Rethinking US Army Counter-insurgency Doctrine

Abstract

This article examines the US Army's approach to counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine from the Vietnam War to the present. COIN doctrine was largely neglected in the mainstream army after the Vietnam War and the success of high-tech warfare against Iraq in 1991 reinforced the cultural tendency of the US Army to ignore the lower end of the conflict scale. Since 2001, the army has had to relearn the basics of COIN; however, many aspects of insurgency have changed since Vietnam. Modern insurgents are organized quite differently to the Maoist insurgents of the 1960s. In addition, contemporary insurgents tend to be adept at employing the media. This article reviews and critiques current US Army COIN doctrine at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. At the tactical level, the US Army has been highly effective at learning COIN techniques. At the operational and strategic levels, the new doctrine represents a considerable step forward, not least in its understanding of insurgent organization. However, its implementation requires changes in force structures and there are still some issues not fully covered, such as the use of contractors, inter-agency cooperation, the training of host nation police forces and the information campaign. While the new army doctrine has its strong points, it is still not right. There are flaws in its conceptual understanding of insurgent organization, and in assessing the requirements for training and equipping allies in the developing world.

Notes

1. The comprehensive US Army doctrine manual for COIN in Vietnam was the US Army Handbook for Counterinsurgency Guidelines, 1966. It was published as a Special Forces manual and not for the mainstream army. Several other manuals of the 1980s and 1990s addressed COIN as a subset of Low Intensity Conflict and Operations Other than War, but these treatments do not amount to a comprehensive doctrine. See Douglas Jehl, ‘For the First Time Since Vietnam, an Army Prints a Guide to Fighting Insurgents’, New York Times, 13 November 2004.

2. Wray R. Johnson, Vietnam and American Doctrine for Small Wars (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2001), pp.91–5.

3. A good description of the US Army officer corps' trauma over Vietnam and its post-Vietnam transformation is found in James Kitfield, Prodigal Soldiers (Washington: Brassey's, 1995).

4. For an overview of the army's institutional turn to conventional manoeuvre warfare see John Romjue, Susan Canedy and Anne Chapman, Prepare the Army for War: A Historical Overview of the Army Training and Doctrine Command 1973-1993 (Fort Monroe, VA: TRADOC Command Historian, 1993), pp.51–7.

5. See Conrad Crane, Avoiding Vietnam: The U.S. Army's Response to Defeat in Southeast Asia, SSI Monograph, US Army War College, September 2002.

6. The Air Force Special Operations School, located at Hurlburt Field in Florida, taught an outstanding course on revolutionary warfare in the early 1990s, which this author attended. However, those taking the course were mostly personnel from the Special Forces and assorted personnel at the lower levels of Defense Department management and leadership, including some members of the Defense Intelligence Agency. In the author's group there were no personnel from the mainstream army combat units.

7. After the First Gulf War, many senior officers predicted that future wars would be high-tech operations in which the technologically dominant US would have all the major advantages. For an overview of US military thinking after Gulf War 1, see Barry Watts, Clausewitzian Friction and Future War (Collingdale, PA: Diane Publishing, 1996). See also James S. Corum, Fighting the War on Terror (St. Paul: Zenith Press, 2007), Chapter 2.

8. Frederick W. Kagan, ‘War and Aftermath’, Policy Review Online, August/September 2003, pp.2–3.

9. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), p.241.

10. See Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (New York: Little Brown, 1993). For an overview and a devastating critique of the enthusiastic reception of the Tofflers' theories of ‘three waves of history’ and ‘information warfare’ in the top ranks of the US military after the First Gulf War, see Richard DiNardo and Daniel Hughes, ‘Some Cautionary thoughts on Information Warfare’, Airpower Journal, Vol.9, No.4 (Winter 1995). The author was a student at the Air War College in 1998 where the Toffler theories were set out as established fact. As a faculty member in two US officer education schools in 1991–2005 (USAF School of Advanced Air and Space Studies and Army War College), I can testify to the strong strain of technological determinism that pervaded military higher education courses over those years.

11. Richard Heaston, ‘Field of View: A New Military Paradigm,’ Guidance and Control Information Analysis Center Bulletin, Vol. 18 No. 1 (January–March 1995).

12. During the 1990s the military history content of the course curriculum at the USAF course for strategists at the USAF School of Advanced Air and Space Studies was steadily cut year by year until the history content of the curriculum in 2004 was 60% of what it was in 1991. In 2006, the Air Command and Staff College went further by cutting the study of military history prior to 1990 out of the curriculum. The author was on the faculty of the Air University from 1991 to 2004.

13. Some of the experience and lessons learned in Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo were collected and published by the senior US military schools such as the Army War College and the National Defense University. Rand Corporation and various other think tanks also published numerous studies. A good example of the literature to come out of the low intensity conflicts of the 1990s is Larry Wentz (ed.), Lessons From Bosnia: The IFOR Experience (Washington DC: National Defense University Press, 1997). Some of the most valuable lessons were recorded in after-action reports such as the 10th Mountain Division's After Action Report on Somalia Operations (1994). However, reports such as this one were ‘in house’ publications and were not broadly disseminated within the army.

14. On the US Army Civil Affairs force structure see Global Security.Org, ‘Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command’, <http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/army/ca-psyop.htm> .

15. Major General Peter Chiarelli and Major Patrick Michaelis, ‘Winning the Peace: The Requirement for Full-Spectrum Operations,’ Military Review, Vol.85, No.4 (July-August 2005), p.15.

16. The various publications and newsletters of the US Army Center for Lessons Learned can be accessed at <http://call.army.mil/links/lessons.asp> .

17. FM 3-07.22, Chapter 6 contains a thorough discussion of recent tactics developed in Iraq for convoy protection riot control, urban combat, and so on.

18. FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency (December 2006). Chapter 1, paras 1-105 to 1-136.

19. FM 3-24, Chapter 1, paras 1-21 to 1-24.

20. FM 3-07.22, Introduction p.vii and section 1-25.

21. As a teacher at the US Army Command and General Staff College, I have heard some interesting accounts from my students concerning senior officers arriving in Iraq who were clueless about the requirements of COIN. On one occasion the staff arranged a reception for an incoming brigade commander with the local sheiks and civic leaders. The general told his staff, ‘I'm not interested in that crap. I'm here to kill the enemy’.

22. Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges and Missions for Military Forces in a Post Conflict Scenario edited by Conrad Crane and Lt. Col. Andrew Terrill (Carlisle Barracks, PA: US Army Strategic Studies Institute, February 2003).

23. FM 3-24, Appendix B.

24. See Montgomery McFate and Andrea Jackson, ‘An Organizational Solution for DOD's Cultural Knowledge Needs,’ Military Review, Vol.85, No.4 (July–August 2005), pp.18–19.

25. Ibid., pp.18–21.

26. FM 3-24, Chapter 6.

27. On the success of the US operations in COIN in the Greek Civil War, see Edgar O'Ballance, The Greek Civil War 1944-1949 (New York: Praeger, 1966), and Howard Jones, ‘A New Kind of War’: America's Global Strategy and the Truman Doctrine in Greece (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); on the Philippines see Douglas Blaufard, The Counterinsurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance (New York: The Free Press, 1977); on El Salvador see James Corum and Wray Johnson, Airpower and Small Wars (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), pp.325–9.

28. FM 3-24, Chapter 6, paras 6-2 to 6-11 discuss the problems usually found in host-nation security forces. Paras. 6-32 to 6-57 provide a framework for developing host-nation forces. Training methods and standards are set out in para. 6-79 and guidelines for advisors presented in paras 6-86 and 6-87.

29. Information from the USMC Combat Studies Command. The current training programmes are ad hoc affairs and there is no formal curriculum available at this time.

30. FM 3-07.22, Sections 2-35, 2-36.

31. Sharon Behn, ‘Iraq Security Companies Lobby for Heavy Arms’ Washington Times, 6 June 2005.

32. This was the author's own experience in Coalition Military Assistance and Training Command – Iraq, which was responsible for recruiting, organizing and training the first units of the Iraqi army. In January 2004, there were a lot of negative reports concerning the competence and performance of the contractors hired to train Iraqi army units. The initial performance of the first units of the new Iraqi army in combat was disastrous. Many of the soldiers refused to fight, and many simply deserted. Battalions that had just graduated from the training course were down to half strength in weeks due to the high desertion rates.

33. Richard Oppel, ‘Security Company Closes Baghdad Airport Over Pay’, New York Times, 10 September 2005.

34. Some of the studies of recent operations from the Combat Studies Institute include: Robert Baumann and Lawrence Yates, ‘My Clan Against the World’: US and Coalition Forces in Somalia 1992-1994, CSI 2004; Robert Baumann, George Gawrych, Armed Peacekeepers in Bosnia, CSI 2004; Sean Kalic, Combating a Modern Hydra, Al Qaeda and the Global War on Terrorism, CSI, 2005; Lt. Col. David Cavaleri, The Law of War: Can 20th Century Standards Apply to the Global War on Terrorism?, CSI 2005. CSI has also published proceedings of conferences and symposia, including: 2004 Conference: Turning Victory into Success: Military Operations After the Campaign, Lt. Col. Brian M. De Toy ed. CSI 2005. The 2003 Conference on ‘Armed Diplomacy’ was published as Two Centuries of American Campaigning, CSI, 2004. Monographs on the Global War on Terrorism and military occupation issues include: Maj. James Gebhardt, The Road to Abu Ghraib: US Army Detainee Doctrine and Experience, CSI 2005; Kendall Gott, Mobility, Vigilance and Justice: The US Army Constabulary in Germany, 1946–1953, CSI 2005; Lt. Col. David Cavaleri, Easier Said than Done: Making the Transition Between Combat Operations and Stability Operations, CSI 2005. Reprints of the Leavenworth Papers concerning intervention and COIN include: Lawrence Yates, Power Pack: US Intervention in the Dominican Republic, 1965-1966, CSI 1988, reprinted 2005. Some works by CSI combine sociology and recent experience: See Lt. Col. Louis DiMarco, Traditions, Changes and Challenges: Military Operations and the Middle Eastern City, CSI 2004.

35. Edwin Corr and David Miller, ‘United States Government Organization and Capability to Deal with Low Intensity Conflict’, in Edwin Corr and Stephen Sloan (eds), Low Intensity Conflict: Old Threats in a New World (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), pp.17–45.

36. Ibid. p. 170.

37. For a good analysis of the cultural and bureaucratic barriers that prevented effective State Department and Defense Department planning for the occupation of Iraq, see Donald R. Drechsler, ‘Reconstructing the Interagency Process After Iraq’, Journal of Strategic Studies,Vol.28, No.1 (February 2005).

38. FM 3.07-22, Sections 3-22, 5-1, 5-28. Section 5 of the doctrine argues that the MPs will help the host-nation establish an integrated police/penal system (5-1). It points out that ‘MPs are trained and equipped to assist in the training and mentoring of local police forces.’ (5-28).

39. FM 3-24, Chapter 6, paras 6-98.

40. On a 1998 trip to El Salvador I interviewed senior officers of the Salvadoran National Police and US police officials training and advising the Salvadorans. In two cities in El Salvador, US advisors had helped the Salvadoran Police introduce a new communications and case tracking system that cut police call response time from days to hours and proved successful in improving the evidence collection and investigative process. Unfortunately, the personnel and resources for this training programme were too small to expand the new systems to the whole country.

41. FM 3-24, Chapter 6, paras 6-99.

42. FM 3.07.22, Chapter 5, pages 5-1 to 5-5 deal with psychological operations, which are described as ‘an integral part’ of the commander's plan and operations.

43. See FM 3-24, Chapter 3, paras 3-97 to 3-100 and Chapter 5, paras 5-19 to 5-34.

44. Reconstructing Iraq, p.14.