100 Years of COIN: What new have we Learned?

A few days ago I finally finished a chapter for the International Studies Association Compendium on ‘Insurgency and Counterinsurgency’. The brief I was given for the chapter was that it should include:

• Major intellectual and social dimensions of the topic;
• Comprehensive review of classical and older literature;
• Changes over time in the topic and its current treatment;
• Sufficient bibliographic material and links to important sources; plus,
• Assessment of future directions in research, theory and methodology; and,
• Critical consideration of important elements that remain unconsidered, were considered desirable too.

I was honoured to be asked but now that it’s finished I have to wonder why I thought the above was going to be easy. Really, what was I thinking? I ended up writing 50,000 words which had, rather painfully, to be cut back to just less than 10,000. You may judge the results for yourself—buy the book, which I think looks brilliant, when it is published. Now, since I’ve already slashed the original down to a fifth of what it was, I think that I might as well put down for KOW readers a postcard version:

• It bears repeating that a main problem with the insurgency literature is that (with certain exceptions) it generally ignores the huge numbers of insurgencies that fail and are consigned by history to the dustbin as failed revolution, rebellion or just plain crime. It is interesting to contemplate How the Weak Win Wars so long as one keeps in mind that most of the time they don’t. Basically, as Napoleon said, fortune really does favour the side with the bigger battalions.
• For a while I was impressed by the way Lawrence described insurgency in The Science of Guerrilla Warfare as a moral contest rather than a physical one (‘The contest was not physical, but moral, and so battles were a mistake…’); but, then again, didn’t Napoleon also say that ‘the moral is to the physical as three to one’? Every student of COIN knows the Maoist proposition that insurgency is ‘80 per cent political and 20 per cent military’. So, give or take 5 per cent, what’s the difference between Bonaparte and Mao? It really is quite hard to pin down what is truly distinctive about this literature.
• For my money this is the biggest mistake in the theoretical literature on COIN is this:

The asymmetrical situation has important effects on propaganda. The insurgent, having no responsibility, is free to use every trick… Consequently, propaganda is a powerful weapon for him… The counterinsurgent is tied to his responsibilities and to his past, and for him, facts speak louder than words… For him, propaganda can be no more than a secondary weapon, valuable only if intended to inform and not to fool.

Of course you all recognize the source. There is much wisdom in what Galula says; that the counterinsurgent must not lie too boldly, if at all, (lest he cause long-term pain to his credibility for short-term gain) ought to be regarded as something akin to a scientific law. However, I think this is far too reactive a mindset for the counterinsurgent to have and, on this point, I think Galula is plain wrong. The facts speak louder than words for both sides; in crude terms, the job of the counterinsurgent propagandist is to make the insurgent stand up for his actions (see Bolt and Betz, Propaganda of the Deed 2008).  

• Here in Britain people tend to talk a lot about the successful resolution of the Malaya Emergency, for obvious reasons; but really on so many levels France’s failure in Algeria is more instructive for today—the paradox of the French beating the FLN tactically yet having no choice but to abandon the fight to them strategically, the urban nature of the campaign, the internationalization of the conflict through manipulation of the media and international institutions, and so on, are all very relevant still.
• I know this is a sweeping statement (I did say this was the postcard version) but between Callwell’s Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice in 1906 and FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency in 2006 the differences are not huge. Yes, I know the former went in for putatively educative depredation against recalcitrant savages when push came to shove whereas the latter counsels against such measures (Callwell in today’s parlance is ‘enemy-centric’ as opposed to the ‘population-centric’ approach favoured in FM 3-24). But Callwell also memorably called small wars ‘protracted, thankless, and invertebrate’ and advised that they be avoided if at all possible which is still sage advice. And I think that he nails the fundamental asymmetry of insurgency which lies in the fact that while tactics favour the regular army strategy favours the irregular. This is because, he says:

   In spite of sea power, in spite of the initiative, in spite of science, and in spite of the wealth, of the reserve of fighting strength and of the resources at their back, the trained and organized armies of the civilized country have undoubtedly the worst of it as regards strategical conditions, and that it is so is actually in a large degree traceable to the very causes which establish their tactical superiority, and which eventually lead as a rule to the triumph of the forces of civilization. For it is the elaborate organization of the regular troops which cramps their freedom in the theatre of war, and it is the excellence of their armament and the completeness of their kit which over-burdens them with non-combatant services and helps to tie them to their base. (85)

  Which is as true today as it ever was. In my opinion, this observation of Callwell’s alone makes it worth bracketing any study of counterinsurgency with him. But the British approach to small wars in something relatively close to its modern form is delineated more or less comprehensively in Charles Gwynn’s Imperial Policing (1934). The essential principles are these: civil power is supreme; force must be used discriminately; and, coordination of civil and military instruments is vital. I would bet that most KOW readers familiar with the state of the art of the COIN debate would be familiar with all those principles whether or not they knew anything about Gwynn’s work and that is because fundamentally the COIN literature is pretty repetitive.

A couple of years ago Andrew Bacevich wrote in ‘The Islamic Way of War‘ in the American Conservative magazine that the apparent advantages of Western conventional forces had been undercut by new enemies employing a panoply of techniques including terrorism (ie., intimidation) as well as ‘propaganda, subversion, popular agitation, economic warfare, and hit-and-run attacks on regular forces’. His plainly put conclusion was that ‘The sun has set on unquestioned Western military dominance. Bluntly, the East has solved the riddle of the Western Way of War.’ But really how ‘new’ is this? What did Callwell say again? Anybody else remember (as the reviewer of my chapter did) Ho Chi Minh saying in 1945 that the ‘White man was dead in Asia’?

Having said all that, 2006 may represent something of a watershed; it’s probably too soon to tell but my hunch is that the stuff which John Mackinlay and David Kilcullen are writing about global insurgency is significant. Kilcullen’s Accidental Guerrilla has garnered a ton of deserved praise. And having seen several chapters of Mackinlay’s book The Insurgent Archipelago which is about to be published, I think he pushes the envelope further still. He reckons that there has been a sea change from Maoist to ‘Post-Maoist’ insurgency: Maoist insurgent objectives were national whereas Post-Maoist objectives are global; the population involved in Maoist insurgency was manageable (albeit with difficulty) whereas the populations (note the plural) involved in Post-Maoist insurgency are dispersed and unmanageable; the centre of gravity in Maoist insurgency was local or national whereas in Post-Maoist insurgency it is multiple and possibly irrelevant; the all important subversion process in Maoist insurgency was top-down whereas in Post-Maoist insurgency it is bottom-up; Maoist insurgent organization was vertical and structured whereas in Post-Maoism it is an unstructured network; and whereas Maoist insurgency took place in a real and territorial context the Post-Maoist variant’s vital operational environment is virtual. My question is whether this is still insurgency or has it evolved into something else sufficiently different as to be actually something else?

Personally, I think there are two really exciting new areas of insurgency research. The first is concept of the ‘virtual dimension’ which I have written and thought about quite a bit (in Betz (2008) ‘The Virtual Dimension of Contemporary Insurgency and Counterinsurgency’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 19 (4), 513–543) although my starting point is really Rupert Smith’s insightful observation in The Utility of Force that in ‘wars amongst the people’ the theatre commander actually operates as a kind of ‘producer’ (as in film or theatre):

We are conducting operations now as though we are on a stage, in an amphitheatre or Roman arena. There are two or more sets of players—both with a producer, the commander, each of whom has his own idea of the script. On the ground, in the actual theatre, they are all on the stage and mixed up with people trying to get to their seats, the stage hands, the ticket collectors and the ice-cream vendors. At the same time they are being viewed by a partial and factional audience, comfortably seated, its attention focused on that part of the auditorium is noisiest, watching the events by peering down the drinking straws of their soft-drink packs – for that is the extent of the vision of a camera (Smith, 2006: 284–5).

I think that Thomas Rid is on to similar topic in War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age but I haven’t read the book yet. (Anybody from Praeger reading this? How about a review copy?) I think it gets to the heart of the biggest problem in the COIN literature, see point 3 above.

The second is the study of insurgency, or more specifically ‘Islamic Activism’, using social movement theory. I have been heavily influenced by Quintan Wiktorowicz’s Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach. SMT is a new area for me but I have really been struck by how illuminating the study of the way social movements ‘frame’ issues in order to animate their adherents and structure their responses to events is of the way that insurgent groups also operate.