Where Is Our Kilcullen?
Where Is Our Kilcullen? – LtCol Michael D. Grice, Marine Corps Gazette.
War is dynamic, changing, and unpredictable. The ongoing war in Iraq is no different; it has seen a fundamental shift in how the Marine Corps fights as the doctrine of maneuver warfare and the decisive single battle concept have been supplanted by the steady state and continued operations that are counterinsurgency operations. Years of active combat in the hotly contested Al Anbar Province have been the driving force for change within the Marine Corps as al-Qaeda and others have sought to nullify American and the nascent Iraqi Government’s influence in the area. Fortunately the studied development and application of counterinsurgency doctrine has resulted in a largely stable Iraq that is well on the road to self-governance. Unfortunately, it wasn’t our idea.
The greatest single influence on our counterinsurgency doctrine isn’t a Marine. He isn’t even an American, or a colonel or a general or an admiral for that matter. He is an Australian lieutenant colonel who did the bulk of his influential work as a captain—work that has become the cornerstone of company-level counterinsurgent operations and has brought him to prominence as an advisor to the likes of GEN David Patraeus, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and to the Department of Defense during the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review. Not bad for a foreign field grade officer, but why are we, the most powerful Nation on the planet, importing talent to help solve our warfighting problems? Don’t we have Marine officers capable of doing the same?
The answer, unfortunately, is that we do not. The Marine Corps has not invested in the education and development of its officer corps to produce such an officer and, as a result, stands ready to be marginalized within the Department of Defense as a result of this shortfall. Unconventional times and unconventional wars require unconventional thought, and the ability to think brilliantly and unconventionally is a product of education. The foreigner who so significantly impacted our counterinsurgency doctrine and the planners who developed the controversial, but ultimately successful, “surge” shared a common background—the commonality of a doctoral-level education. How, though, can the Marine Corps correct the deficiency? And who is this guy, anyway? …
Much more at the Marine Corps Gazette.
