The United States and Counterinsurgency Learning: A Sisyphean Task?

Ahmed S. Hashim

Context

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a character who was condemned by the gods to repeatedly roll a boulder up a hill only to see it roll back down the hill every time. Will the United States be condemned to endlessly re-learn counterinsurgency warfare (COIN) every occasion it finds itself caught in a campaign to fight insurgency? It seems that way. Contrary to general perceptions, the United States is no stranger to irregular warfare. In his book, Savage Wars of Peace, Max Boot details the dramatic history of U.S. involvement in ‘small wars’ or irregular wars from the very inception of the country. Yet, the United States went into Iraq not expecting an insurgency. Why does this happen so often in American military history? Also why does the United States often succeed in stumbling upon the right answers to fighting insurgencies but often too late in the game? Moreover, is it advisable for the United States to be directly and fully involved in large-scale COIN in a foreign country or is it better if it restricts itself to a smaller foot-print? As a result of the experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been a remarkable resurgence in interest in irregular warfare. This has been reflected in the flood of writings on the topics of insurgency and counterinsurgency and in the re-issuing of old classics of irregular warfare.

Historical Background

The purpose of this brief tour d’horizon of U.S. COIN experiences during the country’s modern history is to show that the American military is no stranger to irregular warfare. The United States of America owed its survival partly due to the heroic endeavors of American commanders fighting in an irregular manner against the British army. For example, in the southern theater of the American revolutionary struggle against the British, American commander, General Nathaniel Greene, was repeatedly beaten in conventional battles by professional British Redcoats. However, he turned out to be a master of irregular warfare. In the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 American General Winfield Scott devised effective countermeasures against the desultory incidents of irregular or ‘bandit’ warfare waged by Mexican insurgents against American forces inside Mexico during what was a largely conventional war between two states. The Native Americans waged a type of irregular warfare against the expansion of the United States. The Indians were good individual warriors and knew the land, but their tribal form of warfare was really not effective as insurgent warfare. Even then, American officers like General Crook discovered effective antidotes. The brutal American Civil War was a clash between an industrial entity, the North, and an agrarian one, the South. The Confederacy had no hope or expectation of decisively defeating and subjugating the Union. Rather, it hoped that it would make it prohibitively expensive for the Union to seek to decisively defeat the Confederacy. In this context, its salvation lay largely in its highly motivated and brilliantly led forces. The Confederates did not ignore irregular or insurgent warfare; there were some extensive episodes of insurgent warfare by both sides in some of the contested states. However, irregular warfare never really played a decisive part in a Confederate strategy of ‘national’ resistance against the Union forces.

During the 20th century, the United States found itself fighting insurgencies. This century marked not only two of the most bloody world wars, but also numerous and very bloody irregular conflicts. The U.S. successfully defeated an insurgency in the Philippines in 1899-1902. (See Timothy Deady’s Lessons from a Successful Counterinsurgency: The Philippines, 1899-1902,” Parameters, Spring 2005.) The army and the U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) fought irregular wars in the Americas in the era between the two world wars. Furthermore, the USMC was engaged in formulating one of the most brilliant expositions of small wars ever written, namely the Small Wars Manual. This appeared in 1939, and while much of it is obviously dated, its first several pages are still worth reading even now. The manual was written during a time of tension within the Corps between two groups at Quantico. One group argued that the future of the Marine Corps lay with amphibious warfare, while another group believed that it lay with irregular warfare. It was the latter group, naturally, which produced the Small Wars Manual. However, it appeared right on the eve of World War II and the U.S. entry into the war two years later. The Marine Corps found itself focusing on amphibious warfare in the Pacific; this became its area of expertise. Irregular warfare ‘went away’ and copies of the Small Wars Manual adorned many an officer’s bookcase and nothing more.

The post-World War II era witnessed the decline of former European colonial powers, paralleled with the rise of nationalist parties and ideologies in non-western societies which saw how a non-Western power, Japan, defeated colonial European powers such as the Dutch, French, and British decisively. These nationalist movements created their own modern insurgent and national liberation movements. While the U.S. was genuinely sympathetic to anti-colonial movements, they feared that the Communist bloc headed by the Soviet Union would take advantage of these movements and subvert them ideologically. The fact that these movements got arms and training from the Communists was extremely troublesome to U.S. policymakers. In the immediate aftermath of WWII, the U.S. was involved in Host Nations (HN) in advisory roles with the Filipino and Greek governments to defeat communist insurgencies in their respective countries after World War II. The U.S. did a particularly good job in both instances. What is really interesting about these government victories against Communist-inspired insurgencies is that the U.S. maintained a small foot-print; it sent advisors, trainers and arms. However, its role in helping counter these insurgencies was facilitated greatly by exogenous factors. In the Greek case, the Communists were defeated by their own foibles and mistakes – like taking on the refurbished and re-equipped regular Greek Army in conventional combat and also by the fact that they were abandoned by Stalin’s regime. In the Filipino case the Communist Huk rebellions were defeated by the ideas and practices of the visionary Filipino Minister of Defense and then President, Ramon Magsaysay. While one cannot deny the importance of the U.S. advisory effort and the work of the ‘spook’ and Counterinsurgency expert, U.S. General Edward G. Lansdale, it is unlikely that success would have come without the presence of Magsaysay.

The administration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was particularly worried by the potential for Communists to subvert nationalist movements in the underdeveloped and poor countries. If one of these countries fell to the Communists, then its neighbors were susceptible to an insidious ‘domino effect.’ The administration sought to make irregular warfare an important aspect of the military’s skill set and to move away from the Eisenhower administration’s policy of preparing almost exclusively for nuclear war. The Communists, argued the elite of the Kennedy administration, posed a threat across a broad spectrum of conflict, and one of them was conflict at the ‘lower’ and irregular level. The army was extremely reluctant to make COIN a focus. One general reportedly argued that any conventional soldier can handle an insurgency. Now this is true, in a larger sense, and this is meant to criticize the view that only special operations forces can really handle insurgencies and do COIN. Conventional soldiers can too, but not with a conventional military mind-set; conventional militaries need some profound organizational cultural changes – which do not come naturally – before they can do COIN effectively. In his well received and important book, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, U.S. Army Lieutenant-Colonel John Nagl examines why the British learned how to do COIN in Malaya and why the U.S. failed to do it in Vietnam. The former were able to change their military organizational culture. There were prior structural conditions that helped them achieve that change. They won in Malaya. The Americans were unable and unwilling to change their military organizational culture and learn COIN. They lost in Vietnam. Naturally, the defeat in the Vietnam War soured the American military concerning this type of warfare; and clearly reinforced the U.S. military’s penchant for hi-tech conventional warfare; which was ‘neat’ and ‘clean’ and did not require extended commitment. (See Sarah Sewell, “Modernizing U.S. counterinsurgency practice: rethinking risk and developing a national strategy,” Military Review, September-October 2006.) Even during that sanguinary war many within the U.S. military establishment understood the nature of the war and knew what needed to be done.

U.S. COIN in Iraq and FM 3-24

As a result of the painful experiences in Iraq, which have been analyzed extensively elsewhere, the United States Army and Marine Corps formulated a COIN manual, Field Manual 3-24 which lays out in detail how to defeat an insurgency and promote security, stability, and law and order within a society suffering large-scale violence. The U.S. military entered Iraq not expecting an insurgency, though it did get an unpleasant early taste of it during Operation Iraqi Freedom I. This gap was reinforced by the politicians back in Washington, D.C. stating emphatically that there was no insurgency. Ideological rigidity and doctrinal poverty mutually reinforced one another. Units in the field were left to wing it. Some commanders understood and developed their own ad hoc but effective COIN operations. Others did not, and were wedded to the mainstream organizational actually using force, or a culture of threatening - carrying sticks or iron rods referred to as the ‘hajji be good stick’.

However, the U.S. began to learn, although the process was arduous. FM 3-24 has been regarded as key evidence that the U.S. military is finally ‘getting it.’ But is this really the case? How relevant is the manual to the kinds of insurgencies that are occurring in the 21st century? FM 3-24 was a remarkable intellectual achievement undertaken by several officers and civilians under the direction of General David Petraeus, a former commander of the 101st Air Assault Division, and which found itself dealing with a segment of the Iraqi insurgency in the region around Mosul in 2003. However, while much of the manual is highly relevant to the situation on the ground in Iraq (and Afghanistan), some of it might be too backward-looking in the sense that it was heavily influenced by how to fight the kinds of insurgencies that took place during the 20th century.

In my view, the most successful insurgencies of the 20th century emerged out of two distinct schools. On the one hand, there was the Maoist protracted people’s revolutionary war and its variants in Vietnam. On the other hand, there were the nationalist wars of liberation theories and practice that began with the 20th century’s first successful nationalist insurgency: the Irish War of Independence, 1919-1921. Several other nationalist insurgencies sought to emulate it, namely the Jewish nationalist insurgency in Palestine against the British following World War II, the Algerian War of Independence against France, and the Palestinian national liberation movement under Yasser Arafat. One other school, the focoist theories of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Regis Debray, proved to be a success only in Cuba. The urban guerilla-terrorist school of insurgency which focuses on fighting within built-up areas may be making a come-back in the 21st century. It was not particularly successful in the 1960s and 1970s despite the existence of elaborate theoretical expositions by the Brazilians Carlos Marighella and Abraham Guillen. However, many parts of the world are experiencing dramatic urbanization, and many of these mega-cities lack security and essential services and are barely under central government control. However, there are caveats here, that our British colleagues often forget when they are criticizing the U.S. The British effort in Malaya at the beginning was a disaster; units were sent to Malaya from the British Army of the Rhine and thrown into battle against the Communist guerillas. Not surprisingly, the former adopted a conventional warfare mind-set. Moreover, the British have not been uniformly successful in COIN. They have had their share of disasters and mistakes from Northern Ireland in 1919-1921, through Palestine against a few Jewish insurgents, to Aden in southern Arabia.

Finally, we are also witnessing the emergence of radical Islamist insurgency theories and doctrines of guerilla warfare. While these share many traits or ideas in common with other and older doctrines of guerilla warfare, indeed, some of the Islamist or ‘jihadi’ strategic thinkers acknowledge borrowing from other insurgency doctrines that constitute a distinct paradigm. Their theories and practice need to be studied in detail and the army needs to be able to deal with this 21st century form of irregular warfare.

Is the Army Pushing Back Against COIN?

Is the ‘mainstream’ army happy with this new focus on COIN? It seems not. (See Guy Raz’s “Army Focus on Counterinsurgency Debated Within,” National Public Radio, August 15, 2008.) A somewhat acrimonious debate has broken out among officers within the U.S. Army. On one side, there are those who believe that the army is leaning too far in favor of focusing on the irregular wars approach. This erodes the U.S. military’s edge in conventional warfare, they argue, and it will leave the army dangerously exposed to and unprepared for the rise of a potential conventional opponent in the future. This is unfair criticism - none of the major pro-COIN officers or civilians, as far as I can ascertain, are irregular warfare fanatics who believe that the army should focus on nothing else but irregular warfare. The U.S. Army is without peer in conventional warfare. Most of our closest competitors are our allies. It is true that at some stage in the future, some frightful conventional enemy itching to fight the U.S. might appear. Right now, though, and for the immediate future, our problems in handling irregular warfare in Iraq. The disorganized and factionalized insurgency in Iraq – with nothing like the power and motivation of the Viet Minh or Viet Cong – has roiled the U.S. and damaged our prestige and national security. We cannot afford to ignore the ‘dirty’ or small wars of the 21st century.

Ahmed S. Hashim , a leading expert on counter-insurgency, is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Naval War College.