RETHINKING SECURITY

Robert C. Jones has published a short rebuttal to my short blog. While William F. Owen can undoubtedly speak for himself, I will make a few general observations. As I think this conversation would illuminate other matters of importance, I have replied at length.

The basic problem with discussions of counterinsurgency is the idea that the use of military force is necessarily equivalent to a strategy of forcibly repressing the population. This is what I referred to when I mentioned the strawman of “making a desert and calling it peace.” A deeper strategic definitional dive is required.

First, organized armed rebellion is a form of warfare. War involves the large-scale use of armed force for political purposes. The fact that the combatants are indigenous does not change this essential fact. There is a reasonable argument to be made whether all forms of rebellion itself count as warfare. The French 1968 student revolts were not war, nor is Anonymous’ hacktivism “cyber war.” While I have analyzed Mexican drug cartels from a military perspective, there are reasoned objections.

However, in the context of the Iraq conflict, it is difficult to argue that it was not war. An expeditionary foreign force fought an organized opposition. Over 4,000 Americans died and many more were injured. Even with the context of purely internal war, organized armed rebellion is still warfare. The Chinese Civil War featured a range of everything from small-scale terrorism to large-scale maneuver operations with large land armies. The recent Libyan conflict featured set-piece conventional battles with the use of artillery, armor, aircraft, and land armies. These were wars, and no other analytical lens better describes them.

In fact, intrastate warfare is far more common than interstate war. For most of human history, the foremost worry of the ruler was not necessarily external threat but an internal challenge from competing political elites with private armies and large-scale armed revolts like the Taiping Rebellion. Democracies are not immune to this problem—the American Civil War evidenced. Even before the time of the state, entire political communities have gone to war with each other. Readers who are Bible-fluent understand this point particularly well.

How should the government respond? Here it is useful to understand the distinction between policy and strategy. A policy is a condition or behavior. The policy of the United States in the American Civil War was that the Union would continue to exist and that secession would not be tolerated. The strategy is an action, and in this case the use of armed force to compel the secessionists to return to the fold. As long as the Confederacy had the ability to resist the government, in the form of a large and professional land army with attendant guerrilla forces, the policy could not be accomplished.

When large-scale armed revolts occur, it is of course desirable if necessary to induce those revolting to cease rebellion without force. However, often this is not possible. If submitting to the desires of the rebels involves the destruction of the government, dismemberment of the country, or other drastic outcomes, the government will of course be obligated to fight for basic survival.

Given that the basis of war is politics, there is usually a basic difference that is strong enough to compel two organized groups to willingly engage in combat with other. Someone wants power, someone else wants to keep it. Someone wants his own country, someone else doesn’t want him to have it. War happens because those desires are not compatible with each other and one or both combatants have made a deliberate choice to use violence to attain those goals.

The role of the military within this framework is to restore the pre-existing political condition by eliminating the capability of the opponent to resist. As long as the organized armed group can still resist, he or she has the ability to frustrate the government’s ability to restore the political status quo ante. If a government (or expeditionary partner) cannot use its military forces to accomplish this goal, it must re-think the basic policy.

In the case of secession, perhaps it is simply impossible to hold on to the territory in question. A regime attempting to hold on to an overseas territory or an expeditionary group trying to build a regime may judge the costs of the venture too high relative to the prospective gain. Britain was unable to gain battlefield decision in the American Revolution and judged continued struggle to be of little value. The United States cannot defeat the Taliban for a variety of reasons, and maybe it is time to use force to support negotiations rather than create a political outcome that excludes the Taliban. Similarly, a government that is unable to quell uprisings by a given minority or political group may change its policy to grant some measure of concession to their interests.

What it does mean, however, is that the role of the military within this process is to fight. As long as the armed group maintains the ability to frustrate the government’s plans, benign or not, the military is used to suppress their intent and ability to engage in armed conflict. Force is the key to control. What the state chooses to do with the measure of control it gains is not the military’s problem, but if handled badly can be a problem for the military.

This is especially true because of the problem of clandestine cells and shadow governments. A classical Maoist insurgency will have a shadow government that exists as a means of mobilizing the populace and generating military power. While it flouts the legitimacy of the government, certainly, it also presents a security problem because it can mobilize resources for large-scale armed attacks and terrorism.Allowed to grow too large, and it will become a source of combat power for an eventual Phase III assault.

By giving the rebellion a material basis for its continued existence, the shadow government stands in the way of the restoration of law and order—functioning much like China’s expansive geography did in sustaining the ability of warlords to maintain separate states after the fall of the Qing dynasty. Even should the insurgents agree to lay down their arms if their demands are met, as long as they have the capability to wage war there is nothing to prevent them from going back on their promise.

This does not mean that the government is limited to the use of the military as a tool. Indeed, it can attempt to alleviate the conditions that produced the rebellion, sow discord among the rebels, use the intelligence services to round up the leaders, or create better mechanisms of population control through technology or forced population movements. Democratic and autocratic governments have a variety of tools at their disposal to try to make their discontented subjects return to the fold. Obviously, the use of force is only the beginning of the process. Law and order are also equally important.

As stated before, if the basic policy is not sound, the use of force has no value. The real lesson of The Battle of Algiers was not, as commonly believed in constant military movie screenings, was that the French lost by using torture, or could have succeeded by setting up Combined Operating Posts for tea-drinking. It was that the policy of maintaining a colonial system built on the domination of French colonists was untenable in and of itself. The lesson for the United States here is also applicable. It is not a question of population-centric or enemy-centric counterinsurgency, but whether or not a policy of engaging in counterinsurgency to build other states is tenable.

The problem, however, with many theories of counterinsurgency is that they posit the goal of military forces as to build security or try to gain the sympathies of the populace. There is a reasonable debate over how much this is necessary to gain the intelligence and cooperation needed to be able to defeat the insurgents. The goal is simply to gain control. As stated before, what creates stability is an entirely different matter. The Maliki government is learning at a hard price that strong-arming political opponents does not necessarily create stability.

But it is reasonably clear what can obviously prevent stability is the ability of a substantial armed force to exist within a state. Is it desirable for such a force to be induced to disarm through concessions? Certainly. Unfortunately, this has not happened very often historically. Governments often choose to (and are successful) in restoring order by using military force to disarm internal challengers. And as Jacqueline Hazelton has noted in her research on compellence in COIN, they are often more successful in doing so than using good governance or hearts-and-minds strategies.

Even if we suppose that the government should meet those challengers halfway, the role of the military is still to use force to deprive internal challengers of their ability and will to use force, deter them from using force, or materially shape the conditions to make it impossible for them to do so.

The banality of the idea that you can’t “kill your way to victory” is that it denies that force is the “currency” of war. War is a process of violent “transactions” in which this currency is “cashed” by either using or threatening the use of force. Even if the use of force results in a negotiated settlement rather than complete defeat, it is hard to imagine going without it in many situations. As Owen is often fond of saying, this doesn’t mean that the force used should be indiscriminate, cruel, or irrational. But when it is needed, it will be used. To say you cannot “kill your way to victory” is to say that money is useless for buying things. Likewise, it isn’t Benjamin Franklin or George Washington’s fault that you went broke because you spent too much.

Why does Owen’s paper provide a good basis for thinking about American counterinsurgency? It foregrounds the use of force. If the United States cannot use force—maximal or limited—to shape political outcomes acceptable to our interests in expeditionary theaters, we should not be militarily involved except in the most minute capacity. If the government is not willing to work with us to help guarantee our interests through a necessary shift in policies or strategies, we should not be politically involved except in the most minute capacity.

In the military sense, Owen’s paper clarifies the false dilemma between population-centric and enemy-centric counterinsurgency. All COIN is “enemy-centric” and in that the military fights to defeat an organized opponent. The population is important, but not the focus of effort. Simultaneously, COIN is “population-centric” because the resumption of authority over the population is the point of fighting the rebellion. Again, what the government chooses to do with this authority is an entirely different matter. Maybe it will govern with justice. Maybe it will not. Rebellions have been resolved both ways. The method ought to fit the case and the values of the side opposing rebellion.

In closing, Owen’s paper tells us that war is indeed war. It requires fighting, by trained and capable forces built to handle irregular, conventional, and compound contingencies. A measure of control is obtained by removing the ability and will of the opposing side to resist.  As an addendum to my earlier bullet point, if you either cannot use force to gain control or unable to do anything with that control that accomplishes your political objective, then a policy or strategy review is in order.