Rethinking Counterinsurgency Warfare
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INTERVIEW RETHINKING COUNTERINSURGENCY Warfare Michael Evans explains the complexities of counterinsurgency to Sergei DeSilva-Ranasinghe ichael Evans is the ADC counterinsurgency—at least in its purely Fellow at the Australian military dimension—draws heavily on earlier Defence College in Canberra, traditions of small-unit soldiering in general, where he is responsible for and Second World War jungle warfare the design and delivery of techniques and tactics, in particular. Australian Mcounterinsurgency education for mid-career Army counterinsurgency as a serious and senior ADF officers. He is a war studies institutional activity began in the early 1960s graduate of King’s College, London, and a with the work of Brigadier (later General) Member of the International Institute for Frank Hassett on anti-guerrilla doctrine in South Strategic Studies. Dr Evans served in the East Asia. By the mid-1960s, with Australian Rhodesian and Zimbabwean armies and was troops in South Vietnam, the Army produced closely involved with the British Army in one of the best doctrine manuals of any English- integrating former guerrillas into the Zimbabwe speaking Cold War Western military, the 1965 National Army. He is a former Head of the Division in Battle Pamphlet 11, Counter- Australian Army’s Land Warfare Studies Revolutionary Warfare. It was short, well-written Centre at the Royal Military College, and mercifully free of the business school Duntroon, and the lead author of the style jargon that blights much contemporary Australian Army’s Land Warfare Doctrine 3-0-1, doctrine. Although the manual’s political Counterinsurgency (2009). context is now dated, in terms of technique it In September 2010, Dr Evans spoke was and still remains highly regarded by experts with Sergei DeSilva-Ranasinghe, a defence as a model of its kind. Indeed, it was being used analyst who has published widely on by Australian commanders in Somalia as late Australian, South Asian, and Indian as 1993, which is quite a shelf-life. Ocean political and security issues. Sergei DeSilva-Ranasinghe: From a COIN Sergei DeSilva-Ranasinghe: When did perspective, what was significant about the COIN (counterinsurgency) tactics and strategies Australian involvement and experience in first enter the Australian military and how was the Malayan emergency? it implemented? Michael Evans: The Australian military learnt Michael Evans: In the modern sense, a great deal from the 1952 British Army’s counterinsurgency began in the Australian Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya Army in the 1950s during the era of Forward pamphlet and drew deeply on the success of Defence in South-East Asia under the Menzies British Commonwealth forces under Generals government. However, as has been pointed Briggs and Templer. Pragmatism, flexibility and out by several historians, Australian the Anglo-Saxon penchant for the functional POLICY • Vol. 26 No. 4 • Summer 2010–11 41 RETHINKING COUNTERINSURGENCY Warfare over the theoretical were all products of counterinsurgency.’ I am yet to meet a Vietnam Malaya, and Australia built its approach on this veteran who does not believe that what he was empirical tradition. Of course, today, Malaya doing in South Vietnam was counterinsurgency. has enormous symbolic significance because Counterinsurgency is like pornography: it produced one of the few relatively clear- you know it when you see it. cut victories over an insurgent movement. The Australian Army that came out of Most of the methods used were codified in Sir Vietnam was in my opinion probably the finest Robert Thompson’s classic 1966 work, Defeating small unit army in the world in the early 1970s. Communist Insurgency. Malaya informed It was not for nothing that General William Division in Battle Pamphlet 11. Looking Westmoreland, the US Commander in South back, what is striking about Malaya is that as East Asia, compared the Australian Army to the a campaign, it was sui generis in its success. inter-War German Reichswehr under Hans von When applied by others, most notably by Seeckt. As a former Chief of the General Staff, the Rhodesians, these methods proved much Lieutenant General John Coates, has observed, less successful in the different political and the war in Vietnam professionalised the regular ethnographic circumstances. Australian Army as a modern combined-arms force—and that professionalism had at its Sergei DeSilva-Ranasinghe: From a COIN core the art of counter-revolutionary warfare perspective, what was significant about the (as counterinsurgency was referred to at Australian involvement and experience in the time). Vietnam? Michael Evans: That’s an interesting Sergei DeSilva-Ranasinghe: How would question to ponder given the revival of interest you describe the state of the Australian military in counterinsurgency over the last few years and and its preparedness for COIN in the aftermath the rise of a group of Western military of Vietnam to its deployment in East Timor? fundamentalists known popularly as the Michael Evans: We were not prepared for COINdinistas. Some COINdinistas, drawing East Timor—although people like me had on the intellectual fusion of classical been warning that the Australian Army would counterinsurgency pacification techniques with go and fight offshore in South-East Asia or the neo-classical ideas of ‘clear, hold and build’ Pacific—for several years. The period 1972– theories, claim that the Australians never really 97 was in my view the era of the Australian conducted counterinsurgency in Phuoc Tuy Army’s Babylonian Captivity. The land force province. According to this revisionist was seen as a kind of geographical abstraction argument, the Australian Task Force ‘cleared and not as an instrument of statecraft. It was and held’ but never built. We patrolled in chained like an unwanted dog to the Defence an ‘enemy-centric’ fashion and fought the of Australia (DOA) doctrine and forced to Viet Cong, but we did not take a convert itself from a military establishment ‘population-centric’ approach with all of its configured for expeditionary warfare and tropical attendant civil-military functions. Therefore, counterinsurgency into a force that would be the argument goes, Australians did not optimised for domestic, long-range desert group execute proper counterinsurgency. This strikes operations in Northern Australia. Army 21, as a classic case of presentism triumphing in as this scheme was called, was part of a strategic historical analysis. It is akin to saying that fantasy reminiscent of France’s Petainists and because the Catholic Mass is now performed their obsession with the Maginot Line. No one in plain English with the priest in full view of seems to have recalled Major General Sydney the congregation, the older Latin version Rowell’s wise advice to the Americans about with the priest partly obscured no longer fulfils fears of a Japanese landing in Broome in 1942: the essence of Catholicism as redefined by ‘if they land we’ll send the Salvage Corps to Vatican II. We need to be aware of ‘Vatican II pick up their bones because there is no water 42 POLICY • Vol. 26 No. 4 • Summer 2010–11 RETHINKING COUNTERINSURGENCY Warfare between Broome and Alice Springs.’ Army to understand the implications of post- should have relentlessly quoted Rowell at conflict stability operations and, more broadly, those individuals in the 1980s and 1990s nation-building as a strategy. When we took who sought to impose DOA thinking on the Osama bin Laden’s wolf’s lair in the Tora Bora land force. mountains, what did we find in the caves? Australia was lucky that the Chief of Army We found copies of insurgency manuals, in 1997, Lieutenant General Frank Hickling, including Mao Zedong’s On Guerrilla Warfare. took the brave decision to break with DOA We have no excuse for not knowing what thinking and return the Army to its traditional was coming. roots as an expeditionary force. Not much more than a year later we were in East Timor. To field Sergei DeSilva-Ranasinghe: How has the a force, we had to improvise and cannibalise Australian Army managed its deployments in land force capabilities hollowed out by a quarter both Iraq and Afghanistan? What do you see are century of death by a thousand cuts. We were its successes and shortcomings or similarities saved by Hickling’s breathing space, by the and differences? quality of our soldiers, and by the long shadow Michael Evans: The beginning of wisdom of the expeditionary professionalism bequeathed is to understand that the Australian Army is by operations in Vietnam. If matters had gone first and foremost a political instrument, a tool wrong for Australia in East Timor, there would of statecraft. As Colonel Ted Serong, the leading have been a reckoning with those who designed Australian counterinsurgency theorist of the DOA for the Army. They were lucky. Cold War era, put it, Australia always uses its military force in support of a diplomatic position Sergei DeSilva-Ranasinghe: What impact and never the reverse. Our Army is small; did the East Timor operation have on the it lacks mass; it is an instrument of surgical Australian military and how did it influence effect, insofar as that is possible in land warfare. and prepare the Australian Army for COIN Accordingly, our offshore deployments to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan? Afghanistan and Iraq have reflected a form of Michael Evans: East Timor restored the military statecraft to support both our liberal professional confidence of the Australian Army democratic values and our alliance with the after a quarter of a century of sterile DOA United States. In Iraq, an unpopular thinking. It re-established our reputation as an commitment, we deployed a cavalry regiment; expeditionary land force. It is no accident that in Afghanistan, a war with broader popular this confidence and reputation was epitomised support, we entered Uruzgan with the Dutch by Peter Cosgrove, the last of the great Vietnam in a reconstruction and training mission plus veterans, who provided skilled and charismatic a Special Operations Task Group.