The fourth basic purpose of military forces is paci-fication. Pacification is necessary because groups of people within a state have gone to war, and normal policing agencies can no longer enforce the peaceful and lawful behavior of potentially hostile forces, war-ring factions, or violent criminals.
The Fundamentals of Pacification:
Overwhelming Force and Its Alternatives.
In the past, great powers treated insurrections with overwhelming force, often exterminating offending cities, towns, villages, ethnic groups, tribes, or clans to eliminate the source of resistance swiftly—at least for a generation—and to “advertise” a deterring example.
Pacifying the old-fashioned way does not work for modern democratic states that hope to remain influen-tial and popular in this transparent, globalized world.
The undesirability of extermination as a mode of pacification requires modern democratic states to com-pensate in two ways, both difficult. First, the armed security forces of the state can seize the initiative from the national level down to the local, and apply fo-cused and discriminating force. Knowing the enemy very well, having very good intelligence, and being more creative and strategically savvy than the enemy is essential. In addition, the state has to separate the enemy from the support of the people; it must know the people and retain their trust. Put another way, suc-cessful pacification in the modern era requires a very surgical two-edged strategy that combines the funda-mental logic of offense (because one aspect of the situ-ation requires change) and defense (because another important aspect of the situation must be defended).
The status quo changing (offensive) arm of a paci-fication strategy must also embody two arms (like any strategy to enforce a change in the status quo must)—
one arm unifies physical and psychological pressure to affect the choices of insurgent leaders, followers and supporters; and the other arm takes away their best options one by one, and relentlessly. This pressuring arm must include a relentless pursuit into sanctuar-ies, giving the insurgent no respite from evasion. The defensive arm must provide real around-the-clock security from the armed propaganda and reprisals of insurgent fighters. A fearful and exposed population is lost to the government.
The worst possible conditions for making war on ir-regulars occur in the wake of changing regimes, when the fundamental choice of legitimate government is
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between a foreign occupier and a homegrown com-petitor. The key to regime change is not the knocking down of the regime and its forces, but the successful immediate pacification of the population despite the power vacuum that follows regime change. And this has to be achieved before the legitimacy, in the eyes of the population, of a liberator becomes the illegitimacy of an occupier.
Pacifying unruly ungoverned space is very dif-ficult to do; there are no shortcuts. It takes keeping people safe and getting them on the side of peace. It is also very expensive in terms of trained and armed manpower. Some studies, based on rare historical successes, have judged the price to be no less than 20 security personnel per 1,000 citizens.6 This approach also requires legitimate and efficient courts and pris-ons. It takes patience, time, evenhandedness, and con-sistency of word and deed. The benefit, however, is that the state decides when normal is attained, and warring factions as well as insurgents are eventually integrated into a peaceful society.7
Second, the state can simultaneously war and po-lice in the same area of operations. This is the far more complex practice, and the one actually more common today. Success at warring and policing requires keep-ing straight who it is you are fightkeep-ing and with whom you are enforcing the law of the land—confusing this point incurs great penalties. The principle of polic-ing violence is to suppress it (and resultpolic-ing property damage) to tolerable levels by creating and reinforc-ing the perception that perpetrators will face a high probability of being caught and prosecuted, and that there is no honor in this. Policing successfully requires retaining the moral high ground, and strong and legit-imate institutions of justice—courts, laws, and police.
For policing to succeed, more and more of the popu-lation must see the insurgents’ violent acts as crime.
Going to war with an insurgent is admitting defeat in that regard.
Warring successfully requires being able to defend favorably a desired status quo on the one hand (by causing the insurgents’ attacks upon it to fail), and on the other, to cause a movement of committed warriors of a sacred cause to submit to the rule of the sover-eign state’s authority. Some argue that the one facili-tates the other, but to work well in tandem, they must both be perceived to succeed by the population and by the insurgents. In practice, they sap strength from, and undermine, one another when one or the other is seen to fail. It is possible to switch from warring to policing once a moral high ground and stronger le-gal institutions are established, but switching back to the warring approach is an admission of weakness and failure.
Weak states with weak institutions condemn themselves to perpetual pacification by warring until they win legitimacy with the people and the armed struggle with their armed opposition. Aid by outsid-ers must be provided without delegitimizing the gov-ernment in the eyes of the people. This is very difficult to do.
Pacification and Modern Technology.
Volumes could be written about technique and ex-perience, all worthy of attention, but this is the simple, yet difficult to follow, logic of pacification—enforcing peace in communities of people at war with each other and their governments. Unlike deterrence, defense, and attack, pacification is not altered significantly by
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modern technology. The challenge for the pacifying power has less to do with new weapons than with the fact that each case of pacification is unique.
The most recent U.S. experience with pacification illustrates the point. American and other NATO sol-diers and marines found themselves in the worst pos-sible situation by 2006 when the most recent American counterinsurgency manual, Field Manual (FM) 3-24, was written. They were strangers in lands where the government was ineffective and where their primary task was to cause people to trust their own govern-ments and institutions for physical and economic se-curity. In addition to this, as stated earlier, pacifica-tion is a very people-intensive business. There were too few U.S. and allied soldiers at first—at the time there should have been many more, and when they were still seen by many as liberators. There should have been far fewer soldiers when the surge of more forces came because, by this time, they were seen as occupation forces.
With a view to future strategy and force planning, the question is under what conditions will U.S. Sol-diers and Marines be employed for this broad pur-pose? It is hard to imagine the need for rapid response formations of specially trained pacification Soldiers to be rushed to faraway and strange lands at short no-tice and at the invitation of foreign governments. It is more likely that pacification missions will follow an internal breakdown in governance or a deliberate regime change. In either case, the pacification effort would be anticipated and would begin immediately in the wake of active or potential combat operations to seize and secure inhabited localities. It is also like-ly that governments that face internal turmoil will at some point request support by training cadres of
experts that trickle, rather than flood, into the coun-try. U.S. strategists need not prepare for a land war in Asia, yet they cannot neglect pacification scenarios like the ones described here. Pacification, like attack, can succeed only on the basis of integrated operations containing robust ground forces.