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.