Perspectives on Politics roundtable review on “The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual as Political Science and Political Praxis“, featuring Stephen Biddle, LTC Doug Ollivant, Professor Stathis Kalyvas, and Professor Wendy Brown.
Bill Roggio has an timely and in-depth analysis of Iranian involvement in the Iraqi insurgency via the Ramazan Corps, Qods Force’s operational command in Iraq. The Ramazan Corps provides arms, advice and basic training, distributed along a series of “ratlines” that run into the country from Iran’s western border.
Inside Iran, Qods Force manufactures and distributes weapons, provides training for Iraqi recruits, then facilitates the movement of weapons and fighters inside Iraq. Iraqi recruits, largely radicalized Shia from Muqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army, are sent to Iran for what one US military officer described as “basic jihadi training.” The recruits receive several weeks of training with small arms and, depending on the units assigned, mortars and the use of explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs.
American commanders also dispute reports that Iran has reduced its involvement in Iraq, and that it has helped to curb the violence:
“I don’t know what this Iranian pledge is, but the number of munitions has increased,” Lynch said on November 11. “It could be that we are finding them more. But it is still troublesome. I have no idea when these EFP munitions came … before or after the pledge. I don’t know.”
Arnold Kling, drawing on the work of Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, says in a January 2007 article for TCS that Iraq “under Saddam Hussein was a limited-access order, or “natural state.” And, furthermore, that “Iraq was never on the “doorstep” of becoming an open-access order.”
His analysis uses a model of macro-socio-economic development that begins with the simplest type of hunter-gatherer societies, referred to as “primitive orders”, progresses through “limited access orders” or “natural states”, the first and most enduring civilisational mode, and finishes with the historically recent advance of “open access orders”. A “limited access order” is North et al’s term for a society that “strictly limits access to positions of power within political, economic, and religious systems.” An “open access order”, on the other hand, is a society “characterized by open political and economic competition, rather than the limited political and economic privileges enjoyed solely by elites in natural states.” Transition between the two is rare (Spain, Ireland and Taiwan are some of the latest), because “the state’s foremost task is securing its own survival”, and so it feels the process of change as a threat to its very existence – and the existence of the elites it serves – which, of course, it is.
For that reason, Kling concludes that the US will never succeed “in its objective of establishing an open-access order in Iraq.” At present, the country is barely any kind of order, limited access or otherwise, and the thought of creating a liberal democracy with a vibrant market economy seems faintly ridiculous, certainly premature. Start with a limited access order, he advises, which can provide security and can establish and consolidate the necessary preliminary stage of economic development. Without the self-interest of an elite who feel that they have “a stake in peace”, Iraq will stall and remain a failed state.
I have previously wondered whether it is wise to be resuscitating, or helping to resuscitate, ethnic, tribal identities to shore up the fall-out from the destruction of the Iraqi state. Perhaps we are simply facilitating, entrenching and developing sectarianism. However, the implications of Kling’s article are that progression to a democratic market economy is impossible without first developing as a natural state, as unpalatable as that may be to westerners. “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” and as such we will have to give elites preferential access to political and economic power, or deny them at the cost of state failure and realising Iraq’s potential as an eventual open access order.
Robert Kaplan wrote a recent op-ed for The Atlantic, in which he noted that,
Iraq has had three elections that have led to chaos. Bringing society out of that chaos has meant a recourse not to laws or a constitution, but to blood ties. The Anbar Awakening has been a rebuff not only to the extremism of al-Qaeda, but to democracy itself. Restoring peace in Anbar has been accomplished by a lot of money changing hands, to the benefit of unelected but well-respected tribal sheikhs, paid off with cash and projects by our soldiers and marines. Progress in Iraq means erecting not a parliamentary system, but a balance of fear among tribes and sectarian groups.
It seems that a year since Kling wrote “Iraq’s Natural State” in TCS, the US military is acting out his suggestions. Petraeus, and the new COIN-as-anthropology approach he implemented, seeks to work with the grain of existing cultures rather than attempting to impose new rule-sets from the top down. As the natural state develops out of the centralisation of power in the hands of dominant groups, a natural state is precisely what is developing in Iraq with the empowerment of the tribes. Given a stake in the maintenance of order, i.e. they feel they have more to gain by participating, they uphold the state.
Perhaps this might even aid the state moving up the order-type value chain. Pluralism or plurality of access to economic and political power is, after all, part of what makes open access orders what they are. Such a situation is doubtless more fragile – Saddam found it easier to be a tyrant than the US is finding it to be a liberator – but also more worthwhile: for greater risk (and associated cost), there is greater return.
The still unanswered question is whether the various tribal powers, religious factions and ethnic groups can all be reconciled to the natural state of Iraq. Can be power be centralised and dispersed at the same time? Federalism is probably the most realistic and sustainable solution.
Reading the recent exchange between Noah Shactman and Tom Barnett, it seems to me that both are right in some sense, or at least, both have useful contributions to make.
Shactman’s thesis (published in WIRED) is only partially explained by its title: How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not Electronic. In the article he describes how the focus of the American military, as an institution, on fighting large, WWII-scale battles against peer (or almost peer) opposition armed forces, occluded them and left them unable to recognise or divine the looming mess of post-conflict Iraq urban insurrection.
Except, that’s not quite what he says. It’s probably what he should have said, but as Tom Barnett points out, Shactman’s article, in effect, excuses the US Administration for any mistakes made or lack of foresight, and instead blames it all on… Arthur Cebrowski, John Garstka and the theory of Network Centric Warfare as they developed it.
However, although he initially proposes a strangely simplified dichotomy (further reduced by me to 4GW vs. NCW), as the piece progresses the two supposedly opposing sides don’t seem quite so exclusive. For instance, though Shactman is unimpressed by the Fourth Division’s ultra-modern telecommunications and networked tracking systems, the actual users appear to feel differently. “No commander at his level has ever been able to see so many of his men so easily. “It increases the unit’s combat power, no question,” Prior says.” The potential of the NCW doctrine is ignored, even as its successes are recounted: “When the US went to war in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, its forces achieved apparent victory with lightning speed.” Garstka even tells him directly that “you have your social networks and technological networks. You need to have both.” But Shactman either can’t see the obvious positive uses for the networked, advanced-tech, quantitative analysis approach which emerge from his writing or, perhaps more probably, doesn’t want to because it contradicts his idea.
It’s almost funny when Shactman interviews Petraeus towards the article’s end. “I’m expecting a frontal assault on network-centric warfare,” he writes. “Instead, he sings me a love song.”
Zenpundit sums it up well:
The crux of the problem with Shachtman’s article is that his opener gives the impression that the botching of the occupation in Iraq should be laid at the door of two men who articulated strategic ideas with impressive intellectual celerity and subtlety, one of whom is no longer able to defend himself.
Indeed, Shactman would do better to look at institutions rather than an idea because,
whenever a theory is accepted by a large and powerful bureaucratic organization- like, say, the Pentagon - it collides with reality.
General Petraeus reports to Congress:
As a bottom line up front, the military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met. In recent months, in the face of tough enemies and the brutal summer heat of Iraq, Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces have achieved progress in the security arena. Though the improvements have been uneven across Iraq, the overall number of security incidents in Iraq has declined in 8 of the past 12 weeks, with the numbers of incidents in the last two weeks at the lowest levels seen since June 2006.
One reason for the decline in incidents is that Coalition and Iraqi forces have dealt significant blows to Al Qaeda-Iraq. Though Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq remain dangerous, we have taken away a number of their sanctuaries and gained the initiative in many areas.
We have also disrupted Shia militia extremists, capturing the head and numerous other leaders of the Iranian-supported Special Groups, along with a senior Lebanese Hezbollah operative supporting Iran’s activities in Iraq.
Coalition and Iraqi operations have helped reduce ethno-sectarian violence, as well, bringing down the number of ethno-sectarian deaths substantially in Baghdad and across Iraq since the height of the sectarian violence last December. The number of overall civilian deaths has also declined during this period, although the numbers in each area are still at troubling levels.
Iraqi Security Forces have also continued to grow and to shoulder more of the load, albeit slowly and amid continuing concerns about the sectarian tendencies of some elements in their ranks. In general, however, Iraqi elements have been standing and fighting and sustaining tough losses, and they have taken the lead in operations in many areas.
Additionally, in what may be the most significant development of the past 8 months, the tribal rejection of Al Qaeda that started in Anbar Province and helped produce such significant change there has now spread to a number of other locations as well….
The post at SWJ includes the full transcript and briefing slides for both General Petraeus’ and Ambassador Crocker’s Congressional testimonies.
Additional Assessment:
Col. Pat Lang - Petraeus and Crocker - Intersting
B. Smith & J. Martin - The Candidates Respond to Petraeus
E.J. Dionne - The Surge Has Succeeded… in Washington
Michael Yon - Don’t Ask Me What I Think about the Petraeus Report
Thomas P.M. Barnett - Petraeus’ report was everything we were told it would be
Karen DeYoung & Thomas Ricks - The General’s Long View Could Cut Withdrawal Debate Short
Jonathan Rauch - Be Angry… but Patient
Jacob Laksin - Surgin’ General
Frederick W. Kagan - No Middle Way
Tony Bey - Gen. Petraeus on Iran, Hezbollah and Syria in Iraq
The Times editorial - Listen to Petraeus
Gerard Baker - General Petraeus polarises Washington
Babak Dehghanpisheh & John Barry - The Brains Behind the Petraeus Iraq Report
Paul Berman has written a long, almost book-length article on Tariq Ramadan, the French Islamist and Muslim intellectual, examining what he represents within his own current of so-called “salafi reformism” and what his widespread feting by liberal European intellectuals tells us about society today. It’s very much in the spirit of Terror and Liberalism and, as such, is not so much recommended reading as required. The article was published in The New Republic and is called The Islamist, the Journalist, and the defence of Liberalism.
The Observer, not normally a newspaper I rate very highly, published a brilliant and very brave article by Hassan Butt recently, My plea to fellow Muslims: you must renounce terror. Butt was, at one time, the spokesman for a proscribed British Islamist organisation, Al-Muhajiroun, an involved feature of what he terms the “British Jihadi Network”, and even, following his arrest under the Terrorism Act, a minor celebrity of Muslim extremism. Hassan has renounced his past positions and is using his platform to now call for an Islamic response to Islamist terror, specifically, one grounded in Islamic law.
In the July edition of Reason Magazine, Brink Lindsey has a new article, The Aquarians and the Evangelicals, which discusses the split in what he calls the “postwar liberal consensus” in American society. The split, which gave birth to the oppositional yet curiously complementary left/right political spectrum of today, severed the American polity into the socially liberal anti-capitalists, who enjoyed modern freedoms yet hated the engine of capital that generated them, and the fiscally conservative religious right, who protected the market economy yet despaired of the freedoms it created. Lindsey notes that,
On the left gathered those who were most alive to the new possibilities created by the unprecedented mass affluence of the postwar years but at the same time were hostile to the social institutions—namely, the market and the middle-class work ethic—that created those possibilities. On the right rallied those who staunchly supported the institutions that created prosperity but who shrank from the social dynamism they were unleashing. One side denounced capitalism but gobbled its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them.
Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser in the Multi-National Force - Iraq, Dave Kilcullen, has a very revealing and timely post at the Small Wars Journal Blog, Understanding Current Operations in Iraq. Kilcullen explains the rational behind the surge and the MNF’s strategy for defeating the insurgency. The strategy will not focus on chasing clandestine cells of jihadists around the desert, but will instead look to protect the Iraqi population and cutting off support (be it moral or logistical) for the terrorists. Despite the ever more shrill shouts of “failure” in the press, Kilcullen advises his readers to wait and see, because in fact the surge proper is only just starting. The activity of the previous months was merely the prepapration of forces. “This is the end of the beginning,” he writes. If you want to understand what the MNF is doing in Iraq at present, you really need to read this. Links to related commentary (Kilcullen is always worth discussing) here.
There are plenty of things to be depressed about, at present. However, there are occasional chinks of light amidst the darkness. Here are two:
The Generational Theory of Warfare states that the ways in which a society wages war reflects its particular social structure, politics, governing ideologies and morals, institutional structure, economic base and level of technological development. In short, the way a society wages war reflects what that society is an individual entity and how it is constituted. Hence, a nomadic tribal society will wage war differently to an industrialised socialist society, which will wage war differently to an information-age capitalist society. Moreover, as humans have experienced rapid change in the last few hundred years, what we are describing as the modern era, war has evolved in response.
In 1989, William Lind and a group of four marines used this realisation to develop a conceptual framework for understanding warfare in the modern era in their paper, The Changing Face of War: into the Fourth Generation. The Generational Theory of Warfare divided modern war into four distinct phases or “generations”, beginning with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War, and continuing to the present day. Lind describes these generational shifts as “watersheds in which change has been dialectically qualitative.” Although we might add as a caveat, elements of the forthcoming generations are present in the old.
After the Peace of Westphalia, war was monopolised by the state. Prior to the treaty, war was waged by numerous different actors: tribes, clans, families, gangs, mercenaries, city states, businesses, ethnicities and religions. War was not fought simply between two sets of professional soldiers. War was many sided and chaotic. Assassination, ambush and bribery featured as often as open battle.
1GW – First Generation Warfare: the rise of the state
According to Lind, “first generation warfare reflects tactics of the era of the smoothbore musket, the tactics of the line and column.” 1GW describes the sort of wars that typified the Napoleonic era, such as the Battle of Waterloo.
This kind of war developed as not only the result of tactical and technological breakthroughs, the columns and the smoothbore muskets, but also as the result of the political, economic, social, infrastructural and technological changes, which enabled them and which they represent. Thus 1GW required the rising power and resources of the nation-state, major economic advances necessary to field and sustain large armies, increased transport networks to move them, the emergence of nationalism which mobilised large populations ready to fight and die for the state, and the creation of the smoothbore musket which allowed the direct fire tactics of the Napoleonic wars. Importantly, 1GW inaugurated the military culture of order, the top-down hierarchy, love of rules and rank and all of the associated marching, drilling and saluting, much of which is still with us today.
2GW – Second Generation Warfare: wars of attrition
Lind states that “second generation warfare was a response to the rifled musket, breechloaders, barbed wire, the machine gun and indirect firepower.” Tactics were “essentially linear”, with defence in huge lines of trenches and attacks in small, usually fatal, rushes at the enemy positions. 2GW relied on massive amounts of indirect firepower, with artillery replacing infantry as the main weapon of battle, and as such gave defence the ascendancy. The Great War is the paradigmatic example of 2GW.
WWI in particular, and 2GW more generally, also required massive shifts in the social, political, economic, infrastructural and technological fields of the participating nations. Industrialisation greatly increased citizen wealth and thus the coffers of the state. It also greatly increased the industrial output to the level necessary to produce the huge quantities of shells and artillery spent on the front. The sheer scale of the Great War required the participant’s economies to expand enormously. The development of extensive rail and telegraph networks enabled the movement and coordination of these larger armies. Machine guns, rapid-fire artillery and barbed wire gave 2GW its tactical shape, and fervent nationalism gave it a large supply of men for the campaigns.
3GW – Third Generation Warfare: manoeuvre and mechanisation
The second generation responded to industrialisation, realising its potential in battlefield firepower. 3GW also responded to new developments in industrialisation, “however the driving force was primarily ideas” (Lind). The German army, realising it could not compete with the Allies at 2GW due to its weaker economic position, developed a new form of war to compensate for the relative disadvantage: manoeuvre warfare. 3GW employs non-linear tactics and mission dependent combined arms teams, seeking to collapse the enemy lines at key stress points, then pouring through to attack vital organisational positions (like HQ or communication bases), or trying to roll back the enemy’s flanks or collapse him from the rear. Unit leaders are given flexible mission orders and a high degree of autonomy. The advent of 3GW gave the military ascendancy to attack. Furthermore, the German military actually actively explored these possibilities in the interwar period, as well as studying the reasons for their failure in WWI, even as the French and British sat secure and apathetic in deluded self-confident belief that their 2GW militaries would be enough. The Germans sought out 3GW; when they met technologically and economically more advanced France in battle in 1940, they defeated its 2GW army in six weeks.
Important changes in society enabled the blitzkrieg. Germany ended WWI feeling betrayed by its leadership, rather than exhausted by the slaughter as the Allied Powers were. This gave the Germans the will to seek out and develop tactical and operational solutions to their asymmetry. The advances made in “aviation, armour, motor transport, artillery and communications… [were] essential to the birth of the blitzkrieg” (Hammes). Mechanised and armoured divisions could strike with lightening speed and react fluidly to changing battlefield situations. The Allies had access to the same technology, but lacked the requisite political will to develop it into the next generation of military forces. They were outflanked by German thought.
4GW – Fourth Generation Warfare: globalisation and social upheaval
A Panoply of Information
Globalisation has brought with it a major economic shift: the most successful societies are no longer those that produce the most goods, but those with the best access to knowledge and information. Information is diffuse throughout the whole system. It is shared through open-ended networks, access to which is mostly democratic. It moves easily across the globe. Modern communications and transport systems have flattened the world. People are connected more closely now than ever before. Our differences remain, but the distances between us have collapsed. Relative disadvantage is everywhere more visible.
A Panoply of Actors
The sovereign nation-state is no longer the “most important and most characteristic of modern institutions” (van Creveld). Today it must compete for space with a proliferation of different political entities. These are international organisations, like the UN and the WTO, and regional organisations like the EU and NAFTA. They are the multitude of new states created by the break up of the old colonial empires, all at different stages of development. They are trans-national organisations like NGOs, single-issue campaigns and terror networks like al Qaeda. They are the sub-national, the nations without states, such as the Kurds. And they are the all powerful global financial institutions, the traders of stocks, bonds and currency, the multi-national corporations and the large stock exchanges.
A Panoply of War
The collapse in the power and legitimacy of the state and the globalisation of information has shaped the international polity of humanity. Its structure is evolving from state dominated arborescence into a vast rhizome of interrelating institutions, organisations, networks, power centres, campaigns, tribal bands, hubs, communities; all or any can become involved in 4GW, alone or in concert, as participants or the battlefield. War has become amorphous, pervasive. In Iraq, for instance, Coalition forces face an array of different enemies, drawn from a variety of backgrounds (tribal, cultural and political), who fight for a host of different reasons. Between each other, there is much, even violent, disagreement, yet they fight the same foe: the state. And the state has serious problems. Because of their multitude and diffusion, the Iraqi state (including the Coalition) has found it difficult to locate the centre of gravity of the anti-state forces. It can find no one at whom it can aim its guns. It struggles even to decide who it is fighting. For the same reason, the state has no one with whom it can meet, negotiate, and sue for peace.
The battlefield dispersion, which characterises 3GW, increases in 4GW so that it includes an enemy’s culture as well as his country. The 4GW foe focuses attacks on important strategic centres rather than wasting them in direct conflict with an un-defeatable military machine. Targets are not only military, but also civilian: these might include vital infrastructure or the political support for a government, for example. The war is non-linear and the front is constantly shifting, so that it is barely discernable. Modern information networks encourage this; a terrorist might make a bomb out of whatever can be sourced locally using information distributed over the internet and stored on a laptop hard drive. Groups can remain in close contact with superiors, comrades and allies despite what once were prohibitive distances, allowing operations to be coordinated on multiple levels simultaneously, in different theatres across the globe.
4GW uses moral conflict to defeat the enemy. Strategically, it seeks to collapse the political will to fight by destroying “the moral bonds that [allow] the organic whole to exist – cohesion” (Robb). The fourth generation reverses Clausewitz’s famous axiom: politics as the continuation of war by other means. Operationally, it uses terror, spread through the international media channels, to threaten security. It finds the fault lines and fissures of social tension and exploits them, dividing its enemy. It creates economic uncertainty and stress. Tactically, operations are ad hoc and innovative. Terror cells are the ultimate combined arms teams, using whatever comes to hand to create as much chaos as possible deep within enemy territory. In contradistinction to our own rigidly hierarchical and ordered militaries, 4GW forces are highly flexible, decentralised organisations that spread decision making throughout the whole.
The variety of different hostile groups empowered by the decline of the state can and do wage war for their own particular reasons. Often these reasons remain obscure and beyond reach. Different factions come together for a common cause, to fight a common foe. John Robb describes them as “communities of violence”. War has become open-ended once more: any actors or groups join up and leave as they see fit, a return to the conditions that preceded the rise of the state in 1648. The 4GW enemy is a shifting patchwork of alliances and networks, kinship bonds and violent internal quarrels. They fight for their own causes, but all swim in the same ocean: the murky waters of state crisis and failure.
* * * * *
Necessarily, where two armies of different generations meet, the later generation has the advantage over the earlier, because the later makes better use of all available resources and contemporary political and economic realities. It is this fact that allows much smaller 4GW forces to defeat nominally superior militaries. Much of what occurs in the fourth generation is not new, stretching back as it does to Mao’s “people’s war”, classic Arabian light infantry tactics, and war in the years which preceded the era of state dominated conflict. However, the social changes that enabled 4GW are new. In an age where the state has less and less relevance and sovereignty, globalisation has created a different kind of war in its own image. Western governments and militaries have yet to realign themselves to this shift. They continue to fight yesterday’s wars, even as the future burns all around us. If the impact of globalisation is to be managed without causing systemic failure, we will have to change.
Edit: Bibliography
Hammes, 2004, The Sling and the Stone.
Lind, Nightengale, Schmitt, Sutton, Wilson, 1989, The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation.
Van Creveld, 1996, The Fate of the State.
This post over at Small Wars Journal is excellent, and even (whisper it) cautiously optimistic. Kilcullen discusses criticism of the US army’s COIN manual, and the Petraeus/Nagl surge more generally. Some writers have theorised that Iraq’s insurgency is uniquely and insanely religious, and as such traditional COIN is unsuitable, being too “soft”. Kilcullen notes that,
…there are three problems with this argument. First, there is solid field evidence that modern counterinsurgency methods, properly updated for the new environment, actually are effective against current insurgencies. Second, insurgents in both Afghanistan and Iraq are not actually particularly religious — certainly, they are no more religious than the societies they are attacking. Indeed, there is an empirical problem with the whole notion of a “religious” insurgency, since almost all historical insurgencies have included a strong religious dimension, so that it is not clear that discrete “religious insurgencies” actually exist as observable phenomena. And third, doctrinal publications are not templates, but generic expositions of principle; not cookbooks, but frameworks. Practitioners must populate these frameworks with current, locally accurate, deeply understood insights into the societies where they operate. There is simply no substitute for what we might call “conflict ethnography”: a deep, situation-specific understanding of the human, social and cultural dimensions of a conflict, understood not by analogy with some other conflict, but in its own terms.
