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Excerpt from Newsweek’s review of Dr. David Kilcullen’s Counterinsurgency:

… Last call for Kool-Aid. In decades past, many have criticized the military-industrial complex for not only being insular, but also refusing to accept criticism. Iraq changed that. Though some brass and certainly then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were slow to publicly admit the real magnitude of the insurgency in the early years of the Iraq War, by early 2006 a movement was transforming the way the military thought about itself. The RAND Corporation (a government think tank) launched an Insurgency Board. Minds at Small Wars Journal ran “something of an underground network for the [counterinsurgency] community, connecting key players, quietly prompting change, and providing a forum for discussion” (page 21). In addition, generals like David Petraeus, Peter Schoonmaker, and William S. Wallace cast off hubris and opened themselves up to criticism and rethinking firmly held positions. It not only sparked a radical shift in the way soldiers would be fighting on the ground, but it fundamentally altered the course of the war…

… There’s one massive problem with counterinsurgency: it’s not colonialism, so when you win, the domestic government has to take over. Which means that backing unreliable, cranky, or corrupt regimes (images of Hamid Karzai spring to mind) can very easily mean immeasurable amounts of blood and treasure being spent in vain. Kilcullen acknowledges the fact that “counterinsurgency mirrors the state” (pages 154–161), but any policymaker reading this book has to stop and think that geopolitical strategy must precede the tactical guidance that Kilcullen offers. Because no matter how successful counterinsurgent soldiers prove to be, the real endgame will always be played by the locals. And in many cases, that’s one hell of a wild card…

Much more at Newsweek.