What is the role of security force assistance in achieving national security objectives? Where did security force assistance work well in the post-9/11 era, and where was it unsuccessful? How did policy considerations differ from tactical implementation? And most importantly, how can research and experience from the past twenty years of war inform ongoing partner-building activities in a decidedly different Indo-Pacific theater?
Episode 45 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast engages with these motivating questions by drawing on the extensive practical experience and award-winning research of our guests, who begin by establishing the nature of security force assistance operations in the current security landscape. They reflect on the lessons of the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, while also identifying how other states have succeeded and failed in security force assistance operations. Our guests then consider whether these findings are applicable to the United States’ current focus in the Indo-Pacific theater, where partner force training and development has taken on a new urgency in light of a growing China, or if the contemporary environment in fact has distinct characteristics when it comes to partner compliance.
Retired Lieutenant General Larry Nicholson served for almost forty years in the United States Marine Corps, during which time he commanded the 1st Marine Division and the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade / Task Force Leatherneck, Afghanistan. Most recently he served as commanding general of III Marine Expeditionary Force, leading thirty thousand Marines and sailors in the Asia-Pacific region, before retiring in 2018.
Dr. Barbara Elias is an associate professor of government at Bowdoin College specializing in international relations, insurgency warfare, US foreign policy, national security, and Islam and politics. She is the author of the award-winning book Why Allies Rebel: Defiant Local Partners in Counterinsurgency Wars. Dr. Elias is a senior fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative.
The hosts for this episode are Shawna Sinnott and Andy Milburn. Please contact them with any questions about this episode or the Irregular Warfare Podcast.
The Irregular Warfare Podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, a collaboration between the Modern War Institute at West Point and Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project—dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals.
You can listen to the full episode below, and you can find it and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, TuneIn, or your favorite podcast app. And be sure to follow the podcast on Twitter!
Image credit: Staff Sgt. Dayton Mitchell, US Air Force
The obvious question here becomes: Security force assistance (etc., etc., etc.) to what strategic end?
In this regard, consider the following:
First, from David Kilcullen's "Counterinsurgency Redux:"
" … But, in several modern campaigns – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Chechnya, for example – the government or invading coalition forces initiated the campaign, whereas insurgents are strategically reactive (as in ‘resistance warfare’). Such patterns are readily recognisable in historical examples of resistance warfare, but less so in classical counter-insurgency theory.
“Politically, in many cases today, the counter-insurgent represents revolutionary change, while the insurgent fights to preserve the status quo of ungoverned spaces, or to repel an occupier – a political relationship opposite to that envisaged in classical counter-insurgency. Pakistan’s campaign in Waziristan since 2003 exemplifies this. The enemy includes al-Qaeda-linked extremists and Taliban, but also local tribesmen fighting to preserve their traditional culture against twenty-first-century encroachment. The problem of weaning these fighters away from extremist sponsors, while simultaneously supporting modernisation, does somewhat resemble pacification in traditional counter-insurgency. But it also echoes colonial campaigns, and includes entirely new elements arising from the effects of globalisation.”
b. Next, from the Small Wars Journal article "Learning From Today’s Crisis of Counterinsurgency" — an interview by Octavian Manea of Dr. David H. Ucko and Dr. Robert Egnell:
"Robert Egnell: Analysts like to talk about 'indirect approaches' or 'limited interventions', but the question is 'approaches to what?' What are we trying to achieve? What is our understanding of the end-state? In a recent article published in Joint Forces Quarterly, I sought to challenge the contemporary understanding of counterinsurgency by arguing that the term itself may lead us to faulty assumptions about nature of the problem, what it is we are trying to do, and how best to achieve it. When we label something a counterinsurgency campaign, it introduces certain assumptions from the past and from the contemporary era about the nature of the conflict. One problem is that counterinsurgency is by its nature conservative, or status-quo oriented – it is about preserving existing political systems, law and order. And that is not what we have been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, we have been the revolutionary actors, the ones instigating revolutionary societal changes. Can we still call it counterinsurgency, when we are pushing for so much change?
Dhofar, El Savador and the Philippines are all campaigns driven by fundamentally conservative concerns. When we are looking to Syria right now, it is not just about maintaining order or even the regime, but about larger political change. In Afghanistan and Iraq too, we represented revolutionary change. So, perhaps we should read Mao and Che Guevara instead of Thompson in order to find the appropriate lessons of how to achieve large-scale societal change through limited means? That is what we are after, in the end. And in this coming era, where we are pivoting away from large-scale interventions and state-building projects, but not from our fairly grand political ambitions, it may be worth exploring how insurgents do more with little; how they approach irregular warfare, and reach their objectives indirectly."
Bottom Line Thought — Based on the Above:
As becomes obvious, by reading the two items that I have provide above, this is that:
a. The strategic end that the U.S./the West seeks to achieve
b. Via such things as security force assistance (etc., etc., etc.)
c. This is “revolutionary change" (Kilcullen) and/or "revolutionary societal change" (Egnell).
Accordingly, and from THAT exact such perspective, I suggest that we must, henceforth,
a. BEGIN every paper and every podcast that we see here on Modern War Institute in this area; this with an introduction of the "revolutionary change"/"revolutionary societal change" "strategic end" that we seek to achieve. And, likewise,
b. END every paper and every podcast — that we see here on Modern War Institute re: these such matters — this, with a discussion of how and why we met, or failed to meet, these exact such "revolutionary change"/"revolutionary societal change" goals.
Do you have written transcripts of these podcasts? There are several I would like to cite in graduate school work and a journal article.