Ryan Evans is Wrong!

Ryan Evans is Wrong!

Line of Departure provides a COIN primer to the COIN gurus

by Carl Prine

I’ve long argued the most intellectually lazy, bumper-sticker bullshit anyone can blather is something along the lines of, “Counter-insurgency isn’t dead because insurgency isn’t dead.”

Here’s Evans making it:

Future insurgencies are all-but-certain to challenge American interests to the point that our civilian political leadership will need to decide if our military will become involved in countering them. And if insurgency lives, then so must counterinsurgency.

That was kind of the point of Few’s very brief essay only he asked for us to consider the great expenses of these misadventures, including opportunity costs squandered there, whenever savants like Nagl suggest that we can “change entire societies” or Ucko tries to trick us in believing timeless “lessons” they’re “teasing” out of our taxpayers.

There’s nothing original about saying that insurgency, like all other aspects of war, exists because of a asymmetry that’s inherent to battle.  Someone is always stronger than another, and the weaker party shall seek to even his odds by trying different things to win the contest.

A fundamental lesson Gentile and Few (and Kilcullen) have sought to remind us is that sometimes deciding to fight these wars is akin to defeat.  Or, as Callwell put it somehow without the benefit of having read these “new” thoughts in FM 3–24, quelling rebellion is “protracted, thankless, invertebrate war” that should be avoided at all costs.

Like Callwell, Few and Gentile merely have suggested that we consider other tools in the box the next time we’re faced with foreign policy problems likely caused, or that shall cause, insurrection.

What, Carl?  You mean that there are other choices for the great military power than trotting off to a “protracted, thankless, invertebrate war?”  Well, according to that rascal Callwell (admittedly not an armor cav officer), there are a trio of strategic choices one might employ when facing unruly peoples who cause of problems overseas.

Conquest is that which the British did when they sought to rule directly those souls who didn’t wish to be ruled by London.  The fact that Britain was a great imperial power with a civilian government largely unified in the project provided inherent logic to the effort.

Retaliation was what one might do to recalcitrant peoples who needed a good lesson without the additional pain of subjugating and ruling.  Call it a “punitive expedition,” “butcher and bolt” campaign or the French “razzia” if you want but they were essentially the same sorts of operations in that they were designed to use punitive violence as a means to communicate psychologically to the enemy certain notions about one’s dominant power.

Pacification was the least appealing choice for Callwell and I trust that it would appear to be so for us, too.  What Callwell didn’t have to worry about was our own uniquely idiotic 21st century belief that quashing rebellion should involve subjugating a people, winning their “hearts and minds” through our “legitimacy” and then making them obey the proxy government and security force we create partly in our own image to serve our foreign policy goals.

I’m still awaiting empirical proof that any great power has prosecuted successfully a “hearts and minds” project that led successfully to a proxy government being seated that serves our interests.   I might be here for some time.  Far longer than the combined wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown us that it might be impossible for a foreign force to gain “legitimacy” and win “hearts and minds,” even after incurring $5 trillion in debt trying to do so.

Although he mentions smaller missions to Yemen, the Philippines and, inexplicably, Somalia, Evans seems to believe that we should prepare forever to conduct large-scale nation-building experiments that cripple our power and bankrupt our coffers.

He likely might find receptive ears at the Pentagon because the Army currently is enmeshed in an existential crisis about what it wants to be, and generation-long counterinsurgency slogs might be the card that they play.  Evans has a ready-made pitch for them when he asks that we consider “how the United States would respond to violence spilling over the border from catastrophic state failure and humanitarian crisis in Mexico, for instance.”

In 1916, an unprepared U.S. Army responded with a brief and violent punitive expedition, long on boondoggle and short on dead guerrilla leaders, that nevertheless managed to communicate our foreign policy concerns to the insurgents in a way that they well understood.

Blackjack Pershing and George Patton did so without speckling Mexico with combat outposts, going on joint patrols with armies raised at the American taxpayer’s expense and bribing everyone in a sombrero not to shoot us or cross the Rio Grande to rob our banks.

At some point, our COIN savants might learn that one reason there always are insurgents is that there are stronger powers willing to fight them.  Perhaps a cardinal virtue would be to simply never fight them.  And if civilian leaders low on IQ and high on hubris decide to tackle bands of troublemakers abroad they might encounter real generals who will explain to them the likely impossibility of rebuilding another nation, installing a new government and raising a military to carry out our policies.

It’s easier to do so when you’re not lying to everyone about the timeless COIN skills you apparently need to retain, especially when you know that every insurgency – like every counterinsurgency – is unique because of the specific forms of historical causation of the political grievances.