We Have a Serious COIN Shortage
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The Dunlap piece in debate here & at the SWJ Blog:
Title: We Have a Serious COIN Shortage., By: Dunlap Jr., Charles J., U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, 0041798X, May2007, Vol. 133, Issue 5
Database: Military & Government Collection
We Have a Serious COIN Shortage
Nobody asked me but…
Recently the U.S. Army, with help from the Marine Corps, touted a significant counterinsurgency (COIN) success. No, it was not an announcement of the extermination of another major terrorist as happened when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in an airstrike last summer. Nor was it about yet more debilitating air attacks against al Qaeda havens in Somalia.
Rather, it was the unveiling of the "new" COIN doctrine, Field Manual (FM) 3-24. With magazines such as Newsweek declaring it "The Book" on Iraq, it quickly became a public relations triumph for boots-on-the-ground advocates.
FM 3-24 does exploit the brilliance of respected warriors such as U.S. Army Colonels H. R. McMaster and Peter Mansoor, and other ground-force experts. It also effectively captures scores of lessons-learned from COIN history, and will surely prove invaluable in many future situations. Still, it is not the solution for the U.S. military in today's Iraq.
Why not? At its core FM 3-24 calls for a traditional, land-component solution: pour lots of Soldiers onto the problem. How many? An astounding ratio of 20-25 counterinsurgents per 1,000 inhabitants. As an otherwise fawning article in a January 2007 issue of Time magazine concedes, this means deploying 120,000 troops to Baghdad alone. To pacify all of Iraq? According to U.S. News and World Report, 500,000 or more.
Wow. With that large a force, the Coalition would enjoy as much as a 25-to-1 advantage over what the Brookings Institution has reported as the insurgents' strength of 20,000-30,000 fighters. Such lopsided superiority over any opponent ought to ensure victory regardless of the doctrine employed.
Besides sheer numbers, FM 3-24 requires counterinsurgents who are not only effective warfighters, but also highly trained in language, culture, and history. Moreover, they must be ready to perform such sophisticated duties as building civil institutions and commercial enterprises.
Such specially-talented people do not exist in uniform in anywhere near the numbers FM 3-24 wants. Nor is there any likelihood of recruiting them. As retired General Barry McCaffrey points out, the Army is already lowering standards just to find enough volunteers to meet existing recruiting goals.
To acquire the kind of scholarly, versatile soldier FM 3-24 insists on in the numbers the doctrine demands, the only option is to grasp the electrified third rail of national security politics: the draft. This alone dooms FM 3-24 as a solution for Iraq.
Real innovation for 21st century conflicts calls for devising techniques that avoid exposing thousands of young Americans to the hazards of combat. Achieving this often requires the creative application of America's technological genius, much of which is in the air and naval components' way of war.
Strangely, the innovative high-tech/low-cost approaches that worked in Kosovo and toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan are shunned. For example, airpower is marginalized into a mere five-page annex in FM 3-24's lengthy 282-page text. Instead, the doctrine insists that only masses of troops on the ground can defeat insurgents. Thus, it is much premised on conventional COIN theory of winning hearts and minds through ground-level engagement of the population by thousands of U.S. troops.
Whatever merits that approach may have in other settings, it is much too late for the United States to implement in Iraq. The mindset of entire generations of Iraqis is already poisoned by, among other things, Abu Ghraib and related scandals, not to mention Islamic extremism's innate antagonism to people and ideas from the West. How bad is it? A recent poll by World Public Opinion.org shows that 61 percent of Iraqis actually approve of attacks on U.S. forces. Sadly, more personnel in theater simplifies the enemy's ability to do just that.
This raises another key point: the tragedy of each U.S. death erodes what is left of American support — and the enemy knows this and exploits it. Accordingly, while a short-term troop surge might give some needed breathing space for Iraqis to solve their own problems, the long-term presence of American ground forces as FM 3-24 suggests is not the answer, as inevitably rising casualty figures will generate insuperable political difficulties.
Given such grim realities, it is imperative that we think out-of-the-box and look to solutions beyond merely adding troops. The complexities of counterinsurgency require the talents of the full joint warfighting team, and not just the designs of the ground component. Despite real merits, FM 3-24 regrettably falls short of a practical strategy for winning in Iraq.
PHOTO (COLOR): The author believes that the main drawback of FM 3-24 is that it focuses too much on traditional techniques of winning hearts and minds by using ground forces such as U.S. Army Major Jennifer Bailey of the 402nd Civil Affairs Battalion, here reading to Iraqi childern in Tikrit.
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By Charles J. Dunlap Jr.
Major General Dunlap is the Deputy Judge Advocate General of the Air Force and a Distinguished Graduate of the National War College.
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