Sun Tzu on Counterinsurgency

     As I mentioned last week, I am teaching a Winter Study course on Sun Tzu.  One of today's readings, suggested by one of my students, is a great example of how ancient thought can still have something to contribute to contemporary questions.

    The article is by David Kilcullen, who was profiled in the New Yorker  here, on which I commented here.   The piece, from the May-June 2006 issue of Military Review (Warning PDF!), is entitled, "Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency."  It is thoroughly infused with Sun Tzu's thinking.

     Take Kilcullen's first point: "Know your turf."  This suggests one of Sun Tzu's primary concerns of getting to know the ground or terrain.  For Sun Tzu, this means a direct and detailed understanding of the physical surroundings and how they relate to the enemy's capabilities and deployment.  It also has implications for a broader geo-strategic understanding: how the potential battleground might relate to the possibility of crafting alliances to strengthen a strategic advantage.  Kilcullen moves even further, but in ways still consistent with Sun Tzu, when he includes the social and cultural facets of terrain:

Know the people, the topography, economy, history, religion, and culture. Know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader, and ancient grievance. Your task is to become the world expert on your district. If you don’t know precisely where you will be operating, study the general area. Read the map like a book: Study it every night before sleep and redraw it from memory every morning until you understand its patterns intuitively

     This is obviously the kind of attention to preparation and knowing the enemy that Sun Tzu emphasizes.

     There are many other resonances with Sun Tzu.  Here are two of the more evident.

Start easy. If you were trained in maneuver warfare you know about surfaces and gaps. This applies to counterinsurgency as much as any other form of maneuver. Don’t try to crack the hardest nut first—don’t go straight for the main insurgent stronghold, try to provoke a decisive showdown, or focus efforts on villages that support the insurgents. Instead, start from secure areas and work gradually outwards.

     Or, as Sun Tzu says, "attack a place the enemy does not protect," and "do not attack his elite troops."

    And, as a last example, this point of Kilcullen comes directly from chapter 3 of Sun Tzu:

Fight the enemy’s strategy, not his forces. At this stage, if things are proceeding well, the insurgents will go over to the offensive. Yes, the offensive, because you have created a situation so dangerous to the insurgents (by threatening to displace them from the environment) that they have to attack you and the population to get back into the game.

     Seems pretty clear to me that Sun Tzu can inform modern counterinsurgency.  Too bad the US did not think in these terms four years ago.

Comments

[Dave of the Coonties]

Visiting from Achenblog. A colleague who just raided the University of Florida campus for journal articles not available online assures me that the campus looks neat and tidy and the students are behaving normally. Coonties are cute little Florida cycads, mini-dinosaur plants.

Today, the Washington Post had an online discussion with British General Rupert Smith, who had some success in Bosnia and who's written a book titled "The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World." In response to a question, he mentioned that he and Kilcullen are probably on the same page. To judge from the Guardian's review of the book, Smith prevailed by knowing Ratko Mladic well enough to deceive him--a very Sun Tzu thing to do.

General Smith's last comment at the Washington Post was ". . . having invaded Iraq and if we withdrew now, are we prepared to watch, with the rest of the world, your anticipated bloodbath and then accept whatever regime formed in its aftermath? -- I think not."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/01/17/DI2007011701353.html

Not a popular answer at the moment, when all of the options seem bad.

[Ryan Henke]

Have you ever considered that you don't know "taoism" (i.e., a way....) as well as you conceive.

Ryan

[Sam]

Yes, of course. There is always something about Way that is beyond our understanding.

[Ryan]

Its seems to me solutions to war are more valuable than ways to commence a movement of democracy on a regime that wasn't even responsible for the actions that prompted it. I suppose though you feel that your repsonse to the situation is proper; it just seems that maybe you don't quite get it. Way or the way, there isn't a word for it - heck, it isn't even taoism, in truth.

[Sam]

The post is about Sun Tzu, not Taoism. Sun has a notion of "Tao," but it is closer to a Confucian definition than a Taoist. My only purpose with this post is to suggest that Sun Tzu, as an example of ancient Chinese thought, is still relevant for modern warfare. That is not to say that I agree with this war - I don't - or that I am sympathetic to all applications of Sun Tzu. I only mean to point out the relevance of the ancient to the modern.

[Ryan]

I can see why you do so; I was coming from an angle of trying to lead you beyond such pedantic conversations - but it is likely that you won't understand this, as a manner of being, as I mean it - without a hardened edge. I rarely talk about war, but represent peace: it seems to work without effort, to be a bit trite.