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ABSTRACT
The counterinsurgency era that dominated American military discussion post-9/11 has passed. The desire to move on, particularly since the loss of Afghanistan in August 2021, has left unsettled a conversation on counterinsurgency that, both among supporters and detractors, was often dangerously narrow. Too hastily embraced and too rapidly abandoned, counterinsurgency generated false promises and then became the scapegoat for poor strategy. This article examines the counterinsurgency era that was and demonstrates how fad-like engagement with the topic in both military and academic circles subverted the supposed learning process taking place. It argues that the lessons from this engagement are mostly misleading or at least incomplete, but it also notes that there is minimal appetite to look deeper into a topic now deemed toxic. Therein lies significant danger.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Dr. Marks is Distinguished Professor and MG Edward G. Lansdale Chair of Irregular Warfighting Strategy at CISA and founding chair of its War and Conflict Studies Department (WACS). Dr. Ucko is Professor and current chair of WACS. They have worked together since the latter as a graduate student interviewed the former in the course of dissertation preparation. The views presented are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Defense or its components.
2 Indeed, the U.S. military doctrine defines counterinsurgency as ‘comprehensive civilian and military efforts designed to simultaneously defeat and contain insurgency and address its root causes’. See Joint Chiefs of Staff, Counterinsurgency (Washington, DC: Department of Defense April 25, 2018), xiii.
3 For an elaboration of this point, see David H. Ucko, ‘”The People are Revolting”: An Anatomy of Authoritarian Counterinsurgency’, Journal of Strategic Studies 39/no. 1 (2016), 29–61.
4 The text of the 1958 novel is readily available, but of particular note is the film version in its Italian original, Il Gattopardo, with sub-titles to the 1963 release, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes the same year (the U.S. release suffered from inferior editing and is forgettable).
5 David H. Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the U.S. Military for Modern Wars (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press 2009), 44.
6 Austin Long, Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence: The U.S. Military and Counterinsurgency Doctrine, 1960–1970 and 2003–2006 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 2008).
7 Bruce Hoffman, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 2004).
8 Two theorists simultaneously published their thoughts on the matter: James A. (‘Jimmy’) Bates, resident at the then co-located Air Force Special Operations School (AFSOS at Hurlburt Field, FL)/Joint Special Operations University (JSOU, now at USSOCOM, Tampa, FL), in a paper widely distributed within the special operations community, ‘The War on Terrorism: Countering Global Insurgency in the 21st Century’ (December 2005); and David Kilcullen, ‘Countering Global Insurgency’, Journal of Strategic Studies 28/4 (2005), 597–617.
9 Seminal text for the period being rejected remains Douglas S. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance, 1950 to the Present (NY: The Free Press 1977).
10 Remaining unrivaled in its depth and insights, Peter Rodman, More Precious Than Peace: Fighting and Winning the Cold War in the Third World (NY: Scribner 1994). For the larger strategic issue of intervention, to include the case of Afghanistan, James M. Scott (ed.), Deciding to Intervene: The Reagan Doctrine and American Foreign Policy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1996); and also, Edward A. Lynch, The Cold War’s Last Battlefield: Reagan, the Soviets, and Central America (Albany: State University Press of New York 2011). For the controversy in Latin America, a work which has not stood the passage of time (but noteworthy for both its author and its outlet), Walter Lafeber, ‘The Reagan Administration and Revolutions in Central America’, Political Science Quarterly 99/1 (Spring 1984), 1–25.
11 See Condoleezza Rice, ‘Iraq and U.S. Policy’. Opening Remarks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Washington, DC, October 19, 2005.
12 As an indication of the growing interest in the subject, the U.S. Army’s Military Review featured at most nine articles on counterinsurgency in 2004, the U.S. military’s first full year in Iraq; by 2005, this a number had grown to twenty-nine and, in 2006, it increased to thirty. In the U.S. Army War College quarterly Parameters, the figure rose from three counterinsurgency-related articles in 2004 to eleven in 2005 and 14 in 2006. Most important, many of the articles were based on direct operational experience and embraced counterinsurgency’s civilian as well as military components.
13 See U.S. Department of Defense, Directive 3000.05: Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations. Washington, DC: Department of Defense 2005.
14 This moment is described in detail in Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era, 65–80; also, Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (NY: Simon & Schuster 2013). Indispensable for engaging with the learning process, by the project director for the writing of FM 3–24, Conrad C. Crane, Cassandra in Oz: Counterinsurgency and Future War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press 2016).
15 See Benjamin Buley, The New American Way of War: Military Culture and the Political Utility of Force (New York: Routledge 2007).
16 There is considerable food for thought in the reality that FM 3–24, for all its intense engagement with the subject, neither operationally nor culturally adds to what was contained in the numerous ad hoc publications that emerged during the Vietnam War or even academia. Unsurpassed, for example, remains a commercial publication by a much-experienced army veteran, John J. McCuen, The Art of Counter-Revolutionary War (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole, 1966). The point to which U.S. military knowledge finally arrived with the ‘Surge’ is arguably where McCuen (USMA ’48) begins. The book was long on the Department of the Army’s recommended reading list.
17 See The White House, ‘President’s Address to the Nation’. Washington, DC, January 10, 2007.
18 For discussion, see Stephen Biddle, Jeffrey A. Friedman, and Jacob N. Shapiro, ‘Testing the Surge: Why Did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007?’ International Security 37/1 (Summer 2012), 7–40.
19 U.S. Department of the Army, FM 3–0, Operations (Washington DC: U.S. Army 2008), 1–4.
20 Examples of these critiques abound. See, e.g., Michael A. Cohen, ‘The Myth of a Kinder, Gentler War’. World Policy Journal 27/1 (2010), 75–86; Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War (New York: Cambridge University Press 2013); and Gian Gentile, Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency (New York: The New Pres, 2013). For discussion of critique, see David H. Ucko, ‘Critics Gone Wild: Counterinsurgency as the Root of All Evil’, Small Wars & Insurgencies 25/1 (2014), 161–179.
21 The authors are indebted to Frank Hoffman for the phrase. For the analysis, see David H. Ucko, ‘Counterinsurgency after Afghanistan: A Concept in Crisis’, PRISM 3/1 (2011), 11–12. For the actual playing out of events, which led to Petraeus himself being asked to return to his role as COIN maestro, see Michael Hastings, The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (NY: Blue Rider Press/Penguin 2012).
22 See also Sean Naylor, ‘After years of fighting insurgencies, the Army pivots to training for a major war’, Yahoo! News, 30 October 2018.
23 ‘Although our forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale prolonged stability operations, we will preserve the expertise gained during the past ten years of counterinsurgency and stability operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will also protect the ability to regenerate capabilities that might be needed to meet future demands’. Quadrennial Defense Review 2014 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, 4 March 2014), VII.
24 In 2012, a Joint-Staff-commissioned study into past operations noted ‘a failure to recognize, acknowledge, and accurately define the operational environment’ and a ‘conventional warfare paradigm … ineffective when applied to operations other than major combat’. Joint and Coalition Operational Analysis, Decade of War, Volume I: Enduring Lessons from the Past Decade of Operations (Washington, DC: CJCS J-7, 15 June 2012): 2, 3, 15, 25. One of the most ground-breaking innovations – the creation of six security-force assistance brigades – began in 2018, after 17 years of desperately needed similar capacities in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
25 Hy S. Rothstein, Afghanistan and the Troubled Future of Unconventional Warfare (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press 2006).
26 Christopher Coker, Rebooting Clausewitz: ‘On War’ in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017), 146. For a fuller discussion of counterinsurgency’s enduring relevance, see Chris Tripodi and Matthew Wiger, ‘Worthless COIN? Why the West Should Keep Studying Counterinsurgency’, Modern War Institute, 26 July 2022.
27 Full-spectrum operations feature as a theme in US Army doctrine going back to the 1960s, though these have at different times been called ‘full-dimensional’ operations.
28 In the doctrinal formulation, ‘Irregular warfare (IW) is defined as a violent struggle among state and nonstate actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations. IW favors indirect and asymmetric approaches, though it may employ the full range of military and other capabilities, in order to erode an adversary’s power, influence, and will. It is inherently a protracted struggle that will test the resolve of our Nation and our strategic partners’. U.S. Department of Defense, Irregular Warfare (IW) Joint Operating Concept 1.0 (Washington DC, 11 September 2007), 1; (hereafter JOC).
29 Summary of the Irregular Warfare Annex to the National Defense Strategy (Washington, DC: Department of Defense 2020), 1.
30 For explanation of terminology and categories, among a host of possibilities, particularly useful is an older doctrinal publication, U.S. Air Force, Doctrine Document 2–3 Irregular Warfare (1 August 2007), https://fas.org/irp/doddir/usaf/afdd2–3.pdf. Individual services, notably the army, add further categories to IW, but these are but an extension of the major activities.
31 JOC, 1.
32 JOC, 10.
33 The Annex itself is classified. For quoted passages, Summary of the Irregular Warfare Annex to the National Defense Strategy 2020, https://media.defense.gov/2020/Oct/02/2002510472/-1/-1/0/Irregular-Warfare-Annex-to-the-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.PDF.
34 The shift has not yet been incorporated in doctrine but is reflected in the IW Annex to the National Defense Strategy cited above.
35 In its 2022 capstone doctrine on operations, the US Army went ahead and provided its own reworked definition, removing from the term any mention of legitimacy along with any real criteria as to what it describes. The new definition frames IW as ‘the overt, clandestine, and covert employment of military and non-military capabilities across multiple domains by state and non-state actors through methods other than military domination of an adversary, either as the primary approach or in concert with conventional warfare’. In (far) simpler terms, IW is then literally anything other than military domination, though because IW can also occur ‘in concert with conventional warfare’, even that definitional marker is ambiguous. Though the manual later acknowledges ‘legitimacy’ as a key attribute in irregular warfare, and includes this term sporadically throughout, the etiology and contribution of the term are at risk. See U.S. Department of the Army, FM 3–0, Operations (Washington DC, 1 October 2022), 1—9. For further commentary on the redefinition of IW, see David H. Ucko and Thomas A. Marks, ‘Redefining Irregular Warfare: Legitimacy, Coercion, and Power’, Modern Warfare Institute, 18 October 2022, https://mwi.usma.edu/redefining-irregular-warfare-legitimacy-coercion-and-power/.
36 The threat challenge is illustrated in the well-known Chinese text, Unrestricted Warfare (https://www.c4i.org/unrestricted.pdf). This is but the latest manifestation of formal doctrine (Soviet and Chinese in its original form) now fully a century old. It is but a logical outgrowth of a transition from insurgency (using terrorism as method) to revolutionary power (albeit of a degraded sort). See Thomas A. Marks and David H. Ucko, ‘Gray Zone in Red: The Threat From China’s Political Warfare Past’, The Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International 26/3 (2021), 26–31; and also, our introductory article to the special ‘Chinese IW’ section in Small Wars and Insurgencies 32/1 (March 2021), ‘Gray Zone Conflict: China Revisits the Past’.
37 See Jeffrey H. Michaels, ‘Managing Global Counterinsurgency: The Special Group (CI) 1962–1966’, Journal of Strategic Studies 35/1 (2012), 33–61. See also Marks and Kirklin J. Bateman (eds.), Perspectives on the American Way of War: The U.S. Experience in Irregular Conflict (London: Routledge 2020).
38 For the Philippines, Gregory Wilson, ‘Anatomy of a Successful COIN Operation: OEF-Philippines and the Indirect Approach’, Military Review 86/6 (November-December 2006), 2–12; for Colombia, Thomas A. Marks, ‘A Model Counterinsurgency: Uribe’s Colombia (2002–2006) vs. FARC’, Military Review 87/2 (March-April 2007), 41–56.
39 See e.g., Carlos Ospina and Thomas A. Marks, ‘Colombia: Changing Strategy Within the Struggle’, Small Wars & Insurgencies 25/2 (2014), 354–371; and also, Carlos Alberto Ospina, Thomas A. Marks, and David H. Ucko, ‘Colombia and the War-to-Peace Transition: Cautionary Lessons From Other Cases’, Military Review 96/4 (July-August 2016), 2–14.
40 A useful corrective is Charles Lindholm and José Pedro Zúquete, The Struggle for the World: Liberation Movements for the 21st Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2010).
41 Still unmatched in its laying out of this reality is Dale Andrade, ‘Westmoreland was Right: Learning the Wrong Lessons from the Vietnam War’, Small Wars & Insurgencies 19/2 (June 2008), 145–181. For the relationship between the southern and northern efforts, as now understood based on examination of post-war documentation, Ed O’Dowd, ’”What Kind of War is This”?’ Journal of Strategic Studies 37/6–7 (2014), 1027–1049.
42 For Vietnam, integration of organization and approach was finally achieved too late to escape the demand for disengagement. See Dale Andrade and James H. Willbanks, ‘CORDS/Phoenix: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Vietnam for the Future’, Military Review 86/2 (March-April 2006), 9–23.
43 Jonathan E. Gumz, ‘Reframing the Historical Problematic of Insurgency: How the Professional Military Literature Created a New Literature and Missed the Past’, Journal of Strategic Studies 32/4 (2009), 553–588 (see p.581).
44 For further commentary, see David H. Ucko, The Insurgent’s Dilemma: A Struggle to Prevail (London: Hurst; New York: Oxford University Press 2022), 17–22.
45 Notable counterexamples to this trend include William Reno, Warfare in Independent Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2011); Beatrice Heuser and Eitan Shamir (eds), Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies: National Styles and Strategic Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016); and Paul B. Rich and Isabelle Duyvesteyn (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency, Routledge Handbooks series (London: Routledge 2012).
46 See for example Donatella Della Porta’s Clandestine Political Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press 2013); and Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006).
47 See, for example, the excellent work of the late anthropologist Carlos Iván Degregori on the conflict in Peru, accessible in English in How Difficult It Is to Be God: Shining Path’s Politics of War in Peru, 1980–1999 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press 2012).
48 The scholarship of Ken Menkhaus stands out as a invaluable exception to a broader trend. See, for example, Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism, Adelphi Paper 364 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies 2004).
49 See for example Jason Lyall, ‘Do Democracies Make Inferior Counterinsurgents? Reassessing Democracy’s Impact on War Outcomes and Duration’, International Organization 64/1 (2010) 167–92.
50 The authors have been unable to trace the etiology of the decision-making that substituted casualties for social sciences meaning, but a useful discussion is Mark Gersovitz and Norma Kriger, ‘What Is a Civil War? A Critical Review of Its Definition and (Econometric) Consequences’, The World Bank Research Observer 28 (2013), 159–190.
51 Draws in part on David H. Ucko, ‘Innovation or Inertia: The U.S. Military and the Learning of Counterinsurgency’, Orbis 52/2 (Spring 2008).
52 An argument, of course, can be made that debacles such as Saigon 1975 and Kabul 2021, in fact, carry very heavy costs but that the policy elite is not the ones to bear them, either tangibly or intangibly, perhaps even geopolitically.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Thomas A. Marks
Thomas A. Marks is Distinguished Professor and MG Edward G. Lansdale Chair of Irregular Warfighting Strategy at CISA and founding chair of its War and Conflict Studies Department (WACS).
David H. Ucko
David H. Ucko is Professor and current chair of WACS. They have worked together since the latter as a graduate student interviewed the former in the course of dissertation preparation. The views presented are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Defense or its components.