Not an direct comparison, but as an MI officer I found intel and planning conventional battles fairly easy compared to the civilian-centric operations I studied during my stint in Civil Affairs, or the problems posed from the tactical level on up I currently study as a political scientist focused on international security issues.

Then I went on to say in a follow on post that:

"I am not trying to elevate the past over the present, but trying to keep the lid on how full of ourselves we have become with this notion that what we are doing today is a priori more complex than anything that has happened in warfare in the past.

Such thinking is at its heart troublingly a-historical."

One could find plenty of anecdotal evidence that argues the opposite, Tom, of the British officer that you cite.

I am sorry to say that this seems to have become a very mild obsession within certain defense circles. Think of it this way, what happens if the Army writ large develops its own Coin expertise, institutionally and in the field force? Then what happens to the experts?

I mean really, come on, are we still ready to say that after 9 years of doing this we still dont get it? Are we that stupid and screwed up?

See the Coin narrative assumes as a rule that armies by their disposition must be screwed up at Coin, but then with the help of the experts, they can learn and adapt their way toward getting better at it. Sadly, though, in the narrative an army can never really get good at it because if it does, well no need for experts anymore. But more importantly than experts if an army ever does get good at it and things still dont turn out then what or who is to blame? With a knuckle dragging army that doesnt do Coin well but might if it just tries harder and learns and adapts then the reasons why we are losing always has a home; and the home is us.

Makes things much simpler and easy to understand because it keeps us in our comfort zone of tactics and operations.

gian

This question of what is harder counterinsurgency or conventional war seems to me should be balanced with what is at stake? The stakes of poor COIN implementation is for a vast military power like America is at worst case small casualties and stalemate. The worst case for failing at a conventional operation can be gruesomely grievous casualties and the derailing of ones strategic objective(s). If we screwed up COIN in Afghanistan what happens, we lose prestige and embarrass a few brass hats and politicians. If we screwed up the Battle of the Eastern Solomon’s or the Santa Cruz Islands we lose the strike elements of our fleet, Guadalcanal and everybody on it and must restart the campaign against Japan with public morale in the pits.

if we "lose" a COIN conflict, particularly with regards to our current experience in afghanistan, we allow a dedicated enemy to maintain a safe haven. that sounds catastrophic to me.

Hadn't Nagl and Yingling made similar remarks about Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom?

I'd caveat this statement by noting that the two conflicts are kind of an apples-and-oranges analogy, so take it as you will. (I suppose the same case could be made for any pairing of conflicts)

Battles take days; weeks at most. This COIN stuff seems to be calibrated in years and decades ... or more.

Great quote from Ed Luttwak in March/April Foreign Affairs reprinted in May Air Force magazine:

"(McChrystal) intends to defeat the Taliban by protecting Afghan civilians, providing essential services, stimulating economic development, and ensuring good government, as the now-sacrosanct Field manual 3-24 prescribes. Given the characteristics of Afghanistan and its rulers, this worthy endeavor might require a century or two."

Our military is supposed to wage a successful COIN campaign in support of a government for which our politicians, diplomats, and media show open and justifiable contempt?

One obvious issue with the British Somme-to-Waziristan source you used: isn't it possible that COIN seemed harder simply because he had been focused entirely on high-intensity conflict the previous few years? So, COIN was different and new to him, but not necessarily "harder". A radical change like that is always a huge adjustment.

What about sources who might have been focused on COIN, then suddenly had to switch to high-intensity conflict? Perhaps the Israelis in Lebanon in 2006? Wouldn't that be nearly as difficult an adjustment to make?

Another factor to be considered - one which might make the a switch from HIC to COIN seem harder than the reverse - is that traditionally armies have trained all forces for basic HIC, then only added COIN training for certain units deemed to have needed it. Perhaps there are examples available of constabulary-type units who perfomed COIN being integrated into a conventional army and having to fight HIC - I wonder how easy they found the transition to HIC to be.

Maybe we can lease a live-fire COIN training range in North Mexico? We can experiment in how to train militias to interdict smuggling border infiltration north, while somehow not morphing into a new armed opposition to a struggling and autocratic central gov't.

Pine Ridge, or BedSty in NYC could offer other opportunities to hone our COIN craft at a fraction of Central Asian operating costs. Think about it; a platoon could patrol among every imaginable ethnicity, out of a bivouac in a 5-star NYC hotel, for less cost than a showerless FOB in Helmand or Nuristan.

How about a mission to hold and build educational opportunity and economic sustainability in the less secure zones of DC,Baltimore, Houston? Or to penetrate, co-opt and disarm the still-dangerous Michigan militias? California prison gangs, numbering in the 10's of thousands, are probably as intractable as Taliban and AQI, and are much more likely to infiltrate the Homeland, acquire arms and terrorize citizens. If ever there was a challenge...

Even if we fail initially, these kids of training initiatives could further diversify our COIN skill set, without the years of language study that will be useless 200 miles away from the current Pashtun civil war.

Bob Gates gave an important talk today addressing the future of Naval and USMC procurement. A worthwhile read in NavyTimes.

“Gates raised eyebrows at a Navy League-sponsored conference in National Harbor, Md., by questioning, among other things, whether the United States will need 11 carrier strike groups when no other nation has more than one.”

http://www.militarytimes.com/news/2010/05/defense_gates_050310/

“This was not the same kind of war as WW II. This was not a war of terrain objectives (a fact I’d come to appreciate the hard way at My Canh), each one worth the price in lives if in taking it you moved closer to your final objective, your Berlin, your Tokyo or Pyongyang. Vietnam was a war where more often than not our elusive enemy just went to ground or ran away while we swept through and “cleared” a village, only to return, rebuild, and reoccupy it again the minute we’d moved on. My Phu was a classic example. Twenty-one of our men were dead in a battle for a piece of real estate that elements of the battalion, even A company itself, had searched a number of times in the weeks previous to the 4 March fight. And unlike WW II, where, in just one example, ten thousand U.S. Marines were stacked up on the beaches of Saipan in four hours because we needed that island to construct an air base to bomb Japan to end the war, in Vietnam, at My Phu, twenty-one of our men were dead in a battle for a piece of real estate that had no strategic or tactical value, and that would be abandoned by our “pursuing” forces as soon as the dust settled.

I left My Phu feeling as I had after My Canh: there must be a better, less expensive way to fight these sons of bitches. The whole Tuy Hoa experience led to a big jump in my tactical thinking. I recognized my error at My Canh: I’d fought the battle by automatic reflex based on my previous combat experience, and with everything happening so fast, it hadn’t occurred to me that my second-nature reactions might be wrong. I’d fought the battle as I would have done in Korea. Hal Moore had fought Ia Drang like Korea, too, but in his case it had been a Korea-style battle – the NVA attacked the Cav in waves, not unlike the Chinese had attacked us in the winter of ’50 and the spring of ’51.

In my case I’d had a mission to relieve a besieged unit. I’d deployed my men with one element blocking in case the enemy broke and ran (which is what he was supposed to do); the other’s job, to roll up the enemy’s flank, was a sound employment of forces for a set-piece battle. Except that My Canh had not been a set-piece battle. The enemy’s disposition had not been well defined. He’d had no flanks per se, and his discrete, unorthodox (in terms of the U.S. style of fighting), brilliantly concealed and fortified positions had not exactly been conducive to being rolled up. My brain had automatically told me that to relieve Murphy’s unit I’d have to take the village where the men were besieged. I’d fought for a terrain objective, which the student of guerrilla warfare in me knew was not the way to fight this war, but which the Korean-seasoned warrior in me did not have time, or take time, to remember.

Drawing on the My Canh experience and the subsequent weeks’ fighting that culminated in My Phu, as the Tuy Hoa mission drew to a close I began to advocate more and more small-size patrols for the battalion, and more and more night operations to steal the darkness from the enemy, who up until now had moved freely through it. Though Emerson would be the first to conduct a full-scale, battalion-size nighttime airmobile assault, never again would I let the night hamper me as it had at My Canh – again a result of my Korea experience, which demanded with the coming of darkness that a unit consolidate, dig in, and get set to be hit.

I realized, too, that the presence of a large enemy element should not be the green light for a full-scale assault by our men. After all, what had caused the carnage at Tuy Hoa were the heroic “Airborne” charges. Tuy Hoa proved to me once and for all that paratroopers were innately unfit for guerrilla warfare, even Phase II (battalion- and regiment-size) guerrilla warfare. So were Marines, of whom Harry the Horse had been one before he joined the 101st. Both types of warriors were trained for shock action – to violently close with the enemy and destroy him, and then go back to a rear area to marshal, refit, train, and wait for the next mission. Both were eager, motivated, and aggressive, all admirable characteristics in a conventional war, but on a guerrilla battlefield they became too eager, too motivated, too aggressive. Both Airborne and Marines were determined, but they had no patience; they were always long on guts but sometimes short on brains. After Tuy Hoa I also realized that, my attitude toward decentralized command and mission-type orders notwithstanding, there were times when the issuance of more exacting instructions to my paratroop units was absolutely essential to get the job done right, with the minimum of casualties.

But the main thing I learned at Tuy Hoa was that there was simply no point in taking an objective you had no intention of holding, no point in using men when firepower could do the job. Tuy Hoa’s battlefields may have looked like the hedgerows of Normandy, but if (as was the case) the taking of such objectives one by one wasn’t ultimately going to lead you anyplace, and if (as was also the case) you were going to abandon each objective after you’d taken it, only to take it again and abandon it again, again and again and again, as the French did before us and we were doing now – well, it wasn’t worth the life of even a single soldier. I’d learned.”

David Hackworth – About Face pp. 523-524

Apples and oranges as the saying goes. The difficulties of a conventional war in Europe and an unconventional one in Waziristan are very different. It might be better to say that an officer who has grown accustomed to one way may find it much more difficult to shift to the other.

... the hearts-and-minds component of COIN requires a “good guys vs bad guys” dynamic that is not available to us. It would be more coherent to declare that our national security requires that we deem Af/Pak a US Territory as J Thomas suggests above at 5:14 pm.

It seems to me a laborious, if possibly doable, research project. If one thought of some cohorts that would have fought in both HIC/LIC (eg, British in the 1920s, American in the 1960s - although that might be stretching it a bit), and then dug around the archives for their papers, etc, perhaps one could find documents that attest to the comparative ease or difficulty? Again, certainly laborious. Doable - I know not.

... what should be a non-issue.

Because something is "more difficult" in some ways, it doesn't mean the other thing isn't "more difficult" in other ways.

Anyone who's done serious manual labor and also grad school, eg, knows that that's true. For the two to get together and argue about who's got the harder job is just silly.

Col. Gentile admitted as much years ago when he reviewed FM3-24. Among other points, he argued that the principle that "sometimes the best response is to do nothing" was just unrealistic. Armies need to fight, and when they're taking casualties and getting heat on the street, they need to respond and go get them. Otherwise it will destroy their morale.

In other words, non-retaliation is simply too difficult.

But we must add, only "In some ways!" Obviously, there's things about fighting that are harder than sitting back at base. And there's things about just sitting that are harder than fighting would be.

If Gentile would simply accept that--and maybe some COINdinistas need to also--we could move on.

Finally, a funny story. I can't remember the author of the memoir, but it was by a veteran of the Korean War. The guy had taught school for awhile, found he wasn't cut out for it, and had ended up getting drafted and on the front lines in Korea. One night he and his partner had to spend the entire night shelling the advancing Koreans who were coming in wave after wave. They'd send up a flare and there were just hundreds upon hundreds of them coming. His partner at one point stopped and said, "This is horrible! This is hell!" The first guy said, "No. This isn't hell. You want hell, try teaching kindergarten!"

I can understand why a serving military officer such as Colonel Gentile might be a bit dismayed when all sorts of "experts" come out of the woodwork proclaiming their opinions on COIN and military doctrine. However, for years during the culture wars the military liked to complain that few civilians in the U.S. had any interest, experience or knowledge of things military. Now that a think tank of persons who lean toward the Democratic Party has come along and become a proponent of COIN there are those who say: "Democrats, what do they know? They were all hippies at Woodstock who were skinny-dipping and smoking pot!"

The Army absolutely "gets" COIN. NTC has trained nothing but COIN since 2005 at least. The Army has spent million upon millions of dollars there building an incredible array of MOUT facilities - full size cities! They aren't going to be bulldozed when the last troops leave Afghanistan. Future HIC training will include elements of LIC, "3 block war" style. An entire generation of junior officers have cut their teeth in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't foresee that experience becoming "lost" anytime soon, even as the Army rebuilds its HIC capability. After Vietnam, officers had to discard their COIN mentality to focus on the conventional Soviet threat. I think its a little unfair to say the Army "forgot how to fight COIN". COIN is all well and good, but wasn't going to stop the Soviet hordes from pouring through the Fulda Gap. But in 2010, there is no Cold War; there is no reason for the Army to discard COIN capability. I don't think that's going to happen.

Gentile original claims seems to be that the greater the amount of people killed, then the worse/hardes a war is. Therefore WWI or WWII would be unbeatable. This seems simplistic.

I am sure no war is pleasant. There are large number of people. especially British and French officers, who had the experience of going from COIN to large scale Conventional War or the other way around. Even if I did not think of making such a comparison and do not have the quotes on hand I do have the distinct feeling after years working on a Ph.D. comparing British and French COIN after 1945, of having complaints about how hard COIN was compared to conventional war, and never the other way - but may be Gentile can provide some examples?

COIN was/is harder - not because it was simply different - but because of the way it was different. Making it much more complex and frustrating. You feel less certain about what to do, but also less safe wherever you are. There is no frontline, which means that you cannot be sure who is the enemy/friend, to add to this frustation is the protracted nature of it, and the fact that if don't hold an area after you cleared you risk hainv to regain the some ground again and again. Then there is the frustration of having to observe limits - the law, rights of civilians and, even worse, endure civilian bureaucrats - in the midst of combat.

Do I have any evidence? Yes from a classic practioner and great advocate of conventional warfare, General Baron de Jomini, who in his mostly conventional The Art of War, based on his long experience alongside Napoleon, states unequivocally refering to his experience in Portugal and Spain against the guerrillas of the Peninsular War:
"National Wars [...] are the most formidable. [...] The spectacle of a spontenous uprising of a nation is rarely seen, and thgout there be in it somethin grand and noble [...] the consequences are so terrible that for the sake of humanity, we ought to hope never to see it." He goes on to detail the consequences of thousands of Portuguese and Spanish guerrillas and concludes "As a soldier, preferring loyalswq

Gentile original claim seems to be that the greater the amount of people killed, then the worse/harder a war is. Therefore WWI or WWII would be unbeatable. This seems simplistic.

I am sure no war is pleasant. There are large number of people. especially British and French officers, who had the experience of going from COIN to large scale Conventional War or the other way around. Even if I did not think of making such a comparison and do not have the quotes on hand I do have the distinct feeling after years working on a Ph.D. comparing British and French COIN after 1945, of having complaints about how hard COIN was compared to conventional war, and never the other way - but may be Gentile can provide some examples?

COIN was/is harder in my view - not simply because it was different - but because of the way it was different. Making it much more complex and frustrating. Troops feel less certain about what to do, but also less safe wherever they are. There is no frontline, which means that you cannot be sure who is the enemy/friend, or when the action will come. To add to this frustation is the protracted nature of COIN, and the fact that if don't hold an area after you cleared it, you risk having to back and fight again for the some ground. Then there is the frustration of having to observe limits - the law, rights of civilians and, even worse, civilian bureaucrats - in the midst of combat operations.

Do I have any evidence? Yes from a classic practioner and great advocate of conventional warfare, General Baron de Jomini, who in his mostly conventional The Art of War, based on his long experience alongside Napoleon, states unequivocally refering to his experience in Portugal and Spain against the guerrillas of the Peninsular War:
"National Wars [...] are the most formidable. [...] The spectacle of a spontenous uprising of a nation is rarely seen, and though there be in it something grand and noble [...] the consequences are so terrible that for the sake of humanity, we ought to hope never to see it." He goes on to detail the terrible experience of facing thousands of Portuguese and Spanish guerrillas and concludes "As a soldier, preferring loyal and chivalrous warfare to organized assassination, [...] I acknowledge my prejudices [...] preferring them to the frightful epoch when priests, women, and children throughout Spain plotted the murder of isolated soldiers." (Chap. I Art. VIII)

I think this is pretty representative of the age old problem of soldiers doing COIN. Which, of course, does not mean it cannot be done.

It seems like much of this discussion misses the boat. The important thing is what it means for COIN to be "harder" than conventional war. If you define harder as more frustrating or indeterminate and with tougher metrics for success, perhaps the answer is "yes". But consider the other side. I think there is an important subtlety to Gentile's point that some are perhaps not noticing.

Framing the question as whether an individual officer finds COIN or conventional war harder seems precisely to miss the point.

There's a huge training "tail" to conventional war. It is not just training, but expensive (and often mass-produced) equipment that soldiers have to learn how to use and excel at using as well. That's incredibly difficult and explains why it has been so hard for many militaries to adopt the "modern system" of warfare despite good evidence that it makes success on conventional battlefields much more likely (see Biddle for more of a discussion of the modern system).

The actually relevant question is whether it is harder for a military, in the abstract, to become excellent at COIN or conventional war. It seems like just the huge mass of equipment purchases, training, etc., tilt the "degree of difficulty" towards conventional war.

Or put differently, suppose you had a military completely optimized for COIN that lacked the equipment necessary to pursue conventional land warfare and spent most of its training time on COIN as opposed to getting ready for conventional land warfare. If a conventional war breaks out the next day, this military better hope their country has nuclear weapons and can deter escalation, because otherwise they are going to face some serious, significant problems on the conventional battlefield almost immediately. They aren't going to get a chance to manufacture all new equipment and learn how to use it because they are probably going to get rolled.

Now suppose you have a military optimized for conventional warfare that has to do COIN. How hard will it be for them to transition? Turns out, as we have learned over the last 9 years, it *is* very hard, but the military can get better at it.

The key difference is when you abstract away from the individual and think about the challenges facing the military as a whole. It's the equipment and training "tail" that makes a 0 to 60 transition from COIN to conventional war probably almost impossible against a competent opponent. The other way around is hard too - no question - but saying that COIN is harder means saying you could fight a whole first year of a war in a conventional setting against an army with tanks if you didn't have any tanks yourself - or didn't know how to use them.

Again, this is *not* to say COIN is easy or that, from the perspective of the individual soldier, COIN is easy. It may actually, from the perspective of most individual soldiers, be harder than conventional war. But from a military organizational perspective, in a vacuum, it seems like conventional warfare is incredibly difficult to learn how to do well.

Sorry this is long, but it seems like a lot of this misses the point. If you are looking for policy direction, it seems like the key thing is about what is harder for a military organization in the abstract, not what seems harder from the perspective of the individual. But I could be wrong - it happens all the time. Anyone else?

Thanks for your reply to my comment. Here's why I think mass high tech conventional warfare is necessarily more challenge (and keep in mind I mean more challenging for the average military - if a specific military is already tilted in one direction or another it would obviously change this calculus):

The significant resources, both technical and financial, required to build a modern high-tech military form an enormous barrier to entry. All of those COIN things you mentioned *are* difficult, but the amount of money and technical expertise (engineering, etc.) needed to do them are smaller. That's the whole point made by COIN advocates about how much good work they could do with the funds from a single F-22, etc.

If you include money and technical expertise (e.g. ability to build the equipment, maintain it, etc.) in what counts as difficulty, I think it changes the way you think about it.

I think the best way to illustrate it is to imagine two militaries, one optimized for COIN and one for high-technology conventional warfare. Further assume (and I know this isn't realistic) that you can undo years/decades of training in an instant and immediately retrain all the conventional types with COIN best practices and all the COIN folks about how to conduct conventional war.

Now put each of those militaries on the battlefield doing its "new" task - so the military that used to be optimized for COIN has to fight a big conventional war and the military that used to be optimized for conventional war has to fight an insurgency. How do they do? Keep in mind that through the magic of the assumption I made above, each military already has "perfect" training, conceptually, about how to conduct this new type of warfare (new to them).

The formerly conventional military now doing COIN might struggle a bit transforming theory into practice, but they will already have all the technical resources to successfully conduct COIN (I don't mean because they have the conventional equipment, I just mean because COIN doesn't require a ton of high-priced technologies, it requires using proportionate force, basic local rebuilding, etc., just as you meant it).

The formerly COIN-centric military now conducting a conventional military operation, on the other hand, is completely doomed from the start. They have none of the tools of modern warfare - the advanced platforms, munitions, etc. You can't just whip those up out of nothing. It takes years (or decades) and a ton of advanced technical expertise to build all of that stuff (even presuming money is not an obstacle, which it is, of course in the real world).

I think this example shows that there is this additional layer to conventional war at the *organizational* level that is not usually considered when people have the "which is harder" debate. And I think that additional layer is really pretty big.

Again - this doesn't mean COIN is easy. And I think this question of "which is harder" is a distraction in some ways from the bigger questions facing the US military, e.g. how do you actually balance between these things when you need to be ready for both? But if I had to draw a line somewhere, I think, at the organizational level, it's that additional layer that really changes the equation.

Disagree?

Main-force wars are binary. You win or you lose. LIC/COIN/small stuff is all confusion: you have an uncertain beginning, a muddled middle, and maybe no end at all.

We seem to know how to fight a big war, or so we tell ourselves at least. But LIC? Not a clue, though many trees have given their lives to print theories and philosophies that would say otherwise ... were they ever to produce a victory.

The COIN conventional wisdom has us in Afghanistan for years, decades, perhaps - Ed Luttwak - 'a century or two.' Voila. LIC/COIN is far more complex, so complex as to be unfathomable.

I rest my case.

I am not sure it is right to conflate complexity and difficulty. Additionally, if you include the "complexity" of building aircraft carriers, tanks, fighter planes, and nuclear weapons in the "complexity" of conventional war, is it really all that much easier?

Additionally, I think you are underestimating the difficulty of implementing the modern system for most countries around the world. It's really, really complex. Seems easy from an American perspective at this point -- and from an American perspective perhaps COIN is harder -- but the key is, for an average military with no expertise in either, which has higher barriers to entry.

The technological and financial barriers to being an advanced conventional military are simply larger than anything on the COIN side. There are countries that, no matter how hard they try, could never hope to build a military that could fight an advanced conventional war in the next 20-25 years. The technical and financial barriers are too high. All of those countries (I'm presuming they are internally stable so taking that out of the equation here) could overcome the technical and financial hurdles to COIN.

Modern conventional warfare is complex and difficult in a different, harder-to-overcome, way.

LIC comes in a zillion flavors. In Northern Ireland the Brits just tried to keep the lid on while minimizing casualties so as not to inflame the situation more (after their 1972 fiasco in Derry with the paratroopers). Nation building wasn't in the frame of reference, and defeating the IRA militarily was quickly understood to not be an option as long as there was a birth rate.

Vietnam? COIN, nation-building, defeat of a nation-state and probably a bunch of other things.

Afghanistan? Slightly similar to Vietnam except the "enemy" is not a state and is only partially an indigenous guerrilla force.

Bosnia in the mid-90s? Nation-building, COIN, pacification of both state and non-state players, diplomacy to cool off avid supporters of one side or the other or the other.

Duck's point about binary vs. (possibly) multiple combatants on different "sides" is crucial. LIC often has three or more groupings, with various relationships to the other players, often shifting around. For example, although the British forces and the IRA were the main players in Northern Ireland there were at least two other republican groupings, at least three loyalist paramilitary groups, which were as illegal as the IRA but often colluded with British intelligence and often shared target lists with the Brits and vice versa.

Then there was the Republic of Ireland, an important political player with interesting relationships with both the Brits and the IRA depending on which ROI government we are talking about and which year out of the three decades the conflict dragged on for. Really, really complicated - and not just for the reasons stated. There's a lot of other stuff as well.

Beyond that, wars of national liberation, civil wars, wars between nation-states over territory, etc., etc. all have unique characteristics.

So it seems to me that LIC/COIN is the more complex in terms of execution whereas binary conflict between nation-states is more complex in terms of logistics and its organizational aspects.

That said, in WW II there was action in Alaska, the SW Pacific, the Central Pacific, CBI, Ethiopia, North Africa, SE Europe (Greece, Yugoslavia), Russia and Central Europe, Finland, Western Europe, with significant forces in Central America, and naval forces covering the length and breadth of the Atlantic Ocean, most of the Indian Ocean, parts of the Arctic Ocean, most of the Pacific Ocean, the entire Mediterranean, and Caribbean seas.

Let's see. That's somewhere between 13 and 17 areas of operation depending on how you define them. There's no way the logistics and planning for that sort of conflict is less complex than running a LIC or COIN operation.

Hell - just making that list was pretty complex!