Is COIN No Longer Relevant? By Whitney Kassel, Cicero Magazine
…Preparing for the unforeseen is a critical element of military preparedness. And while looking at the effectiveness of a doctrine like COIN in past conflicts is instructive, it can’t be the only factor that determines how the U.S. prepares its troops for combat. There is also asthe undeniable reality that global conflict is increasingly socio-political, with insurgencies based on ethnic and religious identities on the rise and conventional state-on-state warfare continuing to decline. Such trends make it more than likely that despite its disillusionment with COIN, the U.S. Army – and not just SOF – will find itself engaged in COIN-like warfare perhaps not in the next few years, but over the coming decades. To borrow from Trotsky, we may not be interested in COIN, but COIN is interested in us, necessitating a better, and ideally more integrated interagency approach, rather than an abandonment of the entire skill set. In this light, relying on SOF entities like USJFKSWCS to keep big Army up-to-date on COIN skills may ultimately prove short-sighted.
Comments
COIN is extremely relevant - but our doctrine and application of that doctrine in in Afghanistan and Iraq is questionable at best. And it was not "at best."
COIN is best thought of as a domestic operation for addressing illegal, and sometimes violent, political challenge to governance.
COIN is not large (or small) foreign operations to sustain an illegitimate government of our choosing or creation in the face of domestic challenge to the same.
We still think like the Western Colonial and Containment experts who wrote the texts our current doctrine is so heavily derived from. It will only be once we can step back from that perspective that we begin to see Insurgency and an effective response to insurgency in a more healthy light.
1. COIN, one would think, would be about maintaining the status quo and/or about restoring law and order within some favorable political, economic and social environment.
2. Obviously that is not what we have been about in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc.
3. Our job there, instead, has been -- and continues to be -- to:
a. Encourage, foster and bring about "revolutionary" political, economic and social change,
b. Specifically along modern western lines in
c. These relatively hostile environments.
4. Herein, the upfront employment of large numbers of conventional forces -- to achieve these specific and exact objectives -- has proven to be problematic/counterproductive.
5. Likewise, in such hostile environments, has the reliance on the populations (rather than on the regimes) -- and on such ideas as "universal values" and "shinning houses" -- both proven to be illogical/insufficient/inadequate to the job/task at hand (see item 3).
6. So now we seek to achieve our political objective (item 3) via other ways and other means.
7. The above helping to explain such things as why (a) COIN no longer seems relevant (as a means of transforming outlying states and societies more along modern western lines) and why (b) other approaches to this task are now being considered?
Actually if we would re-establish the MATA course at Bragg we might alleviate some of the problems Ms. Kassel worries about (but not all of course and the MATA course would only be one small effort to train and educate conventional and special operations forces in advisory skills and would contribute to what the Army Capstone Concept calls conventional and special operations forces interdependence.