Why do we lose 4th generation wars?

Summary:  This post examines one of the best and most influential articles written to guide our Middle Eastern Wars, using it to illustrate serious — perhaps decisive — flaws in our thinking.  Not just our strategic thinking, but the very way we see the world.  On this site “we” usually means America, but in this case it means the West — since the article in question was written by an Australian.   This is part 4 in a series; links to the other chapters appear at the end.

Preface

This pitiful little vignette shows one reason why we lose: structural failures in the Department of Defense, from “Knowing the Enemy“, George Packer, The New Yorker, 12 December 2006:

“In 2004, when McFate had a fellowship at the Office of Naval Research, she got a call from a science adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had been contacted by battalion commanders with the 4th Infantry Division in a violent sector of the Sunni Triangle, in Iraq. “We’re having a really hard time out here-we have no idea how this society works,” the commanders said. “Could you help us?” The science adviser replied that he was a mathematical physicist, and turned for help to one of the few anthropologists he could find in the Defense Department.”

Among the thousands of support people in DoD, a battalion commander found nobody better to help understand Iraq than a mathematical physicist. A science adviser to the Joint Chiefs found no better expert on the Middle East than an anthropologist with no specific expertise in that area.

From this a logician could infer the full story of America’s inability to successfully wage 4th Generation Wars (4GW), just as from a drop of water “a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other” (Sherlock Holmes in “A Study in Scarlet,” part 1, chapter 2).  However, logicians are rare. For the rest of us, here is a brief attempt to explain one of the great puzzles of our time: why the US has lost – is losing – and will continue to lose – 4th Generation Wars (4GW).

Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Two Forms of 4GW
3. Article #1 – Know your turf
4. Article #2 – Diagnose the problem
5. Article #3 – Organize for intelligence
6. Article #10 – Be there
7. Kilcullen’s expectations for our company commanders
8. Being rational about irrational things
9. Are we liberators — or conquering a colony?
10. Conclusion
11. For more information

(1)  Introduction

An early symptom of impending defeat is loss of confidence in one’s tactical doctrines. In a strong military culture, though, this can spark a burst of creativity. In WWI, this resulted in the perfection by the German Army of infiltration tactics. Later, with new technology, this became blitzkrieg.

How has the prospect of defeat in Iraq affected the US military?

The first effect has been to grasp at our strengths, the attributes that have proved insufficient in Iraq.  Like a “drop of the hair of the dog that bit you” on the morning-after, it does not help.  Enthusiasm for the work of David Kilcullen clearly shows this dynamic at work. He has a strong background in modern military theory: Lt. Col in the Australian Army, Ph.D. in anthropology, Chief Strategist in the Office of the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, recently awarded the Medal for Exceptional Public Service, and subject of a glowing review in the New Yorker article quoted above.

Let us look at the most widely circulated of his major pieces on counterinsurgency: “Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency” Military Review, May – June 2006.   Explicitly written for a Coalition company commander just warned for deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan, Kilcullen implicitly directs “28 Articles” at senior DoD leaders. It gives practical applications of innovative ideas from his other, more theoretical articles, such as “Countering Global Insurgency: A Strategy for the War on Terrorism.” In which he states:

The ‘War on Terrorism’ is actually a campaign to counter a global Islamist insurgency. So counterinsurgency, not counterterrorism, may provide the best approach to the conflict. But classical counterinsurgency is designed to defeat insurgency in one country. Hence, traditional counterinsurgency theory has limitations in this context. Therefore we need a new paradigm, capable of addressing globalised insurgency.

Although his ideas appear similar to standard western military doctrine, Kilcullen proposes how to radically alter the tactical equation in our favor. Some of the “28 articles” resemble proposals made by 4GW theorists, such as William Lind and Greg Wilcox. Perhaps his work can be seen as a bridge between the various schools withing 4GW theory..

Does this help company commanders? That is important, but this paper considers a larger and more vital question:  do Kilcullen’s recommendations help us win today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Note:  An insurgency is a rebellion; insurgents are rebels. Guerrilla warfare is a method; guerrillas are its practitioners. Kilcullen does not make these distinctions in “28 Articles”, neither, for simplicity, does this paper. So I will sometimes use “4GW,” “insurgency” and “guerrilla warfare” as if they were synonymous. For the purposes of this paper, such conglomeration will cause no great problem, although it may lead to protests by purists.

(2)  The Two Forms of 4GW

With admirable clarity, at the opening Kilcullen defines his subject.

{Counterinsurgency} is a competition with the insurgent for the right and the ability to win the hearts, minds and acquiescence of the population.

As noted above, Kilcullen (and I) is not drawing distinctions between guerrilla warfare, to which this statement applies, and insurgency. With that in mind, we can then ask whether it is possible for us “to win the hearts, minds and acquiescence of the population”?

The answer is “no,” and the rationale is critical to appreciating why Kilcullen’s lessons learned for tactical commanders may mislead politicians who try to generalize it to a war-winning strategy (just implement his tactics and we win) or even worse, to grand strategy. For an explanation we must look at the different types of 4GW.

As a simple dichotomy for analytical purposes, we can say that 4GW’s come in two types, reflecting the degree of involvement of outside interests (obviously there are many other ways to characterize 4GW).

1. Violence between two or more local groups, who can form from any combination of clans, governments, ethnicities, religions, gangs, and tribes.
2. Violence between two or more sides, where at least one is led by foreigners – both comprising, as above, any imaginable combination of factions.

4GW victories by governments are usually of the first kind, local governments fighting insurgencies. Often foreign assistance is important or even decisive, but the local government leads in such areas as political reform and tactics. Western governments have “won” a few type two insurgencies, but only by assisting the locals – with the locals carrying the primary burden. That is, the foreign interest may lead, but the local government must implement.

Examples of type one insurgencies:

1. The WWI Arab Revolt, in which Lawrence of Arabia helped the local Arabs defeat their Turkish rulers.
2. The Indonesian insurgencies in West Java and East Timor that Kilcullen studied.
3. The victory of the Malaysian colonial government over a communist insurrection (1948 – 1960), during which Malaysia achieved independence from the UK. The British, controlling the information flow to western nations, take full credit for what was more of an assist on their part.
4. The apparently successful defensive effort of western nations against al-Qaeda following their early successes in the US and Spain.

After the late 1940’s, western states fighting 4GW’s in other lands – type two wars – usually lost. This is the bright line marking a new age of military history, the ascendancy of 4GW. It began with three epochal events.

1. The end of the WWI – WWII period, conventional wars of attrition which devastated both side, and appears to have (for now, at least) crushed the martial spirits out of Europe’s people.
2. The use of atomic weapons, suggesting an apocalyptic end to future wars between States.
3. The development by Mao of an effective theory of 4GW, and his successful proof-of-concept.

The era of large conventional wars and successful colonial has ended. (Note that the war in Iraq increasingly resembles a neocolonial war, as did Vietnam.)  War continues, but assumes new forms — most esp 4GW.  This schema generates four immediate insights.

1. 4GW’s (and insurgencies in general) are easiest to defeat at home.
2. Do not look to wars won by the locals for lessons how we can win when fighting in foreign lands.
3. We should avoid foreign wars, except when we only assist local forces – a different approach from that attributed to Kilcullen, as we will see below. As Germany learned in WWII and we are learning in Iraq, excellence in tactics and personnel cannot overcome a fundamentally flawed strategy.
4. Kilcullen has been misinterpreted by those who confuse the two types of 4GW’s.

Kilcullen is standing on his head. Our business is to put him on his feet.
— Karl Marx, Das Capital (1867) (Actually Marx said this about Hegel, not Kilcullen.)

Kilcullen describes how to win a 4GW when fighting on one’s home ground. Although greatly advancing 4GW theory, it does not help us win in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Perhaps in the future we will have an insurgency on American soil. Then we can use Kilcullen’s “28 Articles” to fight it.  Let us check this logic by a second look at Kilcullen’s starting point.

{Counterinsurgency} is a competition with the insurgent for the right and the ability to win the hearts, minds and acquiescence of the population.

This nicely defines the nature of competition for a local group waging 4GW. We can catalog Kilcullen’s “28 Articles” as an insurgent’s handbook, filed on the shelf next to Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Not bad company.  Now we can read Kilcullen’s “28 Articles” and appreciate their full power.

(3)  Article #1 – Know your turf

Know the people, the topography, economy, history, religion and culture. Know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader and ancient grievance. Your task is to become the world expert on your district.

It is easy to read this as important but banal. Centurions posted to remote Roman provinces were probably told to “know your turf.” This ignores the depth of Kilcullen’s insight.  Kilcullen here describes the “home court advantage.” It is a powerful advantage in 4GW, perhaps one reason for the consistent victory of locals over foreigners.  This is not a new aspect of war.

“As we shall show, defense is a stronger form of fighting than attack. … I am convinced that the superiority of the defensive (if rightly understood) is very great, far greater than appears at first sight.”
— Clausewitz, On War, Book 1, Chapter 1

Unfortunately, in the Middle East everyone but us has this advantage. The world expert on “your” district already lives there and probably was born there.  US company commanders on six to twelve month rotations cannot develop anything comparable to the locals’ knowledge about their home, especially in so foreign a culture. It might be difficult for some of them to do so quickly in Watts or Harlem.

However, as so often with the US military, we hope deus ex machina will save us.

“.. .a “ruggedized” laptop computer, loaded with data from social-science research conducted in Iraq-such as, McFate said, “an analysis of the eighty-eight tribes and subtribes in a particular province.” Now the project is recruiting social scientists around the country to join five-person “human terrain” teams that would go to Iraq and Afghanistan with combat brigades and serve as cultural advisers on six-to-nine-month tours.”
— “Knowing the Enemy“, George Packer, The New Yorker, 12 December 2006

Since there are so few Arabic-speaking, Iraq-expert social scientists in the US (even fewer for Afghanistan), these laptops’ data will come from the locals. That is, our maps of the social terrain will be that of various partisans in the Iraq civil war. (There are no neutrals in a civil war.)  A high-tech way of making their enemies into our enemies.

Also, this illustrates our confusion between “data” and “knowledge.” Even if the data is correct, most of our company commanders will lack the contextual understanding – the wider view of Iraq or Afghanistan society – needed to successfully apply it.

(4)  Article #2 – Diagnose the problem

Once you know your area and its people, you can begin to diagnose the problem. Who are the insurgents? What drives them? What makes local leaders tick?

Having “strategic corporals” was insufficient. Now we need “sociologist captains.” This is not a task for company commanders, already carrying a complex and heavy load of managerial and leadership duties.  Nor does Kilcullen explain how to apply this advice. Once you have understood the insurgents and diagnosed the problem, how do you construct a solution? A handbook offering these answers could solve many of America’s own domestic problems.

Worst of all, this advice crashes on our lack of the home court advantage. How can someone newly arrived in a foreign culture – Iraq and especially Afghanistan are very foreign to most Americans – do this without speaking the local languages? (Note that Afghanistan – and to a lesser extent, Iraq – is home to many languages.)  As the Iraq Study Group discovered, we have few American translators for Middle Eastern languages. (For more on this see this (update:  link broken) New Republic article from 2003, still largely true today.)  We can hire English-speaking locals, (often of uncertain loyalty), but that is a long, slow way to gain deep knowledge of a foreign culture. (For simplicity, this paper ignores any difference between linguists and translators.)

This advice highlights a difference between the UK experience in Malaysia and our current expeditions to the Middle East. The UK had over a century’s experience governing Malaysia, local knowledge that we lack and cannot quickly develop.

Note that, like #1 above, this advice works better for the insurgents. They know us better than we know them. Few Americans watch Iraq or Afghanistan movies, or speak their languages. Many people in Iraq and Afghanistan speak English, and the whole world watches and reads US media.

(5)  Article #3 – Organize for intelligence

In counterinsurgency, killing the enemy is easy. Finding him is often nearly impossible. Intelligence and operations are complementary. Your operations will be intelligence driven, but intelligence will come mostly from your own operations, not as a “product” prepared and served up by higher headquarters. So you must organize for intelligence. You will need a company S2 and intelligence section.

I’m not a tactician, but this strikes me as excellent advice for the insurgents. Their familiarity with the area and wealth of local contacts makes this easy for local units or cells to do.

Can we do this? I think it unlikely, for all the reasons stated above. In any case, I don’t understand how we can ever do it as well as the locals, unless we occupy Iraq for real and in a sense become colonial rulers.  Wishing for what we lack is not a tactical doctrine; or rather, it is a doomed one. Why not just ask for ten divisions of multi-lingual MP’s and be done with it?

Let us skip ahead to number ten, as it illustrates how our military and political leadership still have not come to terms with 4GW.

(6)  Article #10 – Be there

The first rule of deployment in counterinsurgency is to be there. So your first order of business is to establish presence. If you cannot do this throughout your sector, then do it wherever you can. This demands a residential approach – living in your sector, in close proximity to the population, rather than raiding into the area from remote, secure bases. Movement on foot, sleeping in local villages, night patrolling: all these seem more dangerous than they are.

This is good advice for insurgents, well known since Mao said that the guerrilla is like a fish that swims in the sea of the people. In chapter 37 of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence wrote words that apply equally today (although in a different context) to the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan (bold emphasis added):

“Our largest resources, the Bedouin on whom our war must be built, were unused to formal operations, but had assets of mobility, toughness, self-assurance, knowledge of the country, intelligent courage. With them dispersal was strength. Consequently we must extend our front to its maximum, to impose on the Turks the longest possible passive defence, since that was, materially, their most costly form of war.”

Will this work for us? Perhaps Kilcullen is correct that “these seem more dangerous than they are”, but in insurgent-held areas patrolling has run up casualties with no evident benefit.  Kilcullen might have in mind the Marine’s combined action platoons (CAP), Marines deployed to live in Vietnamese villages. They proved effective in Vietnam’s largely neutral (i.e., apolitical) rural areas.  Iraq is highly urbanized, with a far more politically “mobilized” people than Vietnam’s 1960’s rural peasants. Dropping a unit of Marines into an Iraq town might be …

1. a waste of effort, if in a (relatively) peaceful Kurdish or Shiite area (i.e., already run by the locals), or
2. suicidal, if in an area controlled by the insurgents.

I doubt there are many intermediate situations, except for what are in effect urban war zones like Baghdad, where coalition forces are bunkered in the Green Zone. Anyone suggesting the “residential approach” in Baghdad should be invited to be to test it out, personally.

(7)  Kilcullen’s expectations for our company commanders

We have fielded some of the best-educated and trained company commanders the world has ever seen. We can ask much of them, but not everything of them.  Increasing their responsibilities should not substitute for the military’s lack of effective doctrine and operational intelligence.  Simplifying their job might produce better results than making it more complex. Certainly, the insurgents’ operational doctrines do not require leaders with a college degree, let alone graduate studies. Perhaps we can learn something from them in this respect.

Furthermore, they are products of America – perhaps our finest “products.” As such, they carry with them both the strengths and weaknesses of our culture, and it is not realistic to expect them to quickly free themselves from what they are.  In general, since early childhood they have been indoctrinated to value and believe in freedom and equality, and to consider opposing beliefs are unreasonable. However fine and just, this does not help them understand and empathize a culture with different values – such as Iraq and, even more so, Afghanistan, where religion and tribal/ethnic loyalties play a much larger role.

Good commanders can do much. Great commanders can do almost anything. However, nobody can do everything. Perhaps Kilcullen asks too much.

From another perspective, these 28 articles help us even if we cannot implement them as well as can local insurgents?  That misses their significance.  These are the competitive advantages of insurgents. To borrow Michael Porter’s phrase, these are insurgents’ “core competencies.”  In conventional wars, such as WWII, armies could copy tactical innovations from their enemies. In 4GW’s what works for the insurgents often does not work well for foreigners – a basic tenet of asymmetric warfare.

We can learn from our enemies, but we will continue to lose these wars unless we find other, different, advantages vs. the insurgents. The search for these continues, but for us this is at present a “Handbook for Losers.”

(8)  Being rational about irrational things

There is a deeper flaw in Kilcullen’s view.  He is a social scientist, and that orientation is fundamental to his recommendations. Science is the most rational of human endeavors. That probably aided his rapid acceptance with our military, so many of whose officers have degrees in engineering, science, and management.  Our company commanders come from a culture that esteems rationality perhaps above all other facets of human nature. Unfortunately, war is the most unreasonable of human endeavors. To quote Clausewitz (On War, chapter one) on the nature of war:

“As a total phenomenon its dominant tendencies always make war a paradoxical trinity – composed of primordial violence, hatred and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.”

Also, earlier in chapter one:

“The element in which war exists is danger. The highest of all moral qualities in time of danger is certainly courage. Now courage is perfectly compatible with prudent calculation but the two differ nonetheless, and pertain to different psychological forces. Daring, on the other hand, boldness, rashness, trusting in luck are only variants of courage, and all these traits of character seek their proper element – change. In short, absolute, so-called mathematical, factors never find a firm basis in military calculations.”

By our standards, the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan are unreasonable, spurning our efforts to re-build their society into a little America. We produce manuals and books, hundreds of pages long. Rational, logical, analytical. (Martin van Creveld suggests “smothering our enemies” by bombing them with the thousands of manuals that have been written about modern warfare. Truly horror from the sky.)  While we think and write, they send suicide bombers.

Who has tapped better into the irrational roots of war? Defensive war directly taps love of home, group, and family. Offensive wars are fueled by passion: the promise of booty, to expand the faith, etc.  We are fighting an offensive war without power of these primal drives. Perhaps that is one reason we are losing.

(9)  Are we liberators — or conquering a colony?

Perhaps because his advice is directed towards tactical commanders, Kilcullen seldom mentions the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan. The locals, however, will sense this attitude, with disastrous effects. First, they will likely give “their” government even less respect. Second, our contempt for their sovereignty will brand us as imperialists.  (for more about this see Kilcullen explains all you need to know about the Iraq War)

The past hundred years proves, to the extent that history can prove anything, that locals will reject western armies when perceived as invaders – no matter how benign our intentions. This differs from Germany and Japan, whose populations for the most part accepted our right to be there both as a result of legitimate victory in war and then to defend against a common enemy, the USSR.

The large permanent bases in the Iraq desert, which we built at a cost of many billion dollars, suggest that the insurgents’ fears are well founded – that Stratfor was correct, that the US from the beginning planned to stay in Iraq, install a puppet government, and use Iraq as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” from which to project military power across the Middle East.  For more about this see:

• Stratfor’s analysis of US reasons for invading and occupying Iraq, 4 March 2008
• Stratfor again attempts to explain why we invaded Iraq, 24 March 2008

(10)  Conclusion

Fourth generation warfare has become the primary form of war in the 21st century. As the Iraq War has shown, we do not know how to win such conflicts. Despite our wealth and power, we are losing both wars in the Middle East theater.

Kilcullen shows how western peoples have brought to bear on this problem an even greater strength: our free, competitive intellectual climate. Formally, it is called the Delphi method. People write proposals, which circulate and receive intense review. As scientists know, even failure moves us forward by showing us what does not work.

Eventually we find a solution. I doubt al-Qa’ida has anything like this.

Analysis of Kilcullen’s work suggests that the defense has again become the strongest form of war, fought at home or abroad only when assisting strong local forces. Here is the germ of an insight that might produce a successful strategy for America in the 21st century.

(11)  For more information

Other articles in this series:

• Kuber-Ross gives us a perspective on the evolution of the Iraq War, 11 November 2006 — Introduction
• This is a defining moment in Iraq. The next six months will be crucial. Again. And Again., 12 Novembe 2006 — Part one.
• Part II – What Should We Do in Iraq?, 9 December 2006
• Part III – More Paths to Failure in Iraq, 19 December 2006
• Part V – The Iraq insurgency has ended, which opens a path to peace, 13 March 2007

Reference pages with links to other sources

• About Iraq & Sub-continent Wars – my articles
• About Iraq & Sub-continent Wars – studies & reports
• About the Iraq War – Goals and Benchmarks