Table of Contents
- Two (now three) more articles in the debate about the surge, recent events in Iraq, and the US Army’s new focus on COIN.
- We need a longer unit than Friedman Units to measure the Iraq War — 6 months is not long enough.
- “Petraeus and Crocker, less convincing this time“, W Patrick Lang (Colonel, US Army, retired), Sic Semper Tyrannis (9 April 2008) — A brilliant summary of the selling of a war.
- A provocative new analysis — if not quite a forecast — by Strator.
- Follow-up to the Iraq Study Group: Iraq After the Surge: Options and Questions, US Institute of Peace (April 2008) .
- The staff of the Long War Journal have put together an Order of Battle for the Iraq and Afghanistan security forces.
- This week’s statement of what should by now be blindingly obvious.
(more…)
Summary: the papers from a workshop of the NIC’s 2020 Project provide valuable insights. This post discusses a paper by Martin van Creveld, and then ends with a speculative question.
As part of their ”2020 Project”, the National Intelligence Council held a workshop on the “Changing Nature of Warfare” on 25 May 2004. Key topics and questions focused on surveying the prospects for conflict around the world between today and 2020.
- What are the contemporary characteristics of war that are likely to persist into the future?
- How can we tell, are there signposts?
- What are the characteristics of contemporary conflict that are likely to be consigned to the dustbin of history by 2020?
- What are the emerging characteristics of war?
Many of the papers are relevant today and worth reading. One in particular seems prophetic four years later: Martin van Creveld’s “Modern Conventional Warfare: An Overview“. As usual for his work, it was packed with insights.
(more…)
Summary: A follow-up to this post about the use of social science language and concepts in FM 3-24. They provide useful terminology, but at the cost of either weakening the beliefs of our troops or giving them a “grey net of abstraction to cover the world in order to simplify and explain it in a way that is pleasing to us.” The former would be disastrous in 4GW, the latter probably useless exercise. Or worse than useless, creating the illusion of understanding foreign cultures which eliminates the bafflement that leads to study, thought, and partial understanding. While it is easy to dismiss these fears, the social sciences themselves note the powerful effect of language on thought and behavior.
One of the interesting aspects of the new COIN manual, FM 3-24, is its use of technical sociological terminology ripped from the intellectual framework of its creators (e.g. Max Weber) — a framework both dark and alien to American culture. In it “We hold these truths to be self-evident” reflects the naive thinking of a lost age, and can be believed only by “a few big babies in university chairs or in editorial offices” (from Weber’s “Science as a Vocation“). In it our core beliefs — liberty, freedom of religion, equality of races and genders, democracy and free enterprise — are just choices, like those of any other culture. As such we have no basis on which to advocate any of practices to other cultures (other than Mao’s adage that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun”).
To illustrate this, here are some excepts from Allan Bloom’s great work Closing of the American Mind in which he describes the origins of these concepts.
On the dark roots of this framework
It is amazing to me that the irrational source of all conscious life in Freud, and the relativity of all values in Weber, did not pose a problem for them and their optimism about science. … {Weber’s} science was formulated as a doubtful dare against the chaos of things, and values certainly lay beyond its limits. That is what the very precarious, not to say imaginary, distinction between facts and values meant.
(more…)
(later additions to the text are in red) FM 3-24 provides a basis for DoD’s people to describe a society. This is sketched out under “Describe the Effects of the Operational Environment” (3-16 through 3-65+) using standard social science definitions. This is valuable, as we cannot describe that for which we lack the words, and clear language promotes clear thinking. Ths post discusses the problematic nature of the Army using language and concepts from the social sciences, following yesterday’s post discussing the limited operational utility of social science theories.
General Semantics teaches us that language is a process of abstraction, and can sometimes give just the illusion of knowledge. The map is not the territory. The name is not the thing itself. The deeper we go in this section of FM 3-24, the deeper gets the waters. To take a small example: as Americans we can talk about clans, races, and other groups … but understanding their hold on people’s minds and feelings is far more difficult. As we climb the ladder to more abstract concepts, their meaning becomes more difficult to grasp.
3-44. A value is an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end state of existence is preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end state of existence.
Values are the bedrock on which many people build their lives. Americans are taught in most colleges that facts and values are different things, a concept with roots in western philosophy going back to Hume. Believing that values are not facts puts one in a different cultural universe from that of many other peoples, who believe that their values are not personally chosen but instead rooted in reality … derived from God. The Army can teach the words, but the music is more difficult to learn.
An implied message of western social sciences can be that “we” are superior to “them”. After all, Max Weber taught “us” that values are just beliefs, while “they” do not know this — foolishly regarding their values as permanent and enduring facts about the universe. Armed with these insights, it must be difficult not to patronize the locals (especially in the ancient societies of the Middle East, which had a high civilization when the people of Britain painted themselves blue and worshiped trees). Even worse, these insights might encourage officers to believe they actually understand these foreign societies (much of the language in FM 3-24 encourages this). Worst of all would be belief that the Anthropology 101 concepts allow us to successfully manipulate foreign societies (see yesterday’s post for more about this last point. Much of the professional training in these fields is to overcome these tendencies.
As an example, consider one simple and clear typology from FM 3-24 (from the work of Max Weber):
(more…)
Summary: building COIN strategies upon our ability to successfully change foreign societies (from infornmation operations up to governmental reform) is like basing our monetary policy on our ability to change straw into gold.
The United States has suffered several devastating 4GW attacks since WWII, perhaps the two worst being…
-
Ignoring the recommendation of the Moynihan Report (”
The Negro Family: The Case For National Action“, US Department of Labor, March 1965). Instead of providing government support to black Americans in a way that supported their families, Federal support was exquisitely designed to undermine their family and community structures. The result is a large almost dysfunctional underclass, with areas like Harlem in worse shape than they were in 1964. (see Obama’s comment, below)
-
The credibility of the US government in the eyes of its people has been shattered, so that its statements are widely considered lies. “Never believe anything the government says until the second denial.” Economic statistics are considered manipulated by many on Wall Street. Many African-Americans believe that the US government distributed crack and started the AIDS epidemic.
That is, these would have been devastating 4GW attacks on America, of the fashionable “cultural warfare” and info-ops variants — except that we were the agents. These are major failures in our government’s social engineering. We have to do better; our apparent inability to do so is a major factor in the decline of the state. But that is not the point of this post.
If basic social engineering is often beyond our capabilities at home — where our knowledge and tools are considerable — what about our ability to do this in foreign lands, the keystone to modern COIN theory? For example, before doing info-ops or seeking to alter a society, what must one know about that society?
Excerpt from FM 3-24 (the new COIN manual):
(more…)
“Center of Gravity versus Lines of Effort in COIN“, Herschel Smith, at the Captain’s Journal (3 March 2008) — An article well worth reading. Thoroughly researched, Smith provides several powerful insights and provides an excellent operational and tactical perspective.
From a larger perspective this article shows how the 21st century US military is locked into a historically common trap. No matter how good, it remains harnessed to US elites’ geopolitical thinking — poorly reasoned, emotional (ruled by hubris and fear). Our military apparatus consistently provides professional, smooth execution of bad strategy. We do the wrong thing, but brilliantly. In this we have become like the WWI and WWII German military (aka loosely as the Wehrmacht), attempting to overcome foolish strategy with operational excellence. In the seventh article of William Lind’s ”On War” series (12 March 2003), he presented on of his most incisive observations:
Between 1809 and 1945, the Prussian and, later, German armies developed what is often called maneuver warfare of Third Generation warfare. For the past quarter century, the U.S. military has been trying to adopt this German way of war, and failing.
(more…)
One of the baleful influences on the 4GW analysis is the science of Psychohistory developed by Hari Seldon, capable of accurately predicting history (as described in the Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov). Social science “laws” in the real world are just heuristics, generalities not to be confused with the Laws of Thermodynamics. This is especially true in military theory. For example, Clausewitz’s On War opens with some general rules (e.g., the relationship between offense and defense), which he then elaborates with great detail but no certainty (having experience at war, he knew the limits of theories about people).
This is important, as progress in understanding 4GW requires distilling out more of these general relationships from the mass of 20th century history. For example, in January 2007 I postulated that insurgencies come in two flavors, depending on the role of foreigners. Chet Richards refined this differentialtion of insurgency types into …
-
Classical insurgency: a revolution, in other words, in which a sizable fraction of the population opposes what they consider to be an illegitimate or oppressive government, as the American colonies did in 1776-1781. The goal of the insurgent groups may be either to take control of the central government or to achieve independence for a portion of the population.
-
War of national liberation: in which a sizable fraction of the people in a country throws out an occupying foreign power, as Vietnam did to us in 1965-1975.
From the Introduction to If We Can Keep It (IWCKI)
(more…)
Here and here I discussed our tactical retreat in Anbar Province of Iraq. Dan Tdaxp raises an interesting and valuable question (here) about this: what does “retreat” mean in 4GW?
The previous generations of war occured in physical space. We plot their course on maps, using lines and arrows. A 3GW “retreat” means movement away from geographic objectives.
Can we show the course of the Iraq War on a map? Not easily, as 4GW occurs in social space (aka human terrain). For example, we speak of the “moral high ground”. Also note the growing role of anthropologists (e.g. Kilcullen) and the social sciences (e.g., in FM 3-24) in counter-insurgency (COIN) theory and practice. Update: Ralph Peter’s article “The Human Terrain of Urban Operations” (Parameters, Spring 2000), esp. his challenge at the end, is a poorly-recognised milestone of 4GW analysis –reintroducing the social sciences to the art of 4GW.
In 4GW “retreat” means movement away from objectives expressed in people terms: building institutions, changing loyalties, motivating friends and de-motivating opponents. Traditionally these are strategic considerations — diplomatic maneuvers, the decisive factors in many wars. Our alliance with France made victory possible for the American Revolution. Gaining support in Britan led to the rapid collapse of Britain’s will to fight after Yorktown and their generous terms in the Treaty of Paris (1783). The Union inflamed Britain’s hatred of slavery to keep the UK out of the Civil War, a necessary ingredient for victory.
(more…)
The fateful events in Al Anbar province during 2006 and 2007 illustrate that seemingly simple events in 4GW can mystify even experts. The specifics are clear. By the summer of 2006 local elites in the largely Sunni Arab province in Iraq had established local control against the efforts of the Shiite-dominated central government and Coalition forces. At the same time they began fighting their closest ally, Al Qaeda in Iraq. Experts offer different explanations for this split; there may be no one master narrative. Perhaps the tribal leaders no longer needed these pushy Islamic extremists as shock troops.
At the same time Americans’ support for the war was rapidly fading. At the request of Congress, the Iraq Study Group (aka the Baker-Hamilton Commission) was formed in March 2006, reporting in December. Drastic steps were necessary if the American Expedition to Iraq was to continue.
In September of 2006 the Anbar Salvation Council was created, and the stars had aligned for a deal. The terms, however informal, were clear.
-
The US military ceased operations against them.
-
The US ceded full control of their territories to them.
-
The US paying, training, and arming their militia.
-
The US began directing funds through the tribal leaders for rebuilding their communities.
-
The Sunni Arabs in return agreed to continue fighting the Islamic extremists, with whatever timing and intensity they consider appropriate.
-
They gave no formal promises of allegiance to either the Iraq National government or to the US.
We surrendered this theater of the war; they won. But the word “surrender” has too much baggage for anything but shock value. Technically, in the context of the Iraq War, this was a tactical retreat. As Douglas Macgregor (Colonel, USA, retired) said in his statement to Congress on 8 February 2008 (this is a must-read for anyone following the war):
(more…)
Yet again the public has discovered that our Army has difficulty retaining good people. A big story, but only in the sense that Columbus discovering America was a big story. In both cases, the thing discovered was already there for a long time, had been repeatedly “discovered” – and the discovery was only one incident in an important and larger process.
(new) Army Effort to Retain Captains Falls Short of Goal, Wall Street Journal (26 January) (subscription-only site):
“The program persuaded 11,933 captains to commit to additional Army service, short of the 14,184 goal. The military will pay out more than $349 million in bonuses to the officers who took the incentives. All told, 67.6% of those eligible for the program — which offered officers cash bonuses of as much as $35,000, the ability to choose their next assignment or military-funded graduate school — agreed to serve another one to three years in the Army.”
LTC Nagl leaving is a loss to the army. The departure of so many of the Army’s top COIN experts is bad. But these represent only the surface of a serious problem. Zenpundit digs to find a more serious issue in his post Canaries in the mineshaft:
Nagl is merely the well-known face of an ominous trend. When an institution - be it military, educational, corporate, civic, religious - reaches a point where it is merely a farm team that regularly sends it’s best and it’s brightest elsewhere then it is an institution on it’s way out.
Even this does not go to the core: the Army’s senior leadership has known of this critical weakness for over a decade and still not seriously addressed it. Only a very sick institution does not respond to serious problems after their discovery. In The Army’s greatest crisis I give links to seven major reports over three years (2000 - 2001) about this. Nor were these the first, as the issue was well-known in the late 1990’s, and probably before that.
Unfortunately these recurring waves of articles, like today’s about LTC Nagl, seldom place the problem in context as a long-standing one resulting from deep structural causes. Hence no easy fixes.
Other posts in this series
For descriptions of causes and possible solutions I suggest reading Donald Vandergriff’s many articles and books:
Contents
- A brief note about Kilcullen and his work.
- Kilcullen’s major works
- Kilcullen’s other works (minor only in comparison with his major works)
- My reviews of Kilcullen’s work
- A selction of articles about Kilcullen in the mainstream media
- Articles about the Revolt of the Anthropologists against “militarization” of their science
- Other articles in this series
I. A brief note about Kilcullen and his work
Soldier. Adviser to both Coalition governments and their front-line company commanders. Advocate of the war on terrorism. Kilcullen’s work explains how to think about insurgencies (as biological systems, in “Countering Global Insurgencies”), how to fight insurgencies on every level from a single community to the entire world, and warns of imperial overstretch (ibid).
Analysts of modern warfare (herein called 4GW) can be divided into two groups. First, those who believe that western nations — led by the USA — have the right, resources, and ability to successfully wage offensive “war” (broadly defined) against a global Islamic threat. Second, there are those who disagree with one or more elements of that proposition. Kilcullen is one of best-known and most skillful experts in the first group.
The articles he published while a Coalition adviser have few precedents in wartime. Imagine an adviser to General MacArthur or General Eisenhower writing about our strategy, tactics, and progress during WWII, as Kilcullen has about and even from Iraq. Is the government using the Internet to accelerate our Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action loops, tapping into the expertise and creativity of our citizenry? Or info-warfare to sustain support for the war, propaganda on a new and more sophisticated level? It’s something for historians to debate, as we cannot know.
If the former, has this worked? Note the lack of analysis Kilcullen’s work has received. Much attention, even adulation. But, so far as I can find, few articles providing analysis or review. Given the quality of his work, its importance, and the controversial nature of its subject, this is not only extraordinary but also unfortunate.
(more…)
This series describes the various types of solutions to modern warfare, herein called fourth generation warfare (4GW). It will attempt to show their relationship to one another and their relative potential. 4GW appears to be the dominant form of warfare in the 21st century, so mastery of it might prove necessary for America’s prosperity or even survival. This is a topology, a wide perspective view of writings about 4GW. Future chapters will examine these divisions in more detail.
Analysts – the foundation of the pyramid
This first class of work provides analysis, drawing on a diverse range of resources including history, military theory, and the social sciences. This is foundational to the development of solutions, for nothing can be done except by luck without a deep understanding of
- our situation (strengths, weaknesses, goals, etc),
- the other players on the world stage (both state and non-state actors),
- and the almost infinite range of scenarios possible in the near and far future.
Since everyone working with 4GW does some combination of analysis and recommendations, I include in this group those whose work focuses on more on description than prescription. Applied to individuals, any simple categorization is somewhat arbitrary.
Readers of journals in this field — such as DNI, Parameters, or the Marine Corps Gazette — will see that this category of work is by far the largest both in volume and number of writers. It includes, just to name a few, Martin van Creveld, David Kilcullen, Chet Richards, and John Robb.
Visionaries — another important component of the foundation
(more…)
Worthwhile reading: “Will armloads of US cash buy tribal loyalty?”, Christian Science Monitor (Nov 8, 2007) .
We’re buying — more accurately, leasing — the loyalty of the three major groups in Iraq. This is a brilliant tactic, if used to accomplish specific and useful goals. Perhaps cash and arms were General Petraeus’ secret weapons. Supporting all sides in the civil war, a 4x increase in bombing, and massive ethnic cleansing have substantially reduced violence in Iraq. (None of these are in the FM 3-24 COIN playbook) This can be sold as “peace”. It provides time for us to declare victory and leave (how accurately can only be seen later).
Or we might hope that violence continues to diminish and a new political order arises (both quite likely, imho) — one that meets some of America’s strategic goals for the Iraq Expedition (far less likely, imho): long-term bases, giving our corporations access to Iraq oil, and Iraq as a local ally against Islamic jihadists. Our “hope for the best” strategy has not worked well so far in Iraq. We can only hope for better results from it in the future.
Additional note (12 Nov 2007): See this TomDispatch which makes the same point as above: Fighting Whom in Iraq?, Robert Dreyfuss (11 November 2007)
Part VII of a series about America’s new Long War
Occasionally an expert writes something that perfectly captures the spirit of an endeavor, on multiple levels. The Iraq War has as yet no master chronicler, as TE Lawrence captured the WWI Arab Revolt or David Halberstam the Vietnam War. Until then the best we have is this new presentation by David Kilcullen (Ph.D., LTC Australian Army Reserve):
Counterinsurgency in Iraq: Theory and Practice, 2007 ( 2.6 MB PPT on the Small Wars Journal site)
A seminar at the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Virginia.
September 26, 2007
He explains not only how we have fought the war, but also (implicitly, perhaps inadvertently) why we are losing. Reading it evokes memories of Vietnam, our first 4GW (also run by our best and brightest).
These are preliminary comments, made in advance of Dave Dilegge’s notes to be posted soon at the Small Wars Council, and later production of a DVD providing a full video. I urge you to look at the slides of Kilcullen’s presentation; I found them very enlightening.
(more…)
Part IV of a series about America’s new Long War
How will the Iraq War end? Is there a solution? These are the questions readers most frequently ask me. Here is my answer.
This is the 34th article I have published at DNI over the past four years, the 22nd about Iraq. I wish there were happier things to say about it.
What with the Crocker/Petraeus report and Maliki’s rapidly crumbling position, everyone involved in the Iraq issue is gaming the coming month, calculating the angles and trying to position themselves for whatever changes may be forthcoming.
Marc Lynch, professor of political science at George Washington University
We’re lost in the details about Iraq, even experts like Lynch. The statistics, the differing narratives, the personal attacks. Forecasts for next month, next week, the next news cycle. Here we will instead look for the big picture. What are the major trends in Iraq?
The following are guesses amidst the fog of war. The first two expand upon observations in my article of March 2007. These were controversial then, but almost consensus wisdom today.
- Iraq is fragmenting into three parts.
- Development of local, armed “governments” drives this process. Ethnic cleansing is their major tool. This is a road to peace for Iraq, perhaps the only path still open.
- It’s not about us. The Coalition has been and probably will be irrelevant to nation-building in Iraq.
- More fighting lies in Iraq’s future, mostly battles for control of the new proto-states and border wars. Hopefully this means less killing.
The last two sections of this paper discuss what this means for America.
- Recommendations for our Expedition to Iraq
- What does this tell us about our Long War?
Let’s examine each in of these in turn.
(more…)
The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.
Lord Salisbury, discussing Great Britain’s policy on the Eastern Question (1877)
In the Fall of 2003 this author published on DNI a series of reports suggesting that there was an insurgency in Iraq, that it was waging effective 4GW, and that it was highly innovative. Those were extraordinary claims at that time. Today these are commonplaces, and the basis for our counter-insurgency operations.
This article says that the situation in Iraq has changed. There is no longer an insurgency in Iraq. This is good news, and opens a pathway to peace.
Who governs Iraq?
Being born in a stable does not make one a horse.
Duke of Wellington (source and authenticity unknown)
Having a bureaucracy, capital, constitution, and seat at the UN, does not make a government. Governments have specific characteristics. The more of these they possess, the stronger and more durable they are. The most important attributes:
(more…)
From “Knowing the Enemy“, George Packer, The New Yorker (12 December 2006)
In 2004, when McFate had a fellowship at the Office of Naval Research, she got a call from a science adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had been contacted by battalion commanders with the 4th Infantry Division in a violent sector of the Sunni Triangle, in Iraq. “We’re having a really hard time out here-we have no idea how this society works,” the commanders said. “Could you help us?” The science adviser replied that he was a mathematical physicist, and turned for help to one of the few anthropologists he could find in the Defense Department.
This pitiful little vignette shows one reason why we lose: structural failures in the Department of Defense. Among the thousands of support people in DoD, a battalion commander found nobody better to help understand Iraq than a mathematical physicist. A science advisor to the Joint Chiefs found no better expert on the Middle East than an anthropologist with no specific expertise in that area.
From this a logician could infer the full story of America’s inability to successfully wage 4th Generation Wars (4GW), just as from a drop of water “a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other” (Sherlock Holmes in “A Study in Scarlet,” part 1, chapter 2). However, logicians are rare. For the rest of us, here is a brief attempt to explain one of the great puzzles of our time: why the US has lost - is losing - and will continue to lose - 4th Generation Wars (4GW).
Introduction
An early symptom of impending defeat is loss of confidence in one’s tactical doctrines. In a strong military culture, though, this can spark a burst of creativity. In WWI, this resulted in the perfection by the German Army of infiltration tactics. Later, with new technology, this became blitzkrieg.
How has the prospect of defeat in Iraq affected the US military?
(more…)
