Dazed and COINfused
I’m going to cop to a less-than-secret secret.
I, unfortunately, am the inventor of the term “COINdinista” and his rarely acknowledged evil twin “COINtra.”
Gian Gentile outed me as the COINer of the term years ago,but I rarely have talked about it in public because it’s such a silly phrase.
“COINdinista” was created nearly three years ago to point out a rising caste of thinkers, men and women who sought to redefine the way we looked at the logic and grammar of 21st century warfare: John Nagl, David Kilcullen, Janine Davidson, Andrew Exum, Kim Kagan, Montgomery McFate and others.
The language of my lampoon obviously was filched from a previous small war – the insurrection in Nicaragua, which pitted communist Sandinistas against U.S.-armed Contras, the representatives of the upper caste who once held power and some of their indigenous allies.
“COINdinistas” juxtaposed (with some irony) a certain infatuation I thought Exum and others had with a leader of rebels, T.E. Lawrence, and what they actually are called to do today: The grinding, iron-fisted job of the counter-revolutionary.
“COINtras” — which never caught on — was supposed to reflect the dissenting perspectives of a wider jumble of established scholars such as Andrew Bacevich, Dale Andrade, Gian Gentile, John Mackinlay, Michael Noonan, Colin Gray, Thomas Rid and David Betz.
They sometimes fretted that COINdinistas believed that COIN’s operational arts, especially those thoughts codified in the U.S. military’s primer on the subject, FM 3–24, were ends in themselves. They wanted to re-anchor our lessons learned about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to traditional notions of strategy and the realistic balancing of costs and benefits nations must do when they wage war.
Or, as I’ve put it elsewhere, some of them expressed concern that the COINdinistas had hitched the sled of “strategy” to the horses of the operational arts and tactics, when it should be the other way around.
Regardless, COINdinistas actually liked their moniker, so it took off in their circles, and the COINtras, being somewhat fussy to begin with, didn’t care much for theirs.
But neither term was intended to be a serious marker of intellectual identity, perhaps because I’m not a serious man. They merely conjoined to serve as a jovial means of discussing paradigm shifts within a large, bureaucratic institution– such as the Pentagon — or the larger sprawl of defense intellectuals worldwide, much the way Thomas Kuhn detailed scientific revolutions.
I never thought it would catch on and never intended it to do so.
You can now imagine how awkward was that moment in Washington D.C. a couple of years ago when the primary writer of FM 3–24, Con Crane (CoIn Crane?) , told me his concerns about the intellectual chasm between COINdinistas and the COINtras. He waggishly joked that he was “COINfused.”
We then talked about Frank Hoffman’s concept of “hybrid warfare” as a potential bridge between the divided parties, but I realized that I had created a monster.
“Coindinistas” as a phrase might have reached its apogee on May 6, 2010. That’s when then-CENTCOM commander David Petraeus marched the plural off his tongue, like a pirate walking the plank, in a speech called – oh, yes – “COINdinistas and Change in the U.S. Army in 2006.”
What I found so curious about the general’s speech wasn’t the further diffusion of my silly glossary, but rather how it was used to mythologize a fake past.
I’ll let the general speak for himself as he described to the AEI crowd the gaggle of officers, scholars, humanitarians and reporters dragooned to help script FM 3–24, Counterinsurgency:
These individuals formed something of a guiding coalition for the development of the manual and our overall process of change. Pundits even developed a phrase for those who contributed to the manual and embraced its concepts. They called us “COINdinistas.” The collaboration and discussions spurred by the COINdinistas created a good bit of debate–and, periodically, some healthy discord.
Well, that’s just nonsense. No one was calling that scrum of authors “COINdinistas” when they held court in Leavenworth because I hadn’t invented the term yet. And I invented the term really to show how they were shifting the paradigm, not to describe them as an intellectual vanguard on the cusp of important change.
Petraeus was reusing my language to create the frisson of intellectual revolution before adding a dollop of something I think is completely wrong: That he and the COINdinistas of FM 3–24 were right and that their brainy reordering of warmaking in the manual had led to the pacification of Iraq and it would work in Afghanistan, too.
You see, I also had been provided a rough draft of FM 3–24 shortly after I returned from my duty as an infantryman in Anbar. I called it a “Maoist cartoon” and told the drafter who sent it that it failed to describe how guerrilla wars are actually fought in today’s world, much less why or how best we might use force to mitigate insurrections.
I predicted it would be of little lasting value to anyone in Iraq or Afghanistan. I suspected that its real utility would be as a sales job pimping a cleaner, less bloodthirsty and scientific means of waging war, which would keep us fighting overseas longer than perhaps was prudent.
This isn’t unknown to history. French generals trotted out their notions of “ink spots” and other innovations to convince Paris to engage in endemic wars amongst colonized people who didn’t want to be colonized in the late 19th century.
And I stand by all that today. The question about FM 3–24 isn’t any longer whether it should be consulted (the chapter on intelligence is the best, I grant you) but rather how soon it should be rewritten to reflect real lessons learned by and for our professional officers overseas.
I likely won’t see that done in my lifetime, but I continue to call periodically for it to transpire.
This time, however, leave reporters out of it. We really don’t know what we’re talking about.
In the meantime, the Hardy Boys of 21st century warfare, “COINdinista” and “COINtra,” continue their misadventures. Their latest appearance was perhaps the most embarrassing to me because the phrase was used by the great Clausewitzian scholar Antulio J. Echevarria II.
Gentle readers, I can’t tell you how stupid I feel when I see a real thinker structure a cogent analysis of war with the architecture of my idiocy. There are few scholars I respect as much as Echevarria, so you can imagine my horror.
In his essay, Echevarria captured the heart (and mind) of the debate in a way a mere moron like me could never do.
I still think he gives too much credence to the notion that “the population-centric approach is effective, that it can be replicated elsewhere with appropriate adjustments for different cultures; and that … the capabilities associated with COIN are the long-sought answers to the challenges posed by the ‘new’ wars of the twenty-first century.”
He also buys too quickly the euphemism “protection of the indigenous population” as a genuine, proven means of solving or mitigating the causative forces that roil today’s wars amongst the people. Even if we accept that cleaving people away from the guerrillas in their midst has some utility, it might be for reasons different from how practitioners such as David Galula understood the art of the game during the mid-20th century wars of decolonization.
Too often I think we forfeit to a Maoist construct the language and logic of 21st century wars. I remain unconvinced that most irregular forces aligned against the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan envision their uses of force and subversion in ways Mao intended.
Today’s guerrillas have goals, methods and motivations that don’t exactly sync with the protracted, staged Maoist mode of revolution, which perhaps is why the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan has had such a rough go at pacification.
We’re refighting Vietnam in 1969 and finding the various Taliban aren’t exactly the Viet Cong.
But don’t listen to my nonsense. Read Echevarria’s far smarter analysis. I agree with 95 percent of it.
And I suspect deep down he’s a COINtra, even if I also fear that deep down I’m not.
Tags: Afghanistan, Clausewitz, COINdinista, COINTRA, David Galula, David Petraeus, Iraq
