Fighting Small Wars In The New Century

I thought this a very good article and echo the comments about the 3-24 rewrite needing to take some of their cues from this paper and others like it.

But- I would add that regardless of how we craft strategy- it MUST be tied to national security interests and it must take into account the broader regional and global environment. We may win many COIN "battles" taking into account the lessons of this paper but still lose the overall "war" of our national interests by engaging in COIN where and to an extent that is not commensurate with our overall grand strategy and also failing to ensure greater interests are not ignored due to a fixation on one problem and pretending that problem isn't interconnected regionally and globally to our's and other's greater interests.

Mr. Prine:

It simply struck me that Olivant offered a useful case study illustration of the points Kelly has made.

Also, I don't think that the significance, let alone the immediacy, of either Kelly or Olivant suffers on account of some of their points having appeared 42 years ago in Leites and Wolf's RAND study (avilable for free at the RAND website). I mentioned the latter because, although obviously informed by the Vietnam War, this study, as you may know, develops a number of widely applicable principles that relate closely to Justin Kelly's (and appear to diverge from FM3-24). Of these, the core seems to be:

(1) The spontaneous support, sympathy or loyalty of the people is not necessary for rebellion to begin or succeed; from which flows, inter alia, (2) The progress made by each side in the conflict between insurgents and counterinsurgents influences the affiliations of most of the population-- while the influence of the people's affiliations on the progress or outcome is relatively less significant...

IT'S REALLY ALL A MATTER OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION BY THE GRUNTS!

Isn't it fascinating that as we contract our murderous intervention all over the world, the murderous, incompetent and corrupt allies we have been propping up with young American bodies and cash are being toppled by all sorts of popular "Springs." Our interventionist history is a shame we will not escape, as we are 6% of world's population seeking to consume 66% of the world's assets at cut-rate. That can only be done by supporting evil rulers who give us our cut-rate assets we so desperately need in exchange for protection from their own people or because we invaded and took over these assets in corporate contracts reinforced by our boots on the ground.

That is not what our military is about. The only thing we took back home form Vietnam, after decade long war, was penicillin-resistant gonorrhea, and that we also brought in from nearby brothels where GIs went on R&R. What we did leave behind was a cultural alternative that Le Duan-type Communism under Soviet tutelage could not resist: it was the idea of dare to try and create local enterprises that meet the wishes of the local buyers at competitive prices. Since 1975, South Vietnam had proven the superiority of individual economic enterprise by overcoming the imposition of Communist "Conquerors from the North" behavior, infecting the "Communist victors with "doi moi," a change in perspective which used economic freedoms in a way that greatly enhanced individual liberties where there was, as of April 1975, only oppression and the retribution of the conquering victor from the North over the Southern loser. All this proves that, contrary to Mao Tse-tung, we are the revolution and they the rigid brutal and losing way of power from the barrel of a gun. Yes, we won-- as recently we won in the Mideast-- by leaving, not by staying to blow up "gooks" and "towel heads" because they all look alike anyway.

What is never appreciated is that the rejects of the vaunted fraud American "entrepreneurship"-- a pejorative term for "taker in the middle" who does nothing but just take his cut or commission-- those rejects, had to join the military because the homeland had failed to prepare them for finding their niche in the American economy and culture-- these rejects had inculcated enough of the American Way of Life while in the military to pass it on in the battlefield to the locals whose lands they trampled; a conquered nation is the worst place of all to develop new social norms. But it worked! And CORDS-- as I personally witnessed closely-- was a major success in the hands of American grunts. Nothing speaks more to that success than the fact that the "American presence" for grunts came to be exactly where the rubber touches the road (at the village level) expressed by squad size MAT and CAP teams. To this date, thousands of by now old Viets, recall the names of CAP/MAT guys who served as guardians and guides to their hamlets as they modernized before 1973 when we pulled out. It is that modernization they learned from MAT/CAP Teams that to this day makes South Vietnam socially and economically superior over the North, despite that latter's political dominance.

A soldier's MATURITY comes to a relatively few grunts and FNGs, but many more than enough to change history. Vietnam will never be the Vietnam our forces invaded, nor will Iraq, nor will Afghanistan. Our Americans-- somewhere in the course of their mili-training service-- acquired a sense of buddy-to-buddy dependence to stay alive. And somehow, in very many cases, this "buddy" tie many passed on to Viets, Afghans and Iraqis. That passed on "je-ne-sais-quoi" stays behinds, continuing to spread aa many locals carry it on on their own. That is the great cultural transformation that, often without realizing it and without intending it, but dominated by the decensy they learned at home and in the military, American grunts passed on to the locals; and it made the locals far more plugged-in and able to draw assets from the real larger world around them. So, from wrecking a country, Americans, in the final summation, plugged it into the larger world to a definite economic and social and educational plus upon which to build a future.

This was not conscious and often accomplished despite their imbecilic, avaricious and small minded commanders. Rather, the humanity they were raised at home with, the army in utter desperation mobilized, marshaled and focused to leave a brain-print rather than footprint on the local cultures.

I've often seen it-- but ya gotta be patient as it takes almost a decade to manifest-- as the product of those seemingly "duhhhh" grunts assuredly pushed around by wooden-headed commanders who only knew lying as a way of getting by. The truth is that there's a great vitality in little Americans who "sign-up", despite their deficient education in "Riting, Reading and Rithmetic." Yet, these were disciplined and therefore patient, adaptive and giving of themselves so that every spare moment became a monument to expose American youth to the minds of the locals. Yes, I've seen it in Vietnam and am now seeing it in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, having lived since childhood under American, German and Soviet occupation, I can tell you that nobody does it like Americans. But, you won't see it until the guys at the top, those whores who thought this or that war would be career builders for themselves, finally throw up their hands in disgust, cover-up their failure and give up, that's when the SEA-CHANCE impact of the grunts becomes evident.

As both an American victim and American victimizer, I can trully say that the grunts-miracle once more has manifested and we would do well to study it and debate how it might be bertter used to build a safe world than use an unsafe world to make for plush post-retirement war industry multi-million $ slots of our useless Pentagoners who haven't got a clue what I'm talking about.

Lastly, teaching vets ever since Vietnam in sciences I must say that even those that come home suffering from the PTSD of the defeated, haven enough in them to shake free of the infectious monkey on their backs and to do at home what they did abroad....at ground level that is. We must find them and the real officers that lead them and put them back into some sorts of units that learn the new skills needed by our modern society in order to save us from the bottom up as they revolutionized the culture of all the nations they were sent to destroy but in fact proved to be true that: "WE CAME HERE TO SAVE YOU, NOT KILL YOU." Ask any Viet, Iraqi, Afghan over the next decade and they'll tell you exactly what I just said. HJappy New Year "grunts." Lick your wounds and then start out to conquer retardation and oppression elsewhere based on what you learned doing it so far. Happy New Years, my sons and daughters. This Dad is beeming with pride in you.

Ollivant's small essay was quite good, but it wasn't exactly original. Several had written previously on the subject and he, himself, thanked COIN scholar Jacqueline Hazelton when he discussed it at a think tank press conference.

On my first reading this sentence struck me as the best: Success therefore ultimately lies in the minds of the target population.

Thanks for posting this important paper. I would suggest reading it together with Doug Olivant's watershed paper posted here some months ago:
Countering the New Orthodoxy, Reinterpreting Counterinsurgency in Iraq, New America Foundation, June 2011...And both appear firmly grounded in the view of "supply" as the critical determinant of insurgency, that was developed by Leites and Wolf in their 1970 RAND paper on Rebellion and Authority, which, by the way, I would recommend to all practitioners as a useful counterpoint to FM 3-24.

If the Marines and Army are serious about re-examing and re-writing FM 3-24 they should start with this outstanding article that logically dispells the myths propogated by FM 3-24. The real lessons from our COIN experience are highlighted in this article, but due to political correctness and pervasive influence of CNAS they'll most likely be ignored.