War disciplines militaries: it forces them to refine, and sometimes revise, their tactics, techniques and technologies, or risk defeat in battle. Yet there is no theory of how militaries improve in war. This article develops a theory of military adaptation, which it applies to an analysis of the British campaign in Helmand from 2006 to 2009. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources (military plans, post operation reports and interviews), it shows how British brigades adapted different ways of using combat power to try and defeat the Taliban from 2006-07, and how from late 2007, British brigades have adapted a new population-centric approach that has focused more on influence operations and non-kinetic activities.
Read the entire article at Journal of Strategic Studies.
Comments
Gian
As an antipodean I have much respect for the British yet I'm not sure there are too many lessons from the British as to how the war can be won Afghanistan. As I understand in Iraq the US had to bail them out down in Basra when in 2007 they pulled back to the airport.
This article highlights the trap that Western militaries fall into rather than highlighting how they learn to actually adapt.
There is enormous psychological resistance to changing course in military campaigns. This was colourfully illustrated by Norman Dixon, in The Psychology of Military Incompetence.
They appear to be suffering from cognitive dissonance. The anxiety that comes with the possibility of having made a bad decision can lead to rationalization, the tendency to create additional reasons or justifications to support one's choices. The most famous case in the early study of cognitive dissonance was described by Leon Festinger and others in the book When Prophecy Fails. The authors infiltrated a group that was expecting the imminent end of the world on a certain date. When that prediction failed, the movement did not disintegrate, but grew instead, as members vied to prove their orthodoxy by recruiting converts.
And please there are zero lessons from the French and most other European nations on COIN Given they have had timid rules of engagement in Afghanistan then regardless of kinetic or non-kinetic action, no wonder we seem no further down the track.
I am not a former serving military person and dont pretend to be. But I was aghast at how the most insecure areas in the Provinces run by the European battlespace owners was not 10, 20 or 30kms from the FOB but just 2 - 5kms.
We keep forgetting that while we are adapting so is the enemy. Afghans have learnt to adapt to many, many enemies in the past. We are no different.
This article is a good example of the intellectual framework surrounding New British and American Way of Counterinsurgency warfare.
What shines through in the article is that the end state for any army to learn and adapt to--by immutable rule--is population centric counterinsurgency.
Is it possible for an Army to learn and adapt its way out of doing population centric Coin to something else? Or is there really no other way?
By the current set of rules and principles that so bind the American, British, Dutch, French and most other European Armies into a Counterinsurgency straightjacket the answer is a simple, and sad, NO.
Coin tactics now rule strategy.
Ironically Dr Farrell writes praise of the British Army when it actually suffers from the maladies that he so implores. The routine for western Armies nowadays is not, say again not, conventional war but Counterinsurgency itself. Coin has become the routine. Perhaps it is time to write about this problem and not about problems of routine and an inability to explore new possibilities in tactical innovation that perhaps did exist in the American and British Armies in 2003 and 2004.
The problem now is really the opposite of what Dr Farrell writes about.
gian
Adaptability is an inherent characteristic of an army. At stake is the question of strategies guiding the correct approach to apply military forces in achieving political objectives. In the case of British, they excelled in strategies and operational adaptation through the ninteenth and part of 20th centuries - a reason which allowed them to claim that the sun never set on the British Empire.
Somewhere after the end of cold war, the Western Armies have pursued strategies inconsistent with the prevailing environment - a major failure of strategy after which any amount of operational and organisational adaptation would not yield the desired effects. The British were good in ruling the colonial India and managing its many wars because they employed the righ t strategies combined with a great mix of kinetic and non kinetic methods of managing conflicts. What do we see now, both in Iraq and Afghanistan - armies trying to establish the wrong models of democracies in alien and tribal environments!
Small wars can be fought well if the larger picture on the canvas blends with the "terrain". An aspect the NATO forces need to think through and adapt to.