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A Strategy of Exhaustion
by Vegetius
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Most Jihads do not die with a bang; they have historically gone out with a whimper. The first great wave of Islamic holy war effectively petered out within a century of the death of the Prophet Mohammed and Arabs were no longer actively leaders in the expansion of the Muslim faith after the tenth century A.D. when the peoples of the Turk branch of the Eurasian peoples picked up the banner of Islam. The last of a succession of waves of pre-industrial Jihad petered out at the walls of Vienna in 1683. As we deal with post-industrial Jihad, we may be able to learn something about Islamic holy wars of expansion that have been dealt with in the past.
Jihad was a powerful enough force that it was impossible to permanently defeat by purely military means. Unlike their Christian foes, the Muslim holy warriors were generally content to stop killing when their enemies surrendered and decided to convert to Islam. Jihads died because they reached a point of exhaustion. The most fervent warriors who sought martyrdom in battle could get it easily. This eventually left the Jihad bereft of its most enthusiastic fighters. Those less fanatic or more skillful collected enough slaves and riches in the holy wars to feel that God had rewarded them on earth for their fervor, and settled down to enjoy the good life that successful Jihad made possible. A final element in the death of successive waves of Jihad was internal dissention and struggles for power among the Jihadist leadership. The contest for control for leadership of the first Caliphate began almost immediately with the death of the Prophet Mohammed and culminated in the great Sunni-Shiite schism.
As Edward Luttwak points out in his new book, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, the Byzantines studied this new enemy closely and came to realize that their only hope of survival against the lethal threat of expansionist Jihadism was a strategy of exhaustion. Luttwak’s work is the first really comprehensive modern study of how the Eastern Roman empire survived and largely thrived in the face of expansionist Islam for eight centuries.
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The author is a government employee and a former infantryman.
The Hasan Slide Presentation
A Preliminary Commentary
by Charles Cameron
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There is no place as private as the interior of a human skull: the mind remains inviolate.
Words can reveal some of what goes on inside us, actions can speak some of our intents and passions forcefully, at times explosively. And yet there is no place more secret -- and what a hint, a phrase, a gesture, a speech or an explosion cannot reveal, what even the best forensic examination can only label a probability, is the complex interweaving of thoughts half thought, doubts entertained, emotions pushing on through, and clashing, building at times to a perfect storm perhaps, with all doubts and constraints cast aside and the emotions unleashed in a blind and defining moment.
Major Nidal Malik Hasan MD MPH, a psychiatrist in the U.S. Army, has now been charged with multiple specifications of premeditated murder in the mass shooting at Fort Hood, under Article 188 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Assuming that Major Hasan was in fact the shooter at Fort Hood and that, as alleged, he shouted "Allahu Akbar" during the event, the main question of fact and interpretation now would be whether Hasan was more an introvert under pressure whose "break" took the jihadist cry "Allahu Akbar" as its outlet, or a patient and long-standing lone wolf jihadist of the sort abu Musab al-Suri calls for (Jim Lacey, A Terrorist's Call to Global Jihad, p. 19), or a wannabe with failed or actual al Qaeda connections, or an al Qaeda or related "soldier" under orders.
This analysis attempts to provide some leads in that inquiry, by a careful reading of the only substantial documentation we have from Major Hasan himself, which may throw light on his trajectory.
Download the full article: The Hasan Slide Presentation
Charles Cameron is an independent scholar and writer, and was at one time a Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He would like to thank Stephen O'Leary, Richard Landes and David Cook for their encouragement and support over the years, the members of the NRM mailing list and particularly Jean Rosenfeld, Jayne Seminaire Docherty, Phil Arnold and John R Hall for their thoughts on this subject, David Ronfeldt, Ibn Siqilli and Leah Farrall among others for recent interactions, Mark Safranski for graciously allowing him to guest-blog on Zenpundit, and Howard Rheingold and the Brainstorms community, the folks at TMN, and Jaen Martens and Kevin Murphy for various other forms of hospitality.
Afghanistan: Seven Fundamental Questions
by Major Mehar Omar Khan
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I know we live in a world that is real and is moved by minds – thinking, manipulating, conniving, conspiring, calculating and masquerading minds. Our world therefore seldom has a place for ‘sentiments’ – pure, sincere, honest and spontaneous as sentiments are. But when it comes to war in Afghanistan, I am not deterred by the tyranny of the trend. I like, in fact I am forced, to think through my heart. What else can you do when you see images of your countrymen; innocent and unsuspecting men, women and children; ripped apart by other human beings exploding in their midst almost on a daily basis? How can I not worry about my daughter when I see a pale and empty face of a mother in Kabul or Peshawar, bent like a broken branch of an old, dried up tree; over the dead body of her child? How can I not cry when the soul of my nation is hit and hurt by violence that is so inextricably linked with bloodshed beyond the snaky Khyber Pass? For us in Pakistan, the ongoing struggle in Afghanistan and astride Durand Line is the most seminal endeavor of our history. If this war is won, the entire world stands to benefit. But if it is lost, one country that will be hurt the most is Pakistan – my daughter’s home and her future. War astride the Durand Line is therefore so personal to so many of us.
This war is also extremely personal for thousands of American mothers who await and pray for the safe return of their sons and daughters: bright young men and women who deserve to live and who must never be wasted just because someone considers it politically expedient to continue to muddle along and because setting the course right needs some statesmanship and may also involve some political cost.
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Major Mehar Omar Khan, Pakistan Army, is currently a student at the US Army Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. He has served as a peacekeeper in Sierra Leone, a Brigade GSO-III, an instructor at the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul, and as Chief of Staff (Brigade Major) of an infantry brigade. He has also completed the Command and Staff Course at Pakistan’s Command and Staff College in Quetta.
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A Better Understanding of the Vietnam War
by Colonel Gian Gentile
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Thanks to Senator Kerry for his excellent and very accurate article in Newsweek, “Beware the Revisionists,” on the serious flaws of a certain strain of Vietnam War history. This flawed history coalesces around a number of highly problematic assumptions like the war could have been won if the United States had not lost its political will because by 1972 pacification was working, or that more troops could have done the trick, or that better tactics and methods earlier applied in 1965 could have won the war. Senator Kerry’s points concerning this flawed Vietnam history is actually supported by a general consensus of scholarly historians that still is in line with one of the most well known and respected of them all, Professor George Herring of the University of Kentucky, who states in his book The Longest War that for the United States:
…the war could [not] have been ‘won’ in any meaningful sense at a moral or material cost most Americans deemed acceptable.
Herring’s clear and profound observation of the Vietnam War is still correct and supported by a consensus of historians. Yet there has been this incorrect interpretation of the history of Vietnam that argues that when the wrong General (Westmoreland) was removed after the Tet Offensive in 1968 and the right General was put in place (Abrams) things then turned around on a dime, the American Army started doing classic Coin and had actually pacified the South—had essentially won the war through better Coin tactics—but the American people and their political leaders lost their will and therefore the war. No, this interpretation is dubious.
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The author is a serving Army Colonel. He commanded a Cavalry Squadron in West Baghdad in 2006.
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Crime and Terrorism
by Colonel Robert Killebrew
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The U.S. has been at war in Iraq and Afghanistan now for eight years, and a great deal of our best thinking and most focused military development has quite rightly gone into fighting those two conflicts. We have built an effective counterinsurgency doctrine, we have re-equipped and re-re-equipped our forces, and we have perforce built huge bases of experience in dealing with Islamic insurgent and terror organizations. This is as it should be – Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ admonition to “win the war you’re in” is right on target.
In those eight years, though, as we have focused on the wars we’re in, there have been some profound changes in the structure of global terrorism, particularly with regard to the relationship between terrorist movements and international crime. According to a panel of experts at a recent conference sponsored by the Center for a New American Security, terrorism and crime have now merged, to such an extent that all terrorist movements – all of them -- have become partly criminal organizations to fund their operations, expand their reach – and incidentally make the people on top extremely rich, while lower-level zealots continue to be recruited for suicide missions.
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Robert B. Killebrew is a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Killebrew is a retired Army colonel who served 30 years in a variety of assignments that included Special Forces, tours in the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, XVIII Airborne Corps, high-level war planning assignments and instructor duty at the Army War College.
Afghanistan Trip Report
by Bing West
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Having recently returned from Afghanistan – thanks to the hospitality of Generals Petraeus and McChrystal - I’d like to share a few thoughts. By way of context, let me state my frame of reference. As a former assistant secretary of defense for international security, I am familiar with Washington dynamics; but I believe COIN is decided at the small unit level, not in national capitals. I was 18 months in Vietnam, have written five books on COIN and made 20 trips to Iraq and Afghanistan. This was my third Afghanistan visit in quick succession (April-May, June-July and October). My observations are based on forty to fifty shuras and patrols – several on extended missions – that included numerous small-arms engagements and fire missions. I talked with about 500 Marines and Afghan security forces of all ranks. The observations here are derived from that sample.
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Francis J. 'Bing' West is a Correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. He served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Reagan administration. In Vietnam, he was a member of the Marine Force Recon team that initiated Operation Stingray - sustained attacks behind enemy lines. He also saw action in the villages with a Combined Action Platoon and wrote The Village , a narrative of a Marine squad that lived for 485 days in a Vietnamese village. During the Vietnam time period, he wrote a series of monographs for The Rand Corporation on counterinsurgency and the nature of small unit combat. West is also the author of Small Unit Action in Vietnam, Naval Forces and National Security, The Pepperdogs: A Novel, The March Up: Taking Baghdad with the 1st Marine Division, No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah and The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq.
Turning Fallujah
by Colonel William F. Mullen III
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Fallujah is a city that has taken on a tremendous amount of significance because of what happened there from April to December of 2004. It has become one of the touchstone battles of the Marine Corps involvement in Operation Iraqi Freedom because of the intensity of the fighting and the number of Marines and Sailors killed or wounded there. It is not a large city in either the space it occupies, or the amount of people that claim it as home. It is a compact, dirty, beat up town that always had a sinister reputation under the Saddam Hussein regime as a smuggling and black market center. This went very nicely with its additional claim to fame as the “city of Mosques” due to the large number of Mosques located within its’ boundaries. Its people have been known to be, and still very much are, very xenophobic as their general attitude seems to be “it is us Fallujans against the world.” This was directed not only at coalition forces, but also at any Iraqis who were not specifically from Fallujah. It is certainly not a place that will show up as a vacation hot spot any time soon. My personal involvement there started in December 2004 when I went out to Iraq on a Pre-Deployment Site Survey (PDSS). I was the Operations Officer for Regimental Combat Team (RCT) 8 and we would be replacing RCT 1 in February, 2005. It finished, at least for now, when I departed the area in October, 2007 as the commander of 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines (2/6) having just spent the previous 7 months in control of the city.
This paper is not an attempt to tell how we did everything right and solved the riddle of “turning Fallujah” from being a constant source of trouble and anxiety, to an example of what could be accomplished in Iraq given the proper COIN techniques. We did not do everything right and our success there, such as it was, could only be described as the culmination of years of dedicated struggle and effort on the part of thousands of Marines, Soldiers and Sailors, as well as members of the Iraqi security forces, many of whom were wounded or killed there. It was also a result of the fortunate coming together of several different events, all happening around the same time, which also happened to coincide with my battalion’s arrival in March, 2007. This paper will briefly provide what I know of the history of Fallujah from 2004-2007, the techniques we used as an RCT to try and maintain control of both the town and the surrounding area during 2005 and early 2006, some lessons learned that I took away from observing the units that operated underneath RCT 8 during that year (one of which was 2/6, but under a different commander), the preparations we made in 2/6 after I took over to be ready to return to Fallujah, and finally the specific steps we took to capitalize on the conditions we found when we arrived there in late March, 2007. I firmly believe that it was the preparations we made while training prior to the deployment that enabled us to recognize what was happening in Fallujah and turn it to our advantage. We also developed an approach to turning Fallujah that resonated with the citizens of Fallujah to a degree and generated a level of success that well surpassed what we expected. It was an amazing experience and I feel privileged to have been a part of it.
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Colonel William F. Mullen III, USMC, is the Director of the Marine Corps Tactics and Operations Group of the Marine Corps Air Ground Task Force Training Command. In July 2002 he reported to the J-3 Directorate of the Joint Staff in the Pentagon for duty as an Action Officer in the PACOM and then the CENTCOM sections of the Joint Operations Division. In May 2003, he was assigned as the Executive Assistant to the Deputy Director for Regional Operations until he returned to Camp Lejeune in June 2004 as the Plans Officer for the 2nd Marine Division. In October, 2004 he was assigned as the Operations Officer for the 8th Marine Regiment and deployed with them to Fallujah, Iraq from February 2005 to February 2006. In June, 2006, he assumed command of 2d Battalion, 6th Marines and returned to Fallujah, Iraq from March to October, 2007. He was promoted to Colonel on 1 Oct, 2007 and reported to the Naval War College as a student in March, 2008 and graduated in March, 2009.
Iraq the Model?
How Applying Lessons from our Successes and Failures in Iraq Can Shape a Winning Strategy in Afghanistan
by Lydia Khalil
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“This was a reckless intervention and no one has ever succeeded in occupying this land.” “We are sacrificing young lives in the name of an unachievable mission.” “This conflict has no end in sight.” No, this is not the prevailing mood on Afghanistan. These were comments bandied about just a couple of years ago when the United States was faced with the same uncertainty about how to move forward in Iraq. The tone in 2006-2007 was much the same as it is now, as the United States is again facing an unpopular war with questionable ties to its national interests.
The U.S.’s experiences in Iraq should not be ignored as the Obama administration considers what is to be done in Afghanistan and attempts to answer the same questions– “Do we stay the course?” “Do we reinforce our efforts?” Or “do we scale back our objectives?”
Before critics can cry that Iraq and Afghanistan are too different to draw comparisons, let us acknowledge the differences. Afghanistan is a largely rural, tribal culture with low levels of development. Iraq is more urban, has more resources, a history of highly centralized government and relatively high levels of development. Both countries have their own histories with outside powers.
Context matters, but these differences do not take away from the fact that there are broad lessons that can be applied that go beyond the specifics of each nation and the precise circumstances of international involvement with them.
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Lydia Khalil is an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She was a governance advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad in 2003-2004 and a former counterterrorism analyst with the New York Police Department.
The Influence of Seapower Upon Small Wars
A Review Essay
by Lieutenant Commander Benjamin Armstrong
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Over the past decade the United States has rediscovered the challenges of counter-insurgency, unconventional operations, and hybrid wars. Much of the discussion and development of twenty-first century warfare has been led by the efforts of land forces. The United States Army and Marine Corps worked together jointly to develop a new counter-insurgency doctrine, studying the past as a way to help focus the experiences of the present. While the role of air power has also been sharply debated, the role of sea power has had little discussion. Maritime forces have long played a vital role in small wars, from the mercenary army led by Naval Agent William Eaton and his Marines in the First Barbary War to riverine forces in the Mekong Delta during Vietnam. It is time for Sailors, Marines, and Guardsmen to learn from their history, and realize that they have a central role in today’s global conflict.
The following three books provide important background for members of the sea services and students of complex modern warfare when approaching today’s global challenges. Counter-insurgency doctrine is founded on the experiences of the past. The effort to develop naval irregular warfare would benefit greatly by plotting a similar course. These books are selected neither because they provide a comprehensive view of the subject, nor because they share a philosophical approach. Instead, they are books that provide a starting point from which a study of naval power in small wars can set sail.
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Lieutenant Commander Benjamin “BJ” Armstrong is a Naval Aviator who has served as an Amphibious Search and Rescue and Special Warfare Pilot and an Advanced Helicopter Flight Instructor. He holds a MA in military history and has written on air power and naval history. He is a prior SWJ contributor and his articles and reviews have appeared in numerous journals including Defense & Security Analysis, Strategic Insights, and The Journal of Military History.
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Toward a Kilcullen-Biden Plan?
Bounding Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan
by Dr. Tony Corn
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At this particular juncture, the U.S. simply cannot afford a 500 billion dollar open-ended escalation. Nor can it opt for an incremental (“middle road”) strategy which would fail to create the psychological effects required in both the West and Afghanistan.
A temporary 40,000 surge is doable, but only if the core of the Obama strategy is a “Kilcullen-Biden” plan combining convocation of a loya jirga domestically with a regionalization of the Afghan question diplomatically. Let’s go massive for a limited time, and “clear, hold, and build” as much as we can. If it does not work, a regional negotiation provides ample cover for a drawdown.
COIN diehards will argue that in the absence an explicit long-term commitment, large segments of the Afghan population will continue to do fencing-sitting. Guess what: if the West is “the West” rather than just another Bananastan, it is because, from the British in 1688 to the Americans in 1776, and from the French in 1789 to the Romanians in 1989, Westerners decided that to “live free or die” was a more honorable option than forever “fencing-sitting.” At the end of the day, if 30 million Afghans want to be known as a nation of fence-sitters unwilling to stand up to 15,000 insurgents, it is their problem first, that of their immediate neighbors second, and only third that of the West itself.
COIN Maximalists and Minimalist can at least agree on one thing: whatever the option chosen, McChrystal is the man for the job. On the one hand, as mentioned earlier, the ISAF Commander has a grasp of tribal politics worthy of a professional anthropologist. On the other hand, reading between the lines of the report, it is not hard to see that General McChrystal has the kind of quiet determination that led a General Foch, on the eve of the Marne offensive, to defiantly report:
Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I shall attack.
Download the full article: Toward a Kilcullen-Biden Plan?
Dr. Tony Corn is the author of “World War IV as Fourth-Generation Warfare” (Policy Review, January 2006). He is currently on leave from the State Department and writing a book on The Long War. This article is a follow-up to “The Art of Declaring Victory and Going Home: Strategic Communication and the Management of Expectations” published in Small Wars Journal on September 18, 2009 (before the release of the McChrystal report). The opinions expressed in this essay are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the point of view of the U.S. State Department or the U.S. government.
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