David Ucko on COIN and its Discontents

David Ucko, as careful a student as anyone of the learning process through which the U.S. military has gone since 2001, has written a must-read blog post on Kings of War concerning the enduring utility of counterinsurgency theory and practice in the face of its critics.

To me, counterinsurgency retains value because it:

1. reaffirms the need to understand the social, cultural and political dimensions of the operating environment;
2. reaffirms the significant requirements of effective intervention in foreign polities;
3. emphasises the political essence of armed conflict;
4. recognises the local population as a significant player, rather than as an obstacle to circumvent;
5. recommends a more-than-military approach to the problem of political violence.

What counterinsurgency does not do is:

1. suggest the facility of foreign intervention so long as you’ve read Galula;
2. provide a formula or scientific model to the problem of political violence;
3. provide an answer to ‘the War on Terror’, or al-Qaeda writ large;
4. provide an answer to what the US should do in Afghanistan;
5. suggest that the use of force is irrelevant in modern conflicts.

It is on this basis that I would regret the disappearance, once more, of counterinsurgency. The one good reason to get rid of the term is precisely because of its divisive and distorting connotations; the aim then would be to talk more plainly about the requirements of war-to-peace transitions. But this presumes that the lessons of counterinsurgency have been sufficiently internalised that the concept has lost its utility as an important antithesis. And I fear that we are not quite there yet.