Is it Counterintuitive?
The 20th century witnessed the most destructive wars in human history, but high intensity conventional wars were the exception, rather than the rule. Small wars, irregular warfare, insurgencies, and other violent conflicts dotted the historical landscape throughout the period.
The breakup of colonial empires after World War II, in particular, witnessed a number of revolutionary struggles that embroiled western powers in counterinsurgency warfare in Africa and Asia. Drawing on examples of counterinsurgency conflicts from 1899 to the present, explain how western powers dealt with counterinsurgency wars fought away from their homelands, the strategies they used in their quest for victory, and their success or failure in practice.
Small, irregular, insurgent warfare was far more regular during the twentieth century than mere terminology suggests. Western powers increasingly fought guerrilla wars against revolutionary opponents far away from their home countries. Throughout these wars, the success or failure of western powers rested on their abilities to navigate political compromise, ethnic or sectarian divisions, the westerner’s ability to adapt, domestic political situations, and closing gaps between the aims of government and the aims of insurgents.
Guerrillas have become more successful since 1945 in large part because of their ability to play on public opinion. One of the most critical factors for successful insurgencies rests on their ability to find outside assistance. However, an essential component of most counterinsurgencies has been population-centric operations. Those that resisted heavy-handed approaches learned from their mistakes and executed operations under a coherent strategy were the most successful such as the United States in the Philippines, the British in Malaya, and the United States in Iraq. Those that did none of those things failed, like the French in Algeria and both the French and the United States in Vietnam.
After the defeat of his regular troops, Philippine opposition leader Emilio Aguinaldo turned to guerrilla warfare. American efforts to defeat his forces were necessarily decentralized and could adjust tactics at the local level. Intelligence was vital in defeating Aguinaldo’s forces, but perhaps the most decisive characteristic of the United States’ counterinsurgency campaign in the Philippines was its ability to isolate the insurgents from outside assistance.
In isolating Aguinaldo and his guerrilla’s, the United States disrupted his food and weapons supply while preventing them from engendering support from outside groups. Furthermore, this provided breathing room to allow negotiations and political concessions to Aguinaldo on the heels of sensible military tactics that placed the population at its center.
In the Algerian war for independence, which lasted from 1954 to 1962, French brutality created more insurgents than it contained. French domestic political pressure helped end the occupations. French had no credible political message to sell after World War II and the supposed end of colonialism. Furthermore, against the Algerian National Liberation Front, the French heavy-handed militarized strategy helped perpetuate the insurgency.
Alistair Horne wrote that, “the war was marked by an unholy marriage of revolutionary terror and state torture.” While the torture allegedly had excellent tactical effects during the war, mainly during the Battle of Algiers, once it became public knowledge, both domestic France and the rest of the world called for its end.
The British Malayan experience demonstrates that a shift in policy from a military drive one to a comprehensive hearts and minds strategy is possible — must include a willingness to learn from mistakes and adapt. Critical to British success, according to Max Boot, were four major reasons. Their primary determinant for success lay in the geography of the region. Malaya was a peninsula that shared a border with a country friendly to Britain — Thailand.
This geography allowed the British to isolate the area and prevent much outside support — especially weapons. The British were also helped because the rebellion was ethnic — limited to the Chinese in the country. A third factor was the Korean War outbreak that caused an economic boom in commodity prices — including tin and rubber produced in Malaya.
The final determinant of British success in Malay rested upon Harold Briggs and Gerald Templar’s deft leadership, who rejected “the tougher but ultimately self-defeating tactics employed by French commanders.” Malaya thus serves as a case study in handling an insurgency while highlighting the importance of factors outside of the counterinsurgents’ control.
While many individuals attempted to implement change, they ran headlong into strong organizational cultures predisposed to a conventional attrition-based doctrine. During the Cold War, American military planners were preoccupied with preventing or fighting a land war against the Soviet Union in Europe. This focus on large-scale combat operations in Europe meant an institutional lack of focus on counterinsurgency operations in Southeast Asia.
In Vietnam, the Army insisted on using large-scale operations and a plethora of firepower in pursuing a strategy of attrition. In so doing, army leaders ignored the political and social dimensions that form the foundation of successful counterinsurgency warfare. American failure in Vietnam resulted in a wholesale rejection of irregular, counterinsurgency doctrine that had lasting implications when the United States found itself embroiled in two long counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A similar inability to grasp counterinsurgency principles occurred later, in Iraq. Following Saddam Hussein’s ouster in the spring of 2003, the US-led government all but ignored the Sunni minority that had previously held sway in the country. This helped foment a robust insurgency by late summer of 2003.
Iraq highlights the effect that social or political constraints, in this case, the sectarian divide, have on the success of attempts to adapt. Furthermore, the role of public opinion and its ability to further an insurgent cause is on full display in Iraq, particularly following the release of evidence of torture at the hands of American guards in the Abu Ghraib prison. The subsequent unrest throughout the rest of 2004 is a direct result of the failure to acknowledge the long term effects of such abhorrent behavior.
Nevertheless, American planners returned to population-centric counterinsurgency after the surge of U.S. forces in 2006 and 2007, leading to a precipitous drop in violence that allowed Iraqi government institutions to take root and make lasting change. The two most essential ideas underlying the surge involved the Iraqi people.
Humans became the most essential “terrain,” which meant securing the populace became the most critical mission. To make Iraq safer necessitated more American and Iraqi security forces living among the population, making their presence known and building trust while slowly putting an Iraqi face on operations.
An increasing security bubble encouraged more Iraqis to side with the government, which helped separate the insurgents from the population. Creating an Iraq secured by Iraqis legitimized the government and allowed for political discourse to replace violence as the means to determine the distribution of power and resources in the country — at least in the short term. The Sunni Awakening is an excellent example of local Iraqis owning their security, which helped create the conditions necessary for political dialogue.
The key for any war, however, is the ability to marry operations with a coherent strategy. Of course, operational and tactical mistakes can make achieving victory difficult, but commanders executing near-perfect counterinsurgency cannot make up for ambiguous strategy.
While all war is “politics by other means,” this is magnified in counterinsurgency operations that are inherently more political than kinetic. The cases where isolation of insurgent forces is most successful seems to be when geographic conditions can allow it, such as on the Philippine islands or the Malayan peninsula. Nevertheless, success in modern counterinsurgency campaigns demands a precise calibration of military force along with an integrated campaign to improve governance, spur economic development, and create effective local security forces — formidable tasks for which military service is seldom good preparation.
