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.