WarThinker's Digest - Issue #4

WarThinker's Digest is a feature of theScience of Global Security & Armed Conflict blog that scans the scholarly literature from academia, government agencies, and major think tanks, highlighting new reports and documents bearing on the complexity of conflict and future trends in warfare. A must-read feature for defense and security strategists from all sectors interested in honing their "actionable intellect."


Obama's COIN toss

In Afghanistan, we have a plan -- but that's not the same as a strategy

By Eliot A. Cohen
The Washington Post
Sunday, December 6, 2009

Excerpt:

Strategy is the art of choice that binds means with objectives. It is the highest level of thinking about war, and it involves priorities (we will devote resources here, even if that means starving operations there), sequencing (we will do this first, then that) and a theory of victory (we will succeed for the following reasons). That is the job of wartime presidents; it’s why they have the title commander in chief. Obama set out his objectives for Afghanistan, focused on thwarting al-Qaeda, and enumerated some of the means, chiefly a 30,000-troop, 18-month surge. But what about the hard part: setting priorities, establishing a sequencing and laying out a theory of victory?

C.I.A. to Expand Use of Drones in Pakistan
By Scott Shane
New York Times
Published: December 3, 2009

Excerpt:

The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president’s decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.

By increasing covert pressure on Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan, while ground forces push back the Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan, American officials hope to eliminate any haven for militants in the region.

One of Washington’s worst-kept secrets, the drone program is quietly hailed by counterterrorism officials as a resounding success, eliminating key terrorists and throwing their operations into disarray. But despite close cooperation from Pakistani intelligence, the program has generated public anger in Pakistan, and some counterinsurgency experts wonder whether it does more harm than good.

Assessments of the drone campaign have relied largely on sketchy reports in the Pakistani press, and some have estimated several hundred civilian casualties. Saying that such numbers are wrong, one government official agreed to speak about the program on the condition of anonymity. About 80 missile attacks from drones in less than two years have killed “more than 400” enemy fighters, the official said, offering a number lower than most estimates but in the same range. His account of collateral damage, however, was strikingly lower than many unofficial counts: “We believe the number of civilian casualties is just over 20, and those were people who were either at the side of major terrorists or were at facilities used by terrorists.”

Reconstruction Under Fire: Unifying Civil and Military Counterinsurgency

By: David C. Gompert, Terrence K. Kelly, Brooke Stearns Lawson, Michelle Parker, Kimberly Colloton
RAND Corporation

Effective civilian relief, reconstruction, and development work can help convince people to support their government against insurgency. Knowing this, insurgents will target such work, threatening both those who perform it and those who benefit from it. Too often, the result is a postponement of efforts to improve government and serve the population until contested territory has been cleared of insurgents. This can lead to excessive reliance on force to defeat insurgents — delaying or even preventing success. A RAND team with combined security and development expertise set out to learn how civilian counterinsurgency (civil COIN) (essential human services, political reform, physical reconstruction, economic development, and indigenous capacity-building) could be conducted more safely in the face of active insurgency, when it can do the most good. The authors propose the following to improve the security of civil COIN under fire: a concept for setting priorities among civil COIN measures; a way to allocate security forces optimally among various civil COIN activities, as well as between them and other COIN security missions (e.g., direct operations against insurgents); new, integrated concepts of operation (ICONOPS) that military and civilian leaders could employ during COIN campaigns to manage risk and produce best results for COIN as a whole; and general requirements for capabilities and corresponding investments to secure civil COIN, derived from ICONOPS.

The New Counterinsurgency Era
By David Ucko

Confronting insurgent violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has recognized the need to “re-learn” counterinsurgency. But how has the Department of Defense with its mixed efforts responded to this new strategic environment? Has it learned anything from past failures?

In The New Counterinsurgency Era, David Ucko examines DoD’s institutional obstacles and initially slow response to a changing strategic reality. Ucko also suggests how the military can better prepare for the unique challenges of modern warfare, where it is charged with everything from providing security to supporting reconstruction to establishing basic governance—all while stabilizing conquered territory and engaging with local populations. After briefly surveying the history of American counterinsurgency operations, Ucko focuses on measures the military has taken since 2001 to relearn old lessons about counterinsurgency, to improve its ability to conduct stability operations, to change the institutional bias against counterinsurgency, and to account for successes gained from the learning process.

Given the effectiveness of insurgent tactics, the frequency of operations aimed at building local capacity, and the danger of ungoverned spaces acting as havens for hostile groups, the military must acquire new skills to confront irregular threats in future wars. Ucko clearly shows that the opportunity to come to grips with counterinsurgency is matched in magnitude only by the cost of failing to do so.

Table of Contents:

Foreword by Lt. Col. John A. Nagl, USA (Ret.)
Introduction
1. Framing the Reorientation
2. A Troubled History
3. Revisiting Counterinsurgency
4. Innovation under Fire
5. Counterinsurgency and the QDR
6. FM 3-24 and Operation Fardh Al-Qanoon
7. The Ambivalence of the "Surge"
8. Innovation or Inertia
Conclusion: Kicking the Counterinsurgency Syndrome?



Counterinsurgency – a much failed strategy?
By Patrick Lang

Excerpt:

Conclusion:

COIN is a badly flawed instrument of statecraft: Why?

- The locals ultimately own the country being fought over.

- Such COIN wars are expensive, long drawn out affairs that are deeply debilitating for the foreign counterinsurgent power.

- COIN theory is predicated on the ability of the counterinsurgents to change the mentality of the “protected” (read controlled) population. The sad truth is that most people do not want to be deprived of their ancestral ways and will fight to protect them.

- In the end the foreign counterinsurgent is embarked on a war that is not his own war.

- For the counterinsurgent the commitment of forces must necessarily be much larger than for the insurgents.

What should we do?

- Hold the cities as bases to prevent a recognized Taliban government until some satisfactory (to us) deal is made among the Afghans.

- Participate in international economic development projects for Afghanistan.

- Conduct effective clandestine HUMINT out of the city bases against international jihadi elements.

- Turn the tribes against the jihadi elements.

- Continue to hunt and kill/capture dangerous jihadis,

How long might you have to follow this program? It might be a long time but that would be sustainable. A full-blown COIN campaign in Afghanistan is not politically sustainable.

Civil War Outcomes
By Roy Licklider
Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University
Saltzman Working Paper No. 11
November 2009


This paper attempts to summarize the rapidly expanding literature on civil war outcomes, organizing it around three central questions, all of which remain under debate: (1) what are civil wars, (2) how do we know when they end, and (3) what can outsiders do to help end them and prevent their recurrence? It focuses on the normative and ethical issues involved in negotiated settlements to civil wars: do they reduce violence or not, do they encourage democracy or not, the conflict between amnesty and justice which they often raise, and, if they are seen as desirable, when are they likely to occur and how, if at all, can outsiders support them.



Third-Generation Civil--Military Relations

by Frederik Rosén
Security Dialogue, Vol. 40, No. 6, 597-616 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0967010609350633

Counterinsurgency strategies employed by the US military in Afghanistan have led to the US military embarking on civil governance reform. This has created new forms of civil—military relations with Afghan and international counterparts. These relations appear less dramatic than ‘conventional’ civil—military relations, in that they do not create the same visible alignment on the ground between military and non-military identities. In addition, the increased merging of civil and military work areas creates a new complexity that stems from semantic confusion. This complexity is mostly about norms and principles, in that the core puzzle is the more general question of what kinds of tasks the military should and should not do, rather than about violent consequences to civilians and questions of neutrality. This article proposes the term ‘third-generation civil—military relations’ to capture and examine the conceptual challenges that stem from the merging of military and civil work areas in Afghanistan’s reconstruction.

Afghanistan Options Made Simple (Though the Choice is Not)

Tomorrow night, in a televised address at the United States Military Academy at West Point, President Obama will reveal his long-awaited decision on the next steps in Afghanistan.

The U.S. currently has about 68,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan. Every aspect of US operations there has been subject to intense debate. If there is any consensus to be had in understanding U.S. objectives there, the two stand-outs would probably be:

1. preventing Afghanistan from again being used as a home and safe haven for Al Qaeda; and
2. preventing the hazards of an ungoverned Afghanistan from destabilizing the region, especially Pakistan with its cache of nuclear weapon.

Joanna Gurney from The Truman National Security Project Educational Institute, has put together a presentation called “Afghanistan 101” for those who want a quick overview of the situation. It addresses our goal in Afghanistan; connections between al-Qaeda and the Taliban; US strategy -past and present; the role of Pakistan; and why the President is reconsidering US strategy there.

Here is a glance at the President's main menu of options (according to the NY Times):

Option #1: The Full Monty - 40,000 troops

This is almost as many as Gen. Stanley McChrystal requested. David Kilcullen, one of the chief architects of US COIN doctrine, believes at least 40,000 will be needed.

Under the big option, U.S. troop strength in Kandahar would more than triple. They would more than double in Helmland. And a new infusion would occupy East Afghanistan in the provinces of Paktika, Paktia and Khost (called "P2K"). About 10,000 of the new troops would be deployed primarily to help train and equip the indigenous Afghan Army for an eventual handoff.

Option #2 - The Middle Ground - 20,000 to 35,000 troops

This option is currently the odds-on favorite. This option has the support of heavyweight advisors such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen. Under this plan, there would be half as many military trainers, and much less emphasis on Helmland and P2K. For every 10,000 troops, you can count on a cost of about $10 billion per year.

Kilcullen thinks the middle ground is the worst possible option:

We can either put in enough troops to control the environment or we can credibly communicate our intention to leave. Either could work. Splitting the difference is not the way to go. It feels to me that all these options are dangerously close to the middle ground and we have to consider whether the middle ground is a good place to be. The middle ground is a good place on domestic issues, but not on strategy. You either commit to D-Day and invade the continent or you get Suez. Half-measures end up with Suez. Do it or not do it.

Option #3 - COIN Lite - 10,000 to 15,000 troops

This is Vice President Biden's preferred choice, but most other analysts are pretty skeptical and think the effects would be like putting a Band-Aid on an open chest wound. The rationale for the Lite plan is not to boost combat troop strength, but to focus on training indigenous forces and have more of the trigger-pulling and bad-guy-killing done by the locally unpopular Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones).

Remember the exciting new Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual? Well, if we were to follow the guidance of our own playbook - it would require a surge of more than a half million troops to fit the recommended troop:population ratio.

The Unconsidered Option - Calling it a Day

For a variety of reasons, I suppose, the idea of withdrawal didn't even have a "walk-on's" chance to make the cut. Those who think we should call it a draw and go home are a fairly diverse group, with different motivations.

Robert Jervis, for example, says: "Nothing looks good. ... I’m not convinced that withdrawal is as bad as the conventional wisdom has it. ..I’m really open to be convinced that the consequences are awful. And, of course, like all future, it’s unpredictable, but there are terrorist bases other than in Afghanistan, like in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. And I’m not convinced the Taliban, which of course is not united, would give Al Qaeda an opportunity to consolidate power the way it did in 2001. So unless the U.S. government can come up with a plan that looks to have some sensible prospect, I don’t see the point in sending more troops."

Matthew Hoh, a former U.S. Marine Corps officer and Senior Civilian representative for the US Government in Zabul Province (Afghanistan), in his September letter of resignation said: “To put simply: I fail to see the value or the worth in continued US casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year-old civil war.”

Most of the drama surrounding the President's decision is already over before it is even announced. Now, we will have to see how it plays out. Lives and Nations are quite literally at stake.

Virtual Counterinsurgency

What seems to give the West the most trouble in counterinsurgency (COIN) is not killing bad guys, but preventing new flocks of bad guys from continuously emerging. There is often talk of “draining the swamps” and “stemming the tide,” but violent extremism continues to spread – though in some circles more easily than others. The US and Western allies seem to understand – at some level – that the informational element of the battlespace reaches beyond traditional propaganda. They sincerely wish to “win hearts and minds” and engage in well-meaning efforts to do so, but global sentiments toward the West have not substantially improved.

In the most recent issue of the journal, Small Wars & Insurgencies, David Betz from the Department of War Studies, at King's College in London (and author of the Kings of War blog) offers some insights about why we struggle so much with the virtual dimension of contemporary insurgency and counterinsurgency. Betz’s prose is much more eloquent than mine, so I will begin with his four most fundamental reasons –italicized in his words - why we’re not doing better.

First, we do not take it seriously enough and therefore the tools we try to fight with are not fit for purpose.

Betz notes here that the U.S. is not organized to function optimally in an information-dominated operational environment. The United States Information Agency (USIA) is now a thing of the past and no new single point of coordination has taken its place. The result is that efforts become fragmented and not handled with the kind of precision and care that would be commensurate with a high-priority government activity.

Second, to the extent we do engage in the virtual dimension we concentrate too much on shifting Muslim opinion on an aspect of their religious faith that we as outsiders cannot effectively voice an opinion on. This is not to say we have not a stake in the outcome of that debate. We obviously do. But the surest way to make it go against us is to get involved in it.

Betz believes the ‘war for Muslim minds’ pertaining to the proper interpretation of Jihad is not a war for outsiders (including the U.S.) to fight, and that to throw our hat in the ring probably does more harm than good.

Third, we pay almost no attention to the audience to which we have access and understand: our own population, which includes Muslims in the West whose allegiance to global Jihad is what Islamists crave more than anything.

He suggests that what Western nations seek to communicate to Muslims should seek not only to reach them who reside over there, but also to look inward. Even our best attempts are unlikely to change the minds of the most hardcore militants, so our efforts are better focused on prevention than on reforming the extremist mindset.

Fourth, our efforts at narrative construction falter because they lack vertical coherence.

The basic problem – Betz explains – is that “what we say does not always align with what we do.” He believes that the West has missed the idea that narratives have different levels, and to be persuasive, the messaging must cohere across those levels. If they do cohere, the message is more likely to “feel” true. If not, the message is unlikely to resonate at all. Betz offers a modified analysis of Ann Swindler’s view of ideology in which the levels of a narrative range from the most global – “idealized visions of the future of humanity” – to the most specific, such as individual and community norms about what people should and should not do and the consequences for those actions. The interstitial area between them is the space of the “strategic narrative” in which coherence and consistency matters more than rationality and logical precision of concepts. If we misunderstand the nature of the narrative, we lose the audience. As an example, he offers that ‘democratization’ actually lies at the global end of the continuum, but is often erroneously treated as a strategic-level message.

A thoughtful analysis.

Betz, D. (2008). The virtual dimension of contemporary insurgency and counterinsurgency Small Wars & Insurgencies, 19 (4), 510-540 DOI: 10.1080/09592310802462273