Stateside COIN Academy

[MikeF]

MikeF,

I have two reservations about the teaching as you've described; it is centred around your American experience and outlook. History has a nasty habit of placing you - soldiers - in unexpected places, whilst there are common features in COIN, there are also differences.

Agreed. I look at all the "I's" that I typed in the last post, and it disturbs me, but in that time period, working in tribal village areas, I represented my company.

As a cadet studying economics, Major John Nagl was the wicked smart Rhodes Scholar working on important stuff that I looked up to. Maybe he got part of his studies wrong.

v/r

Mike

[Ken White]

As a cadet studying economics, Major John Nagl was the wicked smart Rhodes Scholar working on important stuff that I looked up to. Maybe he got part of his studies wrong.

Indeed. All things are possible...

You have experience he does not. Don't sweat the small stuff, keep on pushing.

As a smart old general once told me, "If you don't blow your own horn every now and then, People will start thinking it's funnel."

[MikeF]

Indeed. All things are possible...

You have experience he does not. Don't sweat the small stuff, keep on pushing.

As a smart old general once told me, "If you don't blow your own horn every now and then, People will start thinking it's funnel."

I know Ken, and I know that you'll jump in when I'm off base.

At our Superbowl party tonight, I showed some of my boys what I'm doing, and they just laughed.

"Sir, no one's going to believe it. No one will every understand it. Yes, please come teach our boys on how to do business."

I made them do push-ups. They made me do shots.

Life was good .

Final thoughts before I sleep. 40 beers accumalated around my sink. I looked around the room and the boys that I know. I counted up the years that they had served in Bosnia, Iraq, and A'stan. The number far exceeded the beers around my sink. I;ve written and published before. Initially, I wrote trying to understand my own experiences. I wrote for me. Now, as I gazed at the beers and my friends with tours upon tours upon tours, I'm starting to believe that future writings and instruction will actually teach and help others. Now, I'm that major that cadets look up to.

[MikeF]

So, that's the first third of the class- if you're going to use a hammer, here's the appropriate way to use it. I'm trying to decide if I should just use the case study of Zaganiyah or extend it out and include others. We'll see.

Ultimately, that answer can best be described as a post-colonial pseudo-occupation. We've used the American regular army to take back areas that the host-nation couldn't govern (Bob's World is upset). We crushed the enemy (Wilf is happy). Now, we're stuck being in charge. It sucks. As displaced families start coming back into the village or neighborhood, we have to determine land rights and property ownership. Teachers are coming to us asking for funds, books, pens, and paper to start school. Doctors are asking for Class VIII materials to reopen the clinics. Mohammed and Ahmed come to try to settle a dispute over some cow that got run over by a car. Sheik Septar, who used to roll with al Qaeda, is now an American "friend," and he's now coming by everyday to ask for compensation for the house we destroyed that was used to make VBIEDs. Everyone wants something.

So, what do you do now? You're stuck governing, and you realize that dismantling the insurgency was the easy part. Higher command is very happy with your efforts because the metrics look good. Attacks have gone down from 12 a day to one every five days. That looks good on a powerpoint slide while drinking Green Beans I guess. Generals fly in to observe your success. Reporters come by to hang out with the real "Spartans" living out in patrol bases. Command wants you to move on to clear the next village. They want you to make storyboards capturing TTPs and "lessons learned" to send across the force.

Back in the real world, back in the village, the insurgency has just moved back into a Phase One/Zero. They've gone underground, and they are carefully planning a counter-attack. The underlying tensions between the tribes and families and sects that allowed the initial problems are still simmering. As some of the Shias come back, fights break out and ten people are killed.

So what do you do now? That's the second part of this course. You've moved from the role of the counter-insurgent to the arbitrator. Here's what we did...

1. Delegation/Decentralization. No man is an island. A commander can't do this part on his own unless he is a natural dictator. My platoon leaders became the village elders. My platoon sergeants took different jobs: 1st platoon became the Police Chief. 2nd platoon remained focused on recon operations at night to keep the roads safe. 3rd platoon became the City Manager/Planner working schools and medical stuff. My mortar platoon sergeant became the Mayor of Zaganiyah. Every night we'd have a huddle and talk things out.

2. Partnering with the Iraqi Army. The first IA unit was part of the problem. They were commiting war crimes against the Sunnis. So, we placed the commander in jail and sent that unit down to Baqubah. Major Aziz and his boys showed up. Three weeks into it, Major Aziz and I realized that we fought against each other in Nassiriyah on the first night of the war. He was an infantry commander defending Talil Airfield. I was a tank platoon leader. After we found this common ground, we became best friends. Within 120 days, his unit to over full responsibility for Zaganiyah. We moved into an advisor role. Major Aziz just walked in one day and said, "Mike, this is my country. This is my fight. You're boys stay here, and I'm taking charge."

3. Conflict Resolution. Sheik Aziz showed up one day. He was a Baghdad lawyer working under the Ayatollah Sistani's movement out of Najaf. We drank some tea and smoked some cigarettes. We discussed the issues in my village, and he smiled. "Mike, it's not your village. These are Iraqi problems and only Iraqis can solve them." He started a movement of reconciliation and rebuilding. He began leading a series of negotiations to help the people

So, that's a portion of the second part. The final part is the most important. It describes my journey since I last left Iraq trying to understand it all and look for better ways to do business and other tools besides the hammer. For this part, I had to study under men that worked in the Phillipines, El Salvador, and Colombia, a woman who tried to establish governance in Afghanistan for the UN in the late 1990s. I had to work on a gang problem in Salinas. I read about this guy that builds girl schools, some dude who is the banker for the poor, and a quiet professional that works one village at a time. More to Follow...

Mike

[marct]

Mike,

You should look at some of the CORDS stuff for this and, if you really want to go back a ways, some of the Roman stuff. In keeping with calling it "post-colonial", you could also call it "pseudo-indirect rule".

[Steve Blair]

You could also look at the Indian Wars for some examples of power transition and the tension that arises when military and civilian organizations both try to do the same thing. It can also be very instructive regarding what happens when both organizations get the initial read wrong or when they fail to understand the basic nature of the culture they're working with. There was a great deal of tension between the Army and the Indian Bureau during the entire period, with the Army convinced that only they had the experience to administer the reservations while the civilian agency was convinced that the Army officers were amateurs or too disposed to violent solutions to the problem. And of course there were the corrupt and venal on both sides who just stirred the waters.

And with Nagl, the more I re-read his stuff, the more I'm convinced that his real focus was the way the Army deals with and learns (or doesn't learn) lessons and not so much the insurgencies themselves. It's a good example of how folks with agendas can grab onto a book and twist it to suit their own needs (and I'm thinking of people on both sides of the COIN issue).

[Ken White]

...his real focus was the way the Army deals with and learns (or doesn't learn) lessons and not so much the insurgencies themselves. It's a good example of how folks with agendas can grab onto a book and twist it to suit their own needs (and I'm thinking of people on both sides of the COIN issue).

Regrettably, people will do that...