Twenty-Eight Articles:
Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency
by David Kilcullen [©2006 U.S. Army CGSC; reprinted in Military Review
May/June 2006, v86 #3 pp103-8]
Your company has just been warned about possible deployment for
counterinsurgency operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. You have
read David Galula, T.E. Lawrence, and Robert Thompson. You have
studied FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency Operations,
and now understand the history, philosophy, and theory of
counterinsurgency.(1) You have watched Black
Hawk Down and The Battle of Algiers,
and you know this will be the most difficult challenge of your
life.(2)
But what does all that theory mean, at the company level? How do
the principles translate into action at night, with the GPS
(global positioning system) down, the media criticizing you, the
locals complaining in a language you don't understand, and an
unseen enemy killing your people by ones and twos? How does
counterinsurgency actually happen?
There are no universal answers, and insurgents are among the most
adaptive opponents you will ever face. Countering them will
demand every ounce of your intellect. But be comforted: You are
not the first to feel this way. There are tactical fundamentals
you can apply to link the theory with the techniques and
procedures you already know.
What is Counterinsurgency?
If you have not studied counterinsurgency theory, here it is in a
nutshell: Counterinsurgency is a competition with the insurgent
for the right to win the hearts, minds, and acquiescence of the
population. You are being sent in because the insurgents, at
their strongest, can defeat anything with less strength than you.
But you have more combat power than you can or should use in most
situations. Injudicious use of firepower creates blood feuds,
homeless people, and societal disruption that fuel and perpetuate
the insurgency. The most beneficial actions are often local
politics, civic action, and beat-cop behaviors. For your side to
win, the people don't have to like you but they must respect you,
accept that your actions benefit them, and trust your integrity
and ability to deliver on promises, particularly regarding their
security. In this battlefield, popular perceptions and rumor are
more influential than the facts and more powerful than a hundred
tanks.
Within this context, what follows are observations from
collective experience, the distilled essence of what those who
went before you learned. They are expressed as commandments, for
clarity, but are really more like folklore. Apply them
judiciously and skeptically.
Preparation
Time is short during predeployment, but you will never have more
time to think than you have now. Now is your chance to prepare
yourself and your command.
1. Know your turf. Know the people, the topography, economy,
history, religion, and culture. Know every village, road, field,
population group, tribal leader, and ancient grievance. Your task
is to become the world expert on your district. If you don't know
precisely where you will be operating, study the general area.
Read the map like a book: Study it every night before sleep and
redraw it from memory every morning until you understand its
patterns intuitively. Develop a mental model of your area, a
framework in which to fit every new piece of knowledge you
acquire. Study handover notes from predecessors; better still,
get in touch with the unit in theater and pick their leaders'
brains. In an ideal world, intelligence officers and area experts
would brief you; however, this rarely happens, and even if it
does, there is no substitute for personal mastery. Understand the
broader area of influence, which can be a wide area, particularly
when insurgents draw on global grievances. Share out aspects of
the operational area among platoon leaders and noncommissioned
officers; have each individual develop a personal specialization
and brief the others. Neglect this knowledge, and it will kill
you.
2. Diagnose the problem. Once you know your area and its people,
you can begin to diagnose the problem. Who are the insurgents?
What drives them? What makes local leaders tick?
Counterinsurgency is fundamentally a competition between each
side to mobilize the population in support of its agenda. So you
must understand what motivates the people and how to mobilize
them. You need to know why and how the insurgents are getting
followers. This means you need to know your real enemy, not a
cardboard cut-out. The enemy is adaptive, resourceful, and
probably grew up in the region where you will be operating. The
locals have known him since he was a boy; how long have they
known you? Your worst opponent is not the psychopathic terrorist
of Hollywood; it is the charismatic follow-me warrior who would
make your best platoon leader. His followers are not misled or
naive; much of his success may be due to bad government policies
or security forces that alienate the population. Work this
problem collectively with your platoon and squad leaders. Discuss
ideas, explore the problem, understand what you are facing, and
seek a consensus. If this sounds unmilitary, get over it. Once
you are in theater, situations will arise too quickly for orders
or even commander's intent. Corporals and privates will have to
make snap judgments with strategic impact. The only way to help
them is to give them a shared understanding, then trust them to
think for themselves on the day.
3. Organize for intelligence. In counterinsurgency, killing the
enemy is easy. Finding him is often nearly impossible.
Intelligence and operations are complementary. Your operations
will be intelligence-driven, but intelligence will come mostly
from your own operations, not as a product prepared and served up
by higher headquarters. So you must organize for intelligence.
You will need a company S2 and an intelligence section (including
analysts). You might need platoon S2s and S3s, and you will need
a reconnaissance and surveillance (R&S) element. You will not
have enough linguists – you never do – but carefully
consider where best to use them. Linguists are a battle-winning
asset, but like any other scarce resource, you must have a
prioritized "bump plan" in case you lose them. Often during
predeployment the best use of linguists is to train your command
in basic language. You will probably not get augmentation for all
this, but you must still do it. Put the smartest soldiers in the
S2 section and the R&S squad. You will have one less rifle squad,
but the intelligence section will pay for itself in lives and
effort saved.
4. Organize for interagency operations. Almost everything in
counterinsurgency is interagency. And everything important, from
policing to intelligence to civil-military operations to trash
collection, will involve your company working with civilian
actors and local indigenous partners you cannot control, but
whose success is essential for yours. Train the company in
interagency operations: Get a briefing from the U.S. Department
of State, aid agencies, and the local police or fire brigade.
Train point-men in each squad to deal with the interagency
people. Realize that civilians find rifles, helmets, and body
armor intimidating. Learn how not to scare them. Ask others who
come from that country or culture about your ideas. See it
through the eyes of a civilian who knows nothing about the
military. How would you react if foreigners came to your
neighborhood and conducted the operations you planned? What if
somebody came to your mother's house and did that? Most
importantly, know that your operations will create a temporary
breathing space, but long-term development and stabilization by
civilian agencies will ultimately win the war.
5. Travel light and harden your combat service support (CSS). You
will be weighed down with body armor, rations, extra ammunition,
communications gear, and a thousand other things. The enemy will
carry a rifle or rocket-propelled grenade launcher, a shemagh
(head scarf), and a water bottle if he is lucky. Unless you
ruthlessly lighten your load and enforce a culture of speed and
mobility, the insurgents will consistently out-run and
outmaneuver you. But in lightening your load, make sure you can
always reach back to call for firepower or heavy support if
needed. Also, remember to harden your CSS. The enemy will attack
your weakest points. Most attacks on Coalition forces in Iraq in
2004 and 2005, outside preplanned combat actions like the two
battles of Falluja or Operation Iron Horse, were against CSS
installations and convoys. You do the math. Ensure your CSS
assets are hardened, have communications, and are trained in
combat operations. They may do more fighting than your rifle
squads.
6. Find a political/cultural adviser. In a force optimized for
counterinsurgency, you might receive a political-cultural adviser
at company level, a diplomat or military foreign area officer
able to speak the language and navigate the intricacies of local
politics. Back on planet Earth, the corps and division commander
will get a political advisor; you will not, so you must
improvise. Find a POLAD (political-cultural adviser) from among
your people – perhaps an officer, perhaps not (see article
8). Someone with people skills and a feel for the environment
will do better than a political-science graduate. Don't try to be
your own cultural adviser: You must be fully aware of the
political and cultural dimension, but this is a different task.
Also, don't give one of your intelligence people this role. They
can help, but their task is to understand the environment. The
POLAD's job is to help shape it.
7. Train the squad leaders – then trust them.
Counterinsurgency is a squad and platoon leader's war, and often
a private soldier's war. Battles are won or lost in moments:
Whoever can bring combat power to bear in seconds, on a street
comer, will win. The commander on the spot controls the fight.
You must train the squad leaders to act intelligently and
independently without orders. If your squad leaders are
competent, you can get away with average company or platoon
staffs. The reverse is not the case. Training should focus on
basic skills: marksmanship, patrolling, security on the move and
at the halt, and basic drills. When in doubt, spend less time on
company and platoon training, and more time on squads. Ruthlessly
replace leaders who do not make the grade. But once people are
trained and you have a shared operational diagnosis, you must
trust them. We talk about this, but few company or platoon
leaders really trust their people. In counterinsurgency, you have
no choice.
8. Rank is nothing; talent is everything. Not everyone is good at
counterinsurgency. Many people don't understand the concept, and
some can't execute it. It is difficult, and in a conventional
force only a few people will master it. Anyone can learn the
basics, but a few naturals do exist. Learn how to spot these
people, and put them into positions where they can make a
difference. Rank matters far less than talent – a few good
men led by a smart junior noncommissioned officer can succeed in
counterinsurgency, where hundreds of well-armed soldiers under a
mediocre senior officer will fail.
9. Have a game plan. The final preparation task is to develop a
game plan, a mental picture of how you see the operation
developing. You will be tempted to try and do this too early. But
wait, as your knowledge improves, you will get a better idea of
what needs to be done and a fuller understanding of your own
limitations. Like any plan, this plan will change once you hit
the ground, and it may need to be scrapped if there is a major
shift in the environment. But you still need a plan, and the
process of planning will give you a simple, robust idea of what
to achieve, even if the methods change. This is sometimes called
"operational design." One approach is to identify basic stages in
your operation, for example "establish dominance, build local
networks, marginalize the enemy." Make sure you can easily
transition between phases, forward and backward, in case of
setbacks. Just as the insurgent can adapt his activity to yours,
so you must have a simple enough plan to survive setbacks without
collapsing. This plan is the solution that matches the shared
diagnosis you developed earlier. It must be simple, and known to
everyone.
The Golden Hour
You have deployed, completed reception and staging, and (if you
are lucky) attended the in-country counterinsurgency school. Now
it is time to enter your sector and start your tour. This is the
golden hour. Mistakes made now will haunt you for the rest of
your tour, while early successes will set the tone for victory.
You will look back on your early actions and cringe at your
clumsiness. So be it. But you must act.
10. Be there. The most fundamental rule of counterinsurgency is
to be there. You can almost never outrun the enemy. If you are
not present when an incident happens, there is usually little you
can do about it. So your first order of business is to establish
presence. If you can't do this throughout your sector, then do it
wherever you can. This demands a residential approach: living in
your sector, in close proximity to the population rather than
raiding into the area from remote, secure bases. Movement on
foot, sleeping in local villages, night patrolling – all
these seem more dangerous than they are. They establish links
with the locals, who see you as real people they can trust and do
business with, not as aliens who descend from an armored box.
Driving around in an armored convoy, day-tripping like a tourist
in hell, degrades situational awareness, makes you a target, and
is ultimately more dangerous.
11. Avoid knee-jerk responses to first impressions. Don't act
rashly; get the facts first. The violence you see may be part of
the insurgent strategy; it may be various interest groups
fighting it out with each other or settling personal vendettas.
Normality in Kandahar is not the same as in Seattle – you
need time to learn what normality looks like. The insurgent
commander wants to goad you into lashing out at the population or
making a mistake. Unless you happen to be on the spot when an
incident occurs, you will have only secondhand reports and may
misunderstand the local context or interpretation. This
fragmentation and "disaggregation" of the battlefield,
particularly in urban areas, means that first impressions are
often highly misleading. Of course, you can't avoid making
judgments. But if possible, check them with an older hand or a
trusted local. If you can, keep one or two officers from your
predecessor unit for the first part of the tour. Try to avoid a
rush to judgment.
12. Prepare for handover from day one. Believe it or not, you
will not resolve the insurgency on your watch. Your tour will
end, and your successors will need your corporate knowledge.
Start handover folders, in every platoon and specialist squad,
from day one. Ideally, you would have inherited these from your
predecessors, but if not you must start them. The folders should
include lessons learned, details about the population, village
and patrol reports, updated maps, and photographs –
anything that will help newcomers master the environment.
Computerized databases are fine, but keep good back-ups and
ensure you have hard copy of key artifacts and documents. This is
boring and tedious, but essential. Over time, you will create a
corporate memory that keeps your people alive.
13. Build trusted networks. Once you have settled into your
sector, your key task is to build trusted networks. This is the
true meaning of the phrase hearts and minds, which comprises two
separate components. Hearts means persuading people their best
interests are served by your success; minds means convincing them
that you can protect them, and that resisting you is pointless.
Note that neither concept has anything to do with whether people
like you. Calculated self-interest, not emotion, is what counts.
Over time, if you successfully build networks of trust, these
will grow like roots into the population, displacing the enemy's
networks, bringing him out into the open to fight you, and
letting you seize the initiative. These networks include local
allies, community leaders, local security forces, nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) and other friendly or neutral nonstate
actors in your area, and the media. Conduct village and
neighborhood surveys to identify needs in the community, then
follow through to meet them. Build common interests and mobilize
popular support. This is your true main effort; everything else
is secondary. Actions that help build trusted networks serve your
cause. Actions – even killing high-profile targets that
undermine trust or disrupt your networks – help the
enemy.
14. Start easy. If you were trained in maneuver warfare you know
about surfaces and gaps. This applies to counterinsurgency as
much as any other form of maneuver. Don't try to crack the
hardest nut first – don't go straight for the main
insurgent stronghold, try to provoke a decisive showdown, or
focus efforts on villages that support the insurgents. Instead,
start from secure areas and work gradually outwards. Do this by
extending your influence through the locals' own networks. Go
with, not against, the grain of local society. First win the
confidence of a few villages and see who they trade, intermarry,
or do business with. Now win these people over. Soon enough the
showdown with the insurgents will come. But now you have local
allies, a mobilized population, and a trusted network at your
back. Do it the other way around and no one will mourn your
failure.
15. Seek early victories. In this early phase, your aim is to
stamp your dominance in your sector. Do this by seeking an early
victory. This will probably not translate into a combat victory
over the enemy. Looking for such a victory can be overly
aggressive and create collateral damage – especially since
you really do not yet understand your sector. Also, such a combat
victory depends on the enemy being stupid enough to present you
with a clear-cut target, which is a rare windfall in
counterinsurgency. Instead, you may achieve a victory by
resolving long-standing issues your predecessors have failed to
address, or by co-opting a key local leader who has resisted
cooperation with our forces. Like any other form of armed
propaganda, achieving even a small victory early in the tour sets
the tone for what comes later and helps seize the initiative,
which you have probably lost due to the inevitable hiatus
entailed by the handover-takeover with your predecessor.
16. Practice deterrent patrolling. Establish patrolling methods
that deter the enemy from attacking you. Often our patrolling
approach seems designed to provoke, then defeat, enemy attacks.
This is counterproductive; it leads to a raiding, day-tripping
mindset or, worse, a bunker mentality. Instead, practice
deterrent patrolling. There are many methods for this, including
multiple patrolling in which you flood an area with numerous
small patrols working together. Each is too small to be a
worthwhile target, and the insurgents never know where all the
patrols are – making an attack on any one patrol extremely
risky. Other methods include so-called blue-green patrolling,
where you mount daylight, overt humanitarian patrols, which go
covert at night and hunt specific targets. Again, the aim is to
keep the enemy off balance, and the population reassured through
constant and unpredictable activity which, over time, deters
attacks and creates a more permissive environment. A reasonable
rule of thumb is that one- to two-thirds of your force should be
on patrol at any time, day or night.
17. Be prepared for setbacks. Setbacks are normal in
counterinsurgency, as in every other form of war. You will make
mistakes, lose people, or occasionally kill or detain the wrong
person. You may fail in building or expanding networks. If this
happens, don't lose heart, simply drop back to the previous phase
of your game plan and recover your balance. It is normal in
company counterinsurgency operations for some platoons to be
doing well while others do badly. This is not necessarily
evidence of failure. Give local commanders the freedom to adjust
their posture to local conditions. This creates elasticity that
helps you survive setbacks.
18. Remember the global audience. One of the biggest differences
between the counterinsurgencies our fathers fought and those we
face today is the omnipresence of globalized media. Most houses
in Iraq have one or more satellite dishes. Web bloggers; print,
radio, and television reporters; and others are monitoring and
reporting your every move. When the insurgents ambush your
patrols or set off a car bomb, they do so not to destroy one more
track, but because they want graphic images of a burning vehicle
and dead bodies for the evening news. Beware of the scripted
enemy who plays to a global audience and seeks to defeat you in
the court of global public opinion. You counter this by training
people to always bear in mind the global audience, to assume that
everything they say or do will be publicized, and to befriend the
media. Get the press on-side – help them get their story,
and trade information with them. Good relationships with
nonembedded media, especially indigenous media, dramatically
increase your situational awareness and help get your message
across to the global and local audience.
19. Engage the women, beware of the children. Most insurgent
fighters are men. But in traditional societies, women are hugely
influential in forming the social networks that insurgents use
for support. Co-opting neutral or friendly women, through
targeted social and economic programs, builds networks of
enlightened self-interest that eventually undermine the
insurgents. You need your own female counterinsurgents, including
interagency people, to do this effectively. Win the women, and
you own the family unit. Own the family, and you take a big step
forward in mobilizing the population. Conversely, though, stop
your people from fraternizing with the local children. Your
troops are homesick; they want to drop their guard with the kids,
but children are sharp-eyed, lacking in empathy, and willing to
commit atrocities their elders would shrink from. The insurgents
are watching: They will notice a growing friendship between one
of your people and a local child, and either harm the child as
punishment, or use them against you. Similarly, stop people
throwing candies or presents to children. It attracts them to our
vehicles, creates crowds the enemy can exploit, and leads to
children being run over. Harden your heart and keep the children
at arm's length.
20. Take stock regularly. You probably already know that a body
count tells you little, because you usually can't know how many
insurgents there were to start with, how many moved into the
area, how many transferred from supporter to combatant status, or
how many new fighters the conflict has created. But you still
need to develop metrics early in the tour and refine them as the
operation progresses. They should cover a range of social,
informational, military, and economic issues. Use metrics
intelligently to form an overall impression of progress –
not in a mechanistic traffic-light fashion. Typical metrics
include percentage of engagements initiated by our forces versus
those initiated by insurgents; longevity of friendly local
leaders in positions of authority; number and quality of tip-offs
on insurgent activity that originate spontaneously from the
population; and economic activity at markets and shops. These
mean virtually nothing as a snapshot; it is trends over time that
help you track progress in your sector.
Groundhog Day
Now you are in "steady state." You are established in your
sector, and people are settling into that "groundhog day"
mentality that hits every unit at some stage during every tour.
It will probably take you at least the first third of your tour
to become effective in your new environment, if not longer. Then
in the last period you will struggle against the short-timer
mentality. So this middle part of the tour is the most productive
– but keeping the flame alive, and bringing the local
population along with you, takes immense leadership.
21. Exploit a "single narrative." Since counterinsurgency is a
competition to mobilize popular support, it pays to know how
people are mobilized. In most societies there are opinion makers
– local leaders, pillars of the community, religious
figures, media personalities, and others who set trends and
influence public perceptions. This influence, including the
pernicious influence of the insurgents, often takes the form of a
"single narrative": a simple, unifying, easily expressed story or
explanation that organizes people's experience and provides a
framework for understanding events. Nationalist and ethnic
historical myths, or sectarian creeds, provide such a narrative.
The Iraqi insurgents have one, as do Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. To
undercut their influence you must exploit an alternative
narrative, or better yet, tap into an existing narrative that
excludes the insurgents. This narrative is often worked out for
you by higher headquarters – but only you have the detailed
knowledge to tailor the narrative to local conditions and
generate leverage from it. For example, you might use a
nationalist narrative to marginalize foreign fighters in your
area or a narrative of national redemption to undermine former
regime elements that have been terrorizing the population. At the
company level, you do this in baby steps by getting to know local
opinion-makers, winning their trust, learning what motivates
them, and building on this to find a single narrative that
emphasizes the inevitability and rightness of your ultimate
success. This is art, not science.
22. Local forces should mirror the enemy, not the Americans. By
this stage, you will be working closely with local forces,
training or supporting them and building indigenous capability.
The natural tendency is to build forces in the U.S. image, with
the aim of eventually handing our role over to them. This is a
mistake. Instead, local indigenous forces need to mirror the
enemy's capabilities and seek to supplant the insurgent's role.
This does not mean they should be irregular in the sense of being
brutal or outside proper control. Rather, they should move,
equip, and organize like the insurgents, but have access to your
support and be under the firm control of their parent societies.
Combined with a mobilized population and trusted networks, this
allows local forces to hard-wire the enemy out of the
environment, under top-cover from you. At the company level, this
means that raising, training, and employing local indigenous
auxiliary forces (police and military) are valid tasks. This
requires high-level clearance, of course, but if support is
given, you should establish a company training cell. Platoons
should aim to train one local squad, then use that squad as a
nucleus for a partner platoon. Company headquarters should train
an indigenous leadership team. This mirrors the growth process of
other trusted networks and tends to emerge naturally as you win
local allies who want to take up arms in their own defense.
23. Practice armed civil affairs. Counterinsurgency is armed
social work, an attempt to redress basic social and political
problems while being shot at. This makes civil affairs a central
counterinsurgency activity, not an afterthought. It is how you
restructure the environment to displace the enemy from it. In
your company sector, civil affairs must focus on meeting basic
needs first, then progress up Maslow's hierarchy as each
successive need is met. You need intimate cooperation with
interagency partners here – national, international, and
local. You will not be able to control these partners –
many NGOs, for example, do not want to be too closely associated
with you because they need to preserve their perceived
neutrality. Instead, you need to work on a shared diagnosis of
the problem, building a consensus that helps you
self-synchronize. Your role is to provide protection, identify
needs, facilitate civil affairs, and use improvements in social
conditions as leverage to build networks and mobilize the
population. Thus, there is no such thing as impartial
humanitarian assistance or civil affairs in counterinsurgency.
Every time you help someone, you hurt someone else – not
least the insurgents – so civil and humanitarian assistance
personnel will be targeted. Protecting them is a matter not only
of close-in defense, but also of creating a permissive operating
environment by co-opting the beneficiaries of aid (local
communities and leaders) to help you help them.
24. Small is beautiful. Another natural tendency is to go for
large-scale, mass programs. In particular, we have a tendency to
template ideas that succeed in one area and transplant them into
another, and we tend to take small programs that work and try to
replicate them on a larger scale. Again, this is usually a
mistake: Often programs succeed because of specific local
conditions of which we are unaware, or because their very
smallness kept them below the enemy's radar and helped them
flourish unmolested. At the company level, programs that succeed
in one district often also succeed in another (because the
overall company sector is small), but small-scale projects rarely
proceed smoothly into large programs. Keep programs small; this
makes them cheap, sustainable, low-key, and (importantly)
recoverable if they fail. You can add new programs – also
small, cheap and tailored to local conditions – as the
situation allows.
25. Fight the enemy's strategy, not his forces. At this stage, if
things are proceeding well, the insurgents will go over to the
offensive. Yes, the offensive, because you have created a
situation so dangerous to the insurgents (by threatening to
displace them from the environment) that they have to attack you
and the population to get back into the game. Thus it is normal,
even in the most successful operations, to have spikes of
offensive insurgent activity late in the campaign. This does not
necessarily mean you have done something wrong (though it may, it
depends on whether you have successfully mobilized the
population). At this point the tendency is to go for the jugular
and seek to destroy the enemy's forces in open battle. This is
rarely the best choice at company level, because provoking major
combat usually plays into the enemy's hands by undermining the
population's confidence. Instead, attack the enemy's strategy. If
he is seeking to recapture the allegiance of a segment of the
local population, then co-opt them against him. If he is trying
to provoke a sectarian conflict, go over to peace-enforcement
mode. The permutations are endless, but the principle is the
same: Fight the enemy's strategy, not his forces.
26. Build your own solution – only attack the enemy when he
gets in the way. Try not to be distracted or forced into a series
of reactive moves by a desire to kill or capture the insurgents.
Your aim should be to implement your own solution, the game plan
you developed early in the campaign and then refined through
interaction with local partners. Your approach must be
environment-centric (based on dominating the whole district and
implementing a solution to its systemic problems) rather than
enemy-centric. This means that particularly late in the campaign
you may need to learn to negotiate with the enemy. Members of the
population that supports you also know the enemy's leaders. They
may have grown up together in the small district that is now your
company sector, and valid negotiating partners sometimes emerge
as the campaign progresses. Again, you need close interagency
relationships to exploit opportunities to co-opt segments of the
enemy. This helps you wind down the insurgency without alienating
potential local allies who have relatives or friends in the
insurgent movement. At this stage, a defection is better than a
surrender, a surrender is better than a capture, and a capture is
better than a kill.
Getting Short
Time is short, and the tour is drawing to a close. The key
problem now is keeping your people focused, maintaining the rage
on all the multifarious programs, projects, and operations that
you have started, and preventing your people from dropping their
guard. In this final phase, the previous articles still stand,
but there is an important new one.
27. Keep your extraction plan secret. The temptation to talk
about home becomes almost unbearable toward the end of a tour.
The locals know you are leaving, and probably have a better idea
than you of the generic extraction plan. Remember, they have seen
traits come and go. But you must protect the specific details of
the extraction plan, or the enemy will use this as an opportunity
to score a high-profile hit, recapture the population's
allegiance by scare tactics that convince them they will not be
protected once you leave, or persuade them that your successor
unit will be oppressive or incompetent. Keep the details secret
within a tightly controlled compartment in your headquarters.
Four "What Ifs"
The articles above describe what should happen, but we all know
that things go wrong. Here are some what ifs to consider:
* What if you get moved to a different area? You prepared for
ar-Ramadi and studied Dulaim tribal structures and Sunni beliefs.
Now you are going to Najaf and will be surrounded by al-Hassani
tribes and Shi'a communities. But that work was not wasted. In
mastering your first area, you learned techniques you can apply:
how to "case" an operational area and how to decide what matters
in the local societal structure. Do the same again, and this time
the process is easier and faster, since you have an existing
mental structure and can focus on what is different. The same
applies if you get moved frequently within a battalion or brigade
area.
* What if higher headquarters doesn't "get" counterinsurgency?
Higher headquarters is telling you the mission is to "kill
terrorists," or pushing for high-speed armored patrols and a
base-camp mentality. They just don't seem to understand
counterinsurgency. This is not uncommon, since company-grade
officers today often have more combat experience than senior
officers. In this case, just do what you can. Try not to create
expectations that higher headquarters will not let you meet.
Apply the adage "first do no harm." Over time, you will find ways
to do what you have to do. But never lie to higher headquarters
about your locations or activities – they own the indirect
fires.
* What if you have no resources? You have no linguists, the aid
agencies have no money for projects in your area, and you have a
low priority for civil affairs. You can still get things done,
but you need to focus on self-reliance: Keep things small and
sustainable and ruthlessly prioritize effort. The local
population are your allies in this: They know what matters to
them more than you do. Be honest with them; discuss possible
projects and options with community leaders; get them to choose
what their priorities are. Often they will find the translators,
building supplies, or expertise that you need, and will only
expect your support and protection in making their projects work.
And the process of negotiation and consultation will help
mobilize their support and strengthen their social cohesion. If
you set your sights on what is achievable, the situation can
still work.
* What if the theater situation shifts under your feet? It is
your worst nightmare: Everything has gone well in your sector,
but the whole theater situation has changed and invalidates your
efforts. Think of the first battle of Falluja, the Askariya
shrine bombing, or the Sadr uprising. What do you do? Here is
where having a flexible, adaptive game plan comes in. Just as the
insurgents drop down to a lower posture when things go wrong, now
is the time for you to drop back a stage, consolidate, regain
your balance, and prepare to expand again when the situation
allows. But see article 28: If you cede the initiative, you must
regain it as soon as the situation allows, or you will eventually
lose.
This, then, is the tribal wisdom, the folklore that those who
went before you have learned. Like any folklore it needs
interpretation and contains seemingly contradictory advice. Over
time, as you apply unremitting intellectual effort to study your
sector, you will learn to apply these ideas in your own way and
will add to this store of wisdom from .your own observations and
experience. So only one article remains, and if you remember
nothing else, remember this:
28. Whatever else you do, keep the initiative. In
counterinsurgency, the initiative is everything. If the enemy is
reacting to you, you control the environment. Provided you
mobilize the population, you will win. If you are reacting to the
enemy, even if you are killing or capturing him in large numbers,
then he is controlling the environment and you will eventually
lose. In counterinsurgency, the enemy initiates most attacks,
targets you unexpectedly, and withdraws too fast for you to
react. Do not be drawn into purely reactive operations: Focus on
the population, build your own solution, further your game plan,
and fight the enemy only when he gets in the way. This gains and
keeps the initiative.
NOTES
(1) Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency
Operations (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 2006).
(2) Black Hawk Down (Los Angeles, CA:
Scott Free Productions, 2002); The Battle of
Algiers (Casbah Film and Igor Film, 1967).
David Kilcullen, Ph.D., served 21 years in the Australian Army.
He commanded an infantry company during counterinsurgency
operations in East Timor, taught counterinsurgency tactics as an
exchange instructor at the British School of Infantry, and served
as a military adviser to Indonesian Special Forces. He has worked
in several Middle Eastern countries with regular and irregular
police and military forces since 9/11, and was a special adviser
for irregular warfare during the 2005 U.S. Quadrennial Defense
Review. He is currently seconded to the U.S. State Department as
Chief Strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for
Counterterrorism and remains a Reserve Lieutenant Colonel in the
Australian Army. His doctoral dissertation is a study of
Indonesian insurgent and terrorist groups and counterinsurgency
methods.
|
