The Security Serenity Prayer

By Dave Anderson

The classic Serenity Prayer is a beseechment of minimalist goals in that it strives to give its supplicants the wisdom to know which goals are actually achievable and to then have the courage to accept those goals:

God grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change;

Courage to change the things I can;

And wisdom to know the difference.

John Robb asks a good question --- why are we still seeking maximalist goals in Afghanistan and Pakistan when the best evidence suggests that the only goals that are achievable are minimal goal sets:

It's interesting that in practice, open source counter-insurgency is in the process of quickly and decisively displacing the much ballyhooed US COIN (counter-insurgency) doctrine.  So, why are we still clinging to the myth of traditional COIN?  Might as well throw out the existing manual and rewrite it with the rules of open source counter-insurgency. The rules required to do this well are very different and getting them right will save us a lot of misadventure in the future from failed efforts at nation-building and traditional COIN.

If one assumes that violence has been democratized, the power of the state as an entity has been constrained to some degree by an informal norm that is developping against genocide and forced ethnic cleansing (observed as often in the breech as in practice) and increasingly brittle inter-connections as reduncancy and resiliency cut into the short term profit margin, traditional COIN doctrine is one last attempt to assert control on things that may or may not be able to change.

COIN as promogulated by the US military and practiced by the United States is a doctrine designed to implement fairly maximal goal sets.  COIN is supposed to allow a foreign power (the United States) to significantly restructure a foreign society and its underlying power dynamics in order to support a favored ruling regime agianst internal opposition.  That is ambitious, and the resources that are needed to give this a decent chance of happening, according to COIN advocateas, are also ambitious; trillions of dollars, a decade or more, and several hundred thousand loyal, competent troops who possess a high degree of discipline and discretion.  It is an attempt to change things that may not be changable given highly probable resource and political constraints.

Open source COIN, or the hiring of tribal militias when common interests are present is a minimalist goal set. At that point, the foreign power accepts that except on the margin, the foreign power, the United States, can only influence the option space within a foreign country but not fundamentally change the underlying power dynamics. 

That is a massive difference in view.  And if one accepts this view that minimal goal sets are the most likely to be achieved at reasonable costs, then a massive amount of institutional investment, prestige and careers will need to be written off. 

America needs to look at a national security serenity prayer as the line between what is changable and achievable and what is not is often blurred in a haze of chest-thumping and the assumption that if we try hard enough/will hard enough/commit enough troops without concern for costs, we can change anything and anywhere we like to become amenable to our interests without concern for the local interest sets.