Not Your Grandfather’s Counterinsurgency: The United States Must Prepare for Radically New Forms of Nonstate Violence
Steven Metz | 07.28.21
Twenty years of costly counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have left many national security experts—and the American public—ready to move on. However, while the United States may be over COIN, COIN is not done with the United States. Over the past seventy-five years, the US military has been involved in COIN efforts around the world, often engaged in multiple fights at once. Given the prominent role insurgency played in the past and the fact that civil wars and nonstate violence remain consistent features of the international system, we should expect COIN will continue to play an important role in US national security.
The challenge for the United States is not just maintaining COIN expertise as national security attention shifts to great power competition, but also understanding how the character of insurgencies will evolve in the future. The persistent requirement to engage in COIN over many decades has led to an extensive body of both research and military doctrine on how to defeat insurgencies. However, the character of insurgency has evolved due to societal shifts in the areas of technology, economics, social networks, and other changes that shape human interaction. New forms of insurgency will likely emerge in the coming decades, and the United States may once again become involved. As the character of insurgency evolves, the strategies and tools necessary to counter it also need to adapt.
The changing character of insurgency may be no less dramatic than changes in other aspects of modern warfare that are being driven by technological advances in areas such as artificial intelligence, long-range precision fires, swarming autonomous devices, and social media. Ominously, though, America’s security experts and professionals are not focused on what these new forms of insurgency will be. Instead, they assume future variants will resemble those of the past. If this backward-looking approach continues, future US involvement in COIN campaigns could be catastrophic.
Three Waves of Insurgency
https://mwi.usma.edu/not-your-grandfathers-counterinsurgency-the-united-states-must-prepare-for-radically-new-forms-of-nonstate-violence/
