Brits, COIN without coins
Ian recently noted that Great Britain will soon be undertaking austerity measures despite the fact that its economy is still performing significantly below trend. This action is being taken to hold onto the hot money and to please the potential bond market vigilantes who have not made an actual appearance yet on British debt. That means higher taxes, fewer public services, and generally a nastier times for the bottom 97% of the population. Oh yeah, it also significantly increases the chances of a nasty double-dip recession.
The Independent reports that austerity may actually impact British military operations as the Afghanistan deployment is expensive and does not do much to directly add to British security. At this point it is a matter of tagging along in the special relationship in the hope that the US pays attention to Great Britain.
With the Ministry of Defence facing a £36bn budget black hole over the next decade and savage cuts likely under the defence review, politicians are warning that the war has become financially untenable.
“It is unsustainable for this number of troops to be in Afghanistan and Pakistan for an indefinite period. The forces just aren’t large enough, and I know the Secretary of State for Defence is more than aware of this,” said the Conservative MP Patrick Mercer.
A shift in UK government policy was outlined by Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, on Friday, when he said that Britain was not a “global policeman”, that he would like to see troops return “as soon as possible”, and that Britain needs to “reset expectations and timelines”. He added: “We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy of a broken, 13th-century country. We are there to see our global interests are not threatened.”
The comments are a clear statement of intent, according to General Sir Hugh Beach, former deputy commander of British land forces. “Words like ‘timelines’ and ‘expectations’ – if that isn’t a clear message that we’re planning to get out early then I don’t know what would be.”
COIN is expensive and time consuming. Steve has estimated that a fully funded COIN campaign would last a decade and cost $1.2 trillion dollars. Others estimate a fully funded COIN campaign cost north of $2 trillion dollars and last a decade or more. This is an illustration of the grand Clauswitzian failure of Western COIN doctrine as it neglects the political level in pursuit of operational aims.
The political is the supreme level of importance. Tactical and operational successes can feed into political successes as long as they operate within a context that is aligned with a coherent overall grand strategic goal set. If tactical and operational successes do not align or are counter-productive to the overall grand strategic goal sets, then those apparent successes are not successes. At best they are side-shows of no import; at worse they are enablers of grand strategic failure as the political OODA loop is seduced by the appearance of excellence in the lower realms…
Using Algeria and Vietnam, the political costs of the COIN strategy were very high; promises of ten to twenty year wars, consumption of the society’s productive surplus… and domestic political instability…
COIN today promises the same type of inputs — ten to twenty year wars, operational costs of one to two points of annual GDP at a time of structural deficits and domestic fiscal crisis — with the same type of outcomes — weak, client states in need of continual support in secondary or tertiary areas of interest.
And shockingly the public of democracies don’t like COIN nor do they want to spend those resources for minimal real gains in security…
It is politically extraordinarily difficult to tell the voting public that they will have to “suck on it” while fully funding an unpopular war where the optimistic estimate is that there will be another five to ten years of fighting and funding at the current level before anything that could approach ‘victory’ could be declared.Austerity should mean cutting out the luxury expenditures first. And in the minds of most voting publics, Afghanistan as it is currently funded is a luxury expenditure. Great Britain is not the first country to think about leaving Afghanistan (or Iraq) due to budget constraints, nor will it be the last.
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“Words like ‘timelines’ and ‘expectations’ – if that isn’t a clear message that we’re planning to get out early then I don’t know what would be.”
Get out early? This man has a strange conception of time.
“It is politically extraordinarily difficult to tell the voting public that they will have to “suck on it” while fully funding an unpopular war”
Well, I suppose the UK govt is necessarily somewhat more responsive to pressure from constituents, but with a new govt just voted in I wonder if public pressure in this case is much of a worry, at least for the next year or two.
I don’t mean to sidetrack the discussion of military spending, but could we please not adopt the gov’t.’s and corporate media’s term “austerity” to describe what is being proposed? Austerity is self-denial. The proposed cuts in spending are not self-denial, they are denial by the right-wing and neo-liberals to the rest of the population. Note that the “austerity” proposals have not included self-denial by the other 3% of income through taxation. Note that it has not included a financial transaction/speculation tax (“Tobin tax”) on the so-called “hot money.”
I think most readers here are already well aware that “austerity” is a tainted word, anon.
Who is this Anderson guy, and why does Ian let people post who use acronyms they never explain? I take it from google COIN means counterinsurgency. Is that really such a big hard word? Is that really harder to understand than this COIN nonsense?
Anderson’s got some smart things to say, which is why I asked him to post. COIN is a particular type of counter-insurgency strategy, there are other types.
Ian — thanks.
@ Anon — Good point, I have been mainly cross-posting these pieces from my home blog, Newshoggers.com, where I am assuming my audience is familiar with the jargon that I am using. I’ll make sure to remember that I’m writing for a different audience here and use a bit less jargon and acronyms. That should help my writing.
Dave
Osama bin Laden stated that Al Qaeda was all about bankrupting the US (and it allies) and it looks like the Brits think he has succeeded in their case.
Estimated US GWOT costs are at the trillion dollar mark. What Have we Bought for $1 Trillion? asks Rep. Jan Schakowski (D-IL), and the US is talking about “having to adopt fiscal discipline” to counter mounting deficits and debt, when that would mean either continued stagnation or a double-dip, not mention reducing social programs, which, if cut, would reduce the living standard.