Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Missing the Deeper Lessons

"Counterinsurgency Lessons for Iraq and Afghanistan"
October 7, 2006, Indianapolis Star Op-Ed by Matt Rowe

Military and political pundits often advocate John A. Nagl’s excellent book, "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam", as the definitive source for understanding an insurgency and how to defeat it. It is often quoted and some have implied that if the US were only to follow the British example in Malaya for our current war on terror—especially in Iraq—we could expect a better outcome.

An interesting historical point is that the British did not manage the insurgency in Cyprus, which occurred at about the same time, in the same manner as Malaya. As a result, the outcome in Cyprus was completely different from what they had originally envisioned.

James S. Corum’s March 2006 monograph for the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College, "Training Indigenous Forces in Counterinsurgency: A Tale of Two Insurgencies", contrasts the Malaya and Cyprus insurgencies in detail.

The important point that comes to mind is that in Malaya the leadership made early mistakes too. However, Nagl points out that they eventually learned from them and put leaders in place who genuinely understood that the conflict was not primarily a military war, but a socio-political conflict. The Malaya Emergency was managed as a large-scale policing operation, and their military operations were subordinate to the greater political aims of providing security and justice at the local levels where the insurgents operated. In the end, the communist terrorists were utterly defeated.

Nagle reminds us that in South Vietnam, the flawed US strategy was ultimately about firepower and technology and implies a hugely significant question for the Bush Administration.

Have they learned these important deeper lessons about insurgency?

The administration and Department of Defense are now talking about their soon to be released field manual on counterinsurgency. This may be a significant advance as far as the military’s role is concerned, but the US government as a whole must apply all of its resources and agencies in a coordinated manner in order to defeat the insurgents. It must be ready to work with outside resources as well, like the United Nations, non-governmental aid organizations, and religious institutions.

Unfortunately, the Bush Administration, the Secretary of Defense, and the other key leaders have not demonstrated much in the way of flexibility or adaptability. This ability to learn, along with understanding that insurgency is a war of ideas that relies upon the military being subordinate to local political needs are the key points implied by Nagl's research.

Due to the intensity of the internal conflicts in Iraq that have resulted from US occupation, it appears that a counterinsurgency model by itself may no longer be effective there. However, the principles of counterinsurgency as described above always apply in any war and it is not too late to apply these lessons in Afghanistan.

Read more...

Is a New Military Strategy on Insurgency Enough?

According to the October 5th New York Times article by Michael Gordon “The United States Army and Marines are finishing work on a new counterinsurgency doctrine that draws on the hard-learned lessons from Iraq and makes the welfare and protection of civilians a bedrock element of military strategy.” This is a move in the right direction that counterinsurgency experts have advocated for decades. However, this new approach requires a significant amount of time to re-indoctrinate the existing military and it faces some daunting challenges along the way. It is also possible that this response will lack the focus required for success as it has in past attempts.



The military’s new field manual on counterinsurgency will be published sometime next month. Portions have already been released to the New York Times.

The new plan, according to the Times, emphasizes protecting civilians, restoring essential services, and providing security. It also warns against the earlier abuses and mistreatment inflicted upon civilians in the war. These are basic tenets of unconventional warfare, but the challenge to success is that there must be coordinated civilian, governmental, and non-governmental support for the unconventional effort. The military should only play a supporting role.

However, just focusing on the military for a moment, this approach implies that troops at all levels will make hard decisions on how to respond to given set of civilians and their actions during an insurgency. Counterinsurgency by its very nature is local and has more in common with policing than conventional war. By definition, local populations support insurgents in a struggle against a government that does not legitimately protect their interests. It is highly likely that they are oppressed and neglected by their government and as long as that is the case, an insurgent or terrorist can survive on this popular support. It is also possible to coerce support from the population if the insurgent is willing to pay the price and risk potential cooperation between the people and the government.

In order for a counterinsurgency effort to work, a national or regional strategy to provide security, eliminate oppression and neglect, and eradicate corruption is paramount. The government must enhance opportunities for prosperity that reach the local level. If it does not, there will always be sympathy and support for the anti-government insurgents. Beyond the physical security that the military can provide, interaction at the local level requires personal relationships of trust and commitment to building and providing the basic services that the population needs to live and prosper. These opportunities must be driven by the government and be highly coordinated with military and police operations.

The Times article eloquently describes the difficulty of counterinsurgent warfare as “…a task so complex that military officers refer to it as the graduate level of war.”

Success requires much more than simply avoiding the abuse or unintentional injury of civilians. It requires credibility and experience at a myriad of skills. Counterinsurgent troops need expertise in diplomacy, languages, innovation, cultural awareness, construction and engineering, social and administrative planning, consensus building, Human Rights—and the list goes on. They also need to know when and how to sanction those civilians who actively work against them without alienating significant portions of the neutral population. Finally, they need to know how to capture or kill the active insurgents or terrorists whenever the opportunity presents itself.

The US already has troops who specialize in this type of warfare, though they make up only about 1/3 of 1% of total US service personnel—the US Army Special Forces; also known as the Green Berets. They alone are the vanguard of US unconventional warfare assets.

It is important to point out that the military has a larger body of Special Operations Forces (SOF) of which the Special Forces (S-F) are a sub-unit. Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and other elite units are a part of SOF as well, but they do not focus on the specialized counterinsurgency skills mentioned above. As highly selective and elite as they are, these SOF units have much more in common with traditional commandos than counterinsurgents. Hit and run raids by commandos are guerrilla tactics, but guerrilla tactics do not necessarily imply an insurgency. One is a tactical military technique and the other is socio-political military strategy that may use both guerrilla tactics and conventional military tactics.

In the mid-1980’s, congressional leaders considered the dilemma of not having enough unconventional warfare expertise in the US military. They even debated whether to create a 5th military service dedicated specifically to this type of conflict. In the end, they compromised and created the US Special Operations Command (US SOCOM) as a joint military headquarters responsible for creating that capability within the existing military services.

Unfortunately, that compromise has not led to the level of unconventional expertise that congressional leaders had hoped as evidenced by our complete lack of preparedness to conduct this type of operation in Afghanistan and Iraq. What SOCOM did create is the often-confusing concept of SOF, and through the decades, SF (and even SOCOM) has had to reestablish its credibility regularly in the eyes of the conventional military and civilian leadership. Their roles inadvertently evolved into predominantly commando type operations in support of the conventional doctrines. They have relatively little training or emphasis on unconventional warfare. Rather than assigning SF to work with affected populations to reduce the critical outer layers that support the insurgents, they protect VIP’s, provide targets for precision munitions, and act as translators and advisors for coalition warfare. They conduct high-risk hit and run raids against high-value enemy targets, which are unquestionably conventional military tactics.

Our senior military and civilian leaders are products of previous wars that they can better understand: wars in which force-on-force strategies of attrition were the deciding factor and in which irregular warfare played a lesser role. Refocusing them on unconventional warfare is expensive and a direct challenge to the status quo. The same is true at the Department of Defense and within the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. The historic development of these organizations and the bureaucracy inherent in giant institutions are also powerful obstacles to change. Most experts on innovation and contingency theory agree that changes to large, inward-looking organizations are not likely to develop from within.

Whether we term it unconventional, irregular, or asymmetric warfare, it remains the only practical strategy for the global war on terror. It is likely to be the predominant form of conflict faced by the US in the 21st Century. We must reorganize our Department of Defense (DOD) and military force structures appropriately to avoid a similar outcome like that which resulted with the establishment of SOCOM. The US will likely have to define and establish a 5th military service with its own service secretary, supporting structures, and unconventional warfare focused culture. The US must increase its total number of unconventional warriors dramatically and must include conventional units in supporting roles. This way a comprehensive unconventional alternative can be offered to the national command authority.

Beyond the military, since counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism are political-military conflicts the US must create a joint military and non-military agency infrastructure capable of training, planning, preparing, and conducting unconventional warfare for the long-term that is required for success. It must emphasize and expand the roles and responsibilities of other agencies like the US Department of Justice, USAID, the CIA, and others—to include foreign governments, their agencies, and non-governmental organizations. The US military cannot do this by itself in a war on the scale of which we find ourselves in Iraq.

Finally, the US must regain the moral high ground in order to establish the credibility and trust required. We must reengage, coordinate, collaborate, and support the UN, other allies, NGO’s, religious organizations, and even the business interests involved in the unconventional warfare strategy. By definition, the strategy does not require secrecy and a strategy using the right resources focused on the right issues will gain international support. Those entities that typically attempt to stand-alone or at least separate themselves from government and military forces must understand and buy-into the principles of unconventional warfare and their vital roles in it.

Read more...

“Purposefully and Materially” Undermining Democracy & the War on Terror

Recent efforts by Congress to develop a mechanism by which to try unlawful enemy combatants empowers the executive branch to indefinitely detain suspects who have “…purposefully and materially” supported hostilities against the United States. The efforts still fall short of restoring the United States’ credibility as a Just democracy and the bastion of hope to the oppressed people of the world.

The problem is that these very same oppressed people, often misinformed and manipulated by their own governments and powerful organizations like Al-Qaeda, make up the bulk of the support networks for insurgent and terrorist groups. As long as their own governments oppress them, our enemies can manipulate them for support. The last thing the US should do is give these people, who have no historic experience or inherent faith in a representative form of government, a legitimate reason to fear us too.

Unfortunately, this is exactly the consequence of most of the actions taken by the Bush Administration since launching the war on terror. Our government now advocates torturing enemies, exempting certain persons from habeas corpus protections, and submitting them to hidden commissions for judgment and the possibility of the death penalty. It advocates warrantless surveillance of US citizens, and sees military violence as the first resort for dealing with the primarily socio-political challenge of terrorism and insurgency—a situation especially complicated by significant religious and ethnic disputes and historic geopolitical interactions.

The President and his supporters advocate that these abuses of human dignity and rights are an appropriate response to the extraordinary threat that we face from modern terrorism. Even though the extent of the destruction and death possible today is terrifying, does that warrant undermining the very principles of the US constitution, conventions on Human Rights, and basic democratic values? After all, do the Geneva Conventions authorize torture and inhumane treatment for citizens and combatants of warring “recognized” states that might resort to an attack using nuclear weapons?

These flawed policies are not going to affect the active insurgents very much because the extremists only make up a relatively small portion of the population, and a protective layer of direct supporters surrounds them. The largest populations—numbering in the millions throughout the Middle East—who are only loosely affiliated with the extremists consist of sympathizers and relatively neutral people just trying to go on with their lives. We stand to gain much more intelligence and support from this group by ensuring human rights and justice, than from the handful of hard corps terrorists or their direct supporters we may actually catch. Conversely, every time we maltreat a suspect who is not a terrorist we undermine our position and propel more support directly to the enemy.

Some very bad people out there should be captured or killed as quickly as possible, but not at the expense of our civil liberties and constitutional rights. In a terrorist insurgency, the strategy is more like policing than war. Security and justice are paramount. If the Geneva Conventions do not clearly articulate protections for “unlawful enemy combatants”, it is because the people who drafted them did not anticipate the extent to which this group would play in future wars. Perhaps it is time to amend the conventions and provide that protection. For now, in the absence of those amendments, the US should retake the moral high ground by establishing the broadest protections possible and demonstrate to the world that we can back our lofty rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and justice with tangible action.

In the end, you can sometimes fight fire with fire, but you can never fight terrorism and insurgency with more terror. If you want to take away the support of an oppressed people from the terrorists and insurgents, you have to offer them something better than oppression and fear.

They already have that.

Read more...