COIN's coins; political constraints on COIN

By Dave Anderson:

Zenpundit in a massive and brain crunching post argues that counterinsurgency as official US policy preference is now over because the political environment is beginning to recognize the great costs of counter-insurgency operations for the small, long term benefits that may or may not accrue to the United States and its security:

For the next year, politicians of both parties will be  competing hard for this bloc which means “deficit hawks” will soar higher than defense hawks.

America’s nine year drunken sailor spending spree is officially over.

Defense experts have long known that the post-9/11, record DoD budget expenditures were not going to be politically sustainable forever and that either a drawdown of combat operations or cancellation of very big, very complicated and supremely expensive weapons platforms or some combination of both would eventually be needed. That eventuality is here and will increase in intensity over the next five years, barring an unexpected economic boom. Spending $60 billion annually on Afghanistan, a nation with a GDP of roughly $ 20 billion, for the next 7 years, is not going to be in the cards. Not at a time of 10 % unemployment, when the Congress will be forced to cut Medicare, education, veteran’s benefits, eliminate COLA’s on Social Security or raise the retirement age and income taxes. Who is going to want to ”own” an ambitious “nation-building” program at election time?

This has always been the problem with COIN as a strategic doctrine; it makes no sense to invest those types of resources for the types of problems that COIN can solve.  I made this point last February when I argued that COIN is an operational doctrine that has a massive Clauswitzian disconnect as it is a means to solve a problem without tying the solution to the politics of the matter:

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. 

Zen makes a final point that I want you to consider before you go read his entire post:

As good as COIN is though, it is not something akin to magic with which to work policy miracles or to substitute for America not having a cohesive and realistic grand strategy.