FEATURE ARTICLE

October 2005

Marines Probing New Ways to Fight Future Insurgencies

By Sandra I. Erwin

Marine Corps planners are drafting a new strategy for tackling insurgencies in future conflicts. Officials stress that the aim is not to write a war plan for the current conflict Iraq, but rather to generate fresh ideas for countering so-called “irregular” threats in the coming decades. Part of the latest thinking among Marine strategists is the notion that Islamic militant organizations such as Al Qaeda are labeled terrorist organizations when in fact they should be viewed as insurgencies.

Spearheading the project is Lt. Gen. James Mattis, head of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Va.

“Gen. Mattis has asked us to write a concept for counterinsurgency,” said Lt. Col. Lance McDaniel, who overseas the concepts and plans division at the command. Operations in Iraq certainly motivated the Corps to pursue new ways to fight insurgencies. “But we are not going to write a concept for Iraq,” said McDaniel. “We are writing a concept for the future, and taking advantage of the energy and lessons we learned from it.”

Mattis is expected to review a draft counterinsurgency strategy before the end of the year, and he wants to make it a “living document” that can be revised over time, said McDaniel.

The counterinsurgency strategy will shape scenarios in future war games. Marine planners will feed it into next year’s Title 10 war games, said McDaniel. The first one will be Expeditionary Warrior 2006, in January. Title 10 war games are annual service events that highlight combat capabilities and influence weapons budgets, doctrine and training requirements.

In the current draft, the terms “counterinsurgency” and “irregular threats” are used interchangeably. The Defense Department generally characterizes non-state enemies and terrorist cells as “irregular.” The Marine Corps will focus on counterinsurgency as one piece of a broader plan to build the new strategy.

Mattis’ decision to launch this effort is an indication that the Marine Corps remains largely a conventional force, even though it is far ahead of the other services in developing tactics for urban warfare and unconventional so-called “small wars.”

“But we acknowledge that the training we give our people and the equipment we buy is aimed at a more conventional peer threat,” McDaniel said. “We are acknowledging that threats are changing.”

Among those threats are organizations such as Al Qaeda, which employ terrorist tactics but also embody many of the characteristics of an insurgency, according to one Marine strategist.

Al Qaeda’s transnational networking and a multi-ethnic constituency has the makings of a “spiritually based insurgency that is somewhat different than the Maoist people’s war model, which underwrites most counterinsurgency doctrine,” wrote Marine Lt. Col. Michael F. Morris in a March 2005 research paper at the U.S. Army War College.

The dangers Al Qaeda pose flow from its willingness to employ weapons of mass destruction, its global reach and its focus on targeting America, Morris noted. But, more importantly, Al Qaeda’s strength lies in its “revolutionary and expansionist ideology.”

The size of Osama bin Laden’s organization, its political goals, and its enduring relationship with a fundamentalist Islamic social movement, Morris added, “provide strong evidence that Al Qaeda is not a terrorist group but an insurgency.”

This form of insurgency challenges the Pentagon’s traditional approach to planning wars, Morris argued. Al Qaeda is engaging in a “somewhat leisurely paced guerrilla war,” which makes it difficult for U.S. planners to develop a strategic response. “Long term success for the United States will require support for true political reform, a revolutionary cause in itself, among autocratic Islamic governments.”

The Marine Corps, meanwhile, is recognizing that its traditional doctrine of being the “9-11 force” that shows up in an emergency and then hands over long-term deployment duties the Army may have to be revised.

Back-to-back deployments in Iraq are not “something that Marine forces would find doctrinally appropriate,” said Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, director of operations on the Joint Staff. But he noted that, as long as U.S. forces remain in Iraq, the Marine Corps would continue to send troops on seven-month rotations. “Any Marine you talk to will say if there’s fighting and dying to be done, they’re going to be a part of that,” he told reporters.

As a result, the Combat Development Command is drafting a concept for “sustained operations,” said McDaniel. “The Marine Corps doesn’t necessarily see itself only doing 9-11 crisis-response missions, but also plans to be engaged in sustained operations.

“We would go in with no expectation of ending it right away,” he said. “A rotational force is part of our vision of the future as well as the reality of war.”

The counterinsurgency strategy now in the works is not expected to become “joint” in the foreseeable future, McDaniel said. The Special Operations Command, however, has shown interest in the project. “They are concerned about non-state actors,” he said. “I think we’ll see some commonality.”

SOCOM is a more “natural fit, a more natural partner than the conventional Army, although the Army may benefit from our concept as well,” McDaniel added. “At this point, it’s just a service concept, and has not been elevated to joint level.”

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