Counterinsurgency Doctrine: In Context
Dr. David Ucko, no stranger to this community as author of the highly regarded The New Counterinsurgency Era (Georgetown University Press), has the lead article in the forthcoming issue of the interagency journal PRISM. That journal is produced by the Center for Complex Operations, located onboard National Defense University (NDU). David is a professor at NDU’s College of International Security Affairs, an institution borne out of 9/11 and extensively devoted to research and instruction in irregular warfare, counter-terrorism, and homeland defense.
Dr. Ucko’s superb article merits serious attention in the Small Wars community and particularly among those debating the merits of and necessary refinements to counterinsurgency doctrine in the contemporary battlespace. David calls American counterinsurgency doctrine a “concept” in crisis and in need of further debate. Professor Ucko claims that there is widespread frustration over the attempt to use counterinsurgency doctrine to stabilize Afghanistan. He notes the counter-narratives to the simple notion that the Army/Marine counterinsurgency theory saved Iraq (and U.S. support) from the brink of disaster in 2007 in “The Surge.” Finally, he addresses the lack of appetite for “large-scale and protracted military operations to build nations, unify states, and establish legitimate and competent governments” as “undertakings that, even if workable, run counter to the fiscal realities facing the West today.”
Thus, as the small number of prolific critics argue, counterinsurgency doctrine “is naïve in its assumptions, unworkable in its requirements, and arrogant in its unfounded claims of prior success.”
He goes on to put the development of counterinsurgency theory and doctrine into context within the larger U.S. defense agenda. He notes that counterinsurgency theory and principles have repeatedly helped illustrate the complexity of intrastate violence and its distinctiveness from the “conventional” types of military campaigns for which most Western armed forces are structured and trained.” It arose not out of a desire to fix Failed States by what some called “failed thinking” but because our senior civilian and/or military leaders had to face the reality that our armed forces were myopically invested in preferences and illusions rather than the real security problems of the day.
Dr. Ucko’s book and this article show that he is an astute observer of American strategic culture. He goes on to note how our most recent “counterinsurgency era” was motivated by a previous failure to grapple with the political complexities of war in the 1990s during the debate over the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs and subsequently, Transformation. Echoing arguments made by LtGen Paul K. Van Riper, USMC (and subsequently by Dr. Fred Kagan and H.R. McMaster in the U.S. Army), Ucko finds that “U.S. military thinking was marked by a highly conventional and apolitical understanding of war, epitomized by the program of “defense transformation” and burdened by a “fascination with information technology and precision-strike capabilities” and “airstrikes, drones, computers, and satellites dispensing force swiftly, precisely, and decisively.” This limited understanding of war, past and present, provided scant preparation for the real world.
I will leave Dr. Ucko’s worthy contribution to this serious community of practitioners to debate. Is COIN a concept or a doctrine, is it mature or in need of adaptation, or is it simply a divisive theory searching for relevance or are we once again reverting to form, searching for pristine or apolitical solutions to complex or wicked problems?
Frank Hoffman is a retired Marine, now serving at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at NDU as a Senior Research Fellow and Director of NDU Press.
