Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

MONOGRAPH: War by Other Means -- Building Complete and Balanced Capabilities for Counterinsurgency: RAND Counterinsurgency Study -- Final Report, By: David C. Gompert, et al, RAND,

Interesting to scan through. Part of me says I'm looking at the same sort of over-conceptualization that I saw with Net-Centric Warfare, from some of the same people. Another part says this is good institutional learning.

As for the institutional possibilities, the report is clearly drawn to creating some stand-alone agency or near-department, but it limits the logic in that direction by defining the whole challenge as COIN, which is becoming now as buzz-worthy as NCW was before--as in, the answer to EVERYTHING that ails us. Within that definition of COIN implied here, the original assumption of it being overwhelming military-led, with the economic development stuff seemingly small and tertiary in focus to classic mil/security capacity building, I find myself dead-ending in the analysis a lot, meaning I feel like I'm reading about 30% of the answer being dressed up as far more.

In short, I still sense so much desire here for the defense community to figure this out from within, resulting in a sort of defense-out definition of everything, and the subsequent--and inevitable--inflation of COIN to represent the answer to "all" because now "global insurgency" is viewed as all.

I keep getting this sinking feeling when I read stuff like this, as good as it is: I feel like we're trying to describe a complex response to globalization's advance from a primarily government-->defense-->mil-->COIN! soda straw, much like many NCWers tried to capture such vast reality of the Info Rev in their thinking--you know, IR-->gov-->def-->mil-->NCW!

Such exuberance is okay for now, but I suspect it will get increasingly out of hand.

To me, the key thing about institutional arrangements is: which other nations and which private-sector entities will find that package attractive enough (and not too scary) to actually work with it. Defining the institutional requirement from the military-outward seems backasswards: we're trying to fit key players into our preferred paradigm rather than the other way around.

I guess it all depends on how much you see COIN as THE ANSWER!

I suspect that military-operated COIN will end up being a far smaller portion of the ultimate solution set than most defense thinkers will care to admit, and I think we're already seeing its limits in Iraq: it enables other answers to become possible, but absent those answers emerging, the COIN is mostly a delaying and temporizing function. Blown up to the "global" insurgency level, I suspect the military-enabled stuff will get very small indeed in terms of the overall solution set.

Just my gut-check guesses for now.

And you know, sitting through that investment conference at the Dead Sea on the Middle East and North Africa, I really felt I was listening to far more of the answer than I ever hear in the Pentagon. And for that reason, as I sit in LaGuardia overnight, waiting for my 0600 replacement flight, after sitting on the tarmac at JFK for five hours, I'm thinking the Jordan trip was sort-of, almost, kinda worth having six days of my book writing so disrupted.

(Thanks: Lance Blyth)