Last questions about COIN (X): Is it time for a truth and reconciliation commission?

By Major Tom Mcilwaine, Queen's Royal Hussars

Best Defense guest columnist

Question Set Ten -- Do we really want to be doing this? COIN,
or whatever it is that we have been doing over the last decade, is tremendously
difficult. The direction of some of these questions suggests that it might be a
little bit more than that though. If what we are doing is fundamentally
imperial, then it raises two extra questions. First, can we do this without
using imperial methods? Second, do we want to use those methods? Is the price
we might pay to alter the behavior of the population of Yemen (in terms of what
it requires us to do) worth paying? If I am correct, then what we are doing
perhaps takes us into some areas that morally we might not wish to go. Failing
to ask ourselves some hard questions about what we have done and what we should
have done will lead politicians to believe that we can somehow do it without
doing bad things -- which means that they are more likely to want to do it in
the future. Precision munitions surely contribute to this as they have been
sold as making war clean. Perhaps we should restrict their use for COIN fights
to make politicians realize that wars really are nasty? Politicians should
understand that going to war is a terrible thing, something I am not sure the
COIN'dinistia philosophy makes clear enough.

And that is the
final issue I would like to raise: As we move away from the conflicts of the
last decade it is not enough simply to return to our combined arms heritage --
however necessary that might be. Nor is it enough to log the current narrative
on what is required for COIN success in our institutional memory bank, and
return to it when we next face a similar threat. What is required, if we are
not to make the same mistakes that we made this time, is a comprehensive
examination of what it is we were trying to achieve, what we needed to do to
achieve it, and whether we really wanted to travel down this path, or want to
now or in the future.

A
place to advocate some truth and reconciliation rather than escalating the
intellectual holy war within our profession might help too.

Major Tom Mcilwaine is a British Army officer who
is currently a student at the School of Advanced Military Studies at Ft
Leavenworth. He has deployed to Iraq as a Platoon Commander and Battalion
Operations and Intelligence Officer, to Bosnia as Aide to the Commander of
European Forces and to Afghanistan as a Plans Officer with I MEF(Fwd). Consider
this the standard disclaimer.