One of the most persistent misunderstandings of counterinsurgency strategy lay in the popular metric of success measured in killed or captured insurgents. The sheer intuitiveness of it, if you kill enough guerillas the collapse of the movement will inevitably follow, continues to act as strategic blinders for many. The pervasiveness of this idea continues even today, as politicians advocate bloodyminded solutions to intractable insurgencies in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the most notable being President Trump’s assertion last year that he could win wanted “that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the earth, it would be over literally in 10 days.” However, an enemy-centric approach to counterinsurgency misses the forest through the trees, and risks accelerating a cycle of violence that can render an insurgency more powerful.
Now, my goal here is not to merely construct a strawman and then gleefully batter it down with my own insurmountable logic. Destroying enemy forces is a necessary element of any counterinsurgency strategy, but as my previous posts have indicated, a purely military solution with no plan to address the underlying grievances of the population undercuts the overall aim of defeating the insurgency. The logic follows that of the classic Clausewitzian approach to warfare: If you destroy a nation’s armies in the field, their will to fight will crumble. Caution is necessary to avoid giving in to the siren song of body counts as a metric for success or as an end goal to destroying an insurgency.
Perhaps the most infamous example of this approach lay in the obsession with body counts during the Vietnam War. Always starved for metrics of success, civilian and military leadership seized on the counting of enemy KIA as a keystone for their strategy of attrition. The perverse logic of taking bodycounts, where each stage in reporting from junior officers in the field to high command pads the numbers is laid bare in Karl Marlantes’s semi-autobiographical novel Matterhorn:
Mellas keyed the radio. “Bravo Six, this is Bravo One Actual. We got one probable. That’s all. Over.” He wasn’t going to lie so that an artillery officer could feel good.
So the one probable became a fact. Fitch radioed it in to battalion. Major Blakely, the battalion operations officer, claimed it for the battalion as a confirmed, because Rider said he’d seen the guy he shot go down. The commander of the artillery battery, however, claimed it for his unit. The records had to show two dead NVA. So they did. But at regiment it looked odd—two kills with no probables. So a probable got added. It was a conservative estimate. It only made sense that if you killed two, with the way the NVA pulled out bodies, you had to have some probables. It made the same sense to the commander of the artillery battalion: four confirmed, two probables, which is what the staff would report to Colonel Mulvaney, the commanding officer of Twenty-Fourth Marines, at the regimental briefing. By the time it reached Saigon, however, the two probables had been made confirms, but it didn’t make sense to have six confirmed kills without probables. So four of those got added. Now it looked right. Ten dead NVA and no one hurt on our side. A pretty good day’s work.
More problematic, the bodycount mindset can be exploited by officers in the field as a means of proving their aggressiveness to their superiors, prompting unnecessary search-and-destroy missions to further rack up the count, often at the expense of other pacification operations. One of the most intractable problems in counterinsurgency is that all it takes is one overzealous lieutenant to undo years of work undertaken winning over a local population.
Military action is only one (and perhaps not even the most important) element of a successful counterinsurgency strategy. According to David Kilcullen, the end goal for policymakers must incorporate a full array of political, economic, and social tools to “return the parent society to a stable, peaceful mode of interaction — on terms favorable to the government.” Military force may be necessary to create the necessary preconditions for other civil measures, and to lose sight of this in the mistaken belief that one can kill their way out of an insurgency will only find themselves mired in a cycle of violence from which there is no end.
Next in Counterinsurgency for Dummies: Population-Centric Strategy and You
Le Grognard 