Category Insurgency & Counterinsurgency

Walls

20090529_Great_Wall_8125

Walls are all the rage now. According to various articles, Ukraine is planning on building a wall along its border with Russia. This is some 1200 miles and costs $200 million. It is not a wall, it is a actually a 2 meter (7 foot) tall fence, with a tank ditch 6 meters wide and 2-3 meters deep.

See:

http://www.rferl.org/contentinfographics/the-great-wall-of-ukraine/27573891.html

https://www.rt.com/news/258837-ukraine-fence-russian-border/

http://uatoday.tv/politics/lsquo-great-wall-of-ukraine-rsquo-russian-border-fortification-less-than-10-built-478829.html

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/27/the-great-wall-of-ukraine.html

(Note: The Daily Beast article may not link).

We actually did do a chapter on the effectiveness of border barriers in America’s Modern Wars (Chapter Ten: Sanctuaries, Border Barriers and Population Resettlement). In our 83 examples there were 13 in which the counterinsurgency force utilized border barriers. Thus, barriers were present in approximately 16% of our cases.

  1. Indochina War (1946-1954)
  2. Algerian War (1954-1962)
  3. Vietnam II (1961-1964)
  4. Vietnam War (1965-1973)
  5. Namibia (1966-1989)
  6. Rhodesia II (1972-1979)
  7. Polisario Rebellion (1973-1991)
  8. Cambodia (1978-1989)
  9. USSR in Afghanistan (1979-1989)
  10. Kashmir (1988 – present)
  11. Second Intifada (2000-2005)
  12. Hamas War (2006)
  13. Hezbollah War (2006)

We conducted a statistical analysis of the relationship between outcome and the presence or absence of border barriers among the 83-case MISS dataset using Fisher’s Exact Test (see below).

 

Outcome by Presence/Absence of Border Barriers
Outcome Yes No Total
Blue 2 40 42
Gray 2 9 11
Red 9 21 30
Total 13 70 83

 

When we test the hypothesis about a nonrandom relationship between insurgency outcome and the border barriers factor in the two-by-three table above using Fisher’s Exact Test, the p-value is 0.0090. The data suggest strong evidence that the two factors may be associated.

We also tested the more specific hypothesis that the odds of a Blue outcome are different in the absence vs. the presence of border barriers by ignoring the gray observations in the testing procedure. The p-value from the Fisher’s Exact Test is 0.0045 in this case, which can be considered strong evidence in support of this hypothesis.

Thus, it appears that the tests confirm that border barriers have not been significant in combating insurgencies, based on the outcome. This is not unexpected, although it could perhaps be considered counterintuitive. Overall, the insurgents won 69% of the time when there was a border barrier vice 30% of the time when there was not one. We suspect that there is another factor in play here (for example: border barriers are usually built in response to large, intractable insurgencies).

Third-Party Insurgencies

Not a whole lot of analytical work has been done on third-party insurgencies. A third-party insurgency is a conflict where an external state or trans-national organization played a major role in initiating, sustaining, bringing to victory, or otherwise supporting a rebellion or insurgency. Kind of like what is going on in Donetsk and Lugansk in Ukraine.

We did do a little work to examine if the level of outside support results in insurgent victory. It was been the perception of the number of counterinsurgent theorists that significant outside support is important for an insurgent victory. Our analysis, based upon an examination of 89 cases was that it was in fact, not a primary driver of insurgent success. To provide a table from page 79 of America’s Modern Wars:

Outcome by Type of Outside Support
Outcome Primarily Indigenous Some Considerable Not Applicable Total
Blue 11 20 9 2 42
Gray 5 6 0 0 11
Red 7 18 5 0 30
Total 23 44 14 2 83

This table compares the amount of outside support (primarily indigenous, some, and considerable) to the outcome (blue = counterinsurgent victory, red = insurgency victory, and gray = outcome is not a clear victory for either side). Outcome compared to type of outside support produced no discernable pattern. The counterinsurgents or intervening force tended to win more often then not, no matter what the degree of outside support was for the insurgency. Our statistical test indicated that there was no correlation here.

There was no correlation whether we tested to our entire dataset of 83 cases, limited the test to only those 62 cases that were clearly insurgencies (did not include the peacekeeping operations and interventions in our larger dataset), or only those 36 case that were insurgencies against outside intervening forces. If there was a consistent trend in this data, it was that insurgencies with considerable outside support lost more often than insurgencies that were primarily indigenous. This is counterintuitive, but it made of cases that include almost every major and not-so-major insurgency since World War II. But there appears to be little correlation between the degree of outside support for an insurgency and the outcome of the insurgency.

Of course, the purpose of the third-party insurgency may not be to obtain clear victory, but for lesser political purposes, including disrupting an opponent or forcing concessions from them.

We May Not Be Interested in COIN, but COIN is Interested in Us

Photo By United States Mint, Smithsonian Institution [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Photo By United States Mint, Smithsonian Institution [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Is the United States Army turning its back on the experience it gained in Iraq and Afghanistan? Retired Brigadier General Robert Scales fears so. After recounting his personal experience with the U.S. Army’s neglect of counterinsurgency lessons following the Vietnam War, Scales sees the pattern repeating itself.

The Army as an institution loves the image of the big war: swift maneuver, tanks, heavy artillery, armed helicopters overhead, mounds of logistics support. The nitty-gritty of working with indigenous personnel to common ends, small unit patrols in civilian-infested cities, quick clashes against faceless enemies that fade back into the populace — not so much. Lessons will fade, and those who earned their PhDs in small wars will be passed over and left by the wayside.

U.S. Army War College professor Andrew Hill found the same neglect in the recent report of the National Commission on the Future of the Army, in which any reference to stability operations “is barely discernable.” As Scales put it, “here is the problem with that approach: The ability to win the big one is vital, but so is the ability to win the small wars. We paid a price for forgetting what we learned in Vietnam. I hope succeeding generations do not have to pay again.”

The U.S. government appears to be repeating the pattern insofar as its support for basic research on insurgency and counterinsurgency. During the early years of the Vietnam conflict, the U.S. government invested significant resources to support research and analysis efforts. This led to some very interesting and promising lines of inquiry by organizations such as the Special Operations Research Office, and scholars like Ted Gurr and Ivo and Rosalind Feierabend, among others. However, as Chris Lawrence recently pointed out, this funding was cut by the end of the 1960s, years before the war ended. After, the fruits of this initial research was published in the early 1970s, further research on the subject slowed considerably.

The emergence of insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan led to another round of research and analysis funding by the U.S. government in the mid-2000s. This resulted in renewed interest in the foundations built during the 1960s, as well as new analytical work of considerable promise. Despite the fact that these conflicts remain unresolved, this resourcing dried up once more by 2009 and government sponsored basic research has once more ground to a crawl. As Chris has explained, this boom-or-bust approach also carries a cost:

The problem lies in that the government (or at least the parts that I dealt with) sometimes has the attention span of a two-year-old. Not only that, it also has the need for instant gratification, very much like a two-year-old. Practically, what that means is that projects that can answer an immediate question get funding (like the Bosnia and Iraq casualty estimates). Larger research efforts that will produce an answer or a product in two to three years can also get funding. On the other hand, projects that produce a preliminary answer in two to three years and then need several more years of funding to refine, check, correct and develop that work, tend to die. This has happened repeatedly. The analytical community is littered with many clever, well thought out reports that look to be good starts. What is missing is a complete body of analysis on a subject. [America’s Modern Wars, 295]

The ambivalent conduct and outcomes of the recent counterinsurgencies generated hotly contested debates that remain unresolved. This is at least partly due to a lack of a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of insurgency and counterinsurgency. This state of affairs appears to be a matter of choice.