Counterinsurgency is un-American

That is the basic conclusion of a number of recent postings by Ranger over at Ranger Against War: that counterinsurgency as practiced by the U.S. Army and Marines is un-American, because it is the imposition by force of a government upon another people.

Then comes the rebuttal, "if the choice is between a failed state and a counter-insurgency, don't we have to do counter-insurgency?" But that ignores the fact that every failed state we've encountered thus far has originated because we went in and kicked over the ant hill that was the previous government. In other words, we are talking about whether an egg should be poached or fried, when the question is, should we be eating an egg at all? President George H.W. Bush had the correct posture on this question: "Don't eat the egg." I.e., don't kick over the state. He destroyed Iraq's ability to project power beyond its borders and neutralized Iraq's threat to its neighbors, but did not topple Saddam Hussein, because he realized that it simply was not necessary. Saddam minus his nuclear weapons program and military machine posed no threat to anybody, and could be allowed to fester until the day he died or was deposed by someone else within Iraq.

But even if we do for some reason need to kick over a state, the second notion is that a failed state poses some existential threat to the United States of America. It does not. Bad actors located in a failed state are capable of occasional acts of terrorism of the nature of Sept. 11, 2001, but those acts are incapable of toppling or even gravely harming the United States. More Americans die in auto accidents each month than have been killed by acts of terrorism against the American people during the whole existence of the United States of America. So even if we did kick over the ant hill because we had no choice but to do so, there is no need to send U.S. military forces in as an occupation force afterwards.

The fact of the matter is that there is only one threat to the modern organized state, and that is military forces projected against it by other modern organized states. Imperial Japan in 1941 had such military forces. Nazi Germany in 1939 had such military forces. A failed state such as Afghanistan does not. That is the basis of my biggest disagreement with John Robb, who has asserted that "5th generational warfare" originating from failed states presents an existential threat to modern nation-states. Robb points to the successes of Hizballah in Lebanon, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Iraqi resistance movements in defeating the armed forces of invading outsiders. What he fails to point out is that these organizations are successful because they are defending. They control the ground and can carefully prepare it. They control the time at which they will confront the opposing force. They blend in with the populace at times they are not confronting the opposing force, because they are the populace. Hizballah can succeed against the IDF in Lebanon because the IDF is operating upon their territory. But Hizballah has been singularly unsuccessful at any attempts to invade Israel, because Hizballah fighters stand out from the general Israeli population and are swiftly located, fixed, and destroyed by superior conventional military forces.

And as it is with Israel, so it is with the United States. The notion that the Iraqis are going to "follow us home" if we withdraw from Iraq is ludicrous. First, there is the question of how they would get here. There is a big pond between us and them. Doh! Secondly, even if they did manage to get here, they would be isolated, easily identified, and easily destroyed by U.S. police forces, which have weapons and tactics to deal with anything other than an all-out army group, and if there is an all-out army group involved then the National Guard is capable of taking that out.

In short, the U.S. needs only a small Rumsfeldian conventional military in order to take out any current or future existential threat to the United States. Counter-insurgency operations are counter-productive, not something that the U.S. is good at, and to be done successfully would require a level of forces that the U.S. is not capable of sustaining for long periods of time. The Rumsfeld "thunder run" military was quite effective in two wars with Iraq at the task of destroying existential threats to the United States or neighboring states of Iraq. Via air power and superior mobility, our military demonstrated that it could immobilize and defeat in detail any military threat posed by any existing state no matter what state we are talking about. In the meantime, failed states and terrorism pose no existential threat to the United States, and while they need to be dealt with in as assertive a manner as possible, occupation of and counter-insurgencies within these nation-states a) doesn't work, and b) is simply and bluntly un-American.

-- Badtux the Geopolitical Penguin