Abu Muquwama asks whether the case of Sri Lanka’s rapid destruction of the LTTE shows that there is an alternative to population-centric coin and links to a Indian Defence Review story relating “lessons” of the conflict. These lessons include stonewalling the media, NGOs, and foreigners and giving the military complete operational freedom. So what does the apparent crushing of the LTTE mean?
First, states should only choose methodologies that are appropriate to their values, capabilities, and the task at hand. If population-centric counterinsurgency fulfills those requirements, so be it. If enemy-centric counterinsurgency or a straight-ahead counterterrorism campaign works, then all the better. Given the fact that the Sri Lankan civil war had long since become a war of movement, an vigorous offensive strategy was appropriate. Anything else would have been a half-measure. Second, states quelling internal rebellions tend to be more successful at counterinsurgency in general. There are many disadvantages that accrue to an overseas occupier that local forces acting within their own turf do not face. Lastly, we should take note of the unique nature of Sri Lanka’s case. The island state is ultimately peripheral to most great powers besides India, has no strategic natural resources, and lacks the emotional appeal of the Israeli-Palestinian case. There is not a well-connected Tamil lobby in the United States or Europe.
In short, the Sri Lankan military did what they wanted and the world met them with flat indifference. The UN protested, but without any follow-up the threats were useless. Such an advantageous set of affairs is unlikely to be available for the United States in any future conflicts. There is little relevance for us other than the always helpful realization that we cannot become too attached to any one method of fighting guerrillas and terrorists.
From the monthly archives:
August 2009
Zenpundithighlights a new article critiquing the current popular “decline of the state” framework. Having called for something like this earlier, I’m happy to see some critical analysis of state change. There needs to be a competitive process revisiting our assumptions with state change. It’s also worth reflecting on the trajectory of the debate. At first the “decline of the state” framework was a oddity in a defense debate overwhelmingly dominated by concerns about near competitors like China and Russia. Scholars and analysts advocating the framework were at best peripheral to the debate and at worst completely ignored. Now the frame is hegemonic. But just as the traditional force-on-force/state vs. state concepts proved an impediment to creative thinking about the future, the “decline of the state” framework is proving to be an obstacle to effective thinking about process of state change. Despite the fact that the framework has strong overall validity in explaining current conflict it must be challenged, debated, and revised.
Like Steven Walt, I have to question whether framing climate change as a national security threat really makes sense. First, the idea of climate change itself as a national security threat gets things backward. Security is ultimately a matter of politics and politics consists of human interactions. War, for example, is a human interaction that prominently features two sides trying to violently impose their wills on each other. Climate change in the abstract is not a threat–rather it is the way it negatively changes human interactions that is important. Increased war due to climate change is the threat, not climate change. Think this is just idle semantics? Ascribing features of the environment as “threats” is a dangerous road to travel down, unnecessarily militarizing rhetoric and policy approaches. Frame climate change for what it is–a massive systemic change to the international system, just like globalization or technology (both are similarly viewed as a “threat” in some quarters).
The reason why climate change is being articulated through the prism of nationals security owes more to a political failure by the environmental movement than the expansion of a new mode of security thinking. Environmentalist political rhetoric isn’t as sexy or attention-grabbing as the national security frame so environmentalist rhetoric is being cast through the prism of security thinking. Instead of doing so, environmentalists should instead make the case that environmentalism is a viable concern in and of itself and should be regarded with just as much gravity as economics or security. I have no objections to studying the implications of climate change on the international system and US interests. But before that debate begins we need to have some basic conceptual clarity.
Mike Innes of CTLab flags an ongoing trend in conflict studies:
“Somewhere between the relational turn in social science and increasingly granular approaches to warfighting, the reality of international relations, and accounts of the wars being fought from core to periphery, have been looking more and more like exercises in hacking deep ecology. In The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One, David Kilcullen leverages ‘conflict ethnography’ to help explain insurgencies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. In Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival In the Siege of Sarajevo, Peter Andreas fine tunes international political economy through a close reading of the lives of the city’s residents. Similarly, in Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering In the Twenty-First Century, Carolyn Nordstrom digs into the ‘deep politics of war’. ..What’s interesting about this – not what’s new, which isn’t what I’m suggesting, but what makes this more engaging and accessible – is that there’s a deep ecology of virtual violence, ambient warfare, and fluid interfaces, and no single discipline has a lock on how best to decipher and map out its surfaces to get at the underneath of things.”
Innes further notes that the “The point not made is that digging at the details, getting to the story beneath the story, means looking to the event beneath the event – to that spot beneath the epicentre that actually constitutes ground zero: the hypocenter.” Ethnographic research is perhaps more appropriate than political science given the vastly smaller scale of today’s conflicts. Local knowledge is always important in war, but these conflicts place a high premium on detailed multidisciplinary study of the “deep ecology” Innes refers to. The more granular one can go, the better. On the red-team side, more granular information produces a better understanding of the dynamics of “small war”–and thus could be grist for more accurate wargames, simulations, and training. An ecological approach to conflict also remedies another deficit–the fact that debate over insurgency and terrorism rarely if ever addresses noncombatants as anything more than passive victims or a feature of the landscape (the human terrain) that must be factored into overall analysis.
Andrew Exum of Abu Muquwama is soliciting submissions for short op-ed style pieces about what America’s Afghanistan strategy should be. In the spirit of encouraging debate, I think there are three unanswered questions about future warfare and policy that need to be asked.
1. What are America’s fundamental grand strategic interests?
I do not subscribe to the concept of “realism” in foreign affairs, but nonetheless find the concept of national interests useful as an ordering principle. There are certain objectives, such as Britain’s focus on prevention of a European hegemon from emerging, that can be traced over time. People talk of the concept of the national interest in the abstract but rarely bother to define it. This is in part responsible for some of the “mission creep” seen in some stability operations. A working definition gives us something of a yardstick to evaluate our involvement overseas.
2. Many new military concepts argue that the character of war or the environment it takes place in has fundamentally changed. Is this true?
The lack of a peer competitor and the underdetermination of national interests means that defense debates occur primarily over the validity of concept of future warfare. Has the character of war changed or is there truly nothing new under the sun? Most believe that the nature of war (i.e Clausewit’z concept of a violent struggle of wills) remains essentially same, but the way it is fought has differed from time to time. The question is whether today’s warfare is greatly different from that of the recent past. This point has been tremendously controversial, not only for academic reasons. Opponents of new strategic ideas argue that muddled thinking leads to muddled fighting, while proponents either defend the validity of the new terms or claim that they, while inexact, are needed as forcing mechanisms to nudge military establishments forward.
3. What level of risk are Americans willing to accept?
A compelling justification for the now largely bipartisan thrust of the Global War on Terror (now known as the Overseas Contingency Operation) is the protection of the American homeland from non-state threats. Likewise, opponents of military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan argue that overseas US involvement produces “blowback.” While the validity of both notions is debatable, it is clear that both continued engagement and “offshore balancing” carry risks to the homeland. The greater question is what level of systemic risk Americans are willing to tolerate. Any option, no matter how seemingly secure, contains a level of risk. Getting closer to this variable will help us understand which national security policies will be sustainable over the long term.
Perhaps one of our most eccentric (and damaging) quirks is our core irrationality in properly assessing risk. Getting into a car and driving to work is perhaps the most dangerous everyday activity we participate in, yet we hardly seem to notice.
In his book Design Paradigms,1 Henry Petroski highlights the concept of “proactive failure analysis.” He cites Christopher Alexander (the father of design patterns), who notes that
We are never capable of stating a design problem except in terms of the errors we have observed in past solutions to past problems. Even if we try to design something for an entirely new purpose that has never been conceived before, the best we can do in stating the problem is to anticipate how it might possibly go wrong by scanning mentally all the ways in which other things have gone wrong in the past.
Notes:
- Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. [↩]
I have written elsewhere about the need to red team major national policies. As U.S. legislators again consider adopting an expensive and consequential program—in this case, health care reform—I once more question the apparent lack of structured challenge analysis within the arena of public discourse. From my perspective, this lack underscores the chronic wishful thinking and demonizing that animates national debates. [click to continue ...]
If you’ve always wondered how red teaming might apply to business problems, try Carroll and Mui’s 2008 bestseller Billion Dollar Lessons. In it, the authors define a set of common business strategies and discuss how failure often results. In each case, they identify the questions decision makers could have asked that might have helped them avoid failure. They close by arguing for better devil’s advocacy. The issues differ from those that many red teamers typically consider, but the framework is sound, and the principles can easily be ported to other domains. Among other things, Carroll and Mui’s approach suggests that red teaming is not limited to military or security problems.
