A production of H-Diplo with the journals Security Studies,
International Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, and the
International Studies Association’s Security Studies Section (ISSS).
H-Diplo/ISSF Editors: James McAllister and Diane Labrosse
H-Diplo/ISSF Web and Production Editor: George Fujii
Commissioned for H-Diplo/ISSF by James McAllister
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H-Diplo | ISSF Review Essay (No. 22)
Douglas Porch. Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of
War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ISBN: 9781107699847
(paperback, $27.99).
Published by H-Diplo/ISSF on 18 April 2014
http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/ ISSF/PDF/RE22.pdf
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Reviewed by Jacqueline L. Hazelton, Department of Strategy and Policy,
U.S. Naval War College.1
Slaying Friendly Dragons: The Pretty Myths and Harsh Realities of
Counterinsurgency
Perhaps only Douglas Porch, with his encyclopedic knowledge of
insurgency and counterinsurgency (COIN) and his broader military
expertise, could have written this book. Counterinsurgency: Exposing the
Myths of the New Way of War is a magisterial examination across time and
space of the history of COIN. It is intended to dispel the myths
propagated around it as a kinder, gentler form of warfare waged for the
benefit of all involved. An eminent military historian, Porch is a
Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School.
He has been writing about revolution, insurgency, expeditionary warfare,
military empire building, the role of the military in domestic politics,
great power war, and related issues for more than 40 years.
In Counterinsurgency, Porch engages with the contemporary narrative of
COIN success as a process undertaken by a great power, primarily through
its military forces, to introduce good governance within a client or
colonial state in order to defeat an insurgency challenging the
legitimate ruler. This narrative emerged most recently in the mid 2000′s
as the U.S. Army’s solution for the soaring violence in Iraq and, later,
in Afghanistan. Porch argues that this narrative is neither new nor
accurate. In the strongest terms he condemns COIN in centuries past and
today as a high cost, low reward effort that degrades the states and
militaries that conduct it and deprives its local subjects of life,
liberty, and dignity.
Porch characterizes today’s COIN orthodoxy in the form of military
doctrine as “an outgrowth of the belief, common in 19th-century France
and Britain, that military action provided the mechanism for the
dissemination of modern, Western values and attitudes as a foundation
for indigenous governance and social, political, and economic
transformation of pivotal regions” (1). Trying to nail down COIN
orthodoxy is a slippery task. Scholarship on COIN since World War II is
neither internally consistent in its analysis of conditions and
prescriptions for success nor consistent among works by authors who
advance similar ideas. In this practitioner-dominated literature, there
is also resistance to theorizing that might engender a more systematic
understanding of the processes of COIN. This resistance often appears as
the paradoxical assertion that every COIN campaign is different and that
good governance is what defeats insurgencies.
Porch challenges this COIN orthodoxy across the board, on fact, on
assumption, and on the claim that every case is fundamentally different
and yet good governance is the antidote to insurgency. He does so by
providing a detailed look at the history of COIN from its
nineteenth-century conceptualization as a type of warfare (see, for
example, 12, 97, 126). He analyzes German, French, British, and U.S.
campaigns that readers may recognize (Malaya) and that many may not (the
German slaughter of the Bantu Herero people of what is now Namibia).
Across cases, he identifies the pathologies of COIN, including its
creation as a special category of war intended to serve the interests of
expeditionary military forces; threat inflation by these forces as they
seek status and resources by fighting small wars; the stab-in-the-back
narrative that these forces develop when their tactics fail to solve the
political problems of empire and their political masters pull the plug
on their adventures (see, for example, 152, 177, 222); the viciousness
of COIN tactics targeting civilians; and the distorted cultural and
racial views of indigenous cultures inherent in the COIN narrative.
The debate over COIN and its broader goals and assumptions — what works
and what does not, costs versus benefits, and its wisdom as a policy
choice for great powers backing threatened clients — is not new.2 The
current debate, to which Porch is responding, heated up with the
insurgent challenge to the United States in Iraq, started boiling with
the 2006 publication of the U.S. Army/Marine Corps COIN manual as a
trade paperback as well as military doctrine, and has continued to
simmer with periodic outbreaks of strong feeling on all sides. Emotions
run high because reputations and careers are at stake along with the
interests of the United States and its friends and allies, not to
mention the lives of those most directly involved in these campaigns.
Most recently the debate has taken place within the context of lessons
learned from the U.S. experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the
so-called ‘COINdinistas’ (supporters of the good governance approach to
COIN) are correct, then the United States should be making institutional
changes in its military and civilian arms of government to more
effectively conduct COIN operations in a future of peripheral wars
against weak, probably non-state opponents. If the so-called ‘COINtras’
(opponents of this view) are correct, then the United States must
recognize the many flawed assumptions embedded in its doctrine and in
widely held views about the process, value, and likely outcomes of
intervening militarily in clients’ COIN campaigns.
Porch’s argument is unlikely to alter the beliefs of those invested in
the value of COIN for the United States. A more receptive audience is
likely to be the many readers and thinkers who are not steeped in this
debate. The orthodox COIN narrative is a compelling one, with its
message of extending the benefits of representative governance and
liberal values to others in the world. But the stakes are far too high,
Porch argues, to allow the myths of COIN to stand:
All of the issues and questions analyzed in this study underline the
requirement for historians as well as those makers of policy concerned
with the essence of contemporary conflict to continue to establish the
factual record so that mythologized, self-serving versions of the past
are not offered as a grand strategic formula for the future. … Such an
abuse of the record of the past as the basis for professional and
institutional imperatives can lead to people getting killed …. (338).
He attributes to several factors the persistence of the myth that good
governance drives COIN success, including proponents’ misuse of the
historical record (see, for example,44) and the contemporary
neo-conservative and liberal interventionist belief in the efficacy of
military force to effect social and political change within other states
and societies (332). The COIN narrative has always been a marketing
tool used to conflate national interests and military ambitions (341).
“Small wars spokesmen marketed humble, back-of-beyond outposts as
strategically vital pieces of real estate coveted by other European
powers” (44), Porch writes, warning that the narrative corrodes the very
militaries that advance it (see, for example, 172, 192, 317).
The book opens with a prologue identifying the political concerns that
Porch argues led military officers to promote small wars as a
specialized realm. These nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French
and British officers needed to rally political and popular support for
their political projects overseas (1) as concerns rose “about the
barbarity of small war tactics and operations and questions about the
risks and utility of imperial expansion” (2). He identifies one of the
fundamentals of contemporary COIN, “the idea of counterinsurgency is
linked to democracy, and the notion that a government’s legitimacy is
anchored in the consent of the governed” (3). Prior to the rise of
modern, democratic ideals, terror served as a deterrent against colonial
uprising, but in the modern era “the occasional massacre no longer
seemed compatible with democratic humanism … rather than as patterns
of racialized violence endemic to small wars” (3). Part of this
marketing effort involved what Porch calls “rebrand[ing] rough methods
of conquest and exploitative governance as an extension of ‘soft power’
that benefited the governed (and flattered the West’s sense of cultural
hubris)” (2).
Further challenges to the widely seen assertion that counterinsurgency
is a specialized, more sophisticated form of warfare, the graduate level
of war, are threaded throughout the book. COIN was different in the
nineteenth century, Porch notes, but not in the positive ways touted by
its proponents. In fact, it was “the deployment of indiscriminate
violence against noncombatants [that] went against the trends of
continental warfare, which saw combat as an activity led and managed by
professional soldiers to achieve the more or less limited political
goals of sovereign nation-states” (21). The proponents of COIN,
furthermore, have embraced small wars “as a refutation of modern,
intellectual, more strategically sophisticated analytical and
technological approaches to warfare” (50). Worse, today’s doctrine is
deterministic and anti-Clausewitzian in its belief that tactics will
inevitably prevail no matter the political interests at stake, and “it
denies the interactive nature of conflict as manifest in the will,
chance, and anger of conflicting parties as in the duel” (303).
One additional important theme is Porch’s unpacking of the COINdinistas’
belief in the power of cultural knowledge. He sets the stage for the
advancement of this belief in contemporary wars by tracing in detail the
British and French imperial experiences. “While the British in
particular convinced themselves that their impartiality and probity
informed by cultural sensitivity gave them legitimacy both at home and
in country, in fact it often meant imposing incomprehensible decisions
on the locals behind an imaginary facade of cultural knowledge” (33).
These “recreational cultural connoisseurs,” in Porch’s brutal phrase,
survive today in the creation of U.S. Human Terrain Teams by a military
“whose soldiers tend to be at best suspicious, when not totally
contemptuous of the cultures of the populations they are tasked to
control” (329). Rather than requiring and reflecting deep cultural
knowledge, Porch argues, contemporary COIN requires that “non-Western
societies exist in a time-warp which the adoption of Western practices
like democracy, rule of law, and capitalistic competition will allow
them to overcome” (58).
Porch sweeps sometimes breathlessly through history, moving back and
forth between conventional and small wars to build his argument about
the roots of COIN myths. From the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 to global
French conquests to the rising intra-military divisions between small
warriors and continental warriors and the small warriors’ resulting
politicization (47-51); to debunking the myth of the efficacy of the
French oil-spot tactic of spreading “security” in Indochina and North
Africa (54-55); and transforming the narrative of colonial strategic
successes into the reality of “an opportunistic Orientalized reliance on
compliant or unsavory local collaborators ….” (60), Porch’s sweep is
broad and his command of detail indefatigable. By the late nineteenth
century it is time to bring the Americans into the picture as well, with
the “moral ambiguity and brutal tactics” of their Indian Wars taken
overseas to the Spanish-American War, where in the Philippines U.S.
officers learned that “‘this business of fighting and civilizing and
educating at the same time doesn’t mix very well’” (64).
The reader is whisked on to the Second Anglo-Boer War, the Germans in
Africa, the French in the Middle East, World War I, the rise of people’s
war against imperial rule in the interwar period, and the British
experience with World War II-era insurgencies [where the vaunted concept
of limited force meant aerial bombing, shelling, and burning of
villages, the poisoning of wells and destruction of food stocks and
livestock, the execution of the wounded, and the forced movement of
populations (131)]. Porch considers the use of partisan forces in World
War II, the post-war collapse of the French state over squalid military
efforts in Indochina and Algeria, Mao Zedong’s success in China, and the
mythologizing of and by David Galula, once an obscure French army major
and today a leading inspiration for U.S. COIN doctrine (175-198). Porch
eviscerates Galula’s narrative of successful COIN tactics in French
Algeria, noting that the insurgents won, as they did in French
Indochina. He discusses how Galula “sanitized” the French tactics of
torture, the forced movement of communities, and the imprisonment of
populations into a myth of efforts to “‘reassure, support and control
the population’” (175). He further excoriates Galula as a salesman
attempting to “parlay his Algeria experiences into a steady job in a
country whose faith in the universality of its values requires it to
formulate a doctrine to operationalize its vision” (197). From Algeria,
Porch moves to the U.S. campaign in Vietnam, then to U.S. and European
support for Latin American states challenged by guerrillas, and returns
to the familiar story of the special British success with COIN, which
recent scholarship cited by Porch has effectively challenged.3
Galula and the French war in Algeria, along with the U.S. experience in
Vietnam, highlight Porch’s exploration of the stab-in-the-back myth
constructed by COINdinistas to explain the failure of their tactics
across space and time. “The COIN-dinista mantra is that the
counterinsurgency formula invariably succeeds if it is not hijacked by
conventional soldiers or sabotaged by impatient governments and peoples”
(177) he writes. The COINdinista insistence that had doctrine only been
applied properly in Indochina, Vietnam, and Algeria, the great powers
would have won, is, Porch writes with typical gusto, “highly suspect for
no other reason than that it celebrates a COIN-dinista pantheon filled
with losers and sometimes war criminals who claimed that they were
winning on their front and could have won the whole enchilada but for a
government/people/conventional military establishment that knifed them
in the back” (162). Thus, while COIN efforts are en train, “they must
always hover on the cusp of success — COIN as a ‘process,’ ‘a rising
tide of security,’ ‘seizing/breaking the momentum,’ or ‘this is the
decisive year/month/week’ …” (334).
These are the great myths of COIN that Porch wants to banish: that COIN
is about helping people; that COIN is a unique form of warfare requiring
specialized skills, including deep cultural understanding; and that COIN
is less costly than the policy alternatives. Most fundamentally, he
wants us to understand that our beliefs about the processes of COIN and
their efficacy have been manufactured out of whole cloth rather than
based on the historical record.
Perhaps the most painful truth is that in COIN, “protecting the
populace” does not mean what it implies, that is, tending to civilians
with the care a shepherd gives his flock. “Protection and isolation of
the population from the insurgents usually boiled down to campaigns of
counter-terror that included internment without trial, torture,
deportation, creating refugee tsunamis, or curfew and concentration camp
lockdowns supplemented by calorie control” (328), Porch accurately
notes. These uses of force include “assassination, rape, destitution,
internment, and intimidation with the goal of depriving the resistors of
their support base and indeed of any reason to go on living” (21). It is
not meeting popular needs that defeats insurgencies, Porch argues;
“Better strategies, leadership, coercion, and contingent circumstances
in their variety, not popular support, determined victory in small
wars/insurgencies” (303).
Porch insists, again with painful accuracy, that the moral and material
costs of COIN are high. Small wars rarely turn out to be so for the
great power involved. “Most proved to be protracted, unlimited,
murderous, expensive, total-war assaults on indigenous societies” (50).
Today, Porch argues, in the battles that have followed 9/11, “small wars
are long, dirty affairs fought most often in remote places among peoples
little inclined to see the arrival of Western forces as liberation. Even
when they are achieved, military victories in small wars seldom come at
an acceptable political, diplomatic, legal, moral, and financial cost”
(327).
This is a rich, well supported study of a tendentious topic. It does not
break new research ground, but it pulls together material on a
remarkable variety of cases to make a powerful point that is valuable in
the undergraduate and graduate classroom as well as for broader
practitioner and public audiences. It is true that readers not
intimately familiar with the COIN debates may find themselves lost in
the details of cases or disconcerted by Porch’s sometimes inflammatory
language. Porch paints with a broad brush and is short on political
analysis of any state interests beyond logrolling. For the purposes of
this book, Porch is a lumper rather than a splitter. He combines all
sorts of campaigns against insurgents and terrorists in a variety of
contexts. This bolsters his argument by the sheer mass of evidence that
he produces. It also invites finer-grained investigations into COIN
outcomes, COIN strategic choices, the narratives of COIN, and logrolling
within contemporary expansionist states. Porch’s book raises awareness
of the costs of choosing to fight a war for an opaque political
objective while using the military as the primary tool when it may not
be best suited to the task. Porch’s book makes important corrections to
the historical record and should powerfully inform the policy debate.
Jacqueline L. Hazelton is a Professor of Strategy and Policy at the U.S.
Naval War College. Her interests include compellence, asymmetric
conflict in the grand strategic context, military intervention,
counterinsurgency, terrorism, the uses of military power, and U.S.
foreign and military policy. She is writing a book on success in COIN.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDe rivs 3.0 United States License. To view a
copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ or send a letter to
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California, 94041, USA.
Notes
1 The opinions expressed here are those of the author only, not the war
college, Navy, or Department of Defense
2 See, for example, Robert A. Packenham, Liberal America and the Third
World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973); D. Michael Shafer,
Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Douglas J. Macdonald,
Adventures in Chaos: American Intervention For Reform in the Third World
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Benjamin C.
Schwarz, American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and El Salvador: The
Frustrations of Reform and the Illusions of Nation Building (Santa
Monica, CA: RAND, 1991).
3 Important revisionist work on COIN includes Karl Hack, “‘Iron Claws on
Malaya:’ The Historiography of the Malayan Emergency,” Journal of
Southeast Asian Studies 30:1 (March 1999), pp. 99-125; Karl Hack, “The
Malayan Emergency as Counterinsurgency Paradigm,” The Journal of
Strategic Studies 32:3 (June 2009), pp. 383-414; Karl Hack, “‘Everyone
lived in fear,’ Malaya and the “British Way in Counter-Insurgency,”
Small Wars & Insurgencies 23: 4/5 (2012); Paul Dixon, ‘”Hearts and
Minds’?: British Counterinsurgency from Malaya to Iraq,” The Journal of
Strategic Studies 32:3, pp. 383-414; and Huw Bennett,” ‘A Very Salutary
Effect’: The Counter-Terror Strategy in the Early Malayan Emergency,
June 1948 to December 1949,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 32:3, pp.
415-444.
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