A 'Digger' writes The Rise and Fall of Western COIN

[Bill Moore]

Professor Michael Evans, of the Australian Defence College, has a lengthy article in an Australian journal (with free access). Long ago his experience was in Rhodesia / Zimbabwe (where we met in 1985) and he emigrated to Australia in the late 1980's.

Link:https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/201...terinsurgency/

The mini bio:In summary I expect he'd be happy to say "Its a dirty, nasty form of warfare much to be avoided. The supreme irony is the post-9/11 COINdinistas repeated every single mistake from the 1960s and 1970s".

He wrote early on:

What struck me in my first two readings was how little attention appears to have been given to non-Western experiences of COIN, notably in India and Southern Africa. Here on SWC we know there are many post-1945 and post-Cold War successes and failures before the latest campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I often wonder if COIN is necessary not to defeat the local / regional opponent, but to create enough security to enable political dialogue and hopefully peace. My own thinking is influenced by events in Southern Africa, where the "battles were won and the war was lost" as the politicians could not see clearly enough.

Finally read, "The Rise and Fall of Western COIN," and while the history of its evolution was generally accurate the paper tended to fall apart towards the end.

I like their description of the confluence of the end of colonialism and the start of the Cold War, and the number of insurgencies it spurred. In my view, this is the insurgency Bob writes about. Mostly local in scope, and the COIN doctrine was 80% political and 20% military, or colonial era COIN.

The other forms of COIN addressed were modernization (U.S. style) and the more globalized COIN promoted by Kilcullen (the closer to reality in my view). The parallel's they drew between JFK's administration's views on COIN and today's are incredible, but not surprising.

Where I thought the article fell apart was when the authors confused COIN with CT. Killing UBL was not COIN, it was a direct action mission to kill a mass murderer. It was pure counterterrorism. I'm not aware of anyone in the U.S. who thinks we can defeat an insurgency by killing HVIs, but we can certainly destroy terrorist networks and prevent future attacks.

There two long term recommendations do little to address the concerns they already identified. In fact their recommendations will simply prolong the mis-practice of COIN. I agree we need to study it as part of a whole, rather than trying to isolate it as a field of separate from the rest of war and strategy, because of course it will be ignored when it fades from immediate interest. However, it seems they're proposing studying the same doctrine that has failed us.

The second recommendation I somewhat addressed already, they warn we shouldn't develop a parallel illusion with conventional war that Western technology and SOF can bring about lasting strategic results. True, but who said they would? Maybe we need to realize we can't always achieve lasting results and scope our objectives appropriately?

I loved this parallel in the article.

In 1987, Charles Maechling, Jr., the Johnson administration official in charge of counterinsurgency in Vietnam wrote of the US effort in South-East Asia during the 1960s:

[American counterinsurgency] in theory failed in practice since it had to be implemented by an unpopular, unrepresentative local regime … The presumption by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in supposing that middle-grade US Army officers and civil servants from the American heartland could create a viable rural society … in the middle of a civil war is staggering. There was no way for the Americans to get beneath the surface of Vietnamese life.

In an eerie parallel, in September 2013, in an article in Foreign Affairs, General Karl W. Eikenberry wrote,

It was sheer hubris to think that American military personnel without the appropriate language skills and only a superficial understanding of Afghan culture could, on six- or 12-month tours, somehow deliver to Afghan villages everything asked of them by the [2006] COIN manual. The typical 21-year-old marine is hard pressed to win the heart and mind of his mother-in-law; can he really be expected to do the same with an ethnocentric Pashtun tribal elder?

As the article points out, if you don't have a viable partner, then our current approach to COIN is pretty much doomed. That means we either need to change our objectives or change our approach, yet we usually fail to do either.

[davidbfpo]

An article in Open Democracy fits here and it open with, my emphasis in bold:

The current military escalation against ISIS, French engagement in the Sahel, and numerous UN and regional peacekeeping operations illustrate that military interventions are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Today, most of these interventions, at least nominally, aim at ending armed conflict and (re)building functional states with some degree of inclusive governance. It is a good idea to ask why such policies often fail. Even when narrow stabilization goals are met, such as in a number of French interventions in Chad and the former Zaire, this often occurs at the expense of long-term stability and democratic governance. Interventions rarely, if ever, positively contribute to improving the political environments that originally generated the crises which sparked the interventions in the first place.

Link:https://www.opendemocracy.net/nathan...rventions-fail


Clearly not all interventions are COIN or SOIN but the article helps the debate as the author's own focus is on the French, a nation that has often intervened and engaged in COIN.


The author has a short paper on French interventions:http://www.fondation-pierredubois.ch...in-africa.html


The author is an American and affiliated to a previously unknown Swiss place of learning.