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The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One by David Kilcullen

I purchased a copy of The Accidental Guerrilla, intending to read it last summer but, being buried under my own academic course work, I was forced to put it aside until recently. I am not finished yet but I can say that Col. Kilcullen has written a seminal, if idiosyncratic, work on the theory and practice of counterinsurgency – no doubt why some reviewers found The Accidental Guerrilla be difficult book to read, one that “…could be like a junior high school student’s attempting “Ulysses.” Or were aggravated by Kilcullen’s format through which he enunciated a more nuanced understanding of the war and COIN than they found politically tolerable. Most readers in this corner of the blogosphere  will find The Accidental Guerrilla an intellectually stimulating book from an author well grounded in the realities of Iraq and Afghanistan, who is the leading theorist of counterinsurgency today.

I would like to take a look at one section where Dr. Kilcullen discusses the merits of “presence” vs. “raiding” in the context of road-building operations in the Kunar and Korengal vallies of Afghanistan by American troops under, successively, LTC. Chris Cavoli and LTC. Bill Ostlund [p. 96]:

Cavoli contrasts this “permanent-presence” methodology with the “repetitive raiding” that has characterized operations at some other times and places. He argues that persistent presence is essentially a “counterpunching” strategy that relies on a cycle of defense and counterattack, in which the presence of the road and Coalition forces protecting and interacting with the population draws the enemy into attacking defended areas, causing him to come to the population and the government – the opposite of the “search and destroy” approach in which security forces “sweep” the countryside looking for the enemy within the population, as if for a needle in a haystack, and often destroy the haystack to find the needle. More particularly, search and destroy operations tend to create a popular backlash and contribute to the “antibody response” that generates large numbers of accidental guerrillas and pushes the population and the enemy together. The persistent-presence method avoids this.

My Comments: 

The context that Kilcullen is writing here is a tactical one but the conceptual conflict of “presence vs. raiding” scales up easily to one of strategy and engages ( or should engage) consideration of how you want to position yourself at the mental and moral levels of war. Colonel  John Boyd, in Patterns of Conflict recommended principles to create strategies and tactics that would: 

• Morally-mentally-physically isolate adversary from allies or any outside support as well as isolate elements of adversary or adversaries form on another and overwhelm them by being able to penetrate and splinter their moral-mental-physical being at any and all levels.
• Pump-up our resolve, drain-away adversary resolve, and attract the uncommitted.
• Subvert, disorient, disrupt, overload, or seize adversary’s vulnerable, yet critical, connections, centers, and activities that provide cohesion and permit coherent observation-orientation-decision-action in order to dismember organism and isolate remnants for absorption or mop-up.
• Operate inside adversary’s observation-orientation-decision-action loops, or get inside his mind-time-space, to create a tangle of threatening and/or non-threatening events/efforts as well as repeatedly generate mismatches between those events/efforts adversary observes, or anticipates, and those he must react to, to survive

Abstractly, Kilcullen’s “persistent-presence” has superior strategic qualities – it isolates and demoralizes the enemy and daunts the latently hostile while connecting our side to the population and “pumping up” the morale of allies and sympathizers. The initiative is seized and control of the battleground is determined. Most of the time, this is an advantage, so long as the chosen ground is also tactically defensible, unlike, say at Dien Bien Phu. When Julius Caesar was carrying out his conquest of Gaul, he often divided his legions for their winter quarters, even though this entailed some risk, because doing so reinforced the political spine of Rome’s local allies in tribes of uncertain loyalty and intimidated the malcontents or secured the population against  raiding by still hostile Gauls or Germans from across the Rhine. Caesar did a lot better in Gaul than did the French in Indochina.

The problem, is not Kilcullen’s theory of COIN, which seems to me to be solidly based upon his empirical observation and deep experience in counterinsurgency warfare. Nor is tactical execution by American troops the issue either; while the US/ISAF have had successes and failures, the principles of COIN seem to be widely understood, if not always perfectly implemented. The dilemma is at the intermediate level of “state building”, one Kilcullen’s primary strategic goals in Afghanistan, that is supposed to support the progress made in the villages by COIN operations.  

On COIN specifically, Boyd wrote:

Counter-guerrilla campaign  

Action

• Undermine guerrilla cause and destroy their cohesion by demonstrating integrity and competence of government to represent and serve needs of people-rather than exploit and impoverish them for the benefit of a greedy elite.*
• Take political initiative to root out and visibly punish corruption. Select new leaders with recognized competence as well as popular appeal. Ensure that they deliver justice, eliminate grievances and connect government with grass roots.*
• Infiltrate guerrilla movement as well as employ population for intelligence about guerrilla plans, operations, and organization.
• Seal-off guerrilla regions from outside world by diplomatic, psychological, and various other activities that strip-away potential allies as well as by disrupting or straddling communications that connect these regions with outside world.
• Deploy administrative talent, police, and counter-guerrilla teams into affected localities and regions to: inhibit guerrilla communication, coordination and movement; minimize guerrilla contact with local inhabitants; isolate their ruling cadres; and destroy their infrastructure.
• Exploit presence of above teams to build-up local government as well as recruit militia for local and regional security in order to protect people from the persuasion and coercion efforts of the guerrilla cadres and their fighting units.
• Use special teams in a complementary effort to penetrate guerrilla controlled regions. Employ (guerrillas’ own) tactics of reconnaissance, infiltration, surprise hit-and-run, and sudden ambush to: keep roving bands off-balance, make base areas untenable, and disrupt communication with outside world.
• Expand these complementary security/penetration efforts into affected region after affected region in order to undermine, collapse, and replace guerrilla influence with government influence and control.
• Visibly link these efforts with local political/economic/social reform in order to connect central government with hopes and needs of people, thereby gain their support and confirm government legitimacy.

Idea

• Break guerrillas’ moral-mental-physical hold over the population, destroy their cohesion, and bring about their collapse via political initiative that demonstrates moral legitimacy and vitality of government and by relentless military operations that emphasize stealth/fast-tempo/fluidity-of-action and cohesion of overall effort.

___________

* If you cannot realize such a political program, you might consider changing sides! 

Arguably, we cannot realize this kind of political program without a) significantly altering the political culture of Afghanistan which is historically exceptionally hostile to an efficient, centralized state, and b) getting a better set of clients to run the state. Or, c) changing our objectives to ones that are realistic for our time frame, resources and national security interests.

Hamid Karzai is our more humane version of Barbrak Karmal, equally incompetent but more corrupt. Frankly, having stolen the last election and forfeited whatever legitimacy he had in Afghan eyes, Karzai is now a net negative on our efforts and by extending the reach of his government, we alienate every villager and tribesman with whom his officials come into contact. If we are serious, then we should either abandon state-building in Afghanistan and concentrate all our efforts on localities until we secure al Qaida’s destruction in neighboring Pakistan or we should remove Karzai from power and find more effective clients. We need to choose.

If a piece of territory, be it province or nation-state is of no particular intrinsic value to the national interests of the United States, it becomes hard to justify, except upon exigent humanitarian grounds – say, intervening to stop a genocide – a “permanent-presence” COIN operation that lasts for years. It might be better in such places if determined enemies, who are likely to be state supported or at least tolerated non-state actors, faced swiftly dispatched “repetitive raiding” but in a more robust form more properly termed a “punitive expedition“. The the infrastructure that makes the territory militarily useful is systematically and thoroughly destroyed, along with any enemy combatants who assemble to contest the field. Raids, other than neatly targeted assassinations, should not be cruise missile pinpricks but destruction on a scale that General Sherman would find recognizable. 

Is state-building in Afghanistan and appeasing Pakistan’s military elite our primary national objectives in this war?

If our interest in a regime’s survival is vital, then by all means dig in with a “persistent-presence”. If not, then scale down to a more appropriate level of response.

ADDENDUM:

Dr. Kilcullen has a new book out, Counterinsurgency.

Exum has some interesting reads on his desk and in his kindle that readers might find intriguing.

 Andrew is, it would seem, a closet linguist of the vanished, old-school, variety that study real languages instead of investigating the neurocognitive building blocks of language:

Traveling and Reading and Travel Reading

1. Someone sent me a complimentary paper copy of Greg Gause’s new book on the international relations of the Persian Gulf states, and I cannot think of a better introduction to the region. I have only met Gause once, back in 2007, and thought him both really smart and also kind of a smart-ass. So naturally, I liked him. I also have a reading packet prepared by the CSIS, which is leading this trip, crammed full with useful CRS reports and such.

2. I convinced the team here at CNAS to buy me a paper copy of Buying National Security: How America Plans and Pays for Its Global Role and Safety at Home, which readers of this blog will remember I’m excited about. Cindy Williams and Gordon Adams are both really smart and write about something — the national security budgeting process — that is rarely understood by policy geeks like me but really important.

3. I’m also about halfway through an advance copy of Megan Stack’s beautifully written new memoir, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War. More on this book later.

4. On the Kindle, I have two new books on Lebanon written by two journalists I very much respect. Both David Hirst and Michael Young have taken the time to tutor me on occassion during my time in Lebanon, and I answered a few technical military questions for David when he was writing his book. Their two books are, respectively, Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East and The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle. You can read a glowing review of the former here and a glowing review of the latter here.

5. Also on the Kindle are two books that have nothing to do with the Middle East: Louis Begley’s Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.

6. Finally, I downloaded the ESV Study Bible and Phil Ryken’s commentaries on Ecclesiastes alongside Tarif Khalidi’s new translation of the Qur’an. That may seem like an odd combination of books, but both Ryken and Khalidi have been mentors* of sorts through the years: Ryken was a pastor at the church I attended in college, and Khalidi is, well, my scholarly hero. Despite his wicked sense of humor and light-hearted spirit, Khalidi is the most intimidating intellectual I have ever met. His command of English, Arabic, Greek and Latin is simply awe-inspiring, especially for someone like me who struggles with all four, and his new translation of the Qur’an is a remarkable achievement. I’m not about to get into the different ways in which Protestant Christians and Muslims approach their respective holy texts, but I will say that I someday hope to approach at least the New Testament with the erudition with which Khalidi tackles the Qur’an. Really impressive. Khalidi’s humility** and interest in younger scholars also sets an example for others to follow.

Quick question to the august readership:

What should I be reading? Not in terms of books, I’m buried there, but periodicals, e-zines and blogs? We all can get in a rut with what we read and the topics we look at; I am no exception.

Nominate any suggestions in the comments section, if you have the time.

Top Billing! Scholar’s Stage – Cases in Plutarchy: The US Senate by Graduating Institution

T. Greer has a superb post, after taking up an observation by commenter LFC as a challenge.:

….To be pithy: The erosion of this dream is the greatest danger American society now faces.

Therefore, those concerned with health of the Republic have a vested interest in understanding and explaining the source of this erosion. A meme to this effect has been bouncing around the blogosphere of late. The meme, which I have endorsed, can be summarized as follows: in America the most direct avenue to power and influence is an education from one of the nation’s elite schools. Beyond the generally superior education these institutions offer, an education of this type allows students access to the social networks that link America’s ‘biggest’ journalists, analysts, bankers, business executives, politicians, and thought-leaders. In terms of social mobility, the colleges churning out “the best and brightest” have the potential to serve as bridges between the classes, opening doors of success to smart and hard working students from the poorer sections of American society. Meritocracy in action.

The problem is that this has not happened. As most readers are probably aware, the last decade has seen college tuition rates soar to heights previously unknown. If they were not before, the best private institutions in the country are now beyond the price range of the all but a tiny minority of Americans. The upper middle class has been particularly hard hit; unable to qualify for financial aid offered to students from low-income families, students unwilling to rack up dangerous levels of debt have found themselves blocked from social advancement. When the reasons behind these tuition increases are considered, it is difficult not to see this as an inadvertent move to solidify the existing social structure. Plutarchy in action. 

That is the narrative. As it turns out, it is a narrative with some holes.

 LFC, a frequent commentator here at the Stage and other related sites, has objected to this argument (in several different forums). The problem with this meme, says he, is its premise: no one has produced any evidence that links Ivy League attendance to positions of power and influence. Absent hard data, we are working with perceptions, not reality, and there is no particular reason to believe that these perceptions are accurate.

It is a fair point. This author has been eager to make claims about these institutions absent data necessary to back these claims up. This post is an attempt to provide such data. Below is a breakdown of the educational background of a group of people who are unambiguously members of the elite: the 100 men and women who currently compose the U.S. Senate. Unless otherwise noted, all information recorded below comes from Scientists and Engineer’s for America‘s  list of Congress members by degree.

For the data and T. Greer’s analysis, read the entire piece here. This post is the germ of something that would make a fine book or research article.

Hey….the US NAVY..has a blog! It is called Navy Live – best of luck gents and welcome to the blogosphere. (hat tip Galrahn)

SWJ Blog (William S. “Mac” McCallister) – Some Considerations for Planning and Executing a Military-Political Engagement in Afghanistan

….Much intellectual energy has been expended on whether to label our outreach efforts in Afghanistan as tribal or community engagements. This paper therefore does not attempt to settle the issue as to the primacy of tribal- and/or community- or interest-based identities. Suffice it to say tribal identities exist in Afghanistan but community and/or interest groups may not necessarily organize themselves based on these tribal identities. What matters most is that we engage the locals within their own cultural frame of reference.

Wisely said. Pragmatism over ideology is a good basis for policy.

FPRI -(Dr. Walter McDougall)-  Can the United States Do Grand Strategy?

My answer is: Historically, at times, if there is an existential crisis and no way to avoid it. Here is a snippet of Professor McDougall:

In spring 2003, following the last lecture in my survey course on U.S. diplomatic history since 1776, a brilliant, inquisitive student approached me in the hall to ask a final, confidential question. She said that my course helped her appreciate, as never before, how swiftly the United States had become the mightiest nation ever, with unprecedented military, economic, and cultural influence. But how long would it last? How long did I think the United States could stay on top?

At first I was tongue-tied, because I was loath to inject a future national leader with either complacency or despair. Then an answer occurred to me. It all depends on whether the United States is as exceptional as we like to believe. If the United States follows the pattern of all previous powers, then demographic or technological trends, new foreign threats, strategic folly, overextension, domestic decadence, or sheer loss of will must hurl it into decline, perhaps within fifty years. If, however, our institutions, values, and national character really do amount to a new order for the ages, a potent mix enabling the United States to reinvent itself and force other nations to adapt to the challenges posed by us, then the republic may stay on its asymptotic trajectory. I stopped there, but as I walked to my office I recalled Arnold J. Toynbee’s historical law to the effect that empires die by suicide, not murder.

Michigan War Studies Review (Arthur M. Eckstein) – Book review – The Spartacus War by Barry Strauss

Looks like The Spartacus War is a good book about one of history’s most famous insurgents. Hat tip to Adam Elkus.

….Spartacus was certainly both a talented tactician and an insightful strategist. His tactical skills showed in the startling victories of his ill-equipped irregulars over the far better equipped and trained Roman troops. All along, the slave leader sought to avoid set-piece battles with the heavy Romans infantry, preferring maneuver and ambush. Spartacus’ strategic skill is evident in his desire to escape Italy, where he knew no rebellion of slaves could long withstand Roman power. He also knew that the discipline and obedience necessary for survival would be difficult to instill in an army of rebels and fugitives. The break with Crixus and the turning back from the Alps are indicative of the army’s indiscipline

The Committee of Public Safety – This Town Needs An Enemy

Joseph Fouche is informative and amusing, in a post featuring Michael Jordan, Ibn Khaldun and dieting tips from Nassim Taleb.

SEED – Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

This “fits” (pun intended) very well with Joseph Fouche’s post above.

Presentation Zen – You can learn a lot from a child (redux) and The secret to great work is great play

That’s it!

Just heard about this not-yet-released film, RESTREPO tonight. It looks to be quite powerful.

At present I do not have any background information as to the storyline but encourage you to visit the site and take a look, and form your own opinion ( Hat tip to Kanani). Feel free to sound off on the comments section.

RESTREPO: One Platoon. One Year. One Valley