A historical overview of US counter-insurgency

Abstract

Say not the struggle naught availeth,

The labour and the wounds are vain,

The enemy faints not, nor faileth,

And as things have been, things remain.

                        Arthur Hugh Clough

This introductory article introduces some of the articles in this issue and examines the debate surrounding the idea of the “COINdinistas” in the US. It traces the roots of their approach to counter-insurgency and distinguishes “small c” counterinsurgency based on small groups of military advisers in “peripheral” conflicts from “big C” counter-insurgency which became allied to modernisation theory and nation building. The article also looks at developments in COIN thinking after the drawdown of US and other ISAF forces from Afghanistan, especially the work of David Kilcullen focussed on the emergence of future mega “feral” cities on coast lines vulnerable to terrorist and insurgent attacks.

Keywords::

• Afghanistan
• COIN Field Manual FM3-24
• COINdinistas
• counter- revolution
• Dien Bien Phu
• Iraq
• Edward Lansdale
• guerre revolutionnaire
• Ho Chi Minh
• modernisation theory
• Operation Condor
• Vietnam

Notes

^1. I would like to thank Isabelle Duyvesteyn, Tom Durrell Young, Mike Smith, David Ucko, Celeste Ward Gventer and Doug Porch for commenrts on an earlier draft of this paper.

^2. David Martin Jones et al, “Counter-COIN: Counterinsurgency and the Preemption of strategy,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 35, (2012), 622.

^3.Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents: David Patraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013.

^4.Gian Gentile, Wrong Turn: America's Deadly Embrace of Counter-Insurgency. New York and London: The New Press, 2013

^5.Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

^6.Beatrice Heuser, “The Cultural Revolution in Counter-Insurgency,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 30/1 (February 2007), 153–71.

^7.Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of History, London: Methuen, 1981, 202.

^8. David Martin Jones and M.L.R Smith have preferred a cookbook metaphor to describe COIN theory with a strong emphasis upon the “how to.” This approach bears some resemblance to earlier COIN enthusiasts such as the MADMAN Edward Lansdale who applied the precepts of advertising to the field of counterinsurgency. See David Martin Jones and M.L.R Smith, “Grammar But No Logic: Technique is not Enough – A Response to Nagl and Burton,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 33, 3, (June 2010), 439–440

^9.John Tosh, Why History Matters, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 61.

^10.Max Boot, Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present. New York: Norton, 2013, 555.

^11. Porch op. cit., 9.

^12. Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire. New York: St Martins Griffin, 2010, 35.

^13.John D Waghelstein, “Preparing the US Army for the Wrong War: Educational and Doctrinal Failure, 1865–91,” Small Wars and Insurgencies, 10, 1 (Spring 1999), 26. However some analysts have suggested that some Indian insurgents, such as the Apaches, represented a much greater challenge to the US army and that in order to defeat them the US army had to become rather like them, especially with the deployment of Apache scouts. Apache war fighting derived from Apache social organisation and the power of a group leader who could command complete loyalty from followers who knew exactly what was expected of them. See Robert N. Watt, “Raiders of the Lost Art: Apache War and Society,” Small Wars and Insurgencies, 13, 3 (Autumn 2002), 1–22

^14. See in particular Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating & Empire Building, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.

^15. The notable exception to this was the US-backed guerrilla campaign in the Philippines against the occupying Japanese, though this was seen as a military extension of the awaited conventional invasion that would eventually occur under General Macarthur.

^16. In part this can be ascribed to the relative indifference within mainstream academic International Relations to small wars and insurgencies as the discipline has remained remarkably biased, until recently, towards large scale inter-state warfare. Fred Halliday has explained some of this to the impact of the Vietnam War on the study of IR in the US and the discipline's aversion to the study of revolutions and social conflict. Fred Halliday, Rethinking International Relations. London and Basingstoke, the Macmillan Press, 1994, 252–3 fn. 29. One study by Gil Merom has attempted to rectify this, though its overall effect has been rather disappointing as the book fails to periodise small wars and insurgencies within the wider history of the international system. See Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003

^17. Jean Lacouture, Vietnam: Between Two Truces. New York: Vintage Books, 1966, 47.

^18. For a recent assessment of this strategy see Beatrice Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 410

^19.J. Bowyer Bell, The Myth of the Guerrilla. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1971,

^20.Harry Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. New York: Dell Pub, 1984, 127. A similar criticism has been made by Michael Lind who has argued that the US fought essentially a guerrilla war up to the Tet Offensive of 1968 whereas, thereafter, it evolved into a full scale conventional war involving North Vietnamese invasions of the south between 1972 and 1975. Lind thus suggests that the US should have avoided as far as possible a big unit war before 1968, except for general pacification, and to have focused on the rural counterinsurgency. Michael Lind, Vietnam, The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Conflict. New York: The Free Press, 1999. John Nagl has pointed out that Summers's central argument hangs on what is essentially a Jominian rather than Clausewitzean principle argument that the US lost in Vietnam because it was not able to destroy the enemy at all costs. John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Contemporary Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005 (1 ed 2002), 32, fn 11.

^21. Peter Maadd, “Professor Nagl's War,” New York Times January 11 2004.

^22.John Ellis, From the Barrel of a Gun: A History of Guerrilla, Revolutionary and Counter-Insurgency Warfare, from the Romans to the Present. London: Greenhill Books, 1995, 233. Ian Beckett has also argued that there is a basic analytical distinction between an “insurgency” and a “peoples war” since an insurgency “enabled relatively small groups to access power”. Ian Beckett, “The Future of Insurgency,” Small Wars and Insurgencies, 16, 1 (March 2005), 24. One wonders though how far “people's war” really enabled mass access to power given the nature, for instance, of the Vietnamese state post 1975.

^23.Andrew Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986

^24.Dale Andrade, “Westmoreland was right: learning the wrong lessons from the Vietnam War,” Small Wars and Insurgencies, 19, 2 (June 2008), 174.

^25. M.L.R. Smith, “Strategy in an age of Low Intensity Conflict” in Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Jan Angstrom (eds) Rethinking the Nature of War. London and New York: Frank Cass, 2005, 44–46.

^26. Ibid.

^27. See in particular Francis Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, New York: Touchstone, 2000.

^28.Edward R. Luttwak, The Pentagon and the Art of War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985,

^29. Smith op cit, 44

^30.Douglas Porch, “The Dangerous Myths and Dubious Promise of COIN,” Small Wars and Insurgencies, 2, 2 (May 2011), 247. See also David Martin Jones and M.L.R Smith, “Myth and the small war tradition: Re-assessing the discourse of British Counter-Insurgency,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 24, 3 (July2013), 436–457 for a similar in the context of British COIN debate

^31.Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment. New York: W & N, 2000.

^32. To this extent, one obvious path to progress in the COIN debate is to shift the issue to the management of human resources and the planning of the skill sets needed for future conflict. The current management jargon in which these issues are currently discussed (and debated by student on business studies course) is Strategic Human Resource Planning (SHRP) – the word “strategic” - appropriated years ago by management and business studies- would thus, somewhat curiously, be finding its own way back home into defence studies.

^33. This is where North America differs from South America, where themes of conquest from Mexico to Peru are part of daily life and festival while, by contrast, conquest in the North, as the novelist Alejo Carpentier has so cogently pointed out, is “obscured by Hallmark images of Mayflower landings and blunderbuss-and-buckle-bedecked forefathers dining thankfully with feathered, moccasined savages who have stepped out from the pages of Lamartine and Cooper. Alejo Carpentier, The Harp and the Shadow. London: Andre Deutsch, 1992, xi.

^34.Francis Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. New York: Little, Brown and Co, 2002 (1 ed 1972). Fitzgerald's reading of Vietnamese history was an attempt by a non-academic scholar to lay the foundations for a more popular understanding of Vietnamese society and history while the Vietnam War was still being waged. For some observers the study bears some resemblance to the earlier classical study by Ruth Benedict of Japanese culture based on war-time research The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). This was anthropology at a distance based on the study of a culture's history and literature. Fitzgerald adopted a similar approach though her work and thesis was heavily indebted to the earlier work of the scholar Paul Mus and came too late to guide any counterinsurgency policy. Even if it had, it is hard to see how it would have enabled the US to have “won” in Vietnam: if Fitzgerald's arguments had been better understood they might, though, have secured an easier passage for US troop withdrawal given that the South Vietnamese government had such weak political legitimacy. Fitzgerald's basic criticism after all was that US support for the South Vietnamese was fundamentally based on a misreading of the pattern of Vietnamese history, which she saw in terms of a version of the Chinese mandate from heaven. In more recent years, this now seems a rather misguided foray into what exponents of “military orientalism” have seen as yet another form of orientalist interpretation of Vietnamese history and culture, albeit of a “radical” kind. It is certainly not one that appears to have had any significant impact on Vietnamese history in the years after 1975, which has followed, unsurprisingly, a generally Marxist preoccupation with the social roots of revolution in Vietnamese society. See Patricia M. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past. Durham (NC) and London: Duke University Press, 2002, 209 and Paul Mus, Vietnam: Sociologie d'une Guerre. Paris: de Seul 1952.

^35.Josef Teboho Ansorge, “Orientalism in the Machine,” in Tarak Barkawi and Keith Stanski (eds), Orientalism and War. London: Hurst and Co, 2012, 129–149. See also Paul B Rich, “Military Orientalism: Its Appeals and Limitations,” unpub pap. 2014.

^36.Frederik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam. New York: Random House, 2012, 299.

^37.Graham Greene, The Quiet American. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971, 36

^38.David Kilcullen, “Counterinsurgency: The state of a controversial art” in Paul B Rich and Isabelle Duyvesteyn (eds), The Routledge Handbook on Insurgency and Counterinsurgency, London: Routledge, 2012, 136.

^39. See for instance Anthony James Joes, America and guerrilla warfare. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000, 235.

^40.Philippe Pottier, “GCMA/GMI: A French Experience in Counterinsurgency During the French Indochina War,” Small Wars and Insurgencies, 16, 2, 125–145.

^41.Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World. London: Penguin Books, 2006, 231.

^42. Cited in Logevall op. cit., 339.

^43. Ibid., 582 and passim

^44. Ibid., 702.

^45.Alan Cassels, Ideology & International Relations in the Modern World, London: Routledge, 1996, 215–216.

^46. See in particular, George Kennan, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin. Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1961.

^47.William Rosenau, “The Kennedy Administration, US Foreign Internal Security Assistance and the Challenge of ‘Subterranean’ War, 1961–61, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 14, 3 (Autumn 2003), 74. Laleh Khalili has seen Rostows's book as a “sort of manual for developmentalist intervention”, though it was pitched at too general a theory of economic history to really provide any exact guidance. Laleh Kahalili, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies. Stanfoprd: Stanford University Press, 2013, 39

^48. See for instance Douglas S. Blaufarb. The Counter-Insurgency Era: US Doctrine and Practice. New York and London: The Free and Macmillan, 1977, 52–88

^49.Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain's Asian Empire. London: Penguin Books, 2008, 539. Anthony Short, The Origins of the Vietnam War. London and New York: Longman, 1989, 246–247

^50.Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency. London: Palgrave Macmillan 1978; Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations. London: Faber 2011; Frank Kitson, Bunch of Five. London Faber 2011.

^51.Blaufarb, op. cit., 103.

^52. Ibid., 79–82.

^53.Drinnon, Facing West, 379.

^54.William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American. New York, Fawcett Crest, 1958, 153.

^55. For a discussion of Lansdale's representation in The Ugly American see Jonathan Nashel, Edward Lansdale's Cold War. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005, 173–186

^56. Ibid., 131.

^57. Kilcullen, op. cit., 134.

^58. Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, 98. See Montgomery FcFate, “Anthropology and counterinsurgency: the strange story of their curious relationship,” Military Review, March-April 2005.

^59.Peter Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria. London and Dunmow: The Pall Mall Press, 1964, 55.

^60.Fred Halliday, Revolutions and World Politics. Houndmills: The Macmillan Press, 1999, 208

^61. Ibid., 217.

^62. Ibid, 221.

^63. See in particular Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror and Memory. Oxford: OUP, 2009

^64. See in particular the 2003 film by the French film maker Marie-Monique Robin Death Squadrons: The French School

^65.Lou Dimarco, “Losing the Moral Compass: Torture and Guerre Revolutionnaire in the Algerian War,” Parameters, Summer 2006, 67

^66.Christopher Cradock and M.L.R. Smith, “A Reinterpretation of the Influence of the Theory of Guerre Revolutionnaire and the Battle of Algiers, 1956–1957,” Journal of Cold War Studies, 9, 4 (Fall 2007), 68–105

^67.Daniel K. Mares, “The National Security State” in Thomas H. Holloway (ed), A Companion to Latin AmericanHistory, London: Wiley Blackwell, 2010, 386–402. The national security was in one sense the fulfilment of the observation of the guerrilla theorist Robert Taber who pointed out in the middle 1960s that for counter insurgency to succeed it has to “destroy the revolution by destroying its promise – that mans by proving, militarily, that it cannot and will not succeed.” Robert Taber, The War of the Flea. London. Paladin, 1969, 23.

^68. Porch, op.cit. 239.

^69. I am grateful to Doug Porch for this point.

^70. Colonel J.C. Murray, “Victory in Malaya” in Lieutenant Colonel T.N. Greene, The Guerrilla – And How To Fight Him. London: Frederick Praeger 1965, 115–143.

^71. Lucien Pye, “The Roots of Insurgency and the Commencement of Rebellions.” In Harry Eckstein (ed), Internal War. London: The Free Press, 1964, 172. See also The Myth of the Guerrilla

^72.Gentile op.cit., 45.

^73.Thomas R Mockaitis, Resolving Insurgencies. Washington DC: Strategic Studies Institute, 2011, 71.

^74. There is a wider political question here involving the impact of defence lobbyists on US policy makers. The “COIN” lobby was a rather weak one compared to the mainstream defence lobby and it is not altogether surprising it has been generally unsuccessful in transforming – in the short term at least – US defence procurement. At the same time blaming Rumsfeld for not sufficiently recognising the insurgency threat in Iraq early enough and resisting the purchase of weaponry suitable for COIN risks developing a “stab in the back” myth to explain the US debacle before 2007.

^75.David Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the US Military for Modern Wars. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013, 88.

^76. Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency, 145–149

^77. David Martin Jones and M.L.R Smith, “Whose Hearts and Whose Minds? The Curious Case of Global Counter-Insurgency,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 33, 1/2010, 88–89.

^78.Thomas Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency in the Post-Imperial Era. New York and London: St Martins Press, 1995.

^79. See especially Keith Surridge, “Rebellion, Martial Law and British Civil-Military Relations, The War in the Cape Colony, 1899–1902.” Small Wars and Insurgencies, 8, 2 (Autumn 1997), 35–57.

^80.David Ucko, Counterinsurgency in Crisis: Britain and the Challenges of the Modern World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, 26. See also Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

^81. Ucko op. cit. 29

^82. Nagl op cit., 205 and passim.

^83. Ibid., 16–23.

^84. Ibid., 205.

^85.Blaufarb, op. cit 117.

^86. Personal communication from Douglas Porch

^87. Decca Aitkenhead, “Rory Stewart: The Secret of Modern Britain is there is no power anywhere,” The Guardian 3 January 2104.

^88. The action movie genre was well illustrated in the 2012 film of the SEAL mission to kill Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, which grossed over $95 million dollars

^89. Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 54 and passim.

^90. Ibid., 56.

^91.The Huffington Post September 12 2013.

^92. See for example Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear: risk taking and the morality of low expectation. London: Continuum Int Pub, 2005

^93.Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War, 323.

^94. Geoffrey Demarest, “Geopolitics and Urban Armed Conflict in Latin America,” Small Wars and Insurgencies, 6, 1 (Summer 1995), 51–2

^95.Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. London: Profile Books, 2007, 389–408

^96.Tom Marks, “Urban Insurgency.” Small Wars and Insurgencies, 14, 3 (Autumn 2003), 101

^97.David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla. London: Hurst and Co., 2013, 68. See also Dan Gettinger, “Book Review: Out of the Mountains”, Centre for the Study of the Drone. October 14, 2013. http://dronecenter.bard.edu/book-review-mountains accessed 13 January 2014.

^98. Samuel Huntington, “The Bases of Accommodation,” Foreign Affairs, XLVI, (July 1968), 642–56

^99. “Police fear inner cities take law into own hands”, The Times January 18 2014.