COIN Counterinsurgency (merged thread)

[SWJ Blog]

25 August COIN Center Webcast

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[SWJ Blog]

The Real Challenge in Afghanistan: Toward a Quantum COIN

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[SWJ Blog]

White Paper on COIN Instruction

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[SWJ Blog]

Teaching COIN to a (Mostly) Non-Practitioner Audience

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[SWJ Blog]

On Teaching the COIN Canon and Speaking Truth through Fiction

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[SWJ Blog]

US Army COIN Center Webcast With Dr. Christopher Paul

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[SWJ Blog]

PI COIN / FID Fight Over?

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[SWJ Blog]

Ditching Career Centric COIN

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[SWJ Blog]

Grafenwoehr Full Spectrum Exercise Tosses COIN

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[SWJ Blog]

Beyond SWEAT: Developing Infrastructure in Stability and COIN Operations

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[SWJ Blog]

Don’t Break The Bank With COIN

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[SWJ Blog]

COIN Monthly Webcast Invitation 3 Nov 2011

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[SWJ Blog]

COIN is Dead. Long Live COIN?

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[Bob's World]

Getting COIN and FID roles right is in synch with principles of Sovereignty as it helps to prevent the intervening power from drifting into roles belonging to host populace and government. Efforts to secure sovereignty for one must also respect sovereignty of others.

The “Bob Jones Flag Pole Test”: Go to the national capital building of whatever country you are in, look at the top of the tallest flag pole and identify that flag. If it is your nation's flag, you are conducting COIN. If it is the flag of some other nation, then your mission is FID.

Somewhere along the line we lost sight of this simple test, and have been tredding fairly heavily upon the sovereignty of others in the pursuit of a broad definition of what we feel we must do to exercise our sovereign duties (protect the populace) to our own people back home. I don't think we ever flew our flag as the primary sovereign standard over Iraq or Afghanistan, and that was for very good reason. We must learn that we cannot recognize sovereignty with one hand while we abuse it with the other, and still nurture and maintain our good influence and credibility as a nation.

[Dayuhan]

The “Bob Jones Flag Pole Test”: Go to the national capital building of whatever country you are in, look at the top of the tallest flag pole and identify that flag. If it is your nation's flag, you are conducting COIN. If it is the flag of some other nation, then your mission is FID.

In general I agree. Our post-regime change excursions are a bit different, though.

We take it on ourselves to remove a regime. We "install" a new regime. We call them a government. We dress them up as a government: they sit in the chair, wear the t-shirt. We put their flag highest on the pole. That doesn't fool anyone, though, except sometimes ourselves. Everyone else - "government", population, insurgent - knows that the fight is actually about us, our invasion, our occupation, our pretense that the puppet is actually a government.

In these cases, the flagpole test wouldn't define "FID" until the "government" actually governs and is locally recognized as a government, not as an extension of our presences.

I think a great deal of our trouble in Iraq and Afghanistan comes from efforts to apply lessons learned from "FID that we pretend is COIN" to "regime change that we pretend is COIN.

Aside: if we want to define COIN, might be best to start by defining insurgency.

[Bob's World]

I feel your pain on these operations, and believe that we should avoid these at all costs, but when we do convince ourselves that this is necessary we still apply the flagpole test.

Our little fictions of sovereignty only serve to confuse ourselves. Someday we will learn that "king making" is a bit of colonialism that is as obsolete as the rest of that package, and that any process we apply in an effort to create a "legitimate" government to replace the one that we just took out can never truly be legitimate in the eyes of the populace it is supposed to serve.

But if we do take this dangerous path, the best way to traverse it is by being honest with ourselves from the very outset and defining our role as FID and operating within constraints set for us by that fledgling government that is struggling for both legitimacy and effectiveness. Of the two, legitimacy in the eyes of the populace is by far the most important, and FID facilitates that role, while COIN destroys it.

Consider the highly controversial night raids in Afghanistan. These are a gross violation of the cultural perceptions of sovereignty and human dignity of the people of Afghanistan (and frankly, every other country on the planet, but particularly so in Afghanistan where there is little governance and a man's duty in his home and Pashtunwali are so fundamental). This is de facto sovereignty, and we violate it nightly. These operations are also a gross violation of what the government of Afghanistan has clearly stated on numerous occasions. This is de jure sovereignty, and we violate this as well.

Now, under a COIN construct we can rationalize that WE have a duty to defeat the insurgency, and that the ends justify the means, and that we really don't have to honor the sensibilities of the populace nor the directives of the government. We say the government is sovereign with our words, but we declare even more loudly with our actions that even we, the creator of this government, have no recognition or respect for their sovereignty. There is no way to establish a legitimate regime with this mindset.

Under FID we would respect the culture of the people as well as the demands of the government. We would have worked out a process of making a finding of probable cause before some Afghan official, who would in turn offer a warrant that would narrowly define what it is we were authorized to search for or who we were authorized to arrest. We would have Afghan partners in the lead on the operation itself. Now, this would greatly reduce the effectiveness of these operations in terms of the measures of performance that we love so much. The total number of raids would go way down, the total number of suspects captured, killed, questioned and released, etc would all go down. BUT the EFFECT of these operations would change from a major negative into a potential positive that reinforces every night that GIROA is the master of their own country and that they can indeed enforce their most primal duty as a sovereign government: "protect the populace."

For those who think in terms of warfare and cannot see any sound reason for the distinction between COIN and FID, I ask that you consider this issue in the context of sovereignty instead. COIN is a domestic operation by a sovereign to bring stability to his own people. FID is a foreign operation to help a sovereign maintain or establish stability executed in a manner that reinforces his sovereignty.

As to defining insurgency? My cut on this is what I follow when I think, speak or write on this topic. The DoD definition is a dangerously over militarized perspective that creates far more problems than it helps avoid.

Insurgency, IMO, is best viewed as "an illegal political challenge to government, rising from a base of support within some significant and distinct segment, or segments, of the populace; and employing any mix of violent and non-violent tactics."

[Infanteer]

Agree with both of the previous posts; my government and military will take a vastly different approach if it is dealing with unruly locals in Somewhere, Canada than if it is deploying military forces to support the government of Afghanistan to deal with unruly locals in Somewhere, Kandahar.

As well, BW's definition seems fit for the task. The key part to me is that "insurgency" is a political phenomenon where the military aspect (involving formed groups working at policy through other means) may or may not be present to any degree.

I disagree with the trend lately to put "Counter-Insurgency" on a sliding scale of a spectrum of conflict between Major Combat and Peace Support. First, it comes off as putting every sort of irregular conflict or small war into the catagory of insurgency; those two terms are not the same.

Second, counter-insurgency is a response by a government against the whole spectrum of challenges posed by an insurgent movement. By framing what may be simply counter-guerrilla operations as "COIN", regardless of the context, we seem to create rabbit holes for military forces to go down, frittering forces and effort away on things like development, tracking economic trends or acting as a local employment center.

[Bill Moore]

In general I agree with Bob's flag pole test, but the situations in both Afghanistan and Iraq were different. It didn't really matter if we for purposes of show raised Iraq's or Afghanistan's national above ours, during the early years we were an occuppying power and the resistance was largely directed against us, so during that transition period we were in fact doing something that was similiar to COIN, since we were the government that was directly being attacked. Most seem to agree that our approach to both of these cases was deeply flawed, so hopefully these are abberations or outliers.

However, the same situation did apply in Germany and would have applied in Japan if there was resistance to our occupation. I agree it is not COIN, and COIN doctrine is inappropriate for these situations (would add our COIN doctrine for the most part is inappropriate for COIN), and we need an occupation doctrine. Once we transition effectively to a new national government the nature of the mission changes, but we tried to transition too quick (once again political correctness influenced policy in a way that did more harm than good) and the results are quite visible, so draw your own conclusions. Haste makes waste.

[Compost]

Quote from Wikipedia.

Foreign internal defense (FID) is a term used by a number of Western militaries, including the United States, France and the United Kingdom, to describe an approach to combating actual or threatened insurgency in a foreign state called the Host Nation (HN). The term counter-insurgency is more commonly used worldwide than FID. FID involves military deployment of counter-insurgency specialists. According to the US doctrinal manual, Joint Publication 3-07.1: Foreign Internal Defense (FID), those specialists preferably do not themselves fight the insurgents. [ref] Doctrine calls for a close working relationship between the HN government and military with outside military, diplomatic, economic, and other specialists. The most successful FID actions prevent actual violence, although that is rarely possible. When combat is needed, it is best done by HN personnel with appropriate external support, the external support preferably being in a noncombat support and training role alone. [ref]

[ref] US DoD (2004-04-30). Joint Publication 3-07.1: Foreign Internal Defense (FID)

An out-of-country flag tied to FID is a better site. But FID is oriented to a client nation or regime, and is still overshadowed by the lumpen edifice of COIN.

Both the US FM 3-07.3: Peace Operations and British JWP 3-50: The Military Contribution to Peace Support Operations seem devoted to peace keeping. Neither they nor the other generally available manuals are suitable for expansion into something preferable to COIN and FID. My vote was and is for ‘peace-making operations’ because that is pro-active and usefully includes a cordial objective. But it is also generic and implies bureaucratic development of a large quantity of rigorously specified doctrine.

It would be interesting to see more general discussion on the development and dissemination of a yet-to-be named doctrine for (deep breath) military activities to defeat or otherwise overcome irregular interests employing armed force in out-of-country regions. Especially interesting would be the situations and boundaries needed to hold that doctrine within manageable bounds.

[Bob's World]

This is an important point, so I will elaborate a bit.

First, Compost, I absolutely am not suggesting that we need to go fly our flag over the capitals of other countries in order to allow us to implement our outdated COIN doctrine; what I am saying is that unless we actually intend to make some foreign land our own, it is NEVER appropriate to execute COIN overseas. COIN is a domestic operation, it is the actions of government day in and day out to stay in synch with the will of their nation's populace. COIN is also the in extremes actions of a government when it has failed to stay in synch and must act out violently, often even in war-like manner and employ the nation's military against the insurgent elements of the nation's populace to re-stabilize the situation sufficiently to allow government to make the long overdue adjustments that led the nation to that troubled place.

What Bill describes is the rationalization process we applied. Yes, we took out the legitimate governments of Iraq and Afghanistan in the pursuit of solutions that we believed would better meet our own national interests. We determined that the defense of our own sovereignty was so hard pressed that it demanded and justified such extreme breaches of the sovereignty of others. Will history judge our assessment to be flawed? Probably, but that is for history to determine and for other threads to debate.

My point is that just because our actions, or the actions of others, have destroyed the government of some foreign land that we occupy it does not make us "the government" of that nation, we are still merely the agents of the government of the nation we came from. Sure, we may find ourselves executing the roles and duties of that nation's government, but that does not make us that nation's government. We act based upon an authority granted by the nation we came from, not one granted from the populace of the nation we are in. WE MUST NEVER FORGET THAT. In saying that we are conducting the domestic mission of COIN rather than the foreign mission of FID we begin down the slippery slope of inappropriate behavior that all such interventions inevitably take.

As a FID force we are always subordinate to the sovereignty of the nation we are in. Sovereignty does not come from some government, but rather it comes from the collective will of the populace and is merely executed by the government as an agent of the populace. This is as true in an absolute monarchy or dictatorship as it is in a liberal democracy (and bloody floors of history are littered with the heads of such leaders who have forgotten where their power truly comes from).

This may seem like a fine point to some, a semantic debate, such as SFA vs FID; etc. It is not semantics, this is fundamental to the essence of the nature of the operation and the context within which it will be designed and implemented. FID constrains the behavior, rights and duties of the intervening actor.

If there is no government there to tell us what those limits are then we need to be disciplined enough to set them for ourselves, and then publish them to the world so that others can quickly point out to us when we have crossed them.

I know it is easier to operate without constraints. I spent four years working the OEF-Philippines mission within such constraints while our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan did whatever the hell the damn well pleased. I have severed in Afghanistan to see firsthand the difference, both in action and effect. This is important, and the presence or absence of some governmental agent to represent the affected populace is not the deciding factor that should guide our actions.