The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the U.S. Military for Modern Wars

2 A Troubled History

2 A TROUBLED HISTORY “It is useful to learn from your mistakes, but abject foolishness to define yourself by them.” Lt. Col. Ralph Peters (ret.), U.S. Army The U.S. military’s learning of stability operations cannot be fully understood , nor its significance grasped, without some awareness of this institution ’s troubled relation to counterinsurgency. Throughout history, the U.S. military has typically neglected counterinsurgency as a mission—despite repeated operational experience with such campaigns. This is a cyclical pattern —one might call it a “counterinsurgency syndrome”—that has also affected the U.S. military’s conduct of such operations. Only in a few instances has the U.S. military sought to consolidate its experience with counterinsurgency operations by incorporating these missions into its doctrine, education, and training. And even though some of these efforts have been moderately successful, they have consistently been marred by unclear conceptual thinking, causing a poorly targeted learning process. Accordingly, these attempts to learn counterinsurgency have commonly resulted in the further perfection and broadening of war-fighting capabilities or the development of methods that, though focused on irregular campaigns in general, have been inadequate for the specific challenges of counterinsurgency. This chapter elaborates on two such learning processes: the U.S. military ’s efforts to enhance its ability to counter guerrilla warfare in the 1960s, and low-intensity threats in the late 1980s. Although an in-depth historical account of these two periods is beyond the scope of this book, a brief assessment is nonetheless valuable in providing historical perspective and a comparative baseline for DoD’s most recent reorientation. This analysis illustrates how the institutional preferences and idiosyncrasies of the U.S. military can divert or even subvert the necessary learning process. In particular, both previous learning processes reveal strikingly similar tendencies that have hitherto prevented the development of a genuine 25 counterinsurgency capability. These tendencies can be seen most forcefully in the assumptions with which the U.S. military as a whole engaged with counterinsurgency conceptually and in the attendant development of an approach and capability to conduct such missions. The critical question is whether these tendencies will again exert an influence on this most recent of learning processes. THE U.S. MILITARY’S “COUNTERINSURGENCY SYNDROME” The U.S. military’s troubled history with counterinsurgency stems most fundamentally from its self-perception as a force intended for major combat operations.1 With a firm foundation in European strategic thinking, the American military was from the outset configured for battlefield wars conducted against the military formations of other nation-states. This was how George Washington initially sought to fight the Revolutionary War (1775–1783), though Britain’s superiority in this domain ultimately forced the Continental Army to adopt guerrilla tactics. With victory, however, the U.S. military instinctively returned to the topic of conventional war, its initial experience with irregular operations having done little to inform its later evolution.2 This concentration on the “conventional” at the exclusion of the “irregular ” has characterized the U.S. military ever since. Following the Civil War, the U.S.Army focused on large-scale warfare and military engineering while dismissing the frontier, counterguerrilla, and peacekeeping operations of the time as skirmishes and police work.3 At the turn of the twentieth century, Secretary of War Elihu Root framed the Army’s sole objective to prepare for and fight the nation’s wars, which translated into a twin focus on the defense of the U.S. Atlantic coastline against a European amphibious raid and the possibility of a conventional threat to its interests on the Pacific Coast.4 And in the second half of the twentieth century, the U.S. military was primarily concerned with the threat of a Soviet armored advance across Europe . Despite its successful state-building enterprises in Germany and Japan following World War II, it did not institutionalize or prepare for any similar contingencies. Following the Cold War, the focus shifted to the need to develop capacities to fight two major regional campaigns in the Middle East and Asia.5 The contemporaneous experiences in peacekeeping and stabilization operations made only a marginal impact and were generally perceived as detracting from the military’s need to maintain readiness against anticipated conventional foes.6 At no time, however, has the U.S. military’s prioritization matched the types of operations under way. In the nineteenth century “the U.S. Army embraced the conventional Prussian military system as [a] paragon of pro26 Chapter 2 [3.133...