COIN, Clauswitz and Democracies

By Fester:

I had to step out of the Clauswitz discussion group at Chicago Boyz because of time constraints but I have been slowly re-working my way through the work, learning and rethinking the entire time.  One of his most basic insights is that war is an extension of politics.  Thus the tactical, operational and strategic are all subordinate to the grand strategic or national political level considerations.

It is quite plausible within the Clauswitzian framework that a nation can have mass tactical, operational and strategic failure while achieving its primary political goals.  It is unlikely as cascading failures at all underlying levels forces frustration, fog and a GIGO OODA loop, but it is plausible.  At the same time, tactical and operational excellence is often insufficient to overcome failures in strategic and geo-strategic alignment.  That sentence is the ten second summary of German military history since 1872. 

The political is the supreme level of importance.  Tactical and operational successes can feed into political successes as long as they operate within a context that is aligned with a coherent overall grand strategic goal set.  If tactical and operational successes do not align or are counter-productive to the overall grand strategic goal sets, then those apparent successes are not successes.  At best they are side-shows of no import; at worse they are enablers of grand strategic failure as the political OODA loop is seduced by the appearance of excellence in the lower realms and place their hopes on tactical and operational successes to substitute for strategic failure. 

Pat Lang is seems to be conflating operational and tactical success metrics with winning. 

classic counterinsurgency doctrine has always been a "winner."  Logical thinkers should come to grips with the idea that France won in Algeria and America won in Vietnam employing this doctrine only to have public opinion at home and resulting political decision turn away from the fruits of victory.  "Stab in the back?"  "Nous sommes trahis?  No, but the truth is that these counterinsurgency campaigns were won and then the results were negated by poliitcal action at home.

Let's concede that both of his examples are successful examples for sake of argument. 

In his two examples of 'classic' counter-insurgency being a 'winner', he identifies tactical and operational success as the exemplar upon which the strategy should be judged.  However he then engages in the political question and says the grand strategic and political level failed the tactical and operational level.  I think he has his analysis inverted. 

Using Algeria and Vietnam, the political costs of the COIN strategy were very high; promises of ten to twenty year wars, consumption of the society's productive surplus, the consistent threat of de-pacification, severe social and domestic political instability and legitimacy threats.  These costs could be borne if the theatre of war was critical to the existence and maitenance of a desired social order as these costs were borne in World War Two.  However in both examples, especially in Vietnam, the objective loss function was fairly small as Vietnam was a tertiary interest for the United States. 

COIN today promises the same type of inputs --- ten to twenty year wars, operational costs of one to two points of annual GDP at a time of structural deficits and domestic fiscal crisis --- with the same type of outcomes --- weak, client states in need of continual support in secondary or tertiary areas of interest.

And shockingly the public of democracies don't like COIN nor do they want to spend those resources for minimal real gains in security that operational and tactical successes may or may not generate. 

So if we assume that democracies are not likely to support doctrines, strategies and techniques  that produce long term ongoing costs with minimal prospects of producing desired long term political benefits, the problem in the Clauswitzian perspective is not the grand strategic level, but at the strategic and operational levels where the COIN doctrine is implemented in disregard to the grand strategic appreciation of forces and reality. 

The successes at the lower levels of importance do not align with the grand strategic interests of a democracy. At that point, COIN is an attempt to use tactical and operational success to ignore divergent grand strategic aims.  COIN as it does not recognize the grand strategic constraints in which it is implemented is the source of failure as it assumes a willingness to commit society's productive surplus for a generation to a secondary or tertiary theatre.