Time for a FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency Update

[Dayuhan]

I honestly don't see how this:

What I have always stood for is that we must change ourselves, not work so hard to change others to suit us. When I say the US must change the nature of its relationship with the Saudis I mean we must change our end of it.

can be reconciled with this:

I say make fixing the government the priority, balance that with information operations that admit to past failures of government, agree with and co-opt vast swaths of the insurgent's message, and proclaim hard internal fixes being made to address all of the above.

Please explain: how do those two prescriptions fit together? They seem to be opposites, unless there's something there that I'm not seeing.

As to the relationship between the Saudi government and their own populace, that is a conversation for the President to have with his counterpart in private. But the primary reason he does not have it is because the military has kidnapped COIN as warfare and their domain.

I think the primary reason he doesn't have is that it's none of our business, and if he tries to raise the point he will be told exactly that.

To claim that military can simply declare some aspect of governance as warfare, write a manual about it and thereby convert it to warfare is absurd.

No aspect of governance is a military concern unless it involves warfare. If an aspect of governance has been handed over to the military, it has been declared warfare by the civilian government, and the military has every right to treat it as such.

Stable governments with solid relationships with their populaces are conducting COIN every single day and we don't call that warfare when they are doing it effectively.

You can't do COIN unless there is an insurgency; you can't counter something that isn't there. Certainly insurgency can be prevented or preempted by addressing potential causes before insurgency breaks out, but that is not the role of the military. Certainly it is not wise for the US or any other intervening power to get involved in every insurgency or potential insurgency, but that decision is not up to the military. If an insurgency has reached the point where armed force is required, and if the civilian government has decided to intervene, then yes, warfare is involved. If these conditions do not apply, the military isn't involved anyway. From the military perspective - the perspective from which the manual was written - COIN may be called warfare because the only aspect of COIN, and governance, with which the military should be dealing is the part that involves the use of armed force.

I agree that in any case the military aspect will only be one part of COIN, but the non-military aspect is not and should not be the realm of the military. Our problems with the non-military aspect of COIN is not that the military is excessively focused on the military aspects: that's exactly what they should focus on. Our problem is that we have no equivalent organization with the capacity to address the non-military aspects, which are either ignored or passed off to those who are not trained or equipped to manage them.

The answer to our neglect of governance concerns is not to get the military involved in governance: that's a recipe for disaster. The answer is to let the military do its job, and develop a separate but coordinated capacity for dealing with the governance concerns.