Counterinsurgency is bullshit

[thejester]

So I'm in the middle of writing this report that is a follow up to some funding I received last year. Easy as, I've done everything I said I would with the money, put out a few papers, blah blah. But then I notice they want me to summarise the conclusions of my research because there's a new Major General in charge of the funding program and he might want to see what all the fuss is about. And suddenly writing this got a lot harder cause I've got about a page to say in a diplomatic way that our conception of counterinsurgency was fatally flawed in Vietnam and that this goes some way to explaining the last decade of less than optimal results in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Stofsk]

I take it this observation is controversial? Has there been some perception that the less-than-stellar results over the last ten years can readily be attributable to failed policy?

[Stofsk]

Incidently, I'd be interested in reading what you come up with (or if you want to just write a summary if the report isn't meant for public consumption, that too).

[timmy]

My very limited understanding was that there was a dissonance between the brass/PR peeps talking about the successes of MRTF in A-stan versus the diggers actually having to carry out that mentoring of the ANA. The direct quote I heard regarding the last was 'when we made contact they either hit the ground and stayed there or turned and ran.'

[weemadando]

I was reading a report somewhere about how we learned all the wrong lessons about COIN because people wanted to believe that theories which worked in one theatre would work in another. Trying to apply the lessons of Malaya to Afghanistan and so forth, without taking into account the differences in basic situation.

[thejester]

I take it this observation is controversial? Has there been some perception that the less-than-stellar results over the last ten years can readily be attributable to failed policy?

I'm not sure controversial is quite the right word. But as Gian Gentile (who I have pumped on here about 50 billion times but that is because he is awesome) has noted, the 'COIN school' represented by Petraeus and the field manual is an operational framework rather than a strategic solution, yet is treated as the later. In part this conception stems from ongoing debates about Vietnam, in which two schools of thought who both are basically grounded in the US Army yell at each other about whether or not Vietnam was a counterinsurgency or a conventional war and thus if the US Army fought it correctly or incorrectly. It's an incredibly stupid debate but has basically established an orthodoxy of a) counterinsurgency and conventional warfare are distinct entities rather than entries on a spectrum and b) that the solution to the problem, one way or another, lies with the US. My research is basically saying that a case study of province shows that as a third party the Australians had no real way of addressing the long term structural issues crippling the South Vietnamese government or address the issues driving support for the insurgency, and consequently the Australian presence was transient. Ergo counterinsurgency as a strategic choice is incredibly dangerous (even for a superpower like the US, which obviously has more prospect of addressing these big issues than Australia) because you're putting yourself at the mercy of your local partner's ability to change. Something the Obama Administration seems to have gradually realised, as it abandons grandiose nation building in favour of blowing up al-Qaeda with drones. I think this is pretty obvious stuff but Army leadership (for obvious reasons) tends to like operational rather than strategic thinking, so it can never hurt to reinforce it. I kind of chickened out in the end, though - he's welcome to draw his own conclusions.