but we US/NATO and the UN undertook to build a new government and secure it with military forces on the ground. As a result of those policy and strategic choices we were de facto, an occupier of much of the country. In Iraq, by contrast, we made a policy choice to overthrow Saddam's government, destroy its political and military structures, and govern it initially with the Coalition Provisional Authority. Up to this point, we clearly accepted out international legal obligation as an occupier but we were very ambivalent. As a result, we established an interim government followed by a constitutional convention, elections, and a permanent government but one that could not operate effectively without US/coalition active involvement. That means we were still the occupying power and remained so until essentially 2008 when we signed a SOFA with the government. The SOFA was, to my way of thinking, the end of the occupation and the beginning of a "fully" sovereign Iraq. Were the policy and strategic decisons by the USG wise at any point in this story? Different question.
Thanks for the opportunity to cross computers with you again. :)
John
John:
You said this in your response to David's KOW post:
"When a major power determines that it must overthrow the government of a sovereign country, it immediately becomes the occupying power over any ground that it controls. It remains the occupying power until such time as a new host government can control the territory and enforce limits on any agreed upon residual foreign forces. If resistance develops during an occupation - rather likely - then the occupier must fight a counterinsurgency (COIN)."
It seems to me that what you have done in this formulation is to create a strategic rule--or dare i say principle--that says ANYTIME the US overthrows a foreign government by military force then by rule WE MUST stay and occupy and "fight a counterinsurgency."
But i ask why must we do that as a matter of rule? Should not strategy decide first whether or not we do or dont instead of relying on a rule that says we must? If not then we are doomed to doing more and more of these in the years ahead even when strategy would suggest otherwise. For example, let's say we did use military force to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, does that we mean we must then go in and occupy using ground forces and do coin? Your apparent strategic rule suggests that we would.
I would also suggest that such a strategic rule comes out of a hyper focus on the tactics and methods of coin, or in others words that tacticization of strategy. To be sure strategy looks to tactics to achieve policy aims, but it should not be ruled by it.
thanks
gian
I find myself in violent agreement with David Ucko on almost all points. My slight disagreement is on the issue of the degree to which Afghanistan and Iraq are anomalous. When a major power determines that it must overthrow the government of a sovereign country, it immediately becomes the occupying power over any ground that it controls. It remains the occupying power until such time as a new host government can control the territory and enforce limits on any agreed upon residual foreign forces. If resistance develops during an occupation - rather likely - then the occupier must fight a counterinsurgency (COIN). That COIN will be some kind of combination of enemy centric and population centric strategy, operations, and tactics. In Libya, NATO avoided being an occupier by essentially putting no troops on the ground. It worked but the outcome was clearly less than optimal. Although the UN and NATO accepted the obligations of occupation in Afghanistan, it was half hearted and we all tried to transfer sovereignty before Afghan government was capable of fully accepting it. Last point is that direct action is only one of many SOF missions and while other SOF units are capable of performing it, DA is the forte (in the US at least) of the two tier 1 Special Mission Units (DEVGRU and Delta).