Keep fighting! We must not learn from our wars.

Summary:  We were ejected from Iraq, gaining nothing we sought. No oil, no ally against Iran, no unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East. All but the mad hawks realize we gained nothing in Afghanistan. Now comes the post-game show, as our military’s boosters attempt to fog our vision and erase our memories, preparing us for more wars. The truth is out there, if only we would make an effort to see.
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Contents

1. We lose because we’re ignorant of history and refuse to learn
2. Bitter fruit from our failure to learn
3. The history of counterinsurgency by foreign armies, a history of failure
4. A more detailed explanation of why foreign armies fail at COIN
5. For More Information
6. A closing note from Friedrich Schiller

(1)  We lose because we’re ignorant of history and refuse to learn

“Keep Fighting: Why the Counterinsurgency Debate Must Go On“, Mark Stout (Director of the MA Program in Global Security Studies at Johns Hopkins), War on the Rocks, 3 December 2013 — Opening:

Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine in general and the military’s FM 3-24 in particular have been the subject of extensive and often vitriolic debate in recent years.  Now the debate is finally subsiding, but not in a satisfactory way.  It must not be allowed to die yet.

This reasonable article by an expert avoids the big question: why have we learned so little after six decades of failure by foreign armies fighting local insurgencies? It suggests that the next round of debate about counter-insurgency warfare will produce still more tortured history justifying the next war (we could have won!) and happy theory (next time we’ll convince the locals to have good government).

Let’s rewind the tape to see what we learned from the last round. For example, how many counter-insurgency experts listened to Martin van Creveld’s warnings? Such as this from Chapter 6.2 in Changing Face of War (2006):

What is known, though, is that attempts by post-1945 armed forces to suppress guerrillas and terrorists have constituted a long, almost unbroken record of failure … {W}hat changed was the fact that, whereas previously it had been the main Western powers that failed, now the list included other countries as well. Portugal’s expulsion from Africa in 1975 was followed by the failure of the South Africans in Namibia, the Ethiopians in Ertrea, the Indians in Sri Lanka, the Americans in Somalia, and the Israelis in Lebanon. … Even in Denmark {during WWII}, “the model protectorate”, resistance increased as time went on.

Many of these nations used force up to the level of genocide in their failed attempts to defeat local insurgencies. Despite that, foreign forces have an almost uniform record of defeat. Such as the French-Algerian War, which the French waged until their government collapsed.

Seven years later and we’re still attempting to avoid learning from our failed wars.

(2)  Bitter fruit from our failure to learn

Some people are running the sums to see the results of our most recent infatuations with counter-insurgency. Before we let our military experts repeat this history let’s remember the results of their projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here’s a look at Iraq: “Rumsfeld’s War and Its Consequences Now“, Mark Danner, New York Review of Books, 19 December 2013 — Excerpt (red emphasis added):

A bare two weeks after the attacks of September 11, at the end of a long and emotional day at the White House, a 69-year-old politician and businessman — a midwesterner, born of modest means but grown wealthy and prominent and powerful — returned to his enormous suite of offices on the seventh floor of the flood-lit and wounded Pentagon and, as was his habit, scrawled out a memorandum on his calendar:

Interesting day— NSC mtg. with President— As [it] ended he asked to see me alone… After the meeting ended I went to Oval Office—He was alone He was at his desk— He talked about the meet Then he said I want you to develop a plan to invade Ir[aq]. Do it outside the normal channels. Do it creatively so we don’t have to take so much cover [?]

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… Nearly 2 years have passed since the last American soldier crossed the Iraq border into Kuwait, ending in quiet ignominy the American phase of a war that had begun in highly ballyhooed “shock and awe” more than 8 years before.In Iraq, the sectarian guerrilla war set off by the invasion goes on, the suicide bombers continue their work, hundreds of Iraqis die in horrific violence every month.

That most Americans would prefer to ignore this does not alter the reality that we live in a world the Iraq war has made. Before the war, Iraq had served the United States as a check on the revolutionary ambitions of the Islamic Republic of Iran — a “tilt” to Iraq that Donald Rumsfeld had personally set on course, during talks with Saddam in Baghdad in 1983 as President Reagan’s special envoy. It took the American invasion two decades later to make of Iraq an Iranian ally.

Under Saddam, Iraq had been devoid of Islamic jihadists; it took the American occupation to make of Iraq a breeding ground for jihadists and a laboratory for developing and honing their techniques of asymmetric warfare: the car bombs, kidnappings, improvised explosive devices, and other ruthless tactics in a cheap and effective “toolbox” that has been employed with considerable success from Afghanistan to Yemen to Mali. Iraqi jihadists, many of them former soldiers and officers in the Iraqi army that the American occupiers abruptly dissolved in the summer of 2003, have become the proud foot soldiers of the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” a proclaimed zone of insurgency and Wild West lawlessness that stretches west from Fallujah through Anbar province and into the heart of Sunni Syria.

While the increasingly repressive Shia government that the Americans helped install in Baghdad collaborates with Tehran in its support of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, the Sunni insurgents that the Americans unleashed struggle to overthrow Assad in what is becoming the central battle of the three-continent-wide Salafi uprising that al-Qaeda, by its audacious September 11 attacks, had been determined to ignite and foster. Now the Sunnis are increasingly striking back at Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors in Lebanon.

The Sunni–Shia struggle set in motion by the American invasion of Iraq has become the vortex of a violent political struggle that stretches from South Asia to the Gulf. Meantime, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has grown fivefold. Bin Laden is dead, but in Pakistan and Somalia and Yemen the drones go on striking, killing by now several thousand, and more rise to take their place. The jihadists are not winning but they are not disappearing either. There is no end in sight.

Though Bush is long gone, replaced by a president who had seemed to voters to be in many ways his opposite, this geopolitical reality has hardly changed. As Rumsfeld remarks to {Errol Morris in the film The Unknown Known}:

Barack Obama opposed most of the structures that President George W. Bush put in place: Guantánamo Bay, the concept of indefinite detention, the Patriot Act, military commissions. Here we are, years later, and they’re all still here. I think that has to validate, to some extent, the decisions that were made by President George W. Bush.

One needn’t accept such “validation” to concede that more than a dozen years later we still live in the world that Bush’s “war on terror” made. The “state of exception” that began on September 11, 2001, has not ended, owing not only to the political compromises and misplaced priorities of the Obama administration but to the terribly misbegotten and self-defeating way the “war on terror” was conceived and waged.

(3)  History of counterinsurgency by foreign armies, a history of failure

We cannot excuse our ignorance about counter-insurgency’s record of failure by saying it is hidden or difficult to see.

(a)  For an introduction see this review of the rise and fall of COIN by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, one of America’s finest journalists: “Learning to Eat Soup with a Spoon“, American Conservative, 31 August 2012.

(b)  For deeper analysis see:

1. How often do insurgents win?  How much time does successful COIN require?, 29 May 2008 — Robert W. Chamberlain (Captain, US Army) gives the answer in the Armed Forces Journal.
2. Max Boot: history suggests we will win in Afghanistan, with better than 50-50 odds. Here’s the real story., 21 June 2010 — Boot discusses 7 alleged victories by foreign armies fighting insurgencies. They’re not.
3. A major discovery! It could change the course of US geopolitical strategy, if we’d only see it, 28 June 2010 — The doctoral dissertation of Erin Marie Simpson (Political Science, Harvard)  examines the present and past analysis of  counter-insurgency.
4. A look at the history of victories over insurgents, 30 June 2010 — RAND counts the record of failure
5. COINistas point to Kenya as a COIN success. In fact it was an expensive bloody failure., 7 August 2012 — Debunking bogus history.

(4)  A more detailed explanation of why foreign armies fail at COIN

(a)  The first lesson of our failed wars: we were warned, but choose not to listen — Speech by Martin van Creveld, February 2008

(b)  “On Counterinsurgency”, Martin van Creveld, from Combating Terrorism, edited by Rohan Gunaratna (2005)

1. How We Got to Where We Are is a brief history of insurgency since 1941 and of the repeated failures in dealing with it.
2. Two Methods looks at two paths to victory at counterinsurgency: President Assad’s suppression of the uprising at Hama in 1983, and the British operations in Northern Ireland.
3. On Power and Compromises draws lessons from the methods just presented and goes on to explain how, by vacillating between them, most counterinsurgents have guaranteed their own failure.
4. Conclusions — let’s hope we learn.

(5)  For More Information

(a)  Reference pages listing posts about:

• Military and strategic theory and practice
• our wars – Iraq, Af-Pak & elsewhere

(b)  The two most important posts about counterinsurgency on the FM website:

• Kilcullen’s 28 Articles: a guide to failure in Iraq, 7 May 2007 — Kilcullen’s article gave good advice, but it works only for our enemies. Not us.
• How America can survive and even prosper in the 21st Century – part I, March 2007 and revised June 2008

(c)  Other posts about COIN:

1. The 2 most devastating 4GW attacks on America, and the roots of FM 3-24, 19 March 2008
2. A key to the power of FM 3-24, the new COIN manual, 20 March 2008
3. Dark origins of the new COIN manual, FM 3-24, 23 March 2008
4. Another “must-read” presentation by Kilcullen about COIN, 27 May 2008
5. COIN – a perspective from 23rd century textbooks, 10 June 2008
6. Is COIN the graduate level of military hubris?, 30 July 2008
7. COIN as future generations will see it (and as we should see it today), 1 July 2010
8. COIN – Now we see that it failed. But that was obvious before we started (when will we learn?), 6 December 2011
9. COIN, another example of our difficulty learning from history or experience, 7 December 2011
10. As we start new wars, let’s see an expert at COIN review a classic textbook about COIN, 25 February 2012 — Review of Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare – Theory and Practice
11. “COIN of the Realm” – reviewing one of the books driving our strategy in the Long War, 18 March 2012 — Review of Nagl’s How to Eat Soup with a Knife
12. A look back at the madness that led us into our wars. How does this advice read 6 years later?, 26 June 2012

(6) A closing note from Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

From “Die Jungfrau von Orleans” (The Maid of Orleans), Act III, Scene vi (as translated by Anna Swanwick) (1801)

Folly, thou conquers, and I must yield!
Against stupidity the very gods
They contend in vain. Exalted reason,
Resplendent daughter of the head divine,
Wise foundress of the system of the world,
Guide of the stars, who art thou then if thou,
Bound to the tail of folly’s uncurbed steed,
Must, vainly shrieking with the drunken crowd,
Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss.
Accursed, who strives after noble ends,
And with deliberate wisdom forms his plans!
To the fool-king belongs the world.

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