Modern Military Strategy

by Elinor C Sloan

  Box 5.2 Does population-centric counterinsurgency work?

  • Population-centric counterinsurgency aims to win the hearts and minds of the local population as a means of counteracting the influence of insurgents.

  • The idea is to provide security, economic assistance and good governance, thereby encouraging the population to align with the counterinsurgent and forcing insurgents to fight in the open, where they are exposed to counterinsurgent firepower.

  • In early 2007, in response to the growing insurgency in Iraq, the United States dramatically increased the number of troops in Iraq, a measure that became known as ‘the surge’.

  • Beginning in mid-2007 violence in Iraq started to subside and casualties decreased significantly. The view quickly spread that the surge and the US Army’s new emphasis on population-centric counterinsurgency, under the leadership of General David Petraeus, was responsible.

  • A counter perspective put forward by Colonel Gian Gentile is that the reduced violence had little to do with the surge and the new American approach. Rather, among other political changes in Iraq, it was the alliance of Sunni groups with the Americans after progressively – over several years – becoming discontented with al Qaeda which led to the reduced violence and improved security situation.

  • Similarly, Douglas Porch argues the surge had almost no impact on the strategic dynamic within Iraq, which was dominated by the consolidation of Shiite power and the Sunni reaction to this consolidation.

  • Gentile argues that the perceived ‘success’ of the surge in Iraq led America to pursue the same strategy in Afghanistan, starting in 2009 under General Stanley McChrystal, and then under Petraeus in 2010/2011.

  • But the violence in Afghanistan actually increased after the surge in Afghanistan and by the time the major international effort withdrew in 2011 Taliban activity had grown significantly.

  • Porch points out that within a short time of arriving in Afghanistan even Petraeus recognized the ‘vacuity of sunny COIN hearts formulae’ in a place that was so backward, fanaticized and plagued with porous borders, and fell back on decapitation and scorched-earth tactics supported by warlords.60

  • For Gentile, a better strategy in Afghanistan would have been a limited one of militarily destroying al Qaeda in early 2002 with a small force concentrated against remaining strongholds.

  See: Gian P. Gentile, Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency (New York: The New Press, 2013); Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

  The third theme in Gentile’s strategic thought is that America’s pursuit of population-centric counterinsurgency unwisely crowded out other, perhaps better, means of addressing insurgency and instability. This aspect of Gentile’s thinking is the least developed. He states ‘sometimes the best approach to dealing with a problem of insurgency is not necessarily a focus on the people per se but on the insurgent enemy’,61 and he points out both that the British won in Malaya in the 1950s because they ‘crushed the Communist insurgents militarily’,62 and that the Tamil Tigers were defeated by military action on the part of the Sri Lankan military.63 He therefore appears to favour direct military strikes against insurgents as the best way to address an insurgency, and if so is representative of the ‘annihilation of the insurgents’ approach to counterinsurgency that Nagl juxtaposed against the ‘appealing to the loyalty of the people’ strategy.

  Hybrid warfare

  Even as counterinsurgency dominated the debate of the 2000s there emerged, and has continued, a growing literature on so-called ‘hybrid warfare’. The term was first used in scholarly work describing the nature of the mid-1990s war in Chechnya,64 but was later popularized by retired US Marine Corps officer Frank Hoffman who, in discussing the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, argued that Hezbollah used a ‘hybrid’ combination of conventional and irregular warfare strategies to achieve its objectives.65 Future contingencies, he argued, are likely to be characterized by a fusion of warforms, of traditional and irregular tactics. From this perspective conventional and irregular war are not distinct challenges but rather dual threats which will both be present in any given conflict.

  Hoffman later defined hybrid wars as being those that ‘incorporate a range of different modes of warfare, including conventional capabilities, irregular tactics and formations, terrorist acts … and criminal disorder’.66 The term ‘hybrid’ is used to capture both the threats’ organization and means. Organizationally, there may be forces with a traditional hierarchical structure, working alongside decentralized cells and networked tactical units. The means involved may include modern military capabilities like portable air-to-surface missiles, along with ‘low-level’ tactics like ambushes and improvised explosive devices. Alternatively, states could blend high-tech capabilities like anti-satellite weapons, with terrorism and cyberwar.67

  Critics contend that hybrid wars and threats are not new and that, historically, almost all wars have been ‘hybrid’ to some degree. But for Hoffman, the earlier phenomenon is one of ‘compound wars’, not hybrid wars. Compound wars are those that have significant irregular and regular components fighting under unified direction, but traditionally the irregular and regular components occurred in different theatres or in distinctly different formations.68 In hybrid wars the forces become blurred into the same force in the same battlespace; that is to say, they go beyond strategic coordination to having forces fight alongside each other and acting in a coherent, coordinated way. Hybrid wars may be waged by state or non-state actors. The concept was first used to describe non-state actors developing conventional force characteristics and capabilities, such as in Chechnya and Lebanon. More recently it has been used to describe the nature of Russia’s intervention into Crimea and Ukraine wherein Russian forces operate in conjunction with paramilitary and civilian insurgent units using asymmetric, indirect methods.69

  Conclusion

  Revolutionary war, including insurgency and counterinsurgency, is relatively new as a fully developed concept. T.E. Lawrence’s recollections from the early interwar period were the first to include principles of successful insurgency activity, but it is to Mao and his World War Two-era writings that we attribute the beginnings of comprehensive strategic thought on the insurgency component of revolutionary war. The conventional nature of that war, as well as the Korean War that followed, meant that counterinsurgency doctrine did not immediately appear. Only in the mid-1960s, after a decade or more of conflicts associated with decolonization, was there substantial strategic thinking on counterinsurgency, notably by Galula but also by Thompson.

  The strategic thought of Krepinevich in the 1980s and Nagl and Petraeus in the 2000s is important because, even more so than that of Galula, it integrates both the insurgent and counterinsurgent perspectives. But they are consciously housed in the concepts and ideas of earlier strategic thinkers – secure the population, isolate insurgents, address porous borders and safe havens, integrate military and civilian approaches, etc. – and therefore do not so much offer new strategic thinking as highlight and remind us (again) of the need to pay attention to this enduring form of war. That the classics remain relevant is indicated by the fact that it was possible to read, in 2010, of Lawrence of Arabia’s ideas guiding the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan; of the ‘new’ approach adopted by the former commander of forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, being to consolidate the populous urban areas as a means of establishing and then spreading stability; and of a key barrier to winning in Afghanistan being its porous borders where insurgents seek safe haven. Gentile and Porch offer a useful rejoinder to proponents of population-based counterinsurgency, making a convincing case that the approach is far from proven in contemporary and historic circumstances, and may be outright wrong.

  Van Creveld argues cogently that insurgency and counterinsurgency will continue to command the world’s attention, even as his assertion, shared by Lind, that
the state’s place as the predominant international actor is waning has proven to be at a minimum premature. New wars scholarship takes the erosion of the state as a starting point and contrasts player objectives with those of guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency. Although it arguably does not actually identify a new phenomenon, new wars thinking deepens our understanding of civil war and draws our attention to the difficulties faced by state-based actors in responding. Hammes and Kilcullen bring revolutionary doctrine into the modern, globalized, information age, drawing out a number of critical new factors: some contemporary insurgencies are ‘global’ in that they are not focused, as was the case in the past, on a single country or region; some are even ‘beyond global’ in that they do not have any definable, real-world, political objectives; facilitated by globalization, these actors may seek to strike enemy territory directly, bypassing regional military operations altogether; others focus on their home territory but are merely reacting against the activities and presence of an external power; in most cases the insurgent leadership does not exist in a traditional hierarchical sense but is highly networked; and today’s insurgencies are even more political than in the past, taking full advantage of the instantaneous and pervasive nature of modern media.

  Yet although the information era has added a new dimension to insurgency and counterinsurgency, at its core it remains essentially unchanged. Key tenets include securing the population using non-kinetic means while balancing this with highly discriminate, direct combat strikes against the small minority who will always be in favour of the insurgency; where security has been established, integrating economic, political and social measures at the earliest opportunity, i.e. adopting a comprehensive, whole-of-government approach (see Chapter 6); sealing off safe havens and addressing porous borders; and devising measures to sever linkages between insurgent theatres. By the second decade of the twenty-first century most or all of these principles had been relearned and fully absorbed by the political and military leadership addressing modern insurgencies. But counterinsurgency (like insurgency) takes a long time. The challenge, as ever, lies in finding the patience and political will to sustain in practice, over time, the multifaceted elements of counterinsurgency theory.

  Questions

  1 What are the important aspects of the strategic thought of Callwell, Galula and Thompson on counterinsurgency?

  2 What are the key elements of the strategic thought of Lawrence and Mao on insurgency?

  3 What does the term ‘non-trinitarian war’ refer to and how does it relate to irregular war?

  4 What is 4GW and in what ways does it (or does it not) reflect something truly new in the contemporary security environment?

  5 How would one distinguish between traditional concepts of insurgency/counterinsurgency and the idea of ‘new war’?

  6 What are the major contributions of strategic thought on insurgency and counterinsurgency in the 2000s, especially that of Kilcullen and Petraeus?

  7 Based on the historical record, does population-centric counterinsurgency ‘work’?

  8 What is ‘hybrid warfare’ and how can we see the hybrid warfare concept exhibited in contemporary conflicts?

  Notes

  1 C.E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, third edition (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996, first published 1906), 21.

  2 David J. Kilcullen, ‘Countering Global Insurgency’, Journal of Strategic Studies 28:4 (August 2005), 603.

  3 John Shy and Thomas W. Collier, ‘Revolutionary War’, in Peter Paret, Ed., Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 817.

  4 US Army, The U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007) (hereafter known as FM 3–24), 2.

  5 Kilcullen, 603.

  6 Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1991), 42.

  7 Callwell, 21.

  8 References from this section are taken from T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (London: Jonathan Cape, 1940), 199, 202, 345–6.

  9 Mao Tse-tung, On Guerrilla Warfare, translated by Samuel B. Griffith (New York, NY: Praeger, 1961), 42–43.

  10 Griffith, Introduction to On Guerrilla Warfare, 20–22.

  11 Mao Tse-tung, 44, 92–93.

  12 Ibid., 46, 52–53, 98.

  13 FM 3–24, 2.

  14 David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (New York, NY: Praeger, 1964), 35.

  15 The full list is: (1) concentrate enough armed forces to destroy or expel the main body of armed insurgents; (2) detach for the area sufficient troops to oppose an insurgent’s comeback in strength; (3) establish contact with the population and control its movements to cut off its links with the guerrillas; (4) destroy the local insurgent political organization; (5) set up new provisional local authorities using elections; (6) test the authorities by assigning tasks, replace incompetents and organize self-defence units; (7) educate the leaders; (8) win over or suppress the last insurgent remnants. See Galula, 80.

  16 Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency (New York, NY: Praeger, 1966), 50–57.

  17 Andrew F. Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 7–15.

  18 Andrew F. Krepinevich, The War in Iraq: The Nature of Insurgency Warfare (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, 2 June 2004), 1, 3, 6.

  19 Van Creveld, 49.

  20 Ibid., 59.

  21 William S. Lind, Keith M. Nightengale, John Schmitt, Joseph W. Sutton and G.I. Wilson, ‘The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation’, Military Review (October 1989), 6.

  22 Ibid., 8–9.

  23 William S. Lind, ‘Parting Thoughts, for Now’, 15 December 2009, http://original.antiwar.com, accessed June 2010.

  24 Thomas X. Hammes, ‘War Evolves into the Fourth Generation’, Contemporary Security Policy 26:2 (August 2005), 198.

  25 Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (St. Paul, MN: Zenith Press, 2004), 2.

  26 John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, The Advent of Netwar (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1996), 1, 3, 6, 9, 21.

  27 John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, ‘Cyberwar is Coming!’, Comparative Strategy 12 (1993), 144–145.

  28 Colonel T.X. Hammes, ‘Fourth Generation Warfare Evolves, Fifth Emerges’, Military Review (May–June 2007), 15.

  29 James J. Wirtz, ‘Politics with Guns: A Response to T.X. Hammes’, Contemporary Security Policy 26:2 (August 2005), 224.

  30 Edward N. Luttwak, ‘A Brief Note on “Fourth-Generation Warfare”’, Contemporary Security Policy 26:2 (August 2005), 227.

  31 Bart Schuurman, ‘Clausewitz and the “New Wars” Scholars’, Parameters (Spring 2010), 90.

  32 Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 76.

  33 Herfried Munkler, The New Wars (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2002), 29.

  34 Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2005), 3.

  35 Richard H. Shultz, Jr and Andrea J. Dew, Insurgents, Terrorists and Militias: The Warriors of Contemporary Combat (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 37.

  36 Smith, 269–270, 397.

  37 Kaldor, 113–114, 124–125.

  38 Smith, 384–385.

  39 Edward Newman, ‘The “New Wars” Debate: A Historical Perspective Is Needed’, Security Dialogue 35:2 (June 2004), 179.

  40 Schuurman, 95.

  41 David J. Kilcullen, ‘Countering Global Insurgency’, Journal of Strategic Studies 28:4 (August 2005), 604.

  42 David Kilcullen, ‘Counter-insurgency Redux’, Survival 48:4 (Winter 2006–2007), 115–116.

  43 David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009), 35–38.

  44 Kilcull
en, ‘Counter-insurgency Redux’, 117.

  45 James J. Schneider, ‘T.E. Lawrence and the Mind of an Insurgent’, Army (July 2005), 36.

  46 Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla, 264–269.

  47 FM 3–24, 3.

  48 Fareed Zakaria, ‘The General: An Interview with David Petraeus’, Newsweek, 4 January 2009.

  49 FM 3–24, 8.

  50 Ibid., 111, 328.

  51 John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), xxii.

  52 Ibid., 26.

  53 Ibid., 191.

  54 Amitai Etzioni, ‘COIN: A Study of Strategic Illusion’, Small Wars & Insurgencies 26:3 (2015), 348–349; Gian P. Gentile, Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency (New York: The New Press, 2013), 47–52.

  55 John A. Nagl, ‘COIN Fights: A Response to Etzioni’, Small Wars & Insurgencies 26: 3 (2015), 379.

  56 Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).

  57 Department of Defense, Irregular Warfare (Directive 3000.07, 28 August 2014), para. 3a.

  58 Gian P. Gentile, ‘Let’s Build an Army to Win All Wars’, Joint Force Quarterly (Spring 2009), 27.

  59 Gentile, Wrong Turn, 3.

  60 Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 321, 344.

  61 Gentile, ‘Let’s Build an Army to Win All Wars’, 31.

  62 Gentile, Wrong Turn, 6.

  63 Gian P. Gentile, ‘A Strategy of Tactics: Population-Centric COIN and the Army’, Parameters (August 2009), 11.

  64 W.J. Nemeth, ‘Future War and Chechnya: A Case for Hybrid Warfare’, Thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, June 2002 as discussed in Andras Racz, Russia’s Hybrid War: Breaking the Enemy’s Ability to Resist (Helsinki: The Finnish Institute of International Affairs, June 2015), 28.