Cooperation or Control? Assessing the Challenges and Solutions of Counterinsurgency Coordination in Malaya and Palestine

Abstract Effective interagency cooperation to coordinate a counterinsurgency’s military and nonmilitary lines of effort (LoEs) has long ranked among counterinsurgency’s core best practices. The tendency of a campaign’s LoEs to pull in contradictory directions renders coordination and deconfliction vital to strategic success. However, coordination faces significant obstacles, stemming from the tendency of the agencies pursuing a campaign’s LoEs to prioritize narrow objectives over a campaign’s wider goals and resist compromise. Practitioners and doctrine propose two types of structural coordinating solutions: a decentralized committee system to promote joint planning, and a centralized single commander system to integrate chains of command. These systems are analyzed in a pair of case studies in the Malayan Emergency and the Palestinian Rebellion. The cases reveal that while committees preserve balance in planning across multiple LoEs, they may undermine coordinated implementation. Single commanders promote coordinated implementation, but they may empower commanders to pursue narrow organizational goals over a campaign’s wider objectives. In contemporary counterinsurgency campaigns that stress a balance between battlefield success and political/economic development outcomes, the tradeoff between uncoordinated decentralization and parochial centralization present policymakers with a real dilemma. These challenges constitute an important, but understudied, explanation for strategic failure during counterinsurgency. The analysis also demonstrates the importance of distinguishing between strategic planning and strategic implementation and orients attention to the importance of a campaign’s coordinating machinery and the vital role of institutional design in effective campaign planning.