The Art of War

[alice wellintown]

Footsteps small and beautiful?


from The New Yorker

Terrorism Studies
Social scientists do counterinsurgency.by Nicholas Lemann
April 26, 2010

The idea of approaching terrorists as rational actors and defeating
them by a cool recalibration of their incentives extends beyond the
academic realm. Its most influential published expression is General
David Petraeus’s 2006 manual “Counterinsurgency.” Written in dry
management-ese, punctuated by charts and tables, the manual stands as
a rebuke of the excesses of Bush’s global war on terror.

Petraeus has clearly absorbed the theory that terrorist and insurgent
groups are sustained by their provision of social services. Great
swaths of the manual are devoted to elaborating ways in which
counterinsurgents must compete for people’s loyalty by providing
better services in the villages and tribal encampments of the
deep-rural Middle East. It’s hard to think of a service that the
manual doesn’t suggest, except maybe yoga classes. And, like Berman,
the manual is skeptical about the utility, in fighting terrorism, of
big ideas about morality, policy, or even military operations. Here’s
a representative passage:



REMEMBER SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL
Another tendency is to attempt large-scale, mass programs. In
particular, Soldiers and Marines tend to apply ideas that succeed in
one area to another area. They also try to take successful small
programs and replicate them on a larger scale. This usually does not
work. Often small-scale programs succeed because of local conditions
or because their size kept them below the enemy’s notice and helped
them flourish unharmed. . . . Small-scale projects rarely proceed
smoothly into large programs. Keep programs small.


One problem with such programs is that they can be too small, and too
nice, to win the hearts and minds of the populace away from their
traditional leaders.