COIN: Is Air Control" the Answer?

Counter insurgency is war wrought upon the terrain of the mind; a contest of wills between antagonist and a competitive bazaar of ideas meant to sway the masses to one side or another. Overwhelming firepower, such as heavy artillery or air strikes, pales in significance to staying power; the ability to convey a sense of permanence to demoralize insurgents and reassure native allies. This effort is best achieved by a combination of skilled irregular troops acculturated in local customs and mores and masses of native troops seeking deescalation. Deployment of air power in a counter insurgency is not only an escalating action that will raise new cadres and draw more players into a conflict, not only a action that abdicates the mantle of legitimacy and incites the masses against a policing action, but most importantly it is an admission of physical cowardice incompatible with the profession of arms.

"Certainly, the best COIN strategy is the integrated synchronization and application of all of the instruments of power, both tactically and strategically..."

That closing sentence pretty much sums up why we, the U.S. military, have had such a nasty time fighting whatever the new buzz-word is (COIN, MOOTW, IW, 'Small Wars', etc...) We can't get past trying to all sound like Ivy League Ph.Ds when discussing an issue that is fairly simple to understand, in a brutally honest fashion. And I'm here to tell you, the vast majority of people in the DoD have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to this topic. I have 'some' idea, but I'm no expert. I do have my own take on this COIN thing, though, and here it is:

There are two ways to win a 'COIN' type conflict. Option A, you do it the Roman way and just brutalize the place into submission and stay there for the next couple of centuries (think Gaul, Britain, Greece or North Africa during the Roman Empire). We have the firepower, but definitely don't have the bloody-mindedness (thank god) or urge to conquer to try that route, not that the rest of the world would sit still for something like that.

Option B, you send two groups of specialized troops to the country in question. Group One concentrates on buying time for Group Two by doing the three Fs. Find, Fix and Finish the insurgent/guerilla/anti-government forces, especially the leadership. Usually involves direct action forces and aircraft, backed up with a heavy dose of HUMINT (old fashioned spys are still the way to go in this kind of warfare). This '3 F' approach (sometimes called 'Whack-a-Mole' by the cynical and/or brutally honest) is a strategy that USSOCOM (and one very special part of SOCOM) is very good at. Group One gets to do some really cool missions and they do keep the enemy occupied trying to get under cover. But you're not going to 'win' chasing High Value Targets for the next 10 years (HVTs, of course, everything has an acronym these days). That's where Group Two comes in.

Group Two concentrates on training and educating the government forces you are trying to preserve, since they are the ones who are going to have to provide security for the population and actually govern when you leave (which you will do, probably sooner than later). Special Forces ODA teams are the prime examples of this, though the CORDS program and the USAF Jungle Jim and Farmgate programs in Vietnam provide good examples as well. Advisory operations at the paramilitary level used to be a specialty of the CIA in the past, but that may or may not change in the future. This may take years, even decades, so a lot of patience and dedication is required for the Group Two guys. Continuity is also a big factor, you can't keep switch people out so they can move to a new assignment in the Pentagon or grab that aide-de-camp job they've been drooling over. Get the right people and let them really learn their job and location over 4 or 6 or maybe even 10 years. Yeah, it'll hurt their careers but I assume winning the fight is still the objective here, not getting people to O-7 or E-9. Group Two falls under the definition 'Foreign Internal Defense' but it may deserve a better description than that.

That's all it takes. Two groups, each knowing what their primary role is. And leadership on both the U.S. and Host Nation side to have the guts to stick with a strategy and not get all panicky at every setback.

So there you have it. No fifty cent words. No contorted technological mumbo-jumbo. Leadership and two dedicated groups working their ass off. The problem, of course, is that just because something is simple doesn't make it easy. This kind of warfare is extremely hard to pull off. The historical record is a mixed bag of successes and failures. As a Group Two guy, I'll do my best to stay in the fight as long as I can.

Pave Low John is a USAF special operations helicopter pilot with more than 2,500 hours in UH-1H/N, MH-53M and Mi-17 aircraft. He is currently a combat aviation advisor with the 6th Special Operations Squadron at Hurlburt Field, Florida. He is neither a graduate of the Weapons School, ACSC, Harvard or any other prestigous sounding institution, although he did attend Jump School at Ft Benning prior to the First Gulf War, when it was still semi-difficult.