Does Doctrine Matter? The Role of Discretion during Counterinsurgencies

• In Event: Poster Session: International Political Economy II & Conflict Processes I
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Conflict Processes I

Abstract

Political scientists have long been interested in the impact of military doctrine. However, much less is known about how doctrine affects the tactics employed by military units. In particular, scholars have not yet come to a consensus about whether the actions of American military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan reflected the comprehensive counterinsurgency doctrine formally adopted by the in late 2006. Drawing on the principal-agent literature, and particularly work on ‘street-level’ bureaucrats, I argue that the conditions faced during counterinsurgencies should incentivize military organizations to grant significant discretion to tactical units. The primary factors driving this decision are the internalization of costs by tactical level units and ambiguity about which tactics will be most effective in any given area of responsibility. To support my theory, I provide qualitative evidence from US Army managerial publications and case studies from a ‘hard test’ in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2014. I supplement this qualitative evidence with an interrupted time series analysis to quantity the effect of tactical directives, a Bayesian hierarchical model to measure the extent of variation between military units, and a survey at the US Army War College of mid-level officers with experience in Afghanistan.

Author

• Vincent Bauer, Stanford University