Modernization/Development Theory, CORDS, and FM 3-24?

[Bill Moore]

Posted by Dayuhan,

You can also decide not to get involved. The first and most important step in evaluating any insurgency situation is deciding if and to what extent involvement is appropriate. Starting out with the "COIN" term in mind creates, I think, a predisposition to assume that insurgency needs to be countered. That predisposition seems to me something that we'd do well to remove, and a start might be more emphasis on understanding insurgency and less on methods of counterinsurgency.

Agree, and there are other options also.

Irregular warfare is not the "new" way, but rather a continuation of the most common form of conflict (throughout most of history). The vast majority of times we wisely (and sometimes not so wisely) choose not to get involved at all. If we decide to get involved there are multiple forms of involvement that do not involve the U.S. military directly conducting COIN. These include, but are not limited to:

1. Engage with diplomacy in hopes of reaching a diplomatic settlement

2. Provide financial assistance to the government

3. Provide military equipment with no trainers or advisors

4. Proivide intelligence support

5. Put pressure on external actors providing support to the insurgents

6. Conduct the full spectrum of FID (to include U.S. combat operations).

7. The most extreme (and the rarest) option is for the U.S. to take ownership of the problem.

If we decide to support the insurgents, there are multiple options with varying levels of support ranging from the Libya example to Nicaragua to simply providing internationl legitimacy to the insurgents.

I'm beginning to think that many of those who didn't practice or study FID/UW/COIN prior to 9/11 are viewing the world through a much too narrow spectrum of history. Of course I can't know, but I think that both OIF and OEF-A over time will be viewed as abberations in history instead of the norm. The conflict with non-state actors will continue for at least a couple more decades, but largely facilitated by special operations (small foot print operations conducted by people actually selected, trained, and organized to conduct these operations) in concert with interagency partners and of course foreign partners. GPF will provide critical support, and at times be required to conduct larger scale combat operations than SOF can conduct.

Frequently not a popular opinion on SWJ, but the era of state wars and larger non-state actor formations will require that GPF maintain their higher end major combat skills. I think it is dangerous if we continue to distract GPF from this focus after the military invested so much in SOF to get after the IW problem set. GPF will also be required for large scale stability operations like OIF, OEF-A, Bosnia, Kosovo, etc. We're all guilty of wanting to chase the shinny thing (with $$$ attached), but in general our tax payers invested over the years invested in a wide range of military capabilities to defend the U.S.. It makes little sense to evolve an organization over decades to conduct irregular warfare, and then give the mission to organizations that were largely focused on winning the fight against conventional forces. There is much SOF can't do, we can't win a fight against a conventional force (we can provide valuable support). The Army, Air Force, and Marines devastated the Iraqi military, SOF couldn't do that. The Navy secures the Persian Gulf, SOF can't do that, etc.

This is relevant to the topic, because we tend to go over board on what we think we can accomplish when we put a large GPF unit on the ground. Once the combat is over, we try to employ them in a social engineering role (or with our new doctrine, before the combat is over) and then we're surprised that this effort doesn't work.

[davidbfpo]

Fuchs rightly posted on a separate thread, with my emphasis:

The Americans never really mastered this indirect rule and the setup of effective indigenous sepoy-like forces either.

Yes such forces would appear to be mercenaries and history shows that money was one factor in a sometimes complex equation. If the British in the imperial period could raise irregular units in the NW Frontier Province and FATA, with very few examples of mutiny or disloyalty, can this not be replicated? More recently and in a non-imperial context there were local units in Borneo, Oman, Namibia etc.

Are there not American examples post-1945? i am sure there are pre-1939.

[ganulv]

Fuchs rightly posted on a separate thread, with my emphasis:

Yes such forces would appear to be mercenaries and history shows that money was one factor in a sometimes complex equation. If the British in the imperial period could raise irregular units in the NW Frontier Province and FATA, with very few examples of mutiny or disloyalty, can this not be replicated? More recently and in a non-imperial context there were local units in Borneo, Oman, Namibia etc.

Are there not American examples post-1945? i am sure there are pre-1939.

The U.S./Montagnard relationship, perhaps. I don’t know that the comparison isn’t apples and oranges, though. The imperial/provincial dynamic is distinct from the dynamic between a hegemon and an admittedly less powerful but nevertheless sovereign state. Mark Danner’s book The massacre at El Mozote (one of my favorite books of any stripe) is a good case study in the latter.

[Dayuhan]

Fuchs rightly posted on a separate thread, with my emphasis:

The Americans never really mastered this indirect rule and the setup of effective indigenous sepoy-like forces either.

Yes such forces would appear to be mercenaries and history shows that money was one factor in a sometimes complex equation. If the British in the imperial period could raise irregular units in the NW Frontier Province and FATA, with very few examples of mutiny or disloyalty, can this not be replicated? More recently and in a non-imperial context there were local units in Borneo, Oman, Namibia etc.

Are there not American examples post-1945? i am sure there are pre-1939.

Actually the US did exactly that, reasonably effectively, in the Philippines during their colonial enterprise there. Given that the American "sepoys" in the Philippines never staged an equivalent of the sepoy rebellion (though of course they weren't around as long) you could argue that the US did it more effectively. Of course the US didn't pursue that strategy on as wide a scale, because they didn't have as many colonies. It's not a strategy that translates accurately to the post-colonial proxy wars, in which the role was largely taken over by the national armed forces of our proxies.

[Dayuhan]

GPF will also be required for large scale stability operations like OIF, OEF-A, Bosnia, Kosovo, etc. We're all guilty of wanting to chase the shinny thing (with $$$ attached), but in general our tax payers invested over the years invested in a wide range of military capabilities to defend the U.S.. It makes little sense to evolve an organization over decades to conduct irregular warfare, and then give the mission to organizations that were largely focused on winning the fight against conventional forces.

Yes, our taxpayers invested in a range of capabilities with the intention of defending the US. Unfortunately those capabilities aren't always used to defend the US, or at times the definition of "defending the US" has been stretched to quite absurd lengths to justify use of those capabilities.

I agree that GPF are necessary and that they should not be retrained as development workers or pseudo-SF: that would degrade their primary capacities and those capacities might be needed someday.

If we discover that we're involved in efforts that we think require huge numbers of armed development workers or large-scale efforts at armed nation-building, we may not need to question our force structure. Might be better to question how we got into that position in the first place, how we can get out of it, and how we can avoid getting into it in the future.

Post regime change COIN is, as you suggest, largely an aberration, and IMO it's not something we need to do better, it's something we need to stop doing. Why we so often insist on lumping it into the same category as traditional COIN (in support of a pre-existing government) is something I've never understood.

[TheCurmudgeon]

Post regime change COIN is, as you suggest, largely an aberration, and IMO it's not something we need to do better, it's something we need to stop doing.

Here I am going to disagree with you. I don't see this shift as "largely an aberration". Unfortunately, I see it as a the lion's share of what we can be expected to do in the future. Far larger than great power war.

The world has changed since the end of WWII and again as the cold war fades into history. The ideals and expectations of the population of the Western powers is changing. I would trace this slow change all the way back to the enlightenment. It is a change toward placing the individual above the community. You can see it in the call for Universal Human Rights and a push in international law towards R2P. It is a social change that has already altered the way we fight. The expectation now is that we only kill the bad guys. Any civilian death is a tragedy (or a crime). This was not a general concern during WWII or Korea and started to become one in Vietnam.

Perhaps I am misreading history but I don't see fights to effect regime change followed by an attempt to alter the character of the next government as an aberration. It is more palatable to a liberal mindset to justify war as a quasi-religious fight to spread "democracy" (by which they really mean individual liberties or more correctly individual rights like women's rights). It is, for better or worse, the future.

[Ken White]

Perhaps I am misreading history but I don't see fights to effect regime change followed by an attempt to alter the character of the next government as an aberration.

The history IMO is unsettled but that is certainly one valid reading of it. A question is whether it is not an aberration but merely a current fad. R2P for example, has about as many detractors as it does supporters and it is possible for that meddlesome wind to shift...

It is more palatable to a liberal mindset to justify war as a quasi-religious fight to spread "democracy" (by which they really mean individual liberties or more correctly individual rights like women's rights).

A less arguable assertion -- but one which, to say the least, has a proven track record of less than stellar success. The cracks in the theory are starting to show and grow.

It is, for better or worse, the future.

Perhaps -- or we could get a bit smarter. No one has done that at all well and the US due to its political system performs more poorly than most. That "liberal mindset" that assumes it knows what is best -- usually for others but not the set mind's self -- is steadily working itself into a state of disrepute. the question is how quickly that fad is replaced by a return to pragmatism. We'll have to wait and see.

[TheCurmudgeon]

The history IMO is unsettled but that is certainly one valid reading of it. A question is whether it is not an aberration but merely a current fad. R2P for example, has about as many detractors as it does supporters and it is possible for that meddlesome wind to shift...

I appreciate the open mind ... and you are right, only time will tell.

Can we afford to wait to find out that this was all a bad dream or do we start examining what kind of fighting force, strategies, and tactics we would need to actually engage in such fights -- all that DOTMLPF stuff?

A less arguable assertion -- but one which, to say the least, has a proven track record of less than stellar success. The cracks in the theory are starting to show and grow.

True, the cracks are there. And expectations will need to be curbed. But I don't think the mindset will change. And as I said, it is quasi-religious. People don't need much reason to fight over ideals that are held that dearly. It is almost a moral imperative. There was a time not too long ago when millions of people dying in country on the other side of the world would not even be news. Now R2P stretches the limits of international law in an attempt to enforce individual human rights in countries that don't necessarily feel compelled to abide by them. Countries in which we have limited or no real strategic interest other than the interest in maintaining the global systems themselves. We stretch the law to protect not just the lives of people on the other side of the planet but their rights.

It is Perhaps -- or we could get a bit smarter. No one has done that at all well and the US due to its political system performs more poorly than most. That "liberal mindset" that assumes it knows what is best -- usually for others but not the set mind's self -- is steadily working itself into a state of disrepute. the question is how quickly that fad is replaced by a return to pragmatism. We'll have to wait and see.

Baring an economic collapse, which will reign in all this egalitarian sentiment and force people to only be concerned with their own ingroups, I don't see the vector of Western social philosophy changing. How fast these changes affect the way we do business is hard to say. I believe it has changed them more than we realize. Fourth Generation Warfare my not be a change in the way we fight wars at all but a change in the way Western society interprets the appropriate time, place, and method to conduct war. It is a shift in the way WE view war as a political tool rather than anything really new in the way our enemies, or anyone throughout history, has actually conducted war against an overwhelmingly large and powerful opponent.

Too many ideas for one post. Time for a bourbon.

[Madhu]

....which is a good thing because I kind of like this civilian control of the military thing.

I guess my questions relate to the "once they decide you should go, how to operationalize?" factor.

So, it's a given that there is a certain amount of intellectual rot and hubris in the foreign policy community and even in the military defense literature (every scholarly literature has some rot, it's inevitable), but what does one do?

I understand that some have argued we need to re-engineer the army along pop-coin lines or that we need a SYSAdmin force or something like the colonial constabularies. I don't care for that idea, plus, I don't think it would work given our republican sensibilities and our democracy with changing administrations.

What other ways could we have done things after the 2002-2003 period when we thought we had the Taliban beat, but basically they were just licking their wounds elsewhere. I am aware that some governance stuff is popular with some scholars, like we should have written a different constitution.

What I wonder is did we take our eye off the ball and off of the enemy? Did we go to fast from the kinetic aspects and focusing on the insurgency to the "root causes" governance aspects? I know Robert C. Jones would say that is exactly backwards, and I am sympathetic to his arguments, but the thing is, I'm not sure we can effect the sorts of changes he suggests very well as a part of expeditionary COIN. Even if we had done a better job of balancing out Pashtun representation and Norther Alliance representation in the early period of 202-2003, the other Taliban animated by ethno-religious feeling or even just plain old criminality would have been there. Would it matter? Could we even do such things? Why is the military focused on that stuff? Why not a palette of options?

Once again, I just don't know. Just asking around from people that have actually done some of this stuff.

[Madhu]

Maybe this is all really working but it is hard for me to tell from my outsider vantage point?

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/coin-center-interview

Maybe it's working after a fashion? I fervently hope so.

[Dayuhan]

What I wonder is did we take our eye off the ball and off of the enemy? Did we go to fast from the kinetic aspects and focusing on the insurgency to the "root causes" governance aspects?

The idea of governance as a root cause of insurgency is not entirely wrong, but like most ideas, when it's applied without full consideration for context or without realistic assessment of the capacity of those attempting to apply the idea, bad things can happen.

Two problems:

First, looking at "governance" as a root cause of insurgency in post regime change situations overlooks a blue whale in the drawing room: regime change itself. When a domestic government is removed by external force and a subsequent government installed by the same force, the way that government governs is only a small part of its legitimacy problem. Very few people appreciate having governance of any sort imposed on them by foreigners, and thinking we can step around that hurdle by providing better governance is unrealistic. We're likely to find that the issue isn't governance, the issue is us. We're also likely to find that our capacity to serve as mediator between a government we installed and any other interests or factions is very limited, as we are (not unreasonably) perceived as anything but neutral.

Second, our interest in undercutting insurgency by improving governance has to be tempered by realization that our ability to conjure up good governance in other countries is intrinsically limited. The idea that good government can be "installed" and nations "built" by outside influence is inherently perverse and needs to be retired permanently. Good government isn't built or installed, it grows, through an organic, evolutionary process that often involves conflict. That process cannot be circumvented. If we feel that we must go about removing regimes we think inappropriate, well then I suppose we must, but we need to do it with full knowledge that we cannot simply install a functioning democracy afterward... a construct that calls up weird visions of a vast DoD warehouse with rows of crates labeled "Democracy, Functioning, One", all ready to be slapped into place like a light buld or a spare tire. Forget it. "Government in a box" is not going to happen, locally or nationally. If we want to try to get rid of bad governments and create better ones, we need an honest assessment of what we're trying to do, and of what it will require. I'm not sure we've had much of that lately.