Counterinsurgency
Counterinsurgency is described as the totality of actions aimed at defeating irregular forces. The Oxford English Dictionary frames it more narrowly, as any military or political action taken against guerrillas or revolutionaries. It is, in essence, war by a state against a non-state adversary. The phrasing sounds tidy. The reality is anything but.
Consider the metaphor the military historian Martin van Creveld reaches for. He compares the strong counterinsurgent to an adult fighting a child. Hurt the child and you feel unjust. Get hurt by the child and you feel foolish. Either way, you start to wonder why you are fighting at all. That single image captures why powerful armies so often lose to weaker enemies.
These campaigns are as old as ancient history, yet most modern thinking on them was forged during decolonization. One recurring problem haunts every theorist who has written about them. During insurgency and counterinsurgency, the line between civilian and combatant blurs. What follows are the people who tried to think their way through that fog, and the brutal methods some of them endorsed when thinking failed.
The third Marques of Santa Cruz de Marcenado, who lived from 1684 to 1732, may be the earliest author to grapple with rebellion as a distinct problem. In his Reflexiones Militares, published between 1726 and 1730, he explained how to spot the early signs of an incipient insurgency and how to prevent one. His diagnosis was strikingly humane. A state rarely rises up without the fault of its governors, he wrote.
That insight, that insurgencies grow from real grievances, pushed Santa Cruz toward clemency and good governance. He wanted to win the people's heart and love rather than crush them. The same logic surfaces in the idea of winning the hearts and minds of populations supporting an insurgency. Counterinsurgents who follow it try to address the social gaps that breed discontent.
David Galula sharpened this approach into doctrine. A French Army officer in the Algerian War, he argued that the aim of war is to gain the support of the population rather than control of territory. Most people, he believed, stay neutral, and a state wins them over with the help of an active friendly minority. He summed up the whole enterprise in a single instruction. Build, or rebuild, a political machine from the population upward.
B. H. Liddell Hart pointed to the French occupation of Spain during the Napoleonic Wars to explain why occupiers fail. Whenever Spanish forces gathered into a regular fighting force, the superior French beat them in nearly every engagement. The Spanish only became dangerous once they dispersed and went irregular. Napoleon's army had no means of effectively combating them.
T. E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt of World War I offered Liddell Hart a second proof. The Ottomans sometimes held advantages in manpower of more than 100 to 1. Yet the Arabs could materialize out of the desert, strike, and vanish, leaving the Turks paralyzed and creating openings for regular British forces. The French Resistance and the National Liberation Front during the Vietnam War worked the same way, weakening an enemy until victory became easy for regular armies.
Liddell Hart concluded that there are few effective counter-measures to this strategy. So long as an insurgency keeps popular support, it retains mobility, invisibility, and legitimacy in its own eyes and the eyes of the people. Under those conditions, he argued, an insurgency essentially cannot be defeated by regular forces. Yet he conceded that unpopular insurgencies can be beaten, naming the Philippine-American War, the Shining Path in Peru, and the Malayan Emergency as failed insurgencies.
Robert Grainger Ker Thompson wrote Defeating Communist Insurgency in 1966, insisting that a government must seize the initiative rather than react. He set out five principles. The government needs a clear political aim, must function according to the law, must hold an overall plan, must give priority to defeating political subversion rather than the guerrilla fighters, and must secure its base areas first.
Dr. David Kilcullen, Chief Strategist of the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the U.S. State Department in 2006, built a different structure in The Three Pillars of Counterinsurgency. His pillars are Security, Political, and Economic, all resting on Information and supporting the goal of Control. Develop them out of balance and the campaign suffers. Too much economic aid without security simply creates soft targets for insurgents.
Kilcullen rejected the idea that victory means zero violence. The overall goal, he wrote, is not to reduce violence to zero or to kill every insurgent, but rather to return the overall system to normality. Normality in one society may look different from normality in another. Galula had already defined a deeper test. A real victory permanently isolates the insurgent from the population, an isolation maintained by and with the population rather than imposed on it.
Martin van Creveld opens his analysis with a demolition. The first and absolutely indispensable thing to do, he advises, is throw overboard 99 percent of the literature on counterinsurgency, because most of it was written by the losing side. He names only two clear successes. The British efforts during The Troubles of Northern Ireland and the 1982 Hama massacre carried out by the Syrian government against the Muslim Brotherhood.
General Patrick Walters, the British commander in Northern Ireland, embodied the gentler of van Creveld's two methods. His stated objective was not to kill as many terrorists as possible but to ensure that as few people as possible died on both sides. The Troubles cost the United Kingdom roughly three thousand fatal casualties. About seventeen hundred were civilians, a thousand were British soldiers, and no more than three hundred were terrorists, a ratio of three to one.
Hama showed the opposite path. The regime of Hafez al-Assad, near collapse, sent a Syrian Army division under his brother Rifaat to the city. Rifaat's heavy artillery demolished it, killing between 10,000 and 25,000 people, including many women and children. Al-Assad then exaggerated the deaths, promoted the commanders, and razed Hama's great mosque, replacing it with a parking lot. Van Creveld distilled the strategy into five rules he said Niccolo Machiavelli could have written. Among them, once you decide to strike, it is better to kill too many than not enough.
Dr. Lorenzo Zambernardi, an Italian academic working in the United States, framed the dilemma as an impossible trilemma in Counterinsurgency's Impossible Trilemma. A counterinsurgent wants three things. Force protection, distinction between combatants and non-combatants, and the physical elimination of insurgents. Borrowing from economic theory, he argued you can only ever have two.
Protect your troops while destroying insurgents and you end up killing civilians indiscriminately, as the Ottomans, Italians, and Nazis did in the Balkans, Libya, and Eastern Europe. Protect both civilians and your own forces and you must abandon the goal of destroying the insurgents. Discriminate carefully while still killing insurgents and you raise the risk to your own troops, because insurgents hide behind civilians or appear to be civilians.
Dr. Jeffrey Treistman pushed this logic into darker territory. He served with the US Department of State as Policy Advisor to the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq, Salam al-Zaubai. In When Bad States Win, he found little robust evidence that population-centric approaches work. He developed a theory of barbarism, modeling the relationship as a convex function. Moderate violence against civilians backfires, he argued, but overwhelming and brutal force can squash domestic opposition. As a result, bad states may sometimes defeat insurgencies.
Drain the sea, or drain the water, describes the forced relocation or elimination of a civilian population to expose the rebels hiding within it. The people are the water and the insurgents the fish. Remove the water and the fish are left without support, cover, and resources. Examples stretch from the Bar Kokhba revolt and the Second Anglo-Boer War to the Greek Civil War, the Rohingya conflict, and the Xinjiang conflict.
The Briggs Plan, implemented fully in 1950 during the Malayan Emergency, is the textbook version. British forces relocated Chinese Malayans into protected New Villages. By the end of 1951, some 400,000 ethnic Chinese had moved into the fortifications, and the British formed a Home Guard among them against the Malayan Communist Party. Yet van Creveld noted that the eventual British withdrawal and an independent state mirrored the outcomes in Aden, Kenya, and Cyprus, which no one counts as victories.
During the South Sulawesi Campaign, Captain Raymond Westerling of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army's special forces ran his own version. He surrounded suspected villages at night, drove the population to a central location, separated men from women and children, and shot those he exposed as terrorists without further investigation. Survivors swore on the Quran to stop supporting the guerrillas. Westerling directed eleven such operations and restored Dutch rule in southern Sulawesi. His notoriety drew an official inquiry in April 1947, and he was relieved of his duties in November 1948.
Counterinsurgency by major militaries has a habit of ending in failure, and the Nigerian case shows why the cause runs deeper than firepower. The Nigerian academic Akali Omeni argues in Counter-insurgency in Nigeria that three features off the battlefield decide what happens on it. Historical experience, organisational culture, and doctrine. The infantry-centric battalions traceable to the Nigerian Civil War of the 1960s shaped a kinetic approach that failed to defeat Boko Haram.
Fresh data has reframed the whole debate since the early 2000s. The information-centric school, led by the Empirical Studies of Conflict group at Princeton University and the Conflict and Peace, Research and Development group at the University of Michigan, argues that the critical determinant of success is information about insurgents. That intelligence can come from civilian sources as human intelligence, or through signal intelligence.
The American military rediscovered the field after Iraq and Afghanistan, publishing in 2006 a joint Army Field Manual 3-24 and Marine Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3-33.5 that replaced documents from 20 to 25 years earlier. The reckoning has been sobering. A study by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction concluded that the U.S. government greatly overestimated its ability to use these tactics, finding that successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical presence of coalition troops.
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Common questions
What is counterinsurgency and how is it defined?
Counterinsurgency is the totality of actions aimed at defeating irregular forces. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as any military or political action taken against the activities of guerrillas or revolutionaries, and it can be considered war by a state against a non-state adversary.
What are David Galula's four laws of counterinsurgency?
David Galula proposed that the aim of war is to gain the support of the population rather than control of territory, that most of the population stays neutral and can be won with an active friendly minority, that the population must be efficiently protected so it can cooperate without fear of retribution, and that order should be enforced progressively, area by area, using pacified territory as a base. He summed up counterinsurgency as building or rebuilding a political machine from the population upward.
What is the impossible trilemma of counterinsurgency?
Dr. Lorenzo Zambernardi argued in Counterinsurgency's Impossible Trilemma that a counterinsurgent cannot simultaneously achieve force protection, distinction between combatants and non-combatants, and the physical elimination of insurgents. A state must choose two of the three goals and sacrifice the third.
What does the drain the sea tactic mean in counterinsurgency?
Drain the sea, also called drain the water, is the forced relocation or elimination of the civilian population to expose the insurgents hidden within it, depriving them of support, cover, and resources. Examples include the Bar Kokhba revolt, the Second Anglo-Boer War, the Greek Civil War, the Rohingya conflict, and the Xinjiang conflict.
Why does Martin van Creveld say most counterinsurgencies fail?
Martin van Creveld argues that almost all attempts to deal with insurgency have ended in failure and that the core difficulty is moral rather than military or political. He compares the strong counterinsurgent to an adult fighting a child, who feels unjust if he harms the child and foolish if he is harmed, and he advises throwing overboard 99 percent of the existing literature because most was written by the losing side.
What did the Briggs Plan do during the Malayan Emergency?
The Briggs Plan, implemented fully in 1950, relocated Chinese Malayans into protected New Villages designated by British forces. By the end of 1951, some 400,000 ethnic Chinese had moved into the fortifications, and the British formed a Home Guard among them against the Malayan Communist Party.
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