Contextualizing Insurgency
I am currently working on the initial stages of my thesis for a masters in international relations and I am in the process of forming my research problem. Below is a statement of a research problem I am thinking about pursuing, I was wondering if any one had any thoughts:
The problem of modern warfare begins and ends with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The failure of the Soviet Union created chaos and confusion for a US military establishment that had spent forty four years preparing to fight a peer power. With the collapse of the Soviet Union the traditional Westphalian State System has been thrown into chaos. The emergence of rogue states, failed states, ungoverned spaces, transnational actors and super-empowered individuals has created a security environment in which conflict has become significantly more complex.(1)
In this new and complex security environment it appears as if irregular warfare(2) has become the dominant form of conflict. The US response to such a perceived shift has been the wholesale retooling of the military to confront the challenges faced by the irregular/asymmetric threat specifically insurgencies.(3) This retooling is best characterized by the much discussed U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (U.S. Army FM 3-24 and Marine Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3-33.5)(4) and the newer U.S. Army Stability Operations Manual (U.S. Army FM 3-07). At the heart of both manuals are the related strategic and guiding assumptions that local populations are necessarily the center of gravity(5) in modern warfare and that government legitimacy is necessary for victory.(6) At issue though is the idea that these concepts are pervasive throughout insurgencies, unaffected by the geographic and cultural context of the insurgency, and not the result of the “strategic context”(7) in which they were conceived.
It would seem incorrect, for example, to assert, as several senior military advisors recently did, that: “Insurgencies are similar to snowflakes in that no two are exactly alike. However, the principles used to defeat an insurgency whether executed by the Romans in Gaul, the British in Malaya, or the U.S. in the Philippines, remain much the same.” (8) If it is indeed true that all insurgencies are different how is it possible to combat them all with the same strategic concepts, primarily the assertion of population as the center of gravity and the necessity of central government legitimacy by the population? Such an assumption is based on an all too common flaw in military doctrine, which is that it is designed to address the failures of the last conflict. These assumptions mean that FM 3-24 does not allow for the contextualization of current and future irregular conflicts in terms of conflict specific parameters such as geography and the impact of culture on the relationship between population and authority.
The aforementioned short comings of FM 3-24 are currently on display in Afghanistan, where a COIN operation, designed around the idea that the population is the center of gravity and that government legitimacy is the end goal, have failed to achieve their stated objectives (peace and reconciliation). The highly self sufficient rural population of Afghanistan has eschewed buying into the central government, and has proven a most allusive center of gravity. The context of the conflict in Afghanistan, that is to say a country with limited infrastructure, a highly rural populace and tribal leanings is at odds with the strategic parameters of population centric/development based counterinsurgency. It is not simply that geography and infrastructure make such an endeavor logistically difficult, but the fact that the geography shapes the cultural imagination of the Afghan people and their relationship to central authority.
Counterinsurgency, as described by FM 3-24, is difficult in the best of circumstances. The context of Afghanistan makes it impossible. The geography of Afghanistan makes centralized government difficult to administer. The lack of infrastructure compounds the problem of providing government services to the people. The rural nature of the afghan population makes utilizing it as the center of gravity even more difficult given its dispersed and isolated nature.
The origins of FM 3-24’s shortcomings are its bases in the analysis of both nationalist post-colonial insurgencies and Cold War era ideological insurgencies, specifically the French experience in Algeria, the British experience in Malaya and US experiences in Vietnam, the Philippines and Nicaragua. This set of cases manifests itself in the doctrine as a failure to recognize the diversity of conflict causes, the aforementioned cases being all conflicts with ideological and nationalist origins. As is suggested by Samuel Huntington though, in his seminal work The Clash of Civilization, wars of identity are ever present in the Post-Cold War era.
Modern insurgencies poses a strong identity component, and unlike ideological insurgencies, are not necessarily won by securing the hearts and the minds of the people, which is to say, that the people are not necessarily the center of gravity and that achieving the acceptance of government legitimacy by the people is not necessarily possible. There may be cultural, geographic or practical context that precludes these concepts from playing a central role in the resolution of the insurgency and thus the importance of contextualizing the conflict before applying a strategy. It is inappropriate to assume all insurgencies are the same, and dictums of FM 3-24 as a universal cure. Who fights, what they fight for, where they fight and why they fight is always changing, and so to must the strategy.(9)
Endnotes
(1) Thomas M. Nichols, Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventative War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 11.
(2) There are many terms used to describe the current conflict environment ranging from 4GW (fourth generation warfare) to asymmetric. This paper will use the term irregular most often in referring to the general nature of the national security threat faced by the United States because it is broadest in definition, and lacks the charged nature of terms such as 4GW.
(3) Interview of Colonel Gian Gentile, conducted by Octavian Manea for Small Wars Journal.
(4) Interview of Colonel Gian Gentile, conducted by Octavian Manea for Small Wars Journal.
(5) Center of Gravity is a military termed first used by Carl von Clausewitz in his work On War, and is generally understood as “the source of power that provides moral or physical strength, freedom of action, or will to act” ( DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, JP 1-02) for either side of a conflict.
(6) Interview of Colonel Gian Gentile, conducted by Octavian Manea for Small Wars Journal & Stephen Biddle, “The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual as Political Science and Political Praxis,” Perspectives on Politics 6, no. 2 (June 2008): 347
(7) “Strategic Context”: Strategic Context is one of five major elements common to all strategies and specifically refers to “the overriding military ideas or fads” of the time, it is in essence the military zeitgeist of period. Further discussion of the concept can be found George Edward Thibault’s essay “Military Strategy: A Framework for Analysis”, which is part of the National Defense University volume The Art and Practice of Military Strategy.
(8) Robert Downey, Lee Grubbs, Brian Malloy and Craig Wonson, “How Should the U.S. Execute a Surge in Aghnistan?,” SmallWarsJournal.com (2008): 2, http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/jou...loy-wonson.pdf)
(9) Sebastian L.v. Gorka and David Kilcullen, “An Actor-centric Theory of War: Understand the Difference Between COIN and Counterinsurgency,” Joint Forces Quarterly 60 (1st Quarter, 2011): 18.
An incomplete analogy leading to a flawed conclusion
Quote:
Originally Posted by
wmthomson
It would seem incorrect, for example, to assert, as several senior military advisors recently did, that: “Insurgencies are similar to snowflakes in that no two are exactly alike. However, the principles used to defeat an insurgency whether executed by the Romans in Gaul, the British in Malaya, or the U.S. in the Philippines, remain much the same.” (8) If it is indeed true that all insurgencies are different how is it possible to combat them all with the same strategic concepts, primarily the assertion of population as the center of gravity and the necessity of central government legitimacy by the population? Such an assumption is based on an all too common flaw in military doctrine, which is that it is designed to address the failures of the last conflict. These assumptions mean that FM 3-24 does not allow for the contextualization of current and future irregular conflicts in terms of conflict specific parameters such as geography and the impact of culture on the relationship between population and authority.
Certainly all insurgencies are like snowflakes. No two manifests in the same way due to the unique circumstance of the micro-environments they are created in; but all share the same principles and factors for causation.
The problem that the "COIN" manual has is that it cares little about the principles and factors of causation, as it is a manual based upon the historical perspective of intervening colonial powers who merely wanted to sustain the current local government and achieve a stability that suited their purposes for being there in the first place.
Once one gets to looking past the fact that "all snowflakes are different" and gets to looking to how they are similar, one can begin to craft effective preventative and countering measures. The vast majority of those involve not the populace, but rather the government.
"Populaces do not fail governments, it is governments which fail the populaces".
FM 3-24 is not about countering insurgency so much as it is about how an external power can best suppress/manage the symptoms so as to secure their own national interests in some country where the conditions of insurgency are quite high. The government is typically one of their making or control, so it is only natural that efforts will tend to focus elsewhere, such as on the insurgent and the populace he emerges from.
As to your paper, I agree with those who suggest that you pick one small target and laser in on it. Masters and Ph.D.s are intended to be an inch wide and a mile deep. If you go for a mile wide and an inch deep, drilling down deeper where necessary across the problem, you will gain great wisdom, but struggle in your academic pursuits.
Concur with other critiques
I would add that you probably should look to some additional sources that disagree with our freind Gian Gentile starting with Kilcullen's Accidental Guerrilla. Then I would look at Mason and Malkesian for a good source of recent case study writing. Another set of case studies from a period only a little removed is Corr & Sloan, Low Intensity Conflict: Old Threats in a New World. Look also at some of the quant studies including those done by RAND and my own work with Max Manwaring,especially The SWORD Model of Counterinsurgency published in these pages. What is particularly interesting is how well the snowflake/snow metaphor holds up in nearly all serious analysis.
Cheers
JohnT
Couple of quibbles, as usual...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Bob's World
Certainly all insurgencies are like snowflakes. No two manifests in the same way due to the unique circumstance of the micro-environments they are created in; but all share the same principles and factors for causation...
...Once one gets to looking past the fact that "all snowflakes are different" and gets to looking to how they are similar, one can begin to craft effective preventative and countering measures. The vast majority of those involve not the populace, but rather the government.
"Populaces do not fail governments, it is governments which fail the populaces".
"All" and "always" are troublesome words. Certainly many, possibly most insurgencies are conflicts between "the government" and "the populace" that trace back to weak or bad governance, but it would be dangerous to say "all". Sometimes the root cause is conflict among portions of the populace, often portions with incompatible definitions of "good governance".
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Bob's World
As to your paper, I agree with those who suggest that you pick one small target and laser in on it. Masters and Ph.D.s are intended to be an inch wide and a mile deep. If you go for a mile wide and an inch deep, drilling down deeper where necessary across the problem, you will gain great wisdom, but struggle in your academic pursuits.
An inch wide and a mile deep is perhaps not a hole one wants to spend a career in, but there are good reasons to start a career with that experience. Until you've gone deep and developed specialist knowledge you really don't understand or appreciate what depth is, and how much there is to know about every fraction of every picture. That can lead to dangerous overconfidence. I don't see wide and shallow as a road to wisdom; necessarily, especially without that base of specialized knowledge. Too often it leads to dangerously superficial conclusions.
The Death Of LIC-Low Intensity Conflict
Quote:
Originally Posted by
John T. Fishel
The only term we ever came up with that was worse than LIC was MOOTW (which, according to Larry Cable, sounded like a cow going out of both ends).
OE, good quotes - I always phrased it as "there is no such thing as a low intensity bullet."
Bob, Bill Olson came up with a slide called "The 100 Names of LIC"
Cheers
JohnT
Lets see Old Eagle dosen't like it, John T. dosen't like it, and Larry the Cable Guy dosen't like it.....pretty much the end of LIC.