More Commentary on COIN is Dead

And I really like this quote at the top of Mark’s Zenpundit web page:

“No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.” James Madison

We are often our own judge especially when it comes to the COIN/CT/IW/AirSea Battle/Full Spectrum Operations/Major Combat Operations debate. I think Adam Elkus’ quote from is Rethinking Security blog is very appropriate (I have pasted his entire comments below Mark’s rollup of commentary):

“Second, COIN, for all of the heat and noise about it, is still rather poorly understood in Iraq and Afghanistan. So much of the debate is weighted down with external baggage, mainly because it was never entirely about Iraq or Afghanistan. Rather, the COIN debate was often a proxy for many different political, professional, interdepartmental, and other battles within the United States political and defense establishments. Ollivant’s paper, and newer research highlights significant uncertainty to cause and effect in both sides of the COIN debate that will likely not be definitely settled soon.”

I think the second and third sentences in the above quote are most important.

But I am not too worried about COIN dying off because I am confident that Special Forces will keep it alive and well and will continue to practice it whenever and wherever necessary. As I have said, I do not expect we will see a purge of the COIN doctrine as we did post 1975 – at least not at Fort Bragg and especially not here on Small Wars Journal.

Many say the future is COIN or the future is Major Combat Operations with a peer or near-peer competitor (China?).

However, it is not an either or approach at the strategic level. Insurgency is not the only form of warfare nor are major combat operations. The right balance must be struck in education and training for various potential threats just as the right balance ( and coherency) among ends, ways, and means must be struck. We cannot be a one trick pony of either COIN or major combat operations. This is especially true when the fundamental mission of our military must be to deter war and if deterrence fails, to fight and win our nation’s wars. And if it is determined by our political leaders to be in our interest to take on a non–existential threat ( non-existential to the US that is) such as to aid, advise, assist, or support a friend, partner, or ally that is threatened with lawlessness, subversion, insurgency, and terrorism then we need to be able to have the ways and means to do that as well.

But all this arguing about the end of COIN and the trend back towards big wars is to me a waste of our time and intellectual capital. We need to be expending that intellectual capital on how to develop and execute strategy to support our national policy as directed by our political leaders (which of course could be another whole discussion). I would submit that COIN and IW need to take their rightful place amongst all the forms of warfare that we may have to be prepared to conduct in the future, which could also include major combat operations. We cannot throw COIN and IW out but we cannot raise them above major combat operations either. We need to achieve the right balance among the ways we have to support our national objectives and deal the threats with which we have to be prepared to face. And especially the uncertain or unknown threats (which of course makes defense costly – but being ill-prepared is potentially even more costly as we have seen over the past 10 years).

Well said Bill, Dave.

Dave, can I just point out quickly, and I believe Nagl at CNAS has made this point, that Iraq, while it is no China or post war Germany, sits on an estimated 143 billion barrels of oil, could potentially produce 10 million barrels of oil per day in a region which accounts for %60 of global oil production. A region, we now observe, that is full of regimes on the brink of anarchy. And we are looking at an oil crisis very soon as demand gradually reaches the level of production. Under Saddam, Iraq was just rotting, and we were waiting to see some sort of collapse in security there.In that scenario, Iran would have benefited even more than with what they stand to gain now.

Now, that does not mean it was worth so many lives and nearly 1 trillion dollars. However, none of the post 2003 disaster was foreseen by many at DoS or DoD. That is the reason why US forces ushered in a new era of COIN doctrine. COIN doctrine however, is wrongly perceived by many of it’s critics as being a recommended proscribed solution, when in fact most of what you read on COIN is more like an emergency treatment- the emergency treatment that we saw was carried out in Iraq. In Libya, one hopes some of the lessons we are learning from COIN are being carried out by the NTC and foreign advisers.

It’s high time the US and NATO focus on conventional war, but as you rightly point out Dave, we are not in an “either COIN or state on state” world. Let’s hope we can preserve some of the best elements of COIN, not falling into the post Vietnam ignorance of the ’80s, while hoping that our politicians never put our forces into the situation where an insurgency is likely…