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October 25, 2005
Counterinsurgency: Another Name for "You're in the Wrong Country When..."
Here's an interesting bit from this week's NYT magazine story about the killing of an Iraqi youth -- the two unarmed men, cousin, were forced to jump into the Tigris. Zaydoon Fadhil died that day, an incident I wrote about earlier.
But that's not what I want to talk about here. Note this passage below:
But as a consequence of its overwhelming power and prowess, the American Army is not likely to face an enemy similar to itself. It is more likely to face guerrillas. Guerrilla wars typically begin when a smaller army is confronted by a larger one, forcing it to turn to the advantages it has: its ability to hide amid the population, its knowledge of the local terrain, its ability to mount quick and surprising attacks and then melt away before the larger army can strike back. This is more or less the case in Iraq, as it was in Vietnam, yet the leadership of the American Army is still wary of preparing the bulk of its troops to fight a guerrilla war. Most American soldiers are trained to use maximum force to destroy an easily identifiable enemy. Waging a counterinsurgency campaign, by contrast, often requires a soldier to do what might appear to be counterproductive: use the minimum amount of force, not the maximum, so as to reduce the risk of killing civilians or destroying property. Co-opt an enemy rather than kill him. If necessary, expose soldiers to higher risk. In the American Army, that sort of training is mostly relegated to forces like the Green Berets, who account for a small percentage of the Army's manpower."It's a chronic problem that runs deep in the DNA of the Army," says John Waghelstein, a retired colonel in the Special Forces who helped to conduct the American-backed counterinsurgency campaign in El Salvador. "The Army has never taken counterinsurgency seriously. The Army's doctrine hasn't changed since the 1840's." At the Army's Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., attended by all American officers hoping to rise above the rank of major, students must pass a rigorous program consisting of roughly 700 hours of instruction. Of that, not a single required course focuses on how to fight guerrilla wars.
For one thing, the constant need to fight counterinsurgencies is portrayed as a consequence of the size of our Amry. But that is not it at all. It is simply because we are fighting against populations, who by nature aren't armies, in their own soil. The key passage is this: "Guerrilla wars typically begin when a smaller army is confronted by a larger one, forcing it to turn to the advantages it has: its ability to hide amid the population, its knowledge of the local terrain, its ability to mount quick and surprising attacks and then melt away before the larger army can strike back."
Think for a minute. Why can they hide among the population and we can't? It's not the size of the army. The U.S. army could well hide among the population in this soil if we were attacked by a foreign nation. It is simply this: we fight and/or support unpopular wars in foreign countries.
And this is another way in which media bias works. They portray things as consequences of things that are at most questionable and often plain wrong. It's just stated as fact: our Army is large so we fight guerilla wars. Not: our "enemies" fight guerilla wars because they can, and we can't because we are foreigners.
And maybe that's just too hard for the U.S. Armed Forces to even admit this fact to themselves so that they could do it better:
Waghelstein says that the Army's leaders actually decided to de-emphasize counterinsurgency following Vietnam. When Waghelstein was an instructor at the Command and General Staff College, the school eliminated several courses that dealt with guerrilla war or turned them into electives, he says. Kalev Sepp, a retired Special Forces officer and a counterinsurgency adviser to the American command in Iraq, told me: "It's a cliché that the Army is always fighting the last war, but with the American Army, that's not true. When the Vietnam War ended, the Army tried to pretend it never happened. The typical officer in the military knew far more about the Battle of Gettysburg than he did about Vietnam. Initially, in Iraq, they were just making it up."
Posted by zeynep at October 25, 2005 07:31 PM
Comments
I am glad you raise this issue. Why would this happen? Without doing any quantitative research, I can brainstorm a few reasons. How about racism? People in less developed countries could teach us a ton about how to operate in their countries, but we pay no attention. Also, are we doing any better in our inner cities where the culture is much different from that of the policy makers? Why do we continue to set records every year for the numbers incarcerated---the most of any industrialized country. It's even more than Russia.
We perform well with technical issues, but we'er not so hot with human issues. These conflicts are "people's wars".
thanks,
Bob
Posted by: Bob at October 28, 2005 05:38 AM