Counter insurgency

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In the context of an occupation or a civil war, counter-insurgency is a military term for the combat against a political rebellion, termed an "insurgency," by forces aligned with the standing government of the territory in which the combat takes place.

While in theory the term refers exclusively to hostility against combatants or militants, in reality the distinctions between "combatant" and "civilian" are often beyond the means of military intelligence to make competent discernments. As such, known counter-insurgency operations have often rested on a confused, relativistic, or otherwise situational distinction between combatant and civilians, and use of the terms "insurgent" and "counter-insurgent" themselves therefore have hinged on a subjective perception of the government's legitimacy. As such, the term "counter-insurgency" is somewhat cognate with colonialism, and the "suppression" of rebellion.

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[edit] Overview

Counter-insurgency is normally conducted as a combination of conventional military operations and other means, such as Propaganda, Psy-Ops, and assassinations. Counter-insurgency operations include many different facades military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken to defeat insurgency.

Counter-insurgency tactics usually involve human rights abuses and violations of civil liberties; such as internment, detention of family members of suspected insurgents as de facto hostages, extra-judicial killing of civilians and prisoners and torture. Tactics similar to those of guerrilla warfare and insurgency are sometimes used by the governments themselves, such as assassinations of suspected insurgents, extra-judicial executions of suspected insurgent sympathizers and irregular paramilitary operations by covert operatives who may not wear uniforms.

In many conflicts, counter-insurgency operations can kill more civilians than the insurgents themselves. This may especially occur when the insurgents have a sizable support base among certain sectors of the civilian population (or among the population as a whole), or when certain regions are predominantly under their influence or control. Examples of this include the US anti-insurgency operation in Iraq, Israeli counter-insurgency during the occupations of the Gaza Strip, West Bank and Lebanon, Indian Army counter insurgency operations in Kashmir and North-Eastern states of India, many anti-British colonial uprisings, the Caravan of Death in Chile, and many of the different paramilitary groups (such as the AUC) and death squads in Colombia.

Two exceptions to this rule appear to be two recent 'low-prfile' wars in European soil: the first are the 1970s-1998 Troubles in Northern Ireland, in which Provisional IRA guerrillas are said to have killed the most people, including the most civilians, when compared to the British security forces and Loyalist paramilitaries, and also the ETA-Spanish conflict (1968-2006?) in which the insurgent party keeps the greatest part of the crimes.

[edit] Specific definitions

The U.S. Army published a Special Forces manual titled Counter-Insurgency Operations in 1960. The term was used by the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War and since the Autumn of 2004 has been used by them to describe ongoing operations in Iraq.

As used by the U.S. Army, counter-insurgency operations include psychological warfare and information warfare aspects of such operations, which include direct interference in a country's politics and media or the spread of disinformation (the civilian equivalent of military deception) to maintain control of a population.

Notable British counter-insurgency operations occurred during the difficult process of decolonization: for example, the Malayan Emergency, the Aden Emergency, and the Mau-Mau Emergency.

The U.S. military and allied South Vietnamese security forces conducted counter-insurgency operations against National Liberation Front guerrillas during the Vietnam War, including the notorious Phoenix Program which resulted in the killing of thousands of civilians accused of being NLF sympathisers or relatives of sympathisers.

The U.S., British and allied occupation forces and the Iraqi security forces are currently engaging in a counter-insurgency operation against various Iraqi guerrilla groups opposed to the presence of foreign troops and the current elected Iraqi government.

[edit] Tactics

With regard to tactics, the terms "drain the water" or "drain the swamp" are euphemistic for ethnic cleansing as based on political differences, and generally make little distiction based on civilian status. It often involves the relocation of the population ("water") to expose the guerrillas or insurgents ("fish"). In other words, relocation deprives the aforementioned of the support, cover, and resources of the local population. The name is taken from Mao Zedong's advice to his guerrillas to "move through the people like a fish moves through water".

British forces were able to employ the relocation method with considerable success during the Malayan Emergency. The Briggs Plan, implemented fully in 1950, relocated Chinese squatters into protected "New Villages", designated by British forces. By the end of 1951, some 400,000 Chinese had moved into the fortifications. Of this population, the British forces were able to form a "Home Guard", armed for resistance against the Malay Communist Party, an implementation mirrored by the Strategic Hamlet Program later used by U.S. forces in South Vietnam.

Somewhat similar strategy was used extensively by U.S. forces in South Vietnam, initially by forcing the rural population into fenced camps, referred to as Strategic Hamlets, and later by bombing them with B-52s to remove the rest from their villages and farms. Widespread use was made of chemical herbicides, sprayed from airplanes, to destroy crops that might possibly have provided resources for NLF fighters and their human support base.

However, the majority of counter-insurgency efforts by major Western powers in the last century have been spectacularly unsuccessful. This may be attributed to a number of causes. First, as Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart pointed out in the Insurgency addendum to the second version of his book Strategy: The Indirect Approach, a popular insurgency has an inherent advantage over any occupying force. He showed as a prime example the French occupation of Spain during the Napoleonic wars. Whenever Spanish forces managed to constitute themselves into a regular fighting force, the superior French forces beat them every time. However, once dispersed and decentralized, the irregular nature of the guerilla campaigns proved a decisive counter to French superiority on the battle field. Napoleon's army had no means of effectively combating the guerilleros and in the end their strength and morale were so sapped that when Wellington finally was able to challenge French forces in the field, the French had almost no choice but to abandon the situation.

Liddell Hart also points to the experiences of T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt during World War I as another example of the power of the guerilla/insurgent. Though the Ottomans often had advantages in manpower of upwards of 100-1, the Arabs ability to materialize out of the desert, strike, and disappear again often left the Turks reeling and paralyzed, creating an opportunity for regular British forces to sweep in and finish the Turkish forces off.

In both the preceding cases, the insurgents and guerilla fighters were working in conjunction with or in a manner complimentary to regular forces. Such was also the case with the French Resistance during World War II and the Vietcong during the Vietnam War. The strategy in these cases is for the irregular combatant to weaken and destabilize the enemy to such a degree that victory is easy or assured for the regular forces. However, in many modern insurgencies, one does not see guerilla fighters working in conjunction with regular forces. Rather, they are home-grown militias or imported fighters who have no unified goals or objectives save to expel the occupier. Their actions cannot be consummated by an organized force and therefore often their "victories" are of limited scope and strategic significance. In these cases, such as the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, which ended in 2000, and the current U.S.-led Occupation of Iraq, the goal of the insurgent is not to defeat the occupying military force; that is almost always a physically impossible task. Rather, they seek to demoralize and aggravate the morale of the troops and the citizens of the occupying nation to such a degree that the deployed forces are withdrawn. It is a simple strategy of repeated pin-pricks and bleedings that, though small in proportion to the total force strength, sap the will of the occupier to continue the fight.

According to Liddell Hart, there are few effective counter-measures to this strategy. So long as the insurgency maintains popular support, it will retain all of its strategic advantages of mobility, invisibility, and legitimacy in its own eyes and the eyes of the people. So long as this is the situation, and insurgency essentially cannot be defeated by regular forces. Mao Zedong attempted to neutralize this advantage by simply taking away the civilian population that shielded the insurgents; however, this had the forseeable effect of alienating the populace and laying the seeds of later conflict. In the current operations against insurgents in the "War on Terror", such ruthless tactics are not available to commanders, even if they were effective. Another option in combating an insurgency would be to make the presence of troops so pervasive that there is simply no place left for insurgents to hide, as demonstrated in Franco's conquest of Republican Spain during the Spanish Civil War or the Union occupation of Confederate States with Federal troops following the American Civil War. In each of these cases, enormous amounts of man-power were needed for an extended period of time to quell resistance over almost every square mile of territory. In an age of ever shrinking and increasingly computerized armed forces, this option too is precluded from a modern commanders options.

Essentially then, only one viable option remains. The key to a successful counter-insurgency is the winning-over of the occupied territory's population. If that can be achieved, then the guerrilla fighter will be deprived of its supplies, shelter, and, more importantly, its moral legitimacy. Unless the hearts and minds of the public can be separated from the insurgency, the occupation is doomed to fail. In a modern democracy, in the face of perceived heavy losses. no conflict will be tolerated by the masses without significant show of tangible gains. It should be noted that though the United States and its ARVN allies won every single major tactical engagement with North Vietnamese forces and the communists suffered staggering losses (1 million+ casualties), the cost of victory was so high in the American psyche (50,000+ American casualties) that the US public came to see any further possible gains as not worth the expenditure in blood. As long as the popular support is there, an insurgency can hold out indefinitely, consolidating its shadowy control and repleneshing its ranks, until the occupiers simply give up.

[edit] COIN Aircraft

Since the 1960s, a specialized form of close air support has been developed for counter-insurgency operations. This covers a wide range of operations, from ground attack and observation to light transport and casualty evacuation. An aircraft used for counter-insurgency should ideally be able to perform all these roles. Such an aircraft should have low loitering speed, long endurance, simplicity in maintenance, and the capability to make short take-offs and landings from rough frontline airstrips.

At first (particularly during the Vietnam War) counter-insurgency missions were flown by existing airplanes and helicopters hastily adapted for the role, notably the Douglas A-1 Skyraider. Later, more specialized counter-insurgency (or COIN) aircraft began to appear, such as:

[edit] See also

[edit] Books and Articles

  • Ivan Arreguín-Toft, How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ISBN 0-521-54869-1.
  • Ivan Arreguín-Toft, "Tunnel at the End of the Light: A Critique of U.S. Counter-terrorist Grand Strategy," Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2002), pp. 549–563.
  • Ivan Arreguín-Toft, "How to Lose a War on Terror: A Comparative Analysis of a Counterinsurgency Success and Failure," in Jan Ångström and Isabelle Duyvesteyn, Eds., Understanding Victory and Defeat in Contemporary War (London: Frank Cass, 2007).
  • C.E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles & Practice (Lincoln, Nebraska: Bison Books, 1996), ISBN 0-8032-6366-X.
  • James Anthony Joes, Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), ISBN 0-813-19170-X.
  • Mao Zedong, Aspects of China's Anti-Japanese Struggle (1948).
  • Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ISBN 0-521-00877-8.
  • John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2002), ISBN 0-275-97695-5.
  • Kalev I. Sepp, "Best Practices in Counterinsurgency," Military Review, May-June 2005, pp. 8–12.
  • Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966), ISBN 0-701-11133-X.
  • Robert R. Tomes, "Relearning Counterinsurgency Warfare," Parameters Spring 2004. http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/04spring/tomes.pdf

[edit] External links

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