The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency: Strategic Problems, Puzzles, and Paradoxes

In order to address the conceptual underpinnings of counterinsurgency, we must, as a first-order concern, consider whether the term insurgency possesses analytical utility. As the introduction outlined, we can see how COIN came to occupy a prominent place in Western military thought, arising as it did from the events of 9/11 and the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.¹ Comprehending what should be done at the tactical and operational levels in order to address what The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual declares are “organized movement[s]” that aim to overthrow “constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict”² has preoccupied attention. However, as Lincoln Krause points out, “academics and practitioners tend to concentrate their analyses on the government’s role in combating and defeating insurgencies.”³ The emphasis of much COIN thinking—focusing on what the authorities should be thinking and doing—often overlooks the need to define the nature of the intellectual phenomenon that is being engaged—namely, the idea of insurgency. In other words, this focus fails to ask what counterinsurgency in fact counters.

This chapter, therefore, examines the notion of insurgency as a conceptual tool. It argues that classifying insurgency as a separate category or subcategory of war is self-defeating. More particularly, the attempt to detach insurgency from a broader understanding of war commits five categorical errors: it exceptionalizes certain phenomena in war; it denigrates the philosophical study of war; it decontextualizes instances of war; it leads to overprescription in war; and, finally, it destrategizes the understanding of war. From these false premises, counterinsurgency establishes its case as a theory and practice. What is an insurgency? A broad understanding of the term insurgency would suggest that it denotes the attempt to violently overthrow established authority. Many definitions have been advanced, but most of the literature considers it the forceful challenge to wrest political control of the domestic political environment. The British Army’s Countering Insurgency manual, for example, defines insurgency as “an organised, violent subversion used to effect or prevent political control, as a challenge to established authority.”4 This definition resembles that advanced in The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Such officially endorsed definitions mirror those of other observers. According to John Nagl, “Insurgency is an illegal attempt to overthrow a legitimate government or to change its policies through the use of military force.”⁵ For David Kilcullen, it is “a struggle to control a contested political space, between a state (or a group of states or occupying powers), and one or more popularly based, non-state challengers.”⁶

These definitions are of recent vintage, but they echo those developed long before the post-9/11 era. Bard O’Neill asserted in 1990 that insurgency could be “defined as a struggle between a non-ruling group and the ruling authorities in which the non-ruling group consciously uses political resources (e.g. organizational expertise, propaganda, and demonstrations) and violence to destroy, reformulate, or sustain the basis of legitimacy of one or more aspects of politics.”⁷ Frank Kitson, even further back, in 1971, defined insurgency as “the use of armed force by a section of the people against the government for the purposes of overthrowing or changing the way they conduct [sic] business.”⁸

There is, then, some common ground in the literature about how insurgency should be conceptualized. Yet extending these inferences to a concrete understanding of what the physical attributes of insurgency actually entail is more challenging. The academic and military study of insurgent activity has evolved over time. Attempts at systemizing a program of study saw the term insurgency grouped under a variety of headings: irregular war, unconventional war, revolutionary war, guerrilla war, asymmetric war, bandit war, partisan war, insurrection, and low-intensity conflict, to name but a few. The sheer number of names relating to or used as synonyms for essentially the same activity (to violently challenge or overthrow established authority) leads to considerable imprecision in the identification of a specific category of war called “insurgency”: that is to say, a type of war imbued with its own distinctive character and practices. It is extremely difficult, in other words, to get beyond a broad statement that insurgency is the violent contestation for civil control.

The attempt to characterize insurgency as guerrilla warfare reflects this imprecision. Texts do not strictly define the practice of insurgency as guerrilla warfare but locate it within a tradition of warfare.9 Insurgency or irregular war or guerrilla war, it is implied, constitutes a particular style of military practice that has been in evidence for centuries.¹⁰ Implicit in much of the commentary is that this form of warfare involves a weaker side confronting a more powerful enemy,¹¹ an understanding sometimes rendered explicit via the term asymmetric war. The weaker side, in seeking to minimize its exposure to the more powerful adversary, functions by stealth, using hit-and-run tactics. The elision of terms and meanings thus gives rise to the assumption that the term insurgency denotes the presence of nonstate actors practicing guerrilla methods in conditions of civil war.¹² The existence of an insurgency is posited when these factors are deemed present.

This assumed tradition of warfare is, however, both impressionistic and falsifiable. It may, at first, seem a reasonable supposition that insurgencies signify the presence of a combatant inferior to its opponent fighting an asymmetric campaign. Yet this is a truism. War always takes place between unequal combatants in terms of the relative power among the contending actors. In theory and practice, therefore, all wars are “asymmetrical.” All strategies adopted in war are likewise about exerting strengths and minimizing weakness. Nor are guerrilla tactics necessarily synonymous with insurgent campaigns. Methods associated with insurgencies can be employed by any type of belligerent in any set of circumstances, irrespective of whether the circumstances are those of an intrastate conflict.13 Guerrilla actions in the form of hit-and-run operations, raids behind the lines, sabotage, ambushes, and so on are correspondingly likely to constitute features of “normal war.”¹⁴ The question then is, What is “normal war”?

This question evokes Carl von Clausewitz’s concept of war as a chameleon. The Prussian soldier-philosopher identified the lasting essence of war as a social phenomenon. War, in the classic Clausewitzian rendering, is a continuation of political dialogue through the means of violence, and the deed of war itself, he stated, is “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” War should therefore “never be thought of as something autonomous but always as an instrument of policy.”¹⁵ The social nature/structure of a particular belligerent and the wider environment in which the belligerent finds itself will form the values and interests it seeks to maintain. These factors will thus inform the policies the belligerent will wish to advance through war. The determination and skill with which the social actor pursues its goals through violence will always be conditioned, though, by the unique circumstances of time and place. “As a total phenomenon,” Clausewitz observed, “[war’s] dominant tendency always makes [it] a paradoxical trinity—composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam: and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.”¹⁶

Hence, if the very nature of war “is an act of policy,” “a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on by other means,”17 the character of war will always differ in each case because of the interplay of popular passion, chance, and political reason. Clausewitz consequently averred: “These three tendencies are like three different codes of law, deep-rooted in their subject and yet variable in their relationship to one another.” Accordingly, “wars must vary with the nature of their motives and the situation which gave rise to them.”¹⁸ Every instance of war is therefore exclusive and nonreproducible. The progression of each and every war will be different, influenced by why and how the combatants choose to fight. Ultimately, Clausewitz noted, war always “moves on its own goals with varying speed.”¹⁹

For these reasons, Clausewitz considered war to be “more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case.”²⁰ The nature of the chameleon (the innate essence of war) remains the same, but its outer appearance (the individual character of each instance of war) always varies with historically and socially contingent circumstances. It follows that if all wars are unique in their character, then there can be no such thing as “normal” war. There is just war. But if wars are different in each and every case, how is it possible to subdivide war into so many apparent gradations and categories (guerrilla war, low-intensity war, revolutionary war)? Or how can one make distinctions between wars that may be deemed “conventional” and those that are supposedly “irregular,” which is often held to characterize insurgent wars? Trying to divide war into something that is inherently indivisible makes no theoretical sense.

It may be held that differentiating certain forms of war does not question the existential fact of war but represents an attempt to map the characteristics of certain incidences of warfare. Accordingly, it might be argued, by such differentiation one is not questioning the intrinsic nature of the chameleon but merely identifying the different colorful variations the chameleon adopts. In this respect, as Colin Gray observes, the irresistible “urge to categorize and clarify” warfare reflects “the fashion of Victorian entomologists identifying new species of insects.”²¹ Even so, it must be recalled, if wars are always exceptional to their time and place, then they cannot possess any comparable characteristics with other wars beyond their shared essence—namely, to achieve goals of policy through violence. Individual incidences of war are inherently uncharacterizable. To put it simply, as Harry Summers suggests, “A war is a war is a war is a war.”²²

The “urge to categorize and identify” does, however, denote a fault line in war and strategic studies between essentialists who believe that differentiating analytical categories in war is futile23 and those who assume distinctions can be made in the practice of war among certain types of combatants and who thereby maintain that “insurgencies, like other forms of armed conflict,” can be “defined by their methodologies.”²⁴ To put the case in simple terms, because “war moves on its own goals with varying speed,” each war’s relative power will affect its direction and duration, which, in turn, will influence how each combatant chooses to wage its campaign. Hence, in order to maximize its advantage at any given point in time, a combatant may decide to avoid or delay open battle and instead prosecute its campaign through less-direct confrontations, deploying guerrilla methods, hit-and-run operations, sabotage, and ambushes.

The attempt to evade direct battle creates the often unstated assumption that conceptual distinctions may be drawn between those conflicts in which outright force-on-force clashes take place on battle-fronts and those in which they do not. The former are often labeled “conventional war,” whereas the latter are considered “unconventional,” “irregular,” or “insurgent war.” Insurgent war becomes a synonym for many other terms that categorize warfare without battles or battle-fronts. It is from this assumption that many of the other suppositions about insurgencies follow: that they involve a nonstate actor confronting a more powerful controlling authority in conditions of intrastate war. Thus, it can be contended that categorizing does not lead to clarification because it contradicts the essentialist principle that there is only one category of war, and that is war itself.

Yet trying to divide the indivisible is exactly what counterinsurgency theory does. However, the urge to categorize and define a particular subset of war leads not to clarity, as it should, but to confusion. And conceptual confusion is the harbinger of poor thinking and ultimately policy mistakes. In particular, the effort to distinguish a specific category of war termed “insurgency” leads to the five categorical errors elaborated in the next five sections.

Veteran French parachute officer Roger Trinquier argued in 1964 that the Indochina war was lost because “we hesitated to take the necessary measures or took them too late.” The French Army’s approach, he asserted, resembled “a pile driver attempting to crush a fly.”25 Trinquier believed that the Western powers faced a qualitatively new type of war that required fresh methods and doctrines. A period of intensive discussion inside the French Army took place on the reasons for its defeat. It was during this period of introspection that a novel theory of future war germinated known as guerre révolutionnaire—revolutionary war. Although this theory was never formally articulated as an official doctrine, it gained a wide following across sections of the French armed forces.²⁶

Extrapolating from their experience fighting the Viet Minh, the French assumed that the character of warfare in the post–World War II epoch had fundamentally changed. As Raoul Girardet and Jean-Pierre Thomas argued, these officers had come to understand that Indochina had provided a “spectacular revelation of another intellectual and moral universe.”27 Advocates of guerre révolutionnaire maintained that the future would not witness interstate conflict between the two superpower blocs, the United States and the Soviet Union, confronting each other in mass battle along the lines of World War II, and would still less involve the mutually suicidal use of nuclear weapons. Instead, future war would see Communist-sponsored guerrilla movements mount challenges from within the state. For Commandant Jacques Hogard, this type of war represented “the war of revolution for the conquest of the world. This war has become permanent, universal, and truly global.”²⁸ For adherents of this doctrine, le troisiéme guerre mondiale—the third world war—had already started.²⁹ Revolutionary war was the strategy by which the forces of global communism intended to win the Cold War without having to risk a costly, self-destructive war by “conventional” means.

The revolutionary aspect of this unique method of confrontation, pioneered by Communist revolutionaries from Vladimir Lenin to Mao Tse-tung, was that it was a war of the mind. French officers assiduously studied Communist theories as well as a range of thinking about crowd psychology, such as Serge Chakotine’s The Rape of the Masses.³⁰ They concluded that Communist forces possessed major advantages over conventionally deployed military power: a very tight party organization and an intense ideological commitment. Through these means, Communist structures, it was held, could develop parallel systems of governance that would imbricate the people in shadow networks and hierarchies, facilitating their control and organizing them for guerrilla resistance against those in power.³¹ Decisive battle would have no relevance in this new era. The principal “battle” would not be waged between mutually opposed armies or with the intention to gain territory. It would be a battle to win—or rather control—the minds of the population: as Trinquier stated, “We know that the sine qua non of modern warfare is the unconditional support of the population.”³² Seemingly, this form of war was indeed truly exceptional.

However, somewhat problematically for this thesis, the French Army in Indochina did not believe at the time that it faced a revolutionary new type of enemy. The war in French Indochina came to be regarded as the locus classicus of revolutionary war only in hindsight. What, we might wonder, was considered revolutionary about it? If we review the conduct of both the Viet Minh and the French, three determining features of the war suggest that it was far from exceptional. First, the Viet Minh’s chief military strategist, General Võ Nguyên Giáp, conceived the Communist plan of action in fairly traditional terms, envisaging campaigns of defense, offense, maneuver, and positional warfare. Giáp mapped out for his political commissars in 1950 the phases through which the war would progress. The initial phase would involve the retreat of Viet Minh forces northward, ceding French control around Hanoi and the Gulf of Tonkin. The second phase would see the Viet Minh forces surround and destroy small French garrisons, thereby reducing the area of French control. The final phase would see the Viet Minh move toward a sustained offensive campaign of mobile warfare.33

This is indeed how the war progressed, with systematic Viet Minh military pressure eliminating French outposts, which gradually limited French control to the Red River delta region. The Viet Minh’s Red River delta offensive in 1951 was entirely orthodox in orientation, involving frontal assaults against French defenses. Although the Viet Minh utilized guerrilla activities throughout the war, these activities did not constitute the main thrust of its military operations. Instead, they commonly supplemented main battle operations, and the Viet Minh’s campaign followed this pattern. French columns and garrisons were ambushed. Regular Viet Minh infantry and artillery battalions often carried out these attacks.³⁴ Little of this activity diverges from accepted practices in war, and if we insist on calling these actions “guerrilla” or “insurgency” tactics, then there is little that is intrinsically revolutionary or, indeed, Communist about them.

To the extent that Giáp endorsed guerrilla operations to erode French morale and territory, he recognized that such tactics were secondary to set-piece offensives.³⁵ And this discloses the second notable feature of the war—namely, that the French did react to these tactics and with some effect. Commanders in the field innovated their own countertactics, such as the Groupes de commandos mixte aéroportés (Mixed Airborne Commando Group), which trained Montagnard and Vietnamese Catholic forces to operate behind Communist lines. Similarly, the 11éme Parachutistes de choc (Eleventh Shock Parachute Battalion) collaborated with the French intelligence service—the Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-éspionage—to conduct sabotage and counterguerrilla operations against Viet Minh units.

Further, to the degree that the French Army encountered enemy methods that might have been construed as unorthodox, it sought to respond with equally inventive countermeasures.36 Meeting new tactics with countertactics is an entirely natural dynamic in war, as Clausewitz reminds us.³⁷ Indeed, this inventive French response questions the view of those such as Trinquier who argued that the French Army reacted like a pile driver trying to crush a fly. Perhaps the French armed forces adopted too late the more sophisticated measures to deal effectively with Viet Minh guerrilla forces that Trinquier, who was in fact a member of the Groupes de commandos mixte aéroportés in Indochina, advocated. But one wonders whether such advocacy is beside the point because it leads to the third feature of the war, which is whether the Viet Minh was really the metaphorical “fly” in the first place.

The assumption that Viet Minh forces were markedly inferior in either numbers or equipment to the French is in fact highly disputable. Estimates suggest that the total number of Viet Minh troops from 1950 on were in excess of 500,000.³⁸ Some 300,000 of them were arranged in regular army formations and composed Giáp’s main battle forces, and the other 200,000 operated as guerrilla units or in other support roles. By contrast, French forces in Indochina stood at 400,000.³⁹ As well as regular French Army and Foreign Legion forces, this figure also included indigenous Vietnamese troops, who fought under the French flag along with troops from the French African colonies. Many of these troops, however, were tied down in defensive positions, and the French had no more than perhaps 150,000 troops available for offensive combat. Therefore, if we consider the relative strength of opposing forces, it seems apparent that the French were outnumbered. Not only did they lack adequate forces to prosecute antiguerrilla operations, but, more to the point, they also lacked the necessary forces to wage main battle operations as well. The asymmetry of forces ran against the French.

Indeed, from the onset of the Indochina war, a conservatively conceived and executed plan based on the application of numerical superiority at the theater level, rather than a new concept of revolutionary war, ultimately defeated the French. The first phase of Giáp’s campaign saw the destruction of the northern French garrisons that protected the border and main routes from China. These posts were assaulted not by “guerrilla” forces, but by the Viet Minh’s main infantry and artillery formations, which surrounded and pounded them into submission.40 The elimination of these garrisons opened the border with China, allowing the further supply of the Viet Minh with heavy weaponry, notably artillery, mortars, and antiaircraft guns. The Communist forces’ growing capability permitted Giáp to feel increasingly confident that he could take on the French in open warfare. Here, as some have noted, is a general thinking along highly orthodox lines.⁴¹

The Indochina war largely reflected the ebb and flow of traditional offensive and defensive battles. Effective French fortifications repulsed the Viet Minh’s human-wave assault against the Red River delta in 1951. The defeat of the Viet Minh’s forces in this instance encouraged the French to take the offensive, pursuing the retreating Communists to the North. The French, in turn, were subsequently beaten back as a result of overstretched supply lines and inferior troop numbers. These maneuvers were entirely consistent with expected patterns of war. The most telling proof of this was the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which finally led to French withdrawal from Indochina. The battle was archetypal, involving two mutually opposing armies, with 50,000 Viet Minh combat soldiers grinding down with heavy artillery and infantry assaults the French base comprising 13,000 troops.⁴²

If there was nothing revolutionary about the methods of war in Indochina, why did the French later see the conflict as emblematic of a new kind of war? The answer to this question lies not in the battlefields of northern Vietnam but in the way a traumatized French officer corps represented the war after the event. Defeat in Indochina came little more than a decade after the humiliating conquest of France by Germany in World War II, which, it must be remembered, had a devastating psychological impact on the French Army. Soldiers returning from the battles in Indochina subsequently retailed their bitter experiences of fighting an unforgiving enemy imbued with a fanatical political zeal. The Viet Minh’s fervent, single-minded political and military focus contrasted dramatically with the vacillation and betrayal the French Army experienced at the hands of the Fourth Republic. From this perspective, successive French governments failed to invest the campaign against the Viet Minh with a political commitment equivalent to that of their Communist foes. Trinquier and others therefore felt an unprepared French Army had confronted a unique enemy in the Viet Minh. Addressing their defeat consequently required a new counterdoctrine of equal potency. The resulting concept, guerre révolutionnaire, evolved into a set of techniques and guidelines to deal with rural and urban guerrilla warfare, but it principally embodied the will to defeat Communist-inspired subversion at any level it was encountered.

In effect, the anachronistic projection into the course of the Indochina war of a significance that in military terms it can scarcely have possessed at the time follows an established pattern where traumatic defeats are imbued with post hoc iconic, though misleading, significance. Similar patterns may be seen, for example, in the collapse of Western Europe in the course of the German onslaught in World War II between 1940 and 1941. The rapid fall of Norway, the Low Countries, and France itself seemed to intimate a wholly new type of war and was given a specific name, Blitzkrieg (lightning war), even though the Wehrmacht’s armored assaults, if examined closely, reflected entirely conventional German–Prussian operational concepts of maneuver warfare.43 In this regard, the characterizations of shock defeats as something exceptional, bestowing them with labels such as Blitzkrieg or revolutionary war, ultimately functions as apologetics, excusing why one side was outthought and outfought. It is always easier to explain away the trauma of defeat by attributing it to something remarkable, new, and unexpected.

In other words, the construction of the notion of revolutionary war disguised an unremarkable truth: that a more skillful and disciplined opponent defeated a European-based imperial power. Deriving a new theory of revolutionary war from the Indochina war thus offered the French armed forces a creedal motivation to fight for the rest of France’s colonial territories, notably Algeria between 1956 and 1962.44 In this way, the idea of revolutionary war addressed two underlying concerns in the Cold War zeitgeist: first, that nonstate political actors could challenge Western nations, and, second, that these actors were Communist in orientation. In an age of ideological division, this Cold War perspective ensured that such thinking found a keen reception beyond France in the English-speaking world and beyond. The translation of French military texts, in particular Trinquier’s work, saw the precepts of guerre révolutionnaire—or “counter-revolutionary war,” as it was more popularly understood in English—influencing American Cold War strategic thinking at a time when the United States was escalating its effort against the Viet Cong in the second Indochina war.⁴⁵

The term revolutionary war, then, failed to offer an accurate description of a distinctive facet of war. Instead, it served a Cold War ideological purpose. It chimed with the prevailing Western zeitgeist. European states faced a series of violent anticolonial nationalist uprisings while the world assumed a geopolitical division between two superpower-aligned blocs. It was as a result of these twin forces that the Western powers felt their global and regional interests uniquely vulnerable to Communist subversion. From the late 1950s on, the notion of insurgency as a distinctive category of war began, therefore, to take shape via the idea of revolutionary war. In particular, the U.S. military became increasingly obsessed with what Colin Gray terms “counterinsurgency faddism,” the “cult of the guerrilla,” and the “aura of Special Forces.”⁴⁶

The attempt to extrapolate particular understandings of military activity into the category “revolutionary war” facilitated the coinage of additional synonyms associated with insurgencies, such as unconventional war, which carried much the same implication—namely, a form of action undertaken by nonstate actors utilizing guerrilla methods. The question, of course, is that if there is nothing that is ultimately exceptional about this kind of activity, then how can it be regarded as unconventional? If we adhere to Clausewitzian precepts that all war is violence for a political purpose, then there can be no such thing as unconventional war. All war proceeds toward the attainment of political goals no matter who the actors and what the actions are.

Furthermore, if an action is assumed to defy a “convention,” then what is that convention? A convention denotes the norm and relates to something that can be defined as the most common form of activity compared with other practices. As we have shown, however, when it comes to war, delineating what is “normal” is deeply problematic. If conventional war designates conflict that takes place among states, then the statistical evidence negates any claim that this is the normal form of war. Surveys of war since 1945 suggest that only 18 to 20 percent of wars can be accurately classed as interstate war, and more than 75 percent of the 164 cases of war since the end of World War II have involved armed conflict within states.47

Therefore, assessing the convention with reference to the incidence of interstate versus intrastate war would suggest that civil wars involving challenges to the ruling authority of the state—that is insurgencies—has been the normal form of conflict. It is “unconventional warfare” that represents the convention. It follows that exceptional categories to denote insurgency—“revolutionary war,” “unconventional war,” “irregular war”—reveal themselves as arbitrary, ideologically loaded expressions. During the Cold War, only those armed challenges to the interests of Western powers were termed unconventional. Meanwhile, the opposite of unconventional war—conventional or regular war—was an equally artificial construct designed to offload conflicts that did not involve state actors directly into a separate analytical sphere invariably because they were regarded as too complicated and messy to study.⁴⁸ Such conflicts were thus considered of lesser importance and therefore unconventional not because they defied any convention, but because, in Richard Betts’s words, they did not involve or threaten “cataclysmic war among great powers.”⁴⁹

“I know of two types of warfare: mobile warfare and positional warfare. I have never heard of revolutionary warfare,” remarked Charles de Gaulle, expressing his evident reservation about the French officer class’s penchant for subdividing war into categories.50 Superficially it might seem attractive to identify a distinctive insurgency style of warfare, permeated by a unique tactical and political character. However, the distinction undermines any comprehension of the philosophical essence of war and, as de Gaulle implied, obscures the core practices in war. In effect, exceptionalizing insurgency as a form of war and attributing to it epithets such as unconventional, irregular, and revolutionary render the understanding of tactical practice elusive and mysterious. There is, however, nothing mysterious or abnormal about the idea and methods associated with insurgency. Inferring that insurgency is an aberrant, irregular, unconventional form of war does not enhance the comprehension of war. On the contrary, it denigrates a coherent appreciation of war. It arbitrarily identifies a few tactical methods loosely connected to ideas of guerrilla warfare and combines them with a political context where these methods are enacted internally within the state in conditions of civil strife in order to establish a new category of conflict.

The denigration of a philosophical understanding of war is, therefore, the second serious analytical weakness arising from the consequences of categorical exceptionalism. Such depreciation forces an unnatural distinction between regular warfare and irregular war and, according to W. Alexander Vacca and Mark Davidson, “break[s] the link between war and politics.” They argue: “Clausewitz is very clear that war is a political act with political objectives. Yet in irregular war, the political objectives are often forgotten as analysts focus on the tactical challenges.”⁵¹ In other words, those who make this distinction must necessarily claim that such “tactical challenges” exist outside the Clausewitzian paradigm of war. Indeed, asserting that the normal, conventional, and the regular occur only in conflict between more or less symmetrical (and probably state) actors and involve armed campaigns with highly organized forces introduces an abstract distinction that frames “irregular warfare in opposition to regular warfare.”⁵²

Once the distinction has been made, it is plausible to argue further that it is only within the framework of the normal and the conventional that war can be instrumental. Practices that deviate from this frame are perceived not only as distinct from regular war but as fundamentally irrational. As a consequence, the contention that wars are conducted to gain political objectives, as Clausewitz averred, is thereby discounted. Thus, in conflicts supposedly characterized as “unconventional” (that is where combatants employ guerrilla methods within the state), wars cease to be seen as instrumental in political terms. Instead, they are often considered the product of premodern urges that resist any rational comprehension of political action in war.53 Wars that fall into the categories “insurgencies,” “small wars,” and “ethnic wars” (all of them problematic classifications) are regularly treated this way. The rise of ethnoreligious identity-based conflict in post–Cold War Europe and Central Asia reinforced this analytical tendency. In fact, the brutal wars of dissolution in the Balkans and Transcaucasia that accompanied the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union in the 1990s led numerous commentators to dismiss the continuing relevance of the Clausewitzian paradigm. The “irregular” campaigns of ethnic particularity waged by various paramilitary groups are, in John Keegan’s view, examples of “primitive war.” Such conflicts, he maintained, “are fed by passions and rancours that do not yield to rational measures of persuasion or control: they are apolitical to a degree for which Clausewitz made little allowance.”⁵⁴ Mary Kaldor, advancing her thesis that identity conflict constitutes a new type of war, pronounced, ex cathedra, that Clausewitz’s conception of war governs “the regulation” of only “certain types of social relationship” that contain their “own particular logic” (i.e., Clausewitzian thought can explain only war between states).⁵⁵ Martin van Creveld, meanwhile, argued that in this new era “if any part of our intellectual baggage deserves to be thrown overboard, surely it is … the Clausewitzian definition of war.”⁵⁶

Such assertions by informed commentators denied any intelligible understanding of war. In effect, these commentators made a series of unfounded assumptions: first, they presumed rather than demonstrated that a distinction between “unconventional” and “conventional” war exists; second, they asserted rather than established that Clausewitzian “logic” applies only to warfare between state actors; and third, they implied rather than proved that rational political calculation in wars that do not involve state actors are radically different, if not nonexistent (reflecting unfathomable primordial drives, blind hatred, and naked bloodlust). Such reductionist thinking subsequently influenced contemporary U.S. counterinsurgency thinking. Thus, Montgomery McFate could contend: “Neither Al-Qaeda nor insurgents in Iraq are fighting a Clausewitzian war, where armed conflict is a rational extension of politics by other means. These adversaries neither think nor act like nation-states. Rather, their form of warfare, organizational structure, and motivations are determined by the society and culture from which they come.”⁵⁷

Here, we can observe the denigration of the intellectual conceptualization of war. By viewing insurgency as an entirely separate category of war, commentators focus on the form and organization of the nonstate actor at the expense of analyzing the actor’s underlying motivations and political objectives. Because primitive social reflexes motivate these primitive insurgent actors, so the thinking goes, these objectives cannot possibly involve sophisticated political calculation. It is therefore assumed that these actors inhabit a radically different universe, one beyond rational intellectual appreciation.

However, what these assertions ultimately demonstrate is a profound ignorance of Clausewitzian thought. Clausewitz, a Kant-inspired philosopher of war, sought to reveal the philosophical essence of war rather than to treat it merely as an epiphenomenon of state activity. As Jan Honig maintains, Clausewitzian ideas are “easily adaptable to forms of warring social organizations that do not form states.”58 Clausewitz himself is explicit on this point, stating, “Wars will always vary with the nature of their motives of the situations that gave rise to them.”⁵⁹ Wars are, in other words, always the product of the societies and cultures from which they emanate. It is the uniqueness of the time, place, and nature of the social actors engaged, whether state or nonstate, that affects how the course of any war unfolds. Reducing insurgencies to crude manifestations of primal instincts and presupposing that warfare is rational and instrumental only when it takes place between nation-states have implications for misguided policy making, which we elucidate further in the subsequent sections of this chapter. For now, it is sufficient to observe that asserting the existence of insurgency as an exceptional category of war denies that the practice of violence by nonstate actors is an expression of political purpose. The effect of this depreciation of the philosophy of war leads to a third analytical weakness: decontextualization.

Yet, as Colin Gray argues, the preference for classifying war into typologies reflects a military and scholarly community that “typically overintellectualizes the challenges (problems/opportunities) that it perceives.” Referring to the U.S. defense establishment in particular, he notes: “With a culture that privileges theory-building through disaggregation by categorical exclusivity, whole subject areas are conceptually deconstructed and reassembled for neater granular treatment.” Creditable though the attempt to produce such categories may be, Gray observes that, “unfortunately, the actual and potential benefits of theoretical exclusivity are more than offset by the transaction cost in the loss of context.”60 The misguided effort to exceptionalize and categorize leads, as Gray suggests, to the decontextualization of war. Instances of war are as a consequence divorced from their contingent social and historical settings and lumped together merely by their tactical resemblance. A prominent feature of much commentary on insurgency and counterinsurgency evinces a penchant for collating otherwise unrelated cases of war under overgeneralized categories.⁶¹

But constructing categories of war upon the similarity of their tactical methods affords a poor basis for analysis. It is the equivalent of suggesting that the Gulf War in 1990–1991, World War II, the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War, the Korean War, and an assortment of other wars past and present are all in some way comparable because the combatants used rifles, grenades, and machine guns. It demonstrates the fallacy of classifying wars by their outward appearance. An analogous fallaciousness applies to the categorization of many wars as insurgency. Simply because one side employs the methods commonly associated with guerrilla war does not make an insurgency or mean that insurgency constitutes a clearly definable form of war.

The arbitrary subdivision of war into artificial categories can be illustrated if we consider the methods most associated with insurgencies—namely, guerrilla tactics. Any combatant can employ such tactics in any number of ways. Many of the aerial tactics employed by Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain in 1940 were classically guerrilla in character. German pilots observed that British fighters targeted Luftwaffe bombing formations but often flew away at the first sign of German fighter aircraft. Berlin-based American journalist William Shirer commented that these tactics led “many a Messerschmitt pilot to complain that the British Spitfire and Hurricane pilots were cowards, that they fled whenever they saw a German fighter.” Shirer went on to note, however, that, given the steady losses inflicted on German bombers, “I suspect now the German pilots understand that the British were not being cowardly but merely smart.”62 The Royal Air Force adopted tactics that made sense in the operational context: playing to its strengths (fighting over home territory, using radar-guided fighter groups to inflict heavy losses on more vulnerable German bombers) while minimizing weaknesses (avoiding combat with often technically superior Luftwaffe fighters). In this manner, the Royal Air Force preserved its air defenses and foiled the German strategy to erode British fighter capabilities in large aerial battles.⁶³

Analogously, the use of submarines to sink vulnerable merchant vessels in World War I and World War II is an example of guerrilla tactics at sea. Like the Battle of Britain, submarine warfare demonstrated all the characteristics associated with insurgent/guerrilla activity: the dispersal of forces, hit-and-run military engagements, the prevention of enemy concentration, and the avoidance of large-scale battle. When these tactics were first employed, they were regarded as novel, unconventional, and often cowardly. Yet few analysts have described Royal Air Force tactics in 1940 or commerce raiding by submarines as guerrilla, insurgent, or irregular actions. They are instead considered feasible, rational, and instrumental methods adapted to the circumstances and thus constituting tactical innovations aimed at achieving local superiority in combat actions. As such, these actions facilitated the combatants’ wider strategic goals and were quickly assimilated into war-fighting practices. Yet when nonstate actors employ similar methods, these methods are classified not as tactics available to any kind of social actor to utilize if the actor thinks they serve its purposes. Even more incoherently, they are considered as separate kinds of war—insurgent wars, guerrilla wars, unconventional wars—entirely disconnected from mainstream understandings of war.

A prominent feature of much writing on counterinsurgency exhibits this preference for examining the surface manifestations of war while dismissing the need to comprehend the individual context of each instance of war. John Nagl and Brian Burton, for example, assert that a uniform set of “dynamics” inform all insurgencies. Accordingly, “insurgencies, like other forms of armed conflict, are better defined by their associated methodologies than by ideologies.” They add: “While causes change regularly, the fundamentals of insurgent methodology remain relatively constant.”64 The preoccupation with the “fundamentals of insurgent methodologies” at the expense of understanding the unique social milieu from which all war arises leads to the fourth flaw induced by false categorization: an overly prescriptive approach to countering reputed cases of insurgency.

Like a medical practitioner who forms a diagnosis on the observation of a patient’s symptoms, the COIN analyst examines tactical symptoms, diagnoses a case of insurgency, and prescribes the appropriate remedy in the form of a counterinsurgency program. The analyst subsequently prescribes a range of COIN remedies tested in other conflicts. However, unlike a physical disease, which responds to the same medicine everywhere, individual wars differ from one another, and so counterinsurgency remedies, applied to an ailing body politic, vary in efficacy. Although individual prescriptions might occasionally be effective, COIN risks becoming overprescriptive with misdiagnosis and ends up with damaging and costly policies. Wars are always based on a set of mutual interactions between contesting parties, each possessing their distinctive aims, capabilities and motives. Unlike disease, wars do not offer predictable symptoms. Therefore, treating the outward manifestations of “insurgency” never produces a holistic remedy.

Moreover, regarding insurgency as a set of symptoms of a distinctive kind of war facilitates inflexible policy responses. The counterinsurgent view assumes that when an adversary has adopted certain techniques in a particular social context (i.e., guerrilla methods in conditions of intrastate conflict), this adoption becomes a necessary and sufficient cause for a counterinsurgency campaign. In other words, both policy makers and military practitioners find COIN doctrine attractive because it proposes that general operational solutions can deal with complex political problems based on the application of a given set of techniques. President John F. Kennedy is said to have remarked to his advisers: “What are we doing about guerrilla warfare?”65 Apocryphal or otherwise, the quote illustrates the potential for analytical and policy confusion and the bureaucratic predilection for devising countertactics to deal with the outward tactical manifestations of war. Here we can observe the fallacy of overprescription influencing the conduct of U.S. foreign policy in the early 1960s. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations equated nearly all outbreaks of “guerrilla warfare” as threats to Western interests, requiring counterinsurgency doctrine as the antidote.

The negative effects of rigidly adhering to the notion that tactical symptoms require the same set of countermeasures is most clearly demonstrated in two cases from this era: French military conduct during the Algerian War (1956–1962) and in Indochina, where the North Vietnamese insurrection in the South lured the United States into a military and political quagmire. The point is that, pace John F. Kennedy, one cannot do anything about “guerrilla warfare.” Guerrilla warfare represents a set of tactics. Combating the tactics of the other side is only a small part of any response by a belligerent. The most important aspect of any war is to comprehend the underlying political dynamics that motivate a particular actor to take up arms. Only after addressing this first-order concern can tactical responses be considered. Putting tactics ahead of politics is an indication of overprescription in war.

More recent COIN analysis, such as that contained in the British Army’s Countering Insurgency document, of course recognizes the importance of politics. Nevertheless, a close reading suggests that the relationship between the political dimension and combating insurgency remains insufficiently understood. For example, to illustrate that the army understands the key role of politics, Countering Insurgency approvingly cites the French theorist David Galula’s claim that COIN is 80 percent political action and only 20 percent military action.66 Yet Galula considered “political action” merely as the preference for nonviolent countermeasures. He did not consider politics involving an appreciation of the guiding motivations that lead actors to do what they do. His countermeasures were consequently highly prescriptive in content and approach. So in addition to stipulating technical-military measures, military manuals following Galula prescribe social and economic measures to drain the swamp in which insurgents apparently thrive. They thus promote “population-centric” projects such as building schools, hospitals, welfare services, and structures of governance as suitable prophylactics that will, along with more coercive remedies, cure the patient of the insurgent disease.

The medical analogy is not an exaggeration. The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual explicitly exhibits the predisposition in COIN thinking to regard insurgencies as phenomena with definable characteristics amenable to established treatments. The manual maintains that “most insurgencies [like illnesses] follow a similar course of development. The tactics [treatments] used to successfully defeat them [to cure them] are likewise similar in most cases.”⁶⁷ The problem is that implying that insurgency is a distinct form of war that is predictable in its course defies the Clausewitzian understanding that all wars move toward their own goals at varying speed. The precepts contained in COIN manuals consequently slip all too easily into rules for action. An overly prescriptive attitude to war therefore overdetermines the technical factors in war. Such an overdetermination obscures the questions as to why a political actor chooses to wage war and how that actor decides to conduct its campaign to secure its objectives.

The reasons any political entity goes to war and how it selects its methods to fight depend on a number of tangible and intangible factors related to the entity’s physical and mental capacities, objectives, and perceptions of the nature of the obstacles to be overcome. These factors will also in part govern how an adversary responds to an initiation of hostilities. Because of the possible permutations involving this multiplicity of factors, the calculus for the belligerents is necessarily different in each and every case of war. Clausewitz’s scheme of passion, chance, and reason precisely captures this infinite variation and the consequent inability to predict the character and direction of war. Rejecting Clausewitzian precepts—in other words, being overly prescriptive and searching for rules for action—has the further consequence of removing the why in war and focusing principally on the how: how to identify an insurgency and how to combat it. But because the how is always dependent on context, removing the why denies the proper role of strategy in war. This is the final and most damaging analytic flaw in COIN thought: the destrategization of warfare.

Strategy is concerned with ways, ends, and means: the manner in which available resources are utilized to gain given objectives.68 Strategy is not only about the crude application of the tangibles of power, the exercise of force being the most obvious. It also involves complex calculations about how far one party might be willing to invest its time, energy, and resources into trying to attain particular goals in conditions of political uncertainty. Uncertainty necessarily occurs because in striving to attain one’s goals, one may well incur resistance from other political forces that wish to secure their own interests by denying those goals. If the collision of interests is sufficiently serious, a violent clash of arms—a war—might arise. War raises the stakes exponentially because the costs associated with particular outcomes increase the level of uncertainty.⁶⁹

War, then, is a reciprocal activity involving interactions between opposing forces. In this context, the success of strategic decision making cannot be measured by an immutable standard, but in light of responses that actions produce or are expected to produce from an adversary at any one point in time.⁷⁰ Decisions about how far a belligerent is prepared to go to reach an objective are crucial if war is to be proportional to the goal sought. Proportionality in war keeps the activity within rational, instrumental bounds. What is proportional, moreover, depends on contingent judgment. Effective strategy is therefore about good political judgment, and good judgment is prudential and cannot be predetermined.

By contrast, a predetermined counterinsurgency response to a situation that is diagnosed as an insurgency removes all strategic judgment from the equation. This identification of an autonomous sphere of conflict classified as insurgency and thus demanding prescribed counteractions obscures the importance that Clausewitz attached to the shaping of actions by the specific and protean context in which they occur. From the perspective of policy making, such an approach worryingly preempts discussion of more appropriate courses of action in the circumstances of a particular conflict,71 something that chapter 2 explores in more detail. With respect to the related and equally problematic notion of “irregular” warfare, Vacca and Davidson note that such labeling “simultaneously weakens and limits theories of warfare, while leaving strategists conceptually disarmed when confronted with strategic challenges that do not fit neatly in a[n] [insurgency-]specific model.” They further contend: “The use of the term ‘irregular warfare’ is not simply a matter of harmless imprecision; it exerts a pernicious effect on the way that policy makers plan for and conduct military operations.”⁷²

Such false categorization has a number of adverse strategic effects. At the political level, a misleading obsession with invented modes of warfare strips policy makers of the intellectual flexibility to conceive an alternative course of action where there may be a pressing need for one. Such inflexibility was apparent in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. Western defense establishments had habitually prepared for a “conventional war” between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in central Europe, so in the early 1990s they had great difficulty comprehending how to meet contingencies that fell below the threshold of “conventional” military operations. Military planners, as Paul Beaver argues, could not cope with ideas of “asymmetric warfare” because “traditional staff college and command school solutions just do not work.”73 The outbreak of the ethnoreligious conflict in the Balkans, following the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, demonstrated this rigidity. NATO and Western Europe more generally froze into inaction because strategies that fell below the threshold of the total destruction of the enemy fell outside the boundaries of accepted military thought and hindered the development of a flexible policy of peace enforcement. Contingencies below threats to national survival or major national interests had been destrategized. Because nearly all instances of insurgency and low-intensity conflict fall below this threshold, it became somewhat convenient to dismiss humanitarian crimes as the product of barbaric, primeval drives that were beyond rational solution and best left to run their course (a feature of such thinking still affects policy making, witnessed in the prevalence of terms such as hurting stalemate).⁷⁴ The Balkanized outcome produced among both politicians and military practitioners alike a passive fatalism that could scarcely countenance anything stronger than humanitarian assistance.⁷⁵ Although these attitudes slowly changed, their impact on policy making almost certainly prolonged the brutal war in Bosnia⁷⁶ and very likely prevented preemptive action to stop the Rwandan genocide in 1994.⁷⁷

Destrategization, based on erroneous categorization, also produces an equal and opposite defect. On the one hand, it leads to inaction, but on the other it predetermines actions and undermines proper strategic judgment. Identifying a conflict and consigning it to a predetermined category of war—an insurgency—to be met with a preconceived response—counterinsurgency—ignore the fact that war is reciprocal in nature and involves interactions by each combatant. In other words, the COIN model dismisses the importance of values: it ignores the circumstances and motivations that might lead an adversary to fight and dismisses the ways in which it decides to wage a particular campaign (utilizing guerrilla methods as one of its tools for instance). It also reduces the options that might be available to any political actor that chooses to respond to such a campaign. Such overdetermination, for example, embroiled the United States in South Vietnam and determined the military approach it adopted. Equally, the counterinsurgency mind dismissed any appreciation of the North Vietnamese motivation to wage war. It ignored the North Vietnamese patriotic commitment to achieve national unity and their consequent preparedness to make a higher sacrifice to achieve their goal than were the Americans. A more detached strategy that tried accurately to assess the nature of the enemy and the goals it sought, while recognizing the limits of American political commitment, might have offered the United States a more realistic set of options about how to prosecute its war in South Vietnam or, indeed, whether to prosecute it at all.

Treating instances of war as discrete manifestations of certain styles of conflict that come with prepackaged solutions closes down options and narrows the scope for decision making. Equally disturbing, the idea that insurgencies must be met with a predetermined set of responses contains the potential to escalate war beyond what is feasible and proportional in either military or political terms. As Vacca and Davidson argue, by severing the conceptual link between war and politics, “purely military” solutions that push toward “unrestrained destruction” become all too prevalent. In such an atmosphere, they say, “negotiated settlements become very difficult to reach, or even propose.”78 This criticism is not merely hypothetical: these prescriptions affected American decisions to escalate the military campaign in South Vietnam to no useful purpose and determined French policy in the Algerian War, where the French armed forces convinced themselves they fought an irreconcilable enemy—a thesis that ultimately resulted in the deaths of an estimated one million people.⁷⁹ A similarly strategically challenged view of conflict has also caused incoherent policy making in more recent conflicts. Thus, in Afghanistan policy makers and diplomats endlessly lamented the lack of political direction in the NATO commitment to Afghanistan⁸⁰ and disagreed over when or if to talk to the Taliban.⁸¹

The destrategized mind apparent in notions of insurgency and counterinsurgency leads not just to unrestrained destruction but also to a contradictory predilection for grievance settlement. Somewhat perversely, the categorization of types of war and their predetermined responses can promote inflexible policy response that can be as politically damaging to Western interests as those policies that encourage military escalation. For example, as we explore in chapter 4, much commentary on the threat posed by the “global insurgency” of violent jihadism associated with al-Qaeda assumes that understandable socioeconomic and political grievance motivates their actions.⁸² Here COIN analysts somewhat contradictorily offer the antithesis to an unrestrained military solution. Yet although negotiation and compromise might be valid in some cases, they are not by any means a universal panacea or wise policy.⁸³ The practice of grievance reduction requires an assessment of whether political compromises will pacify an adversary or result in the abandonment of core interests.

As a result, we find in documents such as The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual pronouncements such as, “In the end any successful COIN operation must address the legitimate grievances insurgents use to generate popular support.”84 On the surface, grievance settlement may seem plausible and even politically prudent, but it holds the potential for adopting flawed policies of the kind Lawrence Freedman characterizes as “vague talk of hearts and minds.” Good strategic judgment, as Freedman observes, requires an understanding of the causes for which an adversary fights, but even then, he cautions, “we must also recognize the limited quality of the political response available to us.”⁸⁵ The response, in other words, does not necessarily require identifying grievances to redress, but trying to comprehend the dimensions of the conflict and the scope for achieving one’s goals and keeping all action proportionate through available means, be they coercive or conciliatory.

Colin Gray coined the term tacticization to describe the problem generated by “unwise categorization,” which erroneously tries to separate out different spheres of war. The preference for perceiving and reacting to war phenomena solely on the basis of apparent physical manifestations results in tacticization. The approach leads to the “neglect of strategy.” Policy makers and military practitioners must understand that conceptually and historically “war and warfare are rarely option-pure by exclusive intellectual type.”⁸⁶ From this categorical mistake, the errors of exceptionalization, deintellecutalization, decontextualization, overprescription, and destrategization follow. It is these errors that occasion bad policy and decision making. This chapter has therefore argued that the notion of insurgency and associated notions such as irregular warfare and unconventional war are faulty analytical abstractions. Their use does not enhance understanding of war phenomena but, on the contrary, undermines the attempt to appreciate its manifold complexity. Still less do these notions provide a stable basis upon which to apply a predetermined solution known as “counterinsurgency.”