COIN

COIN

Hearts and Minds
1. Myth: Secures victory over insurg. by winning support of populations
  1. Community based/suggests cooperation
    1. Why people Matter
      1. Clausewitzian concern with undermining "will of enemy to risist by the application of force BUT still thinks in terms of "total war"
        Mall - Populations are water and insurgents are fish
        Population control = prerequisite for undermining enemy's capacity to exist
        Kitson - Poison the Water if necessary
  2. Rebellions can be made by 2%, who is best positioned to win support?
  3. Beckett - Convince locals of your values to "win" them
2. Reality - Cover for coercion
  1. Paradoxes
    1. Ideology
      1. Assumes ideological battle can be won
      2. Or de-ideologises it to a matter of "development or Control
    2. Cooperation or Control?
      1. A War for the people (Thompson)?
      2. Control of the masses through a tight organization is the master weapon of modern warfare Trinquier
Coin Strategies
1. Objective: Destroy Enemy AND Support/Sanctuary for Rebels
  1. Thompson, tmepler, Landsdale, Trinquier, Gulala, Vann, Kitson, Kilcullen, Nagl, Petraeus
  2. Cooperative (Hearts and Minds)
    1. Paradox: Pursuasion (cooperation and co-option
      1. Military - good for coercion, not right tool for cooperation
        Lack skills to win communal support, excel in alienating communities
      2. The "Uncommitted"
        Nagel - "the uncommitted"
        Assumes communities are uncommitted, foreign soldiers will be more attractive to local communities & have cultural knowledge to win them over, that demands can be met
        Ahistorical/Acontextual
        Disregard for ideological dimensions
      3. Reality: Psychology's emphasis on 'individuals' and social realities of communal resistance
      4. HAM Strategy and Tactics - still involve force
        Kilkullen - Willingness to show local people that supporting the enemy risks harm and hardship (hidden coercion
    2. Purely military victory impossible
      1. Templer& Thompson - Malaya
        Thompson: Ink Spot Approach: clear, hold, build, concentrate forces and resources on securing an area then spread out
        Flaws: temporal and spacial
        Assumes timing controlled by CIs, and that a foreign timetable can be imposed
        assumes different parts of country are "one size fits all"
        HACK: Myth: Templar stress on coercion - systematic population and spacial control AND reform (elite cooperation, greater political/economic inclusion, land reform(forced relocation), etc.
        Briggs plan (british would leave): correlates with decline of insurgency, not hearts and minds
        Nagl - Says British Military (Templer) open to Tactical Innovation/ learning/change
      2. Landsdale Philippines/Vietnam
      3. Vann - Vietnam
      4. Petraeus FM3-24 2006
        Force counterproductive, money is ammunition, stability operations (state building, development, co-option, long commitment
        "neutral or passive majority" = fundamental error
        More force = counterproductive (an operation that kills 5 insurgents is counterproductive if collateral damage leads to recruitment of fifty more
        Everyone has their price?
        Smart Coin
        Armed Social Work/New Imperialism
        Military Alternatives
        Human Terrain System
        Rhone:
        Authorized 40 million to assign teams of anthropologists to Iraq/Afghanistan
        Militarized social scientists
        stabilitzation/development experts
        McFate - national security should be infused with anthropology - a discipline created to support war fighting in the tribal zone
        Ignorance of culture at tactical level endangers both civilians and troops
        Project Minerva (2008-)
        Criticism: Gonzalez - 'culturally informed occupation"
        Lessons: focus on people (human terrain), proximity (don't commute), work across boundaries (agency, civil and military), exercise initiative (get out ahead of enemy), let the facts speak for themselves, Learn and Adapt, Live our values
  3. Subordination: Coercive/Control
    1. Paradox: Subordination (coercion and control)
      1. providing security/destroying insurgency- how compatible w/winning support?
      2. Plays into hands of revolutionary insurgents, defeat associated with own organizations/politics, not failures of military leadership or doctrine, disregard for ROL or HR
    2. concern with security and military tactics
      1. Kilcullen
        Does Coercion win HAM? - framing COIN force as "protectors" against"intimidation
        "localization" of control - paramilitaries, co-option eg. "vietnamisation" afghanisation training etc.
        Force = shia militias into security forces? Afghanistan?
      2. Kitson
        Kitson - Low intensity operations- defeat = long term commitments, district by district - food rationing - British could ration food, those who fed insurgents could starve, cut off insurgents from population (technically legal
      3. Gulala
      4. Aussaresses
      5. Trinquier
        Modern Warfare - Popularized 1962 - Vietnam - Good intelligence = success - quick and decisive military victory- short term it worked but long term strategic failure
    3. Cromwell "to win a war of that sort you must be ruthless" - Montgomery to Percival - today public opinion precludes such methods
    4. Tactics of population control
      1. Fixed security structures
      2. concentration camps
        death squads, torture
      3. Genocide
      4. Physical Barriers
      5. Resettlement/Ethnic Cleansing
      6. Routine abuse of civil liberties
History/Myth
1. "It Works"
  1. Developed from Military tactics
    1. History: narrative/Counter-narrative
      1. framed as not occupation or conquest, as benevolent co-option, modernization, development, progress -'civilizing mission, pacification, stabilization
      2. By empires to maintain control regimes
        Fall of empires = fail of coin?
      3. by colonizers to eradicate or control indigenous peoples
    2. military theorists
      1. Modern Myths
        Coin Works
        British Model
        Poitical, civil, military coordination manages "end of empire"
        French Model
        brute force undermined by lack of political will
        Hearts and Minds
        Reforms come after defeat of insurgencies
        Templer Reforms in Malaya (1950s) after insurgency peaked
        No interment camps for chinese
        JP Vann in Vietnam - social revolution to win over people
        Not employed well
      2. Writing about direct experience of defeat of empires (they lost?)
Dynamics
1. Structures Conflict
  1. Insurgency/Cinsurgency dynamic interactions
    1. Escalation of violence
      1. More and Stronger COIN needed
  2. Intervening space btw outbreak & resolution of conflict
Military COIN: Ineffective at Best, Counterproductive At Worst
1. Objective: Destroy Enemy AND support and sanctuary for rebels
  1. Theoretical Dilemmas
    1. Biggest problem: lack of strategic objective, struggles about nationalism and state building usually more clearly strategized
      1. Exit Plan
        State and nation building (technocratic elites, fixes)
        Propaganda War vs. substantive reform
        Building Govt. legitimacy through provision of goods = unsustainable, HN can't develop its own capacity
        Failure to address grievances (while insurgency can)
        Goods and services - western legitimacy, may not be shared
        Luttwak- implies one kind of politics in which popular support is important or decisive and can be won by providing better government - persistence of dictatorship shows that government needs no popular support when it has obedience
        establishment of armed local police to create stability
        Can lead to dictators and other criminal entrepreneurs (Beckett)
      2. Porch: Difficulty translating "lessons learned" no one size fits all
    2. "Presence" alienates communities"
      1. More troops = more opposition
      2. Using local troops = exacerbates ethnically divided societies
      3. Infrastructure
      4. Living with "presence"
      5. Excesses
    3. Difficulty following guidelines stated by theorists
      1. Requires Intelligence (how to obtain)
        Drone - intelligence led, no contact at all
        Luttwak: counter-surveillance, interrogation, mass detention Human Vs. Technical intelligence
        SPECIFY COIN: Arabic speaking interrogators, cultural instruction
        Technological Vs. Human intelligence
      2. Proportionality/Discrimination restraints?
        When COIN resorts to same brutality as insurgents
        Sexual Violence
        Indiscriminate Targeting of population
        Collateral Damage: Killing 5 insurgents, but collateral damage leads to recruitment of 50 more
      3. Cultural awareness?
        Naiivety of forces
      4. Longetivy of COIN - What is victory??
        Development (costs, selling it at home)
        political will for "long war"
        Morale
      5. Single Minded focus on military response - need for political, economic and informational (propaganda operations) Kilcullen
      6. Nagl: Lack of institutional Flexibility/Learning
  2. Military Capacity Dilemmas
    1. Capacity Problem: doctrine, recruitment, training, culture
      1. Military purpose: break states, not build them
      2. Pre-Post conflict psychological disorders
      3. Training - what does it do?
    2. Lesson learning: history of interaction with communities
      1. Can't apply lessons from one COIN context to another -Luttwak, etc.
    3. Military Tactics - "corporals wars"
      1. Low-level decision making
        "strategic corporals"
        Low intensity Wars = small units
    4. Concequences of Institutional military culture
      1. getting intelligence from hostile community?
      2. Search and destroy, kills - obsession with "contact"
      3. Difficulty of restraint in force - adrenaline rush
      4. "terrorizing terrorists"= terrorizing communities
      5. Cultural Ignorance
      6. Weapons/technology barrier
    5. Luttwak: ineffectiveness of traditional armies against insurgents, insurgents commanding silence of population can't be overcome by technical means
    6. Nagl - Organizational culture of army - fight conventional wars - prevents organizational learning (pessimistic that this can change)
    7. US Military = Wrong for the Job
      1. Weinberger-Powell Doctrine - questions that must be answered before going to war
        is NS threatened? do we have an obtainable objective? do we understand the consequences, do we have an exit strategy?
        Purpose- avoid Vietnam, result Desert Storm
    8. McFate: Military has situational, not cultural awareness
  3. Information Wars
    1. How open is media war front?
    2. How cooperative is the media?
    3. Capacity to manage news
  4. Case Study: Iraq
    1. The Debate
      1. COIN Success?
        Kilcullen - shift in strategies from transitioning security towards Iraqi forces to imposing security directly by implementing classic COIN techniques
        Flipping of Sunni tribes "Sunni Awakening"
        Provided opportunity for dealing with political and reconstruction issues
      2. COIN Insignificant?
        Porch - tactical innovations are insignificant whereas insurgencies occur at strategic/political level
        Sunni awakening- already happening
        Porch - Violence in Iraq subsided as Shia finished up ethnic cleansing, combined with coalition security operations - bullied Sunnis
        Fig Leaf - temporary condition of security that allowed US to leave without resolving fundamental issues at the heart of the insurgency
        Porch - Repression rather than persuasion created security - no HAM
      3. Conclusion
        Narratives reflect goals
        Porch - old school military guy
        Petraeus - media manipulator
        Conflicting conclusions about historical events
        Lack of clear data
        can't interview insurgents
Definitions
1. Terrain
  1. Fought in urban, to modern, to desert to jungles
2. Insurgents (Beckett)
  1. Operate in difficult turrain
  2. Have local knowledge
  3. Have a degree of support among local population
  4. Insurgency, Rebellion, or Civil War - insurgency removes legitimacy
3. Coin
  1. Regular armies against irregular forces (Porch)
  2. Political contest between COIN and insurgents for support and confidence of HN (FM)
  3. Foreign vs. Domestic?
  4. Cooperative vs. Coercive?
Alternatives?
1. Luttwak; Must be willing to govern/occupy or at least "out terrorize the terrorists" - US and other govts can't do that
  1. OR use ordinary administrative functions against insurgents without violence - government offices, permits, rewards, etc - US can do this but requires OTHER means other than military

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	Created by Rachel Gabriel almost 9 years ago