The David Kilcullen Collection (merged thread)

[Steve Blair]

Next of Kin was a pretty interesting "bad" movie. I remember seeing it on HBO or someplace a few years back and found the way they handled the family network very interesting.

Your point on the Mafia don who uses 3x5 cards is well-taken. High tech can only really defeat someone who chooses to meet you on those terms. If they avoid engagement there, you have problems. One example that folks tend to forget is operations against the Ho Chi Minh trail. The most successful ones were directed or initiated by SOG teams on the ground. The least successful relied on high-tech AF gear that could be fooled or tricked (although this also played into the AF reliance on numbers to quantify their Trail operations...the book "Setup" by Tilford goes into some interesting details about this).

[Rob Thornton]

Gents,
I really appreciate the quick turn and the thoughts. Jedburgh, thanks for the titles - I was hoping to get something along those lines. Slapout - I like the 4th F - in terms of who is working against who. I'd not considered that as an angle, although I'm more aware of it within the ISF then outside (mostly that is based on who I'm exposed to more). Ref. the low tech - here its primarily cell phones and visits - but, its indirect - ex. someone makes physical contact and has some one else tell someone else to call this guy and tell so & so to have him release the brother of the first guy. They have gotten good at getting their point across while having to say very little at all. It makes my head hurt most of the time . Thanks again, I really appreciate the help.
P.S. - low key day here. CF kept a low profile, IA & IP did their thing though. First day I remember in awhile where I could not hear multiple IEDs going off on the MSRs. Could be the feast has something to do with it, could be several things- hopefully tomorrow will be the same, the Iraqis around here could use a break - its mostly the civilians who get wounded these days.

Best Regards, Rob

[Mike in Hilo]

Appreciate the link to RAND's "On 'Other War,' " and your pointing out the section on cost/benefit...Worth highlighting (again) the cautionary note on p.25 of the study with regard to a widely accepted "truism":

"[RAND analyst] Wolf further attacked the argument that increasing the standard of living through development would reduce insurgency"

Wolf was right on VN. Others may judge the value of Wolf's point in the current conflicts...

The logistical underpinnings of the SE Asian insurgency included an important, symbiotic component--put simply, the more materials became available to the economy, the more they were siphoned off to be used by the enemy. We even had a name for the well developed organizational network tasked with "diversion/local procurement" for the enemy, the "Shadow Supply System," which was an important VCI function. Without question, breaking the "System" was the CORDS advisorial priority in our border Province of Tay Ninh, hub of the System, during the last couple of years of CORDS's existence (and incidentally, one at which we failed miserably).

Cheers,
M.

[Bill Moore]

Mike,

This ties into my previous comments elsewhere that the carrot isn't a strategy, at least not without a stick in the other hand. We have been winning hearts and minds for years, but unfortunately that hasn't correlated with winning wars. When I use the phrase political correct war, this is definitely part of what PC war involves. The American population (and political body) expects to see its military handing out rations, building schools, building roads, etc. to demonstrate our good will, and while it plays nicely to the international audience (sometimes) and definitely to the home audience, it has resulted (in my opinion) that we just do these things without any real thought behind them except for a Kodac moment showing we're winning hearts and minds, but in reality we're only getting temporary positive press coverage, and no real effect on the local population. We simply can't stop doing this cold turkey without first educating our population and political leaders that these seemingly nice acts are frequently counterproductive.

I would love to hear some ideas/recommendations from the council on ways to get a quid pro quo from the local populace in return for our good deeds? I heard one from my boss recently where he recommends encouraging an amnesty program, but an insurgent/terrorist can't get amnesty without turning in at least one other insurgent. This betrayal tactic prevents him going back to the insurgency, so he has a vested interest in seeing the government win (this closes the revolving door, and really goes back to you either with us or against us). However, amnesty isn't a carrot like building a well, so what do we reasonably demand in exchange for digging a well, building a road, etc.? How do we enforce it? I know it is situation specific, but any ideas will generate further ideas that will our guys deployed.

[marct]

Hi Bill,

I think you've got a really good point here.

I would love to hear some ideas/recommendations from the council on ways to get a quid pro quo from the local populace in return for our good deeds? I heard one from my boss recently where he recommends encouraging an amnesty program, but an insurgent/terrorist can't get amnesty without turning in at least one other insurgent. This betrayal tactic prevents him going back to the insurgency, so he has a vested interest in seeing the government win (this closes the revolving door, and really goes back to you either with us or against us). However, amnesty isn't a carrot like building a well, so what do we reasonably demand in exchange for digging a well, building a road, etc.? How do we enforce it? I know it is situation specific, but any ideas will generate further ideas that will our guys deployed.

On the amnesty program, I really think it would be counter-productive in that form. Make them take an oath on the Quran (get a local Imam to do the exact wording). It seems that a lot of the local AIF people are fighting in kinship groups, and most kin groups will be happy to have people in both camps (maximizes overall survival chances). Requiring a "betrayal", however, goes against honour.

On the quid pro quo for wells etc., why do you need one? The ideal QPQ is in the form of IO ops. I'll admit that this hasn't been done that wel so far, but that is because there have been serious problems in developing coherent, theatre wide IO campaigns. For example, put verses of the Quran on wells and schools and, if the insurgents blow them up, start rumour campaigns about heresy (NB: in Islam, you are not allowed to deface or destroy a Quaranic quotation).

Marc

[Mike in Hilo]

Bill, I've not been to Iraq. My COIN experience is VN-specific--in the Middle East I was just another embassy bureaucrat...So--at the expense of sounding facile, I'll touch on what was done in VN, where local participation in self defence was the quid pro quo:

Pacification was a package designed to tie the villagers to the government...A community that was reclaimed from the communists for the GVN got its "pacification projects" all right, schools, wells, access roads, etc....But the emphasis was on people-participatory activities that had a security component (As John Vann, who more than any other individual made CORDS work, was fond of saying, "Security may be 10% of the problem, or it may be 90%. But it's always the FIRST 10%, or the first 90%."). So in the newly pacified village, teenagers too young to be drafted and the elderly were immediately organized into the village-based People's Self Defense Force under the village chief. This was a political concept designed to tie the people to the government through this "act of commitment" rather than to provide real defense from enemy attack. (I found that organizing villagers to participate in GVN DEVELOPMENT activities did NOT constitute a similar "act of commitment" on the part of the villagers, mainly because both VC and villagers saw such activities as harmless to the VC.) At the same time, of course, draft age males were inducted into the RF/PF (territorial forces). Did this entail a risk of the ranks being infiltrated by VC?--definitely--and this did happen. However, the key to making this work was supervision/leadership. The RF officers were ARVN officers--vetted outsiders presumably loyal to the GVN. And paramilitary RD Cadre, the same guys who organized the villagers for community development projects, were outsiders tasked with keeping an eye on the village authorities to minimize accommodation with the enemy. (These guys weren't too good--good concept on paper, but falls apart if you've not got top notch people.) Village autonomy was a much vaunted concept in CORDS, but in my experience, having good CENTRAL government officers right there on the ground to provide both leadership and close supervision was a sine qua non to successful "pacification" and to avoiding wholesale local "deal-making" with the enemy. (Excessive local autonomy in a country ripped apart by centrifugal forces only exacerbates the problem--this was one case where the Vietnamese saw it correctly even though the US did not.). And how much better when we could afford to have a small US contingent embedded with the local forces living right there in the hamlet--I mean the USMC CAP effort in I-Corps! In French Algeria, of course, the locally organized village self-defense contingents had French officers.

Now another way of looking at the quid pro quo issue is found in a component of the Malaya model, where the inhabitants of the New Villages lived under seriously constrained movement. There, an uptick in villager-provided, actionable intel led to loosening of those constraints. For example, curfew hours would be shortened. More drastically, food was doled out by the authorities: village recalcitrance led to an immediate decrease in each family's food ration; local cooperation (e.g., good intel, decrease in terrorist incidents) led to an immediate increase in the food ration. Is the Iraqi economy still socialized to the degree that food is government provided? If so, this may be one angle (though I'd shudder at the thought of our politically correct press fastening upon such "collective punishment").

To all y'all, A Happy New Year.
M.

[Bill Moore]

Marc, I like your IO approach, and I don't see why our PC crowd would preempt us using it, as a matter of fact the PC crowd would probably embrace it. Responding to your why questions:

If we don't require an insurgent to turn someone in, then it is too easy to go back and forth between the two sides. We don't want a guy accepting amnesty to get a couple of hot meals and a cot to sleep on, then go back and fight for whomever. If we do, we simply establish a revolving door where they wear a coalition uniform one day, and black pajamas the next. BTW both sides of the revolving door are now infiltrated. However, the oath you suggested taken in a semi-public location in front of a respected local leader does seem more realistic. It is possible for highly educated professionals such as yourself to influence knuckle draggers like me, and it should happen more often. I know there are hundreds of soldiers out there who would be eager to send you questions in order to get your ideas. I am very supportive of forming centers of excellence that DoD members can access from the field, even if the field on this particular day happens to be my home office (lol).

On to the harder issue, why would I want to tie a civil military project such as digging a well to behavior concessions from the local village, neighborhood, etc.? First, we don't have to tie all actions to concessions, because there is merit for doing good (don't forget the international and home audiences); however, I am assuming we want to defeat an insurgency, and that definitely requires the host nation government to effectively assert control over its population, and these projects are a tool for achieving that goal. In a COIN scenario I look at building a well as a tool to persuade the population to separate themselves from the insurgents, but if we don't spell that out and mandate certain actions in return, well we simply dug a well, so now the insurgents have a ready source of clean drinking water.

This is an overly simplistic explanation, but I think the jest of it is clear.


Mike, great thoughts, and I appreciate the relevant history. I want to read the RAND paper all the way through before I comment.

I wish all a Happy New Years!

Bill