An Alternative to COIN

Hello again, readers! I'm going to take a break from the usual discussion about guns and gear to write a little today about national strategy.

The February 2010 issue of Armed Forces Journal includes an interesting article by Bernard I. Finel on short-term kinetic operations as an alternative to protracted counter-insurgency campaigns like that being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. I may lose my honorary membership in the Civil Affairs community for entertaining such a heretical idea, but I think it is worth some thought.

The essence of Finel's argument is to compare the human, economic, and political costs, benefits, and risks of short-term kinetic "hit-and-run" operations (my terminology) as compared to long COIN/CMO campaigns. Using Operation IRAQI FREEDOM as an example, Finel points out that 58% of our goals were accomplished by the end of 2003, at the cost of 11% of the total fatalities and 7.7% of the financial expenditures for the entire war (through the end of 2009). Since that time, we have been fighting against a curve of diminishing returns and diminishing political will on the home front. Finel also points out that many of the adverse outcomes that our national policy sought to avoid where either no worse than the status-quo situation in Iraq before 2003 or could have managed more cost-effectively (including, if necessary, following up with additional "hit-and-run" actions).

Unstated by Finel is the immense difficulty of COIN operations in less-developed countries. In some sense, people have the society that they deserve. Our relatively free and prosperous democracy is based on numerous explicit and implicit prerequisites, including:

• Tolerance of racial, ethnic, and religious diversity.
• A broadening of group identification from the family, clan, and tribe to the nation even to a transnational cosmpolitan identity.
• A commitment to the rule of law, rather than the rule of personalities.
• Vertical mobility between socioeconomic classes.
• A sense of open, fair dealing in business.
• Separation of church and state and the secularization of society.
• Equality for women.

Satisfying these prerequisites took hundreds of years in Europe and the former American colonies. Through a combination of internal and external factors (ranging from economic growth to the post-WW2 occupation of Japan by the US), the developed countries of Asia have made this transition much more quickly, but it still took generations. There are also constraints on economic development, such as the availability of arable land, water, and other natural resources, that must be considered. To expect that a country like Afghanistan or Iraq is going to make the necessary transitions to enjoy anything resembling a free and prosperous democracy over the few years that our national attention span will tolerate is optimistic.

As an alternative to protacted COIN campaigns, Finel proposes what I call "hit-and-run" operations. This could include air campaigns, SOF raids, or large-scale, but relatively short duration, conventional operations. It is similar to the approach we can see Israel taking with Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel's 2006 offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon last a little more than 30 days. Similarly, the 2009 Israeli offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip lasted less than a month. The goals of these operations are quite limited and achievable: namely to disrupt the capability of Hamas and Hezbollah to launch attacks against Israel. Israel makes no serious attempt to reform Hamas or Hezbollah, show them the error (from the Israeli perspective) of their ways, impose a new government on southern Lebanon or the Gaza Strip, remake Ramala in Haifa's image, etc.

I will close with a few concerns about applying this strategy to the US/Coalition war on violent extremism (or whatever we're calling the Long War this week):

1) Israel's logistics for hit-and-run operations are a lot simpler than ours. They can literally drive to their objectives. If we are going to adopt the hit-and-run strategy, we need a true expeditionary force structure and mindset that can make a forced entry into a worst-case environment (a land-locked country with minimal infrastructure, like Afghanistan, is a good baseline), sustain ourselves for 30-180 days, and then (if necessary) fight our way back out.

2) We must maintain world-class intelligence capabilities, including not only "national technical means" but good old-fashioned human intelligence. We cannot afford another false alarm, like we had with Iraq's WMD program, nor can we afford to miss signals, as we did before the 9/11 attacks. We must again be able to rely on our intelligence to drive pre-emptive operations, because the costs of absorbing a hit and then retaliating are far too high when WMDs are potentially in play.

3) We have to sustain at least the surges of political will that hit-and-run operations require. We cannot allow threats like Iran's nuclear weapons program today or al-Qaeda's safe haven in Afghanistan in the late 1990's and early 2000's to fester until we are awakened by airplanes flying into buildings or a mushroom cloud over an American or European city. At least in the US, these brief surges of political will seem to be much easier to muster than the will to fight a years-long COIN campaign.

By: Guardian