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WAR by Sebastian Junger

I just finished reading my courtesy review copy of WAR by journalist and author Sebastian Junger, on his firsthand observation of the war against the Taliban in the Korengal Valley, waged by the soldiers of the 2nd Platoon of Battle Company. I cannot say that I found WAR to be an enjoyable read – though Junger is a polished writer – a more accurate description is that WAR is powerful, thought-provoking, at times moving and, ultimately, a very disturbing account of the war in Afghanistan.

Junger, whose previous works include The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea and Fire, was embedded along with photojournalist Tim Hetherington, with 2nd Platoon during their COIN campaign in Korengal, a mission that resulted in some of the bloodiest firefights and highest American casualties of the Afghan war and withdrawal from a rugged valley sometimes known as “Afghanistan’s Afghanistan”. The Korengalis, related to the people of Nuristan, are noted for their xenophobic hostility to outsiders, which was directed at times toward the Taliban as well as Americans. Junger reports that the US only succeeded in controling a quarter of Korengal and contesting roughly half of the six mile by six mile valley with the Taliban and local “accidental guerrillas”motivated by money, excitement, religious zeal or revenge to attack the Americans.

WAR is not an especially “political” or “policy” book discussing the war from some remove. Junger’s primary interest are the men of second platoon at Restrepo, an outpost dedicated to the memory of a valorous medic who had been killed. O’Byrne, Anderson, Stitcher (who has “INFIDEL” tattooed across his chest), Jones, Moreno, Bobby to name just a few soldiers Junger interviewed and witnessed how they lived in the moment. That moment could comprise the adrenaline high of combat, agonies of grief, anticipatory tension before the next ambush, the angst of boredome behind the wire and especially the iron bonds of brotherhood in a small unit tempered by fire.

What comes through in War, aside from the extremity of the terrain and the uncertainty of ever-present danger, men being shot without warning by the enemy, even in Restrepo, is how very few men are actually involved in combat. Battle Company is the vaunted “tip of the spear” but when only a few hundred men were taking a wildly disproportionate percentage of all combat contacts in a nation the size of Afghanistan ( Junger cites 20 %) the spear begins to look more like a tiny sewing needle connected to a Leviathan-like noncombatant-administrative tail, surreally outfitted with fast food courts.

There’s a peculairly granular quality to Junger’s WAR, the grittiness of the squalid conditions in which soldiers live, the depths of their physical sufferings and mental exhaustion, their primal fear of letting their comrades down in battle and being responsible for getting friends killed. There are also epiphanies of bravery and carrying the day against the odds, men living who but for chance would have died on some rock strewn hill and lusty celebration after the deaths of their enemies. The sort of politically incorrect, atavistic, jubilation that is culturally frowned upon by people who are comfortably safe and far away.

What disturbed me most about WAR was not just how few Americans are carrying the burden of the combat in Afghanistan but how disconnected these few soldiers and their sacrifices are from the rest of the military itself. Junger’s epilogue with O’Byrne, a fine soldier who is a major figure in the book, and his inability to readjust and shift from the battlefield to garrison or civilian life is deeply depressing. “The Army’s trying to kill me” O’Byrne declared, finding a momentary refuge in alcohol, but little help from the military bureaucracy.

Junger attempted to show the war in Korengal as seen from the perspective of the privates, NCO’s and junior officers of Battle Company who lived and died there, from his interviews and his own participation in their patrols as they came under fire or as they gingerly parleyed with Korengali elders in isolated villages. Eschewing theory or a historian’s search for causation, Junger attempts to let the soldiers words and actions drive the narrative.

Sebastian Junger’s WAR is raw and undecorated by sentiment.

The story du jour.

Having previously failed to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza that denies HAMAS war material and economic aid, a coalition of Islamists, Palestinian nationalists and Western Leftists used ships of Turkish registry. The IDF took the bait and blundered into an ambush where the commandos were promptly swarmed by the “peace activists”, overpowered (!) and then had to bloodily shoot their way out of a debacle.

RealClearPolitics has a better video.

Taking stock of this bit of guerrilla theater gone lethal, let’s see what the supporters of HAMAS terrorism gained:

• The world is hearing a false narrative that Israel massacred unarmed peace activists.

• Turkey’s ruling, authoritarian, crypto-Islamist Party has a further wedge to downgrade Turkey’s traditional military cooperation with Israel while putting political pressure on Turkish secularists and Army leaders. 

• Israel’s diplomatic isolation is greatly increased

• Additional strain is put on the already lukewarm relationship between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government

On the moral level of war, HAMAS supporters – whose strategic objective is to end Israel’s blockade of Gaza, so that HAMAS can rebuild it’s military strength – have scored a solid triumph while the IDF have acted with all the instinctive propensity for causing self-inflicted wounds of Richard Nixon confronting the Watergate break-in. 

Because Israel is powerful and democratic and its enemies, despite their viciousness and authoritarian politics, are weak, the Israelis are not held to the same moral standards by international observers (many of whom, it must be noted, begin with a strongly anti-Israel or at least, anti-Western, orientation).  In a 4GW paradigm, even acting in self-defense is not enough for a strong state to play the role of “the good guy” in a globalized media environment, unless the weak side does something that is viscerally morally repulsive – ex. Abu Zarqawi ‘s extreme brutality and lust for staging ghoulish beheadings of captives on the internet.

There seems to be a stunning political-strategic tone deafness on the part of Israeli leaders in recent years. Perhaps there is a degradition of IDF tactical excellence as well. Overpowering highly trained, heavily armed, elite commandos by untrained civilians is not possible unless said commandos were sent in poorly briefed, with unworkable ROE (IMHO, this was more likely a prepared ambush than a spontaneous act). There’s no half-way method of seizing a hostile ship by force. Either you do it swiftly, while citing appropriate legal justification or you don’t and employ a different set of responses to turn the ships away in a manner that does not alienate observers.

Military force used ineffectually is as counterproductive as force used excessively. From a Boydian strategic perspective, the initiative is lost, opponents are “pumped up” while one’s own side and sympathizers are demoralized.  Political irritants become inflated into disasters. HAMAS, Hezbollah, al Qaida and similar entities are not the old, state-sponsored, state-centric, PLO and they are not playing the PLO’s game.

ADDENDUM:

Abu Muqawama gives the “peace flotilla” way too much benefit of the doubt here, but his analysis of how poorly the Israelis handled this situation is spot on:

One could, from the start, think a number of different things about those participating in the peace flotilla to Gaza. (Naive? Righteous? Courageous? Anti-Semitic?) But for the sake of argument, and putting ourselves in the shoes of an Israeli naval commander, let’s assume the most malevolent of motivations for the people participating in the peace flotilla. If I am in charge of doing that for the Israeli Navy, I am going to assume these people are smart and are deliberately trying to provoke a crazy response from my sailors and soldiers that will produce ready-for-television images that both isolate Israel within the international community and further raise the ire of the Arabic-speaking and Islamic worlds. I mean, that is my base assumption for what this group is trying to do. So naturally, the last thing I would want my forces to do would be to overreact, right? It’s like when your convoy gets fired on inside a crowded market: the last thing you want to do is return fire with 7.62mm, killing a bunch of civilians and giving the enemy exactly the effect he was looking for.

If something does go wrong, meanwhile, I am going to have a response ready. I am going to have my very best spokespersons on international and Israeli television. I am most certainly not going to let people like Danny Ayalon provide my government’s response, right? Because a live wire like Ayalon — who the Turks already hate, with an understandable passion — will just say something incredibly crazy like how the people in the aid flotilla were terrorists with ties to al-Qaeda. (Even if you can prove this is somehow true, everyone you need to be speaking to right now — the international community, the Turkish people, the Arabic-speaking world — is just going to think you are nuts for saying it or will roll their eyes and say, “Oh, of course he’s saying that.”)

In reality, what happened today is the Israelis got their butts handed to them. The Israeli response to this aid flotilla was a fabulous gift to Hamas and Iran. (Try to imagine, if you will, the Israelis trying to go before the U.N. Security Council to gather support for sanctions on the Iranian regime right now. They would be more likely to leave New York with sanctions on their own regime!)

ADDENDUM II.

George Friedman of STRATFOR ( Hat tip to Adam Elkus)

Flotillas and the Wars of Public Opinion

….The bid to shape global perceptions by portraying the Palestinians as victims of Israel was the first prong of a longtime two-part campaign. The second part of this campaign involved armed resistance against the Israelis. The way this resistance was carried out, from airplane hijackings to stone-throwing children to suicide bombers, interfered with the first part of the campaign, however. The Israelis could point to suicide bombings or the use of children against soldiers as symbols of Palestinian inhumanity. This in turn was used to justify conditions in Gaza. While the Palestinians had made significant inroads in placing Israel on the defensive in global public opinion, they thus consistently gave the Israelis the opportunity to turn the tables. And this is where the flotilla comes in.

The Turkish flotilla aimed to replicate the Exodus story or, more precisely, to define the global image of Israel in the same way the Zionists defined the image that they wanted to project. As with the Zionist portrayal of the situation in 1947, the Gaza situation is far more complicated than as portrayed by the Palestinians. The moral question is also far more ambiguous. But as in 1947, when the Zionist portrayal was not intended to be a scholarly analysis of the situation but a political weapon designed to define perceptions, the Turkish flotilla was not designed to carry out a moral inquest.

Instead, the flotilla was designed to achieve two ends. The first is to divide Israel and Western governments by shifting public opinion against Israel. The second is to create a political crisis inside Israel between those who feel that Israel’s increasing isolation over the Gaza issue is dangerous versus those who think any weakening of resolve is dangerous.

ADDENDUM III.

Very interesting. Tom Barnett argues the flotilla is a Trojan horse chess move on Ankara’s part to justify Turkey’s eventual membership in the Nuclear Club:

Turkey’s deputy prime minister called the raid “a dark stain on the history of humanity.” So now Ankara has its bloody shirt, which will be used – once Tehran inevitably announces the weaponization of its nukes – to justify Turkey’s rapid reach for the same. Just like Tehran cannot openly rationalize its bid for regional supremacy vis-à-vis archrival Saudi Arabia, Turkey requires an appropriate villain for its nuclear morality play. Anybody watching the deterioration of Turkish-Israeli relations over the past year knew that some cause célèbre was in the works. Suddenly, if perhaps on purpose, Turkey can claim that – despite its efforts to broker a non-nuclear peace in the region (including a recent enrichment deal engineered with Brazil) – it needs its own deterrent against Israel’s nuclear arsenal, too.

Checkmate, Turkey.

 

 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.

This looks highly informative. Hat tip to Wings Over Iraq.

I regret the light posting and lack of attention to the superb comments. I am buried at work and will be until early next week. Will be posting short items until then

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.