War, What Is It Good For? Posted by Michael Cohen

A couple of days ago I nicknamed Judah Grunstein the "always astute Judah Grunstein" and for those who don't make his blog at World Politics Review part of their daily rotation they are missing out.  It's great stuff and, in fact, the whole site is a plethora of really thought-provoking content, particularly when they publish DA writers! (His post today on the theory and practice of COIN is spot-on.

But today I have to take issue with one of his postings, because reflects one of the more dangerous memes about counterinsurgency. Writing about COIN, Judah says:

Unlike Michael Cohen, I think that the COIN doctrine represents an enormous advance in the U.S. approach to warfare, both strategically and politically.

Strategically, it represents the realization that the thinking that dominated during the Cold War era is no longer applicable or relevant to the vast majority of operational environments that the U.S. military will be called on to face today. And although there might be "big war" scenarios where it will once again prove necessary, it certainly isn't applicable or relevant to the two wars we're engaged in now. So far, that strategic advance has gotten the lion's share of the attention in this debate.

Politically, though, COIN marks an end -- not necessarily a definitive end, but an end nonetheless -- to the era of total war, at least as the dominant prism in U.S. military thinking. And that, to me, is by far the more significant of the two advances. This is a warfighting doctrine that by its very DNA rules out the idea of dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or fire-bombing Dresden.

While I appreciate Judah's shout-out, credit must being given to the appropriate folks, like Gian Gentile, Charles Dunlap, Michael Mazarr, Stathis Kalyvas, Ed Luttwak, Andrew Bacevich, Michael Vlahos, Carl Connetta, Steve Biddle, Steve Metz, Chris Preble and many others who have been making far more authoritative arguments than me on the problems of COIN doctrine and the ongoing militarization of our foreign policy.

But improper credit, notwithstanding, I'm not sure I agree about what the advance of COIN doctrine represents. First of all, it is not clear to me that the doctrine of Total War has disappeared. Indeed, if the US were to find itself mired in a major existential conventional conflict than I'm quite sure we would engage in Total War (a point that Judah seems to concede). And if you look at the most recent defense budget, the lion's share of money goes not to irregular warfare or COIN but to old fashioned conventional weaponry. COIN doctrine may be on the rise, but our armed forces are still geared toward fighting major conventional conflicts. (It also bears noting that trends in war-fighting tend to change pretty quickly. Remember when Kosovo was the future of war.)

But really I would argue that the concept of total war has diminished not because of COIN, but because there is no global rival on the world stage for which such a military doctrine would be relevant (which by the way makes my earlier point about defense spending priorities really hard to fathom). If one really wanted to be snarky they could argue that the perpetuation of COIN doctrine is an attempt to ensure the military's relevance in an era when large-scale conventional conflicts are almost certainly a thing of the past.

Judah also argues that COIN represents "an enormous advance towards a progressive, almost humanist approach to warfare (although it feels perverse to frame it that way), and under no circumstances should it be underestimated."

Here I even more strenuously disagree. First, as any COIN advocate will tell you, counter-insurgency might be 20% military and 80% political, but it still involves a lot of people being killed. For example, in FM 3-24 the ArmyMarine counter-insurgency field manual, the authors cheer the CORDS, counter-insurgency program in Vietnam. But a key part of CORDS was the Phoenix program, which basically assassinated more than 25,000 member of the VietCong. Similar neutralization efforts were utilized in Iraq and of course the success of COIN efforts there were due in no small measure to the ethnic cleansing and enclaving that followed the bloody sectarian violence of 2005 and 2006. I could go back further to the Phillipine-US War, which not only featured terrible human rights atrocities by the United State but killed, by some estimates, as many as 500,000, even 1 million Fillipinos. COIN is still war and is capable of killing lots of innocent people.

But having said, I certainly recognize that current COIN doctrine places a premium on minimizing civilian deaths making it infinitely more attractive than conventional "total" warfare. This is, perhaps, why it is so dangerous.

The thing about total war is that it's very nasty and brutish and difficult to rally public support for. It's why in the 1980s and 1990s, Caspar Weinberger and Colin Powell introduced an entire doctrine that would make it less likely we would engage in such a conflict. It's why, for the most part, we avoided protracted and nasty wars for much of the post-Vietnam era, because we didn't want to make the political and military commitment that total war demands.  A doctrine of total war or wars of annihilation are a recipe for less not more global conflict.

COIN doctrine, however, with its seductive humanist approach to war risks changing that equation.
For example, if the option in Afghanistan was not COIN but "total war" I imagine we would think twice about doing it. Because COIN seems on the surface to be more progressive - smart, not dumb war -- it seems less objectionable. Quite simply, it's fetishization and enshrinement is a slippery slope for more not less US military intervention (a point that I think Judah would agree on).

Now of course COIN advocates will say that we need to be prepared to fight counter-insurgencies because these are the wars of the future; but this is a self-perpetuating argument. Perhaps instead of devoting so much energy to preparing our military to fight counter-insurgency, COIN advocates should be patiently explaining all the many reason why we should avoid them at all costs. But they're not. They are orienting army doctrine and key resources toward COIN. They are making it the key approach of our fight in Afghanistan. It's only a matter of time before they convince policymakers (and it may have already happened) that we're so good at COIN we should be doing more not less. If more people agreed that counterinsurgency is "hard" and it's "best to avoid it" why do I feel like Sisyphus pushing that anti-COIN rock up a hill.

William Tecumseh Sherman is always remembered for saying that "War is Hell," but perhaps the better expression of his to remember is "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it."

Comments

[Steve Hynd]

Hi Michael,

COIN starts with good intentions but ends as accidental colonialism, informed by an implicit sense of exceptionalism and a humanitarian gloss on the White Man's Burden. It gets there by increments of wishful thinking.

The hardcore COIN gurus write that the best way to do COIN is to not do it - i.e. not invade and occupy in the first place. But then, being given the task of salvaging quagmires after the fact, they come up with ways of putting lipstick on a pig. Then along come the think-tankers who point out that the lipstick looks terrible on the current pigs but might look better on future ones. Then the politicians and interventionist Very Serious Persons use the white papers the COINdinistas and think tankers wrote to justify some more interventionism in their own minds, because they believe they've just been told that "next time we can do it right". The result of this incremental process from "Don't do it" to "Can we invade it? Yes we can!" will inevitably be more heavily made up pigs wallowing in mire.

Thus accidental colonialism - which is still seen as just colonialism by the rest of the world. As one French commander put it to reporter Douglas Saunders:

"If you find yourself needing to use counterinsurgency, it means the entire population has become the subject of your war, and you either will have to stay there forever or you have lost."

Regards, Steve

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