Rethinking COIN: Petraeus Retires

September 06, 2011

Gen. David Petraeus retired on August 31, 2011, after 37 years of service and with a well-deserved reputation as one of the principal architects of counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy in today's Army.   The Petraeus COIN doctrine was an integral part of the US "surge" in Iraq, which played a role in the reversal of declining US military fortunes in that country.  As Afghanistan commander, he shaped the current strategy; the jury is still out on his actions there.

He became on of the country's most well-known and celebrated military officers, second, only, perhaps, to Gen. Colin Powell.  As one of the principal drafters of the Army's COIN doctrine, Petraeus has been committed to a dramatic expansion of missions and capabilities for soldiers.  These missions and capabilities go well beyond traditional combat into nation-building, development, governance, rule-of-law, and strategic communications, all with the goal of fighting insurgents and winning the "hearts and minds" of populations where US military forces are operating.

COIN and its partner concept - "stability operations" - run serious risk of distorting and over-militarizing US global engagement, weakening our civilian toolkit of diplomacy and development, and harming the reputation and leadership of the US in many parts of the globe.  Gen. Petraeus and his Army successors have drawn the wrong lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan, and have given that lesson global application, at the risk of American leadership.  

COIN is based on a false premise: that US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are a harbinger of military operations to come in the future, and have much to teach us about such operations.  We live in a dangerous world, the argument goes, one in which we face constant insurgencies, a "permanent, long war," and the requirement to train, equip, and deploy the US military to counter these trends. 

But neither Iraq nor Afghanistan was a weak state, beset by insurgents.  In both cases, US military operations sought regime change from stable (if unattractive) governments.  In Iraq, the goal was the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.  Success in that mission, combined with dismissing the Iraqi military and Baathist bureaucrats, unleashed instability. 

In the Afghan case, similar to Libya, US air operations and limited one-the-ground presence overthrew the Taliban regime.  Inattention to the aftermath, caused by the US diversion into Iraq, weakened the successor regime, leaving it vulnerable to Taliban and other insurgent operations.  In both cases, US operations and decisions played a role in stimulating the very insurgency the military then faced.

Neither case, despite lots of learning, contracting, Washington consulting, and research, can be considered an unqualified success.  The reality may well be that we don't conduct COIN operations very well (perhaps nobody does) and lack the ability to do so, and that, in conducting them, we have created widespread resistance to efforts to conduct such operations anywhere else.  Foreign occupying powers have had a hard time historically in beating insurgents.

Moreover, in reality, there do not seem to be a lot of insurgencies around the world begging for a US military response, especially one that seeks to remake a country's political, social, and economic order. Where the US is involved in such activities - air operations in Pakistan, Somalia and the Horn of Africa, the Trans-Sahel, Philippines - they are intermittent, uneven in outcome, and do not engage substantial US military force. 

Much of the rest of the world is not in the kind of turmoil that demands or even calls for US military engagement and, where turmoil exists (Arab Spring), there is little appetite (and precious little US interest) in committing US ground forces to remake nations that are busy remaking themselves, without our "help and advice."

We are now facing a budget and economic crisis at home, one that preoccupies the political machinery and the policy-makers, as well it should.  That crisis affects the entirety of our federal activities, including the operations of the Defense Department.  Gen. Petraeus argued in his retirement speech that, despite this fiscal and economic crisis, "we will need to maintain the full-spectrum capability that we have developed over this last decade of conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere."

Perhaps the time has come to rethink the COIN enterprise as a central mission for the US Army, as part of re-tailoring its missions and operations more broadly in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Large insurgencies do not seem to be on the horizon, and it will make sense for the US, like any nation, to decide on where its interests lie; it will not intervene in all of them (just ask the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates frequently argued that defense budget reductions should be driven by strategy, not math.  Secretary Panetta and the military service chiefs have urged the same, warning that if budget reductions go past the $350 billion in the current deficit reduction agreement, we will "have to revisit strategy."

They are absolutely right; we should revisit the unprioritized set of strategies and missions we have given to the US forces, and COIN is the place to start.  Such future military interventions as may be foreseen may, in fact, involve very few US forces, but more in the Special Forces category, than the US Army as a whole.   That force is pretty well re-tooled today and, as a force larger than the militaries of more than 100 countries, clearly adequate in numbers.  With Gen. Petraeus' retirement, perhaps it is time to put COIN back in the strategic box.

Photo credit: U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley, Department of Defense. www.defense.gov