Tomorrow’s Small Wars Won’t Just Be Land Wars by David Sterman, Defense One
Imagine a crisis in a coastal country where terrorists and insurgents turn the littorals to their advantage. Are the United States and its allies ready for naval forces to play a key role in counterinsurgency?
Events in Yemen suggests this situation is already upon us. Houthi rebels, pushing deeper into a country surrounded on two sides by sea, have precipitated a regional crisis with several maritime dimensions. The rebels have received arms by sea, leading Saudi Arabia to blockade Yemeni ports, the United States to board freighters, and Iran to dispatch its own warships to the area. Saudi warships also shelled Houthi positions to prevent a takeover of the port city of Aden, while China, India, and Pakistan have evacuated their citizens by sea…
Comments
In the course of a COIN campaign, every mission executed by every participant is not also COIN.
This should be self-evident, but often I find that those who are conducting supporting operations feel that it is somehow slighting to what they are doing to not call it COIN (or UW, or CT or whatever the overarching operation is.
For example, if one is a C-130 crew flying support operations pushing critical supply bundles out to those on the ground who are conducting COIN, it does not mean that that air crew is conducting COIN. They are conducting aerial resupply to forces who are conducting COIN.
Similarly, if the navy is conducting blockade operations in support of a larger COIN campaign, it does not mean that they are conducting COIN - they are conducting blockade operations.
This may seem a fine point, but I see us struggle so often as a military community, as a joint force, when we get confused about what we are doing do so often primarily to what we call what we are doing. In gymnastics, ones body tends to follow their eyes - in military operations our actions tend to follow our words. We need to get better about our words.
Taking this a step farther, in truth, COIN is a domestic operation. If one is not dealing with an insurgency in their own country they are not conducting COIN, they are supporting someone else's COIN operation. This is one of the greatest flaws in our current US COIN doctrine. The belief that we are also conducting COIN serves as a powerful enabler of mission creep into activities that only the host should be doing, rationalized by the fact that perhaps they are not doing it very well, and besides, we're all doing the same mission, right? Wrong. This leads to our efforts invariably undermining the very legitimacy we believe we are working to reinforce.
Bottom line is that words matter. Across the board we need to do a better job of understanding problems and organizations for what they actually are, rather than what they have been in artfully labeled, or that we have mischaracterized in some doctrine or strategy or plan.
The navy plays a critical role in support of COIN campaigns, but as insurgency by its very nature happens among the people, and the people live on land, most naval operations in this role are not "COIN."