Counterinsurgency Warfare Research Articles

Social capital and civil war: The Dinka communities in Sudan's civil war

It is generally assumed that violent conflict has a negative effect on social capital, and war zones are considered to be ‘zones of social capital deficiency’. This article challenges this position, and attempts to develop a more nuanced understanding of the status of social capital in the context of Sudan’s civil war. The empirical findings clearly question any simplistic assumption that conflict erodes social capital. While it is true that certain types of social capital have been a casualty of civil war, the opposite is the case in other communities. The article explains this difference by drawing a distinction between ‘endogenous’ and ‘exogenous’ counter-insurgency warfare. Communities in southern Sudan that were exposed to endogenous counter-insurgency warfare experienced a loss of social capital, but where exogenous violence dominated, there has been a deepening and strengthening of bonding social capital among and within communities.

Abstract of Counter-Insurgency in the Philippines and the Global War on Terror. Examining the Dynamics of the Twenty-first Century Long Wars

AbstractThis article examines how the global war on terror affects the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), particularly its long and continuous involvement in many wars of the third kind. It discusses the history and essence of counter-insurgency warfare or low-intensity conflict (LICs) in the Philippine setting. It then explores the impact of the global war on terror on the Philippine military's counter-insurgency campaigns and the current reforms in the Philippine defence establishment to end the insurgency problems. In conclusion, the article argues these reforms and the post-9/11 US security assistance will not significantly transform the AFP's structure and functions as it will be preoccupied with its anti-terrorist and counter-insurgency efforts indefinitely into the future.

Vietnam, Iraq and the Rebirth of Counter-Insurgency

Events in Iraq during the period 2006-8 marked a profound shift both in how the US Army understood its role in the Vietnam War and how it approached counterinsurgency warfare. The shock of failure in Iraq had dislocated several of the US Army's core assumptions about how war should be fought and what the lessons it had learned from Vietnam meant. Now, the Army's challenge was to make sense of Vietnam again in light of the lessons of Iraq and to re-evaluate the place of counterinsurgency in its doctrine and, more broadly, its culture. Part of this re-evaluation and reimagining took place at the Army's Combined Arms Center, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where the new doctrine to deal with the unexpected challenges the Army now faced in Iraq was put together. This paper will explore how understandings of the Vietnam War intersected with the Iraq experience in terms of counter-insurgency doctrine. Doctrine writers and strategists revisited the Vietnam War to draw different, more pertinent lessons from that conflict. The manner in which they did this illustrates the way in which institutional memory can change to suit contemporary needs.

Pakistan's War Within

Prior to 2001, Pakistan had limited experience countering domestic militants. Today, the Pakistani army still prefers to focus on a potential war with India rather than against sub-state actors. Nonetheless, there have been noted improvements since 2001, and throughout 2009 Islamabad has demonstrated increasing resolve to defeat militants challenging the writ of the state. Earlier operations such as Al Mizan revealed serious deficiencies in the ability to conduct cordon-and-search operations and to hold territory. In the later operations in Bajaur and Swat, however, the Frontier Corps and army forces showed an improved capability to clear territory and integrate operations with local tribes. But Pakistani doctrine remains inconsistent with recent population-centric innovations in counter-insurgency warfare. Pakistan's commitment to a conventional orientation and the hardware most appropriate for fighting India has poorly equipped it to deal with the burgeoning domestic threat.

Dirty Windows and Burning Houses: Setting the Record Straight on Irregular Warfare

After a slow start, the U.S. military has made remarkable strides in adapting to irregular warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is beginning to institutionalize those adaptations. Recent Department of Defense (DOD) directives and field manuals have elevated stability operations and counterinsurgency to the same level of importance as conventional military offensive and defensive operations. These changes are the outcome of deep reflection about the nature of current and likely future threats to U.S. national security and the military’s role in addressing them. They represent important steps toward transforming a sclerotic organizational culture that long encouraged a 'we don’t do windows' posture on so-called 'military operations other than war,' even as the nation’s leaders called upon the armed forces to perform those types of missions with increasing frequency. Despite the clear need for change from a Cold War military to one that can deal with the threats of the current century, numerous military officers and civilian experts have challenged the U.S. military’s development of improved theory and practice for irregular warfare.

Modeling and Simulation in Counter-Insurgency/Irregular Warfare

Counter-insurgency warfare in the 21st century has morphed from an attrition focus to an explicit, concentrated attempt to capture the support of the general population of the host country. The principal efforts by coalition forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, are concerned with nation building, infrastructure development and enhancement, reinforcing the effectiveness of national military and police forces to improve population security, and motivating the host population with health, educational and jobs programs. Attrition-oriented activities are more or less restricted to the insurgency leadership. The insurgents, on the other hand, concentrate on terrorizing elements of the population who cooperate with the coalition, producing a steady (albeit small) stream of coalition casualties, and competing for the allegiance of the locals with material subsidies. Since neither side is attempting to reduce the opposition force by attrition, the conflict becomes one of endurance. It is a struggle pitting the allegiance of the host people against the patience of the underlying coalition force domestic population. The other characteristic of 21st century counter-insurgency is that it is increasingly complex with numerous players. An incomplete list is:

Growing a Virtual Insurgency: Using Massively Parallel Gaming to Simulate Insurgent Behavior

Models and simulations of counter-insurgency warfare and irregular (COIN) operations are only as effective as their underlying models of insurgent behavior. Existing simulations of insurgencies rely upon strong assumptions that may limit their validity, and thus their use in training for COIN operations. This paper suggests an alternative approach to modeling insurgencies: using a massively parallel game architecture. Massively parallel systems exhibit surprising capacities for learning, adapting and solving complex problems, while games may stimulate individual learning. By harnessing these adaptive capabilities, the proposed massive multiplayer online first-person shooter (MMOFPS) game holds promise for a more realistic and valid simulation of the behavior of insurgencies by incorporating actual human players. Furthermore, by constructing a persistent virtual world in which human players simulate insurgents, the MMOFPS game allows researchers and decision-makers to observe and measure the behavior of ‘meta-insurgents’, allowing for model validation. Data collection and post-game interviews of players also allow for both quantitative and ethnographic experimentation. This paper proposes a gaming architecture and evaluates the technical risks.

SELF-ORGANIZED CRITICALITY IN ASYMMETRIC WARFARE

Two current conflicts, in Afghanistan and in Iraq were studied to identify a possibility of a critical behavior in an asymmetric conflict. The analysis was performed using temporal dependence of fatalities. The data included daily fatality information from the beginning of each of the conflicts until 31 December 2007. The results suggest that these examples of asymmetric, counter-insurgency warfare can possibly be characterized in terms of self-organized criticality (SOC). While SOC could be an attractor for such conflicts in general, not all asymmetric conflicts are actually at the point of criticality. The conflict in Afghanistan is an example of such a subcritical conflict. The conflict in Iraq, on the other hand is an example of an already critical system. The two types of conflict have in common the power-law dependence between the numbers of fatalities and the frequency of occurrences. However, while for a critical system the numbers of fatalities are correlated over time, for a subcritical system they are anti-correlated. From the point of view of counter-insurgency, the subcritical state is a preferred option. However, from the system point of view the two cases are just two different phases of the same type of a dynamical system.

Partisan and Anti-Partisan Warfare in German-Occupied Europe, 1939–1945: Views from Above and Lessons for the Present

This introductory article begins by sketching the general historical background of partisan and anti-partisan warfare in German-occupied Europe. It then briefly outlines the state of available primary sources, and the often heated, controversial character of the historiographical debates which are taking place within this area. It then considers, at some length, the lessons which the five articles presented, offer for the present-day conduct of counter-insurgency warfare – lessons relating to the effects of higher-level strategic perceptions; to the potential, then as now, for directing a policy of ‘disaggregation’ against insurgents; to the importance of situating counter-insurgency warfare within the context of wider policies which are receptive to the needs of the occupied population and its social and cultural characteristics; and to the necessity of fielding counter-insurgency forces which not only are well-resourced, but which also, in stark contrast to the anti-partisan formations which the Germans so often deployed, conduct themselves in ways that cultivate the population rather than alienate it.

Partners in Genocide: The German Police and the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union, SS and police forces adopted the strategy of the direct approach as the keystone of German security policy in the occupied territories. Operating in conjunction with Wehrmacht units and indigenous auxiliaries, Reich Leader of the SS and Chief of the German Police Heinrich Himmler's Uniformed Police (Ordnungspolizei) battalions, became essential instruments in the subjugation, exploitation, and pacification of the German rear areas. This essay examines the cooperative relationship that developed between SS and police forces, the Wehrmacht, and indigenous auxiliaries during the German anti-partisan campaign in the East. On the one hand, the cooperation of the police with the German armed forces reflected a true ‘inter-agency’ approach to counter-insurgency warfare; an approach formalised in policy agreements between both organisations prior to the 1941 invasion of Russia and cemented in combined operations aimed at Soviet partisans and their supporters. On the other hand, this analysis of combined operations between German SS and police and Wehrmacht forces offers further evidence of the key role played by the German Army and Air Force in the anti-partisan campaign, and ultimately genocide.

Are non‐poor households always less vulnerable? The case of households exposed to protracted civil war in Southern Sudan

Civil wars in Africa are now the leading contributory cause of vulnerability of rural communities. Understanding vulnerability during civil war is critical for humanitarian response and post-conflict rehabilitation planning. The lack of understanding of vulnerability has led existing studies to make sweeping generalizations, either by equating the dynamics of vulnerability during civil wars with vulnerability in other risk events, or by projecting people in the 'war zones' as unable to cope and subsequently becoming vulnerable. This paper is an attempt to gain a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of vulnerability during protracted civil war. It shows that during civil war the non-poor are not necessarily less vulnerable than poor households. The idea that people caught up in civil war are all vulnerable is not supported by the findings of this paper. It shows that the 'standard' pattern of vulnerability to drought is similar to that during exogenous counter-insurgency warfare, while a different pattern of vulnerability to endogenous shocks is identified.

Strategy and the Limitation of War

Strategic theory has failed to provide the tools with which to examine the conflicts now being waged. Major war is the preferred vehicle for the development of strategy, as the issues are absolute, the role of contingency diminished and the play of policy less overt. But a phenomenon increasingly remote from the actual experience of war does not provide a sufficient template for the current debate on strategy. The result is a discussion in flux, without unifying themes or coherence. The labels we currently attach to lesser wars, such as low-intensity operations, irregular war or counter-insurgency warfare, define themselves by their means, not their ends. Governments talk about major war but provide the means only for small war. Having set out with political goals that were unrealisable, they have not adjusted those goals but focused on military solutions which lack a political end. So the application of military capabilities becomes, by default, an end in itself.

Vietnam: Historians at War

By the early 1990s, when I began studying the Vietnam War, the American public had largely lost interest in the history of that conflict. The Civil War and World War II were the wars that historians were advised to cover if they wanted to reach the public. Among government officials, military officers, and political scientists, Vietnam was considered irrelevant, because the United States would never get caught in protracted counterinsurgency warfare again. Iraq changed all that. Ever since the outbreak of insurgency in the former empire of Saddam Hussein, people of all persuasions have been mining the history of Vietnam for information that will support their preferred Iraq policies. Hundreds of thousands of American troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan have received more instruction on Vietnam than on any other historical subject. Although more than thirty years have passed since the end of the Vietnam War, historians today are as divided on what happened as the American people were during the war itself. During the 1960s and 1970s, huge numbers of antiwar Americans entered academia and the media, while few Vietnam veterans and other supporters of the war obtained jobs in those professions, in many cases because veteran status or pro-war sentiments were considered unacceptable. As a result, most academic and journalistic accounts of the war written during and shortly afterwards depicted Vietnam as a bad war that the United States should not have fought. Antiwar history of the Vietnam War thus acquired the label of “orthodox” history.

New Challenges and Old Concepts: Understanding 21st Century Insurgency

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). …

Revising the British Army's Counter-Insurgency Doctrine

The Army's counter-insurgency doctrine is published in Part Ten of its Field Manual.1 It was last updated fully in July 2001. The pamphlet is the latest in a line of Army publications that have wre...

A Model of 21st Century Counterinsurgency Warfare

The insurgency warfare being practiced by global terrorists in the 21st Century is put in a historical context and modeled mathematically. The most widely known insurgency model is the “fish in the sea” formulation attributed to Mao Tse-tung. Fundamentally, it is a phased attrition model that can be described by variations of the Lanchester equations. In a collective sense, much of the Vietnam War fits that formulation. However, the 21st Century has featured a different type of insurgency where attrition is not the decisive factor on either side. Today's insurgencies are psychological wars of political endurance, not attrition. They require different mathematics. The mathematical formulation of 21st Century counterinsurgency warfare contains two stochastic time series, the first dealing with defeat and the second success. The defeat portion deals with the likelihood of precipitous troop withdrawals permitting terrorist insurgents to declare victory in a de facto sense. The defeat probability roughly mirrors public opinion polls. Public opinion polls are probabilistic because they are heavily influenced by short-term unpredictable events, some detrimental to the war effort and some supporting it. In a sense, this is similar to the fluctuations of the stock market or exchange rate variations. They are also influenced by the duration of the war and accumulated casualties, both in a negative sense. Consequently, the defeat probability trends upward asymptotically toward unity over time although the instantaneous values cluster above and below the trend curve. In a democracy, decision makers or funding bodies can resist adverse polls but not indefinitely. If war support polls are heavily negative, it is probable that decision makers will eventually move to cut their losses and pull out. The second portion of the model independently deals with success by counterinsurgency forces; i.e., a level of stability and security that permits at least a partial, phased troop draw down. It is based on estimates of the strength and quality of the host country military and police forces, the level of insurgent-initiated violence, the state of the host country economy, the services provided by the host government, and the willingness of the host government to address the insurgency in an even-handed manner. The success model resembles the Hamlet Evaluation System used during the Vietnam War. The instantaneous measures of success fluctuate above and below the trend curve with a variance that can be small, approaching determinacy. The success model has fixed, predetermined benchmarks that can but may not be achieved depending on the level of effort relative to the insurgent opposition. Both parts of the model deal with counterinsurgent troop withdrawals, one precipitous and one gradual and phased. In neither of the cases considered, de facto defeat or phased withdrawal, does the model deal with “military” defeat or victory. If the type of insurgencies encountered in the 21st Century become the norm, military defeat and victory are irrelevant.

The Wretched of the Empire: Politics, Ideology and Counterinsurgency in Rhodesia, 1965–80

This article examines the vital importance of political ideology in formulating effective counterinsurgency, by examining the case of Rhodesia between 1965 and 1980. During this period, the Rhodesian Front (RF) Government of Ian Smith adopted a radical right-wing ‘world-struggle ideology’ to justify settler resistance to African decolonisation. The RF's ideology, based on settler-status anxiety, upheld a conspiratorial interpretation of modern politics that emphasised virulent forms of Anglophobia, anti-communism, anti-internationalism and anti-liberalism. The Smith Government portrayed African nationalism not as an indigenous political phenomenon, but as an external instrument of world communism and Western appeasement. After 1972, when Rhodesia faced a protracted insurgency, many of the principles of RF ideology were applied to counterinsurgency warfare with disastrous results. Because the Rhodesian Government viewed African guerrilla warfare as unrelated to domestic politics, Rhodesian counterinsurgency lacked a realistic political dimension. The dictates of settler ideology blinded the Rhodesian Government to the vital need to win ‘hearts and minds’ by applying timely principles of political pacification and reform to its counterinsurgency effort. Instead a Rhodesian counterinsurgency campaign of maximum force was pursued. Such a campaign proved counter-productive accelerating strategic deterioration and leading ultimately to the political victory of the African guerrilla cause in 1980.

Blood for oil? Global capital, counter-insurgency and the dual logic of American energy security

ABSTRACTThe US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq coupled with the increased militarisation of international relations as part of the ‘war on terror’ has led to the development of a ‘blood for oil’ thesis that posits the centrality of oil and the economic interests of US oil corporations to American intervention in the Third World. This article argues that this thesis, whilst correct in identifying the importance of energy to US intervention, is not sufficiently attentive to the dual nature of American resource interventions whereby the American state seeks not only to ensure US oil supplies but also to maintain sufficient oil supplies for the global economy as a whole. American intervention is thus driven by oil to a large extent, but in different ways to those commonly suggested by ‘blood for oil’ theorists. In contrast to this thesis I argue that recent energy security moves to diversify oil acquisition away from the Middle East towards new areas such as South America, the Caspian region and Africa continue to be subject to this dual logic. Moreover, counter-insurgency warfare is increasingly being deployed to insulate oil-rich states from internal pressures which is in turn having a profound effect on human rights, social justice and state formation in the global South.

‘Iron Fists in Iron Gloves’: The Political Economy of US Terrorocracy Promotion in Colombia

Most analysts of US post-cold war policy in Colombia argue that the US has switched from targeting Communist guerrillas to a war on drugs and a new war on terror. Contrary to these claims this article shows that the US continues to back Colombian counter-insurgency efforts which essentially amount to a strategy of state terrorism under a democratic façade (terrorocracy). Moreover, this policy continues to be pursued because the US has long employed counter-insurgency warfare to stabilise social formations conducive to US political and economic interests. In short, counter-insurgency warfare is the military strategy par excellence for the policing and reproduction of global capitalism via localised proxy forces throughout the third world. In Colombia this strategy continues to have profound consequences for human rights, social justice and democracy.

Losing the Moral Compass: Torture and "Guerre Revolutionnaire" in the Algerian War

One of the keys to success in the US war on terror and counterinsurgency, in Iraq and around the world, is the ability to intelligence to effectively target the adversary. Obtaining useful intelligence is one of the most important challenges of counterinsurgency operations. This requirement has focused attention on the interrogation of combatants captured on the battlefield and in raids on safe-houses in third-party states. Almost from the beginning of US counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, accusations have been made that US interrogation techniques have included torture. Typical of the domestic reporting is an article in Newsweek in June 2004, titled New Torture Furor, which states that the US Defense Department was exploring legal means for justifying torture. (1) The foreign press has echoed what was reported in the United States, and expanded upon it. The German magazine Der Spiegel asserted that torture was rampant among US forces, and represented the United States as exempting itself from international criminal jurisdiction. While the rest of the world is expected to abide by the UN Convention against Torture, for example, the Americans evaluate international law on the basis of whether serves their interests. (2) This type of reporting is a strategic distraction and has the potential to cause a crisis in American foreign policy. It erodes international and domestic support and can embolden the enemy. Senior US officials have had to speak forcefully on the subject of torture to control the domestic and international damage, distracting their focus from the details of nation-building in Iraq. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has had to invest considerable effort in reaffirming that US policy officially prohibits torture and affirming American support for the UN Convention against Torture (CAT), indicating that it [CAT] extends to US personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the US or outside the US. (33) Still, rumors and accusations persist that US forces routinely abuse prisoners. The French newspaper Le Monde reported in March 2006--without any hint of ambiguity--that the United States has condoned the use of torture in secret prisons on foreign soil, and ... justif[ied] the illegal treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. (4) Torture also has been the subject of much domestic political debate in the United States, but this debate has largely been over the legality of interrogation techniques. The debate usually misses the central point illustrated by the negative impact of international reaction to reports of torture on US foreign affairs: in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations, although torture may bring about some short-term tactical and operational advantages, officially or unofficially condoning its is a major strategic blunder. The disadvantages of sanctioned abuse or torture, or even the perception of torture, at the strategic level dwarf any short-term payoffs, regardless of technical legality. In counterterrorism and counterinsurgency warfare, the moral component of the fight is strategically decisive. Commanders are obligated to maintain both the reality and the perception of impeccable moral conduct within their commands. Senior commanders have the responsibility of ensuring that the tactics of their subordinates reinforce strategic goals and objectives. History offers no modern examples of the strategic effectiveness of harsh interrogation techniques, but is replete with examples of the negative strategic effects such techniques have on the counterinsurgency force. The French experience in Algeria from 1954 to 1962 is one of the clearest examples of how ill-conceived interrogation techniques contributed directly to the strategic failure of a counterinsurgency and the success of an insurgency. In the Algerian War, a very sophisticated insurgent movement with many advantages opposed a modern and well-led counterinsurgency force. …