“I’m dying.”

“…”

This chapter begins with the principles involved in integrating the activities of military and civilian organizations during counterinsurgency operations. It then describes the categories of organizations usually involved. After that, it discusses assignment of responsibilities and mechanisms used to integrate civilian and military activities. It concludes by listing information commanders need to know about civilian agencies operating in their area of operations.

Today, we’re just going to look at the “principles”. Which boil down to: everyone (U.S. forces, host nation forces, sympathetic elements of civil society, sympathetic international organizations, etc.) should be on the same page, but, gosh darn it, that’s hard to achieve. The two basic problems are:

• Many potentially helpful organizations are outside the military’s chain of command, and not about to submit to it.
• A too-obvious chain of command can be counterproductive if it undermines the perceived independence of potentially helpful organizations in the eyes of those that COIN forces are seeking to persuade.

The FM puts it this way:

Interagency partners, NGOs, and private organizations have many interests and agendas that military forces cannot control. Additionally, local legitimacy is frequently affected by the degree to which local institutions are perceived as independent and capable without external support.

This section contains a few other noteworthy bits.

Violence

The FM says:

A high level of violence often benefits insurgents. The societal insecurity that violence brings discourages or precludes nonmilitary organizations, particularly external agencies, from helping the local populace. A more benign security environment allows civilian agencies greater opportunity to provide their resources and expertise. It thereby relieves military forces of this burden.

and:

Effective COIN programs address all aspects of the local populace’s concerns in a unified fashion. Insurgents succeed by maintaining turbulence and highlighting local grievances the COIN effort fails to address. COIN forces succeed by eliminating turbulence and helping the host nation meet the populace’s basic needs.

I presume that these statements apply only to the early stages of an insurgency; once it achieves some measure of success, and begins to establish a counterstate and/or take on responsibility for traditional government functions, it seems that an insurgency would seek to quell violence and turbulence. I also note that the FM seems curiously silent on the apparent fact that, while insurgents can use violence to prevent “external agencies from helping the local populace”, COIN forces appear powerless to move against the insurgents’ political wing, which fulfills much the same function.

Teamwork

This isn’t a deep or surprising point, but, just for the record:

[C]ivilian organizations bring expertise that complements that of military forces. At the same time, civilian capabilities cannot be employed effectively without the security that military forces provide. Effective COIN leaders understand the interdependent relationship of all participants, military and civilian. COIN leaders orchestrate their efforts to achieve unity of effort and coherent results.

Command

This stuff is the meat of this section. First, unified command is ideal:

The ultimate objective of [formal command or support relationships extended to all military forces supporting a host nation] is for military forces, police, and other security forces to establish effective control while attaining a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within the society

But it’s problematic, inasmuch as the local people aren’t going to be happy to see their military under (effective) US command:

As important as unity of command is to military operations, it is one of the most sensitive and difficult-to-resolve issues in COIN. The participation of U.S. and multinational military forces in COIN missions is inherently problematic, as it influences perceptions of the capacity and legitimacy of local security forces. Although unity of command of military forces may be desirable, it may be impractical due to political considerations. Political sensitivities about the perceived subordination of national forces to those of other states or IGOs often preclude strong command relationships …

And forget about controlling any non-military organizations:

The differing goals and fundamental independence of NGOs and local organizations usually prevent formal relationships governed by command authority. In the absence of such relationships, military leaders seek to persuade and influence other participants to contribute to achieving COIN objectives. Informal or less authoritative relationships include coordination and liaison. In some cases, direct interaction among various organizations may be impractical or undesirable. Basic awareness and general information sharing may be the most that can be accomplished.

I think the line “[i]n some cases, direct interaction among various organizations may be impractical or undesirable” is worth special note. I’m not quite sure what it means. Los Pepes come to mind, but then my mind does tend to go to dark places.

Subtlety

I just like this, as a general note on getting co-operation:

Influencing and persuading groups outside a commander’s authority requires skill and often subtlety. As actively as commanders pursue unity of effort, they should also be mindful of their prominence and recognize the wisdom of acting indirectly and in ways that allow credit for success to go to others — particularly local individuals and organizations.

Clinton, a political prodigy of the first order, loved the human side of politics. He listened to the hoi polloi more than he listened to the Harvard faculty. It made him a less consequential but more democratic president.

Meanwhile, Obama’s “People of Earth Stop Your Bickering” aloofness often makes him seem exasperated with the country he leads. He doesn’t seem to care what the people think. If voters disagree with him, that’s their mistake.

He’s lost — if he ever had it — his appetite for persuasion. Oh, he can explain things just fine. But there’s a difference between explaining your position and selling it. Clinton, the consummate salesman, understood the difference.

It seems a bit unfair to single out Obama on this one; lots of people seem to think that the way to demonstrate the rightness of a position is to slowly and patiently explain it, so that others will be compelled to abandon their previous beliefs and adopt new ones based on irrefutably airtight logic.

This is foolishness. Explanation has its place — indeed, it’s vitally important — but it is only a part of persuasion, and it’s a peculiar kind of arrogance to assume that the part can substitute for the whole.

Reason

Reason and logic are great, but, as I may have remarked before, they can’t take you very far; the line of indisputable inference that you can draw from observable reality isn’t very long. Even disciplines such as mathematics, which enjoy the luxury of resting upon rigorous (and choosable) definitions, and are not necessarily troubled by connections to physical reality, contain many conundrums which have proved resistant to reason, and provably contain questions which will never yield to it. As for philosophy, economics, and similar disciplines: perhaps the less said, the better. For example, economists can’t agree on many questions of macroeconomic policy — such as whether the 2009 “stimulus” package was too big or too small — despite extensive academic training, a supposed devotion to academic rigor, and unshakable confidence in the soundness of their positions.

Delusion

It’s part of the human condition to nurture a not-entirely-realistic self-image, and this often extends to the fetishization of rationality; we like to believe that we believe what we believe because of cold, dispassionate, indisputable reason and careful observation of objective reality.

This is bunk. If it were true, everyone would agree with you. If you really believe this, then you must also believe, of everyone who disagrees with you, that:

• They’re emotional, irrational nitwits. Not like you. Or,
• They’re lots dumber than you are. Or,
• They’re ignorant.

Given that outlook, it’s not much of a surprise that you have so much trouble convincing others, is it?

Explanation

The preceding bullet points do seem to underly a lot of modern discourse; oftentimes a “reasonable discussion” between two people consists of slow, patient, respectful explanations of why the other person’s views are ridiculous, ill-founded, irrational, silly, and could only be held by an uninformed, dim-witted, hysterical boob.

Surprisingly, such discussions rarely go well. Usually both parties end up offended at the implication that they’re uninformed, etc., but — even better — both usually end up exasperated that, despite their best efforts, their self-control, their reasonableness, their interlocutors simply won’t see how wrong they are.

Persuasion

Persuasion is never about attempting to bully the other man into agreement through “indisputable” argument. Explaining your position is well and good, but you should never expect such explanation to serve as more than background information. Persuasion is about respecting the other man’s human nature, and creating a situation in which he wants to agree with you.

This might strike you as dishonest, since (see above) we all like to believe that we are, and always should be, guided by reason alone. You might try thinking about it this way: The other man’s viewpoint is (probably) no less founded in logic than yours is, he certainly doesn’t see yours as more reasonable, and the question under discussion probably can’t be conclusively resolved through argument anyway. Also, it’s just bad manners to, implicitly or explicitly, call someone a big dumb jerk.

This is why, though I make an (often unsuccessful) attempt to avoid all argument, I make a particular effort to avoid explainers. Life’s too short.

All you need do is add this pair to your Info.plist dictionary:

<key>UIApplicationExitsOnSuspend</key>
<true/>

Which looks like this in XCode’s plist editor:

Although AAPL harumphs that “[o]pting out of background execution is strongly discouraged”, for some apps it may make little difference, and save you not inconsiderable effort.

How It Works

To quickly review: There are basically two ways that ad networks customize their ads for their victims. The cruder approach is geolocation: Based upon your computer’s IP address, some knowledge of network topology, and some biggish databases, an ad network can deduce (roughly) where in the world you are, and bore you with ads from local businesses/candidates/etc. The more sophisticated approach relies on a network of co-operating sites that track your IP as you travel from site to site, reporting your movements back to the ad network s.t. it can work out your interests, and bore you with a customized suite of ads. (The ‘co-operation’ may consist of nothing more than allowing the ad network to embed its own code on the hosting site.)

Why I Hate It

Advertisers like to talk about how all this “relevant” advertising is really great for the consumer — how it’s providing him with valuable, welcome, desired information on how he can spend his money, as opposed to the annoying white noise of non-targeted advertising. This is bunk. I don’t want to be sold, and I don’t want to be annoyed, and I definitely don’t want to feel like I’m being stalked as I travel across the (virtual) world.

If you want to target ads at me, tone it down a little. Don’t serve me local ads when I’m viewing content from another country. Don’t try to pitch me on that graphing package I looked at 2 weeks ago; if I had wanted to buy it, I would have bought it then. If you want to persuade me, don’t be so pushy, and don’t be so obvious.

Design Goals

The FM is a deeply weird book, in part because it seems to have three, often contradictory, design goals:

• Provide no fodder for enemy propaganda
• Support the morale of US forces
• Provide helpful information

This might seem a somewhat odd list, but, as warfare is a contest of will, I believe that it is not only correct, but properly ordered. So there’s reason to believe that the FM will be, on certain questions, neither entirely forthcoming nor completely straight-forward; viable but unpleasant tactics will not be advocated for US forces, and their effectiveness likely downplayed in the hands the enemy. The FM probably ought not to be taken entirely at face value.

Schizophrenic

The FM is slightly schizophrenic. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it actually self-contradictory, but its views on different questions don’t seem to add up to a consistent model of the world. For instance, there’s this bit, which I consider a perceptive comment on the centrality of emotion in persuasion:

The insurgent group … provides members with identity, purpose, and community, in addition to physical, economic, and psychological security. The movement’s ideology explains its followers’ difficulties and provides a means to remedy those ills. The most powerful ideologies tap latent, emotional concerns of the populace. … Ideology provides a prism, including a vocabulary and analytical categories, through which followers perceive their situation.

There’s this nice passage about storytelling:

The central mechanism through which ideologies are expressed and absorbed is the narrative. A narrative is an organizational scheme expressed in story form. … Stories about a community’s history provide models of how actions and consequences are linked. Stories are often the basis for strategies and actions, as well as for interpreting others’ intentions.

And then there’s this clanger:

[A]n insurgent ideology based on an extremist interpretation of a holy text can be countered by appealing to a moderate interpretation of the same text. When a credible religious or other respected leader passes this kind of message, the counteraction is even more effective.

This is just pathetic. All previous considerations of the emotional benefits of the insurgency, the explanatory function of its ideology, and the worldview embedded in its narratives are simply ignored — presumably swept away by a “moderate interpretation” from a “credible religious … leader”. This just isn’t how people think; a man won’t throw over his model of the world just because someone says, in essence: “Hey! You could totally think about things a different way!”

Whoever wrote the first two paragraphs seemed to grasp this. Whoever wrote the third apparently did not.

Kitchen-Sinkism

The FM takes a very broad view of what constitutes an insurgency. Insurgencies might be waged against existing government, or failed states, or occupying forces. Insurgents might employ tactics from coups d’etat to terrorism, to guerrilla or open warfare.

Some of this stuff just doesn’t seem to fit under the COIN portfolio; a coup d’etat is not an insurgency, and neither is a civil war. The FM seems to define COIN with such fuzzy boundaries that it could be said to encompass all warfare less intense than tank battles.

Cadres

Insurgencies will often split into two “wings”: a “political” wing, which works in more-or-less plain sight in the civil society, and a “military” wing which carries out extralegal activities. Perhaps the most well-known example of this arrangement is the Provisional IRA/Sinn Féin (though Sinn Féin would never cop to it).

Such an arrangement seems essential to the success of an insurgency; if the goal is to persuade the mass of the people, then the insurgency must be able to reach that mass, and it cannot do this as an entirely underground, criminal organization. (Indeed, there seems to be a tradeoff in general between an insurgency’s resiliency and its actual ability to seize power.) It seems peculiar to me that these political cadres can survive; they’re highly visible, so it should be a simple matter for counterinsurgents to remove them. I can think of two possible reasons why this doesn’t happen:

• A civil society must be governed by laws, and under such a system, “it’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove”. As long as the political cadre can keep an arm’s-length away from the militants, a society cannot eliminating them without tearing up the rulebook that allows that society to function.
• Counterinsurgents judge that the political cadre provides a “safety valve” for those sympathetic to the insurgency but put off by its more militant tactics, and that it therefore drains off support for, and may ultimately help to marginalize, the militants.

I’m genuinely puzzled by the survival of political wings, however, and would love to hear any reader suggestions as to what’s going on.

(A)symmetry

There is, in my mind at least, some confusion as to the degree of similarity between insurgents and counterinsurgents. Both seem to desire the same end state — control of a recognized government — but the FM seems constantly to assume that tactics that are good for one are not good for the other.

For instance, the FM says that:

Illegitimate actions are those involving the use of power without authority — whether committed by government officials, security forces, or counterinsurgents. Such actions include unjustified or excessive use of force, unlawful detention, torture, and punishment without trial. Efforts to build a legitimate government though illegitimate actions are self-defeating, even against insurgents who conceal themselves amid noncombatants and flout the law.

But it then claims:

[I]nsurgents are constrained by neither the law of war nor the bounds of human decency as Western nations understand them. In fact, some insurgents are willing to commit suicide and kill innocent civilians in carrying out their operations — and deem this a legitimate option. They also will do anything to preserve their greatest advantage, the ability to hide among the people. These amoral and often barbaric enemies survive by their wits, constantly adapting to the situation.

Well, if “illegitimate actions are self-defeating”, then why are these “amoral and often barbaric” tactics anything to worry about? Shouldn’t they always fail?

It’s possible that the FM is (implicitly, as far as I can tell) defining the “counterinsurgent” side as the one attempting to defend or establish a functioning state. Under this definition, the FM would be arguing that some tactics that might be effecting at destabilizing a state become counterproductive once a side is trying to prop up its own government. This interpretation is supported by passages like this:

Counterinsurgents seeking to preserve legitimacy must stick to the truth and make sure that words are backed up by deeds; insurgents, on the other hand, can make exorbitant promises and point out government shortcomings, many caused or aggravated by the insurgency. Ironically, as insurgents achieve more success and begin to control larger portions of the populace, many of these asymmetries diminish.

On the other hand, the association of “counterinsurgents” with “functioning government” is undermined by things like this:

In almost every case, counterinsurgents face a populace containing an active minority supporting the government and an equally small militant faction opposing it. Success requires the government to be accepted as legitimate by most of [the] uncommitted middle, which also includes passive supporters of both sides. … Because of the ease of sowing disorder, it is usually not enough for counterinsurgents to get 51 percent of popular support; a solid majority is often essential. However, a passive populace may be all that is necessary for a well-supported insurgency to seize political power.

Surely there’s nothing magical about the (former) insurgency’s grip on power, so a passive populace should allow the newly-empowered insurgency’s enemies to disrupt its governance. The FM seems to assume here that insurgents and counterinsurgents are somehow asymmetric even when it comes to holding and wielding recognized political power, but it doesn’t explain what drives this asymmetry. Perhaps it’s simply that the US is assumed to be on the counterinsurgent side, and that the actions of that side are therefore assumed to be constrained by US sensibilities, which preclude the destabilizing tactics that insurgents find so useful. (There is also some stuff about “legitimate” vs. “illegitimate” governance which might be relevant, but which strikes me as a little starry-eyed.)

Causes

Everyone’s got complaints, and insurgents are no exception: they typically have a list of causes they claim to be fighting for. The FM suggests that these causes ought to be taken very seriously:

Gaining and retaining the initiative requires counterinsurgents to address the insurgency’s causes through stability operations…

The FM takes this view despite recognizing that these causes may not be what really motivates the insurgency:

Al Qaeda is a well-known example of such an insurgency. … Such groups often feed on local grievances.

… and might not be entirely legitimate:

Revolutionary situations may result from … grievances carefully nurtured and manipulated by unscrupulous leaders.

I’m not sure that attempts “to address the insurgency’s causes” won’t turn into wild-goose chases.

Winning

I’m going to quote myself here, because, well, I think this is an important point:

The question of will suggests to me that it is very hard for a strong nation to prevail in a struggle against insurgents bedeviling a weak ally. Although the government of the weak ally will be highly motivated to continue the fight (in many cases, those involved are likely to be literally fighting for their lives), the people of the strong nation are unlikely to be as invested in the outcome, and, as the struggle drags on, to maintain the will to support their ally in its fight against the insurgents.

This suggests that governments that cannot stand on their own cannot be propped up for long by outside powers. It also suggests that true “nation-building” efforts — attempts to stand up an entire government — might be best avoided, not because they cannot be done practically, but because they cannot be sustained politically.

Finally, if a strong nation does wish to aid a weak ally in a prolonged struggle, it’s probably best to do so in a way that the strong nation’s people won’t notice or care about: Moderate amounts of “foreign aid”, secret intelligence support, limited deployments of Special Forces types, sales of otherwise restricted defense technology and advanced training — things that can be sustained for decades — may be more useful than unsustainable commitments of conventional forces.

With apologies to Warren Zevon. It’s actually not a bad shopping list for an insurgent: Lawyers to restrict the actions of COIN forces, guns to attack the civil society, and money to propagandize the populace.

Paradoxes

Most of these “paradoxes” are deducible from earlier material in the FM, and almost all are hedged about with “some” or “sometimes” qualifications. I’m going to go through them quickly:

Sometimes, the More You Protect Your Force, the Less Secure You May Be. I’m not at all sure that this paradox is unique, or even particularly applicable, to COIN. The FM is referring to the idea that while troops might be safer (in the short term) on large, well-fortified bases, long-term security requires the use of riskier tactics such as saturation patrolling. Surely this tradeoff applies to all warfare; skirmishes are won by riflemen who are willing to expose themselves to danger in order to fire on the enemy.

Sometimes, the More Force Is Used, the Less Effective It Is. The FM here makes a ‘collateral damage’ argument: excessive violence can fuel enemy propaganda which inhibits the persuasive efforts of COIN forces. While true as far as it goes, this viewpoint overlooks the “breaking the enemy’s will to resist” style of persuasion, which ought not to be ignored.

The More Successful the Counterinsurgency Is, the Less Force Can Be Used and the More Risk Must Be Accepted. As a society stabilizes and moves away from civil war, military tactics become less and less acceptable to the populace. This suggests that an adaptable insurgency should be able to survive even when losing badly, as its defeat alters conditions so that it cannot be extinguished militarily. This might be tolerable if the goal is simply to suppress violent insurgent tactics, but it is more problematic if you want to defeat the insurgentcy’s aims.

Sometimes Doing Nothing Is the Best Reaction. Ooh, I just love this one. It’s the logical answer to the Alinskyite attempt to create a cycle of action and reaction.

Some of the Best Weapons for Counterinsurgents Do Not Shoot. Here, the FM basically hammers home the points that COIN is largely about persuasion (i.e. propaganda matters), and that “lasting victory comes from a vibrant economy, political participation, and restored hope.” Which, yeah, sure, but you have to win the war before you can “win the peace”. This item includes one of the most bleakly droll parentheticals I’ve read in some time: “(though, again, killing clearly will often be necessary)”.

The Host Nation Doing Something Tolerably Is Normally Better than Us Doing It Well. This actually makes a fairly general point about leadership. If you want to maximize your effectiveness, you have to leverage the efforts of others, which means you want those others to be as capable as possible. Since capability grows though experience, you’re undermining your long-term goals if you insist on doing things personally just because you’re better at them.

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. This, of course, recalls Alinksy’s epitaph for the sit-down strike. I found this bit particularly striking: “Indeed, the more effective a COIN tactic is, the faster it may become out of date because insurgents have a greater need to counter it.”

Tactical Success Guarantees Nothing. It is a vexing truth that in the contest between insurgents and counterinsurgents, tactical victory in battle is neither necessary nor sufficient to prevail overall. (”But my goodness, doesn’t it help?”, as Lorelei Lee might say.)

Many Important Decisions Are Not Made by Generals. This might be the most alarming thing I’ve read in the FM so far — not because it’s false, but because it’s so blindingly, forehead-slappingly, self-evidently obvious that it’s deeply worrying that the FM considers this a “paradox”.

Table Time

The FM includes a table of “practices that have contributed significantly to success or failure in past counterinsurgencies”. I’ve reshuffled it a bit to make some the the point/counterpoint stuff even more blaring obvious:

In the meantime, perhaps you might enjoy these re-runs:

• Organization
• Six Word Stories: 11-99
• DC: Recap
• 99.999999999%
• Probability
• Six Word Stories: Virus
• The Facts