The recent debate over coalition strategy against ISIL has reawakened a related question: whether to support rebel groups in Syria in their fight against ISIL and Bashar al-Assad, and if so how? Even former US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is now expressing regret at not having armed certain Syrian rebel groups earlier. It seems the US will train and arm some rebels but not send Special Forces to embed with and advise them. Two important concepts appear to be absent from the strategic culture of the US and most Western countries: unconventional warfare and strategic optionality.

Unconventional warfare (UW) is often confused with asymmetric warfare or hybrid warfare. But UW has a specific definition. It refers to ‘activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow an occupying power or government by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force in a denied area’. UW is what the US engaged in at various times throughout the Cold War when it deliberately supported insurgent groups in Tibet, Angola, Nicaragua, Indonesia, and Afghanistan, for example. It’s also what the US did so effectively in the opening stages of Operation Enduring Freedom. Read more

President Obama’s ‘targeted, relentless counterterrorism campaign against ISIL’ looks more like ‘sloth and pause’ compared to the 2003 ‘shock and awe’ attack on Iraq. Since the President’s 10 September statement, four air strikes (as of time of publication) have destroyed three ISIL ‘armed vehicles’ and a mortar emplacement (here and here). That’s bad news for the occupants of a few HiLuxes but hardly a decisive blow against ISIL.

In a hapless media briefing last Friday the Pentagon’s Press Secretary, Rear Admiral John Kirby, said degrading and destroying ISIL could not be done militarily. ISIL’s ideology is the thing that needs to be destroyed, he said, ‘that’s not going to be defeated through military means alone. It’s going to take time and it’s going to take good governance, responsive politics, both in Iraq and in Syria.’ Meantime, Kirby admitted that a deployment of 125 US personnel to Erbil—part of the 475 extra US forces pledged by Obama—had been delayed: ‘We are still working through some of the sourcing solutions with that 125 personnel presence that will go to Erbil.’ Read more

I was asked in a recent radio interview what drives young men, like Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, the man suspected of beheading James Foley, to become radicalised and go overseas to places like Syria and Iraq to fight and use extreme violence. There’s no easy explanation which could summarise and rationalise why people like Bary become involved in terrorist activity and commit such abhorrent acts of violence. The truth is far from simple, and the fact is there’s no single pathway to radicalisation. Each individual will have different motivations and influences for following such a path. Any ‘expert’ who tells you otherwise is being dishonest.

Since 9/11 there has been a great deal of research conducted on trying to understand radicalisation, with various schools of thought emerging as to the key drivers for individuals to become radicalised to the point of utilising violence. That research concludes that there are a range of global, sociological and political drivers which will influence someone to become involved in those activities, all of which matter just as much as ideological and psychological drivers. Read more

A recent article on The Strategist argued that the US needs to ‘turn down the heat’ by taking advantage of opportunities to ‘arrest deteriorating situations (like Iraq and Ukraine).’ But that advice assumes the United States is capable of arresting those situations in the first instance, and that their resolution would provide foreign policy benefits to the US proportionate to the effort required to effect change.

As the most powerful nation on Earth, the US certainly has the military capability to intervene in situations such as Iraq and Ukraine should it so choose. No other country could have simultaneously maintained combat forces half a world away in the manner the US did in Iraq and Afghanistan throughout the 2000s. But the ability to deploy troops depends on more than military and logistical elements. In a broader sense, the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have eroded global confidence in American leadership, limiting its ability to build international consensus and partnership on humanitarian intervention. Read more

The last couple of months have provided an opportunity to see in action President Barack Obama national security strategy articulated in his 28 May speech at West Point which was elaborated subsequently, and less formally, with a complementary doctrine of ‘don’t do stupid (stuff)…’.

Considerable effort has gone into analysing that strategy, both in these pages and elsewhere. Policy tragics are honour-bound to try to place a stated approach within established theory. Early on, Joshua Rovner attempted to classify Obama’s foreign policy approach as ‘muddling through’, the alternative term for Charles E. Lindblom’s ‘incrementalism’ model of public-policy decisionmaking. Under that model, most policy is made in ‘baby steps’, embracing improvements at a rate the polity can handle—albeit one that never quite achieves the desired objective.

That approach is contrasted often with ‘maximisation’, in which expansive, rational examination of all possible options leads to the selection and bold implementation of the ‘best’ one. Maximisation could describe some of the administration’s domestic policy initiatives, where it’s shown an appetite for strong, risky action: the Affordable Care Act was certainly bold, as are some of the ideas mooted for immigration reform. In this field, the president has led change aggressively—but not in foreign policy. Read more