Knowing the Enemy

by Ariel Cohen

How to cope with global jihad

(at http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/6144)

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The conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan and the global Islamist insurgency have revealed that Western democracies and their political and military leaders do not fully comprehend the multifaceted threats represented by radical Muslim nonstate actors. In this, they violate the most famous dictum of Sun Tzu, the Chinese strategic genius of2,500 years ago: “If you know yourself and understand your opponent you will never put your victory in jeopardy in any conflict.”

The broad support that al Qaeda jihadis and radical Islamist militias such as Hamas and Hezbollah enjoy in the Muslim world and in the global Muslim diaspora, as well as among non-Muslim anti-American political forces around the world demonstrates that describing the global Islamic insurgency as a fringe or minority phenomenon is unrealistic and self-defeating. Since 9/11, democracies have fought three wars against nonstate Islamist actors. The West needs to draw important lessons from Iraq, Afghanistan, and the clash between Israel and Hezbollah to address these strategic deficits. Lack of clarity in defining the enemy and delays in formulating political and information strategy severely endanger U.S. national interests and the security of the West.

Wake-up call

Julian Borger

The Guardian, Friday 6 September 2002 

If the US and Iraq do go to war, there can only be one winner, can't there? Maybe not. This summer, in a huge rehearsal of just such a conflict - and with retired Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper playing Saddam - the US lost. Julian Borger asks the former marine how he did it.

At the height of the summer, as talk of invading Iraq built in Washington like a dark, billowing storm, the US armed forces staged a rehearsal using over 13,000 troops, countless computers and $250m. Officially, America won and a rogue state was liberated from an evil dictator. 

What really happened is quite another story, one that has set alarm bells ringing throughout America's defence establishment and raised questions over the US military's readiness for an Iraqi invasion. In fact, this war game was won by Saddam Hussein, or at least by the retired marine playing the Iraqi dictator's part, Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper.

The Invasion of Iraq: A Balance Sheet

by Brian Michael Jenkins March 22, 2013 in RAND

Historically, wars were fought primarily for material gain: livestock, treasure, tribute, or territory. More recently, however, the profit motive for war has declined as life has become more precious and conquest and plunder have become less acceptable, although conflicts waged for control of diamonds and other precious commodities continue in parts of the world. International law generally prohibits military action by one state against another except for reasons of self-defense. In modern warfare, “gains” must be measured in less-tangible forms, such as preserving national security, liberating threatened populations from tyranny, protecting human rights. Military action to achieve such ends is considered unavoidable and is rarely assessed as an investment.

The invasion of Iraq was a war of choice, however, and therefore should be assessed in terms of costs and benefits. Neither the United States nor its allies had been attacked by Iraq, and there was no evidence that any attack was imminent. Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant, and his regime was an affront to human rights, but the country had suffered under his rule for many years. Iraq's liberation was not the reason for going to war. The official purpose of the invasion was to remove any threat posed by Iraq's presumed arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Regime change was a consequence, not a cause. And although Iraq's citizens are freer now, they are by no means more pro-American.

Gen. McMaster: Raiders, Advisors And The Wrong Lessons From Iraq

By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

Published: March 20, 2013 in AOL Defense

WASHINGTON: On the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq one of the Army's leading thinkers, warned Washington not to learn the wrong lessons.

Army Maj. Gen. H.R. McMaster, now chief of the tank and infantry school at Fort Benning singled out two pitfalls in particular, one about over-reliance on Special Operations raiders, the other about over-reliance on proxies and advisors. Call them (our words, not his) the Zero Dark Thirty fallacy and the Lawrence of Arabia fallacy.

The first mistake is what McMaster called "a raiding mentality": the idea that we'll get a "fast, cheap, and efficient" victory if we can only identify the crucial "nodes" -- enemy leaders, nuclear weapons sites, whatever -- and take them out, whether with a Special Ops team like the one that killed Bin Laden, a long-range smart weapon, or a drone, McMaster said in his remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Mali's Model Democracy Myth

The international community seems intent on "restoring democracy" to Mali. But it was the pre-coup status quo that led to collapse in the first place.

Article | 8 February 2013 by Joe Penney 

Bamako, Mali:

Both the Malian people and the international press have been almost unanimous in lauding the French military campaign in Mali, which started in earnest on January 11. The ultimate French goal appears to be returning Mali to its status quo circa 2011 – i.e. before the start of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) campaign in the north. In accordance with this plan, Mali’s interim president, Dioncounda Traoré, recently announced imminent elections for July 2013.
Thus France will claim to have completed its dual objectives of regaining Mali’s ‘territorial integrity’ and accomplishing a ‘democratic transition’. The French then plan to withdraw smoothly, replacing its fighters with a UN peacekeeping force and conceding the presence of some jihadist fighters in the Adrar des Ifoghas Mountains.

Making sense of Mali's armed groups

After spending weeks reporting from the country's restive north, Al Jazeera's May Ying Welsh reviews some of the different groups and what they want.

May Ying Welsh   Last Modified: 17 Jan 2013 10:19 French planes have bombed targets in Mali in what they consider a fight against al-Qaeda-linked fighters. But the region is a cauldron of instability with a diverse blend of religious fighters, ethnic militas and secularists. MNLA (National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad) The secular separatist Tuareg rebel group wants an independent state in northern Mali called Azawad. MNLA say they want this state for all the peoples of northern Mali (Tuaregs, Songhai, Arabs, and Fulani are the main ethnic groups). They have some token members from the Songhai ethnic group, but the fact is that 99 percent of MNLA fighters are Tuaregs whose motivation is to have a Tuareg state.

Afghanistan: Green on Blue Attacks Are Only a Small Part of the Problem

During the last few weeks, coverage of the Afghan War has focused on ‘green on blue attacks’ - the killings of U.S. and other International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) soldiers by members of the Afghan security services. This is part of a natural tendency to ride the headlines, but the coverage has often been misleading, and it reflects a persistent failure to address the far broader range of problems emerging in the war and the needs for major changes in virtually every aspect of the way it is fought.

Read more: http://csis.org/publication/afghanistan-green-on-blue-attacks-are-only-small-part%20of-proble

John Boyd and strategic theory in the postmodern era

John Boyd and strategic theory in the postmodern era
By Frans Osinga

We live in the postmodern era, the French sociologist Francois Lyotard told us in the early eighties. Postmodernism has come to signify a break with traditional modes of behavior. This includes warfare. Two dominant strands of strategic thought have both earned the label of postmodern warfare: Network Centric warfare (NCW) and Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW). One takes its inspiration from the postmodern information society, the other from the eroding authority and power of the modern-era political institutions. Both are also unified in a common conceptual father: the late USAF Colonel John Boyd, the first postmodern strategist. Few people in the past three decades have surpassed his influence on western military thought, but, like Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, he has also often been superficially read and understood.

Read more: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/boyd/osinga_boyd_postmod_copyright2007.pdf

Irregular Warfare and Adaptive Leadership

Irregular Warfare and Adaptive Leadership

Paul Yingling

When I was a battalion XO in Iraq in 2003, I served with a company commander whose vehicle was struck by an early version of an IED. The fragmentation shattered his windshield and severed his antennas, the smoke and dust obscured his vision and the blast temporarily deafened him. In the first critical seconds after the blast, the commander saw the ubiquitous white pickup leaving the blast area, but didn’t pursue it. His battalion commander was furious, and later harangued the captain for his failure to act. The company commander was crushed; he felt the battalion commander was questioning his courage, and in fact he was.

Petraeus’s Last Stand?

Petraeus’s Last Stand?

February 24, 2011 by Don Vandergriff

The author of this important report in Politics Daily (also attached below), Dave Wood, is a very experienced combat reporter and one of the very best US reporters covering Afghanistan. (Truth in advertising: I have known and admired Dave for 25 years.) Wood has produced an an excellent, if grim, Afghan SITREP that is well worth studying carefully, including its hotlinks.

I think it would be a mistake to conclude that the situation being in a kind a balance, because we are in a strategic stalemate, however. While it is probably true we are in a strategic stalemate in the strictest sense of term ‘strategic,’ every year the Taliban is able to maintain its menacing posture gives the insurgents additional leverage at the far more decisive grand-strategic level of conflict: To wit, ask yourself if any of the following five trends (which are inversions of the five criteria defining a successful grand strategy) is way out of line:

(1) Polls tell us that the political will at home to continue this war is slowing deteriorating;

(2) our allies are also going wobbly and some have already pulled the plug;

(3) uncommitted countries are not being attracted to our cause and our warlike activities are alienating many in the Muslim world;

(4) the insurgents’ will to resist shows no sign of weakening; and

(5) no one the US government has a clue how to end this conflict on favorable terms for the United States that do not sow the seeds of future conflict in the region, or with Islam.

The Afghan insurgents may not understand grand strategy in these terms, but they understand instinctively that they can outlast invaders, because they believe they have done it before to Alexander the Great, the British at the height of their imperial power, and the Soviets. Is there anyone who not think the insurgents’ moral is being boosted by the prospect of outlasting the Americans?

A simple grand-strategic analysis reveals that time is clearly on the Taliban’s side and to assume that battle hardened leaders of the Taliban do not understand this is just a tad optimistic, to put it charitably. In fact, the breakdown of President Obama’s strategic review last December, which devolved into a dispute over when to leave, simply reinforced the obvious.

Chuck Spinney

Read more: http://donvandergriff.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/petraeuss-last-stand/

It Takes a Network

BY STANLEY A. MCCHRYSTAL

From the outset of my command in Afghanistan, two or three times each week, accompanied by a few aides and often my Afghan counterparts, I would leave the International Security Assistance Force headquarters in Kabul and travel across Afghanistan -- from critical cities like Kandahar to the most remote outposts in violent border regions. Ideally, we left early, traveling light and small, normally using a combination of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, to meet with Afghans and their leaders and to connect with our troops on the ground: Brits and Marines rolling back the enemy in Helmand, Afghan National Army troops training in Mazar-e-Sharif, French Foreign Legionnaires patrolling in Kapisa.

But I was not alone: There were other combatants circling the battlefield. Mirroring our movements, competing with us, were insurgent leaders. Connected to, and often directly dispatched by, the Taliban's leadership in Pakistan, they moved through the same areas of Afghanistan. They made shows of public support for Taliban shadow governors, motivated tattered ranks, recruited new troops, distributed funds, reviewed tactics, and updated strategy. And when the sky above became too thick with our drones, their leaders used cell phones and the Internet to issue orders and rally their fighters. They aimed to keep dispersed insurgent cells motivated, strategically wired, and continually informed, all without a rigid -- or targetable -- chain of command.

Read more: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/22/it_takes_a_network 

Special Operations Forces: Future Challenges and Opportunities

Strategy for the Long Haul

Special Operations Forces: Future Challenges and Opportunities

By Robert Martinage 2008 (abbreviated by R. Toomse)

Given the long expected service life of most of its major assets, the US military force structure, which underlies the concepts of operation that drive the US “way of war,” is still based primarily on the premises and experience of the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. Arguably, much of the current Program of Record (the forces the Department of Defense seeks to acquire in coming years) remains similarly reflective of that period. Yet the looming strategic challenges look to be significantly different. Thus there is a danger that many of the forces that the Defense Department plans to acquire may prove to be unsuitable for dealing with future threats.

Special Operations Forces (SOF) are elite, highly trained military units that conduct operations that typically exceed the capabilities of conventional forces.

Counterinsurgency as a Cultural System

Counterinsurgency as a Cultural System

David B. Edwards

Beginning in 2008, when news of the development of the Human Terrain Systems (HTS) program first came to public attention, a number of anthropologists began a systematic campaign to dismantle the program or at least ensure that it would never receive the imprimatur of legitimacy from professional organizations. Since the premise of HTS was that it would bring the insights of academic anthropology to the practice of military counterinsurgency, what might normally have constituted an irrelevant gesture (like the shy 9th grader deciding that she simply would not to go to the prom with the football captain, even if he asked) had some clout, in that many anthropology graduate students and unemployed PhDs who might otherwise have considered joining the program chose not to join for fear of being black listed and never landing a job in academia.

My own immediate response on hearing of the program was more ambivalent than that of most anthropologists, or at least than that of the ones who spoke out on the topic. As someone who has been studying Afghanistan for three decades, I was not ready to condemn the program out-of-hand. I am friends with many Afghans who would have to flee from their country – once again – if the Taliban came back to power, and I also knew that the US-led military efforts in that country were not only failing to dislodge the Taliban, but were also alienating the civilian population whose support was critical if the Afghan government was to consolidate its authority. Despite vastly superior training, leadership, and weaponry, the American military was gradually losing its grip, and one of the weaknesses of American efforts has been their lack of knowledge of the social context in which they were fighting. The social organization of tribal and non-tribal Afghans, the role of Islam, gender segregation, the protocols of respect and hospitality – these were all matters of central importance to Afghans, and matters of which American soldiers have been largely ignorant.

Read more: http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/630-edwards.pdf

Updating close-air support. New doctrine and aircraft are needed for COIN warfare

Updating close-air support. New doctrine and aircraft are needed for COIN warfare

LT. COL Paul Darling and LT. Justin Lawlor

When Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal took command of Afghanistan, one of his first orders severely restricted the use of fixed-wing strike assets in support of combat operations. The newly appointed commander of the International Security Assistance Force, Gen. David Petraeus, has been reluctant to change the order.

The order received much criticism, with many complaining that restricting strike assets posed too great a danger to soldiers on the ground. The order, however, reflected an unspoken reality, namely that the doctrine, structure and airframes currently used for close-air support (CAS) are fundamentally flawed and are an expensive and ineffective framework for counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. Our current CAS structure is hampering our mission in Afghanistan and reflects a reversal of lessons learned not only by U.S. forces in Vietnam but also by countries around the world engaged in COIN for the past 40 years.

How did we get to the point where the one area where we have unquestioned dominance is deliberately neutered to the point of irrelevance? It wasn’t easy, but fixing it can be. We can not only dominate the air, but effectively use it to our advantage as long as the military acknowledges our current failures, uses an analysis of our successful past and encourages an effort by all service branches to adjust to a post-Cold War environment. We can fight better, cheaper and more effectively only when we understand where we are and from where we came.

Thinking Critically about COIN and Creatively about Strategy and War: An Interview with Colonel Gian Gentile

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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Read more: http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/625-manea.pdf

The goal and objectives in the US AFPAK policy

The goal and objectives in the US AFPAK policy

Following the August 2009 national election in Afghanistan, President Obama led a strategic review or the overall U.S. policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. On December 1, 2009, in a speech at West Point, New York, the President reaffirmed his goal in Afghanistan and Pakistan to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaida and its extremist allies and prevent their return to either country. In support of that goal, there are eight objectives that form the framework for our quarterly assessments. The eight supporting objectives, along with the lead responsible departments are:

I. Disrupt terrorist networks in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan to degrade any ability they have to plan and launch international terrorist attacks. (Office of the Director of National Intelligence);

II. Please see the classified annex for details concerning this objective;

III. Assist efforts to enhance civilian control and stable constitutional government in Pakistan. (Department of State);

IV. Develop Pakistan counterinsurgency (COIN) capabilities; continue to support Pakistan's efforts to defeat terrorist and insurgent groups. (Department of Defense);

V. Involve the international community more actively to forge an international consensus to stabilize Pakistan. (Department of State);

VI. In Afghanistan reverse the Taliban's momentum and build Afghan National Security Force capability so that we can begin to transition responsibility for security to the Afghan Government and decrease our troop presence by July 2011. (Department of Defense);

VII. Selectively build the capacity of the Afghan Government which enables Afghans to assume responsibility in the four-step process of clear – hold – build - transfer.(Department of State);

VIII. Involve the international community more actively to forge an international consensus to stabilize Afghanistan. (Department of State).

Classified Annex

Details concerning progress in our objective to "disrupt terrorist networks in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan to degrade any ability they have to plan and launch international terrorist attacks" are included within the classified annex. An eighth objective (Objective II) is classified entirely and fully discussed in the classified annex.

Read more: http://www.fas.org/man/eprint/wh-afpak.pdf

A Well Worn Path: The Soviet and American Approaches to the Critical Tasks of Counter Insurgency

A Well Worn Path: The Soviet and American Approaches to the Critical Tasks of Counter Insurgency

Bart Howard

The conflict in Afghanistan is clearly at the top of the list of U.S. foreign policy challenges. Each year more and more resources are committed to the effort to stabilize and secure Afghanistan. The cost of this effort is more than just monetary. U.S. “blood and treasure” is being spilled as Americans debate the potential success or failure in this enigmatic and distant country. Soon all discussion and debate will intensify on the concept of “transition” sometime in the near future.

Afghanistan has been called a “graveyard of empires” because of the long list of nations that have previously attempted to conduct military campaigns that have ended in failure. 1 The most recent super power to wage a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan was the Soviet Union, which fought an expensive and costly campaign spanning from 1979-1989. Although Russia committed billions of dollars and lost thousands lives in the undertaking, the resulting withdraw and eventual collapse of the Afghan government was perceived as a humiliating defeat for Russia.

After nearly a decade of very mixed results, the United States must ask the inevitable question, is this working? Although the records of other nation’s adventures in Afghanistan are dismal, it does not mean that history will merely repeat itself, but it does bring to light the importance of looking at the efforts of the current campaign in Afghanistan through the lens of history. The experience of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan should not be dismissed; in fact it should be seriously examined to reveal if there are key lessons that can be gleaned in the conduct of the counterinsurgency campaign.

How did the Soviet Union and the United States approach two critical tasks in conducting a counterinsurgency; Denying sanctuary to insurgents and Building effective host nation forces to conduct counterinsurgency operations?

Read more: http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/612-howard.pdf  

3-D Soviet Style: Lessons Learned from the Soviet Experience in Afghanistan

3-D Soviet Style: Lessons Learned from the Soviet Experience in Afghanistan

Anton Minkov, Ph.D.

Gregory Smolynec. Ph.D.

3-D Soviet Style examines the evolution of Soviet strategy in Afghanistan from the initial invasion to the withdrawal of Soviet combat forces in 1989. The paper analyzes Soviet efforts in building Afghan security forces. It includes information on Soviet counterinsurgency practices in Afghanistan and on the adjustments the Soviets made to their force structure and equipment in response to the exigencies of the operational situations they faced. It examines the Soviet approach to civil affairs in their Afghan operations, and outlines the state-building efforts the Soviets undertook in Afghanistan as well as their social and economic policies. The paper also examines the policy of “National Reconciliation” adopted by the pro-Soviet government of Afghanistan to stabilize the country. Among other lessons from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan that can be applied in the current situation, the paper stresses that engaging and enfranchising local populations and power centres is of critical importance; that the economic stability and independence of Afghanistan is a key element in successful state-building; that successive battlefield victories do not guarantee strategic success and that building Afghan security forces is vital. The movement of insurgents and materiel across the Afghan - Pakistan border is a paramount strategic problem.

Read more: http://www.thecornwallisgroup.org/pdf/CXII_2007_13_Minkov.pdf

Closing Ranks

Closing Ranks

Leslie Susser

A series of critical reports points to the Israel Defense Forces failures in the second war in Lebanon, citing poor professional training, mistaken military philosophy and misguided values and principles.

 

(The Jerusalem Report. January 8, 2007)

From time to time raised voices could be heard in the corridor outside the conference room at the Israel Defense Forces headquarters in Tel Aviv, where the General Staff was discussing a report on its performance during the recent Lebanon war. The report, by Maj. Gen. Udi Shani, was damning, starting with the charge that Chief of Staff Dan Halutz had gone into the war against Hizballah without a plan for the ground forces, with ill-defined war aims and poorly formulated orders of battle…

Devastating as it was, the Shani report did not deal with the IDF as such, but only with the way the generals conducted the war. A similar presentation the week before, by a former head of the Northern Command, Maj. Gen. (Res.) Amiram Levin, had touched on much deeper structural and conceptual issues. The military philosophy of the past five years, he declared, had been a resounding failure. The army had been lulled into over-reliance on high-tech firepower and information technology at the expense of classic fighting values, including those the IDF had once excelled at, like large-scale land maneuver and officers leading from the front.

Winning in Afghanistan

Winning in Afghanistan

Ali A. Jalali

Seven years into the US-led effort to bring peace and stability to Afghan­istan, the mission is on the verge of failing. This unsettling new reality is the result of key international and Afghan actors having for years pur­sued a narrow strategy focused almost exclusively on short-term goals at the expense of a broader and more cohesive strategy. Afghanistan, conse­quently, is now plagued by a threat environment shaped and sustained by an expanding insurgency, widespread criminality, ineffective governance, and the absence of a coordinated response to continuing challenges. Vio­lence inside the country has risen steadily since 2006, and in 2008 levels of violence in Afghanistan exceeded levels of violence in Iraq.

The absence of a shared vision for Afghanistan has blurred the dis­tinction between means and ends. Means have too often defined goals, tactics too often driven strategy, supply too often determined demands, and short-term necessities too often took precedence over long-term priorities. This failed vision has also led many to question whether the US-led operation is aimed at securing Afghanistan, reshaping the whole of South Asia, or sim­ply setting the conditions for a responsible exit plan. American policymak­ers have undertaken several assessments of their Afghanistan strategy since last summer, and nearly all have found that the United States and the rest of the international community are guilty of setting unrealistic or shortsighted goals for the nation. In light of the current situation, the United States needs to take the lead in developing policies designed to reinforce any long-term stability in Afghanistan. These policies should be focused, coherent, and shared by all the actors, and they need to be targeted at freeing Afghanistan from the vicious cycle of insecurity, insurgency, impunity, and corruption in which it is trapped. Any continuation of the shortsighted efforts of the past seven years will lead international actors and the Afghan government to certain failure. This article looks at specific strategic challenges facing Af­ghanistan and presents ways in which leaders might transition to sustainable policies that will make peace and stability realistically obtainable.

Read more: http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/parameters/Articles/09spring/jalali.pdf