The ICRC is a marginally well intentioned organization
of little real worth so I don't pay them much heed...
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Originally Posted by
tequila
even any solid examples of how the U.S. or the West is losing "global influence" (I thought we didn't really care how the rest of the world thought of us, Ken, since they are fated to hate us/be jealous of us no matter what?) due to our insistence on care for civilians in wartime?
I do not know if we're losing global influence, nor do I or most Americans particularly care. I also believe that said 'influence' is predicated to a great extent on the strength of the USD. What I do know is that our popularity fluctuates wildly but has never been great so far as the rest of the world is concerned.
Said popularity does go up when we save someone from from a bad day (which happens a lot) and it goes down when we throw our weight around or screw something up (which happens even more often). In my observation, our popularity was not great in 1947 (first year I paid attention) and has been on a generally downhill slope with only occasional upticks since. mid to immediate post Viet Nam was the lowest point I've seen. Iraq was just a slight downturn compared to VN.
The fact that no one like to be bailed out of difficulty by someone else also intrudes; immediate gratitude turns to resentment... :wry:
All that to reiterate that I and many I know do not really care (a few I know do care -- but not a great deal...) what the rest of the world thinks of us; that our 'global influence' is and off and on thing dependent on many factors; and that the fact that we espouse one rule for ourselves and varied more stringent rules for others merely makes us hypocritical -- the effect of that on our popularity or influence is indeterminable and infinitely variable. That effect has nothing to do with what I said or why I said it.
Our 'insistence' on care for civilians in wartime is a totally practical thing. Killing or harming too many has adverse military effect; we're simply trying to avoid that. That 'concern' is enhanced nowadays for propaganda reasons and to be politically correct and placate the American left. I suspect much of it would go out the window if we had a real war on our hands. You read this? (LINK). Shows what happens when the gloves are removed, whole different attitude. And the American left was in charge then... :eek: :D
Aside from not leaving the 's' off "likes," I should've said
'will sooner or later' turn to resentment.
Very wise oriental gentleman you talked to...:wry:
But did they do any COIN operations?
Thanks to those contributing to this thread. I have been doing some research on COIN in different conflicts, trying to evaluate what works the best. I started looking at Sri Lanka as I heard from several friends, "you should look at Sri Lanka, they defeated the LTTE!" And I like this case since it's not tied to the religious issues of AQ and the Middle East.
However, it seems from the sources, Sri Lanka really used a conventional military onslaught to defeat the LTTE.
Does anyone have any insight into what COIN techniques they tried to defeat LTTE? Did they do any of the COIN techniques that are documented in the COIN field manual?
Did they create militias, paramilitaries?
Have amnesty programs?
Increase intelligence?
I'm finding a lot of discussion about the LTTE, it's capabilities, etc, but very little about how the Sri Lankan's did COIN. Maybe they didn't?
Thanks for any suggestions you all might have.
Have you seen any discussion of...
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Originally Posted by
Cavguy
I have a forthcoming essay in Joint Force Quarterly on the topic. Hadn't seen this thread, but the essay pretty much tracks Bill Moore's reasons above - the isolation of the LTTE politically, financially, and militarily played the decisive role, the military operation and tactics used were icing on the cake.
I saw a couple unsupported claims in newspaper articles about the use of paramilitaries and intelligence cooperation and isolation of the Tamil Diaspora to cut off their funding from transnational systems. But no one sources it, so I'm not sure if it is just general talk or a definitive strategy by the Sri Lankan government.
There is some good discussion about the Eastern Branch of LTTE breaking away from the north, but the COIN techniques used in Iraq don't really seem to emerge.
Has anyone seen any proof of these techniques?
How Sri Lanka defeated the LTTE
What Sri Lanka Can Teach Us About COIN
Entry Excerpt:
What Sri Lanka Can Teach Us About COIN
by Lionel Beehner
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It has become a truism to say there are no military solutions to defeat an insurgency. That was the thrust of the U.S. military’s 2006 counterinsurgency (COIN) manual as well as the mantras repeated by CENTCOM Commander David Petraeus, the manual’s coauthor, and his “warrior intellectual” offspring. Conventional wisdom also holds that COIN takes years, if not decades, to complete and emphasizes a population-centric strategy to avoid civilian casualties and win locals’ hearts and minds.
But Sri Lanka’s successful victory one year ago stands all this conventional wisdom on its head. It was brute military force, not political dialogue or population control, which ended its brutal decades-long war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), or Tamil Tigers, a separatist group perhaps most notorious for popularizing the suicide bomb. The final military campaign lasted months, not years or decades. It was a gruesome finale, to be sure. The Sri Lankan government paid little heed to outside calls for preventing collateral damage. While humanitarian workers and journalists were barred from entering the war zone, as many as 20,000 civilians were killed in the crossfire and hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Tamils were corralled into camps after war ended . It was, as one journalist I spoke to in Colombo put it, “a war without witnesses.” Hearts and minds took a backseat to shock and awe.
Still, the lesson from Sri Lanka’s COIN experiment is that overwhelming force can defeat insurgents, terrorists and other irregular armed groups in relatively short order, but at a steep cost. Its model disproves the notion that counterinsurgencies must be drawn-out, Vietnam-like campaigns. With U.S. forces bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, it also provides states fighting small wars with a different counterinsurgency template. Not without reason did Pakistan and Thailand, which both face insurgencies on their peripheries, seek out Sri Lanka for military training and advice in recent months.
So do America’s warrior intellectuals and COIN theorists have it all backwards? Should we be emphasizing military solutions over political compromises and accommodation, overwhelming force over clear-hold-and-build campaigns, defeating the enemy over winning locals’ “hearts and minds”? Does Sri Lanka’s COIN strategy provide any lessons for Washington as it escalates the war in Afghanistan, or for other countries facing violent insurgencies along their unruly peripheries?
Or does the fallout from the use of massive force—the high death toll, the lost hearts and minds, the accusations of war crimes, the unresolved grievances of ethnic minorities—negate whatever victory is achieved on the battlefield or goodwill that comes from a peaceful settlement? It is a perplexing question for military strategists. “The end of the Sri Lankan civil war,” wrote Robert Haddick, a managing editor at the Small Wars Journal, “most especially the way it ended, with a clear military solution – will cause many sleepless nights for Western counterinsurgency theorists.”
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Lionel Beehner is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University and formerly a senior writer at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is also a term member.
Getting away from Sri Lanka and into theory, but...
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Originally Posted by
Bob's World
Evil or selfish men will step up to lead insurgencies when the conditions exist and the same goes for governments and now, non-state actors like AQ, who will swoop in to conduct UW for their own purposes as well.
Poor governance opens the door for change...what that change will be depends upon who steps up to the plate.
This is true, but we must be very wary of any impulse to direct change by trying to step up to the plate on someone else's behalf... no designated hitter rule in place here. Evil and selfish aren't the only dangers: it's wise to remember the old adage about the pavement on the road to hell.
Takes us right back to the problem
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This is still new and the group struggled with the concept. One study was based on a broad base of data from Iraq and lauded as "evidence." It was good work with good insights, but to my thinking it was still based on a sample of one insurgency and as such was still 'analogy' until the finding could be cross-referenced and challenged by running them against a history of hundreds of other insurgencies to see if they stand up
.
This paragraph indicates you have fallen into the same trap most of us fall into. You're looking for evidence to prove a theory instead of using evidence to discover the truth. I'm sure I can cherry pick evidence from hundreds of insurgencies to support my theory compared to yours and vice versa (RAND does it all the time). Fortunately or unfortunately we have military minds (unconventional or not), and we tend to want to develop simple answers (doctrinal approaches) based on common truths (whether they exist or not).
After thinking about your arguments a little more, I also think your approach is too absolute. You are proposing that every problem is due to poor government, and the center of gravity (pardon the military term) is always the government. I suspect people can find supporting evidence (depending on how you interpret it) for that in many insurgencies, just as they can find examples of where an enemy centric approach worked, but the reality in both cases i suspect will be different, and as Mike stated the outcome was due to several variables, perhaps hundreds of them. Until we all learn to back off our pet theories and preconceived ideas the evidence based approach is doomed to fail just as badly as the correlation approach. For an evidence based approach to work it would require using evidence with no bias, and it is very hard for humans to do that.
I have to echo Bill. Though I believe he and I both have said this several times..
This entire paragraph:
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After thinking about your arguments a little more...it is very hard for humans to do that.
Summarizes what I've been saying about Bob's World view from the first. There are other causes (which Bob dismisses as minor inconveniences :D) and the human factor (specifically his US specific remedies) will ALWAYS intrude. We're not as nice or as smart as he wishes. I kept saying that but have sort of backed off recently not because I've come to see the correctness of his views but solely because I don't want to belabor the point -- even if Ol' Bob does. :wry:
I know Bob's a smart guy and that he knows all that -- but he also is trying to sell a product, one that has merit but is vulnerable to a counter pitch on those two factors. Either that or he's looking for that long river in Africa...;)
And Mike, as usual, makes excellent points...