Countering the Military’s Latest Fad

Countering the Military’s Latest Fad – Celeste Ward, Washington Post.

When Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced Monday that he was dismissing Gen. David McKiernan as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan and replacing him with Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, he signaled his support for an intellectual movement that in a few short years has come to dominate military thinking in Washington. Both McChrystal and his new No. 2, Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, Gates emphasized, have a “unique skill set in counterinsurgency.”

Counterinsurgency is king. Once the province of graduate students and historians of the conflicts in Vietnam and Algeria, this resurgent doctrine of how to wage a type of unconventional war has become the lens through which the American defense establishment analyzes what happened in Iraq, what to do now in Afghanistan, and the very future of warfare.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command and the former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, is the inspiration and leading light of this movement. In 2006, he coauthored the Army field manual on how to conduct counterinsurgency operations, stressing the need to provide security for the local population and support the host government, among other imperatives. A vocal cohort of students and adherents of counterinsurgency — now given the inevitable military acronym “COIN” — has emerged to advance the cause. New think tanks and blogs propagate and debate counterinsurgency research, and tomes exploring insurgencies past, present and future are on every cognoscente’s reading list. Even the State Department has embraced the concept, composing its own counterinsurgency manual for U.S. civilian agencies…

Much more at The Washington Post.