The Counterinsurgents Posted by Patrick Barry

Spencer just capped off his series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) profiling the rise of counterinsurgency theorists with an interview with the "King David" of COIN, General Petraeus.  Among other things, the article raises doubts over whether we should rush to dismiss him as the 'sycophant savior' of the Bush Administration. 

The thing progressives should considere, is that Petraeus' conception of the military may actually be something that compliments, not contradicts, our arguments about where the Pentagon's priorities should be.  Just look at where Petraeus and his adherents have placed most of their emphasis: investment in personnel, rather than big-ticket items. Just take a look at this passage from the very first piece in the COIN series:

"Drawing on arcane military and academic histories of largely forgotten "small wars" in places like Malaya and the Philippines, the counterinsurgents place a premium on using the minimum amount of violence needed to target a shadowy enemy; on intimate knowledge of foreign cultures to cleave civilian populations from an insurgency; on distinguishing enemies that can be co-opted from "irreconcilables" that must be killed; on using proxy forces whenever possible; and on the central recognition that military force can never substitute for a political strategy that offers better, deliverable alternatives to a population than those presented by an adversary.

These are the lessons that the counterinsurgents believe need to be applied -- first in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then institutionalized throughout the military. To them, institutionalization is key: it's something that the military avoided in the generation between Vietnam and Iraq, so as not to entangle the U.S. in any more counterinsurgency campaigns -- even as adversaries adjusted to America's conventional military dominance. During the Clinton years, the Pentagon focused on buying "more high-tech jet fighters, artillery systems, and sensors, while there was very little [emphasis] on low-intensity warfare," Yingling said. "Even as we're operating in Somalia, the Balkans, and elsewhere, where we're trying to develop security forces and build governance capacity, we were disconnected from our experience in the 1990s.""

An emphasis on people over machines and hardware hews pretty close to not only the positions taken by center-left organizations like CNAS (who appears to employ every COIN acolyte not working in Government), but also those of more solidly liberal groups like CAP.  NSN's own Max Bergmann co-authored with Larry Korb, a report emphasizing the need for investment in personnel instead of the conventional weaponry that has dominated defense budgets even after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. 

Such an approach recognizes that current and future threats to the U.S. will arise from the most unstable parts of the world, where our best assets are people, not fancy equipment. Rather than increase our military spending to stratospheric levels to counter potential military rivals like Russia or China, we should hedge against those possibilities, and match our resources to more plausible challenges.  Many progressives, myself included, can get behind this platform, and Petraeus' own views are amenable to it. 

Ultimately the problem is that we still can't be sure who General Petraeus is. Is he the 'political general' derided by conservatives and liberals alike? Or is he a tactical wizard whose ideas are revolutionizing the military?  On the one hand, Petraeus has argued, somewhat legitimately, that he is just the implementer of a strategy that he has no ability to set.  But then what do we make of the troubling reports that he has actively politicized his role, crafting and promoting a Bush Administration plan that runs counter to our long-term security interests? 

What is certain is that his appointment to CENTCOM means that he no longer can duck these pressing concerns.  At his confirmation hearings, we'll be able to tell precisely what caliber of general he is. 

Comments

[Dan Q. Public]

The problem with the 'sycophant savior' idea is the fact that there is a large portion of the population--larger certainly in this comm than others, to be sure--that will not acknowledge any positive performed under Bush's watch, no matter what it is. Every person who works for him--including those who, like the military, have no say in the political arena but must work for whom they receive--are stuck with the poison pill of George W. Bush. For all his mistakes and perfidy, Bush couldn't push a kid from the path of a moving car without being accused of an ulterior motive.

Petraeus suffers from this more than most. If he does badly in his job, he gets excoriated by the press for being another failed general. If he does well in his job, he gets excoriated by the intelligentsia for just being another wily stooge of the administration. Someone has to do the job; would you prefer someone who botched it, was replaced by someone who botched it, who was replaced by someone who will botch it again; or would you prefer an intelligent warrior who makes good hay out of hard rain?

[Don Bacon]

"David Petraeus will go down in history as a great counterinsurgency theorist and practitioner," said retiring Army Lt. Col. John Nagl, one of the counterinsurgency experts who helped write FM 3-24. "From his Princeton doctoral dissertation on counterinsurgency in Vietnam through three tours in Iraq -- during the last of which he wrote the introduction for the first-ever translation in French of David Galula's classic 'Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice' after leading the writing team that produced the Army-Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual -- Gen. Petraeus has led the Army to rediscover 'the graduate level of war.'"

Hogwash and poppycock.

General Petraeus is an accident of history, a guy who wrote a key op-ed just prior to the last presidential election and has been rewarded for it. Along the way Petraeus "wrote" a new Army Field Manual purported to cover counterinsurgency, which he is purportedly following in Iraq.

First, what is an insurgency? From the DOD Dictionary of Military Terms: insurgency -- (DOD, NATO) -- An organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict.

Vietnam, Petraeus' wellspring, was not a counterinsurgency. Vietnam was a country where the US llegally installed a government in part of it and then fought a long, losing campaign against the properly constituted government.

What the Field Manual, FM 3-24, actually covers is fighting, not people trying to overthrow a government, but rather nationalists who resist an alien US military occupation. Is this just semantics? No. The point is that it is a natural human reaction to resist by force an alien foreign military occupation, whereas people are inclined to be more tolerant of their own government, no matter how badly they act.

In Iraq and Afghanistan there are no functional governments, the US is fighting nationalists who resist the brutal US military occupations.

FM 3-24 essentially promotes an intelligent approach to dealing with occupation-resisters (not insurgents, remember) with a minimum of force so as not to alienate them unduly from the occupiers. Obviously this is not the course of action Petraeus is currently pursuing in Sadr City, where a humanitarian crisis is developing.

The inability to move armored vehicles through the narrow slum streets of this poor city has meant an increased use of indirect fire and airpower to destroy buildings and entire blocks of buildings, where there are a lot of people present. The people not killed become refugees. So nothing much has changed despite the government propaganda which some people are lapping up.

The "current and future threats to the U.S. will arise from the most unstable parts of the world" is of course mostly poppycock and hogwash. Undoubtedly these "threats" consist of places like Iraq, Syria, North Korea, Pakistan and Afghanistan which do not threaten the US. There are no real military threats to the US, only these concocted ones and who knows what they'll dream up next.

In any case these threats, real or imagined, ought to be handled in the first instance with multilateral diplomacy and political negotiations, and not with military action. Specifically that is what the US should be doing right now in Afghanistan, according to Barnett Rubin. It ought to be obvious by now that brutal military occupations (AKA "counterinsurgency") don't work. If a foreign army occupied my town I hope that I would have the courage to kill as many of them as possible, as the Iraqis and Afghanis are doing.

"COIN" like "GWOT" ought to be put in quotes. It means nothing when related to current US policy..

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