A Conversation with Dr. Douglas Porch
A Conversation with Dr. Douglas Porch
Entry Excerpt:
A Conversation with Dr. Douglas Porch:
Relooking French Encounters in Irregular Warfare in the 19th Century
by Michael Few
Download the Full Article: A Conversation with Dr. Douglas Porch
To complement the recent interviews conducted by Octavian Manea, we reached out to the defense analysts experts at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. In the first interview of this series, Dr. John Arquilla described how he felt that French Encounters with Irregular Warfare in the 19th Century can inform COIN in our time. This rebuttal comes from Dr. Douglas Porch, a historian in the National Security Affairs (NSA) department. This department specializes in the study of international relations, security policy, and regional studies. NSA is unique because it brings together outstanding faculty, students from the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, National Guard and various civilian agencies, and scores of international officers from dozens of countries for the sole purpose of preparing tomorrow's military and civilian leaders for emerging security challenges. Notable alumni from the NSA department include LTG William H. Caldwell.
Download the Full Article: A Conversation with Dr. Douglas Porch
Douglas Porch earned a Ph.D. from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University. Currently, he is a Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School.
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Porch shines a torch on COIN
Professor Douglas Porch, of NPS, has a new book due out at the end of July 'Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War', which is likely to arouse interest, if not controversy.
From the summary:
Quote:
Douglas Porch's sweeping history of counterinsurgency campaigns carried out by the three 'providential nations' of France, Britain and the United States, ranging from nineteenth-century colonial conquests to General Petraeus's 'Surge' in Iraq, challenges the contemporary mythologising of counterinsurgency as a humane way of war. The reality, he reveals, is that 'hearts and minds' has never been a recipe for lasting stability and that past counterinsurgency campaigns have succeeded not through state-building but by shattering and dividing societies while unsettling civil-military relations.
(Elsewhere)The reality, he reveals, is that 'hearts and minds' has never been a recipe for lasting stability.
Link:http://www.amazon.com/Counterinsurge...=douglas+porch and http://www.amazon.co.uk/Counterinsur...=Douglas+Porch
A very partial review by a Guardian journalist, which includes this:
Quote:
The book came from listening to his students, many of whom are seasoned officers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and who repeatedly told him that COIN hadn't a hope of changing the countries for the better. And when he lost two students to "green on blue attacks", he felt an obligation to expose the official doctrine and, in some way, to stop scholarship being militarised.
Link:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...oad?CMP=twt_gu
Professor Porch's NPS entry:http://www.nps.edu/Academics/Schools...lty/porch.html
I have read and enjoyed two of his books on French military history.
Porch and Gentile books ordered....
http://www.amazon.com/Wrong-Turn-Ame.../dp/1595588744
Both have books on COIN coming out and I've pre-ordered both (I think I've mentioned that in a previous thread around here. Maybe I won't be so lazy for a change and write up a review or something. I also plan to read what I suppose might be a bit of a rebuttal, the book by Peter Mansoor on the surge.)
Sorta kinda related to the point made on the 'benevolence' of "hearts and minds", a recent review:
Quote:
“The Imperial lion has roused itself, invoking the Spirit of Clive and of Hastings and Dyer, he roars again,” observed The Daily Tribune in August 1942. Tiring of Gandhi and the Indian National Congress agitating during the war, the British Raj unsheathed the sword. Mass arrests, censorship, and suppression of civil liberties coerced India’s cooperation against the Axis Powers. All pretense of enlightened benevolent rule vanished as Britain showed that its empire, like all others, rested on force.""
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin...iberal-empire/
As I said in a note to a friend, the last sentence seems to be the point of the papers by Porch that I've read: that force mattered.
Before you jump in, you need to know what you are doing
That's what I get from this conversation.
First, you have to ask yourself:
1. What is the most important issue to address for American security?
Then, you have to ask yourself:
2. What should we do about it? (Or is benign neglect an option?)
And, in the process, you need to ask yourself: "what is sustainable," and "what can work given our system of government and our own culture?"
As far as I can see, when it comes to Afghanistan, our security elites first went off to Iraq, and then decided that the lessons it learned regarding countering insurgencies in the midst of the Iraqi civil war would be the main lens through which we would view our mission in Afghanistan. This was our response to 9-11. This doesn't even get into the Saudis and our relationship with them.
We are trying to negotiate a SOFA so that we can keep troops in Afghanistan. Working as a third party has constraints. A plan that doesn't recognize that is not a good plan. Initially, right after 9-11, had we not been diverted to Iraq, maybe an occupation government might have worked for a while.
It will not work now. Bob Jones once suggested (tongue in cheek to make a point, I'm assuming?) arresting Karzai. That will never happen and if we tried now, we'd be facing a NA, warlord and Taliban insurgency. And we'd break the international alliance
Somehow, in response to the Afghan disorder partially created by neighboring intelligence agencies, the US and its allies decided that building a centralized working Afghan government within a ten-to-twenty year window would be our response to 9-11.
We paid a lot money over the years for allies to "do counterinsurgency," and not just in Iraq or Afghanistan. We funded all sides of conflict. Congress only recently cut the funding to some nations but the coindinistas would have funded this supposedly brilliant plan forever, because, uh,"Galula!"
Somehow, the tactics of imperial small wars and the diplomacy of Cold War modernization was supposed to beat back this disorder and convince regional players not to be so naughty.
Quote:
For over a year now, our organization, Shafafiyat at ISAF, has worked with Afghan leaders to reduce the threat that corruption and organized crime present to our shared goals in Afghanistan. From the outset of our efforts, we have engaged continually with representatives from Afghan civil society, with students like you, and with officials from across the Afghan government, to develop a common understanding of the corruption problem—and to frame the problem from the perspective of those who have experienced it—as a basis for shared action and reform. We have been very fortunate to have inspiring partners in this effort who have helped us define, understand, and begin devising solutions to the problem. Afghans have been our teachers, helping us to understand how we can ensure that our development and security efforts are part of the solution, not part of the problem.
- Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster: Anti-corruption speech at American University of Afghanistan
http://www.isaf.nato.int/article/tra...ghanistan.html
Aid is fungible. We have paid for all sides of this conflict for ages. That includes regional nukes, from the 80's onward, the nuclear umbrella under which the disorder is partially being run.
How the American military got to this point will be the subject of historians and scholars for ages and ages. But I fell for some of it early on so I guess I should learn to be little less judgemental.
I posted the following before:
Douglas Porch at bookforum:
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_03/2750
Previously in another thread I mentioned an article by Matthew Cavanaugh, at West Point. The article is in Infinity Journal (and he is a student of Colin Gray's?)
and mentions that like only a few percent of West Point students take an elective in strategy.
https://www.infinityjournal.com/arti..._Adaptability/
I also think that until fairly recently, for the American military, Saudi-US-Israel alliance against Iran and our old security relationships in AfPak from the Soviet times blinded us to alternate narratives. We really believed some strange mythology related to our time in Afghanistan countering the Soviets, or, at least, American military men and women of a certain generation.
State is pretty awful too. One should read some of the late Indian defense analyst B. Raman's writing on the subject of State and its weird clientitis in the region. It's stunning. To back it up with American arguments, you can look at the arguments by John Glenn during the early 90s.
Plus, I am sorry to say, money and the making of it via contracts in DC pretty much runs a lot of our foreign policy and this supports bad military thinking and strategy.
PS: A nice supplement to the Gray article is the interview by Harry Summers I have been posting around here:
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/con.../summers2.html
Sorry my comments are so disjointed, I'm in a rush. I may clean them up later.
Critics gone wild: COIN as the root of all evil
A lengthy review by David Ucko of Porch's book alongside Gina Gentile's 'Wrong Turn' by David Ucko, which in places is very critical. Deserves a longer read, maybe even printing off:http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/1...18.2014.893972
It also provides a glimpse into david Ucko's own book, which has been reviewed on SWJ.
The review appears in the journal Small Wars & Insurgencies and is not behind a paywall.