Sigue la polémica: COIN ¿Sí o no?

 Sigue la controversia en el seno del Ejército de los EE.UU. respecto de la utilidad estratégica de las doctrinas de contrainsurgencia. Es obvio que muchos militares con orientación convencional no se sienten cómodos con ella. Tal vez, la pregunta que deberían hacerse es cuán relevantes serán el el futuro.

Over the Horizon: Dead or Alive, COIN is not the Culprit

By Robert Farley | 30 Nov 2011

In a recent World Politics Review article, U.S. Army Col. Gian Gentile declared that “COIN is Dead” as the motivating intellectual concept for the U.S. Army. Although combat continues in Afghanistan, to some extent guided by the precepts set forth in the Army’s “Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency,” Gentile argues that the inability of COIN doctrine to produce a definitive outcome in Afghanistan, along with the end of fighting in Iraq, serves to render the school of thought obsolete. Indeed, Gentile argues that the Army should abandon the “search for lessons of strategic value from the past 10 years of counterinsurgency warfare,” and instead focus on developing capabilities to achieve victory at every level of escalation.

Gentile has been a critic of the COIN faction of the U.S. Army for some time. In “The Gamble,” an account of the decision-making leading up to the Iraq Surge in late-2006, Tom Ricks was critical of Gentile’s attitude about the Surge. Nevertheless, Gentile has written eloquently about the shortcomings of FM 3-24 and about the strategic insufficiency of the COIN project. Gentile has also argued that the changes enacted during the Surge have been oversold by COIN advocates and that the actual shifts in U.S. Army behavior were relatively minor. Others, both inside and outside the Army, disagree with this assessment, pointing to much wider changes in Army practice.

Over the years, a number of analysts opposed to the escalation of U.S. forces in Afghanistan adopted elements of Gentile’s rhetoric. To many outside observers, Gentile seemed to represent an effective internal critique of a COIN doctrine that appeared to justify an endless U.S. engagement in Afghanistan. Counterinsurgency advocates were explicit about the necessity for long deployments of large numbers of troops, accompanied by expensive development projects and elaborate training programs for indigenous forces. The doctrine seemed to imply that the United States would need to step up efforts in Afghanistan in order to defeat the Taliban, and it was held responsible by some for the “surge” of forces into Afghanistan in the second year of the Obama administration.

However, Gentile was -- and is -- fighting a different fight, one that will continue well after the end of the war in Afghanistan. As David Ucko, among others, has argued, the “victory” of counterinsurgency advocates inside the U.S. Army was bitter and dirty. Before 2007, it was uncertain that COIN as a body of doctrine would prevail. The Surge in Iraq represented both a huge strategic risk for the United States and a huge professional risk for the faction of the U.S. Army that favored its implementation. This faction, led by Gen. David Petraeus, essentially declared doctrinal victory in the wake of the -- disputed -- success of the Surge in Iraq. That victory represented one of the most surprising events in the recent history of military doctrine: COIN advocates managed to get the U.S. Army to effect a major doctrinal shift in a relatively short time in the midst of engagement in two separate wars. It also, however, left many dissatisfied with the direction of Army doctrine. Gentile should best be understood not as an internal critic of Army practice in general, but rather as a disappointed partisan of a particular faction within the Army. His claims about the strategic failure of COIN represent an outreach to potential allies in the fight for the future of the Army.

Of course, abandoning COIN doctrine would not in itself eliminate the possibility for stupid wars or massive strategic errors. To the extent that U.S. Army doctrine had anything to do with the invasion of Iraq, it was in giving the U.S. the ability to completely destroy fielded Iraqi forces in a short period of time with a minimal footprint. In other words, U.S. conventional capabilities, organized by a doctrine that eschewed serious political or strategic thinking, gave U.S. policymakers the impression that the conquest of Iraq would be cheap and easy. And in the wake of the initial conquest, the response of the U.S. Army to the growing Iraqi insurgency was clearly inadequate. Here, however, Gentile plays a bait-and-switch. He is surely correct to say that good COIN tactics and operational proficiency cannot redeem disaster at the strategic level. However, he does not examine in any serious detail the strategic, which is to say the political failures that led to the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, preferring instead to critique the work of the surgeons trying to save the patient. The worst that can be said of COIN, with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan, is that it failed in an expensive way to remedy a disaster produced by a combination of civilian strategic incompetence and extant U.S. military doctrine in 2001 and 2003.

For all that, Gentile may be correct about many things, including the notion that COIN is not good for the U.S. Army. Even institutions historically believed to be good at COIN do not necessarily maintain their edge over time. The British army, for example, was believed by many to be an institution well-suited to counterinsurgency operations. John Nagl made a comparison between the British army in Malaya and the U.S. Army in Vietnam the centerpiece of his book, “Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife.” However, the actual performance of the British army in Iraq and Afghanistan has been judged by many, most recently U.S. Army Capt. Andrew Betson in November’s Armed Forces Journal, to be seriously lacking. Thus, it is unclear whether the U.S. Army could retain whatever COIN edge it might currently have during peacetime. And while some of the capabilities associated with COIN can be transferred to other military tasks, some do not; focusing on certain specific capabilities inevitably soaks up training and procurement resources needed for other jobs. The “No Free Lunch” principle certainly applies to military doctrine.

Why does COIN seem insufficient? Military institutions rely on narratives in order to continue to operate. The Soviet Army sustained itself for 30 years, and the U.S. Army perhaps longer, on the narrative of defeating the Wehrmacht in World War II. The stories that make up these narratives don’t need to be accurate, but they do need to be compelling, and COIN wars just don’t make for good stories. They take too long; the politics are complicated; the enemies aren’t terrible enough; and the victories aren’t clear-cut enough. Even COIN advocates argue that counterinsurgency conflicts will be long, bloody, expensive and unsatisfying. That is in part why the U.S. Army believed, in 1973, that the counterinsurgency efforts practiced in the later years of the Vietnam War would not provide a useful foundation for rebuilding the force. Gentile, too, may well be right to think that COIN cannot provide a useful model for the future of today’s U.S. Army, even if he regularly overstates his case.

Dr. Robert Farley is an assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His interests include national security, military doctrine, and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination. His weekly WPR column, Over the Horizon, appears every Wednesday.