Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
The first being that the outside party is never actually conducting COIN themselves, that COIN and Insurgency are internal business, and much more a family dispute over governance than they are warfare, regardless of how violent that squabble may become (you can't truely hate someone you don't love, so family squabbles can be the worst kind).

So as an insurgent emerges from the populace to compete with the current government for the support of the same, it very much is a tug of war, with the support of the populace being the ultimate prize, and also the COG. A shared COG to be competed for, rather than respective friendly and enemy COGs to be either defeated or defended ala CvC. This is why I say that insurgency really isn't warfare regardless of how violent, and that to apply rules/principles of warfare rather than understanding and addressing root causes and employing that understanding in ones competition for the support of the populace is likely to lead to a tragic, hard to reach, and temporary in duration, solution.

As an outside party to such a competition, one is either trying to gain inroads with a land and people to serve your own national (or if a non-state actor like AQ, organizational) interests, you are conducting what US doctrine describes as "unconventional warfare." If, on the other hand, you already have a stake in this land/populace through the current government, you are likely to come in on their side in an attempt to sustain that status quo. In US doctrine we call this 'foreign internal defense'. To assume that you as the outsider are conducting COIN is the fastest way to get yourself into all kinds of inappropriate roles and develop no end to crazy mission creep. Just not a good idea, and yet, according to our NEW COIN doctirne, that is what we are doing. Bad bit of doctrine, IMHO.

So, while CvC is good knowledge (Scientia) to have, I always believe that understanding (Intelectus) trumps knowledge on just about everything except a standardized test. This is no standardized test.
There are parts here I agree with and parts I don’t agree with. To start with the last first, I don’t think that Clausewitz would ever assert that reading his book gives an understanding of any conflict. However, I think it does provide a good lens through which to view that conflict and help gain understanding. Not everything in On War is still directly relevant. However, I think that enough is too still prompt useful discussion, analysis, and synthesis. I’ll just admit that each time I re-read parts of On War, I come away with new considerations on how it a specific conflict may be working out and what its character may be. (And to Slapout’s previous point about On War not being complete, part of Sumida’s argument in Decoding Clausewitz is that we have misread the order and dates of the various notes he left and that it was, in fact, a nearly complete and whole work. And just to be clear, I like a lot of what Sumida has written, but I’m not as convinced as he is that he has THE definitive interpretation. For anyone interested, I’d recommend Peter Paret’s biographical Clausewitz and the State—and you will be surprised how much of his life and thought was caught up in “irregular” conflict).

More to the point of the above comments on the difference between COIN as an internal struggle and the different “chemistry” when it involves outsiders—such as us in Afghanistan—I think that is a critical difference. Thinking back on my Clausewitz, we mostly think of Insurgents as being on the strategic offensive because the government represents the “status quo.” I would offer that when outsiders are involved the insurgents are on the strategic defensive. They have a negative aim. They do not have provide positive rule or economic benefits. They do not need to defeat or destroy the government or our security forces in the field. They just need to deny us enough success so that we go home. They will not be ultimately successful in replacing the existing government until the external forces are gone. The insurgency meets Clausewitz’s definition for a defense—it is using time in order to position itself for a counterstroke. In effect, the insurgency has a negative aim. They don’t have to “play to win” like the government and its allies—they just need to play to “not lose.”

This gets to successful insurgent endgame. I’d submit that most successful insurgencies end with the insurgent forces acting very much like the security forces they are facing—taking them on openly in the field, or else the threat and exhaustion results in security forces either melting away or changing sides enmasse. This is in some sense a validation of Mao’s progression of stages. For an insurgency to become what it was fighting against, the legitimate governing authority, then it will start to take on those attributes (and those vulnerabilities?).

Looking to Afghanistan specifically, I’d say that the approaches we are seeing that recommend basing our strategy on local initiatives and tribes (One Tribe at a Time, etc.), are a form of fighting an insurgency with an insurgency. While this is attractive, in effect, we would also not be struggling to defeat the Insurgent, but just to provide a rival insurgent force that would never allow them to win. I think that the tribal approaches will just result in a steady state of chaos. If we remove our security umbrella from such a solution—a patchwork of loosely held together areas—then they will be vulnerable to being picked off, one by one, in fairly conventional manner (which is how I believe the Taliban came to power in the first place). Thus while I think the “bottom up”, or tribal, or federal, approach is also an endstate that will require us to maintain a security guarantee for a long while.

Phil Ridderhof USMC