Everything about Counter-insurgency totally explained
In the context of an
occupation or a
civil war,
counter-insurgency (abbreviated COIN) is a
military term for the combat against a
rebellion, termed an "
insurgency," by forces aligned with the controlling government of the
territory in which the combat takes place.
While in theory the term refers exclusively to hostility against combatants or
militants, in reality the distinctions between "combatant" and "
civilian" are often beyond the means of
military intelligence to make completely accurate discernments. As such, known counter-insurgency operations have often rested on a confused, relativistic, or otherwise
situational distinction between combatant and
civilians, and use of the terms "insurgent" and "counter-insurgent" themselves have sometimes hinged on a
subjective perception of the government's
legitimacy.
As such, the term "counter-insurgency" is somewhat cognate with "
suppression" of
rebellion.
Models
Counter-insurgency is normally conducted as a combination of conventional military operations and other means, such as
propaganda,
psy-ops, and
assassinations. Counter-insurgency operations include many different facets:
military,
paramilitary,
political,
economic,
psychological, and civic actions taken to defeat
insurgency.
To understand counter-insurgency, one must understand insurgency. See
models of insurgency to understand the dynamics of revolutionary warfare. Insurgents capitalize on societal problems, often called gaps; counter-insurgency addresses closing the gaps. When the gaps are wide, they create a sea of discontent, of which Mao wrote "the guerilla must swim in the people as the fish swims in the sea."
A stable society rests on the "pillars" of Kilcullen's model, and becomes unstable when "gaps" open among the pillars described by Eizenstat.
, a popular insurgency has an inherent advantage over any occupying force. He showed as a prime example the French occupation of Spain during the
Napoleonic wars. Whenever Spanish forces managed to constitute themselves into a regular fighting force, the superior French forces beat them every time. However, once dispersed and decentralized, the irregular nature of the rebel campaigns proved a decisive counter to French superiority on the battlefield.
Napoleon's army had no means of effectively combatting the rebels, and in the end their strength and morale were so sapped that when
Wellington was finally able to challenge French forces in the field, the French had almost no choice but to abandon the situation.
Counter-insurgency efforts may be successful, especially when the insurgents are unpopular. The Philippines, Peru, and Malaya have been the sites of failed insurgencies.
Liddell Hart also points to the experiences of
T.E. Lawrence and the
Arab Revolt during
World War I as another example of the power of the rebel/insurgent. Though the
Ottomans often had advantages in manpower of more than 100 to 1, the
Arabs' ability to materialize out of the desert, strike, and disappear again often left the Turks reeling and paralyzed, creating an opportunity for regular British forces to sweep in and finish the Turkish forces off.
In both the preceding cases, the insurgents and rebel fighters were working in conjunction with or in a manner complimentary to regular forces. Such was also the case with the
French Resistance during
World War II and the
National Liberation Front during the
Vietnam War. The strategy in these cases is for the irregular combatant to weaken and destabilize the enemy to such a degree that victory is easy or assured for the regular forces. However, in many modern rebellions, one doesn't see rebel fighters working in conjunction with regular forces. Rather, they're home-grown militias or imported fighters who have no unified goals or objectives save to expel the occupier. In these cases, such as the
Israeli occupation of Lebanon, which ended in 2000, and the current
U.S.-led Occupation of Iraq, the goal of the insurgent isn't to defeat the occupying military force; that's almost always an impossible task. Rather, they seek through a constant campaign of sneak attacks to inflict continuous casualties upon their superior enemy forces and thereby over time demoralize the occupying forces and erode political support for the occupation in the homeland of the occupying forces. It is a simple strategy of repeated pin-pricks and bleedings that, though small in proportion to the total force strength, sap the will of the occupier to continue the fight.
According to Liddell Hart, there are few effective counter-measures to this strategy. So long as the insurgency maintains popular support, it'll retain all of its strategic advantages of mobility, invisibility, and legitimacy in its own eyes and the eyes of the people. So long as this is the situation, an insurgency essentially can't be defeated by regular forces. Mao Zedong attempted to neutralize this advantage by simply taking away the civilian population that shielded the insurgents; however, this had the foreseeable effect of alienating the populace and further fueling support for the rebels. In the current operations against insurgents in the "
War on Terror", such ruthless tactics are not available to commanders, even if they were effective. Another option in combating an insurgency would be to make the presence of troops so pervasive that there's simply no place left for insurgents to hide, as demonstrated in Franco's conquest of Republican Spain during the
Spanish Civil War or the Union occupation of Confederate States with Federal troops following the
American Civil War. In each of these cases, enormous amounts of man-power were needed for an extended period of time to quell resistance over almost every square km of territory. In an age of ever shrinking and increasingly computerized armed forces, this option too is precluded from a modern commanders options.
Essentially, then, only one viable option remains. The key to a successful counter-insurgency is the winning-over of the occupied territory's population. If that can be achieved, then the rebellion will be deprived of its supplies, shelter, and, more importantly, its moral legitimacy. Unless the hearts and minds of the public can be separated from the insurgency, the occupation is doomed to fail. In a modern democracy, in the face of perceived incessant losses, no conflict will be tolerated by an electorate without significant show of tangible gains. It should be noted that though the United States and its
ARVN allies won every single major battle with
North Vietnamese forces and the communists suffered staggering losses (2 million+ casualties), the cost of victory was so high in the opinion of the American public (
58,193 U.S. casualties) that it came to see any further possible gains as not worth the troop losses. As long as popular support is on their side, an insurgency can hold out indefinitely, consolidating its control and replenishing its ranks, until the occupiers simply leave.
Oil Spot
The oil spot approach is a descriptive term for the concentration of counter-insurgent forces into an expanding, secured zone. The oil spot approach was one of the justifications given in the
Pentagon Papers(External Link
) for the
Strategic Hamlet Program.
While appealing in principle, the oil spot approach is problematic because it doesn't take enemy strengths into account.
Population monitoring
"Among the most effective
means are such population-control measures as vehicle and personnel checkpoints and national identity
cards. In Malaya, the requirement to carry an
I.D. card with a photo and thumbprint forced the
communists to abandon their original three-phase
political-military strategy and caused divisive infighting
among their leaders over how to respond to this
effective population-control measure."
Specific counterinsurgency doctrines
British Commonwealth
British counterinsurgency (generally called
low intensity conflict in British literature) the British approach, according to Irish Nationalist analysis, always operates on more than a military level alone. describes its key elements as:
» *"Identify the enemy and its reasons for existence.
*"Co-ordinate the resources and personnel of all sections of the establishment against it.
» *"Contain the enemy and wear it down tactically.
*"Isolate and frustrate it's every way, politically and militarily.
» *"Destroy it."
Malaya
British forces were able to employ the relocation method with considerable success during the Malayan Emergency. The
Briggs Plan, implemented fully in 1950, relocated
Chinese squatters into protected "New Villages", designated by British forces. By the end of 1951, some 400,000 Chinese had moved into the fortifications. Of this population, the British forces were able to form a "Home Guard", armed for resistance against the Malay Communist Party, an implementation mirrored by the
Strategic Hamlet Program later used by U.S. forces in South Vietnam.
Northern Ireland
In 1969, Britain committed troops, but immediately recognized the problem wasn't purely military, but had major political dimensions. "...the situation was already one of open rebellion and their primary aim was to counter this and stabilize the situation through identifying those who were rebelling and their reasons for rebelling. Because there had been a history of armed nationalist opposition to British rule there
was also the question of whether open spontaneous rebellion would turn into organized armed revolution and, if so, who would initiate that process...
"However, the initial problem that the British government faced was in finding a suitably coordinated and controlled body that could execute its will. Just who exactly was in charge and who ultimately would make decisions was a problem that would restrict the effectiveness of British counter-insurgency for many years." » *Quadrillage (an administrative grid of population and territory)
*Ratissage (cordoning and “raking”) » *Regroupement (relocating and closely controlling a suspect population)
*‘Tache d'huile' – The 'oil spot' strategy » *Recruitment of local leaders and forces
*Paramilitary organization and militias
While McClintock cites the 1894 Algerian governor, Jules Cambon, as saying "By destroying the administration and local government “we were also suppressing our means of action.”
“The result is that we're today confronted by a sort of human dust on which we've no influence and in which movements take place which are unknown to us.“ Cambon's philosophy, however, didn't seem to survive into the Algerian War of Independence, (1954-1962).
Indochina
Post-WWII doctrine, as in Indochina, took a more drastic view of "Guerre Révolutionnaire", which presented an ideological and global war, with a commitment to total war. Countermeasures, in principle, needed to be both political and military; "No measure was too drastic to meet the new threat of revolution". French forces taking control from the Japanese didn't seem to negotiate seriously with nationalist elements in what was to become Vietnam,
and reaped the consequences of overconfidence at
Dien Bien Phu.
It occurred to various commanders that soldiers trained to operate as guerrillas would have a strong sense of how to fight guerrillas. Before the partition of French Indochina, French
Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés (GCMA), led by
Roger Trinquier,> took on this role, drawing on French experience with the Jedburgh teams. GCMA, operating in Tonkin and Laos under French intelligence, was complemented by Commandos Nord Viêt-Nam in the North. In these missions, the SOF teams lived and fought with the locals. One Laotian, who became an officer, was
Vang Pao, who was to become a general in Hmong and Laotian operations in Southeast Asia while the American forces increased their role.
Algeria
French counterinsurgency in colonial Algeria was a savage one, but the 1957
Battle of Algiers, resuilting in 24,000 detentions, with most tortured and an estimated 3,000 killed, may have broken the
FLN infrastructure in Algiers, but lost any French legitimacy as far as "hearts and minds".
This requires an extremely capable intelligence infrastructure endowed
with human sources and deep cultural knowledge. This contributes to the difficulty that foreign, as opposed to indigenous, powers have in counter-insurgent operations.
One of their most influential theorists was
Roger Trinquier. The
Modern Warfare counterinsurgency strategy described by
Roger Trinquier, who had led French anticommunist guerillas in
Indochina, was a strong influence on French efforts in Algeria.
Trinquier suggested three principles:
- separate the guerrilla from the population that supports him;
- occupy the zones that the guerrillas previously operated from, making the area dangerous for the insurgents and turning the people against the guerrilla movement; and
- coordinate actions over a wide area and for a long enough time that the guerrilla is denied access to the population centres that could support him.
Trinquier's view was that torture had to be extremely focused and limited, but many French officers considered its use corrosive to its own side. There were strong protests among French leaders: the Army’s most decorated officer, General
Jacques Pâris de Bollardière, confronted General
Jacques Massu, the commander of French forces in the Battle of Algiers, over orders institutionalizing torture, as "an unleashing of deplorable instincts which no longer knew any limits." He issued an open letter condemning the danger to the army of the loss of its moral values "under the fallacious pretext of immediate expediency", and was imprisoned for sixty days. in
Chad and Ivory Coast, the latter on two occasions, most significantly in 2002-2003. The situation with France and Ivory Coast isn't a classic FID situation, as
France attacked Ivorian forces that had attacked UN peacekeepers.
India
The Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School (
CIJWS) is located in the north-eastern town of the
Indian
state of
Mizoram. Personnel from the countries such as the US, Britain, France, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Vietnam have attended this school.
Established in 1970, the school is considered one of the world's most prestigious anti-terrorist institutions. Soldiers from India and the United States participating at a long exercise in guerrilla warfare in Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School at
Vairengte in Mizoram. Today there's a joint effort in which graduate level and high quality education is being given by a joint staff of highly trained special operators at Camp Taji Phoenix Academy and the Counterinsurgency Center For Excellence in Iraq. This facility is used to train the U.S. military training team members (MTT) as well as many Iraqi Officers.
Russia
"Exercises with the US troops will be followed by Indo-Russian airborne specialized anti-insurgency exercises between Oct. 11 and 19 at Mahajan firing ranges near Suratgarh in Rajasthan, which borders with Pakistan, the newspaper said.
It will be for the first time that Russian special commando forces, Spetnaz, will be seen in action on Indian soil.
According to the report, the focus of the joint exercise with Russia will be on carrying out attacks against terrorist targets in built-up urban environment. The exercise will involve hit-and-run heliborne operations and use new Russian anti-terrorist equipment.
Army Special Forces will also take part in this exercise, which will be witnessed by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov and other senior officers of the Russian military.
United States
As used by the U.S. Army, counter-insurgency operations include
psychological warfare and
information warfare, which is waged both by the insurgents and counter-insurgency forces. In the main, the insurgents seek to destroy or erase the political authority of the defending authorities in a population they seek to control, where the counter-insurgent forces seek to protect it and reduce or eliminate the supplanting authority of the insurgents.
The
CIA and South Vietnamese security forces conducted the
Phoenix Program to neutralize Viet Cong
sympathizers, while the Viet Cong were busy killing teachers, village headmen, and other manifestations of the Saigon government at local level. The USMC's
Combined Action Program is another, more successful example of counterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam.
The
U.S.,
British and allied occupation forces and the Iraqi security forces are currently engaging in a counter-insurgency operation against
various Iraqi guerrilla groups and supporters of the Jihad from outside Iraq who are opposed to the presence of foreign troops and the current Iraqi government.
Air operations and counterinsurgency
Air power can be an enormous help in counterinsurgency, sometimes with weapons, but often by assisting with support to the population through air transportation, and providing intelligence to help plan operations. Aircraft for this role, both fixed-wing and helicopter, should have low loitering speed, long endurance, simplicity in maintenance, and the capability to make short (or vertical) take-offs and landings from rough frontline airstrips.
Transportation
Intelligence collection
Close air support for counterinsurgents
Since the
1920s, a specialized form of
close air support has been developed for counter-insurgency operations.
As the British found in Iraq in the 1920s and in some encounters in the frontier between what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan, aircraft stripped away many of the advantages that traditional insurgents had enjoyed. It also offered a way of inflicting direct and cost-effective retaliation on the communities that supported the insurgents. Such measures are not possible now, and wouldn't be supported by the domestic populations of Western nations.
At first (particularly during the
Vietnam War) counter-insurgency missions were flown by existing airplanes and helicopters hastily adapted for the role, notably the Douglas
A-1 Skyraider. Later, more specialized counter-insurgency (or COIN) aircraft began to appear, such as:
BAe Hawk (UK)
Britten-Norman Defender (UK)
BAC Strikemaster (UK)
Cessna A-37 Dragonfly (USA)
Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano (Brazil)
Rockwell OV-10 Bronco (USA)
FMA IA 58 Pucará (Argentina)
Cessna O-2 Skymaster (USA, Rhodesia)Further Information
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