LESSONS ENCOUNTERED

How System Attributes Trumped Leadership
there are two. One is to brutalize the population into abandoning support for
insurgents and informing the government on their identity and whereabouts.
If the population will not cooperate, it is isolated and punished. Economic
warfare, concentration camps, massacres, and wholesale slaughter have all
been used for this purpose. This approach is not politically sustainable in the
United States today or in most other countries, so the second approach was
adopted.
The U.S. counterinsurgency approach was to provide security for the
population so they are free from fear of reprisals, construct an elaborate intelligence
apparatus to reveal and penetrate the insurgent organization, use
enough discriminate force to keep insurgents on the defensive without creating
collateral damage that alienates the population, and make enough of an
effort to counter popular grievances to reinforce the legitimacy of the host
government and diminish the appeal of the insurgency. This approach requires
multiple elements of power working in harmony, deep sociocultural
knowledge of the target population, perseverance, and other subsidiary, situation-specific
capabilities.
This type of counterinsurgency is much harder for an outside power such
as the United States intervening in another country such as Afghanistan or
Iraq. It is best to push the host-nation security forces to the front of the effort
because they know the country, culture, language, and insurgents better than
the United States ever could. The United States had to sell the second counterinsurgency
agenda to the host nation and transfer capabilities to execute it,
and do so well enough to generate enough progress to retain political support
at home and abroad.
A “lite” version of counterinsurgency puts less emphasis on the need to
protect and convince the population. Instead, the emphasis is on decapitating
the leadership of the insurgency. The hope is that if the insurgent or terrorist
organization is built around charismatic leaders, eliminating the leadership
will lead to the collapse of the organization. Scholarship on this issue is inconclusive,
47 but this approach has not worked well in the ongoing war on
terror. When U.S. special operations forces (SOF) became adept at exploiting
all-source intelligence to target enemy leaders, some hoped that their proficiency
would collapse enemy organizations. High-volume special operations
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