usually is a generally acceptable solution, rarely a good one. I've also noticed that what is judged 'acceptable' is really defined downwards over time. The longer the costly farce lasts, the poorer the outcome. For everyone.
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True, you don't understand; and
True it is a realatively straight forward matter to employ the military to kill the armed rebelling element of one's populace.
The hard part is resolving the reasons why they were acting that way. Defeating insurgents is easy (relatively); defeating insurgency typically requires the government to change how it does business. Dave talks about how to change the popualce. Governments like to hear that.
I talk about changing the government. They don't like to hear that.
I doubt MLK Jr. or Gandhi count as just small footnotes, unless the history book you're reading from is seriously defective.Quote:
Another name for nonviolent revolutionaries is a (small) footnote in a history book.
Who says this, and where? I'd be curious about the supporting arguments, as I'm reasonably familiar with the situation and I don't see it that way at all.
Of course I also think the "global insurgency" construct is a deeply stretched idea that is more harmful than helpful, so perhaps I shouldn't be asking about it!
Well it takes a good deal of skill to do well, but I concur.
True but irrelevant. They can complain all they like once they give up their guns. Until they do that, political resolution is pointless and merely rewards their aggression.Quote:
The hard part is resolving the reasons why they were acting that way. Defeating insurgents is easy (relatively); defeating insurgency typically requires the government to change how it does business.
The ONLY thing the military can do if force compliance and control, via use of armed force.
But Dave's off his reservation, and you risk undermining the policy of those you work for.Quote:
Dave talks about how to change the popualce. Governments like to hear that.
I talk about changing the government. They don't like to hear that.
I worked the Southeast Asia mission for over 4 years, and many kept trying to make Indonesia into a big problem. "Most populous Muslim nation," so must be a hotbed of insurgency, right? Send a tremendous number of workers to the Middle East, so must be a pipeline of terror, right? Home of the JI, etc.
But insurgency isn't about ideology or religion, it is about politics and the relationship between a populace and its government. Indonesia, like most Asian countries, worked through the big legitimacy of governance issues in the post WWII era of insurgency; so is not a real player in the post Cold War era of insurgency that is sweeping those (largely Muslim) nations still heavily under the influence of Colonial Illegitimacy.
Indonesia is not a problem. We need to work with them as they have a tremendous future that we want to be, need to be for our sake, a part of; but we don't need to "fix" them.
A country in insurgency is by definition one with a government that is inadequate to the task at hand, so the only excess governmental capacity available, the military, is typically brought in to help resolve the problem. This is not a problem of itself. The problems begin when the military takes the lead and naturally shifts the focus of the COIN campaign by doing exactly what Wilf accurately lays out as the military mission and focus: Identify a threat and defeat it.
I have no problem with any of that. My point is that the rebellion is a symptom of larger problems in the relationship between a populace and its government, and that the Civil authorities must retain lead and retain focus on the larger mission of adjusting their actions to better serve the people as a whole. That militant arm of the movement is typically just the tip of the proverbial populace iceberg that shares similar perspectives.
Classic COIN is to have a military led operation to shave the top off the iceberg. We all know what happens next, a new tip ultimately emerges. I don't say don't shave the top off, just understand that at best it is a supporting effort to do so, and if done excessively an even larger tip will emerge the next time.
[QUOTE=William F. Owen;102233]
Dave Kilcullen cannot tell you because he can't tell the future. Neither can anyone else. Even if he could it wouldn't have much if any impact on training. Just do the stuff you've had to do in the past.
Crystal balls are hard to find I agree, but it seems in many facets of human endeavour we are always planning strategies and operations on the past in the hope we will avert a similar tragedy or event in the future.
Is COIN really any different to the "war" that has been waged in our cities between our social justice systems and a crime, drug and violence fuelled neighbourhood? This sector of our population can feel pretty isolated and lacking in representation so looks to other avenues. The Police, social workers, volunteers, NGOs and Government services try to set in a different levels to counter the criminal and gang activity that exploits this mess. May be we need to hire reformed gang leaders to help with COIN in Afghanistan?
[QUOTE=Arnie;102354][QUOTE=William F. Owen;102233]
Dave Kilcullen cannot tell you because he can't tell the future. Neither can anyone else. Even if he could it wouldn't have much if any impact on training. Just do the stuff you've had to do in the past.
Crystal balls are hard to find I agree, but it seems in many facets of human endeavour we are always planning strategies and operations on the past in the hope we will avert a similar tragedy or event in the future.
Is COIN really any different to the "war" that has been waged in our cities between our social justice systems and a crime, drug and violence fuelled neighbourhood? This sector of our population can feel pretty isolated and lacking in representation so looks to other avenues. The Police, social workers, volunteers, NGOs and Government services try to set in a different levels to counter the criminal and gang activity that exploits this mess. May be we need to hire reformed gang leaders to help with COIN in Afghanistan?
Maybe the form is similar but criminals are subject to the criminal justice system. War is generally something exempt from that. You can only have effective criminal justice, when you actual physical control. War is generally a competition for that physical control.
Personally I'd hire Gang leaders who have hunted down and killed their competition, and exert tight control and authority over their communities. The reformed ones tend to reject violence.Quote:
May be we need to hire reformed gang leaders to help with COIN in Afghanistan?
Politics is power over people. Functionally that is the aim of religion. All religion is based in ideology. - Ideas. Ideas as to the right and wrong way for peoples and societies to conduct themselves are politics.
The US was founded on only allowing secular ideas into politics, because it wanted religious tolerance. Essentially it wanted to artificially bar religion from politics - something that is practically impossible to do.
Carl Schmitt would most certainly agree, as do I, with Wilf's assertion above which see Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
Of course the separation between the omnipotent G-d and the omnipotent lawgiver does not exist in Islam, nor does the separation of church and state. Ironically, it took the Reformation, the rise of humanism (fuelled by the Reformation and the Rennaissance in classical learning) , the Treaty of Augsberg (accepting the division of Christendom into two major sects), the Thirty Years War, the Treaty of Utrecht (sanctioning the balance of power as a principle of international politics and the state as the primary actor in it) and the secularist bias of the Enlightenment (and its incredulity to metanarratives), and the concomitant replacement of the theological epistemology with a rationalist scientific one (although that didn't mean people like Newton and Kant weren't religious) to actually bring about this norm!. Once the Catholic Church's role in legitimating the divine right of kings had been sundered and replaced with nationalism the legitimacy of kings no longer required divine sanction thus paving the way for personal freedom in terms of faith (no longer a political problem with transnational/geopolitical ramifications) and the rise of the national state and the concepts of citizenships, rights, duties, obligations, etc. But the imprint of Christianity, like Roman and Greek civilisation beofre it, was still present in a "sanitised" version (as per Schmitt). Thought we often don't notice people not belonging to our civilisation are the first to pick it up. The separation of church and state, for instance, though sounding secular to us is the equivalence of blasphemy to Muslims given that they see it as an imposition of Christian norms even though we don't use it (or understand it) that way (anymore).Quote:
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they were transformed from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver - but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in tha last centuries (p.36)
For an intersting perspective with respect to Islam see, Islam and Globalisation: Secularism, Religion and Radicalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alevites
"Modern Alevi theology has been profoundly influenced by humanism, universalism and the ancient Turkic shamanistic belief, tengriism.
The 1990s brought a new emphasis on Alevism as a cultural identity. Alevi communities today generally support secularism in the form of the Kemalist model."
So, is your position one that if ideology exists that is not adhered to by the current government, so therefore otherwise well governed and satisfied citizens rise up in insurgency in order to ensure that a new government that is consistent with their ideology is in power? I would challenge anyone to show me a single historic case of this happening.
Even the explosion of Islam across the Middle East in its first two generations were far more about power, plunder and domination than they were about spreading the good word. Ideology of Islam was "merely" the essential ingredient, the catalyst to rally the masses to take on and sustain the endeavor.
Certainly the US revolution had nothing to do with religion. Even such famous ideologs as Mao and Ho were out to throw off illegitimate governance, communism was employed because it worked in that time, that place, that populaces under that condition to motivate them to rise up and challenge existing regimes.
American revolutionaries were keen that the government not be slave to any one particular religion, nor that the government be able to enslave any man to any particular religion as well. Not a pursuit of secularity, but rather a pursuit of choice. (not withstanding current debate between liberals demanding secularity and conservatives demanding Christianity. I think both miss the point of what was intended) Interestingly, Saudi rebels push for what is almost the opposite of this. They demand that the government adhere more closely to one religion and not allow choice or secularity to corrupt the law of God.
Sorry for being vague. I've heard it in two wargame situations over the last two years- one ran by the military, one by academia. I confess to not knowing too much about Indonesia, and I was skeptical as well.
And yes, I would tend to fall into the camp that viewing every problem as a military one is much more harmful than helpful. When I'm feeling very pessimistic, I think that we're following the exact playbook that UBL wants us to.
It might be more accurate to say that a certain faction of Saudi dissidents demand that the government adhere to a particular interpretation of one religion... not surprisingly, an interpretation that keeps them in a position of power and authority.
Saudi religious conservatives see modernization, prosperity, and materialism as a fundamental threat to their position and power. They can't directly attack modernization, prosperity, and materialism because they know that the populace at large is quite fond of all three... so they couch their rhetoric in terms of resistance to western domination and adherence to tradition. Mush of the populace, of course, sees through that deception, which is why the jihad gets support when it's fought abroad and much less support when it's fought at home. It's less about western political domination - which does not of course exist - than it is about a struggle between the attractions of modernity and the sentimental drive to tradition.
One of my professors at SOAS, who had spent a number of years living in Western Kurdistan (or Eastern Turkey) once described Alevi-sim (and, for that matter, Alawi-ism) on par with many of the remnants of pre-Islamic beliefs (especially in Kurdish areas; which include the above named belief systems) as psuedo-Islamic sects which mixed Islamic theology and practices into a syncretic "mosaic" (largely to protect their true beliefs; an inverted form of taqqiyah) which had little to do with Islam and which Muslims themselves from both Shia' and Sunni branches considered heretical. Your quote below ...
...merely reinforces what I was taught.
...but I could be wrong. Although I agree with much of the above I have to say that the proposition that Islam was an ideological catalyst for the explosion of the forces of Islam seems to imply that the Arab tribes that had embraced it( or equally, were coerced into embracing it, especially after the Battle of Badr) were already predisposed to desiring power and dominion and Islam merely freed them to go about their bloody business with a free consicence. In your schema Islam merely becomes a universal and rationalised form of assabiyyah. I would take the opposite view; that Islam is what exploded (although the other forces added to the mix). I would also see assabiyah as having been superviened upon by Islam (as a meta-habitus)Plunder, OTOH, was always a traditional tactic of Bedouin/tribal pastoralists.
Be sure to check out Bing West's review of Kilcullen's Counterinsurgency (among other books): http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=23564
Can't quite follow the idea here. My position is that conflicts are cause by politics. Politics is indivisible from religion, ideology or ideas. All wars are wars of "ideas". The differentiation is meaningless.
Any time you have a "religious conflict," it is ALWAYS a political conflict. They are the same thing.
Starbuck:
Good citation.
I am always fascinated by the dichotomy between localized, low level discussions of COIN, by the folks struggling under great personal threat to apply it, and the incompetence at the higher levels to understand what it is or how the local efforts can succeed and connect to anything bigger or sustainable.
Bing West joins Entropy and I in beating the dead horse of Lord Kelvin---If you can count it, you can know something about it. Almost ten years in, and no Americans know whether there are 20 or 34 million Afghans---but we know, or pretend to know that 12 million of them are in US-supported schools.
Bet some NGO can cite a bogus enrollment figure down to the last kindergartener, but it obviously doesn't mean much.
To me, as long as the big US gaps remain basics like functional Combat Demographics, and Governmental Process Mapping, this stuff is just a bunch of theorists making noise while soldiers struggle in the field without adequate planning, resourcing and strategy that could do anything other than, year after year, asking for another year.
Getting serious and honest at the upper levels would be a good start to finding meaningful solutions, but, right now, as West notes, COIN is a theory in search of a War to prove it.
My guess is that if General Petreaus creates meaningful solutions (whatever that means), they will later be disclosed to have been driven by SF, CT, and just plain killing bad guys. The population will, afterwards, be no better or worse off than it was before. The rest is smoke....the kind that regularly blows around the Beltway.
Okay, so I let my personal and professional life take me away from my study of warfare for a couple of weeks. I know, I know, no excuses. Back on track.
One area where Dr. K and I find common ground is his definition of the composition and nature of an insurgency. IMO, he is an expert in this arena. As he's finishing up the introduction, he offers a picture to illustrate the components. Figure 1.1 Surface and Subsurface Elements of an Insurgency (p. 8). I can't find one previously published so I'll describe it and offer my thoughts.
He starts with a pyramid of insurgency design. From top to bottom, it's
1. Insurgents/Terrorists
2. Supporting Infrastructure
3. Sympathetic networks
4. Population base
He then immerses this pyramid into water with with a broad deliniation of the detection threshold.
This is a marvelous viewpoint. As Dr. Gordon McCormick tells us (paraphrased), "an insurgency is really not an assymetrical fight, at least not in the beginning. The host nation retains a comparative advantage in Mass through it's military arm, but the insurgent maintains a comparative advantage in information. He can see us, but we cannot see him."
It is exactly like standing on the shore and looking at the ocean. One can see the tide roll in and out. For most, they are comfortable in describing the ocean in that manner. However, when one takes the time to dive deep into the water, another world appears. Insurgencies are no different, and a true counterinsurgent must determine how best to dive deep into the water and see what's going on.
So, I applaud this figure.
Oddly enough, this was the first concept they taught us in a feminist literature class in the Eighties (the 1980s, not 1880s). They even used a venn diagram for the "dumb guys" in the class; being slower than most, I didn't even understand the venn diagram.
Apparently, the idea was that male culture is a lot more "present" than female culture. Some further argued (loudly) that "female culture", as commonly understood, was also largely a product of male culture. Therefore, "true" female culture is to a great extent, unknown. There was also an implication that the visibility of male culture made it easier for the savvy feminist or femme fatale to manipulate those who unquestioningly accepted its symbolic heft.
Out of the five guys in the class, one dropped in the first week and three more by mid-term. I made it through but had to take a semester off to recover. It was an interesting class, however.
I don't have Kilcullen's latest, but your description of his Figure 1.1 Surface and Subsurface Elements of an Insurgency (p. 8) clicked a residuary brain cell.
Back in the 1960s - the era of muscle car Oldsmobiles (your grandfather's big block rubber stripping 442), SORO (American University, Special Operations Research Office, a non-governmental agency operating under contract with the Department of the Army) published two studies:
1963 Undergrounds in Insurgent, Revolutionary, and Resistance Warfare - SORO.pdf
1966 Human Factors Considerations of Undergrounds in Insurgencies - SORO.pdf
Both are on the "Suggested readings on insurgency and counterinsurgency" from That Place on the Hudson.
The 1966 study had a pyramid (Fig 6) which looked like so:
Attachment 1151
So no one will have to squint, I'm attaching a pdf file with Fig 6 and SORO's explanation for its pyramid.
The question is whether the 2010 muscle car is an improvement over the 1966 model. It also may involve the ultimate Wilfian concept that nothing under the sun is new. :)
Your analysis of these two 45-years-of-separation vehicles is sought.
Regards (from your grandfather Ransom, who is happy to see you screw off every now and then)
Mike
As the latter came after the former one could also say the Jones Insurgency Model is the announced codification of "The building of a revolutionary movement" with a few current era tweaks and some personal beliefs added. :wry:
Nothing wrong with that -- and as I've long said the model is good. :cool:
Though I have also long said and still do suggest not getting too enamored of the pyramid or the model because there have been, are and will be some variations on the themes therein contained that can make target fixation a potential -- and problematic... :eek:
my hardcopy of the 1966 SORO study; and it told me that, since it has been sitting upright on my bookshelf for so long, it just wasn't about to bend over for a newbie. Obviously, a stubborn product of the Cold War (the book, not moi). :D
Regards
Mike
by LTC Mark Grdovic
http://www.soc.mil/swcs/swmag/Assets...de%20Final.pdf
I only pointed this out as the two products, developed wholly independently, tend to validate each other.
Personally I think the pyramid is WAY to specific and suggests a long, complex list of complex steps that an insurgent has to move through sequentially, which of course is probably never the case. But if viewed as general examples of how an insurgency can manifest as it grows and shrinks naturally as it wends its course to either victory or defeat, it is a good product. Insurgencies don't run on checklists.
Mine may be too generic for some, but it is intentionally so for the very reasons described above. So the suggestion of looking at the two together is show how that when viewed together they are consistent, but also help those who find one too specific or one too generic in of itself.
for a good reason - to keep folks from jumping to conclusions such as this:
The anti-Com "warriors" of the 60s were well aware that revolutionary phases do not necessarily flow sequentially; that one part of a country might be undergoing "phase 1", another "phase 2" and a third "phase 3". E.g., John McCuen, The Art of Counter-Revolutionary Warfare (1966) (also on West Point's reading list).Quote:
from BW
Personally I think the pyramid is WAY to specific and suggests a long, complex list of complex steps that an insurgent has to move through sequentially, which of course is probably never the case.
SORO makes this clear (p. 1 of 5 page pdf, here):
Attachment 1154
I realize, Bob, that you are unlikely to change what you think; but others here should be aware that those in the 60s were capable of nuanced thinking.
Regards
Mike
Mike,
Brother! You wound me! I am constantly refining my positions, I just refuse to abandon them and run away the first time someone lobs a poorly aimed round in my general direction...:D
What is interesting in much of the 60s products though is the fixation on Communism; just as we overly fixate on Islamism in much of the products on the street today. This is what led me to write one of my early pieces on the true role of ideology in insurgency.
One great thing about the 60s work was that the SF community took ownership of insurgency-based theory and doctrine far more effectively in those days than they have for the past 8 years. As Ken says, yes, the SFQC lays a foundation in UW, which is the art of waging insurgency. This is a foundation laid only in the SF community, and I am firmly of the belief that one can never truly understand counterinsugency until they first achieve an understanding of insurgency itself. This does not need to happen at the SFQC, and many who come out of the SFQC are no experts in the field either, but at least they have been exposed to the concepts.
My big beef with the current COIN manual, is that for all of its great TTPs on COIN, it is sadly, and I believe dangerously, disconnected from a solid rooting in insurgency itself. They are talking re-write, and I hope like hell USAJFKSWCS is forced (at gunpoint if necessary) to be a full partner in that effort. My one suggestion (besides making SF participate) is to lay a foundation right up front on what insurgency is; leaving room for the fact that reasonable minds can indeed differ on the subject. I would then follow that by a chapter on the American experience (as this goes to our principles as a nation, and suggests how we should approach others based on rights and duties we deemed essential for ourselves). Then, and only then, would I get into how to best go about intervening in the insurgencies of others.
(I feel about 50 other suggestions coming on, so I'll just leave it at this)
Page 14 of the PDF from the UW handbook that has one of Zen diagrams(some folks call them Venn:)) that shows an easier way to look at a resistance movement but it is based on the SORO diamond. The ratio of Guerrilla to underground and axillary may be as high as 1 fighter to 30 underground!
http://www.soc.mil/swcs/swmag/Assets...de%20Final.pdf
First suggestion read the handbook I posted:) This is almost straight up what I was taught in the 1 minute guerrilla course by a real Green Beret who had been to NORTH Vietnam:eek: at the end of the operation I sat on hill with him behind a Fish Camp and drank a lot of beer and just generally acted like a big sponge!
Business-speak and its offspring have much to answer for, and this is only part of it.
I always felt that the old Small Wars Manual was very good when it came to describing its subject, and some of the things I've read from the Indian Wars era are also very good (even though there wasn't much formally written about the techniques used in the field). Mayhap someday we'll get that back...
(If you guys keep droning on about how "older is better" we'll never hear the end of it from Ken!!):D
Mike, the bad news is being senile. The good news is not knowing you are senile.
And my eyes are going because I first read the quote as "Either we're all sterile, or..." :eek:
Cheers
Mike
It's not so much that the concepts were better back then (in many cases they are quite inadequate), but their way of presenting and articulating them was far better than what we get today. The original SWM is a good case in point. It has some failings conceptually (mainly in the political realm), but its presentation is very clear and to the point. I've seen the shift in writing myself between doctrine written before and during Vietnam and some of the stuff that came out for both Active Defense and Air/Land Battle.
And Ken will still be waiting for this to be transcribed to stone tablets before he can respond.... I think we have time yet....;)
I have the Tablets. :D
Possibly the issue here is that 3-24 is not really about COIN but more related to what the Marines call(ed) Countering Irregular Threats (CIT) and the UK Countering Irregular Activity (CIA - an unhappy acronym if ever there was one), of which COIN is a subset. We reviewed most of the available 'COIN' doctrine in 2007/Early 08 and were already thinking in terms of CIT when we got to 3-24 and in that context it made a ton of sense but was less applicable perhaps to the classic COIN campaign a la Vietnam or perhaps the myths of Malaya and Kenya.
Also I think it is important to remember that 3-24 was written against the very specific problem of Iraq and so does not lend itself as a template for other campaigns problems - but then, COIN has never been about simply applying a template to pass Go and get $200 and a stable democratic host nation government. Every contingency needs to be considered on its own merits and issues, and plans/policies/strategies developed accordingly. That seems to where we go off the rails in considering COIN 'doctrine'.
The beauty of the CIT?CIA construct is that, even though it brings in a broader more diverse range of potential problems, it all encourages earlier intervention (by the most appropriate arm of government, not necessarily the military) to head off potential instability before the situation goes over the precipice. 20/20 hindsight would probably show that most campaigns since the end of WW1 probably had adequate warning signs (if people had been looking for them) that conflict could have been averted or at least minimised or contaiined.