New Guidance on Counter-Insurgency

[Bob's World]

The very fact an insurgency exists, shows that the insurgent was very happy to resort to violence. Before the insurgency occurs, violence should indeed be a last resort.

I think if you can get an insurgent to give up or change sides, you should. Point being he is only likely to do that, once you have subjected him to some harm or threat.

My real concern being that POP-COIN is either very poorly explained, or actually suffers from profound failure to understand the nature or irregular warfare, - as I think my answer to your questions would seem to indicate.

The central tenet of POP-COIN is "protecting the population." My reasoning, based on history, is that if you defeat the insurgency (kill, capture, coerce) then you fulfil your aim, axiomatically. My reasoning also being that I want to protect the Government, because the Government, not the Population make the Policies, we wish to benefit from - Clausewitz!
POP-COIN is essentially a poor reasoning of END-WAYS-MEANS.
POP-COIN reasons that killing the enemy means killing the population - which is essentially assuming folks are stupid and changing the means to account for it.

Focusing on crushing the insurgent has never done more than create, in effect, a "cease fire" until such time as the populace can generate whatever part of the equation (leaders, ideology, fighters, resources) you have taken out. History is rife with examples of locations where there have been COIN "victory" after "victory." If it keeps coming back, you never resolved anything.

This is the problem with the Colonial mentality. It rationalizes that the outside presence is proper, and that governments supported by that outside presence are therefore proper as well. Most populaces disagree, though most will also tend to put up with it as well. As Thomas Jefferson said:

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."

In today's information environment it provides more advantages to the insurgent than it does to the government. Tactics like those practiced successfully in Malaysia would be far less likely to succeed today. One Dinosaur of the new info age is the "Friendly Dictator." No longer can a Colonial power (or a pseudo-"I'm not really a colonial power, I'm the U.S.") strike a deal with some Dictator that is mutually beneficial for those parties, but that rides on the back of the Dictator's populace, for one simple reason: Other than perhaps N. Korea, there is nowhere on earth where the populace, and the information available to the populace, can be fully controlled.

Now, I am not a big fan of the CNAS-promoted form of COIN that is based in tackling "effectiveness" of government and controlling populaces. What Kilcullen calls "Population-Centric" COIN.

I am, however, a fan of my own theory which is based in tackling "poorness" of governance (targeted on the specific issues by region/community that are at the core of causation; while also targeting the aspects of the governance that deny those same populaces the ability to address these issues through legitimate means) and supporting the populace (governments come and go, as do threats. The populace is what endures. Ultimately, all governments are expendable, and threats transient. Focus on what's really important). What I call "Populace-Centric" COIN.

WILF is pretty savvy on conventional warfare, both between states and with irregular forces as well; but my opinion, in his refusal to recognize that warfare within a state is unique and must be handled differently than by the rules derived from Napoleonic warfare; is dangerously off track when discussing insurgency.

The Brits lost an empire "winning" insurgencies using the mindset WILF promotes. The U.S. will suffer a similar fate if we apply the same. Good news for the Brits was that they had little brother to pass the torch to. The US might want to ponder just who picks up the torch when we are forced to drop it as well...