Don't Know Much about Counterinsurgency

Anyone wishing wider perspective on the sad and frustrating daily news from Iraq, where the casualty rate has recently averaged 100 deaths a day, will find observations from Thomas E. Ricks's book "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq" (Penguin) illuminating. Ricks argues that "there were early indications that U.S. officials would obstinately refuse to learn from the past as they sought to run Iraq." The Washington Post has printed two excerpts, the first of which cites a classic work on counterinsurgency by French officer David Galula, whose experience in Vietnam and elsewhere led to startling conclusions. (Galula's "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice" was Amazon's 135th best-selling book on the morning of July 24, no doubt in reaction to the Post excerpts of Ricks's book.) Galula concluded that "the population...becomes the objective for the counterinsurgent as it was for his enemy," which calls for a different approach to dealing with civilians in the midst of a guerrilla war, in which it "is imperative" that hardships for them and rash actions by the military "be kept to a minimum." For extensive discussion of Galula's, plus those of another Frenchman, Roger Trinquier, from his involvement in Algeria, see Robert Tomes's piece "Relearning Counterinsurgency Warfare" at this U.S. Army site.

Tomes argues against misplaced analogies to Vietnam and relies on Trinquier's "Modern Warfare: A French View of the Counterinsurgency" as a crucial book in understanding what has become known as "asymmetric warfare." He also discusses Frank Kitson's "Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping" (Faber & Faber) and observes that Trinquier, Galula and Kitson "are among the best sources of insight" from those who have fought modern wars, in which the psychology of the populace is the real terrain. Kitson notes, intriguingly, that counterinsurgency and peacekeeping share "a surprising similarity in the outward forms of many of the techniques involved." Tomes's look into this topic is an excellent snapshot of the intersection of intelligence, propaganda, political aims, motivations, shifting insurgency aims, and military thinking. He cites as well related works that bear relevance -- Mark Bowden's "Black Hawk Down," (Atlantic) and John Lewis Gaddis's "The United States and the End of the Cold War" (Oxford). He quotes Gaddis on the value of studying the past, for humility and a wider view, which often "suggests the continuity of the problems we confront, and the unoriginality of most of our solutions for them."

-- Art Winslow