The British have a long history of stealing/saving (depending on your perspective) historical monuments from other cultures. The Elgin Marbles are a case in point.

However, I think we can all agree that we reached a new high of historical preservation/theft with the acquisition in 2003 of the buttocks from the iconic statue of Saddam Hussein by a (now former) SAS soldier, which he wants to auction to raise funds for wounded UK soldiers.

But now apparently the Iraqi government has demanded its return, claiming that the former dictator’s shiny metal ass is…wait for it…“a cultural antiquity”.

I have no doubt that in some ways it’s a very serious issue with lots of valid argumentation on both sides…but sometimes you really do just have to laugh!

Carl Prine had some not-so-kind words to say (5,500 of them) about my (1,500 word) article on Foreign Policy’s AFPAK Channel and about arguments he ascribes to me that I did not make.

I am going to address these issues point by point (in 1,400 words). I will address the arguments rather than the people making them in the hope they might extend the same courtesy to me and others in the future. It is important that we strive to have civil debate and discussion. Vitriol clouds otherwise reasonable arguments and entrenches people in their differences.

The core argument of my FP article was that we would be ill-advised to let our counter-insurgency capabilities and lessons wither because insurgency is not going to wither. While it is important to critically appraise the policy and strategic failures of the last decade, it is also important to learn the right lessons and maintain the right capabilities to deal with future irregular armed actors that challenge American interests. That is the discussion we must have, rather than keep rehashing the angry debates of the last decade that have produced more heat than light.

Neither Prine nor Major Mike Few have disagreed with that core argument either in Prine’s blog post or Major Few’s more level-headed response in FP.

Now, onto the angry debates of the last decade…

A) Service: Prine objects to my use of the word “served,” to describe my position with the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS). When I worked for HTS, BAE Systems hired people into the training program. We then went through the U.S. Army hiring process while in training. Those of us who made that cut “transitioned” to become Department of the Army Civilians before we deployed.

I took the same oath to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution that Prine and Major Few did. And I put my life at risk in service of that oath. I worked as an Army employee in Helmand, Afghanistan, carrying a weapon, wearing ACUs, going on foot and vehicle patrols alongside soldiers, and I saw combat. I have seen first-hand the human costs of war. I certainly saw it as service to my country, but others may make up their own minds as to what is and is not “service” as they understand it.

B) Not a newbie:  Because Prine has not heard of me before and did not like my article, he called me “new to the field” and ill-read in an effort to discredit me. Let me set the record straight. I have been close to these issues for the last decade as a student, scholar, and most recently practitioner of sorts.

I was lucky enough to be introduced to the study of insurgency/revolutionary warfare and counterinsurgency a decade ago by the great Sam C. Sarkesian (who sadly passed away this year) as a student at Loyola University Chicago, which is when I bought and first read the Small Wars Manual.

After a few years in DC, I went to London and received my MA from the King’s College War Studies Department where I was fortunate to engage with and learn from David Betz (who blogs here at KoW), John Mackinlay, Theo Farrell, and Michael Rainsborough, which is why I was amused when Prine suggested I familiarize myself with David’s and John’s work.

Contrary to Prine’s remarks, not only did I read John’s book, The Insurgent Archipelago, in draft and published form, but I am thanked in the acknowledgments. I had to read Callwell, Galula, Thompson, Kitson, Mao, Giap, Marighella, Debray, and several others in an excellent course run by David and John at King’s on the evolution of insurgency and counter-insurgency.

And as far as some of the other thinkers named at LoD, I drew heavily on Leites and Wolf in one of the studies I carried out for Task Force Helmand as an HTT Social Scientist. I adapted the report and presented it recently at the biennial conference of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, the world’s premiere organization for civil-military affairs. It is currently being adapted for publication. My other work has focused largely on Islamism and terrorism.

I won’t go through my own experience and familiarity with the other scholars on Prine’s extensive list. I don’t think I should have had to mention all of these people in my original article to avoid ridicule. Moreover, I had a word limit. Bloggers often don’t.

Equally relevant is my direct experience on the ground, in support of operations in Central Helmand Province, a very troubled place. And I do appreciate Prine’s kind words about a recent talk I gave last month on that troubled place (audio here).

Needless to say, I recognize COIN theory is not “new” as such. However, in 2006 and 2007 it was framed as “new thinking,” by many observers, officers, and scholars, including one of Prine’s favored scholars (who I also enjoy reading), Steven Metz.

C) Honest misunderstanding: Prine misunderstood what I wrote when I said Colonel Gian Gentile, COIN critic extraordinaire, “represents the first, second, and final strands of anti-counterinsurgency discontent” (I refer readers back to my article for the context). This is a fair mistake. I could have written it more clearly. I was referencing the prior paragraph where I presented “five inter-related drivers” of anti-COIN discontent.

Colonel Gentile’s critiques, which I have read for years with interest (if not always agreement), generally focus on the first, second, and last of these drivers. Prine disagrees with some of these – particularly the relevance of numbers (1) and (4).

D) Armor: I am also tweaked for noting that both Major Few and Colonel Gentile are armor officers, but not noting the same about LTC (ret.) Nagl. I did know Nagl’s branch and perhaps could have noted it, but Prine is reading way too much into this.

Major Few is not as public a figure as the other people mentioned in the article. I was providing background and one of the few things his Small Wars Journal bio states is that he is “an active duty armor officer.”

For the record, I saw armor used to great effect in Helmand by the US Marines, the Brits, and the Danes. I also served under and with some amazing British armor officers and had some fun riding around with armored cav units.

E) Defense Industry: I concede the points Prine makes in his 860+ words on contractors, costs, and the defense industry. His remarks bring context and perspective to the one sentence I devoted to the subject in my article.

F) Operations and Strategy: Prine states that when I draw on Theo Farrell’s “Campaign disconnect: operational progress and strategic obstacles in Afghanistan, 2009-2011″, I am proving my ignorance of military affairs. I disagree. One of the signal failures of our Afghanistan campaign is that despite substantial operational progress, we have not gotten much closer to what we could view as a victory. In other words, we have secured a lot of key populated rural valleys and district and provincial capitals and held them with the Afghan National Security Forces. But, as Farrell argues, there is an “operational-strategic disconnect” in our Afghan campaign.

G) We don’t disagree on much: Finally, Prine and Major Few make a mistake when reading my article. They overlook the central argument and focus on my critique of Few’s unfair and unkind words about the morality of those who have participated in or developed the ideas behind counter-insurgency, in the defense industry and think tank communities. One might even argue that he was demonizing them, which is what I stated in my much-maligned comment to his blog post. He mistook this observation for a personal attack on him (when actually, the subject of my remarks was his attack on third parties).

My FP article is not about Major Few, but this seems to have gotten lost in their responses. In fact, there is so little daylight between my own argument and Major Few’s in his response on FP.com, that I am having trouble figuring out where we disagree aside from the tone we prefer to use when we communicate with others on professional matters (no matter how personally we feel about them).

But I hope this will change in the future when we inevitably encounter each other’s work.

Correction: The “new thinking” quote was in the forward to Metz’s report, written by Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr., the director of the Strategic Studies Institute. Another of people framing modern COIN as somehow “new” can be found here.

_________________________________________

The views and opinions expressed here do not represent those of the Department of the Army, Training and Doctrine Command, or the Human Terrain System.

It is ironic that my article, which lamented the ‘heated and overly personalized polemic’ about counterinsurgency, has now dragged me deep into it. I say ‘dragged’ because it is with reluctance that I reply to Carl Prine’s latest broadside against the article and my subsequent defence of it (following his initial assault). The reason I do so is Prine’s renewed attempt to undermine my integrity as a researcher – something I take seriously. Sure, my analysis can be wrong, but to accuse me of ‘cherry-picking the evidence’ is quite low. Prine, where I am wrong, kindly assume cock-up rather than conspiracy.

But that is exactly the point: Prine’s pre-existing bias about my work produces an almost ideological response. Prine refutes my suggestion that, having coined the terms ‘COINdinista’ and ‘COINtra’, he has come to view the counterinsurgency debate through this reductive lens. The terms were mere jest, he says; or perhaps he was ‘before the COINdinista and COINtra stuff before he was against it’. Regardless, Prine’s insistence in gluing his caricature of me to his caricatures of Nagl, Kilcullen and McMaster belies an undifferentiated understanding of our respective scholarship and an insistence on rejecting his prime ‘adversaries’ as an indistinguishable whole – as COINdinistas.

My crime, apparently, is writing a book on counterinsurgency that included a two-page foreword written by arch-nemesis John Nagl. This is sufficient for Prine to misinterpret the rest of my work as surge propaganda, even when my position is not so far removed from his own. For example, Prine seems to concede that local factors along with US inputs accounted for the decline in Iraqi casualties in 2006-2008, but when I say the same, he reads it as ‘COIN porn’. Prine notes that ‘tactical innovations likely helped matters’ and I write that ‘U.S. inputs were not the only or the main factor’ but nonetheless an important one. Prine, however, interprets my words as meaning ‘it was the “Surge” all along’. Clearly that is not what I said.

Why the distortion? It has to do with perspective. Prine is upset about those who glorified US inputs during the surge and overlooked local factors. I am concerned about those who consider only local factors and overlook US inputs – because I fear this will result in valuable lessons being lost and because I believe the two to be inextricably intertwined. Given our differing starting points, he approaches my scholarship with suspicion and a lot of sneer, even more so because he is convinced I am a card-carrying COINdinista with an agenda to sell.

Yet despite his suspicions and misgivings, his analysis must in the end base itself on what I actually wrote and it is here that he gets himself into trouble. The article in question is far more balanced and nuanced that he realises and if he just gave me the benefit of doubt, I suspect he would find many of my views not so far removed from his own. Anyone who reads my article carefully (please do) and then reads Prine’s tearing apart of it will notice his many factual mistakes and somewhat febrile (I used the word once, Carl, not twice so here is another one to make up the difference) interpretation of the subject-matter. Again, this is all part of this problem of polarization that stunts this conversation, not just between Prine and I, but in general.

IDPs, Surge and Security

That is not to say there are no substantive differences. One relates to the significance of IDP and refugee returns for the surge. In the article, I pointed to the 34,000 Baghdadis who had returned to the city by 2009 to challenge the notion that Baghdad had been stabilized through ethnic cleansing. If this were the case, these returning Baghdadis would probably not want to return and, if they did, they would again face their cleansers and violence would continue. To my mind, a better explanation lies in the security gains that occurred during the time of the surge. In other words, it wasn’t simply that ethnic cleansing had divided the two communities and thereby created a peaceful ‘separation of forces’.

Prine takes me to task for focusing on these 34,000 instead of the three million Iraqis still displaced by the fighting. Prine argues that the return rate is puny and therefore not indicative of anything. Worse, he argues that by focusing on the 34k I am ‘cherry-picking the evidence’.

First, I will concede I made a mistake: I wrote 34,000 ‘Baghdadis’ when in fact the statistics from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) spoke of 33,196 families, that is to say nearly 160,000 individuals. Prine might argue that this number is still too small to say anything about why these people left and subsequently returned to the city. Yet the IOM study also notes that in 2009, more than 78% of the ‘nearly 140,000 IDP families still displaced from Baghdad’ intended to return to the city. That accounts for another 700,000 returnees, excluding the 160,000 already mentioned (i.e. a total of 860,000 people). Suddenly we are no longer talking about ‘nearly 34,000 IDPs’.

On the basis of interviews with displaced Iraqis, the IOM also shows that most of those who returned to Baghdad did so because of ‘improved security’ (and IOM isn’t even a COINdinista organization!). So, as in the article, if Baghdad was stabilized through ethnic cleansing in 2006-2007, why did 860,000 Baghdadis feel safe to return or intend to return by 2009, citing ‘improved security’? Furthermore, 87.1%’ of the returnees said they would like to ‘return to their original homes within Baghdad governorate’. Maybe it is because security had actually improved, not through ethnic cleansing, but because the surge and other local factors, from late 2006 onwards, had stopped the cycle of violence.

Now, Prine will still compare the number of actual and future returnees to the millions of Iraqis still displaced. But Prine is talking about displaced people from Iraq as a whole, whereas I was talking specifically about Baghdad. Why? Not because I was cherry-picking, but because this was an article about the surge and the surge occurred mostly in Baghdad. The broader problem of Iraqi refugees and IDPs is serious and any pretense that all was milk and honey in post-surge Iraq would truly be obscene. But I never made that case and this was not my focus.

(Even then, there are some interesting commonalities: the UNHCR in 2011 found that ‘the majority of Refugees Returnees site [sic] the improved security/ political situation in their area of return as the primary reason for permanent return to Iraq’. Again this challenges the notion that the completion of ethnic cleansing caused violence to drop: if security was merely a product of combatants having been separated, conflict would naturally ensue as soon as this separation ceases to be. But I digress).

Prine also criticizes me for not responding to some of his other charges, so I will do so now.

DC Politics and the Surge

Prine says that I do not get DC politics. What I wrote was that ‘parochial concerns… within the American political scene’ colour the prevalent understanding of the surge, as it was an idea promoted by the Bush administration and resisted by Democrat lawmakers. Prine counters and suggests these Democrats eventually went along with it, lending their support to the military rather than to George Bush. I agree, though the noisy grandstanding by Democrats during the spring and autumn 2007 Petraeus hearings should not be forgotten. Even so, nothing here challenges the original point, namely that Democrats are less likely and Republicans more likely to view the surge favorably, even today, because of domestic party-political reasons. Views on the surge are therefore influenced not only by what happened in Iraq but by, as I put it, more ‘parochial concerns’. This, as I argued, makes it more difficult to have an honest discussion of the surge. Apologies, if this was not clear in the text.

The ‘old COIN bromides’

I do not actually mention the Malayan Emergency in my article yet both Col Gian Gentile and Carl Prine react to it by attacking my previous scholarship on this campaign. Very odd. Prine says I present a ‘fairytale’ version of the campaign. Gentile makes all sorts of outlandish assertions as to what I do and do not say about it. Neither of them appears to have read anything I have written on the topic. Until their allegations are more specifically based on what I actually say – and not their interpretation of it – I do not know how to respond. Certainly I have never denied, as Prine seems to suggest, that the British used violence in its campaign against the rebels, even a lot of violence at times. I do not know where Prine gets this idea from.

As to the ‘verities’ derived from this and other campaigns, substitute ‘minimal use of force’ for the ‘appropriate use of force to meet mission objectives’ and the increase in violence during the surge becomes more consistent with the counterinsurgency principles. This also goes some way toward explaining my view on the use of force in most of the Malaya campaign. Still, I will concede I should have made that substitution from the outset.

The rest of Prine’s latest text repeats accusations I feel I dealt with adequately in my last post.

That leaves just one last, last word on this issue

Prine accuses me of including a ‘nasty slur’ and the ‘cheapest ad hominem attack imaginable’ in my last post. Frankly, I do not know what he is talking about. For those of you who read the post, where is this attack? Help me out… This is actually important to me, because ad hominem attacks are not my style. To the contrary, I wanted to make it clear in my last post that ‘I still like Prine’.

On this topic, though, Prine is at his best when he attacks the arguments I and others make, not when he targets my earnestness and integrity as a researcher. I enjoy discussing my research, fiercely even, and am not married to any of my preconceptions or findings. But I find it less fun to be accused of cooking the books, purposefully manipulating information and deceiving my readers. It does not provide for a constructive discussion but entrenches pre-existing positions and creates enmities. It follows that whatever ‘slur’ Prine divined from my text was certainly not intended and I would greatly appreciate it if, in any follow-up to this post, my integrity as a researcher is not once again dragged through the mud.

Carl Prine is a consummate critic. Using a pseudonym, he long dominated the comments section at Abu Muqawama and then at Ink Spots, where he sniped at blog posts and commentators alike but also provided lengthy and often insightful analysis of the issues being discussed. He has since dropped his pseudonym but continues to offer sharp commentary and criticism over at Line of Departure. Occasionally, his readers are treated to an evisceration of an article, or more specifically an author. The titles will be as uncompromising as the content: ‘Starbuck is Wrong’, ‘Finel is Wrong’, and so on. Prine writes and argues well and is widely read, but sometimes his tongue seems far sharper than his eye. Now that your humble author is in his firing line, let’s take a moment to reflect on what he has to say about the surge and counterinsurgency.

First some background: this all relates to an article of mine published this week in PRISM, the journal of the Consortium of Complex Operations. Titled ‘Counterinsurgency after Afghanistan: A Concept in Crisis’, the article sought to do three things: to assess the increasingly disparaging narratives about counterinsurgency in the United States and beyond; to tease out the concept’s contributions and limitations; and to chart a way that would see us retain the valuable lessons of the last decade of operations.

Carl Prine severely dislikes the article and penned a lengthy critique. He has many problems with it, but in the haste to provide his readers another ‘assault and battery’, he misreads that which he is reviewing and contradicts both himself and the scholarship that he cites. In typical Prine style, let’s go through it point by point.

Prine misrepresents the COIN debate

Straight off the bat, Prine argues that my article makes points that ‘almost everyone already shares, even the most revisionist of the many critics’ of US operations. Prine’s own post would seem to contradict this claim – after all, he thinks I am ‘mostly wrong’. As to the notion of a consensus on this topic, Prine himself notes (just two sentences earlier) the ‘increasingly shrill debates over COIN, the Iraqi “surge” and the “strategy in Afghanistan’. So in fact the debate is far from settled (something further illustrated by the discussions on Small Wars Journal, World Politics Review, and beyond). This is precisely what prompted the article: an attempt to chart a middle course and establish common ground between two polarized camps, so as to reach multi-causal explanations for complex problems.

Prine sees COINdinistas under the bed

Prine suggests that I am incapable of charting such a course because I have a ‘career stake’ in promoting counterinsurgency (given the book I wrote on the topic in 2009 and the ‘counterinsurgency-friendly’ people I interviewed for it). This raises two points. First, the book was on the rise of counterinsurgency within the US military, which it welcomed as a necessary innovation given previous narrow and reductive thinking about war and the benefits of ‘transformation’. That does not, and has never meant, that counterinsurgency is itself an infallible concept, particularly given the fact that it means so many things to so many people. It should also not mean that I am now too biased to have a worthwhile opinion on the matter. Indeed, if someone who has written on the topic is automatically dismissed as ‘tipping the scales’, as Prine suggests, who should we trust instead?

In the end, trust comes down to arguments and evidence – and we’ll get into that in a moment. But this relates also to Prine’s effort to tar me as biased based on the people cited in my book. Why does Prine concentrate on the sources for a book written two years ago when reviewng an article published this week on a different (albeit related) topic? Because doing so helps Prine class me as a ‘COINdinista’ (a term Prine coined for those who ‘like’ counterinsurgency) and as a ‘COINdinista’, everything I say can be dismissed using rote arguments and accusations of buy-in. Suddenly I am a pamphleteer, a propagandist and echo chamber for the ‘dominant narrative’ spun by power-hungry generals and politically-motivated pundits.

The thing is, viewing the debate in terms of ‘COINdinista’ and its antonym, COINtras (a term also coined by Prine), is deeply unhelpful. This is an overly reductive dichotomy: counterinsurgency is not a flavour of ice-cream or a sports team, to be liked or disliked, but an ambiguous term with many meanings and facets. It should therefore be eminently possible to appreciate counterinsurgency for its contributions, all while critiquing its limitations. Indeed, this is the only way of getting beyond this tired polarization that has stifled the debate to date.

Prine doesn’t like nuance

Prine doesn’t seem to like this. He also criticises my apparent desire to ‘have it both ways’ with regard to ‘the surge’, because I argue that it is difficult, or at any rate too early, to identify one singular factor that caused the decline in casualties in Iraq at that time. It is necessary to understand the admixture of influences, including US inputs and local factors, that led to this decline. Still, the evidence so far strongly suggests that while the surge was not ‘the only or the main factor’ it was nonetheless important and provides some very relevant lessons. Its effect varied across time and space – another reason why a blanket dismissal seems so tendentious – but there is ample evidence of it having, together with other factors, affected the calculations of local actors on the ground, resulting in new political opportunities and partnerships that were fully exploited.

Prine misuses his own statistics

Speaking of the surge, Prine tries to use a Pentagon and Congressional Research Service report from 2008 to show ‘a downward slump’ in casualties beginning in December 2006, ‘three months’ before Petraeus arrived. This, Prine says, shows that Petraeus was incidental to the stabilisation of Iraq during this time: ‘by the time Petraeus arrived three months later to begin Surgifying Baghdad and environs, that toll had dropped by nearly a third’.

Now, if Prine’s loyal readers were to consult the actual report, they would see that whereas there were certainly fewer casualties in January 2007 than in the previous month, we are still talking of more than 3,500 deaths in that month alone (p. 19). Second, Petraeus arrived in early February, not March, which invalidates the point being made – though this is really a technicality. Third, even if there was a decrease in casualties in these early months of 2007, Iraq still faced, until August 2007, between 2,000 and 3,700 casualties per month. It would be interesting to hear how the people mired in that violence would react to Prine’s description of it as a ‘downward slump’ in casualties.

Still, the more fundamental point here is not to get hung up on when Petraeus arrived and whether there were 3,000 or 2,000 casualties that month, but on the subsequent reduction in casualties, by November 2007, to the 750 range and below. Thus, whereas Petraeus’ arrival signalled continuity as well as change, the ‘long-term effect [even the medium-term effect] of the shift in strategy’ was ‘undeniably stabilizing’ (a quotation from the article that Prine attacked).

So Prine’s question of ‘why the surge get credit for trends that preceded it’ is misleading. It betrays an expectation that if Petraeus did not change everything, he changed nothing at all – again leaving little space for nuance. With the surge, Petraeus elevated practices that some commanders had come to beforehand through ad hoc adaption. He incorporated these practices, along with other tenets, into a strategic-level campaign plan that was closely tailored to the political conditions, challenges and opportunities on the ground at that time.

Prine confuses history with historiography

Still, Prine is right when he points to the lack of detail in the article on the Iraq and Afghan wars. Yet as any author of a journal article or a book will know, it is simply impossible to do everything and therefore necessary to focus on specific aspects (even if this means skirting over others). In this case, the article was about the popular US historiography of the surge and of counterinsurgency, not a history of politics in Iraq and Afghanistan. As such it deals with the narratives that are emerging in the US defence community about counterinsurgency, what it achieved, what it is and how it should be remembered. This is not, in other words, an article for those seeking to learn more about Da’wa-ISCI politics, the Sadrist militias in Basra and so on. Yet this does not mean that ‘Ucko’s Afghanistan and Iraq contain no Afghans or Iraqis’ or that I do not ‘care about Iraqi or Afghan politics’; these topics are simply dealt with in other articles.

But I still like Prine

I didn’t care for Prine’s review of this article, but Prine remains a vital voice in the debate on counterinsurgency. His passion in challenging the conventional wisdom and detailed understanding of the topics on which he writes usually provide for breaths of fresh air in a debate too stodgy, insular and self-referential. His wide area of expertise, stretching far beyond Iraq to large parts of sub-Saharan Africa and probably beyond, allows him to draw from a far wider canvas than most others.

Prine is a much-needed critic and he comes armed with a sharp pen. But the quality of his argumentation is undermined by the occasional ad hominem attack and his ‘pointlessly obstinate’ approach toward some issues (his words, not mine). My recommendation: your readers demand blood, but make sure they get a full serving of brains as well.

It was Victor Hugo who said:

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come. 

That may be true, and if it is, I can tell you one thing: armies like to fight. And that is what we have seen lately–fights– surrounding a couple of ideas in particular.

Ferguson v Mishra

The Ivory Tower Soap Opera Award must go to the ongoing spat between Niall Ferguson and Pankaj Mishra.  It started in the London Review of Books with Mishra’s review ‘Watch This Man’. (I won’t summarise it; it is well worth the read: involves allegations of racism, of Leftist conspiracy, and much more…and lawyers might be involved soon.)  The battle then raged in the LRB’s Letters sections here and here.  The latest news is that it may move from writing to writs, as Ferguson has threatened legal action.  Goodness only knows where it will lead.

Gentile v Ucko

A much smaller, but somewhat more interesting spat (given that one of the protagonists is a KOW contributor), is one that is brewing between David Ucko and Gian Gentile over an idea: counterinsurgency.

Ucko published an article in PRISM which assesses the idea of counterinsurgency after Afghanistan.  Frank Hoffman blogged about it over at Small Wars Journal and then a nasty little scrap ensued in the comments section.  (Again, check them out for yourself.  Quite worth a read…no lawyers yet marshalled, though). 

In this fight, it isn’t just two armies, there are more.  Gentile throws a punch at his old sparring partner, John Nagl, while he is mixing it up with Ucko.  And then they are the bystanders.  Check out what commentator ‘carl’ had to say about Gentile’s reactions to the Ucko piece:

Sometimes you seem mostly upset because as a historian you think the wrong interpretation of events has been made. Other times you seem mostly upset because Big Army has been dissed. Other times you are upset that anybody out there can think that small wars can be won. Most times you seem upset about all of it.

Mee-ow.  And who says intellectuals are boring?

Disasters always seem to happen at the same time. During the same week that our flat had been flooded by a clogged sewage pipe, my wife and I found ourselves sitting in our third floor hotel room near Clapham Junction, mouths agape as we watched the carnage of the third night of the London riots (the worst night) playing out across the television.

Our location was no coincidence. We had started on the ground floor, but the area outside had already seen rioting and the hotel staff had kindly moved our room. So there we sat, in a horrified daze, as the reports and pictures of hooded rioters smashing their way through our local high streets streamed in:

 ‘Buildings were torched, shops ransacked, and officers attacked with makeshift missiles and petrol bombs as gangs of hooded and masked youths laid waste to streets right across the city…The sheer number of incidents – including in Hackney, Croydon, Peckham, Lewisham, Clapham and Ealing – seemingly overwhelmed the Metropolitan police’.

The next evening, we sat in front of the same television and watched with trepidation for the coming carnage. Like millions of others, we waited, breath held. And waited. And waited. Reports of a few minor incidents trickled in but nothing resembling the pandemonium of the previous night. Finally, my wife conceded: “This is boring, let’s watch something else.” It was a peculiar epitaph to a terrifying episode.

My point here is not so much to critique our society’s morbid fascination with watching violence (nor even to query why Wandsworth Council had failed to clean out the tree-roots from our apartment building’s pipes for over forty years). Instead, I would like to float one possibility about why the London riots – which had seemed so irresistible on the third night – fizzled out so quickly, namely that the rioters failed to excel in the areas traditionally associated with durable insurgencies and the police employed appropriate counterinsurgent methods.

This is not to say (as others have done, both academically and in the blogosphere), that the riots can be understood as an insurgency – they were evidentially not – merely that we can glean at least another dimension of understanding by analysing them through a counterinsurgent lens.

Take popular support. The rioters did have some support, particularly within lower-income council estates. Moreover, the act of looting seemed to hold a degree of universal appeal: numerous people joined the riots entirely on impulse, perhaps based on the lure of ‘sticking it to the man’ or merely the chance to grab free stuff. The case of Natasha Reid, who looted a television (despite already owing a larger one), was iconic.

Generally, however, the rioters failed to secure much backing. Their wanton violence and terrorism caused fear, revulsion and anger: the image of a Croydon furniture store transformed into a gargantuan bonfire or an injured boy being mugged by youths feigning to give assistance were particularly striking. Two examples show the public’s reaction. The first were the civic rallies, where members of the public grouped together to clean up the damage, signal their opposition and even establish vigilante groups. The second was a YouGov poll:

‘Asked if the police should be able to use various tactics in response to riots provoked some pretty gung ho responses – 90% of people thought they should be able to use water cannon, 84% mounted police, 82% curfews, 78% tear gas, 72% tasers, 65% plastic bullets, 33% live ammunition. 77% thought that the army should be brought in’.

(Yes, you read it right – one-in-three people wanted the police to start gunning down civilians in London’s streets!)

This had a huge impact. While the rioters were initially able to conceal their planning within local estates and private homes, the absence of a wider popular base meant they could not fade back into the population for sanctuary afterwards. Just five days after the third night, the disgusted public had called in to report 1,271 people and 745 arrests had been made. Some rioters were so ashamed of their own actions that they turned themselves in. This helped break the back of the movement.

Next, there’s unifying cause. The rioters came from all walks of life, many shared no common social, cultural or economic background, and they lacked a unifying cause. Numerous grievances and short-term goals existed, including poverty; funding cuts to lower-income groups (such as the removal of educational allowances); racial profiling; the death of Mark Duggan; and an opportunistic greed for stolen goods. However, the riots failed to provide a vision about how these grievances would be addressed, or supply any ideology to drive longer term action. This robbed the movement of momentum.

The rioters also lacked clear leadership. Some were loyal to existing gangs, who had formed temporary truces but were never going to be able to transcend factionalism in the longer term. Most, however, held no ties to any leader or group. Without a central leadership, there was no one to plan, rally or coordinate future actions. This meant that once the initial spontaneity was lost, the movement rapidly lost the cohesion and organisation it needed to endure.

Then there’s the terrain. To some extent, the rioters capitalised on the complexity of London to hit different areas across the city without warning. They utilised the streets to surge back and forth, amassed where the police were weak and quickly moved on when the police increased their presence. However, their ability to hide later was hindered by the urban environment. In many cases the police already knew where the troublemakers had come from and were quick to track them down in the days that followed. Similarly, the hostility of the populace prevented even previously unknown participants from hiding for long.

Copy-cat riots did occur in other UK cities and these had the potential to disrupt the level of policing available for London and sap overall public will. Generally, though, the riots were condemned outside of London and the rioters were left firmly isolated (except perhaps for a rather tongue-in-cheek endorsement from Colonel Gaddafi).

Finally, there’s the counterinsurgent effort. Generally, the police did a good job. For example, by encouraging the public to stay clear of the streets, they reduced the availability of ‘human terrain’ and forced the rioters to engage in conventional set pieces. Towards the end of the third night, the police used ‘shock and awe’ tactics (such as armoured van charges), which helped to break up large crowds of rioters and on the fourth night they deployed massively increased numbers of riot police to deter and break up attempts by rioters to undertake large-scale actions. During the days, they conducted systematic search and apprehend missions that were based on local intelligence, public tip offs, facial recognition software and dogged policing. This all prevented the movement from securing a critical mass (e.g. by securing a set area of territory or specific population to hide in). While it is true that the police’s use of rigid formations disappointed the public – who could see their local communities being torched and looted while the police seemingly did nothing – it was nonetheless the correct approach. By remaining in organised groups, they maintained cohesion and avoided being surrounded by the rioters and suffering the same tragic fate as PC Blakelock during the 1985 Broadwater Farm riots.

Three months have passed since that explosive week, and we have learned one incredibly important lesson: always check the pipes thoroughly before moving into a new apartment. That seems to be about the extent of it though. There has been shockingly little discourse about how the riots were fought and why the government was able to restore order so quickly. This is a missed opportunity. In 2004, John Nagl suggested that the British were successful in restoring order to Malaya because we learned from our mistakes. Perhaps it is time we re-examined the 2011 London riots, this time to learn from our success.

Grégor Mathias has recently published a groundbreaking book examining David Galula’s operations in Algeria. The book, aptly titled Galula in Algeria: Counterinsurgency Practice versus Theory, is based on careful archival research and previously untapped sources describing Galula’s own experience with counterinsurgency. Given that much of today’s counterinsurgency theory is based on Galula’s own writing, the task of assessing his approach to these types of operations seems long overdue.

This gap has been amply filled by Grégor Mathias – a researcher at the Service Historique de la Défense and professor at the Collège Foch – Haguenau in France. The book has already attracted some attention over at Small Wars Journal (thanks to Mike Few) and is sure to fall on fertile ground both among counterinsurgency proponents and detractors.

Given the above, I was honoured when I was asked to write a foreword for this new volume. Available as of late October, the book’s publishers have now agreed to feature its foreword here on Kings of War – to trigger a discussion about the book, about Galula as a commander, and about what his record says about the counterinsurgency principles we have inherited from him.

The foreword follows…. and you can buy the book itself here.

Foreword to Grégor Mathias, Galula in Algeria: Counterinsurgency Practice versus Theory (Praeger & ABC-Clio, 2011), 143p.
by David H. Ucko

Mark Twain apparently quipped that while the past does not repeat itself, it certainly rhymes. So, thirty years after it had left the jungles of Vietnam and forgot all about insurgency, the US military again faced the same problem, though in Iraq this time, following its invasion of the country in 2003. Counterinsurgency had been under-researched if not deliberately neglected between these two wars, so it was only natural that when it came to studying and learning about this concept many officers and scholars would turn to the 1950s and 1960s for advice. For better and for worse, insights were drawn from Vietnam and made to apply to the war in Iraq, though notable attention was also given to other countries’ experiences with these types of campaigns: the British in Malaya; the French in Algeria.

This intellectual re-discovery of counterinsurgency elevated an unlikely group of experts, mostly forgotten since their heyday of the 1960s. Foremost among this group stood David Galula, a French military officer whose combat experience in Algeria and writings on counterinsurgency were viewed as particularly instructive to understanding the challenges of modern counterinsurgency. When doctrine writers from the US Army and Marine Corps got together to write their new counterinsurgency doctrine in 2006, David Galula’s influence was evident, not least because his Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice was one of three works cited in the field manual’s final preface.

To those in the US military seeking to gain a better understanding of counterinsurgency, Galula offered an accessible guide to the difficulties and dilemmas typical of these campaigns. From his experience in Algeria he derived and illustrated various counterinsurgency principles that have not only been found to apply elsewhere, but were now picked up on and reiterated in the most recent of doctrine. These touch upon the importance of achieving a nuanced political understanding of the campaign, operating under unified command, using intelligence to guide operations, isolating insurgents from the population, using the minimum amount of force necessary to achieve security, and assuring and maintaining the perceived legitimacy of the counterinsurgency effort in the eyes of the populace. Galula’s writings offered a clear illustration of how these time-tested principles could be implemented based on his own experience in Algeria.

Counterinsurgency Warfare soon earned the reputation of a classic in the field, though it would be fair to say that far more people had heard of the book than actually studied it; indeed, it is another of Mark Twain’s sayings that a classic is a ‘book which people praise and don’t read’. Far less attention still has been paid to Galula’s own life and practical record as a counterinsurgent, of which little is known besides that which he himself shared in his books. The result of this curious neglect has been a tendency toward hagiography in much of the writing on Galula, underpinned by a fundamental uncertainty of how this maverick officer himself handled the problem of insurgency in his day.

This is where Grégor Mathias steps in, providing us with a carefully researched, densely packed and in many ways unique account of David Galula’s own practical experience with counterinsurgency. The picture that emerges is of a remarkable and intellectually hungry French officer; a polyglot; a traveller; explorer; and keen learner. His most formative experience with counterinsurgency was his command of a French company in the Djebel Aïssa Mimoun subdistrict of Kabylia, Algeria, in 1956-57, though as Mathias makes clear, much of what he later taught derived equally from his time as a military attaché in China during the civil war, as a member of the UN commission in Greece during its civil war, and from his visits to Indochina and the Philippines, where he observed ongoing counterinsurgencies without himself participating.

It is said that it is a curse to live in interesting times, yet Galula appears to have taken this fate in his stride. Indeed, his international exposure and encounters not only help explain his fine grasp of political violence, but also provide a fascinating narrative intertwined with major historical events. Still, perhaps this book’s greatest service to counterinsurgency scholars today is to provide a more comprehensive account of how Galula fared when seeking to put into practice the very theory for which he is now so famous.

It soon emerges that even for Galula, it was far easier to derive principles from ongoing campaigns than to make sure they were properly implemented. Indeed, Mathias’ account reveals a company commander grappling with many of the same dilemmas facing today’s military leaders – in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. While Galula was comparatively successful as a commander, his time in Algeria clearly shows the limited ability of an outside force to exert legitimate influence and pressure on a local population. It also shows the difficulty of honouring the principle of civil-military unity of command when there are tangible differences in priority and approach between these two sets of actors. Like many commanders today, Galula struggled with troop shortages, wrestled with a domestic press unconvinced of his operational gains, and outright stumbled in the delicate transition from French to Algerian control and governance. Not all of Galula’s setbacks can be placed at his own doormat: after all, a company commander can only wield so much control. Even so, perhaps one of the more interesting insights in Mathias’ account regards the difficulties of determining ‘success’ in counterinsurgency campaigns and the related tendency, one certainly shared by Galula, for unwarranted optimism in the face of short-term gains.

If Galula’s own record mirrors many of the frustrations felt by today’s commanders, does he nonetheless merit the reputation and influence that he has now earned, posthumously? Certainly. His writing offers one of the most lucid and accessible treaties on counterinsurgency, helpful to any student and practitioner seeking to understand the difficult dilemmas common to these campaigns. His principles, while difficult to implement, nonetheless provide a foundation upon which to base action. That Galula’s own record as a counterinsurgent is more mixed should not surprise, but rather act as a helpful reminder that this form of warfare is never easy, but rather ‘messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife’.[1] Arguably, it is precisely because Galula struggled with the same challenges that we see today that makes his record and his writings so relevant.

For this reason, Mathias’ account is also a helpful corrective to some of the overblown and under-researched portrayals of Galula in recent years. Neither Galula’s writings, nor his experience in Algeria, were ever going to provide us with the right answers, but rather help us ask the right questions. As Mathias persuasively shows in this book, there is no master-key to these types of operations and Galula’s principles provide no checklist for success. This is something the French counterinsurgency expert would no doubt have agreed with: counterinsurgency, he noted, ‘may be sound in theory but dangerous when applied rigidly to a specific case’. (96)

All of this – Galula’s mixed record and his tentativeness in proposing his concept – should instill a much-needed measure of humility about what is possible in counterinsurgency operations, and through military intervention writ large.  For this very reason, it is incumbent on those militaries with expeditionary ambitions to study the history of their intellectual forefathers, to learn from their experiences, and try not to repeat their mistakes.

Three decades ago Professor Michael Howard waspishly described terrorism studies as having ‘been responsible for more incompetent and unnecessary books than any other [discipline] outside… of sociology… It attracts phoneys and amateurs as a candle attracts moths.’ Howard, an intellectual hero of mine and founder of the outstanding and world-famous War Studies Department where I find employ, was unfairly scornful. I think the work of the likes of Professor Paul Wilkinson, one of the main founders of terrorism studies, who sadly died this summer remains very durable and necessary. My colleague Professor Mike Rainsborough mused on the state of terrorism studies in a review essay ‘William of Ockham, Where are You When we Need You?‘ for the Journal of Contemporary History a few years ago (it’s from there that I’ve thieved the Howard quote) which, unfortunately, requires a subscription.  However, with the recent 10 year commemoration of the September 11 attacks there has come a swathe of retrospective ‘what have we learned?’ essays in the open press.

One which caught my eye was this from the Boston Globe ‘911: What else it taught us‘ which provides an interesting summary of how 9/11 changed the research landscape across disciplines from political science to psychology, economics, and sociology. Not mentioned in the article is someone I think probably ought to have been, Thomas Hegghammer, whose scholarship on Jihadi movements I, and many others, have found extremely useful and welcome. However, I see he’s just been profiled over on a bigger blog than ours Abu Muqawama so enough about him. But right in the middle of the article you will find this short precis of the work of another scholar, Max Abrahms, whom I find noteworthy:

In 2005, when Max Abrahms came to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government as a research fellow, the school was still adjusting to the surge of interest in terrorism that had taken hold after 9/11, among both students and the public. The same was true all over American academia. As Abrahms remembers it, most political scientists trying to address terrorism were talking about it in the classic terms of foreign affairs, the realm of political conflicts and nation-states.

Abrahms believed terrorism required a new approach, and questioned his colleagues’ assumptions that it could be understood in terms of the classic machinery of international politics. In 2006, he published a paper in the journal International Security announcing his deceptively potent insight: As a political tactic, terrorism doesn’t work. The record shows that terrorists hardly ever get what they want from the governments they attack, Abrahms found; on the contrary, governments are much more likely to react to terrorism by digging in their heels against whatever the terrorists are demanding.

Abrahms’s observation that terrorism leads to political failure forced a crucial question: What does make terrorism attractive? He has argued that even for terrorists who claim political goals, the real answer is psychological: More than anything, terrorists need to be part of a social group. As strange as it sounds, Abrahms finds that people take up terrorism for the same reasons they might participate in, say, a bowling league. “Two things predispose people to becoming terrorists: social isolation, and knowing someone, having a friend, who is somehow affiliated with a terrorist group,” he said. It’s not about achieving political goals at all, but rather, about how being a terrorist makes a person feel.

What I like about Abrahms is the simple question he asks in this essay ‘What terrorists really want‘. It really is the most basic, most strategically relevant question. And I find his answer ‘strong affective ties with other terrorists’ (i.e., pals) to be compelling because it resonates with things which researchers in sociology (the other field Howard scorned) have been talking about for a while. Robert Putnam’s terrific book Bowling Alone is one which I really think terrorism researchers and strategic thinkers should find worthwhile. The book is based on a simple observation with profound general societal implications: Americans used to bowl in large numbers and regularly in leagues but over the course of five decades they stopped–all through the West people have become ever more disconnected rom one another and social structures have disintegrated. The thing which I find most illuminating is the concept of ‘social capital’ which Putnam explores:

Sometimes ‘social capital’ likes its conceptual cousin ‘community’, sounds warm and cuddly. Urban sociologist Xavier de Souza Briggs, however, warns us to beware of a treacly sweet, ‘kumbaya’ interpretation of social capital. Networks and the associated norms of reciprocity are generally good for those inside the network, but the external effects of social capital are by no means always positive. It was social capital, for example, that enabled Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh’s network of friends, bound together by a norm of reciprocity, enabled him to do what he could not have done alone…

Social capital, in short, can be directed toward malevolent, antisocial purposes, just like any other form of capital. (McVeigh also relied on physical capital, like the explosive-laden truck, and human capital, like bomb-making expertise, to achieve his purpose). Therefore it is important to ask how the positive consequences of social capital–mutual support, cooperation, trust, institutional effectiveness–can be maximised and the negative manifestations –sectarianism, ethnocentrism, corruption–minimised. Toward this end, scholars have begun to distinguish many different forms of social capital.

Bonding Capital

Among the different forms of social capital these scholars have identified perhaps the most basic are the twinned bonding capital and bridging capital. Bonding capital is inwardly focussed, it is ‘good for undergirding specific reciprocity and mobilising solidarity’; it is about reinforcing exclusive identities and ‘by creating strong in-group loyalty, may also create strong out-group antagonism.’ Take the picture on the right, for instance, which shows the young American Nick Berg moments before the men behind him, one of whom is thought to be Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, saw his head off–all captured on video and proudly distributed. Now consider Abrahms’ question ‘what do terrorists really want?’ Indeed, what do they want? What is the purpose of killing in this particularly gross and degrading manner? As a normal human being it’s ‘incomprehensible’ and best leave it at that; except probably I’m not normal (nor are you if you’ve read this far) because I think we ought not leave it at that and that the act is comprehensible. It’s an extreme example of the building of bonding capital. Can you imagine a more explicit drawing of the line between in-group loyalty and out-group antagonism? Me neither.

‘Bonding social capital constitutes a kind of sociological superglue, whereas bridging social capital provides a sociological WD-40.’ It seems to me that just as bonding capital is a concept that possibly helps us illuminate some aspects of social movement (and terrorist groups and insurgencies are social movements) behaviour, so too does bridging capital illuminate other aspects.

Bridging capital

For example, you may have read last year of the controversy over the alliance between the human rights group Amnesty International and the group Cageprisoners represented by the former British Guantanamo inmate Moazzam Begg. A lot of people were, and remain, extremely upset by the relationship:

A SENIOR official at Amnesty International has accused the charity of putting the human rights of Al-Qaeda terror suspects above those of their victims.

Gita Sahgal, head of the gender unit at Amnesty’s international secretariat, believes that collaborating with Moazzam Begg, a former British inmate at Guantanamo Bay, “fundamentally damages” the organisation’s reputation.

In an email sent to Amnesty’s top bosses, she suggests the charity has mistakenly allied itself with Begg and his “jihadi” group, Cageprisoners, out of fear of being branded racist and Islamophobic.

Sahgal describes Begg as “Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban”. He has championed the rights of jailed Al-Qaeda members and hate preachers, including Anwar al-Awlaki, the alleged spiritual mentor of the Christmas Day Detroit plane bomber.

And they are quite right to be upset too. The Cageprisoners/Amnesty International link is a terrific example of a bridging network which Putnam describes as being ‘better for linkage to external assets and for information diffusion.’ In fact, come to think of it, another book which terrorism researchers need to contemplate is Clifford Bob’s amazing The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents, Media, and International Activism. Terrorism studies has long recognised the link between media and terror, although Margaret Thatcher put it best in her ‘oxygen of terror‘ speech:

In this evil strategy, the actions of the media are all important. For newspapers and television, acts of terrorism inevitably make good copy and compelling viewing. The hijacker and the terrorist thrive on publicity: without it, their activities and their influence are sharply curtailed. There is a fearful progression, which the terrorists exploit to the full. They see how acts of violence and horror dominate the newspaper columns and television screens of the free world. They see how that coverage creates a natural wave of sympathy for the victims and pressure to end their plight no matter what the consequence. And the terrorists exploit it. Violence and atrocity command attention.

Less well-recognised is the social movement-NGO dualism which Bob explores. These, he says, are best seen as,

…exchanges. The concept of exchange has long been used in social analysis but its insights have not been plumbed by those who study transnational networks. In this context, domestic insurgents stand on one side, seeking money, materiel, information, legitimacy, and access to aid them in their conflicts with powerful opponents. On the other side are NGOs impelled by their missions but constrained by their interests. By supporting local movements, NGOs do more than help the needy and more than meet their principled or political goals–however worthy these achievements. They also gain non-material resources. Chief among these is a raison d’etre, legitimation for the NGOs international activism and proof that its agenda remains unfulfilled.

Terrorism studies has come a long way since 9/11. We have learned a lot. But there is a lot more to learn still by applying insights from other fields and disciplines. I think Bob’s assertion about the concept of exchanges not being plumbed by those who study transnational networks is still correct; indeed there are many tools of social analysis which have yet to be applied systematically and yet incomplete datasets to be analysed.

This post was going to be entitled "A posse ad esse" but that don't Tweet so good.

Frank Kaplan, in his recent Slate article ‘The post-9/11 Military’,  discusses many points about the contemporary US military.  Let me pick up three for further exploration. 

Which way do we go?

Kaplan notes that there have been many changes in the US military since 9/11, including a (re)new(ed) emphasis on counter-insurgency.  He also points out that not everybody is happy with this:

Some officers and analysts sound an alarm bell over these changes. As military personnel learn new skills and adapt to new forms of warfare, are they un-learning old skills, which might be essential if the old forms of warfare stage a comeback? Artillery and advanced air-to-air jet fighters aren’t so important now, but they might be if a large power invades or starts bombing an ally.

While he does not mention them by name, KOW readers/followers (or since we are in a kingly trope, maybe subjects works better?) will immediately see the stalking horses of Gentile and Nagl.  For those who need a bit of the ongoing debate between these two, allow these extracts from a recent Joint Force Quarterly dialogue to suffice:

Gentile: War essentially is about death and destruction, its hard hand. Unfortunately, the dogma of counterinsurgency has seduced folks inside and outside the American defense establishment into thinking that instead of war and the application of military force being used as a last resort and with restraint, it should be used at the start and that it can change “entire societies” for the better. 

Nagl: U.S.military doctrine…is flexible, adaptable, and well suited to the broad spectrum of threats Americafaces today. It frees the military from a misguided belief that there is a single U.S.way of war that is essentially “about death and destruction.” Instead, it teaches that the Army, and the Nation, must be able to fight and win along the entire spectrum of conflict, from conventional war against a conventional enemy to training and equipping the security forces of our friends and partners around the globe before an insurgency reaches a degree of virulence that demands a  substantial U.S. troop deployment to subdue. 

As this debate raged on, then-Secretary of Defence Robert Gates in an pragmatic, umpire-like move, famously declared: “”I have noticed too much of a tendency towards what might be called ‘next-war-itis’…” He didn’t want the intellectual attention of the military and its attendant supporting community to become distracted with dreams (and nightmares) of tomorrow.  The focus should be on today, and places like Iraq.  “That is the war we are in,” Gates said. “That is the war we must win.” 

For all intents and purposes, though, that war, and along with it the one in Afghanistan, are over.  Even the most pragmatic must agree that the time has come to discuss what comes next. 

Ahh…but there’s the rub: There is no consensus on what tomorrow might bring.  Events in the Arab Spring have not clarified matters.  On the contrary, they have served only to muddy the waters, providing ‘proof’ of everything from the necessity of stability no matter what political stripe it may wear; to the unstoppable power of popular will; to flexibility of airpower; to the utility of military alliances; to the wisdom of leading from the rear.

One thing is clear: the will of the International Community is fickle—intervention happens, but not necessarily coherently or consistently.  We intervened over (and in) Tripoli, but left Damascus more or less on its own.  The militaries of countries prone to lead or join such interventions will not be given a road map for the future, but rather a story book from Dr. Seuss: 

Oh! The Places You’ll Go!

You’ll be on your way up! You’ll be seeing great sights!

You’ll join the high fliers who soar to high heights.

You won’t lag behind, because you’ll have the speed. You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead. Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the best. Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

Except when you don’t.

Because, sometimes, you won’t.

I’m sorry to say so but, sadly, it’s true that Bang-ups and Hang-ups can happen to you.

And in the West, in societies where the paradigm of civil-military relations is ruled by the principle of civil control, the military will have to be prepared to go where they are told. 

Preparing, to my mind, will not be about choosing one path over another, of deciding between Gentile or Nagl.  A bit of both will be required, as will a resignation to the fact that mistakes will be made and lessons learned will be lost and then relearned. 

The key struggles will be two:

1. The future means less.  Defence budgets will decline.  Period.  White elephants will need to be sold, sacred cows sacrificed and iron rice bowls broken.
2. ‘Keeping your powder dry’ will mean needing to come to grips with the temptation of becoming so well rounded that you no longer have a point. 

If war today and tomorrow are about risk management, as many believe they are and shall be, then we must understand that risk management always entails balancing costs with benefits, making priorities, and perhaps counter-intuitively, taking (or at least accepting) risks.  We cannot do everything and what we cannot do we must accept as being a vulnerability.  The aim is to try and reduce that vulnerability, or at least comprehend it.  We may not be able to predict the future, but we can anticipate some of things that are likely to happen in it.

The dangers of Post-Heroic Warfare

Kaplan also raises the important point about the use of UAVs.  A segment of the military of today has changed from being made up of people being drones to people flying drones.  The most critical aspect of the use of UAVs, especially armed ones, is not technological, but rather ethical.

This is not entirely as new a question as it sounds, of course.  There have been other technological advances in warfare that have greatly challenged the ethics—and the ethos—of warfighting, the advent of atomic weapons being only the most extreme example.  Writing in 1996, Edward Luttwak wondered if the post-Cold War, post-Gulf War military reality would lead to an increase in bellicosity, as technology and overwhelming supremacy across the spectrum of conventional war lead to something approaching what the Australian academic Christian Enemark calls ‘risk free killing’. 

If the cost to Us is so slight, in comparison to the price we impose on Them (and the statistics of casualities, intentional and accidental alike inflicted by the West since 9/11 illustrate this to be undeniably the case), do we now fight war free from one of its most powerful restraints? 

If so, many believe that this would have the most profound effect on our understanding of war.  Christopher Coker, for example, believes that war has been a fundamental component of the human condition: 

war – though it may seem paradoxical to claim this – can create a common community of fate in which it is possible, often for the first time, to see that the traditional differences of tribe, religion, race or custom are unimportant compared with similarities all human beings share (pain and humiliation, for example).

If we remove from one side of the war equation such things as pain and humiliation, does that mean we lose our ability to relate to each other, to share ‘a common community of fate’? 

How many colours is your parachute?

The final point that Kaplan touches on that I would like to discuss revolves around an intriguing question that he poses: 

Not all athletes are pentathletes. Can all soldiers be full-spectrum operators? Can all Marines be three-block warriors?

If it is true that, as it says in Line 1, Chapter 1 of the New Testament of Warfare (FM 3-24) “Counterinsurgency is not just thinking man’s warfare–it is the graduate level of war,” are we up to the challenge?  Even if the future is not COINeriffic, few would deny that today’s soldiering bears anything but a passing resemblance to granddad’s soldiering, replete as it is with technical advances and legal considerations of, if not graduate level, then certainly community college complexity. 

This line of questioning raises some other very interesting questions:

1. Should we head for a two-speed army?  If all soldiers cannot be all things to all people for all situations for all time, then is there wisdom in creating specialists or even specialized units/formations for stability/COIN operations, as separate from conventional forces?  This idea was mulled around early in the post-9/11 period.

(Perhaps this is a decision that can only be contemplated by large armies, such as that of theUS.  Smaller armies tend, by necessity, to be more general purpose.  The British Army, for instance, prided itself on being able to operate equally effectively in the Central European Plain and on the streets of Belfast and elsewhere besides.  In a post-Basra world, though, I detect a lack of confidence now.)

1. Are we recruiting the right people and developing them properly?  If we need pentatheletes, are we getting them?  How have we changed the standards, the templates, and the marketing campaigns in order to get them into the military, across the board?  Once we get people into the military, what are we doing to ensure that they gain the necessary training, education, and exposure, so that they might be able to think and fight the way we want them to in the future?  Once we return to the ambiguity contained in the earlier part of this post (scroll up…waaaay up), it is apparent that if we don’t know which way we are heading, it is unlikely that we can prepare ourselves to get there in one piece.

What happens if we look to both of these questions at the same time, while keeping in mind the seemingly post-Heroic nature of contemporary and future war?  If preparing for war is increasingly risky (at the macro level) while at the same time waging it is becoming less and less risky (at the micro level), why do we have to be constrained by warriors at all?  Why do we need a pilot to fly a drone?  Why can’t a civilian do it, tucked up nice and safe in a bunker outside Las Vegas?

One risk management strategy is that of risk transfer.  Why not simply outsource the problem to contractors, at least for those tasks that we cannot or do not want to have our soldiers doing?  

Taking this extension even one step further, why have humans do it at all?  Just as Christopher Coker pondered before he wrote The Ethics of War, will a post-post-9/11 army end up Waging War without Warriors?  Will machines help take even more risk out of war?

Summing Up: I am not as optimistic as Kaplan

The subtitle of Kaplan’s article is “Our soldiers and generals have adapted well to the post-9/11 world.”  That may or may not be true.  It depends on the scorecard we use.  What is more, it is another matter altogether to ask whether or societies and our politicians have adapted well.  

What concerns me is not whether or not if we have succeeded so far (let the Historians have their say), but if we are able to do so as we enter the second decade after 9/11 and our third since the end of the Cold War.  If I am sure of one thing it is that many questions remain.

It has been far too long since my last blog post. Between getting married, starting a new job and writing a new book, my blogging has taken a hit. But I am back now, hopefully with some more regular contributions. Today we shall mostly be talking about drugs…

Over the last month or so, al-Jazeera have featured a series of reports and on the role of the drugs trade in the Americas. For those interested in the relation between drugs, crime and political instability, the on-the-ground reporting and close access to growers, smugglers and ordinary residents affected by the drugs trade all make for interesting and disconcerting viewing. The series as a whole is called Drugs Central and you can find all of the relevant material and videos here. I would in particular recommend scrolling to the bottom of the page, where they have for some reason hidden all of the truly good stuff: 30-minute episodes of Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines programme, providing in-depth investigations of particular problems relating to the drugs trade.

Watching these videos paints a fairly alarming picture of the scale of the problem. The cartels and drugs traffickers have established a scope and reach that stretches across countries, implicates law-enforcements agencies and often gives them more economic, political and military clout than the authorities and governments opposing them. Various counter-measures have been attempted but judging from these videos it would appear that the real losers of this war are the residents, most of them poor, who happen to populate the northwards path from supplier to consumer nations.

Even casual readers of the news are familiar with the particular problem in some of Mexico’s border towns, but the numbers involved are still shocking. More than 8,000 people have been killed since 2008. Here, the proximity to the US is the issue, as every street corner is prime real estate for the sale of drugs and have become the battle ground between the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels. As in many other places visited by the al Jazeera team, the institutions responsible for law and order are either too weak or unwilling to do their job. As a result of lacking capacity and capability, only about 1 to 2 per cent of the murders in Juarez lead to a sentence. Part of the reason for this is corruption, as members of the police force have been found to be implicated in organized crime. The result is a climate of impunity in which cartels harass citizens, engage in extortion and intimidation and violently get rid of anyone who may breach their rule or constitute a threat. The documentary Mexico: Impunity and Conflict provides a chilling assessment of the problem and its many causes.

Mexico may be the most notorious victim of the drugs trade, but the problem truly is international and affects all countries implicated in the process, from growers, transit countries, to consumers, including the United States. One of the reports details the arrest of the mayor and police chief of Columbus, New Mexico, both of whom had been gotten to by the Mexican drugs cartels and were charged with smuggling 400 guns across the border. In the same video, al Jazeera shows the determined effort by the Mexican drug cartels to infiltrate the very law-enforcement agency responsible for stopping narcotics from getting into the country. So far, we are told, 129 US Customs and Border Protection agents have been charged with various corruption-related offences and more than 600 possible charges are still underway.

If the cartels are able to achieve that type of influence and power in the United States, it is easy to imagine their sway elsewhere, where local institutions are weaker and opportunities fewer. In a report from Colon, Honduras, we see how the drug cartels are pushing farmers off their land so as to use their palm-oil plantation to smuggle cocaine. The police are shown as bystanders, refusing to get in the way of the cartels’ intimidation (and by intimidation, I mean ‘burning their farm down’). Through such action, we are told, Colon has gone from being the ‘breadbasket’ of Honduras to the ‘cocaine basket’ of the Central America. The problem, here as elsewhere, is the power and impunity of the cartels, the incapacity and corruption of official authorities and the detrimental effects of these factors on the local economy and society, with citizens resorting to increasingly desperate means to cope with the situation. In the end, for many, if you can’t beat them, you join them.

Of course Al Jazeera spends a fair amount of time on possible solutions, though it quickly emerges that there are no silver bullets here. In Acapulco, we are told, the strategy has consisted of removing the kingpins governing the cartels, in the hope that this would reduce violence. Instead, it seems, the drug flow – the causative factor behind the violence – remains and junior leaders are now engaged in a violent power struggle for the spoils left by their erstwhile leaders. As the younger generations fight, the aggregate death toll has risen.

Elsewhere, governments have attempted to deal with the problem of limited capacity by bringing in the armed forces, including the special forces, to combat the drug cartels. In Guatemala, for example, al Jazeera covers the Kaibiles, an elite unit with a history of gruesome operations against left-wing sympathisers and civilians during the country’s civil war, but that is now involved in domestic counter-narcotics operations. The problem here is that this expedient measure, even if effective, represents a dangerous backwards step for countries with a problematic history of civil-military relations. Take El Salvador, for example, where the Army is now back on the street to deal with problem of gangs involved in the drugs trade. The domestic use of the military was one of the major issues at the Chapultepec Accords that ended the El Salvador civil war in 1992, but when the gangs are armed, number 25-30,000 and control entire neighbourhoods, the state may have few viable alternatives other than to deploy the Army on domestic counter-narcotics duties.

This is not the only problem with ‘bringing out the big guns’. First, the armed forces are not immune to the corruption that has affected most other authorities involved in this battle. In Guatemala, former members of the Kaibiles have allegedly been recruited by the drug cartels as trainers, given their specialist knowledge of the military craft. The cartels have apparently also been able to corrupt mid- to high-ranking military officers and get their hands on Army weapons. And of course armies are directed by civilian masters and as al Jazeera’s coverage makes clear, the cartels are able to buy off local politicians, determining the results of elections and ensuring, in this manner, that future political leaders are friendly to their cause or amenable to their pressure. Contenders to political office who take an undesirable approach toward the cartels are attacked, murdered or otherwise coerced to step out of the race.

Finally, of course, the military typically deals with a security implications of more deep-rooted problems, with economic, political and social underpinnings. This is where the true magnitude of the problem becomes clear. In El Salvador for example, it might be possible for the Army to counter the gangs that are most active in the drugs trade, primarily the Mara Salvatrucha. Yet as the al Jazeera report points out, the gangs in El Salvador are mere service providers for the Zeta cartels based in Mexico. In other words, there is a risk that these gang members, most of whom are under 20, become cannon fodder in a war in which they are just pawns. Then a deeper question must be asked, will these dead pawns simply be replaced and why, finally, are there so many gangs in El Salvador? One boy interviewed in the Al Jazeera report says he had wanted to study graphic design but his parents could not afford it. So instead, he turned to gang-life.

Similarly deep-rooted socio-economic problems underlie the drugs problem in Guatemala. Corruption is a huge problem, as is poor governance and lack of opportunity. Against this backdrop, the drugs trade provides a lucrative market and patronage system, the spoils of which are fought over violently. As an illustration, in an interview with al Jazeera, Alvaro Colom, the President of Guatemala, explains that the amount of drug money passing through Guatemala is 1.5 times the national budget. Not surprising then that in the last decade the murder rate in Guatemala has doubled that of Mexico.

All of the videos in this series are interesting and well worth watching, but the longer programmes are probably the most valuable parts of the series. The interviews are also interesting: witness the brutally honest and pragmatic suggestion by Jorge Castaneda, the former foreign minister of Mexico, that all drugs be legalised so as to undercut the power of the gangs that profit from their control over the market.

That argument may be too extreme for many, but watching these videos and reading around the topic, it seems to me that it is time to think seriously about decriminalising marijuana in the United States. Already the medical marijuana industry provides a grey zone that is ripe for abuse, the topic of a recent PBS documentary. While federal and municipal authorities wrestle over what is lawful and what is not, teenagers and adults keep on buying, selling and smoking the stuff (which for all intents and purpose is no more dangerous, some might say it is less dangerous, than alcohol). Bear in mind also that the Mexican drug cartels at the centre of the mess described in this post derive more than 50% of their profits from marijuana. More than 50%…  Meanwhile,  decriminalization could also provide cash-strapped municipal authorities with some added resources, through taxation and through the savings accrued by not having to pursue and incarcerate US citizens on marijuana-related crimes. According to one estimate, the U.S. spent an estimated $7.6 billion dollars on incarcerating 700,000 non-violent offenders on various marijuana-related offenses in 2003. It is a situation that doesn’t seem to make much sense to me.

To finish on a lighter note, here is Bill O’Reilly apparently getting ‘owned’ on this very issue.