International Security

An excerpt from my interview for International Affairs Forum with Dr. David Ucko on his book, The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the U.S. Military for Modern Wars:

IA-Forum: In counterinsurgency, victory can be hard to measure. Are we asking our military to engage in drawn out conflicts that end only when both parties are exhausted?

Dr. Ucko: Ideally not. Ideally the point of the exercise is to seize the initiative and maintain momentum. I think the notion of mutual exhaustion would be a very unsatisfactory end point to what is often a very painful campaign. Victory is a misleading word, but in the framework of counterinsurgency, you could see victory perhaps as creating an order that is preferable to the status quo ante. And it’s also self-sustainable, that is that it won’t unravel once the intervening forces are removed. Now that takes a very long time and that’s why these conflicts are so drawn out. In a sense, are we asking our military to do this? Well, of course if there was a way of avoiding these types of operations all together, I think that that would be infinitely preferable. The problem is that these types of operations are not always easy to avoid and for some of the reasons that I touched on before, I see the complexities that we see in Iraq and Afghanistan as being representative of future campaigns.

So it doesn’t look good. It is not the type of operations that the military has wanted to fight and perhaps operations that are rapid and decisive, which were two key words in defense planning prior to Iraq, because these were the types of operations that the military was structured to conduct. These are neither rapid nor decisive, but unfortunately it seems to be the only operations that we’re going to face. So that’s why I feel that one way of undercutting their complexity and perhaps making it less of a grueling process is to prepare accordingly rather than to pretend that these counterinsurgency campaigns are not to re-occur.