Counterinsurgent Campaign Planning

A frightening contradiction dominates the counterinsurgent environment: there is little indication that U.S. skill in this type of conflict has grown as rapidly as the strategic relevance of insurgency. This dangerous gap between capabilities and the extent of the threat, which first became evident during counterinsurgency's post-Vietnam Dark Ages, can be traced to a number of factors. Among the most pressing is the lack of a coherent planning process to link strategic, operational, and tactical responses and bring order to the erratic, ad hoc way that the United States currently approaches counterinsurgency. Since planning tools abound, the logical explanation for the lack of a counterinsurgent planning process is the misallocation of responsibility among government agencies. Presently the State Department, acting through ambassador-led country teams, has the lead role in counterinsurgency. But the State Department is, by nature, weak at long-range strategic planning. Clearly, then, some other agency must step forward, develop a method for coherent planning, and vigorously champion it in the bureaucratic morass that often surrounds counterinsurgency. The Army, which has given the most attention to the development of coherent planning methods for the orderly application of resources in conflict, is the logical choice for such an initiative. The objective should be the application of campaign planning to counterinsurgency. While the recent attention given campaign planning by the Army is healthy, nearly all of the effort has focused on the conventional Fulda Gap type of conflict; the architects of campaign planning have shied away from the bureaucratic and strategic complexities of counterinsurgency. As a result, campaign planning in its present form is not directly applicable to counterinsurgency. Adaptation is required. The sooner such a process begins, the sooner American ineptitude at counterinsurgency can be transcended

Political science · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Military History and Strategy · Military Strategy and Technology