Benjamin Friedman notes new Afghanistan commanding general Stanley McChrystal’s background in the “sharp” or “kinetic” end of special forces work and raises some concerns:

In the (recently released!) book on the post Cold War evolution of the US military that I co-edited, Colin Jackson and Austin Long have a chapter discussing the politics of special operations command. They argue that the direct action theory of victory in counterinsurgency is a close relative to the air force’s theory of decapitation, which says you can defeat a nation by attacking its leaders from the air. They explain that direct action has long been the favored tactic of secret or “black” SOF organizations like Delta Force, but that the wars made it the dominant mission in SOCOM as a whole, crowding traditional “white” counterinsurgency missions like population protection, force training, and civil affairs. To them, that is a problem, because the direct action theory of victory is badly flawed. You can’t kill your way to victory in these sorts of wars, they argue. That’s particularly true in Afghanistan, I’d add, where distance and poor roads make the exploitation of intelligence far more time-consuming.

I don’t know to what extent McChrystal shares the black SOF worldview. He would probably say that direct action is just part of the toolkit. It is possible, however, that his appointment reflects a decision to downplay nation-building in Afghanistan and focus more on killing raids and training Afghan soldiers.

I think the use of the term “nation building” probably obscures more than it reveals in this context. The real crux of the matter is that in a geographical sub-portion of Afghanistan where there’s insurgent activity happening, US forces face a choice at the margin between trying to identify and kill insurgents, and trying to identify and protect civilian population centers.

One interesting sub-plot thus far in the Obama administration has been the not-quite-official disavowal of the term “war on terror.” This saw another flair-up recently when a civil servant named Dave Riedel emailed Pentagon officials to tell them “OMB says: ‘This Administration prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ [GWOT]. Please use ‘Overseas Contingency Operation.’” But according to Brian Beutler, when Peter Orszag was asked about this he distanced himself from the distancing saying “I’m not aware of any communication I’ve had on that issue. It was a communication by a mid-level career civil service.” Brian observes:

So GWOT it is. That doesn’t mean the Riedel email didn’t go out, though, and some (me, for instance) wonder if some at the Pentagon might stick with the supposedly new moniker (Overseas Contingency Operation) leading to some amusing confusion on the Hill.

This has been a problem for the government for some time, and to such an extent that even George Bush was willing to admit error. “We actually misnamed the war on terror,” Bush said in August 2004. “It ought to be the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world.” Touche.

I think this is a more important issue than people realize. Names of programs matter. The fact that the Future Combat Systems project is named “Future Combat Systems” allowed John McCain during the campaign to try to get people to believe that Barack Obama had some kind of blanket opposition to funding future combat systems, rather than opposition to a specific boondogglish program. Similarly, it sounds and feels a lot more reasonable to say that Pentagon requests for money to use in overseas contingency operations need to be weighed against other priorities than it does to question funding requests aimed at winning a “Long War” or a “War on Terror.” Completely non-military endeavors have often tried to leverage the term “war” into increased funding (War on Poverty, War on Drugs) but obviously this works a lot better for the military which is in the business of fighting wars.

But reducing the world’s exposure to terrorists is neither an enterprise with a defined beginning and end, nor is it mainly a military undertaking. “War on Terror” and “Long War” thinking distort our policy approaches, distort our budgetary priorities, and encourage the problematic idea that we need to fight a hazily defined “global counterinsurgency” and can’t afford to think about the costs of doing so.

I’ve been looking at the rise of “counterinsurgency” theory first to prominence, then to some influence in the Bush administration, and then via CNAS to influence within the Democratic Party and now the Obama Pentagon with a mix of hope and anxiety. Hope because I think the COIN mindset is a smarter way to think about 21st century security challenges than what you get from F–22 salesmen masquerading as strategists, but anxiety because it also sometimes seems to open the door to a vast new array of misbegotten imperialist adventures. So when Justin Logan recommended Andrew Bacevich’s skeptical take on the new memoir from COIN guru David Kilcullen I paid attention. But even more interesting than Bacevich’s take on Kilcullen was CNAS fellow and counterinsurgent Andrew Exum’s take on Bacevich’s take on Kilcullen:

One of the things I have always maintained is that realists of the Andrew Bacevich school and counter-insurgents of the David Kilcullen school have more in common than they realize at first glance. No one who really understands COIN wants to do it. Liberal interventionalists and neo-conservatives are likely to be much more enthusiastic than the practitioners themselves. Counter-insurgents, often knowing something of what they speak through practical and hard-won experience, realize all too well just how difficult and costly big schemes drawn up in Washington become when they have to be operationalized. Counter-insurgency is hard. Best to avoid it, actually.

I’m torn between wanting to write “I think this is true” and wanting to write “I hope this is true.” But the fact that Exum, who’s on the inside of the COIN clique looking out, is writing it makes me more hopeful that it actually is true. It’s always seemed to me that the clear implication of giving due consideration to the issue of how to eat soup with a knife is that you should do your damn best to avoid putting yourself in that kind of situation. In other words, if at all possible find something else to eat.

But at the same time that this has seemed to me to be the clear implication, I’ve also worried that actual practitioners may be disinclined to draw the implication in practice. After all, active engagement in counterinsurgency operations tends to boost demand for counterinsurgency experts while a foreign policy that aimed to avoid such scenarios might reach the conclusion that it can afford to simply ignore the subject. Thus you could see a certain structural bias in COIN circles toward wanting to see COIN-needed situations lurking under every rock.

The ongoing Afghanistan strategic review process will, I think, be a practical test of whether or not Exum’s ideas about a realist/counterinsurgent synthesis can be made to work. It seems to me that it’s a scenario in which we need to simultaneously apply COINish insights about the tactics employed by our troops (relying on manpower rather than firepower, seeing public opinion as a key center of gravity, etc.) with realist insights about the need to set priorities, define interests, and establish realistic goals. There’s a big risk of tumbling too far into one side or another—either pulling back and just lobbing occasional bombs at bad guys in a manner that radicalizes the entire population, or else committing ourselves to an unnecessary and probably impossible decades-long effort to build a modern state structure in Afghanistan.

I think we’ll see soon enough how well the administration does on this score, but the blogging lifestyle has turned me into an impatient person.

This subject really deserves a treatment longer than a blog post, but let me recommend my colleague Matt Duss’s post on Bob Woodward and the perversity of that burgeoning establishment consensus that the main lesson of Iraq is that, whether or not we should have gone to war in the first place, we’ve now learned a bunch of awesome counterinsurgency techniques that will allow us to subdue future adversaries near and far.

I know he disagrees with this interpretation, but I’ve always thought it made a lot of sense to dwell on the fact that the title of COIN guru John Nagl’s excellent book on the subject is Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife. One thing you might ask yourself, of course, is why would you do that? And it’s hard to say. I mean, even a starving man with a bowl of soup and no spoon is just going to drink directly from a bowl. Of course you can devise some kind of scenario in which it might be necessary to eat soup with a knife, but your basic gameplan in life is going to be to avoid being in those kind of situations. And much the same, it seems to me, with the lessons of counterinsurgency. This is very difficult stuff. Like eating soup with a knife. Your top policy priority should be to avoid the situations in which it arises.