The Need for Old Hands: Mackinlay on Old COIN
Currently reading The Insurgent Archipelago 
….The ratio of coloniser to colonised – and of the tiny British contingent to the vast numbers of the native population –
suggested that a degree of consent to their presence was already inherent. The officials in each colony were competitively selected from an educated and ambitious British upper class, in many cases they were talented and intrepid men, used to living and campaigning in the field, with an intelligent grasp of their territory, its people, languages and culture. They survived and succeeded on their wits, natural authority and knowledge. When the colonised population rose up in insurrection and military force was rushed to the scene, it was subordinated to these same British administrators who became responsible for the direction of the campaign. All the problems of devising a political strategy, ensuring the legitimacy of the military actions and restoring the structures of governance were taken care of by a familiar hub of individuals. It was a continuously reconvening club in which personal relationships tended to override the ambiguities of their civil-military partnership.
Admittedly, there’s a shiny high gloss of romantic nostalgia for the Raj here, polishing the historical reality. The British Empire also saw examples of arrogance or cruelty by British colonial officials that helped provoke uprisings like the Sepoy Mutiny. Or, high-level imperial administrators could zealously pursue local colonial expansion, as Viscount Milner did in starting the needless Second Anglo-Boer War, which partially involved putting down a grueling Trekboer insurgency, that ultimately weakened the Empire at the strategic level.
Those calamities, as expensive and bloody as they were, were exceptions. Mackinlay is correct in assessing the value of Britain’s colonial administrative class, whose deliberate cultivation of “Old Hands” permitted a sixth of the earth’s surface to be ruled relatively cheaply from Whitehall. Lord Milner, for all his faults, could at least speak to President Kruger in his own language and understood the Boer states on which he was waging war, even if he disdained the Afrikaner settlers. It’s hard to imagine many American statesmen or senior generals (or sadly, CIA agents and diplomats) fluently debating foreign counterparts in Arabic, Pashto, Farsi or Chinese. British officialdom took the time – and had the time, professionally – to learn the languages, dialects and customs of the peoples with whom they allied or fought, conquered and ruled.
Not so in contemporary peacekeeping /crypto-COIN operations , according to Mackinlay:
By the 1990’s the colonial officials who had been the key element in every operation since Cardwell were now missing. Coalition forces were intervening in countries that were the antithesis of the former colonies, where the incoming military were regarded as occupiers and where there was no familiar structure of colonial officials and district officers to be seen. Moreover, the diplomats who belatedly attempted to fill this role, although no doubt intellectually brilliant, crucially lacked the derring-do, local credibility and natural authority of their colonial era predecessors. A few extra hands from the Foreign Office or the State Department could not compensate for the loss….
….Although at a local level the British counter-insurgent techniques proved to be successful, broader problems presented themselves as a result of an absence of strategy and a failure of campaign design, particularly in the civil-military structures. It was simply not a realistic option to fill the void left by the departure of a national government – with all its natural expertise and authority – with a band-aid package of contracted officials and flat-pack embassies.
New Hands cannot act or think like Old Hands. They lack not only the in-country experience and linguistic skills but the entire worldview and personal career interests of the American elite mitigate against it. “Punching tickets” is incompatible with becoming an Old Hand and aspiring to be an Old Hand is incompatible with continued employment at most foreign policy agencies of the USG.
American Foreign Service Officers, CIA personnel and flag officers never had the same historical frame of reference as their Imperial British cousins, but the culture of the Eastern Establishment approximated a high church Yankee Republican version that provided an elan, a worldly knowledge and moral certitude until the Establishment’s will to power and self-confidence was broken by the Vietnam War. Subsequent generations of American elite have been indoctrinated in our best institutions to instinctively distrust the marriage of cultural knowledge and political skills to the service of advancing national interest as “Orientalism“.
I am not an admirer of Edward Said but the man was no fool. He understood the strategic importance for his radical political faction of populalrizing the de-legitimization the learning of other cultures and languages as immoral for any reason except partisanship in their favor against the interests of the predatory West. This is why something as esoteric and parsimoniously funded as “Human Terrain Teams” meet with volcanic rage from academic leftists, especially in the fields of anthropology and political science. This is the sort of censorious mindset that would have made the works of Herodotus, Alexis de Tocqueville, the Marquis de Custine, Richard Francis Burton, T.E. Lawrence, Ruth Benedict, Rene Grousset, Raphael Patai and Bernard Lewis, to name just a few, impossible.
Recovering our capacity to act effectively and see with clarity requires the training of a new generation of Old Hands to interpret and act as policy stewards and agents in regions of the world in which most Americans are unfamiliar and likely to remain so. Current academic PC ideological fetishes reigning at our Ivy League universities artificially shrink our potential talent pool. Alternative educational pathways through military service academies, think tanks, professional and Cross-cultural associations and better USG training programs need to be developed to route around the university gateway that is largely in control of keepers hostile or indifferent to American foreign policy objectives. By the same token, USG agency and military personnel and security clearance policies need a systemic overhaul to better take advantage of those already in service who find their career paths blocked or frustrated.
We waste talent on a massive scale.
March 20th, 2010 at 4:18 am
Mark,
Went back to read your posts on Foreign Policy and the American Elite from back in 2006. I couldn’t find the promised Part V/Conclusion in the blog archives however. is it still there?
March 20th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
"We waste talent on a massive scale"
Truer words were never spoken. I would say the fascination with Max Weber and his ideas on bureaucracy have become so ingrained in the USG that there is almost no recourse at this point. The bureaucracies exist simply to strengthen themselves.
It is particularly frustrating in the military. The Industrial Age personnel system still is in full effect, we are all minute cogs in a very large and complicated machine. Despite being in two+ wars over the last decade, the same personnel policies are in place…so every Captain in the Army is going to get a shot at command…which makes so little sense when the Company is the decisive element in a foreign internal defense campaign. You take the people who have performed, keep them in place or promote them to the next higher operational billet once someone leaves.
We will never have the ability to mimic the British Empire. I am reminded of the quote from a CIA officer early in the good old GWOT who said "Get people to stay in one third world country for a decade? With bad food, disease, diarrhea, unpotable water and people who make John Wayne Gacy look like Mother Theresa? You must be dreaming…"
March 20th, 2010 at 4:31 pm
Hi Kevin,
.
I looked briefly but not thoroughly last night at my old blogspot site and did not see a part V. for that month. Let me do a more thorough search and if I find it, I’ll put a link in the comments here.
.
Hi Ski
.
Both the military and State. The former’s system goes back to Elihu Root(!) and the latter to Charles Evans Hughes, the inertia is incredible.
.
Your point on third world states is well taken
March 20th, 2010 at 4:53 pm
Don Vandergriff and I have spent countless hours talking about Root and his toxic legacy.
It might work if an army is expanding rapidly, however, the nature of these conflicts requires the polar opposite of Root’s system.
I remember GEN Schoomaker commenting about the personnel system and paraphrasing – "We probably need to blow up PERSCOM/HRC and rebuild it from the bottom up."
March 20th, 2010 at 7:01 pm
So one of the others made my point already – and it’s an obvious one – but the administrative class made their lives in the colonial lands. Maybe you sent your kids back to the old country for boarding school, but you lived there and it was, for all practical purposes, your everyday home. Americans don’t want to homestead, because we are not colonizers, despite the hyperventilating of certain types. But I am just repeating what you said.
.
You know who does have some of the requisite knowledge? Our business class, the types that go and live in China or India, or maybe, the business types that travel abroad and work closely, for years, developing projects. But they have their own interests, so I can’t carry this one too far.
.
And, on a related note: why is China developing mineral wealth in Afghanistan and not us? Because then we are colonial occupiers? Yeah, you’re right. It’s screwed up.
.
And, on another related note: this is why we have to change our current decripit international aid models – as I seem to say in every other blog comment on every other blog.! Because of our silly ideas about foreign aid, we waste talent and capital.
.
– Madhu
March 20th, 2010 at 7:41 pm
Interesting post, Zen.
There was a lot more to British colonial control of India than Mackinlay makes out. Sure, a relatively small number of British officials and officers ran the civil administration and the Indian army. But they couldn’t have done so without the collaboration of an enormous number of Indian civil servants and army officers and NCOs. These Indians were the ones who allowed the Raj to function, but they are generally overlooked in romantic histories of the Raj. Also important were the many English and Scottish entrepreneurs who spent most of their working lives in India, running factories, plantations etc.
.
More generally, British rule in India depended on the active collaboration of indigenous elites, whether the established aristocratic and land-owning classes, district and village chieftains, or the rising urban classes of businessmen and civil servants. When that collaboration broke down, the Raj was history.
.
We shouldn’t overlook the Raj’s sheer coercive power. The British had at their disposal the Indian army, which was very large, garrison regiments of the British army, and large civil police and paramilitary organizations.
.
If you’re trying to apply Indian lessons to contemporary American experience, another thing to consider is that the British had a very long history of direct involvement in India, dating back to the 17th century. Time in country is invaluable.
March 20th, 2010 at 8:58 pm
Lets not overlook one important factor, the British people were proud of the British Empire and eager to serve it. This was true of the intellectual class as well. Just think of the difference between the anthropologists of that time and the anthropologists of our time.
.
This is really a matter of trade-offs. The Establishment needed to push the civil rights project through in the 60’s to hedge any soviet attempts at causing havoc among the same demographic. Since then all components of the American (and Western) information dissemination system (news, education, entertainment) have been tasked with maintaining/furthering its basic premise (ie.., diversity is strength, tolerance uber alles, white=oppressor).
.
This has resulted in a population that is incapable of maintaining the needs of an Empire. What we know as "Globalization" was supposed create the same returns that an empire did, but would do so in a way that maximized the memes that were created under the civil rights project (freedom, equality, multiculturalism, fighting bigotry). What the Establishment is now figuring out however, is that "globalization" isn’t as efficient as empire.
.
So now the Establishment is between a rock and hard place. Attempting to re-socialize the public (for empire) is almost impossible considering the current demographic configuration (in the West). At the same time, the inability to grow is the death of any global power structure (whether it be globalization or empire).
March 21st, 2010 at 1:08 am
I appreciate it if you could dig up part V, Mark. I really enjoyed that series of post. as a recent graduate of one of those schools, I agree that younger generations absolutely lack the farsighted vision and deliberate pragmatism of the "Establishment," as flawed as it was.
March 21st, 2010 at 1:49 am
Kotare’s point is something overlooked by everyone when talking about COIN. All of the classic works on the subject from the 1950s and such were written with the expectation that one would have the full weight of the state and the cooperation of native elites.
March 21st, 2010 at 4:26 am
Good point, AE. You can see this clearly in the Malayan Emergency (1948-60), which the British never grow tired of describing as the classic COIN campaign, "Confrontation" (with Sukarno’s Indonesian regime) in Malaysian Sarawak and Sabah (1963-66), and even Northern Ireland (the Protestant majority in Ulster).
.
In Malaya, the British colonial administration controlled the government, the army and the police, and were supported by the majority of the population, the indigenous Malays and their traditional rulers.
March 21st, 2010 at 7:23 am
Let’s not aspire to colonialism. That’s nobody’s goal.
Also, I just saw LTG Jacoby on his ‘farewell tour’ the other day. He’d been in Iraq since 2007. Not bad. GEN Odierno was there in the beginning.
Also, I recently opted out of a possible career as one of these Foreign Area Officers–the ones that become regional experts and spend their careers traipsing around regions. Bad-ass assignment sure–and these are the experts you’re asking for.
But, as an ambitious young officer, I was more interested in leading soldiers. So my question is, what would be the culture change if we had all these regional experts running our operations? Would that be a good thing? Wouldn’t we be abrogating some of the traits that have (indeed) brought us success in Iraq and Afghanistan?
March 21st, 2010 at 5:41 pm
"So my question is, what would be the culture change if we had all these regional experts running our operations?" (Kevin)
.
This is an excellent question Kevin. I would assume that most of our problems on the cultural end (especially before 2008) would not have existed? After OIF I, when everyone was ‘chillin’ for the two month window between late April 2003 and August 2003, we would have implemented the strategy we used since the surge. IOW, after major maneuver operations were complete were would have went straight to the tribes.
.
So now the question is, what would this look like for the soldier on the ground? As far as I’m concerned (and I say this as an ex E-5 team leader during OIF I) I don’t think it would be wise to have these people under the brigade-UOA level. Or if they did, they would advise Battalion commanders (or under) on certain projects. But the most likely scenario would be that these folks would man the civilian apparatus that Paul Bremer’s people manned/womanned. They would be included in the planning process for major operations; mostly on the commanders intent section of the operations order, as well as the why under section 3 (mission).
.
The people who work under the brigade/UOA level would be ex-military (such as yourself) since an advanced understanding of military procedures and culture would be necessary.
March 22nd, 2010 at 2:30 am
One also notices that the best American practitioners of COIN tend to have had extensive regional experience. Take Ryan Crocker. As I pointed out in my call for the State Department to under go a bottom-up, region-centric reformation, Crocker credits his own success to, "[knowing] the world from which those 19 hijackers came from almost better than I knew my own country." He was one of America’s strongest Arabists, and this gave him the credibility and capacity he needed to fufill the role he was given. Expecting the similar results from someone who has just flown into the country for the first time is asinine.
March 22nd, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Kevin – I am having trouble finding any trace of the post Part V. Not sure if it has been deleted or was left untagged but I am going to have to open my old account and look at it from the inside and not just the archives.
March 22nd, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Second T. Greer’s comment too