How Much Counterinsurgency Training?

The instructor called up the slide on an gigantic screen, so that the nearly 200 students in the lecture hall could see. The lesson was about the effect of leadership on the durability of insurgencies. One example was Al Qaeda. The slide asked: "If UBL" - meaning Osama bin Laden - "dies, is the insurgency dead?" The next example was the American Revolution. "If George Washington dies, is the revolution dead?"

The instructor, Mark Ulrich, explained that his efforts were geared toward getting the class to think about insurgencies in objective and clinical terms. "Again: clinical!" Ulrich practically yelled just before putting the slides on the projector. "Think clinical. Don't think 'terrorism-bad.' That whole thing, 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter,' that's not clinical. That's emotional."

If this were any other academic setting - a New England liberal arts college, for example - and a tweedy professor tacitly compared bin Laden to George Washington, no matter how loosely, he would find himself targeted by Fox News for the sin of moral equivalence. But Ulrich is largely inoculated against such charges. He's an Army lieutenant colonel and Iraq veteran assigned to the joint Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center.

This center, now nearly two-years old, was developed to embed the lessons of counterinsurgency warfare into the architecture of a military that, at senior levels, still appears resistant to such methods of fighting. Many senior staff fear these tactics would mean bogging the country down in bloody conflicts and eroding traditional military skills.

Yet Ulrich and the Counterinsurgency Center are dedicated to ensuring that the military doesn't repeat the mistakes of the post-Vietnam era, when the military purged counterinsurgency from its institutional memory on the mistaken assumption that such a move would prevent U.S. involvement in such conflicts. Instead, this move guaranteed that the military would have to reinvent the wheel in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Approximately 160 officers and enlisted men from around the US military, along with visiting soldiers from Canada and Australia, attended the 2008 Counterinsurgency Leaders' Workshop this week, at Ft. Leavenworth, to hear Ulrich, the main lecturer, better explain the mission and the enemy many of them have already fought. The conference offered a window into the ways in which the military is changing to absorb counterinsurgency - and, in some ways, how it is resisting that change.

Much more at The Washington Independent.