Volume 5, Number 2 "Counterinsurgency"

This edition of the Australian Army Journal marks a departure from established practice in that it is a thematic edition dedicated exclusively to the issue of counterinsurgency warfare. Since the end of the Cold War military professionals, scholars and policy-makers alike have pondered the changing character of war. Consensus has proved elusive.

Some have purported to identify the emergence of ‘Fourth Generation Warfare’. Others have determined that war henceforth will be ‘amongst the people’. This, in turn, has led others to warn that the nature of war does not change and that it would be folly to conclude that conventional state on state conflict is in permanent demise.

We accept that the nature of war as a violent contest of wills in pursuit of policy objectives remains constant. Moreover, as the relatively small army of a medium power, the Australian Army has never enjoyed the luxury of following strategic fads and fashions. Our core business has always been and remains professional mastery of conventional warfighting.

Nonetheless, the span of our combat experience over time has been vast: from higher formation level conventional warfighting in the global conflagrations of last century, through to the amalgam of warfighting, nation-building and stabilisation operations of recent years.

Since the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States in 2001 the Australian Defence Force, particularly the Army, has been required to operate against lethal, highly motivated non-state actors in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The enemy in each of these conflicts is conducting an insurgency, seeking to wear down our more sophisticated conventional forces by protracted low-level guerrilla warfare.

This has forced our allies, especially the United States and the United Kingdom, to adopt counterinsurgency techniques in order to defeat these insurgencies. Although the Australian Regular Army’s experience of war has predominantly consisted of counterinsurgency warfare since its inception in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, it has become evident that we need to revise our doctrine in this vital area of operations.

Although we had developed considerable proficiency in operating against classical Maoist guerrilla movements in the jungles of South-East Asia, the character of insurgency has undergone significant change since the end of the Cold War. This point is emphasised by Major General Jim Molan in his article in this special edition. He dismisses the hoary myth that our army—or any army—is naturally adept at counterinsurgency. And he stresses the importance of fully grasping the lethality and motivation of the modern jihadist insurgent.

Nor is past success a guarantee of current competence. The Australian Army Journal has consistently advocated the careful study of military history by members of the profession of arms. But, as Professor Jeffrey Grey reminds us, every war is sui generis, and caution must be exercised in seeking to glean lessons from past campaigns.

The pressing importance of understanding counterinsurgency led the Chief of Army to direct the urgent rewriting of Australian Army doctrine for counterinsurgency. In February this year he convened a two-day seminar to frame an authors’ brief to inform the doctrine writing team. This task is now being undertaken against a tight schedule. That is the reason that this edition of the Australian Army Journal is a thematic special edition. It also explains why we have expedited its production, in an effort to stimulate thinking across the Army about this important issue.

Accordingly, a number of qualifications need to be expressed. This issue is built around a significant number of articles expressly reprinted from foreign military journals. This does not reflect a want of confidence in the calibre of our own officers and soldiers. Nor will it become the standard practice of the Australian Army Journal, which is committed to maintaining its authentic Australian voice. We hope that Australian readers will read these articles with a critical attitude and ponder their validity in the light of their own experiences of current operations, before writing their own opinions for this Journal.

It would, however, be parochial in the extreme not to acknowledge the vast experience that our allies have accumulated over the past few years. For that reason we have sought the views of some of the leading experts in this field from other nations. We are honoured to publish the views of General David Petraeus and Lieutenant General Sir John Kiszley, whose contributions in this area are without peer. Likewise, the expertise of Ian Beckett and Stephen Metz—highly esteemed scholars both—are valuable additions to this Journal.

Furthermore, there is a distinct land bias in this edition. As Major General Molan emphasises, successful counterinsurgency demands seamless orchestration of joint effects. And the Chief of Army stresses that the multi-agency, comprehensive approach is vital to counterinsurgency, which requires more intimate coordination of political effects than other forms of warfare. The absence of RAN, RAAF, AFP or NGO perspectives from this edition does not imply a lack of recognition of their fundamental importance to effective counterinsurgency operations. However, this edition has been compiled within the serious time constraints applicable to the doctrine writers. In the interests of publishing this contribution in time to be of any relevance to the Army, we necessarily focused on our primary audience.

We are most grateful to the professional and academic journals which generously permitted us to use the articles republished in this special counterinsurgency edition. While we appropriately acknowledge each of these at the commencement of each article, it is fitting to thank Small Wars and Insurgencies, Parameters and Military Review for their significant support to this edition.

We commend this special edition to our readers and hope that it provides intellectual stimulation as well as practical professional assistance to our readers. We ultimately hope to be of service to our men and women who are fighting the current insurgencies. In that regard we note that since the last edition of this Journal appeared, another Australian soldier was killed on operations in Afghanistan. To the family and loved ones of Lance Corporal Jason Marks, we extend our respectful condolences.

Lieutenant General Peter Leahy AC

I can think of no more appropriate way to bid farewell to the Australian Army after thirty-seven years of service than to introduce this special edition of the Australian Army Journal devoted exclusively to the subject of counterinsurgency (COIN). The Australian Army has a distinguished record of service in wars against insurgents and irregular enemies. Indeed, since the Korean War this has been the staple of our service.

In 1971 I joined the Australian Army as our commitment to the Vietnam War was being wound back. From the end of the Second World War until the withdrawal from Vietnam, the Australian Regular Army was almost continuously on operations. Although we fought a conventional enemy in Korea, the Malayan Emergency, Confrontation and most of our operations in Vietnam were against irregular enemies.

Indeed, the period following the Second World War could be viewed as the era of insurgency, as nationalist and revolutionary movements emerged in much of the Third World. Many of these movements drew both philosophical and doctrinal inspiration from the Maoist model of People’s War, which Mao Tse-tung developed in China in the 1930s and 1940s. There were variants on this Marxist/Communist model, most notably developed by Che Guevara in Latin America and Vo Nguyen Giap in Vietnam.

As an army we developed a high level of proficiency in fighting these types of insurgencies. The Communist brand of revolutionary war proliferated during the Cold War where conventional wars were restrained due to the threat of mutually assured destruction. The prospect of nuclear war made the nuclear armed powers very cautious about direct confrontation with one another. This led to their fighting through surrogates in Asia and Africa, while both China and the Soviet Union sought to infiltrate nationalist movements that were fighting against Western powers.

Such insurgencies exhibited two particular characteristics. First, they tended to be based in rural areas, as in the case of Malaya and Vietnam where they used the jungle and complex terrain for refuge and concealment. In this way they largely neutralised the conventional military power of Western Armies. The Latin American model of insurgency often featured urban guerrilla warfare and terrorism of the type pioneered by the theorist Carlos Marighella. Throughout this period the Australian Army operated exclusively against the rural-based insurgents pursuing the Communist version of revolutionary warfare.

The Vietnam War was ultimately decided by a major conventional offensive, which was very much in accordance with Mao’s doctrine as applied by Vo Nguyen Giap. The guerrilla and irregular phase of operations was designed to weaken and discredit the established government before the main force emerged to launch a final offensive.

Second, these insurgencies tended to have a specific national focus. Regardless of whether a particular movement was acting as a surrogate of China or the Soviet Union, or merely accepted military aid from them to pursue a nationalist agenda, the insurgents’ primary aim was to wrest power and control from the incumbent government.

These two characteristics gave this model of insurgency certain strengths and weaknesses. In Malaya we and our British and Malayan allies were successful, while in Vietnam we were defeated. Of course many here and in the United States have sought comfort in arguments to the effect that ‘We never lost a battle in Vietnam’ or ‘If the media and the public had not believed the enemy’s propaganda we would have ultimately won the war.’

This misses the entire point. It also tells us a good deal about insurgency as a form of war. The nature of the war to be fought will be defined by the side that is weaker in terms of conventional military power. For that reason the insurgent will try to avoid decisive military engagements and wage a low level protracted campaign, which in turn will test the long term resolve of the stronger military power. They will use every form of persuasion and psychological operation to undermine us, while enlisting the allegiance of the population. Today we call this asymmetric warfare.

For an insurgent the objective is to win the allegiance of the population. From our point of view we must reinforce the political legitimacy of the current government. This is more important than destroying the insurgent through fire and manoeuvre. This of course is easier said than done. As the influential French theorist of counterinsurgency David Galula once observed, 80 per cent of the response to an insurgency is political while a mere 20 per cent is military. Galula was of course writing of his experiences in Algeria, but the primacy of a political strategy in defeating an insurgency is one common thread that links the nationalist revolutionary insurgencies of the Cold War to the modern insurgencies we are fighting today.

Despite the defeat in Vietnam, I do not resile from my earlier comment that the Australian Army had achieved a high level of proficiency in fighting the Communist/Nationalist rural insurgencies of the second half of the twentieth century. We had developed excellent training and doctrine for jungle warfare by the end of the New Guinea campaigns of the Second World War. As an aside this perpetrated a dangerous myth that Australians were ‘natural jungle fighters’. This is nonsense. Soldiers need robust training and doctrine to perform well in any terrain or climate. Indeed, we have been blessed with innovative, resilient soldiers throughout our history. But the early disasters in New Guinea demonstrated the importance of the thorough preparation of our troops for any form of combat.

What the New Guinea campaign did bequeath to the embryonic Australian Regular Army was proficiency in small unit operations in close terrain and an understanding of the importance of individual soldier skills. We have never lost these, although for a period in the 1980s and 1990s our emphasis on conventional operations on Australian soil saw these vital skills weakened. They were preserved, almost as tribal lore among our soldiers and NCOs by institutions such as the Land Battle School at Tully and Battle Wing at Canungra.

Against the insurgents known at the time as Communist terrorists in Malaya, and the Viet Cong and even main force enemies in Vietnam, our excellence at patrolling, ambushing and the decency and initiative of our soldiers enabled us to master counterinsurgency operations. By the time we withdrew from Vietnam, we possessed an excellent individual and collective training system for this type of warfare. Our doctrine for Counter Revolutionary Warfare was the distilled wisdom of our experiences and it was well suited to the type of enemy and type of terrain we were likely to encounter in our primary area of national interest.

Indeed, it provided the basis for our operations in Somalia, Timor Leste and Solomon Islands. In each case our soldiers were able to rapidly isolate armed, politically motivated groups from the population, undertake aggressive patrolling, and create conditions for civilians to take the lead in governance and the provision of security. But we need to be realistic about these achievements. We did not encounter highly motivated enemies with access to the most lethal individual weaponry currently available to irregular forces. Nor were they backed by a state sponsor or wealthy criminal or terrorist networks.

This distinguishes them from the most capable jihadist insurgents that our soldiers are facing in Iraq and Afghanistan today. Warfare has changed in significant ways since the end of the Cold War. This should not surprise us as professionals. We all know that war is an innately social and political activity. It reflects the characteristics of its time. Clausewitz was correct in pointing out that war is the continuation of policy by other means. He also correctly defined war as a violent clash of wills.

That is why I intentionally argue that war has changed in significant ways rather than fundamental ways since the end of the Cold War. I do not subscribe to the view that digitisation, precision and stealth have changed war in any fundamental way. Nor, however, do I believe that we can dust off our counterinsurgency doctrine from Malaya and Vietnam and expect to succeed against the current enemy in the highly lethal environment we face. As Sir John Kiszely argues in his excellent article in this edition of the Journal, every insurgency is unique.

Rather, I would argue that the character of war, not its nature, is changing. So is the character of insurgency changing. Moreover, the dividing line between Cold War and post-Cold War insurgencies is quite clear. The era of decolonisation has given way to the era of globalisation. Whereas most revolutionary warfare last century was aimed at seizing control of a particular nation, globalisation has unleashed forces of ethnic and religious fragmentation on a global level.

We are now grappling with the consequences of globalisation. It has given its own distinctive character to wars we are involved in today. These characteristics include:

•  the rapid diffusion of information  

•  a borderless world  

•  a movement to cities  

•  a shift in the balance of power between the nation state and non-state actors  

•  a hunger for certainty and reassurance in assertive ethnic and religious groups as a global mono-culture threatens their traditional societies  

•  the empowerment of individuals through technology, and  

•  the proliferation of lethality.

Whereas some of these trends were suppressed by the bi-polar stand-off of the Cold War, in the period since 1991 they have now been unleashed through civil wars, ethnic cleansing and separatist movements.

While there are nationalist elements in both Iraq and Afghanistan motivated purely by resentment at the presence of foreigners, there are also jihadist elements whose motivation is the establishment of a global caliphate. These elements are highly motivated, diffuse and able to communicate instantaneously via the Internet. This is qualitatively different in scale and complexity to anything we faced in Malaya. While we are not facing an enemy as capable as either the NVA or the best elements of the Viet Cong—in the sense that the jihadists do not mount company and battalion level operations with any regularity—the current enemy does possess other advantages.

First, the era of globalisation has been characterised by an exponential enhancement to individual lethality. Today the rocket propelled grenade and the sophisticated improvised explosive device, rather than the AK-47, are the symbol of the insurgent fighter. The proliferation of easily accessible, powerful, individual weapons is one of the darker aspects of the post-Cold War security environment. One of the effects of this is to require any credible counterinsurgent force to be capable of sustained close combat using well protected combined arms teams. We should not be seduced into thinking that just because we need to operate sensitively, to avoid alienating the population whose allegiance we must secure to achieve our aims, that we must rely only on ‘soft power’. The modern insurgent can hit hard and is willing to stand and fight in complex urban terrain where he not only hopes to neutralise our firepower and sensors but to also channel us into deadly improvised explosive device ambushes. This presents real dilemmas for the counterinsurgent force. We must be able to defeat highly lethal, motivated enemies who are hugging population centres, yet somehow avoid killing innocent people and destroying infrastructure. Again Sir John Kiszley provides brilliant insights into the challenge these apparently irreconcilable objectives present to modern armies.

Complex urban terrain, in conjunction with the enhanced lethality of our foes, provides another distinctive ingredient to contemporary insurgencies. We are living through an unprecedented period of urbanisation. Climate change, reductions in arable land and exploding birth rates in the developing world are combining to create mega-cities on a scale unimaginable even thirty years ago. Whether we are considering conventional or irregular warfare, the empty battlefield dreamt of by the champions of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), where the enemy can be reduced to a set of targets and we enjoy pervasive information superiority, simply does not and will not exist.

As the British General Sir Rupert Smith has so eloquently put it, wars will be ‘amongst the people’ for the simple and enduring reason that war is political. We will need to operate in proximity to people because that is how we protect them, reassure them, support them and attempt to separate them from our enemies. This is especially the case against a non-state, insurgent enemy, who will seek anonymity among the people.

It is not prudent to rule out rural-based insurgencies. Had Alfredo Reinado, for example, been more successful at garnering popular support from the people in the Western Districts of Timor Leste, it is conceivable that we may have needed to support the police and legitimate authorities there, in operations reminiscent of Malaya. But the prevalence of urban warfare and the borderless aspirations of the most credible of the jihadist enemies has rendered our doctrine—so effective against the Communist rural insurgent—obsolete.

In that regard, I urge you to consider carefully the article by Marshall Ecklund, which examines the tactics and doctrine employed by Task Force Ranger in Mogadishu in 1993. The battle, popularised in the book and film Black Hawk Down, was the harbinger of the small wars of globalisation. The prescient US Marine Corps General Charles Krulak was inspired to create his seminal concept of the ‘Three Block War’ by this action. That paradigm, which we have adapted to our Land Operating Concept ‘Complex Warfighting’ captures the complexity, simultaneity, lethality and ambiguity of the modern battlespace.

We need to ensure that our soldiers have the protection to survive in this environment. That is why Army has hardened and networked. We need to match the lethality of the current crop of non-state actors. Moreover, the networking of the force will permit us to operate in small flexible teams to match the agility of our enemies. But we also need the intellectual and thinking skills to exploit these technological and organisational changes.

This is why I convened a joint, multi-agency seminar on COIN at Puckapunyal in February of this year. The aim of the seminar was to re-evaluate what we think we know about counterinsurgency, about the current enemy and the evolving character of warfare. The seminar was the prelude to a thorough rewrite of COIN doctrine. Another step in this renewal of our COIN approach is this special Winter 2008 edition of the Australian Army Journal dedicated to COIN.

To expedite this process of renewal I have directed that Army’s intellectual resources be focused on COIN. I was most appreciative of the enthusiastic support we received from our sister services, the Australian Federal Police, other government departments—notably Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Prime Minister & Cabinet—and the non-governmental organisation community in this endeavour. Their participation reminds us of the primacy of the civil power in counterinsurgency and the imperative of military effects being directed to support a whole of government solution to the insurgency.

The seminar developed lines of operation towards an author brief, which has been provided to the Command and Staff College for work to commence on writing our doctrine. Development of up-to-date, relevant COIN doctrine is essential to equip our soldiers with the intellectual and cultural disposition to operate effectively ‘amongst the people’ in the complex, lethal insurgencies of the twenty-first century.

Likewise, this special edition of the Australian Army Journal is designed to stimulate thinking about COIN at all levels of the Army and to promote discussion and debate. The collected articles in this edition capture the thinking and experience of some of the leading practitioners and scholars of counterinsurgency warfare among the Western alliance today. They cover a spectrum of topics from the theories about the changing character of insurgency to up-to-date case studies from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Take note of the important themes that emerge:

• It is vital that kinetic effects be used with great discrimination and always to support a clearly defined political purpose  
   
• That soldiers at every level must be culturally aware and able to win the trust and respect of the indigenous population that they are supporting  
   
• That strong language and cultural engagement skills are required, and  
   
• That the political and military leadership of the counterinsurgency campaign must be fused at the highest level.

All of the authors in this edition are grappling with a dynamic problem created by an adaptive enemy. All of us as professionals must ensure that we continue to apply our intellects to this problem. Professional reading and debate are vital sources of strength in this regard. Judicious reading of history is a start—but I emphasise ‘judicious’—the slavish application of apparent lessons from Malaya or Algeria or Northern Ireland will be doomed to failure. Every insurgency is unique.

Nonetheless, there are broad characteristics shared by insurgencies across time and geographical regions that warrant close examination. For this reason I have also directed the Land Warfare Studies Centre to prepare an annotated guide to the classic works of leading counterinsurgency thinkers, such as Galula, Paget, Kitson Fall and Trinquier. This will be released later this year.

It is fitting that my final remarks addressed to the Army concern counterinsurgency. My career has gone full circle since 1971. I joined an army deeply imbued with the ethos of counterinsurgency warfare against irregular enemies. During the middle of my career, we focused more on continental defence and conventional warfare, and I taught counterinsurgency warfare at the United States Army Command and General Staff College. Now as I leave the Army our soldiers are deployed in Timor Leste, Solomon Islands, Afghanistan and Iraq on complex stabilisation and counterinsurgency operations.

I leave the Army feeling very proud of its place in our society as a trusted national institution. My life has been enriched by serving in the Australian Army. Words cannot do justice to the sense of pride I have in all of the men and women I have served with over the past thirty-seven years. I have learned something from each one of you. You have taught me so much about courage, initiative, teamwork, duty, mateship, sacrifice and love of country. This has been a source of great pride but it is also humbling.

Some may say that such a long military career represents a contribution to the nation. I hope that is true. But as every one of you knows, the Australian Army gives us much more than it takes. It is one of oldest national institutions and I say with some confidence that it remains one of the most revered across our society. Soldiers of our Army have written large tracts of the history of this nation. You and your forebears, under the Rising Sun Badge, have kindled the flame of decency and humanity in some of the darkest hours of our nation’s history. I take this opportunity to thank you for your service during my time as Chief of Army, to thank you for your camaraderie and good humour every day of my career, and to wish you good luck and good soldiering for the future. I bid you a very affectionate farewell.