Center for a New American Security

I have just spent the past several days talking about small wars and insurgencies with the brilliant graduate students who make up this year's SWAMOS class. I lectured all day Wednesday and stuck around to hear Conrad Crane talk on Thursday about the development and implementation of U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine. One of the topics that kept coming up was the ways in which FM 3-24 needs to be revised, so I was pleased to see Carl Prine, Starbuck and Mike Few tackle this very issue in a paper for the Small Wars Journal (.pdf). Jason Fritz then piled on over at Ink Spots.

My primary criticism of the doctrine as it is currently written is the doctrine's weakness with respect to waging counterinsurgency as a third party, something both Charlie "Erin" Simpson and Steve Biddle have written a lot about. Any doctrine that borrows heavily from lessons learned in the colonial era will not take into account the fact that when you yourself are not the sovereign power, you have a whole 'nother set of issues to deal with. The main issue is that of what Steve calls interest alignment. As the doctrine is written, there is a naive assumption that our interests line up with those of the host nation, which is almost never the case. As a consequence of that assumption, though, we fail to think through how we need to use our leverage over the host nation to be successful.

You might think that the father of the doctrine, Con, would be really protective of it. Not at all. Con was taking a lot of notes yesterday and seems excited about revising the doctrine to incorporate lessons learned as well as to fill gaps where the doctrine is weak. He's a lot more open minded about the doctrine, in other words, than a lot of the doctrine's most vehement critics.

jp3_24

Michael Cohen of the New America Foundation took up my challenge for people not named Gian Gentile to offer up criticisms of counter-insurgency. In two posts, here and here, Michael gives us much to think about. I think, though, that by picking fights with the people and ideas that he does, he ends up ignoring the great many of us who never want to fight another counter-insurgency campaign again but still think it's a damn good idea to have the doctrine and best practices handy. Michael seems to want to avoid all conflicts -- conventional and unconventional. And, well, sure. But as Trotsky didn't actually say, "you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." In the same way, as this blog has certainly said, military institutions cannot afford to just not study up on certain kinds of conflicts in the hopes that the teacher (or crazy policy-makers) will not put them on the final exam.

In the end, I think what Michael has an issue with here is American policy. Which is not the same as doctrine.

I just noticed this post written by Eric Martin criticizing the COIN community -- and me especially -- for promulgating COIN doctrine and then ducking responsibility when policy-makers formulate COIN strategies based upon that doctrine. Essentially, Martin's argument is that it's no use me complaining COIN is doctrine and not strategy -- some of the very same theorists who have advocated on behalf of population-centric COIN are now advocating on behalf of strategies which employ COIN. And I encourage you all to read this as a counterpoint to many of the arguments I have advanced of late. At the end, Martin writes:

Given the costs, the requisite dedication of time and resources, the grandiosity of the goals and, relatedly, the uncertainty of the outcomes, as well as the inefficiency of the long-term occupation model as a means of preventing subsequent terrorist attacks, I'm tempted to simply quote Andrew Exum: "No one who really understands COIN wants to do it." Seriously. So maybe we shouldn't.

I'm going to try and respond to that quickly. First off, we agree that COIN -- as a strategy -- is difficult, expensive, and best avoided. But in formulating policy, one must first decide what interests are at stake and how best to protect those interests. As much as it may stink, a population-centric COIN strategy may be the best way to protect U.S. and allied interests and advance policy aims.

The key arena here is Afghanistan. Going forward, is a population-centric COIN strategy the best strategy to advance U.S. and allied policies and to protect U.S. and allied interests? Maybe. Then again, maybe not. As I have argued many times, the community of theorists and practitioners who work on COIN are divided on this question. Even in the hallowed halls of 1301 Pennsylvania Avenue, there exists a whole heap of disagreement on this issue. The COIN community is no monolith, and although most people in the community will agree (at least in hindsight) that a population-centric COIN campaign was worth attempting in 2006 in Iraq, it may not be appropriate for Afghanistan in 2009.

I think what Martin is most upset about is any circumstance in which U.S. and allied forces occupy a foreign country. Understood. Although I certainly don't care for such circumstances either, my priority is on protecting interests and advancing policy aims. And I am glad we now have COIN as an option for doing so -- even if we choose not to use it.

This blog has a fantastic network of spies who monitor the effect COIN doctrine is having on countries outside the United States. Our friend Stephanie Pezard sent along this speech that French defense minister Hervé Morin gave at the CSIS. (Another friend, Thomas Rid, aparently managed to even swing himself an invitation. He's cool like that.) A translation of the speech is available here on .mp3.

Now, one must remember that David Galula -- whose writings have been so influential on the development of U.S. COIN doctrine -- was first published in English and not his native French. It was not until just last year that Galula's Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice was published in French for the first time. (And with an introduction written by David Petraeus! Amazon.fr reports it is en stock. Which is more than you can say for my book.) During the speech, though, Morin referred to Galula's book as "the latest Bible," claimed he read the book over the course of a weekend, and said:

[This] writing should inspire, in depth, our action toward the Afghan population. This goes also through a strong respect for for the Afghan people -- for their traditions, for their faith -- and we must do everything we can to avoid side effects -- collateral damage -- which of course is giving strength to the recruiting for the Taliban...

Obviously, that sounded a lot better in French. But leaving out the fact that Gian Gentile is now deep in the basement of West Point's library, furiously translating his articles into French, this represents a milestone for population-centric COIN theory. For much of the 20th Century (and even the later years of the 19th Century), French small wars theorists have heavily influenced the way in which we in the English-speaking world have thought about countering insurrections. Now things have come full circle in the most ironic of ways, with Americans popularizing and interpreting a French thinker for the French themselves.

These are happy days -- though it bears keeping in mind that France is not exactly hurting for living Frenchmen in the first ranks of theorist-practitioners.

Here's a fun new project for the readership, building off some rather good comments in this morning's post. Please offer your best definitions for the following terms:

• Doctrine
• Strategy
• Grand Strategy

A few days ago, I blogged on Andrew Bacevich's review of David Kilcullen's new book, writing, "No one who really understands COIN wants to do it." What I meant by that was that people who really understand how difficult COIN operations can be are less likely to have an appetite for actually conducting them than many policy-makers in Washington or Brussels.

I think most people understood that. Matt Yglesias and Justin Logan, though, fret that developing this great new COIN doctrine might lead us to get involved with more COIN operations and not fewer of them. There is a very important and legitimate concern in what both are saying, which I will touch upon while also explaining the mistake both have made in their analysis.

First off, this blog has long warned against the dangers of allowing operations to drive strategy. In war, which takes place on four levels, policies should drive strategy which should drive operations which should drive tactics. One tailors one's tactics and operations to meet the strategy. Often, militaries and their civilian leadership get things mixed up, and operations begin to drive strategy. (Think the German Army in World Wars I and II and the Israel Defense Force in ... well, every war since 1967.)

There is a real danger, then, that because we have this great new COIN doctrine, we will want to apply that doctrine in Afghanistan without first sitting down to determine our interests in Afghanistan and to formulate policies and strategies in defense of those interests. At a party last night for Laura Rozen, hosted by ForeignPolicy.com, I heard one respected foreign policy expert worry that we were committing more troops into Afghanistan without first completing the strategic review. I understood his worry, even if I do not share it. In the absence of new guidance from the Obama Administration, the folks at CENTCOM and in Bagram are simply continuing to carry out a COIN campaign designed to provide security to the people of Afghanistan. If the Obama Administration decides to change course once the strategic review is complete, they can do so. (And I do not think this administration will be shy about reversing course if they feel such a decision is necessary.) It may be, though, that COIN operations are the most effective operations for securing U.S. interests in Afghanistan. As I argued in the New York Times a few weeks back, though, most COIN theorists I know have decided upon a rather depressing calculus for COIN in Afghanistan:

(10 years) + (10,000 NATO dead) + ($500 billion) = Chad

So don't accuse the COIN crowd of going into this adventure in Afghanistan with anything but eyes wide open. LTG (Ret.) David "Smart Ranger" Barno, after all, told the Senate last week that if everything goes right, we'll be in Afghanistan for 25 years.

That said, though, Yglesias and Logan make a mistake that never fails to irk this blog and the rest of those who have worked to promulgate COIN doctrine: they confuse operational doctrine with strategy.

COIN is a means to an end. It is not a foreign policy strategy and is not associated with any particular school of international relations. Proponents of COIN doctrine are realists, neo-conservatives, and liberal interventionists. The reason we promote COIN doctrine in the U.S. military is because, following Vietnam, the military made the mistake of assuming we would never have to fight large-scale COIN operations ever again. As Andrew Bacevich pointed out, U.S. military leaders in the post-Vietnam era made it very difficult for policy-makers to ever use the military for war without also mobilizing the reserve. (A sneaky -- and unconstitutional -- move on their part.) And a certain "doctrine" further deluded the U.S. military into thinking it would never have to fight messy protracted struggles ever again.

There were two problems with this. One, the enemy gets a vote in the kinds of wars we fight. I returned from Afghanistan in 2002 and, five months later, found myself fighting against "Soviet" tank columns in Louisiana. While that might have been good practice for the two-month invasion of Iraq, no enemy I have ever encountered on the battlefield in three tours to Iraq and Afghanistan fought like the OPFOR at Forts Polk and Irwin fought prior to 2003. (The corollary to this is that not all enemies will elect to fight like the Taliban either.)

The second problem is, the politicians get a vote too. They decide when and where the U.S. military will fight. And while you may trick yourself into thinking the Powell Doctrine means you'll never get stuck in an open-ended war that necessitates COIN operations, Colin Powell himself might decide to sit before the United Nations with vial of Anthrax and make sure that you do end up fighting in a messy and protracted popular war.

So because the enemy and the politicians (one and the same? just kidding) get votes in what kinds of wars the U.S. military fights, the U.S. military has to be prepared to not just fight in "major combat operations" but also to execute COIN operations when those operations offer the best chance for the realization of strategic objectives. Which is why we need good operational doctrine and training. And that is NOT the same thing as strategy.

In conclusion, though, many thanks to Yglesias and Logan both for causing me to think yesterday evening, and especial thanks go to Logan for our e-mail conversation yesterday.

Update: Intrepid Spencer has more to say about all this.

Update II: The CATO crowd is still angry at me, though.

So a few weeks ago, when I posted my controversial "winners and losers" from the new Tom Ricks book, I asked why Tom had ignored the impact of the new media on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Ricks cited a discussion on Small Wars Journal once and also cited some things on PlatoonLeader.org but never considered the way in which the new media has revolutionized the lessons learned process in the U.S. military. (Forget Abu Muqawama, though, because this lowly blog started around the same time as the surge.) Instead of just feeding information to the Center for Army Lessons Learned and waiting for lessons to be disseminated, junior officers are now debating what works and what doesn't on closed internet fora -- such as PlatoonLeader and CompanyCommand -- and open fora, such as the discussion threads on Small Wars Journal. The effect of the new media on the junior officers fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was left curiously unexplored by Ricks, now a famous blogger himself.

That got our friend (and more responsible blogging cousin) Dave Dilegge thinking, and so Dave asked a bunch of bloggers and counter-insurgency theorists to ponder the question of how the new media has affected operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and institutional learning. Folks interviewed included Spencer Ackerman, Tom Barnett, Janine Davidson, Grim from Blackfive, Judah Grunstein, Dave Kilcullen, Raymond Pritchett, Mark Safranski, Herschel Smith, Starbuck, Michael Tanji, and Michael Yon. I particularly liked something Janine had to say:

Military learning -- from the western frontier to now -- has always been enabled by what Keith Bickel calls "informal doctrine.” These sources become critical when formal doctrine is off base or lags behind new techniques and threats. During the Banana Wars, the USMC devoured the Marine Corps Gazette, where that era's thought leaders and vets were publishing their experience and insight from their tours in the Caribbean. These articles eventually framed the Small Wars Manual.

Today this dialogue and debate is taking place in print and "new" media. For our community Small Wars Journal and Abu Muquama provide the key fora. These are not just places to pontificate (though we do that too) but rather sites where serious thought leadership and learning is taking place. And yes, the hosts of these sites are making an enormous difference.

I realize this post could fall under "navel-gazing" and of course appreciate people like Janine telling us how important we are, but as someone who studies the way military organizations learn, I am particularly fascinated by the way in which tactical leaders have used Web 2.0 to innovate on the battlefield. Many thanks, Dave, for submitting this RFI. I would now like to hear from tactical operators in the field. If you are a veteran of either Iraq or Afghanistan, write in and say whether or not sites like Abu Muqawama or Small Wars Journal or PlatoonLeader have affected the way you think or the way in which your unit did business on the ground. Because I could just have an over-inflated sense of my own importance. (Which would surprise exactly no one.)

Read the rest of Dave's collection here (.pdf).

My friend Issandr, who knows me well enough to know how easily I can be baited, sent along this silly article in MERIP on FM 3-07, Stability Operations.

There are so many ways in which this article is bollixed. Let's start with this peach of a sentence:

FM 3-07, Stability Operations signifies the success of the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Feith Pentagon and Bush-Cheney White House at legitimating a project that was anathema to many officers a decade prior.

Okay, I know that if you don't like something, it's always easy to link it to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Feith to convince others not to like it as well. I do it all the time myself. But anyone who has closely followed defense debates of the past seven years or read any of the many accounts of the run-up to the Iraq War understands that, if anything, the emergence of doctrine such as FM 3-24 and FM 3-07 represents an explicit rejection of the facile understanding of military power embraced by the neoconservatives. War ain't easy. It is, in fact, the realm of chance. The very fact that military force alone could not bring about quick victories in complex environments such as Iraq and Afghanistan necessitated doctrine such as FM 3-07 and FM 3-24. (The fact that our inter-agency was ill-prepared to support the military in such environments was another reason.)

Then there's the author's whole problem of taking operational doctrine and claiming it represents some tectonic shift in U.S. policy rather than the efforts of pragmatic military officers to find solutions to the aforementioned complex operating environments in which U.S. soldiers -- not to mention thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians -- are dying because our existing doctrine doesn't give operational and tactical commanders a clue as to how to address such environments.

The author of this article reminds me of the Bob Dylan song Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues in which the singer sees communists and the Red Menace everywhere -- even in the red stripes of the American flag.

If you are predisposed to see imperialism everywhere, you'll find plenty of it in the operational doctrine of the U.S. military. My advice to the author is to not stop at FM 3-07. Check out all our doctrine for conventional combat operations as well. All of it -- every word of every sentence -- is fundamentally about the application of military power in the service of political ends. If you see FM 3-07 as imperialist, you'll find lots more to fill articles in MERIP in the rest of the Reimer Library.

In spite of it all, the author raises a good question that has absolutely nothing to do with operational doctrine. Should the U.S. Army be doing stability operations in the first place? Well this is indeed a good question. But that's a question for the politicians, not the military. If the political decision-makers draft policy using the U.S. Army for imperialist ends, then the means also become imperialist. If the politicians use the U.S. Army to fight fascism, well, then I guess our doctrine reverts back to being heroic. And if the officers of the U.S. Army say that "we don't do windows" and refuse to author any doctrine for nation-building and security sector reform and then the politicians decide that oh yes you do, then who is being irresponsible? Both parties, perhaps, but certainly the officer corps. What the author of this article doesn't understand is that while military officers don't decide how the U.S. military is to be employed, they do have a responsibility to ensure junior officers and their units are prepared for any foreseeable contingency. Even nation-building.

This mirrors a problem I had with Andrew Bacevich's thought-provoking new book.Bacevich suggests that because our COIN doctrine is rooted in the writings of Galula and Trinquier -- who were fighting dirty imperialist wars at the time they wrote their books -- our own doctrine is also by necessity dirty and imperialist. Well, no. That just doesn't wash logically. Operational doctrine is just that -- operational. You could apply Galula to a UN-sanctioned peace-keeping mission in Haiti, and there wouldn't be anything dirty or imperialist about that. (Well, not much anyway.)

Bacevich, though, does a better job than the author of this MERIP piece -- who seems like an intelligent guy, even if completely out of his element here -- at asking the big questions. These questions -- how are we to use our military, what is to be the aim of U.S. policy abroad, etc. -- are political in nature. They boil down to decisions that need to be made by politicians and the electorate. The military, meanwhile, concentrates on the operational and the tactical. (As Richard Betts points out, contemporary military operations are so complex and demanding they often prevent military officers from being good thinkers at even the strategic level.) I think that Bacevich, in fact, has in my opinion made the most cogent critique of COIN -- much more coherent than the criticisms offered by our friend Gian Gentile or Charlie Dunlap, for example -- in large part by focusing on the political questions at stake. They are the ones that matter.

This MERIP piece is just another example, I'm afraid, of what happens when a political scientist tries to arrive at broad conclusions about the military without the necessary familiarity and study required to do so.

UPDATE: Dave Dilegge and Janine Davidson get involved here, and Spencer Ackerman contributes his two cents here.

Doctrine, as Colin Gray once wrote, is the skeleton upon which the sinew and flesh of armies are built. Perhaps then, with no NATO doctrine for the conduct of a war among the people, it should be no surprise that the NATO-led ISAF in Afghanistan has often appeared spineless.

NATO has recognized this problem and has commissioned the Dutch who have been operating in Uruzgan province alongside the Australians to write NATO's counterinsurgency doctrine.

This past month, a smattering of counterinsurgency thinkers to include the Counterinsurgency Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth met with the doctrine's lead writers to provide inputs. That said, the "A-team" for developing US counterinsurgency doctrine has not been called out to facilitate and assist. Kip hopes this is not indicative of the amount of emphasis that NATO is placing on the doctrine itself.

The effort is particularly important in light of the lack of a national strategy or regional strategy to defeat the insurgencies in Afghanistan. At the tactical and operational levels, units lack a common language to discuss what it is that they are trying to do and why certain actions may be productive or counter-productive. Whatever the doctrine that emerges looks like these are several of Kip's hopes for it:

1) The doctrine does not cave in to external pressures within the alliance and includes the importance of protecting the populace outside of the FOB (pressure would most likely come from the Germans in this regard)

2) The doctrine focuses on organizing for intelligence and the importance of developing intelligence products which can be shared with other Coalition members as well as Afghan Security Forces.

3) The doctrine develops standard mechanisms for the transmission and retention of lessons learned across the Alliance and ISAF Coalition.

4) The doctrine focuses on counterinsurgency as an inherently long-term commitment.

5) The doctrine focuses on the importance of providing national level guidance on information operations approved by the Alliance and then allowing local commanders freedom of maneuver within this guidance. The days of one-week or longer times between responses to events should be over.

6) The doctrine focuses on developing mechanisms for unity of command and unity of effort under Alliance-led counterinsurgency mechanisms. This should focus on the importance of deployments sans national caveats and the use of a multi-national command structure to which troops are generally subordinate.

7) The doctrine should focus heavily on the importance of host nation security force assistance and particularly on the desired competition and freedom of maneuver of Operational Mentor and Liaison Teams. It should detail their composition and the importance of living, eating, and sleeping with their host nation counterparts.

8) The doctrine develops a mechanism for human terrain analysis. Kip believes the ASCOPE analysis presented in US Civil Affairs doctrine and FM 3-24 is an excellent model.

9) The doctrine focuses on the importance of developing logistical support mechanisms that support simultaneously host nation economic development.

10) The doctrine emphasizes the importance of both warfighting skills and civil affairs capabilities. Particularly it focuses on the importance of dismounted patrolling capabilities while at the same time detailing the need for human intelligence, civil affairs, and political officer capabilities down to the battalion if not the company level.


There are many more, of course. But these are ten of immediate importance that come to mind. Kip is looking forward to learning from the subsequent discussion of this topic.