The Counterinsurgency Debate on NPR
NPR ran an excellent and fair report on the ongoing debate about COIN and conventional preparedness on Morning Edition this morning. John Nagl is called the disciple of COIN's Jesus, GEN David Petraeus.
Update: Charlie, here. Couple of thoughts.
1) Great report. One quibble: the Army report Guy Raz refers to highlights diminished capabilities in the field artillery branch (vice, the whole army). This is undoubtedly true, as almost all of these guys have been functioning as MPs for most of the war (same is largely true in the Marine Corps). But this is a consequence of several factors, not just the irregular environment in Iraq. The ability to (precisely) deliver indirect fire via air strikes Charlie as an important factor that diminishes the demand for field artillery (though she certainly acknowledges the preference for having that capability organic to ground units and not wanting to deal with blue-suiters and their bizarre CAS guidelines). The reduced demand for artillery fires can be seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, but those campaigns aren't the sole (or proximate) cause. (If Kip had ever set up our AM betting pool, Charlie would venture to guess you wouldn't see a lot of ground-based indirect fires in future conventional conflicts either.)
2) But let's say Charlie's wrong (gasp!) and we would need those fires in such a fight. What then? Should we preserve FA units and capabilities? Or invest more in IW/COIN/advising efforts? This is obviously part of a much larger question (one that needn't--and shouldn't--center on the fate of field artillery). And the answer depends on how likely you think each future scenario is, how costly losing each such scenarios is, and how easy you think it is to switch from one to another. This is called strategic planning. (If anyone has seen someone doing it, would you please let Charlie know? Thx.) You can have genuine disagreement along each of these axes, and those fault-lines can highlight where there is uncertainty and how you might hedge plans and force structure as a result. But these fights can be petty and facile as well, which, turns out, is rather less helpful. As we've said before, we don't have all the answers and we need all the help we can get.
38 comments:
The U.S. has misdiagnosed a resistance against an occupation as an insurgence against a government.
Wrong diagnosis, wrong medicine.
The whole COIN debate is thereby worthless.
b:
i agree with your first sentence although it is a mixture of both and not just one or the other.
In a sense, I also agree with your second sentence. Except that the debate from my perspective is worthwhile because the dominance of coin thinking and the positive belief that it can succeed in similar form almost anywhere else precludes us from seeing clearly the war in Iraq as it really is and potential future conflicts.
gian
Boy, this was a great report. I thought NPR was fair to all sides and really nailed down the debate.
Me too my friend. Guy Raz is a first-rate reporter; plus (and you wont care for this being a southern man) he is a Cali home boy just like me.
What are you up to?
drop me a line on email if you got the time to say hey.
gian
There's no doubt we need to maintain our FA capabilities. It's been shown that it's easier to keep artillerymen competent in warfighting than maneuver branches like Infantry or Artillery. Should we acknowledge a need or desire to change force structure down in the future, moving FA units to the Guard or Reserve while creating more maneuver units would be a way to do it while staying under the personnel ceiling.
By the way, relying on Air Force or Army Aviation for fires (CCA, CAS) is all well and good until the weather gets scuzzy and they can't fly. Artillery is there night and day, no crew rest limits their duty day, the flight of a 155 projectile is pretty tough to affect once it leaves the barrel headed for an enemy target.
Matt
Charlie, if "indirect" fire is delivered directly by a different platform, it's no longer "indirect." But we get your point.
This is the larger issue former SecDef Rumsfeld iteratively raised: Wherefore artillery and its large log-train? If technology improves the efficiency of putting firepower cheaply on target from other sources, what's the point of all those boots, gallons of fuel and ordnance?
Do we need GMLRS AND traditional arty? How much does JDAM dropped from all-weather aircraft diminish the need for batteries?
If the nature of warfare changes to population-centric operations, is the use of indirect fire even feasible?
Seemed like a fair report. With regard to Charlie's question, it seems like this is an issue not just for the future role of the Army, but defense allocations as a whole.
But just focusing on the Army, it seems like the key questions are the probability future wars will require COIN (caveat: obviously capabilities will -- or should -- influence willingness to act) versus more traditional mid-to-high conventional combat for the purpose of controlling territory. It is a question of probability times impact. Will the Iraq experience cause the American military to shy away from future stability operations or make them more likely? Not necessarily an easy question to answer. Unfortunately, if you want to answer the question of what the Army should be training for, you have to make some sort of projection about propensity for the United States to get involved in conflicts like this in the future, right?
Furthermore, what is the terminal cost if the Army over-focused on COIN. The cost of not focusing on COIN are easy to imagine because we have lived with them for several years. What is the best work out there specifying potential future conflicts where more conventional Army capabilities would be needed and the *way* the degradation of traditional capabilities due to COIN would influence the ability of the Army to fight? Is it a Korean Peninsula scenario? How would it matter, etc? I am not saying this to be unreasonable, I am curious whether AM or Charlie or gian p. gentile or whoever could spell it out to help clarify the "stakes". What is the worst case scenario in both directions?
Scott:
Admittedly the term "conventional" capabilities connotes visions of trying to recreate the soviet union and fight them in the fulda gap. Or, the unrealistic notion of a major American "conventional" and sustained land camapaign in china.
But when I use the term "conventional" capabilities and what is happening to them I am not talking about the above nonsensical scenarios. Instead I am talking about the American Army's ability to fight at a relatively "higher" level of intensity than in Iraq or Astan today involving sustained ground operations in the field or in urban areas that require synchronized use of combat functions, like artillery, for example. There are many possible scenarios to consider. A sortie into Iraq immediately comes to mind perhaps of a combat brigade or two from Iraq. Or north korea imploding as a state, the south moving up to occupy requiring some level of assistance from the US that might entail some type of irregular or stability operations along with some level of high intensity fighting from left-over forces.
The recent example of Israel in Lebanon comes to mind. I acknowledge AM's correctness in pointing out that there are plenty of dis-similarities between us and the Israelis in 06. But there are some worriesome similarities too in that the Israeli Army did spend most of its effort in the preceeding years doing mostly stability ops in the Palestinian territories. Most of the serious studies of what happened to the Israeli Army argue that that stability ops focus had atrohpied their ability to fight a strong Hiz enemy that fought them less like Iraqi insurgents and more like small squads of fierce and determined infantry.
It is in that sense that I think we should be worried about the coin focus of the US Army. I do not accept the notion by some that the American Army's conventional fighting capability is a constant.
And the risk is that by continuing this sustained level of deployments to Iraq and Astan which requires the operational army to really do nothing but coin, we are in the process of breaking the Army in its ability to do other types of higher intensity ops. The three colonels report on the artillery branch gets at this problem. And along these lines the SF has its own problems assosciated with Iraq in that the majority of its groups and battalions are so focussed on Iraq and Astan that they neglect the other parts of the world they are responsible for, like Latin America.
gentile
I was thrilled to hear this report on my commute this morning. Well done by NPR as usual. At the end though Guy Raz said that the Army had recently made stability ops part of its job(in reference to new 3-0). I would have to argue that the army did not make Stability ops its job, just formalize a framework for something we have always done. I had to explain this to someone later, the army is not making more things it's business, right?
"The ability to (precisely) deliver indirect fire via air strikes Charlie as an important factor that diminishes the demand for field artillery"
Two words - Operation Anaconda. No air, no field artillery, SOL.
Seems to me it comes down to money. With enough, the Army can maintain both capabilities. If that is not going to happen, then it needs to be more than an Army issue. Apportionment of the whole DoD budget needs reassessment IMO.
Steve
That's some strange NPR report - I can't really see calling it excellent and fair, though, - fair to the officers, perhaps, but lacking in some basic fundamentals.
Counterinsurgency has a large psychological operations component - the "hearts and minds" business. Imagine, for example, if the U.S. commanders had sent troops to protect all the government buildings, not just the Ministry of Oil, back in 2003.
This is not the kind of spilled milk that can be put back in the bottle. What if NPR had run a similar segment with Iraq residents on their views of the current COIN campaign?
So, what to do now? Though I do love a good bombardment, that is more effective against armies than against insurgencies that have popular support - unless you want to do what Syria did in Hamah:
"In February 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood ambushed government forces who were searching for dissidents in Hamah. Several thousand Syrian troops, supported by armor and artillery, moved into the city and crushed the insurgents during two weeks of bloodshed. When the fighting was over, perhaps as many as 10,000 to 25,000 people lay dead, including an estimated 1,000 soldiers. In addition, large sections of Hamah's old city were destroyed."
The difference being that any such action in Iraq that was carried out by the U.S. could only be seen as brutal oppression by an occupying power intent on capturing Iraqi oil reserves...
That is called "losing hearts and minds."
There was a great deal of IF from IDF SP Artillery during the 2nd Lebanon War. From the Israeli perspective, the results were disappointing.
AM, Gian, SNLiI, Charlie -
I'm curious to hear your views on just how the focus on COIN has degraded the ability to do conventional operations (as Gian says, a la Lebanon style rather than Fulda), both tactically and operationally.
With practically every FA battalion downrange serving as MPs or understrength motorized infantry, it seems pretty clear that artillery has been hit hard (COL MacFarland's recent article seems like a good demonstration of that). Same with armor, which I understand has become very focused on training to support infantry in the urban fight. But what about the infantry itself? Hasn't all the raiding and the sustained operations by small units actually increased units' capacity for combat - or is that only true of a few units here and there, like the battalions that fought in Baquba and East Rashid last year? And what has the effect been on aviation units?
At the operational level - Gian, I remember you mentioning that you think the Army's ability to logistically support corps-level offensive operations has suffered from the reliance on FOBs and LSAs. Do the rest of you agree? Could a couple of BCTs pick up everything and roll from Baghdad or Diyala into Iran if they were told to?
Gian -- your argument makes some sense. The Army needs to maintain the conventional capability to do the types of operations you envision. What is the *mechanism* by which focusing on COIN withers away conventional capabilities? I could imagine a couple of causal mechanisms, including:
-Trade-off in training time, with the skills learned getting ready to do COIN different from the skills learned to do conventional operations
-Trade-off in procurement, if the technologies purchased to conduct COIN are different than the technologies purchased to conduct conventional operations
-Something more amorphous about organizational routines, etc.
Thoughts?
Damn this was a stupid report.
I'm suprised no one has yet mentioned Excalibur. GPS guided 155mm shells are a hell of a lot cheaper than F-16s. Once they get more widely distributed I expect demand for FA to rise relative to air support. They also have the advantage of being a smaller bang that a 500lb JDAM, which is nice in urban areas.
ISTM b led this off with a resounding salvo, one with which I agree. Reality kind of suggests that the "insurgency" in Iraq is indeed really about those who weren't chosen to be in charge by the Great White Father expressing their disgruntlement at being left out.
IOTM that despite all the lovely COIN talk, what we're essentially doing is choosing sides and thus denying the Iraqi people the one opportunity we gave them by our idiotic invasion: working out how to run their country their own way, and on their own terms. For the first time ever. That's democracy, folks, not what we're imposing on them through our puppet government.
You folks want to get into COIN big time, you're on the right track. COIN is really just an acronym. What it seems the COIN enthusiasts really want is to reinvent the Raj. If that's the case, let's go full bore. Establish a colonial office and just assign the troops for the duration. Let 'em live there forever. Wife and kids at home? They can get more there.
My old officers guide has some words about how the Army is about existential threats to the nation. My dad's even older guide (1943) has the same verbiage. So where does COIN with large numbers of conventional forces fit into that equation? Unless of course, you're talking about an insurgency right here at home.
I'm not COIN hostile at all. Got some experience at it. There are certainly going to be times when a friendly foreign government—if there are any left—is going to need expert assistance from some well qualified professionals. But the whole U.S. Army? The unfortunate reality is that COIN kind of fits nicely into the intelligence and special forces arena, where graybeards can do things that fine young infantrymen just can't.
Of course, FA is withering away. So is Armor. And other branches. Why wouldn't they? The entire Army's being made into a light infantry organization. To fight a one-off weird "war" begun by what's now being viewed as a failed presidential administration.
What will the Army do if (one can only hope) the nation returns to rationality in its foreign policy? How long will it take to reverse the train that's now remaking the Army into a light infantry force? Are all of the so-called existential threats out there—Russia, China, etc.—not really threats at all? Is this why military leaders seem so eager to remake the force into an organization ill-trained to conduct combined arms maneuver warfare?
If those existential threats are real, then what the Army is now doing is a highwire act with no net. Is anyone else concerned about this?
Oh, and what's COIN got to do with terrorist threats to the nation?
So cut and dried. We might be fighting "COIN" or we might be fighting "conventional". What about high intensity COIN? What if somebody supplies insurgents the way we supplied the muj against the Soviets, with modern ATGMs and MANPADS? What then? Will there be CAS?
Also, the death of "conventional". We said that after WW II -- all wars would be atomic. Then Korea happened. Does the apparent lack of conventional capability create a weakness in the eyes of our enemies?
I think part of the reason why COIN keeps moving more to the forefront for the Army is simply because the United States, despite repeated instances requiring nation-building efforts, resolutely refuses to create institutions/structures to stabilize & rebuild nations after military conflict. Clearly this is something that will be a recurring need for American foreign policy as we move forward, but the Army is getting stuck bearing this burden because there's nothing else there to serve that role. So long as we practice an interventionist foreign policy (something we can expect for the next four years based on the remaining presidential candidates) there will be a need for those sorts of operations; the Army will be the default mechanism for execution and the influence of COIN concepts/training will expand.
The potential drawbacks to such an approach, as described by Lt. Col. Gentile are certainly real and valid concerns. Barring significant changes in the trajectory of our foreign policy (unlikely) or a substantial increase in manpower & funding (more likely but still fraught with difficulty), it will become an increasingly narrow line to walk between the execution of COIN-style operations & preparation for high intensity conflict.
What's unfortunate is that the Army is saddled with these potentially contradictory concepts while bearing most of the responsibility for Iraq & Afghanistan. The most logical way of solving this would be to adjust the distribution of funding going into the Defense Department and increasing the share going to the Army (at the expense of expensive boondoggles such as some of the new line of carriers or a few dozen F-22s).
This argument has been made before - Lewis Page, for example, in "Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs" (read it now if you haven't already, AM), compared the log train required by 3 Regt RA in 1991 with the effort required to put the same amount of ordnance on target via air strike, and concluded that air was the way forward. (The phrase "The Stuka is the field artillery of the Blitzkrieg" may also ring a bell or two.)
But I'd make some points in favour of artillery.
First, air platforms are expensive. All you really need to deliver precision air in a friendly air environment (ie no fighters, no heavy AAA or SAM) is something big, fast and long-endurance with a big payload, that can loiter over the battlefield at 15,000 feet, race to wherever it's needed and drop off a JDAM or two.
But the Air Force won't ever buy that - it'll have to be a supercruising stealth fighter with a radar that can count the change in your pocket and an engine that can pull nine G, and it'll cost the thick end of $100 million. So you won't have very many and they won't be very big, and so you won't always have all the fire you want, especially in a high-intensity conflict. Then there's the weather thing, and the availability thing - these high-tech fighterbombers will spend a lot of time off the ramp being worked on. Put in some realistic expectations, do the sums and see how many sorties you could actually expect to generate from, say, a carrier offshore in the Falklands - suddenly 105mm artillery looks much better than air for supporting Longdon or Wireless Ridge.
Second, as Charlie implies, it's presumably very comforting for the land component commander to know that he has the fires when he wants them - he can see the guns right there, he's got the BC right beside him, he knows they're working off the same plan (and their watches are set to the same time zone - pay attention, Rangers...) and he isn't suddenly going to get told, halfway through his battalion assault, "Sorry, air support's off because the pilot's ears went pop first time up."
And as for relying on AH... I think that argument was lost by (IIRC) 11 Air Cav in 2003. 24 go out, 10 come back in flyable condition?
The points about air defences and GPS-guided rounds are also well made.
As for the log train issue - this is one of expense, not vulnerability. You'll have that log train anyway if you have troops and armour on the ground.
Yes, well, Lewis Page is wrong. About nearly everything.
Further, it's not as if helicopters don't have a fearful logistic requirement; wasn't it something like a C-17 load for every three AH64s every day in 2003?
scott wedman asked:
"What is the *mechanism* by which focusing on COIN withers away conventional capabilities?"
The American Army (and Marines) are battle hardened after 6 years of Astan and 5 years of Iraq. No question about it; lots of hard-nosed combat experience. But it is a combat experience of a certain discrete type using certain types of discrete combat skills. We should not delude ourselves to think that just because we are good at coin and the types of combat ops that go along with it in Iraq that we are automatically prepared for other forms of higher intensity combat. I have used this example before but consider the fact that operational logistics in Iraq are node-based and carried largely by civilian contractors. What would happen if a couple of combat brigades in Iraq had to pick up, move in a certain direction and conduct a sustained land operation in the field without fixed bases for support for 3 months? You see the concern here? When was the last time in Iraq that a Division moved off of its fixed base and conducted a movement to contact? Not since I was a BCT XO in the march up in 2003. Clearly there is supreme tactical expertise at the small unit level with the combat outfits fighting in Sadr city now; but we should not confuse that expertise with the kind of expertise that it took the lead American armor divisions in the break out of St Lo. And again the Israeli experience in Lebanon is instructive here. Read Andy Exum's superb battle analysis of Hiz in that fight where they fought tenaciously as small squads of infantry and AT teams. The Israeli Army was woefully unprepared for this higher level of fighting after many years of conducting counter-terrorism ops in the Palestinian territories. These are the concerns that many of us in the American Army have today; and they are not made up and hyperbolic but real. Lastly, the British 7th Armored Division by 43 had themselves become battle-hardened after years of fighting the Germans in north Africa. But when that 7th Armored Division hit the beaches in Normandy and over the next few weeks tried to take Caen they ran into many problems due to unfamiliarity with the new terrain and a different German force. The point here is that battle experience of one type is not automatically transferable to another.
At the very small unit level of say infantry squads the skill set for hic/lic is similar. i mean in coin in Iraq do we really think that a private rifleman or cav scout is meeting with the nac chairman or imam? Of course not, he is doing basic stuff like providing security, shooting, kicking in a door, zip cuffing, observing and reporting, etc. But take things a number of levels up from there and that is the point where you start to run into problems and where it is important to distinguish between hic/lic so as to see where certain skills have atrophied.
Publius commented:
"What it seems the COIN enthusiasts really want is to reinvent the Raj. If that's the case, let's go full bore. Establish a colonial office and just assign the troops for the duration. Let 'em live there forever. Wife and kids at home? They can get more there."
Spot on; Spot-on. That is what is really happening here. For folks at establishment locations the American Army is purely a tool and the type of doctrine it applies operationally is a part of that toolishness. For those folks it really doesnt matter if we do coin, hic, lic, whatever is in fashion. What is important is existential American military presence in the middle east. in this sense Publius your analogy to the Raj is spot on. Only problem is that the history of American foreign relations resists the building of a formal empire like the Brits had (and managed so well for a time). But the new American Raj seeks to jettison that history and start anew; which is why the establishment has embraced Coin as a mechanism for establishing the Raj.
The American Army (and Marines) are battle hardened after 6 years of Astan and 5 years of Iraq. No question about it; lots of hard-nosed combat experience. But it is a combat experience of a certain discrete type using certain types of discrete combat skills. We should not delude ourselves to think that just because we are good at coin and the types of combat ops that go along with it in Iraq that we are automatically prepared for other forms of higher intensity combat
Your thesis is plausible but unsupported. There's not much evidence, except for the Israelis in 2006, that spending too much time in COIN/LIC blunts the edge of an army's warfighting skills.
The British Army in 1914 was a colonial force that had not fought a high-intensity modern conflict since the Crimea. But it performed magnificently against the Germans.
Again, in 1982 no British troops had any experience of high-intensity conflict, but only of peacekeeping and COIN/LIC in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Kenya, Nigeria, or Oman. This didn't seem to do them much harm.
The US army in 1991 had almost no combat experience - a tiny minority of the troops would have seen combat in the skirmish on Grenada, and some senior troops and officers would have seen action in a COIN conflict in Vietnam. Did this harm their performance in Desert Storm? No.
As a counterexample, the US army in Korea in 1950 did have recent experience in warfighting - and was still all but routed in the initial fighting between TF Smith and the North Korean army.
The fact is that high-intensity wars are so rare that most of the time the troops involved won't have any prior experience. (Did you, in 2003? Presumably not.)
One angle that isnt so much discussed here is Vincent Desportes perspective, that the cultural military conflict is between target-oriented thinking and occupation-oriented thinking. Stephane T provided a link for it in april: www.cdef.terre.defense.gouv.fr/publications/
doctrine/doctrine12/us/doctrine/art1_us.pdf
How does one rig a military force for occupation? SInce when did occupation/colonization become US policy? I seem to remember some president saying "We dont do nation building" back in 2000.
So Mr. Gentile, publius: You hit the nail on the head. Its very easy to get stuck in military details, but the basic question you must ask yourself is: How is the US army going to deal with occupying large semihostile culturally foreign pieces of land the next 30 years? And what will it cost? This is the big question that all else flows from.
( PS, mr. Gentile: The myth of the benevolent British Empire is greatly exaggerated. But thats a tangent.)
Matt suggests that we could fix things by adding to the Army and cutting some carriers or an F-22. But what would that actually mean, cost-wise? The oft-quoted figure for how much 10,000 troops would cost is $1.2 billion a year. And that excludes a bunch of the cost, like equipment, which is not cheap. If we cut the F-35 and F-22, we could save probably 4-5 billion a year, on average, for about 30 years (back of the envelope based on CSBA and CBO estimates)
So we leave the various air forces (boys in blue, navy, and marines) flying F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s indefinitely.
Ok. . so what do we get?
According to the CNAS ground forces report, we could increase our forces by about 114,000 (spread across the Army, Marines, and a few other places) for $15 billion a year. I think that is a very generous estimate, but presume it is true.
So to do that, even if we entirely eliminated the F-35 and F-22, we are less than halfway there. . .
My point is this: railing against the F-22 is fun but it is not a solution for serious thinking about how to balance defense priorities.
Gian:
I have read Exum's excellent study along with quite a bit of other work in this area.
I think you have a good point about the trade-off. It is foolish to think we can maximize everything. Even increasing the size of the Army does not really fix the problem. It still leaves open the question of what those new troops are going to be trained to *do*. What do you think of some sort of force splitting option, where some of the Army spends most of its time preparing for COIN-style operations and the rest of the Army spends most of its time preparing for more conventional operations? Many people seem to think such a solution seems nice in theory but would be impossible in practice since it would require the generation of so much more on the tail-end in terms of training capacity, etc. What do you think?
Ajay: Fair point but it is all about training time and organizational focus. In Gulf War I, the organizational focus of the Army was on conventional operations. That's huge.
Yes, well, Lewis Page is wrong. About nearly everything.
Have you posted on this on your own blog? I'd be very interested to read it - my own view was that he was spot on in identifying current problems, especially procurement ghastlinesses, but often off the mark (as he was in artillery) in suggesting the shape the armed forces should take in the future.
Well, there was the thing about how the Navy didn't need any other ships except for CVF, all alone...which actually seems to have become government policy.
We actually might have some crunch-time issues coming up with the navy given the age of some of the carriers, the enormous cost of replacing them, the overruns in some of the other programs, etc. And we can't forget that America's ability to go abroad and conduct operations depends in no small part on its naval supremacy.
I didn't propose those carriers and F-22s as a magic bullet solution to the problem. I mentioned those two as examples of what could be done in the larger context of changing the way funding is allocated in DOD. The Army averages something on the order of 25% of funding while the AF & Navy get 30%. If we are going to keep demanding more of the Army than that formula will likely need to change. There isn't an easy solution to this (as much as I don't like the F-22 that won't cure all ills) but so long as we're engaging in a foreign policy that involves extended stays in relatively hostile terrain COIN is necessary and that will likely require increased financial support for the Army-changing funding formulas is one way of approaching this problem. That, all else being equal, more funding will be required and that, in my opinion, the most logical way to do that is through reallocation is all I meant to convey; I apologize if it came across incorrectly.
After reading the debate over at SWJ, it seems to me that the main, ugly problem is that the US military has had to develop a Soft Power projection-capability through forced adaption to reality and not as part of a ordered strategic plan. It has been a reaction, not a willed action, and it has been forced upon the US by the "enemy". As Gentile writes, the "enemy" has a vote, and the "enemy" is now forcing the US forces to adapt. This means that it is being done in bits and pieces, through trial and error, often by folks on the ground in more or less defiance of stated policy (The Awakenings, etc.). I think its becoming clearer and clearer that Maliki without US support would be in a hell of a lot of trouble, so its become an either/or matter: Either the US armed forces must go through a fundamental change and build a fullscale expeditional/colonial force OR you must move away from unilateralism and reinvent the UN in some fashion. Or withdraw and go into isolationist/rebuild mode.
My solution is, as always to call in the chinese and/or the russians, train *them* in COIN through UN channels and let them sit there for 30 years.. Its a bit flippant, but they are the only ones I can see with manpower and will to do such a project. 50 000 chinese in Basra would be an interesting sight. The downscale version is to establish a Foreign Legion with basically arabic infantry trained in the west. But I know, US forces fight US battles and the UN is just a bunch of pedophiliac kleptomaniacs, yadda yadda. (Apropos, anyone care to point me an article about UNs work in Mosul? Or their role in Iraq in general these days?)
Matt: Fair point -- perhaps I did not phrase my comment correctly, but I am very interested right now in trying to figure out the actual tradeoffs and benefits from giving the Army some cash at the expense of the Navy and Air Force, i.e. what would you actually lose, what do you gain, etc.
I'm beginning to believe that the whole "Conventional vs. COIN" debate misses the point. There aren't going to be any more "conventional wars" - those will be replaced by new "hybrid" wars. We saw it in Lebanon in 2006, and Hezbollah has continued to combine symmetric and asymmetric tactics in the aftermath of that conflict. We've know since 1999 that the Chinese were embracing "Unrestricted Warfare" that would use unconventional tactics when applicable.
The biggest problem with the backlash against COIN is that COIN has created (or tried to create) a better atmosphere for institutional growth and development. With conventional warfare, we were, according to Lind, a 2GW force capable of spurts of 3GW. Our experiences in OEF and OIF has made us take the first tentative steps towards 4GW. Even if a reinforcement of our conventional capability is needed, I fear that such a move will kill whatever innovative capacity the Army has developed in the last five years. Our biggest concern should be creating a more adaptable and capable organization (does Vandergriff read this blog?) that can conform to ANY threat environment. If not managed properly, the cultural effects of a reemphasis on conventional force might leave us even farther from this goal.
The descent of Artillery as a branch into semi-Infantry roles has a few notable exceptions and we ought not write off the branch just yet.
American exclusive reliance on CAS in Afghanistan helped precipitate the rise of the current Taliban force. To build a force, your tactics will initially focus on propaganda value of attacks to recruit new fighters before you focus on larger operations - the move from UW phase I (Latent & Incipient Insurgency) to II (Guerrilla Warfare). Until mid-2004 we did not use FA at all on the Afghan-Pakistan border, and a 20-minute response time for CAS to be on scene to a TIC is 20 minutes for ACM elements to beat feet back to Pakistan or the next village and hide. This certainly helped ACM forces live to tell the tale and pick up some new friends for next time. The resurgence of FA on the border FOB's provided a valuable tool that is organic and responsive.
Daoud's point deserves to be amplified: there are an awful lot of artillerymen in RC-East who are doing an awful lot of artillery work. The numbers of fire missions, the quantities of munitions fired, the complexity of the firing solutions, the two-gun+FDC independent platoon concept, the echelonment of fires in time -- there is extraordinarily advanced lethal fire support work being done in Afghanistan. Since this experience is only being obtained by two of the Army's FA battalions at a time, however, the Army should probably figure out a way to get those best practices spread around to compensate for the very real problems raised in this string of comments.
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