The Clausewitz Collection (merged thread)

[Bob's World]

Part of this discussion is losing me. So, a couple of serious questions:

1. Who are these "policy types" who can "identify, address and repair the failures of local/national governance" ?

2. Have the "policy guys" (whoever they are) actually solved any insurgency; if so, where and when ?

Sorry to be dull, but I need some context to understand this.

Mike

when has a military operation ever resolved an insurgency.

By policy types I mean the national governmental leadership. Karazai, for example, has the insurgency in Afghanistan to either win or lose, the military forces in that country can merely set the conditions..

Similar for the larger GWOT it is incumbent upon the national govenmental leadership of the US to address and change our policy approach to the governemnts and populaces of the middle east to win or lose that event. Bin laden is a SYMPTOM of a much larger problem, a man for his times, if you will. The military can go out and attack that symptiom, but if the larger policy issue is not addressed new men will emerge to pick up that bright burning torch.

[Ken White]

when has a military operation ever resolved an insurgency.

However, we can't use those methods nowadays...

Sigh.

[Bob's World]

Yes, though the days when "self-determination" meant the choice between submit and live or resist and die are long behind us (not to say that when the current veneer of civilization is adequately disrupted they won't be back, I suspect they will, and in many corners of the world are); we tend to take this muddy ground of relying on the military for decisive effect, when under our current legal constructs decisive effect can no longer be produced by the military. We stand with a foot in each camp, so to speak, in terms of how we understand and address these instances of popular discontent with governance within a state.

My recommendation is that the onus be clearly, and completely sat upon the lap of civil leadership. That it is the failures of civil government that allows the populace to move up the curve out of phase 0 "peace" into phase 1 "insurgency"; and that the role of the military is to bring in additional capacity to assist the civil govenrment establish a degree of security while the assess and address their inadequacies; and that once the military has helped get the populace back to the phase 0 box (a mix of reducing violence and improving governance required) its job is largely done.

Until civil governments embrace that a populace is like a yard, and that governance much like gardening, requires constant attention, with an eye both to the immediate and long-term care required, to keep it vibrant and healty and orderly. If you just cut the grass once a month and call it good, you will reap what you sow...

The depletion of soil and the growth of weeds are as natural as the emergence of insurgency. To simply attack the symptoms of ones failures is IMO negligence.

[Bill Moore]

My recommendation is that the onus be clearly, and completely sat upon the lap of civil leadership. That it is the failures of civil government that allows the populace to move up the curve out of phase 0 "peace" into phase 1 "insurgency"; and that the role of the military is to bring in additional capacity to assist the civil govenrment establish a degree of security while the assess and address their inadequacies; and that once the military has helped get the populace back to the phase 0 box (a mix of reducing violence and improving governance required) its job is largely done.

Your logic isn't incorrect, but it is illogical based on the following context,

We're either there because we invaded (OIF and OEF-A), and that should never be confused with FID where we were invited in by the HN government, or we're there because the HN has invited us to help (often at our urging).

In the first case your arguments don't ring true, and in the second case we're there to help because we believe it is in our national interest, and at the same time we know the problem must be resolved politically, yet we normally know (even if we don't admit it) that the HN government isn't capable or willing to that. We're trying to sail a ship that won't float.

You asked where the military solution has worked, and I can name two places right off the top of my head where the military ruthlessly supressed an insurgency, Iraq and Syria. Probably a couple in Eastern Europe also. Where has the political situation worked?

when under our current legal constructs decisive effect can no longer be produced by the military. We stand with a foot in each camp, so to speak, in terms of how we understand and address these instances of popular discontent with governance within a state.

Is this a balanced approach, or simply dysfunctional?

Until civil governments embrace that a populace is like a yard

I don't disagree, but is our strategy to maintain the status quo until the government gets it? The problem with this strategy is we're defaulting to a dysfunctional entity to solve the problems we volunteered to take on.

[Bob's World]

I will never argue that a purely military option cannot effectively suppress an insurgency. Merely that it cannot not resolve one. It is not the decisive element of COIN.

As to our recent incursions into the governance of others, Afghanistan and Iraq. True in both cases we usurped the legitimate authorities of both countries to take them out of power in favor of forms of governance more palletable to the Government of the United States. (One can argue from whence those two governments drew their legitimacy, but I would merely counter that making such arguments to justify replacing those questionable sources of legitimacy with ones own, is an argument that could be made in the days immediately following the 9/11 attacks, but not today).

But then we immediately took the position that we were invaders, but as liberators and not occupiers, and that govenrance was in the hands of those respective nations. This immediately puts us back into the FID role, regardless of how embryonic and incapbable those fledgling governments may well be. To see it any other way is to discount the legitimacy and sovereignty of those very governments and admit that the porpaganda against the US is correct and that they are in fact puppet regimes. BL, we can't have it both ways.

No one said this is easy. So long as we choose to set out to implement control-based policies born of the Cold War, we will find ourselves in these sticky, conflicted messes. Which brings me right back to the national leadership and policy types. The onus must be placed on them to change the strategy within our own capitals, before we set out to force others to change the strategies within theirs.

Which brings us back to good old Carl. COIN is a symptom of civil governance within a state gone bad, it is politics, it is conflict, but it is not war. It is internal discontent expressed by a populace to its own government in the only manner available when legitimate means of expression are either missing or inadequate to the task.

Afghanistan has a means of legitimate recourse (i.e., the results are recognized and accepted by the populace); it is called a Loya Jirga. What scares people about the Loya Jirga is that it cannot not be controlled by either the Preident nor the constitution of Afghanistan (thus why the legitimacy is so powerful), so in the end it appears we value control over stability. My strategic 2 pennies worth is that the US Populace should DEMAND that the US President push Mr. Karzai very hard to conduct a Loya Jirga as the quid pro quo for providing additional forces to support his COIN effort here.

[William F. Owen]

I will never argue that a purely military option cannot effectively suppress an insurgency. Merely that it cannot not resolve one. It is not the decisive element of COIN.

Really? That again calls into question the idea of qualifying something as "COIN." - Insurgents can try to take over legitimate governments. Insurgents/Irregular forces, do not always have a legitimate case. Algeria in the 1990's and Sierra Leone being good examples - and many others. War is politics. Why assume the Government or existing power structure is always at fault?
Military action can and does force "insurgents" to seek non-violent means. That is the aim, as it is in almost any conflict of that type.

[Bob's World]

Really? That again calls into question the idea of qualifying something as "COIN." - Insurgents can try to take over legitimate governments. Insurgents/Irregular forces, do not always have a legitimate case. Algeria in the 1990's and Sierra Leone being good examples - and many others. War is politics. Why assume the Government or existing power structure is always at fault?
Military action can and does force "insurgents" to seek non-violent means. That is the aim, as it is in almost any conflict of that type.

That the military can only set conditions and is not the decisive component of COIN. Algeria is much like the Philippines, in that Western governments have declared it "won" several times following a military suppression of the insurgent; to my way of thinking neither will ever be resolved until the governemnts of those countries create mechanisms to extend good governance to the entire populace equitably, and with a surity of redress when it inevitably drifts, so that that those same populaces can apply course corrections short of once again taking up arms.

Reasonable minds can differ. I just personally choose not to buy into the idea that calling in the military every 20-odd years to beat down the complaining sector of the populace as either effective or good governance.