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 Pamela L. Bunker and Dr. Robert J. Bunker at SWJ Blog

The Spiritual Significance of ¿Plata O Plomo?

Conventional wisdom holds that narco gang and drug cartel violence in Mexico is primarily secular in nature. This viewpoint has been recently challenged by the activities of the La Familia cartel and some Los Zetas, Gulfo, and other cartel adherents of the cult of Santa Muerte (Saint Death) by means of religious tenets of ‘divine justice’ and instances of tortured victims and ritual human sacrifice offered up to a dark deity, respectively. Severed heads thrown onto a disco floor in Michoacan in 2005 and burnt skull imprints in a clearing in a ranch in the Yucatán Peninsula in 2008 only serve to highlight the number of such incidents which have now taken place. Whereas the infamous ‘black cauldron’ incident in Matamoros in 1989, where American college student Mark Kilroy’s brain was found in a ritual nganga belonging to a local narco gang, was the rare exception, such spiritual-like activities have now become far more frequent.

These activities only serve to further elaborate concerns amongst scholars, including Sullivan, Elkus, Brands, Manwaring, and the authors, over societal warfare breaking out across the Americas. This warfare- manifesting itself in ‘criminal insurgencies’ derived from groups of gang, cartel, and mercenary networks- promotes new forms of state organization drawn from criminally based social and political norms and behaviors. These include a value system derived from illicit narcotics use, killing for sport and pleasure, human trafficking and slavery, dysfunctional perspectives on women and family life, and a habitual orientation to violence and total disregard for modern civil society and democratic freedoms. This harkens back to Peter’s thoughts concerning the emergence of a ‘new warrior class’ and, before that, van Creveld’s ‘non-trinitarian warfare’ projections.

Cultural evolution in action, accelerated by extreme violence.

A couple of internet amigos who are hard-core Clausewitzians have put pen to paper of late ( or keys to board):

Wilf Owen at SWJ Blog:

The Toyota Horde

The subject of this article is a broad technical and operational examination of how almost any country on earth can currently gain a viable level of military power by building on the enduring elements of combined arms warfare. These elements are enduring and appeared in the first twenty years of the twentieth century. It is further suggested that skillfully applied this type of capability may enable its user to confront and possibly defeat NATO type expeditionary forces.

A number of popular opinions about the future nature of warfare have created a substantially misleading impression that the skills and equipment required for formation level combined arms capability, such as that possessed by NATO during the cold war is no longer needed, because few potential enemies possess similar peer capability. Thus the object of the article is to show just how simply a peer or near-peer capability can be acquired, and maintained.

Contrary to popular belief, there are many examples of where military action by irregular forces has inflicted battlefield defeats on regular forces. The most famous are the Boer defeats of the British Army during “Black Week” in December 1899 and the Hussite Wars of the 15th Century, where irregular forces, using improvised barricades made of ox wagons (wagenburgs) were able to stand against and defeat the armoured knights of the Holy Roman Empire. In both cases each irregular force was able to generate conventional military force from fairly meager resources. There is nothing novel, new or even complex, in this approach. It is common, enduring and proven.

Wilf, as usual, pulls few rhetorical punches. Read the rest here.

Now for the second piece, which rated a place of honor at Dr. Christopher Bassford’s Clausewitz Homepage (for those readers here whose interests are outside the realm of Clausewitzian strategy or military theory, this is sort of like a parish priest having their Sunday sermon published by the Vatican):

seydlitz89 at Clausewitz.com:

The Clausewitz Roundtable at Chicagoboyz.

My interest in Clausewitz goes back to my childhood when, being very interested in simulated wargames, I bought of copy of On War as a member of the military book club-that is at 12.  This was the the old, 19th-Century translation. I found it hard going and gave up about a third of the way through. 

It was only about 20 years later, after my service on active duty in the Marine Corps and serving as a US Army intelligence officer in Berlin, that I finally actually read On War,  that being the Howard/Paret translation, and realized that there was very much more to the work than I had ever suspected.  Being involved in strategic HUMINT collection was the spark that indicated for me the need of strategic theory, and specifically a theory that could be flexible enough to cover all sorts of conflicts, from industrial war to tense relations between otherwise friendly states or other political entities.

….I found out about the Chicagoboyz Clausewitz Roundtable quite by accident.  I was doing my usual Google search of “Clausewitz” under “news” when a post at Zen Pundit’s blog popped up.  As my comments and the responses show, I was more than eager to contribute.

What resulted was a very interesting mix of views on Clausewitz, some from people who had been familiar with Clausewitz through their military backgrounds or other reasons, as well as intelligent people who simply had picked up the book and started to read.  While this roundtable discussion would not be a good introduction to Clausewitz, since a beginning student might be led far astray by some of the comments, the roundtable did produce a wide variety of interesting perspectives and applications that the serious student of Clausewitz should find stimulating.  In short, the Chicagoboyz Clausewitz Roundtable reflects both the advantages and disadvantages of using the Internet as a forum for dialogue, as an attempt at establishing a dialectic.  The weaknesses would include the nature of blog posting in general, which requires a serious proofreading effort after the fact in spite of the best intentions of the poster.

Read the rest here ( seydlitz89 gives a nice nod in his essay to the moving spirit behind the roundtable, Lexington Green)

I’ve participated in and helped organize quite a few online roundtables and Think Tank 2.0 events, and while all of them were successful and had their own zeitgeist, I can safely say that The Clausewitz Roundtable was the best.

I take a very skeptical position toward America’s alliance with Pakistan, whose elite, to put it as charitably as I can, have a myopic policy toward the Taliban and Islamist extremist groups. That said, the DoD has in previous decades, had standing mil-mil exchanges with Pakistan’s Army that were usually better and far more productive than our diplomatic relationship with Islamabad  ( a situation that is mirrored in Latin American relations). This tradition generally involves talented Pakistani officers partaking in training and educational programs with their American counterparts or studying in our war colleges.

Going back through recent articles at SWJ leads me to recommend the following judicious analysis of the Taliban by LTC. Ehsan Mehmood Khan, currently a student at National Defense University. It’s an excellent survey of the Taliban’s strengths at formulating and implementing their political-military strategy within the context of different strategic schools of thought and it should have attracted more attention than it received when it was first published at SWJ Blog.

 A Strategic Perspective on Taliban Warfare

Taliban Warfare has occupied news headlines in the global information expanse for over a decade. It is also a topic of choice for academics and scholars. However, the subject is often viewed and analyzed in a subjective rather than objective manner. It is mostly looked at across the prism of terrorism – atrocities and crimes against humanity committed by a group of non-state, though not stateless, bandits. Seldom has a theorist or practitioner picked up the pen to draw on the military aspects of the war so as to reach correct conclusions as to how could this war come to an acceptable-by-all end. This line of thought and reasoning might hold good for a given category of politicians but the students of military strategy and those involved in kinetic operations in a counterinsurgency campaign remain bewildered on the nature of the war. There is a need to understand Taliban as people, not monster, and as warriors not gangsters. Likewise, Taliban Warfare is required to be understood in correct military perspective rather than a mere act of crime, terrorism or banditry.

Dr. Bernard I. Finel has an important and provocative article in AFJ challenging the current operational primacy of COIN in Afghanistan and Iraq that has stirred a great deal of backchannel and listserv discussion, but not nearly enough open commentary in the blogosphere. I checked an unscientific sampling of COIN blogs and did not find much discussion of Dr. Finel’s article, except one comment at SWJ Blog by respected SWC member Ken White, who called it  a “well stated and logical essay” with a “valid premise”. Finel’s article merits greater attention and debate:

An alternative to COIN

The U.S. military is a dominant fighting force, capable of rapid global power projection and able to defeat state adversaries quickly and at relatively low cost in American lives and treasure. Unfortunately, American leaders are increasingly trying to transform this force into one optimized for counterinsurgency missions and long-term military occupations. A fundamental problem with the adoption of population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine as an organizing principle for American military operations is that it systematically fails to take advantage of the real strengths of the U.S. military.

It is true that not all political goals are achievable through the use of conventional military capabilities. However, “victory” in war is not dichotomous, and the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan – often seen as proving the necessity for COIN-capable forces as well as a commitment to nation-building – demonstrate in reality that the vast majority of goals can be accomplished through quick, decisive military operations. Not all political goals are achievable this way, but most are and those that cannot be achieved through conventional operations likely cannot be achieved by the application of even the most sophisticated counterinsurgency doctrine either.

As a consequence, I believe the U.S. should adopt a national military strategy that heavily leverages the core capability to break states and target and destroy fixed assets, iteratively if necessary. Such a strategy – which might loosely be termed “repetitive raiding” – could defeat and disrupt most potential threats the U.S. faces. While America’s adversaries may prefer to engage the U.S. using asymmetric strategies, there is no reason that the U.S. should agree to fight on these terms.

This essay argues the U.S. can largely defeat threats using conventional capabilities, and that what encourages a desire to engage in long-drawn-out asymmetric conflicts is not the elimination of threats, but rather the unattainable goal of trying to prevent threats from emerging in the future.

Read the rest here.

First, I have some sympathy with Finel’s position that COIN operations generally do not maximize the utility of America’s military comparative advantages and extended nation-building via COIN is a costly investment. Dr. Finel is correct here. I’m certain even David Kilcullen would agree with Finel that America trying to do heavy footprint, pop-centric COIN everywhere and anywhere is unwise and too expensive. We need to sync our military might with our political will as well as our wallet.

Secondly, I have no problem with punitive expeditions, or what Finel euphemistically calls “repetitive raiding”. Such “Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli Dead!” tinged operations are as old as warfare itself and a state’s demonstrated willingness to carry them out serves a useful deterrent purpose. William Lind has been advocating a combination of punitive expeditions and containment/isolation for years in his writings on 4GW. This is an option we should definitely consider first in a cost-benefit fashion prior to committing sizable deployments of troops to a long-term nation building adventure.

That said, exchanging one operatiuonal emphasis (COIN) for another (punitive expeditions) does not change our strategic situation much, it just represents a different kind of hammer, a mallet instead of a ball peen. Under Finel’s prospective doctrine, the US military will be greenlighted to fight only the wars it likes best because some foes are more targetable than others, resembling a drunkard looking for his car keys under a street lamp because that is where the light is good. If we can just convince all of our enemies to oblige us by becoming states with flags, armies and capitols, then I’d say junk COIN.

Unfortunately, they won’t and the days when only states can cause damage are long past. A well-trained, paramilitary, insurgency can wreck one hell of a lot of damage, especially when it is striking first with the element of surprise. This is why, even in the state-centric days of the Cold War, that the Soviet Union invested heavily in SPETSNAZ, OSNAZ and various GRU sleeper units to wreck havoc behind NATO lines with terrorism, assassination and sabotage in the run up to WWIII. The Soviets expected at least major tactical, if not strategic, results from such units.

Operational tools are not strategies. This was my prior complaint about COIN being oversold in Afghanistan and punitive expeditions likewise do not fit every geopolitical situation and work best with particular circumstances. The fact is, where we have a real national interest in friendly states with legitimate governments beating back insurgents, COIN is a better choice. Many problems will require a response that is altogether different from either. The enemy, when there is an enemy, has to be dealt with as they are and not as we’d really like them to be in our ten year procurement schedule. We have to select the tools that best fit operational conditions, our policy objectives and our resources.

Strategy must conform to reality and not the reverse.

Learning to Eat Soup with a Spoon Again……

There has been, for years, an ongoing debate in the defense and national security community over the proper place of COIN doctrine in the repertoire of the United States military and in our national strategy. While a sizable number of serious scholars, strategists, journalists and officers have been deeply involved, the bitter discussion characterized as “COINdinista vs. Big War crowd” debate  is epitomized by the exchanges between two antagonists, both lieutenant colonels with PhD’s, John Nagl, a leading figure behind the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and now president of the powerhouse think tank CNAS , and Gian Gentile, professor of history at West Point and COIN’s most infamous arch-critic.

In terms of policy and influence, the COINdinistas ultimately carried the day. COIN advocates moved from a marginalized mafia of military intellectuals who in 2004 were just trying to get a hearing from an  indifferent Rumsfeld Pentagon, to policy conquerors as the public’s perceptions of the “Surge” in Iraq (masterminded by General David Petraeus, Dr. Frederick Kagan, General Jack Keane and a small number of collaborators) allowed the evolution of a COIN-centric, operationally oriented, “Kilcullen Doctrine” to emerge across two very different administrations.

Critics like Colonel Gentile and Andrew Bacevich began to warn, along with dovish liberal pundits – and with some exaggeration – that COIN theory was acheiving a “cult” status that was usurping the time, money, talent and attention that the military should be devoting to traditional near peer rival threats. And furthermore, ominously, COIN fixation was threatening to cause the U.S. political class (especially Democrats) to be inclined to embark upon a host of half-baked, interventionist “crusades“in Third world quagmires.

Informed readers who follow defense community issues knew that many COIN expert-advocates such as Nagl, Col. David Kilcullen, Andrew Exum and others had painstakingly framed the future application of COIN by the United States in both minimalist and “population-centric” terms, averse to all but the most restrictive uses of “hard” counterterrorism tactics like the use of predator drones for the “targeted assassinations” of al Qaida figures hiding in Pakistan.

Unfortunately for the COINdinistas, as George Kennan discovered to his dismay, to father a doctrine does not mean that you can control how others interpret and make use of it. As the new Obama administration and its new commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal conducted its internally contentious review of “AfPak” policy in 2009 on what seemed a geological time scale, the administration’s most restless foreign policy bigwig, the Talleyrand of Dayton, proposed using COIN as nation-building on steroids to re-create Hamid Karzai’s Afghanistan as the secure, centralized, state that it has never been.  Public reaction to this trial balloon was poor and the administration ultimately pared down General McChrystal’s troop request to 30,000 men, hedging a COIN based strategy toward policy suggestions made by Vice-President Biden.

So, COIN still reigns supreme, albeit with trimmed sails?

No.

We are forgetting something important about the ascendancy of COIN. It was not accepted by a reluctant Pentagon and the Bush administration because COIN is a very effective operational tool in the right strategic context – although that is certainly true. Nor was it because the advocates of COIN were brilliant policy architects and advocates – though most of them are. COIN became the order of the day for three reasons:

1) The  “Big Army, fire the artillery, fly B-52’s and Search & Destroy=counterinsurgency” approach proved to be tactically and strategically bankrupt in Iraq. It failed in Mesopotamia as it failed in the Mekong Delta under Westmoreland – except worse and faster. Period.

2) The loudest other alternative to COIN at the time, the antiwar demand, mostly from Leftwing extremists, of immediately bugging-out of Iraq, damn the consequences, was not politically palatable even for moderately liberal Democrats, to say nothing of Republicans.

3) The 2006 election results were a political earthquake that forced the Bush administration to change policy in Iraq for its’ own sheer political survival. COIN was accepted only because it represented a life preserver for the Bush administration.

We have just had another such political earthquake. The administration is now but one more electoral debacle away from having the president be chased in Benny Hill fashion all over the White House lawn by enraged Democratic officeholders scared out of their wits of losing their seats next November.

Republican Scott Brown, the winner in a stunning upset in Massachusett’s special election for Senator, certainly had no intention of undermining President Obama’s commitment to Afghanistan. To the contrary, he is for it in a far more muscular manner than was his hapless Democratic opponent. But that’s irrelevant. What matters is that in all the recent elections, Democrats have been clobbered by a “Revolt of the Moderates” – socially liberal, fiscally conservative, independent voters who came out in 2008 for Obama and are now shifting radically away from him. For the next year, politicians of both parties will be  competing hard for this bloc which means “deficit hawks” will soar higher than defense hawks.

America’s nine year drunken sailor spending spree is officially over.

Defense experts have long known that the post-9/11, record DoD budget expenditures were not going to be politically sustainable forever and that either a drawdown of combat operations or cancellation of very big, very complicated and supremely expensive weapons platforms or some combination of both would eventually be needed. That eventuality is here and will increase in intensity over the next five years, barring an unexpected economic boom. Spending $60 billion annually on Afghanistan, a nation with a GDP of roughly $ 20 billion, for the next 7 years, is not going to be in the cards. Not at a time of 10 % unemployment, when the Congress will be forced to cut Medicare, education, veteran’s benefits, eliminate COLA’s on Social Security or raise the retirement age and income taxes. Who is going to want to “own” an ambitious “nation-building” program at election time?

There is a silver lining here. Really.

COIN is an excellent operational tool, brought back by John Nagl & co. from the dark oblivion that Big Army partisans consigned it to cover up their own strategic failures in Vietnam. As good as COIN is though, it is not something akin to magic with which to work policy miracles or to substitute for America not having a cohesive and realistic grand strategy. Remaking Afghanistan into France or Japan on the Hindu Kush is beyond the scope of what COIN can accomplish. Or any policy. Or any president. Never mind Obama, Superman, Winston Churchill and Abe Lincoln rolled into one could not make that happen.

Association with grandiosely maximalist goals would only serve to politically discredit COIN when the benchmarks to paradise ultimately proved unreachable. Austerity will scale them back to the bounds of reality and perhaps a more modest, decentralized, emphasis. COIN will then become a normal component of military capabilities and training instead of alternating between pariah and rock star status inside the DoD.

Austerity may also force – finally – the USG to get serious about thinking in terms of comprehensive and coherent DIME-integrated national strategy (Ok – this is more of a hope on my part). Instead of having every agency and service going off in its own direction with strategic nuclear arms reductions being proposed out of context from our conventional military obligations and urgent security threats we might stop and look at how the two fit together. And how these should be in sync with our fiscal and monetary policies and our need to deeply invest in and improve our unsteady economic position in a very competitive, globalized world. The latter is of much greater strategic importance to national security than Afghanistan or whether or not Israel and Hezbollah fight another mini-war.

We are all COINdinistas now. Instead of being controversial, COIN having a secure place in our operational arsenal of ideas has become the new “conventional” wisdom; it is past time to look at some of the other serious challenges America has ahead.

ADDENDUM I:

First, I wanted to thank everyone for their lively responses, both comments as well as email. The critiques are very helpful, as are the large number of PDFs and links to related material. I am trying to catch up on my replies but first, I wanted to feature a link to Andrew Exum ‘s related but inside baseball article up at Boston Review:

The Conflict in Central Asia will likely mark the end of the current era of Counterinsurgency 

 ….Whether or not the United States and its allies are successful in Afghanistan, the conflict in Central Asia will likely mark the end of the Third Counterinsurgency Era. Counterinsurgency warfare has its roots in the colonial experiences of France and the United Kingdom as well as the pseudo-colonial experiences of the United States in the Philippines and Latin America. In the First Counterinsurgency Era, nineteenth-century French colonial military commanders such as Hubert Lyautey, Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, and Joseph Gallieni devised rudimentary “hearts and minds” campaigns that were—though often just as brutal as the conventional warfare of the time—at odds with then-contemporary thought on the employment of military force. 

….Michael Semple —with two decades experience working in Afghanistan and Pakistan—believes that it is, and that the Taliban and its allies cannot win. The balance of power, he argues, has shifted toward the Taliban’s natural enemies, and the Taliban hides this reality by dressing their civil war in the clothes of an insurgency being fought against Western powers. If this assessment is right, there may yet be hope for U.S. and allied efforts in Afghanistan. Because President Obama has pledged to begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan in eighteen months, time may be too short to execute a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign. But there may be sufficient time to build up key Afghan institutions and allow Afghans to fight a civil war that will no doubt continue after the United States and its allies begin to withdraw.

ADDENDUM II – LINKS To This Post:

Most of these bloggers have extended the discussion into new dimensions or aspects. I will put a short, explanatory tag next to each where warranted.

RBO (Pundita) – The cavalry has arrived: Mark Safranski takes on COIN; Pundita takes on Pakistan  Extensive examination of Pakistan

In Harmonium (Dr. Marc Tyrell) – Is the post-COIN era here?  The conceptual-perceptual-cognitive implications of this debate

Shlok Vaidya – Zen is right  Constraints and innovation….and a great post title!

Newshoggers (Dave Anderson) – COIN’s coins; political constraints on COIN  COIN = Clausewitzian disconnect

Wings Over Iraq – Link of the morning is here…  And the bonus Nagl/Gentile mash-up graphic!

SWJ Blog – The Post-COIN Era is Here  Comments on link excerpt have begun……