Arms and influence

Big and little crusaders

I was agreeing with most of what I read in Andrew Bacevich's recent Atlantic Monthly article until I got to this section:

Embedded within this argument over military matters is a more fundamental and ideologically charged argument about basic policy. By calling for an Army configured mostly to wage stability operations, Nagl is effectively affirming the Long War as the organizing principle of post-9/11 national-security strategy, with U.S. forces called upon to bring light to those dark corners of the world where terrorists flourish. Observers differ on whether the Long War’s underlying purpose is democratic transformation or imperial domination: Did the Bush administration invade Iraq to liberate that country or to control it? Yet there is no disputing that the Long War implies a vast military enterprise undertaken on a global scale and likely to last decades. In this sense, Nagl’s reform agenda, if implemented, will serve to validate—and perpetuate—the course set by President Bush in the aftermath of 9/11.

Nagl, in Bacevich's terminology, is a "crusader." Crusaders believe that counterinsurgency wars are winnable, so the US government should reorganize its national security apparatus, including the military, to go forth and win them.

In contrast, "conservatives" believe we should stick to the old Powell Doctrine, and just avoid those long, messy wars with less than glamorous victory conditions:

Gentile understands this. Implicit in his critique of Nagl is a critique of the Bush administration, for which John Nagl serves as a proxy. Gentile’s objection to what he calls Nagl’s “breathtaking” assumption about “the efficacy of American military power to shape events” expresses a larger dissatisfaction with similar assumptions held by the senior officials who concocted the Iraq War in the first place. When Gentile charges Nagl with believing that there are “no limits to what American military power … can accomplish,” his real gripe is with the likes of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.

And here's where Bacevich's simple distinction between crusaders and conservatives proves to be oversimplified. In reality, there are at least three categories of opinion about wars like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq:

• Big crusaders, who see "the Long War" as a single overarching conflict, or a set of intertwined wars that need to be addressed in some common fashion. Big crusaders invent terms like GWOT to describe their belief system.
• Little crusaders, who think that some of these wars are worth fighting, but there's no bigger meta-conflict at work. A little crusader might think that the war in Afghanistan or Iraq is winnable, but there's no "vast military enterprise undertaken on a global scale and likely to last decades" that we're compelled to fight.
• Conservatives, who want to push these little wars, low-intensity conflicts, or whatever the term du jour is, down the list of priorities. Whether we're not capable of doing a good job at fighting these wars, or the costs outweight the benefits, they're just not worth re-engineering the US defense apparatus to fight them.

You might slice the philosophical or doctrinal distinctions even more finely, but you get the point. I'd classify myself as a little crusader, who believes passionately in taking these conflicts seriously. Creating some bigger story arc, however, isn't necessary to justify the changes needed to fight these conflicts better. 

In fact, the story arc of "big crusaders" creates dangerous misconceptions about connections that don't really exist. Back in the 1980s, people spoke about "global terror networks" as if SMERSH or SPECTRE were running the show behind the scenes. However, revolutionary groups that use similar methods don't necessarily belong to some larger network. (And, in fact, revolutionaries in the same country, using roughly the same methods, often compete with each other.) The occasional collaboration among them, such as sharing technical information about bomb-making or psychological warfare, is also not evidence of some greater network that only a "Long War" can ultimately defeat.

Therefore, we're not just arguing semantics here. The notion that, if you're not a "conservative," you are thick as thieves with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, is just ludicrous.

[Thanks to Mark Grimsley for pointing out Bacevich's article.]

 

Send more stuff!

Armchair Generalist has a good post about why sending more stuff to warzones isn't necessarily a measure of success--particularly if the enemy hijacks the shipments.

The political side of counterinsurgency, part I

Kenneth Payne's recent article in Parameters, "Waging Communication War," raises one of the critical questions around counterinsurgency: How does the political action part work, exactly?

Payne can't possibly answer the question fully in a short article. However, it's important to recognize how little guidance most statements of counterinsurgency doctrine provide. For example:

• Everyone can agree that it's important to understand the population of people whom you're trying to win away from the insurgents. But what constitutes a convincing argument for supporting the government over the guerrillas?
• Where do you begin, with the local elites or average people?
• Are you trying to win the population's support or acquiescence?
• How do you know you've succeeded? And how lasting is that success?

And so on. For the lieutenant or captain stepping into the job of counterinsurgency, even the best books on the subject have surprisingly little to say that provides specific guidance. Just saying that, "Every country is different," is even worse. Surely there's some practical guidance that someone can provide.

Some of the more recent training developed in the US Army and Marines is helpful on this score. I'd also like to offer another source of advice, something that Payne alludes to but only begins to explore, contemporary theories about marketing.

Now, before you roll your eyes, let me just say that the kind of advice I'm talking about goes beyond what people often think of, when they hear marketing. Slick advertising executives of the sort you see on Mad Men need not apply. Instead, there are some very down-to-earth ideas about how businesses and consumers make economic decisions that have some relevance in the counterinsurgency biz. I'll sketch out a few of them in some upcoming posts.

So what's the big secret? Part II

As covered in the previous post, there's definitely something afoot in Iraq that's reducing the number of attacks on US forces. (Less so on Iraqis.) So what could it be?

Red herrings
If Woodward's comments are any clue, it's a technological innovation. Woodward compared it to the invention of the tank and other military technologies, which means it's probably not merely a change in technique. While US military and civilian personnel have been operating in a more joint fashion, following the example of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan. However, this joint approach is nothing new: in US military experience, it's at least as old as the CORDS program in Vietnam. And again, if Woodward's hints are any guide, we're on the trail of something that has some kind of technological angle.

We might increase our chances of finding the mystery innovation if we re-think what makes it secret. Rather than limiting the search to things we don't know exist, we might also include things we know exist, but don't know exactly how effective they are.  The secret, therefore, may be the effectiveness of some new technology, or how it's used.

To extend the tank example, the big innovation of WWII wasn't the tank, since armored fighting vehicles first appeared on the battlefields of WWI. Instead, what changed by WWII is how national militaries used the tank. Rather than treating them as an infantry support weapon, tanks became their own type of unit. Rather than infantry being the "arm of decision," tanks became the most important instrument of maneuver warfare. Rather than tying down tanks to infantry units, armies created special divisional and regimental organizations centered around the tank.

The secret new counterinsurgency weapon, therefore, might be something right in the open, but perhaps not receiving much attention in the US press. That makes me wonder if the Big Secret is the biometric database.

The information weapon
The US and Iraqi militaries have been building on top of the national registries of Iraqis started under the Ba'athis regime, updating it and adding further information such as biometric data (fingerprints, retinal scans, etc.). Iraqi and American forces use it to identify criminals and insurgents at checkpoints, during sweeps, and other occasions.

It's clear how this biometric database might be very effective at identifying the people who have been killing Americans. With more resources and technical skill than their Iraqi counterparts, US military personnel might have enjoyed more success at finding the people attacking them than those attacking Iraqi security forces.

Woodward indicated that the secret program, whatever it is, has been critical in helping US forces "to locate, target and kill leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq, insurgent leaders, renegade militia leaders." That implies the innovation is some sort of information gathering technology--or, perhaps, an information analysis tool, or something that makes information more readily available, like the biometric database.

Improving the biometric database might also fit the "Manhattan Project" comparison Woodward makes. Over time, Iraq and American officials have needed to add data, and also to improve the data mining tecniques used to identify potential targets. While similar efforts, such as the ridiculous Total Information Awareness project, might have failed, Americans in Iraq might have had the resources, incentives, and sense of realism needed to make this data warehouse project succeed.

Uncomfortable questions
If my guess is correct, it's also clear why the US government would want to keep the success of this program under wraps. Iraqis with access to the database might abuse it. Even if religious or clan affiliation were not recorded, it might be possible for Iraqi officials to infer it from the data that is available.

And the potential problems don't stop there. US officials outside of Iraq can use the same information to track Iraqis abroad, including in the United States. And why stop at Iraqis? Why not use the same resource to track suspected Iranian agents who move in and out of Iraq, and plenty of other places, too.

The biggest problem with the biometric database, of course, is the risk that it may not only legitimize monitoring inside the United States, but also expand it. If it works in Iraq, why not use the same sort of biometric database to track suspected domestic or internaional terrorists in the United States?

Therefore, if the biometric database is Woodward's secret program, US military officials have plenty of reasons to avoid talking about it.

So what's the big secret? Part I

As Bob Woodward makes the rounds promoting his new book, The War Within, his interviewers keep asking the same question to which he keeps giving the same answer: What's the new program, technique, or technology that's supposedly responsible for the drop in Iraqi insurgent attacks? In the absence of knowledge, we're left to speculate--and speculate I will!

Violence decreases--but where?
First, we have to deal with the question of the numbers themselves. How substantial was the drop, and when did it happen? Global Security maintains three charts that help answer this question: (1) the overall level of violence; (2) the distribution of attacks, by province; and (3) the distribution of attacks, by target. Since a detailed look into the data's reliability is another big discussion altogether, we'll accept the numbers as presented as accurate, or at least in the right zip code of accuracy.

The first statistic is important--but so are the other two. Since the middle of 2007, the frequency of attacks has dropped dramatically. Geographically, the major drops occurred in Baghdad and Anbar province. Target-wise, the big decrease is in the number of attacks on coalition forces. The number of attacks on Iraqis, both in uniform (security forces) and out (civilians) dropped far more gradually, and far less proportionately.

Coalition forces become harder targets
Are there any conclusions we can draw? Since the numbers reflect insurgent attacks only, omitting violence from other sources, we're seeing only part of the story about fighting among Iraqi groups. Other indicators of internecine violence, such as the recent UCLA study of Badhdad by night, are necessary to depict what people mean by the phrase "civil war."

On the other hand, we can say that either (1) Coalition forces have figured out some way to reduce the number of times insurgents try to shoot them and blow them up, or (2) something else is happening that has the side effect of reducing the attacks on US and British forces. Therefore, it's entirely credible that US officials have crafted some secret something that's responsible for the drop in attacks on Americans.

The imperfect shield
The numbers do cast some doubt on the efficacy of the surge. The focused escalation of effort in Baghdad and Anbar is responsible for some drop in violence. However, this escalation has not created as strong a protective shield around Iraqi civilians as many people assume. Insurgents can still harm, and therefore intimidate, Iraqis within the enclaves that US and Iraqi forces have struggled to create.

Case in point is this weekend's suicide bombing of Shiite mosques in Baghdad. While no protective shield will be perfect, the aggregate statistics echo the anecdotal evidence, such as this weekend's attacks.  Particular insurgent groups, such as Al Qaeda In Iraq, may be weakened, but some Iraqi insurgents retain the power to terrorize.

[Given the scope of this topic, I'm continuing the discussion in a later post.]

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