Santa Cruz de Marcenado The third Marques of
Santa Cruz de Marcenado (1684–1732) was an early author who wrote on conventional military matters and gave suggestions on the topic of "rebellions".
Thomas-Robert Bugeaud General
Bugeaud served extensively in the
French war of conquest in Algeria and was also personally present (although as a junior officer) during the
Peninsular War. After he returned to France he wrote extensively about Algeria and has been cited as an early commander whose conduct contains many aspects of modern counterinsurgency doctrine, such as intelligence lead operations rather than the more "population centric" of both modern doctrines and also latter French Generals during the colonial period who developed the
oil spot method. However, once dispersed and decentralized, the
irregular nature of the rebel campaigns proved a decisive counter to French superiority on the battlefield.
Napoleon's army had no means of effectively combating the rebels, and in the end, their strength and morale were so sapped that when
Wellington was finally able to challenge French forces in the field, the French had almost no choice but to abandon the situation. Counterinsurgency efforts may be successful, especially when the insurgents are unpopular. The
Philippine–American War, the
Shining Path in Peru, and the
Malayan Emergency have been the sites of failed insurgencies. 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 rebel/insurgent. Though the
Ottomans often had advantages in manpower of more than 100 to 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 rebel fighters were working in conjunction with or in a manner complementary to regular forces. Such was also the case with the
French Resistance during
World War II and the
National Liberation Front 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. 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, an insurgency essentially cannot be defeated by regular forces.
David Galula David Galula gained his practical experience in counterinsurgency as a
French Army officer in the
Algerian War. His theory of counterinsurgency is not primarily military, but a combination of military, political and social actions under the strong control of a single authority. Galula proposes four "laws" for counterinsurgency: • The aim of the war is to gain the support of the population rather than control of territory. • Most of the population will be neutral in the conflict; support of the masses can be obtained with the help of an active friendly minority. • Support of the population may be lost. The population must be efficiently protected to allow it to cooperate without fear of retribution by the opposite party. • Order enforcement should be done progressively by removing or driving away armed opponents, then gaining the support of the population, and eventually strengthening positions by building infrastructure and setting long-term relationships with the population. This must be done area by area, using a pacified territory as a basis of operation to conquer a neighboring area. Galula contends that: With his four principles in mind, Galula goes on to describe a general military and political strategy to put them into operation in an area that is under full insurgent control: According to Galula, some of these steps can be skipped in areas that are only partially under insurgent control, and most of them are unnecessary in areas already controlled by the government.
Robert Thompson Robert Grainger Ker Thompson wrote
Defeating Communist Insurgency in 1966, wherein he argued that a successful counterinsurgency effort must be proactive in seizing the initiative from insurgents. Thompson outlines five basic principles for a successful counterinsurgency: • The government must have a clear political aim: to establish and maintain a free, independent and united country that is politically and economically stable and viable; • The government must function in accordance with the law; • The government must have an overall plan; • The government must give priority to defeating political subversion, not the guerrilla fighters; • In the guerrilla phase of an insurgency, a government must secure its base areas first.
David Kilcullen In "The Three Pillars of Counterinsurgency", Dr.
David Kilcullen, the Chief Strategist of the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism of the
U.S. State Department in 2006, described a framework for interagency cooperation in counterinsurgency operations. His pillars – Security, Political and Economic – support the overarching goal of Control, but are based on Information: Kilcullen considers the three pillars to be of equal importance because The overall goal, according to this model, "is not to reduce violence to zero or to kill every insurgent, but rather to return the overall system to normality — noting that 'normality' in one society may look different from normality in another. In each case, we seek not only to establish control, but also to consolidate that control and then transfer it to permanent, effective, and legitimate institutions."
Martin van Creveld Military historian
Martin van Creveld, noting that almost all attempts to deal with insurgency have ended in failure, advises: In examining why so many counterinsurgencies by powerful militaries fail against weaker enemies, Van Creveld identifies a key dynamic that he illustrates by the metaphor of killing a child. Regardless of whether the child started the fight or how well armed the child is, an adult in a fight with a child will feel that he is acting unjustly if he harms the child and foolish if the child harms him; he will, therefore, wonder if the fight is necessary. Van Creveld argues that "by definition, a strong counterinsurgent who uses his strength to kill the members of a small, weak organization of insurgents – let alone the civilian population by which it is surrounded, and which may lend it support – will commit crimes in an unjust cause," while "a child who is in a serious fight with an adult is justified in using every and any means available – not because he or she is right, but because he or she has no choice". Every act of insurgency becomes, from the perspective of the counterinsurgent, a reason to end the conflict, while also being a reason for the insurgents to continue until victory.
Trường Chinh, second in command to
Ho Chi Minh of
Vietnam, wrote in his
Primer for Revolt: Van Creveld thus identifies "time" as the key factor in counterinsurgency. In an attempt to find lessons from the few cases of successful counterinsurgency, of which he lists two clear cases: the British efforts during
The Troubles of
Northern Ireland and the 1982
Hama massacre carried out by the
Syrian government to suppress the
Muslim Brotherhood, he asserts that the "core of the difficulty is neither military nor political, but moral" and outlines two distinct methods. The first method relies on superb intelligence, provided by those who know the natural and artificial environment of the conflict as well as the insurgents. Once such superior intelligence is gained, the counterinsurgents must be trained to a point of high professionalism and discipline such that they will exercise discrimination and restraint. Through such discrimination and restraint, the counterinsurgents do not alienate members of the populace besides those already fighting them, while delaying the time when the counterinsurgents become disgusted by their own actions and demoralized. General Patrick Walters, the British commander of troops in Northern Ireland, explicitly stated that his objective was not to kill as many terrorists as possible but to ensure that as few people on both sides were killed. In the vast majority of counterinsurgencies, the "forces of order" kill far more people than they lose. In contrast and using very rough figures, the struggle in Northern Ireland had cost the United Kingdom three thousand fatal casualties. Of the three thousand, about seventeen hundred were civilians...of the remaining, a thousand were British soldiers. No more than three hundred were terrorists, a ratio of three to one. If the prerequisites for the first method – excellent intelligence, superbly trained and disciplined soldiers and police, and an iron will to avoid being provoked into lashing out – are lacking, van Creveld posits that counterinsurgents who still want to win must use the second method exemplified by the
Hama massacre. In 1982, the regime of Syrian president
Hafez al-Assad was on the point of being overwhelmed by the countrywide insurgency of the
Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Assad sent a
Syrian Army division under his brother
Rifaat to the city of
Hama, known to be the center of the resistance. Following a counterattack by the Brotherhood, Rifaat used his heavy artillery to demolish the city, killing between 10-25,000 people, including many women and children. Asked by reporters what had happened, Hafez al-Assad exaggerated the damage and deaths, promoted the commanders who carried out the attacks, and razed Hama's well-known great mosque, replacing it with a parking lot. With the Muslim Brotherhood scattered, the population was so cowed that it would be years before opposition groups dared to disobey the regime again and, van Creveld argues, the massacre most likely saved the regime and prevented a bloody
civil war. Van Creveld condenses al-Assad's strategy into five rules while noting that they could easily have been written by
Niccolò Machiavelli:
Lorenzo Zambernardi In "Counterinsurgency's Impossible Trilemma", Dr. Lorenzo Zambernardi, an Italian academic now working in the United States, clarifies the tradeoffs involved in counterinsurgency operations. He argues that counterinsurgency involves three main goals, but in real practice, a counterinsurgent needs to choose two goals out of three. Relying on
economic theory, this is what Zambernardi labels the "impossible trilemma" of counterinsurgency. Specifically, the impossible trilemma suggests that it is impossible to simultaneously achieve: 1) force protection, 2) distinction between enemy combatants and non-combatants, and 3) the physical elimination of insurgents. According to Zambernardi, in pursuing any two of these three goals, a state must forgo some portion of the third objective. In particular, a state can protect its armed forces while destroying insurgents, but only by indiscriminately killing civilians as the
Ottomans,
Italians, and
Nazis did in the Balkans, Libya, and Eastern Europe. It can choose to protect civilians along with its own armed forces instead, avoiding so-called collateral damage, but only by abandoning the objective of destroying the insurgents. Finally, a state can discriminate between combatants and non-combatants while killing insurgents, but only by increasing the risks for its own troops, because often insurgents will hide behind civilians, or appear to be civilians. So a country must choose two out of three goals and develop a strategy that can successfully accomplish them while sacrificing the third objective. Zambernardi's theory posits that to protect populations, which is necessary to defeat insurgencies and to physically destroy an insurgency, the counterinsurgent's military forces must be sacrificed, risking the loss of domestic political support.
Akali Omeni Another writer who explores a trio of features relevant to understanding counterinsurgency is Akali Omeni. Within the contemporary context, COIN warfare by African militaries tends to be at the margins of the theoretical debate – even though Africa today is faced with a number of deadly insurgencies. In
Counter-insurgency in Nigeria, Omeni, a Nigerian academic, discusses the interactions between certain features away from the battlefield, which account for battlefield performance against insurgent warfare. Specifically, Omeni argues that the trio of historical experience, organisational culture (OC) and doctrine, help explain the institution of COIN within militaries and their tendency to reject the innovation and adaptation often necessary to defeat insurgency. These three features, furthermore, influence and can undermine the operational tactics and concepts adopted against insurgents. The COIN challenge, therefore, is not just operational; it also is cultural and institutional before ever it reflects on the battlefield. According to Omeni, institutional isomorphism is a sociological phenomenon that constrains the habits of a military (in this case, the Nigerian military) to the long-established, yet increasingly ineffective, ideology of the offensive in irregular warfare. As Omeni writes, Further, the infantry-centric nature of the
Nigerian Army's battalions, traceable back to the
Nigerian Civil War back in the 1960s, is reflected in the kinetic nature of the Army's contemporary COIN approach. This approach has failed to defeat Boko Haram in the way many expected. Certainly, therefore, the popular argument today, which holds that the Nigerian Army has struggled in COIN due to capabilities shortcomings, holds some merit. However, a full-spectrum analysis of the Nigeria case suggests that this popular dominant narrative scarcely scratches the surface of the true COIN challenge. This population-centered challenge, moreover, is one that militaries across the world continue to contend with. And in attempting to solve the COIN puzzle, state forces over the decades have tried a range of tactics.
Information-centric theory Starting in the early 2000s, micro-level data has transformed the analysis of effective counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. Leading this work is the "information-centric" group of theorists and researchers, led by the work of the Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) group at
Princeton University, and the Conflict and Peace, Research and Development (CPRD) group at the
University of Michigan. Berman, Shapiro, and Felter have outlined the modern information-centric model. In this framework, the critical determinant of counterinsurgent success is information about insurgents provided to counterinsurgents, such as insurgent locations, plans, and targets. Information can be acquired from civilian sources (human intelligence,
HUMINT), or through signal intelligence (
SIGINT).
Jeffrey Treistman Dr. Jeffrey Treistman previously served with the
US Department of State as the Policy Advisor to the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq,
Salam al-Zaubai. In his book,
When Bad States Win: Rethinking Counterinsurgency Strategy, he found little evidence to support the ‘hearts and minds’ approach to counterinsurgency. “There is little robust generalizable evidence that population-centric approaches are effective,” he argued. In contrast to other COIN theorists, Treistman examined how the gross violation of international law and human rights affected war outcomes. He developed a theory of barbarism as a counterinsurgency strategy — the indiscriminate use of violence against civilians to defeat insurgents. He proposed that under certain conditions, genocide, rape, torture, repression, and other human rights violations could succeed in suppressing a rebellion. Treistman theorized that moderate levels of violence against civilians would not be effective in dissuading insurgents. But if counterinsurgents increased their lethality, cruelty, and violence against civilians it would successfully deter insurgents. “The overwhelming and brutal application of force against civilians,” he argued, “will squash domestic opposition.” Treistman thus proposed a convex function to model the relationship between barbarism and counterinsurgency outcomes. Moderate levels of repression are insufficient and counterproductive, but as a counterinsurgent increases the degree of lethality and repression it is more likely to defeat insurgents. “Widespread indiscriminate violence and political repression increase the odds of a government victory. As a result, bad states may sometimes defeat insurgencies.” ==Tactics==