Some articles about themes discussed on the FM website.
(1) About Demographics
Excerpt from “Falling fertility“, The Economist, 29 October 2009 — “Astonishing falls in the fertility rate are bringing with them big benefits”
If we look closely at the debate about the Af-Pak War, we see some reasons why America has fought so many wars since Korea – and why these wars so closely resemble each other. Our military journals record 50 years of constant innovation, yet some things are too awful to be seen. For example, see this interesting article:
““Sri Lanka’s disconcerting COIN strategy for defeating the LTTE“, Niel Smith, posted at the Small Wars Council (SW), 27 August 2009 — Excerpt:
In the comments section of this SWJ post, Phil Ridderh of highlights a very interesting and disconcerting article in the Indian Defence Review containing lessons learned from Sri Lanka’s defeat of the LTTE this year. The principles articulated in this article stand in almost complete opposition to the conceptualization of counterinsurgency articulated in FM 3-24.”
“In the President’s Office in Colombo officials talk about the ‘Rajapaksa Model’ (of fighting terror). “Broadly, win back the LTTE held areas, eliminate the top LTTE leadership and give the Tamils a political solution.” Sunimal Fernando, one of Rajapaksa’s advisors, says that the President demonstrated a basic resolve: “given the political will, the military can crush terrorism.” This is not as simple as it sounds. Like most poll promises he did not have plans to fulfill his promise to militarily defeat the LTTE. Eelam I to III were miserable failures. So the ‘Rajapaksa Model’ evolved, it was not pre-planned.”
The article lists the principles as:
- Unwavering political will
- Disregard for international opinion distracting from the goal
- No negotiations with the forces of terror
- Unidirectional floor of conflict information
- Absence of political intervention to pull away from complete defeat of the LTTE
- Complete operational freedom for the security forces -Let the best men do the task
- Accent on young commanders
- Keep your neighbors in the loop
Most western readers will find the lack of concern for civilian casualties in this strategy disconcerting. The article highlights the broad condemnation Sri Lanka received for its approach.
The discussion begins strongly with comment #1, by Carl — going straight to the heart of the matter:
It is interesting that all the successful “ruthless” campaigns cited were conducted by countries suppressing internal insurgencies with their own armed forces. These insurgencies didn’t have any real sanctuaries either. The unsuccessful “ruthless” campaign was a foreign force helping a weak government opposed by insurgents who had a sanctuary.
We are presently involved in small wars as foreign forces helping weak governments. Almost all of the small wars we have been in for the past 100 years have fit this pattern. In Afghanistan the insurgents still have their sanctuary.
So apart from the extremely, fundamentally important humanitarian considerations, the “ruthless” method just doesn’t appear to work in the types of conflicts we are involved in. It seems to me also that we, in essence, ran some small scale experiments confirming this with the approaches of the 101st Air Assault and 4th Infantry Divisions during their initial deployments to Iraq.
This is the vital point, the distinction between local forces fighting insurgencies and foreign forces fighting insurgents.
On COIN and an Anti-COIN Counterrevolution? — An email discussion (or interview) with Dr. Bernard Finel of The American Security Project ( that link is the blog, here is the main site for the org).
COIN, Afghanistan, strategy, tactics, our pool of geopol experts — Finel touches on all these things and more. Also with excellent links to more information.
Update — a brief analysis of Zenpundit’s view of why we fight
Zenpundit says:
It may be time to leave Iraq; Afghanistan, by contrast, presents unsolved problems with al Qaida’s continuing as a functional organization in Paktia and in Waziristan-Baluchistan across the border in Pakistan. While circumstances do not require our turning Afghanistan into the Switzerland of the Hindu Kush, al Qaida is not business that we should leave unfinished.
Emailed comment:
Much of 9/11 was planned or trained for in Hamburg, Las Vegas and Florida. Are we going to leave them unfinished, too?
My reply:
An analysis by James Morton that is well worth reading, lifted from the comments replying to The deteriorating situation in Helmand, by Jonathan Mueller (29 July 2009).
It’s interesting to note that Jonathan Mueller feels that the UK army is not on the same page as the US and have abandoned their clear-build-hold strategy. I came across this article by the M.O.D. — “Armored thrust clears final Taliban from ‘Panther’s Claw’“, 27 July 2009. Strangely I kept hearing the voice of Bob Danvers Walker (the voice of British Pathe News back in the day) while reading this article. Very triumphalist piece where it seems we have prevailed over the enemy and cleared the Taliban out of the region. The article reads as if the operation was conducted against a conventional opponent and not a guerrilla army, that will disperse against overwhelming odds to hit back at another location and at a time of their choosing.
But we have to aks ourselves what extacly is the clear-build-hold strategy? Those 3 little words that the UK government and UK armed forces state so clearly as talking points in every interview. How exactly was it to be implemented?
1. Clear
That seems to be about getting them out of the area and cutting them off from the locals. According to my government and the UK armed forces this has been done, so we can all sleep more soundly tonight — but (and this is a big but) this part of the plan always seems to assert that the Taliban are somehow “alien” to the rest of the population, not least in the Pashtun south. The reality, whether we like it or not, is that the social and cultural values represented by the Taliban have large areas of cross-over with substantial sections of the rest of Afghanistan. That logically means that what is being earmarked for destruction represents often commonly shared values.
Here is a guest post about the situation in Afghanistan by Jonathan Mueller, a sharp and insightful operational analysis. Note the brief description of his background appearing after the essay. My thanks to him for sharing this with us.
One caveat: I disagree with the strategic context of his analysis. That is, counter-insurgency successes are almost always by local forces. CI by predominately foreign forces almost always lose. This is the key distinction, almost always ignored by pro-war western analysts.
“The deteriorating situation in Helmand”, by Jonathan Mueller
It is fairly easy to see why the British Army is taking so many casualties in Helmand: they have abandoned their clear-hold-build strategy and returned to a search-and-destroy campaign against the Taliban. In clear-hold-build one principle is to never occupy territory you cannot hold, but the British have returned to patrolling and raiding across territory they do not have the troops to hold.
Why they have done this is less clear. British commanders have every reason to know that while clear-hold-build has some hope of success, search and destroy draws on a long record of failure for this kind of operation.
The British Army has led the world in developing classical counter-insurgency doctrine and its officers understand it as well as anybody.
About Counterinsurgency
Classical counter-insurgency doctrine developed in the 1950s. It is based on earlier methods of imperial policing but adapted to combat the more robust threat from Marxist-nationalist national liberation movements emerging at the time. The Americans in the Philippines and the British in Malaya found similar solutions, but while the Americans have forgotten and re-learned those lessons several times over the British have institutionalised and continuously developed them.
Part 3 in this series … Unlike Iraq, we have had wise and eloquent warnings about our folly in Afghanistan. Such as this article, which I strongly recommend reading in full.
Excerpt
“Counterinsurgency” as a developed modern doctrine of warfare was created in the aftermath of World War II as a system of defense against “Wars of National Liberation” that erupted across the world as various peoples rose against European colonialism.
… Basically what is attempted in this doctrine is the construction of a society that is more attractive and viable than that promised by the insurgents.
… “Counterinsurgency” made some sense for the European colonial empires. They “owned” the places where they tried this method. They were fighting to retain what they saw as their property. Whatever “investments” they made in the colony seemed worthwhile because they would be retained in the empire.
Continued from yesterday’s post… Unlike Iraq, we have had wise and eloquent warnings about our folly in Afghanistan. Such as this article, which I strongly recommend reading in full.
Excerpt
Every conflict, be it conventional or unconventional, embodies an amalgam of physical, mental, and moral effects.
… Without explicitly saying so, the Times report makes it clear that the Taliban’s strategic target is the mind of their adversary. Its operational schwerpunkt (i.e., main military effort to which all other efforts are subordinated) is also directly aimed at the mind of their adversaries, both in the field or in London and Washington. It is also pretty clear, that the Taliban’s operational schwerpunckt is to use an omnipresent physical menace (manifesting itself through a welter of large and small attacks, and when faced with opposition, running away to fight another day, as well as mine warfare, terror, etc.) is to undermine mental and moral stability of their adversaries. This focus on the mind is a way of war that is entirely consistent with the thinking expressed in the first book ever written on the art war by the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, as well as their modern incarnation in the guerrilla theories of Mao Zedong.
Like the Taliban, the strategic aim of the British operation is also directed toward the mental and moral levels of conflict — namely winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. But in sharp contrast to that of the Taliban, the operational-level schwerpunkt of the NATO forces is entirely physical. It is aimed directly at controlling checkpoints and lines of communication.
Clausewitz spoke of a trinity of the people, the government, and the military. The rise to dominance of fourth generation warfare has made this conceptually useless, providing only a perspective from which to see how the world has changed. During the past 60 years a new trinity of modern war has emerged for armies fighting in foreign lands. Chet Richards discovered it, looking at the similarities between the Vietnam and Iraq Wars — but it applies to most foreign wars.
Modern armed forces, whether of developed or undeveloped nations, tend to rely on a trinity of operational methods. None of these are new of course (almost nothing is new in war, it’s all a matter of combinations and emphasis).
Also interesting is that armies tend to re-discover these 3 methods, dressing them up in the fancy terminology befitting radical innovations. Let’s take a quick look at each.
(1) Popular Front Militia
Popular front militia were a core component of our fighting in Southeast Asia, but when we recruit local militia in Iraq it’s COIN — new, new, new. And of course that’s a staple of our fighting in Afghanistan, as seen in these posts by Joshua Foust at Registan (an essential site for following the increasingly important conflicts in Central Asia):
One symptom of a nation’s broken observation-orientation-decision-action loop (OODA loop) is a disconnect of our national dialog from reality. IMO this is the strongest evidence of America’s dysfunction. A broken OODA loop means that we can neither recognize nor prioritize problems. If uncorrected, we cannot effectively fix those problems that we do see. We become a blind giant.
Wars magnify social prolbems, making them easier to see. So it is with our broken OODA loop. Today’s post discusses one example of this, posing it in question form.
Discussion of counter-insurgency theory has dominated our view of the Iraq War. The role of well-known military natmes – such as General Petreaus, David Kilcullen, John Nagl — are associated with COIN. FM 3-24 (see the PDF) was the most-discussed doctrinal change. Military discussion sites — such as the small wars council — featured vast numbers of papers and comment threads on its intricacies and application.
The key question was seldom asked, and IMO never answered. Let’s take a crack at it today.
Chet Richards (Colonel, USAF, retired), stated what should be considered the null hypothesis:
