My belief about the whole "hybrid warfare" was that it was an attempt by COINistas to maintain their grip on power in Western national defense circles after the heydays of GWOT (2003-2008 for Iraq, 2001-2011 for Afghanistan, 2015-2018 for Syria). Gradually after 2016 the COINistas increasingly began to lose power and influence as the future threats are Russians and Chinese.
However the irregular warfare / special operations circles could extrapolate and invent new terms. Borrowing the whole "4th generation warfare" theory and slap new paints on (actually the original piece about "4th generation warfare" in 1990 did make more sense). If you've read Sean McFate's book on "the new war" (please don't), he basically says that US conventional advantage is some immovable object and the only thing that matters is "hybrid warfare". It does suit their institutional goals of maintaining relevancy.
The theory had some bizarre denominations over the years such as the worshipping of Soleimani and Gerasimov. One could write an entire treatise on all the worst excesses of the whole Hybrid Warfare era.
However there's also a political aspect of "hybrid warfare", western national leaders become increasingly weak and indecisive with regards to national security. Populace grew complacent and believed in the End of History (honestly I hate the 1990s because of the kind of delusional thinking that seemed to last forever). What "hybrid warfare" actually says was that the military and national security professionals should get greater say in media, economy and politics. The natural conclusion of which would be an IRGC-style deep state that would inevitably bankrupt the nation for their many petty goals.
Hybrid warfare ultimately is the fantasy where the defense of a state solely rests on its army and intelligence apparatuses. It takes the whole country, yet no politician is willing or able to do so.
Aside from the painful for Western military men to admit fact that Russian ‘Polite People’ met next to no violent opposition due to a Crimean population that overwhelmingly supported Russia (not the case across northern Ukraine in 2022) there’s a flip side to the hybrid warfare coin of this article, which liberal hawks like ‘Dead Carl’ are not inclined to acknowledge—unless the actor is the Trump Administration trying to bully or cajole the Danes into giving up Greenland.
The idea that the Collective West too engages in salami slicing or boil the frog tactics to see what it can get away with. Witness the current tactic of seizing oil tankers at sea first applied to Iranian, then Venezuelan and now most recently Russian tankers. As well as the pretense that the Ukrainians are launching drone attacks as far from the Black Sea war zone as the coasts of West Africa without direct US-UK intelligence support. The problem with this tactic is that even if you believe Russia is too weak to impose real consequences on NATO members specifically retaliating against the much weaker British or French navies at sea before any direct pushback against the US Navy, there is still the longer term problem of Chinese hard liners recognizing the next target inevitably being Russian crude carrying tankers under the Russian flag bound for China not just India. And that Chinese national sailors can be seized along with the vessels they are piloting in essentially belligerent harassment of China’s freedom of the seas, the principal the US Navy once claimed to be upholding before losing the hypersonic missiles arms race and the largest proxy war in NATO history drove Washington/Langley/London/Vauxhall into returning to British privateering aka Anglo blessed piracy against the Spanish treasure ships roots.
The matter of fact is that the only thing the Collective East is capable of seemed to be pointing out the hypocrisy of the west. Anything more than that they are unable to. The Wretched of the Earth remained a distant fantasy it appears. It's not like China is an active shareholder in counterinsurgency capability and expertise. (OK, the Xinjiang experience deserves much much much more study, but again how are you going to replicate that in Afghanistan? Until the Chinese state is willing to undergo their forever war in Afghanistan or Myanmmar they will never be able to replace the American system.)
There are actually two wars that define the modern age. The Iran-Iraq War and the Algerian Civil War, everything else are just morphosis of the two.
I did five tours in the stan and the battle for primacy of COIN doctrine failed before it ever left the ground. Col Gian Gentile penned a number of articles from West Point that helped nail the doctrine a dead letter. Despite the 2008/2009 doctrinal surge with a new manual, no one really knew what to do with it.
Would you like to explain more? I'm very interested in hearing the "flip side" to COIN.
However I'd argue Petraeus and friends never really become truly influential, "hybrid warfare" was their one chance to remain relevant but they never gained the primacy at any point in time.
There is a lot to unpack with your request. We could practically do a couple 40 minute podcasts for the next 10 days. I will try and be concise. From my perspective as both an embedded advisor to the ANA and also a COIN Instructor at Camp Julien. I left the stan in 2010, I then spent 2 ½ years at DLIFLC writing lessons learned for students, CALL, and The Office of the Sec Def. so, with that….
1. The doctrine is solidly based on academics – good, bad or indifferent, the actual statistical success of COIN is somewhere around the 50% according to the RAND series – “Victory has a Thousand Fathers” This is a great series – 2 books.
2. The COIN Academy at Julien developed a great curriculum – every unit – well, mostly every unit - that was deployed was required to send leaders to the COIN Academy at Camp Julien to level set everyone on the doctrine
a. Few leaders actually read the doctrine or even had time to read doctrine because of all the pre deployment activities they had to accomplish
3. I agree with you. No real general officer influence with COIN. Why? Because the whole process was managed like a franchise. There may have been centralized planning at Kabul, but the Regional Commands that executed the plans were wildly different. Yes, there should be some “Auftragstaktik” but the default response was always, yes always, Kinetic. Additionally, Unit commands changed every 6 to 9 months and so there was no continuity. Just when the Afghan counterpart trusted them, they left. And the New command would scrape everything the previous command did and make up a new plan.
4. It was a rare exception that anyone read anything related to the history – deep contextual history - that could help guide them in personal interactions and execution of joint plans.
a. The Best units to do COIN were the Guard and Reserve units. My personal favorite was the 48 BDE, Georgia NG, – They vindicated themselves from the deployment debacle of Gulf War 1. This Bde was one of a few units to get it right with the right blend of carrot and stick. Unfortunately, because of the proverbial “oil spot” could not be expanded
5. I gave multiple commands the distilled success of lessons learned by two British Officers – Col Warburton and Col Sandman I had to dig into Indian Publishing Companies in Delhi to get books that were out of print that were written about the NWFP and Afghanistan. Only a handful of officers and NCOs were even remotely culturally competent – not to mention no Americans really spoke local dialects or even Pashtu or Farsi
a. Robert Sandeman, Administrator, Baluchistan and Robert Warburton, Administrator, Kyhber
b. The Sandeman System: you made friends with the tribes, you dealt with them through their chiefs, you paid them to patrol your LOC’s, you adhered to tribal custom and settled disputes by Jurga, and kept a constant military presence, Created Baluch Regiments
c. Pashtuns consider themselves descended from Mohammed, (karling, a foundling and adopted son of the 4th Qais Abdur Rashid an Contemporary of Mohammed
d. History is not studied, only from an Islamic or Muslim view in order to prove the order of Gods purpose, western history has no value
e. Arab historical tradition holds a different tradition than the west: Man is limited in his ability to shape his destiny, therefore there is a tendency to write off the past.
f. Cognitively, there is no hypothetical thinking, it is tied to the study of history. To think forward hypothetically is to infer and or state the ability to predict Gods will, More Importantly, it implies an explicit lack of divine faith in events that only God can know and has predestined
g. Sandeman / Warburton ” use a policy of masterly inactivity; use the tribes, liberal payment for services rendered
h. Mirza Ali Khan, a Waziri Pashtun led British and Pakistani forces on a 30 year chase around the frontier, he was never caught
i. One must ask why some tribes revolt and others don’t or that some area’s are ungovernable. Because the idea that poverty is the key is simply not true, all the tribes have the same basic level of comparative poverty, tribalism and segmentation. Downplaying the role of tribalism or pastunwali is a dangerous proposition. Central government has always been anathema
6. The NGO’s and Combat Commands did not play well together. USAID threw money at everything. At one point a Corp of Engineer guy I spoke with said that some parts of RC North had 130 projects worth millions going on at any one time and only half of the could be accounted for. The rest were in Taliban country, and nobody could verify what the province or local government was doing with the money or project
I’ll stop with this because I am getting out of hand. If you have something else you would like to know, I’ll will be glad to offer up how I experienced it Really the bottom line in all this is why did we even think we could do a western imprint of everything western ? The biggest debacle was when some rocket scientist decided that the ANA should ditch the AK’s for M16s and Hummv’s
OK, I’d say disbanding USAID was definitely the right move. Although I’d say the organization will have to be recreated after some period. Hell, USAID used to be the parent organization for CORDS. That’s what they were created for.
I agree, who else is going to do the required and necessary humanitarian work? In Afghanistan, that was the other major issue - thank you for jogging my brain. By Default, because Dept of State and USAID never surged, the US Military, de facto was also doing the humanitarian work. NOt playing well together, not coordinating the kinetics with the carrots and not allowing the tribal leaders to actually do the leading and negotiating was just a debacle
Well, that’s the problem. Since the 1990s the American concept of governance increasingly turned into “descend from the sky, kill people”. Even in domestic environments such altitude permeates, just look at the 1990s war on drugs. All that “matters” is killing, it appears.
In some sense it was worse than Vietnam, at least back then Komer knew there had to be more civilian involvements
Also found this line by William DePuy on Vietnam: “We thought we could bring some disadvantaged country in the image of America,” he said. “Well, now, after all these years, we know better. We have a much more modest view of our capabilities. “
OMG!!! yes, ABSOLUTELY A REPEAT in the Stans and in Iraq. Who was the rocket scientist that disbanded the entire Iraqi Army and the remnants of the Govt? They were the only ones that could have prevented the devolution to insurgency when we created that power vacuum.
DePuy is occasionally blamed for trying to memoryhole Vietnam. But back then his TRADOC was about scraping together a demoralized and underfunded force into a credible defense for Central Europe. DePuy was a divisional commander in Vietnam, he was the head of Counterinsurgency in ‘62, he worked for CIA and was involved with special operations. He knew there’s more to counterinsurgency. The funny part is that in the end the view on DePuy often turn into the image portrayed by “A Bright Shining Lie” where DePuy is remembered as the “more bombs, more shells, more napalm until one side cracks and gives up” guy. He’s much more than that.
Thank you so much. One of my weirdest hobby is writing an alternate history setting where US developed COIN doctrine in response to Latin American chaos in 1990s (the war on drugs went worse due to worsening economy, domestic disturbances and a Cold War that was never ending)
Just a thought. Now that we - allegedly - control Venezuela, and who the hell knows what’s going to happen in the oil patch. You may already have the foundation for a great counterfactual. And Mexico? well, have you considered checking out a couple of books on this? You may already have them or know of them.
Uncomfortable Wars Revisited by Max Manwarring?
Gangs, Pseudo-Militaries and Other Modern Mercenaries by same author, Max Manwarring. and the Center for Military History has some great books. “U.S.Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine - 1842 - 1976,
The big difference actually in the timeline’s approach is that the “national security leaders” recognize that the reason there’s a war on drugs is because Americans consume much of the world’s drugs. If they nuclear bombed every cocaine plantation every drug addict would go on frenzies over the next few years. So the actual “pacification” actions was about doing a “Second Great Society”.
However, on American policing there actually was a somewhat more disturbing rabbithole that involves the 1984 LA Olympic, Rhodesia, Soldiers of Fortune and Fort Bragg SFG seeking jobs. People absolutely love militarization. What actually happened is a bunch of SF vets, various tactical industry professionals and police chiefs selling the public a hallucinated boogeyman, which if it actually exists could not really be countered by their solutions (if a Beslan happened in America there’s no way Delta Force can CQB their way out of it, it will involve tanks and bombs and mass destruction of lives). But narratives of “police being outgunned” and footages of miniature Iranian Embassy raids across America is immensely popular, plus it kept the Special Forces cottage industry happy, that’s why you see Bearcat armored cars for every PD.
I think those two Chines Col's that penned the essay/book titled "unrestricted warfare" nailed it. Of course, the PLA Officers, would never have been allowed to publish that work unless it was tacitly approved by party leadership, but i digress. When Clausewitz wrote - I paraphrase - that we need to unequivocally know the type and character of war we are about to engage in, i think using the term unrestricted warfare captures the essence. If we feel compelled to make the doctrinal verbiage contemporary, then how about something like Unrestricted Multi Domain Operations - Simple!
OK, how “influential” unrestricted warfare as a book was in PLA is actually debatable. I’m actually raised in China and earlier I saw the author of that book writing a cyberpunk adventure which was just pure wackiness. Really, it was peak 1990s Chinese “proto-cyberpunk” weirdness with super hackers, Vatican, American gun dealers, jacked up terrorists, and army units equipped with nothing but helicopters
That may be true, however, its unmistakable view of leveraging practically everything that we consider today as hybrid or asymmetrical warfare. I agree with you in principle. why do we continue to invent all these names to identify what Lind started as "Generation Warfare." Gerasimov is considered a rock star and everyone held their breath when they went into Ukraine, yet they unequivocally botched the Ukraine Invasion. There is actually some consolation in that thought. Like the American Army, did they even read and train their own doctrine? Additionally, although it may be punk literature, I cannot - at the moment - think of any other publication that caused Western Armies to pause and begin to seriously think about what was written. Americans are not very good at cultural immersion, and no one probably even considered that it was punk literature. Lastly, this may or may not apply to this conversation, but tactics, techniques and procedures that we saw used by the Taliban and Chechnians, those TTPs were being used by Cartels 6 months later.
Your point about "hybrid war" being theater resonates. The term functions like a corporate rebrand - same violence, new packaging to keep us from seeing that war never stopped evolving. What makes us so eager to believe each era's violence is fundamentally different, when the pattern underneath remains unchanged?
It’s the inevitable result of the Special Forces / Counterinsurgency types trying to remain relevant in the face of great power competition. It’s the same with the 70s actually, except there’s no DePuy running around smacking SF types silly (OK, DePuy was actually heavily involved with SF and intelligence side of things, he just knew he had to prioritize)
Great article up until the end when you demand the continuation of the liberal International orders complete global dominance until the end of time. Normal stuff
Gen Petraeus success in the Anbar Awakening arguably was a combo of 'best practices' taken from the British anti-Communist Malay COIN and the Russian Federation's gradual subduing of the Chechen insurgency from 1999 to the mid-2000s. In which yes, the Russians gradually bought off one Chechen clan after another while separating them from the foreign Wahhabi preachers and Arab alCIAeda foreign legion Salafists.
We agree that China, notwithstanding its unprecedented peacetime naval buildup, massive minerals/grains reserve stockpiling and nine dash line creeping tactics in the South China Sea, has been remarkably passive for a budding superpower of its size. 6th columnists and 'doomers' notwithstanding, there does appear to be some fatigue among Moscow's hard-liners over being called a weak or timid ally as the likes of Assad got taken down and now the mullahs next in Washington and Jerusalem's cross hairs. Though in truth, with Al-Sharaa's recent warm reception in the Kremlin and his likely Russian passport-holding Obgyn brother being married to a Russian woman, that appears more and more to have been a grand bargain with the Turks, Saudis and Emiratis with Jerusalem more than a passive observer. Perhaps Al-Sharaa, like former Virginia resident Gen Haftar in Libya, was someone the CIA groomed for a long time who 'flipped' to the Eurasian axis, at least the loosest version of it.
Naturally the neocon Captain Ahabs who viewed Assad as their Great White Whale like Michael D. Weiss and others never talk about Al-Sharaa being a compromise candidate between Moscow, Ankara, Tel Aviv and some elements of the Trump Administration. Clearly even if the Ukraine negotiations are going nowhere Dmitriev and Witkoff/Kushner are talking about something, and that's most certainly the Middle East.
I think we're approaching a point where the Russians expect the Chinese to finally do something for China's Iranian allies, not just them, if for no other reason than 80% of Iranian oil exports now go to China with the remainder shipped via tanker to India/Pakistan. Especially since Beijing clearly blessed the North Koreans in deploying to Russia's Kursk Oblast, and also has a powerful proxy willing to fight alongside the Iranians in some Pakistanis. Whom the Chinese refer to as their 'Iron Brothers' and the Pakistanis in return, call China their closest allies.
Surely the Pakistani Air Force fresh off embarrassing the Western/Russian armed Indians a bit could spare a squadron of J17 flying tigers, to fly anti-drone CAP over eastern Iranian air space as a signal to the Americans and Israelis? If the Pakistanis can't be suborned to defend China's BRI investments in Iran, who can? Russia clearly is winning the Ukraine War and has preserved a toehold in Syria with the blessing of its OPEC+/GCC partners, but also has its hands full. China inaction fatigue among many in Moscow is real. The Russians used their Ukrainian combat experience to jam the shit out of Starlink and triangulate a lot of Mossad operatives for the Pasdaran to arrest. What did the Chinese do thus far besides send a spy ship to shadow the US carrier battle group off Oman?
But the question remains, especially for the Russia haters reading this: why should the Russians have to do all the military heavy lifting for the Eurasian bloc? Or do you think every Chinaman's fondest dream is simply to send his daughter to Harvard or Caltech? This unequal burden sharing even if Russia has done most of the military activity while China handled the monetary and economics reset is not going to lead to a Sino-Russian split along the lines of the Sino-Soviet split between Khrushchev and Mao. But it's there as a sore point a smart Vance Administration/Elbridge Colby type could try to exploit. That is, if we'd stop letting ahem certain powerful families whose names begin with the letter R, Eastern European ethno lobbies and London run our deep state and Congressional Eurasia policy via the likes of Lindsey Graham.
Pakistanis on average are not fans of Iranians either, pesky Shias remain pesky Shias. The Pakistani army is heavily influenced by both Americans and Chinese interests, it’s up to a magic 8 ball to decide who they are going to side with. (I’d actually argue Chinese state is better off influencing civilian dominated leadership with money and grants, but anything that involves shooting people is and will remain dominated by Americans due to the long long shadow of Fort Bragg)
Just curious. I like your mode of thinking and would be grateful if you could clarify one thing:
Judging from the international liberal democratic order point of view, what should be done with the (1) Israeli-Palestinian and (2) Taiwan conflicts?
It is always easy to use a Russian boogey to make this kind of arguments, but how about more controversial ones
(btw it is really funny to read about "The West consequently proved keen to make excuses for the Russians" as if the West hasn't been keen to excuse itself when doing literally the same international-order-breaking things. All countries are equal, but some countries are more equal than others, huh?)
Well, imagine if Ukrainians actually did the counteroffensive in 2023 on Belgorod and massacred a ton of Russian civilians. If Palestinians love the globalization so much (their pre-war population and state is not sustainable without extensive foreign aid) they may as well be victims of it… Regarding Taiwan the thing is that China does even less to the “rule based international order” than America does. If China is unwilling to fight a forever war in Afghanistan they will never be able to replace America
My belief about the whole "hybrid warfare" was that it was an attempt by COINistas to maintain their grip on power in Western national defense circles after the heydays of GWOT (2003-2008 for Iraq, 2001-2011 for Afghanistan, 2015-2018 for Syria). Gradually after 2016 the COINistas increasingly began to lose power and influence as the future threats are Russians and Chinese.
However the irregular warfare / special operations circles could extrapolate and invent new terms. Borrowing the whole "4th generation warfare" theory and slap new paints on (actually the original piece about "4th generation warfare" in 1990 did make more sense). If you've read Sean McFate's book on "the new war" (please don't), he basically says that US conventional advantage is some immovable object and the only thing that matters is "hybrid warfare". It does suit their institutional goals of maintaining relevancy.
The theory had some bizarre denominations over the years such as the worshipping of Soleimani and Gerasimov. One could write an entire treatise on all the worst excesses of the whole Hybrid Warfare era.
However there's also a political aspect of "hybrid warfare", western national leaders become increasingly weak and indecisive with regards to national security. Populace grew complacent and believed in the End of History (honestly I hate the 1990s because of the kind of delusional thinking that seemed to last forever). What "hybrid warfare" actually says was that the military and national security professionals should get greater say in media, economy and politics. The natural conclusion of which would be an IRGC-style deep state that would inevitably bankrupt the nation for their many petty goals.
Hybrid warfare ultimately is the fantasy where the defense of a state solely rests on its army and intelligence apparatuses. It takes the whole country, yet no politician is willing or able to do so.
Aside from the painful for Western military men to admit fact that Russian ‘Polite People’ met next to no violent opposition due to a Crimean population that overwhelmingly supported Russia (not the case across northern Ukraine in 2022) there’s a flip side to the hybrid warfare coin of this article, which liberal hawks like ‘Dead Carl’ are not inclined to acknowledge—unless the actor is the Trump Administration trying to bully or cajole the Danes into giving up Greenland.
The idea that the Collective West too engages in salami slicing or boil the frog tactics to see what it can get away with. Witness the current tactic of seizing oil tankers at sea first applied to Iranian, then Venezuelan and now most recently Russian tankers. As well as the pretense that the Ukrainians are launching drone attacks as far from the Black Sea war zone as the coasts of West Africa without direct US-UK intelligence support. The problem with this tactic is that even if you believe Russia is too weak to impose real consequences on NATO members specifically retaliating against the much weaker British or French navies at sea before any direct pushback against the US Navy, there is still the longer term problem of Chinese hard liners recognizing the next target inevitably being Russian crude carrying tankers under the Russian flag bound for China not just India. And that Chinese national sailors can be seized along with the vessels they are piloting in essentially belligerent harassment of China’s freedom of the seas, the principal the US Navy once claimed to be upholding before losing the hypersonic missiles arms race and the largest proxy war in NATO history drove Washington/Langley/London/Vauxhall into returning to British privateering aka Anglo blessed piracy against the Spanish treasure ships roots.
Who give a damn?
The matter of fact is that the only thing the Collective East is capable of seemed to be pointing out the hypocrisy of the west. Anything more than that they are unable to. The Wretched of the Earth remained a distant fantasy it appears. It's not like China is an active shareholder in counterinsurgency capability and expertise. (OK, the Xinjiang experience deserves much much much more study, but again how are you going to replicate that in Afghanistan? Until the Chinese state is willing to undergo their forever war in Afghanistan or Myanmmar they will never be able to replace the American system.)
There are actually two wars that define the modern age. The Iran-Iraq War and the Algerian Civil War, everything else are just morphosis of the two.
I did five tours in the stan and the battle for primacy of COIN doctrine failed before it ever left the ground. Col Gian Gentile penned a number of articles from West Point that helped nail the doctrine a dead letter. Despite the 2008/2009 doctrinal surge with a new manual, no one really knew what to do with it.
Would you like to explain more? I'm very interested in hearing the "flip side" to COIN.
However I'd argue Petraeus and friends never really become truly influential, "hybrid warfare" was their one chance to remain relevant but they never gained the primacy at any point in time.
There is a lot to unpack with your request. We could practically do a couple 40 minute podcasts for the next 10 days. I will try and be concise. From my perspective as both an embedded advisor to the ANA and also a COIN Instructor at Camp Julien. I left the stan in 2010, I then spent 2 ½ years at DLIFLC writing lessons learned for students, CALL, and The Office of the Sec Def. so, with that….
1. The doctrine is solidly based on academics – good, bad or indifferent, the actual statistical success of COIN is somewhere around the 50% according to the RAND series – “Victory has a Thousand Fathers” This is a great series – 2 books.
2. The COIN Academy at Julien developed a great curriculum – every unit – well, mostly every unit - that was deployed was required to send leaders to the COIN Academy at Camp Julien to level set everyone on the doctrine
a. Few leaders actually read the doctrine or even had time to read doctrine because of all the pre deployment activities they had to accomplish
3. I agree with you. No real general officer influence with COIN. Why? Because the whole process was managed like a franchise. There may have been centralized planning at Kabul, but the Regional Commands that executed the plans were wildly different. Yes, there should be some “Auftragstaktik” but the default response was always, yes always, Kinetic. Additionally, Unit commands changed every 6 to 9 months and so there was no continuity. Just when the Afghan counterpart trusted them, they left. And the New command would scrape everything the previous command did and make up a new plan.
4. It was a rare exception that anyone read anything related to the history – deep contextual history - that could help guide them in personal interactions and execution of joint plans.
a. The Best units to do COIN were the Guard and Reserve units. My personal favorite was the 48 BDE, Georgia NG, – They vindicated themselves from the deployment debacle of Gulf War 1. This Bde was one of a few units to get it right with the right blend of carrot and stick. Unfortunately, because of the proverbial “oil spot” could not be expanded
5. I gave multiple commands the distilled success of lessons learned by two British Officers – Col Warburton and Col Sandman I had to dig into Indian Publishing Companies in Delhi to get books that were out of print that were written about the NWFP and Afghanistan. Only a handful of officers and NCOs were even remotely culturally competent – not to mention no Americans really spoke local dialects or even Pashtu or Farsi
a. Robert Sandeman, Administrator, Baluchistan and Robert Warburton, Administrator, Kyhber
b. The Sandeman System: you made friends with the tribes, you dealt with them through their chiefs, you paid them to patrol your LOC’s, you adhered to tribal custom and settled disputes by Jurga, and kept a constant military presence, Created Baluch Regiments
c. Pashtuns consider themselves descended from Mohammed, (karling, a foundling and adopted son of the 4th Qais Abdur Rashid an Contemporary of Mohammed
d. History is not studied, only from an Islamic or Muslim view in order to prove the order of Gods purpose, western history has no value
e. Arab historical tradition holds a different tradition than the west: Man is limited in his ability to shape his destiny, therefore there is a tendency to write off the past.
f. Cognitively, there is no hypothetical thinking, it is tied to the study of history. To think forward hypothetically is to infer and or state the ability to predict Gods will, More Importantly, it implies an explicit lack of divine faith in events that only God can know and has predestined
g. Sandeman / Warburton ” use a policy of masterly inactivity; use the tribes, liberal payment for services rendered
h. Mirza Ali Khan, a Waziri Pashtun led British and Pakistani forces on a 30 year chase around the frontier, he was never caught
i. One must ask why some tribes revolt and others don’t or that some area’s are ungovernable. Because the idea that poverty is the key is simply not true, all the tribes have the same basic level of comparative poverty, tribalism and segmentation. Downplaying the role of tribalism or pastunwali is a dangerous proposition. Central government has always been anathema
6. The NGO’s and Combat Commands did not play well together. USAID threw money at everything. At one point a Corp of Engineer guy I spoke with said that some parts of RC North had 130 projects worth millions going on at any one time and only half of the could be accounted for. The rest were in Taliban country, and nobody could verify what the province or local government was doing with the money or project
I’ll stop with this because I am getting out of hand. If you have something else you would like to know, I’ll will be glad to offer up how I experienced it Really the bottom line in all this is why did we even think we could do a western imprint of everything western ? The biggest debacle was when some rocket scientist decided that the ANA should ditch the AK’s for M16s and Hummv’s
OK, I’d say disbanding USAID was definitely the right move. Although I’d say the organization will have to be recreated after some period. Hell, USAID used to be the parent organization for CORDS. That’s what they were created for.
I agree, who else is going to do the required and necessary humanitarian work? In Afghanistan, that was the other major issue - thank you for jogging my brain. By Default, because Dept of State and USAID never surged, the US Military, de facto was also doing the humanitarian work. NOt playing well together, not coordinating the kinetics with the carrots and not allowing the tribal leaders to actually do the leading and negotiating was just a debacle
Well, that’s the problem. Since the 1990s the American concept of governance increasingly turned into “descend from the sky, kill people”. Even in domestic environments such altitude permeates, just look at the 1990s war on drugs. All that “matters” is killing, it appears.
In some sense it was worse than Vietnam, at least back then Komer knew there had to be more civilian involvements
Also found this line by William DePuy on Vietnam: “We thought we could bring some disadvantaged country in the image of America,” he said. “Well, now, after all these years, we know better. We have a much more modest view of our capabilities. “
OMG!!! yes, ABSOLUTELY A REPEAT in the Stans and in Iraq. Who was the rocket scientist that disbanded the entire Iraqi Army and the remnants of the Govt? They were the only ones that could have prevented the devolution to insurgency when we created that power vacuum.
DePuy is occasionally blamed for trying to memoryhole Vietnam. But back then his TRADOC was about scraping together a demoralized and underfunded force into a credible defense for Central Europe. DePuy was a divisional commander in Vietnam, he was the head of Counterinsurgency in ‘62, he worked for CIA and was involved with special operations. He knew there’s more to counterinsurgency. The funny part is that in the end the view on DePuy often turn into the image portrayed by “A Bright Shining Lie” where DePuy is remembered as the “more bombs, more shells, more napalm until one side cracks and gives up” guy. He’s much more than that.
Thank you so much. One of my weirdest hobby is writing an alternate history setting where US developed COIN doctrine in response to Latin American chaos in 1990s (the war on drugs went worse due to worsening economy, domestic disturbances and a Cold War that was never ending)
Just a thought. Now that we - allegedly - control Venezuela, and who the hell knows what’s going to happen in the oil patch. You may already have the foundation for a great counterfactual. And Mexico? well, have you considered checking out a couple of books on this? You may already have them or know of them.
Uncomfortable Wars Revisited by Max Manwarring?
Gangs, Pseudo-Militaries and Other Modern Mercenaries by same author, Max Manwarring. and the Center for Military History has some great books. “U.S.Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine - 1842 - 1976,
Wow! Many thanks.
The big difference actually in the timeline’s approach is that the “national security leaders” recognize that the reason there’s a war on drugs is because Americans consume much of the world’s drugs. If they nuclear bombed every cocaine plantation every drug addict would go on frenzies over the next few years. So the actual “pacification” actions was about doing a “Second Great Society”.
However, on American policing there actually was a somewhat more disturbing rabbithole that involves the 1984 LA Olympic, Rhodesia, Soldiers of Fortune and Fort Bragg SFG seeking jobs. People absolutely love militarization. What actually happened is a bunch of SF vets, various tactical industry professionals and police chiefs selling the public a hallucinated boogeyman, which if it actually exists could not really be countered by their solutions (if a Beslan happened in America there’s no way Delta Force can CQB their way out of it, it will involve tanks and bombs and mass destruction of lives). But narratives of “police being outgunned” and footages of miniature Iranian Embassy raids across America is immensely popular, plus it kept the Special Forces cottage industry happy, that’s why you see Bearcat armored cars for every PD.
I think those two Chines Col's that penned the essay/book titled "unrestricted warfare" nailed it. Of course, the PLA Officers, would never have been allowed to publish that work unless it was tacitly approved by party leadership, but i digress. When Clausewitz wrote - I paraphrase - that we need to unequivocally know the type and character of war we are about to engage in, i think using the term unrestricted warfare captures the essence. If we feel compelled to make the doctrinal verbiage contemporary, then how about something like Unrestricted Multi Domain Operations - Simple!
OK, how “influential” unrestricted warfare as a book was in PLA is actually debatable. I’m actually raised in China and earlier I saw the author of that book writing a cyberpunk adventure which was just pure wackiness. Really, it was peak 1990s Chinese “proto-cyberpunk” weirdness with super hackers, Vatican, American gun dealers, jacked up terrorists, and army units equipped with nothing but helicopters
That may be true, however, its unmistakable view of leveraging practically everything that we consider today as hybrid or asymmetrical warfare. I agree with you in principle. why do we continue to invent all these names to identify what Lind started as "Generation Warfare." Gerasimov is considered a rock star and everyone held their breath when they went into Ukraine, yet they unequivocally botched the Ukraine Invasion. There is actually some consolation in that thought. Like the American Army, did they even read and train their own doctrine? Additionally, although it may be punk literature, I cannot - at the moment - think of any other publication that caused Western Armies to pause and begin to seriously think about what was written. Americans are not very good at cultural immersion, and no one probably even considered that it was punk literature. Lastly, this may or may not apply to this conversation, but tactics, techniques and procedures that we saw used by the Taliban and Chechnians, those TTPs were being used by Cartels 6 months later.
Your point about "hybrid war" being theater resonates. The term functions like a corporate rebrand - same violence, new packaging to keep us from seeing that war never stopped evolving. What makes us so eager to believe each era's violence is fundamentally different, when the pattern underneath remains unchanged?
It’s the inevitable result of the Special Forces / Counterinsurgency types trying to remain relevant in the face of great power competition. It’s the same with the 70s actually, except there’s no DePuy running around smacking SF types silly (OK, DePuy was actually heavily involved with SF and intelligence side of things, he just knew he had to prioritize)
Great article up until the end when you demand the continuation of the liberal International orders complete global dominance until the end of time. Normal stuff
Well said
Gen Petraeus success in the Anbar Awakening arguably was a combo of 'best practices' taken from the British anti-Communist Malay COIN and the Russian Federation's gradual subduing of the Chechen insurgency from 1999 to the mid-2000s. In which yes, the Russians gradually bought off one Chechen clan after another while separating them from the foreign Wahhabi preachers and Arab alCIAeda foreign legion Salafists.
We agree that China, notwithstanding its unprecedented peacetime naval buildup, massive minerals/grains reserve stockpiling and nine dash line creeping tactics in the South China Sea, has been remarkably passive for a budding superpower of its size. 6th columnists and 'doomers' notwithstanding, there does appear to be some fatigue among Moscow's hard-liners over being called a weak or timid ally as the likes of Assad got taken down and now the mullahs next in Washington and Jerusalem's cross hairs. Though in truth, with Al-Sharaa's recent warm reception in the Kremlin and his likely Russian passport-holding Obgyn brother being married to a Russian woman, that appears more and more to have been a grand bargain with the Turks, Saudis and Emiratis with Jerusalem more than a passive observer. Perhaps Al-Sharaa, like former Virginia resident Gen Haftar in Libya, was someone the CIA groomed for a long time who 'flipped' to the Eurasian axis, at least the loosest version of it.
Naturally the neocon Captain Ahabs who viewed Assad as their Great White Whale like Michael D. Weiss and others never talk about Al-Sharaa being a compromise candidate between Moscow, Ankara, Tel Aviv and some elements of the Trump Administration. Clearly even if the Ukraine negotiations are going nowhere Dmitriev and Witkoff/Kushner are talking about something, and that's most certainly the Middle East.
I think we're approaching a point where the Russians expect the Chinese to finally do something for China's Iranian allies, not just them, if for no other reason than 80% of Iranian oil exports now go to China with the remainder shipped via tanker to India/Pakistan. Especially since Beijing clearly blessed the North Koreans in deploying to Russia's Kursk Oblast, and also has a powerful proxy willing to fight alongside the Iranians in some Pakistanis. Whom the Chinese refer to as their 'Iron Brothers' and the Pakistanis in return, call China their closest allies.
Surely the Pakistani Air Force fresh off embarrassing the Western/Russian armed Indians a bit could spare a squadron of J17 flying tigers, to fly anti-drone CAP over eastern Iranian air space as a signal to the Americans and Israelis? If the Pakistanis can't be suborned to defend China's BRI investments in Iran, who can? Russia clearly is winning the Ukraine War and has preserved a toehold in Syria with the blessing of its OPEC+/GCC partners, but also has its hands full. China inaction fatigue among many in Moscow is real. The Russians used their Ukrainian combat experience to jam the shit out of Starlink and triangulate a lot of Mossad operatives for the Pasdaran to arrest. What did the Chinese do thus far besides send a spy ship to shadow the US carrier battle group off Oman?
But the question remains, especially for the Russia haters reading this: why should the Russians have to do all the military heavy lifting for the Eurasian bloc? Or do you think every Chinaman's fondest dream is simply to send his daughter to Harvard or Caltech? This unequal burden sharing even if Russia has done most of the military activity while China handled the monetary and economics reset is not going to lead to a Sino-Russian split along the lines of the Sino-Soviet split between Khrushchev and Mao. But it's there as a sore point a smart Vance Administration/Elbridge Colby type could try to exploit. That is, if we'd stop letting ahem certain powerful families whose names begin with the letter R, Eastern European ethno lobbies and London run our deep state and Congressional Eurasia policy via the likes of Lindsey Graham.
Pakistanis on average are not fans of Iranians either, pesky Shias remain pesky Shias. The Pakistani army is heavily influenced by both Americans and Chinese interests, it’s up to a magic 8 ball to decide who they are going to side with. (I’d actually argue Chinese state is better off influencing civilian dominated leadership with money and grants, but anything that involves shooting people is and will remain dominated by Americans due to the long long shadow of Fort Bragg)
Pakistani sitting in two chairs in Cold War II makes Turkish sitting in two chairs look smaller in comparison.
Just curious. I like your mode of thinking and would be grateful if you could clarify one thing:
Judging from the international liberal democratic order point of view, what should be done with the (1) Israeli-Palestinian and (2) Taiwan conflicts?
It is always easy to use a Russian boogey to make this kind of arguments, but how about more controversial ones
(btw it is really funny to read about "The West consequently proved keen to make excuses for the Russians" as if the West hasn't been keen to excuse itself when doing literally the same international-order-breaking things. All countries are equal, but some countries are more equal than others, huh?)
Interesting article, tough, thx
Well, imagine if Ukrainians actually did the counteroffensive in 2023 on Belgorod and massacred a ton of Russian civilians. If Palestinians love the globalization so much (their pre-war population and state is not sustainable without extensive foreign aid) they may as well be victims of it… Regarding Taiwan the thing is that China does even less to the “rule based international order” than America does. If China is unwilling to fight a forever war in Afghanistan they will never be able to replace America