the dangerous myths and dubious promise of coin

This article was downloaded by: [Dicle University]On: 15 November 2014, At: 13:21Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Small Wars & InsurgenciesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fswi20

The dangerous myths and dubiouspromise of COINDouglas Porch aa Department of National Security Affairs , Naval PostgraduateSchool , Monterey, CA, USAPublished online: 20 Jun 2011.

To cite this article: Douglas Porch (2011) The dangerous myths and dubious promise of COIN, SmallWars & Insurgencies, 22:02, 239-257

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2011.574490

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fswi20

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2011.574490

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

The dangerous myths and dubious promise of COIN

Douglas Porch*

Department of National Security Affairs, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, USA

Counterinsurgency (COIN) has again emerged as a topic of bothcontemporary and historical interest in the age of what has been called aglobal counterinsurgency. However, little attention is being paid to thehistorical lineage of a COIN doctrine that is being rediscovered andpromoted by an enthusiastic group of military intellectuals and commandersas the basis for US Army and Marine Corps doctrine. This article argues thathistorical claims for COIN success, based on courting popular gratitude byimproving economic conditions, are at best anchored in selective historicalmemory, when not fantasy fabrications. The first argument of this article isthat COIN does not constitute a distinct form of warfare, but merely a sub-setof minor tactics. Second, ‘hearts and minds’, so-called population-centricwarfare, has seldom been a recipe for lasting stability. Rather, historicallycounterinsurgency succeeded when it has shattered and divided societies byseverely disrupting civilian life. In fact, COIN is a nineteenth century legacyof empire whose uniqueness and impact was mythologized in its own day,and that is unlikely to prove a formula for strategic success in the twenty-firstcentury.

Keywords: Counterinsurgency; COIN; small wars; colonialism

Counterinsurgency (COIN) has again emerged as a topic of both contemporary

and historical interest in the age of what has been called a global

counterinsurgency. However, little attention is being paid to the historical

lineage of a COIN doctrine that is being rediscovered by military organizations

and that has spawned its own latter-day priesthood, who argue that population-

centric, ‘hearts and minds’ doctrines offer a formula for success in winning over

people and places in the grip of terrorist organizations.1 But COIN is an old

formula whose current champions, among them Petraeus, McChrystal, Nagl,

Krepinevich and Killcullen, join an apostolic succession of COIN practitioners

that include Wolseley, Kitchener, Callwell, Pennequin, Gallieni, Lyautey, Briggs,

Templer, Kitson, Trinquier, Galula and Massu, to name but a few. Human Terrain

and Provincial Reconstruction Teams are the lineal descendants of the bureaux

arabes, created in the 1840s by the French to spearhead the pacification of the

Maghreb, and Britain’s Indian Political Service. The 2006 US Army / Marine

ISSN 0959-2318 print/ISSN 1743-9558 online

q 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2011.574490

http://www.informaworld.com

*Email: [email protected]

Small Wars & Insurgencies

Vol. 22, No. 2, May 2011, 239–257

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

Corps Field Manual FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency might be seen as the latest

legatee of Brigadier C.E. Callwell’s Small Wars, a primer on imperial warfare

written in 1896 and studied in the British Staff College into the 1920s, or French

Marshal and future Resident General of Morocco Hubert Lyautey’s Lettres de

Tonkin et de Madagascar, an animated tribute to enlightened methods of French

pacification in the 1830s based on ‘oil spot’ and ‘peaceful penetration’.2

For an enthusiastic group of military intellectuals and commanders, COIN

constitutes a profession of faith in an Enlightenment vision of man as a rational

being and in the Idea of Progress, to guide the insurgent-plagued populations to

the sunny uplands of stability and prosperity. However, doubts over whether

COIN will be able to deliver victory in Afghanistan,3 as well as the very tenuous

stability produced by the so-called ‘surge’ in Iraq, have generated a number of

COIN critics who argue that historical claims for COIN success, based on

courting popular gratitude by improving economic conditions, are at best

anchored in selective historical memory, when not fantasy fabrications.4

A second complaint is that COIN is a Western construct. Not only do COIN

theorists, in the words of American military historian Brian Linn, ‘project U.S.

values onto foreign populations’.5 In addition, they operate within the context of

liberal peace theory and its ‘single sustainable model of national success:

freedom, democracy, and free enterprise’,6 according to the 2002 US National

Security Strategy. Rather than a vehicle for modern state-building, COIN is

denounced as a revival of nineteenth century divide-and-rule imperialism

masquerading as state-building. And indeed, the conflicting approaches to

stabilization that emphasize either change and modernization, or reliance on

traditional tribal structures and institutions, replicates those between ‘improvers’,

who believed that economic development would demonstrate the benefits of

imperial rule and make colonial subjects easier to govern, and ‘traditionalists’,

who argued that tinkering with local practices offered a recipe for mutiny, dates

at least from the eighteenth century.

COIN’s rich history stretching over at least two centuries, can provide a

perspective, a reality check, a foundational investigation into the assumptions and

strategic context in which COIN has developed and in which it is applied. This

examination should help to remind strategists, planners, intelligence operatives,

politicians and others, that while insurgencies share certain common

characteristics, every insurgency plays out in a particular historical context, is

the product of a particular set of grievances, is shaped by unique ethnic,

geographic, resource, ideological and strategic factors that defy a formulaic

approach.

The first argument of this article is that COIN does not constitute a distinct

form of warfare, but merely a sub-set of minor tactics. Second, ‘hearts and

minds’, so-called population-centric warfare, has seldom been a recipe for lasting

stability. Rather, historically counterinsurgency succeeded when it has shattered

and divided societies by severely disrupting civilian life with updated versions of

Weyler’s and Kitcheners’ concentration camps, rechristened ‘regroupement’,

240 D. Porch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

‘internment’, ‘villagization’, ‘kampongs’ or ‘strategic hamlets’. In fact, COIN is

an anachronism, a nineteenth century legacy of empire whose uniqueness and

impact was mythologized in its own day, and that is unlikely to prove a formula

for strategic success in the twenty-first century.

The renewal of interest in COIN can be explained by at least three factors: the

re-emergence of an unresolved debate about the nature of the Vietnam War and

why the US military lost it; the rehabilitation of an imperial-vision in US foreign

policy in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the threat of a

globalized insurgency; finally, COIN can be seen as a bid by COIN theorists and

practitioners to define a mission and a doctrine that can be used as an organizing

principle for the US Army and Marine Corps in the absence of a conventional

threat. What links these three factors is a political agenda: COIN offers a strategy,

not to win wars abroad, but to pre-empt civilian control by cloaking an

adventurous, not to say reckless, interventionist foreign policy in the uplifting

guise of the ‘civilizing mission’.

COIN: past and present

That COIN gradually emerged as a separate category of warfare can be linked to

two historic factors: the professionalization of European warfare in the nineteenth

century, and the emergence of a coherent doctrine of subversion in the twentieth.

Western powers have been engaged in counterinsurgency operations at least

since the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula. The requirement to occupy the

Western Hemisphere from 1492, and later the Indian sub-continent, East Asia,

the trans-Caucasus region (sans Afghanistan), and Africa involved Western

powers in armed conflict, much of it irregular warfare. Early in the nineteenth

century, Western European soldiers came to understand that the type of warfare

they encountered in North Africa and India was qualitatively different than that in

Europe, at least outside of Spain during the Peninsula war. This distinction did

not always manifest itself in disproportions between fighting forces on the field,

however. For example, in India, especially the British encountered relatively

sophisticated indigenous resistance with technology that largely matched that of

the Europeans. In Algeria, Abd e-Kader organized a large army that required

defeating in pitched battle.

The problem was that even relatively advanced indigenous societies, like

those of China or India, lacked the administrative capacity or professionalized

officer corps to take full advantage of technology. Because Western armies relied

on locally recruited troops and allies, tactics abroad increasingly came to

replicate indigenous rather than European practices. Disease and geography were

often more formidable opponents than were the weapons of the indigenous

resistance. Battles were seldom decided on the basis of superior firepower alone,

and in fact the logistical requirements of heavy weapons like artillery made them

a positive disadvantage in remote and tumultuous terrain. Heavy weapons were

cumbersome, and volley firing failed to frighten off elusive raiders. Therefore,

Small Wars & Insurgencies 241

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

mobility and surprise usually brought greater dividends than did throwing a

weight of lead.

But tactics and operations are for naught if the strategy is flawed. Sir Garnet

Wolseley encouraged colonial commanders to seize what the enemy prized most.

But in primitive systems, there was often nothing decisive to seize that would at a

stroke break the back of the resistance. Thus conquest usually degenerated into

bitter campaigns of attrition and economic warfare – the razzia or ‘raid’ that was

elevated to a strategic principle by French General Thomas Bugeaud in Algeria in

the 1840s.

Wellesley may have been derided as a ‘Sepoy general’ by Napoleon, but his

India experience was not seen as a disqualifier for command in Europe. However,

the professionalization of European warfare in the nineteenth century left French

imperial soldiers with the feeling that the conquest and policing of empire was

professionally undervalued – a sub-war category and poor preparation for the

real deal on the European continent. Bugeaud sensed that in Algeria, he really

experienced something different – the Peninsula War minus Wellesley. Quite

apart from the tactical innovations mentioned above, imperial warfare had

acquired a brutality anchored in racism. But there was also a recognition that

conquest would require governance. Therefore, the political dimension of

warfare was pushed down to the company level, where even junior officers were

expected to participate in the work of pacification and reconstruction.7

The creation and expansion of the bureaux arabes and Indian Political Service,

both militarized organizations despite their political and administrative functions,

offered a recognition that military success required an understanding of the

cultural and political context in which colonial campaigns were fought as well as

the provision of a foundation for post-conquest stability.

Yet critics complained that proficiency in imperial warfare was bought at the

expense of preparation for Continental conflict. Of no country was this more true

than France, where France’s 1870 defeat brought simmering resentment of the

armee d’Afrique to the surface – the ‘African Mutual Admiration Society’ whose

marginal military skills failed to decelerate their rapid promotion, who cultivated

a quasi-bohemian negligence in dress, and who waddled over the drill field like

gaggles of Canada geese. British historian Richard Holmes argues that ‘Africans’

unfairly took the rap for Paris’ Franco-Prussian debacle, the consequence of

multiple systemic and leadership problems in the French army. However,

cognoscenti scapegoated the decades of experience in raids and skirmishes in

Algeria and Mexico that in their view had left ‘African’ generals both complacent

and ill-equipped to manage large, articulated, multi-arm forces armed with

modern weapons that required campaign plans, precise orders and sizable staffs

to implement them, and logistics adequate to sustain them in the field. Badly

outnumbered French infantrymen equipped for imperial expeditions went into

battle loaded like tinkers’ donkeys, bivouacked in the open as in Algeria instead

of billeting in civilian homes, and launched ragged bayonet charges against well

disciplined German troops armed with breech-loading rifles as if they were

242 D. Porch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

musket-toting Muslims. Cavalry failed to scout and became tangled and out of

position on the battlefield. French artillery – composed of bronze, rifled muzzle-

loaders – was hopelessly archaic, totally outranged, and appallingly organized.

In short, France’s proud imperial army was clueless about how to fight a modern,

industrial conflict.8

The foundation of the post-1871 French military renaissance rested on the

assumption that metropolitan and colonial warfare constituted separate categories

of conflict. The new organization required that the French consign imperial

defense to professional French volunteers and colonial mercenaries, retaining

conscripts for homeland service. The Metropolitan and Colonial armies

formalized their separation in 1900.

The French view that imperial warfare bore no operational lessons for its

Continental counterpart were shared in Germany, although American historian

Isabel Hull argues that ‘the drift to extreme treatment of civilians’ by German

soldiers in Europe in two world wars was impacted by the imperial experience.

German soldiers acquired a suspicion and fear of insurgency in occupied France

in 1870–1871 that transitioned through the colonies to return home as ‘race war’.

Vague ‘mission orders’ that set an objective and gave subordinates a free hand to

achieve it, a lack of supervision in the a dispersed colonial combat environment,

reliance on the ‘officers’ military virtues or character traits’ to curb excessive

violence, lack of civilian control of the military, and absence of coherent policy in

wartime all contributed to the evolution of a German military culture that became

notorious for its mistreatment of civilians in occupied areas generally.9

It followed therefore that in the colonies, the Germans developed no ‘indirect

rule’ practices, but subjected populations to the direct authority of soldiers who,

as representatives of the German state, had a duty to crush opposition.10

The 1900 divorce in France implied that the metropolitan and colonial armies

were worlds apart in spirit, the metropolitan army Prussianized, bureaucratized,

‘a citadel of every routine, of every stupidity’, according to Lyautey, which he

contrasted with the initiative and creativity found in the colonial abroad. On the

other hand, Lyautey fumed that his ‘oil spot’, ‘progressive penetration’, and

‘combination of politics with force’ prescriptions were deprecated as ‘twaddle’

peddled by ‘men (e.g. Lyautey) fearful of war’.11 The problem in the long term

with the 1900 reorganization was that, while war and society became increasingly

entwined on the Continent, the Clausewitzian bond between state, society, and

use of force was severed in the colonies.

Liberated from Clausewitzian constraints, colonial soldiers were free to

characterize their brand of warfare in Jominian terms. In the 1890s, Callwell and

Lyautey defined a ‘small wars school’, which emphasized not only the nobility of

imperial soldiering, but also its unique requirements. Callwell argued that small

war constituted ‘an art by itself’ that required considerable tactical flexibility,

unlike what he categorized as the ‘stereotyped system’ prevalent in Europe.12

Lyautey publicized the ‘oil spot’ and ‘combining politics with force’ methods of

Generals Pennequin and Gallieni, not only as an effective intelligence collection


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

enterprise, but also as steps to bestowing the benefits of a pax Gallica on the

colonized.13

Efforts to separate colonial warfare from its conventional counterpart were

calculated to bolster the image of colonial soldiering as a unique calling and a

specialized category of conflict. It also sought to neutralize the intrusion of the

national government into the management of imperial conquest, an infringement

impelled by public anxiety over scorched-earth tactics and concentration camps

that characterized turn of the twentieth century wars in South Africa, Cuba and

the Philippines, as well as the reckless expansionism of imperialists – including

Lyatuey’s own unsanctioned invasion of eastern Morocco – willing to risk major

war to absorb remote, revenue draining regions into empire. This clash of

competing imperialisms escalated, or threatened to escalate, conflicts beyond the

‘small wars’ category at Faschoda, in South Africa, Manchuria, and Morocco at

the turn of the twentieth century. So, COIN became both a public relations

exercise and a ‘tactic in a box’ to market foreign expansion as both effortless and

low risk. COIN offered a win-win formula that would both proliferate the

influence of the homeland and benefit the local populations, who would see

invasion as a ‘liberation’ – plus ca change!

The problem on the ground, however, was that expansion confronted soldiers

with the old dilemma of seeking to modernize societies or respecting ‘tradition’,

a tension that lies at the heart of COIN. And in truth, COIN practitioners tried to

play it both ways. French soldiers in the Western Sudan tolerated slavery because

abolition would alienate powerful interests and undermine the basis of French

military efficiency, which hinged on giving their indigenous allies carte blanche

to slave raid.14 Advocates of ‘indirect rule’, like Sir Frederick (Lord) Lugard and

Lyautey equated the ‘modernization’ of non-Western cultures with contami-

nation and destabilization – what today is denounced as ‘social engineering’ that

seeks to alter governance practices, the official economy and legal codes that run

counter to indigenous cultural norms and so court rejection.15 The fundamental

problem was that many of the ‘traditional’ hierarchies the organizers of the post-

Mutiny Raj, Fulani, and Morocco looked to shore up were opportunistic creations

anchored in romanticized Western visions of a changeless indigenous society that

had far more to do with the conservative political opinions of Lugard and Lyautey

than with an accurate understanding of indigenous societies.

At the same time, Lyautey’s ‘peaceful penetration’, which consisted of

creating subsidized local markets to lure tribesmen into French posts where

officers could collect intelligence, bribe the right people, showcase the benefits of

stability, and ‘show force so you won’t have to use it’, also failed to ‘dissolve the

resistance’ as theory predicted. On the contrary, ‘peaceful penetration’ proved a

highly destabilizing enterprise because it dislocated trade patterns, alienated

powerful economic interests, and because ‘collective punishments’ for attacks or

even robberies tended to fall on near-to-hand natives who ‘must have known’.16

244 D. Porch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

Mao’s People’s War and the birth of COIN

A second factor that contributed to the elevation of COIN into a stand-alone

category of warfare was the globalization of insurgency following the Great War,

first as an anti-imperial, nationalist phenomenon, and subsequently as a theory of

subversion anchored in a communist-inspired ‘people’s war’. The Versailles

peace touched-off an era of nationalist-inspired insurrections in Ireland, North

Africa, the Near East, Indo-China, China, and India. Few of these insurrections

were countered by what might be called ‘hearts and minds’ tactics, although

some – like the 1925 Druze Revolt – were triggered by them.17 Lyautey’s

meticulously constructed pacification strategy collapsed with the eruption of the

Rif rebellion into the French zone in 1925, which found him begging French

Prime Minister Paul Painleve for permission to use poison gas on his erstwhile

collaborators, a request that accelerated his replacement by Philippe Petain, the

master of conventional warfare. Lyatuey’s ‘combination of politics with force’

also failed utterly when imported into Syria by his disciples, which caused the

French there to fall back on house demolitions, deportations, and air

bombardment to regain control.

But it was Mao’s assertion – that if properly organized and sequenced,

insurgency can produce strategic results – that turned these post-1918 nationalist

rebellions into an orchestrated communist threat to the West’s ‘civilizing

mission’. Mao’s treatise offers fragmentary reflections on the state of his conflict

with Chiang Kai-shek rather than a recipe book for the successful pursuit of

victory through the sequencing of a strategic three-stage progression. Some

scholars suggest that many passages are ghost written or plagiarized because they

lack the verbose, histrionic style of Mao’s political writings. He had scant

military experience or knowledge before the late 1930s. His reputation as the

father of modern insurgency was constructed in the wake of the 1949 communist

victory in China, fruit of the Japanese invasion, Chiang’s weak warlord political

base, and Soviet assistance from Manchuria rather than to the success of any

three-stage revolutionary grand strategy. Mao’s willingness to take credit for the

accomplishments of others, the cult of personality built around the ‘great man’,

the Chinese tradition of showering military and civic accolades on the leader, as

well as the desperate search on the Left for a liberation blueprint account for his

elevation into the stratosphere of major strategists.18 However, in the wake of the

1949 Communist victory in China and the onset of the cold war, his writings were

nevertheless interpreted as a unified theory of la guerre revolutionnaire.

A unitary canon and blueprint for insurgency required a doctrinal counter-

insurgent response – COIN. Given more than a century of experience with

colonial pacification, the evolution of the bureaux arabes into an intelligence

service and eventually the Sections Administratives Specialisees (SAS) during

the Algerian War of 1954–1962, the iconic status of Lyautey’s ‘peaceful

penetration’ and his insistence on ‘indirect rule’ as the foundation of imperial

governance, the French nevertheless acquired during the course of their


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

post-1945 wars in Indo-China and Algeria a reputation for impatience, racism,

brutality and failure. On the other hand, this outcome is less surprising if one

realizes that ‘small wars’ were also considered unlimited ones. This was

especially the case for officers of the 5e (psychological operations) bureau who

believed that they were waging a guerre totale against a communist-inspired

insurgency, one in which it was difficult to distinguish friend from foe. Without

intelligence, the French resorted to torture and ‘resettlement’, which French

historian Vincent Joly argues created ‘a popular consensus among Muslims for

independence’.19 In their eagerness to defeat la guerre revolutionnaire French

officers overlooked the fact that Mao’s writings were inspired by Clausewitz,

while their response consisted of Jominian-like tactics.

Surprisingly, given the French lack of success and the general aversion of

American conservatives for anything claiming French provenance, the latest US

Army / Marine Corps Field Manual FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency claims to take

inspiration in part from a French veteran of the Algerian war, David Galula. John

Arquilla, Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, goes even further, arguing

that the Marshal Suchet in Spain, Bugeaud in Algeria, and Gallieni in Tonkin

respectively pioneered three tactical concepts he believes central to the success of

contemporary COIN: Information Operations (IO), ‘swarm tactics’, and ‘the need

to understand how networks fight – and how to build networks of one’s own’.20

However, those who laude pioneering French tactical precedents and proclaim

Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare the bible of low-intensity operations have

never stopped to ask if, had his prescriptions been applied, we would still be able

to locate Algerie Francaise on a map?21 In fact, nothing in Galula’s

recommendations, all of which are tactical and operational (or borderline bizarre

like ‘promoting women’s rights to counteract support for the insurgents’)22 in

keeping with COIN traditions, would have led to a French victory because Paris

put forward no viable policy to convince Muslims to remain part of la metropole.

But Galula is simply the preamble for the true unfinished business that

inspires what is being referred to as the COIN–dinista school: the US defeat in

Vietnam. Fundamental to the COIN–dinista ideology is the US Army’s alleged

institutional aversion to counterinsurgency. The assertion continues that the

Army has failed to digest the lessons of COIN, despite being handed

counterinsurgency tasks on several occasions, beginning with Vietnam. When

JFK sought to expand Special Forces in the US Army in preparation for what he

anticipated would be a ‘below the threshold of war’ challenge by Moscow, he met

resistance from Army Chief of Staff General George Decker, who argued that

‘any good soldier can handle guerrillas.’ Decker’s statement is frequently cited as

an example of how profoundly out of touch the US military leadership was with

COIN on the verge of intervention in Vietnam.23 On the other hand, for men of

Decker’s generation, Churchill’s vision of ‘setting Europe ablaze’ by mobilizing

swarms of partisans supported by Special Operations forces had proven the great

strategic bust of World War II.

246 D. Porch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

But the COIN–dinista narrative holds that in Vietnam the US military paid

the price of its willful ignorance. The charge that in Vietnam the United States

confronted an insurgency, which the US military totally misread and mishandled,

was most forcefully put by Andrew Krepinevich in his 1986 book, The Army and

Vietnam.24 Not only was the US military led by cold warriors focused on

conventional conflict in the Fulda Gap, he argued, but more urgently, their

unwillingness to learn from defeat was reinforced by Harry Summers’ 1982 book

On Strategy,25 which short-circuited ‘institutional learning’ with the argument

that the US Army had taken a ‘direct approach’ in Vietnam by trying to defeat the

guerrillas, rather than adopting an ‘indirect,’ population centered strategy.26

Could such a line of attack logically aspire to any outcome but failure?

Indeed, the COIN–dinista gospel asserts that there is a right and wrong way

to fight insurgencies. If the French proved to be too brutal and the US military

was too structurally conventional and firepower focused, the British developed

the correct balance between persuasion and force. Thus, while COIN–dinistas’

shared memory starts with Vietnam, their historiography begins with Tom

Mockaitis’s 1990 British Counterinsurgency, which basically argues that

following the disasters of Amritsar in 1919 and the 1921 loss of Eire, London

institutionalized the idea of ‘minimum force’, civil-military cooperation / ‘aid to

the civil’, and tactical flexibility based on decentralized decision-making in their

counterinsurgency operations. These principles were reinforced in official

writings and staff colleges that allowed the British to avoid the brutal excesses

of French counterinsurgency or the firepower-intensive approach of the

United States in places like Vietnam. These refinements brought successes in

Malaya and Kenya especially, mythologized by COIN–dinistas as the Austerlitz

and Jena-Auerstadt of ‘hearts and minds’.27

COIN met ‘organizational learning’ in Richard Downie’s 1998 Learning

from Conflict, which argues that COIN is a canon that has to be transmitted from

generation to generation via ‘institutional learning’. But not all institutions are

amenable to these lessons. Despite the US Army’s COIN experience in Vietnam

and El Salvador, the institution is simply too large and bureaucratic to develop a

‘learning cycle’ that allowed it to ‘build a consensus’ to adapt its doctrine to the

exigencies of counterinsurgency warfare.28

COIN and the ‘End of History’

These books might have remained interesting, if in my view deeply flawed,

exercises in interpreting the past, had it not been for the rise of neo-imperialism in

the 1990s that provided the intellectual climate that, following the 9/11 attack on

the United States, has jump started the COIN renaissance. Such neo-imperialists

as Max Boot, Robert Kaplan, Niall Ferguson, and the liberal internationalist

Joseph Nye have argued that the requirement for international order compels the

West led by the United States once again to take up the ‘White Man’s Burden’,

predicting that the universal appeal of Western values and institutions will cause


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

right-thinking non-Western peoples to welcome occupation as a liberation.

Ferguson, a talented and articulate historian, reaches into the past to correct the

narrative of empire as the exploitation of non-indigenous peoples. Instead, he

argues that the British Empire was a modernizing enterprise that imported the

rule of law, free markets, financial stability, and relatively incorrupt government

to areas of the world that before had known none of it. He attributes the

pervasiveness and quasi-universal acceptance of Western models of civilization

not only to their superiority, but also to the fact that empire was a globalizing

endeavor that exported Western knowledge and culture, European languages,

institutions, and capital and whose ultimate impact was to benefit minorities and

women, and to create an indigenous constituency for occupation through access

to educational and commercial opportunities, without which empire would have

become unsustainable.29

The new ‘civilizing mission’ requires a doctrine to implement it – the

‘end of history’ opened the door to a group of young US officers who see

counterinsurgency as a mission set and who offer COIN as a doctrine around

which the US military can organize, much as British officers in the nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries embraced the preservation of empire as their raıson

d’etre. John Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife blends Mockaitis and

Downie to resurrect the 1970s debate about the nature of the Vietnam War. Nagl

argues that Briggs and Templer blazed a counterinsurgency trail in Malaya

‘after conventional strategy failed’ with a formula that, had it been applied in

Vietnam, could have led to victory for the Americans there. The British

were more adaptable in counterinsurgency than was the larger US Army because

it was ‘a small quasi-tribal collection of regiments’, for whom Callwell’s

Small Wars and its successors – Charles Gwynn’s Imperial Policing (1934) and

H.J. Simson’s British Rule and Rebellion (1937) – became staff college staples

into the post-World War II years.30

Nagl’s arguments are echoed by Australian COIN expert David Kilcullen,

who, in his 2010 The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a

Big One, repeats the mantra that counterinsurgency constitutes a special category

of warfare carried out in a globalized environment. The need to solicit local buy-

in requires different configurations of institutions to implement different

‘strategies’.31 ‘Population-centric warfare’ will induce many guerrillas who join

on a lark to desert or demobilize. Unfortunately, Kilcullen ignores the fact that

although de Gaulle got some high-level takers for his paix des braves, it made no

difference whatsoever to the outcome in Algeria, any more than did very

successful campaigns of raillements collectifs and individuels.32 His praise of the

bottom-up tribal-based nation-building in Iraq is Lyautey lite.33 Kilcullen also

promotes the value of military assistance as a tool of national building (although

to paraphrase a question asked in Vietnam, why is the Taliban able to recruit the

Prussians, leaving the Coalition with the Bavarians?).

There are several problems with the COIN–dinista arguments, but let’s begin

by challenging the Mockaitis-Nagl assertion that the British military broke the

248 D. Porch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

code on counterinsurgency in the inter-war years and managed to become an

exemplary ‘learning organization’ that transmitted its ‘minimum force / aid to the

civil’ wisdom through the generations. The British army did not have a

particularly exemplary record at COIN or at any warfare, for that matter, at the

time of Malaya. It had been run out of Ireland in 1921 – not as Mockaitis states,

because they failed to coordinate an effective COIN program until the spring of

1921, by which time it was too late.34 In fact, British COIN in Ireland combined

tactical success with strategic disaster. Michael Collins admitted that the IRA was

‘dead beat’ by June 1921. But the program of collective reprisals, house burnings,

internment, and other COIN refinements crystallized support for separation

among Irish Catholics while it undermined backing for Lloyd George’s ‘mean and

unnecessary war’ among a British public shamed by the excesses of the Black and

Tans and the Auxiliaries.35 The British held on against the pre-war Arab revolt in

Palestine through a combination of brutal COIN tactics, political concessions,

and the support of the Zionists, who subsequently turned on them after the war.36

Both Aden and Cyprus were failures. In The Politics of the British Army, Hew

Strachan argues that victories in British colonial campaigns were bought with

timely political concessions, not earned through the efficiency of British COIN

tactics.37

Claims of COIN success rest on wobbly historical foundations: Strachan

notes that ‘aid to the civil’ was not imperial practice. Rather, a fusion of civil and

military authority was the rule in post-Mutiny India because the army was

recognized as the central pillar of British power in places where British presence

was not welcomed. Gwynn’s Imperial Policing and Simson’s British Rule and

Rebellion both argue the benefits of martial law in the face of insurgency because

police tactics were insufficiently aggressive. (Martial law also served to pre-empt

imperial administrators too quick to offer political concessions, in this view.)

Both insist that the civil power should back the military, not vice-versa.38

Imperial practice was to fuse police and army roles into a ‘paramilitary’ approach

to order.

Nor must ‘population centric’ warfare be confused with ‘population friendly’

– Kitson’s Low Intensity Operations follows the trend set by Gwynn and Simson

that saw civil disorder as part of a continuum of defiance that escalates through

peaceful protests to war.39 Galula agreed with Kitson that, ‘inwardly you must

consider (every civilian) as a rebel ally until you have positive proof to the

contrary.’40 An attitude that placed the onus on civilians to prove that they did not

support the insurgency was a mindset that contributed to the institutionalization

of collective punishment, torture, ‘resettlement’, internment, ‘special night

squads’ / ’ferret forces’ / ’counter-gangs’, and RAF terror bombing for imperial

policing. The key to success was to rebrand these kinetic methods as ‘hearts and

minds’ and prosecute it out of public view. Because once international opinion

became involved, as in South Africa in 1900, Ireland (twice), post-war Palestine,

Algeria, Vietnam and Nicaragua, then the COIN–dinistas ran smack into a PR

problem.


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

As for national styles of counterinsurgency, Chris Bayly and Tim Harper

writing of decolonization in Southeast Asia and David Anderson’s masterful

book on the Mau Mau have revealed them as wars every bit as repressive – even

‘dirty’ – as those fought by the French.41 Rather than win by applying Mockaitis’

three COIN principles, Bayly and Harper argue that from 1950, Templer cleaned

up a conflict that had already been won by using far more repressive methods,

notably the deportation of an estimated 16,000 ‘communists’ to Nationalist

China, where most surely were executed. Cooperation between the ‘police’ – an

amalgamation of deeply loathed constables imported from Palestine, some of

whom had actually served in the Black and Tans, and ad hoc formations of settler

volunteers – and the army was notable by its absence. The police were seldom

present on operations. Thus ‘support to the civil’ actually left soldiers less

constrained than had they operated under the laws of war.42

British COIN strategy also made little attempt to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of

the Kikuyu population in Kenya, but instead resorted to collective punishments,

especially forced ‘villagization’, in which over a million Kenyans were locked into

what is described as ‘little concentration camps’. This method arose in a war in

which official executions, extra-judicial killings, and incarcerations, Anderson

estimates, exceeded anything carried out by the Dutch in Indonesia or the French

in Algeria.43

So if the British army was not practicing a population-centric version of

COIN, how could it be, as John Nagl argues, an ‘efficient learning organization’

that cultivated an attitude that they must ‘correct quickly the things that are

wrong’ because it was small and had a culture honed in colonial wars?44 In fact,

the charge against the British army was that it was very slow to adapt because it

lacked solid leadership and a tradition of operational and tactical problem-

solving. ‘Indifferent’, ‘amateur’, ‘the mockery of the world’, are some of the

kinder descriptions that Max Hastings applied to World War II British generals.45

Of course, he was referring to the British army’s wooden approach to

conventional operations, which are more difficult to coordinate than counter-

insurgency ones. But it is not clear that regimental-centric decentralization made

the British any more adaptable in imperial police actions. When married to

paramilitary organizations of settlers in Malaya and Kenya (many of whom, as

had been the case with the notorious Black and Tans in Ireland, were former

military), decentralization, far from facilitating ‘organizational learning’, too

often translated into a lack of supervision, lapses of discipline, racist attitudes,

and abuse of the population – as General ‘Bobbie’ Erskine discovered upon his

arrival in Kenya in June 1953.46

It is also difficult to square Nagl’s ‘organizational learning’ argument with

the poor, not to say disastrous, performance of the British army during its early

years in Northern Ireland. In a June 2010 article, Sandhurst instructor Aaron

Edwards argues that ‘minimum force’ and unity of civil-military control were

treated as foreign concepts in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1976, which

contributed to the notorious ‘Bloody Sunday’ incident of 1972. Deferring to

250 D. Porch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

‘political control’ was interpreted as giving the Protestant militias a free pass,

which transformed the British army from the savior of the Catholic population to

the target of the IRA, whose popular support had ballooned as a result of clumsy

and repressive COIN tactics.47 Nor did the British army display a particular

aptitude as a ‘learning organization’ capable of adapting its COIN experience to

the troubles to hand. In fact, the only COIN ‘lessons’ that theorists led by Frank

Kitson managed to introduce, at least in the eyes of the Catholics, was ‘collusion,

counter gangs, dirty tricks, . . . manipulation of the media, the criminal justice

system and the apparatus of the state’.48 This perception, even if biased, hardly

constitutes tactics designed to increase the legitimacy of the state.

Conclusion

What are the important takeaways about COIN? First, the claim that COIN

constitutes a separate category of warfare, one made at least since the 1890s, is

contentious at best. Tactically and operationally, colonial warfare required units

designed for mobility, an ability to conduct independent small unit actions, and to

master logistical challenges over great distances. Beyond that, the ‘hearts and

minds’ strategies based on the self-advertised ‘cultural knowledge’ required for

the ‘peaceful penetration’ and governance of colonial territories came down to

nothing more than the application of an Orientalized Western view of societies as

changeless structures that had either to be ‘improved’, or preserved from

contamination, depending on the political views of the officer-administrator.

Modern COIN writings have followed these nineteenth century trail blazers in

that they emphasize the political character of their ‘population centric,’

‘information warfare’, ‘phase four’, hearts and minds’, ‘aid to the civil’, and so

on, tactics. But like their imperial predecessors, modern COIN–dinistas are

basically romantics who apply paternalistic theories onto populations that will be

grateful for their improved conditions, and who will reject the bad actors in their

midst.

But none of the ‘info war’, ‘hearts and minds’, ‘population centric’ accretions

of modern COIN contradict Decker’s assertion that, ‘any good soldier can handle

guerrillas’. Those uninformed by history too often assume that COIN missions

are more complex than more ‘straightforward’ conventional wars.49 The truth,

however, is that historically COIN-centric armies have had trouble adapting to

conventional operations, not vice versa. This was the problem of the French army

in 1870, and the British in two world wars, because fragmented, regimentalized

forces designed for ‘sovereignty operations’ lack a structure to become top-down

‘learning organizations’, or to channel and assimilate bottom-up lessons learned.

Krepinevich argues that the US Army in Vietnam failed to make the transition

from conventional to COIN, and so lost. Of course, this begs the question of

whether it was in the interest of an army whose primary mission throughout the

Vietnam War years was to deter the Warsaw Pact in Northern Europe to

reorganize as a COIN-centric force? But even had it done so, what difference


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

would it have made to the outcome in Vietnam, where the real problem was not

US tactics, but the strategic context in which the war was fought? Neither a

tactical or operational adjustment nor lashings of security assistance was going to

buck up a corrupt and illegitimate South Vietnamese government and its

morale-challenged military in the face of an enemy who enjoyed an inviolate

sanctuary, legitimacy, solid political and military leadership, a motivated and

adaptable military force, a command economy, two powerful allies who supplied

diplomatic cover and virtually unlimited resources, and who had the winds of

history at their backs. Meanwhile, ‘conventional’ US forces have adapted rather

quickly to the tactical requirements of ‘small wars’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, even

as strategic success remains elusive.50

In the final analysis, Callwell’s definition of COIN as ‘an art by itself’

basically boils down to a mastery of small unit tactics, the acquisition of tactical

Intel (which is really what ‘hearts and minds’ is about), and a capacity to drink

endless glasses of tea with tribal sheiks as they exact their price for cooperation.

The advantage of so-called ‘population-centric’ approaches is that they shift the

strategic focus from whether a stability and reconstruction commitment benefits

the homeland, to its supposedly positive impact on a grateful local population.

Since the 1830s when French politicians suggested terminating the occupation of

Algiers, calls for withdrawal invariably meet objections that retreat will sacrifice

in-country collaborators, benefit the ‘terrorists’, betray our dead, and advertise

the lack of backbone at home – in short, a stab-in-the-back. That proponents for

‘staying the course’ in Iraq and Afghanistan present COIN as a comprehensive

political-military strategy for realizing national objectives speaks to their angst

over defeat in Vietnam, and their search for a mission and a doctrine to unify the

US military.

The contention that COIN be considered in its own conflict category is rooted

in a rejection of the Clausewitzian character of war in favor of a Jominian

approach with tactics and operational methods substituting for policy and

strategy. In Algeria, French soldiers became very proficient COIN–dinistas, and

lost. Their default position was predictably that they were stabbed in the back by

President Charles de Gaulle and the French people. But in the judgment of a

French historian of that conflict, the army’s psyops program was ‘a mediocre PR

campaign cobbled together by amateurs’ who spoke neither Arabic nor Berber,

who had confused and contradictory notions about the nature of Muslim society,

and who ‘applied their Indochina nostalgia to the Algerian problem’.51

COIN offers a doctrine of escapism – an escape from civilian control, even

from modernity, into an anachronistic, romanticized, Orientalist vision that

projects quintessentially Western values onto non-Western societies. Strategic

goals like exporting ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ abroad are at best vague, when

not totally destabilizing, policy prescriptions around which to reorder society.

Even Iraq, a relatively developed country, lacks the expertise and institutions to

invest, track and manage large infusions of capital to apply ‘free enterprise’

notions of development, even if they understood them. In the first decade of the

252 D. Porch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

twenty-first century, nation building is no longer carried out between states that

share similar political traditions, economic structures, and national aspirations to

play a vital role in the international system. In short, ‘stability and reconstruction’

as practiced today no longer seeks to implement your grandfather’s Marshall

Plan – a state-to-state engagement applied by people who believed in the power

of government to do good works. Today, ‘Stability and Reconstruction’ is

outsourced to NGOs and international corporations like Halliburton, DynCorp,

the Rendon Group, and Blackwater. Rather than strengthen and modernize the

state, this quasi-privatized nation building actually bypasses, undermines and

diminishes it, when billions of dollars go missing, the arbitrary power of war

lords is enhanced, and politicians appeal to sectarian divisions. Meanwhile the

actions and attitudes of policemen and soldiers often decrease the legitimacy of

the state, which in turn is unable to provide basic services or improve security and

economic conditions. In short, the complaint is that the chaotic world of

outsourced state-building deprives COIN of a strategic framework for success, so

that it becomes merely a catch-bag of tactics and operational concepts mustered

to achieve an incomprehensible and even undesirable strategic objective for most

of the population.52

All of this underlines the requirement for historians to continue to establish

the factual record so that mythologized versions of the past are not offered as a

formula for the future. Theories based in shoddy research and flawed and

selective analysis of cases are not only ahistorical. They can lead to people

getting killed because they fail to convey that each insurgency is a contingent

event in which doctrine, operations, and tactics must support a viable policy and

strategy, not the other way around.

Last, my guess is that we are on the downside of COIN for a variety of

reasons, beginning with the fact that the ‘liberal peace’ justification for

intervention is becoming less attractive to Western populations, if for no other

reason that it has become horribly expensive. Resistance to modernity is

becoming more fanaticized and globalized, less ‘accidental’, and consequently

more robust. Historically COIN succeeds, at least temporarily, by disrupting and

fragmenting communities rather than by knitting them together, which rather

defeats the purpose of modern intervention. Intervention fails because it creates

legitimacy gaps that are exploited by insurgents.

But the certainty is that predictions for success of COIN doctrines anchored in

mythologized history and selective memory are perilous propositions.

Notes

1. Nagl, ‘The Evolution and Importance of Army / Marine Corps Field Manual 3–24’.2. For these works see The US Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual;

Callwell, Small Wars; Lyautey, Lettres de Tonkin et de Madagascar; Porch,The March to Marne.

3. Cooper and Landler, ‘Targeted Killing is New U.S. Focus in Afghanistan’; Hunt,‘A Collapsing Policy in Afghanistan’.


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

4. An excellent recent article is Marshall, ‘Imperial Nostalgia, The Liberal Lie’.5. Linn, Echo of Battle, 181.6. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 3.7. Lyautey, ‘Le Role colonial de l’officier’, quoted in Porch, The March to the Marne,

156–7.8. Holmes, The Road to Sedan, 31–2, 53–4, 208–33.9. Hull, Absolute Destruction, 117–19, 124, 131.

10. Fage, ‘British and German Colonial Rule’, 700.11. Porch, The March to the Marne, 157, 159–60.12. Callwell, Small Wars. Their Principles and Practice, 23, 256–85.13. Hoisington Jr., Lyautey and the French Conquest, 11–13.14. Kanya-Forstner, The Conquest of the Western Sudan, 200–1.15. Tyrrell, ‘What to Know Before you go’, 14.16. Porch, The Conquest of Morocco, 128–30, 183–5.17. Michael Provence argues that the Druze Revolt was triggered by the imposition of a

corvee system to build high profile public works projects to demonstrate the benefitsof French presence. But the entire French policy was informed by the ‘orientalist’view of Syrian society imported by Moroccan officers influenced by Lyautey’s“indirect rule” philosophy. Provence, The Great Syrian Revolt, 50.

18. Wei, ‘Political Power Grows out of the Barrel of a Gun’, 230–1.19. Joly, Guerres d’Afrique, 278.20. Arquilla, ‘Interview with Dr. John Arquilla’. For a rebuttal, see: Porch,

‘A Conversation with Dr. Douglas Porch’, 1.21. Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare. See, for instance, Reeder, ‘Book Summary of

Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice by David Galula’.22. Hoffman, ‘Introduction’, v–vi.23. Yingling, Lt Col. Paul. ‘A Failure in Generalship’.24. Krepinevich, The Army in Vietnam; see also, Krepinevich, ‘Recovery from Defeat’.25. Summers, On Strategy. For Krepinevich’s criticisms, see The Army in Vietnam,

262–4.26. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, 27.27. Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 23, 52.28. Downie, Learning from Conflict, 11–12.29. Ferguson, Empire. The Rise and Demise of the British World Order, xxv.30. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, xiii, 216.31. Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla, 291–301.32. The most famous being the defection of the leader of Wilaya, Si Salah. Horne,

A Savage War of Peace, 220, 387–97.33. Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla, 182.34. Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 74–6.35. Boyce, Englishmen and Irish Troubles, 140, 180–1.36. Townshend, ‘In Aid of the Civil Power’, 30–3.37. Strachan, The Politics of the British Army, 181.38. Ibid., 170–1, 18039. Strachan, The Politics of the British Army, 169–70, 185–6; Gwynn, Imperial

Policing, 6–9, 11, 17, 23, 31. Simson, British Rule, and Rebellion, 36–7, 64–5, 77,101.

40. Galula, Pacification in Algeria, v.41. In Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars. The End of Britain’s Asian Empire, the

authors attribute the British ‘victory’ in Malaya to a policy of repression anddeportation, and the egregious failure of the Malayan Communist Party to build across-communal coalition and collect the funds necessary to finance insurrection.

254 D. Porch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

David Anderson in Histories of the Hanged argues that the British pursued a brutalwar stripped of human rights protection ‘while maintaining the appearance ofaccountability, transparency, and justice’. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 6.

42. On the ‘white terror’ see Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 317, 433–5, on militaryveterans in the police see 438–9, 484–8, 479.

43. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 292, 296–320.44. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, 218.45. Hastings, Winston’s War, 217 and passim.46. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 257–61.47. Edwards, ‘Misapplying lessons learned?’, 318.48. Ibid., 318.49. Former NSC official Kori Schake insisted that Petraeus’ mission was more complex

than Eisenhower’s in World War II. See Schake ‘Win Wars?’.50. See, for instance, Russell, Innovation, Transformation, and War.51. Joly, Guerres d’Afrique, 285–6.52. See, for instance, Marshall, ‘Imperial Nostalgia’; Herbert, ‘Worse than a Nightmare’.

Bibliography

Anderson, David. Histories of the Hanged. Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End ofEmpire. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005.

Arquilla, John. ‘Interview with Dr. John Arquilla: How can French Encounters withIrregular Warfare in the 19th Century Inform COIN in our time?’. By Michael Few,Small Wars Journal (November 2010): http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2010/11/interview-with-dr-john-arquill/

Bayly, Christopher and Tim Harper. Forgotten Wars. The End of Britain’s Asian Empire.London: Penguin, 2007.

Boyce, D.G. Englishmen and Irish Troubles. British Public Opinion and the Making ofIrish Policy 1918–22. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1972.

Callwell, C.E. Small Wars. Their Principles and Practice. Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 1996.

Cooper, Helene and Mark Landler. ‘Targeted Killing is New U.S. Focus in Afghanistan’.The New York Times, 31 July 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/world/asia/01afghan.html (accessed 27 April 2011).

Downie, Richard Duncan. Learning from Conflict. The U.S. Military in Vietnam,El Salvador, and the Drug War. Westport: Praeger, 1998.

Edwards, Aaron. ‘Misapplying lessons learned? Analysing the utility of BritishCounterinsurgency Strategy in Northern Ireland, 1971–1976’. Small Wars &Insurgencies 21, no. 2 (2010):303–330.

Fage, John D. ‘British and German Colonial Rule: A Synthesis and Summary’.In Britain and Germany in Africa. Imperial Rivalry and Colonial rule, ed. ProsserGifford and William Roger Louis, 700. New Haven, CI: Yale University Press, 1967.

Ferguson, Niall. Empire. The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessonsfor Global Power. New York: Basic Books, 2003.

Galula, David. Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. Westport, CT:Praeger Security International, 1964.

Galula, David. Pacification in Algeria 1956–1958. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2006.Gwynn, Major-General Sir Charles W. Imperial Policing. London: Macmillan, 1934.Herbert, Bob, ‘Worse than a Nightmare’. The New York Times, 25 June 2010, http://www.

nytimes.com/2010/06/26/opinion/26herbert.html?ref¼opinionHoffman, Bruce. ‘Introduction’. In Pacification in Algeria 1956–1958, ed. David Galula,

v–vi. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2006.


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

Hoisington, Jr., William A. Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco. New York:Palgrave, 1995.

Holmes, Richard. The Road to Sedan. The French Army 1866–1870. London:Royal Historical Society, 1984.

Horne, Alistair. A Savage War of Peace. Algeria 1954–1962. London: MacMillan, 1977.Hull, Isabel V. Absolute Destruction. Military Culture and the Practices of War in

Imperial Germany. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2005.Hunt, Albert R. ‘A Collapsing Policy in Afghanistan’. The New York Times, 8 August

2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/world/asia/09iht-letter.html (accessed27 April 2011).

Joly, Vincent. Guerres d’Afrique, 130 ans de guerres coloniales. L’experience francaise.Rennes: PUR, 2009.

Kanya-Forstner, A.S. The Conquest of the Western Sudan. A Study in French MilitaryImperialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Kilcullen, David. The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One.New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Krepinevich, Andrew. The Army in Vietnam. Baltimore, MD and London: The JohnsHopkins Press, 1986.

Krepinevich, Andrew. ‘Recovery from Defeat. The U.S. Army in Vietnam’. In Aftermathof Defeat: Societies, Armed Forces and the Challenge of Recovery, ed. GeorgeAndreopoulos and Harold Selesky, 125–34. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,1994.

Linn, Brian McAllister. Echo of Battle. The Army’s Way of War. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 2007.

Lyautey, Hubert. ‘Le Role colonial de l’officier’. Revue de deux mondes (15 January1900):308–28.

Hubert. Lyautey. Lettres de Tonkin et de Madagascar. (1894–1899). Paris: Armand Colin,1942.

Marshall, Alex. ‘Imperial Nostalgia, The Liberal Lie, and the Perils of PostmodernCounterinsurgency’. Small Wars and Insurgencies 21, no. 2 (2010): 233–58.

Mockaitis, Thomas R. British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60. New York: St. Martin’sPress, 1990.

Nagl, Lt. Col. John A. Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. Counterinsurgency lessons fromMalaya and Vietnam. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.

Nagl, Lt Col. John A. ‘The Evolution and Importance of Army / Marine Corps FieldManual 3–24, Counterinsurgency’. In The US Army / Marine Corps Field Manual.Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007, http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/841519foreword.html.

The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. The White House:September 2002, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/nss/nss_sep2002.pdf, 3.

Porch, Douglas. The March to the Marne. The French Army 1871–1914. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Porch, Douglas. The Conquest of Morocco. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2005.Porch, Douglas. ‘A Conversation with Dr. Douglas Porch: Relooking French Encounters

in Irregular Warfare in the 19th Century’. By Michael Few. Small Wars Journal(December 2010): http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/625-porch.pdf

Provence, Michael. The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism.Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.

Reeder, Brett. ‘Book Summary of Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice byDavid Galula’. Conflict Research Consortium, https://www.beyondintractability.org/booksummary/10672

256 D. Porch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

Russell, James. Innovation, Transformation, and War: Counterinsurgency Operations inAnbar and Ninewa Provinces, Iraq, 2005–2007. Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress, 2010.

Schake, Kori. ‘Win Wars? Today’s Generals Must Also Meet, Manage, Placate, Politic,and Do P.R.’. The New York Times, 13 August 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/world/13generals.html

Simson, H.J. British Rule, and Rebellion. Salisbury, NC: Documentary Publications, 1977.Strachan, Hew. The Politics of the British Army. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.Summers, Harry. On Strategy. An Analysis of the Vietnam War. Novato, CA:

Presidio Press, 1982.Townshend, Charles. ‘In Aid of the Civil Power. Britain, Ireland and Palestine 1916–44’.

In Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare, ed. Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian,19–36. Oxford: Osprey, 2008.

Tyrrell, Marc W.D. ‘What to know Before you go: 10 Questions to ask before, and during,a mission’. Small Wars Journal, http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2008/02/what-to-know-before-you/

The US Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Chicago, IL: University ofChicago Press, 2007.

Wei, William. ‘“Political Power Grows out of the Barrel of a Gun,” Mao and theRed Army’. In A Military History of China. Robin Higham and David A Graff,229–48. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002.

Yingling, Lt Col. Paul. ‘A Failure in Generalship’. Armed Forces Journal (May 2007):http://www.afji.com/2007/05/2635198


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Dic

le U

nive

rsity

] at

13:

21 1

5 N

ovem

ber

2014

the dangerous myths and dubious promise of coin

Documents