Debate on Counterinsurgency: Gentile vs. Nagl
05.01.2013 at 05:47pm
Video of a Grinnell College counterinsurgency and the future of Afghanistan debate on 22 April between COL Gian Gentile and Dr. John Nagl:
Watched it last night and took notes. Here’s what they said:
COL Gentile:
* Myth of enlightened savior Generals, Casey and Petraeus not that different, Vietnam: Westmoreland and Abrams similar
* Myth of non-learning, non-adapting Army that suddenly gets it after FM 3-24, COIN was released
* Core political objective of destruction of Al Qaeda occurred early followed by mission creep
* Did either war “work” at a reasonable price in blood/treasure and if we had left shortly after “mission accomplished” would there have been fewer Iraqi and Afghan deaths?
* Just because small wars have been fought in the past using COIN does not mean we should do it again.
* Small wars cause Armies to forget how to fight larger wars. Armies able to fight big can adapt more easily to fight small.
* The Brits won in Malaya by resettling half a million and there was no external support for the insurgency
* Vietnam involved 3 primary tasks 1) Defeat NVA/VC main force, 2) Pacification, 3) Build ARVN. Westmoreland’s priorities were the first only because it had not been accomplished and he too would have evolved.
* No analytical basis for notion that 10% against the counterinsurgent, 10% favor, and the vast middle majority are fence-sitters
My conclusion: Overly fixated on hating savior Generals. Too willing to accept counterfactuals of similar outcomes without the Surge, if Westmoreland had stayed, and if we had pulled out right away thus claiming savings of Iraqi/Afghan lives, and Americans/coalition forces and money.
Dr Nagl:
* COIN can’t be dead as long as insurgency is alive and well.
* Galula and other historical basis for COIN says protect population first
* Steven Biddle study showed that Surge worked with 76 COPs created
* Messy wars are the future
* Vietnam could have been won if we had bombed in 75 like we did in 72. ANA will survive if we learn from that error and continue to support with money and airpower
* Only reason to go to war is to build a better peace
* Historians mistakenly believe what is written in archives, ignoring that even primary first-person accounts can either mislead, lie, distort, or shade the truth
* The President does not say that a primary reason we stayed in Afghanistan was because Pakistan is troubled and has nukes. Pakistan would not take kindly to him or anyone else in the administration saying as much.
* We literally burned the book on how to do COIN after Vietnam
* Hardcore ideologues must be killed/captured but many of the rest can be won over by providing them jobs. A mere $100+ a month saves Soldier/Marine lives that a would-be insurgent otherwise might have taken.
My conclusion: Nagl won. However disagree that it will be a whole generation before another major land war. A 9/11-like event inflicted on us or the Israelis will force intervention based on the panic resulting from something relatively minor like Boston. Humanitarian tragedies may be ignored, however easily-forecast continued trouble in the Middle East, North Korea, and in the first island chain will force our hand.
Everyone has probably seen this at Ricks’ Best Defense:
http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/05/30/cage_match_in_a_cornfield_g_gentile_wrestles_j_nagl_on_counterinsurgency
The comments there are frustrating and I think the debate is a lot of talking past each other in a sense because COIN, like, er, 4GW, now seems to mean whatever people want it to mean. For the purposes of that discussion, they should have talked about the pop-COIN theories codified in manuals everyone is now sick of talking about.
The real place to go, though, is this:
http://bellum.stanfordreview.org/?p=891
The various envisioned models and the sameness versus difference is the key conversation to have, IMO.
Also, I used the Hinglish colloqialism Talibans in an earlier comment, which is apparently a no-no because Taliban is the plural. Tell it to the editors that allow things like the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban, also, the entire ‘desi’ community. Don’t use language in your own way, use it in the way the DC policy community best likes….
Given Nagl’s statement that the only reason to go to war is to achieve “a better peace,” should we consider what “a better peace” might look like?
Herein, should we come to view the idea of “a better peace” not from:
a. Our viewpoint, to wit: the rule of law, good jobs, stability and good governance (democracy). Thus, the state and society re-configured so as to better fit into, better support and better benefit from global markets. (Herein, the state and society is essentially made to be more-open, more-accessable and more-useable to global market forces, international investors and to other global market players.)
But, rather,
b. From the perspective of the population concerned; a perspective which may find the people of certain locales having no desire to significantly subordinate and/or re-order their way of life and way of governance to meet the needs of the global economy.
Does ” a better peace,” and “COIN,” become much easier, much cheaper and, accordingly, much more feasible if we simply make the adjustment noted at “b” above?
Or does this suggestion really warrant no serious consideration; this, given the fact that the United States and its allies are unlikely to view the idea of “a better peace” — and/or “COIN” — except from the standpoint noted at subparagraph “a” above?
(Be careful here. These are, after all and in my view, the central issues/problems that must be acknowledged, and addressed, in today’s “sovereignty and self-determination” arguments.)
I posted a link to a short video by Luttwak in the Small Wars Council section on the rise of China. In the link, he talks about Chinese strategic culture and the difference between strategy and strategems.
It got me to thinking about the argument that the American Army should reorganize itself to fight “these wars we’ve been fighting”, meaning the various stability operations and insurgencies and peace keeping operations and so on.
It seems to me that we are talking about clever strategems as opposed to a strategy which can best employ an Army even if you agree that the military will fight more messy land wars that we say we will never fight.
There are two intellectual “poison pills” within such a strategem for reorganization, IMO. I keep writing IMO because I’m still working on this and I’m not sure of my ideas.
The first has been said in many ways, but the expense will crowd out everything else. Labor being the most expensive and the long term disabilities associated with soldiers protecting populations (the IED as an insurgent strategy) will make the expense so great that there can be little money left over for anything else in eventuality, and, yes, that includes even if all sorts of boondoggles are cancelled. It’s a growing sort of strategem to deal with the need to perform stability or other operations.
The second poison pill built into the argument is that an Army arranged on the principle of being able to fight small wars as a foundational concept means that it cannot be a learning institution. It will be the opposite, because we are built for one purpose and we are already being outlearned in some ways.
For discussion, anyway.
An interesting blogging heads:
http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/15326
Even taking the so called coindinistas at their word, the stated strategems will create the opposite effect because it is a strategem, not a strategy for the proper use of an Army.
Late to the game here. Will try my best not to rehash arguments already played out (or at least not make the same arguments – some will admittedly be very close:
First, I was somewhat disappointed at the level of the debate. Perhaps it was the forum, but it was not as much about COIN being dead as it was about two people talking past each other. Gentile was making a the argument that the current narrative about savior Generals will not hold up to the test of historical analysis and Nagl seemed to be arguing that counterinsurgencies will happen in the future and certain strategic aspects of our current method of COIN are applicable in most, if not all situations. Nagl was more on point to the question of whether COIN was dead (and so I agree with MovingForward’s comment that Nagl won), but the entire effort seems to have missed the point regarding whether COIN, as developed thus far in the 5-34, should continue to be a major component of the militaries strategic kitbag. Perhaps Gentile has already accepted the fact that turning back time (again) to an era of HIC only warfare is a bridge too far. Without a Soviet like force out there the next best argument is that if we train for HIC then we can do anything. And this is where I disagree.
High Intensity Conflict was certainly the bread and butter of the Army we like to remember – the Army of Civil War, Korea, and WWII. It is a different question as to whether it will be the bread and butter of the Army of the future. That was the argument I was hoping to see.
Without rehashing a debate that Bill, Carl and Major Rod had below, I am going to disagree completely with the idea that you can take an Army trained for HIC and adapt them to FM 5-34 COIN. It is improperly organized, trained, and resourced. It sees victory in terms of body counts. It mindset is that, in order to win, you must destroy the enemies ability to continue the fight. I don’t believe that mindset can be quickly adjusted to a completely different definition of how to win by supporting the population. Serve and protect rather than search and destroy. Soldiers are not machines you can reprogram. In order to go into battle they must dehumanize the enemy in order to justify killing another human being. They do this through broad stereotypes. COIN requires that you eliminate those stereotypes and only look at the actions of the individual. This is most clearly demonstrated by the rules of engagement which in normal HIC includes the uniform of the enemy but in COIN is defined by the actions of the insurgent. I think it is unreasonable to assume that you can switch between these two mindsets easily.
There are multiple conversations going on at the same time, confusing the issue:
1. What really happened in Iraq in terms of the sequence of events and causation of violence? What evidence should be used in order to determine causality. What evidence is pertinent?
2. How did the narrative of the drop in violence associated with the Surge affect military leadership at the time of the Afghan Strategic Review (2009) and how was that experience translated toward planning for that campaign?
3. The intellectual and historical basis for much of what has been written by the Coindinistas–post WWII modernization theory and the study of colonial small wars–is controversial within the American context. How does this controvery play out in “lessons learned”?
4. The tendency of the military to focus on the tactical level. The conversation about whether an army can “easily” switch from conventional tactics to counterinsurgency tactics is important, but in my opinion is far less important than understanding how to tie various tactics of whatever derivation into a larger campaign that can achieve political or core political objectives. This requires a better understanding of regional motivations of competing actors than is traditionally held by the military, again, in my admittedly outsider perspective.
Perhaps regionally aligned brigades may help but these would have to avoid the pitfalls of the various “COMS” which look at the world through the lens of military-to-military relationships within the particular “COM” world, so that in Afghanistan, the understanding of South Asia was interpreted through a Middle Eastern lens and based on the military’s understanding of regional SA armies as potentially useful in operations within that context.