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I continue to be impressed with Dr. John Mackinlay‘s  The Insurgent Archipelago . You might not agree with everything Mackinlay has to say on insurgency or COIN theory but his book is deeply thought-provoking the way The Pentagon’s New Map, Brave New War or The Genius of the Beast are thought-provoking books. As a reader, you highlight. You underline. You scribble praise, condemnation or some relevant factoid in the margins.

This is going to be an influential text.

In Mackinlay’s view, America and the West have failed to adequately understand what and whom they are fighting in the War on Terror. The phenomenon that has eluded them is that alongside older, Maoist iterations of guerrilla warfare, the cutting edge of insurgency has evolved up into a decentralized, networked, partly virtual, Post-Maoism. General staffs, intelligence services, national security officials and diplomats remained hypnotized by the Maoist model that was so frequently aped in the 60’s and 70’s by secular leftists and Third World Marxists in Vietnam, Algeria and subsaharan Africa.

Some excerpts, followed by my analysis, which you are free to disagree with or just put in your own two cents about in the comments section:

Mackinlay writes [p. 164]:

….NATO governments and a majority of their security staff did not recognize post-Maoism as a form of insurgency either. Although they lived in a post-industrial era and directly experienced its social consequences, they dealt with post-9/11 insurgent phenomenon from a Maoist perspective; they neither saw it nor engaged it as a global movement that involved a greater array of dispersed supporters. They also failed to recognize it as an insurgency.

Very true. Even though if the organizational behavior of al Qaida and its affiliated movements had taken place within one nation-state, Cold War era graybeard officials and international law NGO activists of 2001-2004 vintage would have called them a guerilla movement; that al Qaida’s activities took place across many international borders seriously confounded them in an intellectual sense. Obviously, they must be common criminals, no different than junkies who stick-up a 7-11, to be properly mirandized! Call the FBI and have OJ’s dream team ready when we make an arrest! Or Osama is a state-sponsored terrorists of Saddam! No, wait, of Iran!

And so it went, and still goes on to this day as the USG contorts itself into a legal pretzel  in order to never have proper war crimes trials or execute convicted war criminals. Or even admit they are “Islamists” motivated by a reified ideology (Mackinlay’s term “Post-Maoist” may soon come in to vogue at the NSC).

America is like the Gulliver of COIN, bound fast by the cords of politically correct nonsense.

….Because few academics had explained insurgency as a multidisciplinary, as opposed to a narrowly military, process they failed to see how their own populations were vulnerable to insurgent movements, and that when it happened to them it would not look like its classic Maoist antecedent. Countering insurgency required a counterintuitive effort and making this intellectual leap was problematic when military planners had such an idee fixe of insurgency as eternally Maoist form.

I interpret this paragraph as Mackinlay blending the Euro-Anglo-American state of affairs, but it does not apply equally to all, in my view.

Humanities and social science academics are simply not as good at or as intellectually comfortable with true multidisciplinary thinking as are their counterparts in the hard sciences. Nor are the social science faculty particularly friendly, in most universities, toward the US national security and intelligence communities or the Pentagon (though I suspect the situation in 2010 is better than in 2000 or 1990). Nor are American universities oversupplied with military historians or scholars of strategic studies.

Academia, however is not at fault as much as Mackinlay indicates. Even if we had Clausewitz collaborating with Ibn Khaldun and Marshall Mcluhan to write our white papers, the USG interagency process is fundamentally broken and could not execute their recommendations. State is grossly underfunded, institutionally disinclined to turn out FSO’s in the mold of Errol Flynn and is in need of a systemic overhaul. USIA and USAID need to be reborn as heavyweight players. The CIA has problems almost as severe as does State and does not play well with others, including the DNI. There is no “whole of government” approach present that could approximate an “operational jointness”, so presidents increasingly rely on the military as the hammer for all nails ( the military may not do the right thing but at least it does something, as the saying goes).

Mackinlay writes [p. 164-165]

….By 2008 the most up-to-date doctrine was still stuck in expeditionary form, in other words focused on a campaign epicentre that lay in a particular overseas territory and its traditional, or at best modernising, society. The following characteristics that distinguished post-Maoism had not been engaged:

• The involvement of multiple populations which challenged the concept of a center of gravity
• Mass communications and connectivity
• The migration factor
• The virtual factor
• The centrality of propaganda of the deed in the insurgent’s concept of operations
• The bottom-up direction of activist energy
• Absence of plausible end-state objectives in the insurgent’s manifesto

Mackinlay gets much right here but some things wrong – and what is incorrect is arguably quite important – but as an indictment of the failure of the West to adequately address globalized insurgency, it is spot on in many respects.

First, in regard to Mackinlay’s attack on Clausewitzian theory, I am not persuaded that a “center of gravity” for our enemies does not exist or apply so much as its form is not a particularly convenient one (i.e. -easily targetable) or politically comfortable for our elites to acknowledge.

We could conceive of al Qaida’s CoG being Bin Laden’s inner circle hiding somewhere in Pakistan – probably Rawalpindi – that we do not yet dare to strike. Or we could say that the CoG is al Qaida’s “plausible promise” that the “far enemy” of radical Islamism, the US, can be brought down, as was the USSR, by being bled to death by drawing America into endless and expensive wars. Or that the CoG is al Qaida’s peculair, Qutbist-inspired, takfiri, revolutionary Islamist ideology. Our elites recoil from openly confronting any of those possible scenarios but that does not mean that a CoG is not present, only that we lack the will to attack their CoG head-on.

US COIN doctrine is expeditionary – essentially internal COIN for America ended with the Compromise of 1877 and the end of three centuries of “Indian Wars”. Political correctness, not doctrinal rigidity, precludes recognizing Islamist lone wolf terrorists like Maj. Hasan as anything other than mentally ill spree killers, no different from the school shooters at Columbine or Andrew Cunanan. The USG would not recognize an insurgency in the states as an insurgency even if it had flags, a government-in-exile, an air force and armored divisions. Even the capture of verified and admitted members of al Qaida inside the United States, who are covered by a properly authorized AUMF, causes an epidemic of pants-wetting among the elite, if we proceed to try them with military tribunals or commissions.

We do not have a political elite as a national leadership who are prepared to entertain the full strategic ramifications of the existence of a “globalized insurgency”. They do not ignore it completely – the COIN doctrine articulated best by David Kilcullen and John Nagl is to de-fang al Qaida as a strategic threat by isolating it from the “Accidental Guerrilla” groups whose Islamist concerns are parochial and national in character rather than global. So, al Qaida is seen by the American national security community as a de facto globalized insurgency with a reach that extends everywhere – except of course inside the United States. Unless we intercept foreign Islamist terrorists crossing the border or boarding a plane, any violent actions committed here resembling terrorism are purely a law enforcement issue and must be wholly unrelated to Islamist extremism.

It’s a bizarrely illogical strategic worldview – and I fear its’ ostrich-like mentality has already spread from War on Terror policy to matters related to the empirically demonstrable, but continuously downplayed, spillover effects of Mexico’s growing narco-insurgency, where high officials prohibit unvarnished “truth telling” from practitioners in the field from reaching the ears of key decision-makers. It’s no way to run a war – or a country – unless the intent is to lose the former by systematically crippling the ability to respond of the latter.

Mackinlay’s characteristics of “Post-Maoism” strike directly and the political and methodological nerve clusters of a Western elite whose power and status are invested in hierarchical, bureaucratic, institutional structures that are defended from urgent demands to reform, in part, by their ideology of political correctness.

“Law stands mute in the midst of arms. “ – Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny” – Edmund Burke

“Make them bow their heads under the yoke of the law” – Russian proverb

Frequent commenter Schmedlap, who has a fine blog of his own, asked his readers a very important question:

Today a smart, well-traveled, experienced, knowledgeable guy was telling me that “rule of law” is a concept that we need to stop worrying about. Strongly disagreeing, I asked why. After he explained why, it became clear that he was working with a significantly different definition of “rule of law” than I knew of. It reminded me of recent discussions here and elsewhere over definitions of culture, torture, and terrorism. Given his definition of “rule of law” I agreed that it is not something that we need to worry about. If “rule of law” = his definition, then rule of law is not important. If “rule of law” = my definition, then rule of law is important.

Just curious, what is your understanding of what “rule of law” means?

I attempted to leave a comment, using a Google Chrome browser, but it failed to “stick”, so I will pontificate in my usual, windy, fashion here instead.

The Anglo-American tradition of “rule of law” is distinct from that of continental Europe or Confucianist traditions in Asia, both of which are primarily concerned in different ways with the health of the state. Anglo-American “rule of law” has been an evolutionary – and sometimes revolutionary – march to constrain the exercise of arbitrary power and, eventually, assure an egalitarian access to justice. When Norman French-speaking King John of England bitterly complained at Runnymede that the English barons might as well demand his crown, he was right. The Magna Carta was intended to curb John’s capricious tyranny with formal rules governing how and when the King could exercise power against whom.

As national monarchies coalesced out of bastard feudalism’s kingdoms and medieval principalities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Kings propagated a theory of divine right absolutism, which to our ears seems despotic, but to a sophisticated and wealthy, emerging, European bourgeoisie at that time, sounded like music. Better living under predictable, “national” laws and a King far away than a patchwork of greedy, grasping and unpredictable nobles who were ever close at hand. That same, rational, middle-class political sentiment though, soon found fault with even Enlightened absolutism.

Lord Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, a great man to whom much is owed, but who today is largely forgotten, was the great theorist and defender of judicial independence and common law from the whims of a sovereign. Without judicial independence, the rule of law is hardly possible because it is ultimately inseparable from the executive power; Coke was instrumental in moving elite Englishmen’s minds from accepting “Rex lex” (“The King is Law”) to demanding “Lex rex” (“The Law is king”).

The matter was not formally settled with the English Civil War, which came not long after Coke’s death, or even the Glorious Revolution of 1688; nor the American Revolution of 1776 or even at Appomattox Courthouse.  “The rule of law” is an ongoing struggle that must be constantly renewed by an active and vigilant citizenry if it is to be sustained.

From David Betz at Kings of War (hat tip to Charles Cameron)

Uk Strategy and Defence Policy, where should it go? Have your say

As many of you will know the UK MoD is at work now on the preparation of a Green Paper leading up to a full (and overdue) defence review next year. We have been discussing many of the key issues in British strategy here on this blog for two years already. I think it speaks well of the informed and thoughtful KOW readership that the MoD Strategy Unit is now reaching out to this little corner of the defence blogosphere to engage with us on such matters. Below I am posting a note from Vincent Devine, who heads the Strategy Unit, which is intended to kick off a debate here on these pages on issues of mutual concern. I am personally chuffed that we have been asked. More importantly, I welcome the spirit of openness to debate and alternative views which the gesture represents. Across the pond they have been better at this, see The Army Needs Your Help, for instance, and I think they have realized better policy and strategy in the doing. I could quote a bunch of clichés here about ‘sunlight being the best detergent’, or ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’ but, really, it’s self-evident isn’t it? Here in the UK we’ve ground to make up and not a lot of time and resource to waste and so I find this development highly encouraging.

….From here down it’s Vincent Devine talking:

I’m grateful to David Betz for letting the UK Ministry of Defence Strategy Unit engage with Kings of War to gather views about the future of the UK’s defence policy.

The Strategy Unit, which I lead, is a small team of military officers, MoD and FCO officials and international exchange officers. We are pulling together the new Defence Green Paper, which will set out some of the key defence issues before a full defence review next year.  As we prepare the Green Paper we want to take advantage of the very active academic and think-tank debate on defence issues, and ideally provoke some of this discussion ourselves.  We running a series of traditional, real-world seminars and meetings with experts. Via Kings of War we also want to plug into the informed and interested defence blogosphere, hoping to reach a wider and (possibly) fresher audience.

This is, as far as I know, the first time the Ministry of Defence has done this, and it is something of an experiment. Depending on your reactions, we plan to post on several occasions between now and the end of the year. We’d like each time to pose one of the defence policy questions we’re considering, and ask for your views. We won’t plan to respond to each comment as it comes in (though we might chip in if any particularly live discussion kicks off), but will offer a set of reactions and impressions to wrap up the exchanges after about a week. And we want to be able to share with you some of our emerging thinking.

We hope the process will mirror the overall Green Paper approach: it’s about identifying the key questions, rather than trying to answer them now; it firmly places our defence policy within our wider international and security policy; and it’s based on the assumption that we may need to make some tough choices. If you want more background about the Green Paper process, you can find the Defence Secretary’s Parliamentary statement here , and of course some of you may have heard his speech at King’s on this last week.

We have agreed with David some ground rules for our participation in KoW, intended to help keep the debate lively. We are contributing as the MoD Strategy Unit, rather than trying to speak for the Ministry as a whole – we therefore won’t need to have all our contributions chiselled in stone before we submit them. Neither the Strategy Unit nor KoW make any commitment to agree with or support the views of the other – which indeed would undermine the whole point. We (genuinely) want to encourage people to say what they think – the most useful comments will be those which are informed, grounded and focused.

Finally, I’d like to suggest an open question to start the discussion: as we look at setting our future defence policy, what are the greatest problems we need to tackle and – equally important – what are the greatest advantages we can exploit?

There’s been a lot of good writing on this recently, including of course from David himself and Anthony Cormack, and from Theo Farrell, Malcolm Chalmers, Paul Cornish, Andrew Dorman, Hew Strachan and others. They’ve looked both at tactical/operational issues and at the overall strategic picture. Some see the glass half-full, some half-empty. Some focus on the need for success in current operations, others on the state of the whole defence machine. They identify a very broad range of issues: which of these are causes rather than symptoms, and which show grounds for optimism, which pessimism?

I look forward to seeing what you have to say.

Vincent Devine

Post any useful suggestions or comments over at Kings of War.

Dr. John Nagl, president of CNAS, lead author of The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, retired lieutenant colonel and top COIN expert, has penned an important review of Accidental Guerrilla by Col. David Kilcullen, in the prestigious British journal RUSI. Unfortunately, at present no link is is available, but my co-author Lexington Green is a subscriber and sent me a copy of the review, which I read last night. I now look forward to reading Kilcullen firsthand and have put Accidental Guerrilla near the top of my summer reading List.

I state that Nagl’s review is important because beyond the descriptive element that is inherent in a review, there is a substantive aspect that amounts to an effective act of policy advocacy. First, an example of Nagl’s descriptions of Kilcullen’s arguments:

We do not face a monolithic horde of jihadis moti vated by a rabid desire to destroy us and our way of life (there are some of these, although Kilcullen prefers to call them takfiris); instead, many of those who fight us do so for conventional reasons like nationalism and honour. Kilcullen illustrates the point with the tale of a special forces A-Team that had the fight of its life one May afternoon in 2006. One American was killed and seven more wounded in a fight that drew local fighters from villages five kilometres away who marched to the sound of the guns – not for any ideological reason, but simply because they wanted to be a part of the excitement. ‘It would have shamed them to stand by and wait it out’, Kilcullen reports

Tribal and even “civilized” rural people, often find ways of making social status distinctions that relate to behaviour and character rather than or in addition to the mere accumulation of material possessions (Col. Pat Lang has a great paper on this subject, “How to Work with Tribesmen“). We can shorthand them as “honor” cultures and they provide a different set of motivations and reactions than, say, those possessed by a CPA in San Francisco or an attorney in Washington, DC. People with “honor” are more obviously “territorial” and quick to defend against perceived slights or intrusions by unwelcome outsiders. This is a mentality that is alien to most modern, urbanized, 21st century westerners but it was not unfamiliar all that long ago, even in 19th and early 20th century, Americans had these traits. Shelby Foote, the Civil War historian, quotes a captured Southern rebel, who responded to a Union officer who asked him, why, if he had no slaves, was he was fighting? “Because you are down here” was the answer.

While relatively short and designed, naturally, to help promote a book by a friend and CNAS colleague, Dr. Nagl has also taken a significant step toward influencing policy by distilling and reframing Dr. Klicullen’s lengthy and detailed observations into a reified and crystallized COIN “doctrine”. A digestible set of memes sized exactly right for the journalistic and governmental elite whose eyes glaze over at the mention of military jargon and who approach national security from a distinctly civilian and political perspective:

There is much first-hand reporting in this book, based on Kilcullen’s [Robert] Kaplan-esque habit of visiti ng places where people want to kill him. After chapters detailing his personal experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, he returns to his doctoral fieldwork in Indonesia, discusses the insurgencies in Thailand and Pakistan and evaluates the complicated plight of radical Islam in Europe. While all of these confl icts are related to each other, they are not the same, and cannot be won based on a simplistic conception like the global War on Terror; instead, the enemy in each small war must be disaggregated from the whole, strategy in each based on local conditions, motivations, and desires. One size does not fit all, and there are many grey areas. A ‘with us or against us’ approach is likely to result in far more people than otherwise being ‘against us’ in these conflicts.

John Boyd would have agreed that isolating our enemies and winning over groups as allies is much preferred to needlessly multiplying our enemies. That paragraph is more or less boilerplate in the COIN community but this RUSI review is aimed not at them but at political decision makers, national security bureaucrats, diplomats and elite media and constituted a necessary set up by Nagl for “The Kilcullen Doctrine” [bullet points are my addition to Nagl’s text, for purposes of emphasis]:

….In direct oppositi on to the ideas that drove American interventi on policy two decades ago, Kilcullen suggests ‘the anti -Powell doctrine’ for counter-insurgency campaigns.

• First, planners should select the lightest, most indirect and least intrusive form of intervention that will achieve the necessary effect.

• Second, policy-makers should work by, with, and through partnerships with local government administrators, civil society leaders, and local security forces whenever possible.

• Third, whenever possible, civilian agencies are preferable to military intervention forces, local nati onals to international forces, and long-term, low-profile engagement to short-term, high-profile intervention.

New doctrines emerge because ideas are articulated at the moment in time when they both fit the circumstances and the intended audience is ready to accept their implications. George Kennan, the father of Containment in 1946-1947 had attempted to give the State Department and the Roosevelt administration essentially the same advice about Soviet Russia in the 1930’s and the reaction of the White House was to order the State Department’s Soviet document collection destroyed and exile critics of Stalin like Kennan from handling Eastern European affairs ( Kennan saved the collection by storing it in his attic). Neither Stalin’s nature nor Kennan’s opinion of the USSR changed much in the next decade, but the willingness of American liberal elites to consider them did, making Containment doctrine a reality.

The post-Cold War, Globalization era elite is in the ready state of mind for a “Kilcullen Doctrine”. They are ready to hear it because systemic uncertainties have made them justifiably skeptical of old prescriptions and they are seeking new perspectives the way the Truman White House invited Kennan’s Long Telegram. This situation is both good and bad in about equal measure.

The good comes from the fact that the Kilcullen Doctrine is operationally sound, at least for specifically handling issues of complex insurgencies. It is also politically astute, in that it encourages statesmen and military leaders to first tinker with minimal measures while listening acutely for feedback instead of charging in like a bull in a china shop, to empower locals rather than engaging in the military keynesianism equivalent of enabling welfare dependency, as the U.S. did in South Vietnam and initially in Iraq. Kilcullen is also a reluctant interventionist, a healthy sentiment, albeit one unlikely to survive in doctrinal form.

The bad is multifaceted. None of these are dealbreakers but all should be “handled” by the COIN advocates of a “Kilcullen Doctrine”:

First, Kilcullen’s three principles are an operational and not a genuinely strategic doctrine. In fairness, no major COIN advocate has ever said otherwise and have often emphasized the point. The problem is that a lot of their intended audience – key civilian decision makers and opinion shapers in their 30’s-50’s often do not understand the difference, except for a minority who have learned from bitter experience. Most of those who have, the Kissingers, Brzezinskis, Shultzes etc. are elder statesmen on the far periphery of policy.

Secondly, this operational doctrine requires a sound national strategy and grand strategy if it is to add real value and not merely be a national security fire extinguisher. Kilcullen may say intervention is unwise but that is really of no help. Absent a grand strategy with broad political acceptance, policy makers, even professed isolationists, will find situational (i.e. domestic political reasons) excuses for intervention on an ad hoc basis. That George W. Bush entered office as a sincere opponent of “nation-building” and proponent of national “humility” should be enough to give anyone pause about a president “winging it” by reacting to events without a grand strategy to frame options and provide coherence from one administration to the next.

Thomas P.M. Barnett, a friend of this blog, has been articulating a visionary grand strategy since 2004 in a series of books, the latest of which is Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, where he essentially models for the readers how a grand strategy is constructed from historical trajectories and economic currents to make the case. Barnett’s themes have a great consilience with most of what COIN advocates would like to see happen, but Dr. Barnett’s public example of intellectual proselytizing and briefing to normal people outside of the beltway is even more important. Operational doctrine is not enough. It is untethered. It will float like a balloon in a political wind. It is crisis management without a destination or sufficient justification for expenditure of blood and treasure. If these blanks are not filled in, they will be filled in by others.

COIN advocates will have to bite the bullet of working on national strategy and grand strategy, building political coalitions, speaking to the public and wading into geoeconomics and the deep political waters of the long view. For a some time, they have had the excuse that as uniformed officers, such questions were above their pay grade – and this was the scrupulously, constitutionally, correct position, so long as that was the case.

That era is swiftly passing and most of these brilliant military intellectuals now have (ret.) in their titles and wear business suits rather than fatigues. COIN is not an end in itself. The horizon is much wider now and we should all be ready to pitch in and help.

ALSO POSTING ON THIS TOPIC:

SWJ Blog –  Weekend Reading and Listening Assignment

Thomas P.M. Barnett – Safranski on Nagl on Kilcullen

The Strategist – Sunday reflection: on “The Accidental Guerrilla”

MountainRunner –Recommended Reading: Kilcullen Doctrine

Abu Muqawama – Dogs and cats, living together. Mass hysteria!

HG’s World – A Brief on the Accidental Guerrilla by Zenpundit

Information Dissemination – New Doctrines Without Strategic Foundations

Galrahn is right, I have not quite fleshed things out in my post and could use the help. He’s also clarified that the discussion needs to shift to the “why”, the objectives, with which I was not particularly clear by the use of “strategy” which means different things to different people, even those versed in military affairs.

Military historian Carlo D’Este had an inspiring piece up at HNN last week on Sir Winston Churchill, drawn from his book Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945:

“The Power of Oratory: Why Churchill is Still Relevant”

….From the time he became prime minister, until December 1941, when Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, Churchill’s strongest weapon was oratory. As a young army officer stationed in India in 1897 he wrote that: “Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory.”

His speeches of 1940 become legendary, not only for their magnetism but more importantly for their effect on public morale. To counter both the disastrous news in France and to put to rest any notion that Britain might capitulate, Churchill delivered one of his many patriotic speeches to Parliament on June 18 that was also broadcast by the BBC. He made no effort to sugarcoat the extent of the dire situation Britain faced. The struggle that lay ahead from the air and likely from invasion would be met with every means and would be rebuffed. Of Hitler and the nations now under the Nazi jackboot, he said, “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free . . . But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States . . . will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age … Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say, ‘This was their finest hour.’

Read the rest here.

Churchill was an inordinately creative military leader, deeply interested in all facets of warfare from intelligence to technological innovations in armaments ( famously a proponent of the development of the tank in WWI) to military tactics. The amphibious landing at Gallipoli was a disaster but Normandy a generation later, despite Churchill’s misgivings, was a providential success. When in political disgrace – mostly undeserved – as a result of Gallipoli, Churchill did not retire to the shadows but donned a uniform and went to the Western Front ! Moreover he demonstrated there exemplary bravery under fire.

Can anyone imagine a politician doing that today? Or the public expecting him to do so ?

In the Second World War, in 1940 -1941, Churchill was the  indomitible rock upon which Western civilization rested. A lesser man as Prime Minister would have taken easy terms from Hitler and made Great Britain a satellite empire of the Greater German Reich, akin to the Phonecians’ relationship to ancient Persia. Few people alive today realize how dire the situation was in the Spring of 1941 and how close liberal democracy came to vanishing from history. 

Thanks to Churchill and the bravery of the RAF, the West had a chance to catch it’s breath.