I read an article today about David Kilcullen that rang a big bell. Kilcullen is an Australian outsider who has recently made it into the inside of policy being made in Iraq. More about him in a second.
Here is the aha - When the rules of war change, the establishment get struck in their old mindsets and only the outside "amateurs" have a chance of getting you unstuck.
In the 1914 - 1918 war, there was deadlock. No one could find an answer to the defense. All they could do was to increase the weight of the effort. The French and British and later American Leadership were trapped by their doctrine and by the fact that they could all draw on immense manpower that they could easily lose.
The Australians and the Canadians were very different. Both fielded volunteer armies ( Both had large Corps of over 100,000 men) Their men were not urban factory workers or rural peasants. They were extremely self sufficient and bloody minded who did not take to authority. They came from big lands but small populations. They could not be wasted.
Above all they were lead by gifted amateurs. Australia by John Monash, a son of Prussian and Jewish parents who was an Engineer. He had been in the militia since 1884 and in 1914 was a Colonel. Arthur Currie lead the Canadians by 1917 and was the planner for Vimy Ridge. Currie had been a not very successful real estate salesman, echoes of Grant, and also had been in the militia where he began the war as a Colonel in the artillery.
Both men understood that the simple application of mass, think Iraq, was not going to do the job. Both could rely on the quality of their men to take a much more fluid approach. Both also used artillery like a scalpel and not simply a hammer. If you are interested in the detail here is a paper on the Currie revolution that I wrote for Veterans Affairs.
By 1918, a totally frustrated Lloyd George was planning to replace Haig with these two men. Currie's work as point for the allies when the Canadian Corps pushed across the Canal de Nord and broke through the Hindenberg line ended the war before this took place.
I think that Iraq & Afghanistan are deja vu all over again. Our military leadership are stuck somewhere in Northern Europe still fighting the Soviet Union. They cannot break the mindset of applying force and just as bad of force protection. They don't have infinite manpower but they have access to infinite money and to technology. Intellectually they may "get it" but in their hearts they don't.
But now we are in "post Somme" Iraq and there is a realization that we are stuck - the time when the amateur from away can be heard.
Kilcullen's main theory (Wikipedia) is that a Kinetic approach (like the first day of the Somme) cannot prevail against an enemy whose order of battle is organic and cultural:
Counterinsurgency in its traditional guise is based on systems analysis. But Cartesian systems analysis cannot handle the complexity inherent in counterinsurgency. Fortunately, since the 1960s scientists have developed new approaches to systems analysis, based on the emerging theory of Complexity, which does provide means for handling this complexity. Therefore complex systems analysis of insurgent systems may be the tool needed to develop a fundamentally new version of counterinsurgency for this War.
Applying the branch of complexity theory that deals with organic systems, the paper develops a model of insurgencies as biological systems. This model identifies key system elements and means to attack them. It also allows insights into the systems dynamics of global insurgency, the enabling role of culture in insurgent systems, evolution and adaptation in insurgent groups, insurgent ecosystems, and the nature of the Islamist ‘virtual state’. A historical survey of five previous counterinsurgency campaigns provides a tentative validation of this systems approach. Applying this model generates a new strategy for the War on Terrorism – Disaggregation. Like Containment in the Cold War, a Disaggregation strategy means different things in different theatres or at different times. But it provides a unifying strategic conception for the War. Disaggregation focuses on interdicting links between theatres, denying the ability of regional and global actors to link and exploit local actors, disrupting flows between and within jihad theatres, denying sanctuary areas, isolating Islamists from local populations and disrupting inputs from the sources of Islamism in the greater Middle East.
This gives rise to an operational concept: the aim of counterinsurgency (hence the war aim in this campaign) is to return the insurgency’s parent society to its normal mode of interaction, on terms favourable to us. This demands an understanding of what ‘normality’ is for a given society, and a realisation that military measures only create preconditions for other elements of national power to resolve underlying issues. The systems model also generates practical insights – the need for a common strategic understanding, a constitutional path to address legitimate grievances, understanding of the global insurgent ecosystem and our role in it, a tailored analysis of each insurgency, and improved cultural capability.
Kilcullen has argued in most of his works for a deeper cultural and linguistic understanding of the conflict environment, an approach he has recently begun calling "conflict ethnography". In May 2007 on the Small Wars Journal website he argued that:
- The bottom line is that no handbook relieves a professional counterinsurgent from the personal obligation to study, internalize and interpret the physical, human, informational and ideological setting in which the conflict takes place. Conflict ethnography is key; to borrow a literary term, there is no substitute for a “close reading” of the environment. But it is a reading that resides in no book, but around you; in the terrain, the people, their social and cultural institutions, the way they act and think. You have to be a participant observer.(My emphasis) And the key is to see beyond the surface differences between our societies and these environments (of which religious orientation is one key element) to the deeper social and cultural drivers of conflict, drivers that locals would understand on their own terms.
I think that we are here again. Kilcullen is the consummate outsider as were Monash and Currie. He is not trapped by tradition and he also has a keen mind and a different kind of experience (The Australian).
But when the invasion of Iraq was being planned, Kilcullen was one of a handful of senior military advisers in the coalition of the willing to voice a dissenting view. "I was one of a bunch of people ... who said 'Iraq is going to be a lot harder than you people seem to think, based on 20 years of experience doing it and studying it. It's going to take a lot more than you seem to be willing to commit."'
It was a view that then US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected out of hand, saying Kilcullen didn't know what he was talking about.
But now, after more than four years of entrenched conflict with no end in sight, Kilcullen's doctrine of counterinsurgency prevails in Washington and on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, where it provided the foundation for the surge strategy the Bush administration says is beginning to succeed.
Kilcullen is one of the most influential Australian military minds of his generation. He grew up on Sydney's north shore, the son of academics. He studied counterinsurgency as a cadet at Duntroon, served for more than 20 years in the Australian Army and was awarded a PhD in political science from the University fo NSW for a thesis on Indonesian insurgent and terrorist groups and counterinsurgency methods. He has been a military adviser to the Indonesian Special Forces in counterinsurgency, taught counterinsurgency tactics at the British School of Infantry, and served in peacekeeping operations in Cyprus and Bougainville. Kilcullen also commanded an Australian infantry company in counterinsurgency operations in East Timor and trained and led East Timorese forces after the independence vote in 1999. He was a special adviser for irregular warfare to the 2005 US Quadrennial Defence Review and is Rice's chief strategist on counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism, working in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia.
His no-nonsense guide to fighting insurgents, The 28 Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level CounterInsurgency, is used by the US, Australian, British, Canadian, Dutch, Iraqi and Afghan armies as a training document.
It is now time to find more Kilcullens, Monash's and Curries
.
