When "Jargon" becomes policy, you need to get it right
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Entropy
I learned a long time ago that using "guild" terminology with people who aren't in your "guild" is going to breed misunderstanding despite one's best intentions. I would submit that the Ambassador doesn't need to know about your doctrine or the specific terminology you use and isn't likely to understand CIW any better than another term. This is a case where knowing your audience is important (actually, when is it not important?). Therefore, I think a SoF team in the example you give needs to explain it to the ambassador without jargon in a way that he/she will clearly understand. Maybe that SoF team needs to learn DoS jargon so they can effectively communicate what they want to do. Once that is done, THEN you can add at the end, "btw, if you hear us mention CIW/IW amongst ourselves, that term is our short hand for what I just explained to you."
My point in all this is that I don't think it ultimately matters what term is used in your doctrine as long as there is a consensus of meaning among the stakeholders of that doctrine. To relay those concepts in concise terms to outside groups and organizations has always been problematic and probably always will be. In such cases, jargon should be minimized or eliminated to facilitate understanding. On the other hand, perhaps what really needs to happen is to get a bunch of DOS, DOD, academics, NGO's and others together to hash out a common taxonomy that everyone understands.
"Irregular Warfare is the term the Pentagon is running with, and not particularly concerned with how a world-wide audiance with no access or inclination to check the joint pub definition will interpret it. They will judge through all of their own respective national or institutional lenses applying lay definitions of "irregular" and "warfare"
We changed the name of the "War Department" to the Department of Defense because we apparently felt the old name sent the wrong message. Now we adopt a term that says we are coming to town once again to conduct "war." Probably still not a good idea. I stand by my contention that tossing a "counter" in front of it improves the narrative, regardless of the audiance.
Then we're back to conventional warfare
Posted by Bob's World,
Quote:
The Malaysian model of isolating the populace from the Insurgent is largely obsolete as it simply is not feasible anymore. It is also harder to simply suppress the military arm for the same reasons. Now more than ever populace-based conflict must be addressed by identifying and repairing the underlying casuation (not to be confused with the most recent motivation) for conflict.
Why is it unfeasible? Furthermore, if you think you can reduce war to a debate over ideas you're wrong. I can sit in my castle and espouse the grand values of democracy and free markets, while my opponent can espouse the values of Sharia Law, by the way my opponent is holding a knife to the neck of the audience, while we sit back and dismiss the most basic rule of COIN which is protecting the populace. If you can't protect the populace from coercive elements within the society, then you can't win. This is exactly what population centric means. Of course we're not going to completely drain the swamp, or provide 100% protection (we don't do that in the U.S.), but our set backs in Afghanistan were largely due to our inability to separate the insurgent from the populace. We made empty promises, and the insurgent delivered upon his threats. We are talking about a war, not an election.
Wilf,
What's the purpose of IW? Once again it is a forcing mechanism to expand our concept of war. Unfortunately our professional military education institutions have intentionally or unintentionally failed to address IW, and we habitually perform in a substandard manner when we are in an IW conflict. It is unexcusable that we fail to learn and apply the lessons of the past. You're right, IW is just warfare, but it a slice of the whole we are not good at. We need this concept to get past our traditional mindsets.
BW,
I think the idea of organizing our doctrine around C-IW our C-UW is useful on many levels. Hopefully it will gain some traction.
Information can be shaped, but not controlled
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Bill Moore
Posted by Bob's World,
Why is it unfeasible? Furthermore, if you think you can reduce war to a debate over ideas you're wrong. I can sit in my castle and espouse the grand values of democracy and free markets, while my opponent can espouse the values of Sharia Law, by the way my opponent is holding a knife to the neck of the audience, while we sit back and dismiss the most basic rule of COIN which is protecting the populace. If you can't protect the populace from coercive elements within the society, then you can't win. This is exactly what population centric means. Of course we're not going to completely drain the swamp, or provide 100% protection (we don't do that in the U.S.), but our set backs in Afghanistan were largely due to our inability to separate the insurgent from the populace. We made empty promises, and the insurgent delivered upon his threats. We are talking about a war, not an election.
Bill,
In no way am I suggesting that there is not a requirement for military operations against the insurgent both to defeat his military capacity and to secure the populace. My point is two fold: first, that defeating the insurgent alone has never been sufficient to actually defeat an insurgency; and second that in today's information environment tactics of isolation and control are ineffective due to the speed and availability of global information to virtually any person, any where, any time.
Fact is that historically the counterinsurgent has rarely even wanted to truly address the underlying causation for the insurgency and has simply wanted to make the insurgent stop conducting a disruptive level of violence so that they can keep on with business as usual. The reason for this is simple, it’s because insurgency happens when governments fail, and rare is the government that wants to even admit its failures, let alone be forced to change their mode of conduct simply because some aspect of the populace doesn't like it. Crush the squeaky wheel, and the rest of the populace will typically fall back into line; particularly when the government can largely shape and control the information available to that populace.
So my theory is that in today's world governments no longer have the luxury of this time proven tactic, and that today they must actually listen to their populace and truly attempt to address legitimate grievances in addition to crushing the squeaky wheel if necessary (adding oil may be all that is required if addressed soon enough).
Where Wilf and I appear to depart is that he sees insurgency as just the conflict portion of this disagreement between a populace and its governance. I believe that it is more constructive to take a more holistic view and see insurgency and counterinsurgency as a continuous spectrum of friction between every populace and every governance every day. Most are bumping along happily down in what the 1980 State Department COIN manual calls "Phase 1 Pre-insurgency" (with phase 2-4 being Mao's 3 phases). Call it that or call it "Phase 0 Peace," the concept is the same. Populaces will always have grievances, needs, and wants; and governments must always be working to address them. As governments fall behind in this mission the tension rises into more active and more organized dissent, ultimately, if unchecked, resulting in violence. The goal of good governance and good counterinsurgency (the same thing in this view), is to work to stay as low in Phase 0 as possible. The military is only called in to assist in COIN when the governmental failures become so great that they require the added capacity of the military to create conditions that allow the civil elements to regain sufficient control to be able to implement the changes required to address the populaces concerns.
The military should not be a hammer brought in to punish the populace for being dissatisfied, which makes "problems" go away so that the civil government can continue merrily along with its family of failed conduct that gave rise to the insurgency in the first place. This is why governments tend to blame insurgency on the insurgent leadership or on "radicalism" or some "ideology." Total BS.
All of those are critical enablers of the violent movement, but the causation of insurgency is always some real or perceived failure of the government in the eyes of the governed, that the populace feels they have no recourse to resolve through peaceful means.
America's, and perhaps the world's, most successful COIN campaign ever was the passing and enacting of the Civil Rights Act. Certainly it is the most successful of all the widely touted COIN efforts of the 1960s. The government recognized that it was wrong and made major concessions and changes to address the legitimate grievances of a major segment of its populace. That is good COIN. I personally thought that operation was over until I saw how the African American populace reacted to President Obama's election, and I realized that it was low into "Phase 0," but not nearly as low as most of us thought it was. COIN operations are never over. They are continuous, and are usually done in Peace.
(As to our challenges in Afghanistan, that is a whole other chapter, but think about this theory presented here, and how it might apply to what has happened there to date, and how it could inform what we do as we move forward)