Center for a New American Security

A few weeks ago, Abu Muqawama met with a friend in London who was reading Alistair Horne's "A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962.". He -- a reporter whose dispatches from Iraq have been a tremendous resource to this blogger -- told Abu Muqawama he was reading it because of the COIN reading list posted to the right on this blog.

Abu Muqawama penned that reading list relatively quickly when he first set up this blog, and since then, he and Charlie have been thinking about writing up a proper COIN reading list that includes not only the books to the right but also relevant articles (such as Sepp's "Best Practices" and others) and maybe -- gasp! -- a little theory too.

When our schedules relax a bit, we promise to buckle down, write one up, and then post it on the blog. So, stay tuned, and if any of you have suggestions you think we might miss, post a comment before the weekend.

Cheers,

Abu Muqawama

Abu Muqawama appreciates the space the New York Times has been giving to Roger Cohen on its online op-ed page, which means readers get to hear views on foreign affairs not penned by Nicholas Kristof or Tom Friedman. (Which is, we can all agree, a wonderful and necessary thing.) Today, Cohen takes a break from writing about his favorite subject -- France -- to report from Afghanistan.

Nations are built one village at a time. Or so Colonel Bramble has come to believe. He is a thoughtful man, commanding a NATO provincial reconstruction team, one of 25 across the country, at a base in Qalat, between Kandahar and Kabul. His team is supposed to deliver the development and good governance that will marginalize the Taliban.

That’s the theory. The practice looks like this. Seven armored U.S. Humvees form a “perimeter” on the edge of the village and newly trained members of the Afghan police — the “Afghan face” on this mission — are dispatched to bring out village elders.

Looking apprehensive, the Afghans appear swathed in robes and headgear whose bold colors mock dreary U.S. Army camouflage. Staff Sgt. Marco Villalta, of San Mateo, Calif., steps forward: “We would like to ask you some questions about your village.”

The following is elicited: There are 300 families using 25 wells. Their irrigation ditches get washed away in winter. A small bridge keeps collapsing. They send their children to a school in nearby Shajoy, but it’s often closed because of Taliban threats to teachers.

Sergeant Villalta takes notes. “We’ll share this information with the governor and make sure that something is done.”

“No! No!,” says Sardar Mohammed. “We don’t trust the governor. If he gets food, he gives it to 10 families. He puts money in his pocket. We trust you more than him. Bring aid directly to us.”

Bramble’s view is that the governor is as good as officials get around here. The U.S. officer, like his country and NATO, is caught in the hall of mirrors of contested nation-building. The exchange at the village has traversed cultures, civilizations and centuries. For Western soldiers trained to kill, and now in the business of hoisting an Islamic country from nothing as fighting continues, that’s challenging.

[Serious COIN / USMC inside baseball follows; actual baseball fans should go here instead.]

Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. James Conway, spoke at the Center for a New American Strategy last week. Most of the coverage focused on his concern that the Corps was growing too heavy and abandoning its expeditionary history:

“We’ve simply gotten heavier....We’ve become in many ways a second land army....
We now have a generation of officers who has never stepped aboard a ship, and that concerns us with our naval flavor and ability to launch amphibious support,” he said.

These comments wouldn't raise an eyebrow amongst the broader COIN community. One of Charlie's favorite retired generals, LtGen Paul Van Riper, offered this by way of elaboration*:

It seems to me that General Conway is trying to restore some balance to what the Corps will be doing in the next few years. Like the Army who has armor captains that have never maneuvered as part of a battalion, let alone a brigade, the Corps has captains who have never participated in an amphibious operation. I'm not implying an amphibious assault, but simple ship to shore movement in support of non-combatant evacuation operations or a raid. This is one of many examples of skill sets that are atrophying. Marines have always taken pride in their ability to conduct counterinsurgency operations. I don't think our leadership is moving away from that. These leaders, however, do recognize a need to begin to develop other competencies in our young officers and Marines before they reach more senior ranks. At the same time, I'm sure there is a desire to regain the expeditionary mindset that has long typified Marines.

Charlie is actually quite sympathetic to these concerns, particularly with regard to training and education. These skills are hard to maintain, quick to diminish, and unique to the Marine Corps. She assumes most readers of this blog would find it hard to disagree with the rationale presented here.

But while PKVR mades the best case for flexibility and adaptability, Gen. Conway does himself no such favors. Instead he suggests:

In dialogue with those folks, the point came out that you can have a major contingency operation kind of capability, and still do the lesser included things to include counterinsurgency. The reverse of that statement is probably not true. So we need to either make sure that we get that balance right, whatever that balance may in time need to be.

With all due respect (and all evidence to the contrary), Charlie would like to call BS. It's comments like these that lead many to the sad conclusion that the current commandant doesn't "get it." (One wonders how differently Gen. Mattis would have phrased his thoughts on the subject.) It's pretty clear that our general purpose forces (not to mention significant elements of their leadership) have found COIN challenging to say the least.

Now it may be that the senior leadership decides that no COIN or CT threats actually constitute an existential threat to the US and therefore it's ok if we flounder around for 3 or 4 years everytime. This blogger thinks they're wrong, but it's a defensible position. But it's not one that the Commandant is making.

We're not anywhere close to over-correcting toward COIN for the military at large. And so long as Gen. Conway thinks they're "lesser included things," Charlie thinks we're probably all safe from that fate.

(*excerpted with permission)

The New York Times links to a video op-ed by Steve Connors and Molly Bingham on the insurgency in Iraq during the early phases of the war. Abu Muqawama has met and spoken with the film-makers a few times -- no, reader, he wasn't one of the insurgents they filmed -- but disagrees with their op-ed, which he think overestimates the power of the insurgents in the first year of the war relative to the U.S. forces and perhaps romanticizes the insurgents as well. They don't address, example, the very real sectarian hatred and potential for violence within Iraq. Sure, 100% of Iraqis disapprove of attacks against Iraqis. Easy questions, easy answer. But scratch beneath the surface a bit and you get a different story. (To some Sunnis, the Shia aren't even real Iraqis.) Abu Muqawama doesn't think it helps here that neither film-maker speaks Arabic and thus relied on translators the whole time. He also doesn't think it helps they spent most of their time with the insurgents. No, they don't become partisan, per se, but they can't help but internalize the narrative of the insurgent, who sees himself as part of a legitimate, national movement against the occupation. Alas, after the fall of Saddam and the incompetence of the U.S. military in the first few months, the only thing "national" left in Iraq was the football team.*

But come up with your own opinions. You can find out more on the film here and watch a sneak preview here.

*When Abu Muqawama criticizes the performance of the U.S. military in the first few months after the invasion, it should go without saying that he includes his own performance in that criticism. Like most tactical leaders in the 2003 and 2004, he wonders what he could have done better. Unlike most tactical leaders, though, and because he is now a specialist in COIN, he knows what he could have done better.

First it was seven Army sergeants. Now it's twelve Army captains.

Today marks five years since the authorization of military force in Iraq, setting Operation Iraqi Freedom in motion. Five years on, the Iraq war is as undermanned and under-resourced as it was from the start. And, five years on, Iraq is in shambles.

As Army captains who served in Baghdad and beyond, we've seen the corruption and the sectarian division. We understand what it's like to be stretched too thin. And we know when it's time to get out.

At first, Charlie thought this shot across the bow was the most startling statement in this op-ed today. But then she saw:

U.S. forces, responsible for too many objectives and too much "battle space," are vulnerable targets. The sad inevitability of a protracted draw-down is further escalation of attacks -- on U.S. troops, civilian leaders and advisory teams. They would also no doubt get caught in the crossfire of the imminent Iraqi civil war.

So what they're saying is our exit strategy (such as it is) will only make things worse for Americans on the ground (to say nothing of that imminent civil war)? Why didn't they say anything while they were still in uniform?

This is Operation Iraqi Freedom and the reality we experienced. This is what we tried to communicate up the chain of command. This is either what did not get passed on to our civilian leadership or what our civilian leaders chose to ignore. While our generals pursue a strategy dependent on peace breaking out, the Iraqis prepare for their war -- and our servicemen and women, and their families, continue to suffer.

Oh, snap! They did! (We'll leave for another day the question of if and how this information was willfully disregarded.) Well, are there any options left on the table?

There is one way we might be able to succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately. A scaled withdrawal will not prevent a civil war, and it will spend more blood and treasure on a losing proposition.

America, it has been five years. It's time to make a choice.

To many this will seem simplistic. And it is. (Charlie, for one, is reluctant to fetishize the tactical observations of boots on the ground) . But that doesn't mean it's wrong. Fellow traveler Phil Carter has been beating the draft drum for some time. And Steve Biddle has highlighted similar problems with a Goldilocks-like desire to chart a middle course of advisors and phased draw-down. We can either fight a proper counter-insurgency campaign, or we can come home.

Any chance we could get 17 generals to agree?

... the great Colonel McCallister has squeezed into a pamphlet. 72 pages, folks. Short enough for even a Marine to read. (Thanks, Small Wars Journal!)

... is this book.

It's hard to think of a more effective weapon than the IED (Improvised Explosive Device). Thought it can take the form of a roadside bomb or jury-rigged land mine, the U.S. military uses the acronym IED to describe all the bombs, little and large, manufactured by amateurs for use against the U.S. military and its partners in Iraq.

The IED is effective for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it's a cheap, easy way to inflict casualties on a fighting force whose home front and officer corps is casualty-averse. Second, it's a great way -- when placed in a populated area -- to draw a disproportionate response from the targeted patrol. (Example: remember when that Marine special operations unit was hit with an IED in Afghanistan in the spring and they proceeded to shoot their machine guns into a crowd of civilians, killing over a dozen?) And third, it's a low-tech weapon that frustrates a military that wants technical, high-tech solutions.

"Americans want technical solutions. They want the silver bullet," said Rear Adm. Arch Macy, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Washington, which now oversees several counter-IED technologies. "The solution to IEDs is the whole range of national power --political-military affairs, strategy, operations, intelligence."

If you have some time today, read Rick Atkinson's profile of the IED -- and the U.S. military's efforts to counter its use -- in today's Washington Post. Abu Muqawama especially enjoyed the criticism of the way in which America's military culture -- and military industry -- has failed to adapt to the COIN era:

The IED struggle has become a test of national agility for a lumbering military-industrial complex fashioned during the Cold War to confront an even more lumbering Soviet system. "If we ever want to kneecap al-Qaeda, just get them to adopt our procurement system. It will bring them to their knees within a week," a former Pentagon official said.

"We all drank the Kool-Aid," said a retired Army officer who worked on counter-IED issues for three years. "We believed, and Congress was guilty as well, that because the United States was the technology powerhouse, the solution to this problem would come from science. That attitude was 'All we have to do is throw technology at it and the problem will go away.' . . . The day we lose a war it will be to guys with spears and loincloths, because they're not tied to technology. And we're kind of close to being there."

Or, as an officer writing in Marine Corps Gazette recently put it, "The Flintstones are adapting faster than the Jetsons."

One sentence this blog took (minor) issue with was this sentence:

Insurgents often post video clips of their attacks on the Internet, the equivalent of taking scalps.

Well, it's slightly more complicated than that. Conventional thinking says the damage done by the IED was the objective of the operation. Abu Muqawama, though, believes the videotape is the real objective in many cases. Yes, it's nice to kill a few Americans. But even if you don't kill any Americans, you can post your video on the internet anyway (claiming that you killed two, or a dozen, or twenty) and radicalize and inspire others. It's viral warfare, and the most important thing you will have gotten out of your operations is not the enemy BDA (Battle Damage Assessment) but the image of the destruction.

Roland Barthes would have a had a field day with this war, wouldn't he?

Regarding yesterday's post, Abu Muqawama operative "Charlie" (she's a civilian, so you do not salute her) wonders if Charles Dunlap has gotten around to asking any failed counterinsurgents of the 20th Century -- the Soviets in Afghanistan, the French in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam -- if they failed as counterinsurgents because they didn't bomb enough. It's a good question. No where in the lessons learned of any failed counterinsurgency of the 20th Century do you come across this phrase: "Bombing the civilian population -- did we do enough of it?"