Coin Discussion

[Erwin]

This is a small part of a discussion taking place in another group I belong to. Hope it may be of interest here:

"This issue is a more fundamental one than wargaming – it applies to assessment of real world operations as well. More controversial is the notion that it stems from some fundamental inconsistencies in our new construct of war.

The COIN problem, as Peter has pointed out is the lack of a theory that links "doing things right" (MOEs) and "doing the right things (to get your desired endstate – MOEs). Lacking that theory, we tend to – INCORRECTLY – assume that if we do things right, then good things will happen. When the talk goes to simulators (inherently training tools to do things right) as a way to solve COIN problems, this pathology is rearing its ugly head. I would argue there is nothing inherently "COIN" about these simulators – unless one thinks that tasks like protecting a supply convoy, interacting with local officials to facilitate local order, or suppressing partisans are exclusive to COIN. Talk to the Germans in WWII about these things. Or the Spartans... Like Peter, I agree one of our problems is the level "sterility" with which our Cold war models were abstracted.

It lead us to an incorrect understanding of "Conventional war" as a pure military on military affair where the winner made the loser sign a surrender document that ended things cleanly.

Why did this happen? Well, because historical Army's were created to keep the other guys Army from raping and pillaging your cities and stealing all your stuff. Or in more modern times, destroying them. When the Army was destroyed, you had to surrender (i.e. tell your people to stop fighting) then really bad things would happen to your civilians. Well, in the Pax Americana version, Armies no longer do anything bad to civilians, so when you fight the Americans, what good is a defensive Army? It is at best a sacrificial anode to give you time to collect up as much cash as you can and get out of dodge, or go into hiding. The best thing for an Army to do against the US is to go guerilla, blend in with the population and try to bleed us out over time.

But our understanding of military interaction lead us to models of combat based on Newtonian mechanics of attrition. When military units fought military units in the sterile field of battle, these models were "useful'" comparatively speaking, if not the best predictors. These models were "complicated' but "simple". When took certain types of actions, and turned the crank, expected outcomes occurs. Saddled by our own success, driving opponents with all but near –peer capabilities to long term, "COIN" (actually more steeped in guerrilla tradition IMO) we find ourselves having to put all the "dirt" back into our sterile models because we have found, over 10+ years, that in the "real world" pulling the same levers, pushing the same buttons and setting the rheostats the same way does not let you "zero in" on the "right answer" – but gives you a flummoxing range of outputs, that seem to bear little relation to how you set the inputs.

Welcome to the world of complexity where doing the same thing over and over gives you increasingly good results, until it doesn't. Where metrics that "confirm success" suddenly spin around 180 when you dial back a smidge. All those issues that Peter points out. These are the fingerprints of a COMPLEX situation. OK, says General to OR guru – turn my complex situation into a few simple ones so I can get back to turning the crank on well-behaved relationships between MOEs and MOPs. Unfortunately we have some OR guys giving a cheery aye-aye and claiming to do so, when we KNOW that you can't decompose complex systems into components. He may as well ask for a set of actions he can do to make his 16 year old daughter act rationally.

Unless there is reason to believe that our nascent understanding of complexity is fundamentally wrong, then we are left with the situation that our problems are not with our understanding of COIN, but cognitive dissonance between reality, and our desires regarding reality. I blame the whole JV 2010 thing for a lot of this. It represented the total breakdown of rationality regarding warfare when we decided that we didn't like where we saw warfare going, and decided that we could simply state a series of desires about how we wanted war to be, as goals to be accomplished. When it stated to become clear that these were not only unrealistic, but impossible, we just blinked and restated them in JV2020.

The problem may not be with our understanding of COIN, but with the expectations with which we apply military capabilities to complex problems. We envision an end state, we devise a sequence of actions that we believe (key word) will result in that endstate, and then we assume that if we perform those tasks to an acceptable degree of "doing things right" we will get to our end state. In "simple" situations like the delivery logistics to disaster victims, and bombing electrical grids, because there are "simple" problems. They don't work with complex endeavors like COIN. Our military planning hammer is not effective dealing with the screw of COIN, so we call it a "COIN" problem and bemoan the fact the OR gurus can't make it work and the lack of a COIN model that makes the hammer work.

The problem is the complexities of the wide range of situations we paint with the COIN brush do not lend themselves to a "work a series of actions back from the desired endstate framework" – but because that is the only tool we have, or are comfortable with "because it has only worked in the past" it MUST be that we simply haven't broken the code on how to round off the square peg, not re-examine or fundamental assumption that "pulling the same levers, and turning the rheostats" will cause real world effects in a predictable way. They simply won't and we won't "solve the problem of COIN" until we accept that.

The issues of assessing why there is no consistency between action and system response in systems is a similar problem. Black Swans and all that. We "Know" you can't predict outcomes from inputs, yet it's a "problem" in need of solving. We Say we understand that and come up with variations on the words – "indicators", "design frameworks", "correlation mappings", etc., etc, but in the end the "problem" is we don't like the fact the tools we are comfortable with don't work dealing with complex situations.

Until senior military leaders admit where the problem lies, we will never "solve" it."

"For a discussion on the lack of a model of how COIN (or IN) works, the pathological demand for a numbers based assessment of progress despite this lack, the use of junk arithmetic and bogus logic to bridge the gap, and finallly two proposals for approaches to at least make sure the complexitt is recognized, see the two articles in the November issue of the Naval War College Review at http://www.usnwc.edu/Publications/Naval-War-College-Review/2011---Autumn.aspx by Jonathan Schroden and Stephen Downes-Martin, both of whom base their findings on field work in Afghanistan."

[Kandahari]

Perhaps if small groups of heavily armed, but seriously outnumbered soldiers of a certain disposition were to be inserted into semi-permissive (Hazara) areas for a year or two... how about language skills beyond 'get up, go away, shut up and hands up'. How about we spend some money on tarps and rope and fuel and pins and cloth and not so much on stealth fighters. How about we listen to what is being said to us on the ground - how about we commit lives, or else get the f out. The reluctance to suffer is a mark against us - when the fighting starts up for real, we leave. This is observed and marked as cowardice and with contempt. Obviously no politician wants to be the one to announce that 20 American lives were given today for a small collection of rocks, but as things are now, every time we withdraw because it's too hot, the enemy (and I don't really see them as this, I just don't have a better word) can spruik a victory.

Training the Afghan defence force? All very nice when there's tiers of American support that'd make an officer cadet (or CM afficionado [sp?]) weep for joy, but not so good when you have one radio per company (optimistic) and all your air support (one antiquated helo with limited ammo) is assigned to protect the corrupt police chief's compound...

The solution?

Nuke the lot.

Or, educate the people who are to interact in the foreign environment such that at least, they are able to respond to the inhabitants as human beings, with kids and cares and joys and sorrows, and not just as monosyllabic automatons of a military superpower.. language skills would be nice - interpreters only work to a certain extent. You'd be amazed at the change that can come about in human relations when one makes the attempt to speak in the lingua franca and completely butchers it. All of a sudden, everyone is laughing...

This is my first post (ever, to anything), and I'd like to extend my apologies if I've offended or broken protocol... feedback most welcome, even negative (c'mon, I have a thick skin..).