It’s Time We Move Beyond COIN
Foreign Policy's Af-Pak Channel published an article of mine on strategy
As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, the much needed conversation over counterinsurgency (COIN) has returned. Ryan Evans’ COIN is dead, long live the COIN attempts to add to this debate, but his efforts fall short, because he and other COIN proponents refuse to understand the underlining flaws in counterinsurgency as a strategy. COIN as a strategy cannot work in today’s world, given the current limitations in available resources, time, and national will. It was a collection of tactics and operational arts developed for twentieth century wars of nationalism and communism. Strategy, defined as the ends, ways, and means of American policy, must rise above a collection of disjointed tactics that have no proven cumulative effect.
Refusing to understanding the disconnect between tactics and strategy leaves analysts like Evans wondering why “success has eluded the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which has been unable to translate operational progress into strategic success,” as one recent journal article asked. Instead of addressing the underlying problems of the fledgling Afghan state, the regional geopolitics, and COIN in general, Evans in his article looks internally at the American perspective far removed from the fight and examines how “divisions that were aggravated in the lead-up to the Afghan ‘surge,’ remain unhealed” leading to a current “debate surrounding counterinsurgency [that] has become highly personal, emotional, and angry.” Evans thus ignores the possibility that tension in the COIN debate may arise from our actual failure in war.
Well done, Mike.
The article reheats a number of issues that have suffered from poor understanding / definition / mis-appropriation of the lexicon surrounding these issues over the last few years. I do not care to get into the fatuous debates between so called ‘COIN’ proponents vs ‘the others’ so I will restrict myself to a few observations.
Firstly, the term ‘counterinsurgency’ has been given ‘properties’ and contexts across these debates that simply ignore the true nature of what ‘it’ is. (I deliberately use the phrase ‘true nature’ to channel a well established philosophy…..) The lexicon is either misunderstood or wilfully abused. As a military professional, this is annoying. As a PhD student who is constantly hammered by my supervisor about meanings, it drives me nuts.
For example, counterinsurgency is neither a tactic, operational technique or strategy. You will not find it defined as such in any decent writing on the subject (even accepting that prior to the post-world war II era it had other names..) Nor do the ABCA nations define it as such in any of their contemporary doctine – either in that which specifically addresses COIN /IW or their various doctrinal glossaries.
I am not sure whether some of this confusion should be sheeted home to Gian for his cute little ‘strategy of tactics’ line. (As a former think tanker,I think it a killer line. And as a former think tanker I also think it is as deep, meaningful, useful and lasting as most of the populist and agenda driven punditry coming from various Thinks Tanks in the Beltway at the moment). I do believe that part of the blame can be apportioned to those people, apparently unburdened by basic critical thinking skills, who jumped onto it like a seagull onto a hot french fry and plastered it across the media and blogosphere. Before anyone feels like using the term again , or anything like it, please consider the term ‘cliche’…
Counterinsurgency is quite simply, like the structure of word implies, action(s) taken to oppose insurgency. The fact that the term has become laden with associations beyond this simplicity is not really a problem with the term per se, or the idea of having to doing something about an insurgency issue. The fact that a simple concept has been misappropriated does not make the concept bad – though it does call into question the motives of those who do so, and the understanding of those who do not see the misappropriation. Having a ‘problem’ with ‘counterinsurgency’ when you have an insurgency related politco / military issue makes as much sense as having a issue with the term ‘sunlight’ if you have a problem with skin cancer.
Which takes me to another aspect of the lexigraphical challenge being raised – that of strategy. I have just finished teaching a semester of ‘strategy’ to a post-graduate class at our National Security College. I now have many more questions about strategy than I did when started. But the one thing it has convinced me of is that the US military’s reductionism of strategy to the ‘ends ways and means’ mantra (and I am not singling the US out – every other ABCA military, my service included, parrots the same guff) is simply inadequate.The problem is that ‘strategy’ has not only become meaningless (h/t Hew Strachan) from being subject to the ‘Henry Ford’ processing of the modern PME schoolhouse (ie strategy and tactics for dummies), its democratisation has led to the debate around it being ‘dumbed down’ to new levels of asininity.
And I will leave the old chestnut of the failed ‘military strategy’ (implying that somehow the military ‘chooses’ these wars, or their nature) for (insert Campaign involving COIN) well alone for now …
So what? Well, popular writing, opinion and blogging is indeed (thankfully) different to academic or military professional writing. But that does not mean that the meanings /definitions , thoughts and logic used should be similarly relaxed. Whilst we all cannot write like the late Christopher Hitchens, I believe that more rigour, precision and critical thinking is needed to take these important debates somewhere useful.
Regards,
Mark
I agree with many of the comments below. COIN is not a strategy, it is simply the collective efforts taken to counter an insurgency. Whoever started the debate on whether we should pursue a COIN or CT strategy created the mistaken idea that COIN was a strategy (and by default CT fell into the same misguided logic). It was a terrible way to describe the strategy, but instead of challenging it many of our military professionals embraced the debate and perpetuated a bad idea. CT, COIN, Stability Operations, UW and FID are not strategies, and they are not irregular warfare either. It is well past time that we in the military set the record straight on this. Of course that may require actually explaining what our strategy is, which would be a good exercise, one we should have engaged in years ago.
Maintaining a balance between conventional and irregular warfare skills shouldn’t be that hard, since the focus of the military should be to prevail in combat (regardless of its intensity or type, assuming there is a type). Labeling war/warfare as conventional and irregular is misleading since both definitions fall short of reality, so to address this shortfall we developed a new term called hybrid warfare, which actually describes war as it has always been fought.
I do agree with Mike Few that it is time we expand our horizons beyond COIN once again. We have a core of COIN zealots that defend our unproven COIN doctrine like religious fundamentalists. It is simply blind faith, and evidence to the contrary that it doesn’t work is simply ignored or discredited by calling those who challenge it heavens.
We will most likely have to conduct FID/COIN again in the future, so I’m not advocating not training and otherwise preparing to execute it, but rather to redo the doctrine that is the backbone of our failed approach. Of course the population is important, but simply focusing on the population will not defeat an insurgency despite claims to the contrary, which largely ignore the truth about human nature. Yes we can push insurgents out of area and conduct nice acts that the civilians may pretend to like or genuinely like, but as soon as we move on the insurgents (who have not been defeated) have the ability to move back in and coerce (if needed) the population to support them. The insurgents can defeat us indirectly by dragging the conflict on for years until we lose the national will to continue, on the other hand it is unlikely we’ll defeat the insurgents indirectly, but rather must directly defeat them so they can’t conduct future operations. That is an indirect way to population focused operations if you want to play with words.
Our COIN doctrine (not strategy) focuses on population centric tactics to the extreme, while largely ignoring the fact there are insurgents to fight.
MikeF and Bob,
Uniformed journalists publishing incorrect information is nothing new, but what does appear to be new is the impact that uninformed journalists have on military thought. It amazes me that these articles are not critically analyzed and rebutted by military professionals, instead they become part of our dialogue and the articles are actually referenced! Not only did SF study COIN, more importantly we studied insurgencies, and when you understand an insurgency you will be more effective in designing the ways to counter it. Some insurgencies fit nicely into Bob’s model, but I suspect most do not. Each one needs to be analyzed and understood individually. The danger of doctrine, even when you can find a paragraph in the doctrine that states every situation is different,is that our response is always the same doctrinal template. Everyone is buying the COIN snake-oil, which reminds me of the pet rock craze years ago. The guy who sold the pet rocks basically said if people are dumb enough to buy them, I’ll gladly sell them.
I believe that we may not be best served by considering such things as insurgency, counter-insurgency and strategy from a generic/broad historical spectrum point of view.
Rather, I believe we must strive to consider these things (insurgency, counter-insurgency, strategy, etc.) in a very specific and contemporary context,” such as: (1) from the perspective of the goals, ideas and ambitions of the United States today and (2) from the perspective of how others today view and agree/disagree with what they percieve to be the goals, ideas and ambitions of United States.
This very specific and up-to-date focus, I believe, will help us to better understand the “true nature” of things today.
As an example and re: (1) and (2) above:
a. Let us consider that the United States has, post-the Cold War, adopted something of expansionist stance, and that others see that the United States has adopted this stance, and that these other nations (and/or individuals and groups therein) have moved (become radicalized; offered alternative models, etc.) to try to “contain” the United States as best they can.
b. Let us also consider that, in this regard, the United States benefits re: its contemporary ideas, beliefs, goals and ambitions (inherently expansionist in nature) in being able to point to a “hostile world;” in that such helps to overcome our latent isolationist tendencies and to legitimize our expansionist efforts.
With this (or a more correct version of today’s specific and focused “context”), then: How do such things as insurgency, counter-insurgency, strategy, etc., “fit in?”
This, it would seem, would help us determine such things as whether “it was time to move beyond COIN.”
Hey Mike,
I am working on it!
My dissertation specifically addresses the situation of interventionist state(s) conducting activity against insurgency (whilst I would normally just say ‘counterinsurgency’, I hesitated here because of my previous note about how ‘loaded’ that term has become on these pages, and elsewhere).
I use the term ‘second-party counterinsurgency’ to define such states. My (developmental) definition of second party counterinsurgency is “the conduct of counterinsurgency activity by an interventionist state actor, their agents or proxies, within a state, territory or region where they do not have sovereign and or legitimate authority.”
I go could go on for another 10,000 words as to why this changes everything (and have done in one of my chapters..). Suffice to say I can clearly demonstrate – strategically, operationally and tactically that second-party counterinsurgency renders a lot of the current COIN doctrinal paradigms (on all sides of the arguments) virtually useless.
Being a soldier I am keen to offer something practical as an alternative framework. I am weary of academics, military professionals, politicians and commentators who describe the ‘problem’ in agonising minute detail and then offer regurgitated and paradigmatic platitudes and buzz words as the ‘solution’. As the late, great John J McCuen noted 4 decades ago, ‘…most authors end their discussions with conclusions on how to fight a revolutionary war, I know of none who has succeeded in evolving a broad, unified counter-revolutionary strategy’. McCuen was right back then, and I believe from my study of the literature, time in the field and ‘teaching’ this stuff nothing much has changed to this day. And this is simply not good enough. I cannot be critical of this failing circumstance without then honouring McCuen’s implicit challenge.
So I am going out on a limb in my dissertation , based on a lot of research, some experience and a slight amount of inspiration and proposing a framework (stratagem?) that aims to be more than theoretical. It has plenty of practical ‘doing’ things that second-party counterinsurgents can act on in order to meet the unique imperatives of their situation.
A key question that I have maintained uppermost in my mind in synthesising my approach has been “what would this mean at each level if I were a Company / Battalion / Corps Commander / District Official / Ambassador?”. Whilst the framework has different nuances at the various ‘levels’ it seems to be robust enough to ‘nest’ nicely at each. My proposal is supported by anlaysis of three quite different interventionist case studies – Dhofar, SW Africa and Iraq 2007-08.
I do approach the issue of strategy in terms of the ‘ends ways and means’ lexicon insofar as I argue that the present approaches fails to meet what Lawrence Freedman calls the ‘optimum relationship between political ends and the means available’ that is the aim of strategy. My thesis prefers the more direct, Clausewitizian view of strategy as its point of departure – ‘the use of the engagement for the purpose of the war’, temepered a bit by Beaufre’s ‘dialectic of the battle of the wills’ and Brodie’s ‘truth sought in pursuit of viable solutions’. It directly asks the question ‘How do current COIN paradigms meet the stated strategic ends of second-party counterinsurgents?’.
All of which is a long winded way of saying that I have strong reservations regarding the ‘hearts and minds / development / democracy’ ‘strategy’ as a viable departure point for the basis of an effective interventionist (second-party counterinsurgency) campaign. And the evidence from my research of the literature and historical and contemporary case studies appear to support this view.
I will have more to say about the framework (and what it actually proposes) in a few months as the dissertation and the supporting arguments get into better shape. I note that I did present the early core elements of it earlier this year to a a US Corps staff prior to their deployment and they ‘got it’.
Cheers
Mark
Mike,
I think they are – especially for all those whom COIN was, paraphrasing Liddell-Hart “the latest craze or fad”.
The same ‘train jumpers’ were the roosters who wrote earnest essays about 4GW after the Tofflers and Hammes, drove us nuts in the pages of Parameters with turgid prose about ‘transformation’ and in an earlier age espoused Boyd and Lind as gurus.
There is a cathcy french phrase that covers the phenomena, but my multi-lingual skills are not up to speed and I cannot recall it.
Mike, you may be interested in Frank Hoffman’s scholarship on the USMC and small wars and Hy Rothstein’s work on the SF and FID pre-9/11. Neither community was as devoted to ‘small wars’ as is commonly thought, which is not to say that these topics were completely ignored either.
Going back to both Roberts’ and Mikes’ previous comments—we are now seeing tremendous bleedover in similar elements of a conflict ecosystem be it an insurgent or a criminal organization. Taken from Bordlander Beat today—this is not an attempt by one system copying another system in two different geolocations but rather the natural evolution inside a system in an ecosystem using the technology of the 21st century—yes they might have seen it on various internet websites thus sharing their knowledge management, but I think that eocsystems are breathing and living systems and are thus extremely adaptive to their respective environments and yes we have vastly overlooked the economics involved in conflict ecosystems;
“From guns to the media, Mexican drug cartels have turned to new and unusual tactics to intimidate their rivals. Videos of drug-related massacres have been sent to news networks and posted online. The gangs have also tried to win support through public displays of strength.
But as Al Jazeera’s Rachel Levin reports, people in the southern city of Cuernavaca are not impressed by the cartels’ campaigns.”