Porch shines a torch on COIN

[Fuchs]

Judging by Bill Moore's post, this professor is totally in synch with me.

I've been writing about the stupidity of small wars, the neglect of conventional military capability (attention-wise, not necessarily budget-wise) and the risk that population control methods devised to control some foreign people may be used at home.


The forces drawing attention to the current affairs - small wars, stupid anti-piracy patrolling et cetera - are overwhelming, though.

[Madhu]

SWJ interviewed Dr Porch:

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art...-douglas-porch

The interview also mentions a paper by Geoff Demarest that I found very interesting (these have all been discussed around here before, just a reminder).

To clarify, when I said "force mattered" above, I meant that the populations were often brutalized according to other sources than proponents of imperial small wars.

Link to Demarest paper:

http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/Military...8310001-MD.xml

[Madhu]

....and the risk that population control methods devised to control some foreign people may be used at home.

Like snooping on home populations in large broad brush swoops? Creepy, all of it.

[Bill Moore]

A lot of the antibodies against COIN and our incredibly lame COIN doctrine is due to the illogic of those who promoted it, which was little more than a thin guise for promoting themselves. People are starting to realize that

"You can't shoot your way to victory, " "you have to win over the population," "we have to build their economy and build schools" are little more than empty rhetoric. Worse it is rhetoric not tied to any strategic end, and lieu of a strategy we confuse our COIN doctrine and its social engineering tactics as strategy. Thus the debate over pursuing a COIN or CT strategy is idiotic since neither are anymore than an assortment of tactics. Finally a paper that puts it all in strategic perspective by Colin Gray. It is only 16 pages, I highly recommend reading it.

http://www.ndu.edu/press/lib/pdf/pri...17-32_gray.pdf

Concept Failure?
COIN, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Theory

COIN is neither a concept nor can it be a strategy. Instead, it is simply an acronymic descriptor of a basket of diverse activities intended to counter an insurgency.

COIN debate would benefit if the debaters took a refresher course in the basics of strategy. Many fallacies and inadequate arguments about COIN in Afghanistan, for instance, are avoidable if their proponents were willing to seek and were able to receive help from theory.

There are no such historical phenomena as guerrilla wars. To define a war according to a tactical style is about as foolish as definition according to weaponry.

(he listed using tank warfare as an example)

Counterinsurgency is not a subject that has integrity in and of itself. Because war is a political, and only instrumentally a military, phenomenon, we must be careful lest we ambush ourselves by a conceptual confusion
that inflates COIN to the status of an idea and activity that purportedly has standalone, context-free merit.

To be blunt, the most effective strategy to counter an insurgency may be one that makes little use of COIN tactics. It will depend upon the circumstance (context).

Such winning can be understood to mean that the victorious side largely dictates the terms that it prefers for an armistice and then a peace settlement, and is in a position to police and enforce a postwar order that in the main reflects its values and choices. History tells us that it can be as hard, if not harder, to make peace than it is to make war successfully.

Population-centric COIN will not succeed if the politics are weak, but neither is it likely to succeed if the insurgents can retreat to repair, rally, and recover in a cross-border sanctuary.

The principal and driving issues for the United States with respect to counterinsurgency are when to do it and when not, and how to attempt to do it strategically. Policy and strategy choices are literally critical and determinative.

IMO this turns the lame argument that COIN is the way of the future, insurgencies have always been present and likely will continue to be for the next few decades, but that hardly means it is in our interest to get engaged anymore than it is to conduct state on state warfare.

Tactical errors or setbacks enforced by a clever enemy should be corrected or offset tactically and need not menace the integrity of policy and strategy. COIN may not be rocket science or quantum theory, but no one has ever argued that it is easy.

If success in COIN requires prior, or at least temporally parallel, success in nationbuilding, it is foredoomed to failure. Nations cannot be built. Most especially they cannot be built by well-meaning but culturally arrogant
foreign social scientists, no matter how well intentioned and methodologically sophisticated. A nation (or community) is best defined
as a people who think of themselves as one. Nations build themselves by and through historical experience. Cultural understanding is always useful and its absence can be a lethal weakness, but some lack of comprehension is
usual in war.

The issue is not whether Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else either needs to be, or should be “improved.” Instead, the issue is whether or not the job is feasible. Even if it would be well worth doing, if it is mission impossible or highly improbable at sustainable cost to us, then it ought not to be attempted. This is Strategy 101.

[Dayuhan]

Finally a paper that puts it all in strategic perspective by Colin Gray. It is only 16 pages, I highly recommend reading it.

I second that recommendation.

That article really deserves a discussion thread of its own, and could serve as an example to many who write on these subjects. The argument and supporting reasoning are impressive, and it is truly refreshing to see someone match intellectual rigor with a presentation that is clear, precise, and completely devoid of the dense and convoluted jargon that has become so fashionable in so many quarters.

Well spotted.

[carl]

Worse it is rhetoric not tied to any strategic end, and lieu of a strategy we confuse our COIN doctrine and its social engineering tactics as strategy.

I haven't read the paper yet but will. In the meantime, people always talk about strategy, but I don't know what they mean in the sense of doing. What, in your view, is a strategy that should be applied to South Asia? What should we do or have done and how? That is a big question but I am not looking for a big answer. But I am sincerely at a loss about actual actions when people talk about strategy.

[Bill Moore]

I haven't read the paper yet but will. In the meantime, people always talk about strategy, but I don't know what they mean in the sense of doing. What, in your view, is a strategy that should be applied to South Asia? What should we do or have done and how? That is a big question but I am not looking for a big answer. But I am sincerely at a loss about actual actions when people talk about strategy.

Carl,

Getting to this kind of late, so initial response will be short, but I think Colin Gray captured why our efforts are floundering and it because our senior leadership is too focused on an array of tactical activities that we collectively call COIN focused on winning over the population, but that approach is not moving us towards our strategic ends. In fact our current approach IMO is undermining our effort to achieve our ends. This is what happens when we confuse the tactics of countering an insurgency with our strategy aims. What were/are our strategic aims in Afghanistan and the region (since you pointed out S. Asia)? Those would be the ends. How did/do we intend to accomplish them? The ways. What were/are the resources we will employ to achieve the ends? The means. If we agree that strategy consists of the ends, ways, and means we can start here.

The principal and driving issues for the United States with respect to counterinsurgency are when to do it and when not, and how to attempt to do it strategically. Policy and strategy choices are literally critical and determinative.

The above quote is critical to my overall argument. If we pursue unrealistic ends, and/or pursue our ends via a strategy that either won't work, or achieve our ends at an acceptable cost (many factors to consider such as time, money, casualties, and other less tangibles), then we already reached strategic failure (despite our tactical successes), but unfortunately it may take us many years to realize it, and by that time there is a lot of blood and money under the bridge. I'm not making this claim from a position I told you so, like many others I didn't see the mess in Afghanistan coming, but I am critical of two aspects. One we didn't change course when we realized (or should have realized) we got it wrong, and perhaps worse the lessons that the Army is drawing from the past 10 years of fighting is we need more Cow Bell (I think you get my point). This gets at Dayuhan's comment,

Not that the US military is perfect, but I actually have considerable confidence in their ability to get a job done, provided that the goal is clearly defined and suitable for accomplishment by a military force. If those conditions are absent, we don't need to change the military, we need a better set of goals and we need to choose the right tool for accomplishing the goals.

In most cases the military is doing superbly at the tactical level, especially SOF. One thing we learned way to slowly that hurt us was not to act like a jerk. It is true that turning the population against us through brutality or rudeness will hurt us at both the strategic and tactical levels (I'm surprised it took us a few years to really learn that, even in some elements of SOF), but it also true in my opinion that simply winning over the population will not achieve our goals which I expand upon below a little. So despite my sometimes excessive criticism of our COIN doctrine, at the tactical level there are many things in it that are valuable that I hope we don't lose, but of course tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat (hopefully that comes across as balanced, I criticize harshly because the COINdista mentality that pervades our force needs some provocative comments to actually get them to think independently and not recite doctrine line by line and confuse it with strategy).

Denying safe haven in Afghanistan was one of the stated ends (I believe our primary end after the initial combat operations to kill the core of AQ), and our proposed strategic approach for achieving that was installing a centralized and democratic government, and getting the population to support it. That approach may reform a country, but in itself wouldn't deny safe haven, but we ignored that fact. We also ignored the fact we can't transform a country like Afghanistan at an acceptable cost. I don't know we decided to do this based on neocon hubris (the end of history outlook), perception that it was an inherent responsibility (you break it you fix it), but we clearly didn't understand the culture and history which would have indicated this approach wouldn't work without a significant investment in resources and implementing severe population control measures that we can't do by law and custom. This policy end (transforming the nation) and our strategic approach to do so was probably fatal to our ability to achieve our policy end of denying safe haven. It required building a nation from a state composed of tribes with a long history of intertribal warfare. In recent decades the Taliban was the only force that was able to impose some limited degree of stability through tactics we would never employ.

I'm not prepared to argue in detail alternative approaches to achieving our policy end, but will quickly summarize some potential courses of action (that surely are not less realistic than the ones we're pursuing now). In all courses of action I think we started off right with SOF and air power to conduct aggressive combat operations against AQ and their friends (but leaving the door open for their friends to become our friends). Continue pressure on the Taliban/ruling party, and negotiate a settlement with them from a position of power under the table so they can save face and all sides can declare victory except AQ. They agree to deny AQ safe haven in turn for the U.S. not interfering with them. It may be unpleasant to allow these thugs back in power (assuming they regained control, we could have continued covert support to the Northern Alliance), but we live in a tough world.

Another option is no deal, we hit AQ and their friends hard, to include pursuing AQ into Pakistan while we had the global political support to do so shortly after 9/11. That would be a punitive raiding expedition for a couple of months, and then we leave with the promise of returning (based on our recent action we demonstrated we have the means to execute our will, so it wouldn't be hollow threat) if AQ returns. We turn it over to whoever and let them work it out (yes it will be bloody, but not unlike our 10 plus years in country, or the 10 years prior to our raiding expedition). We have every right to conduct a punitive expedition, it didn't need to turn into a humanitarian one. I suspect there are multiple other options that could have been explored related to options with Pakistan, India, Iran and even China at the beginning based on realpolitik opportunities for all concerned that would have got to denying safe haven much more effectively than we have done.

Instead we decided we wanted to install a democratic and central government (which is actually undemocratic in Afghanistan). Not surprisingly the government is opposed by different insurgent groups and our presence is opposed by resistance groups. Our misdiagnosis of the situation led us to naively assume that if we win over the population with economic incentives that insurgents will be defeated and peace will fall upon us and AQ will be denied a safe haven because people have jobs and the kiddies are going to school. Of course the Afghans aren't fighting for our vision of Pleasantville, but for wide range of deep seated hatreds between groups we just can't seem to apprehend. We spent billions trying this approach, and after it failed we assumed we still had the right strategic approach to achieve our end, and decided we needed more cowbell so we surged and spent billions more. Now it seems our leadership realized our current approach failed, but unfortunately the answer isn't adjusting our strategy, but simply leaving. Apparently we never seriously considered actually changing our strategy because we confused our COIN doctrine with the strategy and failed to realize it was the wrong doctrine for this conflict to achieve our end, but we were blinded by the hype that many authors made a good living promoting. This is where the danger of confusing tactics with strategy becomes readily apparent.

The issue is not whether Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else either needs to be, or should be “improved.” Instead, the issue is whether or not the job is feasible. Even if it would be well worth doing, if it is mission impossible or highly improbable at sustainable cost to us, then it ought not to be attempted. This is Strategy 101.

Population-centric COIN will not succeed if the politics are weak, but neither is it likely to succeed if the insurgents can retreat to repair, rally, and recover in a cross-border sanctuary.

[Bill Moore]

Seriously, if our goal was to deny safe haven, and stabilize Pakistan (a related regional goal) because they're a nuclear weapons state, our ways and means certainly worked contrary to our ends. Killing AQ's core was/is certainly in our interest and should have been pursued even more aggressively. Instead we were distracted by COINdista platitudes that were completely disconnected from our strategic ends. Somewhere along the line the platitudes became the ways even if they were disconnected from our ends. We quit learning/adapting somewhere along the way, and now we have a non-coherent arrangement of tactical efforts working towards no collective end. In some cases our PRTs become the supported effort which gave the insurgents, terrorists, and criminals a great opportunity to make money and freedom of movement, because we forgot we still had to fight. Instead we confused an illogical platitude "we can't shoot our way to victory" with focus on the population, when it should mean that war is more than warfare.

A lack of coherent strategy equated to a VSO program that undermines the our effort to develop a viable central state. A corrupt central state that undermines our efforts to win over the population, and neither have much to do with denying AQ safe haven long term. Our massive nation building efforts floods money into both Pakistan and Afghanistan. That money reinforces corrupt politicians which undermines the nation building, which is irrelevant to begin with. However, that money is diverted to our adversaries empowering them to continue fighting why we are trying to win over the population. Finally we announce our desire to reach a political settlement from a position of weakness, because we announced we're finished and pulling out. We should have had the political settlement as our end to begin with a strategy to get to it. Not strive for it after we are tired. The list goes on and on. It all comes down to having disjointed ends, ways, and means. If we spent more time on developing realistic ends and viable ways (a realistic strategic approach to those ends) we would probably be in a different place now. Our military adapts quickly to the tactical situation if you remove the micromanagers. If those micromanaging were more focused on strategy than tactics maybe we would be somewhere else today?

Coming from a Special Forces background I know this sounds self-serving, but there were a number of options for SOF and especially SF, the intelligence community, and law enforcement to maintain steady pressure on AQ at an acceptable cost, well below the stage lights, that would have ultimately been more effective. You can counter hindsight is 20/20, but we should use that hindsight to help shape future decisions. We need our General Purpose Forces to be combat ready for whatever threat emerges on the scene, and quit confusing our fixation with irregular warfare as we it now as the way of the future. The world is trending towards to some state on state conflicts, transforming our Army into a giant PRT will not ensure our security

Such winning can be understood to mean that the victorious side largely dictates the terms that it prefers for an armistice and then a peace settlement, and is in a position to police and enforce a postwar order that in the main reflects its values and choices. History tells us that it can be as hard, if not harder, to make peace than it is to make war successfully.