COIN of the Realm

Colin Kahl, an Assistant Professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and a Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, writes in the November / December issue of Foreign Affairs on while Counterinsurgency — US Army Field Manual 3-24 / Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 33.3.5 is a long overdue step in the right direction, a look back at the history of counterinsurgency offers a sobering reminder of how low the odds of success are regardless of doctrinal excellence.

Note: Links provided within excerpts inserted by SWJ.

Excerpt on Doctrine

… An interim army counterinsurgency manual was released in October 2004, a year and a half after the start of the war, but it was an intellectually sterile document. Work on a much-needed revision did not begin until a year later, when two of the military’s most respected commanders, Lieutenant Generals David Petraeus and James Mattis, took charge of the process. Petraeus, now the four-star commanding general of all U.S. forces in Iraq, was then the commander of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Mattis held a parallel position at the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Virginia. The writing team they assembled included many of the best and the brightest within the army and the Marine Corps; Conrad Crane, the director of the army’s Military History Institute, was charged with supervising the effort. The writing process — which included a February 2006 conference at Fort Leavenworth where outside counterinsurgency experts, human rights groups, and military journalists were brought together to comment on a working draft — was unprecedented in its openness…

Excerpt on Hearts and Minds

Counterinsurgency refers to military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by governments or occupying forces to quell a rebellion. It is fundamentally a contest between insurgents and the government for control and the support of the population (with intervening outside powers sometimes attempting to tip the scales one way or the other). The COIN FM is not an academic document, but it is deeply informed by classical counterinsurgency theory, which emerged in response to the wave of wars of “national liberation” that followed World War II. Within that tradition, there are two competing schools of thought about the appropriate way to conduct counterinsurgency warfare: “hearts and minds” and “coercion.” The COIN FM sides definitively with the former…

Excerpt on “Gloves On”

The most powerful critique of the COIN FM’s approach comes from the “coercion” school of thought on counterinsurgency, which sees legitimacy as an unattainable — and wholly unnecessary — goal. In the 1960s, the RAND analysts Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf argued that counterinsurgents should worry less about winning popular allegiance and more about raising the costs of supporting the insurgency. As Edward Luttwak put it in a recent essay, “The easy and reliable way of defeating all insurgencies everywhere” is to “out-terrorize the insurgents, so that fear of reprisals outweighs the desire to help the insurgents.” In contrast to the COIN FM, the coercion school sees no need for conventional armies to remake themselves into kinder, gentler nation builders; instead, they can win by doing what they do best: employing overwhelming firepower to destroy the adversary and using armed coercion — including harsh collective punishment — to convince the population to shun the insurgents. “The teething-ring nonsense that insurgencies don’t have military solutions defies history,” the widely read military analyst Ralph Peters has written. “Historically, the common denominator of successful counterinsurgency operations is that only an uncompromising military approach works — not winning hearts and minds nor a negotiated compromise.” Ultimately, the thinking goes, military sticks are much more important than civilian carrots…

Excerpt on a Recipe for Failure

When faced with a growing Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the immediate response of Pentagon officials and the U.S. military was denial. By the late summer and early fall of 2003, however, the reality signaled by daily attacks and a wave of massive bombings had finally sunk in. The military initially responded with a “search and destroy” approach to counterinsurgency, which fell uncomfortably, and dysfunctionally, between the extremes of hearts-and-minds and pure coercion. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who led U.S. forces during the first year of the war, was both inept at and uninterested in counterinsurgency. Efforts to protect the Iraqi population were ad hoc, varied tremendously from unit to unit, and were underresourced; most units defined the requirements of counterinsurgency solely in terms of “the enemy” and deployed overwhelming conventional firepower to kill or capture a growing list of “former regime elements,” “anti-Iraqi forces,” “bad guys,” and “terrorists.” Although troops took steps to minimize the risks to Iraqi civilians, many innocent Iraqis were shot at U.S. checkpoints and alongside convoys; many others were caught in the crossfire during daily raids and major offensives in Fallujah, Najaf, Sadr City, and elsewhere. Detention centers swelled as thousands of military-aged men were arrested in indiscriminate sweeps of Sunni towns, and evidence of abusive interrogations — most notably at Abu Ghraib — surfaced with gruesome regularity…

Excerpt on Eating Soup with a Knife

Whether or not the directives of the COIN FM succeed in Iraq, the general model it embraces probably represents the best of many bad approaches to counterinsurgency. But one should not confuse “best” with “easy.” Even under ideal circumstances, the clear, hold, build paradigm is difficult to pull off. The oft-cited textbook case of the British counterinsurgency in Malaya in the 1950s in fact offers a cautionary lesson. The communist insurgents in Malaya were from a clearly distinguishable and unpopular ethnic Chinese minority and were fighting on a peninsula where it was relatively easy to isolate them. And it still took the British army a dozen years to win…

Much more at the COIN of the Realm — read it all – and as a SWJ afterthought — this quote from a recent COIN seminar — courtesy of Dr. David Kilcullen:

“[This] is a political as well as a military war…the ultimate goal is to regain the loyalty and cooperation of the people.”

“It is abundantly clear that all political, military, economic and security (police) programs must be integrated in order to attain any kind of success.”

General William Westmoreland; Commander, U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam; published those words in a 1965 COMUSMACV directive. The point being, understanding by leaders (and others) is not enough. Everyone needs to understand that a framework, doctrine, systems, processes and structures are required to enact this understanding. And even then, COIN is most difficult at best…

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