Abu Muqawama posts a COIN analogy of the day.

An insurgency is like a staircase. At the top of that staircase, you have the insurgent leadership. Below them, you have the actual bomb-throwers or gunmen. On the step below, you have the primary enablers — the people who provide the bombs or the rifles. Below them, you have secondary enablers — like look-outs. Below the enablers, you have the neutral population. And below the neutrals, at the bottom of the staircase, you have the openly friendly elements of the population.

Bad counter-insurgency strategy and tactics have the effect of turning the staircase into an escalator. If you wage a counter-insurgency campaign by kicking down doors and smashing heads against the wall, you move everyone up on the staircase: primary enablers become actual insurgents, secondary enablers become primary enablers, neutrals become enablers, and the friendly population either gets killed or becomes neutral.

Good population-centric counter-insurgency strategy and tactics, by contrast, throw the escalator effect into reverse. Neutrals become friendly and enablers become neutral.

It sounds erudite enough.  The Captain’s Journal (TCJ) would like to counter with one of our own.  Now, we know the drill.  We’re a U.S. Marine friendly blog, and so the following conversation necessarily ensues between academic COIN specialists and their wives when they see us coming.

Academic COIN Specialist (ACS): Dear, remember that I have talked to you about those hairy chested men who drag their knuckles and grunt?  Well, they’re here.

Wife (W): Eeeeww honey, make the ‘bad men’ go away – they scare me.  I’ll bet they club their women over the head and drag them into their caves.

ACS: Dear, they are reported to have smaller cranial volumes and therefore shorter attention spans, so if we pretend like we’re listening they’ll eventually forget what they’re grunting … um, talking about.  Bear with it and I’ll protect you.  Now, ssshhhhh, we don’t want to confuse them or make them aggressive.

W: They look mean and they’re dragging clubs and rocks in their hands, honey … I’m really scared.

ACS: Ssshhhh .. I’ll hold you tight dear.  The ‘bad men’ won’t hurt you.

Now that y’all have the children hidden and the wives secured and are ready to listen, here it goes.  Counterinsurgency has no center of gravity, notwithstanding Clausewitz.  Any theory that has as its suffix “centric” is mistaken, whether it is enemy-centric, population-centric, or whatever.  An insurgency and the salient conditions that surround it should be seen as a living organism, with insurgents as a cancer that occupies and sometimes attacks its host, and the population as the interstitial cells.  They have a symbiotic and interrelated living arrangement.

Lines of operations and lines of effort are necessary to kill the cancer and restore health to the organism.  As we’ve said before, it is necessary to pursue relentless kinetic operations against the cancer, while at the same time ameliorating the unhealthy condition in which the cancer has left the host body.  So a field grade officer can attend a city council meeting and adjudicate between complaints and disputes of the various cells as a scholar of international affairs and interpersonal relationships, while his men are simultaneously handing out food bags in one part of the organism and laying metal down range and kicking the doors in on homes that are known to harbor cancer cells in other parts of the organism.  In COIN, we do not restrict our actions to a single focus.  This is the strategy of losers.

There.  Whew!  We surprise even ourselves that TCJ didn’t lose focus while trying to explain the analogy.  As for Abu’s statement concerning the author of these words:

Sir John would be the last person to say the British Army has it all figured out with respect to COIN and is himself suspicious of the notion that the British have an advantage in places like Iraq and Afghanistan because of their institutional experience in Northern Ireland. But the general himself is a serious COIN intellectual …

To be serious for a moment, while we here at TCJ do not for a moment disparage our brothers in arms in the UK, and this is especially true of those who have made sacrifices in the campaign alongside U.S. forces, at TCJ we wouldn’t mistake for one moment the UK having an advantage in COIN due to experience in Northern Ireland.  She has nothing whatsoever to do with the cultural ethos in the Middle East, where Osama bin Laden says that the stronger horse gets the vote of the population (and we have pointed out that the U.S. Marines were the stronger horse in Anbar).

Besides, if for no other reason than the difference between the results of the Anbar campaign and the Basra failure, we would not point to the British experiment as meaningful.  Finally, our friends the Brits just simply need to get some humor.  If they were funnier and a little looser, you know, they might have won in Basra.  Like maybe this.