Counterinsurgency Math Revisited
Counterinsurgency Math Revisited by A. Trevor Thrall and Erik Goepner – Cato Institute
When does 32,200 – 60,000 = 109,000? That seemingly inaccurate equation represents the estimated number of Islamist-inspired terrorists when the war on terror began, how many the U.S. has killed since 2015, and the number that fight today. And it begs the question of just how can the terror ranks grow so fast when they’re being depleted so rapidly.
As early as 2003, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld hinted at the potential mathematical problem when he asked, “Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” In his memo, Mr. Rumsfeld correctly identified that both sides have a vote: the U.S. can deplete the terror ranks, while the terror groups and their supporters can replenish them.
What Rumsfeld had not yet imagined, however, was the possibility that military force might inadvertently benefit terror recruitment efforts. Specifically, he ignored the blowback a marauding U.S. military might engender among the Muslim world…
I would love to be a back-bencher at a “murder-board” of our GWOT efforts & to hear the ideas that may be put forth to counter AQ/ ISIS/ Hezbollah/ etc, etc… Given the ineffectiveness of 17 years of “whack-a-mole”, I wonder what would be proposed…?
CT makes sense, for all of it’s failures to achieve desired strategic results based on how “the experts” have framed the problem for the past 16-20 years.
The experts are wrong, but there is now a massive industry built around that wrongness, so our assumptions have become calcified as “fact.”
Or, in other terms, we have defined as strategic dynamic in tactical terms, and are thereby put into a reactive cycle of attacking the symptoms. The result of this is to put more negative energy into the actual problem, that has reasonably, and predictably, grown as a result.
The latest “defeat” of ISIS converts civil war back into revolution(temporarily); and will restore AQ as the influence leader of the broader UW campaign that relies upon revolutionary energy resident within Sunni Arab populations in varying degrees everywhere. The cycle continues…