Delicate strategic balancing: perception's role in formulating strategy

I, like nearly everyone, am saddened by yesterday's tragic murders in Afghanistan. The details are gruesome and as a father of young children, I react to the needless death of children viscerally. I'll hold off on any sort of analysis of this specific situation until investigation results are released. I'll also defer to others on what it portends for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and suggest must-read analysts Daveed Gartenstien-Ross and Carl Prine.

I suspect it would be helpful to use this incident and similarly bad events that recently occurred to take a look at the role of perspective and how it affects strategy from a broader perspective beyond Afghanistan. I endorse Carl and his fourth point that the deaths of 16 Afghans will not likely drive changes in domestic perspectives and subsequently will not drive changes to our strategy. Our current force generation system - an all volunteer force - allows the government to use force as a tool of policy without burdening the overwhelming majority of the nation's citizens which in turn negates the need to have the people's consent to wage and continue war. Barring a catastrophe such as Mogadishu in 1993, the bombings in Beirut in 1983, or Tet in 1968, domestic perspectives simply do not play a role in determining how the U.S. government uses force in the current era. Both the government and the citizens seem pretty content with this arrangement as it allows them to pursue whatever they wish to pursue with minimal burden.

That all said, incidents in Afghanistan these past few months have caused me to question the validity of strategies that hinge upon the perspectives of foreign audiences*. This is not to negate the fact that foreign perspectives affect nearly every intervention in some way - there has been plenty of writing on this and believe it to be true. I firmly believe that reminding soldiers of this fact was possibly the only redeeming value of the counterinsurgency manual. To say nothing of this excellent work. But strategies that hinge upon the perspectives of foreign populations are another matter altogether.

This is not to say that abusing detainees, offending the religious sensibilities of local populations, killing civilians through negligence or indifference, mutilating corpses, and willful murder are unimportant or that they should not or may not affect the execution of a strategic plan. Iraq came unglued after the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal and Iraqis had every right to be angry, causing them to rebuke U.S. efforts. And of course there were more screw-ups after this incident - the strategic knucklehead is pervasive and unpreventable after all. But in spite of all of that, the U.S. strategy there eventually met most of its goals (reasons for which include a whole bunch of luck, but good strategy leverages luck). While Afghanistan is obviously not monolithic and reactions will vary, every new incident is accompanied by analysis of how much it sets back our mission there, suggesting to me that we're nearing a cusp where winning the approval of the Afghan people will become the determining factor of our outcomes.

We have a whole suite of problems with our strategy in Afghanistan, foremost of which are a failure to state specific and achievable ends as well as a misalignment of ways and means to achieve the pitifully-described desired ends we have written down. But if our strategic success now depends upon selling to the Afghans that we mean well and that they are now more skeptical than not of us, well we have a very, very serious problem. Balancing the Say-Do equation is an imperative. However, if public perception is that mistakes and crimes committed by individual U.S. service members is indicative of U.S. policy or strategy, then public communications begins to drive strategy instead of the other way around.

Public communications and information operations to influence perceptions are ways, but the U.S. keeps falling into the trap of making perceptions ends in themselves. If our ends, ways, and means were better formed and aligned, I suspect that the "Do" side of the equation would be solid enough to negate the affects of mistakes. But this is not the situation in Afghanistan where continued programs of questionable efficacy, strategic drift with regard to ends (compare this and this for instance), and continued support for an illegitimate and ineffectual government abound. If ways and means are not succeeding (to what ends?!?) or are the wrong ways and means entirely then your strategy rests in total upon Afghan perception that you're making a difference instead of in part, which amplifies individual disasters such as we've seen of late. While it is unlikely that the United States will change course at this juncture, we need to start paying attention to this phenomenon now and avoid it in the future so we can avoid codifying perceptions as ends and put influencing them back where they belong: as ways. A successful strategy would go a long way to restoring this balance. Once again, maybe in the next war.

*I apologize for the awkward term and I just can't find the right one that doesn't sound trite. Here it means the people living in the country in which your forces are operating.

UPDATE: See the always insightful and on point Adam Elkus on this topic.

What's wrong with COIN doctrine?

[PRE-POSTSCRIPT: Ha, I see that Fritz and I had the same idea, so we've got two roughly duplicative posts up this morning. (To be fair, he got there first.) Please forgive the indulgence.]

A great deal of ink has been spilled on this question, but the majority of 3-24's critics have focused on what I think of as "meta" issues with counterinsurgency: questions of policy and strategy and the appropriate use of the military instrument. That's all well and good, and it's important that the country and the community of defense professionals think through those contextual matters. But sometimes we forget -- what with publication under the U of Chicago imprint and blurbs by celebrity academics and such -- that the "FM" in 3-24 stands for field manual. This is military doctrine, which ought to be not only a statement of fundamental principles, but a guide to action for military forces. It needs to be right, but it also needs to be useful.

To that end, friends of Ink Spots Carl Prine, Crispin Burke, and Mike Few have done us all a service: they've published a short piece on SWJ outlining some things they believe ought to inform future revisions to the American military's counterinsurgency doctrine (pdf). It's concise, clear, and to the point, and you ought to read the whole thing (pdf). I hope they won't mind if I boil down their 13 points -- which are already very digestible -- into my own words.

1. The Army has published other doctrine in the last five years that bears on related subjects and supersedes bit of 3-24.

2. Current COIN doctrine is too informed by historical thinking on the subject and not enough by the recent experiences of (and lessons learned by) the U.S. military.

3. A doctrinal rewrite ought to be a part of a broader interagency (and even national) conversation about how counterinsurgency and stability operations fit within the context of national strategy and policy.

4. We need to listen more to the guys who have done this work, and figured out how to do it effectively in practice.

5. This re-look ought to help us do away with silly, simplistic distinctions and dichotomies (and the resulting parochial equities) among various schools of thought on irregular war. Let's get past COINdinistas/COINtras and COIN/CT.

6. New thinking on counterinsurgency should be premised on a reappraisal of what insurgency is in the modern era. What are the drivers of rebellion, and how can military action influence them?

7. Insurgency is evolving -- both in its general, conceptual form, and in its specific practical manifestations. We should consider the forms of our new doctrine so that it can be adapted and reshaped accordingly -- on the fly.

8. Sometimes "the population is the prize." Sometimes it isn't. Doctrine provides a template, but it must be able to account for multiform reality rather than shoving square pegs into round "pop-centric" holes.

9. A template isn't a checklist. It's worth reconsidering whether the old axioms are still true... if they ever were. (80/20 political to military, anyone?)

10. COIN can't and won't always be about enabling host nation government. (What about counterinsurgency operations in support of military governance or an international provisional authority?) Our doctrine needs to get real about variable solutions to different problems.

11. Some of the generalized, prescriptive guidance presented in 3-24 is specious or outright wrong. To come up with real, meaningful "best practices" for COIN, we need to come to grips with the real, wide-ranging, sometimes uncomfortable history of rebellion and government response. No more caricatures.

12. 3-24 may have offered hope of "kinder, gentler war" to its many progressive exponents, and to that end it served a purpose: its popularity helped garner support for necessary changes to the way the U.S. military was doing business in the middle of the last decade. But practitioners know this is a chimera. There will always be brutality in war, even if we recognize that much of it is impermissible for the American military professional.

13. "Propaganda of the deed" is an important concept for the insurgent and counterinsurgent, and focused attention to the subject should help us think through the complex relationship between force, persuasion, volition, and compulsion. We need a better understanding of how perception actually influences action, not bumper stickers about the subordination of all other lines of effort to Information Operations.

I hope Carl, Crispin, and Mike won't feel like I've misrepresented their analysis here in offering my own distillations or amplifications. They've done great work here, and it strikes me as an exellent stepping-off point as the community begins to think about what we want and need out of our next COIN manual.

The Prine-Burke-Few Doctrine and the COINdinistra Manual

Ink Spots' friends-of-the-blog Carl Prine, Crispin Burke, and Mike Few (SWJ Editor) made the case this morning at the Small Wars Journal for a serious rethink and rewrite of FM 3-24 (Counterinsurgency). This is has been suggested from time to time, often by Carl as well others of the more COINtra bent, and I wholeheartedly agree. And I think these three thinkers and experienced counterinsurgents took the right approach: concise points on why the current doctrine is insufficient that should be readily apparent to anyone who has participated in COIN operations. I'm guessing they had some difficulty in word-smithing this piece as it's very hard for any group of people to agree on the prescriptions for a new manual, but the problems they identify are spot on. I would suggest adding a few more to the list, though.

1. The new manual should spend some time and space discussing counterinsurgency as it fits within and relates to the total spectrum of warfare. This gets to the authors' 5th point, but I don't think they went far enough. The problem with a manual that focuses on a subset of warfare is that it can often treat that subset as a one-off that has limited applicability to our understanding of warfare qua warfare. 3-24 does not state that this is the case for COIN, but its writing allows for that interpretation. From my perspective, this discussion goes beyond CT vs. COIN. If smart people sat down and wrote this well, it would be more about how to apply power to achieve foreign policy goals and how COIN tactics play in to this. A more general discussion, in my opinion, would also help address their #12: the use of violence.
2. Speaking of #12, the new manual should go beyond the fact that legitimate violence is an element of COIN and expand on how to use it: primarily the use of indirect and air fires. I've cited some stats previously on how much my brigade blew up during the Surge in Iraq. We dropped over a hundred thousand pounds of bombs and fired thousands of artillery and mortar rounds (I have no idea how many rotary wing engagements we had in the year) and yet we were hugely successful by most metrics - mainly an amazing decrease in violence in both our AO and in Baghdad (AQI was using our AO to funnel car bomb parts into the capital). We need a frank discussion on using this power to achieve our goals so the guy on the ground can use this information.
3. We need a better discussion of ends. I don't know that the new manual wants to wade into the minefield that is COIN metrics, but FM users need a better guide on how to set end goals for their COIN operations and how to understand if they're moving in the right direction, if they're not moving in the right direction, and when they've met those goals. The end states I wrote as a planner were simply terrible because we didn't know how to write them, resulting in platitudinous drivel such as "set the conditions so that the Iraqi people can self govern and protect their people in an environment were services are provided and a healthy economy exists" or some such crap. We just had no idea what we were working towards other than "better than things are now" - talk about mission creep potential.
4. Interagency, interagency, interagency. Division of labor at the USG level needs to get sorted out. As the U.S. Army and USMC move into a period of relative reset as Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, they're going to have to take a hard look at what they can afford (in time and money) to do in the future. Maybe building schools or hospitals or local governance councils in a war zone shouldn't be on the METL. Maybe it should, I don't know. But that analysis needs to be done so the next time we get into the nation building business everyone knows what is expected of them. I could write a book on this topic, because it's still so screwed up (you don't want to get me started on police reform, for instance). This would be some heavy lifting and depends on non-DoD participation, so I'm not going to hold my breath for it, but I think it needs to be addressed and eventually figured out.

Great job, gents - I hope your paper informs Leavenworth and that they make some serious changes to the doctrine. This is a great start and I hope it gets the ball moving.