My musings on unconventional warfare (and countering unconventional warfare), foreign internal defense and political warfare from discussions with Octavian Manea over the past few months.  I should have added now that I am retired from the military I am unconstrained by doctrine, unconstrained by funding, unconstrained by a chain of command and claim an academic freedom defense to state how I really feel. :-)

Read the remainder at Small Wars Journal at the link below

The Need to Understand and Conduct UW

by Octavian Manea

Journal Article | May 25, 2015 - 2:54am

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-need-to-understand-and-conduct-uw

The Need to Understand and Conduct UW

Octavian Manea

Interview with retired US Army Special Forces Colonel David S. Maxwell.

David S. Maxwell is the Associate Director of the Center for Security Studies in the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University.  He is a retired US Army Special Forces Colonel with command and staff assignments in Korea, Japan, Germany, the Philippines, and CONUS, and served as a member of the military faculty teaching national security at the National War College.  He is a graduate of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, the Command and General Staff College, the School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth and the National War College, National Defense University.

SWJ: Insurgency, counterinsurgency, foreign internal defense, terrorism, counterterrorism - does this spectrum of possibilities fall within the larger framework of Unconventional Warfare (UW)?

David Maxwell: Terminology is important. But since 9/11 we have embarked on an effort to rename wars, rename conflicts and come up with new doctrinal terms trying to explain old things in new ways. As Clausewitz said before you embark on a war you first must understand the war. But in America there is this tendency to first must name the war and in order to understand the war we have to name the doctrinal terms that we are going to use. We spend more time on naming than on understanding. When it comes to counterinsurgency, counter-terrorism I subscribe to Colin Gray who said that the strategist needs to understand his subject, which is not COIN, not CT, but strategy for its particular challenge in COIN or CT. I think we spend more time on arguing about COIN and CT than we really do trying to devise effective strategies to protect our national interests some of which includes either defending against terrorism through CT or helping others to conduct counterinsurgency which I still think is a very necessary capability that our military needs. Although the way we have conducted counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan must be thoroughly examined, whether this is the right or wrong way.

At the same time, seeing everything through only the lens of terrorism really misses the point. Looking at everything as a terrorism problem has hurt our strategic thinking. 9-11 was a tragic event and there are people out there that are conducting terrorist acts, trying to harm the West, the US, and western interests. But terrorism is not the only problem. Naming Al Qaeda a terrorist organization is correct from a legal point of view, but what they are really conducting is more of a form of unconventional warfare. UW is a form of warfare that has been conducted for generations and for millennia. It is part of the nature of war. The phenomena we are really facing emanates from a fundamental aspect political-military operations and that is revolution, resistance, and insurgency.  Clausewitz described the paradoxical trinity and UW falls within it. But we have this tendency trying to put everything into a box - terrorism, insurgency, hybrid conflict, conventional war, nuclear war – when we really need to look at and understand the strategies of the organizations and nation-states conducting warfare. I fear that we don’t spend enough time understanding strategy. Do we understand the strategy of ISIL, of Boko Haram? We have to do a better job of thinking strategically. And one weakness is our inability to observe and understand the strategies of our opponents.

SWJ: What are the key components/dimensions of UW?

(Continued at the link below)

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-need-to-understand-and-conduct-uw