text: Twenty-Eight Articles:
  Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency
  unifying, easily expressed story or explanation that organizes people’s experience
  and provides a framework for understanding events. Nationalist and ethnic historical myths,
  or sectarian creeds, provide such a narrative. The Iraqi insurgents have one, as do Al-Qaeda
  and the Taliban. To undercut their influence you must exploit an alternative narrative,
  or better yet, tap into an existing narrative that excludes the insurgents. This narrative is often
  worked out for you by higher headquarters—but only you have the detailed knowledge
  to tailor the narrative to local conditions and generate leverage from it. For example, you
  might use a nationalist narrative to marginalize foreign fighters in your area or a narrative
  of national redemption to undermine former regime elements that have been terrorizing the
  population. At the company level, you do this in baby steps by getting to know local
  opinion-makers, winning their trust, learning what motivates them, and building on this
  to find a single narrative that emphasizes the inevitability and rightness of your ultimate
  success. This is art, not science.
  22. Local forces should mirror the enemy, not the Americans. By this stage, you will be
  working closely with local forces, training or supporting them and building indigenous
  capability. The natural tendency is to build forces in the US image, with the aim of eventually
  handing our role over to them. This is a mistake. Instead, local indigenous forces need
  to mirror the enemy’s capabilities and seek to supplant the insurgent’s role. This does not
  mean they should be irregular in the sense of being brutal or outside proper control. Rather,
  they should move, equip, organize like the insurgents, but have access to your support and be
  under the firm control of their parent societies. Combined with a mobilized population
  and trusted networks, this allows local forces to hard-wire the enemy out of the environment,
  under top-cover from you. At the company level, this means that raising, training,
  and employing local indigenous auxiliary forces (police and military) are valid tasks. This
  requires high-level clearance, of course, but if support is given, you should establish a
  company training cell. Platoons should aim to train one local squad, and then use that squad
  as a nucleus for a partner platoon. Company headquarters should train an indigenous
  leadership team. This mirrors the growth process of other trusted networks and tends
  to emerge naturally as you win local allies who want to take up arms in their own defense.
  23. Practice armed civil affairs. Counterinsurgency is armed social work, an attempt to redress
  basic social and political problems while being shot at. This makes civil affairs a central
  counterinsurgency activity, not an afterthought. It is how you restructure the environment
  to displace the enemy from it. In your company sector, civil affairs must focus on meeting
  basic needs first, and then progress up Maslow’s hierarchy as each successive need is met.
  You need intimate cooperation with interagency partners here—national, international,
  and local. You will not be able to control these partners—many NGOs, for example, do not
  want to be too closely associated with you because they need to preserve their perceived
  neutrality. Instead, you need to work on a shared diagnosis of the problem, building a
  consensus that helps you self-synchronize. Your role is to provide protection, identify needs,
  facilitate civil affairs, and use improvements in social conditions as leverage to build
  networks and mobilize the population. Thus, there is no such thing as impartial humanitarian
  assistance or civil affairs in counterinsurgency. Every time you help someone, you hurt
  someone else—not least the insurgents—so civil and humanitarian assistance personnel will
  be targeted. Protecting them is a matter not only of close-in defense, but also of creating a
  permissive operating environment by co-opting the beneficiaries of aid (local communities
  and leaders) to help you help them.
  24. Small is beautiful. Another natural tendency is to go for large-scale, mass programs.
  In particular, we have a tendency to template ideas that succeed in one area and transplant
  them into another, and we tend to take small programs that work and try to replicate them on
  a larger scale. Again, this is usually a mistake: Often programs succeed because of specific
  local conditions of which we are unaware, or because their very smallness kept them below
  the enemy’s radar and helped them flourish unmolested. At the company level, programs that
  succeed in one district often also succeed in another (because the overall company sector