The Best Trained, Most Professional Military...Just Lost Two Wars?

[Bill Moore]

Posted by Bob's World

Pop-centric thinks one can bribe the populace to success, and that manufacturing better effectiveness of host nation services is the long-tern answer. There is no evidence of that ever working for long, if at all.

Of course there is, 3-24 say it works, so it must be law . I agree, and that is what happens when you have a bunch of GPF folks who have been focused on fighting tank battles get tasked to write a COIN manual. They turn to a couple of guys who had no experience at all, but did a thesis on COIN in college and subsequently were crowned the COIN home coming queen.

Threat-centric thinks one can simply defeat the various aspects of the threat: his fighters, his sanctuary, his ideology, his funding, etc, and that that is the long-tern answer. Equally, while this has indeed suppressed the fighting in many places over time, and has eradicated more than a few specific insurgent groups, I am not aware if it ever producing an enduring peace, and it typically drives the conditions of insurgency deeper into the fabric of the society.

I guess it depends by what you mean by enduring, but it does achieve effects if you're willing to go to the extremes needed to make this approach work. Fortunately our national values don't permit this, but based on that we should realize it isn't an option. It is like the paper Davidbpo posted on the USSR's experience in Afghanistan. In it the Soviets pointed out we finally realized we were waging war on the peasantry, and it was a no win situation.

No, sometimes I feel a little lonely on these thoughts, so perhaps they are "Bob-centric"; but in simplest terms they recognize that the roots of these conflicts reside in the nature of the relationship between various aspects of some populace and the systems of governance that affect their lives. Actual sins of governance and grievances of populaces vary widely, but the core human emotions that seem to pop up again and again in the many histories of these types of conflict around the globe and over time are the ones I try to focus on here.

I think you're close, but the Afghan people aren't ready to accept a national government yet, or so it seems. Karzai is strongly criticized, but he knows what he needs to do to retain the loyality of the tribe/ethnic group that will be with him after we leave. The Soviets realized Afghanistan was ungovernable and their task was easier than ours, because you can impose a communist system upon the people by the very dictatorial nature of communism.

Those chasing threats or populaces either one with a package of tactical programs that do not keep an eye to the the larger strategic criteria I attempt to discover, define and describe, tend to fail. They may put up great numbers, get a great report card and big promotion for their efforts on their tour, but they fail at their mission. Truth.

Only partially true, those executing the missions at the tactical more often than not accomplish their mission. If the mission doesn't support the strategy, or strategies, then shame on us for letting them happen. In my view I think it does support the strategy and we're over reacting to enemy propaganda in many cases.

As to this:


Quote:
Of course what you don't address is how will abandoning this tactic enable the opposition? Will it increase their freedom of movement? Will they be able to conduct more operations against coalition forces if they're not disrupted (especially if the population doesn't reject the insurgents)? There are two sides to this coin, and they're both important.

I have never advocated abandoning any tactic, what I have said is one must frame their COAs and CONOPS for implementing any tactic or program, be it one to defeat, develop or shape governance, with these simple strategic questions as their framework. One must then also employ these same considerations for their measures of success. If one does this and the government one is supporting still falls to the insurgency?

At best these missions disrupt. You can't win with coercive/lethal operations if we're not prepared to conduct them in their safe havens.

Well, sometimes you just can't fix something no matter how bad you want to and it will go sooner than you want it to. You don't know what will replace what goes, and most likely things will be chaotic and messy for quite some time while the people who this directly affects sort it out on their own terms. Sometimes the insurgent is right and needs to win, more often the government is just too wrong and needs to go; better however, if one can convince said government to cure itself and avoid that uncertainty and chaos all together.

Strongly agree, and this ties into a comment I made on blog response earlier:

It is the host nation's fight (political and military) to win or lose, if they fail to take the needed actions, or lack the political legitimacy to do so, then they can't win. When they can't win is when we tend to make what in hindsight appear to be very dumb decisions about surging our forces and in fact taking the lead, that is when we own the problem and it is our fight to win or lose. That in itself seems to be form of mental illness, we realize the HN can't win for a variety of reasons, so we decide to prompt them up with our military forces and then wonder why the people we think we're trying to help are turning against us.

But we have put GIRoA in a sanctuary. We don't honor their sovereignty, but we allow them to act in all manner of self-destructive ways and protect them with our blood and treasure. History will judge us poorly for this. Public opinion already has.

Agree, time to move on. The scariest part of this is all the articles I see on the lessons the Army learnt in the past decade. Unfortunately most of them need to be unlearned.

[Bob's World]

Bill,

Only point I think I need to clarify is that what I propose in no way prevents going into safe havens after the enemy. It simply drives a shaping of HOW we best do that.

For example, we could have aggressively gone into the Pakistan tribal regions in intel-driven raids back in 2001-2002, kicking in doors, dragging out true AQ members, lined them up on their knees in the village main street and announced "These men came to our homes and murdered our friends, families, women and children. We are here to avenge those murders." Shot them in the back of the head and got back on our aircraft and moved to the next target. The local Pashtuns granting those AQ sanctuary under Pashtunwali would most likely have simply nodded in acknowledgment, understanding and respect, and gone back about their business with a very positive view of the US.

Instead we coaxed (threatened, bribed) the government of Pakistan to go up into the tribal regions to "enforce the rule of law and secure their borders", etc. Thereby violating a long standing agreement of non-interference between that government and those populaces, and accelerated Pakistan to its current instability in the process. Equally the drone strikes we do now that are so loved for their clean, easy, safe application bring death within the terms of the rules of law we have written for ourselves, but absolutely violate fundamental rules of humanity and bring the same kind of violent, unjustified death to innocent Pakistanis, Yemenis, etc as the attacks of 9/11 brought to innocent Americans. Just because a true AQ terrorist is having dinner at the home of some family who knows he is a terrorist, it does not give us the right to kill that family with a missile through their front door. We have a strategy that conflates the problem to better hammer it, when we need to segregate the problem to better get at the true evil that needs to be cut out. Our CT strategy and terrorist organization lists enable this poor behavior and shape our poor performance. Yet we cheer every tactical success as we ignore the accompanying strategic set-back. We are better than this. Morally, professionally, culturally. We are better than this.

We make logical decisions that are strategic disasters because we simply do not understand the nature of the problem and do not design, implement and assess our actions within a proper, strategic context.