‘New Thinking’ in the Pentagon

Abstract

According to Thomas Ricks, the ‘Old War’ ended on 19 March 2005 – the date on which a marine squad in Iraq went on a killing spree after being attacked. These four fine books are about the profound learning process that is being experienced by the American security apparatus in order to find ways to address the ‘new wars’ in Iraq and Afghanistan and, indeed, in other parts of the world. The name of General Petraeus is associated with this learning process, although it has to be understood more as a social movement – changed perceptions that have bubbled up from junior-level officers frustrated by what was happening on the ground. One officer tells Linda Robinson that the US army consists of ‘Cold War generals, Bosnia colonels and Iraq captains’. General Petraeus’ role has been to empower the captains. Two of the books are by soldiers and they develop the security thinking that underlies this learning process. David Kilcullen and John Nagl have both been deeply involved in formulating the new ideas that were tried out in Iraq after 2006 and are being tried out now in Afghanistan. John Nagl was a co-author of the new counterinsurgency manual produced under General Petraeus’ supervision during his stint at Fort Leavenworth prior to taking over the operational command in Iraq. David Kilcullen is an Australian with experience in Afghanistan, East Timor, Thailand and Indonesia, who also contributed to the manual and became General Petraeus’ counterinsurgency adviser in Iraq. John Nagl’s book takes its title from a quotation from T. E. Lawrence: ‘To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife’. Nagl’s main proposition is that success in conducting counterinsurgency operations depends on the military’s capacity for learning and adaptation and he develops a model to show what learning and adaptation must involve. He argues that the British army is a learning institution in contrast to the American military, which is deeply resistant to change; it is averse to unconventional tactics and it tends to believe in the importance of mass destruction, technology and ‘the unique moral mission’ of the United States. He traces these attitudes back to the ‘strategy of annihilation’ in the War against Native Americans and shows how it was reinforced by two world wars. The book contrasts the British adaptation to the Malayan Emergency with American conduct in Vietnam, where primacy was given to conventional military operations in a situation characterised by ‘a complex nationalistic and internecine struggle’. In Malaya, the British developed counterinsurgency principles, which included the use of minimum force, civil–military cooperation and flexibility of strategy. In Vietnam there was huge resistance to these kinds of tactics, as proposed by the US Marines. One senior officer said: ‘I’ll be damned if I permit the United States Army, its institutions and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war’. And after the war, the US army refused to learn the lessons of what went wrong; on the contrary the preferred text on the war was the book by Colonel Harry Summers, which concluded that the Vietnam War was not conventional enough. David Kilcullen’s book, which is likely to become a classic of counterinsurgency studies, draws attention to the global character of today’s insurgencies. He argues that what he calls the Taqfiri terrorists – the global Islamists – exploit local situations and mobilise ordinary people through a combination of bribery, marriage and intimidation. The ‘accidental guerrillas’ of his title are those people who have been, as it were, infected by the Taqfiri terrorist syndrome. He contrasts what he claims is the population-centric approach of classic counterinsurgency with the enemy-centric approach of counter-terror. Population security means protecting people from violence and providing basic services. He argues that placing the emphasis on population security allows you to detach the accidental guerrilla from the terrorist, or, in Petraeus’ words, to ‘separate the Global Policy Volume 1 . Issue 1 . January 2010