RETHINKING SECURITY

John Campbell has an post looking at the prospect for new violence in the Congo:

To recap: the incumbent, Joseph Kabila, defeated challenger Etienne Tshisekedi in elections characterized as “too flawed to be credible” by international and domestic observers, including the Roman Catholic Church, which had some thirty thousand observers in the field. The DRC supreme court, seen as in the pocket of Kabila, upheld the incumbent’s victory. Tshisekedi bitterly contested the announced results, and went so far as to have himself sworn in as president at about the same time as Kabila’s ceremony. The stage appeared to be set for a major clash that could re-ignite civil war. [my italics[

What civil war? Oh yes, that one.

Eight nations and 25 armed groups involved. 5.4 million people dead. Now what’s this business about war amongst the people and the end of major conflict again?

Anyone with even the most passing interest in military history knows that atrocities in war are commonplace—even during “good” wars. This is why the analogies to the WWII Pacific Campaign are coming out in droves during the commentary cycle about Marines desecrating the corpses of dead Taliban fighters. Already, the debate is bogging down into extrapolations of the incident into out-of-place critiques of American foreign policy and “war is hell” cliches. I would like to take the opportunity to make a different point about the framework we use to interpret the incident and media during war.

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Svenn Ortmann has written a critique of my most recent blog. While it is interesting, we appear to be talking past each other. Hence I will re-state my arguments in greater depth.

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Why you would you fight a war if you didn’t want to win? While this seems may seem to be a silly question, we must delve deep into this issue as the tangled debate on American strategy grows even more confusing.

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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.

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Gian P. Gentile, Paul Olsen, and others are debating over whether counterinsurgency is dead. Elsewhere, Colin Clark reports that COIN is being “scrapped” by the military. Gentile and Douglas Ollivant has written about the formation of a dominant COIN narrative, and it’s clear that at for a combination of material, academic, and political reasons this narrative is no longer dominant. But is COIN dead? In suspended animation? Some quick thoughts as I continue to hack away at the information warfare and deception research project…

First, it is a bit too soon for us to hail or mourn the death of COIN. What this represents is the end of COIN as practiced and theorized by elements within the Army and Marine Corps from 2006-2010, just as the Kennedy-era idea of counterinsurgency within elements of the US defense establishment died with Vietnam. The United States has faced insurgencies, terrorists, armed rebellions, guerrillas, partisans, and irregular raiding forces since the early days of colonization. It will continue to do so in the near future as long as American allies, clients, and proxies face irregular threats, although the shape of the response will vary.

Second, COIN, for all of the heat and noise about it, is still rather poorly understood in Iraq and Afghanistan. So much of the debate is weighted down with external baggage, mainly because it was never entirely about Iraq or Afghanistan. Rather, the COIN debate was often a proxy for many different political, professional, interdepartmental, and other battles within the United States political and defense establishments. Ollivant’s paper, and newer research highlights significant uncertainty to cause and effect in both sides of the COIN debate that will likely not be definitely settled soon.

Most importantly, it is important not to replace one orthodoxy for another. The emerging consensus of drones, special forces, and Asia has its own flaws which need their own airing.

Packed into David Ignatius’ piece on Admiral Mike Mullen is about two decades’ worth of accumulated assumptions about warfare that have not been particularly useful to us.

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So Wikileaks has now released all of its cables, without any redactions. I can’t add much to what Joshua Foust has written, but I do think that the larger context of WikiLeaks—and why it failed, is extremely important for everyone to understand.

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I felt rather fortunate to be abroad during the debt debate. But one thought I had while (to get very Tom Friedman-like, listening to Jay-Z and Bun B. talk about their own unique understanding of microeconomics in “Big Pimpin” while moving around the outskirts of Shanghai) was that the current spectacle has largely exposed the 20-year debate over future American grand strategy to be rooted on a fundamentally false assumptions. In fact, one might, as Joseph Fouche often does, compare them to the titular fantasy quest in Lord of the Rings. Why?

To sum it up, we neither understand what grand strategy is nor have realistic expectations of how to make it “work” in our unique domestic political system.

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A question for RS readers—would you characterize most formal strategies (i.e written government documents) as strategies or strategic concepts, and are strategic concepts valuable?