¿El fin de las doctrinas de contrinsurgencia?

Se le puede conceder a Clausewitz que el mayor dilema intelectual que enfrenta un político y un jefe militar es definir el tipo de conflicto al que se está enfrentando. Otra cosa muy distinta es circunscribir la guerra a su estrecha concepción concencional. Precisamente, luego de 10 años de guerra contra el terrorismo, voces en los EE.UU. abogan por una vuelta a los ideales trinitarios de la guerra clásica que pregonara el famoso general prusiano. Nos preguntamos si esto debería ser así.

 

COIN is Dead: U.S. Army Must Put Strategy Over Tactics

By Gian P. Gentile | 22 Nov 2011


Patrulla COIN de Marines en Afganistán

There is perhaps no better measure of the failure of American strategy over the past decade than the fact that in both Iraq and Afghanistan, tactical objectives have been used to define victory. In particular, both wars have been characterized by an all-encompassing obsession with the methods and tactics of counterinsurgency. To be sure, the tactics of counterinsurgency require political and cultural acumen to build host-nation governments and economies. But understanding the political aspects of counterinsurgency tactics is fundamentally different from understanding core American political objectives and then defining a cost-effective strategy to achieve them. If it is to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past decade, American strategic thinking must regain the ability to link cost-effective operational campaigns to core policy objectives, while taking into consideration American political and popular will.

In war, results count. And in Iraq and Afghanistan, the gap between promised outcomes and actual, meaningful results is enormous. In Iraq, al-Qaida continues to carry out numerous, deadly attacks every month against Iraqi security forces. The fundamental political issues that divide the country’s ethno-sectarian populations have yet to be resolved, and America will leave the country with its regional adversary, Iran, in the driver’s seat. Afghanistan seems to be headed down the same road. Unfortunately these actual results have been obscured by the false promise of the tactical methods of counterinsurgency.

Rather than seeing the past 10 years of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan as a potent reminder of war’s complexity and, more importantly, of the limits to what it can accomplish, the American military has embraced the idea that better tactics can overcome serious shortcomings in strategy and policy. The ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu said thousands of years ago that “strategy without tactics is the slow road to victory,” but “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Though still relevant, Sun Tzu’s brilliant formulation of the relationship between tactics and strategy is nowhere to be found in current American strategic thinking.

The U.S. Army is in dire need of a conversation on strategy, one that looks critically at the past 10 years of war and asks hard questions about the operational methods employed. Unfortunately, the only thing the Army seems able to talk about is the tactics of counterinsurgency, under the flawed assumption that counterinsurgency has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan. The triumphant narrative of counterinsurgency might allow the U.S. to wrap its withdrawal from Iraq, and eventually from Afghanistan, in an illusion of victory. But the reality in both wars is that, despite much treasure spent and many good people killed and wounded, we will eventually withdraw without having achieved any appreciable strategic gain. Nevertheless, some senior American military and political leaders continue to believe that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan offer some kind of rich trove of lessons for future war.

The recent past confirms what we know from history, something that U.S. Gen. Matthew Ridgway summed up in the 1950s: The “primary purpose of an army is to be ready to fight effectively at all times.” The U.S. Army might be ordered to carry out a wide range of missions by its political masters, including conducting counterinsurgency operations and acting as a constabulary force in a foreign occupation. But first and foremost, before anything else, the Army must be ready to fight effectively at all levels of command. This, and not a search for lessons of strategic value from the past 10 years of counterinsurgency warfare, should be the guiding principle for Army leaders as they look to the future.

Future threats for U.S. ground forces promise to be quite lethal, ranging from state-on-state warfare to hybrid warfare to low-end guerilla warfare. Constabulary forces based on light infantry and optimized for wars like Iraq and Afghanistan will be highly vulnerable and open to catastrophic destruction in this lethal, future environment. Instead, future land battlefields demand a ground force built around the pillars of firepower, protection and mobility. Moreover, this future ground force needs to be able to move and fight in dispersed, distributed operations in an age where the accessibility of weapons of mass destruction makes a ground force that concentrates vulnerable to annihilation. Much will have to change in order to transform the Army and Marines to ground formations of this type, but that transformation is critical, and it will not be accomplished if military thinkers remain obsessed with counterinsurgency tactics.

To build American ground formations for an unpredictable future, counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan offer very few strategic guideposts. To argue otherwise is to commit the U.S. Army and Marines to strategic irrelevance in the years and decades ahead.

Gian P. Gentile is an active-duty colonel in the U.S. Army and holds a doctoral degree in history from Stanford University. In 2006, he commanded a combat battalion in West Baghdad, Iraq. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the official views of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense or the U.S. government.