Thinking Critically about COIN and Creatively about Strategy and War: An Interview with Colonel Gian Gentile
Octavian Manea
That has been the whole problem with the COIN narrative that developed at least in US Army circles since the end of the Vietnam War. It was, and is, premised on the idea that the Vietnam War could have been won by better counterinsurgency tactics and operations.
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When General David Petraeus talks of the “right inputs finally being in place” he betrays a deep seated adherence to the COIN narrative that better generals and reinvented armies can rescue failed strategy and policy. Unfortunately, upon inspection history demolishes this myth.
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The warning it should provide is that you should never think that improved tactics, whether it is a conventional or a counterinsurgency war, can rescue a failed strategy or policy. Sun Tzu offers one of the most profound statements on the relationship between tactics and strategy: Strategy without tactics is the slow road to victory, but tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. Another historical example comes to mind. The German army up to a certain point in WWII was arguably one of the finest tactically fighting armies in history. But it lost. The warning is to be careful how much faith you place in the idea that better tactics can save a failed strategy or policy
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By the way, have we lost Clausewitz in Afghanistan? Because it seems to me that General Petraeus designed a highly integrated comprehensive approach in Afghanistan, one in which economical, civil and military resources are all put in the service of a unified political purpose. All of these things were put together in a sophisticated integrated operational approach which essentially is boiling down to a nation building at the barrel of the gun. Can it work? Sure. But it is not going to take a few years, but multiple years, decades. If one looks to history in the modern world when has a foreign occupying country been successful in this kind of nation building endeavor or operation in a similar context that you have in Afghanistan? I keep using the metaphor of a box - the methods, tactics and techniques of nation building that have come to eclipse consideration of strategy and policy. But if you step out of the box of the tactics and operations of counterinsurgency (which it seems that many folks are locked into) and view things from the level of strategy and say, ok maybe COIN can work in Afghanistan, but it is going to take a very long time that will require a huge commitment of American blood and treasure. Then strategy demands to ask the question of this war relative to what the policy objective given to the military by President Obama is for Afghanistan. And the policy objective, the political objective that was given to the American military by President Obama is actually quite limited. Disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a base for attacks. Our strategy seems to me out of sorts because we have a maximalist tactical approach to achieve a rather minimalist political objective.
Galula, Thompson and Kitson defined the center of gravity in a COIN campaign as being “the people”. Protecting and controlling the people became also the main emphasis of FM 3-24. Could we find an alternative center of gravity in a COIN campaign?
Absolutely. Let's go back to Clausewitz. He said that the center of gravity is something to be discovered. The problem with FM 3-24 is that it has taken a center of gravity which could; in theory, looking at the strategy, based on the political objective, and judging the alternatives; be the population. But it doesn't have to be. Let me repeat, IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE. When we make by rule the population as the center of gravity for any counterinsurgency, well, we have just allowed the tactics of population centric COIN to eclipse strategy. We are trapped therefore in the tactics of population centric counterinsurgency. To prove how much the American Army has become locked down by this rule just peruse the issues of the journal Military Review for 2010 and see how much we have accepted the rule that in ANY counterinsurgency the population is the prize, or the center of gravity. This supreme dogmatism seems to me to preside over the death of strategy. When you say that the population is the center of gravity then you derive a certain set of operational methods. And that is Galula: dispersion of troops, as many troops you can get, live out amongst population, do clear hold and build, protect them, inject energy and resources thus trying to win the population over to your side. The problem is that when you make by rule that the population is the center of gravity in any COIN then you have no more strategy since you have excluded other options or alternatives for dealing with the instability or insurgency.
Why are the core principles of the population-centric technology contestable? After all, they are grounded in historical experiences and validated by the history of COIN campaigns-as the best practices in field. They passed the empirical test in Algeria and Malaya.
They didn’t pass Algeria because the French lost. It’s not that you want to devalue the point of not studying them at all - the tactical and operational activity. No. But one must be careful about how far you go with elevating the importance of tactics and operations when France looses a war like in Algeria. And then with Malaya? No. This has been the construction of the counterinsurgency narrative that is premised in a key way on what people think that British did in Malaya and the notion that the British, once they put a better General, Gerald Templer, in command in February 1952, and then he turned his army on a dime and starting doing population centric counterinsurgency correctly (hearts and minds), they focused on population protection, injecting energy and resources and persuasion to bring people over to the government side which in the end, as this story goes, broke the back of the communist insurgents. No. It is wrong. It is not supported by current scholarship or supported by the historical record. In fact the Malayan communist insurgency was broken before even General Templer took command. And it was broken by large scale resettlement of the Malayan Chinese population that severed their physical link with the communist insurgents. So yes the British did win at counterinsurgency in Malaya, but they didn’t win through a population centric hearts and minds counterinsurgency.
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The idea that hearts and minds have been won by foreign occupying powers in modern counterinsurgency war is just simply hokum.
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So I don't buy at all the whole surge triumph narrative, based on a flawed understanding of Vietnam and an equal misunderstanding of Malaya, that the American Army fumbled in Iraq from 2003-2006 but was rescued in 2007 by a better General who armed his army with a new method of COIN (codified in FM 3-24), the American Army was thus reinvented and because of what it did differently that is what produced a lowering of violence in the summer of 2007. No.
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Personally, I think that it should be organized and optimized around the principles of firepower, protection and mobility and not around the principles of nation building, stability operations and counterinsurgency. If you have an army optimized for combined arms warfare it still can do other kinds of missions. However, if you optimize an army to do nation building and small wars it becomes much more problematic to step into the direction of doing fighting at the high end of the spectrum. History shows that this tends to be the case: look at the Israelis in Lebanon in 2006, South Vietnamese Army between 1973 and 1975, and the British Army in the second Boer War. These were all armies that became predominantly focused on counterinsurgencies and small wars and when confronted with a foe that fought them in a sophisticated way they had problems and they paid a heavy price.
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We should absolutely retain the lessons, the experience, the institutional knowledge that we have gained in the last eight or nine years of operations. But we should be aware of one key lesson: we should get beyond tactics and not place our faith in the idea that improvements in techniques and methods will somehow make the problem of strategy go away. It’s just doesn’t work that way. Nor should we think that Iraq and Afghanistan define the face of future war.
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Does the American Army today know how to plan and execute a population centric coin (nation building) campaign? Of course it does. But does it have the capability to plan and execute a movement to contact into Pakistan to secure lose nuclear weapons, or to conduct a strategic raid with ground forces into Yemen to punish tribes associated with al Qaeda, or to conduct an extensive occupation of North Korea after it collapses which will require a good deal of fighting recalcitrant North Korean infantry dug in along the way?
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