22 November COIN Center Webcast
22 November COIN Center Webcast
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COIN is Dead: U.S. Army Must Put Strategy Over Tactics
COIN is Dead: U.S. Army Must Put Strategy Over Tactics
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COIN is Alive: Know When to Use it!
COIN is Alive: Know When to Use it!
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COIN and Peacemaking Doctrines
This item is focused on discussing what COIN is supposed to be, what it is and what is needed to succeed or more accurately to replace COIN. It excludes discussion of morality and acceptable behavioral norms because those are already codified in military and international law.
Some people believe COIN doctrine contains the experiential, synthesized and theoretical knowledge needed to provide a comprehensive guide for successful action in a theatre such as Afghanistan. If that were valid then the actual mix of material – be it military, political, police, social, other – would be of little importance. The vital aspect would simply be that it was agreed upon and usefully employable.
However, employing COIN doctrine and assessing its use as guidance has lead to argument. That is of itself degrading because COIN is currently used as both a strategy and concept of operation intended to promote understanding, agreement and co-ordination down to sub-unit level. Continuing argument about what is useful, tolerable or useless indicates that there have been some quite substantial changes in operational emphasis within for example ISAF. COIN precepts are also routinely subject to posturing and have generated numerous sound-bites.
Names and phrasing can assist memory and with enough time it is possible to devise a clever name or half-meaningful sound bite about anything. But cleverness often contributes more to novelty and ego than to understanding and productive change. ‘Eating soup with a knife’ is cute but conveys little of real use and every infantry trainee learns early how to tackle congealed muck. The ‘three block war’ is an artificial arrangement with neat boundaries when the common situation is a tangle maliciously contrived to occur within the same block.
The associated term ‘strategic corporal’ is a superlative example of excess. Platoon sergeants and company command teams are well able to guide and constrain junior NCOs and junior officers. So the phrase was not meant as a figurative punch to the head of junior officers but was apparently intended to describe a productive and attainable need. As such it is analagous to requirements creep and the assumption that a combat or combat support platform already heavily equipped and tasked to meet tactical needs can be loaded up with further missions and equipment that serve mainly to increase complexity, training, fatique, maintenance, downtime and also procurement and upgrade costs and word count.
Practitioners of COIN are also prone to use keywords such as ‘seamless’ to imply that adherence to its precepts will result in successful operations. But seamless is also an appropriate descriptor for shrink-wrappers, rigid and inflexible castings and shapeless yowie suits. Anything tailor made to fit well has seams as in a swimmer’s wetsuit, or a dress uniform with discrete margins of surplus to enable later adjustment. In real life ‘seamless’ is code for shallow thinking and a weak substitute for coordination to cope with ever-likely seams and other discontinuities.
Capping it off COIN is often presented as an iron fist and velvet glove. A clever duality that must confuse its would-be and co-opted practitioners when minimum force is stressed as a mandatory requirement to win “hearts and minds”. COIN is altogether too clever and adept at confusing those two items also. Regardless of where the heart is at or is going to, conflict is decided when an adversary comes to perceive realistically or otherwise that a desired outcome is not achievable at tolerable cost. The survivor’s heart may be sore but his mind is dominant even if bitter and resentful.
And then there are the counterveiling maxims. Many of them are hard-learned truisms as exemplified by “Presence patrols generate own goals” and “The minimum force response is an effective way of increasing blue force casualties.”
All the above attempts at cleverness are reminiscent of COIN itself. Extrapolating from the specific to derive a general theorem of applicability and doctrine is difficult. And with good reason because circumstances vary in ways that are not always noted and qualified. And the more one reads the more apparent it becomes that COIN concepts are a ragbag of ideas about what has been sometimes useful in the past melded into a supposedly integrated whole. COIN as practised is not an all-encompassing strategy nor a viable conop for an interposing or expeditionary military power or group.
Repeating some points made elsewhere, ‘counter’ is reactive and intrinsicly weak while ‘insurgency’ is an internal uprising which implies a degree of legitimacy. Though COIN might be appropriate to describe operations in one’s own country, it is nonetheless a malapropism when applied to any form of expeditionary conflict.
The sometime alternative name ‘Foreign Internal Defence’ is usefully descriptive and different as it seems to envisage own forces functioning mainly in an advisory role. But that means the term has limited applicability. Also it must anyway have been thought-up by a poorly informed committee because it licenses the news media to make frequent use of phrases such as “fiddling with the populace” and “fiddling while the cities, towns, villages and countryside burn”.
The ineptitudes of COIN and FID from an international community that developed and productively uses things like kevlar, lasers, MASINT and NVGs. A community so technologically advanced should have enough energy and common sense to employ such resources in an effective strategy and associated concept of operation.
The rest of this item is aimed at the terminology, doctrine and conops to succeed clever and sensitive COIN. Why terminology ? Terminology is a useful starting point and aid to understanding. It can also be a means to more accurately inform and to obtain and retain support within one’s own general population and in the target and other countries.
Peacemaking is as elaborated in earlier posts an appropriate name for a doctrine and an over-arching strategy. It quite literally suggests an external power or international group intruding in some region or country to adjudicate between various interests and participants and to sometimes play one off against another. There are surely other names but peacemaking is good enough and it encompasses both a useful objective and a strategy.
As an alternative to seamlessness it is useful to recall the example of bland sounding anti-submarine warfare - the doctrine which harnessed but held apart two conops each with a diametrically opposed purpose and its own distinct resources. One was convoying that aimed to protect and secure shipping primarily by localized suppression, distraction, deterrence of submarines and secondly by the opportunistic destruction of in-area persistent submarines. Two was hunter-killing aimed at wide-area location, pursuit and destruction of every submarine and all supporting resources. There was in practical terms a huge seam between those two conops. The same could apply in peacemaking.
Winning hearts and minds is a natural task for resident forces. So one conop aimed at local security and HUMINT could employ whatever indigenous military and police resources were available for use in contingencies. That conop might be referred to as MAPOPS or MAPCOPS rather than COIN or FID. Advising and mentoring could be done by visiting special forces who are anyway required to have already-trained linguists for use when alternatively engaged in sponsoring guerilla type operations. Any need for additional numbers of security elements would probably require attachment of visiting regular force units, perhaps of battalion size. As supplementary attached forces it could also be useful to form independent companies based on a reinforced company group. Such units would provide a usefully testing environment for majors being considered for command of a battalion.
Wide-area surveillance and stand-off surveillance of local areas is a task for high technology RSTA assets that are likely to be deployed with visiting forces. Those forces are also certain to have ready access to surface and air vehicles that enable fairly rapid concentration of powerful units and subunits for cutoff, persistent pursuit and destruction of whatever is detected. Isolation, mapping and precise targetting are especially difficult in residential areas but tactical sensors and fusion/display aids are steadily becoming more portable, rugged and easy-to-use. NVGs are one example particularly when curfews are not allowed. This wide-area/regional conop for visiting forces might be referred to as WAMOPS or REMOPS.
In some instances these two conops would of course intersect and probably clash with each other. One example would be an area in which MAPCOPS had not gained sufficient intelligence. But such interaction or clashing could be appropriate because thereafter MAPCOPS or WAMOPS might achieve more than it or the other had previously been able to obtain. The alternative is that both would do worse. That could be left for empirical assessment.
That’s enough stirring the pot in this area of social science. It’s easier to consider amenable topics like military technology.
More Commentary on COIN is Dead
More Commentary on COIN is Dead
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Interesting two sentences,
Quote:
from Compost
Agree that law regardless of how established becomes an instrument of policy. It also functions as a constraint on policy.
They certainly apply in a democracy where more than one power center can be a policy-maker. The US "co-equal" three branches, Executive, Legislative and Judicial, are an example. E.g., the Executive establishes a policy which is executed by "laws" (executive orders). That policy and "laws" also act as constraints on policy-making by subordinates in the Executive branch (e.g., DoD).
They also hold over the other two branches unless they "revolt" (here by a number of constitutional methods). Thus, here, the Executive policy (and its "laws") may be accepted or rejected as constraints (rightly or wrongly) by the other two branches.
But, in an absolute autocracy (in theory), the Autocrat's policy (and its "laws") should operate as constraints on everyone in the state. In fact, that theory doesn't quite hold because multiple subordinate power centers are evidenced in, say, Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR (albeit less evident in the USSR until after Stalin died.
A country's "insurgent group" also represents a power center, which obviously does not agree with one or more of that country's governing policies and laws.
Regards
Mike
Insurgent and the primacy of law
On the insurgent and law, the book
Ya Basta!: 10 Years of the Zapatista Uprising Writings of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ya-Basta-Zap...2389415&sr=8-1
is interresting as you have a compilation of all the laws promulgated by the zapatist movement in the areas under their control.
It is an interresting illustration of Mike point of law as policy tool.
Except for when the law and its application are a major source of causation
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Compost
law should not be modified for advantage, convenience or other reason during a particular military contingency or conflict.
In many cases "the rule of law" is the primary source of causation for insurgency; and even more often, when many factors are contributing to discontent and subversion within a populace, it is the state's instinct to ratchet up enforcement of the rule of law to regain control over the populace that pushes an uprising to the next level. Typically to the ultimate detriment of the state and the larger society as a whole.
Laws are important. Justice is essential. One is rooted in rules designed to objectively describe the left and right limits of acceptable behavior, the latter is much more principle-based and rooted in the intangible and innate perceptions of what people instinctively feel.
For me, the greatest example of this "Rule of Law" vs "Justice" debate is in the fundamental essence of the message delivered by Jesus (who was widely feared to be an emerging insurgent leader by Roman and Jewish leadership alike). The rule of law is the foremost tool of a regime to control the populace, and certainly that was the case in Palestine, where the Romans used Jewish officials and Jewish law to control the Jewish people. Jesus message constantly challenged the injustice in how the law's of Moses were being applied. You see how many came to him believing he was their salvation from injustice on Earth, only to be gently redirected to the fact that he had a larger mission and purpose for his message.
The law can be perverted to evil purpose, or is designed for controlling purposes that are no longer necessary or appropriate for an evolving populace. Often it is fixing and changing the laws; rather than more vigorous enforcement of the law, that is the critical step a state can make in reducing popular unrest and quelling a growing insurgency.
One sees this also in the history of English law, which is the root of our American system. The Law was the King's tool for controlling the populace, but increasingly when one could not find justice under the law, and evolving populace demanded greater justice. The King's Chancellors began to hear cases, and evolved to the Courts of Chancery, with a rooting in the principles of Equity (Good Faith and Fair Dealing). Ultimately the two merged into one, bringing justice to the law. The timing of this development and reformation of governance that swept Europe are not coincidental.
Can Muslim's find justice under the law in countries such as Syria or Saudi Arabia today? That is for them to answer, for justice is how one feels, which is not well assessed by outside perspectives. State's also have a biased perspective as the writer and enforcer of the law to not well see the growing injustice under the same. The quest for justice is historically far more powerful than even the most vigorous enforcement of the rule of law to keep suppressed indefinitely.
To complete my thought ...
having found the 1968 slogan (stored in one of my old semi-frozen mental file cabinets) to accompany La Beaute (ou La Fille du Pave) as her battle cry:
Quote:
Soyez realiste, demandez l'impossible = Be realistic, demand the impossible.
That does make it a bit difficult, doesn't it, for governments to meet the demands of insurgent groups who adopt this line of reasoning. The battle line is simply drawn at a revolutionary or separatist point which the government cannot approach.
Of course, the response is that the government should offer some compromises (a bit of a sticky wicket to decide which ones without losing authority, etc); thereby splitting away those insurgents who are satisfied with lesser, but possible reforms.
My obvious and simplistic point is that, in defining "COIN", one must consider what is possible and impossible in regard to each side of the coin, the government and the insurgents. The Beauty and the Beast; but which one is which depends on your vantage point.
Regards
Mike
Hopefully, regular police ...
as opposed to 1968's CRS and SAC. ;)
Seriously, my summation was too simplistic because it didn't refer to what "the population" wants. That was not meant to exclude "the population". However, "the population" is not likely to be a monolith - your Malayan example involved three major population groups, Malay, Chinese and Indian - and those groups involved subgroups with different wants. The wants of "the population" are harder to determine than, say, the slogans of the government or the insurgents.
But, yes, generally I see true "Rule of Law" as coming from a large majority of the population subject to it - a "constitutional majority" (say, 2/3 -3/4) for major issues. In that respect, I agree with Marcos in what he said about the Zapatista process to develop their laws. Whether what he said was true or false of what was actually done, I don't know.
You also make the point that insurgents, like governments, impose on the population what they believe are the best rules. I suppose Khmer Rouge and Shining Path are examples from the insurgent side. Lots of imposition of law by governments are available. Bob Jones calls that sort of imposition "Rule of Law". I would call it "Rule by Law" - a concept well developed by the Chinese from the Imperial through Communist regimes.
You also make the point that populations are caught in a Catch 22 betwixt the government and the insurgents. You'll get no argument from me on that.
Regards
Mike
Over the Horizon: Dead or Alive, COIN is not the Culprit
Over the Horizon: Dead or Alive, COIN is not the Culprit
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