The Case for Military Defeat of the Enemy During Counter Insurgency

Introduction

Western armies are used to fighting large-scale battles against other armies. In such wars. The focus is always placed on the military defeat of the opposing sides. However, historically counterinsurgency battles place an emphasis on different factors. The main aim during counterinsurgency is usually to outbid the insurgents and gain public favor or support .It is also expected that during such an operation, the armies involved should use very minimal force. It may be difficult to apply the specifics of the counterinsurgency theory to real war situations. Most of the time, soldiers ignore the specifics of the theory and instead use the western military culture to fight battles against the insurgents. Traditionally, whenever there is a conflict and war is the only option, armies go out on battlefields and seek to defeat one another. In western military culture, wars are usually fought against adversaries whose goal is to obliterate their opponents. In such a situation, the side which attains military defeat gets to win. It is therefore very difficult to fight in a war where the two sides have different goals. The theory of insurgency is therefore largely inapplicable in real war situations.

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In many counterinsurgency operations, the insurgents are usually mixed with the population which makes it difficult to launch attacks. It is, however, essential to neutralize the insurgents through military action as ignoring that always creates an environment of instability. The best approach to a successful counterinsurgent operation is to separate the people from the insurgents then launching attacks against them. Launching indiscriminate attacks against a population can only turn the population against the counterinsurgent government. The Somalia counter-insurgency operation which began in 1980 and ended in 1991 is a perfect illustration of why insurgents need to be neutralized. It is however extremely important to apply discriminate force in doing so. In the case of Somalia, the counterinsurgents failed because they applied indiscriminate force in their attempt to subdue the insurgents. The government did not make any attempt of separating the insurgents from the general population. This resulted in a lack of popular support for the government.

It is extremely difficult to gain popular support without defeating counterinsurgents. Therefore before a government can embark on attempting to win support from a population, it needs to create an environment where it can peacefully conduct operations. Insurgents live among the people and if they are not isolated, they may exert their influence, coercion and sometimes intimidation over the people. It is hard for a government to carry out its mandate to the people if it is constantly facing opposition from groups of people who are not aligned to its mission. In the case of the Somali government, the government should have first squashed the insurgents then proceeded to win over the population. The population could have been won through a variety of ways. First, the government should have provided the population with several political inducements in the form of development aid. It should have also created opportunities where the population gets to live freely and they enjoy their basic human rights.

In any counterinsurgency operation, the people are usually spectators and they may align with any side they deem fit. In the case of Somalia, the people felt like the government was losing its grip on national matters. The government's inability to quell uprisings in different parts of the country made it look weak and ineffective. It is hard for a population to align with a government which cannot protect them. Government's which cannot stamp their authority are at a risk of not only losing support but also being overrun by insurgents. The then Somalia leader Mohamed Siad Barre made several attempts of gaining popularity among the several warring Somalia clans by bribing some of the clan leaders. While he was concentrating on creating disunity among the clans as a way of preventing a major attack, the insurgents continued to recruit more people into the fight and kept growing stronger. The insurgents utilized refugee camps which had sprung up in different parts of the country as places where they could obtain food and medical facilities.

Without military defeat of the enemy, a government cannot attain political power to work safely with the population. Siad Barre did not employ effective skills in his attempt to locate the insurgents. There are various methods which can be used to safely separate the population from insurgents. One of the methods is to use police primacy. The use of such a policy restricts the role played by the army. Instead, governments attempting to launch military action against insurgents use locally recruited forces to gather intelligence and report back to governments where the intelligence can be acted upon. Siad did not employ this tactic. The insurgents kept living among the population and therefore it was difficult to stop them without killing innocent civilians. If he would have carefully planned the military attacks, he would have been able to stop the resistance. He should have employed proper intelligence technics to locate and expel insurgent leaders who lived among the population. He should have also installed intelligence collection officers in various towns, villages, and hamlets who would be used to locate insurgents and prevent them from recruiting more people into the cause. Siad Barre's failed to achieve the results he was hoping for because he decided to unleash force indiscriminately.

During any insurgency, the insurgents usually aim to attain political support and to widen their reach. They can easily do this because they live among the population and therefore understand the most effective ways of winning them over. Most insurgent groups can connect better with the local people than the government can. This enables them to spread propaganda and to sway popular opinion. Somalia was a highly divided state during Siad Barre's regime. It would have been very difficult for Barre to gain support among the various clans which wanted to attain autonomy. If he would have pitted himself against the clan elders in an opinion war, he would have lost. Therefore the most appropriate line of action for him was to defeat the insurgents in decisive military action. Instead of focusing on bribing the different leaders, he should have been gathering intelligence to help him locate the insurgents who lived among the people.

The inability to defeat insurgent forces in a country only opens the doors to more political instability. Barre failed to take appropriate military action against the insurgents and instead chose to flee his country. He left the insurgents who enjoyed popular support to run the country. They, however, could not bring about political stability. Most insurgent groups do not possess the requisite knowledge of running successful governments which is why should never be allowed to take to the reign so f power. Ever since Barre fled the country, Somalia has not had a functioning government. There have been various insurgent groups which have come up and have brought a lot of instability to the country. The country has failed to grow economically as the government is always caught in wars with insurgents. The ability of one insurgent group to take power laid down a bad precedent as other groups also believed they could do the same. The case of Somalia illustrates the point that military defeat of insurgency is the most appropriate action in a country which desires to attain political stability.

The theories of counterinsurgencies do not hold in most situations. It is highly ineffective to try and gain popular support in an extremely violent situation. Most counterinsurgency operations are usually very violent and the only option a government can take is to take military action against the insurgents. It does not make any sense to use minimal force against opponents who may be attacking with maximum force. A perfect example is the war between Chechnya and Russia. The war started in 1994 and ended in 1996. During the war, the Chechens would launch full-scale attacks against Russian tanks. The Chechen insurgents had organized themselves into platoons and had armed themselves with heavy artillery. In such a scenario, it was impossible for the government to take up any other non-military action. Even though counterinsurgency operations are usually aimed at winning over the population, it is extremely difficult to do that without eliminating insurgents through military action.

Research indicates that there are two ways through which insurgents can win a war. First, they can organize themselves in conventional armies and go against established government forces where they may have a chance to win. In the second way, the insurgents may protract political conflicts and exhaust ruling governments. Attempting to gain support and popularity is a political tactic which can easily fail. Many insurgent leaders enjoy a massive following and can therefore easily rally public support. The Chechen insurgent leader General Dzhokar Dudayev enjoyed massive support from the group and it would, therefore, be futile to try and fight him in a political battle. He had been a general in the Soviet Airforce before becoming the leader of the insurgency army. At one time when the Russian army reached the leader's headquarters, his supporters sprung a formidable ambush against the Russian military and caught them unawares. The Russians were at a great loss as the attack was highly unexpected. In the case of the Chechen insurgents, it was imperative for the Russian military to respond with maximum force. The insurgents were putting up a formidable fight and the government forces would have suffered greater loss had they used minimal force.

The people who support the use of political tools such as the attainment of popular support and the use of minimal force during conflict do so only out of ethical considerations. However, it should be noted that insurgencies and revolutions rarely adhere to such liberal and simplistic notions. For instance, in the Chechnya and Russian insurgency war, there was little regard for ethics and any other liberal notion. The Chechen insurgents were attacking with maximum force and therefore the Russian military had to respond with equal force. The Russian counterinsurgency force needed to isolate the Chechen insurgents and to launch attacks against them. This was however difficult since the insurgents would sometimes blend with the civilian population. Many insurgencies usually occur as a result of unchecked grievances by some sections of the populations. The government in power is usually unpopular due to some of its policies. Insurgents usually rely on the support of the population in order to sustain resistance and wars against ruling governments. The insurgents may use underhand techniques to recruit more civilians towards their cause. It is therefore necessary for ruling governments to check their expansion and stop them before they metastasize into large and formidable armies.

Since it is very hard for ruling governments to win in political wars against insurgency tactics, the only option is to launch military attacks against insurgent armies early enough. The only precaution which needs to be taken is to ensure the attacks are directed towards the insurgents and not the general population. In the Russia and Chechnya case, the then Russian defense minister General Pavel Grachev underestimated the insurgents until it was too late and their force had grown. He should have taken up military action...