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.
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