“I Need the COIN Cart in here, STAT!!” - Lessons on Counterinsurgency from the Human Body

A Commentary upon the program presented by General Stanley A. McChrystal (ret.), and Kristina Talbert-Slagle

General McChrystal and Dr. Talbert-Slagle gave an interesting presentation December 19 at The Brookings Institution on “Lessons on Counterinsurgency from the Human Body.”  The concept they presented, that the process of fighting an infection like HIV/AIDS in the human body offered parallels and insights into fighting a counterinsurgency campaign in a nation-state, is not new but neither was their presentation a waste of time.  The metaphor imagining a nation or society as a human body or biological organism dates back to the Renaissance.  As recently as the 1950s, officials spoke of fighting off the infection of communism in the USA and abroad.  Nevertheless, it may be that by the power of PowerPoint they presented this notion more effectively and thoughtfully than it has been in the past.

Right at the beginning of their presentation I really appreciated Dr. Talbert-Slagle’s comment that the body is a system of systems, an important concept for understanding both the human body and the body politic.  What the metaphor also offers is a clearer picture of the two-pronged approach that is the basis of counterinsurgency – one line of effort confronts the infection itself while the second line of effort addresses the challenge of maintaining and increasing the body’s strength to better fight off the infection.  This translates into a military effort against the insurgent combat arm and another line of effort to strengthen the current political/social/governmental institutions.

Their presentation included many references to Afghanistan and a lesser degree to Iraq, although I personally saw an even better match with Ireland from 1916 to 1923, a focus of my own recent research.  Ireland in this period is an excellent model which also highlights several additional and useful elements of the infection/insurgency metaphor.

For example, one reason the British authorities were not more alarmed over a possible rising during 1914, 1915, and into early 1916 was the proliferation of armed marching groups in Ireland that had been active over these years.  The British authorities were aware of the Ulster Volunteers, MP John Redmond’s Irish National Volunteers, MacNeil and Pearse’s Irish Volunteers, James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army, and the Ancient Order of Hibernians Rifles.  Of these, the most dangerous were actually the smallest – Pearse’s Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army.  These would actually turn out for the Easter 1916 Rising.  Within the infection metaphor, each of the marching groups represented a separate infection.  This multiplicity of active “infections” served to mask the activities of the others making it harder for the government to make a timely diagnosis of which was the real threat requiring treatment.

Another critically important parallel between COIN and fighting infection is the need for the active participation of the patient.  Both geopolitical and medical experience suggest that it is critically important in counterinsurgency for the population and their leadership (in government and otherwise) to buy in to the COIN effort, just as the medical patient must take an active role alongside his or her doctor in deciding upon an effective course of treatment.

One questioner interjected an interesting issue when he noted that the earliest cases of HIV/AIDS occurred among gay men and that the associated stigma delayed serious action by the medical world, politicians, and society at large for several years.  While this point was acknowledged but not elaborated on during the presentation, I believe that a similar problem of stigma can be identified in connection with a state confronted by an insurgency.  Insurgencies almost always emerge in failing or failed states seriously troubled by corruption and poverty and related increases in violence and criminal activity, among other factors.  These and other signs of the breakdown of the state stigmatize that state and reduce the willingness of other governments and their electorates to be associated with the regime now targeted by an insurgency.  The troubled nation and its population have become “the other” – distinct and separate from the “us” of the US and the Western world.

The association of the metaphor and the already noted situation in Ireland gave rise to another thought as I pondered the implications of the metaphor.  Following the defeat of the Easter 1916 Rising, the British quarantined the infection by executing 16 people they identified as ringleaders and imprisoned almost 1,500 others identified as participants.  Although the situation in Ireland did not then worsen, it also did not return to the pre-Rising “normal”.  About a year later, Britain began releasing its prisoners and allowing them to return to Ireland.

These returning prisoners were in fact even more determined to win Ireland’s independence after their year in prison.  They returned with greater cohesion, unity, and purpose than before. In effect, Britain now faced a super-bug in Ireland, resistant to the treatments used in the past.  Ireland suffered a relapse as a new, more violent, prolonged conflict now broke out.  Finally, in 1922, Britain and Ireland signed a treaty ending British rule in Ireland.  Medically, what had happened over the period 1914-1922 was that the patient and physician had disagreed upon the proper course of treatment and neither really anticipated the dangers of reinfection by a new stronger (more virulent?) form of the ‘virus’.

What the two speakers have presented to us is not a solution to the challenges of insurgency and counterinsurgency warfare. They have revived and improved a metaphor that will help many people better understand the issues and challenges of counterinsurgency. The better both patient and physician understand the challenges and each other, the more likely they will successfully treat the disease.

You Can't Have One Without the Other

December 15’s Sunday Washington Post featured a great review by Gerard DeGroot of the new book “Strategy, A History” by Lawrence Freedman, a British strategic analyst and former foreign policy analyst to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair. What made this a great review was not just the reviewer's positive comments about the book (he convinced me that I want to read it), but I especially appreciated his comments illuminating the relationship between plans and strategy – which are far too often confounded by those discussing either or both.

At the conclusion of his review, Professor DeGroot writes, “All this strategizing is, in truth, an attempt to impose individual will upon a recalcitrant world…We convince ourselves that we are, in fact, architects of our own fate…much more palatable than having to admit that we might be mere flotsam in a turbulent sea of circumstance.” The latter reference resonates with me because it calls to mind the reality within which we work and struggle, especially at the level of national security and warfighting.

DeGroot’s statement resonated with some of the lessons I had learned from experience – enlightened at least equally by a number of tenets drawn from the pages of On War, written by the 19^th Century Prussian officer Clausewitz (and cited by DeGroot in his review)-“everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult”. Strategy is how you intend to conduct your war – plans are how you will make that strategy effective in your campaigns and battles.

During a 30 year career as an American diplomat, I found that of all the Secretaries of State under whom I served only Henry Kissinger thought and worked at the level of strategy, having a clear picture of the nation’s starting point as well as relative current situation while still keeping an eye on the intended eventual end state.  By comparison, it seemed that his immediate predecessor and his successors were for numerous reasons focused intently upon whatever event had washed up into their inbox and there immediately burst into flames.

I suspect that Kissinger, DeGroot, myself, and possibly Clausewitz, share a metaphoric vision of the world in which time moves as a river, pushing us onward as we encounter events that are swallowed up by the forward momentum, are pushed aside by subsequent events or which on occasion force that forward flow from its seemingly intended direction and bursting these banks to move in new and unanticipated directions. A commander who relies upon a precisely executed sequence of actions is doomed to fail against this tide, but one who prepares and anticipates this reality in the knowledge that his plan serves primarily as the basis for whatever adaptation or improvisation will be forced him upon by events and circumstances will have every chance at success.

I have been a player of historically based war games and conflict simulations for more than 50 years, losing and winning innumerable battles, campaigns, and wars played out on a tabletop. I learned the hard way that in games which depended often upon chance (as does war according to Clausewitz), I had to make my plans in the expectation that my plan would not go perfectly or smoothly, but would be repeatedly disrupted either by my bad luck or my opponent's good luck. I had to make plans that were ‘luck-proof’, incorporating provisions against both the anticipated and unforeseen ‘what-ifs’ that might come. Napoleon himself, though an avid planner, also recognized this when he claimed that in battle “first I engage and then I see” – knowing as he did how chance events might derail his plans and how as soldiers say today, “the enemy gets a vote” on how, when, and where a battle will be conducted.

DeGroot’s review did not specifically draw drawn upon Clausewitz’ comments upon the role of chance in warfare, but the Professor does offer his own tale of the unforeseen events that converted his plan to read Freedman’s book in four days, draft his review on the fifth, revise and polish on the sixth, and (inevitably) on the seventh take his ease – into an event-driven reality that required seven days spent on just the reading. The Prussian general von Moltke the Elder famously wrote, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” The mythic iconic soldier, Sergeant Murphy, put it perhaps more succinctly but less elegantly when he reputedly said “shit happens.”

Asleep, Wilfred Owen

Writer’s Almanac today reminds us that

“It was on this day in 1918 that British war poet Wilfred Owen  was killed in World War I, at the age of 25. In the days before his death, Owen had been excited because he knew the war was almost over. The Germans were retreating and the French had joyfully welcomed the British troops. In his last letter to his mother, Owens wrote: "It is a great life. I am more oblivious than yourself, dear Mother, of the ghastly glimmering of the guns outside, and the hollow crashing of the shells. Of this I am certain: you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here." A few days later, he was trying to get his men across a canal in the early morning hours when they were attacked by enemy fire, and Owen was fatally wounded. The war ended the following week.”

                             Asleep

Under his helmet, up against his pack,

After so many days of work and waking

Sleep took him by the brow and laid him back.

There, in the happy no-time of his sleeping,

Death took him by the heart. There heaved a quaking

Of frustrate life, like child within him leaping…

Then chest and sleepy arms once more fell slack.

And soon the slow stray blood comes creeping

From the intrusive lead, like ants on track.

                        *      *     *     *

Whether his deeper sleep lie shaded by the shaking

Of great wings, and the thoughts of stars.

High-pillowed on calm clouds of God’s making,

Above those clouds, these rains, these sheets of lead,

And these winds’ scimitars;

-- Or whether yet his thin and sodden head

Confuses more and more with the low mould,

His hair being one with the gray grass

Of finished fields, and wire-scrags rusty old,…

Who knows? Who hopes? Who troubles? Let it pass!

He sleeps. He sleeps less tremulous, less cold

Than we who wake, and waking say, Alas!