Right Doctrine, Wrong War
by Jason Thomas
Download the Full Article: The Cognitive Dissonance of COIN
The psychological investment in COIN is now so deep that the cognitive dissonance would be too great to change course or admit COIN is the right doctrine for the wrong war. Cognitive dissonance theory suggests that despite contrary evidence, people are biased to think of their choices as correct. Like climate change, so much has been invested in counterinsurgency with huge reputations at stake, that anyone who challenges COIN in Afghanistan could be labeled a COIN skeptic.
No matter how much we try to win the hearts and minds, no matter how many millions of dollars is spent on development and regardless of attempts to improve governance and eliminate corruption, the socio-cultural ecosystem of Afghanistan does not respond to the doctrine of counterinsurgency. While the pockets can be won the heart and minds in Afghanistan will always remain notoriously capricious.
There are many reasons to continually question COIN from every angle, but the two this paper is concerned with are i) whether COIN could be the right military doctrine being applied in the wrong campaign; and ii) preparing for the next major unconventional war -- as is often the case in political campaigns and war, we tend to find ourselves fighting on the issues, theories or practices in the last campaign.
This paper will attempt to "play the ball and not the man" by pointing to the range of reasons unique to Afghanistan on top of self-imposed obstacles that reinforce the hypothesis of right doctrine, wrong war.
Download the Full Article: The Cognitive Dissonance of COIN
Jason Thomas has completed an eight month mission in Afghanistan as the Regional Manager for a USAID implementing partner. The role involved delivering counterinsurgency operations with US and Coalition Forces in three Provinces in Afghanistan - Ghazni, Wardak and Logar. Before Afghanistan Jason had worked in the civil war area in Sri Lanka after establishing one of the largest private responses to the Boxing Day Tsunami in Victoria, Australia. This also involved negotiating with the Tamil Tigers and being the first Westerner allowed by the GOSL into the high security zones following the end of the civil war last year. Jason implemented the Kokoda Track Project in Boroondara in 2008 taking disadvantage youth up the Kokoda track with the support of the Victorian Police, Hawthorn Football Club and the Kokoda Veterans from the 39th Infantry Battalion - this has now been adopted by the YMCA as an annual event. He has worked as Director of Research in the New Zealand Parliament for ACT New Zealand, political advisor in the House of Commons and House of Lords, London and as well as being political strategist for CEOs and Boards of Australian ASX 100 companies. He was Queen's Relay Baton Runner for the 2006 Commonwealth Games, nominated for Citizen of the Year in 2005 and awarded a Paul Harris Fellow in 2006.
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The author concludes: "Avoid seeking a generic, off-the-shelf, model of COIN devised from previous campaigns to be applied to the next campaign."
I can only speak as a civilian observer, but my impression is that General Petraeus and the other officers involved in FM 3-24 tried to strike a balance between what we can learn from past experience and what we must learn in each new situation. What I haven't understood them to have done is to specify the conditions that need to be clear before we intervene in an insurgent country. There seem to me three questions we need to ask if the following two principles correctly define what insurgencies are about:
1. In an insurgent conflict, the insurgents are able to increase, or begin with and maintain, an insurgent replacement rate that seriously undermines the national government of the country. The insurgency can either begin as the classic model of a small group that grows from zero to critical, or it can begin as the rebellion or secession of some already large group or groups.
2. The goal of an outside power intervening against an insurgency is therefore to reduce to zero, or to hold to near-zero, the rate at which the insurgents replace their losses, with responsibility in the later stages of the conflict transferred to the national government. An outside intervention begins to fail when the enemy replacement rate holds steady for years and the outside power's own casualty rate is high enough to undermine the power's resolve over that time.
A counterinsurgency campaign fails either from mistakes that the counterinsurgent side does not need to have made and/or from circumstances over which the outside power has no control or elects to tolerate for higher reasons. In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, (1) the enemy had a geographical advantage because our side elected not to cross and hold territory beyond certain political boundaries, and (2) the governments we backed were not able to assume full responsibility because of intrinsic problems aggravated by the conditions that resulted from (1).
In Vietnam, the North Vietnamese were able to substitute outside forces that could be replaced indefinitely (the North Vietnamese Army) for inside forces in South Vietnam that could not (the Viet Cong). The NVA victory came from first exhausting the American people by replacing their losses in this way and then from knocking over a South Vietnamese government that could not stand on its own.
In Afghanistan, the border is too long to be closed by the forces that the United States has been willing and able to commit, and these forces are also prohibited from occupying territory in Pakistan. Consequently, the Taliban have been able to maintain a hit-and-run campaign from sanctuaries, at a level low enough to permit the Taliban to replace their losses indefinitely. At the same time, the Taliban have been able to inflict casualties on American and NATO troops at a level high enough to be unacceptable to their home populations if it continues indefinitely.
The Taliban strategy depends on the inability of the Afghan army and police to operate more effectively and on the ability of the Taliban side to retain its own unity and replacement rate. If America cannot change these terms, a drawdown of U.S. forces beginning in 2011 may be difficult to extend for more than a few years. If the terms do begin to change over the next year, the US effort may have more time.
From these experiences, American military leaders can ask three questions before the United States enters a future insurgency. First, the military needs to request of civilian superiors a rationale for limiting the geographical scope of operations, if a limit is imposed for political reasons. The military then needs to ask itself whether the internal security of the country can be assured for a critical period, say four years, by the US forces available to provide it. Finally, political and military leaders both need to consider whether the gamble that a local government can take increasing responsibility after an additional four years is worth taking. The first of these questions is a diplomatic one. The second is a matter of military judgment. The last is a cultural judgment requiring insight into why the insurgency exists and who we would be backing.
These questions do not require the President or the Army to articulate an "exit strategy" for the war. Wars do not usually go as planned and what I think is proper instead for military leaders to ask a President is not how we leave a war but how we will fight the war before we enter it.
U.S. Military Learns to Fight Deadliest Weapons
By Adam Higginbotham July 28, 2010 | 2:00 pm | Wired August 2010
Shouldn't we be long past this article title after eight years of IED warfare?---the question is why are we still learning when we should have been ahead of the curve not always catching up.
So if we are still learning WHAT has gone wrong?
The same question applies to COIN-which is more interesting as we have what- collected thousands of lessons learned and we are still behind the curve.
Yes there is a cognitive dissonance currently involved in the COIN debate.
Where one would expect a constant review of the battlefield TTPs against COIN and then if needed adjustments made to the COIN concept---it simply does not occur---WHY?--the enemy does it all the time and he evolves---WHAT do we do-debate and debate and the COIN debate has become static into two camps---which if one looks at both-both are correct.
Why else would there been even in SWJ the great reluctance to openly discuss John Robbs theory of "open source warfare" which some writers are now starting to use as the beginning of 5GW. What he started writing in 2004 is in fact far more valid today and provides the necessary theoritical framework needed to understand an evolving insurgency ESPECIALLY if coupled to "conflict ecology"--the combination of the two is in fact the COIN of the 21st century---the core problem is that the current COIN is to a degree the discussion that should have occurred immediately after Vietnam and it did not occur as it would have caused a rift in the "official" view of the war and it would have called into play some serious discussions about the leadership of the war both from a civilian and military perspective.
In some aspects the COIN debate got sidetracked after Kilcullens's "conflcit ecology" and WHY--it was simply to "hard" for a battlefield officer or an intelligence analyst to understand (offical view)---it came with no directions, it forced the individual to really "understand" the enemy which I believe is the single greatest failure in both Iraq and Afghanistan---after how many rotations to both countries and the insurgency still surprises us daily---WHY?
Hey the Taliban are not educated, so we can expect less of an IED threat--guess what they are killing the MRAPs and they are still killing the foot soldier---and they are not educated. They adapt and adapt and adapt---that is the only way an insurgent can hold his own over the counterinsurgent.
In John Robbs' blog from this week there was the following---read it and weep as it thoroughly provides insight to the "open source warfare evoluntion" that continues daily within an insurgency---ask the WHY is it that we seem to be behind the curve on every insurgent development? ANSWER- COIN theory never seemed to evolve since "conflict ecology" because to evolve would in fact clash with the cognitive dissonance which we have setup and cannot be changed out of fear that change is bad--why do we still teach the standard TRADOC courses with absolutely literally time delayed updating from field TTPs, why does the CTC system never really transfer the most current enemy TTPs in ways that are clearly understandable, why do we have an intelligence system that does not reward for thinking out of the box, why do we have a FORSCOM Leadership Training Program that is not the most advanced counterinsurgency training team as they are the interface to every BCT Cmdr and Staff that deploys say to the NTC?
A side comment to the following---the evolution of the Black Cat in fact started in late 2007 by a single Iraqi bomb maker who then acccidently observed a failed IED attack using a new IR trigger and then he began to modify the technique and he kept trying until we now have the Black Cat---three years of evolution and adaptation on the part of the insurgency---not much followup on the CIED side other than to analyze and follow the development. It should be noted that the handfwritten journal of the leader of the IAI was found in early 2006 and only partially translated---why was it never fully translated and distributed to the field as it is the single most important view of the creation and development of the IAI in the early years of the insurgency---you could have truly build an ecosystem study of the early IAI from the document that would have remained valid for the other Sunni insurgent groups as they all in fact spun out of the IAI.
Monday, 09 August 2010
JOURNAL: Open Source Warfare and IED Design Innovation
Insurgencies that utilize open source warfare are almost always extremely innovative (see earlier posts on the topic). As a result, big conventional militaries find it very difficult to keep up even when they spend tens of billions and hire thousands of consultants (while, unfortunately, studiously avoiding a study of the method of warfare that creates this innovation gap). With this in mind, here's a new article in Wired magazine on the innovation rates seen in IEDs, and how these innovations are spreading globally as new groups adopt this form of warfare. Here are some choice quotes:
"I can take $600, go into a bazaar, and make a device," says one senior Jieddo officer. "And I can tie up $1.2 billion to $2 billion of US money by doing it."
This escalating arms race, pitting kitchen-table bombsmiths against US government technologists, began in the early months of the Iraqi insurgency. The first IEDs were often simple radio-controlled bombs, made from two or three 155-millimeter artillery shells set off by a signal from a cheap household gadget, like a key fob car alarm switch or a wireless doorbell buzzer. US troops, traveling in unarmored Humvees, were defenseless against them until each of the services hastily bought hundreds of radio-frequency jammers -- with codenames like Cottonwood, Ironwood, MICE, ICE, Warlock Red, Warlock Green, Jukebox, and Symphony -- capable of generating an invisible hemisphere of electromagnetic energy that could drown out those trigger signals. Eventually, Jieddo would oversee the deployment of more than 40,000 jammers in Iraq.
The bombers quickly learned how to circumvent the electronic countermeasures. They used handheld radio-frequency meters and bombs with dummy trial-and-error firing circuits to figure out what part of the spectrum the jammers blotted out and how big the jamming field was. Then they simply switched to new remote controls that used bandwidths beyond the jammers range. When US technicians introduced electronic countermeasures to jam low-power radio-control devices like garage door openers and car alarms, insurgents moved to high-power devices, including two-way radios and extended-range cordless phones. Then they moved on to mobile phones in every local cell network, from 1G to 3G. While this race had been run before, it had never taken place at such speed.
At the beginning of this year, US forces in Iraq reported a new version of the passive infrared trigger, nicknamed the Black Cat. It looked exactly like a regular passive infrared sensor, but the motion detector was altered to be triggered instead by radio frequencies. Shielded to prevent it from being set off by household radios and with reduced reception range, the new device is one of the most devious yet. Designed to detect the passing bubble of a coalition jamming systems powerful radio field, the Black Cat has brought Jieddo full circle: It is an IED that will detonate only when it detects an IED countermeasure.
Late one afternoon in April, Llamas shows me the latest device theyve been working on, just in from Afghanistan. A neatly made plywood box about 8 inches high and 5 inches square, it has a length of replica detonation cord emerging from the base. Llamas pulls the box open, revealing a layer of soft foam and a wooden plunger attached to the lid. When stepped on or driven over, he says, the foam is compressed and the tip of the plunger, which is saturated with a chemical, descends into a chamber at the bottom of the box. That chamber contains a second substance, and when the two chemicals mix, a pyrotechnic reaction ignites the end of the detonation cord, which leads to an explosive charge. The box is the logical conclusion of years of reverse evolution in insurgent weapons technology. Without a power source, a blasting cap, or a single piece of wire or metal contact, it has no electromagnetic or metallic signature. Linked to a charge mixed up from odorless homemade explosives, packed beneath a dirt road, it would be all but impossible to detect: a Flintstones land mine. "Its a block of wood, basically," Llamas stated.
Here is a new defintion of "ecology of an insurgency" which is a logical extension of Kilcullen's theory of "conflict ecology" now couple it with "open source warfare" and one has the 21st century COIN that actually fits Iraq and Afghanistan and there is no cognitive dissonance when you use it as it allows for constant evolution and adpation on the fly.
Ecology of an insurgency:
Is the scientific study of the way that living "organisms" in this case "organism" is defined as an insurgency cell, group, or organization interacts with their environment, and the counter insurgent.
Ecosystem of an Insurgency:
An insurgent ecosystem is a system whose members (members defined as being either a group or groups) benefit from each other's participation via symbiotic relationships. Symbiotic meaning mutually beneficial, and self-sustaining.
The main goal of an insurgency ecosystem is to generate common ventures. Once an ecosystem is established in a particular region/area, it becomes very difficult for the counter insurgent to eliminate the established ecosystem. The insurgent operational region/area exhibits network effects and is able to establish lock-in since the start-up costs associated with moving to another region and starting all over are prohibitive (meaning lost time, increased effort and costs, lost initiative/operational tempo, and personnel related issues). This though does not prohibit the local/regional insurgent group or groups from temporarily moving out of the region/area to avoid counter insurgent pressures and then returning when that pressure subsides. This also does not preclude new members joining if allowed by the original member or members based on their symbiotic relationship. Thus current members have a clear incentive to remain, and new would-be members have an incentive to relocate to this region or area.
Due to the fact that an insurgent ecosystem could be composed of multiple members (groups) in the same region/area it increases the pressure on the counter insurgent as it does not know which member to focus its efforts on and/or does not know how many members it is actually facing thus diluting the overall efforts of a counter insurgent against the ecosystem as a whole.
AND by the way DoD can save a ton of money by ending the Human Terrain System as this coupling of "ecology of insurgency" and "open source warfare" theory forces one to address the human terrain from the perspective of the insurgent thus from the view of the counterinsurgent.
Hi, if I might ask a few questions:
From the article:
<blockquote>4. Intensify the global 'hearts and minds' campaign to convince young, mobile and increasingly sophisticated Muslims that the West is not a threat to their belief systems. This must be coordinated at an international level across governments and non- government actors.</blockquote>
From the OCF(Aus) Website:
<blockquote> Overseas Christian Fellowship (OCF) Australia is a student-led campus ministry that works alongside local churches in reaching out to all overseas students in Australia, building them up to be Christs disciples, and sending them back to their home countries as disciple-makers. OCF Australia is interdenominational and consists of 19 active centres on various Australian university campuses.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Vision of OCF
OCFs vision is consistent with Gods eternal purpose and the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20.
To reach out to all overseas students in Australia;
Build them up to be Christs disciples;
And send them back to their home countries as disciple-makers.</blockquote>
http://www.ocfaustralia.org/?page_id=2
Is the juxtaposition of these two excerpts an example of the cognitive dissonance bespoke of in the article, or merely evidence of a poorly co-ordinated public-relations effort?
How does a democracy reason with well-meaning citizens who feel compelled to conduct what amounts to a form of foreign policy?
Do governments find the second and third order effects of such efforts to be helpful in some way?