Arms and influence

Vietnam on the brain

Disagreements over the Iraq war--something that's likely to become more visible, as we approach the presidential campaign debates--are inescapably discussions about the lessons of the Vietnam War. Both candidates worry that the United States will repeat the mistakes of that conflict. Obviously, they are focused on different mistakes.

The "lost victory" of the Vietnam War
John McCain worries that, after flailing for a few years, US officials have finally hit on a winning strategy for Iraq. The situation in his mind is comparable to the phase of the Vietnam War that started in 1967 and 1968, after Creighton Abrams replaced William Westmoreland as the commander of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), and Ellsworth Bunker became the US ambassador to South Vietnam. The two men worked well together, which substantially improved the use of force as a political instrument. Among other changes, the counterinsurgency war took a dramatically more positive turn, thanks to both important doctrinal and organizational reforms that dovetailed with the Tet Offensive, which was a military catastrophe for the National Liberation Front.

Unfortunately, the American electorate was in no mood for nuanced discussions about counterinsurgency warfare. Even if the counterinsurgency side of the Vietnam War had visibly improved, Americans wanted to withdraw from South Vietnam. While the Tet Offensive might have crippled the NLF, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) continued attacks into the South. While the government of President Thieu seemed far more stable than its immediate predecessors, Americans remained skeptical about the political reliability of any Saigon government.

Most significantly, an increasing number of American voters did not feel that the Vietnam War was important enough to win. If dominoes were to topple, the damage to American interests seemed far worse than the blood and treasure lost in continuing to fight the war.

Predictable mistakes
Obviously, the differences between Vietnam and Iraq are considerable. However, the political dynamic of fighting a counterinsurgency war does appear the same. Whatever McCain's beliefs about the "winnability" of the Iraq war, he seems to have ignored how these dynamics. In fact, he bears a great deal of responsibility for fueling them.

We can bemoan how much better prepared the US government should have been to fight a counterinsurgency war. (And yes, I'm one of the chief bemoaners.) However, it seems that every counterinsurgency war seems fated to start with a lot of flailing around. Regimes under siege repeat familiar mistakes, such as rushing green troops into dangerous situations that require greater skill and discipline, or using terror in a counterproductive quest to crush the guerrillas' political organization.

Great power patrons make their own set of familiar mistakes. Here are a couple:

• Promising the war will be easy and short, when we know it will be long and difficult.
• Ignoring the political and cultural details of the conflict, preferring instead to overemphasize the military dimension.
• Treating the conflict as sui generis, without any useful precedents.

To his credit, McCain is not to blame for the latter two mistakes. He criticized the US Army for pursuing a "search and destroy" strategy that focused on killing insurgents over securing the safety and support of the population. He has cited precedents, not only from the Vietnam War, but from other conflicts that offered "lessons learned."

Repeating one of the biggest mistakes
His participation in the selling of the Vietnam War is where he bears the greatest responsibility for repeating the mistakes of the past. However dumbed down his current speeches may be, McCain is certainly not ignorant of this risk. After release from his North Vietnamese captors, McCain dedicated time to reading both histories of the two Indochina wars and the classic works about counterinsurgency. He is both smart and knowledgeable enough to realize what happens when a government promises to deliver a quick, decisive victory in the sort of conflict that is inevitably longer than expected, and rarely offers any chance for total victory over the adversary.

Later, McCain tried to rectify his mistake. His now-infamous "100 years" comment was, no doubt, a belated attempt to provide some amount of "straight talk" about counterinsurgency. Unfortunately, the message came far too late, when Americans in 2007 were as impatient with the Iraq war as they were in 1969 with the Vietnam War. McCain had joined the chorus in 2003 that predicted a short, easy war in Iraq. He therefore set the stage for the classic political backlash that ends counterinsurgency wars, from the American Revolution to the Vietnam War. If he's frustrated with how unwilling Americans seem to be in recognizing any gains made in the Iraq War, he has only himself to blame.

A medieval view of counterinsurgency

A few months ago, Kat over at Castle Argghh! wrote this great post about the Normans' counterinsurgency war in the British Isles, in the years following 1066. While modern revolutionaries like Mao and Lenin might have crafted particular revolutionary strategies, counterrevolutionary challenges go way, way back. For example, the medieval version of an enclave strategy drove the construction of castles across post-Conquest England and Wales in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Prison statistics

A whole generation of instant experts on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism have spent the last several years proclaiming how these struggles are real wars, not police matters. Being people with more volume than knowledge, they've missed the point. Of course, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism are forms of warfare. However, victory depends on turning these wars into something that looks like police matters.

At the end of a counterinsurgency war like the one in Iraq, political and military measures will have reduced the insurgents from revolutionaries to criminals, from a movement to a gang. Robbed of political legitimacy, the ability to intimidate or persuade, larger numbers of active members and supporters, and a free range of action, the insurgents dwindle to something that should be treated as a police matter.

Long before the war has reached this point, what happens to suspected insurgents while in custody matters greatly. Unspeakable acts that fall under the polite term "human rights abuses" are the persistent mistake that governments under siege make. Form a combination of impatience, arrogance, and fear, regimes see torture, murder, indefinite detention, and other forms of "abuse" (another polite term) as the short, urgent road to defeating the insurgents. The political backlash is rarely worth the limited, unreliable information gained, or the number of potential insurgents jailed.

People with successful track records at counterinsurgency counsel a much different approach. (For an example, see Stuart Herrington's recent op-ed piece.) Therefore, stories about the treatment of Iraqi prisoners are central to the counterinsurgency story. If war outlasts the bad memories of Abu Ghraib, jails will still be an important stage on which Iraqi drama plays out. Prison statistics may be far more important than casualty numbers.

The COIN debate within the US military

This article by Spencer Ackerman is a must-read for anyone concerned about being better prepared for the next Iraq or Afghanistan.

The real counterinsurgency era

It's easy to lose track of why John F. Kennedy was a beloved president. Often caricatured for his skirt-chasing, or derided for failures like the Bay of Pigs, the current generation often overlooks his accomplishments, or takes them for granted. However, it's worth looking at Kennedy's personal crusade to make counterinsurgency a national priority to see what could have happened after the 9/11 attacks, but didn't.

Let me say, in advance, that this big topic can't really be covered adequately in a blog posting. I'm going to allude to important events during Kennedy's tenure; to really understand them, you should read about them in more depth. At the end, I'll give a few book recommendations.

The Kennedy strategy
Kennedy took office with the firm belief that the USSR and the PRC were exploiting what Khrushchev termed "wars of national liberation" for their own benefit. While scholars have been debating ever since how well the Soviets and Chinese could manipulate these movements in their favor, it was a threat that Kennedy  decided to address. Counterinsurgency and counterterrorism may have been Cold War priorities, but they were also humanitarian ones. As he said in one line of his inaugural address that resonated powerfully with the American public:

Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.

Since the political and economic defects of other societies led to the kinds of violence that threatened American interests and challenged American ideals, the changes Kennedy set into motion were not purely military, though there was an important military dimension:

• The push for revised military doctrines aimed directly at defeating guerrilla movements.
• The expansion of American special operations forces, seen as important players in counterinsurgency campaigns.
• The creation of economic and technical aid organizations, such as the Agency for International Development, the Peace Corps, and the Alliance for Progress, designed to address the societal problems that generated political violence.
• Overt and covert participation in wars against Communist forces, such as the secret war in Laos.

Failures and successes
Kennedy's broad campaign met with, at best, mixed success. The US military resisted the doctrinal reforms, and the special operations forces remained marginalized. (It wasn't until the late 1980s that they received the kind of support Kennedy had envisioned, and only because an impatient Congress forced the Pentagon to make important reforms to the SOF command structure and budget.) Some counterinsurgency campaigns, such as Laos, were failures. Military and intelligence aid often went to authoritarian governments who jailed, tortured, and murdered their political opponents (not just Communists).

However, there were successes. While the impact of foreign aid is hard to measure, it expanded good will. As a result, the United States could become an energetic participant in many internal and regional struggles without sacrificing its reputation. A generation of US military officers understood what Kennedy thought should happen, felt the resistance of the services to these changes, and experienced first-hand the disastrous results. While the US lost the Vietnam War, the Vietnam-era military and intelligence professionals were ready to do better a generation later, if needed and given the chance.

One of the Kennedy-era accomplishments accidentally helped counterterrorism, but it was an important step forward nonetheless. The Kennedy Administration's decision to turn the FBI's efforts against organized crime gave it vital experience identifying, infiltrating, and dismantling secretive, disciplined, and violent organizations. Had the FBI remained focused on suspected American Communists, it would not have the skills needed to combat terrorism domestically as it does today.

The Bush presidency
How does Bush compare against Kennedy? There is no unifying vision, with its doctrinal and organizational corollaries, that compares to Kennedy's "twilight struggle." While Kennedy may have lost temporarily some political capital because of the bungled Bay of Pigs invasion, he quickly recovered and maintained it through other actions. Unlike Bush, alliances were not strained, and the perception of the United States in the world did not steadily decline. While the Vietnam War was, ultimately, a grand failure, at the very least the United States was actually fighting the right enemy. Among the manifold failures in the Iraq war, the overarching, cataclysmic mistake was that, when the US invaded in 2003, there was no connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi Ba'athists. In the 1960s, the wiretapping of Americans, as execrable as it was, occurred at nothing like the scale that exists today, and certainly not with the intiation and encouragement of the President. Organizations that Kennedy created, such as AID and the Peace Corps, continue working effectively through today. In contrast, Bush's one organizational reform, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, is an embarrassment, botched in execution, and not even Bush's idea in the first place. 

Perhaps the biggest difference between the counterinsurgency era of the 1960s and the counterterrorism era today is the lack of a Presidential legacy. Kennedy inspired a generation, from Peace Corps workers to US Special Forces captains. Bush will leave behind no great organizational or doctrinal reforms, and not even any inspiring rhetoric to compare to the Kennedy inaugural speech. Compared to Kennedy's mixed legacy, during much more time in office, Bush has achieved much less.

Recommended reading
Here are a few books on various topics discussed in this post:

• Douglas Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era
• Andrew Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam
• Burton Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America

Airpower is for airheads

The U.S. military conducted more than five times as many airstrikes in Iraq last year as it did in 2006, targeting al-Qaeda safe houses, insurgent bombmaking facilities and weapons stockpiles in an aggressive strategy aimed at supporting the U.S. troop increase by overwhelming enemies with air power.

So says The Washington Post a few days ago, in a credulous article about US counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq. By now, all Americans should be aware that close air support has, at best, a minor role in counterinsurgency. Insurgents don't normally make themselves easy-to-find targets. Even when you locate them, they're unlikely to be found in large numbers, huddled together in easy-to-bomb clumps. And, of course, there's the continued problem of political backlash from bombing suspected guerrilla locations, since bystanders often lose the property, their limbs, or their lives during the attack.

A five-fold increase in air-to-ground attacks is not, therefore, a sign of progress. It's a sign of desperation, the only measure that the US military has--particularly given the pressure for results in the recent escalation.

Since the insurgent groups are not complete morons, they have taken countermeasures, after years of fighting, to blunt US airpower. Not every group is as smart as every other group, but in general, you won't find them marching around the Iraqi countryside in large groups, waiting to be annihilated.

Any weapons caches or bomb factories are also dispersed enough so that no single attack, or even a series of attacks, will completely eliminate them. Even if the attacks are the result of better intelligence, is bombing a safehouse used by the Army of the Mahdi or Al Qaeda in Iraq (these groups have names, by the way) the best way to get rid of them? Or even start a clear-and-secure operation against them?

Colin Kahl, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University who studies the Iraq war, said airstrikes rose in 2007 because of a combination of increased U.S. operations and a realization that air power can have a strong psychological effect on the enemy.

"Part of this is announcing our presence to the adversary," said Kahl, who recently returned from a trip to the air operations center. "Across this calendar year you will see a reduction in U.S. forces, so there will be fewer troops to support Iraqi forces. One would expect a continued level of airstrikes because of offensive operations, and as U.S. forces begin to draw down you may see even more airstrikes."

Apparently, we are fighting a war against insurgents who don't read the newspapers, or are too stupid to draw conclusions about the staying power of the United States. Therefore, no amount of "announcing our presence to the adversary" matters if the guerrillas conclude they can out-wait the United States and the Iraqi government.

If, instead of "announcing our presence," the air strikes are intended to knock some Sunni and Shi'ite insurgent groups temporarily off-balance, while Iraqi forces assume larger operational responsibility, why not just say it? More corporate PR-ish announcements merely corrode trust between the US government and the electorate that much further.

The COIN owner's manual

Another good reason to read the last issue of Small Wars Journal is Dan Green's article, "The Political Officer As Counter-Insurgent," a practical guide to life on the front lines (such as they are) of counterinsurgency. There are two strong reasons for reading it:

• You're still learning about counterinsurgency, and you'd like to hear, from an operational or tactical level, what it takes to win these sorts of conflicts.
• You're a counterinsurgency grognard, but you'd like an article to pull out whenever you need to demonstrate how different counterinsurgency is from conventional warfare. (Click here for a comparison.)

On that last point, it's worth skimming the Army's manual for the general-purpose infantryman, FM 7-8, Infantry Rifle Platoon and Squad, to compare it with Green's field guide to counterinsurgency. You'll notice immediately how standard US military doctrine has nothing intrinsically to do with counterinsurgency. Even if you throw in specialized publications covering relevant topics--for example, FM 41-10, Civil Affairs Operations, or FM 3-07, Stability and Support Operations--you'll still notice gaps. Even the Marines' venerable Small Wars Manual didn't cover everything.

However the wars and Afghanistan and Iraq conclude, the United States cannot afford to have its military--not to mention the rest of the government--go for another generation without making the tangible, permanent changes needed to fight guerrillas better.

Thanks for the gift, but...

An important rule of counterinsurgency is, Gifts that the recipient does not want, or does not need, will never win "hearts and minds."

Case in point: a $38 million accounting system for the Iraqi government, which for the last year, no one in the Finance Ministry is using. Obviously, the Finance Ministry needs accounting. However, it wasn't necessarily ready for state-of-the-art accounting software. Or, perhaps, the problem was the fashion in which American contractors and officials delivered this system, which failed to convince Finance Ministry's employees that this particular system would work for them.

Either way, $38 million is a lot of money to waste learning a basic lesson about "hearts and minds."

Sending bullets, not men

As I was saying in "The captains' war," counterinsurgency can't succeed without trust. Needless to say, if you can't establish trust with a general in the Green Zone, you really can't establish trust with an A-10 pilot dropping bombs on your neighborhood. The increased dependence on "aerial counterinsurgency" is, like dependence on "private security firms," a natural outgrowth of not having enough of the right kind of forces for the mission in Iraq.

The captains' war

The other day, I said a few words about the crucial role that captains and lieutenants play in counterinsurgency. That’s a stark contrast with conventional war, colonels and generals are the important decision-makers at the operational level of strategy.

I wasn’t completely satisfied with what I wrote, and I finally figure out why. I fell into a trap that’s all too common when writing about revolutionary warfare: people often describe the perspective with which they are most familiar.

That problem is by no means unique to descriptions of counterinsurgency warfare. For example, if Basil Liddell-Hart’s account of World War II were the only history of that conflict you ever read, you might conclude that the war was won on the parade grounds of Sandhurst. Liddell-Hart’s slant on the war is highly surprising, since he was a former British officer who based his work on a broad array of British sources. To understand World War II, you have to read at least a few books, in part to overcome the limited perspective of any particular author.

When Americans write about counterinsurgency, they usually turn it into an American drama. The most obvious examples are the countless accounts of the Vietnam War that describe that historical drama as America Agonistes. As good as the classics of the war, such as Herr’s Dispatches, or Moore’s We Were Soldiers Once, often are, they usually relegate the Vietnamese themselves to minor roles, or in many cases, mere props. Movies about Vietnam suffer this problem even more acutely: for example, the Vietnamese in the Oscar-winning Platoon are nearly shadows behind the main characters, all of whom are American.

Any good depiction of counterinsurgency needs to show the war from multiple sides, combatants and civilians alike. After all, these conflicts are the epitome of Clausewitzian principles, in which military operations are merely tools to construct political outcomes.

Therefore, to understand why captains and lieutenants are critical players in counterinsurgency, you have to imagine the war from the perspective of the average Iraqi. Say that you live in Baghdad, surrounded every day by people you know, and many whom you don’t. Loyalties fall along many lines according, according to family, clan, job, political beliefs, religious faith, and personal inclination. You know that a Shi’ite militia responsible for attacks on local police stations works out of a building down the street. Their activities are an open secret, in large part because people in the neighborhood are afraid of these insurgents.

You might despise this militia group for a variety of reasons. Maybe the form of Islam they profess is antithetical to your beliefs. Perhaps one of their kidnapping victims was someone you know. Or, simply, you’re afraid of what might happen if the Iraqi or American army showed up one day to clear out these militants.

Therefore, informing the Iraqi or American authorities about the militia group—its location, membership, habits, etc.—involves serious risk. These militants kill for a living, so they will have no qualms about killing you or your family. Before you take this enormous risk, you’ll need to trust the person to whom you confide any information.

That person will have to be someone with whom you are familiar. You’ll need to be confident that they will keep your cooperation a secret. You’ll also need to know that they can actually do something about the militia, and they care enough about what happens to you to take great care in doing the job right. In other words, the person with whom you confide will have to meet a very high standard of trustworthiness.

No colonel or general will ever meet that standard. They’re too distant, physically and organizationally, for you to know them well enough. If you approach anyone in uniform with information that may cost your life, it has to be someone lower in rank, but more familiar to you.

(By the way, this is yet another reason, why chasing guerrillas around the map of Iraq is one of the worst ways to prosecute a counterinsurgency war. Not only do you fail to learn the “local situation” anywhere, but the locals never learn enough about you.)

To win a counterinsurgency war, you need the assistance or acquiescence of the local population. You don’t need a sweeping mandate from the masses, just enough people willing to trust you.

Electricity versus the enclave

Iraq's electricity problems--which, at best, are as bad as ever--show many of the problems the US and Iraqi governments have had in developing an effective counterinsurgency strategy. To put it in the simplest possible terms, you can't defeat an insurgency by spreading your efforts thin across the entire country. You need to focus on a particular area, or "enclave," re-establish security and governance, and move on to the next region.

Unfortunately, Iraq's electricity grid undermines any such enclave strategy. Economic development creates a dependency on electricity. The Ba'athist regime under Saddam Hussein built a centralized electricity grid, in part as a instrument of political control; now, that centralization works against the government that replaced the Ba'athists.

Insurgent groups know that they can easily disrupt the highly centralized electricity distribution network, undermining the "civil affairs" side of counterinsurgency, with very little effort. Average Iraqis know that, whatever the government may say, a small group of militants can bring normal life in Iraq to a halt.

Even without a civil war to complicate matters, re-building a nation's power grid is a huge undertaking. Unfortunately, political violence isn't the only complication. Iraqi leaders undoubtedly see the centralized power grid as a tool they might use someday. US firms that receive reconstruction contracts (Bechtel, Halliburton, et al.)would rather have the economy of scale that a centralized grid provides. No one in the Iraqi government, the US government, and the foreign reconstruction firms is eager to assume responsibility for the risky, painful process of decentralization. If decentralization were to succeed, some parts of Iraq would receive visibly better electricity service than others, raising the question of whether any sectarian or ethnic groups that dominate these regions are receiving preferential treatment.

Unless someone is willing to assume leadership for the electricity crisis, it will continue to deepen. No one will step forward if the necessary political and economic resources aren't available. There also needs to be a real plan, not merely a statement of intent. Obviously, Iraqis will look to the US government for help; to date, American officials have had very little to provide. A typical response came during a 2005 press briefing with Robert Zoellick, a Deputy Secretary of State:

QUESTION: Just to follow up on the electricity, isn’t there also a concern about the electricity being centralized in Iraq? Is there an effort to try to decentralize that (inaudible)?

DEPUTY SECRETARY ZOELLICK: Well, one of the aspects and, you know, I didn’t mention to Carol is that in many countries you have a system that is not designed to be attacked or is not assuming you’re going to have insurgents around. I mean this was a very centralized system in terms of the fuel lines as well as the overall electricity grids. So, there are also some efforts to see the role of some particular Iraqi security forces that might help with some key infrastructure aspects. You don’t really have to defend 2000 kilometers to be able to sort of deal with many of the attacks, at least from what I’ve seen. But, as you referenced, one of the main points I mentioned about private generation capacity, we’ve already seen some of that happen. The wonderful thing as you start to open up market possibilities, people do start to figure out a way to make these things happen, but you’ve got to create a pricing structure that also does that. Pricing of the raw material, the fuels, ability to import it as opposed to have government controls, and also the pricing of that fuel versus other fuels. So, those are some of the items that I want to try to see what the incoming Iraqi government, how they think about them.

Sadly, this statement sounds less like a genuine endorsement of the "micropower" movement, and more like just another way of saying, "The free market will handle the problem." Unfortunately, any budding Iraqi electricity entrepreneurs are likely to be shot dead by the insurgents, who want the power to stay off.

Yet again, we return to the enclave strategy that is the fulcrum on which any counterinsurgency strategy turns. The electricity grid undermines any efforts to build emclaves; without enclaves, many efforts to fix the electricity problems can't succeed.

The future of counterinsurgency

Looking beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, how prepared will the US military be for the next counterinsurgency war? Here are the warning signs that military professionals aren't going to be any readier than, say, they were for the Iraq War:

• Officers mouth the right words, but they don't embrace the ideas behind counterinsurgency. That's exactly what the US military did during the early 1960s, when the Pentagon felt that it could avoid President Kennedy's pressures to take counterinsurgency by adopting the language, without changing doctrine or organization.
• Military leaders start focusing on something else. In the waning days of the Vietnam War, American military professionals had already stopped paying attention to counterinsurgency, preferring to invest their time and dwindling resources on conventional and nuclear warfare between the superpowers.
• A few enthusiasts continue to champion counterinsurgency, but little changes. In other words, the war colleges might have several counterinsurgency "true believers" on staff, but the rest of the military's overall TO&E and doctrine remain the same. After the Vietnam War, some in the Defense Department did try to ensure that the United States would be prepared for the next Vietnam. Unfortunately, these individuals were largely isolated, facing not only resistance from generals and admirals who refused to believe that another Vietnam would ever happen, but severe penalties in their personal careers if they continued crusading for counterinsurgency.

The third warning sign is the hardest to discern, since you need to sift through the details of budgets, assignments, and promotions to track what happens to the counterinsurgency experts. The first two warning signs are easier to discern, since you can find them in military journals, the proceedings of Defense Department conferences, and other highly public materials.

The summer issue of Parameters, the Army War College journal, points towards a more optimistic future for counterinsurgency warfare, even as the news from Iraq remains grim. I often cite Parameters on this blog because it gives some insight into what the leaders of the US Army are thinking and discussing. The summer issue includes a "social networks" view of counterinsurgency, a review of the Marines' new counterinsurgency manual, a "think piece" about defining victory in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, and book reviews on these and related topics.

It's clear that the authors of these articles aren't merely paying lip service to counterinsurgency principles. No one says, as many American officers did during the Vietnam era, that any good army can defeat guerrillas.

Why do the prospects for counterinsurgency after Iraq seem better than the same situation after Vietnam? I'm sure that military professionals know that the American electorate understands the level of challenge that Iraq and Afghanistan posed, and the necessity of meeting that challenge. It also helps that there isn't a superpower conflict to justify ignoring counterinsurgency for other forms of potential conflict.

After Vietnam, many observers warned that, like it or not, Americans would face another counterinsurgency war. The same principle applies when US involvement in Iraq comes to an end. Let's be better prepared, this time.

Where numbers can't make the difference

In counterinsurgency, numbers do matter--to a point. You might calculate the minimum number of soldiers needed to protect important public facilities from sabotage, or patrol a neighborhood in Baghdad. However, what you can't solve simply by adding more troops are the sorts of problems that demand cultural and political sensitivities. Counterinsurgency doesn't let you pick and choose: you either take all these missions, or you don't get into the counterinsurgency business in the first place.

Case in point: Great Britain is deploying special teams to Iraq to handle "honor killings." If you think that the reconstituted Iraq needs the rule of law, more effective law enforcement, and a better role for women than what some Salafist insurgents would like to see, you can understand the logic behind these special units. Here are some details from The Guardian:

The complex investigation and three-month trial for Ms Mahmod's murder relied on initiatives more often used to tackle organised crime, such as the use of covert investigative techniques and special measures for key witnesses, two of whom needed police protection. Such techniques are increasingly used to deal with honour crimes.

The CPS will also introduce a "flag" for any forced marriage or honour crime cases, so they can be logged and monitored.

Nazir Afzal, the CPS lead on honour-based violence, said that such crimes are often elaborate, pre-planned and can involve many suspects.

One in nine honour killings in the UK is carried out by hit men, he said. It is also common for the youngest member of the family to carry out the murder, with the others playing a lesser role.

In this case, you can't help Iraqis "stand up so that we can stand down," simply by putting another exhausted National Guardsman on a street corner in Sadr City.

Surgely you jest

We shouldn't be surprised that "the surge" is not officially "working." The US government didn't start this escalation with a clear definition of what constituted success; whatever the definition, the resources deployed seemed inadequate to the task. What's surprising, perhaps, is the number of people watching this four-year war who still have no idea how guerrillas fight, and what it will take to defeat them.

Let's review the basics of "the surge." The Bush Administration ordered a relatively small increase in the number of troops deployed in Iraq. The actual numbers changed, when you factored in (1) the extended tours of military personnel already deployed, and (2) a parallel increase in the number of "private security forces" (mercenaries) not included in the original announcement. The goal remained the same: clear and secure Baghdad. That objective was never going to be easy.

The hard task of urban warfare
Under any circumstances, clear and secure operations in cities is challenging, and nearly always imperfect in its results. In the most famous example, the Battle of Stalingrad, encircled German troops trapped in Der Kessel ("The Cauldron") held on, despite low supplies, low morale, harsh weather, and a staggering numerical disadvantage. And that, of course, was a conventional battle, in which the combatants were relatively easy to identify (though Soviet civilians died in horrific numbers).

In other cases of urban guerrilla warfare, a smart, dedicated, organized opponent can take years to completely clear from a city. Counterinsurgency forces often fail to identify all the guerrilla fighters and agents within a city. Inevitably, the guerrillas try to re-infiltrate; rarely are defensive measures, such as checkpoints and regular sweeps, sufficient.

Making a city 100% guerrilla-free, and then 100% guerrilla-proof, is a major undertaking, and in many cases, something of a mirage. You can reduce the number of guerrillas, but you can't eliminate them altogether--unless they commit major strategic mistakes, as the Tupemaros did in Uruguay. The normal case looks more like Belfast, Kandahar, Lima, or Hebron, where the urban guerrilla was never completely eradicated.

The expected reaction
As long as I've been writing posts here at Arms and Influence, I've taken extra effort to point out the common but fatal mistake of assuming that your enemy in any conflict won't react. The same principle applies to the surge. Of course, Iraqi guerrilla factions moved out of the way of US and Iraqi forces in Baghdad, temporarily moving operations to other parts of Iraq. Of course, many of them switched tactics, deciding to lay low for the time being, or even--as in the case of the Army of the Mahdi--position themselves as a shadow army and police force. Of course, insurgents switched to lower risk attacks, such as bombing instead of sniping, to communicate defiance in the face of US and Iraqi efforts.

The critical question about the surge isn't, "How safe is Baghdad today?" More important is how long the effects of this small-scale escalation can last. That question, of course, has more dimensions than just the number of bombs detonated or rounds fired.

As I indicated in earlier posts, "the surge" doesn't change the politics of the Iraq war, in both Iraq and the United States. The Bush Administration has burned up so much of its credibility that, even if the surge made Baghdad dramatically safer, Americans are skeptical about the long-term prospects for victory. And what, for the US and Iraqi governments, does "victory" really mean? Today, the answer is no more clear than on the first day of the 2003 invasion.

Security alone isn't victory
Certainly, Baghdad residents are happy for any reduction in violence. It's easy to underestimate the value of that political currency--but it's also easy to lose it. If personal safety were the only concern, there would not be an internal war in the first place. A focus on security might eliminate some of the smaller, most violent factions in this war. It may not satisfy some of the groups using these factions, along with other instruments, to make cynical power grabs, express their outrage against the status quo, or simply keep other Iraqi groups off-balance.

Nor will the surge, by itself, drive a wedge between Iraqi groups. Rather than sneering at talks between US officials and Iraqi insurgents, we should be applauding these efforts (as long, of course, as we're talking to the right groups, in the right fashion). According to the current political and military formula, there is no other way to defeat Iraq's guerrilla factions except by exploiting the differences among them. Prime targets include some of the disaffected Ba'athists, who at some point may be convinced that the armed struggle isn't getting them anywhere, and some of the more cynical groups that have been more interested in prestige and money than any political agenda.

The surge, therefore, needs to do more than provide a short-term security fix. Bigger strategic changes are needed, which this temporary, minor escalation has yet to provide.

Before the invasion, anyone taking a serious look at the US military's doctrines for urban warfare and counterinsurgency found serious flaws in both areas. (Here's an example.) Since the invasion, US forces have been trying to innovate as best they can, and have improved their operational, tactical, and technical approaches in many ways. However, they can't do the job alone--particularly if the US public still doesn't know what the war in Iraq is supposed to achieve.

As indicated in yesterday's NYT article, the expectations about the surge were far too optimistic. Guerrillas return quickly to "cleared" neighborhoods. Violence in some areas has worsened, which should be no surprise. The hoopla over the surge provided a major opportunity for insurgents to make a loud, bloody point with just a few well-timed bombs. Shi'ite factions are using the surge as cover for pushing more Sunnis out of Baghdad. Iraqi police and military units are sometimes hesitant to rush into dangerous situations, if the Americans appear eager to prove that the latest campaign is working.

None of this is to say that the Iraqi insurgents are invincible. However, the surge does not seem to have seized the initiative from the guerrillas, nor has it exploited their weaknesses as much as it might have.

[For an earlier series of posts about "the surge," click here.]

Mr. Vietnam. part 2

[For part 1, click here.]

Appointing a "Mr. Vietnam" was an important part of the reforms designed to better prosecute the Vietnam War. Someone, below the level of the President, needed to coordinate and direct the efforts of the civilian and military bureaucracies waging that war.

Does the same idea make sense for the Iraq War? In some ways, yes; in a larger number, no. As vexing as the Vietnam War was, the Iraq War is harder to fix through bureaucratic reforms. Unfortunately, the reforms proposed for Iraq and Afghanistan are themselves a small fraction of the organizational and doctrinal changes the US government made in Vietnam.

The depth of reform
An important difference between Vietnam and Iraq is the depth through the organization chart through which the reforms penetrate. Even the most respected, seasoned national security professional in Washington will have no chance of success, if all the President does is turn responsibility over to that person. If the organizational reforms made in the late 1960s are the measure of what to do, the changes have to go very deep indeed.

Counterinsurgency, which requires an artful combination of politics and force, is the reason why this thorough reform is necessary. As Robert Komer indicated in his first-person account of some of these Vietnam-era reforms, encapsulated in the CORDS program, the line between the civilian and military bureaucracies needs to be very blurry:

How was CORDS different? First, it was a field expedient tailored to the particular needs as perceived at the time. Second, it was a unique experiment in a unified civil/military field advisory and support organization, different in many respects from World War II civil affairs or military government. Soldiers served directly under civilians, and vice versa, at all levels. They even wrote each other's efficiency reports. Personnel were drawn from all the military services, and from State, AID, CIA, USIA, and the White House. But CORDS was fully integrated into the theater military structure.

Contrast this truly integrated approach to counterinsurgency (or "pacification," to use the Vietnam-ism) with the organization that exists today in Iraq. While the Coalition Provisional Authority still existed, there was a clear split between the CPA and CENTCOM, the portion of the military bureaucracy waging the post-occupation war. The chiefs of CENTCOM and the CPA did little to coordinate their efforts, and at times (as documented in Thomas Ricks' Fiasco and other accounts of the Iraq War) did not even notify each other of important decisions or operations. Even with the CPA out of the picture, the CIA works on its own programs, often with little regard for the traditional military. The special operations forces (SOFs) and the CIA seem to have a better working relationship, but the SOFs are not the leading element in the Iraqi occupation.

In other words, appointing a "Mr. Iraq/Afghanistan" in Washington accomplishes almost nothing on its own. The US government would need to re-architect the entire war effort, from the "war tsar" on down, to achieve any noticeable results  from bureaucratic reform alone.

Dilution of effort
Arguably, the Vietnam War was really multiple conflicts. Not only were the United States and South Vietnam fighting National Liberation Front guerrillas, but they were also battling incursions from the conventional military forces of North Vietnam. Given the importance of the Ho Chi Minh trail and cross-border havens to which the NLF and NVA could retreat, the war necessarily involved Laos and Cambodia. While the factional conflict in Laos was settled in the early 1960s, to the benefit of the Communist Pathet Lao, the conflict in Cambodia was, by the mid-1960s, only just revving up. The other dimensions of conflict--ethnic Vietnamese versus the so-called "Montagnards," the Chinese and Soviet support for North Vietnam--made the war even more complex.

However, at bottom, there was still only one war for the United States. The conflicts in Laos and Cambodia were noteworthy, only as they affected the more important part of US theater strategy, the survival of an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam.

There is no such unity at the theater level in Central Asia. Iraq and Afghanistan are separate conflicts, each with its own set of participants, challenges, and goals. Conflating the two makes no strategic sense; making a single "war tsar" responsible for both only deepens the confusion. Since the proposed "war tsar" reports directly to the President, the priority is likely to be Iraq over Afghanistan, in which case Afghanistan may suffer from the same "attention deficit" problem it does today.

It's hard enough to write about Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time. To avoid making this series of posts unreadable, I'm focusing on Iraq, because that's where the inspiration for this "war tsar" idea arises. In the process, I'm committing the same error of overlooking the urgent, independent needs of Afghanistan as the US government. In other words, I'm feeling a tiny fraction of the problem a real "war tsar" might face, trying to juggle Iraq and Afghanistan, and do justice to both.

The man on the scene
The other obvious problem with the "war tsar" idea is the distance from the battlefield. Another person responsible for Iraq or Afghanistan isn't necessarily going to make as much difference as someone stationed in one of those countries. (Again, it's obvious that trying to shuttle, physically or strategically, between both countries is impractical.) While it's always going to be necessary to have some presence in Washington, to kick the bureaucratic apparatus there into gear, or keep any political understandings between the White House and Congress working, the bulk of the war tsar's time must be spent in "in country."

Fortunately and unfortunately, a model for this kind of proconsular leadership already exists, the commander-in-chief (CINC) of the combatant command for the Middle East and Central Asia, CENTCOM. The fortunate part is, a model already exists for theater-level leadership that pulls together the efforts of different civilian and military bureaucracies. The unfortunate part is the Bush Administration's aggressive dismantling of the authority that the CINCs once possessed. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made the curbing of the CINCs' power a top priority, and no one in the White House opposed him. For the US government to resurrect the CINCs' leadership role, the White House would have to make a very clear (and somewhat embarassing) reversal.

[This series continues in a future post.]

Progress in Colombia?

The FARC may be the bigger and more dangerous guerrilla faction in Colombia, but the ELN is no small potatoes, either. If the Uribe government moves from negotiating a ceasefire to getting the ELN to de-mobilize, that would be a major step forward in the decades-long Colombian counterinsurgency war.

Mr. Vietnam, part I

Back in the late 1960s, it was clear that the Vietnam War wasn't going well for the United States and its South Vietnamese ally. One clear flaw in the American approach was that there really wasn't an American approach (singular). In truth, there were multiple Vietnam Wars being fought, by the individual services and civilian agencies.

The Army's operational and theater strategies looked a lot like its doctrines for defeating the Warsaw Pact. The Air Force and Navy focused on strategic attacks against North Vietnam. The CIA and Special Forces fought their own war, sometimes deliberately in the shadows (for example, the cross-border raids into Laos and Cambodia) and often overshadowed by the "big unit war" (for example, the advisory efforts with the Montagnards and other "local forces"). The Marines fought a war that somewhat aligned with what the Army was doing; at times, however, they pursued their own methods, such as the CAP program, that clearly did not fit the Army's approach. The State Department focused on the South Vietnamese government. Even the Agency for International Development (AID) had its own concept of the war, and its own contribution within that conflict.

Who was in charge? Effectively, no one below the President. Ground forces fell under the Military Advisory Command, Vietnam (MACV), based in South Vietnam. The Navy, however, reported to the admiral in charge of the US Pacific Fleet, headquartered in Hawaii. None of the military commanders had control over civilian forces, and vice-versa, all the way up through the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Director of the CIA, and the Secretary of State.

President Lyndon Johnson famously tried to micromanage the war, going down to the Situation Room in the middle of the night, in his bathrobe and slippers, to review bombing targets for the next day. He was not, however, overcoming the cleavages that prevent what military theorists call "unity of command." While bureaucratic coordination may not have been the only problem in South Vietnam, it was a huge problem for the critical first four years of the war.

What has obscured many discussions of the Vietnam War was that, just as the domestic political basis for sustaining the war effort shattered, several important reforms cured many of these bureaucratic ailments. For example, experiments like the CORDS program created a single military and civilian chain of command. The US ambassador to South Vietnam, Ellsworth Bunker, and his counterpart in MACV, General Creighton Abrams (after whom the M1 Abrams tank is named), created a close, effective working relationship.

While these improvements may have been too late to stop the US from withdrawing, they did give the South Vietnamese a better chance at survival than they had. Not only did US operations become measurably more effective, but the US government was able to wield better leverage over its South Vietnamese ally, at the national, district, and even the village level.

Historians argue over how much a difference, if any, these changes made. No one argues, however, that they were necessary.

Why am I telling you about these reforms? Because they sound a bit like the Bush Administration's recent notion of appointing a "war czar" for Afghanistan and Iraq. The idea is not as daffy as it sounds, at the most superficial level. Whether the Bush Administration is on to something merits a deeper look, which I'll do in the next post on this topic.

The training wheels come off

IN THE NEWS
A few months ago, the word training dominated the discussion about Iraq. How many Iraqi soldiers had been trained? How soon would the newly-trained units be ready for combat? Would the rate of training be fast enough to reverse the declining fortunes of the US and Iraqi governments?

These questions, by and large, made my teeth ache. No form of warfare is a mere engineering problem, solved by applying a particular amount of force, or (in this case) training a certain number of people. Training rates are deceptive, since they don't say anything about how receptive the audience is to training. Behavior doesn't change automatically, just because someone has sat through a certain number of lectures, or passed a particular test.

The latest issue of Parameters, the academic journal of the US Army War College, contains an excellent article, "The Limits of Training in Iraqi Force Development" by Gary Felicetti, that convincingly makes just this point. The incentives for the Iraqi police are largely shaped by their employer, the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior. Even if someone could clean up the Ministry of the Interior, the societal cleavages that have grown wider and more jagged make matters far worse:

On top of all this, Iraq is a tribal society where an individual’s identity, and primary loyalty, runs to family, tribe, ethnic group, and religious sect. Political identity is also based on one’s tribal or sectarian group.51 Some elements of the MOI forces, therefore, appear to serve Shi’ite, Kurdish, or Iranian interests, acting as sectarian and ethnic forces that abuse and murder Sunnis. Powerful militias and armed groups, often affiliated with political parties, have infiltrated the police forces. The primary loyalties of Iraqi police are thus so doubtful that members of the Bureau of Dignitary Protection are normally selected from the guarded dignitary’s family or tribe.

Training might show what, under other circumstances, would be the right approach to defeating the insurgents. However, as long as the Ministry of Interior and Iraq's clannish culture reward the wrong behavior, training alone will change practically nothing.

That's not the same as saying that training is pointless, or that every counterinsurgency war is hopeless. However, classrooms full of Iraqi soldiers or policeman, forced to sit through lessons that are not reinforced by the hard realities outside the classroom, won't change the course of the war.

Postscript: The same issue of Parameters contains articles of mixed quality. Worth reading is "The Hobbesian Notion of Self-Preservation Concerning Human Behavior during an Insurgency," which puts the choices of whether to support the existing order or help undermine it in terms that any Westerner should understand--at least if you were awake during Philosophy 101. "Systems Thinking and Counterinsurgencies," on the other hand, is worthless to anyone trying to craft a strategy for defeating guerrillas. It's also such a dry piece of work that it may draw all the moisture from your eyeballs. Definitely to be avoided.

What's wrong with the "surge"? (6)

Previous postings in this series: grand strategy (1, 2), theater (3, 4), operational (5).

IN THE NEWS
The worst error of the Bush Administration’s proposed escalation is its indifference to iraqi politics. All warfare aims at the creation of a political result. In counterinsurgency, however, the bond between violence and politics is even tighter. Combatants win only if they can simultaneously execute military and political operations.

Blowing up a power station may send a political message; protecting that power station may  send an equally compelling message. However, the success or failure of this sabotage attempt does not determine whether the message was understood, or if it found a receptive audience.

At the operational level of counterinsurgency strategy, the number of troops is not, in and of itself, the determinant of victory. Adding or subtracting 20,000 troops will not change the political landscape of Iraq. The important question, therefore, is how these troops are used, and how military operations work in concert with other efforts (reconstruction, intelligence gathering, administrative reform, etc.) to engineer the right political outcome.

Unfortunately, the Bush Administration—and for that matter, Americans in general—continue to speak and act as though Iraq doesn’t have politics. Americans and their representatives continue to discuss the Iraq war as an engineering problem—a certain amount of force applied at a certain physical point—instead of a political challenge.

While there are many facets to this problem, I’ll focus on just one for now. US strategy in Iraq treats nearly all insurgent groups as largely the same. If US officials do not make these important distinctions among anti-government factions, the United States will become irrelevant to Iraq’s internal war. Or, perhaps, the US government, in its inability to make distinctions, might help its Iraqi allies along a sure path to defeat.

It’s shocking that, nearly four years into this war, Americans still speak of “the insurgency,” as if it were a monolithic entity. The political goals of insurgent factions range from the prosaic (get the Americans to leave) to the ambitious (re-create the Umayyad caliphate). Needless to say, they disagree over religion, and not merely along Sunni/Shi’ite lines. Islamist groups the Iraqi National Islamic Resistance and the Islamic Front for the Iraqi Resistance might agree on the removal of Western cultural influences, but disagree on the role that the Shari’a should play in Iraqi politics. (Islamist groups also strongly disagree over the interpretation of the Shari’a, as well as its application.) Since the early days of the insurgency, it was clear that some anti-government groups were opportunists, not revolutionaries, looking for whatever wealth or influence they could gain from bombings and kidnappings.

Insurgent groups differ in other important ways—size, tactics, organization, area of operations, foreign funding, foreign recruits, etc.—but the differences in political goals should be sufficient to show that a one-size-fits-all counterinsurgency strategy is doomed to failure. Bandits operating under a faux revolutionary banner can be easily eliminated, through intimidation if bribery alone does not suffice. The most dedicated Islamist revolutionaries, however, are unlikely to be either bribed or intimidated. (Though you might be surprised at how long some groups might be willing to postpone their revolutions.) Some fighters who took up the gun to end the occupation may be less inclined to fight when fewer troops are patrolling Baghdad. Other guerrillas, such as the Army of the Mahdi, will rush to fill the vacuum that any American withdrawal creates.

Unlike many other counterinsurgency wars, the Iraq war gives the government and its foreign patron a powerful advantage: the disunity of the revolutionaries. To date, the US and Iraqi governments have proven unwilling or unable to play this trump card.

Therefore, the “surge” is a dangerous distraction from a basic problem with US counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq. Americans have to be smart enough about Iraq to stop engaging in pointless debates, such as whether an additional 20,000 soldiers is sufficient to defeat “the insurgency.” Instead, Americans should be discussing how the US government might help the Iraqi government divide and conquer among insurgent factions. Just as the US and Iraqi governments cannot be chasing guerrillas across the physical landscape, they also cannot afford to squander lives, money, and time across the political landscape.

The war of images

IN THE NEWS
I enthusiastically agree with the sentiment expressed at Part of the Plan: If there's any future to the US effort in Iraq, it requires changing the mental image that Iraqis, Americans, and other citizens of the world have of the war from this to this.

Again with the advisors

IN THE NEWS
How well is the counterinsurgency effort in Iraq doing? A lot depends on the effort to train Iraqi security forces. So what do you make of highly impressionist articles like Thomas Ricks' recent piece , which starts with the following gloomy assessment:

The U.S. military's effort to train Iraqi forces has been rife with problems, from officers being sent in with poor preparation to a lack of basic necessities such as interpreters and office materials, according to internal Army documents.

You might dismiss the complaints in this article as the usual grumbling from the grognards. There are never enough resources for the mission, or never enough time to do it right. In even the most successful military campaigns, people in uniform will find things to complain about, usually with justification. While the PFC's corner of the war may look chaotic and disastrous, the general may see an overall success.

However, the problems described Ricks' article are not mere grumbling. If anyone in the front lines of the Iraqi counterinsurgency war--and the advisors are the real front line--admits that they lack the language or cultural skills to adequately train their Iraqi counterparts, US forces are still not equipped to help defeat the Iraqi insurgents.

In the history of US counterinsurgency efforts, the fulcrum of success is often the way the American military prioritizes this kind of warfare. Three years into the occupation of Iraq, a sure sign that counterinsurgency is still not adequately prioritized is the ad hoc way in which American advisors are prepared:

A separate internal review this year by the military's Center for Army Lessons Learned, based on 152 interviews with soldiers involved in the training and advisory program, found that there was "no standardized guideline" for preparing advisers and that such instruction was needed because "a majority of advisors have little to no previous experience or training."

Imagine if each tank platoon in the US Army received a different set of training, with varying degrees of quality. Imagine if each SEAL team received recruited and trained for unconventional warfare differently. Now, imagine yourself as a divisional or theater commander, trying to figure out how well a particular war is going. Maybe the doctrine is wrong--but which doctrine, among many that various units under your command seem to be pursuing? Even more important is the perspective of Iraqi civilian and military leaders, trying to make sense of what the US government wants them to do.

Of course, you don't have to imagine these things, because the US military doesn't allow them to happen. Even among the US special operations forces (SOFs), frequently unpopular with the more conventionally-minded generals who prefer working with tank units, there is enough consistency in training across similar SOF units to know what you're getting.

In short, the Ricks article identifies a severe defect with the US counterinsurgency effort in Iraq. All other grumbling aside, the complaints aout training must be addressed. Even if the theater strategy were a work of genius, it can't succeed if the lower strategic strata fracture into disconnected, misguided efforts.

If the new Congress wants to start dealing with Iraq on the right foot, it might focus its attention on this problem. The US Army needs to treat the training mission in Iraq as the first priority, not the last. While there may be some institutional inertia and doctrinal resistance to this notion, the Congress has helped overcome these obstacles before, when it dictated changes to the SOFs that the Pentagon was unwilling to make. If the US military fails to do an effective job of training, neither the "go big" or go long" options really exist.

Guerre revolutionnaire, again

IN THE NEWS
This article from Parameters neatly summarizes the problems with the French counterinsurgency strategy in Algeria. Their failures is a cautionary lesson tale for today:

French doctrine, tactics, and procedures had fundamental weaknesses
that ultimately contributed to the loss of Algeria and almost led to civil
war in France....

The ideological and spiritual nature of the conflict was internalized by many in the French Army and became one justification for torture. They saw the enemy as communist and therefore as inherently evil. The struggle was one of ultimate national and ideological survival.

Everything said about the Iraqi insurgen