Systems Thinking and Counterinsurgencies

T his article presents the essentials of a successful counterinsurgency strategy by applying a technique known as systems thinking. The fundamentals of good strategic thought lie both in recognizing the most significant interactions between different players, how they influence each other in unexpected ways, and how to measure progress in achieving the ends of the strategy. Systems thinking has proven successful in other contexts at explaining human behavior, policy choices, unintended consequences, and the resistance of systems to change. It also offers insight into how to assess one of the most difficult questions related to strategy in complex environments—how to know when the strategy has been successful. A strategist encounters many difficulties in developing and implementing a counterinsurgency strategy. One major impediment is the lack of a clear and simple way to describe the strategy—US military forces and senior policymakers have traditionally shown a need to learn and re-learn the basic tenets of counterinsurgency strategies. Another difficulty is determining appropriate measures of success, as the twists and turns of a counterinsurgent campaign often lead to considerable ambiguity regarding progress in relationship to the ultimate goal. Issues like these are not unique to counterinsurgencies. Systems thinking has proven useful in understanding public management and policy, energy and the environment, and theory development in the natural and social sciences. Many of these have something in common with insurgencies—complex actors and non-linear relationships, difficulty in measurement, band-aid solutions, impatience with results and unintended consequences or side effects. Systems thinking can provide intuitive and counterintuitive insights for understanding counterinsurgencies. While counterinsurgent theorists will encounter much that looks like “old