OCTOBER 2009

Counterinsurgency and Leadership

The Marine Corps University Brings COIN Experts to DC

by Andrew Lubin

Photos courtesy of Cpl Esteban Gallegos

Irregular Warfare is far more intelligent than a bayonet charge.
T.E. Lawrence

On September 23 the Marine Corps University presented their “Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond” to an overflow audience at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C. With “COIN”, as counterinsurgency is commonly referred, being discussed and debated in forums ranging from the White House to the Sunday morning news shows, “our timing was absolutely perfect”, as MCU Foundation’s President BGen Thomas Draude wryly noted upon opening the symposium.
Counterinsurgency isn’t new. Marines practiced it in Vietnam during 1965-1967, or until ordered by GEN William Westmoreland to abandon it for big FOB’s [forward operating bases] like Khe Sanh. In 1940, the Small Wars Manual was written in order to capture and institutionalize the knowledge gained during the “Banana Wars” of the 1920s when the Marine Corps conquered, and then governed, Haiti and Nicaragua.

With warfare today having morphed from the conventional battles of 2003 and 2004’s An-Nasiriyah and Fallujah to GEN Stanley McChrystal’s current Afghan policy of “protecting the population,” the symposium brought together both the strategists as well as the more successful recent COIN practitioners from Iraq and Afghanistan:

From: Dr. Mark Moyar, Marine Corps University, on COIN leadership:
From Alexander the Great onward, leadership is the most important feature of COIN, and good leadership affects the two most important parts of COIN: 1 – Security, 2 – Governance.

Bad leadership in Afghanistan causes an absence of justice; it’s unable to protect people from corruption.
Good COIN commanders are also good at conventional warfare, but not often the other way around. Ingenuity and flexibility are very important.

The “metrics” used to gauge COIN effectiveness are often overstated – commanders will tend to push those metrics that make them look good at the expense of other, more accurate metrics.

Then how does one judge a successful COIN program, Moyar was asked, if the metrics are suspect? It’s easy, he answered, can you stay out overnight and stay alive? Can you travel without MRAPs and helicopter escorts? Those yes or no answers are accurate assessments of the success or not of a COIN program.

Possibly the most successful counterinsurgency campaign was the Marine efforts in Ramadi and Anbar Province. Once the Anbar Awakening and other Sunni groups threw their lot in with the Marines against the insurgents, Marine casualties dropped precipitously and the local economies and lifestyles in the cities improved as the Sunni’s and Marines worked together.

Col William Jurney was the commanding officer of 1st Battalion, 6th Marines when they were sent to Ramadi in August 2006. Headquartered at Hurricane Point, Jurney and BGen Sean MacFarland were instrumental in helping convince Sheik Sattar Abu Risha to join forces with the Marines and drive the insurgents out of Ramadi.

Their success spread west through Anbar Province as the other sheiks clamored for the peace and revived prosperity brought by the Marine –Anbar Awakening association. Is a COIN program population-focused, or enemy-focused, Jurney asked rhetorically? “Yes”, he answered, ‘the population is how you get to the enemy.”

It’s the combination of civil and military actions tied to the needs of the people that enable you to attack the enemy, Jurney explained, and the best security force is one that’s homegrown. A good local security force is the insurgent’s worst nightmare; it takes away his money, his freedom to move, and his potential recruits.

Col Julian Dale Alford was very blunt. Alford had commanded 3d Battalion, 6th Marines in Afghanistan in 2004, and then took them to Western Anbar in August 2006. “We can’t win if we’re enemy centric”, he explained; “we’ve got to be focused on training and living with the ANA, ANP, ABP, and you do this by getting out in the field and living, eating, and fighting with them.” The Afghan concerns are corruption, physical security, and food security, Alford said, and that they will support whomever seriously addresses these concerns. “It’s simple,” he explained, “how do you get them to pick our side?”

Picking up on Alford’s point on governance was Col Jeff Haynes. Haynes commanded the Regional Corps Advisory Command 3-5 (RCAC 3-5) beginning February 2008 in eastern Afghanistan. Tasked to mentor the Afghan Army’s 201st Corps, Haynes quickly realized that training the Afghan Army had to be done in a hands-on mode, and developed the concept of “Muscular Mentoring” in which he put the Marines and soldiers in his command out in the field with the ANA and then introduced the ANA to the concept of owning their own battle-space. ”It’s their country,” he told the audience “we need to make it their fight.” He explained how when one of the 201st Corps Kandaks built their own FOB and raised the Afghan flag, this simple gesture measurably raised trust and confidence in the Kapisa river valley where the FOB was located. “The people trust the ANA,” Haynes said, “and it’s a successful arm of the Afghan government. Maybe ‘governance’ can start at the bottom and work up.”
The final speaker of the day was CentCom commander, GEN David Petraeus, moderated by LtGen Bernard Trainor, USMC(Ret).

While warning the audience he would take no questions about troop levels or recent events in Afghanistan, Petraeus gave his audience an overview of the entire Centcom area. The “whole nation” approach, where the military goes in first, and then is followed by experts from the Departments of State, Commerce, and Justice is working well throughout CentCom’s region, he said, except for the pirates in the Somalia, Yemeni coastal areas. He did volunteer, for the first time, that he supported GEN McChrystal’s recent request for more troops in Afghanistan.

Properly conducted, counterinsurgency works. The COIN campaigns conducted by Jurney and Alford, were successful in such kinetic areas as Ramadi and Anbar, and Haynes was equally successful in pushing the Afghan Army’s 201st Corp to lead the fight in Kapisa. COIN not only works, it works rapidly, it seems, when it succeeds in involving the locals in making the daily decisions on their future in their country.