| Review of: |
The United States Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual by David H. Petraeus, James F. Amos, John A. Nagl, Sarah Sewall
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Pages: 419. $15.00 |
| Reviewed By: |
Jeffrey Record |
| Reviewed in: |
Middle East Policy |
| Date accepted online: |
14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: |
Volume 14, Issue 03, Pages 143-173 |
Book Reviews
Probably no U.S. Army doctrinal manual in history has been so eagerly awaited as the December 2006 Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency. The University of Chicago Press has subsequently reprinted it with a foreword by Lt. Colonel John Nagl, an influential proponent and practitioner of the new counterinsurgency doctrine, and an introduction by Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
The need for a new doctrine - and a new approach to the war in Iraq - was self-evident to a growing number of Army officers with service in Iraq, most notably General David Petraeus, the present commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. As Nagl notes in his introduction,
When an insurgency began in Iraq in the late summer of 2003, the Army was unprepared to fight it. The American Army of 2003 was organized, designed, trained, and equipped to defeat another conventional army .... It was, however, unprepared for an enemy who understood that it could not hope to defeat the U.S. Army on a conventional battlefield, and who therefore chose to wage war against America from the shadows (p. xiii).
The manual's preface declares: Counterinsurgency operations generally have been neglected in broader American military doctrine and national security policies since the end of the Vietnam War over 30 years ago. This manual is designed to reverse that trend. It is also designed to merge traditional approaches to COIN [counterinsurgency] with the realities of a new international arena shaped by technological advances, globalization, and the spread of extremist ideologies - some of them claiming the authority of a religious faith (p. xlvii).
Counterinsurgency accomplishes both objectives by challenging much of what is sacrosanct about the American way of war. America's thoroughly conventional military remains focused on large-scale warfare against the regular forces of other states. As such, it has been poorly prepared to deal effectively with non-state enemies practicing irregular warfare. Thus, the Army failed in Vietnam largely because it rejected counterinsurgency in favor of the big-unit, firepower-intensive conventional war it wanted to fight. And thus, the Army quickly polished off Saddam Hussein's regular ground forces only to be stumped when Iraqi conventional military resistance unexpectedly morphed into an insurgency. Predictably, the Army reacted as it had in Vietnam: it sought to defeat the insurgency by killing insurgents, completely ignoring the dominant political dimensions of the struggle and the disastrous strategic effects of collateral damage. The Army's initial approach to counterinsurgency likely created far more insurgents than it removed from combat, focusing as it did on destroying the enemy and using excessive firepower, indiscriminate searches and roundups (44,000 of the 65,000 suspected Iraqi insurgents or sectarian killers detained in Iraq since the war began in March 2003 have been released), and humiliating and physically abusive interrogation techniques.
Counterinsurgency thoroughly examines the nature of insurgency and calls for a return to the long-established principles of successful counterinsurgency, including the centrality of intelligence, the primacy of political over military responses, the integration of political and military responses, the primacy of population protection over the killing of insurgents, and the imperatives of using the minimal force necessary and establishing security under the rule of law. To underscore the utterly different requirements of conventional war and counterinsurgency - "the conduct of COIN is counterintuitive to the traditional U.S. view of war" (p. 47) - the manual postulates the following "paradoxes" of counterinsurgency operations:
"Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be."
"Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is."
"Sometimes, doing nothing is the best reaction."
"Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot."
"The host nation doing something tolerably is normally better than us doing it well."
"If a tactic works this week, it might not work next week; if it works in this province, it might not work in the next."
"Tactical success guarantees nothing."
"Many important decisions are not made by generals" (pp. 48-51).
What a radical break from the popular Weinberger-Powell doctrine of assured victory through the politically unconstrained application of overwhelming force!
Counterinsurgency is an impressive achievement. It is intellectually rich and, given the Army's longstanding institutional hostility to counterinsurgency, politically courageous. It explicitly recognizes the dangers of conventional military responses to sub-conventional military threats and the fact that our intelligent enemies are resorting to such threats precisely because of our conventional military supremacy. Is it simply coincidence that all of America's failed post-World War II military interventions - in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia and (probably) Iraq - have come at the hands of enemies practicing protracted irregular warfare, enemies who have compensated for their material inferiority by crafting a superior strategy and mustering a superior political will to fight on? The manual is certainly, and deservedly, an affront to such primitives as the tabloid pundit Ralph Peters and the venomous Ann Coulter, who believe only the Romans got counterinsurgency right. (Plagued by an insurgent-infested population? Not to worry. The solution is simple: slaughter all the males and sell the women and children into slavery. Poof! No more insurgency.)
Yet a new field manual does not a revolution make. As Sarah Sewall points out,
Doctrine is only a precursor to change, not its guarantor. As every student of Max Weber and bureaucracy knows, innovation does not come easily to large institutions. And this field manual is not simply a refinement on the margins of U.S. practice; given where the military has been since Vietnam, it is paradigm shattering. Thus, while the doctrine revision is a signal accomplishment, it is not sufficient to effect a real transformation of the armed forces (p. xxxv).
Counterinsurgency challenges America's very approach to war (and here I am indebted to Colin S. Gray): apolitical, astrategic, ahistorical, optimistic, problem-solving, culturally ignorant, technologically dependent, firepower-focused, large-scale, profoundly regular, impatient and casualty sensitive. Moreover, for the foreseeable future, the very word counterinsurgency will be joined at the hip to our disastrous war in Iraq. "No more Iraqs!" will mean "No more counterinsurgency!" There is also an unbridgeable chasm separating the inherently protracted nature of counterinsurgency and our domestic political tolerance for it. The counterinsurgency clock is calibrated by the decade, whereas the American domestic political clock is dominated by the two-year election cycle. It is certainly realistic to approach counterinsurgency as long war, but the American electorate is not long on patience for such war unless it is manifestly necessary, which the Vietnam and Iraq wars were not. (Over 60 percent of the American electorate believes the Iraq War was a mistake, and the recent defections of Senate Republican bulls Richard Lugar, John Warner and Pete Domenici from the White House line on the war portend the isolation of the president within his own party on the signature issue of his presidency.)
I have argued elsewhere (in The American Way of War: Cultural Barriers to Successful Counterinsurgency, a 2006 Cato Institute monograph) that American strategic culture is so hostile to the performance of successful counterinsurgency that we should avoid direct military intervention in foreign internal wars. We are no good at these kinds of wars, so why should we risk involvement in them except in situations of extreme necessity? I also believe the experience of the Iraq War will exert, for perhaps a decade or two, as chilling an effect on America's use of force abroad as did the Vietnam War. As there was a Vietnam syndrome, so too will there be an Iraq syndrome (see my "Back to the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine?" in the fall 2007 issue of the Strategic Studies Quarterly).
I am further persuaded that the Army will walk away from counterinsurgency after Iraq, just as it did after Vietnam. The new religion of "smart" counterinsurgency may be spreading among some of the Army's best and brightest officers, but it is unlikely to be internalized by the resource-preoccupied institutional Army. Even in Iraq, observes Sewall, "Nothing prevents the field manual's prescriptions from being ignored or even used to mask conduct that is counter to its precepts" (p. xxxvi). More to the point, conventional war remains the Army's cultural comfort zone, and it is a far more potent budgetary claim on resources, especially on big-ticket weapons programs, than the inglorious counterinsurgency mission.
What of the Iraq War itself? Will Counterinsurgency, now put into practice by Petraeus, make a difference? Surely, it is too early to tell, although one suspects that the new counterinsurgency may be four years too late and a couple of hundred thousand troops short. Operation Iraqi Freedom may have been doomed from the start by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's arrogant insistence on an invasion force too small to seize control of Iraq and by U.S. occupation proconsul L. Paul Bremer's mindless dissolution of Iraq's regular army. Even a favorable turn-around in the military situation would count for little in the end, absent the Iraqi government's resolution of such outstanding political issues as the distribution of power between the regions and the central government, de-Bathification reform, the sharing out of oil and oil revenue, the establishment of provincial election laws and provincial authorities, amnesty policy, militia disarmament, and evenhanded law enforcement by Iraqi security forces. Counterinsurgency, it is said, is 80 percent political and only 20 percent military. If that is so, then the heavy lifting in Iraq lies both ahead and out of our hands.
Counterinsurgency grasps the great lesson that the Pentagon failed to learn in Vietnam and, unfortunately, may forget after Iraq:
Western militaries ...falsely believe that armies trained to win large conventional wars are automatically prepared to win small, unconventional ones. In fact, some capabilities required for conventional success - for example, the ability to execute operational maneuver and employ massive firepower - may be of limited utility or even counterproductive in COIN operations. Nonetheless, conventional forces beginning COIN operations often try to use these capabilities to defeat insurgents; they almost always fail (p. lii).
Counterinsurgency deserves a wide audience. Together with Steven Metz's Rethinking Insurgency (Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, June 2007), it offers the reader acute insights into the nature of modern insurgency and counterinsurgency.
