Strategy begins with empathy: Netflix series "Colony"

[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.

[Bob's World]

Yes, TV shows are TV shows. One can fixate on tactical facts and miss the larger picture, or one can step back a bit and consider the nature, rather than the character of a conflict from a different perspective.

Northern Ireland was Britain's first modern colony. The resistance insurgency (warfare) against the English occupiers, and the revolutionary insurgency (illegal democracy) against those who collaborate with the occupiers are two separate conflicts, each very unique in nature, while often very similar in character. More accurately they are two distinct lines of motivation. One insurgent may be 20% motivated by the occupation, and 80% motivated by the fundamental illegitimacy of his government. Another may be the opposite in his motivations. They both may look the same, adhere to the same ideology, and apply the same tactics. That is why the distinction must be made and accounted for at the strategic level, because at the tactical level the distinctions are largely moot.

Likewise Algeria. Galula commented in his classic on COIN how most of the insurgency was against the largely local government of Algeria, and not against the French themselves. Like many colonial powers, he rationalized this as a sign of the relative goodness of what the French brought to Algeria, and the frustrations of the population with the ineffectiveness of the Algerian government. A less biased perspective recognizing the different nature of the two forms of insurgency and recognizing the presumptive drivers of resistance against any foreign occupation (again, physical or by policy); and against any local government deriving its legitimacy more from some foreign power than from the population it claims to serve, would have made his book a more strategic guide.

And yes, the same is indeed true of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

[Azor]

Yes, TV shows are TV shows. One can fixate on tactical facts and miss the larger picture, or one can step back a bit and consider the nature, rather than the character of a conflict from a different perspective.

Well, earlier you said that Colony was “an analogy for the US occupations of places like Afghanistan and Iraq”. On the contrary, it is an analogy for popular American perceptions of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly in the minds of those that never participated and who know the occupation only through what they saw and read in the mainstream media.

You also noted that the fact that the audience is meant to identify with and build empathy for the resistance is a “twist”, and yet it is a well-worn one, from the various film and television about German-occupied Europe (actual and alternative such as An Englishman’s Castle) to those about the Troubles (Crying Game, In the Name of the Father), and to similar ones involving aliens such as Star Wars (1977) and V (1983). Colony is treading old ground, and even the references to the US military aesthetic of the War on Terror can be found in 2009’s Avatar.

If your “larger picture” is that the “invader” is “fundamentally illegitimate”, then that applies as much to the Union soldiers in Confederate territory and Allied soldiers in the ruins of Germany, as it does to the Soviets in eastern Poland, the French in Indochina or the Americans in Afghanistan.

If one has no legitimacy on the territory of an other on the basis of not being an other, than a simple solution presents itself: use standoff weapons to pulverize any threatening person or object on that territory, without occupying it. It would have been far easier for the United States to turn North Vietnam into a wasteland and prevent the orderly unification of Vietnam under the North, than it was to preserve South Vietnam. It would have been far easier for the United States to wipe out the Taliban from the air in 2001, let the Northern Alliance do what they could, and come back if new terrorist camps spring up

Where the United States went wrong with its interventions, was when it wasn't prepared to do what was necessary to accomplish its objectives. It had all sorts of preferences, but the efforts were on the whole half-hearted, and this is true of Vietnam on. Note that all of the successes I listed earlier involved these countries being fully integrated into American economic and defense relationships.

US COIN or FID then became a fluid blend of cynical kinetic operations combined with disinterested attempts to "win hearts and minds". The US then tried to remake Iraqi state and society on the cheap, which meant cannibalizing resources in Afghanistan that were being used to build that country's first viable state in over 30 years.

Nevertheless, all of these insurgencies required massive foreign support in order to make life difficult for the United States.

[Bob's World]

You are crossing your streams again.

None of these insurgencies "required" massive foreign support - but if we create an insurgency and dedicate ourselves to grappling with it, our opponents will certainly leverage our stupidity to their advantage. Be it to advance their own interests, or simply to cause us pain the pursuit of what we believe to be ours. No different than what we have done to dozens of other when the roles are reversed.

First, the US Civil War example. The strategic brilliance of Gen Grant's strategy was that he recognized in warfare between nations was new and different than warfare between kingdoms. He could not simply impose costs on the South by defeating Lee's army, or capture the capital and "win." He had to do three other things to mitigate the resultant resistance insurgency against our presence following the war, and to mitigate the revolutionary insurgency against the governance in those occupied former Confederate territories.

1. Ensure the population of the South were as defeated as their government and their military. He sent his two best Generals on that mission, in Sheridan and Sherman.

2. Implement total and immediate reconciliation as soon as the conflict was won. That began at Appomattox, and though damaged with Lincoln's death, was still a critical component.

3. Allow self-determination of governance IAW the Constitution.

This was brilliant COIN to reduce the degree of resistance and revolution following the end of the conflict.

Where we went wrong in our interventions was in not understanding the nature of resistance and revolution. This led us to opt for far more invasive regime change approaches where punitive expectations would have been more effective. It also led us to not take steps that could have mitigated the resultant resistance and revolution once we opted for regime change as a COA. We applied war theory to non-war problems, and believed that what we brought was so good that the people would not respond to us as they would to some less good-hearted invader.

All avoidable. And to blame our troubles on ideology or the UW efforts of others, or to not appreciate the fundamental difference between WWII occupations in Germany and Japan vice our interventions onto unvanquished populations elsewhere is to keep our heads deep in our 4th points of contact and ignore the strategic lessons before us.