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.2) describes “the realities of today’s operational environment” as “modified by a population explosion, urbanization, globalization, technology, the spread of religious fundamentalism, resource demand, climate change and natural disasters and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”3Asymmetry from AboveAt the heart of the matter is a strange fact: the US military arsenal is overdeveloped.The United States can annihilate any conventional foe and destroy the planet several times over; it spends more on arms than the fourteen next-largest militaries.But the apocalyptic power of the US atomic arsenal is politically effective only if it is not actually used.It only functions as a threat.To be effective in a world of failed states, rebellions, coups, civil wars, tribal clashes, pogroms, banditry, narcoviolence, piracy, terrorism, and desperate surges of refugees, US military violence must be applied with restraint—tremendous restraint, given its potential—and with precision.The empire cannot hunt fleas with a sledgehammer.America’s application of real violence requires smaller weapons, greater agility, and subtler tactics capable of achieving nonconventional political victories, such as the pacification of restive populations, the defeat of irregular forces, the containment and exclusion of refugee flows, and the suppression of hungry urban mobs.Thus, COIN is in fashion.Unfortunately, the current romance with COIN is part of the problem, not the solution.Its methods are, by definition, socially corrosive and destructive.As a doctrine, counterinsurgency is the theory of internal warfare; it is the strategy of suppressing rebellions and revolution.Its object is civilian society as a whole and the social fabric of everyday life.Whereas traditional aerial bombing (which is notoriously ineffective) targets bridges, factories, and command centers, COIN targets—pace Foucault—the “capillary” level of social relations.It ruptures and tears (but rarely remakes) the intimate social relations among people, their ability to cooperate, and the lived texture of solidarity—in other words, the bonds that comprise society’s sinews.4Conventional warfare seeks to control territory and destroy the opposing military, but counterinsurgency seeks to control society.It is thus “population centric.” In an insurgency, the military force—the state or the occupying power—already has (at least nominal) control of the battle space, but it lacks control of the population.Guerrillas, irregular forces, and even small, unpopular terrorist groups all rely on the populace, or parts of it, for recruits, food, shelter, medical care, intelligence, and, if nothing else, simple cover.Mao Tse-tung summed it up: “The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.” Thus‚ the anti-insurgent’s task is to isolate and destroy the guerrillas by gaining control of the population through violence as well as psychological and ideological means.Under these conditions, strategy and tactics now pivot on individual psychology, religion, age structures, rituals, traditions, family bonds, economic activities, and sense of place—in short, all the formal and informal institutions of everyday life.Society is the target, and as such it is damaged.Counterinsurgency is especially destructive because it attacks the social fabric.Like the revolutions it seeks to suppress, counterinsurgency intentionally attacks and attempts to remake the social relations of a place.In the process, it helps set off self-fueling processes of social disintegration.The ReceiptIn Vietnam it was called “winning hearts and minds,” or in the cheeky military argot of the time, “WHAMing the peasantry.” Today, as in the past, such militarized “social work” can involve real economic development and progressive political reforms designed to ameliorate the legitimate grievances of the people—that is, to win their actual support and make the revolutionary promises of the insurgents less appealing.Or it can mean genocidal, society-destroying total war at the grass roots, as in “draining the sea to catch the fish
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