The Committee of Public Safety

Zenpundit writes an excellent post (The Kilcullen Doctrine) which is followed by an excellent response (New Doctrines Without Strategic Foundations) from Galhran over at Information Dissemination. Zen argues that Lt. Col. John Nagl (ret) has distilled the insights of COIN expert Dr. David Kilcullen’s new book The Accidental Guerrilla into a “digestible set of memes sized exactly right for the journalistic and governmental elite whose eyes glaze over at the mention of military jargon and who approach national security from a distinctly civilian and political perspective”. Nagl’s compressed version goes something like this:

….In direct opposition to the ideas that drove American intervention policy two decades ago, Kilcullen suggests ‘the anti -Powell doctrine’ for counter-insurgency campaigns.

• First, planners should select the lightest, most indirect and least intrusive form of intervention that will achieve the necessary effect.
• Second, policy-makers should work by, with, and through partnerships with local government administrators, civil society leaders, and local security forces whenever possible.
• Third, whenever possible, civilian agencies are preferable to military intervention forces, local nationals to international forces, and long-term, low-profile engagement to short-term, high-profile intervention.

Zen correctly criticizes this “doctrine” on three grounds:

1. “Kilcullen’s three principles are an operational and not a genuinely strategic doctrine.”
2. “[T]his operational doctrine requires a sound national strategy and grand strategy if it is to add real value and not merely be a national security fire extinguisher.”

Gahlran picks up these two threads and runs with it:

…I am beginning to wonder where [COIN] becomes a priority towards national security, and how we get to the point this becomes national security as opposed to imperialism. Understanding a culture in COIN is a means by which we implement cultural influence, and potentially force cultural adaptation. Toward what strategic national objective in national security do we participate in this doctrine?

I ask this question because Zenpundit is on to something when he calls this “The Kilcullen Doctrine.” I think there is enormous potential here for positive and effective results, I’m just not sure I see the answer to the “why” question though…

If policy drives strategy, and strategy drives operational doctrine, shouldn’t we all be a bit concerned that operational doctrine has become the policy talking point rather than a policy itself?

With all the intellectual energy being expended on COIN doctrine, we are certainly becoming experts on how to apply counterinsurgency to our military occupations absent a clearly stated objective for the military occupation. What is missing in the open source is the intellectual energy being expended on the “why”, which is what would normally constitute the political policy of a country exercising military power in the context of a grand strategy.

I see two things missing from the national security debate…

1. A clear national political policy for any of the national security debates today…
2. A clear grand strategy for any of the foreign policy and national security debates today, whether it is the QDR, budget cuts, or operations being conducted globally…Ends are not well defined and means are being predetermined by budget decisions, and every major public discussion I see focuses on doctrine, education, and training (ways!) leaving strategy an upside down triangle in the context of a global economic crisis. We are missing a solid political and strategic foundation as a nation, and find ourselves literally teetering on the point and with a clear lack of symmetry…

With the focus on doctrine, in the end we are building the military for managing the problems that result from a lack of coherent policy and an alignment of strategy to policy. What is it we are trying to achieve with our liberal use of military power in the 21st century? This is not a complicated question, but an answer is a mandatory requirement to avoid the perpetual long war scenario. Did anyone in the Obama policy office ever read Clausewitz? Ironically, the Bush administration knew what political objectives they wanted from the use of military power, they just had no idea how to do it. How [do the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars] end when our national strategy has no end derived by a political objective expressed as policy?

Short answer: it doesn’t. Until this country has a public debate on the reason “why” we fight, the discussion will continue to be “how” we fight, meaning doctrine on the “ways” and an industrial driven discussion on what “means” will be purchased to fight will substitute for the public discussion of strategy as a way to avoid articulating a political policy, and in the meantime our military forces are being utilized globally absent a clearly articulated objective.

I wonder if asking for a grand strategy is asking too much from the American system of government. There have been few epochal grand strategic thinkers in American history: Hamilton, Wilson, Kennan, perhaps Jackson, Mahan, FDR, or Kissenger. Hamilton was the greatest of all. Talleyrand, himself an epochal figure whose grand strategy of legitimism ruled Europe from 1814-1914, once wrote, “I consider Napoleon, Fox, and Hamilton the three greatest men of our epoch, and if I were forced to decide between the three, I would give without hesitation the first place to Hamilton”. Hamilton adopted a system outlined in three of the greatest grand strategic documents ever written (First Report on Public Credit, Second Report on Public Credit, Report on Manufactures) that was so potent that even his Jeffersonian opponents adopted it whole hog by 1815 and followed it, excepting a Jacksonian interlude between 1830-1861, with stunning success until 1945. The first grand strategic dilemma that the Hamiltonian grand strategy encountered was the spectacular and sudden elevation of American power during World War I. America went from playing the role of challenger and spoiler to the role of nascent hegemon. This was beyond even Hamilton’s seemingly premature and grandiose predictions of future American greatness:

I shall briefly observe, that our situation invites, and our interests prompt us, to aim at an ascendant in the system of American affairs. The world may politically, as well as geographically, be divided into four parts, each having a distinct set of interests. Unhappily for the other three, Europe by her arms and by her negociations, by force and by fraud, has, in different degrees, extended her dominion over them all. Africa, Asia, and America have successively felt her domination. The superiority, she has long maintained, has tempted her to plume herself as the Mistress of the World, and to consider the rest of mankind as created for her benefit. Men admired as profound philosophers have, in direct terms, attributed to her inhabitants a physical superiority; and have gravely asserted that all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America–that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed a while in our atmosphere. Facts have too long supported these arrogant pretensions of the European. It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race, and to teach that assuming brother moderation. Union will enable us to do it. Disunion will add another victim to his triumphs. Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the controul of all trans-atlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!

Into this breach came a cold Scotsman with a distinct air of personal superiority, that rarest and most dangerous of all creatures, the working political scientist. Thomas Woodrow Wilson saw a world order previously made up of centuries old empires and pronounced a cure in search of a disease: democracy based on the principle of the self-determination of nationalities. Wilson ripped down the old and tried in favor of the new and untested. Wilson planned to bring the principles behind John Calhoun’s vision of a United States with the League of Nations playing the role of the weak Federal Government, the nations of the Earth playing the role of the super-empowered States, and national sovereignty playing the role of nullification. It could be said that the millions that died in the upheavals unleashed by self-determination’s war of all against all, like the Confederacy of the Old South, “died of State’s Rights”. Wilson implicitly desired a world much like the then contemporary New World: a world of dysfunctional republics under the tutelage of a ruthless otherworldly Princeton school master who would “teach the South American world’s republics to elect good men”.

Wilson’s grand strategy was crippled by a few inconvenient truths:

1. America lacked substantial experience, institutions, or personnel appropriate for carrying out a grand strategy of global engagement, intervention, or hegemony at any scale.
2. America lacked a sizable constituency for such a grand strategy.
3. Many Americans, rightly, feared that such a strategy would corrupt the Old Republic and bring the evils of the Old World, with it’s feuding powers, to the New.
4. America was unwilling to invest in the resources, primarily military, that would be necessary for carrying out such a strategy.

Even if Wilsonism didn’t have the answer America was looking for in 1919, the fundamental fact on the ground remained. The Hamiltonian grand strategy had made the United States the most powerful nation on Earth and, due perhaps to a persistent lack of imagination, America only had two grand strategies to choose from:

1. Seek World Americanization, a global revolution that would create America all over the world.
2. Continue the policy of “America in One Country” advocated by Hamiltonians.

America has vacillated between these two Grand Strategies ever since. In practice, the grand strategy of the United States has been to replicate the Western Hemisphere all over the globe, with America as the prima inter pares amongst a group of weak, territorially stable, and easily manipulated (possibly only nominal) republics. This grand strategy was almost implicit under FDR’s policy of the Four Policemen, with Great Britain, the USSR, and (nominally) China playing the role the United States played in the Western Hemisphere in their respective regions and the United States acting as friendly arbiter between them all. This didn’t solve the schizophrenia between the two strategies but allowed the US to limp along. An even more fortuitous occurrence was the rise of enemies like Nazi Germany, Mikadoist Japan, and Communist Russia to provide a focal point for American power in the place of a hard and definitive resolution of the underlying dichotomy. Containment provided a useful framework to ignore the schizophrenia. In the name of defense and often on an ad hoc basis as new crises arose, America began to develop an informal imperialism that involved it in every nook and cranny in the world and made it the target of every crackpot with a gripe on the planet. However, with the inconvenient passing of the USSR, once again America is forced to wrestle with the unresolved dilemma of its own power and its inability to figure out how to use it.

The fundamental assumption that American grand strategy, such as it is, is that the world is made up of nations. This, after all, was the state of Europe during the infancy of the republic and it became the state of America’s immediate neighbors after they won their independence from Spain and Portugal. Where the United States found “non-state” actors, it treated them as nations, signed treaties with them as nations, went to war with them as nations, and moved them to inhospitable parts of the North American continent as nations. There was a solution to parts of the world that lacked substantial nations and that solution was empire. The vast stretches of the world that were subject to tribes and clans were absorbed into empires during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The answer to the tribal problem was the Maxim Gun: Europeans had it and the tribes didn’t.

The United States under Wilson, having a romantic view of its own independence struggle and derivative struggles launched by its Latin neighbors, determined that the entire world should repeat its national experience. One by one the empires of the Earth were replaced with the thin gruel of national self-determination where no nations existed and the democratic aspiration where no democracy existed. The result has been, in many parts of the world, persistent disorder and war. This isn’t to justify the existence of these empires but only to observe that while America is good at destroying the old order of things, it is very poor at providing a new order in its place. This is the true human cost of American grand strategic schizophrenia.

If we’re looking for a rationale behind the Kilcullen Doctrine, perhaps this would suffice. America expects a world of nations. In many parts of the world, there are no nations. America’s grand strategy should be to make a world of nations. This means that grand strategy should aim to establish a global dictatorship of law. Any law will do, as long as it keeps a nation’s citizen out of other nations’ hair. The maximal expression of this grand strategy can be American soldiers going into every nook and cranny of the ungoverned world and using COIN-fu to magically subject the riotous locals to the power of law or it could be the global minimum of collectively punishing a group of tribesmen who don’t think of themselves as a nation as if they were a nation. It certainly encouraged the indigenous inhabitants of this continent to develop a sense of nationhood.

One of the important principles of the original stratum of common law was that every man should have a lord. This served the important role of clearly establishing who was responsible for a wayward subject. A similar principle for the 21st century is that every man should have a nation. The primary goal of this principle is to establish where the final responsibility for an errant citizen lies. A clear bright line can then be drawn from an offender back to the offender’s keeper and recompense can be extracted from them. It has the virtue of providing a minimal bridge between the two possible grand strategies while something else turns up. However, in the ungoverned spaces, such a policy would inevitably rub the locals the wrong way. In herding cats there’s nothing like stroking them backwards. That, in the end, can only lead to more accidental guerrillas. It may be, however, that those covered with Hamilton’s fingerprints will inevitably have more power to accidentally throw around than is desirable.

The winner’s dilemma.