Is Irregular Warfare Really "Irregular" Anymore?

[Bill Moore]

I'm transferring my post from the blog to the discussion panel, because I know most of us knuckle draggers are mo comfortable in this forum. However, please refer to the blog to see the article and some excellent posts.

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/200...ng-y/index.php

Glenn, thank you for your words of wisdom. Since you already addressed my concerns about confusing reality with dated doctrinal references, I will address a couple of other areas.

I found it interesting that the authors did not address recent IW examples such as Iraq where we initially made little to no progress when our effort was focused on the so called overt guerrilla elements. Progress wasn't made until the additional troops were sent in to protect the populace to break the coercive influence link between the insurgent and the populace.

In Vietnam securing and mobilizing the populace was critical (CIDG, Phoenix, etc.), and it was effective where applied, but unfortunately it was too little too late. Of course there were numerous parallels where the populace was critical in other IW conflicts such as Malaysia, the Philippines, El Salvador, Algeria, etc. How the counterinsurgent went after the population was different in each conflict. By focusing your efforts on the populace you are setting yourself in position to defeat the entire resistance organization, not just the overt guerrillas.

While the construct of guerrilla, underground, and auxillary can be a useful model to visualize an insurgency's structure, it is not dogma, and not all insurgencies or resistence elements organize along these lines(apparently we still find it odd that other groups and countries do not feel obligated to follow our doctrine). The lines between these categories are blurred more frequently than not.

Another disconnect in logic jumped out at me when the authors identified the strategic issue as the population, but wanted to narrow IW's definition to the tactical realm. First they claim that the strategic level of IW is the underground, and that the underground is largely focused on the populace (thus strategic victory = populace), but then they argue that IW should only be focused on the overt guerrillas, or at the tactical level? We tried that a few times in our history, and I can't think of a case where it was a successful strategy.

As the authors probably know, there may be several relevant population groups that the competitors may want to influence, to include external actors. This also applies to conventional war, but more so in IW, where the opponent's primary objective may be influencing the populace versus defeating the oppoent's military forces. The Vietnamese didn't intend to defeat us by defeating our military, most of their activities directed against us were focused on influencing our home population, which effectively led to political paralysis in the end. The take away is that the violence is ultimately directed at relevant population group, not defeating the opposing military directly, and that is the difference between IW and conventional war.

The terrorists who conducted the Madrid bombings were not focused on Spain's economy or security forces, but rather influencing the voting population, which in this case effectively resulted in the anti-war candidate being elected and the withdrawal of their military from Iraq. AQ's focus on various external population groups is plain to see, and they are trying to isolate their opponents by cutting off external support. War is war, but the strategy (not just the tactics) varies considerably between conventional and irregular warfare.

Furthermore it is hard to kill the bad guys you can't see, and since we can't win by only defeating the overt forces we need to be able to find the underground. If you want to find and defeat the underground then you have to control the populace to get the human intelligence necessary to purge the threat. Drive by COIN and targeting only overt guerrillas is clearly a recipe for failure.