Law, Order, and Counterinsurgency

Noah Millman doubts that an organized gendarme force would have been helpful in Afghanistan or Iraq (with the hypothetical "suppose Saddam had been involved in 9/11″ so the invasion is properly motivated):

Would a massive gendarmie have helped? Only if you believe that the problems we ran into in Iraq were primarily a matter of maintaining public order rather than a problem of political conflict. And I think the preponderance of evidence points to the latter rather than the former (though the former didn't help, obviously).

Well this sort of hinges on what you mean by "the problems." These are, after all, places with a lot of problems. But I think there's plenty of evidence from a wide array of contexts that when the authorities fail to provide public order than bad things result. In particular, the absence of public order legitimizes the amassing of weapons and the use of force on the part of sub-national actors. And that's one way political conflicts turn into armed political conflicts. The best way to fight an insurgency is to try to avoid armed insurrection in the first place, and decent provision of public order is the best way to do that.

That said, I agree with this:

Matt starts out by asking the right questions. We want to avoid counter-insurgency situations. But sometimes they are "thrust upon us" – and then what do we do? It seems to me, the right answer has two parts. First, be very careful about concluding that such a situation has actually been thrust upon us. Are we actually obliged to become an occupying power? Is there any other entity, national or supra-national, who might be more appropriate to serve that function, assuming someone has to? How much would it cost us, in terms of achieving concrete policy objectives, to decline the part? Second, assuming there really is no alternative, how can we effectively thrust that situation onto somebody else in rapid fashion?

As I say, I agree. This is why I think it's crucial to understand that I was trying to make a proposal for reducing America's overall commitment of resources to the military in general and counterinsurgency in particular. We are, I think, over-spending on the Pentagon and underinvesting in domestic policing. Shifting some of our existing military resources into a potential deployable gendarme force is, I think, entirely consonant with Millman's correct take on the overall situation.