Deterrence of Irregular Threats

[Bob's World]

So basically to understand a certain argument, you will just have to believe that the earth is flat, or that gravity pushes, not pulls?

While I understand the spirit of enquiry and open minded thinking you are trying to impart, I have to say that does not translate well into discussion based on empirical evidence. I am immensely curious about the way you think, because I disagree with a lot of your basic assumptions.

EG: Bob's World teaches that insurgencies are caused by bad governments. I do not believe that to be true, because no government is perfect. What degree of imperfection causes an insurgency? Plus very many very bad Governments are very secure.

Giving up what people actually know to be true, or have evidence to support, is how you get faith based arguments like EBO, MW and 4GW. To understand them, you just have to "free your ass" from the facts.

Ok, you have my position close, but not quite, and this is definitely an area where small nuances are incredibly important.

I do believe that "Insurgency happens when Government Fails," but that is a bumper sticker intended to state a general case and gain the attention of the majority of "new to insurgency" individuals and let them know that if they are focused on defeating the insurgent they are looking in the wrong direction.

Now, I do not say though that this is cause by "bad" or "failed" governments; often they are quite well intentioned and effectively functional. Often it is a fairly small segment of the populace that feels that it is experiencing "poor" governance.

So what is "poor" governance? It can be anything really, and it may only be a strongly believed perception and not actually true. Almost always it is considered to be quite irrational to the counterinsurgent. Usually it is something that falls in the "respect" tier of Maslow's hierarchy. (Too many focus on the lower tier issues of hunger, shelter, security, etc. These do influence the masses to join, but the movement itself is typically about ones mind and not their stomach). But "PG" is a two-part equation. The first part is this condition. The second part is the widely held perception that there is no means in legitimate channels to address the condition. So to target PG one must:
1. Believe that it is important to address PG to resolve the Insurgency,
2. Conduct polling to gain a sense of what the PG issues really are from the perspective of those who either participate in or support the movement,
3. Develop a program of engagement to address the PG issue,
4. Develop a companion program of engagement to address the exclusion (real or perceived) of the disenfranchised group from legitimate resolution channels.
5. Provide enhanced security measures for the rest of the populace coupled with increased efforts to bring key wrong-doers to justice.
6. Bundle all of this into a cogent narrative that describes what you are doing, why you are doing it, and that also matches what you are actually doing. (The insurgent's message will fall of its own weight if you do this, so focus on your own, not his).

I see this as a universal construct to every insurgency that I have studied. I don't believe that the nature of warfare has changed recently, nor do I believe the nature of insurgency has changed recently either. I do, however, believe that many populaces, primarily in the Middle East, were held static with governments that were more the choosing of others than themselves, and that the end of the Cold War set these populaces into motion to seek change (much as the end of WWII set populaces in South and Southeast Asian into motion) and that the new information tools not only render many time-proven tactics fairly ineffective, they also make the insurgent movement itself much harder to simply extinguish through force of arms as they are less likely to lose hope for success. These same info tools allow AQ, which is essentially a club, to act like a state to conduct UW to incite and fuel these many discrete insurgencies to support common causes in addition to their primary nationalist base causes.

Another area we differ is that I see these dynamics on a continuum (as does Kitson by the way, pg 2-3 of LIC) from a satisfied populace, to one that has a subversive movement, to one that has an insurgent movement. The key being, that the causation is the same for the subversion as it is for the insurgency; and it is far more helpful to deriving and implementing a solution to focus on the causation of the problem rather than to focus on if the organization has resorted to violence or not. To focus on the use of violence leads to confusing a populace acting out due to poor governance with other types of violence. It puts the focus on ending the violence rather than resolving the cause for the violence.

Most counterinsurgencies struggle because the counterinsurgent is unwilling to recognize and admit his own shortcomings, after all, he is in the right. Far easier to focus on the insurgent, who is by definition a criminal.

So the BW approach is rooted in what I believe to be the underlying principles of human dynamics, group dynamics, and governance that I see at work in these types of conflicts. This is very different than the dynamics that lead to conflicts between states.

The dynamics that drive insurgency are the same ones that drive neighborhood and family disputes. They are deeply personal and not about what "side" you are on; because at the end of the day you are on the same side, you just have an issue that is intolerable to some, and those same few don't feel they have a legitimate venue to resolve it.

This is why I say the US Gov't approach to our Civil Rights Movement in the 60s was our most successful COIN effort by far. It never really slid from subversion into full insurgency, but primarily because Dr. King chose peaceful tactics, and because President Johnson was willing to enact and enforce concessions to address the issues of poor governance that gave rise to the movement.