How Western Soldiers Fight investigates forces from Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States that were conducting unconventional operations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan and explores why they responded differently to very similar situations and the consequences of their actions for the surrounding civilian populations. The Bosnian case concentrates on crime fighting, arresting war criminals, and counterterrorism; the Kosovo account focuses on crime fighting and protection of minorities; and the Afghanistan discussion revolves around the failure to implement population-centered counterinsurgency. Throughout, the emphasis is on understanding action at the level of combat units and how they implement policy.
The centerpiece of Cornelius Friesendorf’s account is the notion of organizational routines. Routines are a “regular course of action” (pp. 1–2), and their existence is signaled by persisting patterns of behavior. Although formal organizational rules and the education and training systems needed to implement them effectively are a possible indication of routines, Friesendorf does not see them as the routines themselves (p. 14). This approach differs from Graham T. Allison’s Essence of Decision (1971), in which routines are equated to rules and the implementation of the rules is viewed as unproblematic. Friesendorf rejects this definition because rules typically provide discretion to troops, who can bend or ignore them in any event (p. 13). The advantage of Friesendorf’s approach is that it allows for stability to arise from sources other than the rules and for the rules to be less than completely effective. That is also its disadvantage, because anything that generates steady-state behavior thus is deemed to create a “routine,” but not all sources of steady-state behavior necessarily imply that behavior is difficult to modify. Organizations in static environments, for example, might repeat the same actions endlessly, not because the organization is trapped in its routines, but simply because it is not worthwhile to change. Static behavior is thus an unreliable indicator of organizational rigidity. Nor is changing organizational behavior an indication that behavior is not driven by routines, he argues. An organization might simply be operating at a higher level of generality that allows for multiple contingencies and specifies conditions under which action might shift as new circumstances arise.
Friesendorf’s conclusions about the four national militaries are consistent with other writings in the open literature: they typically implemented courses of action that were mildly to wildly inappropriate for their missions and their operational settings. (He is less negative about the British, not at all negative about the Italians, somewhat more negative about the Germans, and decidedly negative about the Americans.) The fundamental difficulty for the British and especially the Americans is deemed to be their accumulated inventory of conventional war routines from the Cold War era that were ill suited to the new settings and missions. The German case is complicated by their lack of post-1945 combat experience, along with their deep initial aversion to combat and to suffering casualties. It is less a matter of the Germans thinking that they were fighting the Warsaw Pact and more that they thought they should not fight at all. Friesendorf ascribes the relatively successful Italian effort to the force’s long-standing involvement in police work and in combating international organized crime networks, as well as its previous smaller-scale deployments in the Balkans (pp. 119–20). The main impediment to its success was not its routines, but the lack of interest among the other intervening forces in controlling crime and their failure to fashion plans for taking advantage of the Italian force’s capabilities (pp. 119–21, 162–65, 221–25). In Afghanistan the Italians provided police training, but only after earlier German and American efforts were unsuccessful.
The first British effort to develop formal doctrine to deal with the situation in Bosnia was begun in 1994 but abandoned by 1998, partly because it did not provide explicit provisions for law enforcement and crowd control (pp. 104–6). A new doctrine developed in 1998 repaired this weakness, but “experience mattered more than doctrine” (p. 106) for British conduct. The routines developed in Northern Ireland were a good fit for the peace support mission (p. 104). In Kosovo the British again replicated their Northern Ireland approach. Although Friesendorf notes several situations where the British handled difficult situations well, he also finds that they often were unable to prevent attacks against minorities or the mass exodus of Serbs from Kosovo. Despite beginning in Afghanistan with a “hearts and minds” outlook, their 2006 deployment to the difficult environment of Helmand Province led them to shift for a time to combat operations. Friesendorf finds that the British tried harder to avoid civilian casualties than the Americans did, but were not highly successful in doing so after that shift.
Friesendorf is frequently critical of the American effort in all three theaters. He faults the U.S. forces for being overly devoted to protecting their own troops, for their failure to fight crime or protect vulnerable civilian populations, and for their uses of force that led to civilian casualties. Although he notes occasions when U.S. forces improvised ingenious responses for situations requiring nonlethal crowd control, the evolution of the U.S. counterinsurgency field manual in an attempt to come to grips with the new realities, the interest of some U.S. commanders in “hearts and minds” operations, and high-level commanders’ efforts to shift doctrine and operations to population-oriented counterinsurgency, his overall conclusion is that the U.S. forces were too constrained by the legacy of Cold War era routines that were dominated by the possibility of a large conventional war.
Had the United States been successful in implementing population-oriented counterinsurgency, population protection, and crime fighting, perhaps Friesendorf would have written a book that emphasized historical U.S. experience as a valuable source of current-day routines. The Cold War NSC-1290d program of improving developing-country internal security by strengthening national police forces would be treated as providing a foundation for programs that provided effective training of police in Afghanistan. Operation Phoenix, a Vietnam War program aimed at capturing or killing the National Liberation Front’s officials and commanders, would be described as the precursor to an aggressive program of capturing war criminals in the Balkans. The postwar military occupation governments of Japan and Germany would be treated as textbook examples of how to convert military success to long-run political stability and democracy. More generally, an author might then point to a long history of American involvement in unconventional missions stretching all the way back to encounters with Native American tribes in the eighteenth century as instilling a body of routines that prepared U.S. forces for mastering the situation in all three contemporary conflicts. Such a book, of course, will never be written because these American successes are all imaginary. Indeed, the lack of an American parallel to Friesendorf’s story of how British experience in Northern Ireland, Malaya, and ultimately in its imperial past provided the foundation for relatively more successful British operations in the Balkans and Afghanistan is the most striking feature of his account. The British seemed to learn from their experience, whereas the Americans did not. Why this is so remains a puzzle.
