Do Civilian Casualties Cause Counterinsurgents to Fail?
Do Civilian Casualties Cause Counterinsurgents to Fail? By Patrick Burke – War is Boring
The Netflix movie War Machine paints counterinsurgency wars as impossible.
All of them.
“The thing about counterinsurgency is that it doesn’t really work,” the film’s narrator says. “We tried it in Vietnam. That went well. The British and the French gave it a shot, trying to hang on to their crumbling empires. It just hasn’t worked. To me, it would seem kind of simple why. You can’t win the trust of a country by invading it. You can’t build a nation at gunpoint.”
The film suggests a simple logic to back this message. A counterinsurgent must win over the “hearts and minds” of the civilian population in order to win the war.
However, a counterinsurgent that kills civilians in the course of defeating insurgents can never win “hearts and minds.” Thus, because defeating insurgents hiding among civilians almost always results in civilian casualties, counterinsurgency is impossible.
We could brush this assertion off as “just Hollywood.” However, one of the most critical influences on counterinsurgency doctrine, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3-24, holds a similar view. With one crucial caveat, of course.
FM 3-24 argues that excessive civilian casualties will cripple counterinsurgency operations, possibly to the point of failure. This is especially the case when the counterinsurgent doesn’t seek popular support by implementing public works projects and rendering other forms of aid, according to the manual.
Still, FM 3-24 is not clear on what exactly constitutes “excessive civilian casualties.” The manual’s authors would likely deem civilian casualties as excessive if a ground unit had the option of using more discriminate firepower to kill the enemy but chose otherwise…
FM 3-24 was simply product differentiation by David Petraeus. He needed an option to tie his wagon to and what had worked in the past- concentration camps, mass killing, intentional famine etc obviously wouldn’t sell. He settled for largely French theories- that hadn’t worked when tried- and British myth.
Unless you terrorize an occupied people into submission they will almost always continue to fight back against outsiders.
If the counter-insurgents aren’t foreigners (and have no place to go if they get tired unlike the west) they can stop doing whatever got the insurgency going in the first place- exorbitant taxes, stealing land, religious persecution etc.- and wind the insurgency down without resort to terror. That’s if the guerillas aren’t just an arm of a conventional force- i.e. Vietnam, and then the war will end on the battlefield not in villages.
The lesson for the modern “counter-insurgent” is to leave foreigners alone and encourage the host government to be less corrupt, unfair or whatever else it’s doing to set off a large enough number of people to be a significant problem. Then it becomes a local police problem. Latin America seems to have good examples of this process. It’s worth a try in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nation building fails because people don’t like being told what to do by armed foreigners. What self respecting American would cooperate with a foreign occupier if the occupier improved schools or roads? Hopefully none. Why would Afghans or Iraqis be different? Divide and conquer may get some cooperation for a while by playing one group off the others. “For a while” is relative and modern Americans don’t have the patience for this the British and French of previous centuries had.
Having picked your “good guys” they’ll invariably rob and defraud you at will while they plot their escape (assuming your endurance has limits) to Dubai or London.
Is there a way to make third world countries “join the modern world”? Not in the short term, rarely in the long and certainly not by an armed occupation. If a state wants to modernize etc it can- but at it’s own pace not based on the needs of USAID or DOD officials to produce clever power points.
So: If we change the question — as it appears we need to do based on our discussions below —
From: “Do Civilian Casualties Cause Counter-Insurgencies to Fail?
To: “Do Civilian Casualties Cause Nation-Building to Fail?”
What then is our answer?
Herein — and in consideration of our successful “nation-building” efforts in Germany and Japan after World War II — and our less-successful/unsuccessful efforts elsewhere since then (as noted in my Rand Corporation study linked below), let us consider, re: such nation-building projects, that:
a. If you have engaged in “limited war” — and thus are now engaged in a “counter-insurgency” — then you have already screwed up. Why?
b. Because, as the Rand Corporation study appears to indicate:
1. Your nation-building effort should have been undertaken via a “total war” effort (as with Germany and Japan). And
2. Your follow-on efforts, likewise, should have been undertaken via a “total commitment (also as per Germany and Japan. ”
The fact of “civilian casualties,” thus, not to be considered an issue in these matters; this, given that — in such “total war”/”total commitment” cases — “civilian casualties,” from the get-go, are expected to be exceptionally high?
(From COL [ret.] Gian Gentile: “The new American way of war commits the US military to campaigns of counterinsurgency and nation-building in the world’s troubled spots. In essence it is total war — how else can one understand it any differently when COIN experts talk about American power “changing entire societies” — but it is a total war without the commensurate total support of will and resources from the American people. This strategic mismatch might prove catastrophic in the years ahead if the United States cannot figure out how to align means with ends in a successful strategy. The new American way of war perverts and thus prevents us from doing so.
Goggle: Gentile’s “A Strategy of Tactics: Population-Centric COIN and the Army, Parameters, August 2009, see the conclusion at Page 15.)
FM 3-24 is a manual about COIN that is built upon a deeply flawed understanding of insurgency. Because it sees revolution, and therefore COIN, as a form of war, even the “population-centric” aspects apply war theory in a manner that dooms the guide to being an approach to suppression of the symptoms of insurgency at best.
The key thing to remember in a revolutionary insurgency is that everyone not in the government is a civilian.
So, by definition, EVERYONE opposing the government is a civilian. What this means is that no matter what, a COIN campaign is going to be directed at civilians and civilians will be killed by state action. While some harsh action against civilians is likely necessary, it is indeed counterproductive to achieving a true resolution to an insurgency.
Consider a traditional family of four living in a 3-bedroom suburban ranch style home as the smallest version of a “state.” It has distinct population groups, a governing body, a security mechanism, and distinct sovereign territory. If parents who are slow to evolve along with their rapidly evolving populations retain an 8PM bedtime as their children become late teens, and refuse to make reasonable adjustments to that time when asked, they are creating conditions of insurgency in those two teenage populations.
So junior acts illegally to ignore or force a change of the time and stays out until 11PM. The parents enforce the rule of law against Jr. with economic sanctions and other reasonable punishments to no avail. So they escalate to corporal punishment and impose a universal curfew of 6 PM onto the entire population of both kids. The conditions of insurgency grow in response, even as there appears to be “stability” due to a lack of infractions. Jr. takes his routine punishments as he plots his chance to end this reign of terror; but when daughter is being punished as well as collateral damage of the COIN campaign.
By 18 she is a stripper and Jr. has blown off college to become a Marine; both radicalized, one by the ideology of her biker boyfriend, and the other by the ideology of a recruiter in blue pants and a khaki shirt. This is not war, this is simply illegal democracy at work where effective legal mechanism of democracy are denied.
A COIN campaign that was based on an understanding of revolution would have recognized from the beginning that poor governance was the primary driver of this rebellion and been built around a central theme of seeking reasonable accommodations and ensuring the population felt they had effective legal mechanisms to engage their parents on these types of issues. Enforcement would focus on perceived justice over blackletter adherence to the rule of law, and punishments would have been narrowly tailored to the actual perpetrator. Overtime the conditions of insurgency would subside, reconciliation occur, and a form of natural stability would prevail. This is not war either, this is simply good governance at work.
And of course, the radical ideologies that corrupted this this tragic young pair would have fallen on deaf ears had governance been on their toes from the outset.
Governments, from parents to princes, love to blame some outside force for the instability in their kingdoms, and to wage war against peace when instability ensues. While it is a strategy that once could achieve suppression at reasonable costs, but now only serves to make the situation worse. If we are still arguing about civilian casualties then we really missed the main point to begin with. They are all civilians, and this isn’t war.