Counterinsurgency and Professional Military Education
Counterinsurgency and Professional Military Education
by Dr. Mark Moyar
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Major Niel Smith’s article “Integrating COIN into Army Professional Education” contains valuable insights and has provoked a large amount of fruitful dialogue on the Small Wars Journal website. What follows here is intended to add some thoughts to the discussion, to point out some challenges involved in achieving change, and to offer suggestions for overcoming those challenges. Although I am a professor at the Marine Corps University, these views are strictly my own, not those of the Marine Corps University.
When I was a course director at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, I was responsible for adding large amounts of COIN instruction to the core curriculum from 2005 to 2007. Most of what I know, therefore, is based on Marine education, which is different in important ways from Army education. The much smaller size of the former allows it to change more quickly, and Marine culture puts less emphasis on doctrine than Army culture. Nevertheless, I think that much of what has been learned from teaching COIN at Marine Corps PME schools is applicable to the Army.
The educational outcomes specified on page 3 of Smith’s article, derived from a 2007 conference at Ft. Leavenworth, are very useful. PME schools are accustomed to developing course content based on such a set of outcomes. This list attaches much weight to doctrine, and particularly to FM 3-24. Although I think FM 3-24 is a pretty good document, I have some serious reservations about it, and some of the commentaries on Smith’s article also reflect concern about FM 3-24, for instance the validity of the “hearts-and-minds” theory that undergirds much of the manual. If you asked 100 COIN experts what they thought of FM 3-24 and what they thought should be taught about COIN in PME, you would get 100 different opinions. Given the lack of consensus, it becomes very difficult to get very specific on what we should teach on COIN.
Download the full article: Counterinsurgency and Professional Military Education
Dr. Mark Moyar is Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Marine Corps University and author of three books on counterinsurgency, most recently A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq.
