The Guerrilla Leader Theory: Maximizing the Strategic Impact of Leading with in Counterinsurgency Operations
[Thesis]
Long, Joseph E.
Barnette, John E.
University of Charleston - Beckley
2019
150 p.
D.E.Lead.
University of Charleston - Beckley
2019
The military track record for successful intervention by the United States military in population-centric insurgency and counterinsurgency-based combat operations has been marked by consistent failure since the 20th century, despite being the U.S.'s military strategic operation of choice in conflicts that include Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. This study examines guerrilla leadership as a tool for reframing population-centric insurgency and counterinsurgency-based conflict as a leadership problem rather than a traditional military problem. By understanding modern conflict as a function of leadership, this research explains how senior-level executive leaders of U.S. military intervention forces fail to employ military intervention forces capable of achieving successful outcomes where success is determined by the intervening force's ability to gain and maintain the support of an indigenous partner force and associated population centers over time. This research provides a review of extant literate related to population-centric insurgency operations and associated leadership theory to propose the guerrilla leadership theory (GLT) and the associated guerrilla leader model (GLM) that explains ideal guerrilla leadership as a product of competence and connectedness. This investigation controlled for high levels of leader competence using the natural experiment presented by 18 years of conflict in Afghanistan. Using a homogeneous group of US Army Special Forces (SF) leaders with a similar training and military education background, this research explored variations in connectedness between SF forces and a pseudo-guerrilla force to determine the degree that connectedness is correlated with positive leader outcomes. The empirical results of this research found positive and statistically significant support for the hypothesis such that, ceteris paribus, leaders with greater levels of connectedness observe better leader outcomes. The results of this research also examine the six sub-factors of connectedness to uncover what behaviors most impact the relational quality of guerrilla leadership and explores the quality of SF connectedness over the duration of this lengthy conflict. This research concludes with an examination of how the results impact contemporary literature and recommendations for future research.