Economics and Irregular Warfare

[Dayuhan]

I see no "Made in USA" label on what I wrote:

Have we the capacity to make it elsewhere?

All this talk about creating, selecting, vetting, developing assumes capacity and will. If the host nation government had that capacity and will there wouldn't be an insurgency in the first place. The reason we're involved in these situations is that the capacity and/or will are not present in the host government... and the harsh reality is that in most cases we can neither fill that gap with our own capabilities (which would require us to govern the territory in question ourselves) or to force or persuade others to fill it.

It is often in the enlightened self-interest of "governments" in failed or failing states - also applicable to the various armed groups that may well be roaming around - to preserve what we (liberal democracies) see as instability and insecurity; and to use what they see as a rational distribution of instability and insecurity to serve their own ends. Credits: Marc Legrange.

One might debate how enlightened this position is, but yes, this is the problem I'm talking about. Complicating the issue is the reality that different units of government (e.g. national vs local) may have very different agenda and priorities, and that individuals within these systems are likely to have agendas and priorities of their own. All of these agendas are likely to be very different from ours, and none of the parties involved may be at all interested in pursuing the sort of capacity building that we're discussing - though they will very likely feign such interest if they think it will get them some of our material support. This is why asking military or civilian forces to assist in "nation-building" in a failed or failing state with the assumption of local capacity is like sending a starving man to sit on a pile of canned goods with instructions to assume a can opener. In a failed or failing state the local capacity is by definition absent. If the capacity was there the state wouldn't be failed or failing.

It is easy to posit a situation (or find one in existence) where the first interest (access to resources) might well be better or more easily secured by support of a "government" that does not support "human development" or "stability".

Conflict over access to resources is actually easier to posit than to find examples of, despite vast amounts of rhetoric to the contrary. In today's world you don't need to control territory to gain access to resources; in fact physical control is often as much obstacle as advantage in resource access. If resources are the issue it's usually easier to cut a deal with whoever has the territory and simply buy the stuff... or, as base resources are generally fungible, to let the Chinese take the risks and buy our own stuff from somewhere else.

In our current situation access to resources is less likely to be the motivation for intervention than a perceived need to deny territory or support to hostile forces.

Once Politik decides to intervene, the civilian and military subordinates of Politik don't have the luxury of reversing the decision, but must try to make the best of what may be a bad situation.

This is all too true, and ultimately the key to managing these situations lies with more realistic decision making at the political level. This of course is small consolation to those in the field, but I don't know if it will help them any more to lay out a program based on assumed capacities that in most cases will not actually exist.