Strategy begins with empathy: Netflix series "Colony"

[Bob's World]

You are tossing a bowl of historical fruit salad, mixing your apples with your oranges. True facts, but imo strategically immaterial. We cling to the facts that feed our narrative, rather than devising a more accurate strategic framework and considering the facts in that light.

[Azor]

You are tossing a bowl of historical fruit salad, mixing your apples with your oranges. True facts, but imo strategically immaterial. We cling to the facts that feed our narrative, rather than devising a more accurate strategic framework and considering the facts in that light.

Well, I was addressing your various points. Note that I have never argued that reconstruction and COIN were easy or quick processes and that a more adept CPA in Iraq or more resources to the Afghan War or leaving Vietnam to the generals would have necessarily led to victory.

I referenced the postwar reconstruction and COIN successes specifically because they each involved a substantial and sustained national commitment and whole-of-government approach to succeed, and they benefited fron having the attrition part out of the way.

[Bob's World]

I am talking about the strategic framework of these types of conflicts. All are unique in countless fascinating ways that must be taken into account in shaping one's campaigns and tactical approaches. But it is our blind belief in what I call the "Humpty Dumpty " strategic approach that framed all three of these conflicts for failure at inception.

Step one, rationalize the need to replace a government one does not like somewhere with a new government one believes will be less "failed," contrary, or of the wrong brand of form or ideological approach.

Step two, believe in the fantasy of "effective" government and "controlled" populations and the power of American brand democracy to creating stable societies. Then set upon "stabilizing" the population as one sets out in earnest to build a virtual "wall" of security force capacity and institutions, governmental effectiveness and institutions, and development. And then put your Humpty up on that wall and grant him the guarantee as your new "ally" that if he should ever fall you will spare no expense to put him back on the wall again.

This creates presumptive resistance and revolutionary forms of political conflict in a complex devil's brew regardless of intentions or interesting peripheral facts. Yet we never learn and rationalize away our failures to these peripheral factors.

As to Germany and Japan, in both those the entire population was as defeated as their respective governments and military. But they still did not want to be little Americas, no, we were the lesser of two evils, so they tolerated our presence to avoid a far worse fate at the hands of the Russians and Chinese who had very legitimate axes to grind...

[Bob's World]

Now look to the British school of hard knocks and the strategic lessons they learned (but seem to have also largely forgotten) in regards to the true drivers of, and resolution to resistance insurgency warfare and recolutionary insurgency illegal democracy.

First, why make the distinction? Simple, because warfare solutions work against war, but political solutions are necessary for democracy. War is a violent political conflict between two distinctly separate entities. Illegal democracy are those illegal, and often violent to a war-like degree, activities to coerce change of governance within a single system of governance. Historically we call the military suppression of revolution a COIN "win" for the state. Truly "good enough for government work," but in reality, unless governance evolves to address the driving issues, this approach makes the actual insurgency worse even as it tamps down the symptoms for 10-15 years.

British lessons began in the Northern Ireland and American colonies, though took a century or so to sink in. The mid-1800s resolution to grant to the British colonists in Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia the same rights previously ask for by and denied to the American colonists is one example of strategic learning. This paved the way to the relinquishing of colonial control and fostering the emergence of self determined governance in Malaya a century after that.

Those lessons were somehow lost on Americans who deluded ourselves to believe that our superior rationale and lighter touch for imposing our political will onto others would somehow make us exempt from the laws of human nature. So while we often borrow British tactics, we cling to American strategy, with tragic results.

Why have the British COIN efforts embedded within US led operations failed to yield durable strategic results? Simple, because good tactics cannot overcome bad strategy.

[davidbfpo]

Bob,

An interesting commentary on British COIN in the above post. My own reading recently has found several books on the subject, the catalyst for their writing being the more recent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I would argue that since 1945 British COIN has been defensive, as we retreated from our imperial / colonial commitments with a few exceptions such as Dhofar / Oman, a close ally. The difference with Afghanistan and Iraq was they were intrusions into nation states, with varying degrees of in-state or local acceptance and reliance on coercion. Both those states were also "broken" and even defeated.

What might have worked historically could not work, either tactically or at the strategic level.

In some places there was certainly empathy, partly a historical legacy before conflict began. Cyprus and Palestine come to mind.

As this thread is about a US TV series, which has yet to appear here; there are irregular media portrayals of such issues, often with a Northern Ireland theme.

[Bob's World]

David, My point that I am trying to convey, is that the fundamental strategic framework for these types of conflicts is rooted in human nature, and therefore largely the same. It made little difference to the people of India what British intentions were in different eras any more than it matters to the people of Los Angeles in this TV series. It is the simple fact of a foreign power occupying either physically, or even virtually through policy, that creates a presumptive resistance effect.

British "COIN" was designed to suppress this effect while they had the power to do so, but as British power became diffused over broad holdings and British technology (steam transport by sea and rail, telegraph, literacy) shifted relative power to connected and evolving populations, it forced Britain over time shift from a colonial system of control to a much more influence-based approach with the Commonwealth. The US only captured the shift in military tactics. Not that we did not see the strategic shift rooted in policy - we just believe that what we offer is so good, and that what we oppose is so bad, that our efforts will not trigger this effect, or that when it does we can suppress the symptoms.

This is the danger of buying in too completely to the idea of "American Exceptionalism."

With your long history in law enforcement, you appreciate full well the dangers of assuming that when entering a home on a domestic violence call that the very wife or child one is saving from some drunken husband's abuse, will not launch their own resistance insurgency against the officers as they work to subdue or arrest the husband. A family is a microcosm of a state, so the same factors of human nature apply.

[Azor]

I came across Colony on Netflix, and I decided to watch a couple of episodes because of this thread.

Unfortunately, it is a blatant attempt to reflect the US occupation of Iraq: the walls, the “green zone”, the drones, the MRAPs, the references to “IEDs”, the checkpoints and even the shape of the helmets as well as the weapons.

Yet its creators clearly have no idea about living under foreign occupation, insurgency or terrorism. Their very notion of the occupation of Iraq has been gleaned by watching CNN rather than visiting Baghdad at the height of the killing. Nor have I come across an occupied people as clueless as those in Colony.

When the Germans swept across Europe, even the lowliest peasant knew why they were there and what they wanted. When the German tide ebbed and the Soviet one surged across Central Europe, no one was surprised. What do these aliens want that is worth the resources expended on securing human cities? Why keep the humans alive? For the Germans, people were kept alive temporarily to be of use as slave labor or to produce food or defer their death by helping the Germans kill others. The Soviets wanted people contributing to the Stalinist system, working in its factories and mines, and protecting the Soviet Union from invasion from the West.

Terrorism and insurgency are interesting things, and are hardly ever two-sided:

• From the Irish War of Independence to the end of the Troubles, the Irish conflicts were overwhelmingly ones of Irishmen killing fellow Irishmen, not the British
• During the Algerian War of Independence and after, the brunt of the slaughter was born by the Algerians, who continued to slaughter one another after the French left
• The same is true of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq

If Colony expects to be accurate, then various human factions should be slaughtering one another with the alien occupation being a rallying point, but with the aliens less involved in the violence than the humans.

Americans care about their role in occupation, when Americans are doing the killing and dying. When the Americans are not present and the locals kill and die in the same numbers or even higher, Americans barely care at all.