One of the most profound political-social developments affecting warfare and political violence is the nexus between state legitimacy and the type of warfare facing the United States today.  The recently released Quadrennial Defense Review now recognizes that Irregular Warfare of the type we are now dealing with is based upon a challenge to the legitimacy of governance and the cultural identities it protects and propagates. Increasingly, the Department of Defense is calling upon the SOF community to step up in this war against cultural extremists that use organized violence to contest the legitimacy of governing institutions.  To meet the growing expectations of Army SOF, we must rebalance our doctrinal foundations with emerging knowledge gained from interdisciplinary studies of the social sciences.  The Irregular Warfare challenge mounted by our adversaries dictates an evolution in the understanding of conflict origination and our responses to it.

For the past half century, US Army Special Forces trained personnel and units to conduct the Army service mission of Unconventional Warfare (UW) and its corollary, Foreign Internal Defense (FID). These two types of military missions have their direct roots in World War II, and indirect roots within the American and French Revolutionary Wars.  Unconventional Warfare is the development of partisan, or guerrilla organizations that work to destroy the elements of governing legitimacy and control over a populace.  This type of warfare is predicated upon an existing unwillingness of the indigenous population to accept the legitimacy of the governing structure.  While there are no ‘book’ solutions to the insurgent’s goal of challenging a government’s legitimacy, there are major threshold steps that lead to an escalation of partisan conflict followed by an increased reliance by the governing structure on the element of coercion. This increase in coercion serves to enhance recruiting by the partisans in a cyclical manner until success or failure of the partisan objective is met.  The ultimate goal of the revolution is to force a renegotiation of the makeup or structure of the governing apparatus.  Failing this goal, the successful insurgency builds sufficient capability to conduct full scale force-on-force warfare against the protective apparatus until it is defeated. Once defeated, the partisan forces disband and reconstitute the now unprotected governing structure consistent with their own cultural identity.  The corollary to the insurgency mission is Foreign Internal Defense.  FID missions are actually more complex, while UW missions are inherently more difficult and dangerous.  In its simplest definition, FID is helping the foreign friendly government reinvent itself, before a successful insurgency does it for them, or the failing government resorts to its last resort of sustenance: genocide.  To successfully reinvent or reform itself, a governing structure must rebuild its ability to monopolize domestic violence, protect its borders from foreign violence and incursion, and articulate its historical unity within a cultural fabric.

US Military personnel conducting these types of missions are essentially warrior-diplomats who fight a type of political warfare that requires them to leave behind preconceived notions of conflict origination (due to the necessities of supporting multicultural, multi-religious cultures).  The intellectual theory of this type of military warfare unit has roots within militias formed by the American Continental Congress and the French Revolutionary Directorate to safeguard the fledgling legal, executive and legislative institutions of post monarchial governments.  A Medal of Honor recipient turned lawyer named William (Wild Bill) Donovan, a close friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, transformed this intellectual theory into military units organized for political warfare in World War II Europe, Asia, and South America.  Donovan’s recruits formed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which recruited, trained and deployed small teams of specialists into enemy occupied territories. Called Jedburgh Teams (after a small Scots-English town), they conducted modern political warfare using the tactics of terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and psychological operations to contest the legitimacy of the German occupation of Europe and the Nazi stranglehold over Germany and Austria.   The teams helped create partisan organizations from France to the Eastern provinces of the Nazi realm, which grew in strength correspondingly with the attempts at eradicating them by the Fascist Governments.  Recruited from both military and civilian backgrounds, they were effective negotiators of internal governmental legitimacy.  They helped to expose weaknesses within the fascist ability to monopolize legitimate domestic violence, and protect its borders against foreign intrusion.  Their activities did prove to be costly in terms of their survival rate, and many of the teams’ members were captured or killed by Germany’s police and military apparatus.  The development of these teams constituted in and of themselves, a Revolution in Military Affairs.  This development came as a response to the rise of internal legitimacy of modern states, and was a product of change in the basis of how a state is constituted.  This article suggests that human conflict, found in both law and war, are essential components of the determination of internal and external legitimacy of a state, and that law, war, and history are not only determinants of this legitimacy, but are themselves changed by its evolution.  The development and employment of specialized military teams dedicated to the conduct of challenging a state’s (actual or proto-state) internal organization as a military strategy does not merely constitute a revolution in military affairs. Rather, this development suggests an entirely new approach to viewing human conflict and state legitimacy.  If human conflict does in fact exist as part of an ongoing negotiation by communities of citizens and states over the legitimacy of a state, then a change in the organizational structure and theory of the public functions of military strategy and foreign policy may achieve better functional results.  Army SOF must build teams which have the capacity to understand and act within the cultural identity of friendly, neutral, or opposing social structures. To successfully act within a cultural identity and achieve discrete results, these teams must integrate the multi-disciplinary functions of psychoanalytical cultural historical anthropology, combined with law and military strategy to un-package targeted cultural identities and either support or attack them at their most vulnerable points.

More than ever before, our understanding of the world around us depends upon interdisciplinary explanations for the complex interaction of our social, political, economic and cultural systems. There is generalized resistance to interdisciplinary theoretical models however, because academic disciplines and military branches tend to understand the world around them in single discipline terms. This tendency must be overcome to successfully understand the interdisciplinary nature of asymmetrical warfare.  There can be no war, for example, with out law and politics to frame and contextualize this type of human conflict.  Organized human violence without any context exists as random, social Darwinian violence inflicted for the purpose of adaptive survival of the fittest.  Organized human violence expressed as political conflict or war exists because of the development of human law and history within a context of cultural identity. War is a corollary to human conflict developed to support the application of our law, history and evolving cultural and individual identities.  War and human conflict do not and cannot, create a human institution.  They cannot build houses, roads, lives, or even a future.  They cannot create new ideas or evolve a human identity, which provides human purpose in existing.  All it can do is defend and destroy.  Organized human conflict exists to negotiate which material possessions, human lives, and human social structures will survive in an adaptive selection process of social structures and the identities they are founded upon.  The Social structures most often at the core of violent conflict are those organized into structures of governance.

But what is a structure of governance, and what is before it?   It can be a person, group or system, (as is found in monarchism, fascism, cabals, theocracy, communism or democracy) but it’s primary purpose is to alleviate the anti-thesis of government – Anarchy.  Thus, a government establishes a blueprint for ordering humans and resources within a particular cultural context, along historical lines and then enforces that blueprint among the populace using its monopoly on domestic violence and coercion.  The citizens negotiate their acceptance of the legitimacy of this blueprint for ordering their society, by using violence (physical control), law (fair rendering of obligations and expectations) and history (habit of acceptance of this particular structural form or societal order).  Although it seems intuitive that humans would accept just about any social ordering to prevent anarchy, there is a dichotomy of human psychology, which works in opposition to order.  Humans look for authority and discipline as a means for obtaining safety and security.  At the same time however, they challenge that authority until its legitimacy is demonstrated by an acceptable level of law, war and history.  This process is analogous to the way a child rebels against a parent until they are disciplined in a manner that enforces an accepted family social order that they have been habituated to by socialization.

Humans use conflict, both violent and non violent, as a final determinant of legitimacy, negotiated by and between, groups, individuals and societies who possess competing ideas of who we are, why we exist, and our future as a species.  We develop our competing ideas through cultural identity formation, articulate these ideas into norms and laws, and weave them into the fabric of the history of our people.   Thus, to understand war and human conflict, the fields of science, engineering, history and anthropology, individual and social psychology, law and politics must be interwoven into a multi-disciplinary explanation for the development and evolution of that which humans hold most dear; our identity and purpose of existence.  Understanding this concept is important so that the ‘group’, theirs and ours (both the in and out groups vying for legitimacy), do not relegate the fight merely to scientists and engineers who would build and maintain complex instruments and institutions solely for taking human life. There has always been a tendency to see the protection of ideas and culture as an appropriate sphere of responsibility of a technical warrior class.  This tendency predates modern civilization back to a time when cultures existed as islands upon the land, and fought for both physical and cultural survival simultaneously.  As the cultures grew and begot out-groups with new or differing ideas, some states learned to negotiate the complex legitimacy of competing ideas, allowing for forms of consensus building and cultural redefinition when required to do so.  Those states that could not master the negotiation process of state legitimacy without immediate resort to violence eventually succumbed, and were replaced.  With time, smaller cultures merged under larger legal groupings called states, and again, those states that adapted to increasingly complex requirements for negotiating state legitimacy survived, and the others did not.  What still matters, and will so tomorrow, is that the human conflict we face today is no different than last century, or last millennium.  Human conflict is now and will always be a struggle for legitimacy of our individual and societal identity as represented by a state.

SOF field operating teams of the future must be able to understand, operate in, and facilitate this negotiation process over the legitimacy of village, community, regional and or state governance.  They must be versed in the history and law of the culture they seek to negotiate in, and understand the impact of calculated violence upon those social structures.  They must understand the relationship between governing legitimacy internal and external to the social structures they are negotiating with and avoid conflict escalation.  If SOF field teams of the future are to be the truest versions of warrior-diplomats we have ever fielded, they must understand the complex processes that underlay an insurgency and the struggle for the legitimacy of a state.  By combining multidisciplinary explanations for rebellion and insurgency, the picture that emerges is complex, but ultimately understandable and applicable to ALL conflicts.  The application of this type of interdisciplinary approach to asymmetrical warfare allows the SOF warrior-diplomat to identify cultural identity landmines of those societies he is negotiating with, and build strategies to avoid conflicts rather than solve them once they occur.  Such an application can facilitate the development of not only psycho-biographies, but psycho-cultural historiographies.  These psycho-cultural historiographies of persons and societies can provide insight into the measured application of micro diplomacy and force required to achieve US strategic objectives at the lowest level in an operating field environment.

Lieutenant Colonel Patrick James Christian is the senior US counter-insurgency field advisor with the Colombian Army, and serves as a security assistance advisory team leader in the Caqueta and Putumayo provinces along Colombia’s southern borders with Peru and Ecuador.  He and his team work in support of the Colombian Army’s 6P^thP Division which is fighting several Fronts/Brigades of the Colombian Revolutionary Army Front (FARC).

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