New Challenges and Old Concepts: Understanding 21st Century Insurgency

Abstract

This article was first published in the Winter 2007-08 issue of Parameters. From the 1960s to the 1980s stopping Communist-backed insurgents was an important part of American strategy, so counterinsurgency was an important mission for the US military, particularly the Army. Even when most of the Army turned its attention to large-scale warfighting and the operational art following Vietnam, special operation forces preserved some degree of capability. In the 1980s American involvement in El Salvador and a spate of insurgencies around the world linked to the Soviets and Chinese sparked renewed interest in counterinsurgency operations (as a component of low-intensity conflict). By 1990 what could be called the El Salvador model of counterinsurgency, based on a limited US military footprint in conjunction with the strengthening of local security forces, became codified in strategy and doctrine. (1) Interest then faded. Policymakers, military leaders, and defense experts assumed that insurgency was a relic of the Cold War, posing little challenge in the world order. With the demise of the Soviet Union and the mellowing of China, insurgency--even though it persisted in the far corners of the world--was not viewed as a strategic challenge to the world's sole superpower. With American involvement in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti, multinational peacekeeping--a previously unimportant role for the military--moved to the fore. In a burst of energy, the military revamped its peacekeeping doctrine and concepts. Professional military education and training shifted to accommodate these missions. Wargames, conferences, and seminars proliferated. Counterinsurgency was forgotten by all but a tiny handful of scholars. Then, one clear September morning, the world turned. Al Qaeda and its affiliates adopted a strategy relying heavily on the methods of insurgency--both national insurgency and a transnational one? Insurgency was again viewed as a strategic threat and the fear grew that insurgent success would create regimes willing to support and protect organizations like al Qaeda. The global campaign against violent Islamic extremists forced the United States military to undertake counterinsurgency missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Once again, the Department of Defense was required to respond to a major strategic shift. The military services scrambled to develop new concepts and doctrine. (3) Counterinsurgency reentered the curriculum of the professional military educational system in a big way. It became a centerpiece for Army and Marine Corps training. Classic assessments of the conflicts in and Algeria became required reading for military leaders. Like the mythical phoenix, counterinsurgency had emerged from the ashes of its earlier death to become not just a concern of the US military but the central focus. This is all to the good. Augmenting capabilities to respond to new strategic threats is exactly what the Department of Defense is supposed to do. There is a problem, however: As the American military relearned counterinsurgency strategy and doctrine, it may not have gotten them right. During the 1970s America's national security strategy was shaped by what became known as the Vietnam syndrome--a reluctance to intervene in internal conflicts based on the assumption that some disaster would ensue. Ironically, while the United States eventually overcame the syndrome, a new one emerged. has been treated as a universal model, the Viet Cong as the archetypical foe. Defense experts even concluded that insurgents who did not use the Vietnamese approach (derived from the teaching of Mao Zedong) stood little chance of success. (4) This tendency to look back to the classic insurgencies of the twentieth century was pervasive. For instance, as the Army sought to understand the conflict in Iraq, the books most recommended for its officers were John Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (which dealt with the British involvement in Malaya and the American experience in Vietnam) and David Galula's Counterinsurgency Warfare (drawn from the French campaigns in Indochina and Algeria). …