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“…. But when the sons of these men received the same position of authority from their fathers-having had no experience of misfortunes, and none at all of civil equality and freedom of speech, but having been bred up from the first under the shadow of their fathers’ authority and lofty position-some of them gave themselves up with passion to avarice and unscrupulous love of money, others to drinking and the boundless debaucheries which accompanies it, and others to the violation of women or the forcible appropriation of boys; and so they turned an aristocracy into an oligarchy. But it was not long before they roused in the minds of the people the same feelings as before; and their fall therefore was very like the disaster which befell the tyrants.”-Polybius

One of the tenets of pop-centric COIN is that better governance will deliver the loyalty of the people who are the center of gravity over whom the insurgent and state contest. This usually means cajoling the state to reform and remove the worst abuses that serve to politically fuel the insurgency. Occasionally this is successful (El Salvador), frequently it is not (South Vietnam, Afghanistan) and in other cases it may be irrelevant as the method is eschewed in favor of indiscriminate brute force and punitive expeditions (Sri Lanka, Soviet COIN) but it begs the question of:

“What kind of governance is most likely to create insurgencies in the first place?”

Of insurgencies that are wholly indigenous, what form of government spawns them most frequently? A chart of historically recent insurgencies is given below containing who fought and who won (“negotiated” indicates a political settlemt “tie” of sorts, with some political accomodation and not settlements that are trucial “exit agreements” for the defeated belligerent): 

The chart is fairly comprehensive, but I have not accounted for all movements or conflicts that can loosely be grouped under the heading of “insurgency” in the previous century. There are more. Corrections and additions are welcomed in the comments section. I also recognize that such a broad historical comparison as this chart involves a fairly massive degree of simplification of diverse examples. To some extent, simplification is unavoidable if insurgency is to be studied as a phenomenon at all rather than as an event in the history of a particular state or people.

EXCLUSIONS: 

Insurgencies before 1900.  A blog post cannot aspire become the encyclopedia of insurgency. 

The Russian Civil War (1918-1921) and the Lebanese Civil War of the 1980’s on the basis that while these conflicts contained many aspects of irregular warfare, they were primarily civil wars with extensive foreign intervention. The Greek and Chinese civil wars, by contrast are included because, despite foreign intervention in each case, the character of one of the belligerents in each conflict remained authentically and continuously insurgent in nature. The Greek communist army supported by Tito had previously been an anti-Nazi partisan force while Mao ZeDong’s Red Army were in rebellion against the Nationalist government before, after and to some extent, during, the WWII Japanese invasion of China.

Unlike the Vietnam War, the Korean War was neither an insurgency, nor a civil war, the adjunctive use of guerrilla operations by the North Korean and Chinese armies and the pro-DPRK apologetics of historian Bruce Cumings notwithstanding. The Korean War is better understood with Clausewitz than Galula.

The Soviet Bloc cases of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Hungary in 1956 were excluded primarily because the resistance to Soviet domination was led by, or at least included, the leadership of the local satellite Communist Parties and governments, making those examples partially state vs. state conflicts. Of the two, Hungary presents a better empirical case for inclusion but from my readings of Soviet history, Khrushchev’s concerns were rooted in what he saw as counterrevolutionary and anti-Soviet elements in the Hungarian Party, army and security agencies and the Soviet response was a conventional invasion. I could be persuaded otherwise, but for now I am excluding Hungary.

The Katangan Secession – the reason here is my own lack of familiarity with the subject, as well as Mobutu’s later fall from power. Readers are invited to weigh in here or on any point.

Inadvertantly awol but intended to be included was Sri Lanka which recently crushed the Tamil Tigers. My error and one not easily remedied at this point for technical reasons, having tweaked the chart with another software program.

ANALYSIS:

Foreign Invasion 

First, if we wish to know what kind of governments most frequently suffer insurgencies, let us set aside insurgencies that derive primarily from resisting foreign invasion and occupation. While these conflicts are legitimately considered insurgencies, the cause of them is fundamentally external to the nature of the state. People have a natural, visceral and ingrained tendency to fight violent intruders and that reaction ought to be taken for granted and planned for accordingly. Even the much abused and absolutely impoverished peasantry of Russia rose up against Napoleonic armies and Nazi conquerors. So we would remove from consideration the cases of Afghanistan after the Soviet and American occupations, Yugoslavia, the Boer War, the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia and the American occupation of Iraq and the Philippines as being externally provoked.

Likewise, insurgencies that are predominantly the creation of foreign powers, which would eliminate the US supported Contras in the 1980’s and parts of the Taliban like the Haqqani Network or Lashkar-e-Taiba in Kashmir (India however, has something like 17 ongoing insurgencies so it remains on the list). Also gone is Che Guevara’s quixotic and numerically insignificant expedition in Bolivia.

Totalitarian Dictatorships

To look at the chart, the type of government that seems to endure insurgency least often are, ironically, totalitarian governments. The USSR is listed with two revolts – the Basmachi in Central Asia in the 1920’sand the Banderists of Ukraine in the late 1940’s. The former began prior to the Revolution and Stalin’s absolute ascendancy and continued while Soviet governmental authority in Central Asia was still relatively weak. In the Ukraine, Bandera’s partisans only took root as a result of the chaos created by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, which demolished the democidal grasp of Stalin’s NKVD apparatus there while replacing it with that of the genocidal SS. 

Historically, governments that exercised analogous control via terror to Stalin’s USSR simply did not endure insurgencies except in foreign territories they invaded, like Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia. North Korea today, despite inhuman cruelties has not provoked an insurgency, nor did Nazi rule in Germany, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or even minor regimes like Enver Hoxha’s Albania, where efforts by the CIA to spark a guerrilla movement failed miserably. There is simply very little social “space” in a society atomized by terror and continuous surveillance for an insurgency to get started except by a spontaneous riot.

It is important to note however, as Jeane Kirkatrick did long ago, that totalitarian rule is qualitatively distinct from authoritarian rule. The USSR before an after Stalin was a different regime, regardless of outward continuity – and the same can be said of Communist China under Mao.

Democratic States 

The type of government that is next least likely to be fighting an insurgency at home are democratic ones – though they are perhaps very likely or most likely to be the states fighting them abroad.  The democratic states listed include Britain, Colombia, Israel, India, Mexico and Nigeria while the Philippines and El Salvador transitioned to democracy while fighting insurgencies and Iraq emerged from American occupation while an insurgency raged.

Of the democratic governments that fought insurgencies at home, Nigeria and the Philippines inherited their conflicts from previous dictatorships and all of the states have significant to severe demographic divisions based on language, religion, caste, tribe, ethnicity or legal status that are reinforced by economic discrimination and (except for Britain) serious to severe levels of corruption.

The economies of Mexico, El Salvador, Philippines and Colombia are historically oligarchic with the economic status quo being reinforced by extralegal violence in the rare instances where the government did not formally side with elite interests (usually because of factional disputes among the elite). The social complexities of Nigeria or India are too great to be delved into here but traditional structures and social relations were neither free nor highly mobile and that these legacies negatively impact or undermine democratic governance.

Of democracies that have not or have never needed to fight an insurgency, the supposition would be that liberal democracy represents the best vehicle for satisfying popular demands and defusing grievances. Further, there is an implicit assumption that democracies are functionally better at solving social and political problems and are less aggressive than dictatorships or traditional regimes. Therefore, a a key tenet of pop-centric COIN theory, the need for good governance, tends in practice to become conflated with implementing democratic and liberal reforms of regressive and repressive states, as was successfully done in El Salvador, to win over the loyalty of the population for the state.

I would like to believe that this theory is correct for intuitive and anecdotal reasons – it seems like common sense because our experience is that citizens of liberal democracies lead more prosperous, freer and more peaceful lives and are therefore unlikely to pick up arms against their government. Unfortunately, this reasonable assumption may be shakier than it appears and have little relation to success or failure of a COIN campaign.

The first problem with this line of COIN thinking is first, it mirrors the flaw in Democratic Peace theory – most democracies are of such new vintage historically that we are not assessing risks and probabilities from an adequate data set. Democracies have been, until the last twenty years, rare historical outliers. Of those democracies that have been around for the longest period of time – the European great powers, the United States and Japan – these nations have a formidibly warlike track record of military intervention or establishing the colonial empires that created the conditions for insurgency in most of the world’s hotspots. This alone should give us pause about the pacifistic nature of democracies if we have failed to learn this lesson from Thucydides.

The second problem is that good democratic governance does not equate with or guarantee military effectiveness of the counterinsurgent forces in the field. The shooting part of COIN wars matter and the “good guys” can lose when out-thought and out-fought; “bad guys” can be courageous, adaptive, highly motivated and militarily skillful adversaries. Nor does democratic governance ensure that wars of choice are fought for sound strategic reasons to accomplish affordable goals. The tendency toward idealism in democratic politics, making a war of choice attractive to an electorate can mitigate against maintaining a strategic perspective and tilt toward pursuing open-ended and ill-defined goals.

 The third problem is that the population is not always the “center of gravity” in 4GW or other non-maoist model insurgencies that have as a strategic objective something other than a takeover of the state. The population itself may in addition, be fundamentally illiberal in their orientation and inclined toward customs that are incompatible with Western notions of democracy or “good governance”.

Overseas, democracies are also historically active in fighting foreign insurgencies or aiding states to do so. Many of these examples are derived from the age of imperialism and the aftermath of decolonization that, as in the Malayan Emergency, became amalgamated with Cold War conflict between the West and Communism. It is also important to note, that liberal democracies are not strictly counterinsurgent/counterrevolutionary powers. Democratic states are also known to frequently aid or sponsor foreign insurgencies for ideological reasons, as under the Reagan Doctrine or the recent R2P intervention by NATO to aid rebels against Libyan dictator Col. Gaddafi.

Colonial regimes:

Colonial regimes along with authoritarian dictatorships most frequently faced insurgencies and generated many of the insurgent movements that lingered on into independence, fighting successor governments (Vietnam, Angola, Rhodesia etc.). While not the sole source of inspiration and historical experience, colonialism was the cradle of COIN theory with such luminaries as Callwell, Templer, Galula, Thompson and Fall as patron saints and the “red team” of Mao, Giap, Che, and Fanon on the other side.

Anti-colonial insurgencies are not considered to be in the same category here as insurgencies fighting foreign invasion because of the duration of colonial rule, decades or even centuries in length, mean that there are always other proximate causes for an insurgency than just the violent intrusion by foreign conquerors, though that grievance will always be present even if the memory of the event is purely historical. No power maintains itself for long periods of time without securing at least grudging political acceptance from a plurality of the population over which it rules and developing enough economic growth to make the imperial enterprise at least self-sustaining.

That said, despite their variable political nature of imperial powers, colonial administrations are almost always engaged in upholding unequal de jure privileges, even when the colonial territory is to be politically integrated into the mother country (ex. Algeria as a French department) or the imperial authorities are more liberal and solicitous of the indigenous population than are the colonial settlers ( ex. British Cape Colony). These unequal colonial priviliges typically relate to economic concessions that range from relatively normal productive capital investments (ex. British railroads in India) to rapacious looting and imposition of slave labor on a vast scale (ex. the Congo Free State under Leopold).

Colonial states are almost always minority governments of a settler/creole population and allied indigenous subgroup dominating a resentful majority excluded from the lion’s share of any economic benefits the regime is capable of generating. In the meantime, while badly outnumbered , colonial regimes tend to lack the overwhelming internal security capacity of the totalitarian police states, making control relatively fragile and dependent in part upon “divide and rule” political tactics. Markets do not operate freely but are arranged under  mercantilist restrictions designed for an export-driven economy based extraction of raw materials and commercial agriculture, a system that directly benefits only a narrow elite even within the privileged settler population. The mercantilist colonial economic structure is so durable that it is seldom dislodged even by independence, as the history of Latin America testifies, with a political elite assuming the privileged role once played by the imperial authorities and settler population.

Authoritarian dictatorships:

This category contains a highly diverse set of regimes, including the absolute monarchies on the list, with widely differing attitudes on political economy, foreign policy and social control. An authoritarian state may be a generally despised government controlled by a minority group (Baathist Syria, Rhodesia under Ian Smith) or it may enjoy nationalist legitimacy (Tito’s Yugoslavia, Egypt under Nasser) or even international respect (Singapore). They may also be bizarrely personalist tyrannies, like that of Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the cannibal emperor of the Central African Republic, or the aforementioned Colonel Gaddafi in Libya. Finally, most Communist states eventually mellowed from totalitarian dictatorships with supreme leaders to collective leadership based party oligarchies, China being the most successful example of such transitions.

In terms of insurgency, it is more difficult to generalize among authoritarian dictatorships than totalitatian ones, or even democracies. Repression alone is not the crucial variable as not all authoritarian states face an insurgent challenge at home and almost no totalitarian states do despite being several orders of magnitude more oppressive. It would be useful to draw distinctions between authoritarian states that faced insurgencies and those that did not.

Looking at authoritarian regimes that are or were free of insurgency – say for example, Nasser’s Egypt, Pinochet’s Chile, Tito’s Yugoslavia or Singapore and China today we notice that they share some nominally positive traits – competent leadership, nationalist or populist appeal, pro-active security policies, provision of public goods and/or effective economic policies – that reinforce or maintain the regime’s political legitimacy. Repression, even brutality, is more easily swallowed when the state is delivering a rising standard of living and is seen by the public as an effective guardian of communal values and reliable protector against threats. Even a certain amount of corruption is tolerable, from the perspective of the average citizen, if the elite polices its members to remediate gross abuses of power. Some minor corruption (baksheesh, na levo) humanizes a rigid system on the margins for people without access to powerful patrons and relieves frustration.

Authoritarian or autocratic states that faced serious insurgencies lack these qualities – South Vietnam, Afghanistan under Karzai, Nigeria, Batista’s Cuba, Nationalist China, the Philippines under Marcos – coupled repression with incompetence, alienation from the public, massively dysfunctional levels of corruption and economic stagnation that magnifies and focuses popular resentment against the regime and provide fertile soil for insurgency and revolution. Contrary to Machiavelli’s famous advice, the rulers of these states made themselves more hated  than feared – and usually were also helping themselves to the “patrimony” of their citizens along the way via looting on a scale that exceeded even that of the European colonial powers. The Arab Spring began in Tunisia where hatred for the family of the wife of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali as a bloodsucking mafia burst like a flood and most recently toppled the mad Colonel Gaddafi, who is now estimated to have stolen $ 200 billion dollars from the Libyan people over the course of his 41 year regime.

CONCLUSIONS:

• Insurgencies do not appear everywhere and where they appear they do not all enjoy similar success. Some are crushed virtually before they begin; others take over the state only to face new insurgencies against their own brand of government. Local conditions matter a great deal in determining whether an insurgency will appear at all, with some of the most monstrous governments in human history reigning unchallenged while relatively mild tyrannies are ignominiously toppled. A sufficiently omnipresent security regime, while economically wasteful, can make an insurgency’s emergence virtually impossible.
• Oligarchical policies seem to increase the likelihood of rebellion by being repressive, economically exploitative, politically unrepresentative and also incompetent, governing in opposition to the interests of a majority of the population. Most of the states comprising historical cases on the insurgency table, though not all, were oligarchical to a significant degree, including the democratic states. However we can qualify this by recognizing that some states that are politically organized as oligarchies, one-party dictatorships such as China, are also capable of moderation and pursuing a version of enlightened authoritarianism and competent governance that secures a degree of genuine popular support. At least for a time.
• Democracies are janus-faced in terms of insurgency. On the one hand, excepting the French Fourth Republic, advanced liberal democracies in the last century have rarely faced a serious rebellion at home (the 1970’s wave of upper-class Marxist terrorism never exceeded a handful of terrorists). On the other hand, these same democracies have an extensive historical record of provoking insurrection in overseas colonial possessions, fighting insurgencies on behalf of client states or even sponsoring insurgents as proxies against unfriendly states. This uneasily complicated relationship between democratic governance qand insurgency mitigates any unstated assumptions regarding promotion of democracy as a natural adjunct of COIN; democracy can be highly subversive of traditional mores or it can manifest itself as intolerant and illiberal majoritarianism.
• Pop-centric COIN is a paradigm for fighting insurgency that is more suitable for some scenarios than others. As such, it would an error to keep it as official doctrine but it would likewise be an error to get rid of it entirely. An array of different COIN approaches of which pop-centric COIN is only one, would be a more realistic replacement; with the caveat, stated many times by many experts, that local conditions should determine and shape a COIN campaign rather than resorting to an established template.

Will COIN go Gentile into that good night?

Colonel Gian Gentile at WPR argues that the US Army must put away tactical things of counterinsurgency and assume the responsibilities of strategy:

COIN is Dead: U.S. Army Must Put Strategy Over Tactics

There is perhaps no better measure of the failure of American strategy over the past decade than the fact that in both Iraq and Afghanistan, tactical objectives have been used to define victory. In particular, both wars have been characterized by an all-encompassing obsession with the methods and tactics of counterinsurgency. To be sure, the tactics of counterinsurgency require political and cultural acumen to build host-nation governments and economies. But understanding the political aspects of counterinsurgency tactics is fundamentally different from understanding core American political objectives and then defining a cost-effective strategy to achieve them. If it is to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past decade, American strategic thinking must regain the ability to link cost-effective operational campaigns to core policy objectives, while taking into consideration American political and popular will….

Dr. Gentile is spot on here, but with a caveat that a serving officer cannot readily state: the political class and civilian leadership
of the USG are failing to provide the American military with the appropriate grand strategic and policy guidance
with which to build the strategic bridge between policy and operational art. This is not a small problem.

The military cannot – and more importantly should not  under our constitutional system – be the sole arbiters or enunciators of American strategy. The proper role of the senior military leadership are as junior partners working hand in glove with policy makers and elected officials to fit the use of military force or coercive threat of force with our other levers of national power to advance American interests at acceptable costs to the American people. If the military’s civilian superiors cannot or do not take the lead here in crafting strategy, the US military is unable to step into that inherently political vacuum and it would be an usurpation for them to try. Operational art is as far as they can go on their own authority while remaining on safe constitutional ground.

Rather than seeing the past 10 years of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan as a potent reminder of war’s complexity and, more importantly, of the limits to what it can accomplish, the American military has embraced the idea that better tactics can overcome serious shortcomings in strategy and policy. The ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu said thousands of years ago that “strategy without tactics is the slow road to victory,” but “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Though still relevant, Sun Tzu’s brilliant formulation of the relationship between tactics and strategy is nowhere to be found in current American strategic thinking.

I fear the real stumbling block is that a coherent and effective national strategy is viewed suspiciously in some quarters as a constraint on the tactical political freedom of action of policy makers and politicians to react in their own self-interest to transient domestic political pressures. This view is correct – adopting a strategy, while an iterative process – involves opportunity costs, foreclosing some choices in order to pursue others. Having a realistic strategy to acheive specific ends with reasonable methods and affordable costs is generally incompatible with “keeping all options open”.

Even on purely domestic issues, which politicians have greater familiarity and expertise than foreign and military affairs, the debacle with the borrowing limit and the “supercommittee” demonstrate we have a political class in Washington that is virtually allergic to making choices or assessing costs clearly and honestly. They see even less well in matters of war and peace.

….Future threats for U.S. ground forces promise to be quite lethal, ranging from state-on-state warfare to hybrid warfare to low-end guerilla warfare. Constabulary forces based on light infantry and optimized for wars like Iraq and Afghanistan will be highly vulnerable and open to catastrophic destruction in this lethal, future environment. Instead, future land battlefields demand a ground force built around the pillars of firepower, protection and mobility. Moreover, this future ground force needs to be able to move and fight in dispersed, distributed operations in an age where the accessibility of weapons of mass destruction makes a ground force that concentrates vulnerable to annihilation. Much will have to change in order to transform the Army and Marines to ground formations of this type, but that transformation is critical, and it will not be accomplished if military thinkers remain obsessed with counterinsurgency tactics.

To build American ground formations for an unpredictable future, counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan offer very few strategic guideposts. To argue otherwise is to commit the U.S. Army and Marines to strategic irrelevance in the years and decades ahead.

I would guarantee that the US will be plagued with irregular warfare for as long as we have to co-exist with the rest of the world. What is probable, in my view, is that we are quite likely to face several different kinds of serious security threats at the same time  – say, a terror-insurgency spilling over from Mexico coinciding with a possible conventional war with a regional power while also defending against a run on the dollar if China tries to “Suez” the US during a third country crisis. The luxury of different threats in convenient sequence is unlikely to happen and American military capabilities must be broad and adaptive.

Hat tip SWJ Blog

ADDENDUM:

The Post-COIN Era is Here

Is COIN Dead?

Dr. Bernard Finel, after a hiatus, has returned to blogging:

Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan-stan

….Now, I am not really making an original argument here, but there is some truth here. In a very significant sense, a president (and, by the way, I hate the way he uses “Commander-in-Chief” rather than “President” in describing his role as a foreign policy decision-maker), any president, is not really a “strategist.” When Libya began to blow up, no one went to Obama and said, “Mr. President, what should we do?” Instead, ultimately, Obama was presented with a series of courses of action developed and proposed by his staff and various other agencies and departments, and the president was asked to select from a relatively constrained set of choices.

Now, obviously,  a president is not wholly constrained. He or she could strike out in a new direction, or demand more options, or whatever. But there is, ultimately, a lot of truth to the notion that the president is ultimately more of a traffic cop than a “policy maker” per se.

….And look, this is not a Cain/Perry problem alone. I mean, Obama was tremendously thoughtful and eloquent on the campaign trail, and in the end allowed himself to be borne along with the tide on the Afghanistan surge decision. The only case I can think of where this was not the case was Nixon who, essentially, spent much of his administration waging war on his own executive departments. I’m not sure that is a better model.

Richard Nixon was a genuinely gifted geopolitical strategist, albeit one who came with serious psychological baggage, the effects of which H.R. Haldeman and Dr. Arnold A. Hutschnecker, Nixon’s sometime psychotherapist, strove to mitigate. Henry Kissinger, so valuable to Nixon as a diplomatic tactician, aggravated Nixon’s darker instincts as frequently as he calmed them (and in turn, Nixon deliberately stoked Kissinger’s anxieties to the point where Kissinger having a nervous breakdown seemed a possibility to WH staffers). I agree with Finel that presidential strategists are quite rare, but while there are more than just Nixon, they too had their share of problems.

Abraham Lincoln, who evolved into America’s greatest strategic leader by dint of circumstance, intelligence and latent talent suffered from bouts of major depression. Dwight Eisenhower, whose discernment recognized the value of strategic restraint in statecraft, had an explosively bad temper that spared neither aides nor grandchildren nor himself, contributing to Ike’s heart attacks. Even by the standards of politics, Franklin Roosevelt was unusually manipulative, deceptive and egocentric, lying with such frequency to his closest advisers that it is sometimes difficult to understand what FDR had really intended on certain issues, particularly in his last years when the weight of the war led FDR to procrastinate on making decisions.

Does strategic thinking come easier to those with psychological flaws?

[by J. Scott Shipman]

The Human Face of War by Jim Storr 

[Zen reviewed this book earlier here. I had forgotten that I wrote a rather long review at Amazon after finishing in January 2010. Perhaps Storr will gain a wider audience as a result.]

Mr. Storr’s The Human Face of War will be I predict, a book studied by military professionals (and smart policy makers) for years to come. Using straightforward prose, Mr. Storr seeks to provide a philosophical approach to war—as he says, “In practice we are concerned so much with war as with waging it.” Storr goes on to differentiate between war and warfare; where war is an “issue” with history and warfare dedicated to methods/methodology. Storr rejects notion that war is art or science, and prefers instead to embrace pragmatism and limited empiricism. He points out correctly: “Pragmatism has obvious application to warfare. A significant aspect of warfare is `a process of trial and error; seeing what wins and exploiting it.” Storr continues that “empiricism is not just trial and error: it is a logical process based on structuring observed facts.” What “works” will suggest a way ahead. 

Storr uses broad themes of what has worked and what has not worked in military history by explaining the nature of combat and tools and models available to the practitioner. He uses Clausewitz’s “dialectic of aims and means” in conjunction with Systems Theory to describe the holistic nature of military units; where effective/efficient output is dependent on input—where a good outcome is “winning” (as Storr repeatedly observes throughout the book, armies aren’t paid to come in second). Hence, organization of military units is fundamental; efficient/effective organizations are more likely to succeed. He observes: “Cohesion and collective performance indicate the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. There is a systemic effect, and we should see armed forces as systems.” 

Storr is a proponent of forcing decision making to the folks on the ground using brief and succinct communications. His chapter on Commanding the Battle is excellent. Storr advocates lean command staff’s and dispersed decision making. “We should employ the best brains in small groups, rather than try to assemble a collective brain.” He points out that “when staff numbers are reduced, the effectiveness of HQ improves.” “Reducing staff numbers would increase speed with which they could get things done.” [Amazingly, Storr quotes a work from 1998 that reports a typical Western division commander has 600 people supporting!—and that number has, I’m sure increased in 10 years.] He concludes this excellent chapter making a distinction between technology and the human factor: “…the future is not digital: it’s human. What is needed is things that bind talents together as a team, not more bandwidth…given time, resources, open minds and not much money we could revolutionize land tactical command. The key problems are human, cultural and institutional.” 

Storr asserts that successful modern commanders are most likely intuitive thinkers and possess the ability to learn from experience. He suggests further the “tendency to learn is more critical. It implies a tendency to reflect on experience and to learn from it, to maximize the benefit of the experience.” This tendency is key to the development of “skills”. He encourages a “permissive man-management regime that allows those who can learn rapidly from their experience to do so.” At the opposite end, Storr makes clear the unsuitability of many leaders who use bullying tactics and fear to motivate. 

Storr concludes by observing that “institutional conservatism” inhibits armed forces from improving significantly during times of peace; that “the current size and shape of Western armies reflect issues that are not primarily related to warfighting effectiveness.” He insists that doctrine should be explicit, relevant,(descriptive and where appropriate, prescriptive), coherent, and practical. The short tours common in western armies harm team integrity—which is “huge”. Innovation is vital, and in many cases military members aren’t with a unit long enough to have the experience necessary to truly innovate. Storr advocates “experience is the best way to achieve practical coordination and overcome the fog of war, as long as the experience gained is positive.” He discourages the common use of lieutenant-colonels in jobs where a captain or major could function/thrive/learn; as these junior officers will have less experience when they are promoted and will have probably developed the habit of “referring decisions upwards, and hence develop little initiative.” 

According the Storr, the “human” aspect of war should take prevalence over technology. He acknowledges the utility of technology, but asks the reader to “…pause and look for a moment at the Vietnam War, which suggests that superior technology is not always the deciding factor.” [9-11 is illustrative of this point on the “terror” side; determination and box cutters wreaked havoc.] 

My review does not do justice to the wealth of information, insight, and counsel in Storr’s book and I quote him frequently because his style is better than a summary. This book was aimed at a narrow audience, hence the high price. When I began, I was concerned about Storr’ opinions concerning John Boyd’s OODA loop; but in late 2009 I rejected Boyd’s deterministic underpinnings of OODA—Storr’s pragmatic and partial empiricism makes more sense. OODA remains, in my humble opinion, a valuable and versatile methodology in both the military/law enforcement and business arenas. 

This book is highly recommended; particularly for junior officers and NCO’s—the price is high, but what you will gain will be worth the cost.

UPDATE 11.17.2011: Jim Storr contacted me and confirmed the issue of a paperback for about $40.

Lexington Green sent this extended profile/interview with Charles Hill by Emily Esfahani Smith. The tone of the article is somewhat hagiographic because Hill is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and….well…. this is in Hoover’s journal 😉  If you can get past that, it is a worthwhile read about a deep thinker and scholar of grand strategy.

Profile in Strategy: Charles Hill

….In diplomacy, literature is relied upon because, as he writes in “Grand Strategies,” “The international world of states and their modern system is a literary realm; it is where the greatest issues of the human condition are played out.” That is why Alexander the Great carried the Iliad with him on his conquests, and why Queen Elizabeth studied Cicero in the evenings. It is why Abraham Lincoln read, and was profoundly influenced by, Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” and why Paul Nitze paged through Shakespeare on his flights to Moscow as America’s chief arms negotiator.

Hill, for his part, has always kept the “History of the Peloponnesian War” in his mind as the “manual of statecraft.”

Why Thucydides? He explains: “When you read the Peloponnesian War, you realize that Thucydides is moving from one set of problems to another, and you have to deal with them all-rhetorical problems, material problems, and moral problems. That’s the closest literary work related to statecraft that I can imagine.”

To understand world order-and those who manipulate it for their own aims-requires a literary education, the kind students were once able to find at such places as Yale, where Hill now teaches the humanities to freshman undergraduates.

This is a departure from his days at the State Department, where he helped orchestrate monumental events in the grand strategy of the Cold War. One of his first memories as a diplomat was of being seated behind Adlai Stevenson at the UN during the Cuban missile crisis, characteristically scribbling notes-in grand strategy, no detail can be lost. Later, Hill was a “China watcher” during that country’s Cultural Revolution. And when the Iran-Contra scandal nearly brought down the Reagan administration, Hill’s meticulous notes played an influential role in the Congressional investigations by shedding light on the chronology of then-Secretary of State George Shultz’s knowledge of the arms sale. Over the years, Hill has also served as confidante to Secretaries of State. For Henry Kissinger, Hill was speechwriter and policy analyst. For Shultz, Hill was an executive aide and trusted ally.

These days, Hill embodies grand strategy in a different way. After a long and distinguished career as a diplomat, Hill is now a heralded figure in academia. Beyond his appointment as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, he is the Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy, a Senior Lecturer in Humanities, and a Senior Lecturer in International Studies at Yale. Alongside historians John Gaddis and John Kennedy [ sic] , he teaches one of Yale’s most legendary courses to a select group of elite students-future statesmen-the Grand Strategies course.

And yet, Hill tells me stoically, “There is no grand strategy in our time.” Turning his attention to the turmoil in the Middle East, Hill provides an example. “America’s lack of strategic outlook responding to the Arab Spring is really distressing.”

Hill retains the diplomat’s gift for understatement.

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ADDENDUM:

Book Review: Grand Strategies by Charles Hill 

Trial of a Thousand Years, by Charles Hill-a review