Updates on COIN is Dead Debate
From Major Mike Few of SWJ and Fabius Maximus:
SWJ Blog (Few) Rethinking Revolution and Do Two Wrongs Make a Right?
When is a revolution over, completed, fulfilled? Traditionally, we prefer to quantify revolutions as ending in a win, loss, or negotiated settlement.[1] While this framework is helpful for shaping theory, it neglects that reality is often much more complicated and messy. As John Maynard Keynes said, “it is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique for thinking, which helps the possessor to draw correct conclusions.” Simply put, it is only a guide towards understanding history and human nature.
….In his seminal work, Rethinking Insurgency, Steven Metz challenged our community to rethink the existing assumptions and relearn how to counter insurgencies.[5] Moreover, over the past decade, scholars challenged the accepted military definition that an insurgency is “an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict.”
Yet, with all the evidence, scholarship, theories, and analysis, we continue to muddle through small wars. Why? Perhaps, we often choose mass over maneuver and speed over subtle influence in attempts to control the problem. Small wars are wicked problems. If we continue to plug and play the latest “new” idea to tame a problem, then we will just muddle along and only make the problem worse.
….Before we can hope to distill any lessons learned from this past bloody decade of war and rewrite the existing counterinsurgency manual[7][8] and find a suitable foreign policy for this new century, perhaps we should first seek to better understand the nature of revolution.
Fabius Maximus – COIN- Now that we See it Failed…. and COIN, another difficulty….
As we walk away from the Iraq and Af-Pak Wars, we face many questions about the future. Two of these are:
- When we should directly fight local insurgencies (what strategy)?
- When we must do so, how should we do so (what doctrine)?
Given the historical record, this series of posts suggest the answers are:
- We go to fight local insurgencies only when necessary (IMO neither Af or Iraq were necessary after their governments were overthrown).
- We lack reliable doctrine to fight local insurgencies abroad. The number of successes by foreign armies against local insurgencies is too few to draw firm conclusions (see section 3 in the previous post for details).
That does not mean that counter-insurgency is impossible for foreign armies. It suggests that repeating failed doctrines (Vietnam, Iraq, Af-Pak) will not work. As the old Alcoholics Anonymous saying goes, insanity is repeating the same actions but expecting a different result.
Update: Not all foreign wars, or even all small foreign wars, are counter-insurgencies.
