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Without, you know, killing loving everyone to win it. I talked a professor into letting me do a independent study into the subject for a grade next semester. And I’m trying to rack my brain to think of a case study that isn’t Malaya, or a straight up genocidal campaign, where it’s worked. One of my mentors/tutors is a professor of political science and history, and he was also in SF for the majority of his career. And the way he put it to me is there’s three ways to do it: genocide (See Native Americans), cultural genocide (probably see Native Americans again on that), or the way that we have laid out in our own Counterinsurgency manual. And obviously the first two are out of the question for what I’m working on. The third HAS TO work in my opinion. And I’ve read up on that Counterinsurgency manual, aka Hearts and Minds with a twist. Social Network Analysis, Human Terrain System, strategic communications, information operations, all that poo poo sounds nice. But is there anywhere in the world I can look and pull out a case study and say “it worked here”? Past or present. Nbd if I get no responses but I’m curious to see what kinda responses I do get. Have a good one and Happy Holidays friends. TheWeedNumber fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 04:16
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The Roman Empire seemed to be pretty good at it, but that was before firearms, the existence of which seems to make counterinsurgency pretty difficult.
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Nov 27, 2022 04:24
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The Roman’s absolutely committed cultural and literal genocide. I feel like the answer is more akin to the nuclear war question: If fought, can it be won? If won, is it worth what it costs? Beyond extreme edge cases, the answer is almost always some form of deterrent policies/forces and credible capabilities. I guess what I’m saying is: The only way to defeat an insurgency is to prevent one from even happening, or divesting any pretense of respect for human life and other cultures. But there are always edge cases, right? Look at what went down with Iraq. We had more than enough capability and resources to prevent an insurgency from forming, then once it had entered the embryonic phase we had more than enough capability and resources to strangle the baby in the cradle. Once we had stepped on our own big swinging dick one too many times we found ourselves fighting a full blown counter insurgency war. And I would argue we did not win, and if anyone wants to make a cogent argument that we in fact did win, I’d return to the question of: If we won, was it worth what it cost? And I’ll guarantee you this sub forum can disabuse anyone of believing Iraq was worth it. If I were you I’d look to see where the edge cases are, and when there are/were plausible scenarios where an insurgency could have been dealt with early, or preemptively. If I’m being honest I feel like that’s the only part of the COIN story that has answers other than “Genocide, or lol nope.” Failed communist uprisings could be a fertile field to plant your flag and research, but that’s just me trying to think of situations you could really juice academically.
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Nov 27, 2022 04:42
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LtCol J. Krusinski posted:Look at what went down with Iraq. We had more than enough capability and resources to prevent an insurgency from forming, then once it had entered the embryonic phase we had more than enough capability and resources to strangle the baby in the cradle. Once we had stepped on our own big swinging dick one too many times we found ourselves fighting a full blown counter insurgency war. And I would argue we did not win, and if anyone wants to make a cogent argument that we in fact did win, I’d return to the question of: If we won, was it worth what it cost? And I’ll guarantee you this sub forum can disabuse anyone of believing Iraq was worth it. I feel like this is going to be your paper - The COIN manual "has to work" when you have frictionless spherical cows, and no counterinsurgency has ever worked because there has never been a counterinsurgency that has ever addressed the root causes for insurgency. It always gets tied up and shot by political gently caress gently caress games. bulletsponge13 did more valuable counterinsurgency work (eg. community building and communications) then an entire senior staff.
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Nov 27, 2022 05:30
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M_Gargantua posted:I feel like this is going to be your paper - The COIN manual "has to work" when you have frictionless spherical cows, and no counterinsurgency has ever worked because there has never been a counterinsurgency that has ever addressed the root causes for insurgency. It always gets tied up and shot by political gently caress gently caress games. bulletsponge13 did more valuable counterinsurgency work (eg. community building and communications) then an entire senior staff. I mean it might turn out that way but I'mma see what I can do. LtCol J. Krusinski posted:The Roman’s absolutely committed cultural and literal genocide. I'm gonna look for those edge cases and I'll try to dig up those plausible scenarios. I'm not the type to blow sunshine up someones rear end though so this paper is definitely gonna have a grim conclusion, judging by the few replies I've received so far. It's in line with what I've been thinking and seeing.
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Nov 27, 2022 05:33
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E- read bad. E2- Read Gooder!: America does not have a coherent COIN doctrine. Period. Mostly because it isn't easy, pretty, or comfortable, and goes against our grain. I will do a longer write up, but it boils down to this- nearly every counter Insurgency fails because you cannot kill your way to victory, not for lack of trying. Realistically, the only real victories you find in COIN operations will be narrow, relative, short-lived, and/or regional. Oman? I'm not read up on it, but in the 70s, the Brits helped the rulers there. bulletsponge13 fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 05:59
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bulletsponge13 posted:E- read bad. You ever read The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins? Or The Phoenix Program by Douglas Valentine? On the former, we pretty much “deep stated” Indonesia through their military and goaded Suharto into taking power from Sukarno in ‘65. Unlike poo poo on Phoenix, this stuff still has alot of classified poo poo that hides the exact nature of our involvement. But what’s not hidden is the State department cables. I have a cat on my chest so I’m not gonna fetch the book, but this is pretty much what the Ambassador there at the time said: “Have opportunity to take out PKI, it’s now or never.” They were the 3rd largest community party in the world. Sukarno was a leader of the Third World’s Non Aligned Movement. A million dead commies/civvies later, that poo poo was shut down. I wouldn’t call it Counterinsurgency so much as anti-communism in action. Fun and perverse fact: around the time they (CIA/anti-communists) were getting set to do Allende in Chile, graffiti in Spanish that translates to “Jakarta is coming” started to show up in the cities. Jakarta was the code word and the example Cold War anti-communists in Latín America used. poo poo was literally a psywar message from right to left. Brazil had an operation Jakarta they were planning but never enacted. Only reason that they didn’t repeat Jakarta in Chile was because the army chiefs were constitutionalists and held out against couping Allende. The rest is history. The example of the Japanese in Korea during WWII came up during my discussions with my mentor. Apparently the Japanese didn’t have nearly enough people to conduct proper COIN ops against the Korean resistance. But they didn’t need it because if so much as an OP or a checkpoint got hit, their QRF would mount up and exterminate the nearest village. If the information I was given on that period of history is accurate, it sounds like you really can kill your way through it. You just have to kill EVERYONE. IIRC, the only people who succeeded in Afghanistan to date are Alexander The Great and Genghis Khan. The former apparently became an alcoholic after that poo poo, the latter killed EVERYONE to do it. IIRC, he’s why the Hazara get a raw deal out there. But like don’t quote me on that cause I only know what I’ve been told and a lil that I’ve read. Regarding Phoenix, I’m convinced that program was a ineffectual shitshow for a variety of reasons. The communists may have feared the program but between the interagency infighting, corruption, bad intel, and poo poo like at least one anecdotal case of an American Phoenix agent doing hits for the Korean mob in Saigon. Yeah it pretty much came across to me as pointless cruelty, torture and murder. Like congrats, you hurt all these people and for what? It didn’t win the war, no matter how hard William Colby sucked off Congress when testifying about it. If you’re gonna kill the king, kill the king. If you’re gonna target the “infrastructure” of a political movement/insurgency, ok kill them. Don’t dragnet practically the whole population to do it. When it comes to COIN and treating individuals as “nodes” in a social network/insurgent network, I’ve kinda wrapped my head around the idea that these nodes have to be disrupted. And there’s probably a few ways to do it: arrest, discredit, disconnect them from their network, and/or kill them. The question is in my head, right this second, is how do you keep the show from becoming a bloodbath. If you arrest them, perhaps they radicalize/indoc everyone else they’re housed with. But what are you gonna do, throw each of them in solitary for the duration? That’s rather hosed. Discredit would be ideal but that’s definitely case by case. Disconnect from network is my euphemism for “arrest or kill everyone else who enables you to do poo poo.” And now I’m back at “why don’t I just punt you off the board in the first place.” Someone’s gonna die in COIN imo. Probably quite a few someones. How do I keep it minimal is my current train of thought. And how do I do it (win the COIN campaign) before the political time clock I’m on runs out. Because yes, the political climate from up top can and will gently caress the whole endeavor if they aren’t on the same page, throughout administrative transitions. At least here in America anyway. Looking forward to your next reply bulletsponge13. Thank you for posting. TheWeedNumber fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 07:07
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Oman gets me a Small Wars Journal article, among other things. It was apparently put in the win category. Thank you again bulletsponge13. Now the Jakarta quote in question from page 138 of the aforementioned book. quote:Washington, DC- The State Department received a cable from the US embassy in Jakarta, signed by Marshall Green. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v26/d147 TheWeedNumber fucked around with this message at 07:30 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 07:27
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Breaker Morant. You're welcome. edit: although I think pacifying the boers might've hung entirely on placating the Germans so I don't know how relevant that might be to mordern counter-insurg-oh poo poo lol Victor Vermis fucked around with this message at 09:57 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 09:39
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Victor Vermis posted:Breaker Morant. Interesting personality but I don’t see how this dead guy matters. Dude flipped out over his dead Captain, who by all accounts, died in a firefight and wasn’t killed in any other sort of egregious manner. He’s an rear end in a top hat and it’s good that he’s dead. What else did I miss in the wash?
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Nov 27, 2022 11:10
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Jakarta (to my limited knowledge) was not a successful counter insurgency. E- not sure topic I've read much on, but I recall the same insurgent group (or splinter) is still operating and not pacified, and the government forces resorted to genocidal type operations. An effective counter insurgency removes the support the insurgents had, denying them a future. You will have to kill to defeat an Insurgency, but killing shouldn't and cannot be the intended doctrine. More over, you need to kill the RIGHT people. Eveytime you gently caress up and kill the wrong dudes, you just created 3 more insurgents. Killing cannot be the primary goal, but it is for most who don't want to grasp that killing doesn't mean victory. Short of actual genocide, you are investing into your next enemy. Killing must be secondary. First, you deny him support. Support in most cases is based on fear; fear is geography based. You are only afraid of the closest threats- something the COIN forces will never be unless they live among the people. After denying the base of operations, you begin limiting operational ability, forcing the enemy to operate in areas you know, and are working to pacify. Once you cut out the legs, they are done. We do that through civil affairs, infrastructure, and cultural support. Find.Fix.Finish. Find- through HUMINT, patrolling, techno wozardr and being good to locals. Actually good. Not change a unit every six months. Not leave them there for two weeks and never return. They should know each other. Find out the why and strategic goals of the insurgent. Fix- built your local support up. Find out what they need, give it to them. Unconditionally. It's their well/school/mosque/whatever. Make your little home secure. They cannot operate here. You do this strategically (Brits in Malaya) and you created spiders that will build out webs to the surrounding area, letting you the spider hunt further and safer. Finish- not just physically, but ideologically. You can't kill and idea, but you can undermine and undercut it. That's why everyone gets on killing. An dead insurgent can't restart. Neither can a dead ideology- you can buy a trooper- you can't buy an ideal. The Pheonix Program was an utter failure that in DoD studies and papers I've seen, produced virtually nothing towards victory. While it was more than targetted assassination at the start, it built an overreliance on it, forgoing the HUMINT aspects. Assassination was used as a tool by the petty to eliminate local rivals; it was used by RVN as a way for regional commanders to gain control. The psychological operational aspects of it tended to fail because it's scary as hell when people slit the throat of a sleeping elder- it's scarier when he was the only thing keeping the VC from a foot hold and/or was the wrong guy. Nevermind that many PP ops ended up killing dozens of civilians to get one VC "cadre". The Intel it got was usually off, and the intel it produced was wrong. Much of the HUMINT we served from it was useless and false, because it was gathered under torture. It was just a program of directed unrestrained murder. It couldn't and never could win. America sucks at COIN because we will not invest the men and energy into it. We want to use tech and money where it takes hard work and manual labor. The lovely part was, Kennedy had the right idea- SF and Peace Corps. Both the same job, two sides of the same quarter. One could be sent in publicly, the other clandestine. SF was originally designed around creating an insurgency, then building it to a state force. We have the manual, the guide. The problem is, that takes training, money, maturity, and time. It takes putting men to live in dangerous areas with nothing but their new friends and their wits. The key to defeating one is the same as building one. Most successful communist backed insurgencies realized this, and was exploited by the USSR to great success. Alexander in AFG- before entering what was AFG, he spent six months building his forces, and working diplomatically because he knew he couldn't win in a traditional way there. His subjugation of AFG was never total, he never truly went to war with them, and he still had an insurgency he never defeated. I'll probably have more to add later. E- the biggest issue is we train our leaders to be conventional thinkers when that is exactly who loses the war. bulletsponge13 fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 15:41
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Worth a watch, I disagree only slightly with some of this guys thinking. https://youtu.be/d3xlb6_0OEs
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Nov 27, 2022 16:02
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You have to define what counts as winning first. Insurgencies reflect a genuine gap in the country or cultures where some group of people want something to be different, and without genocide there’s not much of a way to end that without some kind of negotiation or pathway to change. If you want to define COIN as “the government gets everything it wants and doesn’t give anything up” then yeah, the only success stories are going to be genocide. If you want to look at places where there was a negotiated resolution that mostly keeps the government in place, then it’s always a judgement call over who got more. IMO Northern Ireland is an example of something skewed towards an insurgent victory, for example, but on the other side Colombia is closer to a government victory. Victory in COIN is messy because everything about insurgency is messy. Make sure you define your concepts up front.
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Nov 27, 2022 16:50
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LtCol J. Krusinski posted:The Roman’s absolutely committed cultural and literal genocide. Yeah, the Romans would conquer an area, and if the locals didn't get with the program, they'd slaughter and enslave until resistance disappeared. The only way to prevent this was to not let the Romans take a foothold in the first place, and is why people speak Germanic languages but not Etruscan and why Celtic languages were exterminated everywhere but in the British isles.
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Nov 27, 2022 17:42
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bulletsponge13 posted:Jakarta (to my limited knowledge) was not a successful counter insurgency. E- not sure topic I've read much on, but I recall the same insurgent group (or splinter) is still operating and not pacified, and the government forces resorted to genocidal type operations. I wanna thank you for this outstanding reply. I'm in agreement with it 100% on COIN. Thank you for also clarifying the Alexander The Great/Afghanistan situation for me. It clears up a fuzzy spot in my memory for sure. Gonna go off track for a quick second here on Jakarta. On Jakarta, I think you really gotta read The Jakarta Method book to see it my way on this. Honestly everyone here should pick it up because it makes an interesting argument: that the anti-communist mass murder programs we backed, from Indonesia onwards, were a major part of shaping the post Cold War world into the form it is today. We live in a capitalist world. We live in a globalized world. And maybe it would have been different if the Third World was allowed to negotiate with the first on remotely even terms. But they weren't. The task was difficult to begin with and it was made impossible by Washington, as far as I can tell from my limited reading. The way I understand it, US objectives at the time in Indonesia were twofold: cut the legs out from a united Third World (Sukarno brought them all together initially) and exterminate the third largest communist party in the world. They succeeded in both. There is no communist insurgency in Indonesia. Those who survived and were branded as communist are treated like utter poo poo to this day. The same beaches in Bali that the military and the people it incensed to kill slaughtered thousands on at night are the same ones white folks with tons of money are living it up on during their holidays and "vacays" during the day. Big business moved into Indonesia right after this went down, seamlessly. That book was a crazy read man, lemme tell you. I mean I read this book and I thought "this was Rwanda before Rwanda was even a thought." This didn't even come up at all on a class I had that covered these topics and the political reasons of why they happened. poo poo's wild to me. LtCol J. Krusinski posted:Worth a watch, I disagree only slightly with some of this guys thinking. I'm on it. Thanks shim, love ya fam. Notahippie posted:You have to define what counts as winning first. Insurgencies reflect a genuine gap in the country or cultures where some group of people want something to be different, and without genocide there’s not much of a way to end that without some kind of negotiation or pathway to change. If you want to define COIN as “the government gets everything it wants and doesn’t give anything up” then yeah, the only success stories are going to be genocide. Only a spoiled child gets what they want 100% of the time so definitely not that. In my view, the ideal situation is one where the host nation government is forced to reform sufficiently enough to remove the major reasons for insurgency and therefore reduce/prevent the probability of another one happening again. Like if we got an insurgency in a country, that means poo poo hasn't been right for a WHILE! Its time to make it right! So you work it with strategic communications, information operations, etc. to get the RIGHT message out and to find out what's needed and you make the appropriate legal changes to your regime. You reduce the insurgents power and appeal as much as possible. And while assassination sounds cool in the loving movies and in spy novels, its like bulletsponge13 said. Only I'd say you probably made 5-10 enemies for every wrongful death, 3 is a lowball number in my view. And that's before you consider what you are doing to your own people. The book The Phoenix Program starts with the description of a Phoenix Program hit job by one of the sources tapped for the book, a Navy SEAL by the name of Elton Manzione. He was the "hunter" part of a hunter-killer team out there in '64. And he gets his mission brief. Him and his SEALs are gonna go into a village. There's an AA gun there and they're told "ok here's the picture and the map of the village, here's dudes hooch. He sleeps here on the mat on the left side, he has two daughters. You (Manzione) are gonna snuff him." And the three of them all got their jobs. One's gonna find and blow the gun up, Manzione's gonna "snuff" the target, and the last member has a stoner MG and is gonna cover them in the village. They recon the poo poo for a day or two, establish pattern of life, whatever. Then they crawl into the village and do their jobs. Manzione, as it turns out, doesn't snuff the guy. Stabs one, shoot another when the gun blows up and they wake up. He killed two young girls that day. And "strung out on dexedrine and remorse" he went into the base's ammo dump, sat on a stack of ammo crates with a grenade between his leg (pin pulled) and a M-16 between his arms. And he didn't leave until they gave him a ride out of Vietnam. That's just one incident in the hosed up history of warfare, let alone just that war. I don't want more Manziones. Neither the bad intel that led to him doing what he did, nor the scene at the ammo dump, and definitely not the psychic scars that man is carrying in his mind to this day. If killing is done, COIN wise, IMO its the last resort not the expedient choice. Kill who is a clear and present danger, kill those who are politically relevant and irreplaceable (assuming killing is the only/best option in the first drat place). Find the nodes in the network, disrupt sufficient nodes in the network to render it useless, and take care of the people's grievances. Take care of them, PERIOD, or this is going to keep happening till the COIN forces political leadership withdraws them when the juice is no longer worth the squeeze. I would say the cases where the host nation govt wins 100% is because either the insurgents hosed up hilariously during the course of their insurgency, or because the government enacted a genocidal program to shut it down. And while the latter might preclude/chill the idea for an insurgency for a while, at best, the reasons for insurgency still exist. In the former case, the reasons for insurgency still exist unless the insurgents cause was so poo poo that they couldn't get popular support anyway. In which case, rip. Either way, what's changed legally and politically in the host nation in those two scenarios? There is of course the occasional case where the COIN forces actually made it happen and defeated the insurgency outright, but only two names have come across my desk on that. One is Malaya, the other is Oman. And I'm pretty sure reforms were made in each of those cases, iirc anyway. bulletsponge13 posted:America sucks at COIN because we will not invest the men and energy into it. We want to use tech and money where it takes hard work and manual labor. The lovely part was, Kennedy had the right idea- SF and Peace Corps. Both the same job, two sides of the same quarter. One could be sent in publicly, the other clandestine. SF was originally designed around creating an insurgency, then building it to a state force. We have the manual, the guide. The problem is, that takes training, money, maturity, and time. It takes putting men to live in dangerous areas with nothing but their new friends and their wits. The key to defeating one is the same as building one. Most successful communist backed insurgencies realized this, and was exploited by the USSR to great success. Wanted to come back to this because I didn't address this upfront in the post yet. Again, I'm in agreement. My question is this: if we were to deploy specifically trained COIN forces "for the duration" or, at minimum, tours of duty that were at least 2 years in length as opposed to 6mo to a year, would this help the matter? Can you keep "the boys" out there till the job is done or do you need to bring them back home? And if you gotta rotate people in and out, can you keep the turnover tight and effective so the next one up for the job isn't reinventing the wheel? Same level of service to the local population, minimal disruption to the equilibrium that the old unit fought hard to achieve and maintain. Regarding America's will to do COIN: I don't know if it'll ever be there. We like to act like we aren't imperialist but I'm pretty sure the historians call us out on it all the time. In that sense, aren't we the shittiest imperialists? Like stop for a second and think with me on this, rock with me on this. Let's suppose the hype we grew up with was bullshit and, mask off, we're really no different from all the colonial powers except for our method of keeping tabs on the "locals." We got our spheres of influence, we got our client states (dare a Latin American nation to step out of line that's not named Cuba and see what happens, historically. And we're still mad about the one that got away!), and we got our military adventurism. Isn't an empire supposed to conquer and like assimilate the conquered into itself? Wouldn't you want to be willing/have to commit to COIN in a world where conventional conquests are out of the question in the eyes of the international community? Wouldn't you necessarily need to become masters at the craft if you wanted to flip parts of the world red, white, and blue? That's one way I can roll with it. I wanna say the exact opposite and try to expand on that but I think I'd be lying to myself and everyone here. Latin America, the Philippines, Manifest loving Destiny, Vietnam, Iraq, Iran (before they threw us out and tbqh we'd go in if we thought we could do em), to name a few. We kinda hopped on the empire bandwagon on the low didn't we? TheWeedNumber fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 17:46
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Quick addendum. I searched for Indonesian insurgencies and this one's been happening before Suharto (starts under Sukarno) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_conflict. Then we got these guys in Aceh who were recentish but stopped in 2005 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurgency_in_Aceh. Just wanted to clarify the fact that insurgency can and does happen in Indonesia. And I gotta look at the Papua conflict a bit closer now. My point on Jakarta and the Jakarta Method (tactic and the book) still stands. We, the US, got what we paid for out of the bargain. We secured the biggest "domino" in Asia when that genocide went down and we hosed the Non Aligned Movement hard by removing Sukarno from the equation. It was a Cold War victory and a template for other such actions. I wouldn't call it COIN though because that poo poo is politicide at best. Really, its loving mass murder and its a crying shame so few people know about it in our country, especially what we did to support it wholeheartedly. And how happy we were at the end of it. Its perverse yall, it really is. Edit: something that I shoulda made clear initially but didn’t is the following difference. The PKI was unarmed and refused to arm itself despite being warned by Mao to do so. Same deal for Allende’s movement. Apparently the OPM in Papau New Guinea got hands (armaments really) tho and that’s probably why they are still alive as an insurgency though. PKI had no hands and got loving massacred. TheWeedNumber fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 18:05
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I'd like to take a moment to point out that the United States lost one of the most important COIN operations in history, one that started in 1865. Shortly after the Confederacy the Ku Klux Klan was formed in order to suppress the Black vote and pursue a policy of White Supremacy through violent terror. It quickly found legitimacy and political support in the South, and combined with the catechisms of the Lost Cause movement (edit) changed the entire narrative of the war and completely rewrote history (end edit). At first it was merely an axis of power in the South, but by the turn of the 20th century, it had spread outside of its home in former Dixie and had membership across the United States. By that point, violent action was no longer necessary to achieve their goals. White Supremacy was enacted by both legislative and judicial action, and enforcing that supremacy became possible with the legitimate actions of police agencies across every level of government. Woodrow Wilson's presidency meant that segregation became the law of every federal agency, securing a near total victory for the white supremacists. While the Klan was "destroyed" in 1874, all of its members were completely free to publicly pursue their agendas, suppress the vote, and turn out of office anyone with Republican sympathies. The Second Klan was born under the Wilson administration and was inspired by the mythology promulgated by the movie "Birth of A Nation". In the beginning it was mostly a social club for assholes to tell each other how smart and christian and moral their hatred was. Sure there were significant acts of violence during this period, but there was no directed agenda, as segregation was the law of the land and the vote was effectively suppressed. As a result without a strong need for a terrorist arm by the White Supremacist movement, the organization foundered and eventually disbanded during WWII. It wasn't until the Civil Rights movement that White Privilege felt attacked and the Klan would once again be resurrected, this time with the trappings of the second movement, but the impetus and violence of the first. Depending on the time and place, it has variously been tolerated, condoned, and prosecuted, but at no point has any serious undertaking been made to exterminate it. On January 6th we saw the white supremacist movement make a move to seize autocratic control of the United States. It failed, but again, we have failed to root it out. The only insurgencies the US has won are those where they employed Roman tactics, namely, the Native Americans and the various slave uprisings. A.o.D. fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 18:27
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A.o.D. posted:I'd like to take a moment to point out that the United States lost one of the most important COIN operations in history, one that started in 1865. Shortly after the Confederacy the Ku Klux Klan was formed in order to suppress the Black vote and pursue a policy of White Supremacy through violent terror. It quickly found legitimacy and political support in the South, and combined with the catechisms of the Lost Cause movement found At first it was merely an axis of power in the South, but by the turn of the 20th century, it had spread outside of its home in former Dixie and had membership across the United States. By that point, violent action was no longer necessary to achieve their goals. White Supremacy was enacted by both legislative and judicial action, and enforcing that supremacy became possible with the legitimate actions of police agencies across every level of government. Woodrow Wilson's presidency meant that segregation became the law of every federal agency, securing a near total victory for the white supremacists. While the Klan was "destroyed" in 1874, all of its members were completely free to publicly pursue their agendas, suppress the vote, and turn out of office anyone with Republican sympathies. The Second Klan was born under the Wilson administration and was inspired by the mythology promulgated by the movie "Birth of A Nation". In the beginning it was mostly a social club for assholes to tell each other how smart and christian and moral their hatred was. Sure there were significant acts of violence during this period, but there was no directed agenda, as segregation was the law of the land and the vote was effectively suppressed. As a result without a strong need for a terrorist arm by the White Supremacist movement, the organization foundered and eventually disbanded during WWII. It wasn't until the Civil Rights movement that White Privilege felt attacked and the Klan would once again be resurrected, this time with the trappings of the second movement, but the impetus and violence of the first. Depending on the time and place, it has variously been tolerated, condoned, and prosecuted, but at no point has any serious undertaking been made to exterminate it. On January 6th we saw the white supremacist movement make a move to seize autocratic control of the United States. It failed, but again, we have failed to root it out. Right on, right on brother. I got a book in my library on Reconstruction specifically for the conflict you’ve identified. The way my mentor laid it out for me, we had two revolutions in this country in 1776. The northern, liberal one, and the white supremacist southern one. And the two revolutions have never been truly reconciled. We paid the price for that during the Civil War, and we’re paying the price for it now. Another good book on the subject of America is Caste: The Origins of our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson. That’s a must read imo for everyone as an American. It’s not race that’s the issue, it’s that we have a caste system that’s been identified as being equivalent to India’s caste system and Nazi Germany’s caste system since we first got here. Research on it starts at least as early as 1916. poo poo’ll flip your worldview upside down. As far as COIN wins go for America, gotta throw in The Philippines, namely the Huk rebellion. Ed Landsdale saw to that and got brought into Vietnam to replicate his success there. He didn’t ofc but that’s a story for another day and another thread.
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Nov 27, 2022 18:37
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I'm gonna ruminate on this for a bit, and come back- I'll also respond to WeedNumber's question about possible solutions. Possible correction- if I recall my history right, Alexander never actually passified the insurgency, just did his best to keep it contained. It was a constant draw on his forces to occupy and passify. Something to look at is the insurgency from the other side- see what makes them successful, and look at the failed ones. The Soviets fostered and supported a bunch of successful ones in Africa and South America. COIN is hard because it goes against the military mindset. Hearts and Minds is nice rhetoric, and holds true; but we don't teach our troops civil affairs. We don't invest our leaders into thinking longer than their career. We focus on martial arts, not philosophy of martial arts. You cannot kill your way to victory. Insurgencies start because of deficits within their world and borders. Address those, and their is no support.
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Nov 27, 2022 19:37
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bulletsponge13 posted:I'm gonna ruminate on this for a bit, and come back- I'll also respond to WeedNumber's question about possible solutions. I gotcha. I'm gonna add, not just insurgent doctrine (Mao, Che, Mairghella to name a few) to my list, but also look for successful/failed insurgencies as well. This is really helpful to guiding how I approach the issue. Thank you for taking the time to respond and I look forward to your reply later on.
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Nov 27, 2022 19:45
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Would Northern Ireland count as a win? Armed insurrection largely ceased without achieving their biggest goals, UK retained most of their control. Maybe Front de libération du Québec in the 1960s? Lots of violent attacks but were unsuccessful and mostly arrested. Post-WWI Germany had a communist uprising that got squashed. Would highly recommend asking in our Milhist thread, those folks are experts and have provided detailed answers to my questions before: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3950461
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Nov 27, 2022 20:01
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bulletsponge13 posted:I'm gonna ruminate on this for a bit, and come back- I'll also respond to WeedNumber's question about possible solutions. Well, you can. But you have to be absolutely committed to the Roman definition of peace that means no one is left to fight you. You basically have to leave your own humanity behind.
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Nov 27, 2022 20:08
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Would Northern Ireland count as a win? Armed insurrection largely ceased without achieving their biggest goals, UK retained most of their control. I might go there next, but I felt more comfortable posting here first as I know this community and most of us stood the watch, so to speak. I think I'll go there in a week or so. There's also a professor of military history at the college I was directed to and I might tap him. Plus I got a professor and a Green Beret of my own in my back pocket to call up every now and then. The dude's busy but he takes my texts and calls and I get to chat him up monthly pro bono. Then there are the paid tutoring sessions once or twice a week when I'm active during a school semester, wherein we're turning and burning on some paper and he's a direct help to me there. On this issue, the more heads I got on it, the better though. You don't know what you don't know after all. A.o.D. posted:Well, you can. But you have to be absolutely committed to the Roman definition of peace that means no one is left to fight you. You basically have to leave your own humanity behind. And that's why I kept politely bringing up Jakarta. If you are soulless, you can do it. But you have to be willing to drop the population count of the "target group" to 0 to "win." Baconroll posted:A couple of British ones other than Malaya - the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s and the Borneo conflict in the 1960s. Just caught this as I was making edits. Thank you for the recommendation friend.
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Nov 27, 2022 20:21
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A couple of British ones other than Malaya - the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s and the Borneo conflict in the 1960s. Theres a couple of good books by General Frank Kitson who fought in some of the conflicts - "Gangs and counter gangs" is a classic. The full book is available here http://www.kalasnyikov.hu/dokumentumok/frank-kitson-gangs-countergangs.pdf
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Nov 27, 2022 20:21
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The Brits in the 18th and 19th centuries are case study after case study. Sure, they eventually lost the empire but that took centuries and there were a lot more victories than defeats in the process. Since their goal was generally extracting economic value from their possession they usually didn't resort to outright genocide in Africa and Asia. It seems like the most viable long-term game plan is working with groups of identifiable minorities and using them as proxies. That way the people nominally in charge aren't entirely illegitimate but know they can't maintain power without outside help. For the colonial power it's less of the mess that comes with direct intervention. Even in more recent times, by the time (usually the US in the last half century, but it applies more generally) deploys in any numbers it's because the the proxy option isn't working. There are plenty of cases where a larger power has effectively put a finger on the scale of a civil war or local insurgency, if it's just special operations in theater and financial/political/logistical/etc support for a local proxy does that count as COIN? That's constantly going on and going to get less attention than when the same strategy breaks down and has to be backed up with regular troops. Western Sahara and Papua/West Papua are a couple relatively recent insurgencies that are for the most part subdued at this point. AreWeDrunkYet fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Nov 28, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 22:00
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A.o.D. posted:Well, you can. But you have to be absolutely committed to the Roman definition of peace that means no one is left to fight you. You basically have to leave your own humanity behind. To my thinking, that's just kicking the can, unless you go full Carthage, and the only people left are yours- in the modern world, that isn't even an absolute certainty that would end it. That's the biggest issue already identified- what is victory? What is the definition? America can claim victory over the Vietnam Insurgency (largely considered to be the VC), because it ceased to exist after 68 due to planning by the PAVN- but it didn't defeat the insurgency. That's where it comes down- do you want to win the conflict, or do you want to defeat the insurgency? They are not the same thing. An insurgency doesn't need to win- they just have to NOT lose. Defeating them in the combat arena doesn't mean you won. It means you made them more effective by killing the dumb ones, and more vicious because they can be. You also expanded their recruiting, because it is incredibly difficult to only killing combatants on a clean, conventional field- in an insurgency, it's impossible. I think that's where it breaks down philosophically- in most cases, defeating the insurgency is secondary condition to victory. Many times, the COIN forces aren't invested in defeating the enemy, just winning over him, under the mistaken belief it works. Sorry, just more unfocused brain ramblings from a TBI riddled Grunty Grunt.
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Nov 27, 2022 22:25
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Would Northern Ireland count as a win? Armed insurrection largely ceased without achieving their biggest goals, UK retained most of their control. I personally wouldn't count NI as a win in the permanent sense, as it's more of an armistice. If the British government keeps loving around with forcing a hard border in NI, they're going to find out that the IRA didn't forget anything since the 1990's.
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Nov 28, 2022 01:20
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This has been a great thread already. Thom Barnett's framing of a SysAdmin policy (from the video, and his blog) will help with an answer to a bunch of "why are we doing this" struggles we've had in my team. Trying to explain why, to a generation not even born when these wars started has been failing. This framing of controlling or managing conflict rather than winning it is super unsatisfying for fighters I'm sure, but really resonates, and hopefully will be useful for your COIN paper. Keeping a lid on a bad situation, or helping ensure small fires do not become big ones sounds.... good.
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Nov 28, 2022 05:22
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i wish i had a proper good source to point to for this, but i think you can reasonably say that Russia has won its counterinsurgency following the Second Chechen War, by selecting one of the insurgents to be their chosen buddy insurgent. if you can't beat 'em, co-opt 'em! there is good, if not particularly objective, coverage of the background and ongoing efforts on both sides to continue or quell the fight. Galeotti also has a book that should provide a broader overview (haven't read it, but other books of his i had are well-researched). don't know of anything that covers the post-2010 solidified Kadyrov regime (the era when the insurgency is quite dead) in detail Tajikistan maybe more successfully prevented an insurgency from ever becoming a meaningful threat than defeated one following its civil war, but ensuring that one doesn't crop up has been an ongoing fixture of Rahmon's regime neither of these are, of course, US-style hearts and minds, build a friendly and functional regime approach, they're pacification through violent reprisal and deprivation--not exactly "kill 'em all", but hardly everyone reconciling their grievances and making nice onward to cooperative and mutually beneficial relationship Qtotonibudinibudet fucked around with this message at 09:26 on Nov 29, 2022 |
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Nov 29, 2022 09:22
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I appreciate everyone’s contributions to the thread. With regard to the latest poster to enter the thread, let’s not kid ourselves here. If the USG thought they could get away with it, or had a proxy to do it for them, they’d do the dirt. Appreciate the links. I’m gonna be busy reading until late January when school picks up. Thank you all again. Y’all are awesome.
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Nov 29, 2022 11:07
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a lot of it is terrain as well. Look into slave uprisings/escapes. Places like Jamaica had mountains covered in jungle that had escaped slave communities, as did swamps of the south. But if you got inland in the south there wasn't really a way to deal with a local militia on horseback in an area that's open farm land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaican_Maroons
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Dec 2, 2022 21:43
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Notahippie posted:You have to define what counts as winning first. Insurgencies reflect a genuine gap in the country or cultures where some group of people want something to be different, and without genocide there’s not much of a way to end that without some kind of negotiation or pathway to change. If you want to define COIN as “the government gets everything it wants and doesn’t give anything up” then yeah, the only success stories are going to be genocide. This is what I was going to say, because the FARC in Columbia came to mind but I don't know if it meets the requirement.
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Dec 2, 2022 21:51
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I recently read Black Spartacus by Sudhir Hazareesingh about Toussaint L'Ouverture and I would recommend the person of Toussaint but maybe not the book? It took me awhile to read due to the way his research and writing gave him bits and pieces of the man to piece together. It just made it really hard to read for me for some reason. The stories of the guy are fascinating, a true soldier and general, kicking the asses of the French, the Spanish, keeping the British in line and playing everyone off each other to make a united and free Haiti. He created an irregular army, through sheer force of personality and will he made them into a regular force capable of incredible logistics, absurd marches and ambushes and some quality fighting in grim conditions. I don't know if he won but it's a helluva battle
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Dec 6, 2022 01:34
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stackofflapjacks posted:I recently read Black Spartacus by Sudhir Hazareesingh about Toussaint L'Ouverture and I would recommend the person of Toussaint but maybe not the book? It took me awhile to read due to the way his research and writing gave him bits and pieces of the man to piece together. It just made it really hard to read for me for some reason. The stories of the guy are fascinating, a true soldier and general, kicking the asses of the French, the Spanish, keeping the British in line and playing everyone off each other to make a united and free Haiti. He created an irregular army, through sheer force of personality and will he made them into a regular force capable of incredible logistics, absurd marches and ambushes and some quality fighting in grim conditions. I don't know if he won but it's a helluva battle He won in that France was not able to re-enslave the Hatian people but there was nothing in his or any other Haitian's power to prevent France and later the United States from keeping Haiti impoverished and helpless for the next 230 years and counting.
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Dec 6, 2022 01:50
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Would something like the Eureka Rebellion count? It was nipped in the bud but iirc the followup went a long way to address the grievances that led to the rebellion in the first place.
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Dec 7, 2022 23:10
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LtCol J. Krusinski posted:Worth a watch, I disagree only slightly with some of this guys thinking. Watched this finally and it was well worth it. Gonna do a lot of reading over this week, up until school starts up.
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Dec 10, 2022 21:06
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I wrote a paper a million years ago for class on the failure of American COIN doctrine. One of the reasons I listed- and this is my own posit- that all of the successful ones had a cultural knowledge of the region in which they were fighting, along with a long standing history of cultural exchange. Most often this was in former colonies/colonial proxies, but I think there is a point there. America exports it's culture as a commodity to every region, but it doesn't take much in return. We don't have the experience of true colonization, and the institutional knowledge that comes from administration. Without that, we developed an artificial ego about the American Way™️, inflated by the fact America came through 2 World Wars largely unscathed. That Ego- and the money that comes with it- is what prolongs wars to the point of absurdity. It gives no incentive to the host to make real efforts; our method provides little for local objectives, and the fickleness of any US efforts means their isn't means for the local host to negotiate or find a peaceful end. Just making GBS threads out thoughts.
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Dec 10, 2022 22:44
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I’m bumping this since the course is live and I’m chatting about this in some form every Wednesday when I go to the professor’s office. What I’m gonna do at this point is pop in from time to time and tell you what I’m doing and what I’m learning as I go. I’ll drop google drive links if you wanna read what I’m reading. Bulletsponge13, imma hit you back with a reply soon. Sorry it took so long but I got you.
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Feb 4, 2023 02:31
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No response needed. Excited to see what you share.
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Feb 4, 2023 02:34
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bulletsponge13 posted:No response needed. Would enjoy hearing more as well.
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Feb 4, 2023 04:14
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