COIN Counterinsurgency (merged thread)

[davidbfpo]

Karl Eikenberry has an article in Foreign Affairs 'The Limits of Counterinsurgency Doctrine in Afghanistan: The Other Side of the COIN ', which is on limited open access:http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articl...in-afghanistan

Hat tip to a tweet from Peter Neumann @ ICSR, Kings College; his tweet:

Eikenberrys angry, axe-grinding denunciation of COIN will no doubt become mandatory reading for trainee officers soon

As a former ISAF commander (2005-07) and later Ambassador in Kabul (2009-2011) he cites Galula, US military doctrine and practice, the US$ cost and a man called Karzai:

Karzai disagreed intellectually, politically, and viscerally with the key pillars of the COIN campaign.

Near the start:

The COIN-surge plan for Afghanistan rested on three crucial assumptions: that the COIN goal of protecting the population was clear and attainable and would prove decisive, that higher levels of foreign assistance and support would substantially increase the Afghan government’s capacity and legitimacy, and that a COIN approach by the United States would be consistent with the political-military approach preferred by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Unfortunately, all three assumptions were spectacularly incorrect, which, in turn, made the counterinsurgency campaign increasingly incoherent and difficult to prosecute. In short, COIN failed in Afghanistan.

Elsewhere there are some very direct comments, on 'Protect the Population' for example:

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?

Finally he concludes:

In sum, the essential task is deciding how to do less with less. It has been said that in Afghanistan, as in Southeast Asia 40 years earlier, the United States, with the best of intentions, unwittingly tried to achieve revolutionary aims through semicolonial means. This is perhaps an overly harsh judgment. And yet the unquestioning use of counterinsurgency doctrine, unless bounded politically, will always take the country in just such a direction. Before the next proposed COIN toss, therefore, Americans should insist on a rigorous and transparent debate about its ends and its means.

[SWJ Blog]

Tuppence for your COIN Thoughts

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[SWJ Blog]

COIN Doctrine Under Fire

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[Mark O'Neill]

Attached is the link to my recently awarded PhD Thesis .
Best regards,
Mark
http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/fapi/dat...11717/SOURCE01

[davidbfpo]

Well done Mark and there's no way I can read this before Xmas. However I welcome you using these examples for your work:

Evidence supporting the case for adoption of the proposed framework by second-party counterinsurgents is from the analysis of three comparative case studies. These are the South African campaign in South West Africa (Namibia now), the British campaign in Dhofar (Oman) and the 2003 Iraq War ‘surge’ of 2007-2008.

(Later) Rather, the structure is deliberately one of a problem-solving investigation. It seeks to answer the simpler question ‘is there a better way?’

[Mark O'Neill]

I hope you enjoy the read,
Best,
Mark

[JMA]

Look forward to studying this. Happy too that McCuen’s contribution to counterinsurgency warfare has been finally recognized.

Attached is the link to my recently awarded PhD Thesis .
Best regards,
Mark
http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/fapi/dat...11717/SOURCE01

[jmm99]

Congratulations on becoming Dr. Red Hand.

I read through up to chapter 3; and after moving the snow in my driveway, I expect I'll tackle the next two chapters.

The title is simply excellent in setting the basic theme requiring distinction between second-party counterinsurgency and first-party counterinsurgency. That's somewhat along the lines of Bob Jones (I'm paraphrasing): If the flag on the courthouse you're protecting ain't yours, you ain't doing counterinsurgency; you're doing something else.

Like Mark Adams (JMA), I appreciated repeated references to Michigan-native John McCuen's work; but, just as much, I appreciated repeated references to Andre Beaufre's concepts - and an integrated discussion of both (I did a little reading ahead; pp.164-165, pdf pp. 178-179):

Notwithstanding evidence of broad acceptance and understanding of contemporary Western counterinsurgency thought, the views of two theorists in particular - Beaufre and John McCuen – are instrumental in explaining and understanding much of the South African approach to counterinsurgency in South West Africa. Examination of the impact of Beaufre’s work on higher South African strategy is complete, but his ideas were also highly influential at the operational and tactical level within the SADF. This occurred not only through the expected ‘trickle down’ effect from higher strategic guidance, but also because of advocacy by several senior officers who were impressed by his work. In 1968, C.A. ‘Pop’ Fraser (later a Lieutenant General and Chief of the South African Army) returned from a posting as the military attaché in France, where he was exposed to Beaufre and his work. Fraser and another SADF officer, Deon Fourie, subsequently wrote a local strategic analysis that incorporated Beaufrian concepts and was influential in teaching done at the SADF staff college.

McCuen’s book, The Art of Counter-revolutionary War was also studied at the South African staff college and it too became highly regarded – a former senior SADF officer stating in an interview that ‘I never came across a better book on the subject’. A key message that the South Africans derived from McCuen was that: ‘The aim of counterrevolutionary warfare was to deny the insurgents the capability to get and maintain the support of the general population through force’. This aphorism melded with the idea they had gained from Beaufre about force in the ‘dialectic battle of wills’ to incorporate the deliberate and calculated use of force as a key tenet of the South African approach to counterinsurgency.

There was also considerable alignment between Beaufre and McCuen regarding the coordination and integration of all the functions and functional elements of the state (the bureaucracy) into a coherent counterinsurgency response. Yet while both theorists were clearly influential, a note of caution informs the extent such influence extended into the practical aspects [of] the counterinsurgency fight. As Seegers explains: ‘As time went by, however, Beaufre’s indirect strategy and McCuen’s guidelines would be quoted repeatedly. Yet very little COIN practice originated in theory. Rhodesian improvisation was too valuable. Theory would follow it’.

(footnotes omitted in snip above; emphasis added).

Pretty good stuff from an Ulster sept man.

Regards

Mike

[Mark O'Neill]

Thanks Mike, and Mark
Mark

[SWJ Blog]

COIN Book Launch and Panel Discussion

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Front Row Seat: Watching COIN Fail in Afghanistan

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[JMA]

Time to revisit this matter I suggest.

Would welcome a discussion of the thesis.

[jmm99]

Is Mark O'Neill interested in joining in the discussion ?

Regards

Mike

[SWJ Blog]

Next COIN Manual Tries to Take Commanders Beyond Iraq, Afghanistan

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U.S. Military Learns COIN Lesson

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[SWJ Blog]

Joint COIN Pub Ignores Reality

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[TheCurmudgeon]

This is a bit of a preemptive strike, as I have not been privy to the new 5-34, but this phrase originally tossed around by COL Gentile that COIN is not Strategy has gotten me to wondering. The more I think about it, the more I think it is wrong. In Iraq and Afghanistan, COIN was the ONLY connection we had to the political strategic objective of a free, democratic country. No other doctrine contained anything about democracy or democratic legitimacy. And while I agree that the doctrine is flawed, that connection is not the flaw.

So I ask the question, if the strategic objective is a free, stable, democratic state, what other strategy do we have other than the population-centric government building that is found in COIN?

Simply killing insurgents does not get you any closer. In fact killing insurgents has little to do with the strategic goal. As the doctrine still notes, to stop an insurgency you must address the root causes.

Perhaps I am confusing strategy with strategic objective. I would think the two would be nested. I will wait to see how the statement is phrased in the new doctrine, but I am curious what other action the military can take that would bring the US any closer to its strategic objective.

[David Ucko]

If I may, the point about COIN not being strategy is that nothing in FM 3-24 (or, I suspect, its follow-on) resembles a strategy: not the principles, not the considerations, the guidance or the theory. You can have a counterinsurgency strategy: this would be a strategy based on the premises of counterinsurgency theory but wedded to the particular context at hand (and that is the hard part, of course). The problem in Afghanistan, I submit, is that a lack of strategy clarity led to various counterinsurgency principles and slogans becoming elevated to a strategy in their own right, and pursued without any real prioritisation or sequencing. I tend to quote Eliot Cohen in these discussions: 'strategy, 'he writes, ‘is the art of choice that binds means with objectives. It is the highest level of thinking about war, and it involves priorities (we will devote resources here, even if that means starving operations there), sequencing (we will do this first, then that) and a theory of victory (we will succeed for the following reasons)’. Plainly, a field manual cannot resolve these difficulties and attendant trade-offs.

[TheCurmudgeon]

If I may, the point about COIN not being strategy is that nothing in FM 3-24 (or, I suspect, its follow-on) resembles a strategy: not the principles, not the considerations, the guidance or the theory. You can have a counterinsurgency strategy: this would be a strategy based on the premises of counterinsurgency theory but wedded to the particular context at hand (and that is the hard part, of course). The problem in Afghanistan, I submit, is that a lack of strategy clarity led to various counterinsurgency principles and slogans becoming elevated to a strategy in their own right, and pursued without any real prioritisation or sequencing. I tend to quote Eliot Cohen in these discussions: 'strategy, 'he writes, ‘is the art of choice that binds means with objectives. It is the highest level of thinking about war, and it involves priorities (we will devote resources here, even if that means starving operations there), sequencing (we will do this first, then that) and a theory of victory (we will succeed for the following reasons)’. Plainly, a field manual cannot resolve these difficulties and attendant trade-offs.

Ok, then if the strategic objective is a democratic Afghanistan, what should have been our means and objectives?

Or was the problem not the doctrine but how it was prioritized and sequenced?

Given the parameters Cohen lays out, would any doctrine ever be strategy?

[carl]

The problem with using our experiences and actions in Afghanistan to derive lessons or conclusions about much of anything is that everything is/was severely distorted by the lack of strategic clarity Mr. Ucko spoke of. We never did figure out who the most important enemy was, the Pak Army/ISI, so consequently we never did anything about them. It is almost as if the Royal Navy was trying to judge after losing the war which was better, independent sailings or convoy without ever having acknowledged that the U-boats were Kreigsmarine and Germany was using them to war with.

If you refuse to recognize and confront an actual enemy nothing will work.