Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Iraq War: The counterinsurgency dilemma

Jason Vest looks at the US military's lack of preparation for counterinsurgency warfare in the upcoming Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Willful ignorance: How the Pentagon sent the army to Iraq without a counterinsurgency doctrine July/Aug 2005

Scholars and soldiers alike have often used the phrase "the American way of war" to describe not just a predilection, but a virtual strategic obsession, which holds that wars are fought by gathering the maximum in manpower and materiel, hurling them into the maelstrom, and counting on swift, crushing victory. While this approach may work against a conventional army, it's nothing short of disastrous when fighting insurgents engaging in unconventional guerrilla warfare. Thus far in Iraq, the U.S. effort, though not entirely devoid of successes, has been hallmarked by overwhelmed and underprepared troops effecting heavy-handed, large-scale roundups of civilians (in some cases errantly or overzealously harming them); or the destruction of large swaths of cities and towns. Meanwhile, cycles of insurgent attacks continue to effectively target current and newly recruited Iraqi police, soldiers, and politicians, as well as Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers.

Vest's article looks at the way in which lessons from past counterinsurgencies have not been integrated into "the American way of war."  And how Donald Rumsfeld's version of "military transformation" will move them even farther away from doing so.

But it wasn't just the blowhard white guys who dismissed warning about the need for counterinsurgency preparation:

Throughout the 1990s, both students and professors at the military's war colleges produced a number of papers and studies making the case that insurgent scenarios were likely to become preeminent in the near future, and that the military couldn't afford to continue ignoring the study of counterinsurgency. Among the early and most articulate of these was Steven Metz, an Army War College professor whose respective 1993 and 1995 papers "The Future of Insurgency" and "Counterinsurgency: Strategy and the Phoenix of American Capability" both cautioned against the continued red-headed stepchild status of the field in military studies and outlined practical progressive reforms. In his 1995 study, he wrote that the U.S. military had to be "both looking backward at previous attempts to reconstitute counterinsurgency capabilities and looking forward to speculate on future forms of insurgency and the strategic environment in which counterinsurgency might occur. To do this now will shorten the period of learning and adapttion should counterinsurgency support again become an important part of American national security strategy."

It all came to naught.

According to Vest, one of the few authoritative studies of insurgency with which officers are familiar is Bard O'Neill's Insurgency and Terrorism: Inside Modern Revolutionary Warfare (1990).  One anonymous former student of O'Neill's that Vest interviewed cited the familiar criticisms of the Iraqi occupation that the Iraqi army should not have simply been disbanded and that the occupation authority stumbled badly on restoring basic services like water and sewage.

But he also noted that beyond giving people the universal basics, few in the occupation seemed to have much interest in understanding certain complicated cultural and political historic realities of Iraq. Among these, he said, was that for the coalition to succeed, at least in the short term, it would have to understand that Saddam's oppressive reign was not just about terror. "Saddam's whole history is one of doing nothing but insurgency and counterinsurgency," he said. "Starting with the coup, and then doing an internal divide-and-conquer for years by using carrots and sticks--he was good at knowing when to be deftly brutal, or simply brutal, or simply deft. . . . Where he needed to fight fire with fire--like [suppressing] the al-Dawa [political party] or the Kurds--he did, killing people. Where he could do it by clearing a slum and rebuilding it, putting a Shiite from one tribal clan into a position of power, giving a village something it sorely needed, he did. My point here is that as brutal as Saddam was, he understood that in some cases, delivering basic services was enough to pacify some elements of the population that would otherwise be insurgents." From where he sat, he said, between the coalition's inability to comprehend and deliver, and the military's fixation with the trappings and illusions of conventional warfare, he did not feel buoyant about the next several years.

Vest also refers to "an unclassified but very closely held white paper" prepared by three of the Army's intelligence specialists in November 2003 (nearly two years ago):

The "center of gravity" under attack by insurgents was not--as everyone from President George W. Bush to the Pentagon brass had asserted--exclusively "American will."

Rather, the report noted, the real target was Iraq's tribal socio-political structure. Continued failure to understand this was dooming the occupation's chances of success. "Iraqi history has shown that there is a dialectical relationship between the authority of the state and the power of the tribal elites," it explained. "When the state was powerful, it would tend toward direct rule by avoiding, or even eliminating, the tribal elites. When vulnerable to external aggression and internal strife, the state, through the power of the tribal elites . . . would rule indirectly through key tribes." So far, the report held, occupation forces had not only done a poor job of realizing this and engaging with tribal leaders in a constructive and validating way; they were also engendering ill will by, among other things, the "rough handling of family heads in front of their families." Such things were deeply offensive, the report held, and "the greatest wild card that the insurgents can exploit is the Coalition's lack of cultural understanding and ability to communicate with the rural population to reinforce the idea that our policies are attacks against cultural norms, honor, and way of life."

Vest wentions one of the dumber practices that both military and civilian spokespeople have adopted in the Iraq War: "And when even a slight dip in the number of attacks takes place, U.S. officials proudly proclaim it as possibly the beginning of the end--apparently failing to remember that many of the most successful counterinsurgency campaigns have spanned upwards of a decade."

Finally, citing a 2004 study by Steven Metz and Raymond Millen (Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the 21st Century Strategic Studies Institute Nov 2004;*.pdf file), Vest writes:

Yet what makes the report so striking is its implicit criticism of the current Pentagon leadership. Almost all of itsrecommendations for defining how the army thinks about the likely staple of current and future warfare--the need for more and better training and education of American troops, more civil affairs and engineering units, better relationships between the army and non-military government agencies, as well as simply an actual acknowledgment of the importance of counterinsurgency doctrine--are far removed from the type of "transformation" pursued by the Rumsfeld Pentagon. Moreover, another of the report's central contentions--that the U.S. military should not exacerbate or legitimize liberation insurgencies by deploying increasing numbers of troops to those conflict zones--stands at odds with a current bipartisan orthodoxy that simply sees increasing enlistments and deployments (without any commensurate doctrinal reform) and new weapons systems as the cure-all. But as Sun-Tzu famously observed, all warfare is based on deception--which, apparently, includes self-deception as well.

See also these pieces also cited by Vest in his article:

Toppling Saddam: Iraq and American Military Transformation by Stephen Biddle, et al, US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute April 2004. (Takes a while to load.)

Doomed to Fail: America’s Blind Faith in Military Technology by John Gentry Parameters (US Army War College) Winter 2002-03

How Technology Failed in Iraq by David Talbot MIT Technology Review Nov 2004

The United States' Approach To El Salvador by Robert Coates (1991)

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