The Hon. Thomas A. Schweich is Visiting Professor of Law and Ambassador in Residence, Washington University in St. Louis. He was U.S. Ambassador for Counternarcotics and Justice Reform in Afghanistan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, and Chief of Staff of the U.S. mission to the UN. This essay is based on his presentation at the February 12, 2009 Defense Showstoppers: National Security Challenges for the Obama Administration conference, sponsored by FPRI and the Reserve Officers Association, held in Washington, D.C.

The last job I had with the Bush administration was coordinator for police training, judicial reform, and counternarcotics in Afghanistan. When I got the job, the National Security Council said, "It's got three parts. First, you have to go to Afghanistan and try to coordinate among their agencies for police reform, judicial reform, and counternarcotics. Then you fly to Europe to coordinate with the EU on the same issue. Finally, you come back to Washington and coordinate U.S. interagency." The last of these jobs was the most difficult one.

Afghanistan's interagency process could best be described as "uncoordinated lack of action." For example, in the areas of police training or counternarcotics, the ministry of the interior and the ministry of counternarcotics were supposed to coordinate their activities. The ministry of the interior would train police, the counternarcotics office was then supposed to execute the policies. Well, the ministry of the interior was run by former Mujahideen Tajiks while the ministry of counternarcotics was run by Hazaras who used to work for the Soviets. They didn't like each other very much, they didn't coordinate, and they didn't talk to each other. Then, the two of them were supposed to get together and go down to Helmand and Kandahar and tell the Pashtuns how to get rid of drugs...

More at Foreign Policy Research Institute.

The Introduction begins with a letter to the US Army from President John F. Kennedy that interestingly enough, notes the "several terms" that the Army used to describe guerrilla warfare and goes on to say "by whatever name, this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics, communications and logistics to meet this threat. The introduction also includes a foreword by Secretary of the Army Elvis Stahr, the Table of Contents and (something we could use today) a section called "Use the Right Word!" -- a handy guide to official terminology.

Part I - New Emphasis on Special Warfare includes articles The Third Challenge by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Special Warfare: A Progress Report by General George Decker, Chief of Staff of the US Army.

Part II -- Why You Should Know About Special Warfare includes articles Countering Guerilla Attack by Walt Rostow, Guerrillas: A Formable Force by Captain Thomas Collier, and Soldier of the Future by Major Boyd Bashore.

Part III -- Is Special Warfare Something New? Includes articles The US Army and Guerrilla Warfare by Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Gardner and Counterguerrilla Operations: A Case Study by Lieutenant Colonel Donald Rattan.

Part IV -- What the Army is Doing includes articles Special Forces by Charles Dodson, US Army Special Warfare Center by Brigadier General William Yarbrough, The World's Top Jungle Fighters by Nelson Axlerod, The Jungle Tigers of Viet Nam by Simon Poore, Our Secret Weapon in The Far East by Dickey Chapelle and Special Forces: Europe by Captain Robert Asprey.

Part V -- Some Thoughts on Guerrilla Philosophy and Tactics includes articles Mao's Primer on Guerilla War by Mao Tse-tung, La Guerra De Guerillas by Che Guevara, Encirclement Methods in Counterguerrilla Warfare by Major Thoung Htaik and Both Sides of The Guerrilla Hill by Brigadier R.C.H. Miers.

Part VI -- A Look at The Future includes articles Twilight War by Colonel Robert Rigg and Unconventional Warfare by Franklin Lindsay.

Part VII -- Additional contains reference listings for further reading.

With that we give a SWJ Tip O' Hat to Paul Tompkins and Dave Maxwell.

Al Anbar was a tough fight. Yet after four hard years of war, US Marines and Soldiers, together with the Sunni tribes, defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq and established security. Now, battalions of Marines may be headed to Afghanistan for a fight that promises to look different from the one in Al Anbar. Factors that loom large in any counterinsurgency campaign—politics, society, economics, and outside support—bear only passing resemblance to Al Anbar. This paper highlights 9 major differences between Al Anbar and Afghanistan (particularly southern Afghanistan) and considers their implications for the Marine Corps.

Executive Summary

Full Report

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says that the administration is currently reviewing the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.

"I would say that, at a minimum, the mission is to prevent the Taliban from retaking power against a democratically elected government in Afghanistan and thus turning Afghanistan, potentially, again, into a haven for al-Qaida and other extremist groups," Gates told NPR's Robert Siegel in an interview at the Pentagon.

Gates says he believes NATO plans to commit more troops to the country, especially to provide security for elections in August.

More at NPR.

Gates: U.S. Won't Allow Taliban Resurgence in Afghanistan - Donna Miles, American Forces Press Service

As the United States reviews its strategy in Afghanistan, one thing is certain: The United States won't let the Taliban threaten the Afghan government and re-establish safe havens there, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said on National Public Radio yesterday.

"I would say that at a minimum, the mission is to prevent the Taliban from retaking power against the democratically elected government in Afghanistan and thus turning Afghanistan potentially again into a haven for alQaida and other extremist groups," Gates said.

The secretary conceded that the situation in Afghanistan "began to go downhill again" in 2005 and 2006. That's when the Taliban started taking advantage of safe havens on the Pakistani side of the Pakistan-Afghan border and began "to re-infiltrate into Afghanistan and create security problems."

The decision to send an additional 17,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan and reassess the strategy there focuses on this challenge. "We've really just been responding to that," Gates said. "Clearly, we all still have our work cut out for us."

More at American Forces Press Service.

As President Obama carves out his own foreign policy, there are signs that his use of military force overseas will be tempered by his views on the limits of American power.

Mr. Obama is leaning toward a pragmatic approach that limits military deployment of the kind used by former President Bush in the "war on terror," while remaining open to humanitarian aid and security training, especially in places such as Darfur. This approach departs from Mr. Bush but also synthesizes policy elements from Bush's later years.

"It is a very balanced, pragmatic understanding that America's interests and her ideals don't always coincide and so you have to make some trade-offs," says John Nagl, a former Army officer who now heads the Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington...

More at The Christian Science Monitor.

- Are weak states a bigger problem than strong states?

Conference summary report by Michael P. Noonan at Foreign Policy Research Institute.

On February 12, 2009, FPRI's Program on National Security held a conference on potential "defense showstoppers" for the Obama administration—critical issues that, if not fixed, could lead to a serious deterioration of American military capabilities. The event was hosted and co-sponsored by the Reserve Officers Association in Washington, D.C. Program-affiliated scholars Michael Horowitz, Michael P. Noonan, Mackubin T. Owens, and Frank G. Hoffman served as panel moderators. More than 100 individuals from academia, government, NGOs, the media, the military, and the public participated in person, and another 300-plus individuals from around the world participated by webcast. Audio and video files of the proceedings are posted at FPRI's website; the papers presented at the conference will be published in Orbis and other outlets.

A summary of the major panel presentations and discussions can be found here and include commentary by T.X. Hammes, Stephen Biddle, Roger Carstens, Frank G. Hoffman, Mackenzie Eaglen, Christopher Preble, James N. Mattis, Michael O'Hanlon, Thomas McNaugher, Frederick W. Kagan, Janine Davidson, Thomas Schweich, Ralph Peters and a conference summation by Harvey Sicherman.

As we fight the current IED fight, we need to look to the future. Next-Gen IEDs will lose the I. North Korea and others with fears of US invasion and occupation will manufacture state of the art platter-charge type devices with all sorts of unique designs to blend in any environment, counter-US electronic warfare technology, and increase lethality. With vehicle killing "panzerfausts" in unlimited numbers for urban and other terrain, adversaries may be able to create formidable web defenses when coupled with other attriting technology.

Manufactured or Military Explosive Devices might be a nice term. Irregular no longer, MEDs will be a permanent part of the defensive landscape. We need to start investigating MEDs now, as they develop, and determine doctrinal and technological responses.

Since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military strategists, historians, soldiers, and policymakers have made counterinsurgency's principles and paradoxes second nature, and they now expect that counterinsurgency operations will be the likely wars of the future. Yet despite counterinsurgency's ubiquity in military and policy circles, legal scholars have almost completely ignored it. This Article evaluates the laws of war in light of modern counterinsurgency strategy. It shows that the laws of war are premised on a kill-capture strategic foundation that does not apply in counterinsurgency, which follows a win-the-population strategy. The result is that the laws of war are disconnected from military realities in multiple areas - from the use of non-lethal weapons to occupation law. It also argues that the war on terror legal debate has been myopic and misplaced. The shift from a kill-capture to win-the-population strategy not only expands the set of topics legal scholars interested in contemporary conflict must address but also requires incorporating the strategic foundations of counterinsurgency when considering familiar topics in the war on terror legal debates.

Counterinsurgency, the War on Terror, and the Laws of War - by Ganesh Sitaraman (with a tip of the hat to Erin)

If you've been following the "COIN will breed COIN" debate, check out these posts by Andrew Exum, Matthew Yglesias and Spencer Ackerman. If you haven't, check them out anyway. It's an interesting discussion of whether in making COIN a doctrinal focus of operations, the U.S. military will be tempted to intervene in counterinsurgencies of choice. It's a subject I've written about often over the past 18 months. If anything has reassured me that my worries weren't warranted, it's been Secretary of Defense Bob Gates' emphasis on "strategic balance." Exum's insistence that COIN practitioners are not necessarily COIN enthusiasts rings true, too.

Still, the COIN-dinistas' scholar-warrior approach to war has made it more intelligent and less destructive, and thereby more intellectually satifying and morally palatable. Afer all, "Counterinsurgency is armed social work," as David Kilcullen has said, makes for a better marketing slogan than "War is Hell." Having experience in social work, I can say that at one point or another, we all found ourselves wishing we did have a gun, even while knowing that forced progress is no progress at all.

But I think Spencer's point about the theorist-practitioners moving into policy positions offers a better potential payoff as a line of investigation. The question, though, isn't whether or not the shift will necessarily result in more wars, but what kind of impact will it have on strategic policy? I'd identify three areas where it will have an impact:

1) An emphasis on stability as the strategic objective of American foreign policy. This is largely consistent with America's historical emphasis, primarily due to the benefits of stability to trade and commerce. But with failed states now being perceived as a national security threat vector, that will probably increase. The downside is that promoting stability, if pushed to an extreme, can translate into stifling change and progress. There's also an internal tension, since trade and liberalization often have very destabilizing effects.

2) An emphasis on understanding over knowing. This seems like a clear net plus. One of the cornerstones of the new COIN doctrine is the need to understand the culture within which the operation is unfolding. Translated into a broad policy directive, that can only have a positive effect on strategic decision-making. If there's one risk, it's that in emphasizing the socio-cultural aspect of intelligence, COIN hones the ability to shape opinion through narrative, both within the theater of operations, but also domestically. The potential for abuse should be obvious.

3) An emphasis on a whole of government approach. The advantage here is that the wholistic synthesis of interagency strengths offers better strategic guidance for identifying objectives. It's also the institutional incarnation of "smart power." The disadvantage is that it also often results in policy paralysis and turf wars. The risk, too, is that it might eventually lower the barriers to "policy entrepeneurs" that the systemic firewalls have erected between agencies. There's also the problem that, notwithstanding all of Bob Gates' protests about the militarization of American foreign policy, the military will still be the biggest-funded agency within any interagency approach for the foreseeable future. And we know what talks and what walks, especially in Washington. While that doesn't necessarily mean more wars, it does mean that strategic policy will most likely be driven by the Pentagon and informed by the military's perception of America's national interests.

That's a start. Feel free to shout back with any others I've missed.