Comments on: The Counterinsurgency Debate in Two Quick Hyperlinks

By: Sam Roggeveen

Sam Roggeveen — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:28:39 +0000

Ultimately, the decision to focus on COIN and stability ops is a political one, since it means a lot of resoures have to be moved away from other priorities. More here, at the Lowy Institute's blog:

http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/2008/12/Nat...

By: Sam Roggeveen

Sam Roggeveen — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:28:39 +0000

By: Consumatopia

Consumatopia — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:57:18 +0000

Exum's point proves too much. Once you've completely separated operations from strategy/politics/morality/etc, then you can write yourself a field manual on anything you wanted. How about a manual on “coercive interrogations”? Or tactical use of nuclear weapons? Just as some have argued that ignorance of counterinsurgency got us entangled in Iraq, one could imagine that an army manual on torture might have prevented some of the more extravagant abuses at Abu Gharib and Bagram.

Any manual of operations has to give you some basis on which to judge the likelihood of the operation's success. Those likelihoods have ideological content. The military's desire to avoid “normative” statements is too closely parallel to the MSM's desire for “balance”–an impossible, self-defeating goal. Not to mention that I would have (naively) thought that a bright line between operations and strategy/politics is at odds with how counterinsurgency theorists usually think.

I'm not at all certain that Brownlee is right–so long as we have to fight wars, we'll have to rebuild nations when we're finished. But anyone who is as sure of the distinction between means and ends as Exum is in that post strikes me as somewhat suspect.

By: mk

mk — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:49:35 +0000

But if counterinsurgency becomes a part of the military's MO, doesn't that imply that incentives to build up counterinsurgency capacity, and even to exercise that capacity, will likely increase in the military, just as we currently have a military-industrial complex that tells us to buy and develop more fighter jets?

In other words, aren't we witnessing the birth of a constituency in the military which favors the development and application of counterinsurgency techniques and technology? Then, from a practical standpoint, we can expect more COIN R&D, more COIN ops, and more imperialism on balance.

I'm not sure the question of "whose fault this is" is the relevant question. Instead we should see this event for its practical significance, as a sign of more imperialism in the future. No?