James J. Lee, AFJ Staff Frank Hoffman is a research fellow at the U.S. Marine Corps Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities at Quantico, Va.

Counterinsurgency and irregular warfare will be unavoidable for many years to come, said counter-insurgency expert Frank Hoffman, a research fellow at the U.S. Marine Corps Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities, Quantico, Va.

“It is an enduring form of war with increasing lethality,” Hoffman told attendees at Power & Limits of Jointness, the Armed Forces Journal annual conference in Washington, D.C., on May 31.

Marines are increasingly looking to lessons learned from previous conflicts, particularly Vietnam, in their preparations for modern counterinsurgency operations both in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Hoffman.

As in the past, a solid grasp of local culture is a critical part of counterinsurgency efforts, Hoffman said. “It’s part of the battlespace itself” and is addressed by the Marines at the Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning in Quantico, he said.

The 80/20 rule, where only 20 percent of counterinsurgency efforts involve the military and 80 percent involve governmental and local entities, also still applies to modern counterintelligence initiatives, Hoffman said.

“The 80/20 rule was not used well in (rebuilding) Iraq, and we’re paying the price,” he said.

But intelligence gathering requires a completely different approach from what was used in the past, Hoffman said. “We need to move from gathering intel from technical sources, to [gathering it from] sergeants and patrol leaders. It needs to come from the ground up.”

The thinking that legitimacy follows credibility while supporting a host government is also a break from previous thinking, he said. “Sometimes there is a rush to hold an election, or a rush to legitimacy” without having established credibility, said Hoffman. Credibility needs to extend to the entire government, not just to the security force, he added. “Only then will the population transfer support to its own government, rather than to the insurgency.”

There is also a need to constrain military force in modern counterinsurgency efforts, Hoffman said. Destructive force, as opposed to constructive force, will typically fail as it did for the Soviets in Afghanistan and for the United States in Vietnam. “We’re using (constructive force) in Iraq now, but we didn’t start out with that,” said Hoffman.

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