COIN of the Realm

Such military action is only the first step. "While security is essential to setting the stage for overall progress," the manual states, "lasting victory comes from a vibrant economy, political participation, and restored hope." Here, it echoes the French counterinsurgency theorist David Galula's famous tenet that "military action is secondary to the political one, its primary purpose being to afford the political power enough freedom to work safely with the population." This means that the military must be prepared to support the efforts of U.S. civilian agencies, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and the host-nation government to rebuild critical infrastructure, provide essential services, promote economic development, and empower local and national political institutions. It also means, however, that when civilian entities are slow to arrive, lack sufficient resources, or are incapable of conducting these activities in dangerous environments, the military must be ready to pick up the slack. The military, in other words, is not only the primary protector of the population but also the nation builder of last resort.

Although the guidelines presented in the COIN FM are derived from research on dozens of twentieth-century counterinsurgency campaigns, it is difficult to know whether its template can work in all cases. Every insurgency has unique properties, and no counterinsurgency campaign has ever been conducted in exactly the way the manual describes. The purest example of the clear, hold, build model is the effective British effort during the Malayan Emergency (1948-60). The United States experimented with elements of this approach during the later stages of Vietnam, with some success, but too late to turn the tide. Still, overall, the COIN FM probably represents the single best distillation of current knowledge about irregular warfare.

GLOVES ON

The most powerful critique of the COIN FM's approach comes from the "coercion" school of thought on counterinsurgency, which sees legitimacy as an unattainable -- and wholly unnecessary -- goal. In the 1960s, the RAND analysts Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf argued that counterinsurgents should worry less about winning popular allegiance and more about raising the costs of supporting the insurgency. As Edward Luttwak put it in a recent essay, "The easy and reliable way of defeating all insurgencies everywhere" is to "out-terrorize the insurgents, so that fear of reprisals outweighs the desire to help the insurgents." In contrast to the COIN FM, the coercion school sees no need for conventional armies to remake themselves into kinder, gentler nation builders; instead, they can win by doing what they do best: employing overwhelming firepower to destroy the adversary and using armed coercion -- including harsh collective punishment -- to convince the population to shun the insurgents. "The teething-ring nonsense that insurgencies don't have military solutions defies history," the widely read military analyst Ralph Peters has written. "Historically, the common denominator of successful counterinsurgency operations is that only an uncompromising military approach works -- not winning hearts and minds nor a negotiated compromise." Ultimately, the thinking goes, military sticks are much more important than civilian carrots.

This position is alive and well in the debate over Iraq. Hawkish commentators contend that the United States' problems in Iraq are the result of overly restrictive rules of engagement and a hesitancy to "take the gloves off." Some have even derided the COIN FM as "malpractice" for allegedly applying the lessons of Vietnam under the guise of learning from Iraq. In particular, they object to its application of political models of nationalist and ideological struggle to contemporary insurgencies that are, they contend, essentially religious. Bing West, assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, argues, for example, that the approach endorsed by the COIN FM "does not apply to the root cause of the insurgency [in Iraq and elsewhere] -- a radical religion whose adherents are not susceptible to having their hearts and minds won over."