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| Volume XIV, Fall 2007, Number 3 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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The United States Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual with forewords
by General David H. Petraeus, Lt. General James F. Amos and Lt. Colonel John
A. Nagl, with a new introduction by Sarah Sewall. University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Jeffrey Record
Professor of strategy, Air War College; author of Beating Goliath: Why Insurgencies
Win, and Dark Victory: America's Second War against Iraq
Probably no U.S. Army doctrinal manual in history has been so eagerly awaited as the December
2006 Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency. The University of Chicago Press has subsequently
reprinted it with a foreword by Lt. Colonel John Nagl, an influential proponent and
practitioner of the new counterinsurgency doctrine, and an introduction by Sarah Sewall, director
of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
As the United States approaches the fifth year of an utterly unnecessary war, and as a desperate White House embarks yet again on a "new" strategy to salvage America's fortunes in Iraq, the scope of perhaps the worst-ever U.S. foreign policy debacle becomes increasingly apparent. By destroying both the Baathist regime in Baghdad and (unintentionally) the Iraqi state, the United States forced Iraqis to fall back on sectarian, tribal, clan, and other sub-state loyalties. Coupled with the U.S. occupation's failure to construct a new Iraqi state commanding national political legitimacy and capable of providing basic services - e.g., potable water, garbage collection, electricity, employment, security- the result was a fragmentation of political authority that portends Iraq's disintegration.
The need for a new doctrine - and a new approach to the war in Iraq - was self-evident to a
growing number of Army officers with service in Iraq, most notably General David Petraeus, the
present commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. As Nagl notes in his introduction,
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When an insurgency began in Iraq in the late summer of 2003, the Army was unprepared
to fight it. The American Army of 2003 was organized, designed, trained, and equipped to
defeat another conventional army….It was, however, unprepared for an enemy who
understood that it could not hope to defeat the U.S. Army on a conventional battlefield,
and who therefore chose to wage war against America from the shadows (p. xiii).
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The manual's preface declares:
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Counterinsurgency operations generally have been neglected in broader American military
doctrine and national security policies since the end of the Vietnam War over 30 years
ago. This manual is designed to reverse that trend. It is also designed to merge traditional
approaches to COIN [counterinsurgency] with the realities of a new international
arena shaped by technological advances, globalization, and the spread of extremist
ideologies - some of them claiming the authority of a religious faith (p. xlvii).
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Counterinsurgency accomplishes both objectives by challenging much of what is sacrosanct
about the American way of war. America's thoroughly conventional military remains focused on
large-scale warfare against the regular forces of other states. As such, it has been poorly prepared
to deal effectively with non-state enemies practicing irregular warfare. Thus, the Army failed in
Vietnam largely because it rejected counterinsurgency in favor of the big-unit, firepower-intensive
conventional war it wanted to fight. And thus, the Army quickly polished off Saddam Hussein's
regular ground forces only to be stumped when Iraqi conventional military resistance unexpectedly
morphed into an insurgency. Predictably, the Army reacted as it had in Vietnam: it sought to defeat
the insurgency by killing insurgents, completely ignoring the dominant political dimensions of the
struggle and the disastrous strategic effects of collateral damage. The Army's initial approach to
counterinsurgency likely created far more insurgents than it removed from combat, focusing as it did on destroying the enemy and using excessive firepower, indiscriminate searches and roundups
(44,000 of the 65,000 suspected Iraqi insurgents or sectarian killers detained in Iraq since the war
began in March 2003 have been released), and humiliating and physically abusive interrogation
techniques.
Counterinsurgency thoroughly examines the nature of insurgency and calls for a return to the
long-established principles of successful counterinsurgency, including the centrality of intelligence,
the primacy of political over military responses, the integration of political and military
responses, the primacy of population protection over the killing of insurgents, and the imperatives
of using the minimal force necessary and establishing security under the rule of law. To underscore
the utterly different requirements of conventional war and counterinsurgency - "the conduct of
COIN is counterintuitive to the traditional U.S. view of war" (p. 47) - the manual postulates the
following "paradoxes" of counterinsurgency operations:
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"Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be." |
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"Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is." |
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"Sometimes, doing nothing is the best reaction." |
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"Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot." |
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"The host nation doing something tolerably is normally better than us doing it well." |
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"If a tactic works this week, it might not work next week; if it works in this province, it might not work in the next." |
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"Tactical success guarantees nothing." |
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"Many important decisions are not made by generals" (pp. 48-51).
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What a radical break from the popular Weinberger-Powell doctrine of assured victory through
the politically unconstrained application of overwhelming force!
Counterinsurgency is an impressive achievement. It is intellectually rich and, given the
Army's longstanding institutional hostility to counterinsurgency, politically courageous. It
explicitly recognizes the dangers of conventional military responses to sub-conventional military
threats and the fact that our intelligent enemies are resorting to such threats precisely because of
our conventional military supremacy. Is it simply coincidence that all of America's failed post-
World War II military interventions - in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia and (probably) Iraq - have
come at the hands of enemies practicing protracted irregular warfare, enemies who have compensated
for their material inferiority by crafting a superior strategy and mustering a superior political
will to fight on? The manual is certainly, and deservedly, an affront to such primitives as the
tabloid pundit Ralph Peters and the venomous Ann Coulter, who believe only the Romans got
counterinsurgency right. (Plagued by an insurgent-infested population? Not to worry. The
solution is simple: slaughter all the males and sell the women and children into slavery. Poof! No
more insurgency.)
Yet a new field manual does not a revolution make. As Sarah Sewall points out,
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Doctrine is only a precursor to change, not its guarantor. As every student of Max Weber
and bureaucracy knows, innovation does not come easily to large institutions. And this
field manual is not simply a refinement on the margins of U.S. practice; given where the
military has been since Vietnam, it is paradigm shattering. Thus, while the doctrine
revision is a signal accomplishment, it is not sufficient to effect a real transformation of the
armed forces (p. xxxv).
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Counterinsurgency challenges America's very approach to war (and here I am indebted to
Colin S. Gray): apolitical, astrategic, ahistorical, optimistic, problem-solving, culturally ignorant,
technologically dependent, firepower-focused, large-scale, profoundly regular, impatient and
casualty sensitive. Moreover, for the foreseeable future, the very word counterinsurgency will be
joined at the hip to our disastrous war in Iraq. "No more Iraqs!" will mean "No more
counterinsurgency!" There is also an unbridgeable chasm separating the inherently protracted
nature of counterinsurgency and our domestic political tolerance for it. The counterinsurgency
clock is calibrated by the decade, whereas the American domestic political clock is dominated by
the two-year election cycle. It is certainly realistic to approach counterinsurgency as long war, but
the American electorate is not long on patience for such war unless it is manifestly necessary,
which the Vietnam and Iraq wars were not. (Over 60 percent of the American electorate believes the
Iraq War was a mistake, and the recent defections of Senate Republican bulls Richard Lugar, John
Warner and Pete Domenici from the White House line on the war portend the isolation of the
president within his own party on the signature issue of his presidency.)
I have argued elsewhere (in The American Way of War: Cultural Barriers to Successful
Counterinsurgency, a 2006 Cato Institute monograph) that American strategic culture is so hostile
to the performance of successful counterinsurgency that we should avoid direct military intervention
in foreign internal wars. We are no good at these kinds of wars, so why should we risk
involvement in them except in situations of extreme necessity? I also believe the experience of the
Iraq War will exert, for perhaps a decade or two, as chilling an effect on America's use of force
abroad as did the Vietnam War. As there was a Vietnam syndrome, so too will there be an Iraq
syndrome (see my "Back to the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine?" in the fall 2007 issue of the Strategic
Studies Quarterly).
I am further persuaded that the Army will walk away from counterinsurgency after Iraq, just as
it did after Vietnam. The new religion of "smart" counterinsurgency may be spreading among some
of the Army's best and brightest officers, but it is unlikely to be internalized by the resource-preoccupied
institutional Army. Even in Iraq, observes Sewall, "Nothing prevents the field
manual's prescriptions from being ignored or even used to mask conduct that is counter to its
precepts" (p. xxxvi). More to the point, conventional war remains the Army's cultural comfort zone,
and it is a far more potent budgetary claim on resources, especially on big-ticket weapons programs,
than the inglorious counterinsurgency mission.
What of the Iraq War itself? Will Counterinsurgency, now put into practice by Petraeus, make
a difference? Surely, it is too early to tell, although one suspects that the new counterinsurgency
may be four years too late and a couple of hundred thousand troops short. Operation Iraqi
Freedom may have been doomed from the start by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's
arrogant insistence on an invasion force too small to seize control of Iraq and by U.S. occupation
proconsul L. Paul Bremer's mindless dissolution of Iraq's regular army. Even a favorable turnaround
in the military situation would count for little in the end, absent the Iraqi government's
resolution of such outstanding political issues as the distribution of power between the regions
and the central government, de-Bathification reform, the sharing out of oil and oil revenue, the
establishment of provincial election laws and provincial authorities, amnesty policy, militia disarmament,
and evenhanded law enforcement by Iraqi security forces. Counterinsurgency, it is said, is 80
percent political and only 20 percent military. If that is so, then the heavy lifting in Iraq lies both
ahead and out of our hands.
Counterinsurgency grasps the great lesson that the Pentagon failed to learn in Vietnam and,
unfortunately, may forget after Iraq:
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Western militaries…falsely believe that armies trained to win large conventional wars are
automatically prepared to win small, unconventional ones. In fact, some capabilities required
for conventional success - for example, the ability to execute operational maneuver and
employ massive firepower - may be of limited utility or even counterproductive in COIN
operations. Nonetheless, conventional forces beginning COIN operations often try to use
these capabilities to defeat insurgents; they almost always fail (p. lii).
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Counterinsurgency deserves a wide audience. Together with Steven Metz's Rethinking
Insurgency (Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, June 2007), it offers the reader
acute insights into the nature of modern insurgency and counterinsurgency.
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