Understanding Counterinsurgency

Doctrine, operations, and challenges

Thomas Rid, Thomas Keaney, Thomas Rid, Thomas Keaney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415777643
• eBook ISBN: 9781136976049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

This textbook offers an accessible introduction to counterinsurgency operations, a key aspect of modern warfare.

Featuring essays by some of the world's leading experts on unconventional conflict, both scholars and practitioners, the book discusses how modern regular armed forces react, and should react, to irregular warfare. The volume is divided into three main sections:

• Doctrinal Origins: analysing the intellectual and historical roots of modern Western theory and practice
• Operational Aspects: examining the specific role of various military services in counterinsurgency, but also special forces, intelligence, and local security forces
• Challenges: looking at wider issues, such as governance, culture, ethics, civil-military cooperation, information operations, and time.

Understanding Counterinsurgency is the first comprehensive textbook on counterinsurgency, and will be essential reading for all students of small wars, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, strategic studies and security studies, both in graduate and undergraduate courses as well as in professional military schools.

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Understanding counterinsurgency

Thomas Keaney and Thomas Rid

Not long ago, “counterinsurgency” was an odd and obscure word. In March and April 2003, the United States armed forces pushed into Baghdad with breathtaking speed. Saddam Hussein’s conventional military formations were defeated in a tough but swift battle and his dictatorship was ended. Senior US decision makers, both civilian and military, expected to leave Iraq soon and victorious, but an unexpected enemy crossed their plans. Iraqis and a small number of foreign fighters, not wearing uniforms, began to harass coalition forces with AK-47s, so-called improvised explosive devices—today the well-known IEDs—and suicide attacks. Small-scale, unconventional attacks kept rising. The Pentagon was reluctant to acknowledge that the war was not over, but was instead entering a more vicious and entirely unexpected phase. In mid-June 2003, General John Abizaid, who came in as the new head of US Central Command, took a hard look at the emerging type of war: “guerrilla tactics,” he proclaimed “is a proper way to describe it in strictly military terms.” This acknowledgment of reality spiraled the general’s first briefing into the big news. In subsequent months, the US and its allies would find themselves more and more engaged, not only in combating these “tactics” but also having embarked in counterinsurgency warfare and all that accompanied it: new doctrine, new enemies, an alien population, a different way to use military power on land, in the air, and at sea, unfamiliar intelligence gathering, training of local forces, trials of local governance, unexpected cultural hurdles, ethical dilemmas, propaganda challenges—all while time was running out. Basically, the US military attempted to understand counterinsurgency while fighting a counterinsurgency: an undertaking akin to redesigning and refitting a race car, and teaching the driver new routines, all while speeding along the course.

The US military quickly found itself squeezed between two pressure plates: one at home in Washington—where Congress and a skeptical public were increasingly concerned by the mounting human losses and returning veterans, many of whom were irreparably maimed both physically and psychologically—and one in Iraq’s cities and streets, where increasingly sophisticated roadside bombs shattered hopes of swift success. To make a gloomy situation worse, the political reasons for invading Iraq were more and more discredited. No weapons of mass destruction were found, and Saddam’s connections to the perpetrators of 9/11 turned out to be fabricated, although al-Qaeda then took root between the Tigris and Euphrates as the situation there initially deteriorated under American occupation. At the end of April 2004, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke, turning into an iconic humiliation of American power. By 2006, a number of different and increasingly sophisticated groups confronted the US forces: Ba’athists, nationalists, Shia militias of various loyalties, Salafists, and foreign fighters. The weapons and tactics they used grew equally sophisticated; most importantly an array of constantly evolving IEDs, a signature weapon of modern insurgencies. The roadside bombs were psychologically crippling, as soldiers, hampered in their ability to fight back against an invisible enemy, took entirely unpredictable but calamitous hits as they traveled Iraq’s roads “mounted or dismounted,” in vehicles and on foot patrols. Then, in 2007, a major scandal involving neglect and unsatisfactory conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center broke, accompanied by tumultuous press coverage, adding to the woes of the US armed forces. America seemed to ask its volunteer force to do the worst job, and then treated the veterans in the worst way when they came home. The war in Iraq had turned dark and grim, almost apocalyptic.

But even more than that, Iraq was not the only battlespace that kept American forces and their allies occupied. The war in Afghanistan was simmering on low heat while the world’s attention was captivated by the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. But as the insurgency took off in Iraq, Afghan resistance against foreign troops at the Hindu Kush intensified as well. New and nasty IED tactics began to seep from Baghdad’s suburbs to Helmand’s valleys, aided by the Internet and foreign jihadists. The initially successful resistance of Iraq’s militants inspired Afghanistan’s insurgents. As a consequence, America and its NATO allies found themselves in similar situations: they also increasingly attempted to transplant successful counterinsurgency tactics and methods—developed and tested on the job in Iraq—from the one theater to the other.

It is against this dim and nearly hopeless background that the seemingly unshakable determination and the steep learning curve of the US land forces has to be viewed. Throughout the wars, many American newspapers published a small box with names of those who died fighting, two or three almost every day, sometimes more: mostly privates, specialists, and corporals; sometimes sergeants or master sergeants; more rarely junior officers; very rarely senior officers. The many injured do not even make the news. The courageous men and women who adapted to counterinsurgency warfare under such adverse conditions deserve the utmost respect and admiration of any informed observer, no matter their opinion on the reasons for or against both wars—including those who read or even write about the war, often from a safe distance.

In the years after 2004, a conceptual reorientation of gigantic proportions took place inside the US armed forces. Countless articles were published on counterinsurgency—and the subject was explored in government reports, in presentations, speeches, press articles, on sharp-worded blogs, and in a vast number of books and essays. Counterinsurgency, the “graduate level of war,” naturally required a multidisciplinary approach in scholarship and practice: historians, political scientists, strategists, area specialists, anthropologists, sociologists, as well as military officers and journalists, tackled the subject from a multitude of angles. The debate’s range of ideas and the number of its publications, as a result, has assumed almost encyclopedic proportions.

It is within this ferment of activity that this book has emerged, with two goals: first, to provide a starting point for students as well as practitioners in understanding counterinsurgency; and, second, to make that starting point available to America’s allies in the Atlantic Alliance and beyond. Fortunately, we were able to find among the book’s contributors many of the most productive thinkers on counterinsurgency, as well as some of the most influential political and military advisors. The authors also represent a broad disciplinary background and bring first-hand experiences from many regions and conflicts to the table. Most contributors, it should also be noted, are American and write from a predominantly American perspective. Therefore the book—just like its subject—is focused on developments driven by the United States more than by its European or other allies. Not least to bridge gaps between the allies, the book is designed as an entry point into the debate, not as an exit or summary, or even an assessment of it. It is with this focus and intent that this book proceeds, with the text organized along a chronological structure.

The first part of the book covers the doctrinal, intellectual, and—to a more limited extent— the historical origins of today’s counterinsurgency thinking in NATO’s four most significant land forces.¹ The experiences of America’s European allies are, at closer inspection, at the intellectual and historical epicenter of the counterinsurgency debate. The former colonial empires, especially France and Britain, can look back on a multiplicity of imperial conflicts, both when the erstwhile European empires conquered their new possessions, when they tried to maintain them, and most notably when they lost almost all of them in a series of wars of decolonization that brought independence to a large number of countries. These campaigns were often drawn-out operations—one prominent example is the war in Algeria of 1954 –62— and the armies defense establishments were not only fighting, but, like today, debating and trying to understand the counterinsurgencies they found themselves in. There is therefore much to be learned from European colonial history, and the counterinsurgency debate has borrowed heavily from these historical examples.

France’s counterinsurgency doctrine, therefore, is the subject of the first chapter. The French experience with counterinsurgency began with the conquest of Algeria in 1830, when a number of mountainous insurgencies battled the European conquerors for more than a dozen years. Etienne de Durand argues that France’s experience with counterinsurgency was rich and diverse, perhaps more so than that of any other European nation. De Durand traces the doctrinal origins back to the three “wise men”: Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, Joseph-Simon Galliéni, and Hubert Lyautey. He looks for the major lessons and “non-lessons” of the colonial and decolonization period, and to what extent they are still relevant in the twenty-first century. De Durand analyses the doctrines of guerre révolutionnaire and arme psychologique and puts them into their appropriate strategic and political context—the result can be read as a warning of the hidden perils of protracted counterinsurgency operations.

Britain has an equally wealthy experience with “small wars.” Alexander Alderson, one of the United Kingdom’s leading doctrine writers, traces the influences of Britain’s towering figures of counterinsurgency thinking: Colonel Charles Callwell’s Small Wars, General Sir Charles Gwynn’s Imperial Policing, Sir Robert Thompson’s Defeating Communist Insurgency, and Brigadier Frank Kitson’s Low Intensity Operations. He highlights three fundamental characteristics: the use of minimum force, civil-military cooperation, and tactical flexibility—as well as the British Army’s cultural predisposition toward learning and adaptation. Alderson discusses three cases: Malaya, 1948–60; Northern Ireland 1969–2007; and Aden 1963–8.

Germany never was a notable colonial power. Perhaps this explains the near absence of classic writings on counterinsurgency—as opposed to light infantry tactics—by any well-known German military thinker. More significantly, the Bundeswehr, the army of the modern Federal Republic, was formed under the profound impact of World War II, when the misdeeds of the Wehrmacht were still fresh, and not only in living memory but in the memory of the new army’s senior officers. More than perhaps any other modern army, the German military —and even more so the German public—had an ambiguous relationship to the use of force. The unspoken, tragic reminder was indefinitely present: the last time Germans used the force of arms, the outcome was catastrophe. Only in the past dozen years or so has Germany began to develop a “normal” relationship to the use of military force, yet still—and rightly so—observed by a rigorously skeptical public and Parliament. In an environment of population-centric operations, Germany’s caution, although sometimes counterproductive, may have a beneficial side effect. Timo Noetzel examines the recent evolution of counterinsurgency thinking and doctrine in the Bundeswehr. Not unlike what happened with the US and British forces, a more stress-intensive operational environment seems to be pushing counterinsurgency lessons from the bottom up, sometimes against the political and cultural resistance of the military establishment in Germany.

The United States, in several ways, had to tie these different historical lessons together as it was updating its own counterinsurgency doctrine in 2006. As America’s land forces faced a disorienting counterinsurgency environment in Iraq, a number of officers turned to European and colonial experiences in similar situations and eagerly absorbed counterinsurgency theory. The doctrinal outcome of an intense process of learning under fire was the famous Field Manual, Counterinsurgency (FM 3-24). Conrad Crane provides an insider’s account of the drafting and development process and puts the document, its application, and the controversy it generated into context.

The second part of the book deals with various operational aspects of counterinsurgency warfare. Each chapter looks at the role of the different services—after all, most military activity continues to be structured, funded, trained, and often deployed along service lines, not just jointly. Consequently, the various military services have different views and even different methods they apply to counterinsurgency campaigns. Service perspectives are certainly singular; the Royal Air Force will have a different view of its role in counterinsurgency than the German Luftwaffe. All insurgencies are ultimately based on land, and almost always lack the resources to acquire sophisticated weapons systems, let alone an air force or a navy—yet from the counterinsurgent’s perspective, all services have a role in counterinsurgency, and each service has to come to terms with a specific set of opportunities and challenges. Some of these operational features are shared across the Atlantic Alliance.

The Army, given its size and expertise, is the most involved of the armed forces in counterinsurgency. Peter Mansoor argues that, whether used in an enemy-centric or a population-centric strategy, ground forces are vital to the conduct of counterinsurgency warfare. He analyses the Army’s wide range of tasks in ground war “among the people”: for instance, in securing population centers and lines of communication, force protection, sustainment activities; but also in offensive operations to clear enemy safe havens and targeted raids to kill or capture insurgents. Finally, Mansoor highlights an often neglected but highly important responsibility: ground forces are charged with running detention facilities in a legal and humane manner.

The Marine Corps, in the United States, is an impressive force that complements the Army and sometimes competes with it. But the Marines, more than the Army, have a longstanding reputation for their skillful mastery of small wars. The famous Small Wars Manual, published in 1940, epitomizes this skill. Frank Hoffman explores how the Marines learned—and sometimes forgot—the tough lessons of counterinsurgency, and how the Corps’ historical experiences influence the way America’s smaller land force deals with the complex insurgencies of the twenty-first century.

Airpower has long been a critical, if somewhat controversial, element of counterinsurgency operations. Charles Dunlap, one of the US Air Force’s top thinkers on irregular warfare, argues that no single component of the armed forces can defeat twenty-first century insurgencies. But more so: in practice, Dunlap writes, the surge of ground forces has been accompanied by a surge in airstrikes in both Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years (“the use of airpower has skyrocketed”). Modern technology, Dunlap argues, should not be dismissed prematurely. The central elements of airpower—flexibility and versatility—make it uniquely suited for counterinsurgency.

Naval support may be critical for a counterinsurgency—and even for an insurgency. Martin Murphy points out that scholars of insurgency and counterinsurgency have often concentrated on what happens in jungles and cities. As a result they have neglected both the maritime aspect of insurgency and naval support for counterinsurgency. All counterinsurgency campaigns conducted since 1945, he argues, have been undertaken in the certain knowledge that navies remain in control of sea lines of communication stretching back to home. Murphy asks, what are the strategic and policy implications of the use of naval power in counterinsurgency? He responds that naval involvement for counterinsurgency depends, not unlike land-based operations, on accurate intelligence, an intimate understanding of the operational environment, and a willingness to endure and persist. The argument is illustrated with brief empirical accounts of several campaigns.

Special forces are another critical operational element of counterinsurgency warfare. Kalev Sepp, one of the very few scholar-practitioners of that discipline, outlines the particular roles of special forces in counterinsurgency environments. The more irregular the threats and operations of the future, the more important special forces will likely become. “SOF,” as these units are sometimes called in jargon, are carefully selected personnel who tend to be older, more experienced, more resilient, physically tougher, and more independent than the larger body of soldiers. They are highly trained in a number of unconventional skills, among them “contingency languages,” which they need to penetrate and survive in denied areas. Sepp considers the role of technology, education and training, languages, and intelligence. He concludes by suggesting a to-do list to improve allied SOF—and with a word of caution.

Intelligence is essential in counterinsurgency. David Kilcullen argues that intelligence officers in unconventional operations among the people are not unlike their counterparts in conventional warfare: they are engaged in “something akin to ethnography.” Fieldwork participant observation, as well as qualitative and quantitative data, describes both the physical and social environment. Kilcullen calls the environment “ethnography from hell.” With the focus, complexity, and identification of friend and foe blurred, extrapolating from one source to the organization behind it poses great difficulty. In these circumstances, Kilcullen identifies six pathologies that may inhibit the counterinsurgent’s ability to operate optimally: a preference for quantitative methodological rigor over qualitative local knowledge; a tendency to focus on threats to the force rather than threats to the local population; a tendency to misinterpret cultural signals; a Eurocentric conception of state building; a preference for input rather than outcome; and a vulnerability to loss of situational awareness through rotation issues.

Local security forces ultimately enable sustainable stability and functioning governance. John Nagl outlines the role of trainers and advisors to local security forces, the “professors” of the graduate level of war. He argues that advisory efforts are an extremely valuable force multiplier in counterinsurgency, allowing intervening forces to leverage relatively small numbers of their own forces to increase dramatically the effectiveness of local forces, while simultaneously enhancing the legitimacy of the host nation government. Nagl identifies some of the lasting principles of success for this most difficult—and most important—part of counterinsurgency warfare. These principles may help future intervening powers to apply strategic leverage to the defeat of an insurgency through the application of responsive indigenous forces.

Governance and political progress, not just progress with local security forces, remains vital for long-term success in counterinsurgency. Government capacity and competence, to be sure, are also much more difficult to achieve than a more secure environment. The counterinsurgent, Nadia Schadlow argues, must tackle the tougher job of restoring basic government services and administrative structures at the local and national levels. The instrument to achieve these goals are “governance operations”—those activities that aim to establish or re-establish basic local and national government services in order to rebuild a population’s confidence in its government. Schadlow provides historical examples that illustrate the central role of governance operations in counterinsurgency campaigns and ex...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 Understanding counterinsurgency
• Part I Doctrine
• Part II Operational aspects
• Part III Challenges
• Suggested further reading
• Index