Counterinsurgency


Counterinsurgency is "the totality of actions aimed at defeating irregular forces". The Oxford English Dictionary defines counterinsurgency as any "military or political action taken against the activities of guerrillas or revolutionaries" and can be considered war by a state against a non-state adversary. Insurgency and counterinsurgency campaigns have been waged since ancient history. Western thought on fighting 'small wars' gained interest during initial periods of European colonisation, while modern thinking on counterinsurgency was developed during decolonization.
During insurgency and counterinsurgency, the distinction between civilians and combatants is often blurred. Counterinsurgency may involve attempting to win the hearts and minds of populations supporting the insurgency. Alternatively, it may be waged in an attempt to intimidate or eliminate civilian populations suspected of loyalty to the insurgency through indiscriminate violence.

Models

Counterinsurgency is normally conducted as a combination of conventional military operations and other means, such as demoralization in the form of propaganda, Psy-ops, and assassinations. Counter-insurgency operations include many different facets: military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken to defeat insurgency.
To understand counterinsurgency, one must understand insurgency to comprehend the dynamics of revolutionary warfare. Counter-insurgency focuses on bridging these gaps. Insurgents take advantage of social issues known as gaps. When the gaps are wide, they create a sea of discontent, creating the environment in which the insurgent can operate.
In The Insurgent Archipelago, John Mackinlay puts forward the concept of an evolution of the insurgency from the Maoist paradigm of the golden age of insurgency to the global insurgency of the start of the 21st century. He defines this distinction as "Maoist" and "post-Maoist" insurgency.

Counterinsurgency theorists

Santa Cruz de Marcenado

The third Marques of Santa Cruz de Marcenado is an early author who wrote both advise for conventional military matters he also gave suggestions on the topic of "rebellions". In his Reflexiones Militares, published between 1726 and 1730, he discussed how to spot early signs of an incipient insurgency, prevent insurgencies, and counter them, if they could not be warded off. Strikingly, Santa Cruz recognized that insurgencies are usually due to real grievances: "A state rarely rises up without the fault of its governors." Consequently, he advocated clemency towards the population and good governance, to seek the people's "heart and love".

Thomas-Robert Bugeaud

General Bugeaud served extensively in the French war of conquest in Algeria and was also personally present during the Peninsular War. After he returned to France he wrote extensively about Algeria and has been cited as an early commander whose conduct contains many aspects of modern counterinsurgency doctrine, such as intelligence lead operations in combination with irregular warfare and psychological warfare. However in comparison to theorists and practitioners who would come after him Bugeaud's methods have been analysed as being more "enemy centric" - favouring punitive raids or razzias conducted by light mobile forces rather than the more "population centric" of both modern doctrines and also latter French Generals during the colonial period who developed the oil spot method. Bugeaud's approach was also less discriminatory, between civilian targets and military with razzias often targeting by design subsistence agriculture that supported groups that had not yet acquiesced to French authority.

B. H. Liddell Hart

attributed the failure of counterinsurgencies to various causes. First, as pointed out in the Insurgency addendum to the second version of his book Strategy: The Indirect Approach, a popular insurgency has an inherent advantage over any occupying force. He showed as a prime example the French occupation of Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. Whenever Spanish forces managed to constitute themselves into a regular fighting force, the superior French forces beat them in the vast majority engagements.
However, once dispersed and decentralized, the irregular nature of the rebel campaigns proved a decisive counter to French superiority on the battlefield. Napoleon's army had no means of effectively combating the rebels, and in the end, their strength and morale were so sapped that when Wellington was finally able to challenge French forces in the field, the French had almost no choice but to abandon the situation.
Counterinsurgency efforts may be successful, especially when the insurgents are unpopular. The Philippine–American War, the Shining Path in Peru, and the Malayan Emergency have been the sites of failed insurgencies.
Hart also points to the experiences of T. E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt during World War I as another example of the power of the rebel/insurgent. Though the Ottomans often had advantages in manpower of more than 100 to 1, the Arabs' ability to materialize out of the desert, strike, and disappear again often left the Turks reeling and paralyzed, creating an opportunity for regular British forces to sweep in and finish the Turkish forces off.
In both the preceding cases, the insurgents and rebel fighters were working in conjunction with or in a manner complementary to regular forces. Such was also the case with the French Resistance during World War II and the National Liberation Front during the Vietnam War. The strategy in these cases is for the irregular combatant to weaken and destabilize the enemy to such a degree that victory is easy or assured for the regular forces. However, in many modern rebellions, one does not see rebel fighters working in conjunction with regular forces. Rather, they are home-grown militias or imported fighters who have no unified goals or objectives save to expel the occupier.
According to Liddell Hart, there are few effective counter-measures to this strategy. So long as the insurgency maintains popular support, it will retain all of its strategic advantages of mobility, invisibility, and legitimacy in its own eyes and the eyes of the people. So long as this is the situation, an insurgency essentially cannot be defeated by regular forces.

David Galula

gained his practical experience in counterinsurgency as a French Army officer in the Algerian War. His theory of counterinsurgency is not primarily military, but a combination of military, political and social actions under the strong control of a single authority.
Galula proposes four "laws" for counterinsurgency:
  1. The aim of the war is to gain the support of the population rather than control of territory.
  2. Most of the population will be neutral in the conflict; support of the masses can be obtained with the help of an active friendly minority.
  3. Support of the population may be lost. The population must be efficiently protected to allow it to cooperate without fear of retribution by the opposite party.
  4. Order enforcement should be done progressively by removing or driving away armed opponents, then gaining the support of the population, and eventually strengthening positions by building infrastructure and setting long-term relationships with the population. This must be done area by area, using a pacified territory as a basis of operation to conquer a neighboring area.
Galula contends that:
With his four principles in mind, Galula goes on to describe a general military and political strategy to put them into operation in an area that is under full insurgent control:
According to Galula, some of these steps can be skipped in areas that are only partially under insurgent control, and most of them are unnecessary in areas already controlled by the government. Thus the essence of counterinsurgency warfare is summed up by Galula as "Build a political machine from the population upward."

Robert Thompson

wrote Defeating Communist Insurgency in 1966, wherein he argued that a successful counterinsurgency effort must be proactive in seizing the initiative from insurgents. Thompson outlines five basic principles for a successful counterinsurgency:
  1. The government must have a clear political aim: to establish and maintain a free, independent and united country that is politically and economically stable and viable;
  2. The government must function in accordance with the law;
  3. The government must have an overall plan;
  4. The government must give priority to defeating political subversion, not the guerrilla fighters;
  5. In the guerrilla phase of an insurgency, a government must secure its base areas first.

    David Kilcullen

In "The Three Pillars of Counterinsurgency", Dr. David Kilcullen, the Chief Strategist of the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism of the U.S. State Department in 2006, described a framework for interagency cooperation in counterinsurgency operations. His pillars – Security, Political and Economic – support the overarching goal of Control, but are based on Information:
Kilcullen considers the three pillars to be of equal importance because
The overall goal, according to this model, "is not to reduce violence to zero or to kill every insurgent, but rather to return the overall system to normality — noting that 'normality' in one society may look different from normality in another. In each case, we seek not only to establish control, but also to consolidate that control and then transfer it to permanent, effective, and legitimate institutions."

Martin van Creveld

Military historian Martin van Creveld, noting that almost all attempts to deal with insurgency have ended in failure, advises:
In examining why so many counterinsurgencies by powerful militaries fail against weaker enemies, Van Creveld identifies a key dynamic that he illustrates by the metaphor of killing a child. Regardless of whether the child started the fight or how well armed the child is, an adult in a fight with a child will feel that he is acting unjustly if he harms the child and foolish if the child harms him; he will, therefore, wonder if the fight is necessary.
Van Creveld argues that "by definition, a strong counterinsurgent who uses his strength to kill the members of a small, weak organization of insurgents – let alone the civilian population by which it is surrounded, and which may lend it support – will commit crimes in an unjust cause," while "a child who is in a serious fight with an adult is justified in using every and any means available – not because he or she is right, but because he or she has no choice". Every act of insurgency becomes, from the perspective of the counterinsurgent, a reason to end the conflict, while also being a reason for the insurgents to continue until victory. Trường Chinh, second in command to Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, wrote in his Primer for Revolt:
Van Creveld thus identifies "time" as the key factor in counterinsurgency. In an attempt to find lessons from the few cases of successful counterinsurgency, of which he lists two clear cases: the British efforts during The Troubles of Northern Ireland and the 1982 Hama massacre carried out by the Syrian government to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood, he asserts that the "core of the difficulty is neither military nor political, but moral" and outlines two distinct methods.
The first method relies on superb intelligence, provided by those who know the natural and artificial environment of the conflict as well as the insurgents. Once such superior intelligence is gained, the counterinsurgents must be trained to a point of high professionalism and discipline such that they will exercise discrimination and restraint. Through such discrimination and restraint, the counterinsurgents do not alienate members of the populace besides those already fighting them, while delaying the time when the counterinsurgents become disgusted by their own actions and demoralized.
General Patrick Walters, the British commander of troops in Northern Ireland, explicitly stated that his objective was not to kill as many terrorists as possible but to ensure that as few people on both sides were killed. In the vast majority of counterinsurgencies, the "forces of order" kill far more people than they lose. In contrast and using very rough figures, the struggle in Northern Ireland had cost the United Kingdom three thousand fatal casualties. Of the three thousand, about seventeen hundred were civilians...of the remaining, a thousand were British soldiers. No more than three hundred were terrorists, a ratio of three to one.
If the prerequisites for the first method – excellent intelligence, superbly trained and disciplined soldiers and police, and an iron will to avoid being provoked into lashing out – are lacking, van Creveld posits that counterinsurgents who still want to win must use the second method exemplified by the Hama massacre. In 1982, the regime of Syrian president Hafez al-Assad was on the point of being overwhelmed by the countrywide insurgency of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Assad sent a Syrian Army division under his brother Rifaat to the city of Hama, known to be the center of the resistance.
Following a counterattack by the Brotherhood, Rifaat used his heavy artillery to demolish the city, killing between 10-25,000 people, including many women and children. Asked by reporters what had happened, Hafez al-Assad exaggerated the damage and deaths, promoted the commanders who carried out the attacks, and razed Hama's well-known great mosque, replacing it with a parking lot. With the Muslim Brotherhood scattered, the population was so cowed that it would be years before opposition groups dared to disobey the regime again and, van Creveld argues, the massacre most likely saved the regime and prevented a bloody civil war.
Van Creveld condenses al-Assad's strategy into five rules while noting that they could easily have been written by Niccolò Machiavelli:
  1. There are situations in which cruelty is necessary, and refusing to apply necessary cruelty is a betrayal of the people who put you into power. When pressed to cruelty, never threaten your opponent but disguise your intention and feign weakness until you strike.
  2. Once you decide to strike, it is better to kill too many than not enough. If another strike is needed, it reduces the impact of the first strike. Repeated strikes will also endanger the morale of the counterinsurgent troops; soldiers forced to commit repeated atrocities will likely begin to resort to alcohol or drugs to force themselves to carry out orders and will inevitably lose their military edge, eventually turning into a danger to their commanders.
  3. Act as soon as possible. More lives will be saved by decisive action early, than by prolonging the insurgency. The longer you wait, the more inured the population will be to bloodshed, and the more barbaric your action will have to be to make an impression.
  4. Strike openly. Do not apologize, make excuses about "collateral damage", express regret, or promise investigations. Afterwards, make sure that as many people as possible know of your strike; the media is useful for this purpose, but be careful not to let them interview survivors and arouse sympathy.
  5. Do not command the strike yourself, in case it doesn't work for some reason and you need to disown your commander and try another strategy. If it does work, present your commander to the world, explain what you have done and make certain that everyone understands that you are ready to strike again.