Civilian Casualties, Religion, and COIN Operations

[rborum]

So Randy here is my question. You have heard all the theories are they right wrong? What would you change about them?

slapout9 - There are many SWC folks who have thought about these problems much longer and much better, I'm sure, than I have. It is a privilege to learn from them and I appreciate the gracious engagement.

I began here with two questions - most of our discussion has focused on/around the first: To what extent - and why - do civilian casualties matter in COIN/IW operations? (Is this different when the counterinsurgent is a third-party? Different than in conventional wars?)

I posed the question - which I do understand has been the topic of prior threads and discussion - because I was a bit puzzled and struggling to understand why some analysts seemed to be pushing back against McChrystal's ROE shift to make protecting the population (and minimizing civilian casualties), not increasing militant body count to be the mission's prime directive and metric of success.

Ralph Peters is not the only one to bitch-slap US COIN doctrine and strategy as being too soft and "effete," and its military leaders as being hand-wringers, driven by political correctness. It is a recurringly strident voice, but I can't get a good read on whether it is coming from a very small but shrill fringe minority, or whether this is significant, substantive debate.

My opinion probably has little merit or value, but I'll offer it (in a sprit of great diffidence) since you asked.

1. I generally agree with GEN McChrystal's recent imperatives for success in Afghanistan, and I specifically believe that intelligence-driven kinetic selectivity and concerted efforts to minimize civilian casualties (particularly by a third-party counterinsurgent) should be primary, rather than tertiary, considerations, that serve our longer-term strategic and operational interests in a COIN campaign.

2. Insurgencies are wars. They are different, to be sure, from conventional military battles, but they are wars nonetheless. Insurgent forces kill people, often brutally, and force is often necessary to extinguish their brutality. But targeting and kinetic force deployment should be parts of a strategy, just as information gathering and engendering population security should be part of a strategy.

3. COIN objectives are multidimensional and dynamic. In any operational environment we need to be simultaneously thinking about both adversary and population - The focus is a continuous variable, not a dichotomous one. The nature, degree and scope of that focus is fluid, changing over time, and it both affects and is affected by our intervention. That is, what we do (and where we focus) now, will affect what we do (and where we focus) a month from now. And how we handle adversary/militant engagement will affect the population, just as the way we engage the population will affect the adversary/militants.

4. In the current era of "effects-based operations," we should be explicitly anticipating, measuring, and weighing the moral (in the Clausewitizian sense) costs and benefits of our kinetic strategies and collateral/civilian casualties as part of operational planning.

5. We should better understand the impact of civilian casualties on mission objectives and population perceptions to guide our strategic planning, not just to assume causality. For example, it may be that the negative effects (declining population support for ISAF), arise primarily from how the attacks are portrayed (the "narrative"), rather than whether and how often they occur and to whom they are directed. Whether a particular tactic or kinetic operation does or does not provoke antipathy toward the counterinsurgent might be productively viewed as "effects-based" questions, and we might do well to understand them. The fog of war may be inevitable, but that should not mean that we do not seek clarity.

Or not......