When David Kilcullen is at his best, he is unexcelled at discussing how to wage a counterinsurgency campaign. And I think the Australian infantry officer turned political anthropologist/COIN guru is at his best when he gathers field observations, boils them down to distilled principles, and then describes those rules in a clear, practical manner.
So I want to take some time to go through a paper he wrote recently in Afghanistan. (I didn't get it from him, by the way.) While it ostensibly is about metrics in COIN campaigning, it amounts to a thorough discussion of what works in such warfare, what doesn't, and -- especially -- how to tell the difference. It is written about the current campaign in Afghanistan, but clearly has broader applications. ...
After some initial throat-clearing (one of my rules when I was an editor was to see if I could cut the first three pages of any long article), Kilcullen's first major section is about metrics to be avoided...
Continue on for "what not to measure in a COIN Campaign" at Best Defense.
Comments
The problem with metrics in Coin is that they tend to reflect our own set of tactical methods and procedures. So with the batch of Kilcullen's as reported by Ricks we see measurements of security, or of economic prosperity, etc, etc. Yet these two things among others are inherent to our current system of Coin. So what do we really end up measuring with these metrics, what we want to believe our own system is accomplishing or instead what is critical on the ground?
I go back to Ken White's earlier post which was a cold-shower call warning folks about the limits of metrics in these kinds of wars. Should commanders come up with them, of course? But once done we should not turn metrics into a measurement of progress for domestic consumption in these kinds of wars. That after all, was the basic problem with HES in Vietnam.
Carl,
I'd include a proper understanding of the nature of war AND human nature.
At a minimum, these questions Dr. K is proposing are much better than the one's we asked in 2005:
1. How many raids did you conduct today?
2. How many Traffic Control Points did you conduct?
3. How many patrols did you conduct?
I think that we should strive for the proper balance of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Yes, in our western world, we like data. However, Iraq and A'stan are much more about storytelling and the narrative. So, if you can combine proper questions and interviews, then you can begin to attempt to frame some concept of the truth.
Still, some things will be difficult to determine.
"So, President Karzai, how many of your family members are currupt and receiving bribes from the government and their districts?"
v/r
Mike
I'm not a statistical Luddite, Gian. I assume that numbers can show us things. No one would suggest that someone who bats .003 is as effective in the clean up role as the slugger who puts out a Herculean .368.
The problem is that I think we're seeing the stats applied to baseball used to describe football. The game has changed and continues to change. The metrics that might have worked once -- had they been properly vetted and found to have some utility on the COIN battlefield -- probably aren't quite measuring up now.
Schmedlap and MikeF are right: We must understand the nature of the war and what we hope to accomplish before we can create cookie-cutter measurements that will chart progress or failure across the conflict spectrum.
I guess I'm not ready to assume that we can't arrive at some measurements. In Anbar in 2005-06, I realized that a key endogenous input for the various Sunni Arab insurgencies came from illicit fuel sales. It seemed quite possible to me that a commander of the AO could institute patrols and policies that would crack down on the sales and scrutinize those doing the selling in order to choke the snake.
It doesn't mean that the snake wouldn't have to move on to other food, only that this one input could be quickly attacked. It also came close to addressing a causative force of the rebellion: Criminality in the form of armed fuel dealers who monopolized the trade helped to not only sustain the rebellion but also deny traditional leaders (not necessarily the Baghdad government) the ability to reseize their local legitimacy and help pacify the place.
During a crackdown on illicit fuel sales, it's quite easy to chart the rising price of the petrol, cooking gas, et al, to see if you're taking a bite out of crime. It doesn't mean that you eliminate it, only that you mitigate the effects of the criminality while transitioning to a program that would put these sales into the hands of the more legitimate, more likely to be responsive and, to our policies, coerced leaders.
Sending out patrols that would check on the price of the gas, recording the numbers and names and whatnot of those detained making the sales and tracking the effects of the embargo on the enemy might show some "success" toward completing a mission.
Carl Prine asked, "Can we now move on to seriously consider metrics for today's commanders?"
Here's something to consider for those wishing to quantify warfare. Where is your data coming from? How accurate is it?
Look at the issues we have in the US with conducting a census or voting. One mistake that I observed in Diyala Province in 2006 was that a majority of the measures of SIGACTs and metrics were collected by the Shia-backed gov't during a time of a burgeoning civil war. Needless to say, there was not many indicators of Shia on Sunni violence in the daily reports. I literally spent six to eight hours of my day some days trying to confirm or deny the data sets into accurate reporting.
Given that US forces operating in Iraq and A'stan represent such a small percentage of the overall populace, I think it is almost impossible to assume that data can be collected, correlated, and analyzed on the macro-level. Furthermore, bad metrics skew decision making.
Should we strive to have accurate accountability and measurement. Of course. In the sterile environment of a FOB, a DC think tank, or academic classroom, this makes sense.
Is it possible? I'm not so certain that it is.
v/r
Mike Few
Forget about it Carl, they are lost causes. Both of Ricks's recent books are premised on the Counter Mao Coin method. So too is Kilcullen's.
And it is not just a simple problem of jettisoning a method of Coin that was developed for a previous age. No, the bigger issue is that the counter-Maoist method developed by the likes of Galula, Thompson, and many others was itself deeply flawed. As Peter Paret showed a generation ago in his brilliant but mostly overlooked classic analysis on French Counter-Revolutionary Officers what they and others did was to reduce Mao to a simple sequential check list to counter. Moreover, recent scholarship on Vietnam shows that it wasnt the Maoist revolutionary people's war that transformed the south but instead the hard hand of the process of war through death, destruction, and forced resettlement that did it.
Mao as a text is still relevant but much of the literature, doctrines, and mentalities etc that were constructed to counter it are for the most part irrelevant for todays operational and strategic problems.
What then does this tell you about Tom Ricks's discussion of re-hashed counter-maoist methods?
Metrics are not in a list somewhere on a server or in somebody's notebook - even if that notebook belongs to Kilkullen. Metrics - or measures of effectiveness - measure how well what you are doing is working and they MUST be developed on the basis of what you are doing. You can't find a list of metrics and then fit your operations to the metrics. Any commander looking elsewhere for metrics should probably be relieved because he is, <em>by definition</em>, incompetent.
Did I not call it?
http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/02/09/kilcullen_iii_how_to_ta…
Rehashed and probably unimportant if the counter-insurgent is facing a post-Maoist problem.
Can we now move on to seriously consider metrics for today's commanders?
Perhaps SWJ might further this pursuit, Ken, by getting on a bandwagon that's been hurtling down the road from CTC since 2008: Revise FM 3-24.
There has been a movement, now growing, to reconcile the manual (and thus doctrine) to what our combat commanders have learned in the field. There's also an intellectual jihad to cull some learning from Mackinlay's "Insurgent Archipelago" and related thoughts on post-Maoism from Steve Metz, et al, into discussion about our "best practices."
Obviously, a section on "metrics" inside the FM would force us to intellectually come to terms with what we wish to measure and how we would tie our operations to what we chart.
In 1962, RAND convened the world's top counter-insurgent experts, including Kitson and Galula and Valeriano, to Santa Monica to hash out best practices on the eve of US escalation in Vietnam.
They talked about "metrics" and, I would argue, those sorts of measurements might have helped us guide operations because those counter-insurgent gurus were interested in Maoist and similar revolutions.
But I suspect that much of what our battlefield commanders see today is post-Maoist in the manner Metz and Mackinlay and other people who don't have last names that begin with "M" have argued.
Revising FM 3-24 would require us to confront that, but if Leavenworth doesn't want to tweak it then SWJ might be the proper forum. Let's have that Santa Monica conference again. Let's do it online if need be and let's talk honestly abou the wars we see out there and the yardsticks we need to develop to understand whether we're good at this sort of fighting or not.
I still do not understand why we insist on calling resistance against the governments of two democratic revolutions "insurgencies." The Awakening was AGAINST al Qaeda in Iraq, not FOR the Iraqi government. There are areas in Afghanistan where locals reject the Taliban AND the Karzai government. Foreigners surrounding a village and helping locals rebuild wheelbarrows fosters a temporary working relationship, not acceptance of a new national government.
The revolutionary aspects of these two wars are completely overlooked. We are admittedly terrible at information operations and still have yet to stand up any significant political indoctrination programs. The Taliban will settle land disputes and administer "justice" through sharia courts. ISAF will repair irrigation and tell opium farmers to plant wheat. Is modernization necessary for pacification?
"Body count" is the only one of Kilcullen's recommendations that really bothered me. If this is being used anywhere it is an indication of our inability to institutionalize lessons learned. This is mentioned as a criticism in almost every post-Vietnam paper and is just shy of advising against a strategy of attrition against insurgents.
<b>Carl:</b>
I do not disagree with anything you say and I strongly agree that for SWJ to take a collective look for viable metrics in today's conflict is worthwhile. Not because I believe in the 'metric as warfighting aid' issue but because the current US Army / Government milieu cannot seem to live without them. Harvard MBAs have much to answer for. GWB is the only one of those guys to my knowledge who wisely never got wrapped around that axle. Anyway, if we just have to waste effort on them, might as well make them as worthwhile as possible. Plus, I could always be wrong...
However, one thing you said is key to any success in that look:<blockquote>"But what if the nature of the war is different? ..."</blockquote>Therein lies a part of the problem with metrics and combat. Every war <U>is</u> different, very much so, yet humans will try against all logic to create a standard, transportable set of rules, guidelines -- and metrics. As you noted:<blockquote>"Those fat binders...were there because commanders failed to understand the nature of the war and so collected all the info that they could and asked everyone to just figure it out."</blockquote>True dat. I suspect that could and will happen again. In fact, without being in either recent large theater, I'll bet it's already happened a number of times...
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<b>Schmedlap</b> has it right in large measure:<blockquote>Measures of effectiveness are supposed to measure whether and to what extent certain actions are having the desired effect. They are not supposed to measure whether a particular symptom of something undesirable is subsiding."</blockquote>Heh. That sort of amounts to proving negatives...
If he's correct and I suspect he is at least in part, the issues thus become 'what actions' and 'what effect one is trying to achieve' (both must logically relate, a frequently overlooked area for disconnects).
I submit that in combat, even in a mode as sedentary and low pressure as a COIN / FID / SFA operation, that or those effect(s) become the proverbial moving target and given our tour rotation process, you're shooting from many different positions with varied weapons (some perhaps inappropriate for task...) at that moving target. i.e you might get a random hit but it's fate, not skill.
Schmedlap,
I hope you're right. Unfortunately, from what I've seen, listened to, and read from the new LT's, I think they've started using Pop-Centric PSYOPS indoctrination during Mounatin Phase of Ranger School. While the Ranger candidates are sleep-deprived, they're forced to listen to John Lennon's "Imagine" over and over again.
We might as well move West Point to Santa Cruz.
Mike
In order to correctly discuss current COIN FM metrics maybe we need a thorough discussion on the topic of "open source warfare" that in fact challenges the FM and current COIN thinking.
Especially since a recently released study of "The Ecology of Human Warfare" in Nature magazine draws attention to just maybe how wrong the initial COIN has been. It actually proved the theory of "open source warfare" and it was peer reviewed and challenged which I believe has not been the case for COIN/and the COIN FMs. There have been constant discussions about COIN and the two COIN FMs BUT has it been taken literally apart and peer reviewed?
Currently there must be thousands of individual comments of for and against but has it been challenged by quantitative analysis?
If it has then one would have a set of metrics to look at and further challenge. But since it has not been quantitatively analyzed then the metrics are missing and all we have is chatter about metrics.
"Open source warfare" has now been quantitately analyzed and found to be accurate MAYBE it is time to seriously consider looking at the concept.
The problem with metrics is not whether we are choosing the right ones. The problem is that people do not know how to use them.
Measures of effectiveness are supposed to measure whether and to what extent certain actions are having the desired effect. They are not supposed to measure whether a particular symptom of something undesirable is subsiding.
Ricks typed, <em>"I think the Australian infantry officer turned political anthropologist/COIN guru is at his best when he gathers field observations, boils them down to distilled principles, and then describes those rules in a clear, practical manner."</em> No, he's not at his best when he does that. He is at his absolute worst. Gathering up anecdotes and deriving principles from them is more often misleading and oversimplified than not.
Ken, I'm not willing to concede that some metrics failed to be important to COIN commanders during the years of Maoist or other sorts of revolts against colonialism, Ken.
If we agree that all COIN is local, then I'm willing to be persuaded that in Galula's relatively quiet sector in Algeria a key measurement of pacification was people volunteering information to the colonial occupier.
But I'm not willing to agree that this was so in all conflicts, nor that it might be an important measurement today in ALL of our post-Maoist AOs. I guess I would rather say "it depends."
I also worry that perhaps sometimes the metrics we think are successfully recording "success" in an area actually are measuring a different phenomenon. Perhaps what they're measuring isn't the mitigation or destruction of the causative forces that created and sustained the rebellion but rather occupation itself.
The other problem is my concern that certain metrics might be at cross-purposes to themselves. Let's say that Kilcullen is right and that he notices attitudinal improvements in a local population after we bring in economic development dollars. Indeed, they start giving the COIN commander more intel about bad guys laying in IEDs.
But what if the local economic development also does other things, such as hardening the anti-occupation ideations of key segments of the population? What if the increased amounts of aid end up providing the population with more income, which is then skimmed off the top by Taliban tax collectors to become cash inputs that feed the rebellion? If not in that AO, then perhaps in the one next door because even the Taliban don't like to kill a cash cow when she's putting out so much milk?
This is a problem I've had with some of Kilcullen's wisdom about metrics in OEF. OK, we have reports that the NGO to whom we've lavished dollars has hired X number of MAMs, spent X number of dollars and the people are X times more likely to love us and give us info. A key success, the Army would say, is that these NGO programs also have been X percent less likely to be vandalized or raided by the Taliban.
But let's look at it another way. Could not the lack of attacks on the project signal that the Taliban have been paid off to NOT attack it? Might vandalizing a new factory, school or collective of farmers be a sign of success for the counter-insurgent because it implies the taxman wasn't given his tip?
What if we were to structure our aid programs so that we only provided money or help to a village that had been pacified, thereby bribing them to stay on our side rather than bolt to the enemy?
What it all really boils down to is understanding the nature of the war. What if the Galula-esque measurements are good at charting progress toward "administrative control?"
That's great if we assume that bringing the Karzai administration to certain sections of Afghanistan will mitigate or end some of the causative forces that created the conflict.
But what if the nature of the war is different? What if what is really the nature of the conflict today involves a retributive civil war between non-Islamist Pasthun peoples and those formerly in the Northern Alliance and other ethnic groups bought or otherwise wooed to the side of these ethnic militias?
What if a possible cause of the violence is the very extension of the Karzai government (or any government) to these enclaves?
If so, then pacification doesn't come from establishing governmental control but, perhaps, negotiating a deal wherein not much centralized state control enters that valley, so long as al Qaeda doesn't arrive, too.
How do we measure that?
I was hoping that SWJ might take up those topics and not blurb the silliness about metrics blandished above.
Gian, I don't think HES accurately measured the reach of government in Vietnam. Bing West, among others, lampooned the statistics compiled then for this very reason.
But I'm NOT persuaded that in a counter-Maoist war it's unimportant for the COIN commander to chart the attitudes and effective reach of the host government. In other words, perhaps HES was the right sort of knowledge to have learned, but unfortunately wasn't a very good program for arriving at that knowledge due to local commander's bias, the pressure to put out the rosiest sitreps or yada yada yada.
Vietnam was such a stat-intensive war not simply because of the fad of systems analysis or that we had so many programs beating the bushes to find stats. We had so many programs beating the bushes to find stats because we really didn't understand the nature of the war, the enemies we were fighting or our own role within the populations in which we lived.
Those fat binders Ken faced were there because commanders failed to understand the nature of the war and so collected all the info that they could and asked everyone to just figure it out.
Recently, the MG in charge of intel in OEF came up with the same sort of intellectual shrug that his peers in Vietnam made: We have billions and billions and billions of bytes of data that we've collected. So far, we haven't cracked the code on the nature of the war or a good means to defeat the insurgency. The grail is hidden in all this data!
Maybe not.
<b>Carl Prine:</b>
That sequence was inadvertent but sort of serendipitous. Justin is doing what our current processes tells him he should do. Good for him. Those 'metrics' will give the US Embassy some decent information even if the rapidity of change makes that data appear questionable from time to time. As for giving his commander (or <i>his</i> Commander) any really useful information, I'm dubious.
If one measures the effort to obtain said metrics against the benefit to that Bn or the Bde, I'm beyond dubious...
A response to that is "...perhaps, but higher Hq need such information." Uh, not really, I've seen it produced by the binder full. It gets plopped into briefings because the briefers have to have <i>something.</i> Good rarely flow from it...
Having participated in the statistical folly Gian aptly cites (and quite a few others over the years), I've seen little good and some harm come from such figures. That harm, frequently, revolves around massive effort to capture 'data,' often of little real value and much of which can literally change by the minute and thus give a false picture leading to ill informed decisions. You say:<blockquote>The military mind doesn't often care so much about scrutinizing the highly localized aspects of COIN but, probably rightly, finding a means to check off lists that would eventually conspire to give them a statistical picture of their battlespace.</blockquote>I think that's a bad misnomer. That predisposition for lists is not from military minds, it is in fact from managerial minds and anyone who truly believes soldiering or warfighting is "management of violence" is in the wrong trade. Warfighting is the practical and targeted application of violence, a thing which is not 'managed' at all.
You further accurately state:<blockquote>" Since 2003, the various branches of our military have struggled to find means of measuring progress in OEF and, later, OIF.
What often intrudes, of course, isn't merely the inconvenient fact that much of the traditional COIN metrics ginned up during Maoist wars of revolution simply haven't worked when we've sought to understand contemporary conflicts."</blockquote>Yes to the first and that's merely one symptom of my assertion that there will be no effective metrics for the conduct of combat operations (combat, not military. That, too is a difference, the two are not synonymous).
The second quoted item implies that the COIN Metrics during Maoist wars were effective. They were not. Their failure in fact is the genesis of my comment above; "the reliance on 'metrics' is as -- or more -- likely to create confusion as to provide any clarity. That not least because those who demand 'metrics' are those most likely to misunderstand their meaning."
I'd add to that the fact that the pursuit of 'metrics' often subsumes or overtakes the real mission in magnitude of effort.
As you also say:<blockquote>"The point of metrics remains to see how well we've come toward mitigating or solving the causative forces that produce the insurgency in the first place."</blockquote>Perhaps you're correct but two thoughts occur. I think that entails being totally sure you <u>really</u> know what those causative forces were (and I submit that little item will skew your 'metrics' as it will vary from group to group and day to day...). I'll also mention that the 'causative forces' may be a pure ethnically or religiously based power struggle which an intervenor is highly unlikely to be able to mitigate in any meaningful way.
The second is that such mitigation has to apply to the affected population, not to one's own ideas of what one would want if one were a member of that population when one is not. Convoluted and ungrammatical but very pertinent today, as it was in Iraq and as it was in Viet Nam -- and, believe me, it really was off base there...
As <b>Gian</b> says:
"So we have the worst of all possible worlds. A current bevy of metrics constructed in a bygone age that were half-baked even at the time they were used."
But Carl, it gets even worse than that which is why Ken's post I think is quite perceptive. Even during the age of Counter-Maoist Coin we couldnt get metrics right. If anybody out there thinks that the Hamlet Evaluation System created by American experts for the Vietnam War accurately assessed and portrayed what was actually occurring in the rural areas then they are not keeping up with current scholarship.
So now we have the Current Coin crowd led by analysts like Ricks who regurgitate the metrics created by Galula, Thompson, and American experts in Vietnam and these current folks assume that the metrics worked then; they didnt. So we have the worst of all possible worlds. A current bevy of metrics constructed in a bygone age that were half-baked even at the time they were used.
Like Ken was getting at an assumption underlying metrics is the idea that the system one is measuring functions according to rules that can be measured. But what if the system itself being measured is broken?
I'm struck, Ken, by your missive posted after that of Justin's.
Let's assume that he's a young officer minted for the S-2. He's searching for a workable means of measuring battlefield progress when confronting the complex human topography of Afghanistan.
The military mind doesn't often care so much about scrutinizing the highly localized aspects of COIN but, probably rightly, finding a means to check off lists that would eventually conspire to give them a statistical picture of their battlespace.
In the latest effort by Ricks, there's really nothing new here. Since 2003, the various branches of our military have struggled to find means of measuring progress in OEF and, later, OIF.
What often intrudes, of course, isn't merely the inconvenient fact that much of the traditional COIN metrics ginned up during Maoist wars of revolution simply haven't worked when we've sought to understand contemporary conflicts. Instead, it's the more prosaic problem of properly resourcing one's information gathering; ensuring that the info being collected actually seems to chart progress or retreat; and articulating a means of using force or suasion in concert with the numbers briefed in the TOC to achieve the policy goals articulated by your chain of command.
Based on Ricks' output so far on this topic, I'm not getting a warm and fuzzy that Kilcullen has split the atom. Indeed, to stretch the metaphor to the breaking point, I'm not convinced that he can even describe what an atom looks like, only what they thinks the structure should approximate if everything is going swimmingly and we had all the time in the world to build the galaxy's biggest microscope.
Let me make a prediction. When Kilcullen finally publishes this essay, we'll likely get a rehash of Bernard Fall's perspective on measuring "administrative control." Just like Fall, Kilcullen seems to be keying on levels of "securing" the population (assassination attempts on government personnel, attacks on government or NGO projects, rates of enemy taxation), mixing in notions culled from Malaya such as increasing the people's prosperity and risking their skins providing intel to occupiers' patrols.
He seems to omit great lessons learned elsewhere, such as Napoleon Valeriano and Charles Bohannan's insight into scrutinizing government competence and capacity, the legitimacy of leaders following an election and other, perhaps inconvenient in Afghanistan, yardsticks to consider. Or, at least, Ricks hasn't highlighted this yet.
I feel like the key metric really is how many times I beat a dead horse: The point of metrics remains to see how well we've come toward mitigating or solving the causative forces that produce the insurgency in the first place.
What are our political goals? How might strategy link tactics to our desired outcomes? What is causing the revolution and what might fix it? How do we measure the waning or waxing of these forces?
I fear Kilcullen is falling back on Galula's statements to the RAND gathering in 1962, and all his descriptions seem to echo the paradigm.
But what if we're in a post-Maoist phase of revolutionary warfare? What if the model needs to be tweaked? Why aren't those Galula-esque metrics working in OEF now?
Based on these traditional metrics, one would think that the war was won in 2004 and the existence of the Taliban's shadow governments in so many provinces is a statistical outlier.
Heh. Robert McNamara has a lot to answer for.
'Metrics for Warfare.' That's a myth he largely inculcated over seven years. So-called COIN also badly mutated in that time...
Carl Prine is right, It did get worse.
Not least because those western constructs have only tenuous application to most Afghans -- whose country it is...
However, Ricks last paragraph really sums it up quite well:<blockquote>"...Can you imagine being a new battalion commander in the area trying to keep up with this stuff? Tribes, women, feuds, land disputes, religion -- it is just too hillbilly for me..."</blockquote>Though I suggest that the proposed 'metrics' are not at all "hillbilly" (and I are one...). No self respecting hillbilly would waste his or her time trying to apply 'metrics' to any volatile human endeavor involving multiple parties and goals particularly if combat were involved.
The hillbilly would simply apply subjective judgment to the situation and arrive at a decision on what to do next until such time as the endeavor was proceeding acceptably or completed satisfactorily.
There is a place for metrics in war. They apply in the fields of technology, engineering, logistics -- even in the application of certain aspects of combat power, specifically Artillery and allied support processes. None of those facets can operate properly without at least some metrics.
For ground combat operations involving human combatants and possibly innocent civilians the reliance on 'metrics' is as -- or more -- likely to create confusion as to provide any clarity. That not least because those who demand 'metrics' are those most likely to misunderstand their meaning.
Warfare is too volatile and people and their actions and reactions too unpredictable to provide scientific clarity and the pursuit of such clarity is a chimera. Reliance upon metrics in warfare leads to flawed decisions and that is shown by the simple fact that this discussion is occurring -- there is no question that logistically, tonnage required is valid; in engineering, the strength of material is an important knowledge -- but in the realm of combat success or 'COIN' success, no one can decide what aspect of that constantly moving train is important.
Success in war is like pornography. Lacking total annihilation and destruction of the opponent (the exceptional but today unacceptable metric that proves the rule), we know it when we see it.
It got worse:
http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/02/09/kilcullen_ii_how_to_tel…
OK, SWJ. The ball is now in your court.
Take it one more step, Gian.
If we're being honest, then we're conceding that those traditional metrics developed by Galula and sanctified during the great 1962 COIN conference at RAND in Santa Monica haven't been proven to work in OEF.
There might be many reasons for that, including the possibility that we face post-Maoist insurgencies that require new ways of articulating force to achieve results, much less measure this in any meaningful way.
Rather than be the dogged critic, however, I simply would ask that SWJ use its uniquely fertile open format to convene an online conference about alternatives to not only waging war but finding new yardsticks to chart progress or failure.
Scanning the list of the authors to the right, I don't see any names that jump out as geniuses of complex statistical models. Bing West's work in Vietnam perhaps comes close, and COL Maxwell's mind might prove the sort of brain necessary to arriving at a working system of metrics.
Kilcullen co-authored the "Triage" study at Nagl's CNAS that included a chapter on "metrics" that was almost a punchline, not a serious survey of the issue, so I'm not exactly breathless for his added insight into the problem.
Regardless, it's time to start asking tough questions about why assumptions about COIN didn't work in OIF or OEF. What didn't we know? What still escapes us? What novel ways might be develop to better measure the success of our oplans?
Ricks' striptease that pulls away one Kilcullen fan to reveal another one from Galula isn't satisfying to anyone. If he and Kilcullen can't seriously confect some workable system, then let's ask SWJ's peeps to do so.
Agree with Carl and Wilf.
Is this the best that Tom Ricks can do with Coin metrics, just regurgitate some pithy catechisms from Kilcullen that were actually developed in Tizi Ozou a generation ago? This thinking has become quite stale. It is time to move on and take the debate and discussion to a different level.
Come on. The stock mantra that Ricks highlights that the more civilians killed the more insurgents made and therefore the less pacified the area is fanciful theory. Is it such as Ricks so bombastically states "nuff said"? Perhaps not!
In fact it is hard to know what effect is produced by the killing of civilians in war. During World War II American Airmen believed that the bombing of industrial centers and the killing of civilians (although at the time American's referred to them as industrial "workers" to be "de-housed") would weaken morale. But studies after the war based on interviews of German civilians showed that bombing in some albeit complicated and qualified cases actually stiffened German morale to resist.
In Vietnam the myth created by some analysts is that Abrams's so called radically different "One War" approach pacified the Vietnamese countryside from 69-72 through a hearts and minds counterinsurgency campaign modeled on David Galula in Tizi Ozou with population security as one of its core pillars. Nope, not true, and not supported by current scholarship based on Vietnamese sources. To be sure there was a significant level of "pacification" that occurred between in 69 and 72 in the rural areas. But that was because many rural areas once under VC control were de-populated by the destruction of war and the forced resettlement of hundreds of thousands of civilians. In a sense superior American and South Vietnamese firepower "pacified" the rural countryside by "draining the sea" that the VC swam in.
My point in highlighting these two historical cases is not to explore the moral issues involved in killing civilians in war (which of course is an important and worthwhile subject) but to point out that the theory that underwrites current American Counterinsurgency practice and thinking is broke. Yet that very theory has shaped a New American Way of War and has seduced analysts like Ricks into believing it to be proven in practice. It is this very Coin theory that is driving current American operations in Afghanistan.
It is time for FM 3-24 to be deconstructed and put back together in a similar way as the American Armys Active Defense Doctrine was between 1976 and 1982. That previous operational doctrine was thoroughly debated and discussed in open (not bureaucratic) forums and the result of that debate was a better operational doctrine for the time commonly referred to as Airland Battle . In short, FM 3-24 today is the Active Defense Doctrine of 1976. It is incomplete and the dysfunction of its underlying theory becomes clearer and clearer every day. We need a better and complete operational doctrine for counterinsurgency. The American Army needs one that is less ideological, less think-tank and expert driven, less influenced by a few clever books and PhD dissertations on Coin, and one less shaped by an artificial history of counterinsurgency.
When will the American Army undertake a serious revision of this incomplete and misleading doctrine for Counterinsurgency?
Outlaw7,
Concur with your comments on open source warfare, but I also think it has been around for awhile. The tools of globalization have magnified its impact and will continue to do so, thus it is an important concept to understand. However, why does open source warfare invalidate our COIN doctrine? I'm not overly sold on our current doctrine either because it seems incomplete, but I don't see how open source warfare in itself invalidates the doctrine?
as i've said before, it doesn't matter if we win in Afghanistan and Iraq.. the global terrorist network is still intact because we have failed to deal with the real problem. The real problem is the sponsors of terror.. namely in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, etc. I'm amazed that with our global intel network and knowledge.. we can't identify and attack (by whatever means) our real enemies and put this to rest.