Systems Thinking and Counterinsurgencies

Abstract

T his article presents the essentials of a successful counterinsurgency strat-egy by applying a technique known as systems thinking. 1 The fundamen-tals of good strategic thought lie both in recognizing the most significant interactions between different players, how they influence each other in un-expected ways, and how to measure progress in achieving the ends of the strategy. Systems thinking has proven successful in other contexts at explain-ing human behavior, policy choices, unintended consequences, and the resis-tance of systems to change. It also offers insight into how to assess one of the most difficult questions related to strategy in complex environments—how to know when the strategy has been successful. A strategist encounters many difficulties in developing and imple-menting a counterinsurgency strategy. One major impediment is the lack of a clear and simple way to describe the strategy—US military forces and senior policymakers have traditionally shown a need to learn and re-learn the basic tenets of counterinsurgency strategies. Another difficulty is determining ap-propriate measures of success, as the twists and turns of a counterinsurgent campaign often lead to considerable ambiguity regarding progress in rela-tionship to the ultimate goal. Issues like these are not unique to counter-insurgencies. Systems thinking has proven useful in understanding public management and policy, energy and the environment, and theory develop-ment in the natural and social sciences. Many of these have something in common with insurgencies—complex actors and non-linear relationships, difficulty in measurement, band-aid solutions, impatience with results and unintended consequences or side effects. Systems thinking can provide intu-itive and counterintuitive insights for understanding counterinsurgencies. While counterinsurgent theorists will encounter much that looks like " old 26 Parameters wine in a new bottle, " several advantages accrue from developing and de-fending a counterinsurgency strategy through the lens of systems thinking, including an approach for gauging progress. Four different models of an insurgency will be introduced. Each model extends the previous one, providing new insight about the dynamics of counterinsurgent operations. In addition to unveiling the strategic impera-tives for a counterinsurgent, the models also suggest a new way to organize measures of progress in a counterinsurgent campaign. First, however, a short introduction is needed to explain basic systems thinking.