COIN is Alive: Know When to Use it!
In his opinion piece, COIN is Dead: U.S. Army must put Strategy Over Tactics published November 22 in World Politics Review, Colonel Gian Gentile appears to base his argument on the premise that COIN is not a strategy, but rather a collection of methods and tactics. Given his extensive combat experience and his impressive academic accomplishments, it is clear why his analyses of recent operations carry significant weight with leaders at all levels of our Army. However, I am unconvinced that his desire to reduce COIN from doctrine to a collection of methods and tactics is prudent at a time when we appear to be on the cusp of a scientific understanding of what fuels violent group behavior and the establishment of a strategic framework to determine when and where COIN may be best applied.
The scientific approach to the study of war has resided in the backwaters of military theory since the years immediately following the First World War. However, recent advances in evolutionary biology led by Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson are providing insights to what generates warlike behavior within, between, and among groups of the social species, including our species Homo sapiens. Today, evolutionary behavior can be rudimentarily characterized by adaptations that are considered either beneficial toward the individual and their kin, or to a larger group or even a species.
These forces of natural selection, individualistic and altruistic, are in a continual “tug of war” for primacy and may correspond to individualistic adaptations of governments and altruistic adaptations of populations respectively (think the Arab Spring uprisings). To visualize this relationship, it is instructive to array the dual forces of natural selection along the axes of a Cartesian coordinate system. Given individualistic behaviors as positive values and altruistic behaviors as negative values on both axes, the resulting graph produces a “quad chart” that serves well to characterize the four different, and surprisingly recognizable, types of war. The two symmetric (or regular) forms of war erupt under the combinations of two positive or two negative values. They are individualistic v. individualistic wars (wars of choice) and altruistic v. altruistic wars (just wars), which are both traditionally characterized using classic theories and doctrines. The asymmetric or irregular forms of war erupt under combinations of a positive and a negative value and appear when individualistic adaptations have primacy over the altruistic adaptations, and vice versa. With regard to these latter types of war, referred to as counterinsurgencies and insurgencies respectively, I believe regular doctrine must be replaced with irregular doctrine such as COIN and guerrilla warfare.
If we as a nation desire to avoid conflict in the irregular quadrants this does not equate to discarding the doctrine developed over the past ten years, which appears to have been the case following the Vietnam War. And to say that counterinsurgency does not have a doctrine is to imply that insurgency does not have a doctrine as well. Rather than separate into camps, it would be better to recognize the doctrinal differences of the four quadrants and recognize that because a nation chooses to no longer operate in the counterinsurgency or insurgency quadrant of war, this does not mean the doctrinal tenants no longer exist.
Indeed, as we develop and implement national-level strategy it makes sense to scientifically investigate the relationship between the individualistic and altruistic forces of natural selection to recognize the type of conflict in which our nation is to engage or deter and then apply the appropriate doctrine and strategy. In a paper I wrote during my year at the Army War College, I described this over-arching framework in what I deemed The Nature of War Theory and would welcome to opportunity to develop these concepts in congress with military leaders and thinkers who are willing to consider war’s biological underpinning.
The views expressed here are those of Colonel Olsen and do not reflect the official views of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense or the U.S. government.
Whoa! Someone issue Colonel Olsen a time machine, because Secretary McNamara is looking for men who can think like this!
Seriously, this is a rather frightening comment on Gian’s post. I don’t agree with everything Gian says (I really think he has a perspective on insurgency and COIN that is horribly twisted by his expertise in military history and his own experiences on the topic); but his message is sound.
As to this slide-rule approach to insurgency, I caution, beware the parameters one sets and the metrics one feeds into such a computer… IMO this well-intended approach is headed in the wrong direction.
Cheers!
Bob
I think Bob and I see Coin differently because I still view it as war, albeit a discrete type and form of it, and it seems to me that Bob sees insurgency and counterinsurgency as a set of competing forces all bound up in a social movement. Although even though Bob and I disagree on lots of things, I always pay careful attention to what he has to say.
I think Colonel Olsen misses the point of my essay completely since my piece was about strategy, and strategy’s use of coin as an operational method over the last ten years or so in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is in that sense that I say coin is dead because from the angle of strategy coin as an operational method has not achieved any appreciable strategic and policy gains.
His interesting arguments about biology and evolutionary theory as applied to war are still burried in the tactical application of population centric coin and the promise that it can be mastered if only we understand how to do it better.
After Vietnam the american army did not discard coin, it simply focused on what was the more pressing threat which was the Soviet Union. The perceived better war master of Coin, General Creighton Abrams, was the one who directed this shift from Coin and Vietnam to the Soviet Union in 1974. Alas it has become a stock staple of the coin narrative, however, to constantly lay out the trope that the Army ditched coin after Vietnam. It did not, it simply had more pressing concerns.
Moreover by way of a hypothetical even if the American Army had been armed with a sophisticated understanding of the Way Olsen understands war in 2002 prior to Iraq, things still would have turned out largely the same way since the war from 2003 to today was not really about failure then success at coin operations, but about failure at strategy from the start.
Colonel Olsen is trapped like some others in the army in the comfortable world of tactics and operations, as his post above shows. And as a light hearted aside on this Thanksgiving eve, in his war college essay, anybody who puts David Galula on the same level of Clausewitz loses a lot of cool points with me.:) If he is in search of what his bio says a “multi disciplinary and unifying theory of war,” well St Carl still offers it. Dont need to jam Darwin and a batch of Progressive era thinkers into it.
no worries
happy thanksgiving
gian
I couldn’t follow his model the way he described it, or more accurately I don’t see the value of it based on this article. As for military strategists disregarding the scientific method, I think effects based operations which was an attempt to develop a scientific model of war with predictable causes and effects, and of course that process rapidly failed and actually distracted us from thinking effectively and developing an effective strategy.
Assuming all forms of war can be reduced to four quadrants, the next question is what does that get us? What does it change? I think COL Olsen needs to post another article or a link to his study so we can actually see his effort to link the scientific method to the study of war.
However, I’m hard pressed to see why the author claims the development of COIN doctrine over the past 10 years is tied to any scientific method? In fact, Bob Jones got it right when he said we basically copied colonial doctrine. This wasn’t based on “learning” or experimentation, it was based on mimicking and drawing false parallels to historical examples completely void of strategy to achieve some rather lofty policy goals.
The one point I think most will agree with the COL on is that COIN isn’t dead, so in my view it is imperative we continue to study it, regardless of how undesirable it is to practice, but then again I rather be in a COIN fight than a front line soldier on the Russian front during WWII, so regardless of how messy it may be, we need to put it in perspective. Yes COIN is hard, so are all wars, and yes it hard to demonstrate progress, especially when we set unrealistic expectations. Anything short of those expectations will be viewed as defeat, when that isn’t necessarily the case.
Gian’s point was largely about strategy, and strategy follows policy, and while it would nice if we could base policy on a more scientific process the fact is it isn’t, and regardless of whether or doctrine is based on science or simply best practices won’t matter if we don’t get the policy and cooresponding strategy straight. So perhaps both the COLs are correct and are simply talking past each other?
Specifically for Gian,
You wrote, “The perceived better war master of Coin, General Creighton Abrams, was the one who directed this shift from Coin and Vietnam to the Soviet Union in 1974.”
This mindset in the Army and perhaps DOD wide has frustrated me for years. To my knowledge we didn’t leave the USSR uncovered while fighting in Vietnam, and generally what a shift means in the Army is a focus, and that means the “entire” Army will focus on the Fulda Gap scenario at the expense of everything else. Why does a large and capable organization feel compelled to be so myopic?
In SOF we have seen a myopic focus on CT since 9/11, yet all the security challenges we had before 9/11 remain and new ones have emerged.
Our former SECDEF directed balanced capabilities and that just what we need, yet there seems to be some management guru influence on the Army that is mentoring our senior officers that you can only have one focus area, which in effect puts our nation at risk. The argument shouldn’t be whether or not we focus on COIN, but how do we maintain this capability while preparing to respond to other contingencies. It does seem you want to throw the baby out with the bathwater sometimes.
I’m sorry, how many centuries and eons has Mankind existed on the “cusp of scientific understanding” of human nature? For as long as we have existed each generation has tended to do two things; first, assumed it had figured things out or was on the “cusp” of doing so (every day and in every way we are getting better and better); second, indulged in the hubris naturally associated with that assumption (what we see and think is unique and better than what has come before). And, over the centuries and eons human nature has been understood and misunderstood, and technology has both improved and degraded our lives, with no appreciable change to how we conduct business with ourselves and each other – just in the manner, speed, and efficiency with which we both heal and harm.
So I continue to take exception with those who lead their arguments with “science now tells us” instead of “science now informs us.” The first seems to possess the nature of a dictate, to harken back to the debunked Enlightenment notion that there is “one grand, objective reality” which if we could all just grasp would lead to a new era of utopian peace. In modern terms, it is evolutionary ideology and scientific determinism versus evolutionary theory and scientific pursuit.
It is the desire to find The Answer without acknowledging the falliability of human reason. Who gets to know The Answer, who gets to interpret it, who gets to enforce it? The history of the world is rife with the ill fruit of those questions – the 20th Century especially.
Can science and “modern” biology inform us regarding cause and effect of conflict? Certainly. Can they be wielded as infalliable swords of justice? Certainly not.