One of the first things, taught to young lawyers, in law schools is never ask a question to which you do not know the answer. The same lesson can also be applied to the military and the manner in which it conducts itself and fights in its campaigns. This lesson and the question, which it raises are important when the issue is how best to combat and defeat an insurgency. Insurgency can be generic and not specific to any part of the globe. Regardless of the nature of the insurgency, the doubt still lingers whether the military, engaged in counter-insurgency operations (COIN), knows what it is supposed to be doing in order to defeat a particular insurgency.
The answer, then, would depend if the military understands the nature of the insurgency that confronts it and it will only understand the nature of the insurgency, if it asks the right questions, for example, about the source and the motivation of the insurgency.
Even asking the right questions does not imply that a military force can defeat the insurgency, because the critical element then becomes, whether the military has the institutional, philosophical and even a political capacity to accept the answers to its own questions.
As the old adage suggests, and suggests correctly, every future military generation learns to fight the past and thus, is woefully unprepared to deal with a future conflict with all of its attendant uncertainties. It is an institutional fault, which makes this possible, because what future military officers are taught, in military academies all over the world, is how to fight the battles of the past. Given the curriculum of the military academies and their importance of studying warfare through the experience of the past, the lesson which is, thus, taught confuses the nature of the battle with its political reasons.
Military schools, by their very nature, are technocratic cults preaching a version of martial nirvana to their disciples. The institutional raison d’ etre of a military academy is to study the past and understand why a given battle was a failure and in this, the lessons of military academies can be, at best, formulaic. The graduates of military academies, for most part believe that they have discovered the skeleton key to all future military problems and if given rein, they can provide the right solution.
What is not thoroughly learned or understood at military academies is that wars, or for that matter fighting insurgencies, are efforts of political longevity and not a calculus in the application of military force.
Herein lies the rub, because the failure to understand the political causes of a conflict, invariably, leads to a strategy that instead of winning the conflict ends up simply reinforcing failure.
Military academies and the professional general staffs, which they produce, are mindful of the role of politics in a war but they fail to realize is that politics of a conflict is more fluid than the military plans for that particular conflict.
Every general staff prepares its nation’s future battle plans keeping in view the political and regional military environment and the reason for which general staffs were created in the first place, was to help coordinate their nation’s political response to a conflict.
Therefore, most general staffs and the armies they represent are bureaucracies of a different sort and being such, are prone to what is generally referred to as “bureaucratic inertia”. What this implies is that as a rule military plans tend to be rigid and a lot slower to adapt to changing political circumstances and in this way, they are more of a nuisance than a benefit in a given crisis.
Wars, and for that matter insurgencies, are endeavors of political patience and their end is determined not by the unstinting use of raw power but rather by the most flexible political guile a nation can muster. The nature of a war is as unique as the political question which underlies it and therefore, no two wars will be ever alike in their nature and in their scope. The political considerations of a conflict must be kept foremost in the mind, because a conflict being political nature, will mutate rapidily over a given period of time and in that time, the reasons which started it may be amended or even discarded by the time it ends.
Military plans must never be allowed to influence politics, because just as the nature of wars change, politics too must change to accomodate the changed nature of the conflict itself. A conflict that becomes too militarized tends to lose the flexibility to adapt to new political realities. Military must always be kept under a political control so that its application of force can be guided by the constraints and opportunties of politics and not by the logic of what is commonly known as "military necessity".
A military conflict, which attains a political aim for which it was fought, will be more successful than a conflict which is fought endlessly without its political intention clarified.
It is a pity that most wars are started without even realizing what they are being fought for and it is a lack of this reason, which makes for the tragedy of a war as a metaphor of needless loss and sufferings.
The answer, then, would depend if the military understands the nature of the insurgency that confronts it and it will only understand the nature of the insurgency, if it asks the right questions, for example, about the source and the motivation of the insurgency.
Even asking the right questions does not imply that a military force can defeat the insurgency, because the critical element then becomes, whether the military has the institutional, philosophical and even a political capacity to accept the answers to its own questions.
As the old adage suggests, and suggests correctly, every future military generation learns to fight the past and thus, is woefully unprepared to deal with a future conflict with all of its attendant uncertainties. It is an institutional fault, which makes this possible, because what future military officers are taught, in military academies all over the world, is how to fight the battles of the past. Given the curriculum of the military academies and their importance of studying warfare through the experience of the past, the lesson which is, thus, taught confuses the nature of the battle with its political reasons.
Military schools, by their very nature, are technocratic cults preaching a version of martial nirvana to their disciples. The institutional raison d’ etre of a military academy is to study the past and understand why a given battle was a failure and in this, the lessons of military academies can be, at best, formulaic. The graduates of military academies, for most part believe that they have discovered the skeleton key to all future military problems and if given rein, they can provide the right solution.
What is not thoroughly learned or understood at military academies is that wars, or for that matter fighting insurgencies, are efforts of political longevity and not a calculus in the application of military force.
Herein lies the rub, because the failure to understand the political causes of a conflict, invariably, leads to a strategy that instead of winning the conflict ends up simply reinforcing failure.
Military academies and the professional general staffs, which they produce, are mindful of the role of politics in a war but they fail to realize is that politics of a conflict is more fluid than the military plans for that particular conflict.
Every general staff prepares its nation’s future battle plans keeping in view the political and regional military environment and the reason for which general staffs were created in the first place, was to help coordinate their nation’s political response to a conflict.
Therefore, most general staffs and the armies they represent are bureaucracies of a different sort and being such, are prone to what is generally referred to as “bureaucratic inertia”. What this implies is that as a rule military plans tend to be rigid and a lot slower to adapt to changing political circumstances and in this way, they are more of a nuisance than a benefit in a given crisis.
Wars, and for that matter insurgencies, are endeavors of political patience and their end is determined not by the unstinting use of raw power but rather by the most flexible political guile a nation can muster. The nature of a war is as unique as the political question which underlies it and therefore, no two wars will be ever alike in their nature and in their scope. The political considerations of a conflict must be kept foremost in the mind, because a conflict being political nature, will mutate rapidily over a given period of time and in that time, the reasons which started it may be amended or even discarded by the time it ends.
Military plans must never be allowed to influence politics, because just as the nature of wars change, politics too must change to accomodate the changed nature of the conflict itself. A conflict that becomes too militarized tends to lose the flexibility to adapt to new political realities. Military must always be kept under a political control so that its application of force can be guided by the constraints and opportunties of politics and not by the logic of what is commonly known as "military necessity".
A military conflict, which attains a political aim for which it was fought, will be more successful than a conflict which is fought endlessly without its political intention clarified.
It is a pity that most wars are started without even realizing what they are being fought for and it is a lack of this reason, which makes for the tragedy of a war as a metaphor of needless loss and sufferings.
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