David H. Ucko

Stéphane Taillat, of the En Vérité blog, and Georges-Henri Brivet des Vallons have helped compiled the latest issue of Sécurité Globale, which focuses in part on counterinsurgency and irregular warfare. The issue brings together English- and French-speaking researchers on these topic, including Michel Goya, whose piece on Afghanistan and the U.S. military I mentioned in a previous post, Christian Olsson on the responsibility to protect, and myself on the ‘dilemmas of U.S. military doctrine’. Also included, of course, is COIN anti-Christ Gian Gentile, to add a bit of  debate and dissent to the fray.

You can find more details, and possibly even access, some of the articles here (the uncertainty being that the site is currently down).

I am normally deeply sceptical of any report that appears to sell a technological fix to the deep complexities of counterinsurgency and stability operations, but I am going to make an important exception to that rule to bring attention to this recent RAND publication on non-lethal technology. Cleverly entitled ‘Underkill’ and authored by a team led by David C. Gompert, Stuart E. Johnson and Martin C. Libicki, the report makes the case for ’scalable capabilities’ for military operations conducted among civilian populations. It lists some of the requirements for the effective use of non-lethal weapons and presents some options for how to make a greater investment in this area (as the report points out, the current U.S. defence budget allocates a mere $50m to non-lethal capabilities).

This quotation from early on in the report is quite representative:

The growing frequency and significance of operations amid populations suggests a regular—rather than rare—need for U.S. military forces to be able to gain control of situations, perform their tasks, and protect themselves without using deadly force. Although nonlethal options have long been essential in law-enforcement missions, in which ensuring public safety with minimum violence is stock-in-trade, they have been regarded by the military as having only limited utility in only exceptional circumstances. … Although foreign insurgents present dangers exceeding those that police face in American cities, U.S. military forces could remedy a major shortcoming they face in COIN and other important missions if they had nonlethal capabilities that could produce a range of effects and the skills to use them. Such options would offer typical small units more flexibility, self-sufficiency, and speed; less risk of making mistakes with wide political repercussions; and better odds of accomplishing their missions.

As the report also makes clear, the distinction between lethal and non-lethal is itself too crude, as it implies that everything below the threshold of lethality can be grouped together. This simplistic notion is pushed aside in the report, which instead argues for a continuum of non-lethal to lethal force, and with the understanding that even if a weapon does not kill, its unintelligent use can still have devastating consequences for a force operating with transient legitimacy and limited public support:

“Pain, shock, or injury may turn a crowd into a mob, a mob into a confrontation, or a confrontation into a cause célèbre that can fuel insurgency. Therefore, the ability to calibrate nonlethal force from none to mild to moderate to intense can be as important as simply not causing death. The need is for a continuum of force.”

The challenge is knowing and deciding which intensity of force to use when and where, so the problem is still fundamentally a human one. There is, in other words, no technological fix here, but nonetheless an appreciation that when military operations are conducted among populations whose support or at least acquiescence is necessary, it behooves the relevant armed forces to develop more options than simply ‘inactivity’ or ‘death’. It is intriguing to me that after years operating in urban environments – in Iraq, to a lesser degree in Afghanistan, but also throughout the 1990s – these issues have not attracted more attention.

You can read the rest of this report here.

As a final thought, I wonder whether it is at all coincidental that this report was commissioned by the Office of the Secretary of Defence, rather than by the Army.

The latest issue of the Journal of Military History contains, among a great many things, a review I wrote of Mark Moyar’s latest book, A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq (Yale University Press). Given the amount of discussion of Moyar’s book online (here, here, and here), I asked and received the journal editor’s permission to reproduce the review here. You can find the full text below, as well as in volume 74, number 1 of the Journal of Military History.

Reviewed by David H. Ucko

In A Question of Command, Mark Moyar argues that “counterinsurgency is a ‘leader-centric’ warfare,… in which the elite with superiority in certain leadership attributes usually win” (p. 3). These leadership attributes are gleaned through nine historical case-studies: initiative, flexibility, creativity, judgment, empathy, charisma, sociability, dedication, integrity, and organization. Moyar argues that, together, they produce the ideal counterinsurgency commander and, more forcefully, that it is the quality of leadership that determines the outcome of any counterinsurgency campaign.

Moyar helpfully underlines the importance of good leadership and the demands placed on a commander in counterinsurgencies. The case-studies are thoroughly researched and engaging. Moyar also strays beyond the over-cultivated campaigns of Malaya and Vietnam to explore settings rarely seen in the counterinsurgency literature, such as the American Civil War and the Reconstruction of the South. Throughout, Moyar illustrates how good leaders, and the sacking of bad leaders, has made the difference. A forceful conclusion is that raising security forces is not a numbers game: host-nation forces require competent commanders to have a positive effect. In the conclusion, Moyar usefully elaborates on the leadership practices derived from his case-studies and indicates how these lessons may be used, today and tomorrow.

The case-studies emphasize the role of leadership far above the conflicts’ political context. This is perhaps unsurprising, as Moyar argues that “major social, economic, or political changes” have ‘historically had much less impact’ on a conflict’s outcome than leadership (p. 4). At times, however, the analysis appears slanted to prove this contention. Progress, at any level, denotes good leadership; upsets, or good decisions implemented badly, mean poor leadership; and if the counterinsurgents are failing, it is because they are “still held back by a shortage of good leaders” (p. 181). Ultimately, the explanatory power of ‘leadership’ depends on its definition. Yet as the leaders in A Question of Command range from heads-of-state, senior officials and corps commanders to lieutenant-colonels and captains, the conclusions drawn lack precision. Leadership explains everything, but also nothing.

The somewhat forced focus on leadership, not as an important factor, but as the decisive variable in the outcome of campaigns, also sidelines counterinsurgency’s intensely political nature. The chapter on El Salvador, for example, ascribes the outcome there to leadership factors yet barely mentions the critical role played by the Cold War’s passing. Also, a solution in El Salvador was not to be found purely in professionalizing the military, but by addressing a century-long history of socio-economic bifurcation, requiring the ‘negotiated revolution’ of the Chapultepec process (and even then, the results were uneven). Similarly, Gen. Templer was an exemplary leader in Malaya, and good commanders helped defeat the guerrillas there, but absent an appropriate strategy, these examples of superior leadership would mean little: critical in this instance was the British willingness to leave Malaya and the formation of a new Malaysian state in which ethnic Malay and Chinese populations could coexist. Here and elsewhere, the political essence of counterinsurgency loses out to overly personalized stories of individual leadership, important and fascinating though they may be.

This brings us to Moyar’s theory of leadership, where detail is regrettably lacking. If the ten leadership attributes are truly the winning formula behind counterinsurgencies across time and space, some elaboration might have been useful. Why exactly ten attributes? Why not ‘decisiveness’, ‘boldness’, ‘courage’ or ‘intelligence’? What constitutes a leader and how are we to understand the effects of leadership when good leaders coexist with bad ones? Moyar snipes at the Army for being less adaptive than the Marine Corps, yet provides no indication of how these services deal differently with leadership issues. How does the recent FM 6-22, Army Leadership, play into the debate? Space that might usefully have been allocated to these questions is instead devoted to historical case-studies, which, for their richness, do little to justify the categoricalness of the ten leadership attributes listed in the introduction.

Moyar’s book might have been narrower, focusing on the development and shared characteristics of counterinsurgency commanders, both American and foreign. Such a focus would have greatly added to the literature, without necessitating the bold claims of newness that accompany the elaboration of ‘leader-centric’ warfare. Yet Moyar does not seek to add to the literature but to displace it. He effectively challenges the emphasis in FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, on “social and economic programs” as “counterinsurgency tools” (p. 283). Too often, however, the critique disappoints, as it misconstrues current doctrine. Moyar claims that FM 3-24 sees security forces being used “only to protect the population from exploitation” (p. 3), when it really envisages a full range of military and civilian tasks. He claims that ‘recent theorists’ believe that ‘counterinsurgents should use as little force as possible’ (p.2), when the language in FM 3-24 and elsewhere is consistently of employing appropriate levels of force. Moyar finally plucks one sentence from FM 3-24’s appendix regarding outreach to women, and uses it to deride the manual’s softness and naïve devotion to do-goodism. In the same spirit, Moyar presents a thinly veiled and inadequately defended faith in the use of overwhelming force, approvingly citing one commander’s advice that ‘the more violent you seem and the more scared they [the population] are, they more they cooperate’ (p. 245). In absence of greater elaboration, this challenge to the extant ‘consensus’, such as it is, is a step backward rather than forward. In fact, Moyar’s ‘leader-centric’ approach to counterinsurgency can readily justify a return to an ‘enemy-centric’ paradigm rather than create a new one.

Moyar provides a useful illustration of the challenges of leadership and of developing leaders for counterinsurgency. Its historical analysis is valuable, though occasionally slanted; the author’s phrasing when he tells us he is out “to find supporting evidence from a wide range of cases” may be unintentionally revealing (p. 3). As an exposition of new counterinsurgency theory, or as a defense of a ‘leader-centric’ paradigm, A Question of Command is unconvincing, falling somewhere between historical analysis and theoretical deliberation.

Sean Naylor has a lengthy piece in the Army Times on the conduct of counterinsurgency operations in the Arghandab River Valley, Afghanistan. The piece is extremely interesting because it hints at the lack of agreement across rank as to what counterinsurgency entails or should look like. In this case, you have a very negative bottom-up reaction from the company level to the approach taken by the brigade commander, who apparently foreswears FM 3-24.2 in favour of the much more coercive or ‘enemy-centered’ 1980s’ counter-guerrilla doctrine. The O-6 in this instance sees a heavy-handed approach focusing on the enemy as a necessary precursor to reaching out to the population; the O-3 and his unit think basic COIN principles are being ignored and that the brigade-level clearing operations are achieving little other than more U.S. casualties:

“The ‘clear, hold, build’ thing that we’re supposed to be doing … we’re not doing that,” Hughes said. “If any commander in this brigade goes to sleep at night thinking after we’ve walked through that orchard over there that it’s clear, he’s a f—— idiot.”

As the article explains, the split culminated in the early replacement of Capt. Joel Kassulke and a later change of mission for the entire company. Those events are described as terrible blows to the unit’s morale.

More broadly, this is another article describing U.S. military difficulties in conducting counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, which again makes me wonder what happened to the COIN savvy on the part of the U.S. military that we saw during the so-called ’surge’ in Iraq. Are more positive accounts of operations in Afghanistan simply not being written about, have I not seen them, or did the operational learning in Iraq somehow dissipate as the focus shifted to Afghanistan? It should be mentioned that the battalion in the article (1/17) trained for Iraq before then being deployed to Afghanistan and it is clearly not as if the operational environment in the two theatres are the same. Nonetheless it seems to me that some of the fundamentals have been lost: whereas reports abounded of commanders at all levels in Iraq who understood counterinsurgency, I am getting almost the polar opposite impression when reading about Afghanistan.

This story in the Washington Post today, “Pakistan’s Zardari resists U.S. timeline for fighting insurgents“, provides a clear indication of why the Pakistan piece of the new Afghan strategy is likely to be such a headache and is very much worth the read.

It complements an article I came across earlier in the week: “The Unravelling of Pakistan“, by John R. Schmidt, published in Survival earlier this year. Schmidt lays out the typical reasons why Pakistan’s cooperation is essential to the United States’ efforts in Afghanistan, and to regional stability more broadly, but reminds us, through a compelling review of Pakistani political culture and the performance of the Pakistani political class since the founding of the state, that there are no real grounds for optimism on this front.

What I liked about the article is that it posits the behaviour of the Pakistani government within its national, historical and social context. For someone like myself – no expert on Pakistan – it also provided a useful illustration of the competing forces and interests that influence eventual Pakistani policy. Those of you with access to Survival can read the article here.

Counterinsurgency theory emphasises that understanding your environment – its politics, economics, history and culture – matters, a lot. Counterinsurgents must understand the area’s formal and informal structures and actors, the relation between them, as well as the fears, aspirations and mindsets of the people among whom they will operate. These types of exhortations are made consistently in both scholarly and doctrinal works on counterinsurgency. Yet is the full importance of knowing history, of understanding the culture and the language, fully understood, or are we engaging in a self-delusional form of sloganeering?

In his recently released book, Building Peace After War, Mats Berdal comments on the frequently affirmed importance of understanding your environment:

To many this will appear obvious and as hardly meriting separate treatment. Yet it is striking just how absent, beyond the superficial and glib acknowledgement that ‘history matters’, the significance of complex historical legacies has been from the deliberations of Western governments contemplating interventions in societies which, while fractured and traumatised by war, retain a profound sense of their own history and cultural worth, and whose basis of social order often differs sharply from those of the intervening powers.

I agree wholeheartedly: there is a difference between saying that ‘history matters’ or that ‘culture matters’ and doing the difficult work to understand, to really understand, the areas in which interventions are to take place or are currently ongoing.

Another Norwegian academic, Reidar Visser, takes this argument further, in a challenging but also very interesting post on the Obama administration’s experience with counterinsurgency in Iraq and its plans for counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Most of the blog entry focuses on internal political wranglings in Iraq and will be fascinating for anyone, such as myself, keen to follow these developments. The part that really stuck with me though, because of its wider implications, is where Visser takes the American leadership to task for failing to acknowledge their own poor understanding of politics both in Iraq and Afghanistan and the limiting effects their lack of understanding will have on their ability to ‘conduct state-building’ in either country. He says: “these people cannot know what is right for Afghanistan because they lack a profound cultural understanding of those countries”.

Vissar then raises a bunch of thorny yet for the most unanswered questions about the Afghans’ preferred form of government, and adds that:

No attempt will be made to answer these complicated questions here. Rather, that is something that should be left for true Afghanistan experts who know the languages, the religions and the history of the country. The question today is whether such experts were ever consulted before President Barack Obama made his decision on strategy.

There is a sense of frustration, if not of anger, here, but it may not be wholly unjustified. While we cannot expect Obama and Biden to develop a ‘profound cultural understanding’ of Afghanistan, we may ask for area specialists and regional experts to be consulted — but are they? Planning for the Somalia intervention in 1992 infamously ignored the advice of area experts and ethnographers; the Iraq invasion was made without consulting, or at least listening to, those well versed with the country’s politics and society; and the same could fairly be said for the Afghanistan invasion of 2001. I would be interested in seeing whether, after so many years of experience with counterinsurgency and with so many injunctions to ‘understand the human terrain’, it is now really déjà vu all over again?

I encourage you to check out Mats Berdal’s book here and to read Vissar’s blog post here.

Maj. Niel Smith, formerly of the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center, has written a very important article for the Small Wars Journal on the integration of counterinsurgency in the Army’s professional military education (PME). In it, he argues that:

Counterinsurgency instruction remains uneven in quantity and quality throughout Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) institutions, which have failed to define standards, competencies and outcomes for COIN education.

The piece illustrates once again the ambivalence of the U.S. Army’s reorientation toward counterinsurgency. Maj. Smith makes the case that counterinsurgency must be better integrated in the Army’s PME, both to help soldiers process and learn from their operational experiences, and to guarantee a better ‘linkage between doctrine and application’ in the field.

There is a need, in other words, to make difficult trade-offs if the Army is in fact serious about adapting to the contemporary operating environment. Yet as Maj. Smith concludes:

Integrating COIN does not require divestiture of conventional warfare competency. If the Army is serious about implementing the “full spectrum” concept, it must reform its educational base to provide a full spectrum education covering both conventional warfare tasks and prepare for irregular warfare. This instruction must emphasize the “how” to think, to understand the differences and similarities between the two environments and to apply the right approach in the right context at the right time.

In combination with the last post on the need to change U.S. Army force structure for irregular operations, this article by Maj. Smith should be required reading for those out there suggesting that the Army is now an ‘COIN only’ force. It should also be read more widely for its very valuable recommendations on how to reform Army PME to better integrate counterinsurgency. Some might say its long overdue…

Dr Mark Moyar weighs in Maj. Smith’s article, adding some insight from his experience as course director at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College.  Some of the key take-aways,

• if teaching of counterinsurgency is to be made more uniform, so must the exhortation toward adaptation to local circumstances — (so ‘conform to non-conformity’)
• the factors militating against change in PME curricula: resistance within schools to outside interference; limited number of course hours and need for trade-offs; professors who are unconvinced of the ‘COIN fad’.
• need to emphasise history in counterinsurgency-related education
• move away from lecture toward seminars and other more interactive means of learning

You can read the whole of Dr Mark Moyar’s text here.

Maj. Kenneth J. Burgess, U.S. Army, has an excellent piece in the latest issue of Military Affairs, where he discusses the possible changes that are needed to align U.S. Army force structure to the requirements of today’s operating environment. He cleverly flips the Army argument against force specialisation on its head by pointing out that Heavy Brigade Combat Teams (HBCT) are already ’specialised’ for conventional combat. From then on, he provides some really valuable ideas on how the other BCTs – the Stryker, the Infantry – could be rendered more relevant to stability operations, to conduct the mission components of stability operations that U.S. Army doctrine now recognises as on the same level of importance as major combat operations.

Maj. Burgess also takes issue with the ‘more of the same’ approach with which the Army is expanding the force (though it should be said that the recent decision to convert to two HBCTs to SBCTs is a step in the right direction). Nonetheless, he says: “The Army’s answer to current brigade shortages in its Iraq and Afghanistan rotational pool is to increase the supply of available brigade combat teams. Instead, more effective brigades should be the goal.” He then goes on to provide some ideas on how this could be done.

The article, which you can find here, is an excellent and much-needed contribution to the debate on how to reform force structure for today’s operating environment. I suspect Maj. Burgess’ 175-page Masters thesis, “Organizing for Irregular Warfare: Implications for the Brigade Combat Team” (which I have yet to read) provides more details than possible in the MR article.

The U.S. Naval War College has released videos from its conference in September, entitled ‘Irregular Warfare: Nasty, Brutish but Not Short’.

The conference brought together some of the sharpest minds on this topic and also some experts not usually associated with the ‘COIN community’ who were able to lend valuable perspective on some of its unquestioned assumptions. Suffice to say I would recommend anyone with an interest in counterinsurgency, its theory and its practice, to have a look at some of the videos now posted on the NWC’s own site.

For my own presentation, see Panel 5.

Panel 1: Definitions, Characteristics, and Nature of Insurgency

Panel 2: Historical and Contemporary Case-Studies of Insurgencies, Part I

Panel 3: Historical and Contemporary Case-Studies of Insurgencies, Part II

Panel 4: Learning and Re-Learning Counterinsurgency, Part I

Panel 5: Learning and Re-Learning Counterinsurgency, Part II
(regrettably does not include the presentation by Col Alford mentioned in the yesterday’s post)

Panel 6: Interagency, Ethical, Media and Non-Governmental Dimensions

Lt-Col Michel Goya, director of studies at the new Institut de recherche stratégique de l’Ecole militaire, in France, has published an article on the U.S. military’s ‘Vietnam Spiral’ in Afghanistan. The text is in French but struck me as somewhat out of key with other articles, footage and anecdotes on the U.S. military’s efforts in Afghanistan. Loosely translated, his gist is that U.S. forces operate exclusively from FOBs, complete with plasma screens and American products, and leave their bases only to apply overwhelming force on suspected enemy targets, delivered from the air (of course), and fairly indiscriminately too.

I am of course aware that what has been described as U.S. ‘counterinsurgency’ operations in Afghanistan have not always, or even often, subscribed to the principles of FM 3-24, or of COIN theory more generally. I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel with Marine Colonel Dale Alford at a recent conference at the Naval War College, where he presented a very persuasive and memorable paper on this very point. A different version of this paper can be found here (pp. 12-15), on the site of a Marine Corps University conference on counterinsurgency, which I regrettably did not attend. Col Alford’s point, as stolen from that conference transcript, was that:

We need to re-position a significant portion of our FOBs and COPs among the population because right now they’re not. The problem is they were built for CT missions in ’02 and ’03 and in ’04 in wrong locations for a population-centric COIN effort.
And the second thing is we talk about it a lot, we write about it a lot but we are not focused on the Afghan army and the Afghan police and the Afghan border police. We don’t live with them as partnered units. We consider partnering to link up and do operations. If you’re not sleeping with them, eating with them, and crapping in the same bucket, you’re not partnered and we’re not partnered in Afghanistan.

So there is some resonance between Col Alford’s account and that of Lt-Col Goya. Nonetheless Goya’s account of U.S. force posture in Afghanistan still strikes me as something of a predictable caricature, or at least as somewhat anachronistic; it reminds me of the way Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo was crititised for isolating troops from their operating environment, or of some of the criticism of the unreal life in the ‘Green Zone’ in Iraq. Is it really the case that nothing has changed, that these bad habits of counterinsurgency still prevail? Has there been no operational learning of counterinsurgency? And what then of the many soldiers who conducted counterinsurgency so well in Iraq as part of the surge?

These are the questions I am currently trying to find some answers to. At this point, it seems to me that Goya is a little bit harsh on the conduct of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and that perhaps this criticism would have sounded more appropriate a few years ago. At the same time, Goya may also be a little too nice to his own compatriots: he contrasts the U.S. military effort with that of France, specifying that (loosely translated) “the Afghans have a good image of the French, whose community-oriented approach makes them less confrontational, more patient and more successful”. Is this simply another case of French anti-Americanism?