I have a couple of questions.

Regarding point 2 in the first paragraph "2) would be a counterinsurgency approach centered around military action to attack insurgent sources of military power (sometimes referred to as counter-terror or CT), but not linked to an endstate of a rebuilt or newly built nation state;". Isn't a source of military power the ability to recruit and wouldn't the attitude of the people in the disputed area toward the insurgent and counter-insurgent affect the ability of either side to recruit so wouldn't it be important to affect the attitudes and opinions of the people in the disputed area?

I have a question about this sentence in the second last paragraph "The point here is to emphasize the limits of winning hearts and minds of a population at the barrel of a gun and to create a better, more sophisticated understanding of populations and societal motivation and actions in insurgencies and civil wars." I don't quite understand. When insurgents of whatever time use terrorism to "win hearts and minds" to the extent that the people in the affected area won't tell the counter-insurgent anything at all about them, haven't they achieved what they need to, to the limit they need to, with "the barrel of a gun"? And in order to reverse that achievement doesn't the counter-insurgent have to separate the people in the disputed area from that gun to their head, generally doing that with the gun?

Granted I’m a bit dated with my experience in Viet-Nam, as is my Father-in-Law, with his experience as a veteran of France’s war in Algeria. But we agree that the figure of 80% is quite a stretch - it’s probably much less than that (maybe about 10% at the local level doing any heavy lifting?).

Additionally, speaking of "hearts and minds:" someone might want to consider replacing that dated phrase with something like deference and confidence?

An anecdotal comment for ong Quang Pham: there was also a tendency for many American trained junior Vietnamese officers to hold back in displaying their talents least they be seen as embarrassing their less creative-tactically practiced superiors. However, I would agree with the premise contained in his epilogue statement in general.

Interesting comments as always from Col Gentile. I like the idea of approaching COIN as an undertaking with a variety of approaches, ranging from FID and CT, to the full Monty, population-centric nation building model that SWJ geeks (like me) have grown to know and love. I don’t think that you can separate counter-terrorism from counter-insurgency, as you have to get your intelligence from somewhere and the best place to do that is on the ground talking to people. Still, as ever, strategy is the art of balancing resources with desired ends and Generals do their Presidents a disservice when they only present one approach to a problem (3-24 or else!).

He also made an interesting comment about the need for “more
sophisticated understanding of populations and societal motivation and actions.” There have been a variety of approaches to this, including General Flynn’s “Hungry Analyst/Fix Intel” model. There is also the Human Terrain Team model, which essentially outsources analysis to contract social scientists. I’ve heard mixed reviews. The other approach is the military Culture Centers, such as the Marine Corps Center for Advanced Operational Cultural Learning. This is an in-house effort to teach just enough culture and language to make the operating forces more effective at whatever they are doing. Whether places like CAOCL will survive after Afghanistan or progress beyond “Defense Language Institute-Light” is an open question.

... but I'm glad to see COL Gentile contributing here. I've been following his posts on the Small Wars Journal for quite some time and am always interested in what he has to say.

Not an hour before reading this post, I finished Woodward's "Obama's Wars," and I was struck by the following quotation from Col. Gentile:

"The trifecta trick would be to . . . move away from the dogmatic belief currently held that anytime an insurgency is fought it must be of the population centric (FM 3-24, aka state building) persuasion, and that methods of CT and FID are subsumed within it and hence are seen as "lesser" operations."

Based on Woodward's reporting, that insight seems to be what drove the President's views of the Afghan policy debate. According to the book, Obama consistently emphasized that he was not authorizing a full population-centered counterinsurgency, but was rather authorizing a more limited surge using elements of a protect-the-population strategy. The purpose was to "degrade" the Taliban's capability so we could turn the fight over to the Afghans.

To my (layman's) eye, that seems an awful lot like combining CT and FID to a limited FM 3-24 approach, and is very different from the 2007 strategy authorized in Iraq. Am I missing something, or does that sound right to the non-layfolk who lurk in Tom's comment thread?

Does it really matter what is written down in an FM? My limited experience revealed a huge abyss between what was printed in the manual and the actual conduct of operations. Has this delta shrunk in the past 20 years? Can this fluid type of operation, where there are 10,000 ever-changing variables be reduced to a cookbook? Strikes me as odd, that some believe that wars can be fought (or in this case, the conduct of ‘counterinsurgency’ operations) according to a formula for baking a cake (i.e. a little bit of state-building, a tad of force, and a smidgen of reconstruction…). Could this be a function of having too many staff officers/think tanks? My guess is that most commanders just want to get their men out of there in one piece. More elaborate formulas are not going to help.

Any way you slice and dice this advertising illusion as some kind of noble field manual, the result is the same. War is a business. War makes the pigs who prosecute it rich. The COIN Carnival goes on. But, don´t look inside the tent, you may have to face the truth!

Colonel Lang gives kudos to Smedley Butler.

"This is the dirty big "secret" of this era of war without end. In the last nine years of war in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world, the borrowed US Government money has flowed and flowed and flowed. Some of it has gone into extravagant but understandable expenditures for O&M, equipment, force expansion, bureaucratic growth in the federal government, etc., but a lot of it has gone into the pocket of predatory US, European, and Australian contractors and their local allies in these various god forsaken places. what Karazai has pointed out here is that we have encouraged the natural rapacity of the elites in these countries by participating in their corruption. The rot and profits run very high up the civilian authority structure on our side. There is so much money that it, in itself, is a silent factor in policy decisions.

Smedley Butler would recognize this phenomenon."

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/

These things are not discussed here, because to do so would betray the banality of evil that gives it status. Going to Bob Dylan concerts.... 7 out of 10 counties surrounding the District of Corruption are the wealthiest of all. The looting raid of America has been very good for our criminal ruling class. The SS were very good a looting as well. The benality of evil truly thrives in this dark and evil place. They have their reward.

"I would completely demolish the theory of population centric, hearts and minds COIN that FM 3-24 is currently built on"

COL Gentile is concerned that we take a dogmatic response that leans always to PC-COIN, so his response is to completely demolish it despite historical examples where it has worked? Sounds like swinging the pendulum a little too far in the opposite direciton.

Also, the example he cites of the 10-80-10 diagram is a little disingenuous, no where in the manual does it suggest the 80% in the middle is just waiting for their hearts and minds to be one over, but in most, if not all, societies, that's how the population breaks down politically. In a two-party political system, the small minority of people active in politics campaigns to gain the support of the large majority, that's why millions of dollars are spent on political ads in the run-ups to elections. Counterinsurgencies tend to mirror this phenomenon as in most cases it's a roughly two-party system, the state government and counterinsurgents versus the insurgents attempting to overrun them.

Simply focusing on erradicating the enemy with no concern towards the population base is ignoring the center of gravity around which they build their campaign. Relatedly, attempting to defeat the insurgency without addressing the legitimate grievances of the population is to ignore the underlying cause for the insurgency.

The French tried that in Algeria and where extremely successful in targeting insurgent networks and demolishing them, but they ultimately lost the conflict because they ignored the people.

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...but grabbing the wrong book off the shelf or arguing that the book needs a rewrite is not an honest reason for losing/failing-to-win our nation's longest war.

The simpler analysis: our AVF has not been up to the task nor has our military's uniformed leaders (primarily Army). Iraq was a giant cock up. Afghanistan is a giant cock up.

And the Army's answer is ... the book is wrong? Jesus! With nearly unlimited material support, vastly superior equipment, and up against a ragtag lot of ill-equipped irregulars, the vaunted AVF has been handed its ass. And the Army's answer is ... better doctrine.

Why not better leaders? Why not the ability to achieve the mission, at core 'To conduct prompt and sustained combat operations on land in support of national objectives.' It's that last phrase where failure lies: the US Army has not been up to the task of supporting national objectives.

Yes the Army needs reform. Radical reform. It's not a doctrine problem.

that one of our leading military thinkers finds it necessary to tell us what we already knew: the emperor has no clothes. This field manual reeks of politics, of self-aggrandizement, of hasty action taken to get something, anything published to satisfy a civilian audience that "something" is being done. Sure, it's got some valuable things, but as Gian points out, the fact that it tells readers that there is fundamentally only one way to approach what is a terribly complex issue is totally unfair to the unwary soldiers who, given the hype, can be forgiven for thinking that this is somehow lessons from the mount.

Here's what a field manual is. It's a cookbook. It's doctrine. And doctrine, according to a very wise old commander of mine, is 51 percent of the time. Just as my wife, the master cook, takes recipes and then improves upon them enormously, so do alert and knowledgeable soldiers and marines improve upon whatever they may have learned at Benning or Quantico or from studying a field manual. Military personnel make up new doctrine all of the time. They may not even realize they're doing it; it happens when their training and their books don't give the answer to what they're facing. We've all done that.

There are tons of FMs out there. Most of us are fairly familiar with those that impact our particular part of the military universe. We use them just as good cooks use cookbooks: we take what we need, reject what isn't applicable and then perhaps throw something different into the pot. We realize that FMs are not law, nor are they even regulation. They are guides. Nothing more, nothing less. The problem with this particular FM is that, given its provenance and the way it's been balleyhooed as the answer to all problems, it is now being treated as holy writ. Which means it will inevitably become a straitjacket for those poor troops who might be unfortunate enough to be led by unimaginative officers who actually do believe in the FM's divine provenance.

My friend Gian Gentile will inevitably be viewed as even more of a heretic for what he's suggesting here. There he goes again. Colonel Gentile and his wild notions that somehow flexibility and adaptability are more important than dogmatic adherence to the faith. My. God, Gian, how could you?

And then there is Rubber Ducky with the diatribe against the Army and its leadership. Ducky wonders why this particular book is so important when there are so many other issues. Unfortunately, as a retired Army officer, I find myself hard pressed to disagree with Ducky. He's right. It isn't a doctrine problem. But he's also wrong if he thinks the problem ends with the Army. Hint, Ducky: it goes much higher than the Army. Great doctrine coupled with great leadership wouldn't come anywhere near curing what ails us. Grant, Pershing and Marshall combined couldn't fix this one.

Publius

The book of that title details opportunities and problems when a centralized power fights a decentralized foe. One example given was Australian divers trying to save their reefs by cutting rapacious starfish in half, resulting in yet more starfish.

Kudos to Col. Gentile for warning against the koolaid. But I think JPWREL's comment gets us closer to the strategic heart of the problem. It's hard to win a war that is waged adverse to the national interest. I see that the COIN brain trust has a new marketing position, promising to peel us off this tar baby in four more years, give or take.

Re Af-Pak, a discourse with strategic understanding and implications can be read at:
http://www.acus.org/event/us-pakistan-relations-dialogue-pervez-musharraf/transcript
A Dialogue with Pervez Musharraf: 11/10/10 - Transcript

Tom,

Thanks for asking (no-one cares to ask the difficult questions, you know?).

Boars - even common swine - have tormented my family for generations. My great great grandfather, Herbert Josiah McGuigan, declared a War on Swine (nee 'Boar War') back during the last half of the 19th century. Our family actually resettled to Australia around this time - an advance to the hindquarters of sorts.

Things were bad for us in Europe - the swine was making mince meat out of us. Forced, as it were, like so many sausages crammed in a boat for several months we were shipwrecked at Barwon Heads in 1853.

Sadly, there was swine aboard. Some of whom made it ashore. The ensuing years saw a series of skirmishes and battles, the Battle of Burgher, the Stand at Kransky, and the War of Salted Loin, to name a few.

In which time, through the support of the local population, the swine population - through incestuous union - had increased its numbers with agricultural alacrity.

My family smoked them out at times, scalding them before we really turned up the heat. This, of course, was the Battle of Bastings. The years after were apples and gravy.

Not much has really changed since. Nowadays, even when I look a piggy in the eye - there's a gleam, a knowing, a reckoning that crosses our minds. It's a score that runs just under the skin, and crackles up from time to time.

Best,

AAW
http://www.negativeagain.blogspot.com/

First, the French won the war in Algeria - period. The population they lost was the people of Metropolitan France. The French won by employing methods that, thankfully, we could never stomach. In 1960 I was on a train, drinking beer with French Marines on their way home from Algeria via Marseilles - they were buying. As they told me what they had been ordered to do, they cried. These were men from Brittany. We all forget too quickly and then try to draw lessons from what we have forgotten.

Since I eschew the type of thinking in COL Gentile's comments, I'll avoid an extensive commentary save to say, first, that I barely understand the language that he uses. Second, the bulk of the people is on the fence and will not be persuaded by argument. They just want to be left alone by everybody. Otherwise, as previously mentioned, they will temporarily go along with whoever holds a gun to their head. "The people are like bamboo, bending with the wind." Their goal is to survive.

Although I assert that Afghanistan is unique, a Vietnamese saying does apply, "The emperor's law stops at the village gate." Amongst other things, trying to import and impose a central government on villages in remote valleys is folly. Never mind that the central government is corrupt an ineffectual.

Within the borders of Afghanistan, we are facing a unique rural population that is ignorant with little or no support to learn to read and write. They have no concept of what Afghanistan is and little knowledge beyond the spoken Koran. Where has an insurgency ever been fought in a nation like this? Certainly not in Greece, Algeria, Malaya, or Vietnam. Perhaps the first time in the Philippines would serve as an example. I don't think that Smedly Butler was nation-building. In Afghanistan, the villagers who want you out of their valley will fight you, with or without Taliban support. In Afghanistan, aid workers are killed by the Taliban. That rarely happened in Vietnam. However, like other insurgencies, none was won without the border being sealed. Both Greece and Algeria are prime examples. So, in my view, tradition COIN strategies will not work in rural Afghanistan.

We are, however, succeeding in killing the Taliban and the few foreign fighters who accompany them. In my opinion, this is what is really bothering Karzai, although I admit, I don't know why. The conventional US Army officer has no clue how to negotiate with a Shura and has received little or no training in that regard. Watching a Marine NCO or Army officer talking to a village elder is a sad TV moment. Because "area defeats you," we do not have enough forces to cover the area current strategy demands. Errors like Wanat are due to lieutenant colonels and colonels blindly trying to execute this strategy while ignorantly pursuing what they think are COIN goals.

So what can we do? Well, we can keep on killing the Taliban from company strength outposts and by employing special operations forces surgically. We can stop supporting a Pakistani Army and intelligence service which won't help us and which often work against us. We need another way to seal the border or to make the Taliban afraid to cross the border. Perhaps everyone doesn't want to die in jihad. We can stop trying to export the central government to remote valleys and just strengthen whatever local government we find or leave them alone. OR, we can get out.

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"Wouldn't it be refreshing for the Pentagon to admit the obvious---we don't do hearts and minds or civilian public administration/politics very well except for emergency/disaster intervention, and start the rethink from there."

What's the cure for COIN-fever?

Admiral?

Ducky?

It's like typhoid or cholera.

What's the political equivalent of hand-washing?

Covering dirt with makeup.

Even make-up has a foundation though...