Counterinsurgency Doctrine Research Articles

Money as a “weapons system” and the entrepreneurial way of war

In US counterinsurgency doctrine, money has been characterized as “ammunition” and as a “weapons system”. Money is being wielded to win over the “hearts and minds” of the population, and to protect the lives of the occupying forces. Soldiers are taking on greater responsibility for spending money on reconstruction and development projects on the battlefield. Billions of dollars have been spent by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan on a wide range of projects including building schools, developing infrastructure, and providing agricultural assistance as well as microfinance. But military doctrine now extends to helping implement free-market economies, supporting business creation, setting up banking facilities, and promoting entrepreneurialism. In fact, economic development has been recast as a constitutive form of combat, not simply as a supplement to conventional warfare, or as part of post-conflict reconstruction. The use of money as a “weapons system” speaks to both a different kind of military and a different kind of war. Fighting and violence have not been replaced or even displaced, but are joined with new strategies and tactics that sit uneasily side by side. As soldiers have been retooled to be economic decision-makers, we need to better understand how money and markets are increasingly both the weapon of military intervention and the anticipated outcome.

American Civic Action: The National Campaign Plan and the Failure to Win ‘Hearts and Minds’ in El Salvador

From 1979 until 1992, the United States government intervened in the Salvadoran Civil War to defeat ‘communist revolution,’ establish a moderate, centrist government, and prevent its overthrow. One of the primary means to accomplish American goals in El Salvador rested on a thorough application of counter-insurgency. In particular, American and Salvadoran strategists used civic action programmes to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of Salvadorans and gain their allegiance. In 1983, whilst the war was at its zenith, the Salvadoran military launched an important counter-insurgency effort that attempted to reverse the government’s fortunes. Unfortunately, these plans failed to affect decisively the outcome of the conflict. Regardless, given their failure in the largest American intervention in the post-Vietnam era, they continue to remain a fundamental aspect of American counter-insurgency doctrine.

COIN: A study of strategic illusion

Has the US military become a learning institution, one able to transition from relying on a conventional war model to fighting against irregular adversaries such as insurgents and terrorists? This article examines the United States' interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan in an effort to respond to this question. It shows that there are two major ways for a military to fail to be a ‘learning’ institution: It may stick to its old dogma or – adopt a flawed new one. Those who saw counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine as the best way to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan made the US military into a learning organization – but taught it the wrong lesson. They failed to take into account the absence of the sociological conditions that make a post-conflict environment amenable to nation-building, which is an integral part of the main variants of counterinsurgency. The article closes by outlining the foremost reasons the US military continues to be a poorly adaptive organization.

Learning from the past, Looking to the Future

Abstract: This article offers a framework to aid uniformed strategic leaders in reflecting on the last decade of conflict. This framework takes into account emerging historiography, time-tested military theory, and a holistic understanding of military history to help prepare officers to offer strategic advice in the future. ********** As the black flags of the Islamic State appear in more and more places in Iraq, a new generation of officers will likely reflect on what has and has not been accomplished, and what is and is not possible through the force of arms. Conclusions about the recent era of conflict will affect US officers as they ascend to higher ranks and provide the best military advice they can to the nation's civilian leadership. These future senior leaders should not allow emotion to affect their introspection. (1) Future senior leaders must place their past service in a context that takes into account emerging historiography, time-tested military theory, and a holistic understanding of military history, as this foundation will allow them to provide better strategic advice. This article explores emerging historiography before revisiting just a few of the military theorists who continue to transcend time. It will then offer a brief overview of American military history by examining the popular outliers in the conscience of military professionals before turning to what the US military has done more often. Penultimately, it offers recommendations for how senior military leaders should approach historiography as they consider the future, and how a grounding in theory benefits them in the politically dominated realm of strategy. Last, this article suggests how to use historical context when providing advice and speaking truth to power, even when the message is not popular. As it has in the past, the US military will have to execute campaigns that lack strategic clarity or coherent policy objectives. Some campaigns will be, in the words of Andrew Bacevich, fool's errands. (2) However, armed with an inclusive view of the past, not just the highlight reel, future strategic leaders may be better able to fulfill their roles. Historiography Historiography matters because it shapes approaches used at professional military education (PME) institutions. Iconography and personal views present intellectual minefields students and faculty must navigate with civility even when dealing with interpretations of the increasingly distant American Civil War. At one time, a walk through the halls of the US Army War College could have caused one to wonder who won the war, or how the profession has chosen to remember its past. Military professionals might have to work harder to distill the lessons of emerging narratives seeking to explain the less than decisive outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan, events in which many of them participated. (3) Easily digested Manichean explanations for enormously complicated issues deserve attention only in helping to define the extreme boundaries of the entire field. (4) How the profession remembers the last decade of conflict will likely influence the way it approaches the use of force in the future. (5) Remembering the past can be painful and complicated, as the Civil War illustrates, thus reminding the profession of the care it should take in capturing and interpreting various perspectives of recent events. Anti-COIN Gian Gentile and Douglas Porch each used historical analysis of a variety of campaigns to reach the same conclusion: counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine rarely works, especially in the context of carrying out tasks related to nation-building for a third party. To their credit, both authors offered these perspectives before the recent emergence of ISIL. Although there seems to be little stomach for another COIN campaign, Gentile, to be certain, offers his critique for the good of the profession. His overarching fear stems from the belief the nation might try a similar venture again should it follow Field Marshal Montgomery's dictum that armed with a good plan (as prescribed by doctrine) and the right general, anything is possible. …

A long small war: Italian counterrevolutionary warfare in Libya, 1911 to 1932

The paper argues that the success of the Italian pacification campaign of Libya in 1932 can be traced to the implementation of a military-centric strategy used in counterrevolutionary warfare, a type of Small War made popular in the early twentieth century and an older form of counterinsurgency. Rather than focus on achieving an acceptable level of security common to modern counterinsurgency doctrine, COIN, the Italians used kinetic military operations to defeat and subdue rebel groups in the two Libyan colonies of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. The roots of third rebellion, and the military strategy used to pacify the colonies, were developed during the guerrilla war by Ottoman and indigenous groups used to oppose the Italian invasion of Libya during the Italo-Libyan War, 1911–1912. The lessons of Italy's success should make the application of a military-centric rather than a security-centric strategy useful for current counterinsurgencies.

The 21st-Century Turn to Culture: American Exceptionalism

The U.S. Military's turn to culture in the 21st century occurred largely because of its inability to achieve its stated objectives in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through conventional military force. Building on a long history of military strategies concerned with the cultural differences of others, the U.S. military crafted a warfighting strategy in 2006 based on a counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine of using cultural knowledge to battle the enemy. Charting how and why culture was embraced as a 21st-century “weapons system” shows us how technopolitical systems inside the military-industrial complex are envisioned, built, and then dismantled. Close tracking of these changing 21st-century strategies of war reveals, deep within the counterterrorism discourse, a fundamental belief in American exceptionalism. The principle that emerged from this ideological environment is that the enemies to be fought are not only terrorists or the ideologues of al-Qaʿida but also the countries and cultures that produced them. The implementation of this principle, despite its obvious failures, reveals the ideological underpinning that has justified the incredible destruction and securitized implementation of warfighting.

Hybrid Actors, Tactical Variety: Rethinking Asymmetric and Hybrid War

Wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan should be understood as hybrid wars, wars in which elements of ethnic or tribal conflict, ideologically based insurgency, factional squabbling, and organized crime are inextricably intertwined, with the same actors playing multiple and partially conflicting roles. Hybrid war is inherently transnational, featuring transnational crime networks, “migrant warriors,” transnational diaspora links, legitimate international trade, and foreign intervention. It takes place in hybridized states reliant on local warlords and other actors whose power prevents effective state-building. In this context, while counterinsurgency doctrine prescribes appropriate military strategy and tactics, the core problem is more political than military. Since a hybridized client state is not likely to be politically reformable even if a foreign ally achieves military success, outside allies like the United States should generally refrain from boots-on-the-ground intervention, pursuing instead a diplomatic solution, even though such a deal is likely to be unpalatable.

Counterinsurgency or irregular warfare? Historiography and the study of ‘small wars’

This article argues that the history of irregular warfare provides a valuable analytical and critical perspective for the study of counterinsurgency campaigns and counterinsurgency doctrine. A focus on the history of irregular warfare highlights the close relationship between warfare in Europe and in the colonies. Moreover, it enables us to identify more exactly the intersection of multiple factors that lead to an escalation of violence in small wars. Finally, it also sheds light on the lack of strategic reflection on the use of irregular auxiliaries that is characteristic for many counterinsurgency campaigns.

Rules of Disengagement: Masculinity, Violence, and the Cold War Remakings of Counterinsurgency in Brazil

Amid pronounced anxieties that “new” forms of warcraft (technological, psychological, guerrilla, nuclear) would obviate manly soldiery in the post–World War II period, Brazilian, French, and US military theorists shared a discursive space in which they worked out these fears via the invention of counterinsurgency doctrine. In so doing, they both demonized guerrilla warfare as an unprecedented innovation of nefarious communists and imagined an idealized counterguerrilla or counterinsurgent warrior who must outpace the guerrillas’ putatively formidable masculinity. This essay traces the ideological contours of the transnational alliance of military theorists that collaborated in conceptualizing counterinsurgency as a formal, and now central, stratagem. Key to the cohesion of this alliance was a vision of remasculinization as the bulwark of Western defense. Hashed out in trans-Atlantic conversations, such remasculinization took the particular form of lack of restraint—laying the groundwork for indiscriminate violence, unmoored even from the pretense of rules of engagement.

Staging the Orient: Counterinsurgency Training Sites and the U.S. Military Imagination

This article is a descriptive narrative of the U.S. military's “cultural awareness” training for counterinsurgency doctrine at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center (MUTC) in Indiana. Within the narrative, I show how the “Arab,” “Afghan,” and “culturally sensitive soldier” are constituted within the U.S. military imagination through the practices and spaces of MUTC. Drawing on recent work in “new materialism” and the material geographies of late-modern war, the article argues that the circulation of “culture” within the U.S. military is not an indifferent exercise in familiarity with an occupied population, nor a mere knowledge production. Rather, cultural awareness must be understood as an instrumental activity through which identities are positioned and habitually put to use, like tools, to orient strategic and tactical operations in counterinsurgency contexts. Counterinsurgency training sites such as MUTC are ideal for interrogating how cultural identities acquire a status of serviceability akin to what Heidegger (1962) once called “equipment” or “paraphernalia” that inform the practices of everyday military occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq. In my thick description of the MUTC, I examine the function and silences of the site of the U.S. military's imagination, which I deliberately leave vague here but whose orders, phantoms, and figures I elaborate fully in the narrative.

Surge: my journey with General David Petraeus and the remaking of the Iraq War

Surge is an insider's view of the most decisive phase of the Iraq War. After exploring the dynamics of the war during its first three years, the book takes the reader on a journey to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where the controversial new U.S. Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency doctrine was developed; to Washington, D.C., and the halls of the Pentagon, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff struggled to understand the conflict; to the streets of Baghdad, where soldiers worked to implement the surge and reenergize the flagging war effort before the Iraqi state splintered; and to the halls of Congress, where Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General David Petraeus testified in some of the most contentious hearings in recent memory. Using newly declassified documents, unpublished manuscripts, interviews, author notes, and published sources, Surge explains how President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Ambassador Crocker, General Petraeus, and other U.S. and Iraqi political and military leaders shaped the surge from the center of the maelstrom in Baghdad and Washington.

Escaping the Bind: Comparing Twenty-First Century US Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the French Response to the Algerian Revolution, 1955–1956

Faced with a growing Algerian insurgency in 1955, French Governor-General Jacques Soustelle turned to his ethnological training to convert soldiers into amateur social scientists, hoping to better know the people of Algeria and therefore ease pacification through cultural understanding. Soustelle failed to appreciate the sophistication of revolt in Algeria, a diverse array of movements that did not fit traditional European categories. Confronting similar problems in understanding the causes of Iraqi and Afghan resistance in the years following the invasions of 2001–2003, American military planners also turned to anthropology. Though not taken to the administrative extreme seen in Soustelle's Algeria, the United States Army instituted the Human Terrain System in order to better understand native populations involved in an active insurgency. American planners can learn from the French experience by developing a more nuanced approach to study that includes more advanced anthropological techniques without the baggage of the colonial system.

Counterinsurgency and its Critics

On a drive through Kabul in December 2010, David Kilcullen, one of counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine’s most celebrated theorists and an Australian advisor to American military and civilian leaders,...

Learning to Forget: US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq

Learning to Forget: US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq

Just How Important Are ‘Hearts and Minds’ Anyway? Counterinsurgency Goes to the Polls

Despite all the talk of ‘hearts and minds’ being the key to counterinsurgency, local public opinion is rarely studied and when it is, it often yields surprising conclusions. Through analyzing polling data from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, this article shows that public opinion is less malleable, more of an effect rather than a cause of tactical success, and a poor predictor of strategic victory. As a result, modern counterinsurgency doctrine’s focus on winning popular support may need to be rethought.

COIN flips: American international relations and counter-insurgency

The essay examines the recent rehabilitation of counter-insurgency doctrine, especially as conducted by third party interveners. The advent of the refurbished US (United States) Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency field manual, a volume with scholarly self-presentation, is the focal point. This essay is concerned with the dubious bases of the doctrinal justifications driving recent US interventions. The Vietnam War turns out to be the crucial case for American scholars and policy-makers who have construed the history of counter-insurgency there as an unacknowledged success, which today has become the standard account in American International relations scholarship. The essay is a critical examination of this development and of its implications.

Learning to forget: US Army counterinsurgency doctrine and practice from Vietnam to Iraq

Learning to Forget: US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq By David Fitzgerald Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013 285 pages $45.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In Learning to Forget, David Fitzgerald traces the effects of the Vietnam War's legacy on the US Army's understanding and approach to counterinsurgency. Fitzgerald, a Lecturer in International Politics at University College Cork, Ireland, broaches this topic chronologically, assessing first the role of counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War and then how the memory and lessons of that conflict shaped future institutional attempts to avoid, learn from, repeat, or even recall whatever it was that happened. The overarching argument is the memory of Vietnam has been neither static nor uncontested, but reinterpreted depending on the dominant context and personalities at any given time. The legacy, thus, remains fluid and open to reconstruction (210-211) and is used to justify a range of often incompatible arguments. As Fitzgerald implies, this historiographical tug-of-war reveals the long shadow the conflict still casts over the US Army as an institution. The book's strengths include its argumentation and structure; it is an eminently readable text. It weaves its way from Vietnam and the codification of its immediate lessons in the 1970s, to the re-encounter with irregular challenges in Central American in the 1980s, and then to the peace operations of the 1990s, and their relationship to the Army's counterinsurgency legacy. The last two chapters consider the spectacular highs and lows of counterinsurgency during the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Throughout, counterinsurgency has most commonly been marginalized as an institutional priority and area of investment, a trend bucked only by major traumatic events, (206) most recently the fear of utter failure during the civil war in Iraq. A second strength of the book is its measured tone and analysis. Fitzgerald has authored a sober and dispassionate study that resists the hyperbole and sensationalism typical of other related works. Perhaps Fitzgerald's distance from the debate, as an Ireland-based academic, affords him the necessary perspective. Nonetheless, the nuanced take on this all-too-often overheated topic is refreshing and, also, necessary. Third, the research is thorough and well documented in over sixty pages of footnotes. It is clear that Fitzgerald has consulted the relevant works, which he applies with due recognition of contending interpretations. The eye to detail and fastidious sourcing may be explained by the book's origins as Fitzgerald's own doctoral thesis, something evident in the book's initial literature review and primer on methodology. This last point relates also to one of the book's two weaknesses. Whereas Fitzgerald's analysis is commendably detached, one might wish he more often established his own view on controversial and divisive topics. He cites the dominant voices both for and against counterinsurgency's inclusion as a US military priority but refrains from presenting his own verdict. He covers the Iraq and Afghanistan wars well, but it is never explained why Fitzgerald thinks counterinsurgency succeeded in the former yet failed to produce the tangible results it needed in Afghanistan (198). …

Counterinsurgency American style: Considering David Petraeus and twenty-first century irregular war

This article examines the complex legacy of David Petraeus who was a key figure in the emergence of the US military shift towards counterinsurgency doctrine in the years after 2006. Although Petraeus has been perceived by critics as a publicity seeker, he can be credited with laying the foundations for a more serious commitment to COIN involving in particular in integrating conventional and Special Forces in arenas like village stability operations. The article looks a Petraeus's role in both Iraq and Afghanistan: it concludes that, in the case of Afghanistan, it is too early to assess whether counterinsurgency has had a decisive impact of the outcome of the war against the Taliban.

Counterinsurgency and Lone Wolf Terrorism

This essay examines strategies to counter the threat of lone wolf terrorism. Lone wolves implement a tactical approach dubbed “leaderless resistance,” which has become popular in several extremist subcultures. Although most episodes of lone wolf terrorism have not been highly destructive, there are notable exceptions that have claimed a substantial number of victims. The lone wolf trend should be contextualized in the evolution of conflict and strategy in which smaller and smaller entities figure prominently. Elements of the counterinsurgency doctrine can be applied to lone wolf terrorism. A comprehensive counterterrorism strategy must prepare for the prospect of lone wolf terrorism because of the increasing number of small-scale attacks, the large number of soft targets in contemporary society, and the potential damage that individuals can cause with the use of weapons of mass destruction.

Book review: Strike and destroy: When counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine met hellraiser’s brigade or, the fate of Corporal Morlock

Book review: Strike and destroy: When counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine met hellraiser’s brigade or, the fate of Corporal Morlock