Understanding Current Operations in Iraq

David Kilcullen reports from the field on current operations in Iraq in Small Wars Journal.

Also in the same journal a piece by Frank Hoffman on Neo-Coin which is a must read. Hoffman zeroes in on what I think is the key issue in Neo-Coin: the competition for perceptions. (He also quotes me on FM 3-24 which is nice).

As it happens we had a workshop here in the Department of War Studies organized by my colleague Dr John Mackinlay and myself which looked at the new British COIN doctrine which is being drafted. My job was to look at the 'Virtual Battlefield: Redefining Propaganda of the Deed in 2007'. Here's how I started my talk:

Implicit in the title of my talk is the idea that the contemporary operations environment with which the counterinsurgent commander is concerned has two dimensions: the literal, physical field of battle in which bullets fly, bombs explode and blood is shed, sometimes yours, sometimes theirs but most times and in greatest volume by those stuck in the middle; and the virtual, informational realm in which belligerents contend with words and images to manufacture narratives which are more compelling than those of the other side and better at structuring the responses of others to the development of events.

To begin, therefore, I wish to quote approvingly the words of General Rupert Smith in his perceptive work, The Utility of Force:

We now come to the manner in which we fight and operate amongst the people in a wider sense: through the media… Whoever coined the phrase ‘the theatre of operations’ was very prescient. We are conducting operations now as though we are on stage, in an amphitheatre or Roman arena. There are two or more sets of players—both with a producer, the commander, each of whom has his own idea of the script. On the ground, in the actual theatre, they are all on the stage and mixed up with people trying to get to their seats, the stage hands, the ticket collectors and the ice-cream vendors. At the same time they are being viewed by a partially and factional audience, comfortably seated, its attention focused on that part of the auditorium where it is noisiest, watching the events by peering down the drinking straws of their soft-drink packs—for that is the extent of the vision of a camera.

Then I shall make three assertions which I shall endeavour to defend as I go on and in the discussion which follows. The first assertion is that the virtual now dominates the real. ‘Successful’ operations on the ground make no difference if they are not translated into advancements of one’s strategic narrative in the informational realm. This, it seems to me was well illustrated in a recent Los Angeles Times article which described the tour of General Mattis through Marine outposts in Al Anbar province. Mattis was asked by a sergeant ‘How are we supposed to fight a war when people back home say we've already lost?’ Mattis gave the best answer he could under the circumstances to his soldier: believe your own eyes, ignore the press. But at the end of the day this will not cut it. At the end of the coming months when the success or failure of the operation known as 'The Surge' is judged, the morale state of the Marines in Anbar will not count for much if the people at home have been convinced the thing is a lost cause.

I am sure if we put our minds together we could come up with a very long list of recent examples in which perception of events trumps the reality; arguably this has always been the case in military history—if it were I would not be surprised; but the immediacy of the virtual battlefield, its proximity to the centre of gravity in COIN (that being the frontal lobes of the people both in the ‘theatre’, as Rupert Smith describes, and at home as I would argue), and the low level of Western public commitment to these conflicts makes for a large qualitative difference between COIN now in the Information Age and COIN before it.

This leads to the second assertion I would like to make which is that contemporary COIN is an Information Operation with a military annex (among a multitude of other annexes some of which may supersede it).

The third assertion I would like to make is that we are failing at COIN now because we fail to recognize the truth of the above. We act as though Information Operations are the annex whereas the other side treats it with resolute consistency as the main event to which everything else is subordinate with the effect that with relatively few exceptions we concede the virtual battle.

Britain and Iran

The defence minister issued a report a couple of days ago about the capture of UK Marines and sailors a while back. It says, in a nutshell: mistakes were made, but not by anybody particularly. That's it then; nothing to see here move on. Well, no. It's not like this was the first time. Iran captured 6 UK sailors and Marines and forced them to confess to incursion into its territory in June 2004. Now the BBC reports Iran had also earlier tried unsuccessfully to capture an Royal Australian Navy boarding party:

The Australians, though, to quote one military source, "were having none of it". The BBC has been told the Australians re-boarded the vessel they had just searched, aimed their machine guns at the approaching Iranians and warned them to back off, using what was said to be "highly colourful language".

The defence minister clearly wants to be done with the political embarrassment of all this but something is rotten here and needs to be fixed. Why does the Naby keep making thsi same mistake? I agree more and more with Norman Podhoretz on this.

Update: I missed somehow this interview in the Times with General Petraeus which is really worth reading. Here's the interesting part as far as this discussion goes:

Who was behind the kidnapping of five Britons in Baghdad last month and what is being done to free them?

"We think that it is the same network that killed our soldiers in Kerbala in an operation back in January. We killed the head of that network less than a week before the operation that detained those British civilians. It was already planned and carried out by his followers. It is a secret cell of Jaish al-Mahdi (Mahdi Army) not all of which are under control of Moqtadr al-Sadr. That is the assessment at this point."

“They are not rank and file Jaish al-Mahdi. They are trained in Iran, equipped with Iranian (weapons), and advised by Iran. The Iranian involvement here we have found to be much, much more significant that we thought before. They have since about the summer of 2004 played a very, very important role in training in Iran, funding, arming."

"This is lethal stuff, like EFPs (explosively-formed penetrators), mortars, and rockets that are used against Basra Palace (the main British base in Basra). There is also a degree of direction, not in a strategic way but in tactical operations. We captured a wealth of documentation which showed how they account for what they have done, we assume so they can get paid for it, and get additional funding."

The evidence that Iran is backing with arms, training and funds attacks against US and British is frankly overwhelming.

What ever happened to common sense?

Politicians reacted in disbelief to the revelation that for over two hours yesterday, the BBC News website carried a request for people in Iraq to report on troop movements.The request was removed from the website after it sparked furious protests that the corporation was endangering the lives of British servicemen and women. But according to accounts last night, a story on a major operation by US and Iraqi troops against al-Qa'eda somewhere north of Baghdad contained an extraordinary request for information about the movement of troops. Last night the BBC confirmed the wording of the request was: "Are you in Iraq? Have you seen any troop movements? If you have any information you would like to share with the BBC, you can do so using the form below."

I'd put this down to rank stupidity rather than malicious intent but really are there no editors at the BBC with even a fraction of a clue? Is it so hard to see that this sort of information could get troops, British troops, hurt or killed?

Update: John Kelly is my kind of guy! Read

How to move a book on Amazon

I feel utterly compelled to get myself a copy of The Satanic Verses which I see is now number 11 in the Amazon UK rankings of sales 20 years after it was first published, even though I can't for the life of me imagine myself actually reading it. Why? Crap like this, this and this and this.

My Grand Narrative can Beat your Grand Narrative

My good friend Chris Ankersen has the annoying habit of being smarter and better written than me. (Thankfully I am better looking). Here's his take on the Michael Vlahos piece Fall of Modernity which I linked to earlier:

I came lately across a very interesting article which has been making the rounds, partly because it has been referred to by David Kilcullen, the current 'Brad Pitt' of the counterinsurgency world. Its title, 'The Fall of Modernity,' perhaps occludes the strength of its message. It paints a convincing picture that the age of American/Western supremacy is coming to the beginning of its end (compare, according to the article, today with Rome in the 3rd Century AD/CE: Empire is not over, but getting there). This message, and many others associated with an Imperial theme, are not new. Micheal Vlahos, of a Johns Hopkins-based think-tank, does a particularly good job in this rendition, however, and the article is worth reading for the sophisticated-yet-clearly

-explained concepts he introduces: Fall of Modernity.

What is most interesting, though, is that Vlahos implicates the American project in the downfall of the American project. This is not typical conservative thinking; indeed it resonates more with Marxian theory. You know the story: capitalism is capitalism's own worst enemy, and its own contradictions will eventually bring about its dissolution (contradictions such as its production of poor people at the same time that it makes others obscenely wealthy). The result is a rather all-consuming sense that 'it doesn't really matter what we do, because we are locked in our own death spiral'. In his words:

"We declare that “resistance is futile,” yet the opposite is true. The bigger we make the enemy, the bigger they become. Ours is the complicity of backhand legitimization. Whether we admit this or shout the reverse, effectively our war narrative works to set up superpower defeat—even if at first it seems only a drama of defeat played out in the media—because with one stroke, our narrative itself will have become a lie. This is doubly destructive. Not only do we fail myth—what are we? the D-list to the Greatest Generation—but myth is no longer there for us. World War II cannot save us because according to the strictures of our own myth, we are no longer worthy of being saved."

Of course, such 'defeatist' talk is rife amongst the chattering classes, the media, and the academy. But, if we look at one of the sources cited in Vlahos's footnotes, it is not difficult to see from whence Vlahos derives his pessimism. He includes a link to a PowerPoint presentation made by member of the US Joint Staff, which explains the US strategy in the war against terror. It is worth a look, but will not inspire confidence. Seen after reading Vlahos's piece, it will almost seem a caricature, and a bad one at that.

If (and of course we must cling to idea, as Dickens's Scrooge did, that the future is conditional, not predetermined), Vlahos is correct, there are a number of implications. Not the least among them is that perfecting the tactics of the war on terror is akin to re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic (a metaphor which is acceptable, perhaps, due to the passage of 90 years since the catastrophe. A parallel metaphor, say 'remembering to turn the lights off in the World Trade Centre', jangles our sensitivities). It certainly makes the work of those such as Kilcullen and Petreas far more difficult and maybe just a little beside the point.

If the big picture is as badly and as baldly out of whack as Vlahos claims, we need more than fine tuning. But is it possible to generate a new Grand Narrative, one sufficiently big enough to counter the growing one of Alterity, supposedly the source of strength for our current enemies? One pure enough not to be brought to its knees through its own corrosion? One catchy enough to enlighten the masses 'at home and abroad'? Is such a trick possible 'on the fly' and if so, how long does it take and how do we do it? Vlahos, of course, points out that the need to 'beat' the other side with a bigger, better argument is part of the problem. His conclusion seems to point to a very postmodern position: not domination, but co-existance; plurality and indeterminacy, not monopoly and certainty. Not a single, or even an opposing pair of Grand Narratives, but rather many less sure, more fungible claims.

As usual, the question returns to the eternal 'Quid tunc?'

Gaza meltdown

Here's a good article by Martin Indyk in the Washington Post on the takeover of Gaza by Hamas
which goes beyond the obvious: A Two-State Solution Palestinian Style.

Whither Atlanticism?

It is interesting to read back to back these two articles Why we must break with the American crazies by Anatole Kaletsky in The Times and Come together, right now by Margarita Mathiopoulos in the International Herald Tribune. Well, I question Kaletsky's judgment here. Iran's President waxes lyrical about wiping Israel off the map, claims a green aura surrounded him and entranced his audience when he spoke at the UN, and eagerly awaits the arrival of the 13th 'Hidden' Imam, and it's Americans he calls crazy? Riiight.

To be fair he seems to be referring to specific American neo-cons as crazy not Americans in general in which vein he notes the recent piece by Norman Podhoretz The Case for Bombing Iran as being especially nutty. I've held the view for a long time that we should use a range of measures covert and overt (including bombing) against Iran which is not to say I agree entirely with Podhoretz's argument. I think the characterization of the Cold War as WWIII and therefore the current 'Long War' as WWIV is misleading and unhelpful (see Timothy Garton Ash's A long war? No, a long struggle). His claim that Iran puts religious objectives before national interest is not supported by the actual evidence of its relations with neighbouring states (for example its quiet backing of Christian Armenia in its war with Shi'a Muslim Azerbaijan; see the work of Ali Ansari including this Guardian piece Only the US Hawks can save the Iranian president now), and I'm almost certain that this story about the UK government's handling of the recent kidnapping of its sailors by Iran is an urban legend:

But then, as if this show of impotence were not humiliating enough, the British were unable even to mobilize any of that soft power. The European Union, of which they are a member, turned down their request to threaten Iran with a freeze of imports. As for the UN, under whose very auspices they were patrolling the international waters in which the sailors were kidnapped, it once again showed its true colors by refusing even to condemn the Iranians. The most the Security Council could bring itself to do was to express “grave concern.” Meanwhile, a member of the British cabinet was going the Security Council one better. While registering no objection to propaganda pictures of the one woman hostage, who had been forced to shed her uniform and dress for the cameras in Muslim clothing, Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt pronounced it “deplorable” that she should have permitted herself to be photographed with a cigarette in her mouth. “This,” said Hewitt, “sends completely the wrong message to our young people.”

She didn't actually say that. Did she? We aren't that badly governed are we? Still, Podhoretz's argument is not crazy and Kaletsky's characterization of it as such is sloppy and lazy. What does he propose to do differently with Iran? More of the same (which is to say nothing)?

Here's what Mathipoulos says:

We in Europe need to wake up to the reality that we cannot afford a weak America.

Far from enhancing Europe's position in global affairs, America's failures have also been ours, from securing peace in the Middle East to curbing Iran's quest for nuclear weapons.

Conversely, success has come to us when Europe and the United States have acted in close partnership, whether it was winning the Cold War or building a global economy.

I agree.

Defeat: A self-fulfilling prophecy

I happen to be reading a British Army document on counterinsurgency at the moment. It says in one place that

Experience has shown that in any insurgency about 90% of the population do not support either side and generally remain neutral in their affiliations until one side is perceived to be winning.

This makes execellent intuitive sense: you have momentum so long as people think that aligning their wishes with yours is more likely to lead to their fulfillment than aligning them with the other side. In practice establishing common goals is fiendishly difficult particularly when your own strategic narrative is incoherent. Listen to this fascinating interview with Dr David Kilcullen, counterinsurgency advisor to Gen Petraeus, on the issueof winning te battle of competing narratives.

Getting back to the doctrine, it seems to me that the statement does not go far enough. It's not merely the perceptions of those in the theatre of conflict which are vital; the perceptions of one's own domestic base is equally important. AQ understands very well that insurgency and counterinsurgency are Information Operations with a military annex and plans and chooses its battles accordingly; I think we are begining to understand this but there's a long way to go yet. For obvious reasons the military is chary of any talk of the management of the domestic perceptions of the conflict. But the fact is that the real target of AQ's operations is the frontal lobe of the Western voter; that being the case ceding this vital battlefield is strategically suicidal. Clearly soldiers grasp this. On a tour through Marine outposts in Al Anbar province Gen Mattis* was asked by a sergeant

How are we supposed to fight a war when people back home say we've already lost?

Read the article. Mattis gave the best answer he could under the circumstances: believe your own eyes, ignore the press. But at the end of the day, or rather at the end of the coming months when the success or failure of the 'surge' is judged, the morale state of the Marines in Anbar won't count for much if the people at home have been convinced the thing is a lost cause.

*Incidentally, I met him at a conference last week. He was, as a colleague put it, as charming as only a hard-bitten Marine can be.

One other thing, aside from our own Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman whose recent Adelphi paper The Transformation of Strategic Affairs is a must read, the guru of 'strategic narratives' is the Johns Hopkins Professor Michael Vlahos. His article on the bankruptcy of the Long War and GWOT narratives, The Long War, A self-defeating prophecy, is very worthwhile, as is his longer piece in The American Conservative, The Fall of Modernity which begins

We are losing our wars in the Muslim world because our vision of history is at odds with reality. This is a well-established condition of successful societies, a condition that inevitably grows more worrisome with time and continuing success. In fact, what empires have most in common is how their sacred narratives come to rule their strategic behavior—and rule it badly. In America’s case, our war narrative works against us to promote our deepest fear: the end of modernity.

'For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that...'

If you are not reading Michael Yon's dispatches from Iraq then you are missing something very good. At the moment he is embedded with the Queen's Royal Lancers on the border near Iran. The latest dispatch Death or Glory Part III of IV begins rather depressingly with:

American soldiers think our press is bad to them, but we get off light compared to the Brits. One British soldier told me that when he made a journey of several hours across London, in uniform, not a single person acknowledged him. I said he should go to America where British soldiers are always welcome.

I must admit this observation rings true with me. The British public does not seem to care to be very aware of the remarkable bravery and professionalism of it's citizens in uniform which is, well, it's just appalling. On the other hand I can't remember the last time I saw someone in military uniform where I live or near where I work in Central London. I wonder if there's some cause and effect there?

This site Support our Soldiers seems a worthy way to make your thanks count. Of course the Americans always seem to take these things to the next level. That said, I think Adopt a Sniper is also a worthy effort. I wonder if my vicar will let me put their flyer up? Hmmm...