Archive for the 'Counterinsurgency' Category

After publication of Civilian National Security Force, a number of interesting reactions occurred in reader e-mail, links and trackbacks. One such reaction bears a little more discussion. New Wars asks the question whether Obama proposes something like Thomas P.M. Barnett’s bifurcation of Leviathan and Sysadmin responsibilities.

The video below serves as an introduction to Barnett’s philosophy of Department of War and Department of “Everything else.” As a warning to readers, the video contains profanity.

To begin with, Barnett’s proposal shows an ignorance of the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq. His notion that the Leviathan deploys, goes home, and then is recalled if insurgents begin killing the Sysadmin forces is ridiculous. The Marines were engaged in constant contact with the population of Anbar for three years or more in order to win the campaign. His statement that “if you shoot at us the Marines will come and kill you” is mere dreaming. The Marines will be at Camps Lejeune and Pendleton under Barnett’s model.

Further, if the Marines (or Special Operations Forces which he also places in the category of Leviathan) are located in proximity of the Sysadmin forces in order to provide protection, then there is no point to the bifurcation of responsibilities. Nothing is saved and no efficiency is gained. One also wonders why, if both the Leviathan and Sysadmin forces are deployed to support a counterinsurgency and/or peacekeeping effort, the Leviathan would be sitting on a FOB and the Sysadmin would be contacting the population.

Barnett clearly isn’t thinking about the highly successful Marine operations in Anbar with his recommendations. And if most of the U.S. Army joins in order to engage in operations other than war (as Barnett claims), this should probably change. Eventually, U.S. forces will suffer from the same fate as the Australian infantry. Finally, Barnett’s graph of decreasing expenditure for kinetic capabilities and increasing expenditure for peacekeeping and rebuilding is laughable. No General, despite Barnett’s claims, has told him that they can get by with a much lower budget (at least not one worth anything).

We have noted many programs that need funding, including lighter body armor that has the same area coverage, F-22s (prior to the F-35 joint strike fighter), increasing the size of both the Army and Marines, rebuilding the sad state of naval ship building in America, and on the list goes. A vision into the future of a diminished military budget was put before us with the Russian invasion of Georgia with their dilapidated equipment. Many more casualties were suffered than was necessary (4:1 kill ratio).

Barnett makes a good show, but struts a bit too much given the lack of substance in his model. This must suffice as a short critique in lieu of a longer one (which we might offer in the future). As for Obama, if he is advocating Barnett’s position, then he is advocating a fairytale in never land. The philosphy is self-defeating. Without a constantly refurbished, experienced and increasingly lethal military, what Barnett calls the Sysadmin forces would be killed within hours of deployment to a location. It is precisely the huge budget, the lethality of the forces, and capability at force projection that gives the U.S. the edge that he wants to exploit and put to work doing other things.

If Obama means simply to cut the budget of the military, then this will have the same effect, and we most certaintly oppose this. But it stands to reason that Obama doesn’t see the same function for the military as even Barnett. Whether the current organizational structure or the one Barnett envisions, the existing paradigm for defeating the transnational insurgency we now face is to fight them in a battle space other than the U.S. Obama’s philosopy appears to be diametrically opposed to this paradigm.

We have previously discussed the bravery of British troops in kinetic engagements in Afghanistan, so there is no question of either the capabilities or courage of UK Army and Marines, or the position of The Captain’s Journal concerning the same. But we have covered British operations in the past for the purpose of understanding what the population and culture can teach us about counterinsurgency. Just such a report was recently published, and it confirms our previous positions on the campaign in Basra.

“The situation in Basra is much better than before when this was a terrorised city controlled by car-loads of militiamen,” the doctor said. “The offices of these armed men were like the security offices under Saddam Hussein, not to mention the empty houses that were used to torture anyone who dared to criticise their practices.”

He praised the conduct of soldiers from the 1st Division of the Iraqi Army, the fledgling military’s best-trained unit, who took part in the Basra offensive to boost the numbers of the homegrown 14th Division.

“We noticed the fighting ability of the 1st Division. They were well equipped, had professional training and worked well with local citizens to ensure success and defy the gangsters,” Dr Muhiddeen said.

He had less of a glowing impression of the British military, which had control of security in Basra from March 2003 until December 2007, a period that saw the al-Mehdi Army militia grow in strength and influence.

“British forces did not make an impression on the people of Basra. They let the militia control the city and stayed away from events.”

Ms Ali was also unimpressed, describing the British troops as lodgers.

“As we know, people who rent stay away from trouble even if it is harming the house he has rented,” she said.

“In my personal opinion, although I have no expertise, the US forces always want to appear strong and able to succeed in any battle. They will never allow militias to ruin the reputation of the US army.

The British troops were only “lodgers” because their strategy was misinformed, and their strategy was misinformed because of senior leadership. A whole host of problems contributed to the British failure in Basra, including rules of engagement, British Army leadership, and a reflexive belief that the lessons of Northern Ireland could be applied directly to Iraq. What the U.S. Marines knew upon takeover of operations in the Anbar Province is that the population must immediately respect them, and any loss of confidence in the ability to trust their security to them or loss of respect because of a any signs of weakness, spelled the doom of the campaign.

Going forward in Afghanistan, U.S. and British military thinkers must be of a single mind. There can be no more natural partners than the U.S. and U.K. in the global war in which we are now engaged.

Riddle me this. Is the following statement by a tribal elder in the town of Garmser, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, fabricated or real?

Before the Marines came to Garmser we all believed good things about Americans. There were no Taliban here, and it was the Marines who brought them to us. Since the Marines have been here there has been nothing but killing and destruction, and we all wish they would leave us. We don’t need the Marines here, we don’t need their security. We have no problems with the Taliban, and the Taliban will leave when the Marines go.

The answer comes later. Turning our attention to a valuable report from the Telegraph entitled Troops Face a Wall of Silence from Terrified Villagers, its lessons are timely for the campaign in Afghanistan.

The American patrol had found the dusty streets of Sahak bazaar unusually quiet that morning. Most people were distant and unwilling to talk. Those who did speak insisted there were no Taliban fighters nearby.

Barely two hours later, the first mortar round was fired at US soldiers from inside the village. A few seconds passed before a machine gun opened fire from a mud-walled compound the patrol had walked past only that morning.

In south-eastern Afghanistan, thinly stretched US forces are not only hunting down Taliban gunmen. They are also fighting a counter-insurgency war among terrified civilians, who are caught between them and the insurgents and are deeply reluctant to risk death by helping the coalition.

When the men of the 1st Squadron, 61st Cavalry, part of the 101st Airborne Division, first heard they were going to Sahak, they took bets on how long it would take the Taliban to fire rockets at them. In this patch of Paktia province, Sahak has a reputation as a “bad part of town”. In May, it was the scene of an ambush and a separate attack by three roadside bombs, which injured several American soldiers …

The soldiers from 1st Platoon in Alpha Troop, popularly known as the “Hooligans”, were given the task of capturing and holding a barren hillside until an armoured convoy of engineers could arrive to build the outpost.

As they waited for the 80-vehicle convoy to crawl along the booby trap-riddled road from the town of Gardez, the Taliban duly fired as many rockets at them as possible …

… it soon became clear that the Taliban’s hold on the area around Sahak ran deeper than their ability to launch inaccurate 107mm rockets.

When questioned, not one villager had seen where the rockets had come from, nor who had launched them. Each swore they had been too busy visiting relatives, working or praying to notice anything unusual.

One or two reluctantly revealed glimpses of the brutal punishment that faces anyone caught helping the Afghan army or foreign forces.

Abdul Kadir, a 52-year-old minibus driver, said that insurgents had murdered his son for being a police officer and his body had lain undiscovered in a field for three days.

Mohammed Rahim, a 20-year-old truck driver who fidgeted with nerves, said Taliban gunmen had arrived in his village after dark, going from house to house seeking anyone helping President Hamid Karzai’s government.

We have discussed the tendency to treat Operation Enduring Freedom as a special forces campaign, mostly directed at high value targets. In fact, in the current review of the strategic approach in Afghanistan undertaken by General David Petraeus, one option being floated is a turnover of more of the campaign to special forces, with an increase in the number of SOF teams. A recent veteran of OEF comments about this proposal that it’s the only approach that will work, cites Seth Jones of RAND (in saying that the only way to defeat an insurgency is to ensure that it has no state sponsorship), and ends with this imperative:

The only way things change in A-stan is if GEN Petraeus increases SOF presence along the borders by a large amount, to include bumping SOF teams from the current number of ODA and CAT-A to a more robust package and have the entire CJSOTF focus on the border region.

The conventional guys can handle Helmand, Herat, Mez and elsewhere, including the urban areas – but totally agree with the post above that the “surge” will not work if replicated like they did things in Iraq.

The Captain’s Journal respects active duty military and gives the benefit of the doubt to their studied opinions, but several problems become apparent with this analysis. First, we are in receipt of other studied opinions from SOF in Afghanistan who claim to us that the only way to push OEF forward is to make it a “big Army” operation, since the HVT program can only carry us so far, and the operation is too large for the Marines alone.

Second, Seth Jones, who has become the author of one disappointing counterinsurgency study after another at RAND, has given one requirement for defeating an insurgency, but certainly this cannot be the only one. Otherwise the indigenous Sunni insurgency would have been defeated much more easily in Anbar since they didn’t have the backing of the government of Iraq. If the lessons of Anbar are too easily and quickly forgotten, then Colonel Sean MacFarland reminds us.

“The prize in the counterinsurgency fight is not terrain,” he says. “It’s the people. When you’ve secured the people, you have won the war. The sheiks lead the people.”

But the sheiks were sitting on the fence.

They were not sympathetic to al-Qaeda, but they tolerated its members, MacFarland says.

The sheiks’ outlook had been shaped by watching an earlier clash between Iraqi nationalists — primarily former members of Saddam Hussein’s ruling Baath Party — and hard-core al-Qaeda operatives who were a mix of foreign fighters and Iraqis. Al-Qaeda beat the nationalists. That rattled the sheiks.

“Al-Qaeda just mopped up the floor with those guys,” he says.

“We get there in late May and early June 2006, and the tribes are on the sidelines. They’d seen the insurgents take a beating. After watching that, they’re like, ‘Let’s see which way this is going to go.’ ”

MacFarland’s brigade initially struggled to build an Iraqi police force, a critical step in establishing order in the city.

“We said to the sheiks, ‘What’s it going to take to get you guys off the fence?’ ” MacFarland says.

The sheiks said their main concern was protecting their own tribes and families.

Our advocate of the SOF campaign for Afghanistan has told us that an Iraq-style surge won’t work in Afghanistan, but if the considered and studied summary of the surge and its accompanying tactics involves getting troops into contact with the population, intelligence-driven raids, and most of all providing security for the population with the increase in forces, then the advocate hasn’t given us a single reason to believe that providing security for the population won’t work to enable the population to turn against the Taliban. In fact, the report cited above from the Telegraph (in addition to MacFarland’s report) supplies us with yet another anecdotal justification for believing that the population wants security.

The reflexive tendency to deny the obvious is a skill mastered by “experts.” Many of the “experts” apparently don’t see the need for an increase in troop presence, and yet the two most recent Commanding Generals, McNeill and McKiernan, both have demanded and even begged for more troops, saying that the campaign was under-resourced.

An Iraq-style surge won’t work in Afghanistan, or so some of the “experts” say. But the recent Marine Corps operations in the Helmand Province by the 24th MEU have given us a literal laboratory of counterinsurgency, implementing the same approach they used in Anbar. Much of the combat has been heavy, with “full bore reloading” against Taliban in kinetic engagements. The Marines sustained 170 engagements over 35 days of maneuver warfare. But the Taliban sustained these same engagements, and more than 400 of them died. Following the kinetic part of the campaign the Marines transitioned immediately into security operations, payments to citizens for damage to property, constant contact, and all of the other aspects of successful long-term counterinsurgency.

As for the quote by the tribal elder in Garmser? If you guessed that it was fabricated, you might know enough to qualify as a counterinsurgency “expert.” The real exchange between the tribal elder and the Marines went somewhat different, and it was between the Marines and multiple elders who communicated the same thing to the Marines. “The next day, at a meeting of Marines and Afghan elders, the bearded, turban-wearing men told Marine Capt. Charles O’Neill that the two sides could “join together” to fight the Taliban. “When you protect us, we will be able to protect you,” the leader of the elders said.” Indeed, similar words were spoken at a meeting in Ghazni with the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan: ““We don’t want food, we don’t want schools, we want security!” said one woman council member.”

Special Operations Forces are a wonderful asset, with specialized billets that will always be required in any campaign, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism or conventional. But SOF cannot supply this security for the population, as there aren’t enough of them, and the HVT program is designed for counterterrorism rather than counterinsurgency.

Our SOF contact from Afghanistan has lamented the lack of long term effect of the HVT program, commenting that the next mid-level Taliban commander killed will cause a week or two delay and scurrying about until the next commander rises to the challenge, and then it’s the same thing all over again. Thus goes the HVT program.

With history as our guide, we can see that both the campaign in Anbar and the seven months that the 24th MEU was in Afghanistan demonstrate the same thing. Security must be implemented as a precondition for the population to turn against the insurgency. This is true regardless of what the “experts” say or how many times they reflexively contradict the commanding Generals.

The Small Wars Journal Blog links to a report by embedded journalist Nir Rosen, who spent some time with hard core Taliban, and wrote How We Lost the War We Won: A journey into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan for Rolling Stone. It’s an interesting report, but for regular readers of The Captain’s Journal, it’s not obvious that we learn much new (Sorry here, no bragging, and no embedded report from this end, but we’ve been covering OEF intensely for almost a year, ridiculing inept Army intelligence when they fed General Rodriguez the lunacy that the Taliban wouldn’t launch a spring offensive, telling our readers how important the Torkham Crossing and Chaman were, warning of affects of the TTP and Baitullah Mehsud, warning that roads and construction were irrelevant if IEDs tore them up, warning that British work on dams would be to no avail if dam workers were killed by the Taliban or if the electrical grid was taken out, warning that NATO was hopelessly deadlocked in red tape with many European troops sitting at FOBs with candy-ass rules of engagement, and so on, and so forth, and on and on, again and again and again. Been there, done that.).

So, go and read Rosen’s piece if you wish, it’s linked above. But regular readers of The Captain’s Journal will see our warnings in real life, real time. You’ve read it for a year. Now you can read a summary of our work in 45 minutes. Not bragging – just saying. We’re more interested in the take on this whole affair by Dave at The Small Wars Journal. Says Dave:

Just call me old fashioned – I have serious misgivings respecting and tolerating journalists who embed with an enemy (the Taliban in this instance) responsible for what some call the strictest interpretation and implementation of Sharia law “ever seen in the Muslim World.” The crimes against humanity that were a direct result of their rule in Afghanistan and continue in their desire to regain that rule cannot be forgiven or glossed over in hopes of some temporary respite from increased violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Yea, yea, okay – some people’s terrorists are other people’s freedom fighters – yada, yada – save it for the think tank- or university-circle sponsored seminars, studies and white papers. There is still black and white in today’s complex environment and our efforts in South Asia should most certainly fall within that category.

If there was ever a grouping of individuals and supporters that deserved complete annihilation (yea – I said the A word) – the Taliban and their support structure would and should be up front and center. It will take quite some time (that is why it is called The Long War) and there will most certainly be peaks and valleys along the way – but we must – and will – win this one and we will write the last chapter of the history book reserved for the victors.

Cheers, loud applause from the whole stadium – and the fans keep erupting in spontaneous dancing and celebrations and more applause and cheers. Now, just to set the mood going forward with this article, see the picture below.

The woman being killed (h/t LT Nixon Rants) probably forgot to pull her burqa completely closed and some of her face was showing. Not enough, says you? Want more? How about this.

In Meerwala, Pakistan, an 11-year-old boy walked unchaperoned with a girl. This was a violation of Islam. A tribal council was called.

The boy’s father pleaded that since he was too young to have sex, the girl was safe and no harm was done. The council disagreed. But instead of punishing the boy, it decided to punish his whole family by punishing his 18-year-old sister.

In order to shame the family, the council sentenced the teenage daughter to be gang raped. Four members of the council took turns forcing themselves upon her in a mud hut, as hundreds of villagers laughed and cheered.

“I touched their feet,” said the girl to an Associated Press reporter. “I wept. I cried. I said I taught the holy Qur’an to children in the village, therefore don’t punish me for a crime which was not committed by me. But they tore my clothes and raped me one by one.”

There you have it. The hard core Taliban and people who support them. Now. We can’t kill everyone, but every time The Captain’s Journal has weighed in negatively at the Small Wars Council (handle – Danny) on negotiating with these bastards, much consternation ensues, with Danny being labeled as someone who doesn’t understand counterinsurgency.

The Captain’s Journal (Danny) has lost much sleep over COIN. We’re very close to one particular SAW gunner who stopped counting his kills (literally – stopped counting, according to independent confirmations) and asked for prayer every time we talked. We’ve killed many, many enemy (the Wikipedia entry on Operation Alljah is low in number of enemy dead). As for the rest, “we’re paying them not to shoot at us,” said the SAW gunner to Danny.

Danny nodded approvingly that night, “Good, good,” said Danny. “Good. This is the way it’s supposed to be. Kill the irreconcilables without mercy, make peace with the rest, and sooner or later they will learn to be citizens again. Pay them until then. Good, good. This is the way it should be done.” And so Danny had very good sleep that night, and made sure that there was a concerned citizens category and that we weighed in with approval. Danny has thought quite a bit about counterinsurgency.

But the Anbaris were relatively secular compared to the Taliban, and had no love for the extreme vision of al Qaeda. It’s estimated that there are some 8000 – 20,000 Taliban fighters in the South and East, and these fighters are probably irreconcilable. Peel away a few, okay. Fine. Make your silly attempts to reconcile and negotiate, and you’ll get a few come to our side. But as for the hard core fighters (the majority), they must be killed. Their vision has as its world view a radical version of Islam that is either globalist in its import, or is amenable to that vision (and thus malleable for al Qaeda fighters).

Dave says he’s old fashioned. Fine with us. We are too. As for Nir Rosen, Danny doesn’t need the embedded report. We can figure it out on our own. We may as well have had someone embed with the Schutzstaffel while the Jews were being exterminated. Just as there is nothing romantic about putting Jews in ovens to die, there is nothing good, wholesome, romantic or righteous about Taliban ideology. Nir Rosen had better watch his six, or better yet, embed with U.S. troops.

This comment at the Small Wars Journal Blog by a British officer reminds us again of the myth that has sprung up around the narrative of Anbar.

… dialogue with Afghan tribes/groupings that provided the ‘freedom’ for them to accept localised security responsibility. Given the nature of some of these local forces it was this aspect of our tactical activity that I recall being the subject of friction between the Brit and US chains of command. Slightly ironic when one considers the subsequent endorsement of the ‘awakening’ in Al An bar and Baghdad. Clearly this latter course of action was driven by our own limited means and was fraught with risk. However, compromise is, I submit, an enduring tenet of COIN.

The irony is only apparent, and belongs to the realm of myth-telling concerning the U.S. experience in the Anbar Province. The one who believes that kinetic operations and force projection weren’t the pre-condition for the tribal awakening would do well to remember U.S. Marine deaths in Anbar – approximately 1000 between active duty and reserve.

No less than Colonel MacFarland gives us a synopsis of the tribal view upon his arrival in Ramadi.

“The prize in the counterinsurgency fight is not terrain,” he says. “It’s the people. When you’ve secured the people, you have won the war. The sheiks lead the people.”

But the sheiks were sitting on the fence.

They were not sympathetic to al-Qaeda, but they tolerated its members, MacFarland says.

The sheiks’ outlook had been shaped by watching an earlier clash between Iraqi nationalists — primarily former members of Saddam Hussein’s ruling Baath Party — and hard-core al-Qaeda operatives who were a mix of foreign fighters and Iraqis. Al-Qaeda beat the nationalists. That rattled the sheiks.

“Al-Qaeda just mopped up the floor with those guys,” he says.

“We get there in late May and early June 2006, and the tribes are on the sidelines. They’d seen the insurgents take a beating. After watching that, they’re like, ‘Let’s see which way this is going to go.’ “

Note that even initially the tribes didn’t like the presence of al Qaeda, but just as with Abu Ahmed in al-Qaid, who lost to al Qaeda until aided by U.S. Marines, they needed security and assistance along with a strong presence by U.S. forces in order for their resistance to be successful. The awakening didn’t materialize out of nothing, but rather had a cornerstone, without which the foundation wouldn’t have stood.

So how well does this compare with the situation in Afghanistan? First of all, the Taliban willingly approved of sanctuary for al Qaeda rather than fought against them prior to 9/11. Second, they willingly fight side-by-side with their fighters today against U.S. and NATO forces. Third, Operation Enduring Freedom is an “economy of force” campaign, which means that, as we were told by both Generals McNeill and McKiernan, we don’t have enough troops, and by definition, this means that we don’t have the force projection necessary to do the job of counterinsurgency.

The view is therefore clouded when the loss of the campaign is on the horizon. Senior British military leadership believes that the war is lost.

Britain’s most senior military commander in Afghanistan has warned that the war against the Taliban cannot be won. Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith said the British public should not expect a “decisive military victory” but should be prepared for a possible deal with the Taliban.

His assessment followed the leaking of a memo from a French diplomat who claimed that Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British ambassador in Kabul, had told him the current strategy was “doomed to fail”.

Carleton-Smith, commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade, which has just completed its second tour of Afghanistan, said it was necessary to “lower our expectations”. He said: “We’re not going to win this war. It’s about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that’s not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army.”

The brigadier added: “We may well leave with there still being a low but steady ebb of rural insurgency . . . I don’t think we should expect that when we go there won’t be roaming bands of armed men in this part of the world. That would be unrealistic and probably incredible.”

Negotiating with the Taliban means giving power and authority to Mullah Omar, who paid Baitullah Mehsud $70,000 to mastermind attacks against diplomats of countries involved in the publication of sacrilegious cartoons of Prophet Mohammed, and who has also acknowledged the authority of Baitullah Mehsud over the TTP (Tehrik-i-Taliban).

Baitullah himself has global aspirations. “We will continue our struggle until foreign troops are thrown out. Then we will attack them in the US and Britain until they either accept Islam or agree to pay jazia (a tax in Islam for non-Muslims living in an Islamic state).”

So the difference between the Anbar awakening and the Taliban insurgency are stark, and serve to highlight the confusion of this British officer who doesn’t understand why we cannot negotiate with the Taliban. More troubling, however, is the acquiescence of General Petraeus to the notion of peace-making with the Taliban.

For Afghanistan, he spoke of increasing international forces and what he called “thickening” local forces as well, through greater political engagement of tribes and reconciliation with fighters who were not hard-core. There was also the need to engage countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia, to help with the Taliban, he said.

This must be done very carefully, since the force projection necessary to convince the tribes to reject extremism has not been implemented since the beginning of the campaign. We must do first things first. As for the mistaken effort to get the Saudis to collaborate and win the peace, the Taliban clearly aren’t interested. Why should they be, since they are winning? Negotiating in this instance is a sign of weakness. The Anbaris wanted security and patronage. We have nothing that the Taliban and al Qaeda want. The mistake is a simple one of category. We aren’t involved in a traditional counterinsurgency. We are waging a counterinsurgency against religious jihad. They want us.

The Herald Sun has an article from an Australian perspective on the campaign in Afghanistan. Recall as you read this that based on discussions in The Cult of Special Forces, the Australians do not allow their infantry to engage in combat operations, and in fact require that they sign formal agreements stating that they haven’t provoked kinetic engagements. They allow only their special forces to engage in kinetic operations.

The ambush and serious wounding of nine elite Australian soldiers in Afghanistan this month showed just how tenuous the coalition’s hold is over most of the troubled country.

Despite the advanced weapons and remote technology waged against them by the world’s top military powers, including unmanned spy planes that escort most patrols, Taliban fighters backed by their comrades in Pakistan and Iran just keep on coming.

The situation is so confused that highly trained Australian special forces troops have been implicated in the death of a district governor during a firefight between the Diggers and Afghan police.

For one British attack helicopter crew the reality of this bitter war reflected the fantasy of a Terminator movie during a recent operation in the restive Helmand province.

After firing a Hellfire missile from their Apache chopper to level a building housing key Taliban leaders, they were astonished to see several men escaping from the smouldering pile of rubble in a sports utility vehicle.

The pilots tuned their high-tech optical equipment, which can focus on an individual face from several kilometres away, onto the speeding utility and positively identified a prime target inside.

Another Hellfire reduced the Toyota to scrap metal, but, amazingly, one of the insurgents had survived and what was left of him began crawling away, Terminator -like, from the carnage.

The coup de grace was delivered by a short burst from the chopper’s lethal 30mm chain gun.

The Taliban might be unable to drive foreign forces out with a decisive military offensive, but they are determined to win this war of attrition.

From the heavily fortified United Nations, American, NATO and Afghan government citadels in the capital Kabul to the bloody frontline “green zones” in Helmand and Oruzgan provinces, this is a war that could last for decades and may never be won.

As the coalition death toll mounts and the Western political landscape changes, the question being asked across Afghanistan is not how the military campaign is going but rather what are the alternatives.

The 70,000 foreign troops in the country, including 1100 Australians, represent the blunt instrument of international policy.

But the force is nowhere near big enough to actually defeat the enemy, train the Afghan army and secure desperately needed infrastructure development.

Indeed, the war may never be won, and the last paragraph explains exactly why. Not enough troops. Interestingly, the author calls the 70,000 troops in Afghanistan a “blunt instrument.”

With many of these troops unable to perform offensive or kinetic operations due to rules of engagement, and with strategic incoherence keeping them on FOBs rather than contacting the population, the remaining troops that can engage in combat do so with heavy use of air power with its collateral damage and raids against high value targets.

This is a blunt instrument indeed. While counterintuitive, one lesson learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom is that while some old school counterinsurgency thinkers advocated the small footprint, it is precisely this that causes convulsive contact with the population. The more productive, precise and surgical operations require time and infantry. Infantry contacts both the population and the enemy constantly, with enough force projection to provide security and gain intelligence.  The Captain’s Journal has repeatedly stated a maxim: the necessity to apply force is inversely proportional to the force projection.

So while the pedestrian version of kinetic operations has special forces raids as surgical and infantry operations as blunt, in counterinsurgency exactly the opposite is true. Australia’s political leadership would do well to learn this, and also surmise that in the end, the small footprint model will be more costly. Australia’s military leadership already knows this.

The Captain’s Journal has been an advocate Operation Enduring Freedom for more than eight months, along with the commanders on the ground in Afghanistan. The top brass has heard, but apparently we haven’t been loud enough. General McKiernan is doing his part (as did his predecessor General McNeill who said Afghanistan was an under-resourced war).

The senior U.S. general in Afghanistan said Tuesday he is fighting the war with too few ground troops, and that even the reinforcements President Bush announced last week are insufficient. He said the shortage compels him to use more air power, at the cost of higher civilian casualties.

Speaking just hours after a new U.S. commander took charge in Iraq, Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of international forces in Afghanistan, told reporters that he realized the only way he would receive the additional ground forces he needs is for Washington to decide to divert them from Iraq.

McKiernan spoke in an interview with reporters traveling with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who arrived here Tuesday evening after presiding at a ceremony in Baghdad where Gen. Ray Odierno took over for Gen. David Petraeus as the top commander of the 146,000 American troops fighting that war.

McKiernan said his Washington bosses had “validated” his request for three more ground combat brigades, in addition to the Army brigade that Bush announced will deploy to Afghanistan in January instead of going to Iraq.

He said the brigade coming in January will merely fill an immediate need for more help in eastern Afghanistan and cited a need for at least 10,000 additional ground troops, beyond the 3,700 due early next year.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are headed in opposite directions: violence is down substantially in Iraq and U.S. troop levels are declining, whereas the fighting is heating up in Afghanistan and more U.S. troops are needed. It will fall to the next U.S. president to decide how to balance resources on both fronts.

McKiernan said he believed it was a question of when, not whether, he would get the troops he has requested.

“It’s a question of political decisions to be made to divert capabilities from Iraq to Afghanistan,” he said.

He disputed the notion that the U.S. and NATO war strategy has failed and needs to be overhauled.

“Our strategy of approaching counterinsurgency operations is a valid strategy here,” McKeirnan said. “Our problem is we don’t have enough resources to do it with.”

Several thousand more troops for Afghanistan have been announced, but it clearly isn’t enough. Without the needed boots on the ground, the over-reliance on heavy-handed air power is risking alienation of the population with unnecessary collateral damage and civilians casualties.  In counterinsurgency, loss of the population means loss of the campaign.

That constant contact with the enemy and security for the population is necessary should be obvious based on our Marines in Helmand coverage and commentary, and it was a counterinsurgency lesson re-learned by the commanders in the ISAF upon the initial engagement with the Taliban (h/t Small Wars Journal Blog).

Lt. Col. Kent Hayes knows all about the blood, sweat, and excruciating effort needed to lay the initial security piece of the counterinsurgency puzzle. The rangy executive officer for the 24th MEU explains that the Marines’ original plan to act as a roaming strike force in Helmand had to be torn up after the first battle with the Taliban. The enemy unexpectedly stayed and fought fiercely for more than a week rather than relinquish Garmsir. An estimated 400 insurgents died. Marine commanders immediately realized that the town was a critical resupply and logistics hub for insurgent operations throughout the province.

“Our original mission was to act as a quick-reaction force for the ISAF commander in Kabul so he could throw us at any escalating crisis in this area,” Hayes says. But Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, understood the strategic importance of Garmsir and instead ordered the marines to stay in the town and implement a classic counterinsurgency operation of “clear, hold, and build.” Hayes says that his troops are “not normally in the business of owning ground, but I guess you could say we’ve rented Garmsir for a while” …

Hayes is unequivocal in naming the key to the 24th MEU’s success in Helmand province: “It’s a real simple concept–we learned during this mission that the best way to combat this type of enemy is to mass forces and stay. We actually replaced a small British force that was spread thin trying to cover too much ground with too few troops. Instead, we flooded a town that was strategically important to the enemy with overwhelming forces. That’s the way you can win this kind of fight–with boots on the ground.”

The message could not be clearer. We need boots on the ground.  The Marines have proven that counterinsurgency can be successful in Afghanistan with the appropriate force size and strategy.

There are many differences between insurgencies in the twenty first century and those of 100, 50, 30 or even 10 years ago.  In addition to the transnational nature of the fighters, the easy and quick access to technologically advanced and standoff weapons introduces elements that makes previous centuries of counterinsurgency experience almost meaningless.  Examples of such elements are cell phones, IEDs and in particular, EFPs.  Our quarter century old enemy Iran is busy in Afghanistan as they were (and still are) in Iraq.

The comments by the commander, who would not be named but operates in the south east of the country where there has been a surge in Taliban attacks, were a rare admission of co-operation between elements within the Iranian regime and forces fighting British and American troops in Afghanistan.

“There’s a kind of landmine called a Dragon. Iran’s sending it,” he said. “It’s directional and it causes heavy casualties.

“We’re ambushing the Americans and planting roadside bombs. We never let them relax.”

The commander, a veteran of 30 years who started fighting when the Soviet Union was occupying Afghanistan, said the Dragon had revolutionised the Taliban’s ability to target Nato soldiers deployed in his area.

“If you lay an ordinary mine, it will only cause minor damage to Humvees or one of their big tanks. But if you lay a Dragon, it will destroy it completely,” he said.

A “Dragon” is the local nickname for a type of weapon known internationally as an Explosively Formed Penetrator (EFP) or “shaped charge” and has been used with devastating effect in Iraq by Iranian-backed groups. It is shaped so that all the explosive force is concentrated in one direction – the target – rather than blasting in all directions and weakening its impact.

A former mujahideen fighter who knows the Afghan arms market well and who asked to be known as Shahir said the Dragon mines came directly from Iran.

Iran has denied these allegations, but Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador in Kabul, said the British Army, which is deployed in south-western Afghanistan, had intercepted consignments of weapons which they believe were “donated by a group within the Iranian state”.

The only other possible source, the arms expert said, would be Pakistan’s Tribal Areas where a relatively sophisticated arms industry has grown up. “Until now,” he said, “no-one in the Tribal Areas has been able to copy these mines. Both the metal and the explosives are different, very high quality and very effective, obviously not Chinese or Pakistani.”

He said there were two routes for Iranian weaponry getting to the Taliban. “There are people inside the state in Iran who donate weapons. There are also Iranian businessmen who sell them.”

The Taliban are also employing technologically advanced communications in order to avoid electronic interdiction and eavesdropping.

Taliban fighters targeting British troops in Afghanistan are using Skype voice-over-IP phones to evade detection.

Security sources have told the Evening Standard that unlike traditional mobile calls, which can be monitored by RAF Nimrod spy planes, Skype calls are heavily encrypted.

Taliban leaders had previously been known to use satellite phones, which could be tracked and located by western forces.

The British and American governments are said to be investing resources to crack voice-over-IP (VoIP) codes.

“The trouble with this technology is that it is easily available but devilishly hard to crack,” a security source told the Standard. “The technology can now be accessed on mobile internet devices and the country’s mobile phone network is expanding rapidly.”

Skype is owned by eBay and has around 300m user accounts worldwide.

Sir David Pepper, head of government listening centre GCHQ, has previously complained that internet calls are “seriously undermining” his organisation’s ability to intercept communications.

There are suggestions as to what might be effective means to stop this use of Skype.

Simple – move to compressed data on their system.

Compressed Skype calls make life a lot easier for pattern recognition software to detect key words in the digital data stream, simply because the $trings of data are shorter.

There’s been a few reports on the subject over the last few years, but Skype has avoided making any comment for fear of upsetting its users.

Now that the issue is coming into the open, however, I strongly suspect Skype won’t have much choice.

Unless, of course, it wants to see ISPs in dodgy areas of the world like Afghanistan block the use of Skype on their Internet connections, so depriving the Net telephony company of valuable call revenue…

Maybe it’s this simple – and maybe not.  Both the U.S. DoD and the British MoD should invest as necessary to stay ahead in technology.  But we must not miss the the point concerning technology.  Playing the game of one-step-ahead is a deadly and costly way to run a campaign.

The solution to the problem of Taliban technology is to conduct intelligence driven raids against the Taliban who perpetrate the use of such technology.  Rather than the so-called high value targets with recognizable names, the real high value targets are the Taliban perpetrators, the fighters, technicians and practitioners.

 But in order to conduct intelligence driven raids against such people, we first have to have intelligence.  In order to gain the proper intelligence, the population must have security.  Maj. Gen. Jeffery J. Schloesser has said that there are as many as 11,000 insurgents operating in the Eastern part of Afghanistan.  This size insurgency requires a larger projection of power by infantry to ensure the progress of the counterinsurgency campaign.  Killing and capturing Taliban will end the threat posed by EFPs and Skype.

The Autumn 2008 Edition of the Australian Army Journal contains an important article by Major Jim Hammett, entitled We Were Soldiers Once: The Decline of the Royal Australian Infantry Corps? Several key paragraphs are reproduced below.

There are indicators that the feelings of angst prevalent within the Infantry Corps have festered to the point of public dissent and critical questioning of the Corps’ raison d’etre. This is reflected not only by questions posed to our leadership (including the Minister for Defence and the Chief of Army) across three theatres of operation, but also by recent articles published in mainstream media. Furthermore, anecdotal evidence would suggest that disillusionment regarding the employment and future of the Infantry Corps has been a significant contributing factor to the discharge of personnel from the Corps …

The Infantry have not been tasked with conducting offensive action since Vietnam; Special Forces have been engaged in combat operations almost continuously since 2001. When comparing the role of the Infantry with that of Special Operations Forces (SOF), in contrast to the nature of deployments, the logical deduction is that either the role of the Infantry is now defunct, or that only SOF are considered capable of the role …

‘This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier, who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree’. Field Marshall Sir William Slim was remarkably prophetic when he cautioned against the inclination to consider some tasks capable of being fulfilled by Special Forces only. The parallels between Slim’s ‘Royal Corps of Tree Climbers’ analogy and the current trend of operational deployments accurately summarise the frustrations of the Royal Australian Infantry Corps, who, despite the lack of a ‘green hat’ (or possibly Sherwood Green or ‘Sandy’ beret), consider themselves more than capable of ‘climbing trees’ …

Notwithstanding recent combat actions performed by Infantrymen in Afghanistan, the role of the Infantry component of the Reconstruction Task Force is limited to force protection—rigidly imposed to the point whereby participants have been required to sign formal documents declaring that they have not provoked combat operations— whilst their fellow countrymen from the Special Operations Task Group actively pursue engagement with enemy forces, having been publicly praised by defence and governmental hierarchy for previous tours of duty that involved daily contact with the enemy. In the same theatre, armies with whom we possess a standardisation program (US, Britain and Canada) are employing their Infantry aggressively against the enemy. The lack of Australian participation in combat has drawn adverse comment and questions from the international press …

Since 11 September 2001 Australia’s allies have become embroiled in violent conflicts in the Middle East and Central Asia. Australia has professed itself a staunch ally of the Americans in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and indeed has received significant political kudos for what has been termed as unwavering support. At the coalface, however, such sentiments are dismissed as political rhetoric, as serving members from the United States, Britain and Canada lay their lives on the line in support of their government’s objectives whilst the Australian Infantry appear to do little more than act as interested spectators from the sideline.

Notwithstanding the mutual accolades provided between international political bodies in the interests of diplomacy, Australia’s contributions to both Iraq and Afghanistan have been derided and scorned by soldiers and officers alike from other nations who are more vigorously engaged in combat operations. In Iraq, the much heralded deployment of Al Muthanna Task Group-1 was met with incredulity by British forces deployed on Operation TELIC V. The stringent force protection measures and limitations to manoeuvre applied to the newly arrived (yet very well equipped) Australians were in stark contrast to the British approach of using the benign Al Muthanna province as a respite locality for (not very well equipped) troops who had been in sustained action in either Basra or Al Amarah.

The initial caution of such a deployment is both prudent and understandable, however the ongoing inaction and lack of contribution to counterinsurgency and offensive operations has resulted in collective disdain and at times near contempt by personnel from other contributing nations for the publicity-shrouded yet forceprotected Australian troops.

The restrictions and policies enforced on Infantrymen in Iraq have resulted in the widespread perception that our Army is plagued by institutional cowardice. Rebuttal of such opinions is difficult when all staff at Iraq’s Multi-National Division (South East) Headquarters are formally briefed that the Australian contingent’s national caveats strictly prohibit offensive operations, attack and pursuit. Of the phases of war, this leaves only defence and withdrawal.

Commentary & Analysis

In the Weekly Standard in March of 2007, Michael Fumento had an interesting article entitled The Democrats’ Special Forces Fetish: A Fatuous Promise to Double the Size of Our Elite Military Units. It is worth reading for the volume of information in the article, as well as for a good knock-down argument for why it is impossible to double the size of the Special Operations Forces.

The Democrats’ reflexive push to treat counterinsurgency as counterterrorism is one reason that The Captain’s Journal doesn’t cover or analyze hits against so-called high value targets (HVT). The war on terror isn’t about personalities, even though some of their favorite think tanks do wish to treat it as a police campaign against individuals.

But beyond this, there has grown up around SOF a sort of cult following and hero worship that clouds informed judgment and clear thinking. SOF, it is believed – perhaps based on the Rambo persona – can do anything, and tend to be the real warriors deployed when the fighting gets tough. Hard core kinetic operations is reserved for SOF. Gone are the days when special operations has to do with specialty billets such as language, reconnaissance, airborne, and other qualifications that is is just too expensive to grow in the armed forces. Enter the days of SOF as supermen.

But the advent of each new story about SOF that kills some high profile name, while riveting for the non-military reader, continues the same lesson that Rumsfeld took into Afghanistan with his vision of airmen with satellite uplinks guiding JDAMS to target, CIA operatives, and alliances with rogues in the country who could knock out the Taliban. Afghanistan is a failing campaign precisely because of this view. Counterinsurgency requires infantry and force projection, those things necessary to ensure security for the population.

While Fumento’s view might be applicable to the Army, Navy and Air Force, since The Captain’s Journal is a USMC blog, we’ll take a uniquely Marine view of things. While some Recon Marines have been split off from their units, Recon primarily still supports infantry, and the Marine force structure is uniquely aligned to conduct kinetic operations, whether conventional or counterinsurgency.

In order to help explain this, a conversation is given below. In this conversation, TCJ is The Captain’s Journal, M is some unnamed Marine, and City is the location in which this Marine happened to be during his deployment. It is left to the reader to surmise whether this is a real or fabricated conversation.

TCJ: Did y’all ever conduct distributed operations in the city?

M: Units of how large?

TCJ: Two, or three, or a fire team.

M: No. If you went into the city with less than a squad you died. Usually a platoon, always at least a squad. If a squad, the fire teams conducted a satellite patrol to throw the enemy off.

TCJ: What about snipers? Didn’t you have and use them?

M: Yea, we have the DM (designated Marksman) specialization who is also still part of his unit.

TCJ: How did he deploy into the city?

M: A platoon or squad delivered him to his location. When he was finished a day or two later we picked him up and escorted him back to the FOB or outpost. If he got into trouble, we were a radio call away.

TCJ: What if the population saw you deliver this DM and knew he was there?

M: So what?

TCJ: Well, if they knew he was there, so did the insurgents, and they would then know to avoid that area altogether.

M: Right. So whether the DM shoots or merely uses his known presence to pacify an area, you’ve met your objective, right?

TCJ: I understand. So the idea is to provide maximum force protection while also contacting the population.

M: Look. Combat in the Marines is engaged by the infantry. Infantry lays maximum metal down range when needed, beginning with the SAWs.

TCJ: So no one, including Recon, sees more combat than infantry?

M: It’s all still infantry. Recon is attached to infantry. DMs are attached to infantry. Artillery supports infantry. No one person is more special than anyone else. They are all billets, and the Marine does his job and fulfills his billet. Everyone is billeted to support infantry, and infantry protects everyone else. Infantry is king. It’s the focus of everything.

Major Hammett’s disdain for the lack of respect for and utilization of his infantry is both obvious and understandable. While Australian forces were inside the borders of Afghanistan prior to U.S. forces post 9/11, they were special operations forces. No infantry has been deployed to engage in kinetic operations in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

For a picture of what the Democratic proposal for structuring the armed forces of the United States would look like, see the one painted by Major Hammett. Special operations conducts black operations against high value targets, and infantry sits in the States training. The war on terror will not be treated as a counterinsurgency campaign. It will be understood to be a policing action requiring the SWAT team of U.S. special operations forces.

There are some who favor equipping, training and preparation for a near peer conflict who might like this picture. But before jumping too quickly, the reader should consider the unintended consequences of such an approach. According to Major Hammett, such consequences can be (but are not limited to) an Army that suffers from the perception of “institutional cowardice” and (as Major Hammett discusses later in his paper) the loss due to lack of job satisfaction of the very soldiers who the institutionalists wish to retain, and loss of the very soldiering that they wish to press due to inexperience.

The Captain’s Journal has previously discussed the kinetic operations in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of the Pakistan tribal area, along with the stand down of these operations over Ramadan. It now appears that the entire effort was a high value target initiative.

The Pakistani military has halted operations in Bajaur Agency in the northwest of the country, saying “the back has been broken” of the militancy there.

A military spokesman said that in light of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began on Sunday, all action would stop, which would allow about 500,000 displaced people to return home. Officials claim that in three weeks of fighting 560 militants have been killed, with the loss of 20 members of the security forces.

The ground reality, though, is that the operation failed in its primary objective, to catch the big fish so wanted by the United States – al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. This would have been the perfect present for Islamabad to give the George W Bush administration in the run-up to the US presidential elections in November.

Pakistan said they had Zawahiri in their sights, but he evaded them. Zawahiri, who has a US$25 million bounty on his head, escaped a US missile strike in January 2006 near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.

The Bajaur operation was a comprehensive joint show of power by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Pakistan forces as they were convinced that the al-Qaeda leaders and other senior Taliban militants were in an area spanning Kunar and Nooristan provinces in Afghanistan and the Bajaur and Mohamad agencies immediately across the border in Pakistan.

NATO and the Pakistani military had hoped that a pincer operation would force their prey to move their base, thereby exposing them. The thinking was that the militants would seek refuge inside Pakistan, where they could be cornered.

The mission began disastrously, though. Two days before troops were ordered from the corps headquarters of Peshawar in North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) early last month, news of the impending attack was leaked to the militants and the al-Qaeda leadership was hastily moved. The Pakistani forces also received an unwelcome – and unexpected – reception when they began operations in Bajaur; the militants were armed and waiting …

Pakistan and NATO had placed high store on a successful mission, launching the heaviest-ever aerial bombardment inside Pakistan’s tribal regions – hence the high level of displaced persons. The militants claim that many dozens of paramilitary troops were killed and many captured, along with their heavy weapons and tanks.

The assault continued for several more weeks, but on August 28 during a secret meeting on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, and the chief of the Pakistani Army Staff, General Ashfaq Pervez Kiani, it was agreed the Bajaur mission had failed. No key militants had been hit and they had now completely fallen off all radar screens.

The Asia Times can exaggerate the facts from time to time, but in this instance they seem to have gotten the facts basically correct. In fact, an official Pakistan government press release admits the failure of the operations.

Pakistani troops in the country’s tribal areas recently discovered the location of Al Qaeda’s number two but “missed” a chance to capture him, according to the politician who oversees Pakistan’s Frontier Corps.

Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s interior ministry chief, told a group of foreign journalists that the military obtained evidence Ayman al-Zawahiri’s wife was in the Mohmand agency, near the border with Afghanistan.

“We did raids and traces there,” said Malik, who manages the underfunded front-line forces fighting militants in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. “Certainly we had traced him in one place, but we missed him. Certainly he is moving in Mohmand Agency and Kunar, mostly in Kunar and Paktika,” referring to two areas across the border in Afghanistan. He did not give specific details of when the raids took place.

Publicly, U.S. officials will not comment on Malik’s claims, but privately senior officials tell ABC News they are skeptical and have seen no evidence that Zawahiri was narrowly missed.

Malik claimed that that “50-60” foreign al Qaeda leaders were currently hiding in Pakistan, and admitted to some frustration over Pakistan’s inability to capture the most wanted terrorists in the world. “Whoever’s it is, his strategy is obviously better than ours,” he said.

Malik’s assertions come despite criticism by the Untied States and some in Pakistan that the military is not doing enough to combat militants along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. This week the army announced it would temporarily and provisionally halt two campaigns against militants for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Historically, Ramadan has been peaceful, and Malik said the Pakistani military would be judged negatively by Pakistanis if it had not stopped the attacks.

If the operations continued, he said, “we will have a bad image as a Muslim state.”

So either the operations didn’t even succeed in coming close to killing Ayman al-Zawahiri (and U.S. intelligence doubts that it did), or they missed him entirely. In either case, they missed him, and the operations – insofar as they were primarily a high value target initiative – failed.

This last statement in the report (Ramadan and their reputation as an Muslim country) is a poor excuse for the stand down in operations in the NWFP, and the Taliban feel no such moral compunction, but the entire report points to a larger problem with the campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is being treated as a counterterrorism campaign rather than a counterinsurgency campaign. While there are new reports every day of a mid-level Taliban commander being killed, The Captain’s Journal doesn’t cover or provide commentary for hits to high value targets or other black operations. The targeting of individuals, while making for intriguing and interesting reading, adds little to the effort to win the population or destroy the enemy.

The Captain’s Journal has long been opposed to the overuse of special operations and the high value target program as an expensive and time consuming initiative that has yielded marginal benefits. Soviet General Gromov had 104,000 troops under his command in Afghanistan (and still lost), and General Petraeus has 32,500. At the moment, NATO and CENTCOM do not have the forces necessary to treat the campaign as a full-orbed counterinsurgency campaign.

This will change, or the campaign will be lost. The recent operations in the NWFP are exemplary of the kind of affects that are seen with repeated and halting starts to kinetic operations, and operations which target individuals: approximately one half million noncombatants are now displaced, and the next time the Pakistan Army needs to conduct operations in the NWFP it will be profoundly more difficult due to the knowledge by the people that it will not redound to success, if history is any indicator of the future.

Special operations cannot win counterinsurgency campaigns. COIN requires infantry in proportions outlined in FM 3-24, and above all, security for the population. Security for the population takes constant contact with both the population and the enemy, until there are no more enemy to cause the insecurity in the first place.