Arms and influence

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 insurgent groups, or the Taliban, may be exactly true. What matters is winning the political argument. Being in the right is not enough, and being self-righteous is a surest way to lose.

Dershowitz, shut up already

IN THE NEWS
The United States is attacked in a way that's surprising to most Americans. Suddenly, a threat that once seemed peripheral suddenly becomes the first priority. If you're the American media, do you (1) recruit people who know something about this kind of warfare to be regular columnists, or (2) hand the difficult job of making sense of this new reality to your general purpose, "I know a little about everything" professional blowhards already on contract? Unfortunately, the choice has been, nearly always, option #2.

Case in point: Alan Dershowitz's recent column in The Los Angeles Times. Apparently, no one has ever noticed the inherent moral difficulties of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism pre-Dershowitz, in the world according to Dershowitz. Since he's managed to ignore everyone who has written about this subject since the Napoleonic Wars, I can only conclude that he is either too intellectually lazy to read up on a subject on which he wants to be an "expert," or he is so ignorant of the world beyond the legal profession that he should never be allowed to write on any other topic. Either way, his article is an insult, not only to the people who study and practice counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, but more importantly, to the people trapped in guerrilla and terrorist conflicts.

First, let's establish exactly how ignorant Dershowitz really is:

• He can't distinguish between guerrillas and terrorists. "But just who is a 'civilian' in the age of terrorism," Dershowitz wonders, "when militants don't wear uniforms, don't belong to regular armies and easily blend into civilian populations?" Well, gosh, Mr. Dershowitz, I guess we have to first break it to you that not all "militants" are terrorists. You were alive during the Vietnam War, weren't you? Was there something you missed?
• He can't distinguish among the reasons why people collaborate with guerrillas or terrorists. Dershowitz says, "There is a vast difference—both moral and legal—between a 2-year-old who is killed by an enemy rocket and a 30-year-old civilian who has allowed his house to be used to store Katyusha rockets." Yes, but why is that civilian "allowing" his house to be a munitions dump? Is it because he actively supports the insurgents? He thinks they're bad, but the government is worse? Because he fears what might happen to his family if he doesn't cooperate? Because the insurgents happen to be the current force majeure in his town, but he'd be just as glad to cooperate with the government when they occupy it?
• He can't distinguish among guerrilla fighters, their political "infrastructure," and willing or unwilling supporters. Here's a revealing sentence from the op-ed piece: "These differences and others are conflated within the increasingly meaningless word 'civilian'—a word that carried great significance when uniformed armies fought other uniformed armies on battlefields far from civilian population centers." Again, Mr. Dershowitz, we're sorry to have to point out when your intellectual fly is open, but there's a world of difference between an un-uniformed guerrilla fighter and someone who, fearing for his life, doesn't tell a government patrol about the guerrilla unit operating in the area.

Ultimately, he seems to have no idea what it takes to win a counterinsurgency or counterterrorist campaign. Here's another quote from his article:

The domestic law of crime, in virtually every nation, reflects this continuum of culpability. For example, in the infamous Fall River rape case (fictionalized in the film "The Accused"), there were several categories of morally and legally complicit individuals: those who actually raped the woman; those who held her down; those who blocked her escape route; those who cheered and encouraged the rapists; and those who could have called the police but did not.

Of course, the point of criminal law in the United States--where there is no internal war being fought today--is to assign culpability, under the assumption of a placid society where people are generally safe, and therefore responsible for their actions. Even so, the law takes into account when people are coerced into participating or ignoring crimes. If someone in the Mafia threatens your family, chances are the judge and prosecutor in an organized crime case will give you some latitude, if your role as a witness in that case is more than a little compromised. Multiply that kind of fear by several orders of magnitude, and you have some idea what life is like in the thick of an internal war.

In most revolutionary conflicts, as Dershowitz should know, the revolutionaries and their willing supporters normally amount to a small fraction of the population. A broader segment of the populace might acquiesce to the revolutionaries, in large part because of the obnoxiousness or ineffectiveness of the government. In other words, the average civilian caught in the midst of internal wars resembles the woman being raped a lot more than one of the rapists themselves.

The more obvious point of comparison isn't a recent rape case, but the US government's handling of the South after the Civil War. Rather than prosecute everyone who supported the CSA as a traitor, the federal government more or less forgave everyone, including the Confederate generals who led an organized effort to kill as many Union soldiers as possible. Reconstruction was less about "war guilt," and more about changing the legal and economic structures of the South. Though "waving the bloody shirt" inflamed passions, post-Civil War leaders worked to protect the rights of the newly-freed blacks (until, of course, the end of Reconstruction in 1876) and prevent another secessionist war.

Since we're already talking about the moral and legal issues surrounding an American insurgency, let's jump ahead in time from the Civil War to the Oklahoma City bombing. Let's say, for sake of argument, that a Christian Reconstructionist, white supremacist group had a compound in northern Idaho. Everyone knows the political beliefs of the people living behind the barbed wire fence, but no one has a clear picture of what they're actually willing to do. Is there talk of armed uprising just talk, or are they serious? The militants have threatened local residents with dire consequences, if they tell the local police or the FBI anything concerning their activities. If the local hardware store owner fails to tell law enforcement officials about an unusually large purchase of fertilizer and kerosene oil, is he on the same moral and legal plane as someone holding down a woman while another man rapes her? Should the law treat him as roughly as the domestic terrorists who use the fertilizer and oil to build a bomb?

While you might have to struggle a bit to apply normal jurisprudence to the continuum of internal wars, from tiny white supremacist groups to large-scale guerrilla armies, the moral arguments have already been covered in depth. Opinions range across a broad continuum. On one extreme, Franz Fanon was willing to excuse revolutionary groups like Algeria's FLN for excesses of violence and terror. On the other extreme is Arnaud-Amaury, the Abbot of Citeaux and papal legate to the crusade against the "Albigensians" (a.k.a. Cathars), who made famous the quote, "Kill them all; God will know His own." There are also plenty of living experts on terrorism and guerrilla warfare, from the essayist Paul Berman to counterterrorist practitioners like Brian Jenkins, whom Dershowitz might have read, or even just called for a quick chat.

Instead, Dershowitz plunges into a realm he does not know, proclaims himself enough of an expert to write books and articles on the subject, and reaches a conclusion that resembles Arnaud-Amaury's. If there's any culpability to be assigned for this tiny moral atrocity, the momentary trivialization of pain and suffering in a national newspaper, The Los Angeles Times certainly shares that blame.

[Thanks to Lawyers, Guns, and Money for pointing me in the direction of Dershowitz's article.]

Snipers and guerrillas

IN THE NEWS
Military History Quarterly's short history of snipers includes a telling detail: like other aspects of warfare that the US military does not like, the military bureaucracy, at times, has ignored sniper instruction for as long as it could. The cost of this willful ignorance increases as you rise through the levels of strategy.

For example, during the Vietnam War, sniper and counter-sniper tactics were a common feature of the battlefield from the very beginning of the US intervention. NVA and NLF snipers harassed troops on patrol, airmobile forces at their landing zones, and any troops they could reach within firebases and other static positions. An important goal of regular patrolling was to keep snipers away from the perimeter of these bases. While patrolling, the pop of a sniper bullet occurred as often as every few minutes, unnerving troops (already nervous about mines and booby traps) even if no one got hit.

Surprisingly, it took three years after US conventional troops first locked horns with the enemy (and several years after the advisory effort began) to formally re-institute sniper training. In 1968, Lt. Gen. Julian Ewell, commander of the 9th Infantry Division, ordered that snipers become trained and equipped as official components of each battalion.

The MHQ article overlooks one part of the US military that already had taken sniping to heart: the special operations forces (SOFs), including the Army's Special Forces (a.k.a. the Green Berets) and the Navy's SEAL teams. These were the same units, the Special Forces in particular, that had already taken another important aspect of the Vietnam War to heart, counterinsurgency, and for their efforts were ignored by the conventional military. The "snake-eaters" did not fit into the military's concept of itself, an institution trained and equipped to fight Soviet armored divisions in Central Europe, not elusive Viet Cong guerrillas units in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

After the Vietnam War, the US military did incorporate snipers formally into its training, doctrine, and table of organization. Changes at the technical and tactical level are easier to make, particularly if there is a way of shoehorning them into the military's existing concept of itself. For example, the increasing frequency of urban warfare made snipers a logical part of US military thinking, particularly with the famous sniper duels in the ruins of Stalingrad as a much-discussed part of recent military history.

Counterinsurgency, however, requires broader changes, at higher levels of both strategy and organization than snipers demand. For that reason, it should be no surprise that the American troops who occupied Iraq had snipers aplenty, but no real preparation for counterinsurgency.

The post-Vietnam military formula, for everyone except perhaps the SOFs (again) and elements of the Marines, excluded counterinsurgency. The famous Weinberger-Powell doctrine, which demanded that the US military fight only those wars that were quick, popular, and had a high probability of quick victory, by definition excluded counterinsurgency. Therefore, while Colin Powell deserves the credit, along with many of his post-Vietnam cohort of American officers, for rebuilding the US military, he also deserves the blame for not getting the bureaucracy focused on the wars it would fight (and was fighting), instead of the wars it prefers to fight. It's important to remember Colin Powell for his role as JCS chairman for both the campaigns in Iraq, which he supported, and the Balkans, which he resisted, even though both were American victories.

Beyond concerns about Iraq itself, the larger question now is, will the Iraq debacle finally, finally compel the US military to take counterinsurgency seriously? Most great military innovations arise from painful failures. The blitzkrieg was the response to the deadlock on the western front of WWI. Maoist guerrilla strategy was the response to the failure to defeat the Kuomintang through conventional means. The US military already chose not to respond to the painful lessons of the Vietnam War, even though there were experiments in counterinsurgency that actually worked.

Will an even bigger catastrophe in Iraq fail to move military leaders yet again? So far, the signs are fairly mixed. If Iraq can't get the American military to take counterinsurgency seriously, probably nothing will.

Taliban wants anti-armor weapons

IN THE NEWS
According to this CTV report, the Taliban is looking for anti-armor weapons. But why?

Certainly, the Taliban guerrillas in question may be shopping around for anti-tank mines and rockets for all the wrong reasons. Insurgents aren't supermen, immune from error. For example, the ELAS guerrillas in Greece's civil war tried to use conventional methods at the operational level of strategy, and the Greek government thanked them for this chivalric gesture by cutting them to pieces. The current Taliban leadership, or some faction within the Taliban, may just be making the same mistake, looking for ways to fight battles that don't need to be fought.

Not too long ago, the Taliban defeated the mujahideen government (later, the Northern Alliance, and now the coalition behind the current government in Kabul) without a healthy arsenal of anti-armor weapons. The mujahideen had a healthy arsenal of tanks and armored personnel carriers, many appropriated from the former Najibullah government. While the Taliban wasn't exactly powerless against these weapons, Kabul didn't fall because of some Kursk-like clash of armor, or waves of anti-tank rockets fired against government vehicles.

You could make the argument that the mujahideen used their tanks and APCs poorly, while the NATO allies are not making the same mistakes. Mujahideen armored units often did act more like mobile artillery, driving from one fixed position to another, blasting any enemies they found at each point. NATO APCs are highly mobile and well-armored, and the tactical doctrine that guides their use is much better than what the Taliban faced in the past.

However, what happens at the technical and tactical levels of the current war in Afghanistan won't decide the conflict. The Taliban's essential strategy remains the same: maintain a military and political presence until the NATO allies withdraw and the Kabul government collapses (in whatever order those two events occur). Meanwhile, the Taliban has to avoid being shut out of whatever enclaves the Kabul government and its foreign patrons can establish, in an ever-widening swath of the Afghan countryside.

Anti-tank weapons may help the Taliban keep any potential enclave from being totally secure. They may also be an important political tool: destroying NATO vehicles--and killing a lot of enemy soldiers in the process--is good PR for the Taliban. If, as the CTV article suggests, the Taliban is planning on raiding NATO and Afghan National Army (ANA) bases, the goal is the same: demonstrate that nowhere, no one, is safe.