The Great COIN Debate in JFQ, Almost… (Updated)
I intended to link to two articles in the current issue of Joint Force Quarterly this morning by John Nagl and Gian Gentile but JFQ’s current issue site is hard-down. In the meantime, please see Tristan Abbey’s post featuring Brian McAllister Linn’s take on issues raised by the articles at Stanford Review’s Bellum.
Update:
Time for the Deconstruction of Field Manual 3-24 – Colonel Gian P. Gentile
The principles of population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) have become transcendent in the U.S. Army and other parts of the greater Defense Establishment. Concepts such as population security, nationbuilding, and living among the people to win their hearts and minds were first injected into the Army with the publication of the vaunted Field Manual (FM) 3–24, Counterinsurgency, in December 2006. Unfortunately, the Army was so busy fighting two wars that the new doctrine was written and implemented and came to dominate how the Army thinks about war without a serious professional and public debate over its efficacy, practicality, and utility…
Constructing the Legacy of Field Manual 3-24 – Dr. John A. Nagl
In late 2005, then–Lieutenant General David Petraeus was appointed to lead the Army’s Combined Arms Command at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. After two high-profile tours in Iraq, the posting to Fort Leavenworth was no one’s idea of a promotion; the dominant local industry is prisons. But to his credit, General Petraeus recognized that this supposedly backwater assignment presented an opportunity to help revamp the Army’s vision of and approach to the wars that it was struggling with in Iraq and Afghanistan. He called on his old West Point classmate, Dr. Conrad Crane, to take charge of a writing team that within just over a year produced Field Manual (FM) 3–24, Counterinsurgency, in conjunction with a U.S. Marine Corps team under the direction of Lieutenant General James Mattis…
Freeing the Army from the Counterinsurgency Straightjacket – Colonel Gian P. Gentile
In October 2006, while in command of a cavalry squadron in northwest Baghdad, I received an email with an attached document from my division commander, then–Major General James D. Thurman. General Thurman sent the email to all of the division’s brigade and battalion commanders asking for input on the important document attached, which was a draft of Field Manual (FM) 3–24, Counterinsurgency. Over the next couple of weeks, I tried to read the draft manual closely and provide comments to the commanding general. Alas, though, like probably most of the other commanders, I was so busy carrying out a population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign on the ground in west Baghdad that I never found time to get to it. While anecdotal, my experience suggests a microcosm of the U.S. Army. The Army has been so busy since FM 3–24 came out 4 years ago that it has been unable to have a Service-wide dialogue on the manual…
Learning and Adapting to Win – Dr. John A. Nagl
Admiral Mullen highlights Clausewitz’s dictum that war is not essentially “about death and destruction” but is fundamentally an instrument of policy designed to achieve political aims. It is this understanding of war that must drive how military strategy and doctrine are developed, and the metric against which they must be judged. The counterinsurgency field manual must therefore be evaluated against its record in assisting in the accomplishment of national objectives…
H/T to redactor, Robert Jordan Prescott and Dave Maxwell.
