Keep Fighting: Why the Counterinsurgency Debate Must Go On

The evidence from our recent history in Iraq and Afghanistan indicates that our pop-centric COIN approach and associated COIN doctrine is a crock if you evaluate it strictly on results. An objective evaluation requires putting pride and old beliefs to the side which is easier said than done. This doesn’t mean that political, social, and psychological aspects are not critical considerations when developing a COIN campaign. In fact they’re critical considerations for any time of conflict or war.

Americans have a hard time grasping that there is plenty of historical evidence that a counterinsurgent can shoot their way to victory because we generally don’t have the political will to do so for good reason. A political aspect of war is maintaining our own moral legitimacy with our population (not just those we occupy), and an excessively violent effort against insurgents and the populace from which they hail cannot be sustained long before our own people are in the streets protesting. It speaks to our national character in a positive way in my view, but it also means we have to adjust our campaign approach to adapt to that political reality, which is separate from the reality in war/insurgency zone.

Doctrine means little, but context is everything. If we're in a war against another Nation-State and we believe the stakes are our national survival we have no problem carpet bombing cities and even using nuclear weapons to compel the other side to surrender to our terms. With few exceptions our streets will remain quiet. When we're fighting insurgents in another country our national survival is not at risk, so we have to go to great lengths to maintain our moral legitimacy in our own eyes. This puts us in a position where we can't win militarily, so we are forced to pursue a pseudo social-science approach that is built on faulty economic, political, social, and psychological assumptions. We choose due to collective arrogance and pride to reinforce these assumptions through selective and shallow interpretation of history to include our recent history in Iraq where it is in some people’s personal interests to promote it as a success. Personal agendas are always going to be present, and some of those individuals will have outsized influence based on their rank, position, or academic standing (doesn’t equate to being right), thus common sense and a non-bias assessment is hard to come by when a powerful group think is preventing challenges to current views on COIN.

In my opinion I’m glad to see the COINdista group’s influence erode, but it also concerns me because the author is right. We’ll do COIN again, so while we may dismiss the current doctrine and COINdista cult we don’t have the luxury of dismissing COIN, so the debate should be far from finished. I think we’re overly focused on doctrine, when we should be focused on analytical methods to gain a better understanding. We're not Einstein, but his approach is worth considering, spend 90% of our time understanding the problem, then 10% solving it. Every situation will vary significantly due to the cultural and political issues that are unique to each conflict. We tend to look for commonalities instead of gaining nuanced understanding. Throughout our recent history I have come to believe that our mission analysis and operational design processes have largely been a joke because of the way they’re practiced, not because of the process itself. We rush through the understanding and move quickly to applying our doctrinal template to solve the wrong problem based on a rushed analysis. This too often results in second and third order effects that puts us in a no win situation like putting illegitimate governments in place that we align ourselves with.

In some ways we have become the new communists with our evangelistic push for other countries and cultures to embrace our democracy and free market values and systems, which is why we're increasingly disliked in many parts of the world. I see a trend where people around the world are starting to ignore us and look for alternatives to American leadership and the American model. It wasn’t that long ago they looked up to us. A large part of this strategic shift is directly and indirectly tied to the way we conducted COIN the past 10 plus years, and the way we conduct COIN is tied more to our political and cultural values than to reality in the countries we’re operating in. This debate should be far from over, but it may need to start anew with fresh voices leading it.

Outlaw 09 may have made an argument for why the counterinsurgency debate must go on with his observations here (taken from another thread) regarding our neighbor to the South:

"Bill C----this was taken from John Sullivan's recent article which goes to what I indicated---would argue that currently Mexico is at stage 3 on the list below and headed towards stage 4---what is interesting for me is the simple fact that if one takes the drugs out of the equation what is going on inside Mexico is an old fashioned insurgency (maybe a throw back to the Zapata Revolution which was never completed) against the existing government---maybe we could call this new model criminal induced insurgency;

1. Local Insurgencies (gangs dominate local turf and political, economic and social life in criminal enclaves or other governed zones);
2. Battle for the Parallel State (battles for control of the ‘parallel state.’ These occur within the parallel state’s governance space, but also spill over to affect the public at large and the police and military forces that seek to contain the violence and curb the erosion of governmental legitimacy and solvency);
3. Combating the State (criminal enterprise directly engages the state itself to secure or sustain its independent range of action; cartels are active belligerents against the state);
4. The State Implodes (high intensity criminal violence spirals out of control; the cumulative effect of sustained, unchecked criminal violence and criminal subversion of state legitimacy through endemic corruption and co-option. Here the state simply loses the capacity to respond)."

This suggesting that one cannot simply wish insurgency and counterinsurgency away nor ignor it.

From my perspective, of course, problems such as insurgency, terrorism, increased criminal activity and, in fact, state and societal difficulties of every stripe and kind, can be traced to our decades long effort to transform states and societies (including Mexico) such that they might better benefit from and better provide for the global economy.

These such efforts having been initiatived and driven hard for decades now, one cannot simply shut them off and go back to the way things were. The damage to the cohesiveness of states and societies -- worldwide -- has already been done. Now we must deal with the consequences of our actions, whether we like it, or can afford it, or not.

It will be very hard to keep any interest in COIN. The “debate”, if you can call it that, is now in the realm of historians who are arguing the he-said-she-said of historical facts. Is GEN Petraeus really a genius and a hero or simply a convenient poster child to make us feel good about events after 2006 and forget about the events from 2003 to 2006? What did Karl Hack really mean when he said “…”? It is almost more about personalities than it is about what works and what does not work … and more importantly, WHY what does work works.

Military people are more comfortable with military history than political science, social science, and psychology so the debate will remain “personality deep”. The military “can’t handle the truth” that the world is a complex place filled with complex people, not all of whom can be coerced into submission. That legitimacy really does matter, but we don’t want to understand legitimacy because it is a squishy concept that does not have easily quantifiable metrics. So we default to what we are good at – using force to obtain compliance. I remember the old phrase from Vietnam “When you got them by the balls there hearts and minds will follow”. Our doctrine may have moved slightly beyond that but our execution still relies on that type of thinking.

So we will endlessly debate the false dichotomy of Pop-Centric versus Pop-Control. But there is no glory in being the global social worker and you don’t need next gen tanks, ships, and fighter jets to build roads and expand local economies. The answer will be Pop-Control because that is what we want it to be. And the debate will end there.

Yesterday I posted a comment on WoTR, it is yet to pass moderation and is reproduced slightly changed here.

Mark is right to say the COIN debate must continue, alas to date this debate is very limited OUTSIDE the US military, who have recently come to dominate the debate.

From my British vantage point, with the current Afghan and Iraqi experience in mind, there is NO political will to debate COIN here, it is simply too painful. There is concern within the Whitehall-Westminster bubble how do we explain to the electorate why all the blood and gold was spent for such an end result?

In some West European countries (including Canada) there has been a public debate about the validity of prolonged campaigning in such places.

How much debate is there in France for example? We know that French policy in its primary theatre of intervention, Africa, has changed in the last twenty plus years largely without a public debate. I suspect that policy change was a politically driven policy stance.

There are FAR more users of COIN than the USA. India for example has a significant problem.

Nor is COIN always a military-dominated campaign and across the world today it is far more often a joint police-military effort alongside varying degrees of civil government.

I would argue that it is the weakness of US civil effort in your recent COIN campaigning that is your national weakness, not the military. This weakness has also been seen in the UK’s role in Helmand, with some startling decisions by DFID and other civilian partners.

Let us have a debate in the knowledge that many others have their own debate, very few of the public are listening and even fewer politicians. This leads it appears to the temptation COIN is a military-led process and so we can talk to ourselves.

One must come to look at COIN, I believe, through the prism of one's goals (for example: containing communism or promoting westernism) and understand insurgency and counterinsurgency accordingly.

Thus, if my goal is to contain communism, then I might, in my effort to secure popular support, point out that communism was incompatible with the history and the culture of a state and society, and that communist thinking clashed with the foundational values, attitudes, beliefs and practices of the nation and its people. In this scenerio, (containing communism/communist insurgency), the more-liberal (pro-change) elements of the population become my natural enemy.

If, however, my goal is to promote westernism, then I might, in my efforts to secure popular support, point out that the present way of thinking, present way of life and present way of governance of the state and society could -- quite obviously -- no longer meet the wants, needs and desires of the population. And suggest that, as "history" indicates, only western ways of life and western ways of governance could accomplish these tasks in the modern age. In this scenerio (promoting westernism), the conservative elements of the population (anti-change; status quo anti folks) become my natural enemy.

Thus, insurgency and counterinsurgency must be addressed, I believe, within the context of the political objective of a nation. This providing one with:

a. A knowledge of one's self.

b. A knowledge of one's enemy and

c. An understanding of the type of war that one was embarked on and why.

These such matters helping to explain why the counterinsurgency debate must go on.