In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on January 25, 2010

My friend and fellow SWC denizen Mark Safranski (aka Zenpundit) has an excellent post today entitled The post-COIN Era is Here.  It is, IMHO, an excellent post on the (supposed) “COINdinista vs. Big War” debate; a “debate” that exists more in the minds of the policy crowd that the actual debaters.  Mark makes some really excellent observations in the post, but the one I would like to play off on is the following:

Informed readers who follow defense community issues knew that many COIN expert-advocates such as Nagl, Col. David Kilcullen, Andrew Exum and others had painstakingly framed the future application of COIN by the United States in both minimalist and “population-centric” terms, averse to all but the most restrictive uses of “hard” counterterrorism tactics like the use of predator drones for the ”targeted assassinations” of al Qaida figures hiding in Pakistan.

Unfortunately for the COINdinistas, as George Kennan discovered to his dismay, to father a doctrine does not mean that you can control how others interpret and make use of it.

Information wants to be free

Well, outside of being metaphysically silly (the assumption that a class of perceptions can have free will), this little meme does relate a nice, condensed version of one property of information once it is no longer closely held.  “Information”, in the sense of ideas and ways of perceiving, does tend to spread along lines of interest / communications.  At the same time, what this catchy little meme doesn’t capture is the inherent polysemia of communications or, as Mark phrases it, “to father a doctrine does not mean that you can control how others interpret and make use of it”; a point well know to scholars of religion.

Mark quite rightly notes that the current US COIN doctrine was very carefully crafted and framed with very specific conditions in mind.  Indeed, much of the debate has actually been about framing conditions and the dangers of perceiving more events as meeting those conditions than actually do.  The COIN vs. Big War debate has, also, become wrapped up in a much larger debate over how varieties of conflict should be perceived; a taxonomic debate, with some very serious, long-term, implications (see here for a recent example).

In many ways, this taxonomic debate is much more important than COIN vs. Big War for one very simple reason: categories of symbolized perception (“taxons”) construct how a culture a) perceives and b) reacts to external stimuli.  This, in and of itself, makes it critical that such a debate take place.  At the same time, the exercise of debating how such a taxonomy should be constructed serves to lay bare the underlying environmental assumptions required to support the validity of each taxon – at least, one would hope that it does.

So what?

Is this all an academic exercise?  Well, it is a scholarly exercise, no escaping that, but it also an exercise in applied knowledge for one simple reason.  Organizations do not have perceptions.  What they have is a common form of communications that contains implicit and explicit taxonomies which there members are trained in.  And, yes, that “training” is neo-Darwinian in that members of the organization define positive and negative selection criteria.  At the organizational level, and the social level when we are dealing with critical institutions such as the military, the real world validity of those selection criteria play out in the field, so it is crucial to have the organizational “map of reality” match, as closely as possible, the lived experience of reality.  This is one of the reasons why it is so dangerous to have people using taxonomies without knowing what the boundary conditions of the taxons are.  Or, to put it another way, would you hire a plumber to solve a problem with constipation?

I remember a comment a year or two back the COL Gian Gentile made over at the SWC (apologies, but I can’t find the link) to the effect that “we don’t need doctrine for that, it’s common sense”.  I agree, much of COIN doctrine is common sense but, IMO, that doesn’t lessen the need for doctrine in it.  The reason why I believe that has nothing to do with whether or not something is common sense to someone with several years of experience in a setting where COIN is supported.  Rather, my belief as to why it is necessary has to do with the simple fact that most of the people on the ground are the age of many of my students.  Being able to tell them “Okay folks, this is a COIN setting, so we will do this by the book” constructs a perceptual environment that is vastly different from “Okay folks, there are bad guys in this village – keep your eyes open and don’t let them get you first”.  Possibly exaggerated, but it cuts to the core of why I believe this type of doctrine is necessary: you have to train people’s expectations and their actions.

Having said that, there is always a danger of an idea achieving “cult status” and being applied to situations when it is just, flat out, the stupidest thing you could do in terms of survival; a concern expressed numerous times by COL Gentile.  That is at the immediate, lived-reality level, and the implications are even more dangerous at the social level.  To mistake apples as the only fruit would only deprive us of mixed fruit drinks; to mistake COIN as the only type of war or conflict could deprive us of our societies and lives.  BTW, one central point I want to make here is that no one in the so-called “COINdenista camp” is advocating the position that COIN is the only type of war there is; that is a mental aberration that is reserved for people who don’t have to live with the results of their actions.

Category: COIN
Tags: COIN, COINdenista vs Big War, Epistemology, Ontology