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Wilf Owen, noted Clausewitzian and Editor of Infinity Journal has a provocative new piece up at SWJ Blog:

 Killing Your Way to Control

The population is not the prize. The population are the spectators to armed conflict. The prize is the control the government gains when the enemy is dead and gone. Control only exists when it is being applied, and it exists via the rule of law. The population will obey whoever exercises the power of law over them. Power creates support. Support does not create power. This is the source
of great confusion.

….In general terms killing the wrong people (civilians) may undermine the political objective being sought. Whether it does or does not will be the policy context. How proportionately, precisely or discriminately lethal force is applied will be dependant on the tactics employed. Thus Rules of Engagement (ROE) are those limitations on lethal force and military activity that armed forces use to ensure that force does not undermine policy.

….All the new counter-insurgency theorists concede, some killing is required but to quote FM3-24 while necessary, especially with respect to extremists [killing] by itself cannot defeat an insurgency. Again this makes no sense, unless as part of a defence mounted to preserve the idea that you cannot kill and capture your way to success. Those who are extremists do not become apparent or may not even exist until the ranks of the enemy have been thinned by death, desertion and surrender. Until lethal force is focused on the enemy, the extremists may not be apparent, and who is and is not an extremist is irrelevant if they are clearly armed and thus a legitimate target within the ROE.

Killing and capturing are important, because lesser forms of operation aimed at disrupting or dislocating while useful, may allow the enemy to survive. Dead and captured cannot return at some later date to re-contest any issue they see fit. Warfare against irregular forces is won in a similar way to warfare against regular forces. The only major differences is that force usually has to be employed far more precisely, discriminately and proportionately. This is because lethal force will be applied close to or within a population that you are politically/legally required to protect. The other difference is that lethal force will be focussed at the individual level. This is a general distinction from that of fighting regular forces where operations would seek to defeat units and formations in part or as a whole.

The case of Algeria, during the 1990’s with the battle between Islamist rebel-terrorists and a radical Arab-socialist dictatorship provides some support for Owen’s ideas regarding killing and the separation of opponents into extremists and moderates. The government, which applied force with minimal constraints, did succeed in killing off the leadership cadres of the FIS, GIA and MIA faster than they could be properly developed, leaving leadership in the hands of either younger, more radical but less experienced men or causing the groups to accept government amnesty. 

Algeria of course enjoyed several advantages that the West lacks in places like Afghanistan – the Algerian rebels were isolated from the outside world and enjoyed minimal foreign support and the Algerian dictatorship conducted operations without regard to the laws of war in a media blackout, getting a pass from the international community because the behavior of the rebels was even worse. In Afghanistan, the center of gravity of the Taliban movement is the support of Pakistan’s ISI whch is using them as proxies to drive ISAF out of Afghanistan and the kind of punitive raiding into Pakistan to decimate Taliban manpower is forbidden by policy.

ADDENDUM:

Spencer Ackerman offers a spirited rebuttal to Wilf Owen:

Please, God, No More Stupid Anti-Counterinsurgency Arguments

…. Where to begin. Sometimes, as in nearly all counterinsurgency fights, the counterinsurgent cannot easily distinguish the insurgent from the civilian. That’s not always because of poor tactical intelligence or ignorance of a foreign culture. It’s because the guy who gives his old cellphone to his cousin so his old neighborhood friend can use it to construct IEDs for the guy paying a good going rate — quick, is he an insurgent or not? If you can’t immediately answer, Owen’s argument falls apart.

Even if you unflinchingly decide the guy’s an insurgent, killing the guy can easily inspire the whole neighborhood to rally to the insurgents’ cause. Quick: do you kill the guy so you can approach the Magic Number of dead insurgents that assures you victory? Or does not killing the guy take you further away from the Magic Number?

I know, I know. Counterinsurgency is OVER. Whatever context, wisdom or experience led people to consider it a least-bad option ought to be ignored. Its unsuitability for Afghanistan has rendered the entire enterprise inert. What, you didn’t read that National Journal piece?  

My only comment here is that Pop-centric COIN is only one brand of COIN that fits some situations better than others. I suspect much of the time in the near future, US military forces will be limiting themselves to FID, largely for budgetary reasons, and the host nation may see COIN differently than our current doctrine prescribes.

Darth Creveld explains the strategic dark side to SWJ

Michael Few pinged me regarding an interview Martin van Creveld gave to SWJ with the always interesting interlocuter, Octavian Manea:

The Age of Airpower

Q: It is stated that Operations Rolling Thunder in Vietnam was the wrong way of using airpower in order to break the will of an opponent. Why? And which is the right way?

MvC: As Jesus once said, by their fruit will thou know them. Given the vast cost of Rolling Thunder, and the meager results it yielded, there can be no question that it was a foolish waste of resources. It was only made possible by the fact that it was carried out by the richest nation in history at the very peak of its economic power and psychological hubris.

The real question is, had the “gradual approach” been replaced by a short, sharp, all-out attack, would it have worked any better? To my mind the answer is almost certainly negative. Look at “Shock and Awe” as carried out both in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Both of these offensives employed weapons infinitely more sophisticated, and in many ways much more powerful, than the ones the Americans used in Vietnam almost forty years earlier (though some aircraft, notably the venerable B-52s, may well have taken part in both campaigns). Both depended their success, if indeed one can talk of success, on the presence of troops of the ground. Vietnam, though, was primarily a guerrilla war. Expanding ground operations into North Vietnam, as some in Washington DC demanded, would merely have made things even more difficult for the Americans.

Postscript: 

Adam has his take on the Infinity article.

I was involved in a discussion elsewhere regarding the excellent and thought provoking article at SWJ by General Huba Wass de Czege on operation art, design and thinking:

Operational Art is Not a Level of War

Strongly recommend you read the article first. My remarks follow, slightly revised:

I have only read a few pieces by General Wass de Czege, those published at SWJ but the caliber of the general’s self-reflective, professional, thinking is something we should strive to emulate.

Here is what seems to be the crtical point in his article, after which I have a comment:

 “We doctrine writers of the 1980’s inserted operational art as a mid-level of war between tactics and strategy – making it the art of translating the governing strategy into the implementing tactics of the “tactical echelons.” And thus, making operational art the province of “campaigning” generals. Because of the way I was conditioned to think then, that strategy was the business of the upper echelons and tactics the business of the lower ones, I miss-translated an idea borrowed from Soviet doctrine about the mediation between strategy and tactics. I was then a product of indoctrination in the US Army’s War and Command and Staff Colleges. These institutions, and the business schools of the time, taught based on the industrial age organizational model of the head (where strategic decisions are made) and the rest of the body (where tactical decisions implement the strategy). I now believe that, without violating the historical meaning of the terms strategy and tactics, this is a much more useful and natural way to think of the relationship between tactics, strategy and operational art.

In fact, this allows one to close the conceptual gap between our bifurcated way of thinking about warfare between nation states and that between states and armed movements of any kind. It also helps do the same for the two tactical operating modes that have recently surfaced in new Army concepts – “combined arms maneuver” and “wide area security.”

Campaigning, another word for operational art, can occur at any scale, and in any milieu, as a close look at what our best company, battalion, and brigade commanders have been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. “

I think maybe this should be qualified – re; operational art is not a “level”. It is a level of war and it is not at the same time.
 
The difference between the two I think is *how* we are employing the term: “Operational art” as a historical, taxonomic, description of how a military-political command structure has behaved/behaves as a warfighting institutional culture vs. methodologically how they *could* and *should* think about warfare and in turn behave at any “level”.
 
It is not surprising to me, thinking in terms of history, that Wass de Czege, where he wrote that he was in error, was drawing from Soviet examples. If we think about “operational art” as a “level of war” we are led to military powers where powerful ideological constraints systemically interfered with the “natural” clausewitzian connection between Policy and Strategy.
 
The USSR’s Red Army, from the early days of Commissar-Commander relationships in battle, through the Stalinist era to the more modern and restrained (i.e. non-murderous) controls of the Army’s Political Department and vetting security checks for promotion carried out jointly by the military, State Security and Party organs, created an atmosphere where deferral of political implications caused a) a segregation of an officer’s intellectual initiative to organizational and technical military questions and b) constructing military strategy and operational campaigns to at least nominally reflect Marxist-Leninist dogma and the Party line as a matter of necessity, and for a period, in an effort to try and avoid being physically liquidated.
 
Most of the Soviet Union’s most gifted military strategists and tacticians were unsuccessful in this regard and perished (ex. Svechin, Tukhachevskii, Blyukher). Arguably that left an institutional legacy in it’s wake that narrowed the conceptual framework with which Soviet Marshals and generals approached planning for war, including nuclear war.
 
Germany is another example, with the policy-strategy split favoring a professional military focus on operational art emerging as early as 1870 in tensions between Bismarck and Moltke over the war with France, growing worse during the Great War until during the Third Reich, a state of enforced paralysis occurs after 1942 on the Eastern Front. In theory, Hitler, who was his own war minister and commander-in-chief of the Army in addition to being the Supreme Commander, Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor, could (like Stalin) have resolved any contradictions or discordance between Policy and Strategy. Hitler deliberately chose not to do so and his paranoia led him to eventually limit even his field commander’s tactical flexibility (some generals, like Rommel, resisted this more effectively than others).
 
The US military, in my view, suffers a similar fixation. The reasons are very different – proper constitutional deference to civil authority coupled with a limited or absent capacity of most civilian political authorities to think in a complementary strategic fashion that would allow them to best guide their military commanders in jointly constructing a seamless bridge between policy-strategy-operational campaign. Another reason, though I do not want to go into it here, is a cultural reaction to the experience of the Vietnam War that became embedded in the officer corps during the shift to the AVF starting with the Nixon administration.
 
Tom Ricks had a very interesting post at Best Defense while back on the Hew Strachan article in which Ricks argued against the existence of an operational level of war, but as we are not discussing platonic forms, militaries are at whatever “level” of war for which their culture institutionally encourages officers to think about and plan. So in that sense, Wass de Czege is absolutely correct – they can and should be thinking across the whole range and not in “slots”. However, if they don’t do what he suggests and if they do predominantly focus on one “level” as most of their thinking and planning, be it tactics, operations, strategy. Then that level “exists”, it leaves a bureaucratic “trail”, grows a structure to execute it and will be put into practice during a war – at least initially until events force a change of practice from below (the field) or above ( political leaders).

OPENLY BREAKING WITH THE HIERARCHY

This article is a shot heard round the world:

“A failure in Generalship” by LTC Paul Yingling.

WaPo has picked it up here “Army Officer Accuses Generals of ‘Intellectual and Moral Failures'”

The Small Wars Council is discussing it here.

How much you want to bet that this article has crossed the desk of Secretary Gates ? And it should.

Required reading.

ADDENDUM:

SWJ Blog – “A Failure in Generalship”

Interview with LTC Paul Yingling Combined Arms Research Library ( thanks, Lex !)

Thomas P.M. Barnett -” New Officers”