Attackerman

Much as I have a certain verse of “The Takeover” in my ears, let me try to lower the temperature on Michael Cohen and hopefully clear up some misconceptions. He takes exception to my rejection of the COIN-as-kinder-gentler-war strawman and writes:

Perhaps no one has ever used the specific term “kinder and gentler” before my WPJ editor did; but here’s Mark Bowden calling counter-insurgency doctrine “warm and fuzzy.” Or how about FM 3-24, which praises the CORDS initiative and carefully omits its ugly partner – the Phoenix Program. Or John Nagl’s Learning to East Soup With a Knife, which argues that Templar’s “hearts and minds” strategy turned the tide in Malaya rather than the Briggs Plan, which forcibly relocated 500,000 ethnic Chinese before Templar ever showed up. Or perhaps the best example, Rachel Kleinfeld writing about COIN in Democracy.

OK. If he really prefers it this way, I fully concede that Rachel Kleinfeld or Mark Bowden have also misunderstood counterinsurgency. And FM 3-24 is a bad history book, although I’ll leave it to those who’ve read it to decide if it’s supposed to be a history book. John can speak for himself. I see all these examples and raise you Dave Kilcullen. (As a side note, Rachel’s poor essay would have made a stronger case had she focused on Dave and not Petraeus, but I digress.)

But if this misconception persists, let’s simply state that in many, many relevant texts, including FM 3-24 and its cousin, FM 3-07 on Stability Operations, strategic emphasis is placed on the perspectives of a given population as the locus for success or failure in an operation. What follows from that is an understanding that ensuring those perspectives go in the direction you’d like them to go requires meaningful attention to the interests of that population, competitive with an enemy force — with “meaningful” defined by that population. That will mean different things at different times, but most importantly it will mean the provision of many things simultaneously: security, justice, economic development, and political expression in matters relevant to that population’s interest. If there is a core insight here, it’s that all of these things matter and must exist in supplement or the whole enterprise risks destabilization or unsustainability. Welcome to counterinsurgency.

If this seems “kinder or gentler,” it shouldn’t. It will involve very close fighting to forcibly deny enemy access to an area and a populace. There is a reason infantry and cavalry are prized in Iraq and Afghanistan and armor and artillery (to say nothing of air power) are emphasized less (not renounced, emphasized less): there is a greater danger of miscalculation with the latter than with the former — meaning the provision of excess force, which is alienating and hence counterproductive. The only reason COIN can seem “kinder or gentler” is because other modes of warfare do not view the perspectives of a population as decisive. They focus on either an enemy or on the perspectives of a leadership, and so have no need not to apply maximum force. They accordingly do not need to concern themselves with anything beyond the fight. But as we saw for many, many years in Iraq and Afghanistan, to treat the problem of an insurgency with such an approach is a category error and a recipe for a disaster.

None of this implies that counterinsurgency isn’t a particularly complex and, indeed, kinetic kind of warfare. It’s a shame that misleading shorthands like “kinder, gentler war” or “warm and fuzzy” war or, as I’ve written for years while eating my hat, “hearts and minds” exist. (I’m starting to prefer “asses, stomachs and wallets,” a more precise formulation of the objectives.) Ain’t nothing kind or gentle about Marja or about Ramadi or about Arab Jabour or, to be a bit cheeky, Jisr al-Doreaa. A smarter and more discriminating method of warfare should never be mistaken for a kinder or gentler one. So let’s let this canard die and go back to discussing reality as we find it, in its awful complexity.