Small Wars Journal

Operational Effectiveness and Strategic Success in Counterinsurgency

Sun, 02/10/2008 - 6:18am
Operational Effectiveness and Strategic Success in Counterinsurgency

By Steven Metz

When I was a young professor at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College I joined a small committee responsible for strategy instruction. This was all new to me: I had to learn before I could teach. One of the ideas that most impressed me then—and continues to today—is a simple, elegant, yet powerful way of thinking about strategy: it must be feasible, acceptable, and suitable. Feasibility means that there must be adequate resources to implement the strategy. Acceptability means that the "stakeholders" of the strategy have to buy in. Suitability means that the strategy had to have a reasonable chance of attaining the desired political objectives. This was the most important of all. A feasible and acceptable strategy was worthless if it did not offer a reasonable chance of attaining the desired political objectives. Reading Major General Dunlap's essay on counterinsurgency reminded me of this. His recommendations are feasible and acceptable but short on suitability.

In insurgency the military battlespace is not decisive; the psychological and political ones are (at least so long as the insurgents are not stupid). Insurgents recognize that they are militarily weaker than the state and deliberately shape their movement so that the military battlespace is not decisive. While the state would prefer that the military battlespace be decisive, it cannot make it so. The state can (and often does) dominate the military battlespace but if this does not directly translate into dominance of the political and psychological battlespaces, the state cannot attain strategic success. Hence operational effectiveness is no guarantee of strategic success. William R. Polk provided an elegant and powerful description of this when he described the Northern Ireland conflict in his book Violent Politics: "...the dominant power and the insurgents were fighting overlapping but different wars. The dominant power aimed to destroy the insurgent movement while the insurgents aimed to dishearten the occupying power and convince it that the struggle was too expensive to maintain. The dominant power relied on force and avoided political action, while militants, having limited force, sought to make the struggle political but also violent."

General Dunlap's recommended approach focuses on operational effectiveness—he does not mention strategy—but does not connect this to strategic success. He argues that a greater reliance on precision standoff firepower—particularly airpower—would lower American and civilian casualties and diminish the U.S. footprint. This might help sustain support for continued U.S. involvement—it would be acceptable. Even if true (and the contention that a greater reliance on airpower would diminish civilian casualties is questionable), this may not increase the chances of strategic success—it may not be suitable. The key to counterinsurgency is designing operations with the desired psychological effects, most importantly greater confidence by and in the regime. Simply killing insurgents is not enough.

The question, then, is whether substituting airpower for landpower has this psychological effect. I do not believe that it does. There are several problems. For starters, airpower relies on accurate, timely intelligence gathered from something other than the strike platform. Land forces can be effective in counterinsurgency because the strike platform—the individual soldier or Marine—is its own intelligence source. It can see, hear, even smell the target. This makes the "organic" strike platform better able to make split-second decisions, distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate targets, and identify a wider range of targets including ones difficult to find with technology. It is certainly true that soldiers and Marines sometimes make mistakes—as General Dunlap points out—but the appropriate solution is to better train them, not to replace them with technical systems. Human rights abuses by ground forces are no more inevitable than the bombing of wedding parties by fighter planes.

The bigger problem with substituting airpower for landpower is that airstrikes often do not have the desired psychological effect, particularly the creation of confidence by and in a regime. Airpower theory assumes that strikes can render the enemy physically or psychologically ineffective. Because insurgents do not rely on large military formations and are dispersed among the population, it is impossible to render them ineffective via precision strikes. Dispersion not only erodes the effectiveness of airpower but also makes it uneconomical. It would make sense to attack a small insurgent team with a weapon costing tens of thousands of dollars carried on a platform costing hundreds of millions if doing so had some desired psychological effect that could not be attained with a few dollars worth of bullets. Little in the history of counterinsurgency suggests that it does. Insurgents today make even greater use of dispersion than in the past. Airpower may have a significant psychological effect against an inexperienced or irresolute enemy, but not against a determined one. To create an approach to counterinsurgency which only works against inept or stupid insurgents is the height of folly (even though that is exactly what much of the American revolution in military affairs did).

Even more broadly, substituting airpower for ground forces overlooks a simple truth about insurgency: insurgents win not when a regime is defeated on the battlefield, but when its will collapses. Hence the first and foremost question for any counterinsurgency strategy is: What could precipitate the collapse of the regime's will? Again history suggests that a sense of isolation often contributes to such collapses. For the United States to tell a partner regime that we're —to provide airpower but not to shed blood or commit landpower sends the message that American support is qualified. The psychological effect is to leave a regime feeling isolated. If it does hang on, it will remember that Washington was tepid during its time of need.

A better integration of airpower into the military component of counterinsurgency is a good thing. Substituting airpower for landpower is not. It maximizes acceptability at the expense of suitability. I believe that the United States should only undertake counterinsurgency support in the rarest of cases, perhaps not at all. But if we do, doing so on the cheap may be the worst option, angering enemies without a full commitment to friends. We should either do it right and maximize the chances of strategic success or not do it all. Half way approaches are not suitable.

Dr. Steven Metz is the author of Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy (Potomac Press: Forthcoming).

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