Your Friendly Butch Anarchist Live-Tweet Reading: The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual

Part 5

Part 1: https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1291559405696106496?s=21
Part 2: https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1292995286197923840?s=21
Part 3: https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1294076761123119104?s=21
Part 4: https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1295520419466772480

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Today we begin Chapter 2- Unity of Effort: Integrating Civilian and Military Activities

This chapter, as its title implies, is going to focus on how counterinsurgencies (COIN) combine military and civilian arenas to attempt to combat, suppress, and collapse insurgencies.

They begin by restating what seems to be a central thesis in this field guide: that military actions are necessary for successful counterinsurgencies, but can only be effective when “integrated into a comprehensive strategy employing all instruments of national power.” (p.53)

This means that military might is an important tool to use against insurgencies, but for counterinsurgents to actually succeed in suppressing an insurgency, their victory HAS to be a political one.

For this to happen, COIN operations have to include and support civilian efforts against the insurgency. Unity and integration with local NGOs is crucial to success to the point of often being even more valuable than conventional military operations.

Counterinsurgencies need to gain, or regain, the populace’s active, continued support for the State, and their acceptance of it’s sovereignty.

This means coordinating political, social, and economic programs to address the cause of the conflict and undermine the insurgency.

Insurgents succeed by disrupting state order and highlighting grievances that the state fails to address.

Counterinsurgents have to answer this be reasserting order and meeting the population’s needs to keep them dependent on that order.

To defeat an insurgency, counterinsurgencies have to apply instruments of national power along multiple logical lines of operations (LLO) focused on the populace.

“Each line depends on the others. The interdependence is total: if one fails, the mission fails.” (p.55)

^^ reading that line should leave no question as to how fragile counterinsurgencies really are. Disrupting one logical line of operations disrupts ALL others and crumbles the whole oppressive apparatus.

Logical lines of operations often require applying the capabilities of civilians organizations such as:
-U.S. gov agencies other than the DOD
-IGOs
-NGOs
-Private corporations
-Other organizations that have political, economic, or informational power

With military forces COIN’s preferred method is to establish a unity of command: control of all gov organizations engaged in counterinsurgency under one leader.

This often cannot be achieved integrating with non-gov civilian orgs, so the next aim is establishing unity of effort.

Unity of effort is the goal for all involved in the counterinsurgency effort, military and civilian, to work uniformly to undermine the insurgency.

Brings to mind when I compiled this thread of @fox12oregon flying away every time police started attacking protestors in June. https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1269501047556333569