The David Kilcullen Collection (merged thread)

[jcustis]

Errr....just...errrr.

[marct]

Errr....just...errrr.

LOLOL. Well, all I can say is that this would be a great podcast . Barring that, I'd definitely agree to buy a couple of rounds to hear that discussion!

Marc

[Bill Moore]

I just finished Fabius's article, not bad, although I don't agree with much of it, I do understand his position now.

Fabius states the obvious, which is that the home team has the advantage. This has always been true in every war we fought, so it is illogical to assume to this advantage always equates to victory. The fact is that it is not always possible to find indigenous personnel to do your dirty work (surrogate or unconventional warfare), and even when it is possible, it isn’t always desirable. We were doing a regime change, and while the Kurds and Shi’a supported seeing Saddam disposed, only the Kurds were willing to work with the U.S.. The Kurds are great warriors, but they are also a political liability, so their utility was limited. Non Kurds didn’t like seeing armed Kurds in their neighborhood. If our objective is a unified Iraq, then the perception we’re siding with one ethnic group has more disadvantages than advantages. The same can be said about using the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. We simply flipped the coin (NA on top, Taliban on the bottom); we didn’t really change the underlying conflict conditions. In my opinion we have lofty ideals that are not achievable (e.g. “imposing” democracy on a society that clearly isn’t ready for it), but that doesn’t mean our military strategy is flawed, it means our political strategy is. Yes they go hand in hand, but they are two different hands, and in this case the left hand is dysfunctional, because it doesn’t understand the limitations of the right hand.

Another point on so called home turf advantage is that it is very much localized, as there are cultural sub-states within most nations. I don’t fit in well in Latino or Black neighborhoods, and nor do I fit in well in a fundamentalist Baptist town in Alabama. You can be a foreigner within your own nation, so achieving true home turf advantage using an indigenous army is normally a bridge too far.

Furthermore, we're not losing in Iraq because we don't have home turf advantage, we're losing because we had no plan to transition from combat operations to stability operations (it was supposed to happen magically according to Wolfowitz), so we created a big gap where there was little or no control (remember we liberated Kuwait, we didn’t liberate Iraq, the difference is crucial), and that gap allowed chaos to grow to the tipping point. Several actors emerged in this gap quickly pushing the situation into a state of anarchy in many regions.

This wasn’t a preplanned insurgency, because the regime didn’t plan on losing, and many Iraqi Military leaders were waiting to join the coalition (as promised), so this was an emerging crisis that could have been mitigated with martial law, enforced by the U.S. military in parallel with the Iraqi Army (which was the original plan, until Bremer made the biggest strategic mistake in U.S. history when he disbanded them). Then to add fuel to our incompetence fire, we denied the nature of the conflict (we don’t have an insurgency), and we didn’t have enough troops to react with.

The reason I'm revisiting all of this is to point out that even if our COIN doctrine fails us in Iraq at “this time”, it isn't because our doctrine isn't valid (it may or may not be), but rather that we applied it too late. We're in a different type of conflict now, and more U.S. troops, more advisors, and more jobs more jobs may help (they definitely would have helped in 2003), it may also be too late for this approach, since Humpty Dumpty already fell off the wall.

We failed originally because we refused to recognize the insurgency, now we’re failing to recognize the Civil War, so we still seem to be behind the power curve. Will our COIN doctrine work in the midst of a Civil War, I don't think it will. What we need now is a peace enforcement strategy with zones of separation, agreements between the belligerents, and then strive for political agreement (compromise, so hard to come by in the ME). It is a complex playing field with tribes, religion wars, freedom fighters (those trying to eject the coalition), organized criminals, transnational terrorists, foreign players (Iran, Syria, Turkey, others), etc. We need our best minds at the strategic level (realists, not idealists) to come up with workable solutions.

Fabius from my perspective as a participant in 2003, I would argue that if every Company Commander and his Bn and BDE Cdrs had Kilcullen's 28 articles (and understood the intent) we would have created some breathing space, perhaps enough to allow for a functional political strategy to develop. You look at other divisions compared to the 101st in Mosul at that time, you can see the disparity. The 101st applied COIN doctrine and achieved a remarkable degree of stability (it was still a tough fight), while others simply made the situation much worse. Operations at the tactical level have strategic impact.

What you're saying is true now because we failed to follow our doctrine, not because of our doctrine.

Bill

[Merv Benson]

Can we get links to the Kilcullen articles mentioned in his reply to Fabius?

BTW: Thanks to the SWJ crew for setting up this dialog. I would like to see these guys meet and work the problem together.

[jcustis]

The majority are in the first post of this thread. Not certain about Countering Global Insurgency. I probably have it on my work maching.

[marct]

BTW: Thanks to the SWJ crew for setting up this dialog. I would like to see these guys meet and work the problem together.

I'll second that. Personally, I'd love to be at that meeting since I think that there are some similar thoughts floating on the horizon.

Marc

[SWJED]

... but not here - so go here - Strategy wars: Lots of discussion of Kilcullen.

Council member ZenPundit also addresses this thread here - Debating Counterinsurgency.

On Edit - Robb takes more than a few liberties in "claiming" intellectual property rights on COIN related issues. Looks like a hurt ego is the crux of his post. Kilcullen on the other hand has a genuine interest in our "boots on the ground".

[slapout9]

I would like to mention two points that have bearing but are overlooked often.

1-We are "not" a democracy we are a Constitutional Republic. If we were a democracy "Al Gore" would have been president (he had the most votes). Then we go public and invade a country to give them democracy which we don't even have in this country. I went all the way through school and not once did I ever pledge allegiance to the democracy for which it stands! But to the Republic for which it stands! Don't you think the rest of the world sees the hypocrisy of this? We have lost the moral high ground through our own stupidity.

2-The types of enemies we are fighting are very different. Rob Thornton of SWC has talked about Mosul and the fact that generations of children have been raised in war, that is all they know. That is very different than a traditional insurgent or even gang motives. It is closer to tribal conditioned serial murders and that is a poor description. When the FBI originally began to profile what we now call serial killers they wanted to call them "Recreational Killers" they did it because they liked it or had simply grown used to it. The name was changed because it was not PC but it is more descriptive. What does this forecast? You are not going to win the hearts and minds of these groups they will take at a sign of weakness and just become more ruthless and brutal. Your only options are to kill them or imprison them for life.

Fabius may be right when he says we should concentrate on the defense because it is surely lacking in our country.

[Fabius Maximus]

Fabius states the obvious, which is that the home team has the advantage. This has always been true in every war we fought, so it is illogical to assume to this advantage always equates to victory. ... Furthermore, we're not losing in Iraq because we don't have home turf advantage, we're losing because we had no plan to transition from combat operations to stability operations (it was supposed to happen magically according to Wolfowitz), so we created a big gap where there was little or no control (remember we liberated Kuwait, we didn’t liberate Iraq, the difference is crucial), and that gap allowed chaos to grow to the tipping point.

Bill goes directly to what are, I suspect, the two key points in this debate.

First, the strategic question about "home court advantages." I will discuss this at some length (as usual, probably too great length!) in my next article. Briefly, this concerns the degree of advantage in 4GW of defense over offense.

There is little agreement in military theory on the superiority of defense over offense, or even if these are useful terms. I believe that they are useful, if imprecise, and that in 4GW defense is decisive.

Second, was our defeat in Iraq inevitable (assuming we do "lose")? Lind and van Creveld, among others, said yes to this -- before our invasion. I agree, and in a dozen articles have explained why I believe so. In my article under discussion I give 1950 as a "red line" date after which 4GW is decisive over previous forms of warfare.

Needless, it is an important question to resolve, essential before we craft a new geo-pol strategy for America.

As Kilcullen and I both say earlier in this thread, the current state of the art only allows us to guess at such things -- and (as we both do) state them clearly to facilitate debate.

Answers will only come with time.

[Fabius Maximus]

Here is the "official" citation for ‘Countering Global Insurgency’:

The Journal of Strategic Studies
Vol. 28, No. 4, August 2005, p. 608.
(Subscription only site)

There are articles by him with this title around the web. Not sure if they are identical to the above.

Here is the version I used,from this site (no details as to source or date).

http://smallwarsjournal.com/documents/kilcullen.pdf

Kilcullen has also written some excellent articles in the Australian Army Journal. Easy to find via google (citations available via Google).