Official doctrinal manuals are a unique source of insight for the study of war, but too often are ignored by political scientists. An exception is the new U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (U.S. Army FM 3-24 and Marine Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3-33.5). Downloaded more than two million times on the Internet (p. xxi), it has now been published by the University of Chicago Press and has sold vigorously.
Much of this extraordinary interest is of course attributable to the war in Iraq. The manual's relationship to the conduct of this war has been of particular interest, in that the current commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, was one of the two generals under whom the manual was written. It has been widely reported that the principles in the manual have guided his conduct of the war since he took command in early 2007.Footnote 1 After an initial upswing, violence in Iraq is now down dramatically as of this writing; many have thus attributed this improvement to the ideas in the new manual.
With this interest has come considerable debate. Controversy within the military is common with any major doctrinal revision, and the new counterinsurgency (COIN) manual has attracted a range of critiques from officers. The most important of these debates have involved the relative emphasis on coercive violence as opposed to the winning of hearts and minds (the manual stresses the latter); the relative focus on offensive action against enemy forces as opposed to the defense of civilian populations (the manual emphasizes the latter); the comparative merits of waging COIN with large conventional forces as opposed to small commando detachments (the manual mostly concerns the former); the relative utility of airpower in COIN (the manual focuses on ground action and says much less about air forces, especially in strike roles); the ability of civilian agencies to provide the development assistance needed to win civilian hearts and minds (the manual prefers that civilians play such roles, but instructs the military to fill the gap themselves if their colleagues fall short); and the willingness of democracies to afford the cost of effective counterinsurgency (the manual warns that COIN is slow, labor-intensive, and very expensive in lives and treasure).
The manual's defenders have mostly gotten the better of these arguments to date. The manual was vetted in advance before an extraordinary range of potential critics and other interested parties, and its authors clearly profited from this process. The result is a remarkably thoughtful response to a vexing military problem, and one worthy of the widespread attention it has received both within and beyond the military.
It is not perfect, however. In particular, it makes assumptions about the nature of insurgency and the relationship between the United States and the host government that are sometimes sound but sometimes not. Yet these assumptions shape much of the manual's prescriptions. Where a war fits the presumption, these prescriptions are sound, but elsewhere the manual could easily lead to serious strategic error. In fact, Iraq is among the cases that fit the manual's assumptions poorly—which has led actual U.S. strategy in Iraq to diverge from the manual's prescriptions in ways that are not always fully appreciated in the public debate.
The Nature of Insurgency
The manual assumes that insurgencies represent a contest for the loyalty of a mostly uncommitted general public that could side with either the government or the insurgents; success requires persuading this uncommitted public to side with the government by winning their hearts and minds via provision of superior goods and services, including government-supplied security.Footnote 2 For the United States in ideologically driven wars of national liberation such as Vietnam, this is not an unreasonable assumption, and the manual's extensive treatment of the means for winning hearts and minds makes much sense for such wars.
Not all internal wars are ideological, however. In ethnic or sectarian wars of identity, by contrast, the truly uncommitted fraction of the public can be small—and the fighting itself quickly reduces it, as subnational identities harden and frightened civilians turn to their co-ethnics or co-religionists for survival.
Some have argued that partition is the only solution to such conflicts.Footnote 3 Others argue that negotiated power-sharing deals enforced by outside peacekeepers can succeed.Footnote 4 Still others see no meaningful solution short of overpowering the weaker community.Footnote 5 But it is far from clear that the manual's central prescription of drying up an insurgent's support base by persuading an uncommitted population to side with the government makes much sense in an identity war where the government's ethnic or sectarian identification means that it will be seen as an existential threat to the security of rival internal groups, and where there may be little or no supracommunal, national identity to counterpose to the subnational identities over which the war is waged by the time the United States becomes involved.
Interest Alignment with the Host Government
Similarly, the manual assumes that the role of the United States is to support and defend a threatened government that has a presumptive claim to legitimacy. It may be necessary to persuade that government to reform in order to strengthen this claim to legitimacy, but the manual presupposes a powerful alignment of interest between the United States and the host government—the Americans' role is to enable the host government to realize its own best interest by making itself into a legitimate defender of all of its citizens' well-being.Footnote 6 The authors were constrained here by other U.S. doctrinal documents, but the result is a potentially problematic assumption. Many threatened governments are more committed to their own subgroup's interests than they are to some abstract idea of national well-being. The existence of an insurgency in the first place is often a signal of an illegitimate government with strong leadership interests in an unrepresentative distribution of wealth and power. In many cases, leaders will see U.S.-sponsored reforms as a greater threat to their personal well-being—or even survival—than the insurgency. One thus cannot assume that the U.S. interest and the host government's interest are aligned in COIN; what the United States wants is not necessarily in the self-interest of the host leadership.
This in turn interacts with the manual's assumption that uncommitted civilians can be persuaded to side with the government. Sectarian governments in identity wars will often be highly resistant to U.S. hopes for nonsectarian outreach that provides services and builds confidence among their internal rivals' populations. To expect this to flow naturally from a common interest in good government is unrealistic, yet the manual offers little guidance on other, more coercive approaches to changing the host regime's behavior.
Problems of Omission and Commission
Together, these two assumptions give rise to some potentially serious errors of omission and commission.
The chief error of omission is the absence of any discussion of coercive bargaining with the host. There is much instruction in the manual on capacity building in the host state—of creating improved systems for delivering government services. But what if an ethnic or sectarian faction in control of the government views provision of services to rival groups as enabling their enemies? To create a more efficient bureaucracy under such leadership can simply be to create more proficient sectarians with a stronger technical capacity to direct services to their followers and more systematically deny them to their rivals. What if a host government beholden to a land-owning plutocracy sees U.S.-favored COIN reforms as the end of a system of privilege that they value more than peace or stability? To assign U.S. mentors to government ministries or military commands will hardly persuade lifelong plutocrats to embrace equal opportunity for all. For such regimes, persuasion is insufficient, and ostensibly apolitical capacity building can actually make things worse. If host-government legitimacy in U.S. terms is the only route to success in such wars, then far more forceful coercive leverage will be needed. Yet the manual says nothing about how this should be done—or how its employment would affect the conduct of the tasks it does describe: The details of everything from joint combat operations to intelligence gathering to interagency coordination would surely differ as a function of the mix of coercion and cooperation between the United States and its host.
The chief error of commission is the manual's treatment of host nation security force development (especially Chapter 6). Rapid buildup of indigenous security forces makes much sense in ideological wars. In identity wars, however, it can easily exacerbate the internal security dilemma that often fuels the violence. If a major ethnic or sectarian group sees the government as a tool of its rivals, for the United States to strengthen the government military is to increase the others' perceived threat, which will often stimulate greater mobilization of the rivals' population and harsher resistance from them in wars that are often seen as existential by the parties. The manual acknowledges this problem in passing, and suggests overcoming it by raising communally mixed security forces.Footnote 7 In an identity war, however, mixed forces are subject to serious effectiveness challenges due to the same communal distrust that affects the larger society.Footnote 8 Nor is it clear that nominally mixed forces under rivals' command will be trusted by threatened communities, especially where the threatened group is a minority of both the population and the military.
The Manual and Iraq
Perhaps ironically, Iraq is precisely the kind of nonideological communal war of identity that the manual is least suited for. This war has many overlapping casus belli, but the chief underlying enabler of the others is the struggle among Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds for power and survival. Ideology, conventionally understood, is among the least important contributors to the violence.
Some aspects of the manual have proven very helpful in Iraq even so. In particular, its guidance, for example, on unity of action, limitation of violence, the need to accept risk in population security, the importance of human intelligence, respect for the laws of war, adaptive small-unit leadership, accounting for the greater difficulty of logistics, or understanding the local society and culture are all sound and important, whether the conflict is ideological, ethnic, sectarian, or merely criminal. In these respects, the manual has contributed importantly to Iraq's recent decline in violence as these provisions have been implemented. And its emphasis on adaptability has proven helpful in reacting to a war whose premises differ in important ways from those on which the manual was based.
The manual's assumption of interest alignment with the host, and its emphasis on indigenous security forces, have been much more problematic, however. The predominantly Shiite Maliki government has consistently resisted U.S. pressure to compromise with its Sunni rivals. And in spite of more than three years of trying, the United States has not yet produced an Iraqi security force that can consistently defend the interests of all Iraqis. These problems have led to some significant divergences between actual U.S. strategy in Iraq and the approach embodied in the manual.
In particular, the “surge” strategy adopted in early 2007 represented a deliberate movement away from reliance on Iraqi forces to counter the insurgency. Whereas U.S. policy in 2006 put the primary U.S. emphasis on preparation for a transition to Iraqi responsibility for the war, the policy in 2007 assigned U.S. troops a primary mission of providing direct security to Iraqi civilians.
In addition, the rapid growth of local negotiated cease-fires between American commanders and Iraqi insurgent factions in the field has increasingly posed an alternative to reform of the Iraqi national government in Baghdad as a means of stabilizing the country. As of this writing, more than 80,000 Iraqis have joined over a hundred “Awakening Councils” or “Concerned Local Citizen” (CLC) groups in observing local cease-fires across much of central and western Iraq. This extraordinary spread of negotiated deals is largely responsible for the recent reduction in violence: Whereas earlier U.S. offensives had merely induced insurgents to move elsewhere, destabilizing new areas while securing old ones, now many of the insurgents have remained in place but have stood down in voluntary cease-fires, preventing a mere movement of violence from one part of the country to another. The United States would like the Maliki government to embrace this movement and incorporate its members into the official Iraqi Security Forces, and eventually it may. But for now, the government is resisting such entreaties, and hence the CLC cease-fire movement remains largely extragovernmental and independent.
Nor is the CLC phenomenon that has been so instrumental in the current reduction of violence chiefly a product of the hearts-and-minds logic at the root of the manual. The availability of more U.S. troops to provide population defense was certainly important, and this emphasis on population security is clearly consistent with the manual's prescriptions. But the surge was far too small to secure all of threatened Iraq in itself, and cannot in itself account for the growth in negotiated cease-fires. At least as central to the latter was a dramatic change in Sunnis' perceived military prospects following their defeat in the wave of sectarian violence after the February 2006 bombing of the Askariya Mosque. Prior to this, Sunnis believed that they would win an unconstrained civil war with Shiites, but their inability to prevent Shiite militias from evicting them from much of Baghdad in the 2006 fighting has now made it clear to Sunni insurgents that the military balance vis-à-vis the Shiites is against them. Combined with the needless brutality of their erstwhile Al Qaeda allies toward fellow Sunnis, and Al Qaeda's interference with traditional Sunni smuggling routes in western Iraq, the strategic interest calculus of the Sunni insurgency thus underwent a sea change in late 2006 and early 2007, leading most Sunnis to conclude that self-interest lay in abandoning Al Qaeda for a negotiated accommodation under American protection while they could still get it. If this condition holds, it will prove a very favorable development. But it hardly represents the winning of Sunni hearts and minds by the Shiite government through the provision of services and government security. On the contrary, most CLCs provide their own security from continuing fear and distrust of their fellow Iraqis in the government security forces.
Of course, today's favorable trends in violence may reverse in the future. And the voluntary decisions of former insurgents to sign CLC contracts and stand down could reverse as well.Footnote 9 It is far from clear what the ultimate outcome in Iraq will be. But either way, recent improvements are only partly attributable to the policies prescribed in the new manual. To the credit of General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, they have proven able to improvise and innovate under fire, departing from the manual to take advantage of unexpected trends like the growth of CLCs, and working around the major interest divergence between the United States and the Maliki government to forge a significant reduction in violence. For this, the prescriptions in the manual deserve some, but only partial, credit; but if the improvement proves transient, the manual's imperfect fit between assumption and Iraqi reality may ultimately get the greater attention.
