On Other War: Lessons from Five Decades of RAND Counterinsurgency Research
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On Other War: Lessons from Five Decades of RAND Counterinsurgency Research
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780833039262 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | RAND Corporation |
| Publication date: | 07/15/2006 |
| Pages: | 93 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.33(d) |
Read an Excerpt
On "Other War"
Lessons from Five Decades of RAND Counterinsurgency ResearchBy Austin Long
Rand Corporation
Copyright © 2006 RAND CorporationAll right reserved.
Chapter One
Introduction
It was an inextricable mess of things decent in themselves but that human folly made look like the spoils of thieving. -Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (2004, p. 32)
In a paper written in early 2004, Bruce Hoffman compared the U.S. experience with counterinsurgency (COIN) to the movie Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray's character, Phil Connors, is forced to live the same day over and over until he gets it right. Unlike Connors, getting counterinsurgency right still appears to be a consummation devoutly wished for the United States. In Iraq and Afghanistan, insurgents vex U.S. forces despite massive improvements in both technology and training since the last deployment of combat troops for counterinsurgency in Vietnam.
This continued failure of the U.S. government to develop appropriate measures for counterinsurgency is all the more puzzling in light of the effort devoted to understanding previous COIN campaigns. Literally hundreds, if not thousands, of articles, monographs, and books have been written on the topic by academics, analysts, military officers, and journalists. Yet learning and adaptation by both civilian and military organizations remain elusive.
The U.S. military in particular has had difficulty adapting to COIN, in large part due to an overwhelmingorganizational focus on conflict with peer competitors and conventional warfare contingency operations. The term "other war," meaning pacification operations, arose in Vietnam to differentiate those operations from the "real war" of conventional search-and-destroy operations. This focus on high-intensity conflict has, perhaps ironically, resulted in such overwhelming superiority in nuclear and conventional military capability that opponents (with a few possible exceptions) are forced to embrace low-intensity conflict as the only viable means of challenging the United States. In Iraq and Afghanistan, rapid and overwhelming conventional success has been countered by terrorism and insurgency. Adaptation and learning about COIN have thus become critical for the military in the 21st century.
For almost five decades, RAND has been at the forefront of the effort to improve learning on COIN, conducting extensive research beginning in the late 1950s. This book is an attempt to examine much of this work in light of current COIN, in hopes of reducing the amount of "reinventing of the wheel" that is necessary for the United States to improve its capabilities for COIN both in the present and future. It is thus part intellectual history and part policy recommendation, with the goal of encouraging the type of serious introspection by the U.S. government that will be needed to get COIN right. The lessons of the past, with due consideration for changes in the global security environment, should be applied in Iraq, Afghanistan, and wherever else the United States may need to wage low-intensity conflict.
The book consists of five substantive chapters. The first presents a brief history of COIN research at RAND to provide context for the reader. Next is a short discussion of the benefits and perils of using previous experience as a guide to current COIN. The third section is an overview of the development of COIN theories at RAND and some suggestions for synthesizing those theories. The fourth examines RAND's analysis of the practice of COIN in a number of conflicts in an attempt to draw out "best practices" for today. The last chapter is an admittedly tentative attempt to apply these practices to the present. In addition, an annotated bibliography of much of the RAND research on which this book is based is provided as an appendix. Some of the documents cited herein were part of RAND's D series of publications, which were intended to promote discussion among researchers. Those publications were not reviewed and were never intended for external dissemination, yet provide interesting insights into the debate with RAND on these issues at the time. Not all D-series publications are available to the public.
Chapter Two
The Wizards of Less-Than-Armageddon: RAND and COIN
As World War II drew to a close, the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces was concerned about the future. Airpower and technology appeared inextricably tied together, particularly in the dawning atomic age. Yet General Henry "Hap" Arnold was worried that, without the impetus of war, U.S. scientists would return to universities, depriving the military of their expertise. In order to ensure access to elite intellectual talent, Arnold and others in and out of government established the Research and Development (RAND) Corporation in October 1945. RAND quickly grew into an interdisciplinary think tank concerned with the problems of the nascent Cold War (see Digby, 1991; Martin Collins, 1998; and Andrew May, 1999).
In these early years, RAND's primary focus was on the problems of the Air Force, particularly the nuclear forces of the Strategic Air Command. Analysts such as Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, Andrew Marshall, William Kaufmann, and Thomas Schelling grappled with a variety of questions for the Air Force, ranging from the strategic to the tactical (see Kaplan, 1991). Optimal basing strategies for bombers, game theoretic approaches to escalation and deterrence, and avoiding surprise attack were some of the central questions they sought to address.
Counterinsurgency had not entered the lexicon of defense planners at RAND in this period. The first attempt to address the problem came in 1958, with a set of war games at RAND known as Sierra (Paxson, 1958). These war games sought to explore the possibility of limited war in Asia in light of the U.S. experience in Korea and the French war in Indochina. Sierra envisioned the fighting as semi-conventional, mirroring the later stages of the French conflict in Indochina. Large enemy formations and the possible use of atomic weapons were considered and evaluated in several scenarios.
This work was consonant with the feeling among many at RAND and in the government that reliance on strategic nuclear forces for deterrence was uncertain. The threat to resort to launching so-called "Massive Retaliation" was not credible below a certain threshold, particularly in conflicts outside the United States or Western Europe (see Gaddis, 1982). Former Army Chief of Sta. General Maxwell Taylor was perhaps the most vocal and widely recognized critic of what he saw as overreliance on strategic nuclear forces. In his 1960 book The Uncertain Trumpet, Taylor advocated a policy calling for a buildup of conventional and tactical nuclear forces to allow for a more flexible response to provocation below the threshold for total war.
The inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961 marked a major turning point in U.S. strategy, particularly in response to the problem of Third World insurgency. Kennedy adopted Taylor's slogan of "Flexible Response" as his own, but expanded it to cover insurgencies as well as limited wars such as those envisioned by Sierra. Kennedy was also keenly interested in attracting the "best and brightest" minds to his administration, and several RAND personnel came to Washington as a result. This both deepened and broadened RAND's ties to the government, as it could increasingly work on problems not directly tied to and funded by the Air Force. As the Kennedy administration took office, an insurgency was gaining strength in South Vietnam, one of the countries formed by the dissolution of French Indochina following the French loss to insurgents in 1954. The United States had committed itself to supporting an independent, non-communist South Vietnam, but the government of Ngo Dien Diem was increasingly unable to resist insurgents supported by communist North Vietnam. U.S. advisors were aiding the South Vietnamese; military assistance was flowing quite freely but seemed to do little to stanch the erosion of the government's authority.
RAND would quickly become intimately involved with both the general problem of counterinsurgency and the specific problem of Vietnam. Analysts such as Guy Pauker, George Tanham, and Stephen Hosmer (among many others; Figure 2.1 shows the latter) began intensive investigation of previous counterinsurgency campaigns in an attempt to derive lessons. RAND brought in participants in these campaigns as consultants and held several symposia seeking patterns in insurgency and counterinsurgency. The Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (ISA) and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funded most of this research.
Over the next several years, U.S. involvement in South Vietnam continued to escalate incrementally. RAND's research expanded in parallel, leading to the establishment of a permanent presence in a French colonial villa in Saigon. From this location, RAND researchers traveled the country, gathering and assessing data. RAND's Santa Monica office also had an entire room dedicated to Vietnam, which included RAND products, captured Viet Cong documents, and U.S. intelligence reports.
During this period, one of the largest RAND projects on counterinsurgency, the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study, was initiated. With funding from ISA and ARPA, RAND was tasked to discover what motivated the Viet Cong and how they could be influenced. This entailed conducting and analyzing hundreds of interviews with captured and surrendered Viet Cong and their supporters.
RAND analysts would contest the findings of the Motivation and Morale study, a symptom of increasing divergence within RAND on Vietnam. Leon Gouré was representative of one school of thought, optimistic about the findings and the war generally, believing the Viet Cong to be increasingly hard-pressed and dispirited (see, among others, Gouré and Thomson, 1965). Konrad Kellen represented the opposite school of thought, increasingly questioning the viability of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and finding the Viet Cong well-motivated and disciplined in the face of incredible hardship (see, among others, Kellen, 1969b).
This division between those at RAND (like Gouré) who were more sanguine about the prospects for U.S. success in Vietnam and those who felt the effort unlikely to succeed (like Kellen) mirrored the emerging split in the country between "hawks" and "doves." This split emerged publicly in October 1969, when a group of RAND researchers sent a letter to the editor of The New York Times calling for U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Subsequently, another group of RAND analysts sent a rejoinder to The Times countering the first letter's arguments (see Roberts, 1969a, 1969b).
Despite the emerging fissures within RAND, research on counterinsurgency continued to expand for the duration of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. ARPA created a special research program, Project AGILE, dedicated to analyzing the problems of counterinsurgency in Southeast Asia. AGILE funded many additional RAND studies, ranging from assessing measures of effectiveness in counterinsurgency to understanding the rural population (for example, Benoit, 1970; and Sweetland, 1968).
The Vietnam conflict (more specifically, U.S. involvement in the conflict) finally began to wind down in the early 1970s, and with it U.S. government interest in counterinsurgency. As the interest of sponsors went, so went RAND research. RAND produced a few more "lessons learned" products from participants in the Vietnam conflict, but by 1972, RAND was all but out of the counterinsurgency business as interest returned to the conventional defense of Western Europe and strategic nuclear forces. The unhealed divisions within RAND over Vietnam and the unauthorized release of the classified "Pentagon Papers" by Daniel Ellsberg, which had significant negative repercussions for RAND, no doubt added to the desire of many to put counterinsurgency behind them.
This fallow period would last nearly a decade, as both the Ford and Carter administrations had little appetite for anything remotely related to Vietnam or counterinsurgency. RAND was fortunate to retain many researchers with counterinsurgency experience, but they were tasked with other questions. For example, RAND analyst and former director of civilian programs in Vietnam Bob Komer went to work on issues of coalition warfare and NATO policy (for example, see Komer et al., 1973).
One refuge for counterinsurgency specialists at RAND was the growing concern among the policy community over the issue of international terrorism. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw an explosion of terrorist activity, from the Munich massacre by the Palestinian Black September organization to various "Red" terrorist groups in Europe to the Weather Underground in the United States. Researchers such as Konrad Kellen and Brian Jenkins quickly transitioned to the intensive study of terrorist motivation, strategy, and tactics (for example, see Kellen, 1979; and Jenkins, 1974).
The doldrums of RAND COIN research ended in the early 1980s, as the Reagan administration became increasingly concerned about insurgency in Latin America, particularly Central America. The fall of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua to the communist Sandinistas and an ongoing insurgency in El Salvador rekindled fears of a Central American "domino effect" that ultimately could threaten the stability of the hemisphere. This threat to the "Southern Flank" enabled RAND to pursue research again on COIN, though not at the same volume and intensity experienced during the Vietnam era.
In this period, new analysts such as Bruce Hoffman and Benjamin Schwarz joined old hands from Vietnam. In addition to examining the Salvadoran conflict itself, RAND analysts assessed post-Vietnam COIN efforts in an attempt to draw lessons for current and future conflicts. The transitioning of the Arroyo Center, the Army's federally funded research and development center (FFRDC), to RAND in 1984 also presented new funding opportunities for COIN research.
However, just as RAND COIN research began to regain momentum, the Cold War ended. This dramatically reduced interest in COIN within the policy community, and many of the Central American insurgencies came to an end. Without this impetus, RAND COIN research slowed again. However, unlike the post-Vietnam period, it did not come to a halt. RAND researchers continued to investigate COIN subjects, such as the trend in urbanization of insurgency and developing strategic frameworks for COIN (see Taw and Hoffman, 1994; and Hoffman and Taw, 1992). In addition, RAND increasingly linked COIN to other topics of interest to policymakers, such as terrorism or stability operations (for example, Meyer, Duncan, and Hoffman, 1993; and Quinlivan, 1995). RAND research on COIN thus analyzed and drew lessons widely from across both space (from Malaya to El Salvador) and time (from the late 1940s through the 1990s).
Chapter Three
Analogies and War: Are Theory and Empirics from Prior COIN Relevant?
Before proceeding, it is worth discussing the merit of studying previous COIN theory and practice. Some consider valueless any attempts to develop a generalizable theory of COIN or to seek analogies to other conflicts, as each insurgency is deeply rooted in a particular set of conditions, both domestic and international. Only an analyst with great depth in a given region or country can make judgments about it, obviating the need for theory or analogy.
Answering these objections involves an issue that is at the core of both social science and policy analysis, and this particular work more so than many others. This issue is that of analogical reasoning, or more simply, what can previous problems tell us about (or mislead us in) thinking through a new problem? From this issue of analogical reasoning springs the question of generalizability, or what can a few specific examples of some type tell us about all examples of this type? More specifically, what theories and practices appear to work generally in COIN and how can they be applied today?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from On "Other War" by Austin Long Copyright © 2006 by RAND Corporation. Excerpted by permission.
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