Unconventional Warfare is Not the Answer to Your Problem
Unconventional Warfare is Not the Answer to Your Problem by Andrea Filozof, War on the Rocks
A group of disenchanted humanitarians recently launched a spin-off of the infamous game Cards Against Humanity entitled JadedAid. Included among the deck’s many satirical (and subtly true) combinations is the game’s tagline: “Coming to terms with the fact that your intervention is the problem.” The expression applies equally well to the interventionist foreign policy the U.S. has broadly followed since the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001. Although the Obama administration has dialed back large-scale counterinsurgency and stabilization operations, it has also sought to intervene through a new mechanism: unconventional warfare.
At first glance, unconventional warfare appears to provide the ideal solution to many of the problems the administration faced with prolonged occupation and counterinsurgency campaigns. President Obama attempted to strike this balance in his initial strategy against ISISL, vowing to “increase [U.S.] support to forces fighting these terrorists on the ground” while preventing American ground troops from becoming involved in a combat mission. Unconventional warfare, per the U.S. military’s Joint Publication 3-05, “consists of operations and activities that are conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an auxiliary, underground, and guerrilla force in a denied territory.” This doctrine holds that the United States can exert its influence through limited involvement to achieve its policy objectives, sidestepping the publicly unpalatable notion of large and prolonged military commitments. Yet the perception that unconventional warfare requires only limited involvement is a dangerous illusion. Not only does training and equipping proxy forces still exact a heavy financial cost, but the operational success of proxy forces often does not lead to the desired political outcome. Serious problems arise when ways and means are not connected to ends. Without organic political solutions to accompany unconventional warfare campaigns, the United States will at best waste vast amounts of defense spending; at worst, it will find itself entangled in the same costly, long-term operations it has endured in Iraq and Afghanistan with little to show for its efforts…