Fitaloon at MicroShaft

Attached to this post is a report entitled Irregular Warfare – Counterinsurgency Challenges and Perspectives written some three years ago which goes along way to explaining why the Americans began to get it right in Iraq after such a long time and why they are now, under McChrystal beginning to get it right in Afghanistan. It starts with the following charter:

The most likely threats the United States will face in the near future will come primarily from within weak or poorly-governed states – breeding grounds for sectarian violence, radical religious or ideological movements, genocide, and criminal and terrorist organizations with regional and global reach. During the Cold War our military was primarily configured to deter and defeat state-based, conventional military threats, which it did with great success. The overwhelming conventional capability of the U.S. military has led enemies to attempt to defeat us through other ways and means. Indeed, the only outright defeats suffered by western, technologically-based military forces to non-western enemies since the end of World War II have come at the hands of insurgent movements.

Furthermore, the world order ushered in by the Treaty of Westphalia is being challenged by a new form of insurgency – transnational, distributed, networked and ideologically driven. Continuing resistance to democratically elected regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with periodic sensational terrorist attacks in the United States and western Europe, are currently the primary manifestations of this insurgency. Successful counterinsurgency operations create the political conditions for local governments to gain legitimacy, provide security, generate economic growth, and create stability both within their borders and, often, across their regions – which eliminate the conditions in which insurgent movements flourish. Defeating insurgencies, therefore, requires the use of all elements of national power. In the military realm, effective counterinsurgency operations require conventional forces to adjust their mindset, organization and doctrine, and to create new capabilities, tactics, techniques, and procedures to secure populations and deal with guerrilla and terrorist threats.

Basically it is saying we are no longer likely to be fighting a conventional war but a Counter Insurgency (COIN) war.

The trouble is that despite this fairly obvious statement we in the UK are still stuck in the Cold War mentality by Politicians and Military command on how we should organise and run our Armed Forces. This impacts the whole way we structure our Forces, how we procure equipment for them, how we train them and how we fight our enemies.

This past week or so has seen a number of articles by various sources that explore what is happening and we have also had Gordon Brown’s half-hearted explanation of what our strategy will be going forward. Each has a little bit more of the information that  goes to giving the whole story of how we managed to get is so wrong in Afghanistan.

First we have this article “Cracking on in Helmand” by Stephen Grey. In it he looks at how the UK has been cracking on:

Crack on. From Basra to Sangin, I’ve heard that phrase as regularly as Amen in church. Cracking on: the army’s greatest quality, and perhaps its greatest weakness. I remember standing vigil on Sergeant Johnson’s body at dusk on a hilltop, after he had died in the battle for the town of Musa Qala in December 2007. His fellow soldiers were silhouettes, drawn close to their commander. On the horizon muffled bombs flashed through the drizzle. Major Jake Little told his men to put their grief to one side, to deal with it later. After the battle.

Cracking on could also mean failing to challenge impossible orders, or unwillingness to expose a flawed strategy. In the year I spent studying the Helmand campaign for my book, I sensed a questioning, a doubt about whether it was worthwhile. One senior Whitehall figure stunned me by declaring, almost as his first words, that Helmand “was a terrible strategic blunder.” His views were not uncommon.

In response to this we also have  sociology professor Anthony King’s response to this in “Getting it wrong in Afghanistan” King is as Richard North says

an interesting observer, having carried out several studies of the British military, and he is thus better qualified than most to contribute to the ongoing – albeit limited – debate about the performance of the Army.

In his article King says about cracking on:

Having worked with the British armed forces for the last five years, watching them on operations in Kabul and Basra, it has become clear to me that the culture of “cracking on” may not mean merely that British troops from the Somme to Sangin have dutifully enacted orders which they know to be poor but, more seriously, it affects operational command itself. As Grey notes, British commanders have blithely conducted missions in Helmand despite a woeful lack of intelligence about the theatre and knowingly inadequate military resources for any realistic chance of success.

King finishes off with these words

There is some evidence that the British armed forces may be capable of this change. In previous campaigns in Malaya and Northern Ireland, the British recognised, after false starts, that the key to success in counter-insurgency campaigns was the slow suppression of insurgency through intelligence, negotiation, the presence of adequate security forces and cross-governmental coordination. The British now need to relearn these lessons very quickly. The alternative is that their commanders in Helmand will continue to disperse their forces in futile and blunt demonstrations—ensuring that they crack on to defeat not only in Helmand but at home, in the arena of public support, as well.

Which shows that without much change we will soon be on our way to  a humiliating defeat , both militarily and on the home front as the public support for our Armed Forces is drained away.

Then we have Michael Evans the Defence Editor of the Times writing about the army making the “same old mistakes“. he picks up on a number of articles that appear in the British Army Review, which is often used as a platform for controversial comments and opinions about the way that the Armed Forces conduct operations. The latest edition, for internal consumption in the Army, focuses on the perceived failures of Britain’s campaign in Iraq and the risk of repeating errors in counter-insurgency in Afghanistan.

He highlights some interesting parts of the article but perhaps the most devastating is this one:

The US Colonel: Peter Mansoor

“Only through a thorough appreciation of the mistakes it made in Iraq can the British Army turn defeat into victory as it fights the untidy wars of the early 21st century. It should not … gloss over its recent experience in Iraq … Although the conditions [in Afghanistan] are different, the lessons of Iraq are still relevant.

“The British failure in Basra was not due to the conduct of British troops, which was exemplary. It was, rather, a failure by senior British civilian and military leaders to understand the political dynamics … in Iraq, compounded by arrogance that led to an unwillingness to learn and adapt, along with increasing reluctance to risk blood and treasure to conduct effective counter-insurgency warfare . . .

“British commanders attempted to cut deals with local Shia leaders to maintain the peace in southern Iraq, an accommodation that was doomed to failure since the British negotiated from a position of weakness.”

Retired US Colonel Peter Mansoor served two tours in Iraq and was executive officer to General Petraeus in Iraq

This has been picked up by a number of sources in the MSM though it is not a new story to  the blogs as they have been writing about this for some time.

But perhaps the best tying together of all these stories has been done by Richard North who has produced three articles here, here and here in the last week covering all the stories. In each he has tied together the many strands that indicate that we are getting it catastrophically wrong in Afghanistan and have yet to learn from the lessons learnt in Iraq.

So we have a story of how the UK Forces and indeed even now the US Forces, in Afghanistan are badly prepared for the whole COIN war in Afghanistan, how can this be possible for a force that manged to defeat insurgents in Malaya and indeed in Northern Ireland.

If we look a little at the report then we begin to understand how this might have come about.It develops a case of how to fight the COIN war and says:

Suppressing an insurgency requires an interagency approach that integrates activities in the economic, political and security sectors. Over the past century, there have been 53 cases that can be classified as insurgencies, i.e. violent movements whose aim is overthrowing or seceding from an established government and whose methods include resistance to occupation and/or terrorism. The actions taken to defeat these insurgencies have been as diverse as their sources and characteristics. Countering some insurgencies has required more military support than others. Nevertheless, these cases have yielded a menu of “best practices.”

BEST PRACTICES TO DEFEAT AN INSURGENCY:

• Emphasis on intelligence, especially human intelligence. The primary source of this intelligence is the population itself.
• Separation of the insurgency from the population by employing military checkpoints and other means. This is tied to the idea of secure areas, which can then be maintained by persistent presence to ensure civic order.
• Utilization of military and civilian psychological operations campaigns to influence the attitudes and perceptions of individuals, organizations, or governments. This is particularly relevant given that the United States is restrained by laws established before the age of the Internet and satellite television.
• Expansion and diversification of local police forces.
• Reorientation of military forces as well as civilian institutions by decentralizing and devolving authority to the unit level.
• Embedding of military and civilian advisors in all local institutions.
• Denial of sanctuaries to insurgents by combining good governance and effective intelligence gathering.
• Provision of opportunities for amnesty and rehabilitation for insurgents.
• Keeping the security and other basic needs of the population foremost in mind.
• Assisting the government to show clear signs of progress for ordinary citizens in designated insurgent zones.
• Placing one person in charge of integrating the overall strategy

This list is then countered by

MALPRACTICES TO AVOID:

• Making the killing and capturing of insurgents the highest priority.
• Utilizing battalion-size (or larger) sweep operations.
• Concentrating military units on bases in order to ensure force protection.
• Employing Special Forces to conduct raids.
• Giving adviser duty low priority.
• Inadequate attention to open, porous borders.
• Continuing peacetime government processes (e.g., the system of managing contracts).
• Giving primacy to the military effort.

and then makes the observation that the objective of counterinsurgency is not victory, but a better peace. To achieve this objective, all agencies of the U.S. government must be engaged.

If we look at what is happening with the UK forces and the UK Government we see that we are ignoring many of the best practices and doing many of the malpractices despite our once good knowledge of how to fight the COIN war. We only have to look at the third malpractice, Concentrating military units on bases, to see one that is painfully obvious and and amongst the good practices we are ignoring one obvious one is , Denial of sanctuaries to insurgents, which we are patently not doing. If we go through the list we will find many such obvious issues despite the fact that we have now been in Afghanistan  for 8 years.

The report also goes into a bit more detail about how counterinsurgency has become a major campaign operational theme. and how the US Forces will operate as below:

COIN PRINCIPLES:

• Legitimacy is the main objective (as defined at the local level).
• Unity of effort is required.
• Acknowledge the primacy of politics.
• Understand the environment.
• Recognize that intelligence is the driver of operations.
• Isolate insurgents from their cause and support.
• Provide security under the rule of law.
• Be prepared for a long-term commitment.

COIN IMPERATIVES:

• Manage information.
• Use measured force.
• Learn and adapt.
• Empower the lowest levels.
• Support the host nation.
• Temper expectations.

COIN PARADOXES:

• The more you protect your force, the less secure you are.
• The more force you use, the less effective you are.
• The more successful you are, the less force you can use and thus the more risk you must accept.
• Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction.
• Tactical success guarantees nothing.
• Most important decisions are not made by generals.
• What works this week in this province might not work next week in another province.

It is these final paradoxes that we seem to least understand and it makes us think we have won a victory rather than just had a temporary success.

The report summarises at the end with the following 5 statements :

1. That, given the phenomena of failed states and the proliferation of nonstate actors, COIN is the future.
2. That the U.S. military cannot assume that the civilian leadership will supply a pre-packaged comprehensive strategy for countering insurgencies and thus must forge ahead to develop a counterinsurgency doctrine and adjust training, force structure and acquisition accordingly.
3. That the U.S. Army’s new FM3-24 Counterinsurgency goes a long way toward laying the doctrinal foundation for mounting effective counterinsurgency operations.
   
4. That the essence of such operations is that they are multi-level and multifaceted in character – encompassing the security, political and economic spheres; involving all U.S. government institutions (not just the armed forces); and geared toward separating the insurgents from the population.
   
5. That the military component of counterinsurgency operations must carefully balance lethal and non-lethal activities, devolve authority to the extent possible to the field level,partner with local forces, and maximize engagement with the host nation population.

This report has now been around for three years, FM3-24 Counterinsurgency has been around in final format for more than this, you can even buy it from Amazon, so how is it that we are still getting the COIN war in Afghanistan so wrong. The answer is simple at the moment our Forces are just “Cracking On” whilst our Politicians sink their heads in the sand and try to ignore what is going on as best as possible in case the bad news rubs off on them.

Irregular Warfare Final Report