3-0, 3-24, and all that stuff…
Abu Muqawama has a post up concerning the new FM 3-0 (Operations), FM 3-4 (Counterinsurgency) and Council member LTC Gian Gentile’s view on both – Standing Athwart History, ‘Yelling Stop’. A continuation (with links back to the Small Wars Council) of a dynamic debate that often weaves its way through our pages, AM points readers to the current issue of Military Review (FM 3-0 Operations—The Army’s Blueprint by General William Wallace) for more on why FM 3-0 now includes things like stability operations as important alongside major combat operations.
According to LTC Gian Gentile, though, FM 3-0 doesn’t really matter, because for all intensive purposes, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency has become the operations manual of the U.S. Army. Gentile is not too happy about this, and in an essay that also runs in Military Review, he takes great exception to a U.S. Army that — in his eyes — is now incapable of doing anything but COIN. And he agrees with MG Charlie Dunlap that we can’t grow so obsessively focused on counterinsurgency operations that we forget how to do everything else. “Disciples of FM 3-24,” Gentile writes, “see themselves as ‘out of the box’ thinkers when, in fact, they fit very neatly in a ground-based box, one they are un—to look beyond.”
More at Abu Muqawama.
