The Ugly Truth: Insurgencies are Brutal

SMALL WARS JOURNAL smallwarsjournal.com

VOLUME 6

NO. 8

AUGUST, 2010

About This Issue

All the articles featured in this issue were published in single article format during Au-gust 2010. This recap & index issue was re-medially produced in October 2010.

We're blessed with a growing number of ar-ticles submitted and published. To better highlight the material, beginning with the Sep-tember 2010 end-of-the-month issue, we are now preparing regular monthly issues. Keep checking online throughout the month, as we‘ll continue to publish individual articles as they are ready. At the end of each month, look for an issue that recaps the articles published that month and debuts some new articles and features.

This is one part of many changes at Small Wars Journal over the coming months.

-- SWJ

The Ugly Truth: Insurgencies are Brutal

by Dr. Robert Bunker Published online, 2010.08.15

The recent release by WikiLeaks.org of over se-venty thousand classified U.S. Military documents pertaining to the insurgency in Afghanistan has generated immense media and public interest and is being compared in scale to the release of the ‗Pentagon Papers‘ in 1965 by Daniel Ellsberg. Im-mediate U.S. governmental condemnations con-cerning unnecessarily placing troops in harm‘s way, on the one hand, combined with war crimes accusations, on the other, have only served to heighten the rhetoric surrounding the posting of these documents on the Web. The criminal and unauthorized manner in which this massive vo-lume of documents was leaked has only helped to further politicize and emotionally galvanize com-mentators taking sides on this issue.

The intent of this short essay is to move past the hype, rhetoric, and passions of the moment and get to the core of the issue at hand. The ugly truth has nothing to do with who released the documents, why they were released, or even what political out-comes and potential policy fallout will occur after the dust settles. The core issue at hand is that in-surgencies, by their very nature, are inherently brutal. This point was recently driven home after

doing a considerable amount of research and ref-lection on issues pertaining to insurgent use of tar-geted killing, via both the techniques of assassina-tion and political execution, and engaging in sub-sequent discourse on this topic with insurgency warfare scholars and practitioners. Further sensi-tizing me to this truth is that, prior to the insurgent analysis, I was recently involved in an edited book project on Mexican drug cartels and the criminal insurgencies taking place within the lands of our Southern neighbor with over twenty-five thousand dead since December 2006.

What these research projects have taught me, or should I say have reminded me - as over time I have become detached, analytical, and emotionally shielded from the raw violence of the subject mat-ter - is that insurgencies can be just as, if not more, brutal than conventional military engagements between opposing conventional armies. The re-lease of this multitude of classified documents is bringing this home to the American public and the rest of the world. How long this heightened public awareness will last is unknown but, for the mo-ment, a psychic emotional shockwave has been unleashed by the bombshell posting of these doc-

In This Issue

The Ugly Truth: Insurgencies Are Brutal, 1 by Dr. Robert Bunker What Sri Lanka Can Teach Us About COIN, 4 by Lionel Beehner America‟s Flawed Approach to the Global War 11 On Terror, by Jon C. Couch President Obama: Look for a New Massoud, 21 by Cora Sol Goldstein The Hezzbollah Myth and Asymmetric Warfare, 25 by Adam Elkus The Strait of Hormuz: al-Qaeda‟s Newest Jihad Zone? 31 by Malcolm Nance Index of All Articles Published in August 2010 33

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

2 smallwarsjournal.com

uments on WikiLeaks. Citizens of the United States, her friends, the neutral parties, and even her enemies are at the moment in a heightened state of awareness concerning US involvement in the face of insurgencies raging not only in Afgha-nistan but also in nearby Pakistan, in Iraq, and, for those somewhat more cognizant of politics, in many other quarters of the globe.

The crux of the problem is that democracies loathe being involved in insurgencies. They are nasty, brutish, and have a bad habit of being very drawn out. Afghanistan is now the longest U.S. ‗war‘ on record if we can call it such. Both blood and treasure are often expended for no perceivable reason and, at times, no clear cut distinction exists between the good guys and the bad guys when loyalty can be bought and paid for in hard cash. Accountability can be non-existent and despotic and corrupt regimes gleefully siphon off U.S. aid to enrich themselves, their families, and their cronies. Hamid Karzai is in some ways a Ngo Dinh Diem or Nguyen Van Thieu redux. Memories of Vietnam are never far from the surface when insurgency becomes the topic of table discussion. In fact, Viet-nam is an excellent touchstone with regard to the sheer brutality surrounding an insurgency. Richard Schultz published a 1978 work on terrorism, insur-gency warfare, and the Viet Cong. Key statistical information on targeted killings, kidnappings, and the brutality of the conflict in Vietnam is as fol-lows:

Between 1958 and 1965, approximately 36,800 kidnappings and 9,700 assassina-tions occurred in South Vietnam

…during 1957 (the year given most fre-quently for the serious expansion of the NLF insurgency) a total of 472 officials were assassinated. This figure doubled dur-ing 1958-1959 and during the early 1960‘s. The NLF eliminated on the average of fif-teen GVN officials a week

In May 1961, Kennedy sent a ―Special mes-sage to Congress‖ in which he attributed NLF success to ―guerillas striking at night, assassins striking alone—assassins who have taken the lives of over 4000 civil offic-ers in the last 12 months…by subversives and saboteurs and insurrectionists, who in some cases control whole areas inside of independent nations.‖1

1 Richard Schultz, ―The Limits of Terrorism in Insurgency War-fare: The Case of the Viet Cong.‖ Polity. Vol. 11, No. 1. Autumn 1978: 76-77, 81, 85. Kennedy quote cited to John F. Kennedy,

These statistics are in addition to the better-known insurgent and allied campaigns. From the insurgent side, they pertain to casualties resulting from routine ambushes of U.S. patrols, meeting engagements and firebase sieges, and booby traps set on jungle routes to kill and maim U.S. troops. From the allied side, we of course have the U.S. ‗pacification campaigns‘ at the ―boots on the ground‖ level, in addition to liberal amounts of close air support and strategic bombing campaigns, targeted at the Viet Cong, North Vietnamese Army,

Public Papers of the President, 1961. Washington, DC: Govern-ment Printing Office, 1962: 347.

SMALL WARS JOURNAL Volume 6, No. 8. © 2010, Small Wars Foundation.

Editor in Chief Dave Dilegge Publisher Bill Nagle Editor Mike Few Small Wars Journal is published by Small Wars Founda-tion, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. If you value this material, please consider supporting us in our efforts to bring it to you.

Business Office 4938 Hampden Ln, #560

Bethesda, MD 20814 [email protected]

Permission is granted to print copies for personal, non-commercial use. Since we are in this together, Small Wars Journal publishes under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license to provide for certain limited uses in the com-mon good; all other rights reserved.

See http://smallwarsjournal.com/site/terms/.

No factual statement should be relied upon without further investigation on your part sufficient to satisfy you in your independent judgment that it is true.

ISSN 2156-227X

Watch for Robert Haddick's weekly editorial, This Week at War. Friday evenings at Foreign Policy.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to all authors for their contribution of content. It's what makes this all worthwhile. Thanks to Abbie Evans for her work to produce this issue. This issue is published and our operations made possible through the support of Smith Richardson Foundation.

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 3

and their supporters. U.S. military deaths tallied out to about 58,000, Viet Cong and NVA deaths are estimated at many times that level, while the indigenous populations caught in the middle of the mayhem suffered at far worse levels— somewhere between 3 to 6 million dead if Laotians and Cam-bodians are also included.1

Two mutually reinforcing strategies were thus being waged in Vietnam by the insurgents. The first was one of targeted killing, kidnapping, politi-cal execution, and re-indoctrinization, to create a shadow government. The second was a more overt guerilla campaign based on hit and run raids and terrorist acts. In return, the U.S. responded with its own targeted killing programs against the political cadre of the insurgents and fielded sizeable field forces to engage the armed guerrilla groups in the countryside, villages, and larger urban areas. The drawn out and nasty experience of the Vietnam conflict left the U.S. homefront visibly exhausted, shaken, and increasingly divided. Memories of the Tet Offensive in 1968, Kent State in 1970, and the fall of Saigon in 1975 are forever part of the greater American psyche as are the stark images of both that naked and burned Vietnamese child running on a road in terror after a napalm attack and the unsettling extrajudicial execution of a Viet Cong agent by means of a pistol shot to the head by a South Vietnamese official.

Comparisons and mutterings of the historical American experience in Vietnam vis-à-vis the ac-tive insurgencies of Afghanistan and Iraq where U.S. soldiers are deployed are generally considered bad etiquette though, looking back, the same could be said of Lebanon— the Marine Barracks bombing in 1983 is still a relatively open wound— and So-malia— remember the 1993 Mogadishu debacle immortalized in the work Black Hawk Down. The intent is not to raise the specter of failure, though such potentials always exist, but rather to highlight the brutal nature of insurgency itself. Just as the insurgency in Vietnam has been brutally characte-rized above so too can we characterize those taking place in Afghanistan and Iraq. Readers, however, have no doubt personally experienced the graphic and dark news stories and imagery themselves now for almost a decade. No further discussion is thus deemed necessary though, compared to the earlier Vietnam conflict, U.S. casualties have been rela-tively low. The recent WikiLeak has only reminded

1 ‗Welcome to Vietnam War.com.‘

http://web.archive.org/web/20080604140842/http://ww

w.vietnamwar.com/.

us of what we already know— that brutality, and even war crimes, are part and parcel of an insur-gency environment even though our American citi-zens and others around the world would rather too soon forget.

Insurgents, the states they are engaging, and the defenders of those states, spend an inordinate amount of time and effort on concepts of legitima-cy and illegitimacy, media spin, propaganda, and the ilk. In some ways, insurgency and counter-insurgency are raw politics and government at its most primal level. Who will ultimately govern, who will make decisions, and who will live or die hang in the balance. Since the attack of 9-11, the Ameri-can government, for reasons which have been and continue to be contentious and hotly debated, has found itself locked in active and ongoing insurgen-cies in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Basic questions pertaining to what strategies to follow, i.e. whether we are willing to spill more American blood, and whether we even have the financial resources to even continue fighting— are continually being raised. The specter of cross border violence spilling over from the active narco-insurgencies in Mexico and the dire security threats in Central America stemming from cartel and gang violence are also increasingly gaining attention.

Within this broader context, the ugly truth that insurgencies are brutal must never be forgotten. Democracies have little stomach for them because too many gray areas exist—the just causes are quickly tarnished, allegations of war crimes and actual war crimes take place on all sides, and, as in all conflict and war, the indigenous populations caught in the middle suffer the most. Distressingly, more and more insurgencies are breaking out glo-bally that seemingly require the attention, and ul-timately the blood and financial resources, of the United States to respond to them. It is hoped, whatever administration is in power—be it Demo-crat or Republican— that wise, measured, and grand strategic decisions will be made. It is far eas-ier to wreck the position and power of a state by undertaking the wrong international policies, espe-cially as it pertains to undertaking foreign wars, than to build up or regain the power and prestige lost. America has been a great power throughout the 20th century. What has been gained over the course of a century can be lost in only a few short years.

Thus, in a time of economic constraint and budget deficit, we must pick and choose which in-surgencies to be involved in, whether our own troops or those of proxies will fight them, and how encompassing our goals should be. Sometimes the

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

4 smallwarsjournal.com

limited mission of only mitigating the threat to the U.S. homeland may be sufficient. Making the ap-propriate decisions will ensure that we will be in a position of strength in the face of the specter of even more insurgencies on the horizon—some of which are in our backyard, especially if, we openly accept the brutal nature of the conflict that we are getting our troops into. Our intent is to ultimately fix our position as a great power throughout the 21th century and the only way, as a nation, that we will be able to do this is conserve our resources when we can and only get mired in insurgencies when the core national security interests of the U.S. are imperiled. Such core interests should be openly debated. The fact that insurgencies are in-herently brutal and once we commit our troops to the fight it is going to be a long haul need not be.

Dr. Robert J. Bunker holds degrees in political science, government, behavioral science, social science, anthropology-geography, and history. Training taken includes that provided by DHS, FLETC, DIA, Cal DOJ, Cal POST, LA JRIC, NTOA, and private security entities in counter-terrorism, counter-surveillance, incident-response, force pro-tection, and intelligence. Dr. Bunker has been in-

volved in red teaming and counter-terrorism ex-ercises and has provided operations support with-in Los Angeles County. Past associations have in-cluded Futurist in Residence, FBI Academy, Quan-tico, VA; Counter-OPFOR Program Consultant (Staff Member), National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center—West, El Segun-do, CA; Fellow, Institute of Law Warfare, Associa-tion of the US Army, Arlington, VA; Lecturer-Adjunct Professor, National Security Studies Pro-gram, California State University San Bernardi-no, San Bernardino, CA; instructor, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA; and found-ing member, Los Angeles County Terrorism Early Warning Group. Dr. Bunker has over 200 publi-cations including short essays, articles, chapters, papers and book length documents. These include Non-State Threats and Future Wars (editor); Networks, Terrorism and Global Insurgency (edi-tor); Criminal-States and Criminal-Soldiers (edi-tor); Narcos Over the Border (editor); and Red Teams and Counter-Terrorism Training (co-author— forthcoming). He has provided over 200 briefings, papers, and presentations to US LE, MIL, GOV, and other groups in the US and over-seas. He can be reached at [email protected].

What Sri Lanka Can Teach Us About COIN

by Lionel Beehner Published online, 2010.08.27

It has become a truism to say there are no mili-

tary solutions to defeat an insurgency. That was the thrust of the U.S. military‘s 2006 counterinsurgen-cy (COIN) manual as well as the mantras repeated by CENTCOM Commander David Petraeus, the manual‘s coauthor, and his ―warrior intellectual‖ offspring. Conventional wisdom also holds that COIN takes years, if not decades, to complete and emphasizes a population-centric strategy to avoid civilian casualties and win locals‘ hearts and minds.

But Sri Lanka‘s successful victory one year ago stands all this conventional wisdom on its head. It was brute military force, not political dialogue or population control, which ended its brutal dec-ades-long war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), or Tamil Tigers, a separatist group perhaps most notorious for popularizing the sui-cide bomb. The final military campaign lasted months, not years or decades. It was a gruesome finale, to be sure. The Sri Lankan government paid

little heed to outside calls for preventing collateral damage. While humanitarian workers and journal-ists were barred from entering the war zone, as many as 20,000 civilians were killed in the cross-fire and hundreds of thousands of internally dis-placed Tamils were corralled into camps after war ended1. It was, as one journalist I spoke to in Co-lombo put it, ―a war without witnesses.‖ Hearts and minds took a backseat to shock and awe.

Still, the lesson from Sri Lanka‘s COIN experi-ment is that overwhelming force can defeat insur-gents, terrorists and other irregular armed groups in relatively short order, but at a steep cost. Its model disproves the notion that counterinsurgen-cies must be drawn-out, Vietnam-like campaigns. With U.S. forces bogged down in Iraq and Afgha-

1 The Sunday Times, ―The Hidden Massacre,‖ May 29, 2009

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6383449.ece

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 5

nistan, it also provides states fighting small wars with a different counterinsurgency template. Not without reason did Pakistan and Thailand, which both face insurgencies on their peripheries, seek out Sri Lanka for military training and advice in recent months.

So do America‘s warrior intellectuals and COIN theorists have it all backwards? Should we be em-phasizing military solutions over political com-promises and accommodation, overwhelming force over clear-hold-and-build campaigns, defeating the enemy over winning locals‘ ―hearts and minds‖? Does Sri Lanka‘s COIN strategy provide any les-sons for Washington as it escalates the war in Afg-hanistan, or for other countries facing violent in-surgencies along their unruly peripheries?

Or does the fallout from the use of massive force—the high death toll, the lost hearts and minds, the accusations of war crimes, the unre-solved grievances of ethnic minorities—negate whatever victory is achieved on the battlefield or goodwill that comes from a peaceful settlement? It is a perplexing question for military strategists. ―The end of the Sri Lankan civil war,‖ wrote Robert Haddick, a managing editor at the Small Wars Journal, ―most especially the way it ended, with a clear military solution – will cause many sleepless nights for Western counterinsurgency theorists.‖ 1

A Tiger Growls

The war left this tear-dropped shaped tropical island of 22 million devastated and in perpetual military lockdown mode. Fishermen missing limbs still limp along the harbor of Trincomalee, a port in the northeast. An estimated 80,000 people pe-rished during the quarter-century conflict, includ-ing an Indian prime minister (Rajiv Gandhi, felled by a female suicide bomber in 1991) and countless Sri Lankan politicians.2 Several attempts by out-side powers to mediate ceasefires proved fruitless. The intervention of Indian peacekeepers in the late 1980s backfired as well (and tilted New Delhi against the Tigers). Even Mother Nature was una-ble to bring the warring sides together: The brief détente after the 2004 tsunami wiped out entire swaths of the coastline never stuck.

1 Westhawk Blog, May 2009

http://westhawk.blogspot.com/2009/05/did-sri-lanka-debunk-counterinsurgency.html 2 BBC News:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8062922.stm

The war began, as many civil conflicts do, over an aggrieved minority‘s demand for greater rights. After its independence in 1948, the Sinhalese ma-jority resented that the British colonialists had giv-en minority Tamils, most of them scattered across the north, preferential treatment and higher-paying jobs. That bred ethnic nationalism and dis-criminatory practices, which fed into Tamil desires for self-rule. The Tamils, comprising roughly 20 percent of Sri Lanka‘s population, are mostly Hin-du (there are also some Christians and Muslims), while the majority Sinhalese are Buddhist. Because of a 1956 ―Sinhala only‖ rule to replace English as the island‘s official language, schools became in-creasingly segregated, as Tamils who did not speak Sinhalese were denied civil service jobs and access to universities, keeping them permanently margi-nalized.3 Resentment built up, and in 1975, a rosy-cheeked young Tamil named Velupillai Prabhaka-ran allegedly shot the mayor of Jaffna, a city up north, at point-blank range.4 That set the tone for what was to follow: A long drive for Tamil self-rule that would be achieved through violence, not di-alogue or diplomacy.

The next year, Prabhakarn formed the group that would later become the LTTE, launching a war that was as relentless as it was ruthless. The group pioneered the use of suicide bombers, including the enlistment of female ―Black Tigers,‖ to terrorize civilian populations.5 It carried out targeted assas-sinations against political leaders, filled its own military rank and file with child soldiers, and used human shields. At its height, the Tigers controlled a 10,000-square-mile swath of territory. It was flush with cash, thanks to a rich and powerful Ta-mil Diaspora that spanned several continents, not to mention the LTTE‘s mafia-style ability to extort protection money from Tamil businesses. The group engaged in lucrative human and narcotics smuggling on the side. ―They have billions of dol-lars,‖ a former governor of Sri Lanka's central bank, told me. ―For $50,000, they could get every-thing from arms to humans. Terrorism is a busi-ness.‖ Their cells across the globe had access to

3 Encyclopedia Britannica

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/546059/Sinhala-Only-Bill 4 Hindustan Times, April 22, 2009:

http://www.hindustantimes.com/Profile-of-Velupillai-Prabhakaran/Article1-402963.aspx 5 BBC News:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2516263.stm

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

6 smallwarsjournal.com

pricey lobbyists, lawyers, and public relations firms.

Unlike most violent non-state actors, the LTTE fielded an army of 20,000 well-trained conscripts, a full-flung navy, and even an air force. The Tigers purchased GPS systems to accurately target its missile projectiles well before the Sri Lankan mili-tary did. They were adept at both guerilla and con-ventional types of warfare, as evidenced by the air raid in March 2007 against an airbase outside Co-lombo. ―That was our mini-9/11,‖ Murali Reddy, a Colombo-based correspondent for The Hindu, told me. The attack served as a wakeup call for the gov-ernment that the LTTE was not some ragtag band of religious fanatics, but capable and willing to ter-rorize its population by land, sea, and air. To dis-lodge the threat, the government decided, would require overwhelming force. 1

The Brothers Rajapaksa

Enter Mahinda Rajapaksa, a Buddhist lawyer-turned-politician. He came to power in 2005 by promising to win once and for all the war against the Tamil Tigers (Ironically, he was elected partly because the Tigers urged Tamils to boycott the vote).2 His smiling visage, clad in a traditional white tunic and red sash, is plastered across the country. At a time when talking up the need for political solutions to insurgencies was just coming into vogue in Western capitals, Rajapaksa preached just the opposite. He boldly declared that only a military solution would end the violence, not political accommodation. It was a posture that put him at odds with the West. Even still, Rajapaksa cast the Tamil conflict as part of the larger ―war on terror.‖ That was partly a political move to help shield him from outside criticism for the over-whelming force he was about to employ – then-Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke in similar terms to describe his scorched-earth campaign against Chechen separatist rebels in the early 2000s– yet also a shrewd way to internationalize the conflict (the Europeans and Americans both eventually slapped the Tigers on their terrorist lists, which limited their ability to funnel aid from overseas). When faced with outside criticism, Ra-japaksa played the ―neo-colonialism‖ card, while

1 Rohan Gunaratna, Implications of the Sri Lankan Tamil In-surgency (2001). 2 Business Week:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-26/rajapaksa-leads-sri-lanka-vote-as-fonseka-candidacy-challenged.html

criticizing the West for hypocrisy, given the civilian carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan (although his ar-gument is unfair, seeing how the hundreds of Afg-hans killed as collateral damage does not compare to the tens of thousands of Tamils killed or held in camps).3 Until Rajapaksa took office, the govern-ment had employed a variety of applications of mil-itary force against the Tamil Tigers, to no avail. ―The government forces continue to fight an un-conventional war in a conventional mode,‖ wrote Rohan Gunaratna, author of Implications of the Sri Lankan Tamil Insurgency, back in 2001. ―Gov-ernment bureaucracies, unlike transnational ter-rorist networks, are not administratively or opera-tionally flexible, to engage and interlock new threats.‖4

The application of military force in a place like Sri Lanka is obviously much different from the ap-plication of force in, say, the mountainous hidea-ways of Afghanistan or the desert sands of Iraq. It is far more difficult for insurgents to slip unnoticed into a neighboring country when surrounded by sea. Likewise, it is much easier for militaries to squeeze insurgents onto a tiny swath of land. Still, the Sri Lankan model holds important lessons for Washington, as it ramps up its own counterinsur-gency in Afghanistan.

To win the war, President Rajapaksa, along with his brother Gotabhaya, who was appointed defense secretary, took a number of important steps. They overhauled Sri Lanka‘s intelligence system and clamped down on the financial activity of Tamils living overseas. They beefed up the ranks of the army. For most of the conflict, the military‘s re-cruitment rate was about 3,000 per year. By De-cember 2008, that number had spiked to 3,000 per month.5 It was also the way in which the mili-tary deployed its forces. It fought like its enemy, emphasizing smaller units of four-or-eight-man teams that operated as de facto commando squads. These irregular army units, backed by air support, were more mobile, more flexible. They were able to

3 Times of India, May 28, 2010: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/south-asia/Sri-Lankan-President-Rajapaksa-rejects-demands-for-probe-into-rights-violation/articleshow/5984931.cms 4 Gunaratna. 5 Sergei DeSilva-Ranasinghe, Strategic Analysis of Sri Lankan Military‘s Counter-Insurgency Opera-tions (February 12, 2010): www.futuredirections.org.au/.../1266992558-FDIStrategicAnalysisPaper-12February2010.pdf

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 7

infiltrate Tiger strongholds and assassinate rebel leaders. ―We were a conventional army fighting with a guerilla,‖ the government‘s defense spokes-person, Keheliya Rambukwella, said last year, ―and in some form our army was converted to a guerilla [army] to...fight the LTTE.‖1

Unlike conventional COIN doctrine – which emphasizes ―clear-hold-and-build‖ operations aimed at seizing land by means of moving soldiers onto streets, gathering intelligence, winning over locals (by providing basic services and security), and reclaiming areas block-by-block – capturing territory was of secondary importance to the Sri Lankan government. More important was main-taining momentum by continually launching offen-sive operations aimed at killing LTTE commanders to rob the insurgency of its manpower and material resources. In 2006, for example, roughly 1,700 rebels were killed, according to the government. By 2009, that figure exceeded 7,000.2

Sri Lanka also relied on a shrewd divide-and-conquer strategy, not unlike the one proposed to defeat the Afghan Taliban. Secretary of State Hil-lary Clinton has spoken about the need to ―peel off those [Taliban] who are willing to renounce vi-olence‖—that is, those in it for the money, not for ideological reasons—and effectively flip them over to the Americans‘ side.3 Similarly, the Sri Lankan government was successful at exploiting fissures within the LTTE leadership. The government backed these splinter movements with military force and money, which allowed the military to reclaim formal Tiger strongholds in the eastern province. If politics makes strange bedfellows, civil war makes for even stranger ones. A LTTE com-mander who later defected and goes by the nom de guerre Karuna later became Rajapaksa‘s minister of national integration.

The Karuna wing numbered around 5,000 figh-ters and splintered from the LTTE, among other reasons, over complaints that the grievances of eastern Tamils were ignored. 4That prompted the

1 International News Services, May 2009:

http://www.internationalnewsservices.com/articles/1-latest-news/11731-sri-lankas-victory-over-rebels-may-inform-counter-insurgency-worldwide 2 DeSilva-Ranasinghe. 3 NPR January 29, 2010:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123098927 4Dr. S. Chandrasekharan, South Asia Analysis Group (October 30, 2004):

LTTE, most of whose leadership came from the northern areas around Jaffna, to question the loyalty of Tamils from the east. They were unfami-liar with the supply routes and local terrain. The bumpy road linking Trincomalee in the east with the hill country of the middle of the island, once lined with dense jungle heavily saturated with Tig-er snipers, was cleared of brush for hundreds of yards to allow military convoys to safely traverse the corridor. Robbed of manpower and material resources, the LTTE stepped up its conscription of child soldiers to fill in the gaps, turning locals in-creasingly against the Tigers. ―The soldiers were so small, their rifle butts were touching the ground,‖ a Tamil restaurant owner in Trincomalee, a busy port in the eastern province, told me, shaking his head. ―We had hope in the beginning. But they let us down.‖5 The Tiger leadership, suspecting eas-terners of being Karuna loyalists, in turn began targeting the local population. Dozens were killed or tortured. Shops were destroyed. A parallel could be drawn to Iraq in 2007, and how al-Qaeda in Iraq overreached when it targeted Iraqi Sunnis in Anbar Province, which ultimately gave rise to the Sunni Awakening and the U.S. military‘s clever plan to pit Sunni insurgents against the foreign terrorists there.

The war required enormous political will (some might call it hard-headedness) on the part of Pres-ident Rajapaksa. Throughout the conflict, he met little resistance from parliament. Unlike in opera-tions past – whenever violence reached a crescen-do, the government would be pressured to pull back by the international community and hold peace talks – during the final phase of the war, Ra-japaksa ignored outside calls to let up. He re-stricted access to the war zone, barring humanita-rian workers and journalists. Under a dubious anti-terrorism law, some human rights organizations were branded as sympathizers with the Tigers and independent journalists were targeted on occasion (perhaps most brazenly was the unsolved January 2009 assassination of Lasantha Wickrematunge, a newspaper editor and outspoken critic of the re-gime).6

http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/notes3/note245.html 5 Lionel Beehner: ―What Does It Look Like To Win A War On Terror?‖ Slate (November 3, 2009):

http://www.slate.com/id/2234459 6 Time Magazine (January 8, 2009):

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1870440,00.html

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

8 smallwarsjournal.com

The government also stepped up cooperation with its neighbors. Colombo relied on intelligence from India and satellite imagery from the United States to pinpoint and intercept vessels ferrying arms to the Tigers up north. Colombo also received dollops of military and economic aid from China, which has a vested interest in the waterway and ports along the island‘s southern periphery that are convenient for shipping purposes.

By early 2009, with the LTTE‘s navy and air-power neutralized and its command-and-control capabilities in tatters, the military had effectively garrisoned off the northern and eastern sections of the island, while squeezing what remained of the Tiger leadership onto a tiny swath of coastline the size of Central Park (The final phrase of the war began in earnest in January 2008, when Rajapaska formally abrogated a 2002 ceasefire with the LTTE).1 As the ―final assault‖ began, tens of thou-sands of homeless Tamil civilians found them-selves trapped in the no-fire ―safe zone‖ and at-tempted to flee. Thousands perished, according to UN estimates. The Tigers believed the internation-al community—namely Britain, the United States, or India—would step in either militarily or diplo-matically to pressure the government to back off, neither of which happened (The Tigers had anta-gonized many of their Indian sympathizers after assassinating Rajiv Ghandi in 1991). Cornered, many of them committed suicide by swallowing the cyanide poison capsules they kept around their necks to avoid capture. In late May, the charred corpse of Prakharian, his wide almond eyes staring blankly into space, was found in a lagoon and then paraded before a jubilant television audience.2 The war was declared over.

Lessons Learned?

The Sri Lanka model of counterinsurgency – while neither entirely replicable nor recommended in places like Afghanistan or Iraq, given the varia-tions in the enemy and terrain (squeezing the ene-my is much easier on an island than an impenetra-ble patchwork of mountains) and the humanitarian catastrophe that followed – does hold some impor-

1 Robert Templer: ―Day of Reckoning in Sri Lanka‖ Foreign Policy (April 20, 2009):

http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/asia/south-asia/sri-lanka/day-of-reckoning-in-sri-lanka.aspx. 2 New York Times (May 18, 2009).

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/world/asia/19lanka.html?_r=1&ref=liberation_tigers_of_tamil_eelam

tant lessons for U.S. foreign policy. Yes, Sri Lanka‘s victory was messy and morally suspect, what with the civilian carnage, the internment camps, and the accusations of war crimes. For a democracy like Sri Lanka to make zero distinction between innocent civilians and armed combatants is morally repug-nant, and the government should allow for an in-dependent Gaza-style investigation into alleged war crimes, empty its internment camps, and lift restrictions on journalists and human rights organ-izations.

Yet to say as Robert Kaplan and other military analysts have, that ―there are no useful pointers to be gleaned from the Sri Lankan government‘s vic-tory‖ makes little sense, too.3 Sri Lanka, like Chechnya, represents one extreme end of the spec-trum on the use of force. The jury is obviously still out on whether it was successful or not in the long run, since much will depend on the government‘s ability to integrate its Tamil minorities and reach some kind of national reconciliation (the ugliness of the recent presidential election is also not a good harbinger for Sri Lanka‘s democratic future). That said, the government‘s military strategy deserves to be studied in closer detail, as it proves that insur-gencies can be won with decisive force. Moreover, it puts the lie to the argument that COIN takes dec-ades, requires non-military solutions, and works best with population-centric campaigns to win over hearts and minds. In some cases, in fact, the exact opposite is required. As Paul Staniland of the Uni-versity of Chicago and other analysts have noted, winning hearts and minds is sometimes antitheti-cal to effective state building. ―[S]tate-building is characterized historically by relentless coercion, social homogenization, and center-periphery con-flict,‖ Staniland wrote in Foreign Policy.4 The im-peratives of creating strong governments and of ‗winning hearts and minds‘ can directly clash with one another.‖

Coercion does not mean tossing hundreds of thousand of internally displaced civilians into in-ternment camps, silencing the media, turning a deaf ear to calls for war crimes investigations, or rolling back democracy, as the Sri Lankan govern-ment did in the wake of its war victory. But it is a

3 Robert Kaplan, ―To Catch a Tiger,‖ Atlantic Monthly:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/07/to-catch-a-tiger/7581/ 4 Paul Staniland, ―Counterinsurgency is a Bloody, Costly Busi-ness,‖ Foreign Policy (November 24, 2009),

http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/11/24/counterinsurgency_is_a_bloody_costly_business

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 9

tacit acknowledgement that conflicts between states and non-state actors, by their very nature, are morally ambiguous and raise difficult cost-benefit conundrums. Would decades of continued fighting and the steady drip-drip-drip of violence have claimed more lives in the long run than a sweeping victory achieved by heavy-handed means? (Israel and Turkey have used a similar ra-tionale to justify their use of disproportionate force – sustained aerial bombardments, raids in ―hot pursuit‖ of militants, the use of cluster bombs – against Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Kurdistan Workers‘ Party.) Would the escalating cost of the war – which was setting the government back on average about $4 million per day – have bank-rupted Sri Lanka‘s economy? As horrific as the fi-nal operation was, nowadays Sri Lankans no longer are afraid to board a bus or commuter train as be-fore. Life, despite the checkpoints and nearby camps, has resumed some semblance of normalcy in Jaffna and Trincomalee.

So what lessons does Sri Lanka hold for U.S. foreign policy? With the United States embroiled in its fight against Taliban insurgents in the depths of Afghanistan, it would be wise to incorporate at least parts of the playbook Sri Lanka used to defeat the LTTE. Its ability to flip factions within the Tig-ers, its emphasis on targeting the top tiers of the LTTE leadership, and its overhaul of how troops are deployed on the ground all borrowed from clas-sical COIN doctrine, even as the government downplayed the need to avoid collateral damage and ―clear, hold and build‖ territory. COIN theor-ists are finally starting to come around to this theory. ―The strength of a terrorist adversary, al-Qaeda or any other, does not correlate with control of a piece of territory in Afghanistan or elsewhere,‖ wrote Paul Pillar, a former national intelligence officer, in The National Interest. ―If a terrorist group has a physical safe haven available, it will use it. But of all the assets that make a group a threat—including ideological appeal and a supply of already-radicalized recruits—occupation of acreage is one of the least important.‖ 1

Sri Lanka demonstrates that not just targeted killings or a ―surge‖ of forces is sufficient to win the war. A more effective approach is one that com-bines Special Forces operations, a divide-and-conquer strategy, and sustained aerial assaults.

1 Paul Pillar, ―Is Afghanistan the Right War?‖ The National Interest (March 2010): http://nationalinterest.org/greatdebate/debating-afghanistan/afghanistan-war-pillar-3796?page=1

The Sri Lankan approach deemphasizes the need for winning hearts and minds and underscores the need for applying coercion and a monopolization on the use of force. The U.S. military, given the constraints it faces and wariness of the war back home, suffers from the Goldilocks paradox: It ap-plies just enough force to upset the locals and kill civilians, yet not enough to actually dislodge the threat and win the war. The result is a worst-of-both-worlds scenario: An angry populace and an entrenched non-state actor. If governments are unwilling to deploy sufficient force to fight insur-gents because it will undermine their democratic values, then a better model to follow is not a mid-dle-road solution but rather one that relies on mi-nimal force, a smaller military footprint, and scaled-back expectations, combined with stepped-up policing and intelligence-sharing (think Spain‘s handling of its ETA insurgency). Or as the COIN manual puts it: ―Sometimes doing nothing is the best policy.‖ [Emphasis mine]

To be sure, Sri Lanka faces enormous chal-lenges, from political infighting to rebuilding the island‘s war-ravaged infrastructure to resolving the pending humanitarian crisis up north. But it is an infinitesimally improved situation from a few years back, when locals were afraid to even board a bus or commuter train for fear it would be blown up by an LTTE suicide bomber. The downtown market in Trincomalee, once emptied of its customers, is not bustling with activity – as are the local lumbe-ryards, given the coastline‘s construction boom. Foreign investors, developers, and tourists are trickling back to the areas south of Colombo. That said, the root causes of the war—ethnic discrimina-tion against Tamils, economic and political margi-nalization—remain unaddressed (not to mention that a rich and vocal Tamil Diaspora, embittered by the government's handling of the war, still lobbies forcefully from abroad for Tamil rights), causing some to suspect the LTTE may someday resume their fight another day.

In small wars, the non-state actor need not win the war on the battlefield, but can declare victory by simply prolonging the conflict indefinitely and exhausting the state. In Sri Lanka, the LTTE‘s ap-parent strategy was to win the war by simply not losing it and dragging the conflict out indefinitely, while continuing to enrich itself on handouts from Tamils abroad. The notion that the war could have been won by political accommodation, given the government‘s repeated efforts at good-faith negoti-ations, seems like a fantasy. Moreover, the idea that military force is too blunt an instrument to wield against non-state actors, given the dangers of

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

10 smallwarsjournal.com

turning locals against the state, has been shaped by U.S. mishaps in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though the evidence elsewhere paints a different picture. As Seth Jones of RAND and others have noted, military force – although only successful seven percent of the time – tends to be most effective against groups that are ―large, well-armed, and well-organized.‖1 Indeed, the lesson learned from Sri Lanka is that to win a war against a determined enemy like the Taliban or Tamil Tigers, over-whelming force is preferable to underwhelming force.

Lionel Beehner is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale Uni-versity and formerly a senior writer at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is also a term member.

1 ―How Terrorist Groups End‖ Seth Jones, Rand (2008)

(www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG741-1.sum.pdf).

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 11

Terrorism or Insurgency: America’s Flawed Ap-proach to the Global War on Terror

by Jon C. Couch Published online, 2010.08.03

America is not fighting a global war on terror;

rather, it is engaged in a global insurgency whose participants are intent on destroying western cul-ture and replacing it with an Islamic Caliph – or Islamic government. For centuries, insurgencies and other forms of strife have plagued the global community. Likewise, terrorists claimed center stage for high profile acts attributed to this asym-metric type of warfare; most notably the bombings on September 11, 2001, as well as earlier attacks on US embassies in Africa. The problem is that the United States has incorrectly coined the current conflict the global war on terror when the term global insurgency more closely describes the con-flict. The present global environment, complete with the technologies available (to the United States and its enemies) and the strategic decisions made by the United States of how to counter these threats will shape America‘s future, positively or negatively. If the correct threat is realized and that threat‘s correct center of gravity chosen for attack, as well as a correct long term strategies and poli-cies chosen and applied, America could very well succeed in this conflict. If, on the other hand, the incorrect threat and center of gravity are pursued resulting in the wrong strategy being chosen; America will fare poorly in the current conflict, and may very well lose the conflict.

To be successful in such an environment, the United States must employ a holistic approach to battle the global insurgents. This approach must employ the entire range of governmental and non-governmental considerations.1 These solutions should include economic, political, social, and mili-tary methodologies. At the same time the United States battles this asymmetric threat with the whole of government approach, it must also mi-nimize collateral damage to innocent civilians‘

1 General John Abizaid, USA (Ret.), discussion with author, 15 Sept 2009. During this interview, General Abizaid and the au-thor discussed conventional and unconventional operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the topic discussed was the au-thor‘s belief that the current GWOT is mislabeled and is more appropriately a global insurgency. General Abizaid indicated his concurrence on the belief that the current conflict is best de-scribed a global insurgency.

property and refrain from the killing non-combatants. Further, America‘s chosen strategy must be founded with a solid understanding of the enemy‘s center of gravity, and finally, that center of gravity‘s‘ (COG) critical vulnerabilities (CV). It is only through a complete understanding of the enemy‘s critical vulnerabilities that the COGs may be exploited and lead to the defeat of the enemy.2 Current doctrine states, ―[t]he most important among those [enemy‘s] capabilities are the COGs, those aspects of the adversary‘s overall capability that, theoretically, if attacked and neutralized or destroyed will lead either to the adversary‘s inevit-able defeat or force opponents to abandon aims or change behavior.‖3

For a holistic approach to COIN to succeed, the participants – governmental and non-governmental alike – must see the problem with an open mind since, many times workable solutions require a paradigm shift in thinking. This last is-sue, in particular, poses real issues for the United States government, since too often in the past, our foreign policy was often carried out by the military – so much so that today, the first response to con-tingency operations often seems to be ―send in the military‖. Examples of nations employing incor-rect tactics and operational plans for that environ-ment are numerous.

The most recent, and certainly one of the better known examples of excellent [mid-term] strategy is Germany‘s use of the Blitzkrieg tactics on Poland

2 Dr. Joe Strange and Colonel Richard Iron. Understanding Centers of Gravity and Critical Vulnerabilities, Part 1: What Clausewitz Really Meant by Center of Gravity. Downloaded on 24 Sept 2009 from:

http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/cog1.pdf and Dr. Joe Strange and Colonel Richard, Iron. Under-standing Centers of Gravity and Critical Vulnerabilities, Part 2: The CG-CC-CR-CV Construct: A Useful Tool to Understand and Analyze the Relationship between Centers of Gravity and their Critical Vulnerabilities. Downloaded on 24 Sept 2009 from:

http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/cog2.pdf. 3 United States Government. Joint Publication 5-00.1, Joint Doctrine for Military Campaigns (Washington, DC: GPO, 2002), ix.

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

12 smallwarsjournal.com

and the other European nations as the German military dominated Europe in 1939 and 1940. To explain this disparity in tactics and equipment, the German – or Axis and Allied nations will be de-scribed in the opening battles of World War II. Germany was barely defeated in WWI. As the de-feated power in that war, Germany was subject to post-war restrictions on their armaments and size of their military. Never the less, Germany secretly started rebuilding her military forces. During the interwar years (1919-1939), and although she was restricted by the Versailles Treaty, Germany took many lessons from her senior military officers, ex-periences gained from the last war and with the assistance and guidance of many fine German of-ficers like Moltke and Seeckt, and rebuilt the Ger-man military capability.

This rebuilding encompassed more than Ger-many‘s military. This transformation touched every facet of the military and encompassed their train-ing and education system, equipment, organiza-tion, logistical, armaments, but most importantly, the German Army built a force capable of maneuv-er warfare. In short, the Germans built a military capable of getting inside the OODA Loop of their enemy. In part, the OODA Loop is "...a decision cycle known as the Boyd cycle, or the OODA loop... According to John Boyd, decision-making occurs in a cycle of observe-orient-decide-act. An entity (either an individual or an organization) that can process this cycle quickly, observing and reacting to unfolding events more rapidly than an oppo-nent, can thereby "get inside" the opponent's deci-sion cycle and gain a military or business advan-tage."1

The exploitation of technologies and strategies – critical to the German‘s Blitzkrieg (or Lightening War), was the single largest piece that made the real difference between what France did and what Germany did during the interwar years. This ma-neuver warfare capability led to the defeat of many nations later in the war (commencing on 1 Sept 1939). So what exactly was this maneuver war or Blitzkrieg capability? This tactic called for the use of mobile forces, towed and tracked armor and ar-tillery, the use of Stuka (and other) support air-craft, all tied together with a command and control (or C2) capability that enabled them to maneuver at a speed previously unknown in the history of warfare. For Poland and other European oppo-

1 John Boyd. The OODA Loop. Accessed online:

http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/OODA_Loop on 31 Oct 2009.

nents on the battlefield, this meant the Germans could out maneuver and out communicate them, thus able to defeat them on the battlefield with un-common speed and efficiency. France was one such example of this great disparity in military ca-pabilities. France retained their static defensive tactics and was simply by-passed by the fast mov-ing German units. France‘s defeat was secured by the fact that during these interwar years, France retained a military, but retained one stuck on the last century's methods of static warfare -- a tactic that was used in the former WWI, where all stayed in the trenched, restricted by rail lines and other logistical restraints. This is evidenced by France's use of the Maginot Line and like tactics.

Although many frown on the German military of WWII, due mainly to their mass extermination of the Jews, Germany had a first rate military offic-er and NCO corps. Conversely, France might also look much different today had she taken a different view of warfare in the interwar years.2 In sum, France attempted to fight the current war with the last war‘s tactics. This leads to the question, ―but what of insurgencies and terrorism of the current day and how is the United States fighting the wrong war?‖ For that answer, insurgency and ter-rorism must be defined. Without understanding the current war, it is impossible to find suitable strategies, tactics and policies for such endeavors.

The United State Department of Defense‘s joint dictionary, Joint Publication 1-02, describes insur-gency as an ―organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict.‖3 As one would expect, counterinsurgencies (COIN) are those efforts undertaken to defeat an insurgency. Terrorism is defined as ―the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimi-date or coerce a government, the civilian popula-tion, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of po-litical or social objectives.‖4 The United States is fighting a war based on the belief that our enemies are terrorists, while in reality these jihadists are simply part of a more organized, funded and ma-

2 James Corum. The Roots of Blitzkrieg (Lawrence, KS: Univer-sity of Kansas Press, 1992), 2-63, Daniel Hughes. Moltke on the Art of War: Selected Writings (Navato, CA: Presidio Press, 1993), 21-38. 3 United States Government. Joint Publication 1-02: Depart-ment of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (Washington, DC: GPO, 2008), 268. 4 Federal Bureau of Investigation. TERRoRISM in the United States: 1996 (Washington, DC: FBI Counterterrorism Threat Assessment and Warning Unit National Security Division, 1996), 3.

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 13

naged global insurgency. This new type of religious insurgent is simply using terrorist acts as one of the vehicles reach their end states, a new global caliphate or political order based on strict interpre-tations of Islam‘s holiest book, the Qur‘an. If the United States is engaged in a global insurgency instead of a global war on terror, does this mean the incorrect tactics are being applied? What tac-tics will be successful in such a conflict? To answer this question, the current tactics being applied in the global war on terror must be examined.

The United States predominantly uses special operations forces (SOF) supported by advanced intelligence capabilities in support of Direct Action (DA) missions with which the Al Qaeda or Taliban are located and then killed or captured. These mis-sions often rely on kinetic solutions; offensive or deadly force options. Oddly enough, non-kinetic solutions are tasks the United States Army‘s Spe-cial Forces (SF) also excels at due to their cultural expertise and country orientation to diverse areas of the globe. But a more perplexing question is how did the world got where it is currently at? Why is the United States seemingly dominated by kinetic military actions in such social and political global environment?

Three periods are used to frame the discussion of insurgencies, and the efforts to counter them – counterinsurgencies. The periods are early 1961 through 1975, second - 1976 through the Septem-ber 2001, and finally, September 2001 to present. The events of the turbulent sixties in America is remembered and perhaps well known by most. Many do not, however, understand the United States‘ loss of that war being attributed to the North Vietnamese leadership‘s realization of the United States‘ center of gravity (COG); the United States citizens‘ loss of support for our involvement in that war. What are less-well known are the COIN strategies and documents of the Vietnam era and how they contributed to America‘s loss of that war? But what of terrorism and its strategic im-pact?

Following World War II, many former colonial nations experienced a loosening of the grips on their former colonial countries. In many of these cases, these former colonial nations saw rises in nationalistic feelings as their former colonial mas-ters‘ influence lessoned. To some degree, much of the post-WWII Middle East wrestled with the idea of modernity. Many in Egypt, in particular, saw modernity as an encroachment upon their Islamic traditions and culture. The centerpiece of this view was that the encroachment of Islamic society was directly the result of western societies and their

corrupt values and influences. The United States leads the list of corrupt western nations in many of these Islamists. Several Islamic-based works writ-ten during the early thirties and forties influenced many to follow the more traditional, e.g., strict path which offered salvation, but also offered a path that seemed to justify their stance against what the Qur‘an viewed as moral corruptness – or the disbelievers.1 Before delving into Islamism and a violent Middle East, we must understand the en-vironment such conflicts thrive within.

The United States‘ insurgency problems are not new. America introduced forces in the Philippines at the turn of the century to defeat insurgents in that budding country. Since the decades following World War II, the United States experienced insur-gent problems on nearly every continent. These included Europe (Greece), Africa (ongoing), south-east and southwest Asia, as well as South America. In 1962, a panel of counterinsurgency experts met to discuss the world‘s current and past guerilla ac-tivities so that a suitable strategy for COIN in Southeast Asia might be realized.2 The issues dis-cussed during these sessions included the four ma-jor guerilla motivations; personal ambition, fear (for one‘s safety), seeing a successful cause and wanting to join, and finally, the ideals of the movement itself.3 This and other meetings took place, all in attempts to figure out the correct solu-tion for the insurgency problem in Vietnam. The outcome in Vietnam was not to be a positive one; for COIN or for the larger conventional military establishment. Among the many other reasons for the United States‘ defeat in this war was the United States‘ military and political leadership‘s failure to recognize one of the key features of this war; a Maoist style of insurgency pitted against the cor-rupt South Vietnamese government, and a war in which the largest proportion of the United States military were not equipped for such a war, did not understand this type of war, and most importantly – did not understand how to fight it. The current global problems are summed up as the Muslim extremists having a belief and desire to establish a modern Pan-Arab caliph. This would, in the Mus-lim extremists‘ minds, add to their society‘s securi-

1 Qur’an, 9:73. In this verse, the Qur‘an states, ―Strive hard against the disbelievers and hypocrites and remain strictly firm against them.‖ Other examples of influential works include Muhammad ‗Abdulah‘s Islam and the Principles of Govern-ment, as well as Abd al-Raziq‘s On Pre-Islamic Poetry. 2 Hosmer, Stephen and Crane, Sibylle. Counterinsurgency: A Symposium, April 16-20, 1962 (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corpo-ration, 1962). 3 Hosmer, 5.

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

14 smallwarsjournal.com

ty by reducing corruption and thus regaining a sense of God given balance to their lives. In many ways, the United States‘ military‘s misunderstand-ing of the correct strategies to be employed in the global GWOT mirror those of the Vietnam War. Like the former North Vietnamese antagonists in Vietnam, the current Islamists have their strategy. If a successful outcome is desired, changes in US strategies, approaches, and policy are warranted.

In the current age, the United States coined the larger global conflict as the GWOT. This conflict saw its North American birth in Washington, D.C. and New York as Muslim extremists (intent on es-tablishing a new Middle East caliph, and destroy-ing the United States in the same effort) slammed three commercial aircraft-turned suicide bombs into key American targets, and a fourth aircraft full of passengers who lost their lives while attempting to prevent another American target from being struck. Shortly thereafter, the United States Con-gress passed the PATRIOT‘s ACT which greatly increased the government‘s ability to collect intelli-gence on potential terrorists and thus prevent them from taking further American life.1 Although the merits of the PATRIOTS ACT are numerous, the ACT is not without its faults. Perhaps a more per-plexing issue is the United States strategy for this GWOT being appropriate for the threat and condi-tions faced? Because if the strategy planned or ex-ecuted does not match the threat and conditions faced, the United States‘ success in such an endea-vor might not conclude in a manner favorable to the national security of the United States.

To further illustrate this point, the words of Da-vid Galula should be reviewed. In part, Galula said a ―revolutionary war is 20 percent military action and 80 percent political.‖ Galula later said ‖Giving the soldier authority over the civilian would con-tradict one of the major characteristics of this type of war.‖2 The current global conflict poses a less-conventional force on force type threat such as the seemingly looming Korea conflicts or the China-Taiwan scenarios. Today‘s threats are smaller scale conflicts requiring US political and military ac-tions.3 But the current threats are not new to man-

1 United States Government. PUBLIC LAW 107–56—OCT. 26, 2001, UNITING AND STRENGTHENING AMERICA BY PRO-VIDING APPROPRIATE TOOLS REQUIRED TO INTERCEPT AND OBSTRUCT TERRORISM (USA PATRIOT ACT) ACT OF 2001. Washington, DC: GPO, 2001, 273. 2 David Galula. Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Prac-tice (Westport, CN: Praeger Security Group, 2006), 63. 3 Aside from the author‘s beliefs on the global insurgency; three other authors believe much the same with regard to a global insurgency, as well as the more asymmetric nature of the cur-

kind. Although in a modern age, strategists have wrote of such conflicts for thousands of years.

Sun Tzu wrote that war is politics by other means; in effect war is an extension of the politi-cian. This is an ageless concept in one that every student of our military‘s graduate schools adopts. Yet, if we look into the nation‘s current COIN doc-trine, we see many of the same concepts called for in Vietnam era doctrinal works restated. The Unit-ed States‘ current COIN doctrine was signed in 2006, and although it reflects some of the tenants of current warfare, the mass of the document re-verts to older and less suitable doctrinal phrases, methods, and in the end, suggests a strategy that will not work in the current environment.

The late nineteen fifties and early nineteen six-ties was the period in which the COIN strategy that guided the United States military in Vietnam was born. On February 3, 1961 a National Security Ac-tion Memorandum (NSAM) was signed, which stated the United States government should ex-amine ―the means for placing more emphasis on the development of counter-guerilla forces.‖4 Simi-larly, a NSAM issued on February 12, 1961 stressed the need for more counter-guerilla capabilities in Vietnam.5 During November, 1963 President Ken-nedy was assassinated and Vice President Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency. During this timeframe, the United States was trying to come to grips with race relations within its borders, espe-cially those states most well known for racism and slavery in the past - the southern United States. Moreover, the United States was wrestling with Cold War issues and potential thermo-nuclear war with the Soviet Union Socialist Republic (USSR) and their client states, the Warsaw Pact nations. At roughly the same time, the United States‘ mili-tary was pursuing a doctrine that allowed it to fight, train, and equip its armed forces for uncon-ventional warfare (UW).

rent conflict requiring not just more agile forces, but also for the US Department of States, Justice, and Treasury to take larger roles. The sources include: Collin S. Gray. Another Bloody Cen-tury: Future Warfare (London, England: Phoenix, 2005), 9-255., David Kilcullen. The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (New York, NY: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2009), 12-16., as well as Thomas Barnett. The Penta-gon’s New Map: Blueprint for Action, A Future Worth Creating (New York, NY: Berkley Books, 2005). 4 United States Government. National Security Action Memo-randum 12: Development of Counter-Guerilla Forces (Washing-ton, DC: The White House, 1961), 1. 5 United States Government. National Security Action Memo-randum No. 12 (Washington, DC: The White House, 1961), 1.

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 15

Up to that point, the United States‘ counterin-surgency experiences were limited to mostly the turn of the century experiences in the Philippines, as well as post WWII COIN campaigns in Greece, and China. The UW experiences gained in WWII, which included the Office of Strategic Services‘ ac-tions in occupied Europe and the China-Burma-India theaters, but had been allowed to lapse as the nation believed its main threats were thermonuc-lear capable aircraft and submarines, as well as intercontinental ballistic missiles. UW was an area of expertise not often studied or taken seriously by most in the United States government, thus atro-phied in the post war years.

These nineteenth and twentieth century COIN experiences later translated into historical docu-ments (in the place of) doctrine with which the United States framed its early Vietnam strategies.1 This doctrine was based on Maoist insurgencies. Such insurgencies typically have three phases; an initial phase in which the guerillas formulated their strategies, a second phases where limited guerilla actions were executed against the occupying forces, and a third phase where the guerilla and conven-tional forces carried out open pitched battles for gaining the power base within the country. The early sixties‘ COIN operations were largely carried out by US Army Special Forces in Southeast Asia. The resultant American strategies for Vietnam missed the mark; an incorrect COIN strategy being only part of the problem. Post WWII was an era where not only the occupations of Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire were turned back, but the yoke of colonialism was shed worldwide. It was in this environment that:

―The real problems facing Southeast Asian countries are related to the ‗Colonialism‘ of the past rather than to the present. Through the exposure of Southeast Asia to European rule and European influence, European institutions and standards have been inherited. The education, economy, political institutions, and even the philoso-

1 At the forefront of the referenced works that guided early United States doctrinal guidance was the Lieberman Code. Offi-cially known as General Orders no. 100 : the Lieber Code (in-structions for the government of armies of the United States in the field). This code, Prepared by Francis Lieber, promulgated as General Orders No. 100 by President Lincoln, 24 April 1863 provided the guidance on how to treat combatants and non-combatants and served the United States military until the Ge-neva Conventions (1949) were ratified. A copy was downloaded from:

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lieber.asp.

phy of Southeast Asian nationalism are products of Western thought and practice. Ideas of Western democracies are compet-ing with Marxism and religious mysticism, while the great majority of the people still live in the traditional village manner. As yet, no political force appears to have emerged which has been able to amalga-mate these diverse influences‖….2

Between 1989 and the end of the twentieth cen-tury, militant Islamist groups became more violent and thus posed an increased threat for the United States and its allies. The perpetrators of these at-tacks were not always state supported groups but, many times were non-state actors. And, although the fact of a group or entity being a non-state actor might make it seem a more attractive target, non-state actors prove more elusive since they can hide behind the legitimacy of state actors and are thus more difficult to locate and strike. Examples of these attacks, which would provide a glimpse of what the future would hold, included the attack on the USS Cole, as well as several American embassy bombings in Africa. Following the attacks in Wash-ington, DC and New York, the US Special Forces (and other governmental agencies) were key to forcing the Taliban to leave Afghanistan, albeit just across the border to Pakistan. The US Army Special Forces were doing two missions they had long trained to do; Unconventional Warfare through the training and employment of the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, as well as direct action mis-sions against Taliban and Al Qaeda hide-outs. The splendid successes in Afghanistan formed opinions in some policy makers minds that these Special Forces, as good as they are, were the answer to all of the United States problems in this new war. Was an entire strategy based on these early successes? More importantly, was our strategy based on a cor-rect understanding of this new threat?

Put into current context, many of the terrorists involved in the attacks on the Pentagon and Twin Towers received training and support through an international organization that recruits and trains such Islamist operatives who are willing to die for their God. 3 Often times, these recruitments are

2 Paul Jureidinl (and others). Casebook on Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare: 23 Summary Accounts (Washington, DC: Special Operations Research Office, American University, 1962), 21. 3 United States Government. 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Washington, DC: GPO, 2007), 57, 86, 167, and 187. Also available at: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/911/.

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

16 smallwarsjournal.com

conducted through religious schools that teach more than Qur‘anic verses. Many such religious schools (or madrassas) are located in Sudan, Pakis-tan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. Moreover, these schools often received funding and support through many of the same aforementioned gov-ernments. These locations are often the focal points such insurgents use for spotting, assessing, recruiting, training and employ their forces – many times young, uneducated youth with seemingly no other options in life. 1

Moreover, these Islamists parallel insurgents of an earlier age due to other tactics and strategies employed. They continue to use asymmetric forms of attack, thus lessening the effectiveness of the overwhelming conventional United States military. Likewise, through the use of the Internet, successes are publicized to their supporters, members and the larger world audience. Examples of this use of propaganda and information operations is seen through the use of American (or allied hostages) seen on television, often through the noted Al Ja-zeera news network.2 Like information (or propa-ganda) operations of past insurgents, Al Jazeera (and others) attempt to make their websites appear more legitimate in the world‘s eyes, thus create legitimacy for the insurgents or those that would use their services. These groups, although they as-pire to political goals, still use violence as a tool towards their end.

Fast forwarding to 1990, COIN was an out of vogue, Vietnam-era, term that had been in large replaced by newer terms like low intensity conflict (LIC),3smaller scale contingencies (SSCs)4, military operations other than war (MOOTW) 5, fourth gen-eration warfare (or 4GW),6 and most recently, Ir-

Paragraph 5.4 (page 187) is particularly helpful because of its discussion of the money trails. 1 Angela Rabassa (and others). Part 1: Beyond Al Qaeda, The Global Jihadist Movement (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corp, 2006), 100. 2 See Al Jazera on the World Wide Web at:

http://english.aljazeera.net/. 3 United States Government. Field Manual 7-98, Low Intensity Conflict (Washington, DC: GPO, 1992). 4 United States Government. 1998 Quadrennial Defense Review (Washington, DC: GPO, 1997), sec 3. Accessed on 10 Oct 2009 at

http://www.defenselink.mil/qdr/archive/sec3.html. 5 United States Government. Joint Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures for Joint Special Operations Task Force Operations (Washington, DC: GPO, 2001), GL-15. 6 Colonel Thomas Hammes. The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (Minneapolis, MN: Zenith Press, 2006), 2.

regular Warfare7 (or IW). One manual published during the nineties tried to fuse the political, social, and military considerations in such contingency operations when it said in part ―In LIC operations, political objectives drive military decisions at every level from the strategic to the tactical. All commanders and staff officers must understand these political objectives and the impact of mili-tary operations on them.”…8 By the early nineties, the world had changed. The Soviet empire had been defeated in Afghanistan; the world‘s econo-mies were becoming intertwined, as well as China and other Asian countries were fast becoming eco-nomic juggernauts.

Currently, several United States Government (USG) documents describe threats to the United States by such asymmetric opponents. Moreover, some of these documents offer hope and a means, others not but most alarming is the assertion that none of these address the true threat the United States faces. And as has been previously stated, if the United States (or any government) does not understand the threat it faces, that government cannot expect to forge a viable strategy to defeat that threat.

First and foremost is the PATRIOTS Act of 2001 (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Ob-struct Terrorism of 2001). Although the Act clearly states who is the target of America‘s counterterror-ism efforts; the Islamist extremists – not Muslims at large, the Act does authorizes actions which are counter to what needs to occur in the post 9-11 COIN environment. The most disturbing portion of the act, as it applies to global insurgency, is that unlimited funds are authorized for countering any terrorist acts.9 With unlimited funding, not only are we funding the wrong military actions, but we are doing so with seemingly unending funds. One of several issues will spell disaster for US military operations; the loss of popular support and fund-ing. Among the other documents is the already discussed 2006 NSS.

If we looked more closely at what occurs follow-ing the issuance of the 2006 NSS, we would gain

7 United States Government. IrregularWarfare (IW): Joint Operating Concept (JOC) (Washington, DC: GPO, 2007). 8 United States Government. Field Manual 100-20: Operations in a Low Intensity Conflict (Washington, DC: GPO, 1990), 1-5. 9 United States Government. PUBLIC LAW 107–56—OCT. 26, 2001 (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appro-priate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001 (Washington, DC: GPO, 2001), 276.

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 17

clarity on the problem. Following the issuance of the 2006 NSS, the Secretary of Defense and Chairman, Joint Chief of Staff produces two other documents; the National Military Strategy (NMS) and the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan (or JSCP). The NMS translates national security goals into military objectives, while the JSCP translates these national military objectives into planning requirements for the geographic combatant com-manders (GCCs).1 This is pivotal to the argument at hand because in the case of the GWOT, the Unit-ed States Special Operations Command receives its guidance for its execution of GWOT through the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan via a series of pen-tagon plans known as the 7500 series.2

This seems feasible, yet, if the United States‘ strategies and tactics used in the Global War on Terror were examined, troubling information would be found. If we look to the 2006 National Security Strategy (2006 NSS), we see the beliefs of President Bush and his cabinet:

―In the short run, the fight involves using military force and other instruments of na-tional power to kill or capture the terror-ists, deny them safe haven or control of any nation; prevent them from gaining access to WMD; and cut off their sources of support.‖3

Conversely, Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsur-gency starts with a definition of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies and then discusses the current environment. In part:

―Long-term success in COIN depends on the people taking charge of their own af-fairs and consenting to the government‘s rule. Achieving this condition requires the government to eliminate as many causes of the insurgency as feasible…. Over time, counterinsurgents aim to enable a country or regime to provide the security and rule of law that allow establishment of social services and growth of economic activity. COIN thus involves the application of na-

1 United States Government. Chairman of the Joint Chief of

Staff Instruction 3100.01B: Joint Strategic Planning Sys-

tem (Washington, DC: GPO, 2008), 1-7. 2 United States Government. FY 2009 Department of the Navy Budget (Washington, DC: GPO, 2008). Accessed on 26 Apr 2009 from

http://www.finance.hq.navy.mil/FMB/09PRES/Highlights_book.pdf. 3 United States Government. US National Security Strategy (Washington, DC: GPO, 2006), 11.

tional power in the political, military, eco-nomic, social, information, and infrastruc-ture fields and disciplines. Political and military leaders and planners should never underestimate its scale and complexity; moreover, they should recognize that the Armed Forces cannot succeed in COIN alone.‖4

Most importantly, however to the question at hand is how these Islamic movements are insur-gencies – as opposed to being terrorists with a global reach. As previously discussed, classical insurgencies typically move through phases in which a political movement and cause is devel-oped, an organization is created, and until the time is right for full conventional battle with the oppos-ing government, much of the insurgents‘ activities remain clandestine. The insurgents often create cellular structures that guarantee security through compartmentalization, but often times contain po-litical and military wings, all lead by a headquar-ters element. Moreover, these organizations often contain financial, logistical, and training cells, all compartmentalized for security.5 Although the global community is less likely to experience purely socialist or Maoist based insurgencies as are dis-cussed in Human Factors Considerations of Un-dergrounds in Insurgencies, the basic require-ments for organization, security, logistics, intelli-gence and propaganda all remain valid in the current conflict.

One of the early proponents of this more radica-lized view of Islam and how to apply the tenants of that faith to fit their world view was Sayyid Qutb, ―a poet, educator, journalist, critic, controversial Islamic ideologue, and radical Islamist.‖6 Even-tually, Qutb was imprisoned and executed by the Egyptian government, but not before he made his mark on Islamic extremism in Egypt, the greater Middle East, and the world. Qutb‘s beliefs are easi-ly surmised; the west‘s corruptness makes the western civilization no longer capable of leading humanity.7 The British wartime measures, seen in in the period 1917-1918, lead to increased require-

4 United States Government. Field Manual 3-24, Counterin-surgency (Washington, DC: GPO, 2006), 1-1. 5 Andrew Molnar. Human Factors Considerations of Under-grounds in Insurgencies (Washington, DC: Special Operations Research Office: The American University, 1965), 17-35. 6 Adnan Musallam. From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islamism (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2005), viii. 7 Adnan Musallam. From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islamism (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2005), 7-9.

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

18 smallwarsjournal.com

ments upon the Egyptian citizenry. As a result, many, but especially the poorer in this occupied land caused an increase in hostility towards their British occupiers. This occupation and the accom-panying resentment were some of the overriding factors which lead to many in that society the de-sire to revert to an earlier, more pure time when Islamic law and society.1 This was true in the micro sense, internal to Egypt, but was also evident in the larger pan-Arab movement in the Middle East. Qutb is not the only one that proposed such asym-metric measures.

If we examine Robert Pape‘s influential work, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Ter-rorism, we would see that countries that are in-vaded (or occupied) often resort to suicide opera-tions against the occupying forces because of the helplessness felt when facing tanks and armored vehicles. This phenomenon (as a modern occur-rence) was noted by Pape in 1982 when Israel in-vaded its northern neighbors. When Israel invaded Lebanon, the Shia soon resorted to such suicide attacks.2 So where does that leave the United States?

In the current environment, non-kinetic ap-proaches should dominate the United States‘ strat-egy if the outcome is to be a positive one. When kinetic means are used in Afghanistan, for exam-ple, whether or not the intended target escapes the operations – too often times -- kill innocents. These innocents include Afghans, Pakistanis, or others – those civilians who ‗s allegiances may have been undecided before such attacks, will often go over to the insurgent‘s side believing the force used was disproportionate, if not outright wrong. In short, the United States developed COIN doctrine, which addressed many of the military aspects of the world‘s insurgencies, but at the same time was (and remains) short on political, social, and eco-nomic solutions which offered more tangible long term benefits. Following the United States‘ defeat in Vietnam, the doctrine of the eighties and early nineties contained many of the same traits as those of the Vietnam era; long on kinetic military solu-tions – but lacking in social, economic, infrastruc-ture, and political solutions. One interesting as-pect of the eighties and nineties doctrine however, was the nearly universal propensity for newer

1 Adnan Musallam. From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islamism (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2005), viii – 11. 2 Robert Pape. Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York, NY: Random House, 2006), 27-37.

terms to describe the environments we fought these wars in.

The world had become smaller through the im-pacts of the global Internet. As a direct result, un-ilateral COIN or other military efforts were becom-ing less common. All the while, a global realization that international political organizations (NATO, OAS, ASEAN, and others) were beneficial but at the same time required more political, social, and financial backing. The Soviets‘ failed efforts in Afg-hanistan (1979-1989) linked with their economic failures in their homeland provides one such ex-ample. Following the Soviets‘ withdrawal in the early Spring of 1989 and after a decade of contin-ued violence, a politico-religious organization - the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan. The Taliban appeared on the world stage but many did not un-derstand their genesis, much less their global agenda. Moreover, many did not understand the links between the Taliban and Osama bin Laden‘s (OBL) global Al Qaeda (AQ) network.

In the end, a proper understanding of the ene-my and that enemy‘s tactics are vital to choosing the correct course of action for defeating the ene-my. If the threat an enemy poses, or tactics used by an adversary are not understood, a less than optimal course of action will likely be chosen. Such is the case with the global insurgency. Successful COIN efforts require the support of the people, or at a minimum, the COIN efforts must alienate the insurgents from the population. The global insur-gents seek to form a new political order. In the case of the global insurgency, the population that OBL and his AQ are vying for their support is the globe‘s Muslim community (or umma). The scope of this global insurgency is different from past insurgen-cies; however, the underlying concepts remain the same.

Today‘s conflicts, many times are more asym-metric than conventional. In a small number of cases, and although the threat may be convention-al, unilateral approaches are not typically em-ployed due to the influence of such organizations as NATO‘s International Security Augmentation Force (ISAF) or perhaps the Organization of Afri-can States. Therefore, it is entirely appropriate that the international community remedy such perplex-ing problems with finesse, while at the same time understanding that many of these contingencies‘ solutions are as much political as military. There-fore input, and in many cases, active participation by NATO-led forces are quickly becoming the norm. But the belligerents are often armed. So how is the issue of technologically based militaries engaging with asymmetric forces armed with only

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 19

AK-47s, and often in politically sensitive areas of the globe? Being more specific, how are remedies applied in the current GWOT?

The problem is the agency assigned the leading roles for executing this global insurgency. But, the problem goes further than simply who should lead this global insurgency. This global insurgency cer-tainly calls for a USG response, but who should assume the lead in such an effort? The US military should not be the lead or even as the main compo-nent. When a DOD component is the lead for GWOT, insurgency, or any other mission, histori-cally the DOD was assigned as the lead agent. Al-though the military does train forces in civil affairs and psychological operations, those forces (subor-dinate to US SOCOM) are low density and high in demand – or simply stated there are not enough to go around. Similarly, SOCOM has some of the best trained and equipped forces in the world for the kinetic response, or DA in military parlance. But as already discussed, a kinetic response is not the optimal method for winning a global COIN cam-paign. The question posed then is, who should be this lead?

The United States Department of State (US DOS) should be the lead agency for such global COIN operations. The DOD should be but one of several interagency partners placed in a supporting roles. The task before us then is to describe how the USG‘s strategic documents should read as to properly reassign the GWOT tasks from the DOD (US Special Operations Command) to the US De-partment of State, as well as re-labeling the GWOT efforts counterinsurgency. With COIN, diplomatic initiatives should be more at the forefront while military action should receive less attention and focus. Looking past diplomacy, we would expect more of a civilian presence in counterinsurgency efforts in locations such as Afghanistan. There are too few DOS personnel on the ground in Afghanis-tan and far too many military personnel giving the Afghanistan Provincial Reconstruction Teams more of a military appearance and less a civilian appearance. Although security is certainly re-quired for a government to regain its footing, an overwhelming military presence appears more like an occupation force to that nation‘s inhabitants.

Having the US Department of State the lead, however is not as simple as stating this new role. This new role, and in reality new strategic ap-proach must be founded by several other actions. These actions include rewriting the United States National Security Strategy. The NSS describes the threats faced by the United States and thus under-pins other national strategic documents such as the

DOD‘s National Military Strategy. Moreover, the rewriting of the NSS would cause a realignment of national priorities, such as the US DOS‘s funding for overseas operations, training for the DOS‘s new roles and responsibilities, and perhaps the most difficult change – the culture. This cultural change would be required in the US DOS, the DOD, and certainly the US Congress and Executive Branches since the current way of thinking keeps the US DOD in the lead role. The Department of Defense would also face sizable changes.

The Department of Defense receives its guid-ance through several key documents; the NMS hav-ing already been discussed. Assuming the NMS were changed to reflect the change in primary roles for the DOD, follow-on changes would then be re-quired. First among these changes are the services‘ approaches to training, organization, and funding. It is the separate services (Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Army, and Special Operations Forces – un-der Special Operations Command) that recruit, train, and equip forces for the various geographic combatant commanders (GCCs). Therefore, the GCCs authorities, missions, and manning require modification. Currently, the Chiefs of Missions (or ambassadors) are responsible for all personnel in their countries except those under the OPCON (or operational control) of the GCCs. That being said, changes to the GCCs roles are also required for the DOS‘s new roles and responsibilities.

In summation, this interagency guide states the ―strains created by globalization, by the collapse of weak state structures, by demographic, environ-mental, and economic pressures, by the ease of cooperation among insurgent groups and crimi-nals, and by the appearance of destructive radical ideologies, all augur a period in which free and moderate governance is at risk.‖ The guide goes on to say that governments are less likely to engage in unilateral actions, citing the political and economic restraints of the modern international community.1 Although seemingly moving in the right direction, the US Interagency COIN Guide (USICG) and the DOD‘s FM 3-24 (COIN) partially speak to the is-sues at hand but they do not provide direction or policy direction.

The following recommendations are thus of-fered. First, the USICG and the military‘s FM 3-24 are not policy, nor are they included in law or any governmental regulations. Therefore, the steps dis-cussed in the USICG, such as the US DOS being the

1 United States Government. US Government Counterinsurgen-cy Guide (Washington, DC: GPO, 2009), 5.

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

20 smallwarsjournal.com

lead agency, are just guidance and recommenda-tions. Until these words are included in legislation and get passed as law, they will be of little conse-quence. Until the requirements are stated in law, they can not affect funding. Only with the neces-sary funding, can the DOS and DOD change those department‘s recruitment, training, equipping, or employment. United States law requires the sepa-rate services recruit, train and equip their forces. It is the Geographic Combatant Commanders (GCCs) that employ these forces in support of national ob-jectives. Without the requisite laws and funding the GWOT mission will remain a kinetic response through the GCC‘s use of available assets and as a reflection of their primary mission – fighting our nation‘s wars. Likewise, this same funding would similarly affect the DOS‘s recruitment, manning, organization, and missions.

Second, the US DOS should take more of a lead in the global insurgency. As already discussed this will require a cultural change within the DOS, but such changes are not impossible. Moreover, the US DOS should establish an organization which is responsible for leading global COIN efforts. This branch would, necessarily be funded but it could then employ personnel experienced in military and expeditionary operations. More is required than being part of meetings for national strategy meet-ings when they deal with insurgencies. The US DOS should chair and report to the US Congress for the United States‘ global COIN efforts. Third, the United States global COIN efforts should be, and already are in many occasions, part of multila-teral efforts such as that found in Afghanistan / ISAF. The ISAF model of counterinsurgency is a suitable template for COIN efforts elsewhere in the globe. Among the tenants of the ISAF COIN model is the ―shape, clear, hold, and build‖ methodology, all being led by a political organization, as well as relying on political leadership, and all being back-stopped by the host government‘s efforts at social and political solutions. This methodology would apply for all current COIN environments since this technique relies on the host government (Afghanis-tan in this case), the US DOS (or other political body) to be the lead, and therefore reduces the mil-itary footprint in the affected countries, thereby reducing the perception of an occupation by a mili-tary force.1 And, although the former Secretary of

1 Based on discussions the author had with the current and in-incoming ISAF Air Operations Center Directors. The discussion was held during a private luncheon the author had in Stavanger, Norway on 22 June 2009. Due to ongoing operations in Afgha-nistan, the General Officers names‘ were omitted. The two of-

Defense was using a multilateral, internationally sanctioned approach to the War on Terror, the United States need only redirect some of the posi-tive efforts already being executed.2

Fourth, the strategies chosen for COIN cam-paigns must reflect the needs of the host nation. Moreover, the United States‘ national strategies must contain the end state as well exit strategies that compliment the host nation‘s overall goals. For in the end, if that country‘s priorities are not the overall goals for the insurgency, the mission is much less likely to succeed. Fifth, and lastly, these strategies must be intrinsically linked to the center of gravity for that conflict. Moreover, the centers of gravity must be linked to the critical vulnerabilities and critical capabilities. Only when the centers of gravity are thus prosecuted can a positive resolu-tion be enjoyed.

In closing, current and future COIN efforts must rely on the efforts of multiple nations, agen-cies, and international organizations. Successful COIN campaigns do (and will) rely heavily on po-litical solutions, non-kinetic solutions, and in all cases should be based on the needs of the host na-tion involved. The world is in a post modern envi-ronment; a period of high speed global communi-cations, global connectivity through the Internet, and a global economy in which the counterinsur-gency doctrine of yesteryear will not suffice. For-mer colonial powers, as well as former Cold War nations will continue to experience internal vi-olence as nationalistic issues continue to surface. Until these measures are realized and appropriate-ly changed, the global insurgency will plague the international community and international com-munity with little hope of a successful conclusion. America is on the brink of repeating history of four decades ago when it lost the Vietnam War. It is often heard that America lost the war in Vietnam but never lost on the battlefield. Unless America changes its strategies for GWOT (to include Afgha-nistan) – Americans might again be repeating this oft heard quote.

Jon Couch enlisted in the USMC in 1979. Mr. Couch originally trained to be an amphibious Re-connaissance Marine and then in 1982 changed his job specialty to Intelligence Analyst and later Special Forces Survival Instructor. Mr. Couch went on to serve in aviation and logistical units

ficers also hold the belief that the ―GWOT‖ is more aptly names a global insurgency. 2 United States Government. The National Military Strategy for the War on Terrorism (Washington, DC: GPO, 2006), 1.

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 21

before being medically retired at twenty years active service.

After retiring from the Marine Corps, Mr. Couch worked as a contractor at the Marine Corps' MAGTF Staff Training Program. Since 2003, Mr. Couch has been working at the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency as a Personnel Recovery In-structor, Observer-Trainer, Supervisory Intelli-gence Analyst, and Course Manager for the Intel-ligence Support to Personnel Recovery Course.

Mr. Couch has earned a bachelor's degree from Campbell University (History) and a Master's de-gree from American Military University (Uncon-ventional Warfare/SOLIC). Mr. Couch currently lives in Stafford, Virginia, has two children and is Married to the former Kristi Kluckey from Dun-dee, Michigan.

Please view the article online for its extensive bib-liography.

President Obama: Look for a New Massoud

by Cora Sol Goldstein Published online, 2010.08.10

The U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is floundering,

and the American presence in Central Asia is in peril. After more than a thousand American casual-ties and billions of misspent dollars, the U.S. Army will be forced out of Afghanistan without having achieved any of its objectives: capturing Bin Laden, destroying Al Qaeda‘s operative and training capa-bilities, and transforming Afghanistan into a stable democracy governed from Kabul. This is tanta-mount to defeat. It is a mistake to equate, as it is often done, the American defeat in Vietnam with the looming American defeat in Afghanistan. Nei-ther the National Liberation Front nor North Viet-nam ever launched terrorist attacks against conti-nental U.S., Europe, or other American allies. The Vietnamese who fought against the U.S. in Vietnam were not interested in projecting their ideology abroad. Theirs was a defensive struggle of national liberation and self-determination. The American defeat in Vietnam had political consequences both at home and abroad, but did not imperil American national security. On the other hand, an American defeat in Afghanistan will threaten American ho-meland security and configure a severe setback for American foreign policy. When the U.S. leaves Afghanistan, the country will once again become the ideal safe haven for training terrorists capable of launching attacks against the U.S. and its allies. If the U.S. leaves Afghanistan as it is, Pakistan, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban will be able to challenge American strategic presence in Central Asia and project their influence on Turkmenistan, Uzbekis-tan, and Tajikistan unchecked. Pakistan will con-tinue to wage its undeclared proxy-war against Ka-bul and Indian interests in Afghanistan, and will become the main power-broker in the region.

Critics of Obama‘s policy in Afghanistan claim that the U.S. needs to withdraw immediately and continue the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban using drones. This sounds attractive because it of-fers a way out of an increasingly unpopular war, and it promises a technological (and relatively pain-free) quick-fix. However, the proposal is flawed. To begin with, assassinated Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives are rapidly replaced. Second, after American troops leave Afghanistan, the coun-try will be converted into a subterranean maze of refuges and arsenals that will be beyond the reach of drones. If this happens, the U.S. will be forced to escalate its air campaign, and this in turn will in-crease the severity of collateral damage. Third, strategic bombing, no matter how sophisticated, needs human intelligence to pinpoint targets. Last-ly, a counter-insurgency war cannot be won by drones alone because every civilian casualty is a propaganda victory for the enemy, both in the bat-tlefield and abroad. Collateral damage, irrespective of the actual number of victims and their putative ―non-combatant‖ status, is a sure way to heighten critique of the U.S. Furthermore, if the U.S. uses drones in Afghanistan after withdrawing, the strikes will be qualified as illegal by the interna-tional community. The U.N. Human Rights Coun-cil has already condemned the American use of drones in Pakistan and Yemen because they are not war-zones. The issue is not the inadequacy of drones themselves, but their efficacy in achieving the military and political objectives of the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Drones alone will not be able to defeat a fundamentalist, multi-headed, jihadis movement bent on capturing Afg-hanistan and projecting its terrorist agenda beyond the Afghan frontiers.

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

22 smallwarsjournal.com

Drones are part of the solution if and only if they are integrated into a campaign waged by anti-Taliban and anti-Pakistani Afghan guerrillas. Mul-tiple Afghan armed factions waging relentless guerrilla warfare against the Taliban are likely to provide better results than gargantuan operations led by American and European soldiers with the dubious help of the new Afghan army and police. It is hard to believe that the American-trained Afg-han armed forces, inefficient, corrupt, unreliable as they are, and extensively infiltrated by Taliban and Pakistani spies, will be able to supplant the Ameri-can and NATO forces once these withdraw. The Obama administration and the U.S. Congress must reconcile themselves to the fact that the $27 billion spent on the training of the Afghan security forces since 2002, has been a waste. Instead of continuing the pointless (and failing) ―democratization jihad,‖ the American goal should be to empower local anti-Taliban militias that share with the Taliban many of the same cultural, religious, and social mores, and use comparable techniques of warfare. They know the Afghan territory and its people with the same depth as does the Taliban, and have extensive military experience in irregular warfare. Yet it is evident that without American support, the anti-Taliban groups will not succeed. American intelli-gence, American special ops, and American tech-nological resources must be deployed as needed. In this way, the Afghanistan war will cease to be an asymmetric conflict and become a military and political struggle between the Taliban and rival Afghan groups. If there is a model to copy in the fight against Pakistan and the Taliban, it is that of Ahmed Shah Massoud‘s Northern Alliance. The only way to fight the Taliban is through Taliban equivalents. A guerrilla movement can only be challenged and eventually defeated by another guerrilla movement equally knowledgeable of the territory and its people, and animated by a similar commitment to victory. Moreover, Al Qaeda and the Pakistani ISI will find it harder to exploit the collateral damage caused by American drones if the aerial bombing is helping an Afghan anti-Taliban guerrilla.

There is still time to change course. The U.S. government should not attempt to create a unified country led from Kabul. The decade-long Ameri-can attempt to unify Afghanistan through social engineering (just like the Soviets tried to do) is preposterous. The U.S. does not need Karzai and his pseudo-army. American strategists should ex-ploit the political potential of a divided Afghanis-tan, as Pakistani strategists already have. The Pashtun area of Afghanistan, which spans two thirds of the country and holds 42 percent of the

Afghan population, is a vast tribal territory with very vague (or simply nonexistent) loyalties to Ka-bul. Therefore, Afghanistan must be divided into two zones, one Pashtun, under the control of Pakis-tan, and the other in the hands of American-backed anti-Taliban and anti-Pashtun guerrillas. The U.S. would not be artificially dividing Afgha-nistan, but rather using preexisting cleavage lines. Afghanistan is already an ethnic and political mo-saic of communities that are often hostile and fear-ful of one another. The Afghan civil war, that began after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 and lasted until the American invasion in 2001, had a death toll of 100,000, mostly civilians. No one could blame the U.S. for the disintegration of a country that is al-ready de facto divided.

Of course, arming anti-Pashtun guerillas is a risky strategy. If President Obama decides to re-draw his Afghan strategy and fully back anti-Taliban warlords, he will be attacked on ethical grounds. Recently, the House Subcommittee for National Security has voiced its concern about the use of taxpayers dollars to finance warlords in Afg-hanistan. This critique is naive because U.S. tax-payer dollars have uncritically supported the Pakis-tani ISI, the strongest warlord organization in Cen-tral Asia, for decades. The issue is not financing allies, but which potential allies to finance. The real risk posed by this strategy is that the anti-Taliban militias could eventually turn against the U.S. After all, Al Qaeda, the Afghan Mujahidin, and the U.S. were partners in the anti-Soviet crusade in Afgha-nistan. But the role of American diplomacy and American intelligence should be to avoid this evo-lution.

The history of the American occupation of Iraq and its aftermath should serve as a cautionary tale. In Iraq, American planners also failed to appre-ciate the potential benefits of dividing an already fragmented society. They were unable, or unwil-ling, to read the political situation on the ground with objectivity and accuracy. The Bush adminis-tration, fixated on the fantasy of an ethnically and politically integrated and democratic Iraq, did not realize that once Saddam Hussein was militarily defeated, the Iraqi army, the Iraqi security forces, and the Baath Party ceased to be the problem, but could have been part of the solution. The partition of Iraq and Baghdad into a Sunni/Kurdish zone and sector and a Shia zone and sector, would have allowed the U.S. to pacify and reconstruct the Sun-ni/Kurdish zone and sector, and outshine its com-petition. No Shia regime modeled on the Ayatol-lahs‘ Iran would have been able to compete with an American-driven development project in the Sun-

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 23

ni/Kurdish zone and sector. Instead of partition-ing Iraq, President Bush attempted to unify the country and thus made it possible for the pro-Iranian Shiites to gain access to power. The dis-astrous American occupation of Iraq led to the growth of Al Qaeda in the country, to the emer-gence of a powerful Sunni insurgency, and to the establishment of a government with dubious alle-giance to the U.S. The Sunni Awakening move-ment, a late addition to the American strategy, achieved some success in the fight against Al Qae-da, but it was not able to conclusively defeat Al Qaeda or challenge Shia political control. As a re-sult, Al Qaeda is still a threat in Iraq, and the U.S. is protecting a quasi-hostile Shia government.

Once again, the U.S. has bet on the wrong horse. First, President Bush installed Mr. Karzai in Kabul, and now President Obama is following his predecessor‘s lead and continues to back the cor-rupt, inefficient, and disloyal Afghan government. Obama too has been deluded by the mirage of a mythical Afghanistan, ethnically heterogeneous but united and peaceful. His military and political strategy in Afghanistan, in spite of his insistence otherwise, closely resembles the failed policy of the Bush administration. The widely publicized Marja offensive was a failure, and the much heralded drive to win the heart and minds of the people in Kandahar is likely to collapse as well. The piece-meal addition of troops and the renewed commit-ment to civil reconstruction in a context marked by an absolute lack of security, are simply useless. The Iraq experience shows that it is futile to attempt to construct or reconstruct a country and a civil socie-ty in an environment that can only be described as violent, hostile, and dangerous. The imminent military and political defeat of the U.S. in Afgha-nistan is ineluctable if the Obama administration does not take into account the reality on the ground and changes the nature of the war. While Washington hesitates to use anti-Taliban and anti-Pashtun guerrillas, Pakistan and the Taliban have de facto fragmented Afghanistan. Pakistan has al-ready achieved its aspiration to create a unified political and military Pashtun zone spanning Pash-tun Afghanistan and its own Tribal Areas. Moreo-ver, Pakistan is taking the political initiative by ne-gotiating directly with Karzai.

It is often said that foreign powers are con-demned to fail in Afghanistan. This is an over-simplification – the ancient history of Afghanistan is the history of successive and successful foreign occupations that radically changed the country and its prevailing ideologies. It is true that in modern times imperial powers have systematically lost

their Afghan adventures. In all cases, the invading armies tried to deploy a reduced number of troops and attempted to keep their casualties low. They relied on their technological superiority in their efforts to impose a central government that could be controlled from afar. The U.S. is losing Afgha-nistan because it is adhering blindly to this model.

It is imperative to free American policy from the straitjacket of misconceptions that shapes U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.

“The democratization of Afghanistan is possible.”

Not really. Democratization by force is not the same as radical regime change. It implies a tho-rough ideological and political transformation that can only be achieved if the enemy is militarily an-nihilated and politically defeated, and unable and unwilling to resist. Therefore, if an American gov-ernment were interested in introducing liberal de-mocracy in Afghanistan, it would have to fight and win a total war. Only then would a military occupa-tion aimed at democratization by force à la Germa-ny and Japan have a chance of success.

“There is a nation in Afghanistan and it‟s been there for a long time.”

Hardly. Afghanistan is a fragmented conglome-rate of tribal and ethnic groups harboring deep resentments against each other, and split by re-gional and local conflicts. If anything, Afghanistan is two countries, Pashtunistan (which straddles over the Durand line and includes parts of Pakis-tan) and the rest. Any American policy tailored around the idea of a united Afghanistan governed from Kabul is condemned to fail.

“We are fighting a stateless enemy in Afg-hanistan.”

Not true. Pakistan functions as the base and sanctuary of Taliban and al Qaeda. It is a failed state with expansionist ambitions where political decisions are heavily influenced, and often dic-tated, by the armed forces and the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI). The ISI trains, pays, protects, and manipulates the Taliban, and shelters, tole-rates, and condones al Qaeda. Therefore, unless the Pakistan problem is solved, the war in Afgha-nistan will be lost.

“It is crucial to avoid collateral damage.”

Is it? If American national security is really at stake, collateral damage should be an irrelevant strategic consideration. 19,894 French civilians

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

24 smallwarsjournal.com

were killed by the Allies during the invasion of Normandy, yet the world would be rather different without D-Day.

“We must win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.”

Before that, we must win the war. It is imposs-ible to construct and reconstruct in a context devo-id of security, and it is impossible to win the heart and minds of an enemy population during war and before defeat. The U.S. was able to win the heart and minds of the population of its zone and sector only after the unconditional surrender of Germany. Military defeat and physical destruction had made the German population amenable to change, and the American military government was able to gain a quasi-absolute monopoly of violence, informa-tion, and propaganda in the American zone. This allowed the American military government to carry out a denazification and reeducation campaign, introduce monetary reform, and guide the con-struction of democratic institutions and practices.

“We can get the Taliban to drop their wea-pons through diplomacy.”

How? It is preposterous to think that Taliban fighters can be won over by the NATO forces. The Taliban are winning, and therefore have no real incentive to accept American conditions and Ka-bul‘s leadership. American military and civilian strategists seem unaware of the depth of the ideo-logical commitment of the Taliban commanders and many of their fighters. The only way to make the Taliban drop their weapons is by drying the pond in Pakistan while conducting a fierce anti-Taliban guerrilla war in Afghanistan.

“Investing in education, not military surges, will bring peace to Afghanistan.”

This is absurd. The U.S. is not in Afghanistan to ―improve‖ the Afghan school system, and we should not be involved in a farcical democratiza-tion à la Iraq. Humanitarian organizations may be interested in discussing Afghani education with tribal elders in order to preserve the safety of new schools, but we should not follow this example. If ―respectful consultation‖ with tribal elders guaran-tees the security of a school, the inference is that the Taliban are authorizing the school and its cur-riculum. Al Qaeda and the Taliban would certainly profit if the U.S. government and humanitarian organizations invested in educating their future recruits because they use contemporary weaponry and incorporate modern information and commu-nication technology. Any policy, governmental or

non-governmental, aiming at increasing education in a Taliban-ruled society, means increasing the power of the enemy.

“American national security is not at stake in Afghanistan.”

This is simply wrong. How many Americans must be killed by al Qaeda using operatives trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan to consider the Afgha-nistan war a national security priority? There were 3000 casualties in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. This is approximately the number of American soldiers killed in action in France from June 6 to June 20, 1944. Is this not reason enough to consider the outcome of the Afghanistan war relevant to American homeland security? Moreo-ver, if the U.S. leaves Afghanistan without defeat-ing the Pakistani/Taliban/al Qaeda challenge, American foreign policy in Central Asia would suf-fer a considerable setback. Pakistan, the Taliban, and al Qaeda would be able to project their influ-ence on Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan unchecked, and Pakistan would become the main power-broker in the region.

No foreign power can win an asymmetric war by relying exclusively on its state of the art tech-nology. If Afghanistan is in fact an area of strategic importance for the security of the U.S., then Presi-dent Obama must radically change his present mil-itary philosophy. He must not withdraw from Afg-hanstan, but reëngage. The use of nuclear weapons is not yet justified. The national and international political context makes it impossible for the U.S. to fight a total war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, since this would require military conscription and the full mobilization of the home front, and would imply very high Afghan and American casualties. The only chance of success is to accept and encour-age the division of Afghanistan, and to partner with anti-Pakistani and anti-Taliban militias.

Cora Sol Goldstein is an Associate Professor of Political Science at California State University, Long Beach. Goldstein received her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago in 2002. Her book, Capturing the Ger-man Eye: American Visual Propaganda in Occu-pied Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) discusses the U.S. experience in postwar Germany. Her recent publications in-clude “2003 Iraq, 1945 Germany, and 1940 France: Success and Failure in Military Occupa-tions,” Military Review, July 2010 and “A Strateg-ic Failure: American Information Control Policy in Occupied Iraq,” Military Review, March-April 2008.

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 25

The Hezbollah Myth and Asymmetric Warfare

by Adam Elkus Published online, 2010.08.17

Since the early 1990s, military theorists ex-

amined ways that a rogue state, substate, or non-state actor could frustrate a conventional force. The 2006 Israeli clash with Hezbollah came to be seen as the harbinger of an era of cheap missiles, stronger defenses, and danger to conventional forces. Hezbollah‘s supposed success furthered a growing notion that a strong high-end asymmetric warfare defense could make a country a poison pill for foreign intervention.

But this narrative does not capture the conflict‘s ambivalent results, exaggerating Israeli difficulties while overplaying Hezbollah‘s performance. The Hezbollah myth also masks the ability of a suffi-ciently driven and equipped state to use conven-tional military power to annihilate a weaker state or substate group. While the operational challenges of high-end asymmetric threats do pose dangers for conventional forces that deserve sustained analysis, the strategic question of whether high-end asymmetric warfare can effectively deter a conventional force hinges instead on the political context of the conflict and the adversaries who fight it.

The Strategy and Terminology of the Poison Pill Defense

One of the biggest contemporary anxieties in American defense debates is the operational chal-lenge of state and non-state threats utilizing cheap but lethal weaponry to frustrate intervention by conventional forces. The old concept of a ―Swiss‖ defense rooted in the combination of regular and irregular forces fighting to the death is reflected in new worries that new combined capabilities might make a state or a sanctuary zone a poison pill for expeditionary forces. Although this concept is as old as military history itself and also not necessari-ly novel in a contemporary context, it has been aided by the perception that Hezbollah was able to frustrate the Israelis in 2006 with innovative tac-tics and weapons.

Strategists fear—and dictators and insurgents hope—that capabilities known popularly as ―high-end asymmetric threats‖ will prevent the projec-tion of power abroad and limit American options. This is a valid concern, especially due to the prob-lems it poses for expeditionary policies, whether

they are full-on interventions or ―strategic raids.‖ It is also natural—and supported by military histo-ry—to note that no advantage, no matter how overwhelming, can be exercised permanently with-out encountering adversary countermeasures.

While uncomfortable questions ought to be asked about the tactical and operational challenges these threats pose, we should also remember the military power of the modern state, built up over centuries, to devastate the military, government, and commercial infrastructure of a target state or sanctuary. This dynamic was demonstrated by Israel‘s actual conduct of the 2006 Lebanon war and Hezbollah‘s state of desperation upon trigger-ing a war it neither wanted nor was truly prepared to fight.

Of course just because a state can annihilate a small power or non-state group, however, doesn‘t necessarily mean it should. Nor does it guarantee that the intervening power will achieve the desired political results from its usage of military force or will be morally justified in inflicting such destruc-tion. Thus, the question of whether America‘s op-tions are limited by asymmetric warfare hinges on questions of whether policy from which our strate-gies are formed is worth the risk, opportunity cost, and can be realistically implemented.

Before we delve into the complexities of the is-sue it is first necessary to briefly examine the ter-minology involved. One of the greatest barriers to understanding and sound decision in defense mat-ters is language. Familiar words such as ―strategy‖ no longer mean what they did a century ago. New words and concepts enter the lexicon that both confuse and clarify. Definitions of military con-cepts also are dependent on the strategic culture and requirements of the country that use and de-bate them.

The term ―high-end asymmetric threat,‖ drawn from the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) de-bate is the preferred term for a host of state and nonstate military capabilities. 1 There is also the

1 For an introduction to the concept, see Michèle Flournoy and

Shawn Brimley, ―The Contested Commons,‖ Proceedings, July

2009, http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2009-

07/contested-commons

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

26 smallwarsjournal.com

older concept of ―compound warfare,‖ which de-scribes armed cooperation between conventional and irregular forces—a timeless dynamic as old as war itself, as well as the newer concept of ―hybrid warfare.‖ Since the subject of this analysis is the overall ―poison pill‖ defense of a country through a mixture of positional, standoff, and mobile warfare and irregular operations that exploit the usage of inexpensive but powerful munitions and com-pound warfighting, the inelegant concept of high-end asymmetric warfare will generally be used.

The way history, language, and theory some-times conflict in the writing of war studies is an interesting subject in its own right and amply cov-ered in other works. 1

The Search for an Asymmetric Counter

After the Cold War, some military theorists be-gan to look again at the problem of asymmetric warfare. However, this type of theory dealt with physical rather than moral attrition. Theorists were looking at ways that technology, tactics, or organization could present challenges to conven-tional armies on tactical and operational levels. According to this literature, conventional forces could be defeated—or at least severely tested—by smaller state or nonstate forces leveraging cutting-edge tactics, skillful use of the terrain, and cheap but effective weapons. Physical attrition would be combined with moral attrition to create a compre-hensive method of defeating conventional forces. This paralleled a growing interest in non-state threats in general as various ethnic and religious conflicts dominated the news.

The first paper on Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) theory, for example, principally concerned exploitation of advanced weapons by small teams moving in dispersed fashion. ―Technologically, it is possible that a very few soldiers could have the same battlefield effect as a current brigade,‖ the authors of the first 4GW paper wrote. ―Small, high-ly mobile elements composed of very intelligent soldiers armed with high technology weapons may range over wide areas seeking critical targets. Tar-gets may be more in the civilian than the military

1 William F. Owen, ―The War of New Words: Why Military His-

tory Trumps Buzzwords,‖ Armed Forces Journal International, November 2009,

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2009/11/the-war-of-

new-words/

sector. Front-rear terms will be replaced with tar-geted-untargeted. ‖ 2

The conflicts of the 1990s fueled a growing in-terest in asymmetric physical attrition. The Rus-sian military‘s 1995 debacle in Chechnya was in-tensely studied by military professionals seeking to prepare for Chechen-like tactics in future warfare. Urban warfare was a hot topic of study in the 1990s, and the subject of large exercises such as the ubiquitous Marine Corps Urban Warrior pro-gram. Even if discussion of asymmetric warfare did not dominate defense issues, it was definitely bub-bling under the surface. Ins short, theorists out-lined a future that very much resembles today‘s talk of anti-access, cyber, and ―G-RAMM‖ (guided rockets, artillery, mortars, and missiles) threats.

Interest in asymmetric warfare exploded after the September 11 attacks, which was seen as the pinnacle of the art. The worsening Iraq campaign and the Global War on Terrorism added fuel to the fire, and the 2002 Millennium Challenge wargame entered into legend as a scenario that supposedly proved that a skilled irregular force with sound tactics could defeat a tech-heavy conventional force (although the story behind MC-2002 is still a mat-ter of intense controversy).

American participation in irregular warfare, however, was not the only source of inspiration for the emerging concept of a high-end asymmetric threat. The controversy surrounding the 2006 con-flict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon helped revive the old concept of a defense that was neither conventional nor irregular, but a lethal mixture of the two.

The Hezbollah Myth

2006 was the not the first time an Israeli con-flict caught the eye of Western military observers. The 1973 attrition of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) tanks by Egyptian anti-tank forces heavily influ-enced American military thought and doctrine. General William DePuy‘s Field Manual 100-5 Op-erations assumed a high degree of weapons lethali-ty, and some pundits at the time claimed that the missile-armed ground soldier had ended the era of the tank. 3 As Robert Citino points out, this view

2 See William S. Lind et al, ―The Changing Face of Warfare: Into

the 4th Generation,‖ Marine Corps Gazette, October 1989, 22-26. 3 Stephen Biddle and Jeffrey A. Friedman, The 2006 Lebanon

Campaign and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy, Carlisle Barracks, Strategic Studies Insti-tute, 2008, 2.

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 27

ignored an outnumbered IDF‘s successful defense of two fronts and successful armor-led strategic penetrations into enemy territory. The IDF‘s defi-ciencies had more to do with specific problems with force employment and organization as well as the proven strength of Egyptian armed forces on the defense. 1

The 1973 war was closely studied because it supposedly granted a glimpse of future warfare between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Since both sides fought with equipment and doctrinal con-cepts supplied by the dueling superpowers, the ―Chinese Farm‖ could be analyzed to shed light on the Fulda Gap. Similarly, the IDF fought in 2006 with concepts at least partially inspired by Ameri-can defense transformation against an adversary capable of limited partisan combat and considera-bly more sophisticated than the Iraqi or Afghan insurgents. Thus, it was natural that Israel‘s clash with Hezbollah would receive an equal amount of attention.

A definitive English-language account of the 2006 conflict that incorporates the full range of Israeli and Lebanese (government and Hezbollah) experiences has yet to be written, although there are many military analyses and journalistic ac-counts, just as the Third World wars of the 1980s gave impetus to exhaustive technical analyses by Anthony Cordesman and other defense intellec-tuals. This literature provides an imperfect set of sources to look at how Lebanon has entered into American defense debate. It is striking to see the similarities between respective American misper-ceptions of 2006 and 1973, as in both cases Israeli difficulties were exaggerated and the enemy‘s own desperation and military failures minimized.

A popular perception emerged of Hezbollah as a strong force that leveraged inexpensive technolo-gies and partisan warfare tactics to conventionally fight Israel to a standstill. 2 The fact that Hezbollah employed a mixture of conventional and irregular tactics is also cited as a harbinger of an evolved

1 Robert Citino, Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm: The Evolution of

Operational Warfare, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006, 183-186 and 256. 2 See Greg Jaffe, ―2006 Israel-Lebanon War Looms Large in

Pentagon Debate on Future,‖ Washington Post, 6 April 2009,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-

dyn/content/article/2009/04/05/AR2009040502235.html and Steven Erlanger and Richard A. Oppel, ―A Disciplined Hez-bollah Surprises Israel with Training, Tactics, and Weapons,‖ New York Times, 6 August 2007,

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/07/world/middleeast/

07hezbollah.html

form of warfare posing a difficult problem for con-ventional forces. 3 While opinions hotly differed over whether or not the conflict was a win, loss, or strategic stalemate for Hezbollah, many agreed that they had fought in a disciplined and effective manner. As Anthony Cordesman relates, some Arabs and other international observers also saw Hezbollah‘s survival and ability to continue firing rockets as a strategic victory over the IDF. 4 Thus, the myth of Hezbollah‘s success was born.

There is no doubt that Israel‘s performance in 2006 was flawed on multiple levels. The Israelis themselves thought so—hence the Winograd Commission and the changes that followed. And Hezbollah, by all accounts, did punch above its weight. However, the war‘s conduct and results are much more complex. Stephen Biddle, Jeffrey Friedman, Daniel Byman, and Steven Simon have noted these complexities in their techno-tactical and strategic analyses.

First, the conflict itself started from Hezbollah‘s own strategic miscalculation. Postwar interviews suggest that Hezbollah would not have launched an attack if it were aware that doing so would have led to the sheer level of destruction it endured. 5 Second, as Byman and Simon observe, Hezbollah‘s strategic position by the end was more desperate than many believe: ―[b]y the time Hizballah was pushing for a cease-fire, which winners do not normally do, its fighters were trapped in a box be-tween the Israeli border, a blockaded coast, blown bridges and roads leading north, and a large IDF force in Marjayoun, poised to march up the Bekaa to the east.‖ 6 David Ucko also argued counterfac-tually that the war was a strategic victory for Israel, if one saw the conflict through the Israeli strategic prism. 7

3 See the helpful bibliography provided at the Combined Arms

Center blog

http://usacac.army.mil/blog/blogs/reflectionsfromfront/a

rchive/2009/06/01/hybrid-warfare-the-second-lebanon-

war-of-2006.aspx and Biddle and Friedman‘s own citations on 1-5. 4 See Anthony Cordesman, William D. Sullivan, and George

Sullivan, Lessons of the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah War, Washing-ton: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2008. 5 Daniel Byman and Steven Simon, ―The No-Win Zone: An Af-

ter-Action Report From Lebanon,‖ The National Interest, No-vember-December 2006, 55. 6 Byman and Simon, 56.

7 David Ucko, ―Israel‘s Strategic Victory in Lebanon,‖ Open

Democracy, 19 October 2006. http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-middle_east_politics/israel_victory_4016.jsp

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

28 smallwarsjournal.com

Finally, Biddle and Friedman give Hezbollah credit for some basic tactical skills such as cover and concealment and preparation of fighting posi-tions, but note that ―Hezbollah appears to have attempted a remarkably conventional system of tactics and theater operational art, but there is a difference between trying and achieving, and in 2006 at least, Hezbollah‘s reach in some ways ex-ceeded its grasp.‖ Biddle and Friedman qualify this with favorable comparisons to conventional forces with worse strategic performance, but this is not the shining endorsement seen in other analyses. 1

The ambivalence of the 2006 war and its prob-lems of interpretation aren‘t unique. Citino argues that the lessons of pre-World War I conflicts such as the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War or Bulga-ria‘s 1912 campaign in Thrace are contradictory and far from clear. 2 Such complexity was lost in translation as Lebanon became a part of the never-ending counterinsurgency vs. conventional debate. Since predicting the wars of the future necessarily depends on interpreting the conflicts of the present, it is perhaps inevitable that the Lebanon conflict would become a proxy for something else.

Israel did not completely destroy Hezbollah, but the war turned out to be more than Hezbollah had bargained for, destroyed a large portion of Leba-non‘s infrastructure, and gave Tel Aviv a short res-pite. Fault can be—and was—found in Israel‘s poli-cy, strategy, and operational conduct, but just as in 1973 an exclusive focus on those faults obscures the military power of the Israeli state and the weakness of its enemies.

The Problems of Asymmetric Defense

The Hezbollah myth fed into a growing percep-tion that high-end asymmetric defense utilizing a combination of guided weapons, the aid of complex terrain, and mixed conventional and irregular or-ganizations could make a state or sanctuary into a poison pill for prospective invaders. One defense analyst, looking at how Taiwan could alter the bal-ance of power against China, examined the pros-pects for a Hezbollah-style missile array.3 Others warned about the implications of a ―post-power

1 Biddle and Friedman, 75.

2 Robert Citino, The Quest for Decisive Victory: From Stale-

mate to Blitzkrieg in Europe 1899-1940, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002. 3 Daniel Goure, ―Defending Taiwan, The Hezbollah Way,‖ Lex-

ington Institute Early Warning, 28 July 2010,

http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/defending-taiwan-the-

hezbollah-way?a=1&c=1171

projection era‖ in which the advantage had shifted back to the defender. 4 A journalist for The Atlantic tic Monthly explored the possibilities for Georgia to employ a guerrilla-style defense against Russia. 5 5 However, Western defense thinkers weren‘t the only ones looking at the viability of an asymmetric deterrence strategy.

Venezuela and Iran both were influenced by the concept of a high-end asymmetric warfare defense that would make the most of their unimpressive military capabilities. As Max Manwaring detailed in a series of monographs, Venezuela has been moving its armed forces toward both offensive and defensive usage of asymmetric warfare that draws on Hugo Chavez‘s favorable readings of modern irregular warfare theory and its perceived validity in the wars of the 21st century. 6 In Iran, the situa-tion is similar, as the regime has developed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as an irregular attack force and utilizes the Quds Force as a paramilitary arm for special operations and active measures.

However, the concept of the asymmetric de-fense is as old as military history itself--and it has a mixed record in practice. There are countless ex-amples of militias in military history operating with regular forces in defense of the homeland, and some states‘ national security strategies make a ―Boer‖ or ―Swiss‖-style defense the keystone of their conventional deterrent. As Sandhurst lecturer Claus Telp notes, revolutionary France‘s grand strategist Lazare Carnot combined conventional operations with extensive irregular skirmishing against enemy communications in the desperate war of annihilation to preserve the Revolution. 7 The perceptive analyst Ka Po Ng also observes that for a while, China‘s overall national security strate-gy under Mao was to ―lure the enemy into the deep‖—letting an enemy overextend itself in Chi-na‘s vast heartland where it would be encircled and destroyed by a combination of conventional and

4 Greg Grant, ―Defense is Best Again,‖ DOD Buzz, 15 June 2010,

2010, http://www.dodbuzz.com/2010/06/15/defense-is-

best-again/ 5 Reihan Salam, ―Georgia‘s Guerrilla Option,‖ The Atlantic

Monthly, 13 August 2008,

http://thecurrent.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/08/follo

wing-hezbollah-lessons-in.php 6 See Max G. Manwaring, Latin America‘s New Security Reality:

Irregular Asymmetric Conflict and Hugo Chavez, Carlisle Bar-racks: Strategic Studies Institute, 2007. 7 Claus Telp, The Evolution of Operational Art, 1740-1813, From

Frederick the Great to Napoleon, New York: Frank Cass, 2005, 44-47.

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 29

irregular forces. 1 The operational theorist Richard Simpkin suggested a guerrilla-style net of dis-persed anti-tank hunter-killer teams in complex terrain as a means of frustrating the Soviet inva-sion of Europe during the 1980s. 2

The problems with this concept are legion. First, although irregular forces are often romanti-cized as brave and inventive warriors, there is a reason why professional militaries tend to predo-minate in the defense of nation-states. Crispin Burke thus recounts Saudi Arabia‘s negative reac-tion to Osama Bin Laden‘s offer to defend the kingdom against Iraqi armored forces in the after-math of Saddam Hussein‘s Kuwaiti conquest: ―[B]in Laden was reported to have claimed that he would fight the Iraqi tanks with ‗faith.‘ Unfortu-nately, faith doesn't really hold up well against T-72s (though it is, admittedly, difficult to clean off the treads).‖ 3 There is something to be said for sheer numbers, combat power, and technological advantage, however unromantic this might seem to T.E. Lawrence‘s ―dreamers of the day.‖

An asymmetric defense does not work for every country in every circumstance. As the example of Saudi Arabia demonstrated, some countries simply do not have the terrain to carry out such a layered asymmetric defense. Militia--as opposed to profes-sionally trained militaries—also often lack basic soldierly skills, equipment, and weapons that would make them more likely to survive intense fighting. Saddam‘s fedayeen guerrillas in the con-ventional phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, for example, fought hard but were insignificant to the overall outcome. Coordination between irregular and conventional arms is also more difficult in practice than it seems in theory. Finally, the ―Swiss‖ strategy, by default, leaves the defender‘s countryside and urban centers open to terrible de-struction.

The United States follows, compared to what might considered the non-Western world, very unique rules of engagement concerning irregulars. This enlightened approach, however, can some-times blind us to the historical record of guerrilla

1 See Ka Po Ng, Interpreting China‘s Military Power: Doctrine

Makes Readiness, London: Routledge, 2004. 2 Simpkin cited in John A. English, Marching Through Chaos:

The Descent of Armies in Theory and Practice, Westport: Praeg-er, 1996, 168. 3 Crispin Burke, ―Black Swans and Butterflies,‖ Wings over

Iraq, 8 August 2010,

http://wingsoveriraq.blogspot.com/2010/08/black-

swans-and-butterflies.html

warfare and the more sanguinary policies of other states. Throughout military history, irregular resis-tance has triggered harsh reprisals. Antoine-Henri Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz both stressed the horrific nature of this type of warfare, and anyone with even a cursory familiarity with the history of guerrilla warfare in the American Civil War will understand what atrocities they speak of. The de-vastation wrought by Russia in Chechnya and Sri Lanka among the Tamils is a contemporary exam-ple of a dynamic well-known to both conventional and irregular soldiers throughout history.

Operations and Policy

The question of anti-access and asymmetric de-fense as a barrier to conventional power projection, despite its lack of novelty, is a valid operational concern. William F. Owen‘s scenario of the ―Toyota Horde,‖ for example, correctly notes that the ability to mount a basic combined arms defense has been executed by irregulars in the past and can be done today through a ―Do-It-Yourself‖ method. 4 G-RAMMS and other high-end asymmetric weapons pose a real danger to military forces and deserve sustained operational thought. Dr. Robert Bunker has been a pioneer of these studies, beginning with his 1998 operational analysis of how a group utiliz-ing complex tactics and technologies could fru-strate the Army After Next force concept. 5 But as Owen notes, it is not surprising that small states and substate powers have manifested these abili-ties.

No military advantage, no matter how vast, re-mains undisputed for long. In the struggle between the natives and colonists in the Western Hemis-phere, technological advantages possessed by Eu-ropeans were quickly negated as natives acquired Western arms and used them to augment their own unique style of warfare. The 21st century is no dif-ferent. However, in the past such challenges have been surmounted by sound concepts of operation, combined arms capabilities, and soldiers trained to handle unique ―Boer‖-type challenges. There are a large number of theorists and practitioners cur-rently examining the operational implications high-end asymmetric warfare, and hopefully they

4 William F. Owen, ―The Toyota Horde: Examining a Lost Mili-

tary Capability,‖ Small Wars Journal, 7 April 2010,

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2010/04/the-toyota-

horde/ 5 See Robert Bunker, Five Dimensional (Cyber) Warfighting:

Can the Army After Next Be Defeated Through Complex Con-cepts and Technologies?, Carlisle Barracks: Strategic Studies Institute, 1998.

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

30 smallwarsjournal.com

will find solutions or at least means of mitigating the threat.

But while the operational questions have justly received attention, the policy and strategy dimen-sions have been ignored. Wars are not solely de-cided by technologies and operational methodolo-gies. The question of whether high-end asymmetric warfare can effectively deter a conventional force hinges instead on the political context of the con-flict and the makeup of the adversaries who fight it. Clausewitz, often stereotyped as a theorist of abso-lute war, in fact strongly counseled analysts to re-member that in practice wars are limited by all kinds of political and material circumstances.

As previously mentioned, different states have vastly differing conceptions of proportionality and usage of force. Russia‘s conduct in Chechnya, for example, could never be duplicated by a Western state. Moreover, all state fight wars with limited and unlimited objectives differently. In the stereo-typical Hollywood scenario of a rogue state collud-ing with non-state groups to terrorize the American homeland, a retaliatory war with unlimited objec-tives is fought in which greater losses and collateral damage is more acceptable. However, risk-taking in limited war is by no means uncommon. 1991, we accepted the risk of potentially high conventional losses from Saddam Hussein in order to accom-plish the limited objective of restoring the Middle Eastern balance of power.

Beyond the narrow operational questions of how, for example, to revive our doctrines for things such as opposed landings or the employment of AirSea Battle against China, there is the unans-wered policy question of what rationale force will be employed under. In other words, it is not enough to talk about ―anti-access‖ without explain-ing what we are attempting to acquire access to and why.

Just because a state can use its power to devas-tate a ―Swiss‖ defense does not mean it is wise to do so. Force does not automatically generate favor-able political results because it is ultimately a tool whose results are dependent on the utility of the policy aims it seeks to achieve. As Robert Bunker recently noted, ―it is far easier to wreck the position and power of a state by undertaking the wrong in-ternational policies, especially as it pertains to un-dertaking foreign wars, than to build up or regain the power and prestige lost.‖1 Additionally, the

1 Robert Bunker, ―The Ugly Truth: Insurgencies are Brutal,‖

Small Wars Journal, 15 August 2010,

ability to completely destroy or severely damage a state with conventional force does not necessarily come prepackaged with a handy moral justification for doing so. But we should be aware that the capa-bility exists—both Sherman (and Vladimir Putin) made Georgia howl.

Conclusion

The Hezbollah myth, and the growing idea of asymmetric defense against conventional power-projection has been a dominant thread of contem-porary defense theory. It satisfies both warring camps in the future warfare debate between coun-terinsurgency and conventional advocates. But a look at the complexity of Israel‘s clash with Hez-bollah, military history, and the strategic context of modern irregular warfare will not only shed light on the problem but also lead back to questions of policy that should be front and center in the de-bate.

Adam Elkus is an analyst specializing on foreign policy and security. He has published on defense issues in Small Wars Journal, West Point Combat-ing Terrorism Center Sentinel, Defense Concepts, and other publications. He is currently the Asso-ciate Editor of Red Team Journal.

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2010/08/the-ugly-truth-insurgencies-ar/

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 31

M. Star Damage – Emirates News Service

Strait of Hormuz

The Strait of Hormuz: al-Qaeda’s Newest Jihad Zone?

by Malcolm Nance Published online, 2010.08.13

After the July 28 explosion alongside the Japa-

nese oil tanker M. Star in the Strait of Hormuz (SOH) initial speculation was that it had struck a derelict sea mine from the 1991 Iraq war, encoun-tered a rogue wave from an earthquake in Iran or had a collision with a whale or submarine. Pundits and even some counter-terror observers, particu-larly those in the Gulf States, spent an inordinate amount of time attempting to explain it away with any possibility except the most obvious one - ter-rorism. That can no longer be ignored.

When news of the incident broke caution was called for in the region as to assigning a specific cause and terrorism was specifically rejected as likely.

Here in the UAE, skepticism is the preferred form

of denial and critics of the suicide boat theory are being given strong voice. The very mention of the possibility of terrorism originating in or near the United Arab Emirates is met with hushes and al-ternative explanations, hence the whale, wave and submarine theories. The ―T‖ word (Terrorism) is not welcome in public or political discourse. Some political pundits claim that conventional war with Iran is a greater threat to the Strait. That may be true solely in relation to Iran‘s nuclear ambitions, but a wave of successful al-Qaeda suicide attacks could destabilize the markets in a way that rising tensions with Iran cannot.

However, on 6 August the UAE Coast Guard con-

firmed a terrorist act was indeed the cause of the blast. Homemade explosive residue was found on the hull of the ship from a speedboat that had exploded nearby. It was the first definitive physical evidence

that a terrorist group, most likely al-Qaeda, in-tended to send a message: the 40% of the world‘s oil that transits through the SOH is now fair game. To ignore the matter any further places not only other vessels at risk, but the global economy as well.

Why should the incident be attributed to terror and not another cause? For one, a sea mine that had dislodged and drifted into the Strait of Hor-muz after 19 years underwater would more likely have come ashore in Qatar, the Western UAE or Oman‘s Musandam peninsula rather than enter the narrow channel. Second, a large contact mine such as the Saddam era Iraqi LGM-45 or the Iranian M-08 would not only pierce the double hull of the tanker but also set the ship rapidly ablaze. Other classes of mine such as the bottom laying Italian Manta, also dropped in large numbers by Iraq, were swept clean by 1992 and do not drift.

Damage to the M. Star also indicates a nearby surface explosion. I have personally experienced what it is like to strike an LGM-45 on a 20,000 ton helicopter carrier. The hull damage from a sea mine would have been a 25x25 foot hole, blazing oil and copious flooding below or at the waterline.

This tanker suffered a dent mainly above the wa-terline. Additionally, railings on the main deck broke off, a life boat three decks above was sent flying and watertight windows and doors were dis-lodged. This kind of damage can only occur be done by massive blast pressure near the detonation spot that vectored upwards. Most telling, there was

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

32 smallwarsjournal.com

no major damage below the waterline. Collision with a whale, a rogue tidal wave or even a small ship/submarine, such as the collision between the

submarine USS Newport News and the Japanese mer-

chant M/V Mogamigawa in 2007 leaves enormous attendant damage and evidence of the damaging effect.

The UAE believes a small explosive boat was the culprit. It was most likely a small boat full of un-contained homemade explosives launched from a dhow or other mother ship. Why a mother ship? Because a small craft laden with 200-300 lbs of explosives would find it extremely difficult to tran-sit the coastal waters of the Indian Ocean. The mission would be easily endangered from swamp-ing by ocean waves, running out of petrol from the long transit or being identified as an unusual craft operating at night by the Omani or Emirati Coast Guard. A support vessel, like a motorized dhow or a small fishing boat would not be noticed, could launch a Zodiac surreptitiously and provide a plat-form to video tape the attack and exfiltrate assist-ing operatives. It should be noted that a crewman on the M. Star also witnessed a flashing light on the horizon just before the explosion. This may have been a signal from a mother ship to the bomber to overtake the tanker and finish the job.

Though speculative, the most probable scenario is that a leased fishing dhow or private speed boat towed a Zodiac along the eastern fjords of the Mu-sandam peninsula and launched the bomber near the first passing tanker coming from the west. At 00:30 hours the suicide boat would have seen the bridge and navigation lights of the M. Star, but the fact that the small craft appears to have struck the starboard stern indicates that the bomber had little experience adjusting to the speed of the ship and had to overtake from the rear in choppy seas. At midnight in the SOH there was no way for a small craft to identify a specific vessel apart from its class. It just happened to be the Japanese tanker M. Star.

This brings us to the question of who would plan and execute a plot to leave a tanker burning 2 million gallons of oil at the exit of a globally stra-tegic energy artery? All signs point to al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula. This incident seems to in-dicate al-Qaeda‘s preferred method of maritime attack.

If it is al-Qaeda the attack on the M. Star could be just the latest in a series of maritime terror op-erations that started in February 2000. They have attempted or successfully struck ships three times in Yemen against the USS Sullivans, the USS Cole

and the MV Limburg. The modus operandi is equally identical - a suicide terrorist driving a Zo-diac boat full of homemade explosives which then explodes alongside a victim vessel. The Limburg attack in 2002 signaled al-Qaeda‘s shift away from directly attacking warships, which only achieved symbolic terror value, to targeting economic trans-port. It has also been evidenced in Iraq where three high speed suicide boats of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) attempted to blow up the Basra oil terminal in 2004. Since the demise of the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers terrorists applied suicide boat tactics are almost exclusively al-Qaeda‘s domain.

Despite dubious claims from a group calling itself the Abdullah Azzam Brigades the tactics, tech-niques, procedures and geographical location again suggests an AQAP cell operating temporarily in the UAE or Oman.

Experts agree that the Abdullah Azzam Bri-gades is just a cover name attributed to the terror-ist cells that have conducted attacks in Egypt, Leb-anon and the Arabian Peninsula. However, most attacks attributed to this cover name, though tech-nically and geographically distinct, did lead back to al-Qaeda affiliates and suspects. Even the noto-rious Abu Mussab al-Zarqawis‘ al-Qaeda in Iraq used this name in 2005 when they missed two US warships docked in Aqabah Jordan and Eliat, Israel with 107mm rockets smuggled from Iraq.

So why should we believe any al-Qaeda claim? One factually challenged statement and a video with images of an alleged suicide bomber with a photo of the wrong tanker may be good propagan-da but the claim is not a disqualifying factor.

Though al-Qaeda‘s maritime attacks of the last decade have been eclipsed by the Somali pirates the Strait of Hormuz incident should not be dis-counted or ignored. Maritime terror strikes remain part of al-Qaeda‘s long term strategy to economi-cally damage the West. By attacking the oil tankers al-Qaeda can introduce instability into the markets in an effort to further damage America‘s global in-fluence.

Since as early as 2001 Osama Bin Laden has stated that America‘s greatest vulnerability is its poor capacity to suffer sustained economic uncertainty and that it would be his highest priority. He also stated that the 9/11 attacks were intended to inject that uncertainty into the world markets and bog America down in a slow bleed Afghan insurgency. The results of that strategy, and its unplanned sis-ter war in Iraq, are plain for all to see. With the United States now in a weakened economic state, and the limitations of our combat capacity laid

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 33

bare by bin Laden‘s asymmetric warfare plan, an al-Qaeda attack on the choke point of the global economy was almost predictably inevitable.

By choosing a target of international signific-ance such as an oil tanker in the volatile Strait of Hormuz, bin Laden tried to send a message that arterial lines of energy to the entire developing world can and will be threatened by even just one of his most devoted non-state actors.

Despite AQAP being sensitive to the security capabilities of the UAE and Oman, history indi-cates they will most likely try again. Next time they may use one or more larger vessels with much more explosive capacity. Despite commitments to

stepped up patrols in the SOH, by the Emiratis, Omanis, Iranians and the US Fifth Fleet, it would be extremely hard to detect and interdict small craft operating close to the shipping lanes at night.

Like most al-Qaeda attacks, this attempt was a bold, though amateurish attempt to raise the cost of oil to further destabilize a badly bruised Ameri-can and European stock markets. Nothing more, nothing less. Should a future attack leave the spec-tacular image of a burning oil tanker on our TV screens their message will come through loud and clear.

Malcolm W. Nance is a counter-terrorism and terrorism intelligence consultant for the U.S. gov-ernment’s Special Operations, Homeland Security and Intelligence agencies. A 20-year veteran of the US intelligence community's Combating Ter-rorism program and a six year veteran of the Global War on Terrorism he has extensive field and combat experience as an field intelligence col-lections operator, an Arabic speaking interroga-tor and a master Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) instructor.

Index of All Articles Published in August

By Author (alphabetical by last name)

Author - Article Date Link

Tristan Abbey – The Saudi Option 08.03 link

Colonel Gary Anderson – A Retrospective on Combat in Iraq 08.29 link

Colonel Charles D. Allen – Redress of Professional Military Education 08.16 link

Dean-Peter Bajer – Is the US Intelligence Community Misreading the Shabaab-Qaeda Relationship?

08.29 link

Lionel Beehner – What Sri Lanka Can Teach Us About COIN 08.27 link

Nahama Broner, Ph.D. – Interviewing Tactics in Counterinsurgency 08.03 link

Steve D. Berlin – Conviction Focused Targeting: Targeting Violent Extremists While Developing Rile of Law Capacity

08.24 link

Thomas Bundt – Reexamination of a Quintessential Joint Force Operation Case Study: Urgent Fury

08.18 link

Dr. Robert Bunker – The Ugly Truth: Insurgencies are Brutal 08.15 link

Bradford Burris – Professional Military Education for US Army Special Operations Forces

08.19 link

Jon C. Couch – Terrorism or Insurgency: America‘s Flawed Approach to the Global War on Terror

08.03 link

Daniel R. DePetris – Deterring Al Qaeda After Iraq: A Critique of Paul Davis‘ RAND Study

08.31 link

Nicholas Dickson – Preventing Future Natural Disaster Casualties: Partnering with USAID and the Office of Reconstruction and Development

08.26 link

G. Murphy Donovan – Signals and Noise in Intelligence 08.27 link

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

34 smallwarsjournal.com

Author - Article Date Link

Stephane Dosse – The Rise of Intrastate Wars: New Threats and New Methods 08.25 link

Adam Elkus – The Hezbollah Myth and Asymmetric Warfare 08.17 link

Hugues Esquerre – Deep Inside the Insurgent‘s Mind: Past the Motorcycle Diaries Towards Understanding Che Guevera

08.24 link

Major Gail Fisher – Down at the District: A Look at the District Delivery System 08.06 link

Dr. Roy Godson – A QDR for All Seasons? The Pentagon is Not Preparing for the Most Likely Conflicts

08.16 link

Cora Sol Goldstein – President Obama: Look for a New Massoud 08.10 link

John Ty Grubbs – Constructing the Revolution: The Social Psychological Develop-ment of Radical Spiritual Leaders

08.23 link

Robert Guido – US Efforts to Combat Terrorism Financing: Progress Made and Fu-ture Challenges

08.19 link

David H. Gurney – An Interview with General James T. Conway, USMC 34th Com-mandant of the Marine Corps (Joint Force Quarterly)

08.26 link

Vincent G Heintz – Eritrea and Al Shabaab: Realpolitik on the Horn of Africa 08.29 link

John Hollywood, Ph.D. – Interviewing Tactics in Counterinsurgency 08.03 link

Stacy Lamon, Ph.D. – Interviewing Tactics in Counterinsurgency 08.03 link

Colonel Billy McFarland, USAR – Interviewing Tactics in Counterinsurgency 08.03 link

Phillip S. Meilinger – Primitive Violence, Culture, and the Path to Peace 08.18 link

Renanah Miles – Iran Goes Nuclear: An Analysis of the Bushehr Nuclear Plant and Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talks

08.25 link

Judy Mionki – Genocide in Darfur: A Rebuttal of the UN Commission of Inquiry 08.30 link

Jeff Moore – Thai Village Security Lessons for Afghanistan 08.03 link

Malcolm Nance – The Strait of Hormuz: al-Qaeda‘s Newest Jihad Zone? 08.13 link

E. Walker Nordan, Jr. – The Best Defense is a Good Offense 08.24 link

Joe Royo – Afghanistan Part II: The Reoccurrence of International Terrorism in So-malia

08.30 link

Dr. Lee Rowland – Strategic Communication & Influence Operations 08.03 link

Dr. Richard H. Shultz, Jr. – A QDR for All Seasons? The Pentagon is Not Preparing for the Most Likely Conflicts

08.16 link

Dave Shunk – Army Capstone Concept and the Genesis of German World War One Assault Squad and Infiltration Tactics: A Historical Linkage

08.03 link

Jeffrey D. Smotherman - An Interview with General James T. Conway, USMC 34th Commandant of the Marine Corps (Joint Force Quarterly)

08.26 link

Steve Tatham, RN – Strategic Communications & Influence Operations 08.03 link

Jason Thomas – The Cognitive Dissonance of COIN: Right Doctrine, Wrong War 08.13 link

John Ubaldi – Another Way in Afghanistan: Overcoming the Current Flawed Strategy 08.31 link

Thomas Weiss – Mostly Dead 08.26 link

Dianna Wuagneux – Identity, Insurgency & Healing 08.19 link

Ben Williams – Transition to Iraq Sovereignty 08.23 link

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 35

By Date

Date Article Author(s) Link

08.31 Deterring Al Qaeda after Iraq: A Critique of Paul Davis‘ RAND Study

Daniel R. DePetris link

08.31 Another Way in Afghanistan: Overcoming the Current Flawed Strategy

John Ubaldi link

08.30 Afghanistan: Part II The Reoccurrence of International Terrorism in Somalia

Joe Royo link

08.30 Genocide in Darfur: A Rebuttal of the UN Commission of Inquiry

Judy Mionki link

08.29 A Retrospective on Combat in Iraq Colonel Gary Anderson link

08.29 Is the US Intelligence Community Misreading the Sha-baab-Qaeda Relationship?

Deane-Peter Baker link

08.29 Eritra and Al Shabaab: Realpolitik on the Horn of Afri-ca

Vincent G. Heintz link

08.27 Professional Military Education for United States Army Special Operations Forces (Part Two)

Bradford Burris link

08.27 Signals and Noise in Intelligence G. Murphy Donovan link

08.27 What Sri Lanka Can Teach Us About COIN Lionel Beehner link

08.26 An Interview with General James T. Conway A Joint Force Quarterly Interview

David H. Gurney and Jeffrey D. Smotherman

link

08.26 Preventing Future Natural Disaster Casualties: Part-nering with USAID and the Office of Reconstruction and Development

Nicholas Dickson link

08.26 Mostly Dead: Continuing the Discussion on the Re-ported Death of the Armor Corps

Thomas Weiss link

08.25 Iran Goes Nuclear: An Analysis of the Bushehr Nuclear Plant and Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talks

Renanah Miles link

08.25 The Rise of Intrastate Wars: New Threats and New Me-thods

Stephane Dosse link

08.24 Deep Inside the Insurgent‘s Mind: Past the Motocycle Diaries Towards Understanding Che Guevera

Hugues Esquerre link

08.24 The Best Defense is a Good Offense: The Necessity of Targeted Killing

E. Walker Nordan, Jr. link

08.24 Conviction Focused Targeting: Targeting Violent Ex-tremists While Developing Rule of Law Capacity

Steve D. Berlin link

08.23 Transition to Iraq Sovereignty: The Impact on US Mili-tary Advisory Efforts

Ben Williams link

08.23 Constructing the Revolution: The Social Psychological Development of Radical Spiritual Leaders

John Ty Grubbs link

08.19 Identity, Insurgency & Healing Dianna Wuagneux link

08.19 US Efforts to Combat Terrorism Financing: Progress Made and Future Challenges

Robert M. Guido link

08.19 Professional Military Education for United States Army Special Operations Forces

Bradford Burris link

08.18 Primitive Violence, Culture, and the Path to Peace Phillip S. Meilinger link

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

36 smallwarsjournal.com

Date Article Author(s) Link

08.18 Reexamination of a Quintessential Joint Force Opera-tion Case Study: Urgent Fury

Thomas Bundt link

08.17 The Hezbollah Myth and Asymmetric Warfare Adam Elkus link

08.16 A QDR for All Seasons? The Pentagon is Not Preparing for the Most Likely Conflicts

Dr. Roy Godson and Dr. Richard H. Shultz, Jr.

link

08.16 Redress of Professional Military Education: The Cla-rion Call

Colonel Charles D. Allen link

08.15 The Ugly Truth: Insurgencies are Brutal Dr. Robert Bunker link

08.13 The Strait of Hormuz: al-Qaeda‘s Newest Jihad Zone? Malcolm Nance link

08.13 The Cognitive Dissonance of COIN: Right Doctrine, Wrong War

Jason Thomas link

08.10 President Obama: Look for a New Massoud Cora Sol Goldstein link

08.06 Down at the District: A Look at the District Delivery Program

Major Gail Fisher link

08.03 Strategic Communication & Influence Operations: Do We Really Get ‗It‘?

Dr. Lee Rowland and Commander Steve Tatham, RN

link

08.03 Thai Village Security Lessons for Afghanistan Jeff Moore link

08.03 Army Capstone Concept & the Genesis of German World War One Assault Squad and Infiltration Tactics, The Historical Linkage

Dave Shunk link

08.03 The Saudi Option Tristan Abbey and Scott Palter link

08.03 Interviewing Tactics in Counterinsurgency Stacy S. Lamon, Ph.D., Nahama Broner, Ph.D., John Hollywood, Ph.D., and, Colonel Billy McFarland, USAR

link

08.03 Terrorism or Insurgency: America‘s Flawed Approach to the Global War on Terror

Jon C. Couch link

Article Intro / Excerpts (Chronological Order)

Interviewing Tactics in COIN by Stacy S. Lamon, Ph.D., Nahama Broner, Ph.D., John Hollywood, Ph.D., and COL Billy McFarland, USAR

There is a recent growing body of literature on strategic, operational and theoretical approaches to interacting with insurgents, as well as official documentation on the topic. Though there is demand for it, often from junior officers, surprisingly little attention is given to the applied, boots-on-the-ground questions of "How do I do it? Who do I ask? What do I ask them?” and"How do I ask it?"

Not since Galula's 1964 manual on counterinsurgency has a basic hands-on approach, written for the user, been offered. Using techniques from criminology, police investigation, military science, psychology, and social network analysis, as well as practices learned in the field, this article provides a framework for organizing tactics of how to conduct interviews in non-controlled settings with the uninvolved man or woman in the street and the bystander or victim aware of insurgent activities, as well as the non-combatant collaborator and functionary of an insurgency, and a framework for interviews in semi-controlled settings such as gov-ernment or police offices. In effect, this article walks the reader through the interview process step-by-step, question-by-question, from planning to execution to analysis. In doing so, it provides a basic tactical answer to the question "How do I do it?" – This is how it can be done.

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 37

Download the full article: Interviewing Tactics in COIN

The Saudi Option by Tristan Abbey and Scott Palter

The year is 2012. Squadrons of F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s streak across the sky, swamping air defenses and neutralizing other key Iranian installations. The next wave targets the uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Qom, the nuclear power station at Bu-shehr, the conversion plant in Isfahan, and the heavy water plant at Arak. Within hours the Iranian nuclear program is crippled. As the armada returns to base, the head of state who ordered the attack readies to congratulate the pilots who carried it out.

―Peace be upon you all,‖ King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz says to his men. ―Your bravery humbles me. The Saudi Kingdom will be forever grateful.

Download the full article: The Saudi Option

Army Capstone Concept & the Genesis of German WWI Assault Squad and Infiltration Tactics, A Historical Linkage by Dave Shunk

How German Captain Willy Rohr changed infantry tactics, weapons and doctrine within the World War One German Army is a remarkable story. He succeeded in his task as a result of the German Army‘s ideas of operational adaptability, mission command and decentralized authority. This paper presents by historical example the basic ideas and inherent power in the Army Capstone Concept based on the German model. But first, a few Capstone Concept definitions as a baseline reference....

Operational adaptability requires a mindset based on flexibility of thought calling for leaders at all levels who are comfortable with collaborative planning and decentralized execution, have a tolerance for ambiguity, and possess the ability and willingness to make rapid adjustments according to the situation. Operational adaptability is essential to developing situational understanding and seizing, retaining, and exploiting the initiative under a broad range of conditions. Operational adaptability is also critical to developing the coercive and persuasive skills the Army will need to assist friends, reassure and protect populations, and to identify, isolate, and defeat enemies. 5

So how did the Germany Army of World War One use decentralization, mission command, and operational adaptability to create infiltration tactics and revolutionize infantry tactics in World War I? The story revolves around a Captain Willy Rohr.

Download the full article: Army Capstone Concept

Thai Village Security Lessons for Afghanistan by Jeff Moore

As General David Petraeus takes over military command in Afghanistan, a major point of contention has arisen regarding village security forces – are they to be, or not to be? Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his supporters are weary, saying village security forces will become tools of warlords and undermine central authority. General Petraeus and his subordinates think they are valuable to their COIN strategy. A hyper-political debate, full of miss direction, is likely to follow as both sides maneuver to control the is-sue. Village security, however, is essential to separating the people from insurgents, no matter what the war. Examples from Thail-and‘s COIN successes can help show the way forward.

Download the full article: Thai Village Security Lessons for Afghanistan

Strategic Communication & Influence Operations: Do We Really Get „It‟? by Dr. Lee Rowland and Commander Steve Tatham, RN

The last 2-3 years have seen an explosion in interest in the application of influence as a tool for achieving military objec-tives. This is not new, the military have always sought to exert influence – albeit at times unwittingly. However, two significant events have brought the issue to further prominence - the publication of JDP3-40 and the deployment of 52 Brigade to Helmand Province in 2007/8. This article does not intend to debate either in any detail – a quick search of inter and intra nets will provide plenty of information for the curious reader – but there are two issues worthy of slightly more discussion.

The first concerns 52 Brigade‘s deployment. When Brigadier Andrew Mackay led 52 Brigade to Helmand Province he did so having examined previous kinetic based deployments and concluded that these, for various reasons, had not achieved the effects that he envisaged for his mission. For him the consent of the population was utterly key and would not, nor could it, be achieved by hard power alone or even with hard power primacy; as he developed his operational design he felt frustrated that existing doctrine did not adequately prepare him to operate within the influence arena. The second is that Andrew Mackay subsequently became one of the driving forces behind JDP3-40 and in particular the forceful articulation of the ‗centrality‘ of influence. However, the ‗how to do it‘ guidance still lags behind the emphasis on and enthusiasm for, its use.....

This paper seeks to provide greater clarity in two key areas – Target Audience Analysis (TAA) and Measurements of Effective-ness (MOE).

Download the full article: Strategic Communication and Influence Operations: Do We Really Get ‗It‘?

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

38 smallwarsjournal.com

Down at the District: A Look at the District Delivery Program by Major Gail Fisher

In foothills of eastern Afghanistan on a brilliant spring day, district elders from Sayyidibad crowd into a cold, sunlit room in the cinderblock district center. They listen to speeches from men smartly dressed in western style just arrived from Kabul.

An enormous wooden table sits squarely in the middle of the room. The district center was built only three years ago, but a flo-rescent light already dangles precariously from the ceiling, one end free of its anchor. Burnt-orange curtains, stained and torn, hang on the windows. Brightly colored plastic-wrapped snacks are brought in with tea, and the Provincial Governor gives his speech over the rattle of opening snacks and sipping of tea.

The Provincial Governor speaks of endless disappointments, the Afghan central government‘s broken promises, and proposes a way forward in the district. Promise and caution comingle in the morning‘s remarks.

Download the full article: Down at the District

The Cognitive Dissonance of COIN: Right Doctrine, Wrong War by Jason Thomas

The psychological investment in COIN is now so deep that the cognitive dissonance would be too great to change course or admit COIN is the right doctrine for the wrong war. Cognitive dissonance theory suggests that despite contrary evidence, people are biased to think of their choices as correct. Like climate change, so much has been invested in counterinsurgency with huge reputations at stake, that anyone who challenges COIN in Afghanistan could be labeled a COIN skeptic.

No matter how much we try to win the hearts and minds, no matter how many millions of dollars is spent on development and regardless of attempts to improve governance and eliminate corruption, the socio-cultural ecosystem of Afghanistan does not re-spond to the doctrine of counterinsurgency. While the pockets can be won the heart and minds in Afghanistan will always remain notoriously capricious.

There are many reasons to continually question COIN from every angle, but the two this paper is concerned with are i) whether COIN could be the right military doctrine being applied in the wrong campaign; and ii) preparing for the next major unconventional war – as is often the case in political campaigns and war, we tend to find ourselves fighting on the issues, theories or practices in the last campaign.

This paper will attempt to ―play the ball and not the man‖ by pointing to the range of reasons unique to Afghanistan on top of self-imposed obstacles that reinforce the hypothesis of right doctrine, wrong war.

Download the full article: The Cognitive Dissonance of COIN

Redress of Professional Military Education: The Clarian Call by Colonel Charles D. Allen

Joint Force Quarterly has kindly granted Small Wars Journal permission to publish this forthcoming JFQ article.

In 1908, the American short story writer O. Henry penned ―The Clarion Call.‖ This title has become synonymous with a powerful request for action or an irresistible mandate. As the Nation looks to the institution of the U.S. Army during an era of persistent con-flict and after 9 years of war, it is time to recapture professional military education (PME) as part of our profession.

The Army is arguably the largest and best educational and training institution in the United States. It has a strong, established educational program that seeks to provide the right Soldier with the right education at the right time. Without doubt, even as we have fought two wars, there have been laudable advances to include an expanded graduate school program, increased numbers of international fellows at our schools, and an effort led by the Chief of Staff of the Army to broaden the experiences of the officer corps with more opportunities to serve in think tanks, interagency positions, and world-class universities.

For the officer corps, this PME program is ingrained from pre-commissioning through promotion to general officer. Unfortu-nately, even with the advances mentioned above, what is presented in official policy as an espoused value does not always translate into what is valued within the Army in the real world. More importantly, the gap between espoused and enacted values is significant and growing. Without action to arrest this trend, the Army risks the professional development of its senior leaders as well as its competency as a force to meet the Nation‘s needs in the years ahead.

Developing promising senior and strategic leaders is an obligation of the military profession. At a recent Military Education Coordination Council meeting in Washington, DC, several uniformed members asked questions about the types of conflict that we should prepare our senior officers for. In the contemporary operating environment, the focus has understandably been on the curri-culum within the colleges: what is taught, how it is delivered, and by whom (faculty) in order to provide relevant education to senior officers. Two essays from the National War College and Naval War College, respectively, captured the discussion of the joint PME and Service-specific senior PME content and methodology in a recent issue of this journal. As important as curriculum and faculty are, they are moot issues if those officers who have the greatest potential to serve as strategic leaders deem attendance at one of our war colleges unnecessary and are allowed to bypass it.

I look forward to the always superb commentary by SWJ readers on this debate, and I hope that Dr. Gilroy and Mr. Ford will join us.

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 39

Download the full article: Redress of Professional Military Education

A QDR for All Seasons by Dr. Roy Godson and Dr. Richard H. Shultz, Jr.

Joint Force Quarterly has kindly granted Small Wars Journal permission to publish this forthcoming JFQ article.

The end of the Cold War and the massive changes in the conflict environment that ensued launched the United States on a trans-formational path in military force planning. In 1996, the first Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) set out a vision of the two regional contingencies model, with the Nation equipped and able to dominate in two major conventional wars at the same time. But the out-lines of a different kind of conflict setting began to emerge as the United States attempted to protect its interests in several different regions. The first decade of the 21st century has shown clearly that the way the Nation thought about and prepared for war in most of the 20th century requires a major overhaul. But change comes slowly.

The years following the toppling of Saddam Hussein‘s regime in Iraq were filled with adversity and indecision among the mili-tary leadership about how to overcome a different type of foe. The 2006 QDR appeared to be an attempt to refocus the Pentagon‘s warfighting approach to meet the challenge. In that assessment, the Department of Defense (DOD) acknowledged that a serious gap existed between the changed nature of conflict and the doctrine and means it had available for fighting it. DOD stipulated that irre-gular warfare (IW) had become a vital mission area for which the Services needed to prepare. Post-9/11 combat was depicted as ―irregular in its nature.‖ Enemies in those fights were ―not conventional military forces.‖ Rather, they employed indirect and asym-metric means. Adaptation was the way forward.

The 2006 QDR also set in motion IW initiatives inside DOD leading up to the December 2008 release of DOD Directive 3000.07, ―Irregular Warfare.‖ That directive was unambiguous about 21st-century conflict, declaring: ―Irregular warfare is as stra-tegically important as traditional warfare,‖ and it is essential to ―maintain capabilities . . . so that the DOD is as effective in IW as it is in traditional [conventional] warfare.‖ Moreover, according to Directive 3000.07, the capabilities required for each type of fight were different.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had been among the most vociferous advocates, reinforcing the message in numerous state-ments, lectures, congressional testimony, and popular articles. Gates was by no means alone in the Pentagon and administration. But despite direction at the top, consensus was elusive. Many within the Joint Chiefs organization, Defense bureaucracy and indus-try, and Services viewed post-9/11 irregular fights as anomalies—ephemeral trends generated by particular circumstances. Further-more, they held that conventional or general purpose forces could handle them.

Download the full article: A QDR for All Seasons

Reexamination of a Quintessential Joint Force Operation Case Study: Ur-gent Fury by Thomas Bundt

Although Operation Urgent Fury, the 1983 American-led intervention in Grenada, was a successful operation from a public ap-proval standpoint, significant concerns developed over the performance of the joint command structure charged with the conduct of the mission. Examination and reassessment of relevant literature reveals the overall operation as a textbook case study of the intri-cacies of joint forces command. In an effort to continue to capture historical lessons learned, further introspection of Operation Ur-gent Fury, if only to reexamine the primary shortfalls of a joint command experience, is necessary. Reviews of literature mixed with current updates to this operation delineate significant components and recommendations for consideration in future joint doctrine reviews. This analysis narrows the components and recommendations into three mutually ‗inclusive‘ categories as they relate to three key joint force doctrine tenets: command and control, operational techniques, and equipment interoperability (joint procure-ment/acquisition).

Operation Urgent Fury was the U.S. response to the growing destabilization in Grenada that climaxed with the assassination of Maurice Bishop, Grenada‘s president. Following the Iranian crisis and expansion of communist presence in the region, this opera-tion proved critical to America‘s prestige and commitment to national security. Because of the nature of the crisis, the time in our nation‘s history, and the prior military fiasco demonstrated by Operation Desert One, diplomatic and military bodies seriously con-sidered the measures necessary to ensure success. The primary mission imperatives included the neutralization of the Grenada forces, protection and evacuation of US and designated foreign nationals, stabilization of the internal situation, and transition to peacekeeping. To complete these mission imperatives, the US deployed nearly 6,000 soldiers, marines, airman, and sailors to the region under the command and control of a single joint force commander.

Although this vast force complied with the mission imperatives, significant incidents and unintended casualties resulted from deficient command and control relationships, unfamiliarity with operational designs, and the lack of interoperability of key equip-ment. Some of these same themes likewise resonate with current challenges in present day joint operations such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Specific to Operation Urgent Fury case study these issues raised great concern for Department of Defense planners, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Secretary of Defense in the mission‘s aftermath. Aside from specific lessons learned annotated in after-action reviews, the single greatest commitment to amend these shortcomings was the enactment of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act legislation.

Download the full article: Reexamination of a Quintessential Joint Force Operation Case Study

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

40 smallwarsjournal.com

Primitive Violence, Culture, and the Path to Peace by Phillip S. Meilinger

There is an old saw among political scientists that democracies seldom fight other democracies. Although the accuracy of that statement often hinges on definitions—was 1914 Germany an autocracy because of the Kaiser, or a budding democracy because of an elected Reichstag—it is nonetheless largely valid. It has thus been a tenet of US diplomacy to urge the spread of democracy world-wide. Richard L. Armitage, the former Deputy Secretary of State, said recently in an interview: ―every President except John Quincy Adams has been involved in the belief that the world is made better by a U.S that is involved in the protection of human freedoms and human rights across the board.‖ He went on to assert that ―every postwar President has believed we have a duty to spread de-mocracy.‖

At times, as with Presidents Ronald Reagan and both Bushes, that quest has been a major factor in foreign policy. Ironically, when President Barack Obama accepted his Nobel Peace Prize, he stated that negotiations would not force terrorists to lay down their arms; rather, ―force is sometimes necessary [and that] is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history.‖ He went on to argue that ―the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace‖ and that ―force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That is why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace.‖ These are interesting words coming from a man not viewed as a hawk; yet, implementing such a vision is problematic.

Wishing for peace and the growth of democracy will not produce them. Although the fall of the Soviet empire has spawned nas-cent democracies in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, Russia itself seems to be backsliding into its traditional form of Oriental des-potism. The democratic experiment in tribal Afghanistan is certainly an advance over the dismal situation that had existed under the Taliban, but the future of freedom in that unhappy nation is not assured. As for Iraq, time will tell if elections are truly inclusive and credible enough to bring all parties to the negotiating table of democratic government, much less whether the government can de-fend itself against hostile neighbors and internal rebels.

When looking ahead to the prospects of democracy spreading in dark corners of the globe, it may be useful to look backwards first. The tribal, fractional, culturally driven, and in some ways primitive nations we are trying to influence today are not unlike those we have confronted in the past.

Download the full review: Primitive Violence, Culture, and the Path to Peace

Professional Military Education for US Army Special Operations Forces by Bradford Burris

One way to educate United States Army Special Operators is by allowing organizational design and individual competencies to form the nucleus of a professional military education curriculum routinely evaluated against assessment variables such as the emerging strategic context, the requests of Theater Special Operations Commands (TSOC) or other customer units, and the feedback of deployed operators. This essay recommends an Army Special Operations Command-focused educational development process applicable to the career-long education and utilization of Special Forces, Civil Affairs, and Psychological Operations professionals.

To make these recommendations, I consider why the organizational structure of the Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF) should differ from that of their General Purpose Forces counterparts and identify the expected ARSOF mission set for the next twen-ty years as well as the professional competencies required to execute this expected mission set. I then offer a series of suggestions for how the recommended changes could be implemented.

Unlike the majority of academic thought papers that analyze and present data in a dry and mechanistic fashion, this essay presents several ideas for consideration utilizing the literary medium of fiction. The characters used to convey the ideas herein are figments of my imagination; any relationship to any actual former or future special operator is purely unintentional. What you take away from the following pages will depend on your desire to infer practical concepts from the nascent thoughts presented by mem-bers of the USASOC PME working group that, while it does not exist in reality, you will nonetheless find hard at work in the follow-ing paragraphs.

Download the full article: Professional Military Education for US Army Special Operations Forces

US Efforts to Combat Terrorism Financing by Robert M. Guido

The United States and the international community have made great strides against al Qaeda since September 11, and counter-terrorist financing policies will remain a vital component of future efforts. The successes in tightening and shoring up the interna-tional financial system in the post-September 11 era, however, cannot be taken for granted. Al Qaeda and its affiliates have shown remarkable resilience and an ability to structurally evolve to survive the best efforts of the international community. To maintain progress in squeezing al Qaeda‘s finance, governments will need to continually adapt counter-terrorist financing policies to address the simpler but untraceable methods of moving cash and assets such as hawala, and work collaboratively to combat alternative me-thods of finance that capitalize on the ever-present and growing field of international criminal activity.

Whether or not any of this amounts to a bellwether for the future of land operations remains a hotly debated issue across de-fense-interested communities. Some traditionalists see unacceptably high-risk in these trends; whereas less traditional military thinkers argue that contemporary strategic conditions necessitate a new, more unconventional focus for land forces, leaving many aspects of the next generation traditional warfight to the Air Force and Navy.

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 41

Some influential thought leaders see recent irregular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as concrete demonstrations of the utility of robust (if not less traditionally-oriented) land forces. Still others see the uneven history and raw cost of Iraq and Afghanistan as data points militating against future large-scale U.S. interventions. The author argues that future land interventions are unavoidable. But, the circumstances under which they occur, the operating concepts employed in their execution, and the objectives pursued through-out their course may be substantially different than those that shape current warfights.

Download the full article: US Efforts to Combat Terrorism Financing

Identity, Insurgency & Healing by Dianna Wuagneux

A constant challenge faced by the Coalition Forces in Afghanistan is the ability of the Anti-Coalition Forces (ACF) to steadily reinforce its ranks through the recruitment of a seemingly unending supply of fresh human reserves. Though the Taliban , et al are known to recruit from a variety of sources (e.g. particular madrassas and more fundamentalist villages on both sides of the Durand Line), among the most lucrative hunting grounds are those places where refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) languish in political and geographic limbo. While the numbers vary from one agency to the next, Refugees International estimates that at present over 3 million Afghans remain refugees. Nearly all reside in decaying, ramshackle camps lacking basic health, education, or food facilities and over 300,000 are approximated to be suffering from the effects of contaminated water and substandard food today. The overcrowded shelters pro-vided most often consist of makeshift tents which cannot protect the inhabitants from the extreme environment, or provide women and their children with basic privacy and protection.

The needs of these Afghans are for the most part neglected by the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (IROA), CFS, and donors alike. In recent months many refugees and IPDs have made efforts return to their former homes. They are largely undocumented, disenfranchised, and unwanted where ever they go, leaving them, like their counterparts remaining in the camps, particularly sus-ceptible to the attentions and motivations of ACF. Like any predator, Taliban and other ACF recruiting scouts are seeking the prey most vulnerable to their intentions. This includes individuals who, because of their experiences and circumstances, are both angry and malleable, such as young and impressionable males without much in the way of resources or future prospects and who lack suf-ficient mature patriarchical guidance. These landless, disenfranchised populations offer the ACF an abundance of low-hanging fruit.

Download the full article: Identity, Insurgency & Healing

Constructing the Revolution: The Social Psychological Development of Rad-ical Spiritual Leaders by John Ty Grubbs

Sayyid Qutb is widely acknowledged as the unchallenged Islamist ideologue of the past century. Virtually every piece of contem-porary literature about Islamic terrorism makes at least a perfunctory reference to the radical spiritual leader. The dawn of the 20th century gave birth to several movements in the Middle East. Zionism, Arab Nationalism, and Radical Islamism, all came to the world stage in varying degrees, and it was Qutb that became the godfather of Islamist thought. Due to his role as the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), he was executed by the Egyptian government in 1966. Nevertheless, his legacy lives on.

Since the British occupation in 1882, modernity, secularism, and Western-style education were becoming more prevalent in Egyptian society. The rapid infusion of commerce, political diversity, and progressive culture created friction with Egypt‘s Islamic traditionalists. Perceived oppression under British rule was further exacerbated by the British Mandate of Palestine, the United Na-tions Partition of Palestine, and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Israelis know it as The War of Independence, while Arabs know it as al-Nakba (the catastrophe). Calls for reform could be heard in Egypt long before 1948. However, the events that unfolded after the British Mandate of Palestine engendered an unforeseen level of discontent in the Arab world. Sayyid Qutb and the MB capitalized on this anger.

Qutb was born in 1906, in the northern Egyptian farming village of Musha. His family was caring, religious, and well-respected in the community. While he may have been considered a pious child, nothing indicates his views were ever radical. Rather, the popu-larly-held belief is that his radicalization occurred over time. Several historical events are usually cited: the British occupation, al-Nakba, Qutb‘s experiences in the U.S., and the events he endured during imprisonment in Egypt. There is no doubt that all of these events played a major factor in his intellectual maturation. However, looking at these events alone reveals little about the social psy-chological reasons behind radicalization.

Download the full article: Constructing the Revolution

Transition to Iraq Sovereignty: The Impact on US Military Advisory Efforts by Ben Williams

ODA (Operational Detachment Alpha) 5122 and its principal partner force, the 7th RCB (Regional Commando Battalion) were instrumental in disrupting the activities of Sunni Insurgent Groups in northern Iraq throughout late 2009. In less than six months, this combined force conducted over 50 operations, attained an 85% capture rate, and detained five of the ODA‘s top ten HVIs (High Value Individuals). These successes were not simply a direct result of our own diligence and professionalism, but also a reflection of the professionalism and high level of ability of our Iraqi counterparts.

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

42 smallwarsjournal.com

Simultaneously, our combined, aggressive, precise, and counter-terrorism efforts were complemented by an equally aggressive and robust array of shaping efforts. Relationships with local civic, religious, and military leaders were cultivated and networks of influence expanded. The ODA also orchestrated no fewer than ten carefully developed and successful Psychological Operations. These were implemented using multiple forms of media and were intended to shape the perception of local nationals, incite violence between rival threat groups, and discredit specific HVIs. This paper explores a representative cross section of the ODA‘s activities during the latter half of 2009. This is the story of a small group of men who thought and acted unconventionally, and were able to leverage their capabilities to obtain maximum effects within their area of operation.

In 2006 the coalition‘s populace and resources control measure for management of privately owned weapons was to allow each Iraqi household to maintain one AK-47 or AK-74, with two magazines with 60 rounds of ammunition. Ostensibly, this would allow the family to protect itself against local criminals and insurgents, while limiting the number of armed individuals who might oppose the forces of the coalition and the Government of Iraq. Instead this policy ensured that local residents were left helpless to resist the insurgents, who cared little about limits on gun ownership and generally travelled in armed groups of four to twenty.

Download the full article: Transition to Iraq Sovereignty

Conviction Focused Targeting: Targeting Violent Extremists While Develop-ing Rule of Law Capacity by Dr. Steve D. Berlin

Stability operations present unique, simultaneous challenges to traditional intelligence-driven operations and rule of law (ROL) development. As units expand from purely offensive operations into increasing stability operations, host nation entities must con-comitantly become increasingly responsible to suppress violent extremist networks (VEN) and other criminals within their borders. However, even though the host nation authorities are to assume more responsibility for VENs and other criminal activities as stabili-ty operations evolve, the conundrum is that these extremists often remain the primary focus of U.S. Forces (USF) because they pose the largest threats to host nation, and hence regional, stability. In order to be effective, intelligence-driven targeting within stability operations must operate in conjunction with the host nation legal systems. During the shift to increasing stability operations, com-manders must also shift their targeting philosophy to combat violent extremism by means of the host nation criminal justice institu-tions. The host nation systems in turn become stronger; thus, USF will target VENs while simultaneously strengthening the host nation ROL systems.

Perhaps the greatest impediment that many commanders face in combating violent extremists during full spectrum operations is that they operate solely on intelligence-based targeting. They rely on intelligence to find, fix, and capture violent extremists. These violent extremists then become security or criminal detainees and some commanders then hope that they will one day be punished for their actions. To ensure these violent extremists are properly punished for their crimes, commanders should instead leverage the host nation legal system. In order to use the host nation criminal legal system, commanders should not look at facts they gather only as intelligence, but also as evidence. Intelligence, in turn, becomes evidence for use in host nation criminal prosecution and this evidence, in turn, also feeds into intelligence.

As USF conduct stability operations; or, more importantly, shift from offense focused operations to increasing stability opera-tions, units must find practical methods to simultaneously support ROL development while targeting violent extremists. This article posits a model when USF and the host nation conduct stability operations by working as true partners. While this article is Iraq-centric, its methodology applies to any host nation legal system. Commanders should work alongside host nation legal systems how-ever they are aligned. Thus, when units then plan to target violent extremists, they should do so using a law enforcement partnership model that focuses on convictions rather than stopping at the warrant threshold. Doing so moves us past a catch-and-release pro-gram while simultaneously strengthening host nation institutions and removing violent extremists from the operating environment.

Commanders should therefore create prosecution support teams. These teams pull together a brigade combat team‘s organic Soldiers, Department of State personnel, and contractors to team with host nation security forces. The combined forces then create a task force that targets VENs. The USF will deliver evidence and evidentiary leads to their host nation partners. Together they will develop criminal cases to eliminate the VENs using the local judicial system. The ultimate goal of the organization is not simply kill or capture, but for the local courts to convict the violent extremists and for them to face punishment. This method not only targets VENs and eliminates them from the community, but also simultaneously builds rule of law institutions. Thus, the U.S. will leave the host nation more capable of controlling its own security.

Download the full article: Conviction Focused Targeting

The Best Defense is a Good Offense: The Necessity of Targeted Killing by E. Walker Nordan, Jr.

Over the last four decades, terrorism has grown to be recognized as not only the popular, but openly-accepted method among Is-lamic extremist factions in making a political statement. Through the practice of airline hijackings and bombings through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, to the astonishing blow to the United States on September 11th, 2001, radical Islamists have ultimately been suc-cessful in striking fear into the hearts and minds of people world-wide, innocents and combatants alike. Though most democratic nations of today have the standard policy of not accepting, sponsoring, or even negotiating with terrorists; very few have a policy of eradicating them. Israel, however, has maintained a practice of openly engaging terrorists through ―targeted killings‖. Israel has raised a great deal of controversy in the international community as to whether or not targeted killing is an acceptable form of war-fare, and more specifically, whether or not targeted killing is identical to ―assassination‖.

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 43

I shall assert that targeted killing is distinctly different from assassination and fits within the guidelines of international law – though some changes should be made; additionally, with the changing face of the battlefields of today, I shall argue that targeted killing should be supported by the international community and embraced by the United States as not only an acceptable form of warfare, but the form of warfare against terrorism for the future.

Download the full article: The Best Defense is a Good Offense

Deep Inside the Insurgent‟s Mind: Past the Motorcycle Diaries Towards Understanding Che Guevera by Hugues Esquerre

The second half of the 20th century was dominated by the Cold War; however, partisan warfare, guerrilla warfare, brush-fire wars, civil wars, rebellions and insurgencies – what British Major General Charles Callwell summarizes as ―small wars‖ – continued to proliferate throughout the world. Western militaries focused almost exclusively on preparing for high intensity, technologically advanced warfare. Meanwhile, the study of insurgencies and the development of counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine essentially came to a halt. Since 2001, the protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have once again brought the study and development of coun-ter-insurgency principles and doctrine back to the forefront of Western military thought . For the most part, these "new counter-insurgency doctrines " have been based on the works of theorists like the Frenchmen Bernard Fall , David Galula and Roger Trinqui-er , the American John J. McCuen , or the Englishmen Frank Kitson and Robert Thompson . Although these works are valuable re-sources, they focus primarily on the American, English, French and even sometimes the Soviet counter-insurgency experiences and perspectives . The shortfall of these works is that they fail to examine the insurgency from the point of view of the insurgent.

As every soldier or strategist knows, one must "turn the map around" and view the situation from the enemy's perspective. One must understand and anticipate his opponent's most likely courses of action in order to defeat him. As such, it is very interesting to try to enter into the mind of an insurgent to understand how an insurgency is conceived, developed, and led on "the other side". Of even greater interest and value, given the insurgencies currently being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, is to choose to study insur-gents who won their fights within the last six decades. The number of insurgents that fit this criteria are relatively small, with the most famous being Mao Zedong, who defeated the Chinese nationalists to seize power (1949), Vô N‘Guyen Giap, who served as Hô Chi Minh‘s strategist against the French (1954) and the Americans (1975), and finally Che Guevara, who took a prominent role in the rise to power of Fidel Castro in Cuba (1959).

In analysing the publications produced by each of these insurgents, the works of Che Guevara, and particularly his book Guerril-la Warfare , stand-out as an excellent "guidebook" to the mind of an insurgent. Indeed, after the victorious Cuban campaign of the late 1950‘s led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, it was Guevara's goal to publish and widely disseminate what he considered to be the best rules and practices to ensure victory to any insurgency. Due to the influence and impact of Guevara's book, it is now consi-dered by counter-insurgency theorists to have an equal place of importance next to the revolutionary doctrines of Mao . As a result, the study of Che Guevara's Guerrilla Warfare is extremely pertinent because it clearly lays out the keys to weaken, discredit, and ultimately defeat - sometimes before it has really even started - an insurgency.

Before delving into Guevara's insurgency theories found in Guerrilla Warfare in the second part of this article and before identi-fying in a third and last part what are the weaknesses of his theories and what can be useful for a counter-insurgency force to defeat an insurgency, one must first put this book into context by remembering, without any political or ideological blindness, who Che Guevara was and what he did. This will allow the reader to avoid any preconceptions and to concentrate only on his theories and their usefulness in modern counter-insurgency warfare. That‘s the aim of the first part of this article.

Download the full article: Deep Inside the Insurgent‘s Mind

The Rise of Intrastate Wars: New Threats and New Methods by Stephane Dosse

Ultimately, the war among the people rising is really one of the "symptoms" of a temporary global decline of the concept of ―State‖ and of the interstate warfare. An evolution of the political organizations and practices involves a change of the methods to make war. Nobody can really say what will be the face of war during the next decades even if for the next years, the hybrid threats may probably entail new types of operations which will combine counter insurgency, stabilization and interstate war knowledge. A large share of information and the understanding of the environment, the opponents and the populations should be the keys of the future warfare. The greatest armed forces in the world will thus have to train both for interstate and intrastate wars. What seems to be the most important is to adapt all aspects of these forces to intrastate warfare: command and control systems, organization, equipment, and mentalities. Those who dare not to adapt will run the risk of defeat. To paraphrase Charles Darwin, it is neither the strongest nor the most intelligent competitor that survives, but rather the most adaptive to change.

Download the full article: Rise of Intrastate Wars

Iran Goes Nuclear: An Analysis of the Bushehr Nuclear Plant and Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talks by Renanah Miles

Iran won‘t swerve first and Russia will do as Russia pleases are, perhaps, the intended takeaways from Sunday‘s ceremony open-ing the Bushehr nuclear power plant. The event itself was uncharacteristically subdued, factual, just one more tick on the clock counting down to Iran going nuclear. But in light of Bushehr, it‘s a very different announcement made two days prior that is most

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

44 smallwarsjournal.com

worth considering: Resumption of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks next month. Progress in the talks is critical to buying Israel, America and wary Arab states strategic room to maneuver with Iran.

With impeccable timing, the news preempted the spotlight from Bushehr, and will likely do so again in September. The planned start date for the talks – September 2 – is purportedly linked to the expiration date of the Israeli settlement freeze in the West Bank at the end of September, an incendiary issue that if resumed would likely burn bridges to negotiation yet again. If talks start on time though, it will handily refocus attention off another Iranian milestone the same weekend – Bushehr is scheduled to become opera-tional Sunday, September 5.

Download the full article: Iran Goes Nuclear

Mostly Dead: Continuing the Discussion on the Reported Death of the Ar-mor Corps by Thomas Weiss

In mid-April, COL Gian Gentile offered what amounted to an Armor Corps post-mortem in a piece for Small Wars Journal called The Death of the Armor Corps. Recently in the same pages, Major James Smith and Major James Harbridge wrote a rebuttal entitled A Combined Arms Response to Death of the Armor Corps. The first question which came to mind after reading the latter piece was: if two Jacks beat a lone King in poker, do two Majors trump a Colonel in a doctrinal argument?

COL Gentile, in many important respects, echoes the arguments made by three former BCT commanders in a white paper diag-nosing the Field Artillery with a similar disease, entitled The King and I (which was, ironically, forwarded to me by a gleeful Armor officer some two years ago). In essence, both arguments state that the capability of the maneuver, fires and effects elements of the Army to prosecute a high intensity conflict has been drastically reduced by our commitment to the counterinsurgency competencies employed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, COL Gentile plainly declares that the Armor corps ―is no more.‖

In their rebuttal, Majors Smith and Harbridge seem to be saying, like the old man about to be put onto a meat wagon in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, ―We‘re not dead yet.‖ They offer examples of units transitioning the spectrum of conflict and proffer that as an Army, our strength ―is our ability to adapt and innovate while still retaining the ability to relearn our core competencies.‖

Three fundamental questions arise from these two articles. First, is the Army truly at a place where its combined arms compe-tencies have degraded almost to the point of non-existence? Second, if these competencies have degraded, does it constitute a crisis or a point from which we may never return? And third, looking beyond our current conflicts, how should we best organize and train our forces?

Download the full article: Mostly Dead

Preventing Future Natural Disaster Casualties: Partnering with USAID and the Office of Reconstruction and Development by Nicholas Dickson

On March 4, 2010, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ADM Mullen, discussed the future of the military in the 21st Cen-tury to the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth KS. ADM Mullen stressed that in our future conflicts, the Unit-ed States military would need to be prepared for several eventualities. First, the Military should be the last resource used in the ele-ments of national power at the President‘s disposal. Second, ADM Mullen stressed heavily that the Military must take care of the civilians. At one point, he mentioned that the military needed to focus on people and prevent strategic failures with tactical success. (Mullen, 2010) While this was an obvious nod to GEN McChrystal‘s new policies which attempt to limit civilian causalities in Afgha-nistan, it is easy to see this focus stretching out to almost all that the military encompasses. It is essential that we carry this focus to all aspects of our efforts. Most importantly, it is necessary to examine an unexplored crisis developing in our nation‘s efforts. The majority of our military led construction projects do not adequately address proper design or engineering standards commensurate with the level of geological risk in the development area. This is a failure which will damage our reputation, or relationships, and has the potential to kill innocent civilians in the future.

One of the key aspects of the military‘s efforts to reach out to civilians and local leaders is the Civil Affairs team. These teams, as part of the Special Operations Forces missions in both Iraq and Afghanistan, have unique access to the populace. With this access comes an unparallel chance to build trust with the local civilians and government organizations. It is through this trust that the ma-jority of the efforts to legitimize the host nation occur. ADM Mullen highlighted this during his speech when he said, ―trust is the coin of the realm.‖ (Mullen, 2010) GEN McChrystal‘s new strategy in Afghanistan attempts to earn the trust of the populace by sepa-rating the population from the insurgency and attempting to limit events which could harm this trust. However, our current policies on Commander‘s Emergency Response Program (CERP) projects, and especially our implementation of these projects, do not cur-rently show the planning or execution to keep the trust of the populace. The mutual support, or lack thereof, between the Depart-ment of Defense (CERP) and Department of State projects has already been explored at length in many Congressional studies. What has not been explored is how CERP projects for infrastructure and buildings are potentially setting the stage for future failures in this trust with our host nation partners and citizens and how Civil Affairs forces can work to prevent this from happening.

Download the full article: Preventing Future Natural Disaster Casualties

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 45

An Interview with General James T. Conway, USMC Joint Force Quarterly Interview by David H. Gurney and Jeffrey D. Smotherman

Joint Force Quarterly has kindly granted Small Wars Journal permission to publish this forthcoming JFQ article.

JFQ: For several years, the Marine Corps has been operating very closely with the United States Army in Iraq and Afghanistan. To what degree have sea service skill sets atrophied, and do you sense that some increasingly see the Marine Corps as a second Ar-my?

General Conway: I‘ll answer the second part first. The bottom line is that the Marine Corps, as we say, ―does windows.‖ That has prompted us in both Iraq and Afghanistan to operate 500 miles from the smell of salty sea air. But that‘s okay with us. If there‘s a fight to be engaged in, we‘re going to be there, and so we‘ve made the necessary adjustments to make it all work. In 2003, we lined up alongside V Corps and 3d ID [Infantry Division], and did something that no MAGTF [Marine Air-Ground Task Force] has ever done—that is, to attack 500 miles from Kuwait to Baghdad and beyond. It really strained our capacity to do that, but we were pretty proud of ourselves that in the end we were able to make those kinds of adjustments. Going back to Iraq in 2004, and subsequently in Afghanistan, we‘ve had to heavy-up, because of the threat, because of the employment methodologies, and so forth. So yes, we have in some ways become a second land Army.

I think we‘re able to morph in and out of those kinds of conditions and missions based on events, but we do not feel as though we are being properly employed as a second land Army. We have more to offer the Nation. When I go to meetings and I hear ―Army and Marine Corps‖ talked about in the same breath, I get uncomfortable. It should be ―Navy and Marine Corps.‖ One day, again, it will be. But right now, we‘re simply doing what the Nation asks us to do. We‘re trying to keep current, and polish those Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard skills. My people get it, they buy into it, and as we see more dwell, 14 months at home between combat dep-loyments, I think we‘re going to be able to return to our naval and amphibious roots on an increasingly incremental basis.

Download the full article: An Interview with General James T. Conway, USMC

Signals and Noise in Intelligence by G. Murphy Donovan

Media pundits have reduced the complex problems of tactical and strategic Intelligence to a kind of running joke. Failure to ―connect the dots‖ is the common taunt. Such mindless euphemisms, when applied to national security analysis, reduce the sig-nal/noise dilemma to a child‘s game. As a practical matter, conveying the correct signal to the correct receiver is the most difficult challenge in art, science, and especially, government. A signal is not singular. Indeed, signals are irrelevant without receivers. In similar veins; speakers require listeners, writers require readers, warnings require recognition, and analysis requires acceptance.

Many of the impediments to signals are internal to the Intelligence Community: this includes time honored vehicles like brief-ings and reports and less obvious barriers like structure, size, and politics. Intelligence collection and targeting systems operate effi-ciently today in real time. The strategic analysis process, however, does not provide a comparable return on investment.

Download the full article: Signals and Noise in intelligence

Professional Military Education for United States Army Special Operations Forces (Part Two) by Bradford Burris

One way to educate United States Army Special Operators is by allowing organizational design and individual competencies to form the nucleus of a professional military education curriculum routinely evaluated against assessment variables such as the emerging strategic context, the requests of Theater Special Operations Commands (TSOC) or other customer units, and the feedback of deployed operators. This essay recommends an Army Special Operations Command-focused educational development process applicable to the career-long education and utilization of Special Forces, Civil Affairs, and Psychological Operations professionals.

To make these recommendations, I consider why the organizational structure of the Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF) should differ from that of their General Purpose Forces counterparts and identify the expected ARSOF mission set for the next twen-ty years as well as the professional competencies required to execute this expected mission set. I then offer a series of suggestions for how the recommended changes could be implemented.

Unlike the majority of academic thought papers that analyze and present data in a dry and mechanistic fashion, this essay presents several ideas for consideration utilizing the literary medium of fiction. The characters used to convey the ideas herein are figments of my imagination; any relationship to any actual former or future special operator is purely unintentional. What you take away from the following pages will depend on your desire to infer practical concepts from the nascent thoughts presented by mem-bers of the USASOC PME working group that, while it does not exist in reality, you will nonetheless find hard at work in the follow-ing paragraphs.

Download the full article: PME for USARSOF

VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010 SMALL WARS JOURNAL

46 smallwarsjournal.com

Eritrea and Al Shabaab: Realpolitik on the Horn of Africa by Vincent G. Heintz

Eritrea and Ethiopia are neighbors on the Horn of Africa. They share common languages, ethnicities, tribal structures and reli-gious traditions. By outward appearances, they should co-exist symbiotically, like Canada and the United States. Instead, they re-semble the Koreas – each at the other‘s throat with no prospect for reconciliation on the horizon. Eritrean political culture over the past fifty years has spawned a national psyche consumed with fear and hatred of all things Ethiopian. That same culture has isolated Eritrea from the African Union (AU), the UN and the United States, and has driven the country into alignment with destabilizing regional forces for which it has no pre-ordained cultural affinity. Principal among Eritrea‘s unlikely allies is Al Shabaab, the al Qae-da-affiliated militia prosecuting the Islamist insurgency in Somalia and an expanding terror campaign in greater Africa. This article reviews the genesis of this strange alliance and explores potential military solutions.

Download the full article: Eritrea and Al Shabaab

Is the US Intelligence Community Misreading the Shabaab-Qaeda Relation-ships? by Deane-Peter Baker

In a recent report at Long War Journal an unnamed senior US intelligence official is quoted as saying that "Al Qaeda's top lea-dership has instructed Shabaab to maintain a low profile on al Qaeda links." This, according to the same official, is because "al Qaeda is applying lessons learned from Iraq, that an overexposure of the links between al Qaeda central leadership and its affiliates can cause some unwanted attention." The official added that ―al Qaeda is pleased with the double suicide attack in Uganda, but sug-gested Shabaab reserve future strikes at US interests in the region.‖

Perhaps access to the intelligence sources available to the unnamed official would make it obvious to any analyst that this inter-pretation is correct. From an outsider‘s perspective, however, there are reasons to suspect that the intelligence community might, perhaps, have misread matters in this case.

Download the full article: Is the US Intelligence Community Misreading the Shabaab-Qaeda Rela-tionships?

A Retrospective on Combat in Iraq by Colonel Gary Anderson

When bombs began to fall on Baghdad on March 19th, 2003, I was doing some commentary with NPR anchor Neal Conan who was broadcasting a description of the kick-off of the war. One observation that I made to him that night was that, once the first shots in a war are fired, the plans of the side that initiates the fighting are subject to a series of permutations that the planners could not have predicted. I went on to further observe that, the longer a war lasts, it becomes subject to more and more permutations. As we near the August 31, 2010 deadline for the end of combat operations in Iraq, this long war has seen more than its fair share of ironic twists.

No-one in his right mind sets out to start a long and bloody war. Most planners have visions of short and glorious affairs. In every major conflict of the Twentieth Century, the war plan of the nation that initiated the conflict called for a short campaign. In fully sixty percent of those cases the war lasted longer than a year; and in eighty percent of those the initiating nation lost the war. Of those nations that lost long wars that they started, one hundred percent experienced regime change.

Download the full article: A Retrospective on Combat in Iraq

Genocide in Darfur: A Rebuttal of the UN Commission of Inquiry by Judy Mionki

The words ‗Darfur‘ and ‗Genocide‘ have been synonymous for quite some time now. The crisis in Darfur began in February 2003 when the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), composed mainly by the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit tribes, started accusing the Sudanese Government of oppressing the black Africans and being in favour of the Arab Africans. These two groups began attacks against the government and to counter this, the Sudanese Government military to-gether with some African Arabs known as the Janjaweed militias, launched their own attacks. As in many conflicts, the civilians suffer the most. Whereas reports vary, the death toll is said to be about 300,000 people.

This essay aims to examine the findings of the Darfur Commission of Inquiry in relation to its approach to the crime of genocide. This will be done by analysing the purpose based approach used by the Commission to come to its conclusion. The essay will also attempt to prove genocidal intent in the Darfur case and it concludes by stating that the Commission erred in its findings and that Genocide was and is taking place in Darfur.

Download the full article: Genocide in Darfur: A Rebuttal of the UN Commission of Inquiry

SMALL WARS JOURNAL VOL. 6, NO. 8 – AUGUST 2010

smallwarsjournal.com 47

Afghanistan Part II: The Reoccurrence of International Terrorism in Soma-lia by Joe Royo

Recent events in Somalia are slowly grabbing the world‘s attention. Is the world paying attention, though? In the 1990s another country followed a similarly dysfunctional pattern – Afghanistan. There are lessons to be learned from the way Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in 1996 to how the al Shabaab terrorist network may be trying to seize Somalia. We should not only pay attention to the clues. We should act on those clues. The conditions are ripe to do something about it now. If something is not done now, we may be replaying what happened in Afghanistan with the Taliban all over again.

Download the full article: Afghanistan Part II: The Reoccurrence of International Terrorism in So-malia

Another Way in Afghanistan by John Ubaldi

All too often, the United States tries to impart a Jeffersonian style democracy into regions of the world which have had no histo-ry of democracy or into a complex tribal region of similar circumstance. If the United States Government wishes to be successful in Afghanistan, then it needs to reexamine its current Afghan strategy, understand traditional Afghan governance, and pursue a federal system of governing. Both the Bush and Obama administrations implemented flawed strategies in Afghanistan by focusing U.S. efforts on establishing a strong central government in Kabul as a way to build a cohesive national government. Both administrations failed/fail to understand the complexities of the Afghan tribal structure that resent a strong central government. Ultimately, Afgha-nistan needs a central government built around a federal system with strong autonomous regions.

For the United States to pursue an effective counterinsurgency strategy the center of gravity needs to be on the civilian popula-tion. The focal point of U.S. strategy should be in establishing a federal system of governing in Afghanistan, by centering our focus of efforts on the tribal structure and building up governance at the local level. The Afghan people don‘t want the return of the Taliban, but they represent something the central government in Kabul has not brought them; security and the end of corruption. As brutal as the Taliban where they were fair and acted in a swift manner, unlike the corrupt governmental officials in Kabul. The tribal struc-ture will act as the governing body in the local areas, they will provide the security. We just have to show that we have their best interests at hand and will not leave them to the chaos that we did before. If we are to be successful in Afghanistan, we as allies need to pursue a successful counterinsurgency strategy which focuses on the tribal level.

Download the full article: Another Way in Afghanistan

Deterring Al Qaeda in Iraq: A Critique of Paul Davis‟ RAND Study by Daniel R. DePetris

Today marks the last day of Operation Iraqi Freedom. So what? At what cost? To what end? Ever since the successful conclusion of the Cold War, U.S. academics and policymakers have frequently championed deterrence as a military concept. This, of course, is not without substance. Through a combination of nuclear weapons, large bases overseas, and the potential for quick military action, Washington was able to change the Soviet Union‘s behavior from a force who aggressively tried to expand communist ideology in the 1960‘s to a reserved and degraded confederation by the time of its collapse.

Deterrence is not just about the past, however. Today, the White House uses deterrence throughout its foreign policy, both to keep adversaries in check and to prevent violence from spiraling out of control once conflict is initiated. After Saddam Hussein‘s invasion of Kuwait, deterrence worked on Iraq quite significantly until the collapse of his regime twelve years later. The threat of mutually assured destruction continues to prevent the North Koreans (however ―crazy‖) from invading its southern neighbor, lest the US military be drawn into the fighting. The most contemporary example of deterrence at work is the containment of the Ira-nians, who have become isolated in terms of the international community and boxed-in by U.S. forces along its southern coast (via U.S. naval vessels) and its western border (U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan).

Paul Davis -- a researcher at the RAND Corp. -- is now taking the concept further than it has ever gone before. In a recent study that was just published by the RAND Corp‘s National Defense Research Institute, Davis tries to assess whether old-fashioned deter-rence theory can work on one of America‘s most dangerous contemporary foes: Al‘Qaeda (AQ). Is it possible for the United States to deter AQ from launching large-scale attacks on American targets? And if so, can deterrence apply to other terrorist groups as well, say the Pakistani Taliban or Lashkar e-Taiba in South Asia?

Download the full article: Deterring Al Qaeda After Iraq