The real debate about COIN

Mon, 01/19/2009 - 2:55pm

By Peter Feaver

The problem with Chris's post on COIN is that it takes the existing debate at
face value, as if it really were a debate about the best way to do COIN or
its place in American national security. I don't think it is.

Let's stipulate for the sake of argument that all of the COIN critics Chris cites are sincere patriots who honestly believe what they have written and have no deeper agenda. Setting them aside, the larger debate seems driven by one of three deeper considerations. First, anti-COIN is a convenient way to argue against American military involvement in any fashion because the most urgentnear-term threats requiring military operations involve COIN. So if your ideology tells you that the dominant problem in the world is American militarism; if you look at recent history and can only find cases where we did use military force and shouldn't have and can find no cases where we did not use military force and should have; if you think that getting defeated in Iraq (or Afghanistan) would have a salutary chastening effect on American adventurism; if any or all of that applies, then it makes sense to argue against Gates' emphasis on COIN now. If the U.S. military cannot or will not do COIN, then the U.S. military cannot and will not be operational.

It is no coincidence that the last time this debate arose, in the waning
days of the Vietnam war, the anti-COIN side won largely on the basis of a
"no more Vietnam" trump card. Stripping the U.S. military of the know-how
to do COIN was seen as a way to prevent civilians from ever using the
military again in another Vietnam.

Second, anti-COIN is a convenient way to argue for parochial inter-service
interests. If there were no pesky COIN requirements, then the Air Force and
Navy would be the dominant actors in inter-service rivalry and demand the
lion's share of resources.

Third, anti-COIN is a convenient way to argue for parochial intra-service
interests, for the specialties that used to dominate the ground forces but
have ceded pride of place to the light infantry and special forces that
dominate COIN. A good marker of this deeper argument is if someone is
hard-pressed to celebrate the increased proficiency that soldiers have shown in fighting the no-kidding war we are already in, and instead worry that these same soldiers would, without further training, perform less well in
training exercises involving tank vs. tank battles against, well, they never
really say who we would be waging a tank war against but it sure sounds a
lot like the old Red Army.

That does not mean that the current balance of effort in DoD should be accepted without question or criticism. Even if one stipulates that COIN is
an essential capability, there are at least two other legitimate debates
that the Obama Administration will have to address. The first concerns the
proper mix between COIN-by-us and COIN-by-them. COIN-by-us keeps the
know-how, skill-mix, and force mix within the U.S. ground forces to do a
major COIN operations with U.S. forces in the lead (think Iraq 2007-2008).
COIN-by-them narrows the U.S. role down to training and advising and
specialty functions like logistics, command and control, close air support,
and so on (think Iraq 2009-20??). If Obama is serious about ramping up in
Afghanistan, he may have to keep a major COIN-by-us capability, but there is a reasonable debate to be had over whether it would not be better to do
Afghanistan in a COIN-by-them mode.

The second concerns how, in a challenging fiscal environment, to keep investing in the other kinds of non-COIN capabilities we need to deal with threats and challenges on the horizon -- to hedge against the emergence of a peer-rival/competitor with sufficient military capacity to pose a direct
threat to our global force projection capability. When the anti-COIN debate
first began, this was the concern that was flagged. The concern struck me
as legitimate but premature. Before we worried about a future war we hope
we never have to fight, we first had to win the war we were in and that
required improving COIN capacity. In 2006 and early 2007, it was no sure
thing that we would prevail in Iraq. Now, Iraq seems to be on a surer
footing and so the medium-term and long-term trade-offs bite more painfully.

These two legitimate concerns blend together: to save money for longer-term hedging, we may need to shift to more of a COIN-by-them posture. I expect the Obama team to wrestle with this problem in the next Quadrennial Defense Review. I just hope they are not side-tracked by ideological agendas regarding "militarism" or parochial service rivalries.

Peter Feaver | Permalink | | Comments? Login or register


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I couldn't agree more

by TH on Mon, 01/19/2009 - 5:40pm

The two keys of this article have to be, "they never
really say who we would be waging a tank war against but it sure sounds a lot like the old Red Army," and, "before we worried about a future war we hope we never have to fight, we first had to win the war we were in." They add a much-needed dose of realism and pragmatism to the debate. I think certain peace-time leaders refuse to admit we're at war.

I've honestly never heard

by Brett on Mon, 01/19/2009 - 6:26pm

I've honestly never heard anyone argue against COIN on the basis of stopping US militarism. Most the arguments against it that I've heard are that it

1)Turned the use into a personnel-heavy army with no firepower, unprepared to fight against not only a future peer competitor, but wars like Gulf War I, where conventional military superiority prevented a long, drawn-out conflict;

2)Resulted in the gutting of long-term modernization projects that will be severely harmful to the US military;

3)That it is dependent on largely fluke circumstances. We wouldn't even be talking shifting to a large COIN-prominent force if it weren't for the Iraq invasion; Afghanistan never drew, and probably won't draw, as much personnel as Iraq has.

Go Devils!

by ELindsey on Mon, 01/19/2009 - 7:29pm

This whole “crusaders vs. conservatives” thing deserves its recent salience, but the underlying dilemma goes way back—-should the army do what it likes to do, or what civilian policy makers would like it to do? Really this is “transformation” take two.

Recognizing it as such, Prof. Feaver's point is an interesting one--one must always consider parochial interests in matters of military doctrine. Of course, there’s plenty to go around… For an Army fearing “strategic irrelevance” a few years before Iraq, a COIN focus would be a windfall (albeit without many super cool new toys) and a great way to turn the tables on the Air Force and get revenge for the whole RMA era.

As for the national interest, COIN capability probably is a strategic imperative. Still, IMO it’s the right way of fighting the wrong kind of war. We should not be overconfident of our ability to handle situations that should probably be avoided like the plague. COIN will always be a b****, even with all our newfound “expertise”...

Avoid like plague

by J Thomas on Tue, 01/20/2009 - 4:50pm

As for the national interest, COIN capability probably is a strategic imperative. Still, IMO it’s the right way of fighting the wrong kind of war. We should not be overconfident of our ability to handle situations that should probably be avoided like the plague.

Agreed. When the time comes that you have to take a big army and occupy a country where a nonhostile government can't get sufficient support to do most of the work, things have already gone desperately wrong.

What fraction of our resources do we want to put into preparing for that problem? How many competing potential problems deserve resources?

A military force is about

by AllanGreen on Wed, 01/21/2009 - 9:21am

A military force is about adaptation. Adaptation takes time. A good force, makes the curve steep, but keeps time on its side. There is only so much you can anticipate. Frankly, looking into the future, you can identify at least a zillion threats. But the most tangible ones are those you can see now - the military capacities of peers/contenders. Fifty years from now, COIN can be giganormous enterprise, beyond DoD imperatives. The best way to cut down the eventual costs of thisis by focusing on the non-tradable goods aspect facilitating insurgencies. I.e. urban development schemes, and strengthen sovereignty though increased administrative capacity. Literally, build cities that wont easily translate into guerrilla assets during an insurgency.

COIN and democracy promotion

by J Thomas on Thu, 01/22/2009 - 11:57pm

COIN and democracy promotion are two competing approaches. If you actually promote democracy then you mostly don't need COIN.

If we had wanted to promote democracy in iraq we could have done it. Go to cities and towns and set up elected town councils, with full local powers. Make it clear that a town council that tells US troops to stay out of their town will be obeyed. Find people whose honesty is generally respected to watch over the elections. Once you have towns and cities mostly working, then invite them to make regional alliances, with voting for regional councils. The shape of the provinces gets determined by who chooses to join each one. And when the provinces are mostly working, invite them to make national alliances. If some provinces want to be separate countries, or if some groups of provinces do, that's the cue to let them. They can join up later if they want to and can negotiate it.

We had civilians hired to start that process. They were going to cities and towns and setting up local elections, and it was working. But Bremer decided he didn't want anybody religious in government, so he disbanded the local elected governments and put in people he chose himself. Right about that time iraqis decided we were lying about democracy promotion and they forced us into full COIN instead. Getting rid of the elected local governments would have been enough to do that, we didn't have to try to kill a prominent iraqi politician, al Sadr, who wanted us to go away. But we did, and all of a sudden our democracy promotion teams couldn't go anywhere in iraq without US soldiers to guard them.

Democracy works better than revolution, when it works. You don't have to kill anybody, you only have to get 51% voting on your side. If it's a shooting war and the population splits 51:49 you don't have an easy victory, likely everybody will lose. But if it's a fair election and you get 20% of the vote, you're probably better off not to fight. Start convincing people to vote different next time.

Places like iraq and afghanistan where there are plenty of weapons, it might be better to start out with democracy that obviously reflects the actual strength. Maybe have voting only for men, and they have to bring a gun and enough bullets that they can hit a target once at 50 feet. The test isn't to weed people out, it's to show that they actually have a gun they can sort of use. So if you get 20% of the vote and the winner gets 30%, not only do you see they're truly stronger than you are. Also the uncommitted 50% is real important. Better get a sense whether they'd back you or at least stand aside. You'd better get some of them backing you because you aren't going to control a lot with only 20% of the force. So you try to see who'll back you and who'll stand aside, and you might as well be getting them to vote for you in the next election instead....

Sure, it's good for women to get the vote too, and grandmothers. But to start out with it's better for politicians to keep it in mind that every single voter who didn't vote for him has a gun and knows how to use it.

But there's a big problem with democracy promotion. When you set up a real democracy, people vote the way they want to. They might not vote in the best interest of the USA. If you want to make sure they do what's best for the USA then you need fake democracy promotion and you need a strong COIN program. Is it worth it?

Imagine that when we got into a dispute with another nation maybe we wound up fighting them, and invading them, and we achieve whatever goals we set out for and leave them with a democracy that represents them. We might have to fight them again in a few years, because we didn't occupy them long enough to make sure they were properly re-educated. If our army is good at beating other armies, is it worse to have to beat the same foreign nation twice, or is it worse to beat them once and spend X years doing COIN? Could we get away with letting other nations have real democracies and we don't have to do COIN at all?