On statebuilding and the English Channel

February 5, 2008 | Alex Evans | More on Conflict and security, Development | 

A while since we’ve heard from William Lind, who’s cheerfully posting away on DNI’s snazzy new blog.  On sparkling form, he’s currently offering an explanation as to why winning counter-insurgency campaigns is like crossing the English Channel:

For centuries, Continental wars that included Great Britain tended to follow a pattern. The British would send an army to the Continent; it would be defeated by the French or Germans; the British would withdraw to their island; and their triumphant European enemy would draw up a superior force on the French or Dutch Channel coast. There was little doubt about the outcome, should that army land in Britain. But it could never get across the English Channel.

A recent conversation over dinner with a Marine lieutenant colonel, formerly a battalion commander in Iraq, helped clarify the nature of our “crossing the Channel” challenge in Fourth Generation war. With a combination of good counter-insurgency tactics (tactics that de-escalate confrontations), a strategy of protecting the population and some luck in the form of blunders by our 4GW opponents, we may be able to restore some degree of order in places where the state has disintegrated. We may further be able to take advantage of the restoration of order to get things working again on the local level: open the schools, turn the power back on, create some jobs, see local commerce revive.

What we do not know how to do, either in theory or in practice, is move from these local achievements to seeing the re-creation of a state. Yet in 4GW, that is crossing the Channel, because unless we can do that we cannot win the war.

But if you’re hoping for the answer, then disappointment sadly awaits. 

The problem of crossing the Channel in 4GW is actually more difficult than it was for those French and German armies encamped on the Channel coast, hoping. They knew perfectly well how to cross the English Channel: in boats. They just could not do it in the face of the Royal Navy. As one admiral told the British cabinet during the French invasion scare of 1805, “I do not say the French cannot come. I only say they cannot come by sea.”

We have the boats and we have the superior fleet, in the form of complete material supremacy over our 4GW opponents. What we do not have is an understanding of how to employ that superiority to regenerate a state out of statelessness. Until theory can give us such an understanding - and it may find the problem insoluble - we, like yet another attempt to invade England, the Spanish Armada, will sail in expectation of a miracle.

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