Contextualizing Insurgency

I am currently working on the initial stages of my thesis for a masters in international relations and I am in the process of forming my research problem. Below is a statement of a research problem I am thinking about pursuing, I was wondering if any one had any thoughts:

The problem of modern warfare begins and ends with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The failure of the Soviet Union created chaos and confusion for a US military establishment that had spent forty four years preparing to fight a peer power. With the collapse of the Soviet Union the traditional Westphalian State System has been thrown into chaos. The emergence of rogue states, failed states, ungoverned spaces, transnational actors and super-empowered individuals has created a security environment in which conflict has become significantly more complex.(1)

In this new and complex security environment it appears as if irregular warfare(2) has become the dominant form of conflict. The US response to such a perceived shift has been the wholesale retooling of the military to confront the challenges faced by the irregular/asymmetric threat specifically insurgencies.(3) This retooling is best characterized by the much discussed U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (U.S. Army FM 3-24 and Marine Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3-33.5)(4) and the newer U.S. Army Stability Operations Manual (U.S. Army FM 3-07). At the heart of both manuals are the related strategic and guiding assumptions that local populations are necessarily the center of gravity(5) in modern warfare and that government legitimacy is necessary for victory.(6) At issue though is the idea that these concepts are pervasive throughout insurgencies, unaffected by the geographic and cultural context of the insurgency, and not the result of the “strategic context”(7) in which they were conceived.

It would seem incorrect, for example, to assert, as several senior military advisors recently did, that: “Insurgencies are similar to snowflakes in that no two are exactly alike. However, the principles used to defeat an insurgency whether executed by the Romans in Gaul, the British in Malaya, or the U.S. in the Philippines, remain much the same.” (8) If it is indeed true that all insurgencies are different how is it possible to combat them all with the same strategic concepts, primarily the assertion of population as the center of gravity and the necessity of central government legitimacy by the population? Such an assumption is based on an all too common flaw in military doctrine, which is that it is designed to address the failures of the last conflict. These assumptions mean that FM 3-24 does not allow for the contextualization of current and future irregular conflicts in terms of conflict specific parameters such as geography and the impact of culture on the relationship between population and authority.

The aforementioned short comings of FM 3-24 are currently on display in Afghanistan, where a COIN operation, designed around the idea that the population is the center of gravity and that government legitimacy is the end goal, have failed to achieve their stated objectives (peace and reconciliation). The highly self sufficient rural population of Afghanistan has eschewed buying into the central government, and has proven a most allusive center of gravity. The context of the conflict in Afghanistan, that is to say a country with limited infrastructure, a highly rural populace and tribal leanings is at odds with the strategic parameters of population centric/development based counterinsurgency. It is not simply that geography and infrastructure make such an endeavor logistically difficult, but the fact that the geography shapes the cultural imagination of the Afghan people and their relationship to central authority.

Counterinsurgency, as described by FM 3-24, is difficult in the best of circumstances. The context of Afghanistan makes it impossible. The geography of Afghanistan makes centralized government difficult to administer. The lack of infrastructure compounds the problem of providing government services to the people. The rural nature of the afghan population makes utilizing it as the center of gravity even more difficult given its dispersed and isolated nature.

The origins of FM 3-24’s shortcomings are its bases in the analysis of both nationalist post-colonial insurgencies and Cold War era ideological insurgencies, specifically the French experience in Algeria, the British experience in Malaya and US experiences in Vietnam, the Philippines and Nicaragua. This set of cases manifests itself in the doctrine as a failure to recognize the diversity of conflict causes, the aforementioned cases being all conflicts with ideological and nationalist origins. As is suggested by Samuel Huntington though, in his seminal work The Clash of Civilization, wars of identity are ever present in the Post-Cold War era.

Modern insurgencies poses a strong identity component, and unlike ideological insurgencies, are not necessarily won by securing the hearts and the minds of the people, which is to say, that the people are not necessarily the center of gravity and that achieving the acceptance of government legitimacy by the people is not necessarily possible. There may be cultural, geographic or practical context that precludes these concepts from playing a central role in the resolution of the insurgency and thus the importance of contextualizing the conflict before applying a strategy. It is inappropriate to assume all insurgencies are the same, and dictums of FM 3-24 as a universal cure. Who fights, what they fight for, where they fight and why they fight is always changing, and so to must the strategy.(9)

Endnotes
(1) Thomas M. Nichols, Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventative War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 11.
(2) There are many terms used to describe the current conflict environment ranging from 4GW (fourth generation warfare) to asymmetric. This paper will use the term irregular most often in referring to the general nature of the national security threat faced by the United States because it is broadest in definition, and lacks the charged nature of terms such as 4GW.
(3) Interview of Colonel Gian Gentile, conducted by Octavian Manea for Small Wars Journal.
(4) Interview of Colonel Gian Gentile, conducted by Octavian Manea for Small Wars Journal.
(5) Center of Gravity is a military termed first used by Carl von Clausewitz in his work On War, and is generally understood as “the source of power that provides moral or physical strength, freedom of action, or will to act” ( DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, JP 1-02) for either side of a conflict.
(6) Interview of Colonel Gian Gentile, conducted by Octavian Manea for Small Wars Journal & Stephen Biddle, “The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual as Political Science and Political Praxis,” Perspectives on Politics 6, no. 2 (June 2008): 347
(7) “Strategic Context”: Strategic Context is one of five major elements common to all strategies and specifically refers to “the overriding military ideas or fads” of the time, it is in essence the military zeitgeist of period. Further discussion of the concept can be found George Edward Thibault’s essay “Military Strategy: A Framework for Analysis”, which is part of the National Defense University volume The Art and Practice of Military Strategy.
(8) Robert Downey, Lee Grubbs, Brian Malloy and Craig Wonson, “How Should the U.S. Execute a Surge in Aghnistan?,” SmallWarsJournal.com (2008): 2, http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/jou...loy-wonson.pdf)
(9) Sebastian L.v. Gorka and David Kilcullen, “An Actor-centric Theory of War: Understand the Difference Between COIN and Counterinsurgency,” Joint Forces Quarterly 60 (1st Quarter, 2011): 18.

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Originally Posted by wmthomson

In this new and complex security environment it appears as if irregular warfare(2) has become the dominant form of conflict.

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Two minor points here:

First, I think you'd find that irregular warfare, conducted largely by proxy, was the dominant form of conflict during the Cold War. It's not as new as it's sometimes made out to be, or as drastic a shift as it's sometimes made out to be.

Second, the assertion that the current security is more complex than the Cold War security environment is highly debatable. Different, yes, but not necessarily more complex.

In general - and others will have far more to say on this - I'd point out that after reading this I still don't know what the problem you intend to address is. You'll want to delineate it clearly, and narrow it down a good deal. There's a great deal that's been said, written, and done, and too big a bite can be hard to chew.

While I'm certain that tearing down that Wall I spent too much of my young life guarding had repercussions across a wide field, I have trouble correlating the fall of the wall (or the related Soviet collapse) with the conflicts of these times.

Certainly, the Cold War narrative was the stuff of world organizing principles to the US (and, I assume, their nemesis), but conflicts continued to simmer, and explode on their own time frame, below Western attention.

I believe that one could launch a much more reasoned argument that much of the forest fires attempting to be stomped out recently all extend more from the rumbling effects and aftershocks of the end of the British Empire in and around the Arab/Indian Lake (as their shipping monopoly between India and the Suez was called).

What if the Indian partition, and Durand Line never happened? Or the Afghanis had been carved up differently, say with some parts to Iran and some to Baluchis?

Painting Iraq as part of that British (and maybe German/Ottoman) story seems to strike closer to home.

As for COIN, the lack of central government allegiance/control was not a problem under Saddam---we invaded to take out that government. At best, the Taliban was one in a long string of folks trying to control the "country" from Kabul. Any actual historical successes at central Afghani control, it seems, came at a horrific and brutal cost to civilians---so there was a stable nation (for our purposes) at the expense of the population's freedom to do (....whatever.....).

I was sort of saddened to read, for example, Gary Anderson's recent pice on Closing Up after COIN. He was recounting his experiences and diagnosis as an EPRT guy in Anbar in 2009...sounded all to much to me like the same story from 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, as he assured the skeptical Iraqi farmer that he "would be back often...." to help him rebuilt his country and way of life (and especially the Dairy Processing Plant which got blown up).

Personally, I have the greatest respect for EPRT folks, who really did the most dangerous and productive work on the civilian side. But the problems which Gary and others were trying to correct went far beyond the local Dairy Plant. The entire social economic infrastructure was in shambles, and Gary, despite best efforts, could not fix that (and the farmer knew it).

So, all too often, this COIN thing results in war survivors making "best choices" from the armed vehicle that drives into their courtyard today. What lasting value or effect that has is, in fact, the $64,000 Question (as yet unanswered).

As Dayuhan suggests, you may want to, as my thesis advisor recommended years ago, find some discrete problem definition to go after... (other than world peace in general).

I'm itching for someone to take a crack at the re-emergence of the Silk Road, and its possible implications to old and new Big Games.

Do ya feel lucky, punk? Do ya?

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Originally Posted by Steve the Planner

I'm itching for someone to take a crack at the re-emergence of the Silk Road, and its possible implications to old and new Big Games.

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I haven't seen a credible argument that any such thing is happening or is likely to happen... though pursuit of that one would be a substantial thread hijack.

Is the Afghan war a war of identity? Is it a war of national liberation? Is it a civil war? Or is all of that irrrelevant to ending the war on favorable terms? I agree with Dayuhan and Steve that the current range of conflicts has less to do with the end of the Cold War, which may helped the old system linger a little longer, than with the total collapse of the European world order over the span of 60 or so years. The problem you seem to identify is that 'strategy' cannot be effective without context. But that's true with all doctrine and theory. Battle Drill 6 (room clearance) is always the same, but it changes with the design and conditions of the real world building you are entering. So, perhaps the underlying problem isn't that counterinsurgency theory and doctrine are without context, but that they are based on unsound assumptions and priniciples.

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Originally Posted by wmthomson

It would seem incorrect, for example, to assert, as several senior military advisors recently did, that: “Insurgencies are similar to snowflakes in that no two are exactly alike. However, the principles used to defeat an insurgency whether executed by the Romans in Gaul, the British in Malaya, or the U.S. in the Philippines, remain much the same.” (8) If it is indeed true that all insurgencies are different how is it possible to combat them all with the same strategic concepts, primarily the assertion of population as the center of gravity and the necessity of central government legitimacy by the population? Such an assumption is based on an all too common flaw in military doctrine, which is that it is designed to address the failures of the last conflict. These assumptions mean that FM 3-24 does not allow for the contextualization of current and future irregular conflicts in terms of conflict specific parameters such as geography and the impact of culture on the relationship between population and authority.

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Certainly all insurgencies are like snowflakes. No two manifests in the same way due to the unique circumstance of the micro-environments they are created in; but all share the same principles and factors for causation.

The problem that the "COIN" manual has is that it cares little about the principles and factors of causation, as it is a manual based upon the historical perspective of intervening colonial powers who merely wanted to sustain the current local government and achieve a stability that suited their purposes for being there in the first place.

Once one gets to looking past the fact that "all snowflakes are different" and gets to looking to how they are similar, one can begin to craft effective preventative and countering measures. The vast majority of those involve not the populace, but rather the government.

"Populaces do not fail governments, it is governments which fail the populaces".

FM 3-24 is not about countering insurgency so much as it is about how an external power can best suppress/manage the symptoms so as to secure their own national interests in some country where the conditions of insurgency are quite high. The government is typically one of their making or control, so it is only natural that efforts will tend to focus elsewhere, such as on the insurgent and the populace he emerges from.

As to your paper, I agree with those who suggest that you pick one small target and laser in on it. Masters and Ph.D.s are intended to be an inch wide and a mile deep. If you go for a mile wide and an inch deep, drilling down deeper where necessary across the problem, you will gain great wisdom, but struggle in your academic pursuits.

I would add that you probably should look to some additional sources that disagree with our freind Gian Gentile starting with Kilcullen's Accidental Guerrilla. Then I would look at Mason and Malkesian for a good source of recent case study writing. Another set of case studies from a period only a little removed is Corr & Sloan, Low Intensity Conflict: Old Threats in a New World. Look also at some of the quant studies including those done by RAND and my own work with Max Manwaring,especially The SWORD Model of Counterinsurgency published in these pages. What is particularly interesting is how well the snowflake/snow metaphor holds up in nearly all serious analysis.

Cheers

JohnT

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Originally Posted by John T. Fishel

Low Intensity Conflict: Old Threats in a New World.

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John,
IMO we lost a lot of clarity when we stopped using that term to describe our current situation. Because that is what it truly is....low intensity conflict (sometimes armed) over religion,politics,economics and customs and traditions of various cultures and everything else that people are willing to fight for or fight over. It is the method(s) of handling the human conflicts that is causing us all our problems.

Slap

I was one of CSA's "LIC" guys back in the 80s when John T, Max Mainwaring, Bill Olsen and others were doing their work. And when there were proxy wars raging in the developing world.

The issue is the definition of "low intensity". As one of my former bosses pointed out, if you're an infantry platoon leader who just sprung an ambush on the lead element of a main force NVA regiment, your conflict is about to become anything but low intensity.

At the other end of the spectrum, President Duarte of El Sal, speaking at NDU made the point that the Salvadoran insurgency was low intensity for the US because if the FMLN prevailed, life in the US goes on as usual, whereas the gov't of ES was in fact playing for all the marbles. Not very low intensity for them.

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Originally Posted by Old Eagle

Slap

I was one of CSA's "LIC" guys back in the 80s when John T, Max Mainwaring, Bill Olsen and others were doing their work. And when there were proxy wars raging in the developing world.

The issue is the definition of "low intensity". As one of my former bosses pointed out, if you're an infantry platoon leader who just sprung an ambush on the lead element of a main force NVA regiment, your conflict is about to become anything but low intensity.

At the other end of the spectrum, President Duarte of El Sal, speaking at NDU made the point that the Salvadoran insurgency was low intensity for the US because if the FMLN prevailed, life in the US goes on as usual, whereas the gov't of ES was in fact playing for all the marbles. Not very low intensity for them.

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We never have found that one good label as all fall short of being a description that suggests a solution.

A "small war" can be very conventional and between nuclear states; or it can be little more than Mr. Shay's rebellion.

Similarly "intensity" has little to do with the nature of the conflict either. (Though I would offer to President Duarte, that while his government may be playing for all the marbles, the nation of El Salvador I am sure would endure the change in stride.)

Certainly considering all to be "insurgencies" to apply COIN upon is equally flawed.

Even if one goes with "inter-state" vs "intra-state" conflicts it still leaves a wide range of options, and more often or not will include elements of both.

I suspect that a pretty good decision-tree could be crafted, that allows one to key their way down to one or two of a dozen different options by focusing on the presence of absence of key indicators, and then assessing ones own role as to how they fit into the mix. I haven't seen anything along those lines, but if anyone out there has, I would love to see it.

Bob

The only term we ever came up with that was worse than LIC was MOOTW (which, according to Larry Cable, sounded like a cow going out of both ends).

OE, good quotes - I always phrased it as "there is no such thing as a low intensity bullet."

Bob, Bill Olson came up with a slide called "The 100 Names of LIC"

Cheers

JohnT

Read "SAS Secret War" by Tony Jeaps. It used to be required reading at the British War College and probably still is.

http://www.amazon.com/Sas-Secret-War.../dp/0004708997

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Originally Posted by Bob's World

Certainly all insurgencies are like snowflakes. No two manifests in the same way due to the unique circumstance of the micro-environments they are created in; but all share the same principles and factors for causation...

...Once one gets to looking past the fact that "all snowflakes are different" and gets to looking to how they are similar, one can begin to craft effective preventative and countering measures. The vast majority of those involve not the populace, but rather the government.

"Populaces do not fail governments, it is governments which fail the populaces".

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"All" and "always" are troublesome words. Certainly many, possibly most insurgencies are conflicts between "the government" and "the populace" that trace back to weak or bad governance, but it would be dangerous to say "all". Sometimes the root cause is conflict among portions of the populace, often portions with incompatible definitions of "good governance".

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Originally Posted by Bob's World

As to your paper, I agree with those who suggest that you pick one small target and laser in on it. Masters and Ph.D.s are intended to be an inch wide and a mile deep. If you go for a mile wide and an inch deep, drilling down deeper where necessary across the problem, you will gain great wisdom, but struggle in your academic pursuits.

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An inch wide and a mile deep is perhaps not a hole one wants to spend a career in, but there are good reasons to start a career with that experience. Until you've gone deep and developed specialist knowledge you really don't understand or appreciate what depth is, and how much there is to know about every fraction of every picture. That can lead to dangerous overconfidence. I don't see wide and shallow as a road to wisdom; necessarily, especially without that base of specialized knowledge. Too often it leads to dangerously superficial conclusions.

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Originally Posted by John T. Fishel

The only term we ever came up with that was worse than LIC was MOOTW (which, according to Larry Cable, sounded like a cow going out of both ends).

OE, good quotes - I always phrased it as "there is no such thing as a low intensity bullet."

Bob, Bill Olson came up with a slide called "The 100 Names of LIC"

Cheers

JohnT

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Lets see Old Eagle dosen't like it, John T. dosen't like it, and Larry the Cable Guy dosen't like it.....pretty much the end of LIC.

You don't want to fall into the trap of thinking new wars are new at all. I'm sure it has already been mentioned. Yes the end of the Cold War left the sole great power of the world reflecting on its new role in the world. There is plenty of stuff out there on how the 90's were punctuated by the humanitarian intervention and how at the end of the decade there was a massive over reliance on airpower. In terms of the US military machine (or the military machine of any nation) they are only as good as the last war they fought. That is to say, and I know it is somewhat cliche, but armed forces seems to go into any new conflict and conduct it the same way they conducted the last conflict they were involved in. See the massive use of airpower in Afghanistan in 2001 or in Iraq in 2003 and compare it to the use of airpower in Kosovo in 99'. I think militaries are very unwilling to admit they are doing something wrong almost as much as they are to admit defeat.

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TBD posted:
In terms of the US military machine (or the military machine of any nation) they are only as good as the last war they fought. That is to say, and I know it is somewhat cliche, but armed forces seems to go into any new conflict and conduct it the same way they conducted the last conflict they were involved in. See the massive use of airpower in Afghanistan in 2001 or in Iraq in 2003 and compare it to the use of airpower in Kosovo in 99'.

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Though this is true, generally people disparage various country's militaries because when they try to fight the new war using the old war's strategy/tactics, and failed (like the much-maligned French during WWII).

While we did use a huge amount of air power in Afghanistan in 2001, it actually worked very well for us, particularly during the few weeks of the battle. Gary Shroen, in First In, and Gary Bernsten in Jawbreaker both outline this very well. Using a combination of CIA personnel (some from the Special Activities Division) and, later, Special Forces A-Teams, along with the Northern Alliance, we pretty much routed the vast majority of the Taliban and al Qaeda. None of that would have been possible without the massive air campaign conducted over Afghanistan.

The over-reliance on air power, the emphasis from the Bush administration on having as low of a footprint as possible, and unreliable warlords and allies (particularly in southern Afghanistan) would come to bite us in the a**, most noticeably during the battle for Tora Bora. But I don't think that was the case of "fighting the last war," - it was a deliberate attempt to destroy the Taliban and Al Qaeda on the cheap, without having to commit massive amounts of troops and treasure. While that worked great for us at first, the lack of any sort of plan after the initial invasion screwed us. All of this (the lack of a plan for a post-Taliban Afghanistan, the small footprint in terms of troops and thus a reliance on unreliable warlords) was because as early as a few days after 9/11, the Bush administration was planning to invade Iraq (See: The Longest War, by Peter Bergen; Descent into Chaos, by Ahmed Rashid).

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Originally Posted by wmthomson

The origins of FM 3-24’s shortcomings are its bases in the analysis of both nationalist post-colonial insurgencies and Cold War era ideological insurgencies, specifically the French experience in Algeria, the British experience in Malaya and US experiences in Vietnam, the Philippines and Nicaragua. This set of cases manifests itself in the doctrine as a failure to recognize the diversity of conflict causes, the aforementioned cases being all conflicts with ideological and nationalist origins. As is suggested by Samuel Huntington though, in his seminal work The Clash of Civilization, wars of identity are ever present in the Post-Cold War era.

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I am reading FM 3-24 right now (doing my thesis also) and its interesting because its explains much of what I saw in theatre, in terms of behaviors of US military personnel, especially US Army HQ elements. But I don't think its shortcomings are its analysis of insurgency: its a great intro document and contains all you really need to read before deploying -- however understanding the words in it is another thing.

For instance

"3-55. Once they have mapped the social structure and understand the culture, staffs must determine how power is apportioned and used within a society. Power is the probability that one actor within a social rela- tionship will be in a position to carry out his or her own will despite resistance. Understanding power is the key to manipulating the interests of groups within a society."

I actually LOL'ed at this... not because its incorrect, but because "mapping the social structure" takes a LOT LONGER than the time it takes to plan an operation... and I routinely saw military planners use any o'l information just because they had to because 'the job had to be done'.

I think the shortcomings to 3-55 is not its content, but rather that the average US military person cannot adjust his/her thinking patterns to truly question everything, whereas military culture is about DON'T ASK ANY ####ING QUESTIONS JUST DO IT DO IT DO IT which is completely understandable given the nature of combat operations, but when applied to areas like intelligence and operation planning, this mindset hinders.