Heads We Win: The Cognitive Side of Counterinsurgency (COIN)
Abstract
This paper documents an effort to specify requirements for stronger cognition comprehension, reasoning, and decisionmakingin 21st-century counterinsurgency (COIN). Different from information technology (IT) (e.g., sensors, chat rooms, displays), cognition is what occurs between the ears after receiving information. It is as crucial to COIN as physical capabilities, organizational structures, and territorial control, especially against shrewd, distributed insurgents. Greater attention to cognitive capabilities is dictated by the rise and persistence of a new class of insurgency that combines utopian aims, intense motivation, global connectivity and mobility, extreme violence, and constant adaptation. The foremost example of this is the Islamist-Sunni-Salafist jihad, which aims to overthrow what its adherents see as a corruptnation-state order in the Muslim world, devised by the West to dominate Islam. Like classical insurgency, the jihad vies for the support of a contested populationin this case, alienated Muslims in both Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority states. Jihad not only aids but also infects local insurgencies with anti-Western venom, religious extremism, and suicide terrorist leanings, making them more vicious and intractable. As we know from Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Levant, such hybrid (global-local) insurgencies are complex, unstable, and harder to comprehend than purely national insurgencies. The U.S. response to this pattern of insurgency has stressed (1) new bureaucratic layers, e.g., the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, that seem to have improved neither analysis nor decisionmaking; (2) increased investment in military platforms, which are of marginal utility against a diffuse and elusive insurgency; and (3) the use of force, which may validate the jihadist argument, producing more jihadis and inspiring new martyrs.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2007
- Accession Number
- AD1157641
Entities
People
- David Gompert
Organizations
- RAND Corporation