Mental Sine Waves

Abu Muq and my go-to Pakistan expert F.A. alerted me to this amusing item.  It's an editorial by a former ISI head urging the Pakistani Army to fight the Taliban.  He argues, counterintuitively, both that the Army's limited knowledge of COIN is not a hindrance, and that its training in conventional operations is the essence of COIN.  The funny thing is, I've heard this same contradictory line of argument from American Big Army advocates.  

Every time I learn something new about the Pakistan/Afghanistan situation I take another step down the mental rabbit hole.  For instance, the Pakistan developed the Taliban (I knew that) so that the Pakistani Army could take refuge in Afghanistan in case of an Indian invasion (rabbit hole).  

I oscillate between seeing the Pakistani military/intelligence community as COIN-fumbling buffoons and hard-headed realists.  I suppose the truth is somewhere in between.          

More Questions Than Answers

More questions than answers, that's what you've come to expect from this blog, and that's what I'll continue to deliver. :)

The closure of Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan.  Perhaps this is a naive question, but can't the flow of supplies into Manas be diverted to go directly into Afghanistan?  

Let God Sort 'Em Out

After 26 years of fighting, in May 2009 the insurgency of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka came to an end.  Last year I took a class from terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman, who described the LTTE as one of the most professional terrorist groups in the world.  They operated a (small) navy and air force in addition to capable ground forces.  They had an extraordinarily well developed intelligence system, with infiltrators in every level of the Sri Lankan military, intelligence, and police forces.  They were consummate fund raisers, receiving millions from foreign donors. 

 

Their most unique attribute, however, was their innovation.  They invented dozens of tactics over the decades, chief among them the suicide bombing.  This tactic has since been copied by many other groups, to include Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, etc.

 

As Dr. Hoffman described the capabilities of the LTTE, it occurred to me that the Sri Lankan military should just squash the LTTE.  Sure, the LTTE are expert insurgents.  But Sri Lanka is a tiny place.  If the Sri Lankan military simply moved into the LTTE's safe areas, they would have nowhere to hide.  The LTTE lacked one crucial aspect of a successful insurgency: sanctuary.  They had nowhere to go when push came to shove.

 

And that's exactly what happened. 

 

I have two questions about this:

1. Why did it take so long to get around to this?

2. What are the lessons for the U.S. and counterinsurgency? 

 

I have already seen one op-ed claiming the LTTE defeat as a point for the "kill 'em all" school of counterinsurgency.

Cue Realism

I have been working my way through David Kilcullen's "Accidental Guerrilla."  He describes counterinsurgency success in Kunar Province, by way of standard counterinsurgency doctrine: protect the people, build links between the people and the national government, improve indigenous forces, etc.  One is left with an optimistic feeling.  It appears that Obama, Petraeus, and McChrystal will now be trying to copy the Kunar method in the rest of Afghanistan.

So we are really going to give this old college try: forging a nation-state out of a collection of perpetually warring tribes.  Let's assume that it's possible.  What is the strategic rationale for this effort?  Al Qaeda Central is in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.  A completely secure Afghanistan will not materially affect our ability to influence events in Pakistan.  Drone strikes will still be the limit of our power.  Anything will more will still depend on the cooperation of the Pakistani military and intelligence services, and the Pakistani border tribes. 

A secure Afghanistan will create one less place to hide for Al Qaeda.  But I don't see how it will positively affect events in Pakistan.  

Metrics Schmetrics

Much discussion about metrics at the Center for a New American Security's (CNAS) annual conference today.  As I mentioned in a previous post, CNAS' report on Afghanistan put forward Afghan civilian casualties as the primary metric of success.  

Afterwards, a co-worker and I discussed metrics some more, and soon realized our focus on metrics is a little misplaced.  War is more complex and unpredictable than any other human endeavor.  We tried to come up with metrics that would have been appropriate in either of the World Wars, and came up empty-handed.  I'm not sure what metric could have told the story of Operation Iraqi Freedom.  In particular, the turning point, the Sunni Awakening, couldn't have been predicted by any metric. 

So metrics are not a magic bullet.  But metrics do serve two useful purposes.

1. They drive out bad metrics.  Bad metrics are a crutch.  In Vietnam, one of the official responses to failure was to start counting enemy casualties.  If an official metric is established, there's no room to lapse into bad metrics.   

2. They provide a concrete way to transmit commander's intent.  Most commanders will tell their troops to avoid killing civilians.  Such platitudes have more impact when a team's performance is measured in civilians protected, rather than bad guys killed.

Question for tomorrow: if we achieve success in Afghanistan, and create a secure, prosperous, well-governed state, will that make it easier to go after Al Qaeda Central in Pakistan?      

Marine Corps and the Spectrum of Conflict

Five to Ten Years After Landfall

General Cartwright, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, laid out a possible new guideline for the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review.  Since the 1990's, military strategic planning has been based on the capability to fight two high-intensity wars simultaneously.  Instead, Cartwright suggests that planners count on extended, five to ten year conflicts.  This is long overdue.  Unfortunately, the Marine Corps seems to be moving in the other direction.  There is an inherent conflict between a Marine Corps focused on forced landings, and the first 60 days of war, and a Marine Corps focused on sustained conflict.

The Marines have explicitly stated that they are trying to get away from the Iraq/Afghanistan operational model, and go "back to basics."  Cartwright is saying that everyone needs to get used to the Iraq/Afghanistan model, and start planning to do it better, because the future is likely to hold more of the same.     

 

In Which I Dispose of Another Defense-ism

"Rapidly changing global threat environment."  This phrase appears often in defense literature.  It's not accurate.  The global threat environment has changed only incrementally over the past two decades.  Many things have not changed.  Iran supporting Hezbollah.  Proliferation of nuclear weapons and technology.  North Korea.  Terrorists.  Low-intensity warfare.  Deterrence.  

 

The big changes since the 1990's are that Al Qaeda came to our attention, we established a huge presence in the Middle East and Central Asia, North Korea and Iran got closer to the bomb, and India and Pakistan went nuclear.  

The global threat environment is changing in long, broad trends, not in short little hops.  Usually references to "rapid change" in global security are used to explain the United States' slowness in adapting to 4th generation warfare.  Unfortunately, the cause of the mismatch between U.S. capabilities and global security requirements must be sought elsewhere.

MV-22 and Strategic Inertia

Spring Bored alerted me to an aspect of the MV-22 I hadn't considered: its tendency to start fires and melt carrier platforms when landing.  

http://springboarder.blogspot.com/2009/05/osprey-down-grassfire-edition.html

To me, the MV-22 is a symbol of the strategic inertia of the Marine Corps.  The Marines have a long history of innovation, a history far too rich and detailed to delve into here.  It ranges from the first use of close air support (grenades thrown from a biplane in Nicaragua), to the invention of the Combined Action Program in Vietnam, to the concepts of the three-block war and the strategic corporal in the 1990s.  The most important innovation of the Marine Corps, however, is probably their perfection of amphibious warfare during the years before World War II.  The concepts they perfected in the interwar years were used to win the war in the Pacific, and were taught to the Army for use on D-Day. 

The Marines are still innovative on the operational and tactical level, as amply demonstrated by the actions of junior officers and enlisted Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan.  At the strategic level, however, they are not.  The Marines recently released two new papers, Amphibious Operations in the 21st Century, and Seabasing for the Range of Military Options.  The first calls ambitiously for the Marines to have an "intellectual renaissance" (so far so good) in "amphibious operations" (so close...and yet so far).  The document states that adaptation to counterinsurgency operations has been "successful" (great news, I guess we can go home now) and that the time has come to re-focus on the Marines' core mission, amphibious operations.  In particular, forced landings. 

A forced landing capability is paramount, it argues, because then most other operations in the littoral will be possible.  This sounds a lot like the "lesser included" argument used in the 1990s.  

The same document that calls for an intellectual renaissance makes the limits of this renaissance clear by making several platform-specific endorsements.  First, the MV-22 and EFV are critical to the future of amphibious warfare, not, interestingly, just because they are useful in forced landings, but because they are even more useful in "low-intensity" operations.  Second, the MRAP is not a part of the Marines' future, because it's too heavy to fit on amphibious ships.  And finally, the Navy should bring several battleships back on line, and should pay for them by giving up carrier groups.

It seems that the Marine Corps has already made up its mind.  It used to be that the Marine Corps valued men over machines.  As the saying went, the Army depends on its tanks, the Air Force its airplanes, the Navy its ships, but the Marine Corps depends on its people.  Their unseemly need to procure the MV-22 speaks otherwise.     

How Many Do We Need?

Has anyone done an actual analysis of how many troops are needed in Afghanistan?  My impression is that the majority of Afghanistan's population is not provided security by the coalition.  

I know for that for counterinsurgencies, a historically successful ratio of troops to population is around 1:20.  For Afghanistan, that would imply 500,000 troops.  We have a tiny fraction of that.  But that's just an extrapolation of history, it doesn't take into account the actual situation in Afghanistan.  Perhaps only part of the country needs a 1:20 ratio.  Maybe some parts will be fine with 1:100, or 1:1000.  I don't know.  

It should be possible for a military planner to map out the number of troops required to provide security for all of Afghanistan.  Someone should get on that.    

CNAS has published a report on Afghanistan: 

http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/ExumFickHumayun_TriageAfPak_June09.pdf

The part I was most interested in was the metrics of success.  Metrics are difficult to define in a counterinsurgency, since many of the factors contributing to success or failure are intangible.  In Vietnam, with signs of success elusive, enemy casualties ("body count") became the default metric.  Easy to measure, easy to exaggerate, and visceral, this metric is now infamous for its uselessness.  

Body count is now cropping up again in official reports, offered as a sign of success.  It's understandable - it's a simple, concrete metric for those struggling to understand a complex war.  The CNAS report cleverly flips this on its head, proposing Afghan civilian casualties (whether resulting from coalition or enemy action) as the chief metric of success.  This is just as simple and concrete as enemy casualties.  

The brilliance of this metric is that a full adoption would imply a significant operational change.  Among other changes, troops chasing Taliban fighters through uninhabited mountain ranges would be moved to populated areas.  

However, full adoption would also expose a massive capability gap.  To keep Taliban from assassinating civilians, friendly troops must be present wherever civilians are.  There just aren't enough troops to accomplish this.  

"Know Yourself and Seek Self Improvement"

There are two schools among the opposition to the COINdinistas.  The first is that counterinsurgency as a strategy does not work.  The strongest evidence for this is the 75% failure rate of post-1950 counterinsurgency campaigns.  

The other school of thought is that even if there is a hypothetically successful counterinsurgency strategy, the United States is not capable of executing it.  The evidence for this is the lack of U.S. capability in non-military areas.  As any counterinsurgency theorist knows, a counterinsurgency is 90% political and 10% military.  The U.S. strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan, conversely, is 10% political and 90% military.  This is due to a combination of factors, but perhaps most prominent is the American culture of national security.  The American "Way of War" is biased toward the style of warfare that succeeded in World War II.

Eight years after the invasion of Afghanistan, the military is still making only incremental shifts toward a counterinsurgency capability.  The political portion of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus (Department of State, USAID, etc.) has not visibly adapted.  

To construct an effective foreign policy, we must know ourselves.  If our institutions cannot adapt to fight counterinsurgencies, then perhaps we should not be engaged in counterinsurgency.   

On Making It in the DC Policy World

"Making it" in the DC policy world is a lot like going to LA and trying to "make it" as an actor.  The city is filled with talented people, but the industry can only sustain a few superstars.  You're more likely to end up waiting tables and throwing scripts into producers' cars (i.e. working as an intern and sending your papers randomly hoping someone will publish them).  After a while, some just sell out and just start doing commercials (i.e. going to work for a big defense contractor on some giant boondoggle project).  Others are lucky enough to find steady work at think tanks or in government (i.e. sitcoms - good exposure, good pay, varying amounts of respect).  Yet others settle into academia (i.e. teach at acting school).  Those who really break out as movie stars (Cabinet members/National Security Advisors and the like) are few and far between.  To do it, takes luck, connections, and of course a boatload of actual skill.  You also need the energy and self-confidence to market your skill.               

LA has the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, DC has the Black Buildings of Broken Dreams.