I finished the John Boyd biography last week, and have been digging into any source documents of his that I can find.
On reading many of them, they seemed right, but somewhat stale…and then I realized that they were stale because I have been reading about reflections of these ideas for the last twenty years. One reason I enjoyed the film ‘Shakespeare in Love’ so much was that it brought back to me the idea of what it must have been like to see ‘Romeo and Juliet’ fresh and free of preconception.
I have been paying particular attention to ‘Patterns of Conflict’ (available as a blurry pdf at Defense and the National Interest). I keep trying to weld together the liberal half of my worldview – which tells me that, short of something that looks like genocide, we can’t kill the opposition in this War on Bad Philosophy faster than they grow, and so we must somehow disrupt their growth cycle by changing political and social conditions to radically lowering the attractiveness of these causes – with the conservative, which suggests that confronting and killing the opposition is the way to go.
Boyd was there first.From Slide 108 of the pdf above:
Action:
Undermine guerilla cause and destroy their cohesion by demonstrating integrity and competence of government to represent and serve needs of the people – rather than exploit and impoverish them for the benefit of a greedy elite.*
Take political initiative to root out and visibly punish corruption. Select new leaders with recognized competence as well as popular appeal. Ensure that they deliver justice, eliminate grievances and connect government with grass roots.*
Infiltrate guerilla movement as well as employ population for intelligence about guerilla plans, operations, and organization.
Seal-off guerilla regions from outside world by diplomatic, psychological, and various other activities that strip-away potential allies as well as by disrupting or straddling communications that connect these regions with the outside world.
Deploy administrative talent, police, and counter-guerilla teams into affected localities and regions to inhibit guerilla communication, coordination, and movement; minimize guerilla contact with local inhabitants; isolate their ruling cadres; and destroy their infrastructure.
Exploit presence of above teams to build-up local government as well as recruit militia for local and regional security in order to protect people from the persuasion and coercion efforts of guerilla cadres and their fighting units.
Use special teams in a complementary effort to penetrate guerilla controlled regions. Employ (guerillas’ own) tactics of reconnaissance, infiltration, surprise hit-and-run, and sudden ambush to: keep roving bands off-balance, make base areas untenable, and disrupt communication with the outside world.
Expand these complementary security/penetration efforts into affected region after affected region in order to undermine, collapse, and replace guerilla influence with government influence and control.
Visible link these efforts with local political/economic/social reform in order to connect central government with hopes and needs of people, thereby gain their support and confirm government legitimacy.
Idea:
Break guerillas’ moral-mental-physical hold over the population, destroy their cohesion, and bring about their collapse via political initiative that demonstrates moral legitimacy and vitality of government and by relentless military operations that emphasize stealth/fast-temp/fluidity-of-action and cohesion of overall effort.
*If you cannot realize such a political program, you might consider changing sides.
(emphasis and footnote his)
What Boyd is suggesting is to do two things: First to reinforce the legitimacy of the government under attack, and second to do so in a way that bridges across to a fluid counter-guerilla strategy.
Now to an old Vietnam-era cynic like myself, this bespeaks the “hearts and minds” approach that ultimately failed.
But on a fundamental level, his proposed solution is the only one that can work.
We need to do two things, according to him (and do read the whole document, it’s fascinating even if it hasn’t completely gelled for me yet): a) create a fighting force that can outguerilla the guerillas; and b) ensure that the overall population has enough faith in our side – enough belief in the legitimacy of the government – that they will not only not willingly cooperate with the guerillas but will willingly cooperate with us.
I’ll even suggest that this is probably the best litmus test I can think of for how we’re doing…are people in the street helping us catch the bad guys? If they are, we’re winning.
And it’s a reminder that a purely military victory in our circumstance isn’t enough. We do have to win the hearts and minds of the people in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Iran, and Syria, and Saudi Arabia, and so on).
We’re faced with a pest-control problem here. Like the coyote problem that besets suburban Angelinos; we can kill them as we find them; we can make our homes more resistant (both of which are good things). But to ultimately solve the problem, you have to reduce the population. We have the capacity to burn down the forests where they live and breed, but the cost of doing that is extraordinarily high. We need to examine the lifecycle of the pest, find the places where we can disrupt it, and do so.
In this, I will argue, the fundamental problem is the tolerance of kleptocracies convenient to our economies and to the investors in our political process. The injustice in those tyrannical societies is the fuel that the engine of Bad Philosophy consumes.
So we need to do four things, as I see it:
# Attack and kill the active terrorists where we can find them, and destroy the infrastructure (financial foremost, logistical, and physical). We need to convince other states that the cost of them not doing this is that we will.
# Attack the belief-structures which constitute the engine of Bad Philosophy; attack them by expounding our own Good Philosophies and by being willing to suggest that all things are not, in the end, equal.
# Deprive the engine of Bad Philosophy of fuel, by attacking the horrible conditions of life that many people in the kleptocratic states must endure – while watching us fete and fund their oppressors.
# Make our own society more resistant to the kinds of attacks they are likely to mount. This isn’t going to be done by some national-scale, Orwellian bureaucracy. It will be done by the coordinated efforts of tens of thousands of county officials and the millions of front-line public safety staff that work for them.
Boyd said (slide 118):
Observations Related To Moral Conflict
No fixed recipes for organization, communications, tactics, leadership, etc.
Wide freedom for subordinates to exercise imagination and initiative – yet harmonize within intent of superior commanders.
Heavy reliance upon moral (human values) instead of material superiority as basis for cohesion and ultimate success.
Commanders must create a bond and breadth of experience based upon trust – not mistrust – for cohesion.
I think that sums it up better than anything I can think of tonight.
Three words: Small Wars Manual
Been around forever and a day in the Marine Corps and based upon Americans’ experience in all the small wars we fought in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th Centuries. Most people forget that big, WWI and WWII-style wars have been an aberration in our history. Including Westmoreland.
Here’s a useful link re: Small Wars for our readers. We’ve covered it here before, and it will show up via the search function.
It’s also worthy of note that when Col. Boyd died, the Marines sent a delegation to the funeral, and even placed a Marine insignia on the grave. The Air Force, the service Boyd belonged to, was conspicuous by its absence. Today, there’s a statue of Boyd in the lobby of the new Marine Corps Research Center at Quantico. Needless to say, any one of these honours is extremely unusual for an Air Force officer.
Just downloaded it, and will read and digest…
A.L.
If you want that download too, head to the U.S. Marines’ Small Wars Center of Excellence online.
I’m in a quandry because I don’t want to rain on the bulk of the post, which is excellent, over a niggling point, but on the other hand I’m a bit vexed at a characterization of what the “conservative” position consists of, just as I don’t try to put people like yourself in a box with the other fruit loops. You wrote:
“the conservative, which suggests that confronting and killing the opposition is the way to go.”
Hmmmmn. . .where to begin. . .considering that it is, so far, generally “conservatives” who have taken up the banner of saying yes, we can foster change in these places that will result in reducing and eventually drying up the problem, while it has been “Liberals” who have been wringing their hands about stability of the various dictatorial societies in the area we want to see transformed (if you say those Liberals are behaving more like Reactionaries, then I won’t disagree, but then much of Liberalism IMO has become Reactionary).
Sure, there’s a difference between conservatives and, say, Patty Murray types, in that conservatives believe that there are indeed hard-cases: people who will not be changed by an appeal to their wonderful record of humanitarian reconstruction, which they have lavished on the places, building schools (Wahhabi Madrasas, schools, six of one, half a dozen of another), unlike America which of course has never spent a single dime helping any country develop. . .and that we’ll have to fight – that will have to be one of the tools in our arsenal, in no small part because there are forces that will resist, with violence (as they already have and indeed as is one of the reasons for terrorism in the first place), the sort of transformation we want to encourage.
But to suggest that confronting and killing are the only tool, or indeed that confronting is to be paired with killing necessarily, is wrong. Indeed, “confront” is something that not only means militarily but also intellectually. Sure, the hard cases aint gonna change their minds and can’t be reasoned with; but I don’t think the operations carried out in either Afghanistan or Iraq by a conservative Administration can properly be characterized as the “Kill them all, god will know his own” policy in action. They – we – can be criticized for some errors in implementation, but not for lack of attention to trying to change the political and social conditions in those areas to make them less hospitable to the ideology of the other side and more hospitable to healthier trends.
Failing to recognize that a great many conservatives share concern with what you call the “liberal half” of your view on this, lumping them just into pursuing policies of kill ’em all – well, that’s an attitude I would expect comming from the gang over at MoveOn or Indimedia. If you share their attitude towards your conservative bretheren, then I’d have to re-evaluate the degree to which there is any possibility of cooperation between pro-war conservatives and Liberals at all.
I would have hoped that by now you would see that conservatives aren’t all just benighted, mindless slaughterers, simply because we recognize the same thing that you do: this is a world where sometimes force *is* necessary.
Porphy –
That’s a “gotcha”.
I used cheap phraseology because I was in a hurry, and made what should have been a subtle but serious distinction into an overly clear and somewhat stupid one.
Sorry ’bout that.
Having apologized, I’ll suggest that there are two poles in this discussion, which can be well-represented by “find them and kill them” and “give them something nice and they’ll become loving, well-adjusted members of world society”. ‘Conservative’ and ‘liberal are just not the right labels for those poles.
A.L.
Ok, no harm no foul; thanks for clearing it up.
Hmmm, I’m not entirely convinced. I don’t doubt Boyd’s general prescription for fighting a guerilla war, but I don’t think the war on terrorism (or “bad philosophy,” if you prefer) is at all a guerilla war. Oh, I suppose a few aspects of the lingering fighting in Iraq (and even Afghanistan) might be considered guerrilla war, but there are terribly important distinctions. Also, my guess is that Boyd’s book is directed primarily toward Marxist insurrections – not religious schisms and cultural civil wars – so its utility for our problem would be somewhat imperfect.
Anyway, despite the earlier reference to Spengler’s “1 billion Muslims” essay, our problem is really a small handful of well-organized, well-funded ideological militants who, to date, have been unable to establish their own governments anywhere, or even defend the one government they glommed onto. Their cause is fueled primarily, I believe, by a religious extremism that few of their fellow Muslims really accept, let alone desire. I don’t believe, especially after the examples of the Taliban and Iran, that many Muslims would democratically choose a nation run by Mullahs under Sharia. In short, I don’t think the popular support Boyd writes of is really an issue here. Sure, collections for Islamic charities may make their way to al Queda (or Hamas), and al Queda is able to feed off of Arab alienation or dissatisfaction, but I do not see it building into a mass movement. After all, the “Arab street” seems fairly quiet these days – and that speaks volumes.
However, this isn’t to minimize the extreme character of either the Taliban, the Mullahs in Iran or even the Wahabbists in the House of Saud and the risk they pose to us. It is just that those governments have yet to take us on directly – not that they would dare to now – and the surviving Taliban who supported al Queda have learned the price for that support. And for those who learn lessons the hard way, Iraq can only reinforce the impression.
Which is my last point. While we should be open to broader approaches (after all, why not use all the tools available to us?), it seems to me that the most efficient way to win this war (and the necessary way) is to kill the terrorists (and their supporting states, when necessary) and make examples of them to those who might be thinking of joining their cause. In other words, no more paper tiger. Terrorists need to go to be at night wondering if they ever wake up, or if they’ll wake up courtesy of Delta Force. Terrorists need to feel every day like we did on Sept. 11 and the immediate aftermath – extremely vulnerable no matter where they are.
In this sense, using A.L.’s (now disavowed) characterization of the “conservative” solution it might be better understanding it as the initial, necessary solution. There just is not an endless line of al Queda recruits just waiting to war on the U.S. Young Arab men, like all young men, might be impressionable, and they might be willing to die for a cause – but they aren’t entirely stupid. Our successful shows of force in Afghanistan and Iraq have surely begun to impress them that al Queda and Saddam were lost causes. It is also important to remember that 9/11 hijackers were all middle class, and mostly Saudi (a nation with a very high standard of living, relative to the rest of the Middle East). I suspect fewer are in a rush to die than we might fear.
It is not that Boyd’s methods regarding winning the “hearts and minds” battle aren’t necessary – it is that that they are not sufficient, let alone a primary tactic. And even there, how do we reform failing cultures and religious extremism? I don’t know – but one way is to show them the price for failure to reform themselves – Afghanistan and Iraq – and let them get to work. Lord knows, they have a lot to do.
Tim, if the problem were entirely Islamism, and as soon as we put paid to Qutb’s followers, we’d be home free, I might agree with you.
But I’m unconviced that it is, and I believe tha tthey are just the first wave of what is going to be a large set.
I will grant that demonstrating that we’re not a paper tiger is certainly something that may dissuade some from attacking us.
But it just also may provike others.
The key is managing that ratio.
A.L.
For the conservative approach, consider reading Weigly’s The American Way of War. It reviews the strategic tradition of U.S. Grant which used force to attrite the Army of Northern Virginia, lay Richmond under siege, at the same time that he directed Sherman against Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.
It worked well enough that there was no descent into remorseless revolutionary warfare. The supporters of the so called “Confederacy” were largely killed off, but at terrible price.
Weigley’s book on the American way of war is good, it’s a overview of American military history and tradition.
But for the “Conservative” approach to the Civil War, I’d recommend Jay Winik’s “April 1865: The Month that Saved America”, wherin Winik, a Reaganite, stresses the importance of avoiding wholesale slaughter and the like is stressed.
Tim says : –
> . I don’t believe, especially after the examples of the Taliban and Iran, that many Muslims would democratically choose a nation run by Mullahs under Sharia.
I’m afraid I think that they would in Pakistan, in Nigeria, in Iraq; for sure they would – and did – in Algeria. They probably would in Egypt.
It’s a phase these places seem to have to go through; if that’s patronising, then sorry, but there sometimes seem like half a million people here in England who’d go for Sharia too. I can see Iain Paisley accommodating to it, come to think of it.
A couple points to consider:
1) Boyds hearts and minds insights are not original although they are well stated.
2) Paraphrase of Clausewitz: “Some well meaning people would like to believe that you can win wars without bloodshed. They are very much mistaken. War is the province of destruction.” My apologies for my laziness in not digging out the exact quote.
3)From Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence:
“We had to arrange their minds in order of battle just as carefully and as formally as other officers would arrage their bodies. And not only our own men’s minds, though naturally they came first. We must also arrange the minds of the enemy, so far as we could reach them; then those other minds of the nation supporting us behind the firing line, since more than half the battle passed there in the back; then the mnds of the enemy nation waiting the vverdict/ anof the neutrals looking on; circle beyond circle…..A province would be won when we had taught the civilians in it ot die for our ideal of freedom.”
(Chapter XXXIII, the most succint definition of the principles of guerilla warfare I have seen in English..read the whole chapter).
4)It is not clear that our adversaries in Iraq are fighting a guerilla war as much as using guerilla tactics. In a guerilla war they would be primarily seeking to advance an ideology. The population would be supporting them. This does not seem to be the case. It seems that isolated groups of foreign terrorists, Baath Party loyalists, tribal loyalists or opportunists, and criminals are using guerrilla tactics to strike at coalition forces without widespread popular support.
5)An observation I make on my own, although it is founded in my reading of many other distinguished thinkers and my interpretation of history. The more fundamental change in a society you wish to make the more people you must be willing to kill. When Sherman observed that it would be necessary to kill about 300,000 Southerners of the Cavalier/Planter class in order to end the Civil War he was basically correct. And that is what the Union did. This is despite the fact that large parts of the southern states particularly in the Applachian Mountains and the Outerbanks counties of the Carolina’s were actually pro-Union.
The planter class was utterly convinced of their right to enlsave other men and they either conciously or unconciously knew they could not preserve their culture without slavery. And they controlled the political and cultural affairs of the region. Other men, like Lee and Jackson, who did not particulary support slavery were bound to the culture by their notion of honor and loyalty. No government that precluded slavery and overode their local customs, no matter how just and equitable in our eyes, would satisfy these men. They had to be killed.
Contrast that with the very tactical concerns of Captain Nathan Brittles (John Wayne) in the movie “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon”. In this movie, set during the the great Indian uprising that defeated Custer, the US Cavalry at Ft. Stark is dealing with a local outbreak of the Pawnee (I believe). These local indians have captured some women and children and are holding them. Brittles leads a raid that recaptures the children, inflicts minimal casualties ont the Indians and scatters the indians pony herd thus, at least temproarily, defusing the situation.
In this case the Army was not trying to change the nature of the Indians or settle the Indian Problem once and for all, it was only trying to get the kids back and forestall any raids by that band in the immediate area.
In actual historical fact, the strategic situation was that most Indian tribes lived in a state of more or less constant warfare with hereditary enemies. In some cases the major source of income for a tribe came from either booty gained in warfare or tribute from subordinate tribes. In almost all cases, warfare was at the very heart of their concept of manhood and identity. They could no more adopt subsistence farming and herding as a culture than a leapord can change his spots. At long last, solving the “root causes” of white-Indian violence ended up killing the majority of the Indians and demoralizing the rest. Even if all the corruption and wrongheadedness of the Indian Policy had been corrected, I don’t see how it would have ended any different.
5)The “hearts and minds” philosophy of counterinsurgent warfare is based on the assumption that you wish to govern the population in question. If you are merely trying to destroy their capacity to hurt you, the assumptions and therefore the prescriptions, don’t apply.
6) Our main purpose in invading Iraq and Afghanistan is to prevent those folks from hurting us. We are operating under the assumption that we can replace the former government and culture with someting very, very different and by so doing; “address the root causes” of anti-American/Western animus. Further, that we can do so by means of “just and equitable government” and establishing “a self governing democracy”. Maybe we can. It doesn’t hurt to try. We seem to be succeeding for the moment.
7) However, if the current “hearts and minds approach” fails, we should be prepared to either limit our objectives to a stable, albeit not very attractive, government that wont’ allow its citizens to fly airplanes into our skyscrapers or be prepared to kill lots of people.
8) One way we and our adversaries “arrange the minds as formally as other officers arrange the bodies” is through violence. Our adversaries today are using violence to influence all the circles of the picture. Each attack on US forces or those Iraqis who are part of the new government are “propaganda of the deed” as the Tupamaro’s used to say. We certainly should communicate via words and just actions but we must never forget that violence will be necessary to protect ourselves.
9) This is exactly the same dilemma we faced in Vietnam.
Patrick –
Good comment, although I disagree in several places. Let me assemble some arguments and we’ll see how they fit.
A.L.
ninja – think about it
#13 from Patrick E. Walsh:
7) However, if the current “hearts and minds approach” fails, we should be prepared to either limit our objectives to a stable, albeit not very attractive, government that wont’ allow its citizens to fly airplanes into our skyscrapers or be prepared to kill lots of people.
Many, including Hugh Fitzgerald (at Jihad Watch), Diana West (who can be read at Town Hall), and more humbly myself believe there is a better way: if people are eager to kill the non-Muslims among them and in their way (that is, our soldiers) and then each other in civil wars, the best thing that we can do is withdraw to safety the non-Muslim targets that everyone can agree to kill, and let the fratricide truly begin.
It’s not our responsibility to keep our troops in place as targets for all and as scapegoats for everything Muslims choose to do to each other by way of violence and bad government.
Since Sunnis and Al Qaeda supporters in Iraq want a civil war that they will lose – with the numerical odds more than three to one against them, we should say: “Your wish is granted!”
And when the fratricidal killing slackens? The standard answer emerging is: toss chum in the water, and let the sharks go at it again, or if an unacceptably dangerous government forms, knock it over, and again divide and diminish.
This is a reversion to a Byzantine defensive policy of [i]let’s you and him fight[/i]. There is not a more logical policy available for Christian people with skilled troops and money to trade on, but condemned to a lasting defensive by inferior demographics and ferociously swarming foes.
This sounds great, in theory:
“Undermine guerrilla cause and destroy their cohesion by demonstrating integrity and competence of government to represent and serve needs of the people – rather than exploit and impoverish them for the benefit of a greedy elite.”
Now, of course, you must find sufficient people who have integrity and are competent enough to govern. And, you now need to find sufficient people with integrity and competence to be governed. The USA is, in fact, just such experiment. The first its kind in human history precisely because we tried to become a society of people with integrity and competence. Our Founding Fathers knew that it would take a long time to achieve a majority of just such people. They did not, in my humble belief, believe that it would turn our any other way. Today in America, we have finally seen that this wonderful experiment appears to be failing. A majority of its people hate this country precisely because it wants to be what they hate the most: honest and competent. The majority of human history back tens of thousands of years have demonstrated that the difficulty of finding sufficient numbers of good and honest people willing to govern the ungovernable. Torture and death have been the result in every period of human existence. We think this past century, because most of us are alive in it, is different. It is not. Those whose hate is so deep will never see what their future truly is because they are led by those whose goal is to kill the American experiment fully and finally!!