Operationalizing The Jones Model through COG

[Dayuhan]

You cannot reach for a different tool IF you are the hammer! - that's my point. Military force is a set of hammers. You use them on nails.

Wilf, I understand your point here, and in a sense it’s valid. It’s also largely irrelevant. Look at it this way, continuing your analogy.

We send a bunch of hammers out into the field to drive nails. Fortunately these hammers are not completely dense, and they quickly notice that a lot of the nails are in fact screws. They report back to their Government that a lot of these nails are screws, and they need some screwdrivers. The Government’s reply is along the lines of “we haven’t any screwdrivers, do the best you can”.

You’re right, the functions under discussion are not really military functions and it’s not a great idea to be asking a military force to perform them. Unfortunately that is the position we’re in: the functions need to be performed and there’s nobody else available to perform them. So we have a bunch of hammers talking about how best to drive screws. Saying that they’re hammers and they shouldn’t be driving screws is probably accurate, but it isn’t very helpful: there are screws that need to be driven and there aren’t any screwdrivers. Maybe better to lighten up and try to help them work out how to do what needs to be done.

Great observations that play into my own struggle to define area denial. Reading your points brings home the fact that despite all the collections assets we have at our disposal, that harness military manpower, very few of them (at least that I can tell) are focused on identifying the root causes of why knuckleheads do what they do

One place to start might be to question the knucklehead assumption.

Of course some of them may be exactly that: testosterone-addled young men just looking for a fight. In some cultures young men are expected to prove themselves by fighting, and it’s possible that some of them are fighting us just because we’re there, and if we weren’t there they’d be fighting the tribe on the other side of the hill.

There may be other factors involved also. I’ve said this before, but I think failure of government to deliver services or development is overrated as a cause of insurgency, especially in areas where people have very low expectations of government. People are more likely to fight because of anger or fear: either something has been done to them that they didn’t like, or they expect something to be done that they won’t like.

There’s also the foreigner factor. What would happen if some vastly superior power sent an army to our country, removed our government, installed a new one, and told us that it was henceforth our duty to support that government, and if we failed in that duty we would be called “insurgents”? I may be wrong, but I kind of suspect that a few of the people on this forum might be tempted in such circumstances to do a bit of fighting.

In any event, if we want to get people to stop fighting without having to kill them all, figuring out why they are fighting is a reasonable first step, and it’s also worth looking for divergence between the local narrative of resistance and the insurgent ideology.

Recently MG Carter looked his commanders and staff in the eye and told them during a planning meeting for Kandahar: "The key to Hamkari is the creation of representative governance and representative opportunity."

Now, this is very much in line with what is proposed in the Jones Model, and I knew immediately what he was getting at, and more importantly, why it was so critical. To create these two conditions would strike at the heart of the causal perceptions of poor governance in Kandahar Provence.

Afterwords several of the commanders were discusing the meeting. One of them said: "I understand what the General wants, I just don't know what he wants me to do." This drew several nods and grunts of agreement.

This to me underscores one of the real problems we encounter when we identify governance as the core challenge.

At least MG Carter was proposing to create “representative governance and representative opportunity”, which is one step up from trying to take them out of a box. The problem, to put it bluntly, is that we can’t do that. We cannot create representative governance and representative opportunity in Afghanistan, or anywhere else. The Karzai Government can’t create them either. These things aren’t created, or installed. They grow, and they grow through a long process of adaptation and cultivation.

The belief that we can create or install governments for other people is a monument to hubris, and it’s already gotten us into a world of merde. We need to set that one aside forever, and quickly.