The limitations of military doctrines and practice are often exposed, not by arguments, but by events Thus it was mainly events in Iraq and Afghanistan that exposed the inadequacies of the so-call

Why have the major post 9/11 U.S. military interventions turned into quagmires? Despite huge power imbalances, major capacity-building efforts, and repeated tactical victories, the wars in Afghanistan (2001-present) and Iraq (2003-2011; 2014-present) turned bloody and intractable. The inability to design and manage war termination is an important part of the explanation why successful military operations to overthrow two third-world regimes failed to achieve favorable and durable outcomes. This thesis uses the abductive research method to develop three hypotheses to investigate these problems. Hypothesis #1: The failure to consider war termination heightens the risk of selecting a myopic strategy that has a low probability of success. Hypothesis #2: Cognitive obstacles, political frictions, and patron-client problems can impede the ability to recognize and abandon an ineffective or losing strategy. Hypothesis #3. When the United States tires of the war and decides to withdraw, bargaining asymmetries can undermine the prospects of a favorable outcome. These hypotheses are examined in the case studies and used to draw conclusions. Three main findings emerge. First, the United States government has no organized way to consider war termination and thus selected strategies that overestimated the prospects of decisive military victory. Second, the United States was slow to recognize and modify or abandon losing strategies. In both cases, U.S. officials believed their strategies were working even as the situations deteriorated. Third, once the United States decided to withdraw, bargaining asymmetries and disconnects in strategy undermined the prospects for a successful transition or negotiated outcome.

Doctrine and Reality in Afghanistan

End-game : why American interventions become quagmires

Fighting the Mau Mau

British Army counterinsurgency campaigns were supposedly waged within the bounds of international law, overcoming insurgents with the minimum force necessary. This revealing study questions what this meant for the civilian population during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s, one of Britain's most violent decolonisation wars. For the first time Huw Bennett examines the conduct of soldiers in detail, uncovering the uneasy relationship between notions of minimum force and the colonial tradition of exemplary force where harsh repression was frequently employed as a valid means of quickly crushing rebellion. Although a range of restrained policies such as special forces methods, restrictive rules of engagement and surrender schemes prevented the campaign from degenerating into genocide, the army simultaneously coerced the population to drop their support for the rebels, imposing collective fines, mass detentions and frequent interrogations, often tolerating rape, indiscriminate killing and torture to terrorise the population into submission.

Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency

With strategic success in Iraq and Afghanistan far from certain, comforting beliefs about Britain's superiority at counterinsurgency have come under increasingly sceptical scrutiny. This article contributes to the debate with particular reference to the supposedly pivotal principle of minimum force. After discussing the recent literature on the subject, the article critiques the methodology employed by advocates of the traditionalist view on British COIN, arguing for a more rigorous historical approach based on primary sources. Following these historical matters, it is argued that conceptually, minimum force should be analysed dialectically in relation to practices of exemplary force, and above all, on the evidence of what happens in a conflict. Arguably the value ascribed to doctrine in strategic analysis has become unduly inflated, and we must look beyond it to understand war and political violence.

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Minimum force in British counterinsurgency

After the swift victory in conventional battle against Iraqi forces in March 2003, American forces fairly quickly encountered a growing insurgency movement which turned into an enormous political a...

Doctrine and Reality in Afghanistan

Citations

End-game : why American interventions become quagmires

Fighting the Mau Mau

Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency

Minimum force in British counterinsurgency

NATO's Vietnam?: Afghanistan and the future of the Atlantic Alliance

Related Papers (5)

Afghanistan: From Here to Eternity?

Can the doctrine of just military intervention survive Iraq

Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence: The U.S. Military and Counterinsurgency Doctrine, 1960-1970 and 2003-2006. Rand Counterinsurgency Study, Paper 6.

An Actor-centric Theory of War: Understanding the Difference Between COIN and Counterinsurgency

The United States and the politics of the laws of war since 1945.