U.S. Army's new strategy in Iraq—launched in February 2007, along with a surge of 25,000 additional American troops—qualifies neither as particularly new nor even as a strategy. Better to call it, instead, an enhanced reliance on tactics and operational concepts previously in use. Or, put less charitably, an over-hyped shift in emphasis that, on the one hand, will not necessarily yield an American victory in Iraq but, on the other, might well leave the United States Army crippled in future wars.
Properly understood, the surge narrative is really not about Iraq at all. It is about the past and future of the U.S. Army. It resurrects dubious battlefield lessons from the past—Vietnam, principally—applies them to Iraq, and extrapolates from there into an unknown future. On all three counts—past, present, and future—the narrative suffers from numerous and irreparable defects. Its reading of the past, grounded in the cliché that General Creighton Abrams's "hearts and minds" program "won" the war in Vietnam, is a self-serving fiction. Its version of the more recent past and even the present is contrived and largely fanciful, relying on a distorted version of both to tell a tale in which U.S. forces triumphed in Iraq in 2007 and did so despite the misguided efforts of their predecessors even a year before. More than anything else, the surge narrative stakes a claim on the future, instructing us that its methods of counterinsurgency will be uniquely suited to the next war and to the one after that.
From the surge, its most fervent advocates have extracted a single maxim: that they and only they have uncovered the secret to defeating insurgencies. Prior to the surge, in this telling, only a few exceptional units were engaged in proper counterinsurgent operations...
Much more at World Affairs.
Discuss at Small Wars Council.
UPDATE: With a hat tip to Charlie at Abu Muqawama, here is a good campanion piece to Gian's World Affairs article - Review Symposium on the New U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Manual at Perspectives on Politics Journal.
UPDATE 2: More - Gentile, Not Gentle by Dr. iRack at Abu Muqawama.
Comments
Here's my 2 cents on Iraq:
1. Great maneuver victory followed by the stupidity of ignoring the basics of reorganization & consolidation on the objective.
2. This is followed by the "ride around in a jeep and get blown up" strategy that lasted for three years. And contrary to popular belief, General P was part of this.
3. Army and Marine Corps captains initiate the dialogue with tribal leaders. The brass tells them they are on their own, but then the brass takes credit when it starts working.
4. General P does the transformation from Saul to Paul and adopts the "surge" strategy from the Kagans, while taking full credit as the architect of this.
5. The surge demonstrates that we can kill the bad guys if we really want to.
6. However, the softies get tired of this back home, to include much of the brass who would rather be diplomats instead of fighters, and the killing of the enemy ceases. So...
7. We pull out of the cites, hence leaving the battlefield, since it is an urban insurgency, and declare "we won" since the enemy doesn't follow us out into the countryside.
8. Now for you unbelieving Gomers, Go back into the cities and see if the enemy doesn't somehow just reappear. I mean after all they are still setting off bombs in the cities chewing up their own.
COIN seems to me to be yet another absurd reaction going too far in the opposite direction. Now we will have COIN commanders and their historically unschooled offspring throughout the force when once again faced with a decisive war not of our choosing.
Then we will have to recall the terminal enemy destroyers from retirement to defeat the enemy, in addition to remaking the fighting forces under pressure. See World War II.
We just don't get it. The US ARMY has got to be prepared to fight effectively (i.e.-accomplish the mission) at every threat level, yet the ARMY can never give up the ability to fight on the continental level. Some things are just more important than others. Reforming Muslim lands (impossible) is just not a decisive interest of the United States.
Tim:
And thank you for your gracious response. Agree and I think my previous post acknowledged that the American effort in the Philippine War used both coercion and persuasion. However, Linn's book does make clear that there was plenty of coercive force applied toward the population and the insurgents; sometimes quite harsh too.
FM 3-24 certainly acknowledges that coercion is an essential part of Coin. But the thrust and spirit of the FM does lean toward persuasion. Biddle argues this same point in his recent review of 3-24 in Perspectives on Politics.
gian
Gentile: Thank you for your gracious response. Since you cite Brian MacAllister Linn's latest book on American military history, I suggest you consult his book on the Philippine War, as in it he describes how the US used a mixture of coercive & persuasive techniques to pacify the Philippines. For instance, the US brought medicine, schoolteachers, and sanitation to the Philippines as part of our pacification effort.
The coerciveness of US methods in the Philippine War has often been greatly exagerrated, taking exceptions (like Samar) to be representative of the whole. However, I'm unaware of any COIN advocates who deny any role for coercive techniques in COIN warfare. It takes both carrots and sticks to win. Neither an all-carrot nor an all-stick approach will succeed.
Find that the most profound observation was that Dave Petraeus and his generals have contributed to the current situation by adding incremental adjustments to an existing evolution of occupation strategies. In a way they have thickened a mantle upon an active volcano. I believe it, the volcano, is presently in a cycle, and a more violent series of activies will appear in the near but indeterminate future.
Other issue; why are the West Pointers not also spending time in Newark as opposed to Jersey City. It is a city that has an active murder, gang and drug war, a police force under stress, ethnic cleansing and foreign NGOs of Mother Teresa tending in the fields abandoned by both church and state. It also has a dynamic mayor, Corey Booker with a cadre of political action teams that try to hold it together. It may be a microcosm of the American political failure in inner cities that match the happenings in the bad lands, former colonies and foreign interventions.
To Tim Star:
Reference your point #3 about my statement that insurgencies cant be beaten unless a government is in place with a reasonable semblance of some legitimacy in the eyes of at least significant parts of the population. Your critique of me here is a reasonable one and I accept it. I should have qualified the term "counterinsurgencies" with the idea of counterinsurgencies based on an FM 3-24 approach which essentially is the French Revolutionary War School of the early 60s and their counter-maoist, protracted peoples war approach, which the United States tried to apply in Vietnam and failed, and the current FM 3-24 is heavily based on. In that qualified sense my statement is correct. To be sure there are plenty of recent historical examples of counterinsurgencies working even when there was not a legitimate government in place in the eyes of the people. The Chinese counterinsurgency in Tibet from 1951 to 1960 comes to mind where the Chinese controlled Tibetan government did not hold legitimacy of the majority of Tibetans but the Chinese were still able to eventually crush the insurgency through a brutal, enemy-centric approach.
As far as your use of the history of the Philippine War (1899-1902), I would argue first that the American approach certainly did not reflect in any way the spirit of the new FM 3-24 since then the Americans relied on a large measure of coercive techniques against the insurgents and the population rather than persuasion. The new FM 3-24 prefers the latter. And I would also argue that there was a semblance of a legitimate government simply because the legitimate government there was an American colonial one run by William Howard Taft. Too, Taft had cut some shrewd deals with certain elite Philippine political parties and tied them to the colonial government and in turn these parties help to spread American colonial government legitimacy into the provinces. The capture of Aguinaldo certainly helped along with plenty of coercive military operations by the American army combined with civic improvement programs coordinated by Taft.
Thanks for the push back
gian
Gentile is wrong on several points:
1) He accuses his rhetorical targets of claiming to be the only ones who know how to beat insurgencies. However, the COIN methods advocated for Iraq are based upon wide-ranging study of guerilla warfare (not just the Vietnam War), as in Robert Asprey's "War in the Shadows: The Guerilla in History."
2) He claims the Army was already practicing classical COIN methods by mid-2004, but seems to be overgeneralizing from his own experience. Even so, I'd question whether there were enough troops in-country and whether they were distributed so as to make it possible to apply those methods consistently. The failure of the US military to clear and hold Fallujah in 2004 indicates at least one major exception to his claim that the US was already practicing clear-and-hold in 2004.
3) He claims that insurgencies can't be beaten in societies lacking "a relatively cohesive identity" and "a government that possesses at least some measure of legitimacy." Unfortunately, the history of guerilla warfare provides ample exceptions to this alleged universal law, such as the Philippine War. The Philippines lacked any such cohesive societal identity, as well as any legitimate government.
The Philippines were split amongst many different language groups (Tagalogs, Visayans, etc.), and between at least two major religions (Catholics and Muslims). The Spanish had never imposed any official language in the islands, and had never even conquered the Moros or permanently occupied Moroland. The Spanish colonial regime was widely regarded as corrupt & incompetent, and no indigenous replacement government had been established to replace it. So, the US ended up allying itself with some of the factions within the Philippines against the other to pacify the country, and built the first government to occupy and control all of the Philippines pretty much from scratch.
Since the Philippine War was the biggest US military experience with COIN prior to the Vietnam War (and longer than Vietnam, since the Moro Rebellion lasted until 1913), for a military historian to assert allegedly universal laws of COIN that are directly contrary to that experience is a rather glaring omission.
4) Paying Iraqi Sunnis to join us rather than fight us, and getting Sadr to retreat to Iran, are measures that are part of the "Surge," not distinct from it. This is not obvious from the term "surge," which suggests a mere increase in the number of troops in Iraq. However, the number of troops was increased in order to enable the consistent application of COIN methods that had already proven themselves in limited areas. Enlisting local allies is a standard COIN practice, as the US did in Vietnam and the Philippine War (not to mention the Indian Wars), and a consistent US policy of population security meant that the Shi'ites no longer had to turn to Sadr as their only protector.
5) Finally, Gentile presents the false alternative of US preparation for _either_ COIN _or_ conventional operations, and accuses COIN advocates of saying the US need not prepare for conventional operations. What COIN advocates have said is that the US was wrong to _only_ prepare for conventional operations, without any COIN preparations. Our enemies are most likely to hit us where we "ain't." If we focus solely upon conventional preparation, our enemies will hit us unconventionally. If we focus solely upon unconventional operations, our enemies will hit us conventionally.
We need the capability for both conventional and unconventional operations. With the Iraq War, we've finally regained the COIN capability that the US had previously built from scratch in the Indian Wars, the Philippine War, the Marine Corps' various constabulary experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Vietnam War. The usual American historical pattern has been for the institutional memory of these experiences to be swiftly lost after the wars were over, thus leaving us unprepared next time and needing to reinvent the COIN wheel all over again, from scratch. We must not let that happen again, even if we also need to strengthen the US military's conventional capabilities.
Were it not for a surge of US troops to reassure Iraqis that we were committed to staying in the fight against AQI, the Sunni tribes would probably have been reluctant to work with us. I think most sensed that the writing was on the wall, that the political pressure back home was forcing us to begin a withdrawal. Upping the ante sent the opposite message. Were it not for that, I don't think they would have played ball, for fear of AQI retaliation upon our withdrawal.
Regarding the atrophy of our conventional warfighting skills, it would be interesting to see a comparison of our combat readiness prior to 9/11 with our readiness now. I don't mean a slide that shows what percentage of Soldiers scored sharpshooter or a comparison of average scores on Table VIII. I mean a good solid critique that discusses intangibles as well. In the 1990s, we were taught to fear our weapons and that safety was more important than anything. It strains my credulity to think that any force from the mid- to late-1990s was more ready for prime time than any of the US forces that are presently dispensing scunion in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One other point: thanks to LTC Gentile for pointing out that a troop surge is not a strategy and, by extension, that it is also not a change in strategy. It's a minor point, but one that always annoyed me. I believe that he is the first to point this out in a publication of note.