Whose hearts and minds? Introducing gender-transformative COIN operations

Within the U.S. military, war is often conceived as a masculine realm, a perception which victimizes, marginalizes, and overlooks the roles of women. Socially constructed power structures and gender roles give rise to distinct needs, challenges, and vulnerabilities which cause war to affect men and women differently. These gender dynamics affect the implementation of U.S. counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. Harmful gender norms and structural inequalities are amongst the root causes of war, contributing to cultural, societal, and ideological tensions and injustice forming the political raison d’être for insurgencies.

As a consequence, mainstreaming a gender perspective into COIN operations— making organizational arrangements responsive to gendered needs, challenges, and risks in all stages, from design, planning and implementation to assessment, monitoring and evaluation—is key to more sustainable and effective results. The U.S. should focus its resources on developing capabilities that make its COIN operations more gender-sensitive to win the hearts and minds of the entirety of host populations by comprehensively targeting the host nation’s core problems. Mainstreaming a gender perspective into COIN operations will enhance gender equality, thereby preventing sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), contributing to economic growth, reducing poverty, and fostering sustainable peace. Most importantly, gender equality is a human right.

Gender-Insensitivity of Current COIN Operations

Current COIN operations are gender-insensitive in several ways. First, the 2006 Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 3–24) outlining U.S. COIN doctrine marginalizes gender by understanding a gender perspective as referring solely to women. Additionally, it holds little guidance on how to engage women and fails to acknowledge that women are a diverse group of individuals with distinct wartime and societal roles that represent multifaceted sets of interests. Hence, COIN operations remain focused on men rather than addressing the gendered needs of the entire population. 

Second, COIN doctrine directly links the subordination and marginalization of women to the host country’s culture and thus accommodates repressive gender norms as part of what are considered to be fixed cultural norms. This means that it acknowledges gender differences and inequalities, but works around them to achieve project objectives. However, the underlying assumption that women’s presumed oppression is based on traditional culture that cannot be changed without imposing western social values on the host society is false because gender relations are a result of negotiation. Counterinsurgents thus have the opportunity to participate in this discourse and build leverage for women by engaging, consulting, and assisting them. In other words, rather than imposing western social values, COIN operations can use the heart of the host country’s culture to renegotiate gender norms and transform unequal gender hierarchies in accordance with local customs.

Third, COIN operations instrumentalize female soldiers in a manner that contributes to gender inequality and backlash against their deployment. Female soldiers engaging with local women are expected to add to the operational effectiveness of COIN operations by engaging a segment of the population that had formerly been unreachable, a value that has become an added burden carried by female soldiers alone. These unfair gendered expectations arise from a militarized environment that values certain masculinities above feminine characteristics; if they go unmet, this may lead to an institutional backlash against female deployment altogether, thus contributing further to gender inequality.

Alternative Approach: Gender-Transformative COIN Operations

COIN operations should strive to create social, cultural, and political change through the renegotiation of socially constructed gender roles by making security, governance, justice, education, and the economy gender inclusive. It is not enough to open these spheres up to women and girls; rather, gender inclusivity requires a gender-transformative approach so that everyone in society can take advantage of opportunities and so that all genders benefit equally. Security forces not only need to be trained to protect the population from SGBV, but harmful masculinities need to be transformed to tackle the root causes of SGBV. Further, it is not enough to include more female representatives in peace talks and in the justice system, but all participants need to receive gender training, and all parts of the justice system reinforcing structural inequalities need to be reformed. Finally, building schools and funding income-generating activities alone is not sufficient; schools must be sensitive to gendered needs such as privacy, security, and gender-segregated sanitary facilities, while income-generating activities must ensure equal access to participation by decommissioning social stigma, opening up traditionally male dominated areas, and providing caretaking facilities to relieve women from the double burden of caretaking and economic responsibilities. 

In order to become more gender-sensitive, U.S. COIN operations must go beyond the notion of operational effectiveness when deploying female soldiers. This means overcoming gender bias and introducing improvements in the working environment of the U.S. military at large—and COIN operations in particular—to make it more attractive for all genders. Additionally, gender is an organizational issue that needs to be promoted by everyone, so simply deploying female soldiers will not naturally incorporate a gender perspective because they are not automatically familiar with the needs of local women, especially since local women are not a homogenous group with homogenous interests and experiences. Making COIN operations more gender-sensitive requires allocating human and financial resources to components that will ensure gender equity, including gender advisors, gender focal points, gender trainings, and gender analyses identifying the needs of the entire population in order to create a framework through which to understand the necessary solutions to shift focus from men to all genders. 

The current COIN approach neglects at least half of the population, and thus cannot succeed in winning the hearts and the minds of everyone. The United States should acknowledge that gender sensitivity means more than ensuring that women and girls are not being neglected while accommodating harmful gender roles and unequal power relations. An alternative COIN approach must understand that transforming gender norms and identities is essential to achieve long-term successes and provide security, governance, justice, and economic opportunities for all.