Another aspect of the debate centers on economics, our attempt to buy loyalty, and the creation of dependent populations, or a culture of entitlement, as debated at this SWJ post. I really do not think that COIN can be anything but armed state-building. I also believe that we should avoid involving ourselves in such a project of folly, especially given our propensity to underinvest, flail about, then leave. State-building takes time. Our impatience and our profligacy only further distorts fatally flawed socio-economic orders. Whether you are trying to leave a country capable of defeating the remnants of a civil war/insurgency, or a country capable of fending off its northern neighbor's powerful conventional army, you must create an economy that creates revenues, a populace that consents to state taxation, and a state that is capable of extracting resources from the economy without imploding it and turn those resources to beneficial ends. Principally, this includes securing its borders and holding a monopoly on violence within them. This is a massive undertaking in both resources and time. By pouring money out onto the ground in a firehose that cannot be absorbed, you are only washing more of the soil away and beating down the sprouts you want to nurture. You can't do COIN on the quick or cheap. We aren't interested in long term investments. We need to not do armed state-building unless we are going to be honest about the costs and requirements. We won't be honest about the costs and requirements unless they are clear and compelling matters of core national interest.
The slogans about dollars and ballots as more important than bullets are all so much nonsense. You cannot weaponize economic and political development. This is a long, complex process. Weapons create simple, first order effects. They rend flesh and splatter blood and tissue everywhere, if they don't vaporize it. This is easy to understand and to control. Dollars and ballots have effects we cannot understand, even with great study. Dollars float around, changing hands over and over again, often only strengthening skewed socio-economic power structures. This feeds into the political realm, where ballots do not always create great democratic virtue. Often, money, power, and organization favors those very forces that have appropriated the resources of economy and society. As a result, the state can be even weaker after the election than before it. The danger in elections is not the illiberal Islamist bogeymen we love to demonize. The danger is the legitimization of kleptocracy, sectarianism, and the like. None of this, can we control as we so arrogantly lead ourselves to believe.
By shouting about the fine points of COIN, people are missing the broader lessons. We cannot do these wars well at the grand scale. We can adapt to the tactical realities, we can create a lot of local successes, but in real state-building, we have nothing but a record of failure. This is the lesson.
Additional comments after input from readers:
-I was rightly called out on my line "in real state-building, we have nothing but a record of failure." This runs against the history of the postwar reconstruction under the Marshall and Dodge Plans in Europe and Japan. These support my language above that in cases of compelling core interest as perceived by the public, the friction of the bureaucracy can be overcome. Additionally, these were cases of state rebuilding, not state-building. We had credible partners to work with, who in fact did most of the real work of rebuilding, supported by U.S. funds to address the capital crisis in these countries postwar. While there are lessons to be gleaned from these cases, my assertion holds that we will not be able to put these lessons into practice in the case of small wars of peripheral interest as the phenomena described above will dominate. See the comments for a bit more discussion.
-For the commenter on Doctrine Man's Facebook page who asserts that COIN is not state-building and therefore I wasted electrons, this is, in a way, right, but also irrelevant. The tactics of COIN (TM) are not state-building. However, in order to wage a successful counter-insurgency and to leave a state behind that no longer needs to be propped up, you have to successfully conduct state-building. A bunch of CERP projects, a flawed vote, and tons of aid dollars only distort the socio-economic and political entities you leave behind. COIN may not be state-building, but you have to state-build to truly and finally defeat an insurgency. If we are honest with ourselves about this, our appetite for COIN and scenarios where insurgency is likely to pop up will be far more circumscribed.
"...but in real state-building, we have nothing but a record of failure..."
ReplyDeleteNot even...the US is not good at COIN. No argument. The US is brilliant at high-end MCO. No one can be good at everything not should they want to nor attempt to be.
For example of US success in 'real state-building', have a look at Japan, South Korea, ALL of Western Europe (not your fault what the Europeans turned it into) and all those other nations that have had the freedom to develop under the mantle of US security...Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Israel, Taiwan, etc, etc...
Take the credit where it is due...
I think some of SJPONEILL'S examples are not well-taken - Israel, for example, was not the US client state (or at least the recipient of massive foreign aid) that it is today for some time - but his larger point is. Taiwan and South Korea, in particular, might offer some lessons about how we indeed do in fact aid or participate in state-building. The article "Lessons from Democratic Transitions: Case Studies from Asia," by Tom Ginsburg, in the Winter 2008 issue of "Orbis," pages 104-105 comes to mind (external existential security threats created the impetus for "clean" and effective governance). I also think it's important to ask whether the US has, in fact, ever conducted COIN successfully. The Philippines comes to mind as a tentative "yes," and maybe there are others. (I don't know much about them, but Michael Few keeps referencing El Salvador, Colombia and the Philippines, to cite a few possible examples.) Is there something fundamentally different about how the US conducted COIN circa 1900 versus 2011 that we should expect, in the present and future, "nothing but a record of failure"? My bias, to be upfront, is that we are indeed prone to ineffectual flailing absent a self-perceived existential need to be involved in a conflict. But I'm not sure I'm right, and perhaps more importantly, who determines whether a conflict is existential, and how, isn't always very straightforward. (Defending western Europe in 1948 - sure; defending A in 19XX? - harder to understand, perhaps.)
ReplyDeleteADTS
SJPO and ADTS,
ReplyDeletePoint well taken on the state-building points. I do state that in cases of clear and compelling interest, this interest overcomes the friction of the bureaucracy. This applies to the postwar cases. The caveat, however, is that those states were being rebuilt, not built. While the U.S. made a massive investment in the form of the Marshall and the Dodge Plans, they relied heavily on their counterparts to do the actual reconstruction of institutions and infrastructure. I am less familiar with the case of S. Korea, but I think this was more of a case of shielding an ally and letting it develop over the long-term than our short-term COIN state-building in 10 days adventures. I'm going to insert language into the post to address these issues.
As for the COIN 1900 versus COIN 2000, I have to think more about that, but I think our trumpeted success in the PI has a lot to do with it being a backward country on a set of islands in the 1900s. As for Mike's cases of El Sal, Colombia, etc, the U.S. didn't really take as much of a central role in COIN and state-building there. Perhaps there are some lessons, but I think they would support rather than topple my thesis.
"the U.S. didn't really take as much of a central role in COIN and state-building there."
ReplyDeleteThis is NOT nuance; this is a key to understanding the difference. In El Sal, Colombia, and the Philippines, we were NOT imposing our will. We deferred to the actual state seeking quiet influence through an 80% political, 20% military mixture built on networks, trust, advice, time, and PATIENCE. We were NOT telling the people how to live. We RESPECTED their choices.
El Sal and the PI are more about "waging an active defense" against decline and failure than state-building and COIN. They are the proof for an ounce of prevention vs a pound of cure.
DeleteAnd we could have done the same thing in Iraq in 2003 and A'stan in 2002.
ReplyDeleteThe whole idea that we must invade, occupy, democratize, and police Muslim lands because of terrorist attacks that hit us hard because of our rickety border-protection strikes me as akin to the 1960s view that crime could only be fought with extensive anti-poverty efforts in the inner city. In reality, cops, jails, and gated communities in the suburbs did most of the trick. The most cost-effective means of addressing certain persistent problems is not to attack “root causes”–a technique which is both expensive and not terribly effective– but instead to address symptoms as they appear. We now know that jails, cops, long sentences, and the like did a lot more to combat crime than “urban renewal” ever did. In the case of terrorists, it may mean letting these countries fester, monitoring them as much as possible with our intelligence sources, keeping our borders secure, and bombing training camps and nation-state sponsors of terrorism vigorously as they reveal themselves. This approach certainly beats the Bush-Obama policy of decades-long occupations of the world’s hell holes with very little to show for it.
ReplyDeleteSIR,
ReplyDeleteI see counterinsurgency as one facet to a larger "irregular warfare" mission. I don't think that counterinsurgency can be reduced to a tactical or strategic mission as there are elements of both inherent in the mission. My issue with the article was the view that COIN = state-building. COIN has a deep relationship in state-building in that it facilitates the host nation's ability to provide state functions to "insurgent held" areas. COIN is one part of a larger mission and I feel that people are focused on that mission because of the press that it gets. We all tend to forget peacekeeping and stability operations, security force assistance, et al. that go Shona ba Shona with the COIN mission. I agree with you that there is a state-building function within the irregular warfare mission, but COIN isn't the lead in this process.
The issue that we've seen within Afghanistan and Iraq is the military taking the lead in state-building, usually under the guise of COIN, due to a lack of fundamental cooperation between the civilian and military communities. Both the Army and Marine Corps have been called to take on missions that would have been better served by USAID, DoS, etc., however because of the very essence of how civ-mil relationships are structured the missions relegated to the military, I believe, erroneously.
Finally, I don't see much of a rush to theaters that would focus on COIN in the future. It is true that COIN is a long-term strategy and cannot be accomplished within a 9 month or 12 month tour of duty. What the dialogue should be focused on is that of "irregular warfare," which is the type of warfare that the US has been fighting for the majority of it's 236 years, with a few notable exceptions.
On additional reads of your article, I think we agree on more than we disagree, yet I maintain that COIN is a viable and relevant strategy. Do we do it perfectly? No, but we have the capacity and ability to do it well.
Your statement "No matter how many lessons we learn, our national security decision-making apparatus will churn out suboptimal policies." largely echoes that of Amy Zegart (former student of Condi Rice and author of "Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC"). YOu could have stopped there - its not COIN or any other thing that will lead the US to adopt Sub optimum strategy - sub optimum strategy is the only thing the system is capable of churning out due to bureaucratic infighting. How much of the COIN effort in Iraq floundered in the earlier years over bureaucrats "not playing" after they didn't get their way? It is inevitable. However - it was not always so. The key difference between the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Japan and Germany was, in part, the fact that there already existed a social order to build on amongst a homogeneous group of people, but that the NSC, CIA, and JSC/DoD system didn't exist or was still in formation when it happened. The National Security Act fundamentally altered the US National Security apparatus, and while it functioned ok for the purpose of its reorganization (Cold War) everything since has only nibbled at that original reform - which was fundamentally flawed, just not as flawed as the Soviet system it sought to defeat. It was, though, horrifically inefficient and full of bureaucratic infighting - which has largely resulted in all sorts of bad policy (Korea, Vietnam, etc...) You are right about missing the bigger picture - you can't "fix COIN" if the overall system is designed to fail. Bad COIN is a symptom of a greater disease. The entire National Security Apparatus (especially in the Intelligence community) and NSC is in need of serious, massive reform - but as Dr. Zegart points out - there are no votes in it - so Congress has no desire or will to enact the necessary legislation short of a Presidential push, but even with impetus, the end result because of bureaucratic bargaining will likely be no better, and probably worse than the existing system.
ReplyDeleteAnon 1120,
ReplyDeleteI agree with much of what you say. I remember seeing Zegart's book reviewed, but forgot about it until now. I need to take a look at it.
The part where I think we disagree, at least from my reading of your comment, is that I don't think this is solely the fault of reorganizations. I think the system worked in WWII because the force of the threat and the clarity of the interests at stake overcame the friction and dysfunction of the bureaucracy. Maybe this is a flawed view, but it is a point that I think is important. Am I correct? Would the system work if the imperatives were compelling? Or would we fail in the face of an existential threat?
The Ghost of Amy Zhegart??? Peter, that could be your title of your next article, and it does help explain both the current foreign policy, economic, and political tensions. The book is very good, and it speaks to how our system in general is flawed to prevent a Machiavellian style of dictatorship.
ReplyDelete" I really do not think that COIN can be anything but armed state-building. "
ReplyDeleteOh, come on. You're just being provocative. You know that most COIN through the ages has not involved the counter-Maoist sort of nation building.
Carl