Systems failure: the US way of irregular warfare

ABSTRACT

Since 9/11, the United States has achieved notable gains against al Qaeda, and also Islamic State (IS), all while avoiding another mass-casualty attack at home. Yet, institutionally, culturally, and in its capabilities, the US government remains seriously ill-equipped for the task of countering irregular threats. Partly as a result, Islamist extremism shows no sign of being defeated, having instead metastasized since 9/11 and spread. Why, given the importance accorded to counterterrorism, has the US approach remained inadequate? What is impeding more fundamental reforms? The article evaluates the United States’ way of irregular warfare: its troubled engagement with counterinsurgency and its problematic search for lower cost and lower risk ways of combating terrorism. It suggests needed reforms but acknowledges also the unlikelihood of change.

KEYWORDS:

• Institutional learning
• irregular warfare
• United States
• counterinsurgency
• counter-terrorism

Acknowledgement

This article draws on a shorter and earlier version of the same text. See David H. Ucko, “Learning Difficulties: The US Way of Irregular Warfare,” S&F Sicherheit und Frieden 36, no.1 (2018).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a critique of this concept, see Call, “The Fallacy of the ‘Failed State’,” 1491–1507. Also Aidan Hehir, “The Myth of the Failed State and the War on Terror,” 307–32.

2. US Department of Defense, “Directive 3000.05: Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations” (2005).

3. US Department of the Army and United States Marine Corps, FM 3–24/MCWP 3–33.5. Counterinsurgency (Washington DC: US Army, 2006).

4. See Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era; Serena, A Revolution in Military Adaptation.

5. Schadlow, War and the Art of Governance.

6. Weigley, The American Way of War.

7. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era; Downie, Learning from Conflict. The British Army has also, and despite repeated engagement in counterinsurgency, struggled to institutionalize the lessons of campaigns, necessitating quick adaptation on the ground with each new engagement. See Ucko and Egnell, Counterinsurgency in Crisis.

8. US Department of Defense, “Quadrennial Defense Review” (Washington DC, 2014). 19.

9. This is the metric employed in Cassidy, Peacekeeping in the Abyss; Downie, Learning from Conflict; Deborah Denise Avant, Political Institutions and Military Change.

10. Downie, Learning from Conflict., 23; Cassidy, Peacekeeping in the Abyss.

11. Sewell, “Introduction to the University of Chicago Press Edition,” xxxv.

12. Kiszely, “Post-Modern Challenges for Modern Warriors.”

13. Observation based on author’s employment at the US National Defense University, 2011–2017. The one exception to this rule is the College of International Security Affairs (CISA), the DoD flagship for the study of irregular warfare. Its faculty, however, is 34 strong compared to e.g. National War College’s faculty of 66. See also Stiehm, The U.S. Army War College; Maj. Gen. Robert Scales (USA, Ret.), “Slightly ‘Steamed,’ Gen. Scales Explains His Criticism of the Military’s War Colleges,” Foreign Policy (blog), 11 May 2012, https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/05/11/slightly-steamed-gen-scales-explains-his-criticism-of-the-militarys-war-colleges/.

14. Burke, “Sorry, Pentathlete Wasn’t on the Syllabus.” See also, Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era, 143–44.

15. Association of the United States Army. The U.S. Army: A Modular Force for the 21st Century. Torchbearer Issue (Arlington, VA: AUSA: Institute of Land Warfare, 2005).

16. For more on this point, and for proposals on how to reform the units to reflect the challenges of irregular operations, see Burgess, “Transformation and the Irregular Gap,” 25–34.

17. Flournoy and Schultz, Shaping U.S. Ground Forces for the Future, 20.

18. Joint and Coalition Operational Analysis, “Decade of War, Volume I: Enduring Lessons from the Past Decade of Operations” (Suffolk, VA: Joint Staff J7, 15 June 2012).

19. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, as cited in Lamb and Franco, “National-Level Coordination and Implementation,” 227.

20. Kosiak, Analysis of the FY 2008 Defense Budget Request, 20. The budget request sought “$27 billion for aircraft programs, up $4.1 billion or 18 percent from this year; $14.4 billion for ship programs, up $3.2 billion or 29 percent; and $6 billion for space programs, an increase of $1.2 billion or 25 percent more than Congress authorized this year.”

21. Towell, Daggett, and Belasco, “Defense: FY2008 Authorization and Appropriations,” 29.

22. See “Fiscal Year 2009 Budget Request: Summary Justification” (Arlington, VA: Department of Defense, 4 February 2008), 164–65. See also Boot, “The Corps Should Look to Its Small-Wars Past.” While extra-budgetary supplemental appropriations helped pay for operations, they were not intended for general capability-building, the bulk of it being, by force, allocated toward pay and benefits, as well as on resetting worn-out equipment. Disturbingly, however, even these extra-budgetary bills were used to fund conventional weapons platforms, supplementing, quite literally, the allocations made for such systems in the base budget. Towell, Daggett, and Belasco, “Defense: FY2008 Authorization and Appropriations,” 15.

23. OOTW includes ‘strikes, raids, peace enforcement, counterterrorism, enforcement of sanctions, support to insurgency and counterinsurgency, and evacuation of noncombatants’. See Joint Chiefs of Staff, JP 3–07 Joint Doctrine for Military Operations Other than War (Washington DC, 1995), vii, http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA327558.

24. Ricks, “Our Generals Failed in Afghanistan.”

25. Kane, “Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving.”

26. Mansoor, Baghdad at Sunrise, 350.

27. Palmer, The 25-Year War, 204–5.

28. Aswell, Calming the Churn.

29. As cited in Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam, 206.

30. Yet as William Stothard Tee, chief instructor at the Jungle Warfare School from 1948 to 1951, explains, even “two years in Malaya … is not really a sufficient time to become acclimatised, to become trained and become used to the circumstances and the enemy.” See Stothard Tee, Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, Accession no. 16 January 6397, 1996.

31. Joint and Coalition Operational Analysis, “Decade of War, Volume I: Enduring Lessons from the Past Decade of Operations”, 2, 3, 15, 25.

32. Some key advocates of reform, whose efforts have in singular moments overcome the system, include Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, Gen. David Petraeus as Commanding General of Ft. Leavenworth, and Gen. H. R. McMaster as Director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, and Deputy Commanding General, Futures of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command.

33. 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.

34. “Hybrid threats” is defined by Frank Hoffman, intellectual progenitor of the term, as incorporating “a full range of different modes of warfare including conventional capabilities, irregular tactics and formations, terrorist acts including indiscriminate violence and coercion, and criminal disorder.” Hybrid wars, Hoffman adds, “can be conducted by both states and a variety of non-state actors.” Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st Century. See also Qiao, Santoli, and Wang, Unrestricted Warfare.

35. Murray and Mansoor, Hybrid Warfare.

36. US Department of Defense, “Quadrennial Defense Review.” 19. My emphasis.

37. McGarry, Pentagon’s New Role for JIEDDO Counter-IED Agency.

38. See US Department of Defense, “Quadrennial Defense Review.” 19.

39. Perkins, “U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command” (Arlington, VA: Association of the United States Army, 16 September 2016), https://www.ausa.org/articles/us-army-training-and-doctrine-command-%E2%80%98army%E2%80%99s-architect%E2%80%99-adapts-current-and-future-success.

40. It really is: it has been replaced by the term ‘wide area security’, defined thus: ‘Wide area security is the application of the elements of combat power in unified action to protect populations, forces, infrastructure, and activities; to deny the enemy positions of advantage; and to consolidate gains in order to retain the initiative’. US Department of the Army, “Unified Land Operations” (Arlington, VA, October 2011), 6.

41. Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, 63.

42. For the phrase, ‘insurgency is armed politics’, and complete discussion, see Marks, ‘Insurgency in a Time of Terrorism’, 33–43.

43. In Malaya, for example, Britain struggled to maintain congenial relations, first, with the sultans and rulers, then with the emerging class of national politicians via which the counterinsurgency was run. In Dhofar, the solution to Said bin Taimur’s refusal to accede to British reforms was a military coup carried out by his own son and with the support of the British government.

44. See Egnell, “A Western Insurgency in Afghanistan.”

45. Collins, “Initial Planning and Execution in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

46. Lamb and Franco, “National-Level Coordination and Implementation: How Systems Attributes Trumped Leadership,” 208.

47. Hegland, “Pentagon, State Struggle to Define-Nation Building Roles.”

48. Indicative of this tendency were the bureaucratic maneuverings necessary for the creation of the Office of Military Affairs within USAID.

49. It has also proved difficult for the US military to incorporate said organizations in its military planning, and so, at best, their presence, contribution, and effectiveness are simply assumed to obtain.

50. Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era, 97.

51. Greentree, “Bureaucracy Does Its Thing,” 341.

52. Those who volunteer leave not only their career path but also a billet now to be filled, temporarily, by their agency. Civilians who deploy are hampered by rapid rotation schedules and risk-averse security protocols, greatly limiting their effectiveness. For more detail, see Paul Fishstein and Andrew Wilder, “Winning Hearts and Minds? 50. See also Greentree, “Bureaucracy Does Its Thing,” 338–442. It may be further noted that the first actual courses for personnel did not commence until early 2009.

53. Sewell, “Introduction to the University of Chicago Press Edition,” xl.

54. I am grateful to Michael Davies for this idea.

55. Oakley and Casey, “The Country Team.”

56. Marks, “Next Generation’ Department of State.”

57. Keith Mackiggan, Oral Testimony given at the Iraq Inquiry, 2010, iraqinquiry.org.uk/transcripts/oralevidence-bydate/100107.aspx., 52.

58. According to New America, President Bush oversaw 48 drone strikes in Pakistan, killing 399–540 people, whereas President Obama oversaw 353 strikes, killing 1934–3094 people. See “Drone Strikes: Pakistan,” New America, accessed 18 May 2017, /in-depth/americas-counterterrorism-wars/pakistan/.

59. Prior to being killed in a drone strike, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, wrote a message to bin Laden complaining that his fighters “were getting killed faster than they could be replaced.” See Miller and Tate, “Al-Qaeda’s No. 2 Leader Is Killed in Pakistan, U.S. Officials Say.” Letters recovered from Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound also reveal the al-Qaeda leader’s deep concern about drones and the burdensome countermeasures they imposed on his organization. See Burke, “Bin Laden Letters Reveal Al-Qaida’s Fears of Drone Strikes and Infiltration”; Williams, “The CIA’s Covert Predator Drone War in Pakistan, 2004–2010,” 871–92

60. “Obama’s Speech on Drone Policy,” The New York Times, 23 April 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/us/politics/transcript-of-obamas-speech-on-drone-policy.html.

61. See Sudarsan Raghavan, “When U.S. Drones Kill Civilians, Yemen’s Government Tries to Conceal It,” The Washington Post, 24 December 2012; “Did a 13-Year-Old Boy Join Al-Qaeda?” Yemen Times, accessed 19 May 2017, http://www.yementimes.com/en/1855/report/4851/Did-a-13-year-old-boy-join-Al-Qaeda.htm.

62. This was the defense alluded to by President Obama. See “Obama’s Speech on Drone Policy.” See also, for example, Steven Groves, “Drone Strikes: The Legality of U.S. Targeting Terrorists Abroad,” Backgrounder (The Heritage Foundation, 9 April 2013), /terrorism/report/drone-strikes-the-legality-us-targeting-terrorists-abroad.

63. Author’s personal experience operating within this community.

64. Shane, “John Brennan, C.I.A. Nominee, Clears Committee Vote.”

65. Brooks, “Drones and the International Rule of Law.”

66. See The White House, “Report on the Legal and Policy Frameworks Guiding the United States’ Use of Military Force and Related National Security Operations,” December 2016, http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/national/read-the-obama-administrations-memo-outlining-use-of-force-rules/2234/.

67. Penney et al., “C.I.A. Drone Mission, Curtailed by Obama, Is Expanded in Africa Under Trump.”

68. For the crucial distinction between terrorism and insurgency, and by extension between counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, see chapter 1 of Marks, Maoist People’s War in Post-Vietnam Asia.

69. On this point, see the lax interpretation of imminence developed under the Obama administration to authorize drone strikes on US-citizens within the senior rungs of al-Qaeda. Presumably, the threshold for non-US citizens is lower still. Ackerman, “How Obama Transformed an Old Military Concept.”

70. Micah Zenko, cited in Elliott, “Have U.S. Drones Become a ‘Counterinsurgency Air Force’ for Our Allies?” See also Plaw and Fricker, The Drone Debate, 67–69.

71. See, respectively, Booth and Black, “WikiLeaks Cables”; “Secret Memos ‘Show Pakistan Endorsed US Drone Strikes’,” BBC News, 24 October 2013, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-24649840.

72. A helpful contrast is provided by the use of British military force in Sierra Leone, which was integrated within a local Sierra Leonean campaign plan to defeat the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). See Ucko, “Can Limited Intervention Work?” 847–77.

73. New York University law professor Philip Alston, as cited in Coll, “Obama’s Drone War.”

74. The 2015 film, Eye in the Sky, though fictional, superbly portrays this dilemma.

75. Coll, “Obama’s Drone War.”

76. Cronin, “Why Drones Fail.”

77. Government Accountability Organization, “Yemen: DOD Should Improve Accuracy of Its Data on Congressional Clearance of Projects as It Reevaluates Counterterrorism Assistance,” Report to Congressional Committees (Government Accountability Organization, 2015), 6. http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA617200.

78. “US Deploys ‘a Few Dozen’ Troops to Somalia: Pentagon,” Al-Jazeera, 16 April 2017, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/04/deploys-dozen-troops-somalia-pentagon-170416033127155.html.

79. Crotty, “The FY 2016 Budget,” 7. Stephen Biddle et al. put it, ‘this idea of using “small footprint” SFA [security force assistance] to secure US interests without large ground-force deployments is now at the very forefront of the US defense debate’. See Biddle, Macdonald, and Baker, “Small Footprint, Small Payoff,” 2.

80. Nixon, “Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam,” 4-1.

81. See Marks, “Colombian Army Adaptation to FARC”; Ucko, “Counterinsurgency in El Salvador,” 669–95; Wilson, “Anatomy of a Successful COIN Operation,” 2–12.

82. As Fernando Luján points out, “Since the approval of Plan Colombia in 1999, the cost to run the entire program – including all military and civilian assistance – has roughly equaled the cost of running the Iraq or Afghanistan war for a single month during the surge.” See Luján, “Light Footprints,” 8.

83. ‘Within the case studies explored, BPC [building partnership capacity] was least effective as a tool for allowing the United States to extract itself from conflict (victory in war/war termination). However, it was most effective as a tool for building interpersonal and institutional linkages, and for alliance building’. See McInnis and Lucas, What Is ‘Building Partner Capacity?’ i.

84. Interview with General Carlos Ospina, former Commander of the Colombian Armed Forces, Washington DC, October 2014.

85. Hammes, “Raising and Mentoring Security Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq,” 332.

86. Carter, “Why Foreign Troops Can’t Fight Our Fights.”

87. Pan Sahel Initiative (PSI), African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI), African Contingency Operations and Training Assistance (ACOTA), International Military Education and Training (IMET), Counterterrorism Fellowship Program (CTFP), Flintlock exercise, and the Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI).

88. Shurkin, Pezard, and Zimmerman, Mali’s Next Battle, 16–25. See also Powerlson, “Enduring Engagement Yes, Episodic Engagement No: Lessons for SOF from Mali.”

89. Ucko, “Counterinsurgency in El Salvador”; Ramsay III, “Advising Indigenous Forces.”

90. Lake, “Orders for US Forces in Syria.”

91. Tilghman, “U.S. Combat Adviser Mission in Iraq Expands to Battalion Level.” One such critical case was the liberation of Mosul, where U.S. advisors, while still officially behind, operated very close, to a constantly shifting frontline of troops. See Sisk, “US Doubles Number of Advisors in Iraq as Forces Push into Mosul.”

92. “U.S. Army to Train Africa Forces in Anti-Terror,” CBS News, 24 December 2012, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-army-to-train-africa-forces-in-anti-terror/.

93. “The Nature of the U.S. Military Presence in Africa, An Exchange between Colonel Tom Davis and Nick Turse,” Mother Jones, 26 July 2012, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/nature-us-military-presence-africa.

94. Flournoy and Schultz, “Shaping U.S. Ground Forces for the Future,” 31; Nagl, “Institutionalizing Adaptation.”

95. Sheik, “Army Opposes Permanent Advisor Corps to Train Foreign Forces.”

96. Greentree, “Bureaucracy Does Its Thing,” 336.

97. Freedberg, “Army Builds Advisor Brigades.”

98. As Biddle et al. find, “For the foreseeable future, small footprints mean small payoffs for the US – where limited US interests preclude large deployments, major results will rarely be possible from minor investments in SFA.” Biddle, Macdonald, and Baker, “Small Footprint, Small Payoff,” 7.

99. Observations gleaned through continuous engagement with members of the Philippines armed forces, Washington, DC, 2011–2017.

100. Anderson, “The Psychology of Why 94 Deaths from Terrorism.”