Juan Cole talks about his new book, Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East
Interview with Robert Pape
Interview with Juan Cole
For Discussion: Think about how a game theorist likeRobert Aumann would analyse the situation? The more I think about the current insurgency in Iraq, it seems that it would be impossible for the US to withdraw from Iraq without victory- if it did so, the costs (economic, political, moral, security) will probably outweigh the benefits of withdrawal.
Harvard Forum on Long War
Related;
Kahl: The US Military and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq
Guest Op-Ed: Polk on Insurgency & American History;
Is there some new magic formula for success? Generals David Petraeus and James Amos argue that there is. They have laid out a counterinsurgency doctrine. (December 2006 Counterinsurgency Field Manual). But it is not new. When tried in Vietnam, it did not work. As Petraeus and Amos admit, the key element in insurgency is political: “each side aims to get the people to accept its governance or authority as legitimate.” Is this a feasible objective for foreigners? One searches the historical record in vain for an example of success. The foreign occupying force, by definition, is alien. Vietnam showed that even when the aliens (us) had a numerous and established local ally (the South Vietnamese government) that ally was more apt to be alienated by its association with the foreign military force than that force was to be “Vietnamized” by their native ally. In sum, the single absolutely necessary ingredient in counterinsurgency is extremely unlikely ever to be available to foreigners.
Free Market Shock and Awe
John Nagle at Charlie Rose Show (highly recommended, was better than The Daily Show interview)
The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual;
Perhaps no doctrinal manual in the history of the Army has been so eagerly anticipated and so well received as Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency. It is designed both to help the Army and Marine Corps prepare for the next counterinsurgency campaign and to make substantive contributions to the national efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most important contribution of the manual is likely to be its role as a catalyst in the process of making the Army and Marine Corps more effective learning organizations that are better able to adapt to the rapidly changing nature of modern counterinsurgency campaigns. The most notable section of the manual is probably the Zen-like “Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency” in the first Chapter on page 47. These capture the often counterintuitive nature of counterinsurgency. The nine maxims turn conventional military thinking on its head, highlighting the extent of the change required for a conventional military force to adapt itself to the demands of counterinsurgency.
The field manual emphasizes the primary role of traditionally non-military activities and the decisive role of other agencies and organizations in achieving success in counterinsurgency in Chapter 2, “Unity of Effort.” In Chapter 3, “Intelligence,” the field manual shows it understands that, while firepower is the determinant of success in conventional warfare, the key to victory in counterinsurgency is intelligence on the location and identity of the insurgent enemy derived from a supportive population; one of the Principles of Counterinsurgency is that “Intelligence Drives Operations.” The Appendix on “Social Network Analysis” helps drive the Army’s intelligence system away from a focus on analysis of conventional enemy units toward a personality-based understanding of the networks of super-empowered individuals that comprise the most dangerous enemies the United States confronts today.
Small Wars Journal Blog
Vietnam's real lessons
In unconventional wars, body counts don't really count. In the Vietnam War, superior American firepower enabled U.S. forces to prevail in most tactical engagements. We killed plenty of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. But killing didn't produce victory -- the exertions of U.S. troops all too frequently proved to be counterproductive.
So too in Iraq -- although Bush insists on pretending otherwise. His speech had him sounding like President Lyndon Johnson, bragging that, in each month since January, U.S. troops in Iraq have "killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 Al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists." If Bush thinks that by racking up big body counts the so-called surge will reverse the course of the war, he is deceiving himself. The real question is not how many bad guys we are killing, but how many our continued presence in Iraq is creating.
Progress in Iraq?
Global Guerrillas Blog
The Open-Source War
What's left? It's possible, as Microsoft has found, that there is no good monopolistic solution to a mature open-source effort. In that case, the United States might be better off adopting I.B.M.'s embrace of open source. This solution would require renouncing the state's monopoly on violence by using Shiite and Kurdish militias as a counterinsurgency. This is similar to the strategy used to halt the insurgencies in El Salvador in the 1980's and Colombia in the 1990's. In those cases, these militias used local knowledge, unconstrained tactics and high levels of motivation to defeat insurgents (this is in contrast to the ineffectiveness of Iraq's paycheck military). This option will probably work in Iraq too.
Our War on Terror;
The most counterintuitive, as well as the most politically difficult, premise of the manual is that the American military must assume greater risk in order to gather much-needed intelligence and, in the end, achieve greater safety. The emphasis of the 1990s on force protection is overturned by the assertion of several breathtaking paradoxes: “Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be.” “Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is.” “Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction.” Sarah Sewall, a former Pentagon official who teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (and a close colleague of mine), has contributed an introduction that should be required reading for anybody who wants to understand the huge demands effective counterinsurgency will place on the military and the voting public. “Those who fail to see the manual as radical probably don’t understand it,” she writes, “or at least what it’s up against.”
Sewall can say what the generals who devised the manual cannot. She addresses the concern that the manual is nothing more than a “marketing campaign for an inherently inhumane concept of war,” arguing that if politicians continue to put young American men and women in harm’s way, military leaders have an obligation to enhance effectiveness, which in a globalized era cannot be disentangled from taking better care of civilians. Military actions that cause civilian deaths, she argues, are not simply morally questionable; they are self-defeating.
But Sewall explains that even if the military can overcome the substantial challenges of executing such a counterintuitive doctrine — and here the near-daily reports of large-scale civilian loss of life as a result of United States counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq are a reminder of the yawning gap between theory and practice — it will not succeed if it does not get the civilian leadership and support it needs. The military does not have the expertise to perform the range of economic and political tasks associated with nation-building, but in Iraq and Afghanistan, as civilian reconstruction teams went unstaffed, it was forced to pinch-hit. Sewall rightly calls for the “risks and costs of counterinsurgency” to be spread across the American government, but notes this is not an overnight job. “More people play in Army bands than serve in the U.S. foreign service,” she writes.
The manual shows that the demands of counterinsurgency are greater than those the American public has yet been asked to bear. Sewall is skeptical that the public — now feeling burned by Iraq — will muster the will, even in Afghanistan, to “supply greater concentrations of forces, accept higher casualties, fund serious nation-building and stay many long years to conduct counterinsurgency by the book.”
While the United States military’s new counterinsurgency doctrine is based on achieving legitimacy with the local population, Ian Shapiro, a professor of political science at Yale, believes American foreign policy as a whole must vastly increase its legitimacy if it is to defang terrorists in the long term. For this to happen, he writes in his book CONTAINMENT: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror (Princeton University, $24.95), the president’s critics in the Democratic Party must stop freezing like “donkeys in the headlights” in the face of Bush’s war on terror and instead put forth an alternative strategy. “You can’t beat something with nothing,” he insists. Shapiro argues for a return to the cold war rubric of “containment” — a halfway house between “appeasement and the chimerical aspiration to achieve U.S. control over the global security environment.”
Hezbollah: A Short History by Augustus Richard Norton
Professor Nagl's War;
The more Nagl read, the more he understood the historical challenge of insurgency. Julius Caesar complained that his legions had trouble subduing the roving Britons because his men ''were little suited to this kind of enemy.'' In the early 1800's, Carl von Clausewitz wrote of ''people's wars'' in which ''the element of resistance will exist everywhere and nowhere.'' The book that most forcefully captured Nagl's imagination was written by T.E. Lawrence, popularly known as Lawrence of Arabia, the British officer who, during World War I, led Arab fighters against the Turkish rulers in the Middle East and described the campaign (taking liberties with the facts) in his counterinsurgency classic, ''Seven Pillars of Wisdom.''
Lawrence's is one of the few books in the canon written from the point of view of the insurgent. (Another is Mao Zedong's ''On Guerrilla Warfare.'') In a near-hallucinatory state, suffering from dysentery and lying in a tent, Lawrence realized the key to defeating the Turkish Army. ''Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head,'' he wrote. Lawrence's guerrillas, by contrast, ''might be a vapour.'' For the Turks, he concluded, ''war upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.''
In his own research, Nagl focused on two modern insurgencies in Asia. In Malaya in the 1950's, the British successfully suppressed a Communist revolt (comprised mostly of ethnic Chinese) by generally steering clear of excessive force and instituting a ''hearts and minds'' campaign to strip the insurgents of public sympathy. In Vietnam in the 1960's and 1970's, the United States military took a different approach and failed. The Americans resorted to indiscriminate firepower and showed little concern for its effect on the civilian population. Comparing the two efforts, Nagl demonstrated that a key issue for a counterinsurgent army is to calibrate correctly the amount of lethal force necessary to do the job with the minimum amount of nasty, counterproductive side effects. Even if using force with restraint meant the mission would take more time or reduce the level of force protection, it was still an indispensable step: a successful counterinsurgency took care and patience. When Nagl's doctoral thesis, ''Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam,'' was published in 2002, it carried the subtitle ''Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife.''
How much did the Marshall Plan really matter?
Think before you shoot;
The 282-page manual reads at times like a litany of the things America has done wrong in Iraq. But those arguing for withdrawal will find little solace. Insurgencies, it says, “are protracted by nature”. America and its allies must show the “ability, stamina, and will to win”.
Moreover, counter-insurgency cannot be done on the cheap. It requires large amounts of manpower—some 20 to 25 members of security forces for every 1,000 civilians. The 483,000 combined coalition and Iraqi forces (of dubious quality and loyalty) fall well short of the 535,000 to 670,000 required to secure Iraq.
American military tactics-How to do better;
In an example recently praised by George Bush, the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment carried out a model attack on insurgents in the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar in September, first emptying it of civilians, then giving Iraqi soldiers the lead in the offensive. This success was, in large part, a response to failure, according to the regiment's commander, Colonel H.R. McMaster. On a previous deployment to Iraq, in western Anbar province, the unit had done terrible damage with random and aggressive house-to-house searches, mass arrests and thuggish crowd control. Since arriving in Tal Afar last April it had patrolled often and on foot, looking for human intelligence, and had avoided making indiscriminate arrests.
But Colonel McMaster was relatively lucky. He had seasoned troops, and enough of them, to control his area. The marine division currently in Anbar, Iraq's most violent province, is too thinly spread and too shot-at to develop such nice behaviour. Unable to get control of the rebellious towns in the Euphrates river valley, often supported by air strikes but rarely by Iraqi troops, the marines are fighting a mid-intensity war.
Battle Command Knowledge System
Military Hones a New Strategy on Insurgency
Small Wars Manual
On the COIN Manual
Air Force Lashes Out at Grunts in New War Manual
The New Counterinsurgency; Airpower to the Rear; That Satellite Is Toast .... ;
The views in FM 3-24 reflect a limited knowledge of airpower’s true role in the current operation and suspicion that airpower can all too easily prove counterproductive. This is all the more distressing in light of the view that Petraeus will set direction for the ongoing fight in Iraq.
The new doctrine argues that airpower is best put under control of a tactical ground commander or, at the highest level, the multinational force commander, but not an airman.
It usually takes a while for a government to realize that an insurgency is under way, Petraeus and Amos wrote. The insurgents “take advantage of that time to build strength and gather support.” When the fight erupts, defenders “have to ‘come from behind'" and catch up to the situation.
In short, counterinsurgencies don’t go too well at first. Western militaries “falsely believe that armies trained to win large conventional wars are automatically prepared to win small, unconventional ones” and fight COIN with a similar mind-set.
Professors on the Battlefield ;
Over the past few years, Gen. Petraeus has been cultivating ties to the academic community, drawing on scholars for specialized knowledge and fresh thinking about the security challenges facing America. "What you are seeing is a willingness by military officers to learn from civilian academics," says Michael Desch, an expert on civilian-military relations at Texas A&M. "The war on terrorism has really accelerated this trend."
The terms of this relationship are most evident in the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual. In the face of a gruesomely persistent Iraqi insurgency, Gen. Petraeus was charged with revamping the outdated counterinsurgency doctrine. In an unprecedented collaboration, he reached out to Sarah Sewall, who directs the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, to help him organize a vetting session of the draft manual at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.
The conference brought together journalists, human-rights activists, academics and members of the armed forces to exchange ideas about how to make the doctrine more effective and more humane. Ms. Sewall, who since 2001 has been trying to get the military to bring the concerns of the human-rights community to the table, tells me that with Gen. Petraeus it is like pushing on an open door. And according to Montgomery McFate, who had a hand in drafting the manual, this was probably the first time that anthropological insight has been officially incorporated into more than 200 years of military doctrine. In chapter one, it explicitly states that "cultural knowledge is essential to waging a successful counterinsurgency. American ideas of what is 'normal' or 'rational' are not universal." (The manual was published last month by the University of Chicago Press. Ms. Sewall wrote the foreword.)
"Anthropologists have the opportunity right now to influence how the national security establishment does business," writes Ms. McFate in an email from Afghanistan, where she is a senior adviser to the Human Terrain System project. A Yale University-trained anthropologist, she has been the target of bitter criticism from the anthropology establishment on account of her tireless efforts to convince the military that cultural knowledge is key to winning over the people in war-torn societies like Iraq and Afghanistan. She insists that a growing number of anthropologists are questioning the conventional wisdom and reconsidering whether the most effective way to influence the military is "by waving a big sign outside the Pentagon saying 'you suck.' "
Harvard's Humanitarian Hawks
Podcasts;
John Nagl talks about his book, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam.
Dr. Robert Pape on 'Dying to Win'
A Conversation on Iraq with Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D-Del.)
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