Thoughts of a Practitioner: A Contribution to Australia’s Counterinsurgency Doctrine Drafters

The Australian Army’s decision to write a new manual for counterinsurgency operations is a welcome one. Doctrine drafters may soon discover that the writing of doctrine, with some degree of ‘Australian-ness’ about it and deserving of our future commanders, will be a more complex task than initially imagined. This process will include a number of stakeholders, and there will be frequent reference back to the most senior officer responsible. Importantly, in addition to experience, if senior officers can contribute anything to the process it must be ownership. If we own it, we will take it seriously and put the time and effort into contributing to it.

However, if ultimate responsibility for counterinsurgency doctrine is to lie with Army, the product may become overly biased towards land doctrine. There is already a strong belief in the ADF that counterinsurgency is something only Army does. If we have learnt anything from Iraq it should be that counterinsurgency is (or should be) not just joint: it is interagency, whole-of-nation and multinational. I suggest that the Australian counterinsurgency capability, including its doctrine, must be ‘owned’ by the Vice Chief of the Defence Force (VCDF) as the Joint Capability Manager.² To do otherwise is to send a message that we either do not understand counterinsurgency or we are not yet serious about it.

Those drafting our doctrine must consider: will our doctrine be authoritative and align all relevant military and civilian agencies behind a single, well thought out body of ideas, or will it only offer general guidance, a philosophy, that is already available in any undergraduate course in strategic studies? If counterinsurgency doctrine is authoritative and causes change, it will be questioned, debated, revised and possibly even implemented. If it is a collection of assumption-based generalisations that does not reflect the world our future commanders can already see, then our officers will ignore it. A single doctrine publication can never be all things to all people; but whatever it is, it should be authoritative, it should be enforceable,³ it should be reviewed regularly and seriously, and it should cause change. Thus, to ensure that such important joint doctrine is effective it must be the personal responsibility of an individual—in my view, the VCDF.

Compare our approach to counterinsurgency—which we are fighting today and are likely to fight for many years to come—with our approach to the air combat capability in the ADF. Such is the awareness of air combat as a capability deficiency that even our political leadership can give a passable dissertation on the subject. There have been study centres established, teams formed, papers written, metre-high stacks of requirement documentation produced, and billions of dollars of resources allocated. This should not be a consideration in the development of doctrine; but if we apply the air combat capability approach to the ADF’s ability to plan, prepare, execute and sustain a counter-insurgency campaign, we must be able to create actual capability rather than just to write doctrine.

Counterinsurgency is important for the ADF, but we will only have done our job if we produce a true counterinsurgency capability. I watched the US effort to produce a counterinsurgency capability during 2004 and 2005, in the face of defeat in Iraq. It was far more like our approach to the air combat capability than it is to our current approach of just writing doctrine. Nothing focuses the mind like looming defeat. The US effort to create an effective counterinsurgency capability was owned by individuals, was run out of a powerful centre, national leaders took an interest, it was joint, and there was wide interest across the United States in one particular product: the Petraeus/Mattis doctrine.

The proposed Australian counterinsurgency doctrine will be written for Australian commanders—not so much for those who are fighting current conflicts, but for those who will lead counterinsurgencies in the future. Our current involvement in the Middle East is at the tactical level and their doctrinal needs appear to be well served by ‘tactics, techniques and procedures’-type publications and by lessons learnt processes related to these specific conflicts. Our units, ships and squadrons in current coalitions are under the control of coalition manoeuvre commanders above the tactical level.

Our allies have produced operational level doctrine⁴ for the current campaigns based on their (now) vast experience of current counterinsurgencies. If we Australians have a unique approach to our part in the current counterinsurgencies, because that part is tactical, we should express that approach in tactical doctrine.

I urge that some judgments about the future also be committed to doctrine. We tend to stay away from prediction for fear of being wrong, but in my view we are obliged to do so. At the very least we can say that future stabilisation operations are likely to have as much insurgency in them as current operations, they are likely to be as violent as current operations⁵ and to be at least as asymmetric.

These are important judgments about future military operations that I would expect to find in an endorsed Australian military strategy. It is not sufficient for our political or strategic leadership merely to say that the ADF must be capable of conducting counterinsurgency. That would be like saying that the ADF must have an air combat capability, and stopping there. If we are serious about being competent at counterinsurgency, then our strategic level must specify what kind of counter-insurgency, what level of competence, and what resources Defence is prepared to allocate. In the absence of such guidance, doctrine drafters will have to make clear assumptions and emphasise the deficiencies, with the hope of prompting guidance at some later stage. I will bet that Petraeus and Mattis did not lack guidance from the strategic level when they were producing their doctrine in 2005 and 2006.

My observation, stimulated by some Defence writings⁶ but more by the ideas of Dr Michael Evans,⁷ is that there are two models of future conflict in which the ADF will become involved, and which I suggest our doctrine should address. These two models are conflicts of choice and conflicts of necessity. They are both very important and they are markedly different. They are a manifestation of a distinct Australian middle power approach to military art in general and operational art in particular.

In conflicts of choice, Australia is referred to as a ‘security provider’ and as such provides tactical level forces to alliances across the globe. These are missions of choice because Australia can choose the conflict, the time of involvement, the force level we send, the area of operations within the conflict, the type of operations conducted and, most importantly, choose the time to go home. Missions of choice are not about winning the conflict, they are about showing commitment. In conflicts of choice, Australian forces are commanded by Australians at the tactical and national level, but are likely to be under control of alliance manoeuvre commanders at the high tactical or operational level. Australian command can normally be exercised directly from the strategic level in Canberra to the tactical level in theatre through national commanders.⁸ Lessons learned from our experience are valid at the tactical level, particularly if we have chosen to engage in combat. Unique Australian lessons may be harder to find at the operational level because we are less likely to have first hand knowledge. Lessons derived from conflicts of choice may not be transferable to conflicts of necessity. Australian examples of conflicts of choice are all of our military involvements over the last fifty years, except in Timor Leste.⁹

In conflicts of necessity, Australia is referred to as a ‘security leader’ and provides forces and leadership to alliances for conflicts in our region. These are conflicts of necessity because we have much less choice in when we go and what we do. Conflicts of necessity are about winning, and the critical factor in winning is leadership. Australian commanders are more likely to command or control Australian and alliance forces from the strategic level through a deployed operational level commander and headquarters (who is also a manoeuvre commander) to the tactical level. A recent example of a conflict of necessity was East Timor. Unlike our historical experience with conflicts of choice, our one recent conflict of necessity was characterised by very little combat. This may be the exception.

While most of the conflicts that Australia participates in are conflicts of choice, and only perhaps once or twice in any generation do we experience a conflict of necessity, doctrine must cover both and must differentiate between the two. Our recent conflicts of choice are going well and have met or exceeded government expectations. Our ability to be successful in conflicts of necessity, especially those against a demanding enemy, is much less sure and the consequences are greater if we fail.

In Iraq, I fought with a military that was in the midst of a conflict of necessity.¹⁰ I replaced a US general as Chief of Operations and I was replaced by a US general. US strategy and tactics, despite the enormous friction and confusion in Iraq, were those of a military that was intent on winning. The United States’ tolerance of casualties to itself or to its enemy was appropriate for a military fighting to win. The US approach to creating a full counterinsurgency capability, while in conflict, contains lessons for the ADF.

Australian ground units in Iraq are using tactics appropriate for a conflict of choice, but they are doing so in the midst of a massive army using tactics appropriate for a conflict of necessity. On occasions, this has led to private criticism of  our great and powerful ally for clumsiness or excessive use of force. This in my opinion is wrong. As an Australian in the midst of the US military, and as someone in control of all coalition operations across all of Iraq at the operational (theatre strategic) level,¹¹ it is my judgment that if Australia was fighting a war of necessity in a theatre like Iraq, we would act in a similar manner, and it would be legal, moral and appropriate. That is why I believe that the US experience in the Iraq campaign is of such value to the development of this doctrine.

During my time in Iraq, the counterinsurgency was heavily joint. We benefited from joint fires, joint intelligence, joint personnel, and joint and contract logistics. Our campaign should have been much more ‘whole-of-nation’ and interagency, but during this time (and, I understand, still after five years) this was severely deficient. The counterinsurgency in Iraq was multinational in name only. There were twenty-eight nations in the coalition, but the United States and the United Kingdom carried out almost all of the offensive combat operations. Of course it was predominantly a land operation, but it was undeniably a ‘joint land operation’. More importantly, it was not an Army responsibility—I was mentored and prepared for operations by a US joint organisation.

Australian counterinsurgency doctrine must reflect this reality. If we address conflicts of necessity in our doctrine, yet base it on a hope (for example) that interagency participation will be high while knowing that there is no capacity for interagency participation in anything above a small ‘conflict of choice’ commitment, then we invalidate our doctrine immediately. If we speak confidently of time sensitive targeting in our doctrine but we have put no effort into understanding it or indeed creating it, we are building our counterinsurgent future on foundations of sand that will collapse in the face of an enemy. If we acknowledge that counterinsurgency is totally dependent on good intelligence quickly passed to lower commanders, yet our ADF intelligence capacity is stretched by current deployments where combat is low, then what credibility can our doctrine have? If we know that counterinsurgency is ‘war among the people’, which needs specialised capabilities such as detention operations, information operations, human intelligence, military policing, secure logistics, civil affairs and population control (through biometrics), and we know that we are deficient in all of these, our future commanders will not put faith in this doctrine.

Our doctrine must of course provide a historical perspective but should focus more on contemporary counterinsurgency, even at the expense of classical theory. In 2004 I considered myself knowledgeable about classical counterinsurgency theory, but I quickly came to appreciate in April 2004 that Iraq was different from anything I envisaged. So different was the counterinsurgency in Iraq that it took us from April 2003 to mid- to late-2004 to come up with a counterinsurgency campaign plan that came close to meeting the requirement. Each conflict is unique and needs to be understood by those who are participating in it.

Of course we will need to adapt to the conflict that faces us, but in my opinion it is not an excuse for overly generalised doctrine. The doctrine should address a specific enemy; both models of conflict—choice and necessity—can have more or less violent enemies. But in conflicts of choice, Australia can decide how much combat it will become involved in. I believe it would be folly to set our doctrine against Timor Leste-like militias that had little capacity for violence against anything but civilians and no access to explosive weaponry. The next generation of commanders might, only once or twice in their careers, have to fight in a violent conflict in which they must win. If their doctrinal base is Timor Leste militias, rather than the Mehdi Militia, their need to adapt might be so large that it could dislocate them before they can effectively fight. If they spend all their training and preparation time addressing the Mehdi Militia, and they are required to confront an Timor Leste-like militia, then they will thank us all.

The impact of the level of violence on the conduct of a counterinsurgency should never be underestimated and must be addressed in this doctrine. Violence is the most common manifestation of asymmetry because it creates casualties which over time impact on the Western counterinsurgent’s greatest vulnerability—resolve. To focus our counterinsurgency capability only on a low violence insurgency such as Timor Leste or Solomon Islands, just because they are our most recent experience, is to miss the whole point of asymmetry. It is the insurgent that makes the initial decision on the level of violence, not us.

I recommend that our doctrine concentrate on an enemy whose central idea represents religious totalitarianism.¹² If our doctrine can address this it will cover the range of any threats in any counterinsurgency that the ADF is likely to lead or participate in within the foreseeable future. Having picked a demanding but realistic enemy, we should then ensure that if we master that, we can handle lesser challenges.

The most credible yet challenging physical environment in which to situate our religiously inspired insurgency, for the purposes of developing our counterinsurgency doctrine, is a city. This is because insurgencies are about ideas, and only people have ideas—and people live (mainly and increasingly) in cities. Insurgents will hide from our military capabilities ‘among the people’ and they will attempt to intimidate concentrations of people in cities. War ‘among the people’ (urban) is at least as difficult as war in any other physical location because of restrictions on the use of force.

This doctrine should include real examples to illustrate counterinsurgency concepts, and avoid using rhetoric and myth. Wars are emotional activities, especially sustained violent wars. The people and their elected leaders demand rhetoric and create their own myths. However, if professionals use rhetoric too often and if they begin to believe their own rhetoric and myths, then failure is likely. As a professional soldier that has worked with many Western and non-Western armies, and as a practitioner of counterinsurgency, I am yet to be convinced that an ‘Australian approach to war’ exists that will withstand scrutiny. I am sceptical of any claim involving an ability to do things that have not been resourced, recently practiced or demonstrated. I have heard it claimed that Australians are very good at counterinsurgency because we have a long history of success. Our soldiers, our rhetoric claims, are able to relate to the people better than others based in some way our national traits of mateship and ‘a fair go’.¹³ These are dangerous beliefs which belong more in the popular press than they do in military minds.

Our doctrine should be ‘distinctively Australian without being uniquely Australian’. Despite Australia having a presence in Iraq, I do not yet detect a widespread understanding of the wider struggle in Iraq, an insurgency that is likely to set a benchmark for insurgencies for many years to come. The two most dangerous concepts in the Australian military or bureaucratic lexicon at the moment are first, the term ‘warfighting’ unless it is understood, and second, the rhetorical flourish that some aspect or group in the ADF is ‘the best in the world’. Perhaps there is a place for this, but it makes me deeply uncomfortable because it is delusion before a fall. If we are the best in the world at anything then I will be the first to claim it. But my observation over a long time indicates that Australian soldiers have no more natural ability to be soldiers (whether as ‘carers’ or ‘killers’) than individuals from any other similar society. Our soldiers are only as good as the training and equipping that goes into preparing them for conflict, and the leadership that they depend on. And all of that counts for nought if we are in the wrong war for the wrong reasons, or we are not clear about when to use force.

An essential part of our responsibility to our nation in creating a counterinsurgency capability is to draw on the lessons of those who are involved in broader and much more complex operations than we are. We cannot learn from them if we do not understand the war they are fighting. I have rarely been able to link the war in which I fought with either an official Australian view of the war in Iraq or the conversational view of the war. I would expect that our doctrine will include lessons from those who are doing the fighting, but these must be the right lessons or the counterinsurgency cause will not be advanced. Doctrine must draw from our own experiences, without rhetoric or myth, and build on the experience of others where we are lacking.¹⁴

Our doctrine has an obligation to tell future commanders how modern counter-insurgency is conducted, because many of them will not know. I was not ready for the Iraq war, having only a few weeks to prepare, and I took with me all the prejudices of a soldier from a small country at the end of the earth. As I quickly came to understand the complex nature of the war, one of the first tasks I gave myself was to be able to state how we were actually conducting this modern counterinsurgency. It would seem to me to be relevant for our doctrine.

I put it in the following way: modern military ‘manoeuvre’¹⁵ in a complex counterinsurgency consists of framework operations, leadership operations and, surprisingly, ‘conventional’¹⁶ operations. The purpose of this manoeuvre is to create security so that the non-military aspects of national power—diplomatic, political, information, economic and reconstruction—can be applied to stabilise the target nation.¹⁷

Framework operations are what most troops do most of the time and are essentially ‘three block war’.¹⁸ If there are enough troops, framework operations protect the people, the economy and the processes of government and society from the insurgent, and create conditions for other types of operations, kinetic and non-kinetic. Framework operations need vast logistic support which in turn needs to be protected, and specific ‘war among the people’ skills such as civil affairs, human intelligence, detention, information operations and population control through bio-metrics. Framework operations need to establish an enduring presence among the people.

Leadership operations are aimed at killing or capturing the insurgent leadership so that they are less lethal in their attacks on the population, and the rank and file insurgent can be influenced away from the insurgent idea. Almost all combat forces can perform leadership operations but Special Forces, backed up by surveillance and intelligence capabilities, are particularly effective. Direct action against the insurgent leadership is conducted by raids, and by strikes against time sensitive targets.¹⁹ Time sensitive targeting is a complex specialised activity that, in my view, is essential in urban counterinsurgencies. It is so complex, technically, legally and morally, that it does not emerge as an afterthought, but must be purposefully developed over time. Intelligence-led time sensitive targeting is one of the most effective asymmetries that Western countries can apply to an insurgency.

‘Conventional’ operations are required when the insurgency presents an opportunity to eradicate a large number of insurgents by the use of concentrated forces. This was the case in Fallujah, and only slightly less so in Samarra, Kut, Tal Afar, Sadr City, Basrah and Najaf during my time in Iraq. This is a level of combat that is far more intense than the ‘third block’ of the ‘three block war’ but is carried out by the same troops and commanders with the same equipment as were deployed for framework operations, with maybe a day or so to change from one to the other. Because of this, doctrine cannot give the impression that Australia can create a force that might be good only at some misguided concept of counterinsurgency, at the expense of conventional warfighting skills.²⁰

My experience in Iraq suggests that a major focus of Australian counterinsurgency doctrine should be generalship or operational art, because that is a necessity in any counterinsurgency and, in my opinion, Australia’s major military deficiency. We define operational art as the skilful employment of military forces to attain strategic goals through the design, organisation, sequencing and direction of campaigns and major operations. It translates strategy into operational and ultimately tactical actions. We also tell ourselves that ‘operational art is at the centre of our thinking on the conduct of war’, ²¹ but I can find no proof of this beyond the written word.

Operational art is not a concept that is only relevant to big militaries running big wars. It is the objective, not the mass a combat force generates or the level of its command, that determines whether operational art is necessary. Operational art is about the function and effectiveness a given force brings to bear in fulfilling strategic objectives. Operational art is what ‘generalship’ is all about, and in modern conflict, with strategic corporals and tactical political leaders, many civilians exercise a form of generalship, more so in conflicts of necessity where the stakes are high. Anyone who exercises operational art needs and deserves consideration within our doctrine.

Despite much popular criticism, the US forces I observed in Iraq adapted to become competent counterinsurgency forces in very difficult circumstances in only a relatively short period of time.²² At no stage did I observe that the war was being ‘lost’ by commanders and soldiers at the tactical level.²³ The tactical leaders were highly competent. The soldiers fought exceptionally well and, despite the myths, did non-kinetics²⁴ as well as possible given the security situation, and often at the expense of their own lives. Where there were problems was at the operational and strategic level—a lack of counterinsurgency operational art or ‘generalship’, both civilian and military.

The need is not at the tactical level as much as it is at the operational level. Soldiers do not lose wars; civilian and military ‘generals’ lose wars. I would suggest that a major focus of Australian counterinsurgency doctrine should be the operational art, because Australian senior officers lack experience at the operational level. If your strategic leadership cannot get the right force in the right place with the right equipment to fight the right war, and your operational leadership cannot orchestrate the campaign, then it is almost irrelevant how good your soldiers can fight at the tactical level.

Operational art is a deficiency across the ADF, not just regarding counterinsurgency. Australian commanders have no recent experience of exercising operational art, and as forces and conflicts increase in complexity, both training and education is needed for senior officers. It would be almost impossible to solve the operational art problem in the ADF without a full review of this issue, and I see no move in that direction at this stage. But to me it seems folly to write doctrine based on an assumption that Australian operational level commanders will be competent in operational art, when we are not positively assisting them to do so. It is a brave decision to rely so heavily on luck, and risk increases exponentially. Our doctrine should at least highlight the importance of operational art in trying to win a counterinsurgency conflict, even if our doctrine cannot solve it. Australian operational commanders (and their political and strategic superiors) have at least as much right to counterinsurgency doctrine as do the soldiers.

Close combat is so ugly that everyone is looking for alternatives—except the modern insurgent. Insurgencies are about violence, the main expression of asymmetry. Violence causes casualties and casualties cause fear. A fearful local population can be intimidated, which enables an insurgency to thrive. But also, insurgents aim to cause fear in intervening nations through combat, violence and casualties because, over time, this affects resolve. The major strategy of an insurgency is to control the population by intimidation and to outlast foreign intervention by attacking resolve.

Central to all of this is violence, and insurgent violence must be met by force, especially in the early stages of a conflict. Of all the desirable traits of a counterinsurgent force that should be reflected in our doctrine, the ability to fight must be paramount. Our doctrine must not create a belief in our future commanders that somehow, combat should be considered a failure.²⁵

The ugliness of combat causes our societies to search for alternatives to solving conflict, and that is a good thing. But I question some of the popular silver bullet proposals. I have noticed a desire to confront conflict by cultural understanding and an ability to communicate in local languages. In certain circumstances perhaps this will work. It worked many times for me personally on the streets of Jakarta in 1998 and Dili in 1999. But if we are going to subscribe to this in our doctrine, we must see cultural sensitivity and languages as but one tool in the counterinsurgents tool box, and not necessarily as a substitute for traditional tools such as the threat or use of force.

The practicality of creating widespread cultural sensitivity and language skills in any military in anticipation of a conflict needs to be questioned. We tried it once in the Australian Army many years ago. It was idealistic and impractical, and was quietly dropped. I have mastered two languages apart from my native English, and I have worked in them for periods of years in foreign countries and in foreign conflicts. I understand the effort required to be a competent linguist. Languages are indeed the key to cultural understanding which is the key to success in foreign countries, but often this cannot occur on a widespread basis in advance of a conflict.

I would argue that in the early years in Iraq, we had to fight to establish the security that would then enable us to conduct the clever parts of counterinsurgency—touching hearts and minds through humanitarian operations. I would also argue that in the sixth year of the war, we may still not yet have established sufficient security to influence all of the Iraqi people. The lesson that I draw from this is that the probability of any Australian commander having adequate time or troops to prosecute some form of idealistic counterinsurgency is likely to be very low indeed. Counterinsurgent soldiers and commanders must expect an imperfect environment, and doctrine must convey this.²⁶ I fully understand the importance of humanitarian operations, but particularly early in an insurgency before an adequate level of security has been established, humanitarian operations cannot be stressed at the expense of combat operations.

Collateral damage is a major issue in counterinsurgencies because it creates enemies. It is always detrimental, but may be unavoidable. If we must confront insurgent violence with force, there will be collateral damage. The laws of armed conflict do not prohibit violence in war, they try to minimise it, as should we. Studies of civilian casualties in Iraq reinforce my view that the vast majority are caused by the insurgent as a major element of their tactics; but we also caused some, and our doctrine should give this perspective.

Putting the human tragedy to one side, we should take some comfort from the fact that collateral damage caused by the enemy hurts the enemy, but it seems to take much longer. This is because he reduces the short term backlash from the local population by simply increasing the violence.

One of our greatest advantages as we confront insurgent violence is our technical intelligence and legally applied targeting (strikes and raids) against the enemy leadership. In Iraq, there were totally different levels of collateral damage due to the actions of different nations, depending on whether they were in Iraq to win or to show commitment. I also noticed that there were different levels of acceptance of collateral damage between Iraq and Afghanistan. Acceptance of collateral damage depends on the circumstances. In a conflict of necessity, higher levels of collateral damage may be more acceptable if you have to win than if you are only in the conflict to show commitment. This is the nature of modern counterinsurgency. And it is at the political level that responsibility for collateral damage must ultimately rest, and this responsibility is expressed through rules of engagement.

As a practitioner, I can state confidently that the theory on how to win a counter-insurgency conflict is not difficult. It is the execution that is problematic because it must address a situation that demands trial and error. Key players in Iraq in the second year of the war had a solid grounding in the classical theory of insurgency. If they were a bit rusty because they had been fighting conventional wars, they easily brought themselves up to speed.

Our doctrine must provide advice to future commanders on how to win. Of course it will be simplistic; commanders (like doctrine) have an obligation to make complex matters simple.

First, you must have a strategy to win, not a strategy to go home. If your strategy is to go home, you are in a war of choice, and you face other difficult decisions. If you have a strategy to win, then you are in a war of necessity. I fought in Iraq with a nation that was confused initially about whether it was in a conflict of necessity or a conflict of choice, and its commanders were receiving mixed signals from the national leadership as to whether they were there to win or there to come home. The rhetoric told them they were there to win but the resource allocation, particularly of time, told them they were not. Another manifestation of this confusion was the lack of troops allocated to the task. The US allocated what it thought it could afford, not what the task needed.

My views concerning conflicts of necessity are that the strategy must be consistent and sustained over time, and it must be to win. However, such clarity of strategic vision and strength of resolve normally does not exist at the start of a conflict. Or it may exist initially, it may develop over time, or it may disappear. This is the environment in which our future commanders must operate, not some idealised environment in which we are led to expect consistent and clear strategic guidance.

Regardless of the strategy, the tactics that lie below the strategy should be infinitely flexible. In any specific counterinsurgency, it will be the norm not to know if a tactic will work until it has been tried; however, there is a limit to the number of times that tactics or techniques can be seen to fail. The doctrine should include a comprehensive plan that focuses all aspects of national power against the insurgency’s ideas. In Iraq, initial failures were magnified by a failure of non-military bodies in the US to provide capability. Not only did we have insufficient troops, time and money in Iraq, we did not have sufficient numbers of CIA, State Department or Homeland Security officers. In a lot of cases, this was because they just did not exist, and the limitations of the Coalition Provisional Authority were an illustration of this point.

The military, as part of a comprehensive plan, will be required to compensate for what I consider to be the inevitable failure of non-military bodies in our society to meet the need. The military does not conduct counterinsurgency, the nation conducts counterinsurgency. But history shows that the nation will rarely be ready. Doctrine should acknowledge that the military must be prepared to carry the burden of interagency failure, and to provide, at least in the early stages of a conflict,²⁷ almost everything that will be required.²⁸ This means that the ADF should be creating a Civil Affairs capability in the US sense, and not just a CIMIC capability.²⁹

So the military will be a large part, if not all, of the comprehensive plan, especially at the beginning. But in any insurgency worthy of the name, we will hardly get into the initial stage, much less out of the initial stage, unless we can provide security, because we will be beaten. There are lots of ways of providing security³⁰ but our doctrine should not downplay the importance of being able to fight, especially during the early stages.

I observed that as we learnt and adapted in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, we sometimes fought unnecessarily, but this did not occur often. It was not a long stage in our learning process, but it was a very important stage. We had learnt the war (as it was at the time), by my estimation towards the end of 2004, and the campaign plan that we produced was appropriate to the time. But again, just having a campaign plan does not guarantee that you can execute it.

The role of the military in our comprehensive campaign plan was to provide security behind which counterinsurgency could then be conducted. Within that comprehensive campaign plan, the military had to be able to protect the people and their essential services; protect the political, legal and economic processes; develop the host nation security forces; and attack the extremists. Our ability to do this became as much a function of resource availability as of our operational level generalship—we did not have enough troops and it looked like we were not going to have enough time.

So the third item of advice and possibly the most important in how to win, is that no counterinsurgency campaign will be successful until it is fully resourced in terms of manpower, time, money and national resolve. The manpower aspect is such an important issue that I will address it again later.

Fourth, if the above is applied and we adapt well to the current war and start to see some signs of success against the insurgents, do not be surprised if we are surprised. As soon as we make progress, our enemy will try to find a way to change the war. By the end of 2005, the steps that we took over the previous two years meant that, although we would never claim to be winning, we were certainly not being decisively beaten. Our enemies are living, breathing, thinking opponents, and they did not stand back and admire our progress. It was obvious that if the insurgents had not taken drastic steps after the three successful elections in 2005, we would have continued to make progress going into 2006. So they changed the war through sectarian violence. From 2003 to 2005, we learnt the war that faced us and we adapted. When our enemies changed the war in early 2006³¹ and began a slaughter of their own country’s people, we had to learn and adapt once again. And the resolve of the major nations in the war was severely tested.

The most visible issue in current counterinsurgency remains troop numbers, because troop numbers are directly related to effectiveness, casualties and cost, and these are directly related to resolve. This is not a marginal issue—it could be the central issue. You cannot be in a counterinsurgency to win, or at least win in a reasonable period, if you do not have enough troops. Despite what we learnt in Iraq, the issue of troop density seems to have been marginalised in Afghanistan, so I would not be confident that ‘adequate troops’ is a lesson that we have learnt for eternity. In Iraq, the US commander that I worked for³² handled the problem in two ways: he asked for and was given a significant troop surge to the maximum capability of the US military in late 2004 and in the first half of 2005, and he put maximum resources into creating a competent Iraqi force, with full knowledge that this was a long and risky undertaking. Even in the second year of the war, the United States was raising ten new US brigades (40 000 soldiers) and now has moved into a program to increase the US military by 92 000 soldiers. Often, however, adequate numbers of troops will not be available, and in those cases we should anticipate a long fight.

Our doctrine on counterinsurgency must address the issue of adequate numbers or we will repeat the failures of Iraq in every subsequent conflict, as I fear we may be in Afghanistan. Doctrine must offer our future commanders some rules of thumb that encapsulate what we have learned.³³

Based on studies by the RAND Corporation of historically successful counterinsurgencies, a rule of thumb has been that twenty competent, trustworthy troops (or para-military police) are needed per 1000 of the population. Iraq has a population of twenty-seven million, therefore the troops theoretically needed by historical standards was 540 000.³⁴ But the number of quality troops available in Iraq has never been more than 170 000, with only about 150 000 able to regularly conduct offensive operations. Just because a future commander is not given the theoretically correct number of troops, it does not mean the campaign will not be conducted. And if the campaign is conducted with less than the optimum number of troops, this does not necessarily mean defeat. In a conflict of necessity, future Australian commanders may have to do their best with the number of troops that they have available. What it meant in Iraq was that the fewer troops we had, the longer the conflict would run and the more vulnerable was our resolve.

As well, historical rules of thumb may not have taken into account the progress over time of high technology surveillance or the increase in quality of US troops. We could take risk and not deploy troops to areas outside cities because we could see from surveillance that no enemy was present in significant numbers. But in war among the people in cities, there is no equivalent to wide area surveillance, and this is exacerbated because language and ethnicity limit the ability to gain intelligence from agents (human intelligence). Urban counterinsurgencies consume troops in very large numbers indeed.

So our historical experience tells us we may need hundreds of thousands of quality troops in Iraq, but we only had 150 000. This proportional deficiency might be the norm for our future commanders and doctrine should address this in an Australian context rather than some ideal. The question then becomes: What should commanders do if they face this situation? We faced that situation—and we continued to fight the war. We knew that the fewer troops we had, the longer the war would go, but if we kept our resolve, we could still win. We had no way of saying how much longer because we had to try this level of troops and see what happened. We knew that the United States was pressed for troops worldwide and responsible US commanders did what they could with what they had, asked for more when they really needed them, and tried to create an Iraqi force to fight alongside us. We should not be surprised that the war is in its sixth year, but our doctrine must ensure that all those connected with counterinsurgency in the future understand this issue.

Our doctrine must align with higher level concepts that state how the ADF will fight as a joint force in the future. These concepts provide the discipline that doctrine drafters need in relation to the maximum force size that future Australian joint commanders might have access to in an Australian-led regional counterinsurgency or in worldwide military operations in the future. Those who draft doctrine must take account of the leadership’s best judgment on how long we will need to deploy, and what will be the pattern of our deployment. They must also address the deficiencies in the future force that our counterinsurgency commanders will be using, with the hope that we start now to remedy those deficiencies. By disciplining our doctrine writers through the guidance of the senior leadership, we align the joint force from top to bottom, and we address Australian issues at an Australian scale.

Joint Operations in the 21st Century is an unclassified document set many years into the future. The only issue for doctrine writers is the emphasis that we place in that document on manoeuvrist strategies, given that counterinsurgency is essentially attritional. An unthinking manoeuvrist attitude by a future Australian counterinsurgency commander might be counterproductive.

In summary then, based on my experience in Iraq, I have offered the following observations to the drafters of our counterinsurgency doctrine:  

• It will be a more complex task than you imagine.
    
• Our counterinsurgency doctrine should be ‘owned’ by the Vice Chief of the Defence Force as the Joint Capability Manager.  
• Our doctrine should be authoritative. 
   
• We should really be creating a counterinsurgency capability for the nation, only part of which is doctrine.  
   
• Base our doctrine on lessons from our current conflicts but write it for those Australian commanders who will lead counterinsurgencies in the future.  
   
• Concentrate on the operational level and only stray into lower level tactics when they are very important.  
• Commit to some judgments about the future.  
   
• Emphasise the two models of future conflicts—conflicts of choice and conflicts of necessity—and differentiate strongly between them.  
   
• Counterinsurgency is joint, ‘whole of nation’, inter-agency and multinational—but don’t count on it.  
   
• Our doctrine must reflect what is, or what is likely to be, not what we hope will be or what should be.  
   
• Focus more on contemporary counterinsurgency, even at the expense of classical theory.  
   
• Position our doctrine to address a religiously inspired enemy on an urban battlefield.  
   
• Be free of myth and rhetoric.  
   
• Explain how modern counterinsurgency is conducted and how to win.  
   
• Address the biggest problems—operational art.  
   
• Emphasise that a counterinsurgency force must be able to fight, more so in the early stages—if you cannot fight, you will never get to the ‘hearts and minds’ part.  
   
• Address the tactics of counterinsurgency—you must have an adequate number of troops—but don’t count on it.
    
• Align doctrine with concepts to give realistic guidance on force size, timings and force structure for Australians.

Endnotes

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1    This article is based on a presentation given at a seminar called by the Chief of Army in February 2008, the purpose of which was to guide authors drafting counterinsurgency doctrine to capture an Australian approach to this important subject.

2    The VCDF has had the responsibility for Joint Capability Management for some years but does not yet have the staff or organisation to effect it.

3    Doctrine should be ‘enforceable’ in the general preparation for non-specific conflict. It is not proposed here that this level of doctrine is binding in practice. As arguably the most influential military doctrine ever written, the German Army’s 1933 ‘Truppenfuhrung’ says: war itself is an art, a free and creative activity founded on scientific principles.

4    An example is Field Manual 3-24, the Petraeus or Petraeus/Mattis doctrine. The U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007.

5    The level of violence in current counterinsurgencies is greater than most deployed ADF elements are seeing at the moment.

6    Department of Defence, Australia’s National Security: A Defence Update 2003, Defence Publishing Service, Canberra, 2003, p. 7. Department of Defence, Australia’s National Security: A Defence Update 2005, Defence Publishing Service, Canberra, 2005, p. 10. Department of Defence, Australia’s National Security: A Defence Update 2007, Defence Publishing Service, Canberra, 2007, pp. 37–9.

7    Michael Evans, ‘The Closing of the Australian Military Mind: The ADF and Operational Art’, based on a paper written for the VCDF, which will be published in a forthcoming edition of the Kokoda Foundation Journal Security Challenges.

8    National commanders are commanders deployed to a theatre with specific responsibility for the national interests of troops that are deployed under control of coalition manoeuvre commanders, but they do not manoeuvre the forces (or command them in battle).

9    For example: Korea, Malaya, Confrontation, Vietnam, Somalia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Solomon Islands, Iraq and Afghanistan. It has been argued that the 1914 Australian campaign to seize German possessions in New Guinea and the Pacific, and Blamey’s role in the South-West Pacific in 1943-44 were at the operational level.

10   I refer here not to the invasion of the Iraq, which clearly involved choice, but to the counterinsurgency that followed.

11   My position was referred to as chief of ‘Strategic Operations’ because it interfaced with the Iraqi Government. It was also referred to as ‘theatre strategic’. In a global sense, it was the operational level of war, with the strategic level being run from Washington, and the tactical level of the war being run by the Multinational Corps.

12   I take the term from Allan Behm, Strategic Tides: Positioning Australia’s Security Policy to 2050, Kokoda Paper 6, November 2007, who says that ‘religious totalitarianism depends on the idea that all human action is absolutely subject to the will and power of God, who not only knows and directs ... but actually prescribes the course and rules of human action’.

13   I heard almost the exact same claim made by the Indonesian Armed Forces about their troops in Cambodia, except that ‘mateship’ was replaced by principles of Panca Sila.

14   I saw on a daily basis that commentators, as the old saying goes, ‘did not believe what they saw, but saw what they believed’. No one is immune from this, but the learning cycle of soldiers on the ground can sometimes be measured in minutes as reality imposes itself in terms of violence, casualties and sometimes defeat. For the media, often there was no learning cycle as they quickly moved on to the next issue.

15   The term ‘manoeuvre’ is used in the sense of what militaries do when deployed on operations.

16   The term ‘conventional’ is used to describe a military operation where asymmetry is not as central as it is in counterinsurgency. It describes operations where the enemy stands and fights.

17   Often referred to by the acronym ‘DIME’, Diplomatic, Information, Military and Economic. In Iraq, we added Political and Reconstruction.

18   A term coined in the 1990s by the US Marines to describe complex operations that involved simultaneous humanitarian, protection or control, and combat operations occurring in neighbouring city blocks.

19   Time sensitive targets are those that only appear for short periods of time. In an urban environment they must be found and dealt with rapidly, but legally and accurately, normally by Special Forces raids or by aerial bombs.

20   This should not be a surprise to most Vietnam war veterans—there was an abundance of conventional operations in Vietnam and some on a very large scale. The post-Vietnam generation, however, has not experienced general and consistent support for the fact that a conventional combat capability is always necessary.

21   Joint Operations for the 21st Century, Future Joint Operating Concept, Department of Defence, June 2007.

22   A period still measured in years, but short in comparison to the average length of a counterinsurgency campaign.

23   There were individual failures but (arguably) no military institutional failures.

24   Such as humanitarian and civil affairs operations.

25   Many people see the Petraeus/Mattis doctrine as under-emphasising combat, and over emphasising other activities such as humanitarian operations.

26   The Petraeus/Mattis doctrine does this relatively well, especially through some of the writings of David Kilcullen. For example: what if higher headquarters does not get counterinsurgency? What if the theatre shifts under your feet? What if you have no resources?

27   The ‘initial stages’ of a counterinsurgency might be measured in years rather than months.

28   I am not saying that military doctrine is likely to influence non-military agencies, but doctrine must carry the idea that such agencies may not be able to participate, especially in the early stages.

29   In the US sense as practiced in Iraq, a Civil Affairs capability enabled the coalition to ‘run a country’ (with all our errors and clumsiness), as well as do ‘civil military cooperation’. This might be more appropriate if we are to be ‘security leaders’ in our region.

30   ‘Human security’ methods—employment, delivery of humanitarian assistance, the rule of law, human rights, freedom from fear, education, reconstruction, etc., much of which can only be delivered by non-military bodies.

31   Marked by the destruction of the Mosque of the Golden Dome in Samarra, of great significance to the Shia.

32   General George W Casey, Jr.

33   Ultimately the military does not decide the numbers of troops that are committed to a conflict of choice or necessity. Politicians own wars. The military’s role is to advise and then execute the government’s decision. But good advice cannot be given if the facts are not widely known.

34   This number is as complex as everything else about the Iraq War. It may need to be lessened significantly because the insurgency was concentrated in the Sunni Triangle, but it may also need to be increased because of the demand of cities. This is the kind of number (‘several hundred thousand’) used by the US Army in Congressional inquiries into the occupation of Iraq prior to the invasion, but supposedly disregarded by the Administration. James T Quinlivan, ‘Burden of Victory: The Painful Arithmetic of Stability Operations’, RAND Review, Vol. 27, No. 2, Summer 2003, pp. 28-9.