Abstract
As a result of coping with military contingencies in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, particularly the troubled occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the prominence of counter-insurgency (COIN) theory and practise has for the best part of a decade asserted itself as a priority in Western military thought.1 Much effort and writing has been committed to understanding what should be done at the tactical and operational levels in order to contend with what the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual declares are ‘organized movement[s]’ that aim to overthrow ‘constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict’.2 Commentators have, however, drawn attention to the fact that ‘academics and practitioners tend to concentrate their analyses on the government’s role in combating and defeating insurgencies’.3 Neglected in this concentration is an understanding of what it is exactly that counter-insurgency is meant to be countering. The solipsistic nature of much COIN thinking — focusing exclusively on what the authorities should be thinking and doing — overlooks the necessity of being clear about the nature of the intellectual phenomenon that is being engaged, namely, the idea of insurgency.
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Notes
See Beatrice Heuser, ‘The Cultural Revolution in Counter-Insurgency’, Journal of Strategic Studies 30, no. 1 (2007): 153–71.
Lincoln Krause, ‘Playing for the Breaks: Insurgent Mistakes’, Parameters (Autumn, 2009): 49.
British Army, Countering Insurgency, vol. 1, part 10 (Warminster: Ministry of Defence, 2009), pp. 1–4.
John Nagl, ‘Local Security Forces’, in Understanding Counterinsurgency: Doctrine, Operations and Challenges, eds Thomas Rid and Thomas Kearney (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 161.
David Kilcullen, ‘Counter-insurgency Redux’, Survival 48, no. 4 (Winter 2006–2007): 112.
Bard E. O’Neill, Insurgency and Terrorism: Inside Modern Revolutionary Warfare (Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 1990), p. 13.
Frank Kitson, Low-Intensity Conflict: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping (London: Faber, 1971), p. 48.
Robin Corbett, Guerrilla Warfare: From 1939 to the Present Day (London: Guild, 1986), pp. 10–21.
See, for example, Richard Clutterbuck, Guerrillas and Terrorists (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1977), pp. 22–32.
See, for example, C.E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), pp. 21–2.
John Shy and Thomas Collier, ‘Revolutionary War’, in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), p. 17.
Ian Beckett, ‘The Tradition’, in Guerrilla Warfare, ed. John Pimlott (London: Bison, 1985), p. 8.
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Peter Paret and Michael Howard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 87.
Colin Gray, Categorical Confusion? The Strategic Implications of Recognizing Challenges either as Irregular or Traditional (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2012), p. 26.
Harry Summers, ‘A War is a War is a War is a War’, in Low Intensity Conflict: The Pattern of Warfare in the Modern World, ed. Loren B. Thompson (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 27–49.
For the essentialist case, see M.L.R. Smith, ‘Guerrillas in the Mist: Reassessing Strategy and Low Intensity Warfare’, Review of International Studies 29, no. 1 (2003): 19–37.
John A. Nagl and Brian M. Burton, ‘Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Modern Wars’, Journal of Strategic Studies 33, no. 1 (2010): 126.
Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency (London: Pall Mall, 1964), p. xiii.
George Armstrong Kelly, Lost Soldiers: The French Army and Empire in Crisis, 1945–62 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), p. 127.
Raoul Giradet and Jean-Pierre Thomas, La crise militaire Française: 1942–1962: Aspects sociologigques et ideologiques (Paris: Libraire Armand Colin, 1964), p. 179.
Peter Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria: The Analysis of a Political and Military Doctrine (New York: Praeger, 1964), p. 4.
Serge Chakotine, The Rape of the Masses: The Psychology of Totalitarian Propaganda, trans. by E.W. Dickes (New York: Alliance, 1940).
Bernard Fall, Street without Joy (London: Pall Mall, 1967), pp. 34–5.
Võ Nguyen Giáp, People’s War, People’s Army: The Viet Cong Insurrection Manual for Underdeveloped Countries (New York: Praeger, 1962), p. 98.
See Peter Drake Jackson, ‘French Ground Force Organizational Development for Counterrevolutionary Warfare between 1945 and 1962’ (master’s thesis, Army War College, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 2005), pp. 38–118, http://www.au.af.mil/ au/awc/awcgate/army/sgsc_jackson.pdf (accessed 14 April 2007); See also Kelly, Lost Soldiers, p. 91; Trinquier, Modern Warfare, pp. viii-ix; Paul Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Algeria, 1955–57 (New York: Enigma, 2002), p. 6.
Bernard Fall, The Vietminh Regime: Government and Administration in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1954), p. 143.
Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (London: Pimlico, 1994), p. 199.
See G.D. Sheffield, ‘Blitzkrieg and Attrition: Land Operations in Europ. 1914–45’, in Warfare in the Twentieth Century: Theory and Practice, eds Colin McInnes and G.D. Sheffield (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), pp. 51–79.
See Christopher Cradock and M.L.R. Smith, ‘No Fixed Values: A Reinterpretation of the Influence on the Theory of Guerre Révolutionnaire and the Battle of Algiers, 1956–1957’, Journal of Cold War Studies 9, no. 4 (2007): 68–105.
See, for example, John J. McCuen, The Art of Counter-Revolutionary War: The Strategy of Counter-insurgency (London: Faber, 1966).
Colin Gray, Strategic Studies and Public Policy: The American Experience (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1982), pp. 114
See Tables 2.1 and 2.2 in K.J. Holsti, The State, War and the State of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 22–4.
Barabara F. Walter, ‘Designing Transitions from Civil War: Demobilization, Democratization and Commitments to Peace’, International Security 25, no. 1 (1999): 128.
Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 71
J. David Singer and Melvin Small, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816–1980 (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982).
Jan Willem Honig, ‘Strategy in a Post-Clausewitzian Setting’, in The Clausewitzian Dictum and the Future of Western Military Strategy, ed. Gerd de Nooy (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1997), p. 118.
Richard K. Betts, ‘Should Strategic Studies Survive?’, World Politics 50, no. 1 (1997): 7.
W. Alexander Vacca and Mark Davidson, ‘The Regularity of Regular Warfare’, Parameters (Spring 2011): 24.
See, for example, Bjørn Møller, ‘Faces of War’, in Ethnicity and Intra-State Conflict: Types, Causes and Peace Strategies, eds Håkan Wiberg and Christian P. Scherrer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 15.
John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 58.
Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 13.
Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: Free Press, 1991), pp. 57–8.
Montgomery McFate, ‘The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture’, Joint Forces Quarterly 38, 3rd Quarter (2005): 43.
Many examples across the military studies literature past and present reflect this tendency. For illustrative purposes see, for example, Donald Featherstone, Colonial Small Wars, 1837–1901 (Newtown Abbot: David and Charles, 1973), pp. 11–3
Juliet Lodge, ed., Terrorism: A Challenge to the State (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981)
Richard A. Preston, Alex Roland, and Sydney F. Wise, Men in Arms: A History of Warfare and Its Interrelationships with Western Society (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), pp. 359–85.
William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941 (Boston: Little Brown, 1941), p. 556.
See J.F.C. Fuller, The Second World War, 1939–45: A Strategical and Tactical History (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1954), pp. 83–9.
Armand Van Ishoven, The Luftwaffe and the Battle of Britain (New York: Charles Scribner, 1980).
John A. Nagl and Brian M. Burton, ‘Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Modern Wars — A Reply to Jones and Smith’, Journal of Strategic Studies 33, no. 1 (2010): 125.
Quoted in Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy (New York: Delta, 1967), p. 413.
David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1964) p. 63
Michael Howard, The Causes of War (London: Counterpoint, 1983), p. 86.
See Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 83–118.
See Brendan Sims, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (London: Penguin, 2001).
Edward Luttwak, ‘Give War a Chance’, Foreign Affairs 78, no. 4 (1999): 36–44.
See Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both, Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 71–98
James Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War (London: Hurst, 1997), pp. 298–331.
Hans Morgenthau, ‘Vietnam and the National Interest’, in Vietnam: History, Documents and Opinions on a Major Crisis, ed. Marvin E. Gettlemen (London: Penguin, 1965), p. 391.
For a survey see Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954–1962 (London: Penguin, 2002).
David Kilcullen, ‘Countering Global Insurgency’, Journal of Strategic Studies 28, no. 4 (2004): 612.
Lawrence Freedman, ‘Globalization and the War against Terrorism’, in Understanding Global Terror, ed. Christopher Ankerson (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 227.
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Smith, M.L.M. (2014). COIN and the Chameleon: The Category Errors of Trying to Divide the Indivisible. In: Gventer, C.W., Jones, D.M., Smith, M.L.R. (eds) The New Counter-insurgency Era in Critical Perspective. Rethinking Political Violence series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336941_3
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