Learning COIN the Hard Way

Introduction

Counterinsurgency has been an aspect of the United States military for generations, and its place in military operations is just as important as ever. Counterinsurgency still happens around the globe but is primarily thought of when it comes to the Middle East, especially in the post-9/11 world. Before those attacks, there were still concerns about insurgent groups in the Middle East and the complexities of the Sunni versus Shiite power struggles and how to handle leaders like Saddam Hussein without creating a power vacuum for insurgents to exploit and fill, such as the Islamic State. Some previous battles had early echoes of what is seen in the Middle East today, with America projecting itself as a humanitarian force trying to help vulnerable groups in need and not having any other goals in mind. Indigenous peoples also had a lot of lands to use for retreating, which is similar to how Americans could not exactly bomb the Viet Cong out of the Ho Chi Minh trail or the Middle East insurgents out of deserts and caves (O’Hanlon, 2016). 

Vietnam changed the way that Americans thought about war and the military industrial complex. Many Americans felt lied to about the purpose of the war and updates about the situation. The military conducted widespread napalm bombing attacks and even leveled entire villages in select cases, and all of these efforts at curbing the insurgence of the Viet Cong resulted in futility shortly after American troops vacated the Asian country. The main problem was that America was in a position in which it should not have been, which is the same argument many make against the Middle East wars today. America fares much better with more conventional military situations, and that was true during Conflict Desert Storm, which was much more convenient than the insurgencies in the Middle East in the 21st century. The military needed to understand how to optimize counterinsurgency tactics and how to handle “the impossibility of fighting a protracted war with a conscription military, a divided public, and half-measures of national commitment,” which sounds a lot like the situation in the Middle East today (O’Hanlon, 2016). America was not going to stop being the world’s police, so it had to make improvements. Because counterinsurgency does not require conventional warfare, battlegrounds, and tactics, the Central Intelligence Agency’s role in counterinsurgency grew. The CIA identified a number of phases relevant to the progression of insurgency in order to take a more measured and logical approach than the failed methods from efforts in places like Vietnam (Steinmeyer, 2011). America had not learned enough from its past and took too long to start making adjustments. 

There is a systemic failure by the United States military to apply lessons learned from previous experiences as we conduct counterinsurgency operations in the Middle East.

Body Outline

A. Counterinsurgency strategy was not well thought out and did not learn from past mistakes about how such a fight would not be quick and lead to an easy exit.

1. The situations in Afghanistan and Iraq were different, but Iraq had counterinsurgency problems with Americans being killed from two different fronts (West, 2009). Air superiority, like in Vietnam or Mogadishu, does not always work well against insurgents (Fleri et al., 2003, p. 16).

2. Insurgents can blend into populations and into vast stretches of uninhabited land.

3. America did well in going after Hussein and the Taliban

4. American forces needed to work with indigenous allies, like in Vietnam.

B. Americans did not fully understand the capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses of indigenous forces.

1. Like in Vietnam, American forces were supposed to help liberate the people of Iraq, which included working side by side with native forces.

2. Was difficult to properly assess each of the different security forces and predict how they would handle counterinsurgency work with America and eventually on their own (Jones, 2008).

3. Afghan National Army has shown measurable improvements since 2002 (Jones, 2008).

4. America started to see a couple of years of progress, but this came later in the 2000s and did not stop the eventual spread of the Islamic State. 

C. Population protections show successes but may have started too late.

1. American forces were supposed to do their jobs in the Middle East quickly and then swiftly exit the region, but this did not happen, and it was not until the use of population protection tactics that there were improvements.

2. Surge in Iraq in 2007 and rethinking counterinsurgency in Afghanistan (O’Hanlon, 2016).

3. Still problems with politicians not understanding the importance of changing the counterinsurgency tactics (O’Hanlon, 2016). 

4. All of these oversights and a refusal to learn from history left the Middle East in the mess it is in today.

Conclusion

The counterinsurgency conundrums in the Middle East spanned multiple administrations with plenty of important personnel changes along the way (Eikenberry, 2013). Even though one lesson from Vietnam was that America does not do as well in counterinsurgency situations, counterinsurgency was not going away, so the military needed to learn from Vietnam, which was not really what happened in the Middle East this century.

References

Eikenberry, K. W. (2013, October 11). The limits of counterinsurgency doctrine in Afghanistan. Foreign Affairs. Retrieved from https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/afghanistan/2013-08-12/limits-counterinsurgency-doctrine-afghanistan

Fleri, E., Howard, E., Hukill, J., Searle, T.R. (2003, November 13). Operation Anaconda case study - AF. College of Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education Maxwell AFB Alabama.

Jones, & G., S. (2008, May 06). U.S. efforts in Afghanistan will fail if Taliban not routed from Pakistan. RAND. Retrieved from https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG595.html

O'Hanlon, M. E., (2016, July 28). America's history of counterinsurgency. Brookings University. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/research/americas-history-of-counterinsurgency/

Steinmeyer, W. (2011, August 05). The intelligence role in counterinsurgency. CIA. Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol9no4/html/v09i4a06p_0001.htm

West, B. (2009, May 5). Counterinsurgency lessons from Iraq. U.S. Army. Retrieved from https://www.army.mil/article/20621/counterinsurgency_lessons_from_iraq