The Threat Posed by Islamic State ISIS – Dr. David Kilcullen Aussie Counterinsurgency Expert

David Kilcullen: It’s different in three major ways. Firstly, it is much bigger and more militarily capable than al-Qaida ever was. It has tanks, it has helicopters, it’s got very large numbers of artillery pieces, it’s got more than 30,000 fighters, so it’s significantly larger and more militarily capable. Secondly, it controls about a third of Iraq and about a third of Syria, including a network of very connected cities, economic installations that make it about between $2 million and $3 million a day in terms of revenue, and it’s really building a significant territorial state in the Middle East, which is something that al-Qaida was never able to do. Thirdly, and, actually, I think most importantly for people in Australia and New Zealand, it’s having a very significant reinvigorating effect on regional groups in South-east Asia, in Africa and the Middle East. That’s really taking us back almost to square one in terms of re-energizing a global jihad against the West. So I think all those three things adding up together, it’s really a very, very significant threat that’s somewhat larger than what we’ve really ever seen from al-Qaida.

Lisa Owen: Now, you were in Iraq with General Petraeus and helped to mastermind the troop surge there. That seemed to bring a level of stability, so why do you think we now find ourselves in this mess that we’re in?

Well, it’s actually very simple. There are two reasons, and you’re right, we did successfully stabilize Iraq, and we successfully destroyed al-Qaida in Iraq, which is the predecessor organization to ISIS, down to the point where it had less than 5 percent of its fighters left. But then the first reason is we pulled out too quickly. We essentially cut the cord and left at the end of 2011 and put the Iraqis in a position where a lot of the deals that were put in place as part of stabilizing Iraq between 2007 and 2010 just weren’t followed through on, and different parties in Iraq felt that the others weren’t acting in good faith, and the whole deal really fell apart, and that’s allowed the re-invigoration of ISIS. The second very significant reason is the Syrian civil war. So even though we had gotten ISIS down to a shadow of its former self, when the war broke out in Syria and lots of different groups turned against the Assad regime, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, at that time the head of ISIS, sent a number of his fighters into Syria to join that fight. And by their success on the ground against the Syrians, they’ve generated a lot of support within Syria. So we’ve seen two big groups—

Can we now say looking at this that the West’s intervention in Iraq was a failure?

No, I think that if you do something and it works and then you stop doing and things go bad, that means that what you did was working, not not working. What I think it tells us is that our whole approach since 9/11, which has essentially been to pick the most dangerous military aspect of Islamic jihadism worldwide and focus military effort on that has been short-sighted. And I’m worried that we’re about to make the same mistake again by switching targets from al-Qaida to ISIS, which is the next, sort of, crocodile to the canoe, if you like, instead of sitting back a little bit and saying, ‘What is it about these groups that makes them so appealing to people in our own societies, and how can we deal with that threat without, in the process, turning our own countries into police states?’ I think that’s really the question that everyone needs to be engaging on now. The military bit is important, but it’s not the forefront.

Okay, I want to come to that a bit later, but I’m wondering – is it now time to start thinking about a radical rejig in Iraq? Do we need three separate states there – Sunni, Shiites? You know, do we need to be thinking about that direction?

I think actually that ship has sailed. We’re already looking at a de facto soft partition, if you like, of Iraq into a sort of south-eastern part of the country that’s really dominated heavily by Iran and is controlled by the Shia majority government in Baghdad and then a Kurdish regional government that now includes not only northern Iraq but significant parts of Syria, and then you’ve got this sort of vacuum in the western part of the country where ISIS is currently. And it’s still a little bit unclear what the future of that part of Iraq is going to be, but I think the chance that it’s ever going to be a one single unified country again is really a bit of a fantasy at this point.

Okay, so let’s go back to the first principle question, then – should we, the West, be getting involved in this at all now?

I do think we need to be getting involved, and the reason I say that is because the reason that a significant number of people are joining Islamic State from our own societies is because they want to be part of something that’s successful, that’s world historic, that seems to be making a significant difference. And one of the most important things we can do to limit that recruitment is to, sort of, take the shine off the Islamic State. Does that mean we should be invading and occupying and trying to restabilise Iraq? Absolutely not. So I think it’s a question of how much is enough in terms of military effort to really set back Islamic State as this attractive thing that people are turning to. But, you know, that’s only part of the issue, as I said. There’s a lot of other stuff that needs to happen in our own societies that, in my view, is actually more important.

Yeah, so looking at the military effort, then – what do we need to do? You’ve been critical, I think, of the air strikes – the level of air strikes. Do we need boots on the ground? What do you see as the way forward?

I think that the way forward has been relatively well set in terms of the tactics of it, which is that we’re going to provide advisers, probably a limited number of special forces for raiding and targeting of high-value targets and then people to designate air strikes and control air power. So it is boots on the ground, but it’s not independent combat units. The main Australia, New Zealand, UK effort here is going to be in training Iraqis and possibly Syrians to take the fight directly to ISIS, but that’s going to be a matter of months, possibly years before those guys are ready to do that. Then—

But who exactly are they training, though? Because there are a lot of commentators that are saying, say, for example, the Iraqi army is in complete disarray and has fallen apart. So who exactly are they training?

That’s not actually a good understanding of what’s going on with the Iraqi military. The Iraqi special operations forces and a number of the Iraqi combat units are actually in pretty good shape. The problem is that over the intervening period since 2011, a lot of the leadership were weeded out and replaced with in some cases corrupt, in other cases sort of politically connected people who were much more interested in the politics of Baghdad than in actually building a viable military force. There’s a lot of potential in the Iraqi military, and I think it won’t be too long before they are able to come back. The real challenge is in Syria, and this puts its finger on the heart of the problem, which is a lot of Syrians are not willing to back a US-led effort unless it’s going to result in the overthrow of Assad. And right now, we’re not focusing on that. We’re not striking the Syrian regime, and there’s a worry that, sure, you can strike ISIS, but all you’re going to do is create space that allows the Assad regime to expand.

I want to just in the time we’ve got left talk a little bit about New Zealand’s involvement in this. Our Prime Minister says that we’re going to be behind the wire – that’s the phrase he likes to use. So not in the front line, offering people to train troops on the ground. But should we prepare ourselves for the possibility of casualties, even though he likes to say we’re away from the main action?

It really depends where New Zealanders end up. If they are not in Iraq, if they’re training people in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere, then I think that they are relatively safe from attack. It’s when you’re operating in Iraq or even in Syria that you’re going to find yourself in an environment where there really is not front line, and, sure, you can be inside the wire, but that doesn’t mean you’re safe. If I were advising Kiwis, I’d be saying, ‘Look, prepare yourselves for not only a significant military conflict but one that could last quite some time, and prepare yourself for a domestic threat within New Zealand.’ And that’s part of the challenge that we’re all facing, which is this is not just restricted to the Middle East. It is in our own societies, and it’s affecting public safety in big cities.

Well, when you mention the domestic threat, again, the Prime Minister has released figures publicly that says there are about 40 people who are on a watch list in New Zealand for supporting Islamic State, 40 more than need investigation and about five that have been fighting for Islamic State. Does that sound like realistic numbers to you?

I don’t have any better information than what you have, but it sounds about right when you compare it to what we’ve seen from the UK and Australia and Canada and the US. It’s about on par with that, and I think it’s worth pointing out that the number of foreign fighters who are going to join Islamic State is somewhere between 10 and 12 times the scale of what we saw during the Iraq War. It’s a very substantial number of people. I think the paradox again is the vast majority of Muslims are not involved in anything like this, but yet obviously 100 percent of people involved in the Islamic State are Muslims, so there’s a danger here that we’re going to tar everybody with the same brush and start looking at an entire subset of our own society as a threat. And I think that’s a really important fine line that we need to walk as we deal with the challenge.

But in saying that, how real is the threat on home turf? In New Zealand, say, that something could happen?

So again, back to your very original question – why is this more of a threat than al-Qaida? Al-Qaida’s style of operating was to generate teams of terrorists who would go in a pre-planned way to attack a target and so on. What we’re dealing with now is something that’s a lot, sort of, lower level but is actually rather more dangerous, which is this idea of remote radicalization so that individuals who have a social media connectivity with the Islamic State or they have friends over there becoming radicalized and essentially taking to the streets and carrying out more or less random acts of violence upon people in society. And the example that I point to is what happened in Woolwich in London last year, where two men of Nigerian descent ran down an off-duty British soldier on the street in a car—

And beheaded him in the street.

And then beheaded him in the street. Now, you can’t really protect against that in the same way you can protect against something like 9/11. The challenge for people—

So are you realistically saying, though, that that is something that could happen in New Zealand?

Absolutely. Absolutely. But I think what people need to say is how much surveillance, how much police protection are we prepared to tolerate before we turn our own societies into a police state? And you have to recognise that it’s a real risk and it could happen, but is it worth the sort of mass surveillance and police presence that governments may want to put in place to protect against it?

Well, it’s funny that—

And that’s something that every citizen needs to be involved in.

It’s funny that you raise that, because our government is saying that they would like to bring in 48 hours of warrantless surveillance so that they can watch people for 48 hours without going to the court for a warrant and that they would like to put cameras on private property. So how far or how much privacy should we be prepared to give up? And is privacy something that we have a right to now, or is that notion just gone?

Well, I think if you want to continue to live in a democracy that’s an open society, as New Zealand is, then it has to be something that’s open for debate, and we have to be looking very carefully at safeguards to the kinds of surveillance and security measures that people are putting in place. In Australia, for example, there’s been a debate where the Attorney General has said, ‘Well, look, it’s okay. We’re not planning to use these regulations in order to, for example, shut down journalists’, but once the regulations are on the books, some future government can use them to do whatever it wants. So I think we have to really be looking carefully at things like sunset clauses, where these regulations are up for review on a regular basis, and we have to be encouraging public debate and helping people see that it’s not choice between perfect security and risk at the hands of groups like ISIS. It’s about how much of your security or how much of your privacy and freedom are you willing to give up, and is it worth doing that in order to achieve security against this kind of risk? And, of course, the answer to that is different in every different country, and everyone needs to be part of the discussion, otherwise we’re likely to find ourselves looking back on this and saying, ‘It looked like a good idea at the time, but now we find ourselves living in a different society from how we were originally’.

Dr Kilcullen, thank you. So interesting to talk to you this morning. Thank you for your time and for joining us on The Nation.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Transcript provided by Able. http://www.able.co.nz

Read more: http://www.3news.co.nz/tvshows/thenation/interview-counter-insurgency-expert-david-kilcullen-2014111515#ixzz3cDF1e1zL

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Every Insurgency Is Different

By PAUL STANILANDFEB. 15, 2015

CHICAGO — America faces a wide array of insurgencies across the globe, from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to the Taliban in Afghanistan, each one different in its aims, structures and strategies. So why do the United States and its allies take pretty much the same approach to all?

A “surge” briefly stabilized Iraq, but the same strategy failed in Afghanistan. Internationally backed negotiations succeeded in Bosnia, but have so far failed in Syria. Israel’s targeting of Hamas leaders has not degraded the group, even as the deaths of factional leaders have sowed confusion within the Pakistani Taliban.

This track record is spotty because the insurgents themselves vary tremendously, particularly in the social networks among their leaders, and between those leaders and the local communities in which they operate. All insurgents are not created equal, and so strategies need to be matched to the specific strengths and weaknesses of a group.

That said, it is possible to categorize insurgent groups as one of three primary types. The first, what we might call “integrated groups,” like the Afghan Taliban, rely on robust social networks to link leaders to one another and to local communities. They are resilient and cohesive: Despite various local feuds and internal disagreements, the Afghan Taliban have never collapsed into internecine warfare.

That cohesion helps to explain why the huge, decade-long American investment in counterinsurgency in Afghanistan has largely failed. Integrated groups can survive many of the standard prescriptions of counterinsurgency doctrine, leading to long, bloody conflicts. Only intense, often brutal, warfare, like Sri Lanka’s campaign against the Tamil Tigers, is likely to destroy or contain them.

Because organizations like the Afghan Taliban are unlikely to collapse quickly, governments need to consider deal-making as an alternative to protracted warfare, even if the groups pursue undesirable goals. They are cohesive enough to bargain with the government or international community, allowing them to implement agreements without splintering.

Insurgent organizations in another category, “vanguard groups,” have a tight leadership core but weak pre-existing links to local communities. They often emerge when urban, elite or foreign fighters try to mobilize parts of society with which they have few ties. Their cohesion lets them move fast and effectively, as the Bolsheviks did in Russia in 1917, or as Al Qaeda in Iraq did in the first years after the American invasion.

But unless they quickly embed themselves in local communities, vanguards are vulnerable to dissent and disobedience from below. That’s why Al Qaeda in Iraq was so susceptible to the Sunni Awakening in 2007. Similarly, the Islamic State has been able to rapidly expand as a vanguard, but its major weakness remains the possibility of counterrevolt by wary local allies.

Vanguard groups are also vulnerable to a wider range of government strategies than integrated groups. If their leadership is quickly eliminated or politically co-opted, the organization crumbles. The key to counterinsurgency against them, then, is to quickly target leaders while preventing these groups from rebuilding.

Vanguards present difficult dilemmas for peace processes, however: Even if leaders agree to a deal, they may not be able to persuade their local units to go along. Negotiating partners therefore need to actively bolster the leadership of such groups in order to prevent dissension and encourage unity — in other words, peace may require that a government support the leaders of a group it has long been fighting.

Groups in a third type, “parochial insurgents,” have a fragmented leadership splintered across powerful factions, despite existing under a shared organizational banner. They often emerge from loose alliances among distinct local networks. Their local ties make them militarily formidable, but leadership divisions leave them prone to internal splits.

The Pakistani Taliban is a classic parochial insurgent group that has been plagued by infighting, side-switching and an inability to build and maintain coherent strategies, even as it has been able to impose heavy costs on Pakistan’s government and society. These internal rivalries have triggered brutal violence against civilians to try to show a faction’s power, as in the group’s recent attack on a school in Peshawar. (Parochial groups shouldn’t be confused with truly fragmented organizations, like some of the non-ISIS groups fighting in Syria; such groups are fatally undermined by the complete absence of central leadership and are easily marginalized.)

Dealing with parochial groups presents a distinct challenge. Targeting the overall leadership — whether through violence or negotiations — is not very productive, since central control is weak. Killing top leaders may affect only their own faction, not the broader organization. Counterinsurgents are instead forced into long and messy campaigns focused on imposing state control at the local level.

Peace is also hard to negotiate and implement with parochial groups. Because of the weakness of central leaderships, local factions must be approached individually, an often protracted and byzantine process. Rather than grand bargains or overarching settlements, peace with parochial groups is built through live-and-let-live deals, cease-fires and local accommodations.

This diversity among insurgent groups means that some strategies that work in one place might be counterproductive in another. There is no such thing as counterinsurgency doctrine; rather, doctrines and strategies have to be tailor-made to unique situations, based on a careful study of the groups and the political, social and economic contexts in which they operate. Only then can America and its allies hope to stabilize conflict-weary regions of the world.

Paul Staniland is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of “Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse.”

The Strange Death of the Counter-insurgency Era

What lessons can we learn from the counter-insurgency era that spanned the US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq? As M L R Smith and D M Jones see it, COIN was more of a narrative than an empirical concept, it concealed ideologically-tainted modernization projects that worked at cross purposes with actual needs, and much more.

By MLR Smith and David Martin Jones for ISN

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The notion of counter-insurgency is an elusive idea that in general terms simply denotes the attempt to confront a challenge to established authority, but which came to function as a synonym for long-term external armed interventions by Western states, most notably in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the mid-2000s, ‘COIN’ was elevated to a position of explicit importance in defence thinking and became a source of endless fascination in analytical circles. The ‘classical’ thinkers of counter-insurgency were resurrected from a largely forgotten past and became an object of reverence. COIN became the defining military practice of the age.

Since 2011 Western forces have been withdrawn from major theatres of operation. In 2014 Western nations ended their major combat roles in Afghanistan. Once heralded as an almost universal formula for success in complex interventions, the costs, consequences, and controversies associated with the counter-insurgency era have left an ambiguous and unfulfilled legacy. Analytical opinion has already moved on. The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan that once loomed large in political life have already begun to fade from view, displaced by new and different crises on the world stage. Few have stopped to ponder the aftermath. Now that most of the troops have gone, what should we make of the ambiguous COIN era?

In particular, commentary still struggles to answer the most fundamental question: what, exactly, is counter-insurgency? COIN’s ambivalent character is partly explained by the lack of clarity of the term it is intended to counter: ‘insurgency’. Analysts and practitioners have deployed terms as various as small wars, irregular war, unconventional war, guerrilla or revolutionary war in an attempt to capture this indistinct phenomenon. These various terms have rarely succeeded in clarifying what precisely an insurgency is. Accordingly, the notion of counter-insurgency is rendered equally obscure and malleable, one that can cover anything from policing operations to large-scale military combat.

COIN as narrative

Dissecting the term counter-insurgency reveals not so much a concept as a narrative. Its actual meaning may be contested, but as an explanatory mechanism through which the past can be filtered, it becomes a powerful tool. For example, between 2007 and 2011, the COIN narrative maintained that the confusion and complexity of Iraq’s post-invasion civil strife could be reduced to a single understanding: ‘an insurgency’. This required applying the recently re-discovered tactics of classic population-centric Cold War counter-insurgency, distilling them into The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The decline in violence in Iraq after the 2007 ‘surge’ seemed to vindicate the approach. Irrespective of a genuine causal connection, Western militaries extolled the virtues of COIN. The counter-insurgency school became an intellectual movement, advancing through the corridors of power, think tanks and academe.

The narrative power of COIN lay not only in that it offered a simple, if deceptive, explanation of the decrease in violence in Iraq after 2007 but that it purported to identify recurrent patterns of conflict that yielded enduring tactical lessons for operational conduct. This claim rested on the analysis of supposedly ‘classic’ counter-insurgency campaigns, most notably the British conduct of the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960) and French practice during the Algerian War (1954–1962). Other cases also made appearances in the narrative, either as positive or negative examples. These included the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya (1952–1960), the Northern Ireland conflict (1968–1998) and Vietnam (1965–1975). The somewhat arbitrary conflation of these diverse conflicts under the rubric of COIN gave historical veracity to the narrative.

COIN as apolitical science

Thus, COIN’s centrality to contemporary debate over armed conflict derived from the apparent proof that past practice yielded lessons for current and future wars. That the theory identified a distinct form of conflict, characterised as insurgency, led naturally to the assertion that a series of palliative methods and core operational principles could be implemented that would, if correctly applied, ensure success. These practices invariably included: securing the loyalty of the population; grievance reduction; the integration of civic action plans; democracy and human rights promotion; and the minimum application of military force in overarching programmes described in terms of ‘clear, hold, and build’. This emphasis on technique, however, came at the expense of the contingency of political decision-making that always gives rise to war and which exerts a continuous influence over military operations.

The methodology of COIN, therefore, reflected an attempt to scientifically rationalise warfare into a series of steps or procedures, promoting the technical ‘how’, over the political (and more complicated) ‘why’. The overriding concern for the ‘how’ of operational conduct thus pre-empted vital strategic questions about proportionality: for example, what crucial political values are at stake in interventions and what costs are worth incurring to defend them? The ‘why’ question is political and depends upon contingent circumstances. COIN theory not only had no answer to the question, it never saw fit to even pose it.

The ideology of COIN

This leads onto another of the characteristics of the COIN advocacy, that although it eschewed overtly political statements, it was, paradoxically, highly ideological. On the surface, COIN theory wished to present itself as apolitical: offering an historically proven set of techniques for action across time and space. According to this understanding, counter-insurgency responded to the timeless dynamics of insurgency with an equally timeless set of rules for action. Such claims to universal applicability, however, concealed a normative project, namely, modernization.

Though remaining unarticulated, the ultimate goal of counter-insurgency theory as it evolved in the United States and Europe after 2003, was to propel conflicted societies mired in customary practice or authoritarian political cultures along the road of socio-economic improvement and democratic development. Yet, the question of whether non-Western, tribal and ethno-religiously divided political cultures in the Middle East or South Asia were susceptible to such nation-building schemes and worth the long-term costs of Western efforts in modernizing them was never asked. Buried within Western counter-insurgency discourse was an ideology, which asserted that successful nation building would facilitate a liberal democratic ‘end of history.’

Mythologising the past

This brings us to a final characteristic of counter-insurgency thinking, which is that its underlying end-of-history teleology exhibited a capacity to mythologise the past, disfigure historical understanding and obscure complexity. The promotion of an assumed British expertise in small war and counter-insurgency evinced all these limitations. Analysts repeatedly credited the British armed forces with an almost gnostic counter-insurgency expertise based on their experience with colonial warfare, particularly in winning over the population through techniques of minimum force and hearts and minds. Rarely was this reputation scrutinised. Commentators simply assumed the practice they needed to demonstrate.

The British armed forces never officially extolled any innate expertise in COIN. Yet the constant repetition by external commentators of a British facility for this supposedly distinctive form of warfare meant that by the first decade of the twenty first century sections of the British military and political establishment came to assume that they did indeed possess a distinctive competence in this sphere. Prior to the end of the Cold War, the armed forces tended to view its colonial encounters in terms of orthodox demonstrations of hard power to curtail rebel activity. As a consequence of buying into this myth, when shortcomings in British military interventions became evident, most notably in southern Iraq in the mid-2000s, commentators expressed dismay at the demise of this non-existent tradition of COIN excellence.

Such myth making, moreover, obscured a more prosaic but important reality, namely that Britain had prevailed in many of its ‘small’ wars, not solely because of innovative tactics on the ground, but primarily as a result of a government commitment to see these campaigns through so that stipulated political objectives were met. Ironically, COIN’s cherry picking of the historical record misrepresented the tactical proficiency that the British did possess. This proficiency, far from demonstrating a flair for minimum force, invariably exhibited a talent for escalation into the dark arts of intelligence-led Special Forces operations and the penetration of rebel networks—from Malaya to Northern Ireland to the back streets of Baghdad. This is where Britain’s capacities really lay and continue to reside.

Conclusion

Ultimately, what a careful unpacking of counter-insurgency illustrates is a simple but important truth: COIN-think is symptomatic of a fallacy at the heart of much contemporary Western social inquiry, which is the attempt to impose a structure on the contingent complexity of the past. These structures of thought were never present at the time. In this respect, counterinsurgency ‘theory’ is little different from many other attempts to read the past through an understanding of a social or political ‘science’ as if it were possible to identify timeless patterns, lessons and principles. In this regard, counterinsurgency is a distorting lens that narrows an appreciation of the past, over-simplifies the present and over-determines the future. COIN is therefore a false narrative and should not be regarded as a formula for prescribing the principles of action to be used in future wars. COIN-centric readings of history, like all grand social science theorising, should be treated with scepticism.

For more information on issues and events that shape our world, please visit the ISN Blog or browse our resources.

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M.L.R. Smith holds the Chair in Strategic Theory, Department of War Studies, King’s College London. His book, co-authored with David Martin Jones, The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency: Strategic Problems, Puzzles and Paradoxes will be published in May 2015 by Columbia University Press.

David Martin Jones is Visiting Professor, Department of War Studies, King’s College London. His book, co-authored with M.L.R. Smith, The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency: Strategic Problems, Puzzles and Paradoxes will be published in May 2015 by Columbia University Press.

Learning from the CIA's Village Defense Program in South Vietnam

Local defense forces and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan: learning from the CIA's Village Defense Program in South Vietnam

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DOI:

10.1080/09592318.2014.959772

Jon Strandquist^a*

pages 90-113

Publishing models and article dates explained

• Received: 26 Jan 2013
• Accepted: 5 Jun 2013
• Published online: 12 Dec 2014

Article Views: 190

Abstract

This research note makes the case that if the US and its international allies are to successfully use ‘Local Defence Forces’ (LDF) to overcome counterinsurgency constraints in Afghanistan, current initiatives need to be significantly modified. A key issue is that the Village Stability Operations/Afghan Local Police (VSO/ALP) LDF program is unlikely to be effective in filling security gaps in rural Afghanistan because, much rhetoric to the contrary, it is essentially focused on militarily combating the insurgency rather than fully developing local communities as counterinsurgency resources by winning their support for the Afghan central government. The CIA's Village Defense Program in South Vietnam, a counterinsurgency program that has thus far received cursory attention in current LDF literature, provides a useful counterpoint. Through a comparison of the VDP and VSO/ALP operational patterns, implications are drawn for current and future US counterinsurgency practice employing LDF components.

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Keywords:

• local defence forces, 
• Afghan Local Police, 
• US Special Operations Forces, 
• counterinsurgency, 
• Central Intelligence Agency, 
• Vietnam

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COIN US Army Manual – Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations

from The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be Counterinsurgency (COIN) presents a complex and often unfamiliar set of missions and considerations. In many ways, the conduct of COIN is counterintuitive to the traditional U.S. view of war—although COIN operations have actually formed a substantial part of the U.S. military experience. Some representative paradoxes of COIN are presented here as examples of the different mindset required. These paradoxes are offered to stimulate thinking, not to limit it. The applicability of the thoughts behind the paradoxes depends on a sense of the local situation and, in particular, the state of the insurgency. For example, the admonition “Sometimes, the More Force Used, the Less Effective It Is” does not apply when the enemy is “coming over the barricades”; however, that thought is applicable when increased security is achieved in an area. In short, these paradoxes should not be reduced to a checklist; rather, they should be used with considerable thought. Ultimate success in COIN is gained by protecting the populace, not the COIN force. If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents. Aggressive saturation patrolling, ambushes, and listening post operations must be conducted, risk shared with the populace, and contact maintained. The effectiveness of establishing patrol bases and operational support bases should be weighed against the effectiveness of using larger unit bases. (FM 90-8 discusses saturation patrolling and operational support bases.) These practices ensure access to the intelligence needed to drive operations. Following them reinforces the connections with the populace that help establish real legitimacy. Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is Any use offeree produces many effects, not all of which can be foreseen. The more force applied, the greater the chance of collateral damage and mistakes. Using substantial force also increases the opportunity for insurgent propaganda to portray lethal military activities as brutal. In contrast, using force precisely and discriminately strengthens the rule of law that needs to be established. As noted above, the key for counterinsurgents is knowing when more force is needed—and when it might be counterproductive. This judgment involves constant assessment of the security situation and a sense of timing regarding insurgents’ actions. The more successful the counterinsurgency is, the less force can be used and the more risk must be accepted This paradox is really a corollary to the previous one. As the level of insurgent violence drops, the requirements of international law and the expectations of the populace lead to a reduction in direct military actions by counterinsurgents. More reliance is placed on police work, rules of engagement may be tightened, and troops may have to exercise increased restraint. Soldiers and Marines may also have to accept more risk to maintain involvement with the people. Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction Often insurgents carry out a terrorist act or guerrilla raid with the primary purpose of enticing counterinsurgents to overreact, or at least to react in a way that insurgents can exploit—for example, opening fire on a crowd or executing a clearing operation that creates more enemies than it takes off the streets. If an assessment of the effects of a course of action determines that more negative than positive effects may result, an alternative should be considered—potentially including not acting. Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot Counterinsurgents often achieve the most meaningful success in garnering public support and legitimacy for the HN government with activities that do not involve killing insurgents (though, again, killing clearly will often be necessary). Arguably, the decisive battle is for the people’s minds; hence synchronizing IO with efforts along the other LLOs is critical. Every action, including uses of force, must be “wrapped in a bodyguard of information.” While security is essential to setting the stage for overall progress, lasting victory comes from a vibrant economy, political participation, and restored hope. Particularly after security has been achieved, dollars and ballots will have more important effects than bombs and bullets. This is a time when “money is ammunition.” Depending on the state of the insurgency, therefore, Soldiers and Marines should prepare to execute many nonmilitary missions to support COIN efforts. Everyone has a role in nation building, not just Department of State and civil affairs personnel. The host nation doing something tolerably is normally better than us doing it well It is just as important to consider who performs an operation as to assess how well it is done. Where the United States is supporting a host nation, long-term success requires establishing viable HN leaders and institutions that can carry on without significant U.S. support. The longer that process takes, the more U.S. public support will wane and the more the local populace will question the legitimacy of their own forces and government. General Creighton Abrams, the U.S. commander in Vietnam in 1971, recognized this fact when he said, “There’s very clear evidence, … in some things, that we helped too much. And we retarded the Vietnamese by doing it. … We can’t run this thing. … They ’ve got to run it. The nearer we get to that the better off they are and the better off we are.” T.E. Lawrence made a similar observation while leading the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in 1917: “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.” However, a key word in Lawrence’s advice is “tolerably.” If the host nation cannot perform tolerably, counterinsurgents supporting it may have to act. Experience, knowledge of the AO, and cultural sensitivity are essential to deciding when such action is necessary. If a tactic works this week, it might not work next week; if it works in this province, it might not work in the next Competent insurgents are adaptive. They are often part of a widespread network that communicates constantly and instantly. Insurgents quickly adjust to successful COIN practices and rapidly disseminate information throughout the insurgency. Indeed, the more effective a COIN tactic is, the faster it may become out of date because insurgents have a greater need to counter it. Effective leaders at all levels avoid complacency and are at least as adaptive as their enemies. There is no “silver bullet” set of COIN procedures. Constantly developing new practices is essential. Tactical success guarantees nothing As important as they are in achieving security, military actions by themselves cannot achieve success in COIN. Insurgents that never defeat counterinsurgents in combat still may achieve their strategic objectives. Tactical actions thus must be linked not only to strategic and operational military objectives but also to the host nation’s essential political goals. Without those connections, lives and resources may be wasted for no real gain. Many important decisions are not made by generals Successful COIN operations require competence and judgment by Soldiers and Marines at all levels. Indeed, young leaders—so-called “strategic corporals”—often make decisions at the tactical level that have strategic consequences. Senior leaders set the proper direction and climate with thorough training and clear guidance; then they trust their subordinates to do the right thing. Preparation for tactical-level leaders requires more than just mastering Service doctrine; they must also be trained and educated to adapt to their local situations, understand the legal and ethical implications of their actions, and exercise initiative and sound judgment in accordance with their senior commanders’ intent.

Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 47-51 of The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual by the United States Army and United States Marine Corps, published by the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.) United States Army and United States Marine Corps The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual With Forewords by General David H. Petraeus and Lt. General James F. Amos and by Lt. Colonel John A. Nagl. With a New Introduction by Sarah Sewall. ©2007, 472 pages, 30 figures, 33 tables Paper $15.00 ISBN: 978-0-226-84151-9 (ISBN-10: 0-226-84151-0) For information on purchasing the book—from bookstores or here online—please go to the webpage for The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. See also: John A. Nagl’s foreword to the University of Chicago Press edition of The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam by John A. Nagl Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II with a foreword by John A. Nagl Our catalog of history titles Our catalog of books about war and remembrance Other excerpts and online essays from University of Chicago Press titles Sign up for e-mail notification of new books in this and other subjects Read the Chicago Blog

The Future of Special Operations

Beyond Kill and Capture – By Linda Robinson – Linda’s Bio here

FROM OUR NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2012 ISSUE

Over the past decade, the United States’ military and the country’s national security strategy have come to rely on special operations to an unprecedented degree. As identifying and neutralizing terrorists and insurgents has become one of the Pentagon’s most crucial tasks, special operations forces have honed their ability to conduct manhunts, adopting a new targeting system known as “find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze, and disseminate.” They have adopted a flatter organizational structure and collaborated more closely with intelligence agencies, allowing special operations to move at “the speed of war,” in the words of the retired army general Stanley McChrystal, the chief architect of the contemporary U.S. approach to counterterrorism.

Implementing McChrystal’s vision has been costly. Spending on sophisticated communications, stealth helicopters, and intelligence technology; building several high-tech special operations headquarters; and transforming a C-130 cargo plane into a state-of-the-art flying hospital have consumed a large (and classified) portion of the total special operations budget, which has increased from $2.3 billion in 2001 to $10.5 billion in 2012. The investment has paid clear dividends, however, most dramatically in May 2011, when U.S. Navy SEALs, operating in coordination with the CIA, raided a compound in Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden.

The target and location of that raid made it exceptional. But similar operations, which in earlier eras would have been considered extraordinary, have become commonplace: during the height of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. special operations units sometimes conducted as many as 14 raids a night, with each successive raid made possible by intelligence scooped up during the previous one and then rapidly processed. When decision-makers deem raids too risky or politically untenable, they sometimes opt for strikes by armed drones, another form of what special operators refer to as “the direct approach.” (The CIA conducts the majority of drone strikes, but special operations forces are also authorized to employ them in specific cases, including on the battlefields of Afghanistan.)

Dramatic raids and high-tech drone strikes make for exciting headlines, so the media naturally focus on them. But this attention, along with policymakers’ reliance on raids and drones, has encouraged a misperception of such actions as quick, easy solutions that allow Washington to avoid prolonged, messy wars. In fact, raids and drone strikes are tactics that are rarely decisive and often incur significant political and diplomatic costs for the United States. Although raids and drone strikes are necessary to disrupt dire and imminent threats to the United States, special operations leaders readily admit that they should not be the central pillar of U.S. military strategy.

Raids and drone strikes are rarely decisive and often incur significant political and diplomatic costs.

Instead, special operations commanders say the direct approach must be coupled with “the indirect approach,” a cryptic term used to describe working with and through non-U.S. partners to accomplish security objectives, often in unorthodox ways. Special operations forces forge relationships that can last for decades with a diverse collection of groups: training, advising, and operating alongside other countries’ militaries, police forces, tribes, militias, or other informal groups. They also conduct civil-affairs operations that provide medical, veterinary, or agricultural assistance to civilians, improving the standing of local governments and gaining access to and a greater understanding of local conditions and populations.

It is time for special operations forces to prioritize indirect operations. That approach — also called “special warfare,” the preferred term of its advocates in the U.S. Army — offers the prospect of lasting benefits with a smaller footprint and lower cost than the hugely expensive wars of the last decade. The indirect approach is not without its pitfalls, and the special operations community will need to reconfigure itself to execute it more skillfully. But it holds great potential for advancing security objectives, especially in a time of fiscal austerity.

DIRECT VERSUS INDIRECT

In testimony delivered to the U.S. Congress last March, Admiral William McRaven, head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, said that “the direct approach alone is not the solution to the challenges our nation faces today as it ultimately only buys time and space for the indirect approach,” arguing that “in the end, it will be such continuous indirect operations that will prove decisive in the global security arena.”

Yet despite such high-level Read entire article here