Shades of CORDS in the Kush: The False Hope of "Unity of Effort" in American Counterinsurgency
Authored by Mr. Henry Nuzum.
April 2010
148 Pages
Brief Description
Counterinsurgency (COIN) requires an integrated military, political, and economic program best developed by teams that field both civilians and soldiers. These units should operate with some independence but under a coherent command. In Vietnam, after several false starts, the United States developed an effective unified organization, Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), to guide the counterinsurgency. CORDS had three components absent from our efforts in Afghanistan today: sufficient personnel (particularly civilian), numerous teams, and a single chain of command that united the separate COIN programs of the disparate American departments at the district, provincial, regional, and national levels. This Paper focuses on the third issue and describes the benefits that unity of command at every level would bring to the American war in Afghanistan.
The work begins with a brief introduction to counterinsurgency theory, using a population-centric model, and examines how this warfare challenges the United States. It traces the evolution of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) and the country team, describing problems at both levels. Similar efforts in Vietnam are compared, where persistent executive attention finally integrated the government’s counterinsurgency campaign under the unified command of the CORDS program. The next section attributes the American tendency towards a segregated response to cultural differences between the primary departments, executive neglect, and societal concepts of war. The Paper argues that, in its approach to COIN, the United States has forsaken the military concept of unity of command in favor of “unity of effort” expressed in multiagency literature. The final sections describe how unified authority would improve our efforts in Afghanistan and propose a model for the future.
Summary
The past 2 years have been the most violent of the Afghan insurgency thus far. Taliban and affiliates seek to undermine the state and sap the will of the occupying force. In response, the United States and the coalition pursue a counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign that coordinates military, political, and economic assistance to the Afghan government so that it may provide security and services to its people. If the effort succeeds, the government will win the confidence of the citizens, who will increasingly reject the insurgents.
To achieve this unified program at a subregional level, the United States has deployed civil-military Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) across the country. The collocation of different departmental representatives has improved the American response to insurgency. However, the program faces obstacles— too few civilians, too few teams, and multiple chains of command. This monograph examines the last aspect, the absence of a unified authority to guide American PRTs, and more briefly considers the management of our nationwide efforts.
Each PRT has nearly 100 uniformed members and two or three representatives of civilian agencies. Guidance from Washington has divided the team’s mission into three spheres: improving security, which falls to the military team leader; enhancing the capacity of the government in the provinces, the purview of the State Department officer; and facilitating reconstruction, the responsibility of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) representative. The first team deployed in the fall of 2002; today, there are 25 PRTs in Afghanistan, a dozen of which are American. While the teams have increased the standing of the government in the hinterlands, the absence of unified authority diminishes their impact. Because the military, State, and USAID personnel report through separate chains of command, performance depends on the relationships between departmental representatives. When personalities mesh, teams function well. However, because there is no on-site arbiter, and recourse to Kabul is convoluted, conflicts may fester without resolution.
Similar problems plague regional and national efforts. PRTs, led originally by Army Civil Affairs officers and now by Air Force and Navy officers, have uncertain influence over battalions led by combat arms officers. When the demands of reconstruction and traditional use of force compete, the Regional Commander (who directs maneuver battalions and the military elements of PRTs) arbitrates, often in favor of combat arms priorities. At the national level, General David Barno and Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad established a tight relationship which improved civilmilitary coordination. However, the arrangement depended on those individuals. It was not an enduring construct and lapsed under their successors.
The United States is not new to this type of war. As Washington increased its commitment to South Vietnam through the mid-1960s, several departments directed segregated counterinsurgency programs. After numerous attempts failed to unify American COIN efforts, President Lyndon Johnson initiated the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program in 1967. CORDS assigned responsibility for counterinsurgency to the military and integrated all programs, including civilian, under its command. A 3-star equivalent civilian director, serving as a component commander of U.S. fighting forces in Vietnam, led the new organization. Civilians and uniformed members were interspersed throughout the organization and were vested with full authority over subordinates, no matter their parent department, agency, or service. Along with these organizational changes, the program dramatically increased the money and manpower devoted to counterinsurgency. It is true that the vast majority of the American military, which focused on conventional campaigns and assisting the South Vietnamese army, was excluded from CORDS’s purview, as were national level civilian programs. In spite of these shortcomings, the organization effectively integrated, within its parameters, the security, political, and economic portions of the COIN campaign from the district to national levels and contributed to the defeat of the Viet Cong insurgency.
Despite this success, the United States has neglected the lessons of Vietnam for at least three reasons. First, due to cultural differences, agencies resist integration. Second, the executive branch has not matched the prolonged attention of the Johnson administration that overcame this bureaucratic resistance. Finally, societal conceptions of war, instilled during World War II and reinforced by the purported failures in Korea and Vietnam as well as the exaggerated success in the Gulf War, tend to reserve the battlefield for the warrior alone, free from political interference and noncombatant complexities at the tactical level, and supported by the nation’s full might. Insurgency violates this model: it is an intimately political form of warfare in which fighter and bystander are interspersed, with limits on use of force. Moreover, insurgency must be met by American civilians as well as Soldiers.
Since American society and its leaders have been slow to accept COIN as war, the government has not applied the joint model of unity of command to our multiagency efforts in Afghanistan, instead accepting a weak surrogate, “unity of effort.” In the place of the imperative language of unified authority, the doctrine and directives for the disparate departments urge cooperation, coordination, and consensus, the soft tools of combined warfare. These mechanisms are the strongest available to manage an unwieldy coalition of sovereign state entities, such as the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), but are far from the strongest available for our own COIN efforts, which still account for half of the international involvement in Afghanistan.
While collocation has brought great benefits to PRTs, the lack of unity of command prevents further integration of the teams. Unified authority would eliminate the long, multiple chains of remote management which impede decision. Additionally, a clear command structure would reduce the role of personality which now unduly influences leadership dynamics among the three senior PRT officials.
Most importantly, unity of command would couple responsibility and authority. Today’s model of tripartite command gives each representative the authority to act in his own sphere: the USAID representative runs reconstruction, the State representative directs political programs, and the military team leader is responsible for security. But in COIN, as the widespread use of the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) demonstrates, action in one sphere affects all three. Each representative, reporting to a distant senior, acts to improve his department’s sphere, with less concern about the significant effects of that activity in the other two. By uniting command at the provincial level, a single PRT leader, with authority to direct action in every sphere and responsible for effects provincewide, could appropriately manage the broad impact of each decision beyond its bureaucratic sphere of origin.
In Afghanistan, the United States should build on the CORDS concept, uniting all our civilian and military efforts. The American command should designate one team leader of each PRT. In stable provinces, a civilian should lead, with a uniformed deputy; where significant combat continues, a military officer should lead, assisted by a civilian deputy. The Regional Commands should adopt a similar model. At the national level, a civilian ambassador, aided by a general as a deputy and an ample staff, should direct all American activities in Afghanistan through the Regional Commands and PRTs.
This monograph will focus on American efforts in the country, rather than those of the broader coalition. If the United States can take complete responsibility for two of ISAF’s four regions and resurrect the solution it devised in Vietnam, it may influence by example the command structure of the coalition.
Diffuse command is not the only challenge we face in Afghanistan. In theater, the greatest obstacles are the tenacity of the enemy and the low capacity of the Afghan government; other impediments include coalition dynamics, organizations ill-suited for COIN, and a lack of familiarity with the host nation. Furthermore, departmental divisions in Washington, exacerbated by congressional loyalties, impede our multiagency effort. Nor is the lack of unified authority the only problem with PRTs; with so few teams and so few civilians, progress will remain slow. I limit my scope to ambiguous management because this organizational problem requires almost no new resources to remedy, its correction will quickly address oft-cited problems, and the solution simply makes sense.
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