Managing COIN: Lessons from Malaya

[Jedburgh]

RSIS, 29 Aug 07: War As They Knew It: Revolutionary War and Counterinsurgency in Southeast Asia

Since the end of the Second World War, Maoist-inspired revolutions based on the People's War model have swept through Southeast Asian like a raging prarie fire. The two most carefully studied of all the Southeast Asian revolutionary struggles are those of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) against the British in Malaya, and that of the Vietminh, Vietcong and Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DVRN) in Vietnam. With good reason, these two case studies have become "meta-models" in the art of revolutionary war and counter-insurgency (COIN). The successful containment of the Malayan Emergency spelt the only victory won by a Western democracy against practitioners of revolutionary warfare, while Vietnam stood out as the first case of the success of the People's War model when it defeated two major Western powers in succession. This paper thus relies on the above two paradigms to explain the COIN approaches of the Americans (dominated by military annihilation) and the British (shaped by decades of imperial policing) in Southeast Asia. By examining the British experience in the Malayan Emergency and that of the Americans in the Vietnam War, this paper explores the two distinctly different trajectories that British and American military cultures took, which ultimately determined their respective response to revolutionary war in Southeast Asia. The focus is on the British and American approaches in the following four key components of COIN strategy - utility of military force, civil-military relations, population security and propaganda - for it is in these four crucial areas that the battle for hearts and minds takes place. The state's performance within this interconnected quadrant ultimately dictates the success or failure in countering revolutionary war, simply because it is through them that the power of the word and deed is most keenly felt by the population and the revolutionary. Many students of COIN have acknowledged the importance of the credibility factor, but none have addressed its pertinence within an integrated approach to COIN and counter-revolution. This paper thus demonstrates that insurgencies and revolutionary wars are, by their ontological nature, "credibility wars" and, as such, credibility is the cornerstone - the sine qua non - in any COIN campaign.

Complete 48 page paper at the link.

[John T. Fishel]

Malaya was, as several posts point out, a relatively "easy" case in which nearly everything favored COIN. So, why did it take 12 long years to end the thing favorably? (3 years after inedpendence).
Lesson: COIN ain't easy

Malaya had not only unity of effort but unity of command. Most COIN will not permit unity of command but all would permit it among USG elements.
Lesson: USG needs to have unity of command among all USG components even if this means putting the Ambassador in command of the military commander (or vice versa).

Cheers

JohnT

[goesh]

ROE is defined by the Constitution/UCMJ/Geneva Conventions when it should be defined by culture and environment and in that respect, COIN can never be very well managed, except at the theoretical level. ROE is static and results in what I call the uniform code of adaptability, which assumes there are a set of common cultural dynamics that are uniform across the 3rd world spectrum and can be similarly manipulated culture-to-culture. Add to this inductive generalization the problems military traditionalists pose for COIN and it remains a concept that cannot be well managed in real time in real field conditions. Small unit autonomy is the answer but the more you have small unit autonomy, the more you perforate the parameters set by current ROE - a vicious circle.