The scrimmage should be as hard as the game.
By General Martin E. Dempsey, US Army
"This compilation of writings by General Dempsey—six articles published in ARMY magazine from October 2010 to March 2011, plus the speech he delivered at AUSA's 2011 Winter Symposium in February—captures the mutual focus of the Chief and his TRADOC commander on what our Army must do to shape itself for the future. There is recognition that our Army is always a force in transition, that it will expand and contract, train and deploy, and perpetually modify its Tables of Organization and Equipment. But the primary imperative for our leaders must be to care for the Soldiers and families who have endured so much for the country they love."
"That said, the Army and its leadership must win, learn, focus, adapt and win again—win the conflicts they face, learn better and faster than their enemies, focus on the fundamentals, adapt as an institutional imperative and, when called upon, win again."
General Gordon R. Sullivan, US Army Retired
President, Association of the United States Army
Comments
A principal point that has been made in this and other blogs: "Classic Counter-Insurgency," by whatever label, is designed for governments whose members are part of the country population, and who are trying to keep their jobs and are not going anywhere. We can help a government learn and do this type of COIN, but we can't do it for them -- especially when their culture is not compatible with what we are trying to offer.
Further, even classical COIN emphasizes that security must exist before you can do the nation-building; but we seem to ignore that -- or at least can't seem to achieve it.
We need a COIN doctrine suited to a "great-power" with no CLASSICAL imperial ambitions, and therefore has no desire to stay where they are at, but who wants to leave as soon as possible -- meaning (hopefully) as soon as appropriate objectives have been accomplished. Such a doctrine must account for the anomalies of the local government and culture. That means that we may have to push aside the preferred approach of the State Dept. and empower local villages, tribes, or whatever (when central governments aren't up to the task). Funding made available to Battalion commanders for use in their area for projects important to local leaders would go much further than the centralized chaos currently in practice.
Such doctrine must also capture the necessity of forcefully holding accountable governments that support insurgents arrayed aginst us. In almost every case, insurgencies are fueled by outside powers; and that is the current case also.
Finally, it must address the issue of when and why to get involved. Some conflicts can and should be ignored; others, if ignored for very long, end up as something that looks like WWII (or WWIII, WWIV, ...etc.).
If a government has, for example, a modernization agenda (which the government believes will cure many ills of the state and society), and if this government then acts to implement this modernization program, then this effort often runs afoul of those conservative elements of the society -- and much of the population generally -- who disagree with (for various reasons) this undertaking.
One overarching reason for this disagreement -- and the often resulting insurgency(ies) -- is that "modernization" often means that the state and society will need to be adapted and opened up for better access to, interaction with and utilization by foreign entities (example: the "Modern Silk Road" concept endorsed by Pres. Karzai and GEN. Petraeus re: Afghanistan). http://www.silkroadstudies.org/new/docs/silkroadpapers/1005Afghan.pdf (See page 5.)
Herein, one can see, as COL Jones suggests, a classic -- and extremely familiar -- example of how "causation for insurgency radiates out from the government" (to wit: government policy [modernization], critical aspects thereof [adapting the state and society and opening these up for better use by foreign entities], alienates and infuriates significant numbers and important elements of the population, who revolt).
Thereafter, as COL Jones suggests, these non-representative governments and the foreign powers who support them -- "hold themselves harmless and engage in an endless series of "whack-a-mole" dealing with one insurgency after another."
COL Jones: As relates to present circumstances -- and to many of those in the past -- did I get this fairly right?
Gian,
Not at all. Until one can separate in their mind the various organizations over time that emerge from a popualce, employing a range of ideologies and causes to challenge a single government from the conditions of insurgency that exist across those populaces as created by the government, one is really just managing symptoms.
Governments and the external powers that support governments more often than not hold themselves harmless and engage in an endless series of "whack-a-mole" dealing one one insurgency after another, as in the Philippines and Algeria; or a constant program of breaking up groups by arresting without warrant and holding without charge an endless stream of citizens who dare to complain, as in many Arabe countries today.
It is only when governments take responsibility and address their own problems that true healing occurs across a populace. This was a particular blind spot for Galula as a man who grew up a French Colonist in Africa, and spent his adult life suppressing challenges to colonial governments around the globe. He pointedly noted that it was never the Colonial power's fault, but rather that the populace was being stirred up to challenge the (puppet) local national government; and that when revolutions such as the ones that are erupting across the Middle East today occurred they were "accidents" and unpredictable. He could not see outside his pardagim; and we built current US doctrine shaped by that same pardigm.
Until one can see how causation for insurgency radiates out from government, rather than in from some malign source or harsh condition, one really cannot begin to design an effective COIN campaign. I like Galula, but he was a man of his times and his experiences. So are American leaders tasked with sustaining foreign governments we count on to manage our interests for us today as well.
Carl: Agree about both of your book choices. Galula's extended essay on his experience in Algeria is much better than his book. And West's Village is a classic (although I like his new book "The Wrong War" much better!)
Bob, saying that defeating the "insurgents" doesnt defeat the "insurgency" reads like Orwellian double speak. Of course it does. The insurgents in Malaya were crushed through physical relocation and military destruction which is what ended the insurgency. You can juice up the thing with theories of state building, constitutions, governments etc, but you cant get away from the basic fact that in the historical case of Malaya--and accepting as a good historian its uniqueness and contingencies--that the insurgency ended when the insurgents were defeated.
Brother Slap, are you calling me a "political scientist"? ;)
gian
Hmmm. Not saying that some cultures are not more warlike than other, I think history bears out the existance of warrior cultures emerging now and again.
But insurgency is not about being "prickly" so much as it is about not liking being pricked. Warrior culutures tend to take their war making on the road. When they turn it inward onto their own leadership there is a problem in that leadership that supercedes any culture of conflict. I would chalk this theory of Mr. Laqueur as one more of many examples of governmental "blame-shifting" when it comes to insurgency. Whereas I believe virtually every true insurgency is a response to causation that radiates outward in the nature and the policies of the governance, I cannot think of many instances where any government every said "This is our fault and we need to change how we government to make this go away."
So, blame it on ideology, poverty, internal or eternal malign actors, or blame it on culture. At the end of the day, responsibility cannot be delegated, and it rests with the government. The nature of the colonial master/colonial government/colonial populace dynamic really skews clear perspectives.
Robert C. Jones:
Mr. Laqueur called it a "guerrilla tradition". I take that to mean some peoples are just more prickly than others. An example might be some people of Mindanao vs. some peoples of other islands. Or you might expect more trouble from the Vietnamese than from the Japanese. That kind of thing. My examples might not be precisely correct but I hope it conveys the general idea.
Slap,
I know what the doctrine says. I know what the history books say. Both were written by the counterinsurgent at a time when we believed that evil communists were brainwashing the people of South East Asia to rise up against their kind hearted colonial and neo-colonial patrons. We apply that same thinking to our perspectives on the Middle East today. We cast it in terms of "Good Vs. Evil" with us in the role of "Good." One has to strip away that bias to get to a clearer perspective.
Now, I have no problem with counterguerrialla operations. My point is that the defeat of the gurrilla is not a prerequisite to addressing the causal factors of governance; nor does the defeat of the guerrilla need to be complete in order to move to the next "phase" of addressing governance. The main effort is addressing governance, set that as your main effort from the very start, and only apply what supporting effort necessary to distractors such as the guerrilla, in order to make those changes. Most governance changes can be made with the stroke of a pen, so I'm just not buying the "guerrilla firat" mantra.
Guerrialla first came from an era where the colonial power's endstate was to sustain in local governance the very factors that also drive the insurgency. That is why we addopted TTPs aimed at managing the symptoms instead.
As to Carl, you really suggest that some people just have a culture of insurgency? Maybe I misunderstand your point. People do not wage insurgnency because they don't know what else to do any more than they do so becuse someone laid some sexy ideology on them. That's just not how it works.
As to resettlement as a cure, how did that work in the Philippnines when we sent the Huks down to Mindano? How did it work in the US when we moved the Natives from the SE out to Oklahoma? Resettlement is one of those issues where we have credited an effect to the wrong cause.
Robert C. Jones:
With respect to the Philippines, Algeria and such places, you could look at them as being places where rebellion or insurgency are a strong part of the culture. They happen over and over again. If that is so, a successful effort against the insurgency would be one that damps things down for a while, just a while, and not one that brings bucolic peace for all time after. That kind of success would have to wait for a cultural/economic change, a type of change that would be beyond one particular gov or military's ability to effectuate. That is an observation Walter Laqueur made and it seemed a good one. With that in mind you might even look on the troubles in Mexico as being sort of in the category of the latest in Mexico's long list of rebellions and insurgencies.
Gian:
You are right and I typed before giving your comment careful thought. Which leads me to a question.
Two books I liked a lot that I thought were filled with good small wars practices (as far as an interested civilian can judge) were The Village by West and Galula's book about his experiences in Algeria. In neither of those accounts did popularity projects play a very prominent role. They were both characterized by things like staying the night, lots and lots of patrols and ambushes, getting to know the local people, their names and faces, not gratuitously pissing them off, selective and careful use of heavy weapons, use of local forces etc. They were really mostly about fighting-who, when and how.
Do you think the small wars experiences of the past as represented by those two works have been mischaracterized (sic) to de-emphasize the fighting part? (How's that for awkward sentence structure, an ize followed by an ize.)
Robert C. Jones, the quote below from Gian used to be basic "Green Beret Stuff" at least as I learned it. You have to deal with the guerrila force or nothing much will matter. They are killing people....and you have to stop that or good governance dosen't have a chance. Why is that not still valid or what has changed exactly?
gian p gentile:
One more time with Malaya; the defeat of the insurgents had little to do with the granting of "suffrage" to the ethnic Chinese and everything to do with physical resettlement of them and military operations that severed the links between them and the insurgents.
Gian, that is very,very good systems analysis stuff!!
Gian,
My conventional brother in arms, the point is, that the defeat of the insurgent has little to do with the defeat of the insurgency.
One can defeat insurgent movements over and over and over again, and never address the insurgency itself. This is the Philippines. This is Algeria.
Malaya was different, everyone fixates on the success with the insurgent, and those were the lessons we attempted to apply in Vietnam and elsewhere. What is lost is that they only worked because the actual factors of governance driving the insurgency itself were addressed.
Now, some argue that one had to defeat the insurgent first before one could move on to addressing the causes of insurgency. They make that argument in Afghanistan today. I don't buy it.
The truth, I believe, is that the insurgency really has very little to do with the insurgent. Insurgents are like surfers riding the wave of insurgency. If the insurgency surf is up, insurgent surfers will come to ride it. By addressing the causal aspacts of governane one calms the seas of the populace. With no more waves of insurgency to ride, the insurgents of every flavor are rendered moot and fade away.
This has nothing to do with "hearts and minds" nor is it pure counterguerrilla. This is not an either or, and infact both of those approaches merely swipe at the symptoms; it is pure good governance. Governance that is perceived to be legitimate, just, and respectful over a populace that percieves itself to live in liberty.
One more time with Malaya; the defeat of the insurgents had little to do with the granting of "suffrage" to the ethnic Chinese and everything to do with physical resettlement of them and military operations that severed the links between them and the insurgents. To be sure the political accommodations and adjustments that the British made mattered, but only really in terms of locking in the support of the native Malays of which they had all along anyway.
Winning the war against the insurgents was never really in question, just how long it would take.
Still Malaya is an example of successful Counterinsurgency, just not of the hearts and minds persuasion. That kind of coin has simply not worked.
Yet that is exactly the kind of Coin we are trying to make work in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan the purpose of the American military is to turn the population against the Taliban by winning their trust and allegiance. That is pure hearts and minds stuff.
gian
Oops. Major brianwave disconnect. I meant " design, adoption and implementation of the CONSTITUTION",( not the equally wonderful Declaration of Independence which served and continues to serve a very special purpose in the true American COIN perspective).
Thinking way faster than I can type...and yes, I realize I am a slow typer. Just doing spell check is not enough... :-)
The real test is that of enduring results, not nirvana, but a populace and government that are able to move forward together without the populace feeling compelled to continually resort to illegal means to affect substantive change.
Often, it is simply opening the aperture of what is considered legal for the populaces to be able to adequately express their legitimate concerns short of becoming outlaws and insurgents. The Tea Party in America would be disbanded and the leadership arrested in most of the Arab states currently facing growing unrest by their respective populaces across North Africa and the Middle East. The best "COIN" those governments could implement now would be to adopt reasonable measures within their cultural construct and expectation to give the people greater legal means to express discontent and legally pursue solutions to real problems.
The Philippines often gets listed as an example of past COIN success, yet insurgency has been continuous in that land since first colonized by Spain. Insurgencies ebb and flow, emerge among various groups and locations, adopt various ideologies and causes. This is the response to governmental causation. Certainly the Philippine government has gone through changes as well, but in critical ways is little evolved from the Spanish Colonial perspective of over 100 years ago.
Historians tend to use too short of a ruler in measuring COIN success; and the metrics applied are far too biased to the western historic perspective of our colonial predecessors. We have to learn to step away from that heritage to gain a new, clearer, and more appropriate perspective.
Examples of successful COIN?
1. US abolishment of the Articles of Confederation to put a check on the ravages of pure democracy; and the subsequent design, adoption and implementation of the Declaration of Independence to defuse the growing air of insurgency across the country.
(And no, the Civil War was not an insurgency, as it was legal conflict under the constitution between sovereign governments.)
2. The Malay Emergency. Great Britain began by employing the old model of seeking to defeat the challenger to the colonial government they had carefully shaped and controlled through their High Commissioner in country, and the Colonial Office back home. Ultimately they realized they were clinging to a model that was no longer cost effective. Ethnic Chinese were granted Suffrage and Great Britain relinquished their control over the government. When the surviving communist insurgents came back in from where they had been chased, they found that the populace that has supported them had no further need for their services.
3. The American Civil Rights movement. Attaining greater freedom and rights during WWII, African Americans were unwilling to return to an antebellum status quo that left them outside the rights and protections offered to other Americans by the Constitution. Efforts at the local level were to suppress such illegal challenges through the rule of law, but at the Federal level President Johnson pressed for three landmark bills that ultimately extended the benefits of the Constitution to all Americans and returned the country to stability (like all COIN, it is a work and action and never "won", but must always be tended to in a continuous effort by civil leaders).
By and large our expeditionary interventions are not, and have never been, "COIN." To flippantly pass that off as mere semantics is very dangerous indeed.
Bob
Gian:
Maybe counterinsurgency didn't work in Iraq, nor in Malaya, nor in the Philippines, nor in Vietnam, nor in El Salvador, nor in many other places. But something worked by whatever name one chooses to call it. I don't see what is wrong with figuring the broad outlines of what worked in those places and then adapting to whatever the new place will be. And there is always a new place. It is better to go into that new place with at least some idea of what might be needed rather than starting from scratch every single time.
Here is one simple lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan: Counterinsurgency doesn't work. That is Counterinsurgency that aims to win the trust of local populations to turn against the enemy through programs of state building combined with military presence to "protect" the population. It failed in Iraq and is currently failing in afghanistan. When as an army are we going to learn and adapt ourselves out of this failed doctrine?