Over the Horizon: Dead or Alive, COIN is not the Culprit
by Robert Farley
World Politics Review
Why does COIN seem insufficient? Military institutions rely on narratives in order to continue to operate. The Soviet Army sustained itself for 30 years, and the U.S. Army perhaps longer, on the narrative of defeating the Wehrmacht in World War II. The stories that make up these narratives don’t need to be accurate, but they do need to be compelling, and COIN wars just don’t make for good stories. They take too long; the politics are complicated; the enemies aren’t terrible enough; and the victories aren’t clear-cut enough. Even COIN advocates argue that counterinsurgency conflicts will be long, bloody, expensive and unsatisfying. That is in part why the U.S. Army believed, in 1973, that the counterinsurgency efforts practiced in the later years of the Vietnam War would not provide a useful foundation for rebuilding the force. Gentile, too, may well be right to think that COIN cannot provide a useful model for the future of today’s U.S. Army, even if he regularly overstates his case.
Comments
With reference to "COIN wars" Dr. Farley writes:<blockquote>"...COIN wars just don’t make for good stories. They take too long; the politics are complicated; the enemies aren’t terrible enough; and the victories aren’t clear-cut enough. Even COIN advocates argue that counterinsurgency conflicts will be long, bloody, expensive and unsatisfying."</blockquote>The stories issue is purely and simply a straw man.
However, the rest of that quote is accurate. I suggest that the last word, "unsatisfying" be replaced by the advocates with any one of a number of other negative words or phrases. For example, 'inconclusive' or 'a failure' are both far more accurate and honest. Quite simply, the answer to "Why does COIN seem insufficient?" is simply that it is terribly ineffective, wasteful and in this era is destined to never provide a satisfactory conclusion. It's that simple.
One should also consider the fact that the enemies are actually terrible enough, there just are not very many of them. Their performance is generally fair to poor but that is too often as good or better than our performance. That fact is due most often to the fact that we are playing by their rules on their turf. We may be forced by circumstances into one or the other of those conditions, to voluntarily operate in both is insane. We have been proving that since 1962.
Contrary to Dr. Farley's conclusion:<blockquote>"...That is in part why the U.S. Army believed, in 1973, that the counterinsurgency efforts practiced in the later years of the Vietnam War would not provide a useful foundation for rebuilding the force."</blockquote>the Army believed that the processes of so-called COIN efforts were deeply flawed and that deploying major combat forces to such campaigns should be diligently avoided.
Guess who got that right...