Graph Theory’s Use in Early 21st Century US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine
In his paper for the 2012 Political Networks Conference and Workshops at the University of Colorado in Boulder, sociology professor David Knoke discusses the relatively successful implementation of General Stanley McChrystal’s Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine, as documented in US Army Field Manual 3-24 (FM3-24), in Iraq, as well as its relative failure in Afghanistan. FM3-24 acknowledged the changing threat that modern jihadist insurgencies pose when compared to the Maoist insurgencies of the 1960s and 70s. Due to the more decentralized nature of such emerging threats, traditional campaigns targeting high-value military and political insurgent leaders are far less effective.
While much of the paper focuses on the population-centric approach to COIN, the enemy-centric component of COIN has a number of interesting insights driven by graph theory. In discussing network-based insurgencies (as opposed to more traditional, hierarchical insurgencies), FM3-24 states that
“Networked organizations are difficult to destroy. In addition, they tend to heal, adapt, and learn rapidly. However, such organizations have a limited ability to attain strategic success because they cannot easily muster and focus power. The best outcome they can expect is to create a security vacuum leading to a collapse of the targeted regime’s will and then to gain in the competition for the spoils.”
In response, the US Army shifted its tactics towards kill-or-capture missions against leaders in high-density insurgent networks, forcing these cells to take on more network-based organization and be starved out of effectiveness, having been denied access to resources and forced to attempt lower impact attacks.
Source:
http://www.insna.org/PDF/Connections/v33/Knoke_Vol33Iss1_INSNApdf.pdf