COIN, Salience and 2nd "Bests"

By Dave Anderson:

The "easiest" form of counter-insurgency is to drain the ocean in which the insurgent fish swim. This has the side-effect of killing all the coral, seaweeds, mussels, small fish and intermediate predators in the quest to either kill off through force or starve out the sharks that are the insurgents, but it is "effective" if one does not care about the long term impacts on the biome.

It 'worked' for Stalin in the Caucuses for at least three or four generations, it 'worked' for the Stalin in Ukraine against the Cossacks and other anti-Soviet groups. It 'works' if the occupying/counter-insurgent power does not care about the population at all, and wants the land for either its strategic rents, economic rents such as oil production capacity that requires a minimal and easily imported work-force or to establish a very credible precedent of deterrance.

 Matt Yglesias makes this point that for high enough priority needs brute force and genocide "work" as a solution set in the context of Star Wars and COIN as Abu M et al are engaged in some fantastic fan-boy and COIN in-crowd wankery about COIN in the Star Wars universe:

Once it�s clear that the Empire can destroy planets wholesale, the rebels are in agreement with Tarkin and the Emperor that sufficient firepower, deployed without conscience, can, in fact, win the war. Thus, the rebels only hope for staving off defeat is a bold attack on the Death Star itself. As Exum�s correspondent notes, �they got lucky� in terms of destroying the Death Star so it made perfect sense for the Emperor to simply respond by trying to build a new one. Here, again, both sides agree that a fully operational Death Star can end the war, so again the rebels need to mount a somewhat desperate attack. And they win!

But the lesson here isn�t that the rebels are being irrationally conventional; the lesson is that there are limits to the logic of counterinsurgency doctrine. Overwhelming force and brutality really can be applied to good effect if you�re really willing to unleash it in an evil way.

Destroying the cities, killing the men, and enslaving the women while salting the earth around the ruins is the �classic� counter-insurgency solution when the problem possesses high enough salience. Population-centric COIN is a "second best� approach to low salience conflicts.